Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  The cattle were still out there too, but they were feral now, never saw humans except when they were hunted the way the buffalo that had roamed here had been hunted, and looked nothing like the fat, box-shaped walking meat-sacks that used to drift around these green fields I’d seen in those history books. These were cattle like you could find sometimes down in the valleys below the Mountain: crazy-eyed, wary, and rangy as a goat, and as the train sped by, they ran away from it, fleet and agile, then whirled to stare at it suspiciously as if to make sure it wasn’t going to escape its cage. There are a few of them at the Mountain that some of the folks in the settlements have caught and tamed down, but it’s so hard to keep them fed properly and from running away that most people don’t bother. Goats and sheep are easier to keep, and they do better if the herd has to be driven up into the snow to protect them from a monster raid.

  There were things that weren’t birds circling overhead. Harpies. I could tell by the shape. Huge, blunt wings, though they still shouldn’t be able to fly, Master Kedo says. He says it’s probably magic keeping them up. I’ve driven them off hundreds of times, and we’ve killed a few too; they’re like huge vultures, but with four legs instead of two, and something that might look like a human head in bad light. The head is bald for the same reason a vulture’s head is bald; they stick it right down inside the body cavity of whatever they’re eating, if the thing is big enough. They have a short, blunt muzzle, and a mouth full of pointed, tearing teeth.

  They were probably waiting for one of the cattle to do something stupid and get itself killed. Harpies didn’t hunt; they were scavengers, like vultures, and cowards at that. Nothing to worry about unless a flock of them decided to take you on, or you were toddler size. One of the things I was really proud of was that nobody had lost a kid to Harpies since I’d become a Hunter.

  But in the far distance there was smoke, a lot of it, and it had that tinge of black that told me it was coming from burning buildings. I squinted; there was some movement at the base of the smoke, and if I could see movement at this distance, it had to be something big. Drakken maybe, or Gogs and Magogs. So—I’d heard about this before I’d left. Out there was what was left of Springdale. Springdale was lucky; everyone had gotten out before the Drakken charged in and set everything ablaze. No point in going back, either; the Drakken had taken it for their nesting grounds, and you might as well think about going to the moon as think about taking back your town when Drakken moved in. And the Hunter Elite weren’t going to show up and take the town back, either. Not even an Elite team could handle a flock of Drakken when they decided to settle. Since the Springdalers had gotten outside the danger zone on their own, it had been up to the army to evacuate them to a new settlement. No wonder the steward was nervous last night. One Drakken couldn’t take on a train, but a whole flock could. Drakken hadn’t wanted Anston’s Well. There hadn’t been any of them at that attack. I don’t know what we would have done if it had been Drakken that night. Just give up, probably, let them have the town for nesting season, and only take it back when the snow drove them off again.

  I’d never Hunted Drakken; I’d never, ever heard of a single Hunter who had. The Masters said there had been Drakken killed by groups of four or more Hunters working together, and Elite teams could do it, but it couldn’t have been recently, or for sure it would have been on the official vid-broadcasts we were supposed to try to watch. Between the fire they breathed and how fast and big they were, I couldn’t imagine any way to kill one down here on the flat plain. You’d need a way to pin it, and then a way to escape being turned into scorched meat yourself.

  In between the cattle at the side of the tracks and the burning town, there didn’t seem to be anything. I knew better than to trust that. It was just when the landscape seemed empty that it was inclined to sprout things that wanted desperately to kill you.

  Now, some of this was pure, mindless, “humans are the tastiest things there are” sort of wanting to kill you. And we are the best “eating” there is for Othersiders; the younger we are, the tastier we are. If you haven’t studied magic, and most people haven’t, you wouldn’t know why. It’s because of the manna, which is raw, magical energy. Everything makes it, but humans make more of it than animals, plus we’re born with a huge honking reservoir of the stuff, so young humans are extremely tasty indeed. The manna is one reason why the Hounds work with me; together we can take out very manna-rich targets, and they get to eat it all, since I don’t need it.

  But the most dangerous of the things, and the rarest for humans to see, are the brainy ones. The Folk. They kill humans for reasons of their own, and we don’t know what those are, because they don’t speak to us, except on very rare occasions, and then it’s usually a challenge or very cryptic. They live on—they own—the Island of California, among other places. Most people never see them. Of those that have, almost all are Hunters, and they lived to tell about it because they killed the Folk before the Folk killed them. Are the Folk in control of the other creatures? Sometimes. Were they the ones that caused the Breakthrough, or did they just take advantage of it? No one knows.

  Cits never hear about the Folk because the government really does not want people to know about them. That’s what my Masters told me, anyway, when I was picked to be sent to Apex. They warned me to be careful about talking about them out in the rest of the world; they told me before I left that unless and until someone important actually said something about the Folk, I was to pretend they didn’t exist. Us on the Mountain know, all of us, because of the Masters, who don’t believe in holding back information. Master Kedo told me that he reckons that the military and the government that’s based in Apex would rather regular Cits didn’t know there were creatures out there that were that smart and in control of things.

  As I looked out that window, I got one of those feelings, a goose-bump moment combined with a certainty. It’s not being a Psimon, because I’m not. My Master, Kedo, says he thinks it’s that I’m sensitive to the magical presence of things, and sometimes I can tell what they are, if they’re powerful enough.

  Anyway, that was how I knew that there was one of the Folk out there. Maybe more than one, I couldn’t tell this far away. Springdale had fallen because they wanted it to. And I was very glad we were speeding past it. We were going fast enough that they probably wouldn’t notice us. Incidents are horrible enough without having the Folk involved. But that explained why the Cits of Springdale had managed to escape. The Folk let them, holding back the monsters until everyone was out. Why? Heck if I know. The Folk do things all the time that make no, or little, sense. And maybe that was another reason why the government didn’t want ordinary Cits to know about them. It’s hard enough knowing there are monsters outside your protections that you can at least predict. But smart monsters that are completely unpredictable? That’s enough to put people into a panic.

  I quickly directed my thoughts to concentrate on my token, One White Stone. This is my Core, the object I have learned to think about exclusively when I am worried that something might pick up my thoughts. This is a trick the Masters taught me, and so far as I know, I am the only Hunter who does this, though most of the Masters of all sorts do. Before the Breakthrough, I think the Masters must all have been Magicians along with being religious personages, even if they didn’t call themselves that, because how they teach us to use magic is from books or traditions hundreds and hundreds of years old. My Master, my special mentor, for instance—his name is Kedo Patli, and his magic is all from what used to be Mexico. There’s Dineh Masters, who’ve taught the Way of the Monster Slayer to two of our people, and Ivor Thorson, who knows all about Norse things and taught Rennie Clay, and Lady Rhiannon and her group, who do Celtic magic and taught old Mary, Hudson, Big Tom, and Little Tom, and—well, like I said, it’s a big mix. Even the carvings and paintings, the weavings and embroideries that are all over the Monastery are a mix of all sorts of art styles.

  The Hounds know that when my thoughts are full
of One White Stone, there is danger around me. They would know, on the Otherside, that something was up and be ready for a summons.

  It’s just not wise to talk or think about the Folk. Some people believe it can summon them right from the Otherside. I don’t know about that, but I do know that thinking about them certainly gets their attention.

  The smoke dropped behind us, and I relaxed a very little bit. Enough that when the steward brought me breakfast, I was able to enjoy it. Some of the Masters are vaygen: they only eat plant-stuff, and animal-stuff that doesn’t involve killing, like butter and eggs, but most of our people up on the Mountain are omnivores, so the smoked bacon and eggs weren’t new to me. Except that I suspected this bacon at least was clone pig—vat-grown meat a couple of cell generations down from the sample that had been taken from a living hog. It had a kind of uniform taste and texture I wasn’t used to, and I missed the “wild” taste and leanness of bacon that comes from a pig that’s raised outside of a confining pen. But there was some orange-colored juice that was really nice and more of that Chocolike. We have coffee—it grows on mountains, and people managed to get it to grow on ours—and I like coffee a lot, but I could get used to this other stuff pretty quickly. There was toast made from bread of a sort I wasn’t used to. Ours isn’t wheat bread, it’s half lupine flour and half other stuff, depending on what got ground into flour lately; it’s dark and dense. This was hardly like bread at all. It was all right, especially with butter, kind of delicate. Like cake that wasn’t sweet. Our jelly is a lot better than Cit jelly, though, so I skipped that. Cit jelly is insubstantial, sweet without having an actual flavor.

  I think of “us” and “Cits” as being different, which we all do where I come from. Up on the Mountain, even though we’re technically Cits, we never use that name for ourselves except with outsiders. Cit means “citizen,” which everyone is except outlaws or preps or vivalists or militia, or anyone in the army. Back in the early days, when it was the Armed Services that were protecting everyone they could gather up over in the East, that was how they divided folks up. You were either a soldier, or a Hunter, or a Cit. When Apex got built, they kept those divisions, ’cause it was easier. But we use “Cit” to mean “person who lives in a city.”

  Except when we’re talking to Cits. You never want to go out of your way to make people think you think differently from them. No one wants to give the army a reason to come snooping around the Mountain. We don’t want to lose our Hunters, and we don’t want people who haven’t the right to know about it find out about the Monastery. My uncle knows, but he’s different. He was fifteen years older than my father, and he was raised in Safehaven. The monks told me that when he was fourteen, his parents took the family to Apex because they wanted him to get more education than you can get on the Mountain. Apex was where my father, his baby brother, was born.

  My breakfast was long gone by the time most of the others started waking and queuing up for the ’fresher. I’d used it as soon as I’d gotten up; it was…okay. It was very, very strange, to strip down to your skin, hang your clothes in a glass box, step into another glass box, and get you and your clothes vibrated all clean. It just doesn’t feel really clean, even if your hair is all silky and your skin tingly when you get out. I’d sniffed my clothes over, but they smelled…not at all. And even one much-faded old stain on the bottom of my pants had gotten vibrated away, but it still didn’t seem right.

  When Uncle wrote us to ask for me to be sent to Apex, the Masters had taught me all about how to use ’freshers and other tech so I wouldn’t find myself at a disadvantage, but on the whole, I like a real bath or shower better.

  I didn’t stare at the others as they lined up, but that didn’t stop them from staring at me.

  I was wearing the same clothing I wear for Hunting at home, because I don’t have much else. I know I had to look odd to them. They were all done up in what I guess must have been the latest fashions, a lot of light, shiny or soft matte fabric, and the women were in colors we don’t see very much, because we can’t dye things those shades with the dye we make ourselves. It was pretty, and I guess it was all right for being in buildings all the time, but it was stuff that wouldn’t last half an hour in the woods. And the women were all in shoes with heels that must have caused a million backaches. I was in sober dark brown linen, a hooded wrap-coat and pants tucked into real leather boots with sensible flat soles (elk hide, if you want to know), and a knit wool tunic the color of oatmeal. I heard whispers but politely ignored them. Besides, I had my exercises to go through.

  You don’t become a Hunter without knowing magic. The Masters told me that a lot of Hunters off the Mountain don’t go much beyond the summoning, though, and they couldn’t see the point of that. So like all the Hunters the Masters train, I knew a lot of magic, and magic is a slippery thing; it doesn’t like to be controlled, so you have to practice all the time or you lose it. The spells and Glyphs just slip out of your mind and are gone if you don’t keep it up. Like I said, the Masters were Magicians before magic was so easy to come by in the world. You should see their books; beautiful things, drawings and designs in colored inks and paints on every page. Some are one long piece of paper—scrolls. Some are paper folded back and forth and held between two covers tied together, and some are real books. Everybody with even a tiny little bit of magic gets taught at the Monastery; there aren’t many who have as much as me, but it seems like everyone has a little bit. Master Kedo says that’s normal, but most people are too lazy to learn how to use it or keep it in their heads. On the Mountain, though, we use everything. When we butcher a pig, every bit of him becomes something. And when we have magic, we keep it sharp, even if all it’s good for is to throw your voice to the other side of the valley or light the fire. So every morning, right after breakfast, I ran my exercises.

  You’re probably wondering what that feels like. It’s like pulling a bow without an arrow in it. All this tension, this pent-up power builds up in you, and you take it as far as you can, but instead of releasing it all at once, the way you would if you were shooting an arrow, you relax back down again and let the magic flow back into you. A little like doing kata, the moves of martial arts without the strength behind them that turns them into attacks. If I were home, I’d go through spells properly, with gestures, fully visualizing the lesser Glyphs, then sketching them in the air. But that’s not the sort of thing you can do in a place surrounded by people who don’t know you, so I just ran through them all in my head, visualizing them.

  It’s all fighting magic, of course, except for things like lighting a fire, drying wet clothes, some kitchen magic. Blows and counters, tricks and traps, and, most of all, shields and defenses. It takes concentration, and the Masters used to bang drums and set the kids to playing around me and do anything they could to break that concentration, so the stares and whispers didn’t really bother me at all.

  The screams, however—

  I snapped out of my little world, and I was on my feet with my knife in my hands instantly, drawn out of the sheath in my boot, since it was the only real weapon I had on me. No need to look farther than the windows for the reason for the screaming; I was looking right into the glittering gold eyes and arm-long ivory fangs of a Drakken. It was just a flash—the train was moving fast—mostly an impression of huge teeth and angry eyes and dark green scales streaming by the window. But every Hunter knows what a Drakken looks like.

  I wanted to scream, but I held it in. Hunters don’t scream. Not when we’re startled, not when we’re terrified, not when we’re hurt. Not when we’re dying. Though in our case, the dying usually happens too fast to scream. Screaming only brings more trouble, and if you feel the urge to scream, you probably already have too much trouble to begin with.

  The steward opaqued the window a second after I opened my eyes, but I’d taken it all in, like a camera, and now I remembered past that initial flash of impression and I knew we were in very deep trouble. There wasn’t just one Drakken out there; i
t was an entire flock. They had been raving at the cage, trying to cling to it and being flung off by the electrical charge. They couldn’t have seen the train from where they were at the ruins of Springdale, we hadn’t blown the whistle (which would have attracted them), and in any case, this was nesting season and they’d taken that town for a nest. They wouldn’t leave a nesting site on their own. So there was only one reason why a flock of Drakken would be attacking the cage around the train.

  They’d been led here by one or more of the Folk. Had to be.

  I wasn’t even consciously aware that I was up and running until I hit the door to the car. It opened just a hair before I reached it, and I saw that every single door all the way to the armed car at the front was open. The steward must have been quick-witted enough to have registered what I was doing, and slapped the controls to open them all. I went into a full-out run down the length of the moving train. It might not have been my best sprinting time, but it was right up there.

  The door to the armed car was closed and locked, of course, but I’m a registered Hunter. I was registered from the moment my uncle sent for me, and my palm on the door-plate opened it to me. I was confronted by another sealed hatch and a metal ladder welded to the inner hull. The engineer would be below in his sealed pod; I wanted the top deck, where the gunners and their commander were. I really don’t remember going up the ladder.

  The three gunners reacted predictably to my sudden appearance, whipping around in time to see me presenting both hands, backs to them, with the round Hunter Mandalas with their intricate designs tattooed there. The Mandalas identify us instantly; nobody in his right mind would dare try to counterfeit them, because he’d either be found out quickly or he’d be sent out to Hunt and…well…that would solve that. “Joyeaux Charmand,” I said. “Registered Hunter. And yes. Niece. What’s the situation?”