Caleb's expression didn't change, save for the fire of rage burning more brightly behind his eyes.  "You<span style="font-style: italic">want</span>me to try to kill you, don't you?"  He laughed twice, his tone a mockery of enjoyment.  "You want me to give you an excuse to cut me down.  Just like the way you baited Lanner into shooting first."<br/><br/>Uneasy shuffling of feet drifted about the room.  Geena and Arden were still frightened, but when Caleb brazenly turned his back to Dreamer, their fear seemed to heighten.<br/><br/>"This land is<span style="font-style: italic">ours</span>," Caleb said.  "This is humanity's land!  We owned this land before the furs took it from us.  They turned us into slaves and made us work on it!  They broke our backs to reap all the rewards!  Shark is showing us the way to take our freedom back!  It's time to punish the furs for what they did to us!  Time to make the furs pay for all the people they tortured, raped, killed, and ate!  They deserve it!"  He glared at Arden and Geena.  "And anybody that's too weak to bring evil to justice should stay out of the way, or die."<br/><br/>Those near him didn't look like they disagreed.  Those around the room were stock-still, uncertainty flowing around them like icy water.  While compassion was a strong emotion, vengeance was stronger, and anybody that wielded it could harness the power of nations if they had to.  Arden and Geena looked on, saying nothing.  Their frightened eyes darted between Dreamer and Caleb, and neither of them had the ability to part their taut lips.  They shied away from Caleb's vicious eyes.  He stared at them both for just a moment longer, then suddenly turned back to Dreamer.  "And don't insult the Gods by saying Heaven is like a whorehouse!  Everything you're saying proves more and more that you don't know ANYTHING about the truth."<br/><br/>Maeve stood solidly behind Dreamer.  She felt sweat forming in the hand that held the gun.  Its stock began to chafe her skin.  She hated the feeling, wanted just to get away - flee the violence and hide among her own kind.<br/><br/>She stopped herself from going down that track of thought.  Her own kind?  Was she suddenly seeing everything in an us-versus-them manner?<br/><br/>She couldn't do that.  She had spent far too much of her life resisting those thoughts, the easy path a mind could follow in coloring the world black and white.  Shark and his followers were taking advantage of that, tearing down all the progress she had made.  There wasn't any way to win against the psychosis of blind faith.<br/><br/>"We're not going to put down our weapons," said Caleb.  "Not until every slave-driver is put down.  The Outcast made the furs to destroy humanity, and now it's our turn to bring holy retribution down on all of them!  Every last one!"<br/><br/>"They're not all slave-drivers, Caleb!" Arden shouted.<br/><br/>"I NEVER LAID A HAND ON YOU!!" screamed Maeve suddenly.  Her frustration had overtaken her better judgment.  Caleb's smoldering eyes shot to her, his hate pure and unfettered.  "Never ONCE did I or any of my employees beat you!"  she went on, whirling to the crowd.  "We never raped you!  We never killed you!  We never did anything to you!"<br/><br/>"She's pleading for her life!" Caleb interrupted, a maniacal grin on his face.  "Yes, go ahead, beg us to be spared from your holy punishment!  Repent your sins against humanity!"<br/><br/>"I never sinned against you!"<br/><br/>"You made us break our backs in your fields!"<br/><br/>"You were well-treated!"<br/><br/>"WELL-TREATED?!" Caleb was shouting beyond his normal volume now.  It seemed that Maeve had touched a nerve -- the wrong one.  "<span style="font-style: italic">WELL-TREATED?!?!</span>SLAVING EVERY DAY FOR A CHANCE TO GO TO BED WITH A FULL STOMACH?!  WORKING TO GROW THE FOOD THAT YOU ATE TONS OF, WHILE WE WERE GIVEN JUST ENOUGH TO KEEP US HEALTHY?!  TO KEEP US GOING BACK TO THE FIELDS, TO WORK AND WORK UNTIL WE DIED ON OUR FEET OUT THERE?!<span style="font-style: italic">THAT'S</span>WELL-TREATED?!"<br/><br/>Caleb had the decisive upper hand now.  More people's eyes flicked to Maeve, their expressions unsympathetic.  There were still some, like Geena and Arden, that seemed afraid for their former master's life, but Dreamer could feel the ice of uncertainty beginning to melt away from many others.<br/><br/>The zealot pressed his attack, his voice quickly getting hoarse from the exertion.  "YOU AND ALL OF YOUR KIND MADE US INTO PROPERTY!!  NO MATTER HOW 'WELL' YOU THOUGHT YOU TREATED US, WE WERE NEVER GIVEN OUR FREEDOM, OR OUR DIGNITY!!"<br/><br/>"I was trying, Caleb..."  Maeve's eyes watered.  She remembered - she knew why he'd surrendered himself to hate and vengeance.  Lanner was just a twisted opportunist, but Caleb could be reached.  In all of her years and endeavors, it was easy to forget a single grain of sorrow in a whole nation's despair.  "I was really trying...  I couldn't change the world... But I tried..."<br/><br/>Caleb drew dangerously close, barely four inches from Dreamer, his eyes fixed over Dreamer's shoulder at Maeve.  "<span style="font-style: italic">Not good enough,</span>" he seethed.<br/><br/>She'd found the way.  "I tried, Caleb..." Maeve wept.  "I was too late... your little daughter... your lovely little girl..."<br/><br/>Caleb's wild eyes cooled, as if a glacier had been suddenly drawn over them.<br/><br/>"She was sold to a coyote up north, in Dragoncrown," Maeve's voice strained.  Her heart remembered how it had broken when she'd learned this story.  "She was told to pick the shiny rocks out of the blasting debris... they never waited for her to get clear... she thought it was a game... she was crushed to death... I never could tell you..."<br/><br/>Caleb's left eye twitched.  His lip trembled.  His nose began to bleed uncontrollably.  He stumbled back from Dreamer and Maeve with a shocked grunt.  His hand darted to his nose, trying to staunch the flow of blood.  The room fell dead silent.  Caleb's labored breaths came gurgling through his nose.  His eyes never left Maeve.  Geena and Arden stared.  Most others were stunned beyond emotion.<br/><br/>Maeve put her free hand on Dreamer's back.  "Let's go... now..."  She fixed her watery eyes on Caleb.  "In my room, under the bed... the proof..."  She pushed lightly on Dreamer.  "Let's go..."  She looked at Caleb.  "I'm so sorry..."<br/><br/>The room was so still it could have been frozen in time.<br/><br/>-----<br/><br/>"Oh, he better DAMN well be glad we're here," Halvorson said to Feign.  "We might still have to drag him, though.  Who knows what the Bitch did to him."<br/><br/>As Mad took the lead, Halvorson dashed in line behind her, letting Baz take rear guard in the narrow hallways.  Rubble was scattered all over the floor straight up to the first junction in the hallway, where another one branched off to either side.  Cell block beta, as Mad would recall, was down the hall branching right.  The dust here was thick still, clouding vision and choking off scents.<br/><br/>Three grenades clattered, hissing, on the floor in the main hallway where Feign was standing, having been thrown from around the bend beyond the stairs.<br/><br/>At the same instant, a pair of guards leapt at Mad from the right-hand corridor, their blades stabbing for her neck.  Halvorson reared back in reflex, his gun dropping to bear, but the blades would hit Mad before he could fire, unless she could react...<br/><br/>-----<br/><br/>Lady Alhanda's eyes flashed with bloodlust as Chiro and Mag began to fight.  She knew she would have her tail, and her trophy, very soon.<br/><br/>-----<br/><br/>Janus and Fenson's heads darted to watch the great wolf approach them, then suddenly kneel down and extend his arm at an angle.  To their utter shock, they saw Heretic!  He was palm-sized, but he was still Heretic.  That had to be him!  What had happened to him?  As the shrunken anthro-fox jumped down Bachera's arm and made his way to stand on Janus' shoe, both humans gaped, afraid of what had happened to their...<br/><br/>...their friend?  Yes.  Yes, he'd earned that title.  The shady, aloof drifter they'd first met had become someone they knew, someone they trusted and respected, for Janus especially.  He took his finger away from Fenson's throat and looked down at the little fur with concern.<br/><br/>"It was... frightening," Janus said.  "All I wanted was to drink their blood.  All of it.  And not just fur blood - human blood too."  Fenson eyed Janus, puzzled and disturbed.  "And I... I<span style="font-style: italic">liked </span>killing them," Janus finished.<br/><br/>"Wait, what happened?" Fenson asked, looking at Heretic.  "What's he talking about?  And why are you small like that?"<br/><br/>-----<br/><br/>Arget didn't take long to find a vertical shaft in the exhaust ducts.  There was still plenty of airflow into the system from lower levels, and it wasn't too hard to pick the right shaft to head down into.  The real trick was trying to stay quiet in the shaft when his sweaty skin threatened to make the metal walls ring like an organ's piping.<br/><br/>The Palace was reeling, trying not to descend into chaos as it was wounded repeatedly from within.  Guards, technicians, servants, everyone was running everywhere all at once.  Guards were quickly summoned to the boiler room where Arget had done his work.  They tried to push past the water and wires.  Unable to endure the pain for very long, they lit up the room with their flashlights.<br/><br/>"Nobody's here," muttered one.<br/><br/>"The vent!" said another, aiming his light.<br/><br/>"Shit," said the first.  He grabbed his radio.  "Intruder in the ventilation system."<br/><br/>The Guard barracks relayed the information to all the Guards in the Palace.  Most of those near a grate or vent didn't bother - there was a dedicated assault coming in from the catacombs, and that took precedence.  But there were some that dashed for the nearest visible duct a person could fit through, trying to listen for movement over the alarms and commotion.<br/><br/>Arget's ears were mostly numbed by the noise themselves, and this put him at a disadvantage.  It was hard for him to hear what was going on outside the confines of the ductwork.  The first horizontal duct he found himself in went only one way - straight into another air handler, obviously the one for a single floor.  It was that way or back up to find another way down.<br/><br/>-----<br/><br/>The thing that had killed the First Sergeant did not come through after Jenten.  The two sonic blasts illuminated the room beyond the doorway for the anthro-bat... a large storage room, perhaps thirty foot square... crates, soft boxes, tarps and cloths... a body bound to tackles embedded in the floor...<br/><br/>...another body, large, furred, the ring of metal in its hands.  For the instant Jenten had detected it, his assailant was right beside the door, its blade held high where it had severed the First Sergeant's spine.  Its other hand was low, empty, but aiming at him.  The second sonic blast had not shown this body... it had moved out of his echo-vision.<br/><br/>But it had not moved out of his hearing range.  Heavy breathing... there, just above the door... waiting...<br/><br/>A crash, wood splintering.  No, not waiting.  The wall above the doorway erupted.  As boards and splinters expanded in a debris cloud, a muscular lupine body hurtled out at Jenten, its hooked and distorted shape only a mockery of true lupine form.  The feet were falling toward Jenten.  He would be crushed or pinned.  The arms, as they emerged from the hole in the wall, slashed downwards ahead and behind, the long, curved blade arcing ahead in Raice's direction, the other hand, its claws shining, trying for any would-be attackers from behind.