Tribulations (Rogue Mage Anthology Book 2)

by Faith Hunter

  Step.

  It wasn’t long before he found what a deer would consider an ideal watering hole. The creek curved outwards, leaving a sandy slope in the lee. There were clear sight lines in all directions, so animals would feel safe drinking there.

  In the sand, John saw numerous prints: porcupine, fox, some birds, an old print that could be a wild pig. And a single deer hoofprint. The edges were sharp. The indentations not yet filled with seeping water. Less than an hour old. With nothing to scare it away, it wouldn’t have wandered far in its foraging in an hour.

  It hadn’t left any other hoofprints in the sand, but there were only a couple routes it would have used to approach the watering spot, and it would have left along those same routes. Picking the likelier one, John began walking back into the woods.

  Step.

  Scan the ground. Always scan the ground.

  Step.

  A bit of fur on a branch beside the path. Whitetail. He’d picked the right route.

  Nock an arrow to the bowstring.

  It was a good Pre-Ap bow. Not a modern bow with complicated pulleys that could freeze up in the winter, but a strong traditional bow passed down for generations. Although its origins were certainly in a sporting goods store maybe a century ago, not somewhere in the mists of tribal prehistory or any of that hokum.

  Of course, he had a rifle strapped on his back. He wasn’t an Old Ways idiot. But with a rifle, you got one shot, and if you missed your target, the noise would scare all the nearby prey away for a good long while. And right now, just the sound of chambering a round would ring out in the quiet of the forest. Sometimes, in some situations, the old ways made sense.

  Step.

  Ahead of him. A flash of ivory through the branches. Angular. Antlers.

  Too far away to get a clean shot. He continued moving forward, careful to stay downwind, to keep a clutter of trees between him and the buck, keeping his movements natural. John Sawatis belonged there in the same woods as the buck.

  His grandfather had claimed to remember places called Canada and New York. He said that when the glaciers had forced them off their northern reservation land, the family had chosen to live free in the woods, instead of going southwest to beg for space on another tribe’s reservation or south to take over the homes of dead people in the cities. Grandfather Joe remembered some of this uncles and aunts struggling and failing in the forest—they may have been living on a reservation in upstate New York, but they’d been city folk for all that. His grandfather had grown up practicing survival skills with his father and grandfather, so they’d made the transition better than most.

  John Sawatis had lived in the Tennessee woods his entire life. He was a part of the forest, a part of nature. Just like the buck.

  Step.

  Closer.

  The buck was walking slowly through the brush, browsing on the fresh greenery poking through the melting snow. Then it paused, alerted to something. John paused. Made a low grunting noise. Started moving forward again. Nobody here but us wild pigs. Satisfied, the buck returned to its grazing.

  Closer.

  It was odd that the buck still sported antlers this late in the year. They usually dropped off before spring—sometimes in the middle of the winter. A rare doe or an underage buck might keep them late, but the depth of the hoofprint said this was a heavy deer—a mature male. But the winter had been different and spring had come early this year; maybe that confused the animal’s internal clock.

  Closer.

  Close enough. John drew back on the string, sighted along the arrow at the deer. The brush screened it, but the low foliage was thin enough that it wouldn’t turn the arrow. He released it. The arrow streaked across the clearing.

  Crash! The deer was off.

  Run!

  John angled his sprint to pass through the spot where the deer had been standing. No arrow sticking out of the ground or a tree; he’d hit it.

  Now it was time for him to think like a wolf. The buck could run faster than a man or a wolf, but not forever. He had to have patience, keep on its tail, keep the pressure on it to make it exhaust itself, keep an arrow ready in case he got a chance to hit it again. He didn’t have to keep the deer in sight; so long as it could still sense him somewhere behind it, it would keep moving.

  Run!

  He wasn’t stalking anymore; time to make noise. John yelled as he ran. Not words; barking noises that would evoke images of wolves in the deer’s instinctive brain.

  Run!

  John saw it ahead of him, its path curving to follow the lay of the land, the path of least resistance and maximum speed. A longer shot, but still doable. He loosed another arrow at the buck, hit it again.

  Run!

  He wasn’t aware how long he chased the deer. Time was meaningless. There was only the buck and running.

  The buck was slowing down. Another arrow. A miss, but he kept the pressure on the injured beast.

  Run!

  Finally the deer couldn’t run anymore. It collapsed to the ground. John came in cautiously, long knife drawn for the kill, but careful to ensure that the buck couldn’t gore him with the last of its strength.

  His arrows had caught the buck in a haunch and in—John hissed through his teeth—in the pink, hairless flesh below one of its arms—one of its human arms on its human torso. The “deer’s” antlered head and neck blended seamlessly with the pink torso. So did its furred legs.

  Another monster from the headwaters of the Mississippi, up where St. Louis used to be. Either John had strayed further north than he’d thought, maybe to Kentucky—although lines on the maps didn’t matter much on the frontier—or maybe the ice was still advancing, forcing . . . things like this further south. Or maybe the monster population was growing, like it did in his grandfather’s day, expanding in all directions.

  It didn’t matter. He’d have to burn it. Didn’t want the local predators to get a taste for human flesh.

  Holding the thing’s head down with a foot on one antler, John slit its throat. He hung the body over a stream to bleed out. The blood would dilute in the running water, and the body would burn more quickly; he wouldn’t have to gather as much wood for the pyre.

  As he searched for tinder and fallen branches dry enough to burn, John’s thoughts drifted to discussions around the campfire with his father and his grandfather. Damn them all. Let the seraphs kill the dragons or the spawn kill the seraphs. Let the mules die fighting the kylen or the mages die screwing them. Let the orthodoxy wipe out the EIH. Let the cities burn. Let the ice take them all. He didn’t care. When they were all gone, the land would be given back to The People.

  It was almost sunset with he finally got the pyre built and the fire started. He had no prayers to offer over the abomination’s burning body, but the flickering flames brought to mind a joke John’s grandfather used to say. He must’ve really liked it, because he’d said it often enough. He’d repeated a lot of things in his last couple years. “Whadaya call an alien invasion, a plague, a world-wide religious war, and an ice age that kills three-quarters of the world’s population?”

  “A start,” John Sawatis said aloud.

  SPIKE Y JONES is a long-haired, tie-dye-wearing Canadian editor, writer, and trained philosopher. There not being a lot of money in philosophy, he’s concentrated his energies on his other talents.

  As a writer, Spike’s work has ranged from write-ups of Dungeons & Dragons monsters in the ’80s all the way to stories about different sorts of monsters in this collection three decades later.

  As an editor, Spike started by editing a presidential campaign game in 1992, and now in his day job edits 2016 presidential campaign transcripts. Rogue Mage: TRIALS and Rogue Mage: TRIBULATIONS are the first short-story anthologies he’s edited.

  Girl Loves to Shop

  Spring 105 PA / 2117 AD

  Faith Hunter

  Zerah strapped on the ES24, the electronic shield devised by the R&D department of the Pentagon. When she flipped the sw
itch, the unit buzzed against her skin like angry bees—she had an urge to scratch an itch that wasn’t there.

  The ES24 would allow her to use the satellite uplink communications and her new miniature computer while in the presence of neomages . . . at least for a time. Not even the Pre-Ap electromagnetic shielding designed to thwart atmospheric detonation of a nuclear warhead was proof against mage energies. And the military still didn’t know why, Zerah thought sourly. But at least they were getting a handle on it.

  Once activated, the ES24 would give her four hours of electronic stability. After that it was a crapshoot. And there would be five mages on this mission. Five freaking mages. She flicked the switch down, deactivating the unit, saving it for when she really needed it.

  From the EWU, the electronic weaponry unit, Zerah strode down the long hallway to the StandRep, the standard hardware repository. She had carte blanche here: permission to sign out any weapon she wanted, up to and including the T-47, the howitzer capable of launching the new .502 mage-inspired ammo, each round loaded with seraph steel and salt from the Holy Land. She’d been tempted to take a T-47, but had no transport for the massive unit. Zerah had seen the demonstration on captive spawn. Damned effective against the damned. Her grin hardened, showing teeth and fury.

  Once, only beheading, burning to ash, being eaten by its own kind, or processing through a meat grinder had been permanently effective against devil-spawn. Now the good guys had ammo that kicked major Darkness ass, and swords were finally beginning to fall by the wayside. Of course, swords didn’t run out of ammo, which gave them an undeniable edge, though she balked at the play on words.

  She shoved open the StandRep door and it banged against the wall behind.

  “Morning, Cap’n,” the gunnery sergeant saluted. He didn’t rise, but she didn’t expect him to. He was sitting in the cockpit of the mobile armament retrieval vehicle, affectionately referred to as Morry, and only one arm was free of the straps and electronic sensors that married him to the unit. “Watcha need?” he asked around a mouthful of chaw—either that was some of the low-quality tobacco that grew here and there in the U.S. nowadays or the job paid better than Zerah thought.

  “I want something that’ll knock a hole in a dragonet big enough to disable it so I can kill it before it regenerates. And I want enough ammo to repeat the process for a hellhole full of ’em.” Her anger had been hidden, pressed down deep inside her for years, but in the silent, dark places of her soul that rage had continued building and growing. And finally she was going to set it free, the decades-old fury that that had shaped and formed her. She forced herself to relax, and stood at parade rest, fighting the tremors, the demand for fight-or-flight in her limbs. She watched Morry and its driver.

  Gunny muttered under his breath, his eyes roaming his arsenal. He shook his head and activated a foot pedal. Morry, made of reinforced tubular mage steel, pulleys, a long-life solar battery powered by a Sun mage, and protective mesh in the event of a gravitational mishap—the military’s way to describe stock falling from high shelves—moved smoothly forward on its wide tires. He shifted his left arm, sheathed in a Pre-Ap sensory glove, and Morry’s retrieval arm raised, extended, and sought a wooden box on a shelf marked “AR.” The pincer at the end of the arm opened and closed on the end of a medium-sized box and began to slide it forward. With a series of complicated hand motions, Gunny maneuvered Morry’s pincer along the long box to its midpoint, and then lifted it and carried it to the floor. The box was marked “AR-82.”

  The AR-82s were lightweight, shoulder-mounted, practically recoilless, wildcatted .470 semi-automatic dragon-guns. With a velocity of around 2,000 feet per second, and increased range and penetration over their blackpowder, elephant-gun forebears, the ARs were a dragon-hunter’s wet dream.

  “Oh yeah,” Zerah murmured. She took a pry bar from the desk and opened the box. Sighing with pleasure, she removed one of the two sleek, black units from the molded foam padding. Expertly, she broke down the weapon, inspecting it thoroughly and minutely. Satisfied, she nodded at Gunny. “I’ll take seven of them and as much ammo as a WetBetsy can carry.” WetBetsey’s were armored personnel carriers based on the same design as Morry. They were created to penetrate hellholes and carry troops and weaponry deep underground. And they cost a freaking fortune. Zerah knew she would be court-martialed if she came back without it.

  Gunny’s brows rose in surprise. He opened his mouth to question, but spat into a cup instead. He closed his mouth, pursed his lips and spat again, and had Morry bring down another box. While he worked, Zerah remembered to breathe, and meandered to the steel weapons cache. She chose seven human-forged steel swords and fourteen throwing knives, each with its sheath or scabbard. From the aisle dedicated to handguns, she gathered seven Smith & Wesson 9mm semiautomatics, a couple pristine originals and some newer models built from the original patterns. They were useless against spawn, but they worked against Dark mules well enough.

  When she glanced back, all the AR cases were on the floor and Morry idled. His eyes narrowed, Gunny watched Zerah, making her itch between her shoulder blades almost as intensely as mage-shielding did. It was as if he knew she was here with forged papers—as if he knew she was going off the grid, into the wilds, on her own. Just Zerah, her handpicked troops, and five battle mages, chasing after the dragon who had killed her family. It had taken her twelve years of careful and clandestine accumulation and analysis of data to pinpoint the region where the dragon’s hellhole was situated, and now, finally, she was going after it. And no sergeant was going to stop her.

  The door to the hallway opened, and six black-clad second unforeseen walked in, their battle boots oddly silent on the concrete floor. Each saluted her, nodded to Gunny, and began to inspect his or her weapons, strapping on the blades and shouldering the ARs. Without a word, they left, one at a time, slipping from the room.

  Gunny spat again and smiled, his big horse teeth coffee-brown in the sterile light. “Good luck, Cap’n. Bring me home a claw for my part in this little . . . run.”

  Zerah tensed. It sounded like blackmail. Claws were expensive items on the black market. She studied the sergeant, wondering if he would report her, set an alarm, call the general and have her stopped at the gate. I should take him out.

  Gunny tensed his fist. The huge pincer swung—hard, fast, right at her. Zerah whipped back her head. The pincer stopped a bare inch from her chin. She froze.

  “What?” he barked. “You think you’re the only one who lost family to the Dark? Think you’re the only one who goes after them when they find the hellhole?” Gunny relaxed his hand, the pincer easing away from her face. Zerah remembered to breathe. “Just don’t bugger up my guns. And try to get them all back to me. It’s a pain in the ass to balance the paperwork.”

  Zerah back-stepped slowly to the door, her eyes hard on the sergeant.

  Gunny grinned. “Don’t forget that claw.” He pointed with his chin, and Zerah looked to the corkboard on the wall. There were five claws hooked into the board, each holding a photo of a dead dragon. Before she could react to the sight, he added, “I got good odds on you making it . . . all of you. The general thinks you’ll leave your men’s blood on the ice. Don’t make me lose my pocket money.” The breath stopped in Zerah’s lungs. Gunny just laughed.

  Beauty and the Beasts

  Late Spring 105 PA / 2117 AD

  Faith Hunter

  Reimei watched from his cell, standing well back from the demon iron bars so he wouldn’t get singed. The stone at his sides and under his bare feet burned badly enough as it was. A Stone mage might have drawn power from it and found freedom, or at least taken out some of the swarming spawn in the hellhole. But deep beneath the ground, there were no winds to draw on, no weather patterns to siphon energies from, and his own meager stores were long-depleted. An Air mage was useless down here.

  The captive neomage had no idea what the dragon intended for him, but whatever it was, it would be far worse than being eaten a
live by dragonets. Eaten alive—Reimei, neomage of a litter of eight, chuckled to himself, the half-mad cackles bouncing sickly off the stone. It was a strange day when being eaten alive would be the lesser of two evils.

  In the passageway outside his cell, he heard rustling—not the beloved rustling of leaves in the wind, but the dry slither-rustle of scales and chitinous feet on stone. Reimei took an involuntary step back, his shoulder blades only millimeters from the cold rock wall.

  The dragon stopped outside his cell and peered in. Chorael was small, only eight feet tall, and so stood straight, not hunched, when he paused outside the cell door. Chorael pulled his leathery wings close around him, leaving only his misshapen head, his haunches and lower feet, and his long tail visible above and below.

  The dragon’s eyes were the shade of the finest pearls, matching the rows of pointed teeth and the silvery horns extending back from his head. His tongue licked forward, moistening the black lips that outlined his mouth. Chorael was beautiful in his dragon form, his skin glowing like the sea on a balmy day, and his wing tips appearing frosted like whitecaps kicked up by the wind. The scales swirled down his body, darkening in color as they formed a distinctive geometric pattern across his belly and then cascaded chaotically over his thighs and lower legs. His feet were emerald green, with even darker claws. Chorael’s skin would make a beautiful wall hanging.

  Early on in his confinement, Reimei had hoped to see the skin on a wall in the New Orleans Enclave, or perhaps even as a canopy over his bed. He still harbored hope that his litter-mate Melina was alive somewhere in the hellhole’s depths. If so, she might yet find a way free, and perhaps even bring help to rescue him. It was a faint hope, but the only one that kept him going each time he woke.