Elite: A Hunter novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  Good gods, what are we going to do if the Othersiders attack again? I suddenly thought, and felt a moment of sheer panic at the idea of having to turn around and go back to the Barrier, because I had nothing left to fight with.

  But that was when we pulled up at HQ, and we all more or less tumbled out of the transporter. We staggered into the building, and I headed for my room since there didn’t seem to be anyone wanting to debrief me. I sat down on the couch, just for a minute—

  The minute lasted twelve hours, according to the clock on my vid-screen when I woke up.

  WHEN I CAME TO—IT wasn’t exactly “waking up,” since the entire twelve-hour period had passed in something like a dead stupor—the vid-screen displayed a single message, dated from about two hours ago.

  Report to the armory. It took me a couple of minutes to grasp what it said, actually—I still felt stupid with exhaustion. I shoved myself into a sitting position with arms that still felt as clumsy as if they were made of wood, and everything that had happened all came rushing back, and I burst into tears and cried myself into throwing up.

  Oh, Steel, I am so sorry—

  It was my fault. We were on the same team, and if he hadn’t been with me, Ace would never have attacked him. If I had been paying attention, if I’d had my Shield up or even just the Shields of my Hounds, he wouldn’t have gotten knocked away.

  I didn’t want to report to the armory. I didn’t want to have to face Hammer. Steel had been with me when he’d been blasted by Ace. I was probably the last person to see him alive. I didn’t want to have to tell Hammer that. I didn’t want to tell him I hadn’t gone to Steel’s rescue. Even though there was no way I could have gone to his rescue, since Ace was monofocused on turning me into component atoms. Yet, at the same time, I knew I had failed Steel, failed all my fellow Elite. I was the Hunter with a pack of eleven. I was supposed to be able to do the impossible, right? What could I possibly say to him?

  I wasn’t hungry. In fact, after throwing up, my stomach was all twisted in knots, but I downed a couple of meal-drinks. Then I went and stood in the shower for five minutes and changed before I left for the armory, still trying to figure out what to say to Hammer. The walk there seemed both too short and took forever, at the same time. What was I going to say, not just to Hammer, but to everyone? How were we ever going to repulse another attack like that? Some of us were dead, all of us were exhausted, and the Psimons were in no better shape than we were. How could we ever save the city?

  And Ace…we were lucky he’d just been so focused on me that he ignored everything else. If he’d actually turned his attention to getting through the Barrier, he would have. He could have cut his way through the defenses like they were made of paper, and once he’d gotten inside the pylon, he could have destroyed the workings from the inside and taken down the Barrier.

  At that moment, as my hand touched the doorknob, all I could think of was Ace, with that Folk Mage behind him, doing impossible things, as if he’d gotten some sort of super-serum boost like in a pre-Diseray story, or had tapped into a whole new power source—

  And out of nowhere, that was when I remembered what “my” Folk Mage had said when he’d grabbed me and had shook me so hard for a moment that my teeth had rattled.

  “Do not just look, shepherd. See! Power always comes from somewhere!”

  I froze with my hand still on the knob. Because at that moment, things started falling together. What if I ignored that this was a member of the Folk, who had always been our deadly enemies? What if I forgot his weird behavior?

  The Folk almost never said anything directly. “Power comes from somewhere” was about as close as one of them was ever going to get in telling me how they—specifically, how Ace—had gotten overclocked. Besides, he would have known that, as a member of the enemy, I would never trust anything he just told me until I saw it for myself.

  So, I should not let myself get distracted by the source of the warning, and concentrate on what I was supposed to figure out. The first, that things were not what they seemed, had been something I already knew. But he had also told me that there was something right in front of me that I wasn’t seeing.

  Right in front of me. And right after he’d yelled that at me, Ace had shown up.

  Ace. Doing things he shouldn’t have been able to do, more powerful than anyone I’d ever seen, even the Masters. And the Folk Mage, standing behind him, who instead of joining Ace in attacking me, had apparently been doing nothing—or at least, had been passive until the moment came when they had to escape or be savaged to death by Myrrdhin and Gwalchmai.

  Except that if “my” Mage was right, I’d been wrong about all of that. I had looked, but I had not seen. Now…what if the Folk Mage had been doing something? It just hadn’t been obvious.

  What if he had been acting as Ace’s power source?

  It was one of those things the Masters were always saying: As soon as you realize the candle is a flame, your meal is cooked. Once you know something can be done, you’re halfway to doing it yourself. It had never occurred to me—or anyone else, I guess—that it might be possible to share magic. But magic was just another form of manna….

  It wasn’t that crazy an idea. I already knew that some Hunters could supply manna directly to their Hounds. I could do that, for instance. What if that feral Mage, acting as a sort of power supply, was the reason why Ace had been doing impossible things, things he never could have done on his own with only his own magic energy to fuel his spells?

  If that was true, it meant that not just manna, but magic itself could be stolen, donated, or shared. And that information could change everything. Would change everything. If that was true, I knew where us Hunters could get “power supplies.”

  All that flashed through my mind in the time it took me to open the door to the armory. Suddenly, I felt something I hadn’t for the last twenty-four hours.

  Hope.

  Someone had hauled in chairs for everyone to sit on, and it was obvious from the slumped shoulders and postures of exhaustion that everyone was just as drained and dispirited as I had been. And that didn’t even take into account all the bandages and bruises and other signs of injury. Even Armorer Kent was sitting, one wrist and the opposite ankle strapped into elastic supports, his eye blackened, a big bandage on his head, and the bulge of another on his right thigh under his clothing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him sitting down except when we were on a chopper. He looked toward the door as I opened it, and nodded at me.

  “Here’s the last of us,” he said, and waved me toward a chair. I felt horribly conspicuous as I edged between two rows of seated Elite to get to it. I didn’t look for Hammer; I was just as glad I didn’t immediately spot him. I still didn’t know what to say to him.

  Kent looked past me. “Go on, Siren. You were saying?”

  “Well, PsiCorps has been all over the news feeds,” said a woman behind me—I didn’t recognize her voice. “Taking credit for saving the city, and pledging they’ll do it again.”

  “They can’t, not unless the Othersiders hold off any more attacks for a couple of weeks at least,” Kent replied. “The Psimons are as depleted as we are. Half of them were collapsed on the ground at the Barrier, unconscious, if not dead, the last I saw.”

  There were uneasy murmurs at that. “We’re in no better shape,” Elite Mei protested from two chairs over. “There’s not a single one of us who isn’t hurt or exhausted or both. We aren’t ready to face another attack like that.”

  Kent’s jaw tightened, but a shadow passed over his face. “No, we aren’t. I—”

  “Sir?” I said, putting my hand up. “I—sir, I maybe have an idea—”

  Now all eyes actually were on me, and I squirmed a little in discomfort and began to doubt my sudden inspiration. What if I was wrong? But Kent nodded. “Go ahead, Joy.”

  So, into the silence, I explained about facing Ace and the Folk Mage. Described how the Mage had acted. I kind of decided not to men
tion “my” Folk Mage because I was pretty sure that if I did that, everyone would think my mind had been melted a bit by him. Heck, I’d have thought the same, except that I had eleven checks on my behavior, and none of my Hounds were treating me any differently.

  “…so I couldn’t figure it out, how Ace could be doing all that spellwork without dropping over, unless he was getting magic power from somewhere else. It’s been stewing in the back of my mind until I got to the door of the armory. And that’s when it hit me—that what if that Folk Mage hadn’t just been acting as his minder, what if he’d been acting as Ace’s battery bank?” I concluded. “And if he could do that, maybe we could too. That would mean we wouldn’t be limited anymore, if we could find another source of magic energy.” I didn’t add that we wouldn’t need PsiCorps next time, though I was pretty sure that thought had occurred to just about everyone here. “Think of what each of us could do, magically, if we had twice, three times the magic power available to us!”

  “Well…what sort of battery bank were you thinking about?” the armorer asked skeptically. “And how were you thinking of verifying this notion in the first place?”

  “Same answer for both questions, sir,” I said. “I figured I’d ask the Hounds.”

  Well, that caused a stir. People began looking at each other, then back to me, then started muttering to each other. Did they think I was crazy? I wouldn’t blame them if they did. But I had to get everything I’d figured out in front of them before they made up their minds I was insane. So I continued right on, over the murmuring. “See, Hounds are magic, and they eat manna. I thought, maybe they could turn manna into magic. I know some of us can share our manna with them so they can heal up. Maybe they can share magic back with us.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes,” remarked Elite Flashfire from my right. He looked like death warmed over, his head completely wrapped up in bandages and one arm in a sling. I didn’t blame him for feeling skeptical. But at least I had a source for the answers, and if the reply was no, well, we were no worse off than when I’d walked in.

  “But it’s easy enough to find out,” I pointed out. “I just bring over one of my Hounds and ask him. I haven’t had a chance to do that yet—the idea just hit me as I started to open the door here.”

  Kent made an impatient little gesture that more or less said “then get on with it,” and I got up, went to the front of the room, and pulled up magic inside myself. For the first time in a long time, it ached to do that, a dull, unpleasant throb deep in my chest followed by an all-over tenderness, like after you’ve overused your muscles and then try and do something before they’ve gotten a chance to recover. But it didn’t matter that it hurt, what mattered was that after that twelve-hour coma there was magic enough in me now to bring one Hound over, and I cast the Glyphs and opened the Way.

  Bya leapt through and stood there in his greyhound shape, looking from me to Kent and back again, waiting for me to say something.

  “Bya,” I said, “you know we’re in trouble; you know we can’t possibly face the Othersiders right now, not without help. So I need to know, can Hounds share magic with their Hunters? And if you can, will you?”

  Bya put his head to one side and thought about this for a moment, while all the Elite in the room held their breaths and stared at him. Finally, he nodded slowly, and there was a kind of collective sigh of relief. Tell them all what I tell you, exactly as I say it, he ordered.

  “He wants me to tell you exactly what he tells me,” I said. I heard some murmurs at that, as if some of my fellow Elite were not used to being spoken to by their Hounds as if we were all equals. Well, that didn’t matter, because we are, and if they hadn’t figured that out by now, it was time they learned it.

  In the course of ordinary Hunting, this would not be possible, Bya continued. In the course of ordinary Hunting, there is only enough manna released in a kill to allow us to feed and prosper. But we do not face ordinary Hunting now. We face war.

  Obediently, I repeated that word for word. A few of my fellow Elite looked shocked, not at what had been said, but at the fact that my Hound was smart enough to figure it out and say it.

  “He’s right,” Kent said flatly. “We’re into a whole new phase of hostility now. What we faced out there was all-out war.” There were murmurs of agreement, but also a sense of fear.

  You saw what happened when you faced so many of the enemy back there. You are depleted by what you do, but we have so much manna flowing to us that we cannot use more than a tenth of what is available. There is no reason to hoard it, since we cannot store that much manna, no matter how much we would like to. And it is foolish to let it go to waste. We can change it to the energies of magic, and, yes, we can give it in that form back to you. And I do not think that any Hound will refuse to do so. But do not take my word for this, Bya added. Ask your Hounds.

  I repeated all that, and needless to say, the reaction was pretty electric and was followed immediately by everyone in the room, Kent included, casting their own particular Glyphs, opening the Way, and bringing through their pack alphas, until the room was full of all the wild and weirdly varied kinds of Hounds we all had. Each alpha turned his attention to his Hunter. But I saw something new in the eyes of some of my fellow Elite—a realization that their Hounds were not just smart, magical animals, but something much more.

  And whether the query and reply was by thought or by word, the answer was the same as Bya had given me. Yes. They could turn surplus manna into magic, and they would, and they would feed us with it.

  We weren’t fighting against overwhelming odds anymore. We might not have more Hunters, but we Hunters had just been given a whole new weapon to fight with.

  The mood in the room, which had been somber, quietly frightened, and deep in despair, was transformed in that moment.

  The room had turned from a gathering of Hunters to a sea of Hunter-Hound pairs as each Hunter went into deeper and more involved conversation with his or her alpha. For some, I sensed, it was the first time actual “conversation” had ever taken place. But Kent glanced down at his Perscom and looked stunned.

  Then, without a word, he grabbed me by my elbow and dragged me out into the hall. Even limping hard, he was still a big, strong man, and I wasn’t exactly resisting. “Medbay,” he said as the door closed on the buzz of conversation. “On the double. I’ll catch up.”

  Even though I hadn’t a clue what was going on, I blindly followed the order, racing down the corridors at the direction of my Perscom to the medbay, which combined the infirmary, where minor injuries were tended, with the surgery and hospital. I still didn’t know why I was being sent here—but no sooner had I burst through the doors when Jessie grabbed my elbow and started shoving me toward the Hospital ward. “Wha—” I said.

  “Hurry up. He’s askin’ for ye, an Kent, I reckon Kent’s a-comin’.” Jessie was a big girl and muscled, and she wouldn’t have had any trouble frog-marching me anywhere she chose, but I didn’t see any reason to resist her. My only question was, who, exactly, was he?

  I winced to see that all the beds were occupied, but Jessie steered me toward one in particular.

  One that Hammer was standing beside.

  One that held—

  I gasped, but before I could say anything, Jessie had me parked on the other side of the bed from Hammer and laid a gentle hand on his unbandaged shoulder. “Mistuh Steel,” she said. “Got Joy here, an’ Kent’s a-comin’.” And only now did I realize that Jessie was still in a staff uniform—but it was medic white, and she had a little red cross over her left breast with an embroidered name, Jessie Knight.

  Steel looked like someone had been beating him with clubs. His face was so bruised it was blue-black, and his eyes were swollen shut. There was a stitched-up gash across his forehead and the top of his head, and he had his left arm in a cast. Frankly, he looked like everything in the world had used him for a punching bag.

  “Wait for Kent,” he croaked. His voice sounded as if he ha
d been screaming for about ten hours. Maybe he had been.

  “They brought him in a couple hours ago,” said Hammer, which explained why he hadn’t been at the meeting. “He’s concussed, and the Othersiders had a grand old time dancing on him. His Hounds grabbed themselves a search party and practically dragged the rescuers to him. Once they got him here, I sent his Hounds home and positively ID’d him. He wasn’t in any shape to do anything more than mumble, so he was only marginally more incoherent than normal.” I knew by that little dig that Steel really was going to be all right.

  “Ears work fine, moron,” Steel croaked.

  That was when Kent got there. Jessie had left us to wait by the door, and towed him over so Steel could tell us what we needed to know.

  He told his story in little bits, resting between each sentence, his words slurring together a little. “Last I saw of that rat Ace, he’d slammed me in the chest with a massive levin bolt and I was flying backward. I ended up landing soft, so I didn’t break every single bone in my body.” His paused for a breath, and Jessie stuck a straw leading to a glass of ice water in between his swollen lips. He took a couple sips, then continued. “Unfortunately, I landed soft on a bunch of Goblins, and they weren’t exactly in a forgiving mood.” He winced a little as he took a breath. “I managed to get something like a Shield up after they’d pounded on me with clubs for a while, but my Hounds couldn’t get to me, I knew I couldn’t keep the Shield going for very long, and I figured I was a goner.”

  He paused for a lot longer, Jessie hovering like a protective bird. “Then, all of a sudden, they stopped beating on me and parted like the Red Sea, and this Folk Mage just strolled through them. Not the one that was helping Ace—this one was different.”

  “How do you mean?” Kent asked when Steel paused again.

  “Fancy,” Steel replied. “For starters, he wasn’t feral. For another thing, I think he must have been pretty high ranking, given how he looked. I’ve seen rich people out Straussing that weren’t dressed as fancy as he was.”