Big Seth and Pankow exchanged a look. Pankow shook Valentine's hand.
"You'll just have to meet Father Wolf and see for yourself. Magic, son, is a little hard to explain."
The week dragged on, and Valentine made it pass more quickly by devouring the few books in the cabin. A heavy snowstorm came, and the Wolves relaxed the tough schedule shared by the two Aspirants. Valentine gratefully retreated to his bunk. Pankow gave him a pamphlet written by his foster mother. Printed in heavy, slightly smeared type and cumber-somely titled Fallen Gods: The History, Theory, and Practice of the Kurian Order, it was fifty pages relating the history of the Lifeweavers, their schism over the use of vital auras to attain immortality, and the Kurian takeover of Earth.
The Kurians failed in their first effort to take Earth because it was chaotic, badly planned, and they had not even consolidated their victory on Kur itself, where knots of Lifeweaver resistance slowed them. Humanity owes these brave lost souls a four-thousand-year debt of gratitude. Mankind in its primitive, isolated state was less vulnerable to the spread of the Ravies plague and quicker to accept the word and help of the Lifeweavers.
We hunted the horrors that came over from Kur, closed the doors, and having eradicated the threat promptly forgot about it two hundred years before Stonehenge was built. Vampires became rumor, then legend, and the Caste of the Bear trickled down into human legend as the berserkers of the Norse sagas.
Certainly a Kurian or two remained on Earth, lurking in untraveled corners of the globe. And Kurian-de-signed spawn, now known generically as Grogs and individually through slang and names out of mythology, no doubt survived to trouble humanity now and again as it pushed back the borders of the unknown.
But though the Gates of the Interworld Tree were closed, the Kurians in their red-clouded underground world learned in the long years of their exile how to open new ones. When and where the first of the new portals were opened is a matter of some dispute. Even the Lifeweavers are unable to say. It could have been as early as the Dark Ages in the Balkans, or as late as the eighteenth century. Opening the portals requires enormous sacrifices of vital auras to achieve, but after the first Kur came through the new Gate or Gates, humanity aided the Kurians in this all too frequently.
Humanity took the first step toward its own overthrow. Over the years, the Kurians recruited human allies, perhaps by striking Faustian bargains. The Kurian moles gained positions of trust and authority in society.
With the new millennium, the dragon's teeth sown in the last hundred or so years of man's history were ready to grow. In the first week of June 2022, they sprang the trapdoor on the vital auras of Earth's seven billion inhabitants.
The door to the cool room opened noisily, and Gavineau entered the cabin. He walked over to the hearth, apparently not seeing Valentine, and took the jug of busthead down from its place on the shelf. Gavineau collapsed in the leather-webbed camp chair by the empty fireplace, took a long pull, and stared at the cold ashes. Sailor Tom took advantage of the warm lap, and Gavineau scratched the cat between the ears without looking at it. Valentine considered greeting him, but didn't wish to be given something to do. He returned to his booklet.
THE OVERTHROW
The world was already a miserable place in the spring of that cursed year. The New Depression was at its height. Stocks fell, jobs were lost, and consumer consumption fell in a corporate death spiral as the aging technoczars were revealed to have feet of clay. Financial institutions underreacted, the government overreacted, and a society living on borrowed time paid for with borrowed dollars failed. Hard times and hunger came to the Western world, which was all the more of a shock because the generation that survived the last financial collapse had virtually died out.
Ancient hatreds smoldered and burst into flame. Europe saw its first real war in generations over food tariffs; China used America's preoccupation with its economy to overrun Taiwan. Russia and Japan, both backing different factions in Europe and the Pacific Rim, started a naval war that the United States, in its last great overseas commitment, stopped by cordoning off the two powers.
Civil unrest over the use of American wealth and resources abroad with so many suffering at home erupted into violence. Paramilitary groups took a hodgepodge of economic, political, and even racial grievances to the ultimate court of violence. A few polarizing and charismatic leaders further unraveled the tattered American social fabric.
The Earth itself added its cataclysmic voice to the dissonant chorus of human suffering. A worldwide string of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions leveled cities and made ash-covered wastelands of regions near the volcanoes. Particles in the atmosphere changed the climate more to the Kurians' liking. As if the tectonic damage was not enough, a plague added to the chaos. People called it rabies, but its twenty-four-to seventy-two-hour incubation cycle and mind-altering effects made the cure seem more like a job for exorcists than doctors. Wild mobs tore through the cities in a biting and clawing frenzy that shattered civic order.
Not even suspected at the time was that both events were long planned. Kurian technology allowed the fallen Lifeweavers to use the Earth itself as a weapon, and the disease, which we know today as Raving Mad-ness, had appeared on Earth in the first Kurian invasion. The pale, robed Reapers began to walk the night.
The Reapers strode into the maelstrom, alternately cowing and killing. They commanded legions of Grogs, genetically altered creatures designed to break up opposition. As fearless in battle as army ants, but far more cunning, the Grogs come in many shapes and sizes. The most common form is a large rhino-hided ape, with hands and brains capable of using weaponry from assault rifles to armored personnel carriers.
The military and civil forces of the United States, already unable to deal with the plague and widespread destruction, succumbed as spare parts, ammunition, and especially morale ran out. A few Kurian agents and collaborators in the command structure helped orchestrate defeat on a grand scale. In the final extreme, a scorched-earth policy destroyed military bases and their equipment to keep them out of the hands of the Kurians. A few nuclear and chemical weapons were used in the last gasp of the war, but this added to the suffering rather than slowing the Kurian takeover. The end came with a bang and a whimper. The president shot himself when he learned his family had caught the Raving Madness virus at a riot in Quantico, and the vice president fled with a few leading members of congress to Mount Omega after she read the president's final executive order. In it, the despairing president declared, like the captain of a sinking ship, that the situation was "every man for himself."
The United States, and as far as we can tell the rest of the world, belonged to the Kurians within a year.
Valentine could understand why Kostos ended her life a hard-drinking woman. The facts of life of the New World Order came more easily to Valentine, who had been born well after the Kurian takeover. No memories of the vanished security and assorted technological delights of the past haunted him, just a wistful curiosity. He sometimes felt a schism between himself and Pankow's generation, including even the Padre. They cherished and fought for the past, a flag with stars and stripes, a way of living that would probably never return. Valentine wanted to win back his future.
A creaking from the sitting part of the room and a disgruntled miaow from Sailor Tom made Valentine glance up from the old red pamphlet and look at Gavineau. The Wolf set the jug on the floor and shuffled over to his bed, a sad and sick look visiting his face with every intention of staying the night.
"You okay, Don?"
"Hey, Val," he slurred. "Didn't see you there. Pankow giving you some slack?"
"He rode up the Happy Trail today," Valentine explained. The Happy Trail Getaway was a saloon where the bartender was friendly to the Wolves and the girls were even friendlier, if the words were kind and the price was right, the price being anything from a new pair of shoes to an old song, depending on the charm of the man. "I think he's letting up on me with the Invocation a day away. All I had to do was draw him a hot bath and put an edge on the razor. He told me I couldn't eat anything, and just to take it easy. Wouldn't tell me why I couldn't eat, though."
"Valentine, Marquez is dead. Can't think of any other way to say it."
The Aspirant's thoughts about-faced and came to attention in a hurry. "What?"
Gavineau sat on his bed, a bunk away from Valentine's. A sheet of laundry hung between them.
"It just happens sometimes, boy," said Gavineau.
"He made it through the Invocation fine. It's not like you run an Indian gantlet or something," slurred Gavineau. "He got out of the cave and just lost it. It can affect you funny. I remember I got out of mine and all I could smell was wood smoke on everything. He looked around like he didn't know where he was and took off at a run. Jumped right off the damn cliff. I remember two years ago one kid quit eating after it. Wouldn't touch any food, always saying it was diseased or filthy or something. He starved himself to death, just threw up when we force-fed him. Usually the guys who come over funny are just jumpy for a couple of days, then they come round. Bad business with Marquez. A couple others volunteered to go down and get the body. I only saw it from three hundred feet up."
"My God, what made-?"