Power Trio

They link up with the tour that evening in an idyllic campsite at the fork of a river. Anise’s fretful forms and filings have paid off with a fishing license, and the savory smoke that greets Nick and Dee carries fragrant notes of fresh salmon. That night, the pack celebrates the newly bonded mates returning in their twos and threes from self-exile.

Nick and Dee eat their fill of buttery, grill-charred fish and go to bed so stuffed they can barely fool around (well, maybe some hand stuff). The next morning, the tour is off again, rolling along the crest of the river to Legendary’s second stop in Tarouna.

Central First Willow is the largest and most glorious of the Tarounese cities. The every city the same doctrine only goes so far—the CFW clearly inspires a certain pride in its citizens.

Dee and her pack load the set into the city’s courthouse. Anise is confused why they’ve picked a court for their venue; she balks at the huge operating theater setup. “Why is this place so freaking huge?”

“The Tarounese have a, uh, spirited and public approach to justice.” Dee explains, as she waves a group of stagehands forward to relocate the gallows scaffold under the scrutinizing eyes of their hosts. “Don’t worry about it. We’re not subject to their laws. The packs have done enough good turns to the Tarounese that we kinda roll with our own agreement in place.”

“I didn’t think I had to worry about it.” Anise bites her nail.

“We’ve committed a few felony-level offenses going through the country,” Dee says. “You know, you’re wearing two different fabric types right now. And wearing green, on a Thursday. Big no-no.”

Anise’s almond eyes widen as Dee stays stone-faced, then narrow. “You’re fucking with me.”

Dee’s laugh cracks her facade. “Yep.” She ruffles Anise’s hair again, which she’s started doing a little more often than might be appropriate. “The fucking-with is definitely worth a fine at least, though. They don’t like jokes about their legal system.”

The load-in occurs with no international incidents and the venue’s acoustics are fabulous: rolling and cavernous without losing their punch and fidelity. Dee’s in the green room for the first time. Normally it’s band only, but since Nick frets out of his skin when he can’t see her, they’ve made special dispensation. Evan Kamiyon is standing on one foot, flamingo-style, doing some kind of breathing exercise. Kell relaxes into Thekla’s touch as the goblin works out a knot in her shoulder.

“Mates, huh?” She smiles blissfully at Dee. “Feels pretty fucking sick, doesn’t it?”

Dee rests her leg in Nick’s lap as he runs a major pentatonic up and down his guitar’s neck. There’s a light from within him, almost, illuminating every detail. Today, she’s obsessed with his knuckles as they stand out and recede beneath his spidery fingers. “Pretty sick, yeah.”

“Can I say I’m jealous of orcs?” Thekla does a series of motorboat chops along Kell’s broad back. “You got the crazy mate bond, you got the mad height and the big muscles. What do the poor little goblins get?”

“Pointy teeth and fabulous wagons.” Kell plucks Thekla from over her shoulders and holds her up around the middle like a cat. “And being small enough for their big orc wives to pick up.”

Thekla hums. “Fair enough.”

Despite her vocation, Dee’s never actually watched the show in full. She’s always been pulled elsewhere by some matter requiring her attention or by some packmate she’s checking in with. Tonight, for the first time, she parks herself in the wing next to Anise Cantator and lets herself enjoy the music.

The day the Door opened changed all their lives. For Pack Voraag, already accustomed to the ways of their own slice of humanity, it was a rich opportunity. But fires above, the way it’s changed music. Dee liked music well enough, loved to dance to the drums and had some posters of Kor Vokornos up in her childhood yurt. Who didn’t?

But there was a hole in her soul she didn’t even realize was there, and the first time she heard Legendary, heard that insanity they call rock music, it filled. The insane forest of percussion, a whole drumline at Kell’s fingertips that she beats the everloving shit out of. The swagger of Thekla’s sexy red electric guitar and all the badass names for the devices she uses on its squalling sound: amp, whammy bar, stompbox, overdrive. The bass, her new love, in the hands of a virtuoso like Evan Kamiyon, bringing these fastidious Tarounese squares screaming to their feet and shaking their butts.

And Nick. Her perfect mate Nick, in a pair of tight, shiny pants, sweeping his black stare out across the crowd as the beaten-up shred machine in his hands makes the most beautiful sound she’s ever heard.

Thekla treats her guitar like a complex, beautiful clockwork; Evan holds his bass with ancient reverence.

Nick plays his guitar like he fucking hates that thing.

He plays Fossil Fuel and mercilessly bends his strings into detuned howls. On Wendi Richter Scale, he does some crazy maneuver with his selector switch that plunges his guitar into seizures of indignant reverb. On Vampire Facial, the veins on his hands stand out as he chokes the guitar neck and thrashes out percussive, evil-sounding dead notes and popping palm mutes.

Their finale is the new single from the album, a roaring, fuzz-drenched forest fire of a cut called Never Yours. A full half of it is instrumental, and Nick just rips it open, pours his frenzied tangr’ak into it, jagged runs and intricate riffs that shake themselves apart with repetition only to slam back into machinist place around Evan’s rock-solid melody and Kell’s pyrotechnic toms.

Anise is doing this goofy dance, singing along to it, her voice lost in the squall. Dee wishes she had Dalma’s camera so she could immortalize how free and unburdened her little golden boss looks right now.

Thekla dips into Kyssaki in the chorus, singing it entirely in that hissing language that Earthlings call goblintongue, and the majority hobgoblin crowd loses its mind. Nick unslings his guitar as the song self-destructs around him and hurls it into the corner where its amp sits, creates a banshee wail of feedback that slices across the wall of sound. He picks it back up (now sporting a new ding near the horn) and carves a final laceration out into the arena before Kell brings the song to its shuddering conclusion and the staid courthouse’s concrete foundations shake to the roar of approbation that follows.

Legendary bundle offstage and Dee engages in her own rendition of Kell’s after-action tradition, sweeping Nick into a liplocked embrace. Firecrackers go off behind her eyes as he returns the kiss. He pins her to him with a bearhug across the small of her back and lifts her giggling off her feet. The tangr’ak is rolling off him, the heat spreading from his hands on her. Big, strong, sexy, talented Nicky. She needs to get him somewhere alone right now. She wants to feel some of the things he was doing to that guitar.

Anise coughs politely. “Kell, could I, you know. Borrow again?”

“Girl, you don’t even have to ask anymore. It’s all yours.” Kell pokes her head out from her own tangle of mates. “Have you talked to Nick and Dee about the, uh—” she goes silent as Anise does a quick throatcut gesture.

“Mmm?” Dee liberates her face from Nick’s for a confused moment. “What are we talking about?”

“Have your moment,” Anise says. “We can discuss it at rehearsal.”

* * *

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” Nick says. “For small time stuff, I think we’re already there, basically. Four simple songs and we’d be ready.”

Dee’s heart leaps to hear him say it. “Quill fuckin’ Bear is a go, then?”

“Let’s all hold our—uh, let’s rest our rhinos.” Anise holds up a precautionary drumstick. “As far as the schedule is concerned—”

“Ani. Honey.” Dee puts her bass aside and looms above the drum kit. “If you didn’t want this, you wouldn’t have brought it up. And if you want it, and I want it, and professor Nick thinks it’s a good idea, then fuck it, girl. Schedule ain’t stopping us.”

Anise blushes. “Well, I mean, I thought I had to at least mention it. Are we not being too ambitious? Splitting a bill with Legendary. They’re… well, they’re legendary. And us, we’re seriously running out of time. The tour’s touring, and I gotta go at the end. Maybe you want to replace me.”

Nick shakes his head. “You’re too central to the sound. We’ve been building these beats off you.”

“They’re really just elementary, Nick. I mean a motorik? You could teach that to a kid.”

“It’s not about complexity, Ani,” Nick says. “It’s about attitude and it’s about precision. You can lead a kid to motorik, but you can’t make him krautrock.”

“I do not know what Nick just said, but for the record I agree,” Dee says.

“You’re a fucking machine. I mean, you are on. I’ve never played with someone as consistent on the attack as you. You’re like a drum machine that can react and improvise in real time. That’s our sound right there.”

“Don’t say that.” Anise’s ears flutter. “You’ve played with Kell Kamiyon.”

“I know,” Nick says. “I stand by it. She’s an artillery barrage. You’re a drone strike. We need the Cantator beat. You’ve got Dee sounding like a session pro and she’s just picked the instrument up. No offense, babe.”

“None taken.” Dee shrugs. “Newbie’s a newbie. And I don’t wanna learn another drummer yet. We sound so sick together. I want you.”

She doesn’t mean it like how it ends up sounding. Except as the words drop into the tent floor like a lead weight, she realizes maybe she does.

You’re just oversexed right now, Dee. And tangr’ak happy. What did we say about hitting on the boss?

Anise looks like she’s about to melt into her drum throne. “You guys are just buttering me up now,” she mumbles.

“Fuck yeah we are,” Nick says. “Is it working?”

“It better be working,” Dee says. “I’m trying to butter you so hard we can spread you on toast. And then jam with you.” She hits a lick on her bass and bounces her shoulders. “Eh? Izzat something?”

“Sometimes I remember how English is your second language,” Nick says, as Anise lets out a choked sound that Dee diagnoses as a laugh.

Dee gives him a playful punch on the shoulder, which breaks the no touching rule they agreed on before rehearsing with Anise, so she pinches his butt too. In for a penny, in for a pinch. She’s very proud of both of them when they separate without getting under each other’s clothes, though they still make the elf blush. Whatever; a stiff breeze could make the elf blush.

“If.” Anise says, and then pauses, as though she didn’t know what the next few words would be. Dee crouches to the sitting elf’s eye level, locks gazes with her. “If… we are doing this.” Anise twists the drumstick in her hand. “Then we need to get serious about getting these songs nailed down.”

Dee punches the air in triumph and hurries to her bass, strapping in for the evening. Anise finishes the twirl with the stick pointed at Nick. “You said four, right? Four songs and then we gig?”

“That’s right.” Nick is dialing in the tone on his amp/cab. “Short, sweet, and barely prepared. That’s the ideal first gig.”

“Okay then, Quillies.” Anise starts a rhythmic whoosh of open-shut hi-hat. Her verdant lips pull into a smile. “Let’s try for two tonight.”

The hi-hat snaps shut one more time and Anise drills an instantly groovy dance beat into it. Dee hits a ridiculous boogie to it that cracks a smile into Nick as he hefts his axe. He scratches a snarling muted attack dog line, straining against its leash. Dee finds his root note and broods on it, stretching it into a darkwave pulse.

Then they throw the floodgates open, and Quillbear roars to life.