Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  The Hounds were fine, given that they had their Walls and mine too, and reverted to their doggy forms when we walked back to the first of the passenger cars and got back on the train the easy way. I—well, I was shaken, I was starving, I was exhausted, what I wanted was to lie down and not think, but I knew that I needed to debrief with the military types. If this had been the Mountain, I would have to report first to the Masters while everything was fresh in my mind, and the military men on this train were the equivalent. But the Masters warned me that pretty much everything out in the Cits’ world had a zillion spy-eyes on it, so I was pretty sure that every bit of the encounter had been broadcast up the line to Apex and the authorities. After all, if we succeeded, there’d be a record of something important—an encounter with a Folk Mage—to learn from. And if we’d failed, well, they’d have a record of what not to do.

  The Cits in the cars would want to know what was going on, and most of them were of a high enough status to demand and get information, even if they didn’t get all of it. They knew about the Drakken. They knew about me running like the wind to the armed car. They knew about the train coming to a stop. And they’d have seen the glare of the Hellfires ahead—twice—and now they would presumably have at least been told that there’d been a confrontation with Othersiders and we’d (obviously) won.

  I was right about that, and the stewards were having to hold people back from the door of the first car. It wasn’t like a riot or anything, but there was a lot of excitement there, and they were crowding up the aisle. I figured the Cits needed to make a fuss over something to occupy them for a while, so I left the Hounds to be fussed over and went back into the armed car.

  Now…I wasn’t nearly as cool as I looked, way down deep inside, but for now, I would be all right. Once I’m in Hunter mode, I’m kind of in a Zen state where nothing much bothers me. I figured I couldn’t afford to let Hunter mode slip right now. I was going to pay for that later by having a proper little meltdown in private, but that would be then, and this was now, and right now I needed to make people think I had known exactly what to do all along. That’s part of a Hunter’s job.

  I wasn’t sure what I’d find up on the gun deck, but I was actually kind of pleased to find it full of sober faces rather than whooping and hollering as the train shuddered into motion and began to pick up speed again.

  “Did we—” the officer began.

  I shook my head. “No telling. Can you show me the playback on crawl-time? I was busy kissing dirt at the time you made the big bada-boom.”

  The playback showed me pretty much what I expected on slo mo. The Folk Mage had just enough time to realize what was going on and poof out before the barrage got through his Wall. I wouldn’t be able to play that trick on him again, and possibly not on any other of the Folk, but then, I’d expected it was a one-off. Heckfire, the whole encounter was a sort of one-off; I’d never heard of one of the Folk talking to a Hunter sensibly. Nor of any of the Folk offering—what had he offered? A job? An alliance? To be his pet?

  Then again, if any Hunter had taken up such an offer, no one among us humans would ever hear about it, would we? He’d just vanish, presumed dead.

  I dragged my thoughts back to here and now. “There—” I said, pointing to the telltale flash of light inside the Wall that wasn’t quite obscured by the stuff blowing the Wall to bits.

  The officer said something rude, then sighed. “He bamphed.”

  I nodded. “Yes. But getting him dead wasn’t the point, or our job. The point was to get him gone, and our job is to get these people safe inside the city.”

  Well, they didn’t like it. That didn’t surprise me. My Masters had explained to me in detail the difference between the way a soldier thought, the way a Cit thought, and contrasted both with the way a Hunter thought. Our people, of course, were not like Cits or soldiers, more like Hunters in their outlook. Cits—the city folk sort of Cits—they want victories. They want to win, or cheer the winner. Soldiers want things to end neatly, they want victories too, and win or lose, they want things ended. But up on the Mountain, we’re much more pragmatic. We know what seems to be an ending rarely is, that victories don’t last forever, and you take what you can get and make the most of it for as long as you can. I had to have all that, the way Cits think, the way soldiers think, taught to me. It wasn’t natural for someone raised in the Monastery to think that way.

  Short form: for these soldiers, anything that wasn’t a victory was a defeat unless someone managed to spin it as a victory. Which, the officer would do as soon as I left, because that was his job.

  “My guess is they won’t bother this train, and maybe will think twice and three times before they tackle any train for a while,” I said, to give him something to work on. Then I smiled on the surface, because I really needed to go be truly by myself, or with Bya, for a bit. “You men were ace. All I was good for was to be the bait and the distraction, and the mouse that ate into his Wall. No way I could have taken him; best I could do was make a hole for you to shoot through.”

  Which of course wasn’t true, but it fed more into their mind-share. They looked a lot more cheerful. I could almost see the thoughts spinning up behind the officer’s eyes.

  Then I left.

  The first car was all private compartments, ’cause if the train had to drop cars and put on emergency speed, guess who’d get saved? The friendly ginger-haired steward surprised me by waiting at the door of the car. “There’s a lot of people that want to thank you,” he began, then gave me this odd little smile. “But I wondered if you wanted to let them just yet….You look like you could use a short break.”

  I didn’t break down in front of him, but…wow. He must’ve been a borderline Psimon. “Actually…I…” I began, and before I could say anything more, he’d whipped open the door of the first compartment and kind of gently shoved me in. It was small, but there was a tiny ’fresher in there, a little bitty sink with water taps in the wall, and a bed, a real bed, turned down and waiting. And some snacks and drinks.

  “Push that button when you’re ready to come out and mingle,” he said. “I’ll come get you.” Then he shut the door and I was finally alone.

  Not for long, though. Bya ghosted in through the closed door (yes, they can do that when they are on this side) and was all over me. And that was when I cried, and shook, and cried some more. All of the ways that could have gone bad went through my mind in vivid detail. I could have died, and everyone in the train could have died, or the Mage could have made me his prisoner and made me watch while everyone died, or he could have used me to get at my Masters and the Mountain or…lots of things. Lots of things, and not a one of them was any kind of happy ending.

  It took me a while to calm down, let’s just say.

  Then I washed my face, put a cold cloth on my eyes until they stopped looking so red and you could tell they were hazel instead of scarlet, ate something that looked like a tiny artwork made of food, drank a lot of water, and went out to get fussed over.

  I don’t like fuss. I don’t like it when it’s people I know, and I like it less when it’s people I don’t. But the Masters and Uncle both made it very clear to me that part of my job now was to accept the fuss and take it as a gift, even when it made me feel a little sick inside.

  The fellow I was coming to think of as “my” steward was watching at the end of the car, and stopped me before I went on. “The Company would like it if you could do a walk-through on all the passenger cars,” he said.

  Well, things had just gotten more interesting. “Uh…” I said, deciding to play turnip again. “What company?”

  “The one that owns all transportation that isn’t military,” he told me. “Like this train.” I actually knew that, the Masters had explained all that in school when we were kids and getting our current history lessons.

  “I thought the Armed Services—” I began, still playing dumb.

  He shook his head. “The military does one thing well: fighting. They
don’t run Cit things.”

  Which I knew.

  “Not even the trains?” A logical question for someone who didn’t know, because transportation is a big thing to have control of.

  “Only military transport. And the Company would like you to make an appearance.”

  But there was a little more nuance this time; when he said “the Company,” he really meant “the people right on top and in charge of the Company.” Which told me, as I had figured, someone had already relayed what had happened upline, and orders had come downline. This wasn’t a “the Company would like it.” This was a nicely phrased order. I didn’t know why they wanted me to do this; maybe I could figure it out later.

  “Right, I can do that,” I said. I could hold off more hysterics and then have the usual post-Hunt collapse for a while. “Then let’s get to it, shall we?”

  He just nodded, and opened the door for me. People crowded around, as best they could in the narrow car. I smiled gravely and nodded and said soothing things; the Hounds eeled their way through the legs and to my side, packing around me to give me more space. I made sure to say something to everyone, but the first person who thrust a piece of paper and a pen into my hand and asked for my autograph kind of threw me. For a minute, I didn’t know what she wanted; “autograph” just wasn’t a word we used up on the Mountain very often. But it happened over and over, not just in the first car but in all of them. So I scrawled my name and added a version of my Mandala with a lot of symbols left out, and they seemed to like that.

  It was draining. I’m not used to spending that much time with that many people after a Hunt. Neither are the Hounds; they slipped away from me one by one, leaving only Bya. And it wasn’t just working down the train, I kind of had to go through a shortened version on the way back up.

  When I got to my car, though, “my” steward was waiting. “The Company has authorized you to have that first compartment,” he said. “The one I opened for you. They want you to have plenty of rest.”

  I could have kissed him. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do anything, much less sleep, with the people in my car staring at me and pretending not to stare. “I would really like that,” I said with feeling. “Thank you. And thank you for opening it in the first place.”

  He blushed a little. “Just push the call button if you want anything. There’s just a short interview for you to go through, and they’ll leave you alone.”

  Oh, someone else wanted to debrief me; probably the officer, alone, without his men listening. The thoughts of that were completely drowned out by my growling stomach. I was starving; I felt hollow. There is kind of a feeling of warmth where magic energy is when you are really fully charged, and when that’s drained, there’s a hunger there too, and you feel a little too cold, and a little too light. Not light-headed though, more like the opposite, as if your head is too heavy for your neck. Working magic does that to you. I was already contemplating a great big slab of meat and some greens as the steward showed me to the compartment, where the bed had vanished and a bigger table and two seats were at the window. But what was waiting there was not what I thought it would be.

  I was expecting the officer from the armed car again, this time with more detailed questions from upline. What I got was…a vid-screen, and someone in a uniform looking at me out of it, and a cam-eye glowing at me.

  He was very sober-looking. “So, you would be Joyeaux Charmand, the prefect’s niece.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, not sitting, but taking that formal stance I always did when standing before a Master.

  “Sit, please. I just want to ask you some questions.”

  I schooled my face into a pleasant but sober mask, and sat.

  The steward showed up as if I had summoned him, and brought me a glass of water. I smiled at him gratefully, which made him blush again. Bya pressed in next to me but didn’t make any other moves, although by the way he eyed the vid-screen, it was clear he understood I was talking to the person on the other side. I sipped the water, just enough to buy me a little time while he phrased his first question and I thought about the answer.

  He asked me careful questions, except he didn’t mention the Mage. Instead he talked about a cluster of Drakken and a Gog. Warning tingles ran all over me when he did that. I didn’t correct him. For some reason, this man or his superiors wanted a…What did the history books call it? A “sanitized” version of what had happened. Something without the Mage in it.

  A version that the Cits would be told…that had to be it. I sipped water. It tasted flat; definitely recycled.

  His next question confirmed what I’d figured out. “How do you think those Drakken and that Gog got inside the cage in the first place?”

  “Hunters have seen Drakken and Gog working together in the past, so I would guess it was the Gog who figured out he could tear the cage apart ahead of the train if he got the Drakken to help,” I said. Now I was thinking really, really hard. I had to spin this, somehow, and I wasn’t used to spinning anything, much less being a spin doctor. Gog were smart-ish. Not like the Folk, but you could talk to them, even if all you got was “Shut up, lunch.”

  To explain Gog, I’ll have to go back to Greek stories again. They’re a lot like the Cyclops that Odysseus tricked. About that smart, which is to say, not very. The other critters, the two-eyed Magog, we don’t see as much, and some Hunters think they’re Gog mates and are the smarter halves of the pairings. You might not actually see them together, but where there is a Gog, there will be a Magog somewhere around. The names are from the Christer Bibble, and that’s all I know about where the terms came from. “Obviously we stopped when we saw the Gog, and when the first round didn’t take him down, we knew he had a Wall up. I got out because I had to keep the Gog distracted while the shot got set up, and I had to weaken his Wall,” I said. “Gogs can only concentrate on one thing at a time, and while he was having a standoff with me and the Hounds, he wasn’t protecting himself, and his Wall was getting weaker as I worked on it.”

  “So, besides creating a hole in his defenses, you got out and made yourself a target so the creatures would concentrate on you?” He didn’t look approving, he didn’t look disapproving. He was…waiting for something. I just didn’t know what it was he expected to hear.

  So I’d give him honesty.

  “I’m a Hunter, and our job is to protect the Cits,” I pointed out. “This wasn’t even a real Hunt, not with an armed car full of Hellfire missiles backing me up. Really, all I did was get warning out in time to stop the train, then I managed to rig things so the soldiers could save the day.” There. More spin for the military. He was military; that should make him happy.

  “Thank you, Hunter,” he said, and finally produced a very small smile. “You made my job much easier than I thought it would be.”

  “Uh…you’re welcome,” I replied, but the vid-screen shut off, and a shutter closed down over the cam. I thought for a moment, only now allowing myself to feel all those things I’d put off. Exhaustion, mental and physical. And that raging, roaring hunger. Right now hunger was stronger than exhaustion. Bya pressed into my leg. I thumbed the call button.

  “Is there any way I can get a steak and greens and beans?” I asked when the steward came in person to see what I wanted. “Please?”

  WHILE I WAITED, I sat and thought for a while, running over everything I’d learned in school when we talked about how things were run off the Mountain.

  See, back in the Diseray it was the military that sort of took over, learning how to fight off the Othersiders and gathering up survivors as they hunted for a really defensible place where they could make a fortification and restart civilization. They never left anyone behind. It was what became their motto: “Modo ad pugnam paulo durioribus”—“We just fight a little harder.” It was a good thing they did, too, because they picked up and protected the very people they needed most, the techs and the makers and the smart people, the kind of folks who are not obviously useful when what you a
re doing is mostly fighting, and are not real good at protecting themselves, usually. They picked up some of the first Hunters, who helped with the defense. Anyone who wasn’t military or Hunter got called a “Cit.” When they found a good spot that was defensible and had a lot of stuff that was still intact and could be looted, they dug in, and the Cits started figuring out what to do about the Othersiders besides throw lots of ordinance at them. Someone invented the first Barriers, and then they all started building Apex. The general in charge was really smart. He knew that the military excels at doing military things the military way. But. It’s really bad at doing civilian things. Eventually, Apex was the sort of city that was safe to live in, and once that happened, there started to be hard feelings between the military and the Cits. That’s when he sat down with people who were starting to become leaders among the Cits, and they divided things up. Premier Rayne is the guy in charge of the Cits, and the general is the guy in charge of the military. When something needs to be done, the side that is best at doing that sort of thing does it. So there are private, for-profit entities that handle the stuff that isn’t military, like trains for civilians, and food production, and power and water. When you’re working for one of these entities and you say “the Company,” you mean the one you’re working for. By choosing what I said carefully, hopefully I made whoever was in charge of the Company happy, and I made the military happy, which was definitely a bit of a juggling act. It was crystal clear that what my Masters had told me was right: Company, government, or military, the powers above did not want anyone to know about the Folk. I had been a good little Hunter and kept my lip zipped.

  My steward brought me a cute square bit of meat and some other things. I looked at it, then at him. “You’ve never fed someone just off a Hunt, have you?” I asked. Before he could answer, I continued. “I’ve burned a zillion calories. I’m starving. It’s like running a marathon. Uphill. Both ways. With a backpack full of bricks.”