Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Good attitude.” Karly nodded. “And now you know why your first several shifts are going to be inside the Prime Barrier. What’re your weapons?”

  “When I can choose?” I thought about that. “Any need for silence?”

  “Sometimes.” She watched me. I sensed this was another test.

  “Hand crossbow for silence, nine-mil auto if we aren’t going anywhere dirty, six-shot revolver if we are, couple of throwing knives for backup, shotgun with deer slugs for anything the handgun won’t take down.” I regarded her steadily.

  She nodded. “That and the ammo is a reasonable load-out. I’ll let the armory know; they’ll make up our day packs. When you solo, you’ll check your assigned territory, make your weapon decisions, and do the same for yourself. You ready?”

  I stood up. “As I’ll ever be.”

  Our assignment was inside the Barriers, in the area that Uncle had pointed out to me from his office: the part of Apex that held what the Cits here called the “city farms.” Nothing like farms, of course; big hydroponic greenhouses with tilapia tanks, big blank buildings where they built cloned meat and vegetables in vats. Vat-grown was what most people got, and there were grades of that, because as the parent cells aged, the quality and flavor degraded. First run off the cow or the carrot was best; by the time you got to fifth or sixth run, everything had to be enhanced with artificial flavors and colors. That was why the vat-farms kept the real things on hand, in protected conditions that were nothing like what I would call a farm, so they could take samples for new batches all the time.

  “This makes this part of Apex a big target, though,” Karly pointed out, as we stood on a little platform that gave us a good view over the small pastures that held a few cattle, sheep, pigs, and fowl.

  “Easy kills, for things that eat meat,” I observed. “No place for the critters to run or hide.”

  Karly nodded and hopped down off the platform. I followed. The Hounds were milling in that sort of restless pattern around me that meant they were alert but didn’t actually sense anything yet. They’d reverted to the greyhound shape for now. Karly’s Hounds—she only had four—looked like wolves carved out of a block of shadow. Somehow they didn’t quite look three-dimensional. She directed them with little hand signals.

  “How spooked would these meat-sacks get if I sent the Hounds among them?” I asked.

  Karly snorted. “Not. They’re used to Hounds in the first place, and in the second, they’re about as bright as bricks.”

  I nodded. Bya looked up at me, mouth open a little in anticipation.

  “Search,” I told him and the others. “Stay in range.” That meant they weren’t to go farther away than a bullet would reach. A lot of the Othersiders just laugh off bullets, but a lot don’t. Rule of thumb is that if it’s not one of the Folk, the smaller an Othersider is, the more likely it will be that a bullet or at least something made of ferrous metal will end it. All our bullets have steel jackets, shotguns have steel slugs or steel shot. The Othersiders get badly hurt by anything with iron or steel in it. Back in the Diseray, people discovered that by accident, and then found old folk tales and books that said the same thing about “supernatural” critters. That was when the army started seriously hunting for libraries and looting anything that was folklore, traditional tales, myths, and fantasy. A whole lot of it proved out true, too. It all got incorporated into Hunter and Magician training.

  The Hounds spread out across the neat patchwork of enclosures, quartering the fields as Karly and I moved along, all their senses alert for Othersiders. We were alert too; the Hounds are awesome, but the Othersiders are crafty, and some of them can pull all sorts of tricks of popping in and out of our real-space. Bamphing is what we call it. My Hounds can do that too. Not all Hounds can, but mine do.

  All the time, in the back of my mind, there was this thought: could the Folk get in here, inside the Prime Barrier? I had to keep reminding myself that even if they could, this was absolutely no different from Hunting at home, where there were no Barriers and the Folk could always get to us if they cared to.

  We quartered over the pasture-pens without any more incident than scaring up and putting down a few Hobs. That was predictable; Hobs are like roaches, you never really get rid of them. Hobs look like little shrunken people, bent over and hairless, about the size of a rabbit. They wear clothing, which a lot of Othersiders don’t—pointed hats, leather pants, wooden shoes, and shabby linen tunics. Every so often I’d see some movement in my peripheral vision and turn quickly only to realize it was a hovering cam. I was never going to get used to that.

  When we had covered the pastures and gone over every inch of ground between the buildings, Karly waved me over to a round hatch in the ground. “Storm sewers,” she said. “Don’t worry, nothing worse down there than runoff water. And lighted so the cams can see. But if there’s anything that got under or over the Barriers last night, it’ll have ducked down here to wait out the day.”

  I eyed the hatch dubiously. At home, the only underground places big enough to prowl through are our own basements and some mines. I never liked Hunting the mines.

  Still, I didn’t have any choice, since that was part of the assigned territory. With more than a few second thoughts, I waited while Karly hauled the hatch open, then followed her down the ladder inside.

  I didn’t know what to expect, but to my surprise, it was a big sort of cement tunnel, about nine feet in diameter, with just a runnel of water in the bottom. It smelled like stagnant water, but no worse than that. And it was lit really well. I hadn’t in the least expected that.

  Karly caught me staring at the lights and nodded wryly at them. “Hard to fly a cam down here. And hard to vid in the dark.”

  Well, of course, that made sense. This was all part of Hunting, and those weren’t just lights, those were light and cam rigs, all for the benefit of our audience.

  Once we were in the tube, our Hounds came down. Karly’s jumped, but not mine. They just apported. Bamphing. “They’d never give Knight this territory,” Karly said as we started our patrol. “His Hounds wouldn’t work well down here. Good in the open air, though.”

  I was about to ask what Knight’s Hounds looked like, when Bya growled and I felt a sort of warning tingle all over. And then I heard the little tap-tap.

  “Knockers!” I shouted, “Shields!” I threw my own up, and as it snapped into place, saw the egg-shaped distortion in the air around Karly that told me she had gotten hers up. The Hounds went on alert and down the tunnel toward us poured a gray-and-brown flood of wizened little humanish things about knee-high to me, like mostly naked, bent-over old men, scraggle-haired, ugly as broken concrete, and all armed with flint-tipped weapons, nasty stone hammers, and needle-sharp teeth.

  “The hell?” Karly yelped, which told me she’d never seen Knockers before. But I had. The Hounds and I had fought them so often I didn’t even need to give orders.

  The great lighting down here gave us way more warning time than we’d have had in the mine tunnels. With our primary shields up, we couldn’t be knocked silly by the paralyzing fear that the Knockers induce. I didn’t like to think what would have happened to some poor Cit doing maintenance, or Apex Police Department down here. My Hounds flattened themselves against the wall of the tunnel, and, taking their cue from mine, so did Karly’s. I unloaded the shotgun, reloaded, and unloaded it again. The entire front rank went splatter as the heavy slugs hit them, the next rank or two got bowled over, tumbling into the horde behind, and they all tangled up for a few precious moments in a tumble of blood-spattered nasty. Bya and Dusana bamphed to a point just behind the pileup, and the rest spread themselves between me and the Knockers. I shoved Karly against the side of the tunnel and threw up stronger shields around us both. Then, as one, my Hounds belched out fire.

  This wasn’t the pretty stuff they’d played with on the train. This was great, roaring gouts of hell-mouth just like the stuff that comes out of a flame-thrower. Caught between fire in
front and fire behind, the Knockers screamed in a thousand voices. Some tried blindly to run, but there was nowhere to run to; the ones that the fire didn’t get, Karly’s Hounds and our guns did, and it didn’t take long for them to stumble and fall onto the concrete with the others, writhing horribly and screaming until they died. The backwash of heat was enough to scorch your skin, which was why I had shoved Karly against the wall and shielded us both with magic.

  It was over in maybe two minutes. The Hounds snapped their mouths closed, cutting off the flames. Dusana leapt over the blackened corpses to join us. Bya lifted his leg and pissed on one before doing the same.

  Karly, of course, was already poking at one of the Knockers, seasoned Hunter that she was. “The hell are these?” she asked, looking at me.

  “Knockers, or Tommyknockers. They live in caves and mines,” I said briefly. “And they just can’t keep from giving themselves away by tapping on the walls with the hammers before they attack.”

  Karly shook her head. “I probably read about them in a briefing at some point…but I have never seen these things before, not in person, and not in vid. The hell?”

  “I’m from the western mountains,” I reminded her. “Some have old silver mines with enough still in them worth looking for, some copper, and lead.”

  “Not a lot of mines around here,” she pointed out. “Please tell me these things don’t make their own tunnels….”

  “Not that I ever heard,” was all I could tell her. “The only time I ever saw them was when we were asked to go in and clean them out.” As Othersiders went, they weren’t dangerous to a Hunter who was forewarned, but a swarm of them could be lethal if you weren’t prepared for them. But for anyone but a Hunter, like a regular Cit, or even a heavily armed policeman? Toast. Because like many Othersiders, the Knockers have a weapon that is magic and psionic in nature—in their case, the ability to induce terror. Other sorts of critters have seduction; some can make you giddy, or laugh hysterically. You get hit with one of those psionic or magic offenses, and they can easily get the drop on you.

  A Psimon would be able to shield against the psionic weapons—but not the magic and certainly not the teeth, the claws, the numbers. And a Psimon has another little problem; a Magician, like me, can start the spell going and forget it. A Psimon has to constantly concentrate on what he’s doing to keep his defense active. That’s why Psimons never go Hunting without at least a squad of regular military.

  “So they’re only in mines?” Karly asked, poking one with a toe.

  “Or caves. Definitely tunnels underground,” I told her. “We’ve never seen them in the light of day.”

  Of course, hardly anyone mines anymore. If you need metal, you go get it from a Diseray ruin, or a pre-Diseray junkyard or trash site. There’s precious metals in our mines, though, and gold and silver are something you don’t usually find in ruins unless you come upon a jewelry place that somehow escaped a couple centuries of humans and Othersiders looting. “They swarm like bees,” I added, and poked at one of the smoking corpses with the tip of my shotgun barrel. “The queen was in there, more than likely, and more than likely this was a swarm that was looking for a home.”

  Karly made some notes on her Perscom while I was talking. When she finished, she swung her shotgun off her back into a position where she could use it. “You’ll have made your rating today, kid,” she said wryly as we both stepped around the edges of the pile of bodies. They smelled like baked algae and hot rock. “And, thank you kindly, you’ll have raised mine. I can put in for that bathroom upgrade now.”

  The rest of the sweep was not nearly as eventful as the swarm. Our Hounds sniffed out some giant bug things and killed them with claw swipes, adamantly refusing to bite them. We shot a couple more Knockers, strays or scouts, maybe. Eventually there was no sign of any more Knockers. I could see Karly starting to relax as we doubled back and climbed the ladder to the surface.

  Part of me wanted to follow her lead and relax a little too. After all, we’d already swept the area above before we came down here. And anything we’d missed—or anything that might turn up—would be no more dangerous than a wild dog or a cougar. Right?

  But the rest of me never, ever relaxes unless I am in some deeply warded or otherwise protected place like the Monastery or the Hunter headquarters. And even then, there’s a tiny bit that is still alert. Maybe that’s the difference between Hunters who were trained as I was, out there in the boonies, where we can’t ever take safety for granted, and Hunters who were trained here in “civilization.” It’s not a fun way to live, but at least you stay living.

  So when Karly stopped moving, I reacted immediately.

  “Hounds! Catch!” I snapped. Then I reached up, grabbed her belt, and yanked her down.

  She fell off the ladder and landed soft on a pile of Hounds, hers and mine. I ducked my head and didn’t look at what was up there.

  KARLY’S HOUNDS dragged her away and began licking her face. I skittered down the ladder and joined her, and after a minute or so, she came around. The second she did, she grabbed my shoulder and pointed down-tunnel, and we both scampered farther away from that open shaft.

  “Gazer,” she said. I sucked in my breath. Gazers would paralyze you with a look, and you couldn’t use the cute trick of a reflection to shoot them, either; a reflected look worked as well for them to paralyze you as a direct one. Shields didn’t work against the Gazer paralysis; I don’t know why. They looked like nothing so much as giant floating eyeballs inside a forest of hair with fat pink tentacles below, and the only way I could think that one had gotten across both Barriers was that it had floated up, floated across, and floated down. Dangerous for the Gazer, since at any point in that process it might get spotted and shot down. “It must have seen us when we went into the sewer, and it’s been playing cat-at-a-mouse-hole waiting for us to turn up again.”

  Well, now this was bad. Gazers almost never were alone, they generally ran with a pack of a different kind of Othersiders we called Jackals, and if the Gazer didn’t paralyze you, bake your brain, and flay the flesh from your bones, the Jackal would harry you until you ended up looking at the Gazer and got caught anyway.

  Then again…if it had floated over, maybe the Jackals hadn’t been able to come with it.

  “Did you spot a Jackal?” I asked, and Karly shook her head. Well that was one in our favor anyway.

  “It’s going to come down here if we don’t come out,” she said flatly. “How good is your combat magic? Can you do more than etch something’s shields? Or do we need to call for an Elite?”

  I gulped, because I wasn’t sure. Gazers can make their own Shields, and they are very strong. The first, last, and only time I’d ever faced a Gazer I had been with three other Hunters and most of the village. We’d dazzled it with flash-bangs from the villagers, and while it was confused and blinded, we’d all hammered it at once from a safe-ish distance with levin bolts and other magic. I don’t honestly know which of us took it out.

  But everyone back home said my combat magic was the best. And everyone swore I’d been the one to take the Gazer down. “I’ve got full combat magic,” I said, hesitantly. “But—”

  “Then, my call. We can’t wait for an Elite. No telling if one’s going to be available this minute anyway, and we don’t want that thing to get bored and go looking for other prey. We have to keep the Cits safe. I play bait,” she said flatly. “My magic is limited to shields and some illusions.” She turned around, pulled out her Perscom, and pointed it at the lights overhead, then tapped something in. The lights went out. She trotted quickly but quietly down the sewer and did the same several more times before she came back to me. “HQ will already know we’ve got a Gazer, and if there’s an Elite free, they’ll be on the way already,” she said as she returned, and nodded at the cameras. “But we can’t wait for help. It only knows that I’m down here,” she pointed out. “I’ll go over in the lighted part of the sewer; you stand here in the dark. I’ll get its atten
tion and shield, and you take it out. Hopefully you’ll do that before my shields go down and it turns my brain to mush.”

  Before I could say anything, she was slipping away down the tunnel and into the section just past the manhole. There she stood, her pistol out, her Hounds around her, waiting. My lot dimmed everything down to shadow and crouched against the side of the tunnel as we did the same.

  The tension was horrible, and all that was going through my mind was that my combat magic wasn’t nearly as good as the monks said it was, that it wasn’t nearly good enough to take down a Gazer solo, and that we were all going to die unless my Hounds could do what I couldn’t. And we waited. And waited. You couldn’t hear anything but a faraway drip of water and a very, very faint, somehow unpleasant hum that the Gazer made. Running away down the sewer to another exit wasn’t an option. The Gazer was up there where there would be people at shift change, and by my Perscom’s reckoning, that wasn’t far off. By the time we legged it to another exit and back to here, there would be a slaughter. And Karly was right. Even if there was an Elite free, they still had to get dispatched and get out here. No one was going to get here to help us any sooner than fast transport could bring them.

  This was our job. We had to be up to it.

  Even if I was shaking all over and felt like I was going to scream.

  The humming changed, ever so slightly, the pitch edging upward. The Gazer had gotten impatient. It was moving.

  The dangling tentacles inched down through the hole first. No use even trying to shoot those; Gazers regrew those the way lizards regrew a shed tail. Ugh! The sight of those pink, dangling things, like ugly, slimy worms, just made me nauseous. The Gazer’s Shields looked like soap bubbles made with dirty water; there were little moving specks in the shields and the color was a slightly cloudy off-white. What were those specks? No one I’d ever talked to knew, and Gazers weren’t in any mythos that the Monastery knew about.