Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  I made a face at him. “I like sausage biscuits real well, thanks,” I replied, and picked one up and bit into it. The biscuits were too fluffy, but like I said, vat-meat makes a good ground base, and the good, fresh herbs and spices more than made up for the fluffy biscuits. There was that, and fruit, and yoghurt, and Caffeelike. He drank his black. I put in lots of cream and sugar. “Briefing?” I said after I swallowed my first bite.

  “We’ll be outside the Prime Barrier. And there are places where the Second Barrier goes over water at that point, so it’s a slip-in zone. They call that part of Apex ‘Spillover.’ People who have come here without getting jobs first live out there. Or people who have been here all along and haven’t gotten jobs inside the Prime Barrier.” His face was neutral, but there was a faint tightness in his voice that gave me the notion he didn’t much like this. Well, I didn’t much like the notion that people were kept outside the Barrier either, but I kept my Hunt face on. “You see…there are Cits…and there are Cits,” he elaborated while I listened. “Apex only has so many jobs and so much room. So unless you have family here to take you in, you have money, or you came from someplace else with a job offer in hand, if you turn up at the Barriers, you don’t just get to come inside and set up house. You have to wait outside, make some kind of place to live in the ruins, and keep seeing if you can get a job. That will get you inside, and make you an actual citizen of Apex. But they are Cits, and they do get Hunter protection.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I wondered if his people did the same as mine. Because people do turn up, looking for a settlement, out of nowhere. And what we do when they turn up is test them. The first test is whether they pass by the Hounds—both to make sure they aren’t Folk in disguise and to make sure they aren’t thieves or troublemakers. I’ve never seen any of the Folk try to pass as human, but we’ve turned our share of troublemakers away. Then we test them to see if they’re lazy—and by “we,” I mean all the settlements on the Mountain do this, having learned the hard way in the past that the lazy make as much trouble for you as the actual troublemakers. We give them a spot to build a home and the instructions, and some help and the start of the materials. If they don’t have a skill, then they had better learn one fast, work for other people, or become a farmer. We’ll supply some seed and help, but after that…unless they fail through no fault of their own, they’d better get used to working for other people because no one is going to feed them for free.

  And I could see how random people showing up all the time wanting to live in the city could be problematic here in Apex.

  “Having people out there attracts the Othersiders,” Knight said, and shrugged. “But the choice is to have a bunch of people squatting in shacks inside the Prime Barrier, or squatting in slightly better and more defensible ruins outside. Either way, they’re going to be attracting trouble, and possibly making it. Those in charge decided if they were going to make trouble, it should be outside the Prime Barrier. Someone has to patrol it, so this is my regular territory. Mostly what turns up there is mobs of small stuff; not so bad individually, but a mob can pull you down, easy.”

  “Like the Knockers. Load-out?” I asked.

  “Magic and iron or steel,” he replied. “A lot of the smallOthersiders that turn up in Spillover are only affected by magic or ferrous metal.”

  I nodded. “Same crossbow as yesterday,” I said. “Shotgun with steel-shot loads.” A pistol probably wouldn’t do me much good. “Pair of long knives, set of throwing knives. And do you think I can get about two pounds of these?” I held up one of the little cubes of sugar I’d used in my drink.

  He blinked. “What for?”

  “Bait,” I explained. “A lot of the small, stupid Othersiders can’t resist sweets. If they won’t come out, we might be able to lure them in.”

  He gaped at me a little. “Where did you learn that?” he asked. “I mean, how?”

  “We have silver birch up where I am. You can boil down the sap to make a sweetener. Little Othersiders were always stealing the sap before we went to steel taps and buckets.” It was one of the places we taught kids to Hunt in. The little monsters were always hovering around the birch trees, longing after the sweet sap being collected, repelled by the ferrous metal, and paying no attention to anything else. Worked as good as luring in Death-Moths with a flame.

  He tapped all that into his Perscom. “Right. Soon as you finish, then let’s go. It’s a long ride out there.”

  We got our load-out and there was a pod with an army driver waiting for us at the entrance. Knight didn’t seem surprised, so I figured this was not anything special called up just for me, which was fine so far as I was concerned. Knight stayed quiet all the way to the Barrier, which was where the driver left us.

  There are doors in the pylons that create the Barrier. Although going through the Barrier itself outside of a pod or a train car isn’t lethal to a human, it’s not fun and hurts a lot. Not that I’ve done it, but the descriptions were pretty vivid—feels like your skin is on fire, and all your muscles start twitching. Of course, it doesn’t kill a human, though it does kill an Othersider. We used the door in the nearest pylon; just an ID check at the door in, another at the door out, and then we were in Spillover.

  And I was shocked.

  There hadn’t been any of this on the part I had come through on the train. Maybe the authorities cleared Spillover away from the train routes, which wouldn’t surprise me. But Spillover looked like nothing so much as the pictures from just after the Diseray. Tumbledown buildings, some empty, with window holes like sockets in a skull. Most buildings were abandoned, but some had little signs of life, like clean windows with shutters that could be pulled closed in case of attack. The nearest of those had a guard stationed at the door, an old man with one leg sitting on a piece of rock with a crossbow on his lap. He and Knight nodded at each other. A strange smell hung in the air; I finally identified it as the scent of mildew and damp and rot that hangs about abandoned buildings. Not something I’d sniffed much in the mountains.

  There was an army guard on the other side of the door, and a line of people starting to form at the base of the pylon. I looked at it quizzically. “What’s all that?” I asked Knight as we walked away, deeper into Spillover.

  “They’re lining up for a day pass into Apex,” he said, voice flat. “A couple are going in there to shop or trade, but most of them are going in to apply for work. Remember what I said earlier? If you have a job, you can live inside. A job gets you a voucher for a small apartment right away.”

  The people lining up hadn’t, for the most part, looked hopeful. Their clothing was shabby, faded, and, from the look of it, never had been made from stuff as sturdy as we make up on the Mountain. Our stuff doesn’t look shabby until it’s been handed down at least twice. “Does that happen often?” I asked. “Getting a job, I mean.”

  He shrugged. “Two, maybe three a day.”

  I looked back over my shoulder. The line was already fifty or so people long. “Why so few?” I asked.

  “Because most jobs are skilled. Unskilled stuff is all done for free by prisoners.” His face was absolutely expressionless. “It’s not hard to get enough prisoners when you can get thrown in for years for things like going into debt, talking back to police, being suspected of sedition or fomenting discontent or having ties to someone who has. The people who are lining up there and will get jobs probably had them before, ran out of money or got tossed into jail, and rather than getting tossed in again for homelessness escaped to Spillover. They can at least keep getting day passes to apply for work from here.”

  I didn’t need him quickly seizing my hand and squeezing it to know to keep my lip zipped. With cameras hovering around and catching everything I said or did, even an expression could be considered grounds for getting a stern talking-to from someone like the armorer. Knight might be able to get away with speaking his mind, but anything I said or did wrong could come around to bite Uncle. So I just nodded, kept my H
unt face on, and kept walking. Then there was what Knight had said about “sedition” getting you thrown in jail. They surely wouldn’t do that to a Hunter, but I couldn’t think of anything I could say about what Knight had just said that didn’t have the potential to buy me and Uncle some trouble, so I changed the subject. “What’s the most likely thing we’ll need to take down today?” I asked as a woman hanging up worn and frayed clothing under the protective eye of a young boy with a lethal-looking slingshot spotted Knight and waved to him. He unbent enough to smile at her and waved back. The boy waved too, but didn’t stop scanning the sky and places where trouble might rush out.

  “Lately, it’s been Ketzels, but that could only mean I’m due for a change,” he said.

  I reckoned up seasons in my mind. “Actually maybe not. You’ve been getting parents hunting for the young in the nest,” I said. “Down here on the flat you should be getting parents taking the young out to hunt now.”

  He made a face, but didn’t contradict me. “Time to call the Hounds, then. I’m interested to see yours.”

  “Likewise.” We stopped on the cracked and broken asphalt of what had once been a street. There didn’t seem to be anyone living in the nearest buildings, which looked as if they had been two-story apartment complexes. I drew the Glyphs and cast them down, and opened the Portal, and my Hounds came bounding through in all their eye-watering glory.

  They circled Knight and stared at him. He stared back. “Blessed saints. I thought those colors had been enhanced in the studio.”

  I had to laugh at that. “Oh no, that’s all them. They even glow in the dark.”

  He looked a little pained at that but said nothing. He only drew and cast his own Glyphs, and when his Portal opened, what bounded through it were four pure-white winged lions. I knew they were lions, because I’ve seen pictures of lions—but of course, no real-world lion ever had wings.

  “Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Uriel,” he said, nodding at them.

  “Bya, Dusana, Begtse, Chenresig, Shinje, Kalachakra, and Hevajra,” I replied. And please do not ask me why, if they are Zapotec, they have the names of Tibetan deities. They picked the names, or were created with them, or just decided to tell me those were their names to mess with me. Maybe they chose those names to honor some of my Masters. Maybe the Tibetan Othersiders and the Zapotec Othersiders are actually the same. I just roll with it.

  Knight sketched a salute to my Hounds as his hovered in midair. They were blindingly white. I bet they glowed in the dark too. I nodded to them, with respect, one Hunter to another.

  “I’ll bet they blind the little Othersiders just on looks alone,” he said, with one of his rare smiles and even a hint of a chuckle.

  Bya snorted, turned, and trotted off straight ahead, as the rest fell into their usual pattern, quartering and cross-quartering the territory in front of us. Even though they’d rarely Hunted in an urban setting before I came here—only once, actually, and that was to clean out a set of ruins—they took to this landscape as easily as if they had Hunted through it all their lives. Knight’s Hounds arrowed off, doing the same from the air. Those wings were never big enough to support the weight of a full-grown lion, but then, Hounds didn’t exactly need to obey the laws of physics.

  We like him, I heard in my head, in Bya’s voice. This was something of a shock, since the warmest feeling they’d ever had to Christers before was a studied indifference, and plenty had evoked pure detestation. On the other hand, since Knight was my mentor until Karly was better, it was a good thing they did like him.

  Well, good, I thought back. We didn’t waste words, the Hounds and I.

  They chased up a lot of little stuff, but they took care of it themselves. Knight’s Hounds quickly figured out that mine would flush the winged things for them to take down, and they could harry the running things right into the jaws of mine. We only had to take out a couple of little horrors, me using my hand crossbow with steel-headed arrows, Knight wielding a more lethal slingshot than the boy at the entrance had sported, with steel balls for ammunition. It was very satisfying. Actually, it felt a whole lot more like being at home. This was the sort of Hunting I was used to doing, and I was good at it. “I’d like to talk to the armorer about having us do this together once a month when you’re running solo,” Knight said, his voice sounding more relaxed and much more like himself now that we weren’t treading on potentially dangerous ground. I wonder if he guessed how appalled I was by what he’d told me about the Spillover. “My lot can’t go after the runners the way yours can.”

  “I’d be open to that,” I replied. And I knew, now that I’d actually worked most of the morning with Knight, that’d I’d enjoy it too. Hunting as a duo is more efficient. And not as lonely. I was only just beginning to realize how lonely Hunting solo was. Three Hunters lived permanently at the Monastery, the rest all went to their home villages once they were trained, and there was a lot of ground to cover, so we all hunted solo once trained.

  Now I wondered, as we Hunted the landscape of ruined buildings…what would it be like to know you would never have to Hunt alone again?

  Then again, it would be terrifying to Hunt all the time with someone you cared about. You’d not only have to worry about yourself, you’d have to worry about them, too. I thought of how awful it had been to watch Karly set herself up as bait, and I only liked Karly as someone who had been friendly and helpful. That’s why Hunters don’t marry Hunters, if they marry at all, I decided.

  I KNOW I’VE SAID this a lot before, but Hunting is very hungry work, so we’d brought food with us. You see, it’s not just the physical stuff. Magic is energy we use, but to move that energy around takes more energy, and that has to come from someplace. That someplace is the Hunter herself, so you burn through a lot of calories. Knight called a halt around noon so we could rest and eat. The Hounds, of course, were quite satisfied with their quarry, and just dispersed themselves around us with a couple on guard while the others rested. We found ourselves some high ground on the roof of a gutted building that was still sound and ate while the Hounds kept watch.

  “What’s your home like?” Knight asked out of nowhere.

  “Mountains,” I said, my attention caught for a moment by a glint among the ruins, but nothing came of it. “Really tall ones. Snow all the way down into the deepest valleys half the year, though warm enough to grow plenty of stuff in the other half. For some reason the worst of the Othersiders don’t much seem to like the cold, so we can always retreat to the snow if we have to. What’s yours like?” I figured the best way to avoid more questions was to get him to talk.

  “Mountains, but low ones,” he said, and his mouth turned down a little. “Part of it is lush and green¸ part is poisoned and ruined by mining. Othersiders don’t like the poisoned parts, so we have the option of living where it’s safe and dying slowly from the poisons in the earth and the water, or living where it’s clean and green and getting killed quickly by Othersiders. My people live in the poisoned part; the Othersiders absolutely will not go there. Most of the people still mine, since the cities all need some raw materials; the mining itself isn’t that dangerous. I suppose that the miners reckon if your life is going to be short anyway, you might as well get a good job out of it that pays well. And I will say, mining does pay well. We’re not poor.”

  There was nothing in what he actually said that could be taken as seditious—and anyway, I would bet that Hunters were allowed to get away with saying things most Cits wouldn’t dare to because we’re a scarce resource. But the deep bitterness, and the darkness in his tone when he spoke made me think there was a lot of built up rage in there. I was slowly beginning to understand why. I don’t know if the Masters had sheltered me from this knowledge, or if they genuinely were not aware of it themselves, but I was beginning to get pieces of what might turn out to be a very ugly picture.

  “The poisoning,” I said. “That’s from before the Diseray?”

  “Most of it; they used to mine coal a
nd bring gas out where I come from. You can’t get coal and gas out of the ground cheaply without bringing out poison with it, and before the Dies Irae, they flattened whole mountains and filled in the valleys with the debris, and the debris itself was poisonous. We actually mine the debris for things like arsenic.” There was no doubt of the bitterness there. “Those Knockers you took on yesterday. They turn up in mines, you told Karly?”

  “I’ll bet you never see them in your mines because of the poisons,” I replied. Mining metal ore isn’t inherently poisonous, though if you aren’t careful (we are) extracting and smelting it out can be. But we work small, and slow, and careful, and to be honest, there is a use for anything, even poison, if you look for it, so why not capture everything? Like they say when we butcher a pig: “Use everything but the squeal.” We use some of the poisons we get in smelting on weapons against the Othersiders, and in tiny amounts, some poisons are also medicines, things like dyes, or, with careful application, insecticides and rodenticides.

  Besides being as gentle as we can on the land, working small, slow, and careful means we never send enough to the capital to get them excited and interested in us. Just enough to pay for a few things we can’t make for ourselves, and that they won’t send us as part of our support.

  “Have you got relatives back home?” Knight continued. “Or is it just your uncle here?”

  “No one, just friends.” I began telling him about my friends—omitting the other Hunters, of course, and concentrating on Kei. “My grandparents are gone, but they would have been really old by now anyway. They moved from the Springs to Apex to get Uncle a better education. Then they got a surprise, my father, and when he was grown, he met a girl from a town called New Bana who was visiting cousins, and he married her and moved there. Then New Bana got overrun. It was too far from Apex for an Elite team to get there in time to save the town. I was just a toddler, and I really don’t remember that. Uncle got me and some other kids that were orphaned and took them to families in the Springs who offered to take us. My best friend Kei was one of them too. She’s really pretty, black hair down to her waist when she combs it out. She’s probably going to have her pick of every boy in the Springs, because she’s not stuck on herself even though she’s pretty, and she’s as good with a gun as she is with a needle.” I told him a lot more about Kei, some of the funny stories about the trouble we used to get into together, just harmless stuff, pranks that made even the victim laugh, then tilted my head over. “What about you?”