James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“I don’t imagine she has much love for strange men.” Michael didn’t even try to pet her.

“She and I are alike in many ways,” I said. “We are here for business. What did Jenner tell you about our findings?”

“That you found child pornography in your old apartment.” Spotted Elk looked over at me. His eyes were as dark and patient as a horse’s: gentle, wary, and anxious. “That Duke lost control and the change took him over… and that you got carried away with your magic.”

They thought I’d used magic to blow the apartment? Well… if they thought I was that powerful, I suppose that was in my favor. Sort of. I rubbed Binah’s ears, massaging the tension out of her scalp. “They deserved it.”

“That is questionable,” Michael said. “Because now they cannot talk.”

I grimaced. “Kir was talking before Duke lost control.”

“So we heard,” John replied. “You had no knowledge that this filth was taking place in your home?”

Was everyone going to ask me that question? “No. I ever only really knew the business of my unit.”

“What business was that?”

Even after everything that had happened, I couldn’t tell them. Talking about some of the ins and outs with the likes of Jenner and the Tigers was one thing, but when it came to people like John Spotted Elk, self-proclaimed good guys tied up with the Feds, the business of the Organizatsiya was the Organizatsiya’s business alone.

I exhaled thinly. “Nothing involving children.”

“Hmm.” Spotted Elk stood. “Tea or coffee?”

I glanced up at him. “Coffee. Black, strong, no sugar.”

“Michael?”

Michael shook his head.

John disappeared out of sight behind me. When I turned around to track his position, I saw him at a small table with a kettle and a box of assorted packets and sachets. While the kettle boiled, he began to spoon dark, syrupy sugar into one of the cups. Two, three… six. I stopped counting at eight, and turned back in consternation.

“Ayashe told us about the explosion,” Spotted Elk said. “They found the remains of at least three men, and sniffer dogs picked up extensive drug residue. There were explosives and assault weapons scattered across the street. The entire top floor burned out, and the other floors were damaged. Fortunately, the building did not collapse. She says the apartment was registered to a man named Kostya Kalikov.”

“I lost the passport for that alias years ago.”

He made a short sound of amusement. “Are you going to stay when Ayashe arrives to speak with us?”

I mulled that over for a moment. “I assume no one has expressly told her that it was my apartment that was destroyed.”

“They have not.”

I shrugged. “Then there’s no problem.”

“There is a huge problem.” Spotted Elk said. “Because the entire purpose of the Four Fires and the Pathfinders is to unite shapeshifters in lawful, constructive ways.”

“Besides that, we have the Ib-Int ,” Michael added. “The ancestral laws of all shapeshifters, passed through generations of Elders since Mesopotamia was a world power. They proscribe against killing for revenge.”

The word ‘law’ had a number of unpleasant connotations for people like myself, but knowledge was knowledge. Besides… whatever corner these men hoped to talk me into, I still had Nicolai’s notes. “Fortunately for you, I am not a shapeshifter, and therefore not under your aegis.”

“Listen to me. You’re a Phitometrist,” Spotted Elk said. “Which means you must have at least partial knowledge of the threat we face from the Outside.”

He spoke the word like a name. “Something of it.”

“Michael is the best one to tell that story.” He motioned to the other Elder, sipping at his tea. “My old brain gets too cluttered.”

Michael inclined his head in acknowledgment. “That may or may not be true, John. You have more years than I do.”

“You were reared in the cradle of the Law, Michael. I was born on a Rez.” He laughed briefly at his own joke.

“True enough.” Michael smiled faintly, the first time his face had relaxed in any way. “We have a long history of interaction with magi. To begin with, your soul and my soul were both born out of a great calamity. The oldest Gift Horses – one of the oldest beings in all Creation – all call it the same thing. The Second War.”

My eyes narrowed. I remembered the litany. The First War was not a war. It was a slaughter…. It came with the first star to ever light the Mirror of the sky.

“I know what a Gift Horse is, vaguely. The First War was when the DOGs came from the NO-thing, I believe,” I said. “I don’t know what the Second War is.”

Spotted Elk nodded, stirring his tea. There enough sugar in it that it was soupy. “Around about eight hundred years ago, I was living as a barley farmer in South Korea. I was visited by a great Gift Horse Stallion and his manservant. Michael knows him, too. He was a powerful elder of his people, and hard as tacks… stern, ruthless, terrifying.”

“Stallion?” I thought back to Zarya, but struggled to remember her face. “Gift Horses call themselves Stallions… and Mares?”

Spotted Elk laughed for a moment, and then shook his head. “They wouldn’t deign to call themselves man and woman, in case they’re mistaken for HuMen.”

“I see,” I replied. “So what about the Second War?”

Michael considered his words for a minute or so in silence. “As John has noted, I also know of this ancient Horse. He called himself Dust, and it was he who conveyed the story of the Second War to my mentor. For the purpose of this conversation, I will recount the short version. The White Land was the original skin of GOD, and by that, I mean the creature that we live inside… the acronym is a YESian term, nothing to do with the religions of the world.”

YESian? “I’m aware there is a difference.”

“Dust told us that the name of the White Lands was AZN, and that the AZN was destroyed at the end of The First War by a great evil known as the Morphord, no ‘e’. Dust said that his people, the Gift Horses, were the first beings in all of AZN to wear the man-shape, and with two legs to run, two arms to fight, two eyes to see and a head to turn, they stood a chance to drive the Morphord and his army – the Morph- horde – out of the territories they had now infested.” As the story progressed, Michael slipped into the rhythmic cadence of memetic recall. “To do this, Dust’s ancestors took up the shards of glass the Morphord had caused to fall from the broken shell of the sky. They made this glass into the first swords, and with them they fought back.”

“Their enemy, who Dust was very adamant was male, was clever,” Michael continued. “The Morphord observed the inhabitants of the AZN, and when he realized that he was going to lose to AZN’s Man-shaped host, he drew all of his soldiers and their victims back in to himself, and with their mass, created a form for himself for the first time. This form agonized him, because it was against his nature to take a shape, and so it was of the largest and strongest Man-shape he, in his great narcissism, could conceive of. He was thirty thousand miles tall, when he stomped a foot down on the White Land, he shattered the entirety of the shell protecting GOD, ending The First War and mixing himself into Creation forever in the process.”

I listened in heavy silence, the coffee steaming on the desk in front of me.

Michael closed his eyes. “The destruction of the White Land caused the formation of strata of different sorts, with the first being that of the Wra-Tha, who Dust referred to as ‘The PusLickers’, followed by HuMans, and then us: The Ka-Bat, or animal spirits, who bonded with some of the first HuMans even as Dust’s people and allies engaged the Morphorde again in The Second War. The very oldest of us came to consciousness as the whole of GOD writhed in agony from its wounds. The Ka remembers this anguish, Rex. Even the youngest of us remember bits and pieces, and with that memory, clear or faint, every Ka-Bah responds to the presence of illness and corruption in the world. They may accept the call or reject it, but those who choose to serve find allies, while the outcasts remain alone and weak. The Ib-Int is formed around this concept and is built around gathering like-minded Ka-Bat to rejoin the current War, the Third War, to fight the corruption imposed on Creation.”