Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  Part of the situation was obvious; the monitors at every gun station linked to cameras on the exterior of the car were not blanked. The Drakken were keeping pace with the train, throwing themselves over and over at the electrified cage. Drakken don’t fly, but they can leap enormous distances, and their size utterly defies the square-cube law. But then, most things from the Otherside defy the laws of physics. If you’ve never seen a Drakken, well, see if you can find the Tenniel illustrations of the Jabberwock from Through the Looking-Glass. Like that. Only about 150 feet long. Like some deep-water horror of a head married to a snaky body with a row of spikes down the back and a whiplike tail, perched on thin birdy legs with wicked-long talons at the end of them. They’re usually various shades of brown and green. Their eyes are gold and the size of bushel baskets, and they have fangs as long as my arm and as sharp as knives. I wasn’t, at the moment, concerned with them. They were the distraction.

  It isn’t practical to keep the cage electrified for more than five miles in front of and behind a train. Most beasties don’t bother to try to break through the cage when a train isn’t there; why should they? They can see for themselves there’s nothing in there, until there is, and by the time they see the train, it’s generally sped past so fast they haven’t a hope of catching it. And they aren’t bright enough to realize that if they could get inside the cage well ahead of the train, they’d have it.

  Ah, but when the Folk get involved…

  And I knew it, I knew it when I saw this, that one or more of the Folk was behind this. Drakken just don’t act like this on their own.

  One White Stone. One White Stone. One White Stone.

  “Psi-shields!” I snapped at the soldiers, because they probably hadn’t yet figured out that one of the Folk was out there. The Folk aren’t like us humans; we can have magic, or we can have Psi, but we can’t have both. They can. Psi-shields are tech, and I don’t know how they work, I only know they block thoughts. They’re only on the armed car, and they aren’t nearly as effective as something a real Psimon can put up, but they’re better than nothing. It would be nice to have a Psimon on every train, but…they’re more rare than Magicians, and the army gets first call on them. Psi-shields would do, and I didn’t need these lads pulling their sidearms on me in here because the Folk took them over. The armored car has plating of Cold Iron so the Folk magic couldn’t get inside, but that meant my shielding magic wouldn’t work right in here, and the Masters hadn’t taught me how to dodge bullets yet.

  “But there’s—” began the one with the most stripes.

  “Don’t argue with her, you moron. Do it,” snapped one of the other two, then, without waiting for orders, reached out a long arm and snapped a series of switches over the ranker’s head.

  “Full zoom ahead,” I said, and the same fellow scrolled a wheel that zoomed out the view on the front monitor more than a mile, two, five, out to where the electrification on the cage ended, out to where—

  —part of the cage was missing!—

  —and someone was standing there, sparkling like a queen’s tiara in the sunlight, with another shimmer all around him and a Drakken waiting like a dog beside him.

  The ranker knew what to do about that. He slapped a signal that told the engineer below to hit the emergency brake, because if we hit that shimmer at speed we’d flatten like a tortilla on it, and there wasn’t a damn thing the Cold Iron shielding could do about it. And he hit something else at the same time as I was grabbing a stanchion to keep from going arse-over-teakettle, and six Hellfire missiles streaked away from the front of the train. They all hit at once, in a burst of flame over the track that made the front-facing monitor white out for a moment. But when the monitor cleared again, he was still there, standing casually behind his Wall, although the Drakken had fled.

  Trains take a long time to stop. Two miles for us, plus the amount we’d traveled when we’d spotted him. Cheeky bastard could see we were stopping, and lifted up and began levitating toward us, floating along with his arms crossed casually over his chest.

  Oh, this was so not good.

  One White Stone. One White Stone. I kept my concentration on my Core. Maybe this Folk Mage couldn’t get past the Psi-shields…but maybe he could. If he could, it would only be enough to read thoughts, but the most important thoughts in this car right now were mine, and I didn’t want him snooping. A cautious Hunter stays a living Hunter.

  He couldn’t get the Drakken to come in the cage with him, though, so we had that much going for us. We’d only have to face him and whatever else he could summon.

  We came to a full stop. He was still a mile away. I made a lightning decision.

  “I’m going out,” I announced. “Can you creep the train behind me at a walk?”

  “Are you—” the ranker began, then snapped his mouth shut. “Yes, Hunter, we can do that.”

  “I need to get out to summon, and I don’t want to do that when I’m trading eyeball-glare with him,” I explained. Wordlessly, the smart one handed me a headset. It was…well, ridiculously tiny compared to the ones we have on the Mountain, but I knew what it was. I stuck the ear-carrot in the right place and adjusted the threadlike mic boom.

  “If you see a chance for firepower, give us a sign,” he said.

  I thought about it. The Hounds could and would protect me from nastiness like blowback and shrapnel. “The sign will be ‘Zapotec,’” I said. He gave me a weird look, but nodded. I wasn’t surprised. Most Hunters have never heard of the Zapotec, and I’d be shocked if a Cit ever had, but one of their old men is the most important one of my Masters, my special mentor, Kedo, the very first one who helped me learn my magic. His people were the Zapotec, and he’d turned up at Safehaven right after I did. My Hounds were Zapotec too, and I don’t think that his turning up was an accident.

  With a whoosh of hydraulics, a hatch above me opened and a ladder dropped down. I climbed it to find myself at the top of the engine, which was hissing and popping and making heat sounds. It took a moment to find the ladder that took me to the ground, but as soon as my feet were on earth, I used the field summons.

  The regular summons takes too long in an emergency, and I was horribly, horribly vulnerable every nanosecond I was out here without my Hounds. So, I used the field summons—which, ironically enough, is both instinct for a Hunter, and the first summons you ever do. I held my hands over my eyes, shouted the words that were the vocal equivalent of the Glyphs, and felt the Mandalas on the backs of my hands light up. I mean that literally, it felt as if they were etched in red-hot wire.

  There’s always a price for everything a Hunter does; the price for fast is pain.

  I felt the Portal open up in front of me, the door to Otherside in the air that is fast and dirty, and unlike the Glyphs, can’t be held for long, and heard the scream of defiance as my Hounds, who already knew how bad things were, rushed up and out and to my side.

  And now they had their true forms.

  The smallest, Bya, was the size of a horse. The largest was the size of the shed you’d keep the horse in. And they looked like something out of a peyote dream, things people had once thought were only the hallucinations of an artist in a high fever. Uh, no. They were real enough that when that artist, a man named Pedro Linares, caught a fever and saw into the Otherside, they were what he saw.

  Take just about any animal. Now add spines, wings, horns, whatever you like. Now paint it in eye-watering psychedelic colors and crazy patterns. Now make it horse-size or bigger, give it a lot of manna and the ability to use it, and add the physical offensive weapons: the stingers, the claws and poison fangs, and fire-breath. That’s an Alebrije, the Zapotec version of a Hound. And they like us, they like humans, and near as I can tell, they hate the Folk. Which is a damn good thing or Pedro would never have come out of his fever dream. Heck, the Alebrijes might even have been the ones that cured him.

  I’m the only Hunter I know with Alebrijes as Hounds. Most of them have things that look like dogs, so
me get slightly more exotic, but only Master Kedo—and maybe the Zapotec Hunters, if there are any—and I have Alebrijes. Somehow, Master Kedo had known I would, and had drifted up to the Mountain just in time to teach me—although now he says he’s never leaving, he likes it there. Master Kedo is…not exactly like a father, and not exactly like a brother to me. Maybe like a grandfather? I don’t know how old he is; like most Masters once they get past about fifty, he looks aged and ageless at the same time. When it comes to magic, he is all business. Outside of magic he’s funny, and warm, and he made sure every minute of every day that I knew he cared about me as much as he cared about the Hunter I was becoming. All the Masters care about their students, but I think Master Kedo and I have something special.

  Having Hounds like no one else was another damn good thing, because there was a chance that the Folk Mage ahead of us might not recognize them or know how to fight them.

  Bya, as usual, glued himself to my side as we walked out to meet the Mage, the huge engine barely crawling along behind us. The rest ranged to either side of me, carefully not touching the cage.

  Outside, I looked calm, cool, indifferent.

  Inside, I was a screaming mess. I’d never faced one of the Greater Folk alone before, and when I had seen one, and only one at anything but a distance, it had been one that a Master—not Master Kedo, but Master Shinji—had faced down before, and Master Shinji was with me at the time. Scared? I was glad I was dry and empty, let’s just say that. And my mouth was parched, and my stomach a cold, hard knot, and my heart going like a fancy-dance drum.

  Because not only was I going up against one of the Folk, I was going up against a Mage. The ones I’d seen in the distance, and the singleton I’d run up against were all feral; hair down past their knees, but all dreadlocks, braids, and straggles, with feathers and carved stones and bits of bone braided in, dressed in skins with the hair still on, decorated with beads and trinkets and whatever other odd bits take their fancy. They hadn’t been Mages; all their control of magic was at the level of instinct. Babies in their control, when compared to the Mages. But even so, on the Mountain, to keep from triggering some sort of blood feud, the policy of the Masters was to drive them away rather than kill them. Off the Mountain, it was general wisdom to kill any Folk you saw before they saw you. Either way, you just do not take chances with the Folk.

  This one was nothing like that. This one was something far more dangerous. This one was civilized, highly trained, and even more unpredictable.

  But my hands were steady, my vision clear, and so was my mind. So. It was time.

  One White Stone. One White Stone. One White Stone…

  SOON ENOUGH I WAS trading eyeball-glare with the Mage, him hovering in midair with his arms crossed, me on the ground surrounded by the Hounds. The Folk…well, we don’t know what they really look like. The one thing they can do better than any human is illusion, so the truth is we don’t know if what we see are their true forms, if they’re shifters and can change form and shape for really and truly, or if it’s all illusion. But I can at least tell you what they let us see. There’s some differences among them—hair, skin, eye color, and definitely costume—but they all share certain things.

  For starters, they are beautiful. Even the wildest, most feral of them is gorgeous enough to make you gasp if you aren’t ready for it. They all have pointed ears about as long as your forearm, and eyebrows like antennae, and thin, sort of pointy faces. They’re tall, usually seven or eight feet, with thin bodies to go with the faces.

  Since he was floating there, his long, long silvery-lavender hair, perfectly groomed and smooth as ice, ended a couple of feet past the soles of his shoes. His hair was done in some sort of elaborate style with strings of sparkly beads behind his right ear. He had a silver headband stretched across his forehead, with a lavender stone in it that matched his lavender eyes. I couldn’t even begin to describe his costume. It was all of some soft, shiny silvery-lavender stuff, with floaty sleeves, and lots of layers, and every visible bit of it was covered in silver embroidery and more sparkly beads. The sphere-shaped Wall around him glimmered like the surface of a soap bubble, all transparent and faintly iridescent, like oil on water, but I had just seen that six Hellfire missiles wouldn’t dent it, so I wasn’t fooled by how fragile it looked. Besides, Walls and Shields always look like glass bubbles that are only barely there. Looks are always deceptive in magic.

  He and I stood there staring at each other for a while. My Aki-Do Master taught me that the one who makes the first move sacrifices his advantage by putting his energy out there, so I had learned patience. Behind me, the train thrummed quietly; I knew the soldiers in there keeping the cam on us also had the long-range pickups going on the external mic. I wondered what they were making of the long silence. Finally the Mage spoke, and his voice was just as beautiful as his face. A low tenor, with lots of over-and undertones to it. He had a voice that sounded like the lower registers of a harp.

  “I see you, Hunter.”

  There it was, the traditional opening of a battle. But not a duel. Good, that meant I could cheat, and I intended to.

  “I see you, Magician,” I replied.

  “What have you to do with the sheep behind you?” he asked in a conversational tone.

  “I am the shepherd of these sheep,” I responded, taking responsibility for the train and everyone on it.

  “Then the shepherd can spare a lamb…or two. Or more.”

  Now that surprised me. I hadn’t expected him to try to bargain. I concentrated on my One White Stone, however, and kept my face as smooth as the stone itself. “Not an option,” I said flatly. “You must look elsewhere, Magician.” There were people who would sell their fellows to the Folk. Where I came from, you earned a rope necklace doing that, but there were scum and lowlifes who would do that and not think twice about it. There are always people who aren’t human, who think the only thing in the world that matters is themselves. The kind of people who caused the Diseray in the first place, and no, I didn’t need the Masters to tell me that, that’s just plain sense. If you don’t look after your fellow man, if you think that what you want is always more important than what anyone else wants or needs, you’re not human, and that’s that. There is no virtue in selfishness, not one bit.

  Slowly he tilted his head to the side. I was not wearing a Wall or a Shield.

  Now…let me put you straight here. Remember how I said that magic costs. So where I was taught, I learned to do the most with the least, which is kind of how everyone on the Mountain lives. Do the most with the least, everyone has enough, and there’s something to spare in an emergency. So, yeah, I could have put up a Wall to match his, but why? The Hounds could do it too, and they were faster than me; if Bya felt something coming, he’d snap up his Wall to deflect what was coming before it hit us. Then I could invoke my better, stronger one, and meanwhile I wouldn’t be bleeding manna. And he wouldn’t be reading my strength from my Wall.

  So he was puzzled, because I wasn’t doing this the way the Folk would, and maybe the way any other Hunter he’d met had, and he was studying me, trying to decide if I was just stupid or if I was a lot stronger than he could guess.

  And while he was studying me…let’s just say I wasn’t being idle. Most with the least, right? I had a little tiny bit of magic going, slowly grinding through his Wall, so subtle, so inconspicuous, it was happening right under his nose and he wasn’t even copping it.

  “You have no Shield, no armor,” he said conversationally, “and yet your mind is smooth.”

  One White Stone. One White Stone.

  “So they say.” I shrugged. “Of a courtesy please unencumber the way, Magician. I would take my sheep to their pasture.”

  There, I asked you nicely. Go away.

  “You could,” he replied thoughtfully, tilting his head to the other side, “take them to mine.”

  Say…what? Had he just—

  “We have shepherds tending our flocks,” he continued, c
onfirming what I thought I had heard. “You could be one, take seisin of me, take me as your lord, and forsake the lords of the city. You would find a more pleasant life, I do assure you. Your sheep would be tended. You could tend them yourself, if you wish. They will even prefer their new life.”

  Okay. This was new. I stalled for time. A little more and my magic would have scoured my part of his Wall very thin indeed. “The Folk have no love for my kind,” I retorted. “Why would you offer such a thing?”

  He laughed. It sounded like bells. “You interest me, Hunter. You are not a sheep. You are more clever and patient than a wolf. You are braver than the lion. You are a new thing. You might prove to be a weapon in my hand. Or…something else.” He leaned down, his eyes glittering at me. “You are partly incorrect. Not all of my kind consider yours to be the enemy. And my kind do not find yours…uncomely.” He straightened. “Properly groomed and garbed of course,” he added, with the arrogance that was natural to someone who was sure of his own superiority. “And your Hounds, they interest me too.”

  Bya’s back vibrated under my hand as he growled.

  “They are new to me as well,” he continued. “What are they?”

  His Wall, at the point where he faced me, was thinner than paper, and he had just handed me what I wanted on a platter.

  “Oh,” I said. “Zapotec.”

  And I flung myself to the ground and the Hounds flung themselves on top of me as I flung up a Wall of my own around us.

  And a hell of ordinance blasted into his Wall at point-blank range.

  I didn’t see it, of course. I was buried under the Hounds and under all of our Walls. But I certainly heard it, and I felt the concussive force and some of the heat, and I made myself as small as possible and thought of my One White Stone, kept up the process that was the Wall, and felt energy pouring out of me like blood out of an open wound until I was dizzy.