Elite: A Hunter novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  Then it wasn’t gaining height; it was losing it. It wasn’t thinking now; in the battle to stay aloft, its world had narrowed to the fight to escape the pull of gravity. Desperation overcame it, and all it could do was call out frantically to its fellow Thunderbirds as it fell, slowly, to earth.

  In the last few yards, it gave up the fight altogether—or maybe it just ran out of strength. It crashed to the ground with a piercing cry of mingled fear and despair.

  “Don’t shoot it!” I yelled into my mic as Dusana and Hevajra bamphed to its shoulders, pinning its wings to the earth without breaking any of the delicate wing bones. “Cover us!” I added as I sprinted to the front of the fallen creature. Like most birds, now that it was pinned breast-down on the ground, it couldn’t raise its head very far and certainly couldn’t strike at me. The deadly talons were extended beneath and behind it, and it couldn’t lever itself up enough to stand and rake me with them.

  The rain poured down on both of us as we took the measure of each other.

  “What are you doing, Joy?” Kent shouted in my ears.

  I didn’t answer. He’d put this in my hands. I hoped he’d continue to trust that I knew what I was doing.

  I hoped I knew what I was doing. Now that I was here, in front of the thing, I was galvanized by something that was not quite fear but was not far from it.

  I stared into its eyes—still red, but no longer glowing. I’ve never had much to do with birds. That was Master Pepperberg’s specialty. I didn’t think I was misreading what I saw there, though; behind the flattened feathers and staring eyes, it was terrified of me. Good. I wanted it terrified. This would only work if it was afraid of me, and the original plan of picking the Thunderbirds off one at a time while more mobs of monsters attacked us was not an optimal strategy.

  “What I have done to you, I can do to every one of your flock,” I said. The eyes flared fiery red for a moment, and then the light subsided again, leaving only the fear. “And you know that. You know what we can do. But I think you have been misled, and I am willing to allow you to correct that mistake.” Now I bowed a little to it, remembering what Master Hon Li had done so long ago. “Of a courtesy, I think that you should abandon your allies, who did not warn you of this, and leave us in peace.”

  This was what I was gambling on; after that encounter my uncle had described, the Mountain had never again been troubled by Thunderbirds. That made me think they might be very different from the Othersiders we usually fought. That they could be something we could negotiate with.

  The circle of my reality narrowed to the Thunderbird and myself. I stared into those glowing, alien eyes and tried to project confidence, even though I was probably as terrified as the Thunderbird was. The bird’s eyes blazed. Finally, the great hooked beak opened, and a strange metallic voice emerged from it.

  “What surety do you give us that you will not pursue us?” it said in perfectly good English. I nearly jumped, I was so startled. But I managed to cover my surprise by turning that into a shrug. Does it understand a shrug? Never mind….

  Overhead, the other Thunderbirds circled, their attack on the pylon aborted as they stared down at us. This was what I had hoped for—that the Thunderbirds would remember or had heard of the encounter with Master Hon Li and be willing to listen. They’d shown they could be talked out of attacking once, so why not a second time?

  “The surety that we have more than enough to deal with without pursuing you,” I replied, forcing a laugh. “Your allies have done you no favors; they lured you here with promises they could not keep, and they lied to you about our strength. Escape with your lives, and stop your ears to them in the future.” Bya came up beside me, and we put a double Shield over ourselves. Get off his wings, I told Dusana and Hevajra, taking the chance that even if the Thunderbird struck at me, the Shield would deflect it and the rest of my team would cut it down with their weapons before it could get in a second attack.

  The two Hounds bamphed off it. Then the rest of them gathered up beside me, still feeding me magic, and the huge bird got clumsily to its feet and gave itself a tremendous shake, finally breaking the ice on its tail and sending shards everywhere. Now that it was free, it was threatening enough to bring my heart up into my mouth. It was taller than Dusana and loomed over us all, staring down at us with its neck curved so it could stare at us directly, strange and indecipherable thoughts passing behind its eyes.

  It looked from me, to its fellows, and back again. Was it talking to them? It looked as if it was.

  Then it spoke for the last time. “I do not understand why you would do this, but we say yes,” it replied shortly. It raised its head skyward and uttered a deafening, piercing cry. The others answered it, and it spread its wings. Warned by that, the Hounds and I scrambled backward, and it shoved itself up into the air with powerful thrusts of its legs and wings. We were buffeted by the blast from those wing beats, nearly knocked off our feet, in fact. Or at least, I was. I had to hang on to Dusana and Shinje to keep my footing.

  It gained height rapidly now that it was no longer weighed down by the ice. When it reached the same altitude as the rest of the Thunderbirds, they circled the pylon three times before shooting up into the clouds, heading westward, and abandoning their attack.

  An unnatural silence fell on this part of the battlefield; for a moment, the rain slackened off, and I turned to see that the rest of the monsters that had been attacking us were staring, dumbfounded, at their retreating allies. Before they could break out of their shock, I pulled my rifle around from my back and stitched their front line with bullets. A second or so later, so did the rest of my team. My Hounds and I sprinted back to the group, and Hammer and Steel raised their Shields again. The rest of my team cheered, while they continued to hammer at the Shields of the latest lot of monsters.

  I became aware of someone sputtering at me on the comm.

  It was the armorer.

  “What in—Joy!—how did you—what—”

  “Elite Joyeaux here, Armorer,” I said between levin bolts.

  “What did you just do?” He finally managed something like coherent speech.

  “I convinced them to go away,” I replied. “Can you send us some help? I don’t think the rest of the Othersiders appreciate my negotiation skills.”

  Kent’s response was definitely colorful, mostly unprintable, and in the affirmative. Which was good, because now we were really getting hammered.

  With this pylon no longer in immediate danger, Kent’s plan was to work all of us toward the Barrier. Eventually, we formed a ragged line with the pylon at our rear center and the Barrier at our backs. That took us out of the army’s line of fire, in theory at least.

  In practice, not so much; shells fell and rockets exploded much too close to our line for comfort.

  The Thunderbirds had not taken the storm with them either. The last encounter at the Barrier had been in the pitch dark of predawn; this one was in a tempest.

  The skies opened up. If we had been getting pounded before, now it felt as if we were standing under a waterfall. Once the Thunderbirds were gone, nothing was exercising any control over this storm. Lightning arced across the sky, and the barrage of thunder was indistinguishable from the artillery barrage.

  The Hounds continued to pour magical energy into us, and we continued to work just short of miracles, but it takes physical strength and endurance to use magical energies. That strength and endurance are the same resources anyone uses to run marathons, chop wood, or lift weights. Eventually, they run out, and no amount of magic will replace them.

  And to make matters worse, what had been a hayfield was now a muddy morass, only getting deeper and stickier with every passing moment. We were mired up to our knees in water over thick, sucking mud. Just moving took herculean effort, and we were moving and fighting.

  We were starting to flag. PsiCorps was nowhere to be seen. Although, to be fair, by the time they would have gotten into choppers, the rain was coming down so hard I’m
not sure choppers could have flown in it.

  The only thing we had going for us was that the Othersiders were just as handicapped by the muck and mud as we were. More, some of them. The Nagas were not doing well; you’d have thought that snakes would have no problem slithering through mud, but their weight played against them. If they went erect, and they had to in order to fight, they were getting just as stuck as anything with two legs. Only the giant monsters were unaffected; to them, the mud was barely halfway to their ankles, and for the Gogs and Magogs, it barely covered their insteps.

  I wasn’t bothering to move, and when my Hounds did, they bamphed instead of trying to wade through the mud. Fire bolts were all but useless; they fizzled out halfway to the target. The good news: because their own forces were slogging just as much as we were and stood between them and the pylons, the Gogs and Magogs couldn’t get close enough to the pylons to attack them without squashing their own allies. And that was about the only good news that there was.

  You couldn’t see more than twenty or thirty feet, but that was more than enough, when that twenty or thirty feet was full of things that wanted to kill you.

  I wasn’t just wet; I was sodden. I was stuck, and where I was standing, the water and mud were just over my calves. Every muscle ached, and there was a metallic taste of fatigue in my mouth.

  Can they just keep throwing cannon fodder at us until they wear us down?

  “Huddle up and form layered Shields!” Kent suddenly ordered. “Artillery incoming! Right flank launching Hellfires.”

  I looked in Hammer’s direction; most of my team was with him, but the Hounds and I had gotten too far away.

  “Joy!” Steel shouted. “You—”

  “Don’t worry!” I called back. “Not my first Hellfire rodeo!” And at the same time, I was calling all my Hounds in. Hold and Strike, who couldn’t bamph, had never left my side, but the rest started popping up next to me like gophers.

  Just in time. “Hellfires in five, four—”

  Shields up! I told them all, and put up my own.

  “—three, two—”

  We were covered in a lovely, multicolored dome, which had the added relief of keeping off the rain, at least for a moment.

  “—one!”

  The middle distance, beyond the curtain of rain and the waterfall effect of the downpour streaming down the Shields, bloomed with red and yellow. The concussive force that followed a fraction of a second later actually made the Shields bow in toward us, and I felt it in my gut as magic got sucked away from me to compensate.

  Then came a wave of welcome heat.

  “Hellfires, incoming, left flank in five, four, three—”

  The left flank of the army support must have been farther away than I’d thought—I hadn’t had a second to look at a battle map on my Perscom—because this blast was a bit more distant, though it had almost the same impact on us.

  The effect on the monsters around us depended on the monsters themselves. Some, with little or no protection against the concussive blast, were knocked unconscious. Sadly, there were not as many of those as I would have liked. The rest were shocked, at least, and that gave most of us a little breathing room.

  Most of us.

  But not me. Because striding through the morass straight toward me, walking on top of the water, with the rain sheeting over their Shields…

  …were Ace and his pet Folk Mage.

  “HAMMER!” I SHOUTED ON our team freq. “I’ve got company. Ace and his buddy. Take over the team.” Before he could reply, I switched to the general freq. “Kent, Hammer is now lead,” I said, and transferred all my attention to Ace.

  Behind him, that feral Mage just stood there, knees flexed, eyes unfocused. Ace must have heard what I said; he wasn’t that far away from me, and I don’t think even all the battlefield noise or the roar of the rain drowned my shout out. He glared at me, then opened his mouth….

  I had the sudden and absolute conviction that he was about to do something that would give him more than an edge; it would give him the win without even trying for it. Like calling in some big favor from the Folk—more than just getting his Folk Mage battery. Or if not that—what if he’d been given the spells to calling up Portals? He could bring a flood of Othersiders, right here to the base of the pylon, and with his help, they could get inside it and destroy it from within.

  So before he could get a single syllable out, I let him have it. Powered to the teeth by all that magic my Hounds were pouring into me, I delivered a tremendous hammerblow right on the top of his Shields.

  It didn’t break his Shields, but it bowed them the way the distant blast of the Hellfires had bowed mine, and more to the point, the blow shook him physically, actually made him stagger for a split second and enraged him that I’d gotten a salvo off first.

  That was what I wanted: to get his attention centered on me and make him forget what he’d been sent to do.

  And that worked. The Folk Mage put a hand on his shoulder, and Ace shook it off—and if he’d been able to shoot lasers out of his eyes, I would have looked like a piece of lace. Whatever mission he’d been on, it was forgotten now.

  And he didn’t know I had my own eleven-Hound battery system.

  Before he could recover, I followed the hammerblow up with cold; with all that rain pouring down his Shield, casing him in a dome of ice was going to be a lot faster than it had been when we’d dueled in the arena. I sucked the heat out of the area around him so fast it looked as if I was flash-freezing him. In fact, the ice was an inch thick before he reacted and flexed his Shields to shatter the frozen shell.

  Dammit. If that had only worked, I could have cut off his air and knocked him out….

  He tried fire bolts…which fizzled out in the downpour before they even reached me, something the rest of us out here had already figured out. The rain was just coming down so hard and fast, fire bolts didn’t have a chance. I guess he wasn’t paying attention. While he was launching fire bolts, I hit him with another hammerblow and followed that up with a blinding light-flash, learned from Dazzle.

  “Joy! What’s going on?” Kent called as Ace switched to levin bolts, which were not unlike Archer’s explosive “magic arrows.”

  “Got company,” I said shortly, bolstering my own Shields against the barrage of levin bolts. “Ace and his pet.”

  At least this time he doesn’t have access to a laser. One thing we did know, the Folk had absolutely no use for our tech and either abandoned it or left it melted and useless when they found it.

  Both of them were standing higher than me, right at the level of the mud or a little above. Ace and his pet Mage must have created some sort of solid surface out of the water; I’d have given an awful lot to know how they’d done that. Or maybe the Folk Mage was floating them both; we knew the Folk could float in midair and seemed to prefer floating to standing. There were rumors they could fly too, but no one had ever actually seen one doing so. Then again, why fly when you can bamph?

  Then, suddenly, the attack stopped.

  It took a moment or two before the Shields washed clear of mud again. And when we could see, my heart stopped too.

  Ace stood there, grinning, looking just as lively as before. The Folk Mage with him didn’t look particularly tired either. And standing to either side of his Shield bubble were Drakken. Huge, golden-eyed, hungry-looking Drakken.

  My mind went absolutely blank.

  “Like my new Hounds?” Ace called with a sneer in his voice. “I think they’re a definite upgrade on the old ones. You might as well keep my mutts, ungrateful whelps that they are. I like the new ones better.”

  I’d thought I was afraid before. That fear was not even close to what I was feeling now. This was way out of my league. It was too late to run, there was nowhere to hide, and I couldn’t handle a single small-size Drakken alone—Ace had two, two of the biggest Drakken I’d ever seen.

  Bya whimpered, staring up at the two monsters as they stared down at us. I would hav
e whimpered, if I could have gotten my paralyzed throat to produce a sound.

  How tall were they? All I knew was that they seemed to fill half the sky. I felt like a bug. Rain sheeted down the Drakken’s heads, creating waterfalls that cascaded over their scales and down their shoulders. Their golden eyes were like searchlights, pinning us where we stood in the mud. They didn’t move; they just stood there, breathing, biding their time before they turned us into snacks. The only reason I could tell they were alive and not some illusion was the perfection of those streams of water tumbling down their scales, as if they were mountains in a Japanese wall scroll. When people make illusions, they usually forget details like that.

  And then, they moved. Not much. They just arched their necks and brought their heads down a little farther. Just enough so that it was completely obvious that they were lazily deciding how they would attack us.

  “So how should we do this, do you think?” Ace continued, an evil glee in his voice. “Should I let them pick off your Hounds first? Should I give your Hounds the option to desert you? Should—”

  There was no warning. One moment, those monstrous heads were looming over us. Then in the time it took me to blink—

  —in no more than a second, maybe less, everything changed.

  Because something invisible slammed their heads together, just like those pre-Diseray ’toons, where one anthropomorphic animal would put a paw on either side of the heads of two others and slam their heads together to teach them a lesson.

  They hung above me for a moment like that, mirror-image Drakken heads slightly deformed, flattened, against a space between their heads, invisible except for the fact that their heads were pancaked against it; it was poised right between them.