Hunters Unlucky

by Abigail Hilton

Chapter 6. The Storm

  Storm returned to the cave and lay down, fuming. I really will become a curb, he thought. I’ll leave the herd forever. If Eyal wants to hunt ferryshaft after the winter migration, I’ll do that, too. They’re no more than sheep to me. I’m not one of them. He knew he was being ridiculous and did not care.

  The wind was picking up. Far below and off to the south, he could see a milling mass of animals pushing their way up the trail that led to the stone bridge and the Great Cave. It looked even less organized than what he remembered from the previous Volontaro. Storm squinted. He thought he saw both ferryshaft and creasia, all packed together on the trail. Those on the ground pushed and shoved for their chance to start up. As he watched, one of the climbers—he could not tell what species—fell from halfway up the cliff.

  Stupid ants. “I’m glad the herd has such organized and thoughtful leaders,” he announced to the wind.

  The rational part of his brain pointed out that the storm had come up suddenly, after the danger had seemed passed. Conditions on the trail would be nightmarish—panicked animals struggling along a steep and increasingly narrow path. Foals would be trampled or separated from their mothers. Anyone who was careless or unlucky would be pushed over the cliff. The bridge itself would be the worst—single-file over a thread of stone, animals piled up waiting to cross, an endless stream coming up behind them, pushing…

  Storm gave an involuntary shiver. That can’t be the best plan for a Volontaro. He wondered whether the elders had invented or exaggerated the danger of the storm. Because the creasia require it? So that they can get an accurate count of our numbers? Volontaros were the one time when the creasia were guaranteed access to the entire herd. But, then, why risk bringing all of their own species? It seems dangerous for them as well.

  Storm shook his head. Doesn’t matter. I’m not a ferryshaft. I can wait out the Volontaro right here. Even if the mazes are underwater, I should be safe. It only lasted for about a day last time.

  Below him, the occasional straggler pounded past. Storm watched with indifference. The sky had darkened, and it had begun to rain—stinging darts that hurt when they hit his nose and eyes. The wind was making an eerie noise as it gusted among the rocks. Storm saw the scrubby trees among the boulders laid almost flat. He was grudgingly impressed. The clouds overhead looked like a bruise—purple and violet and black. Lightning bounced between them.

  Storm knew that he should scoot to the back of the cave, where he would be most sheltered from the elements. However, each time he moved away, he returned to the lip moments later, unable to drag his eyes from what was happening outside. The light had almost gone. He heard a sound that he could, at first, not identify. Then he recognized it. The sea. The waves must be tremendous if he could hear them breaking from this side of the cliff.

  A niggle of doubt began in the back of his mind. Maybe staying here wasn’t such a good idea…

  In a flash of lightning, Storm saw something out across the plain—a gray column as tall as the cliffs. One flash, and then it was gone. Storm blinked in the shadows. His heart pounded. What was that?

  Thunder crashed overhead. The wind howled like an animal in agony. It was growing louder. Storm backed into the farthest corner of the cave. It was too dark to see anything outside, and he no longer wanted to.

  Then the rock shuddered under Storm’s feet as something slammed into the cliff. For one moment, he was completely submerged in water. He came up gasping and sputtering. Something slick and wet was thrashing against his flank. Lightning lit the world again, and Storm saw water gushing from the cave he was now sharing with a tentacled monstrosity the color of day-old meat. Storm swallowed a scream as the world plunged into blackness again. The thing in the cave writhed. Octopus? Squid? Something else? He’d never seen anything like that in a tide pool. Can it bite, sting?

  He couldn’t get away from it in the small space, so he tried to kick it towards the mouth of the cave. He’d barely begun this effort, when he heard a noise that he would never forget. He’d imagined that noise before, heard it in nightmares, strained for it during winter storms, but never heard it in reality…until now. It was the sound of a massive rockslide.

  * * * *

  The telshee caves were in chaos. Everyone was scrambling to snatch eggs and young pups from the pools. Valla did not see any of the telshees she recognized. “Where are you going?” she tried to ask, but no one seemed interested in stopping to answer her.

  “They go to deep caves with air pockets,” Sauny said. “It’s less dangerous than the higher caves during the storm, but we can’t dive that deep. We’ll go to the Dreaming Sea. I know they don’t drown.”

  “But they can hold their breaths for a long time,” said Valla doubtfully. However, she didn’t have a better answer.

  As they started towards the passages that lead into the deep mountain, the water level of the pools began to drop sharply. Sauny saw it and frowned. “Oh, that’s not good. That’s not good at all.”

  * * * *

  Every ferryshaft old enough to have visited the cliffs had heard about rockslides. They were the most dangerous disaster one was likely to encounter. Rockslides could bury dozens of animals in the time it took to draw breath, and they could hopelessly trap ferryshaft in caves or on trails. The only warning was generally a rumble and a plume of dust. Fortunately, large slides were rare, and every ferryshaft who climbed the cliff took care not to needlessly disrupt stones.

  Storm had seen small slides, and he’d heard the characteristic rumble, which died immediately as a minor slide subsided. The noise he heard now was not minor. It grew to a roar that drowned the wind, and then the opening of his cave vanished in a deadly curtain of falling stone. The tentacled creature was swept away, and Storm cowered in the back of the cave, expecting it to collapse and crush him at any moment. After what seemed like a lifetime of terrifying noise, the outline of the cave mouth came back into view, and the grinding roar was replaced by the howl of the wind and the splatter of hail.

  Storm staggered back to the cave’s mouth. Well, aren’t you more clever than everyone else? What a fantastic idea—staying up here for the Volontaro.

  He waited for the lightning. When it struck, he saw with relief that most of the sheep trail seemed to be intact. However, a huge portion of the cliff to his right had been wholly ripped away. Lucky. For once. Don’t expect it twice.

  Storm had seen something else in the flash of lightning—two more gray columns swaying across the plain. I have to get out of here.

  Chapter 7. No Different

  Storm did not think about the sheep trail. He knew that if he thought about it, he would fall. He waited for the lightning, got one good look at where he had to land, and then bounded to the head of the main path. He teetered only once on a shelf of stone that was half-missing. He was certain that his memory had not betrayed him. That bit of cliff had simply been washed away.

  Storm hit the path running and almost slipped over the edge. Another jagged shaft of lightning showed him a gaping wound across the main trail. Again, he did not stop to think, just jumped, scrabbling at the far side, and then he was running again. Water gushed along the trail, spilling in cataracts from the edge. The rock was slick, and he forced himself to slow down as he reached the steepest section. Rain was coming in torrents now.

  Storm jumped the last few lengths from the trail and landed in hock-deep water. Ghosts and little fishes. The mazes were already flooding. It would be like running through mud. In desperation, Storm leapt atop a boulder, then to another, then another. He was not far from the trail to the bridge, but it seemed like an immense distance as he measured the space between boulders in the flashes of lightning and felt the solid rock shift beneath his weight as the water rose higher. He heard another rumble from the cliffs. Another rockslide? How close? Off to his left, something enormous was thrashing in the water. A shark? A lishty? Something larger?

  Storm almost missed the trail to the bridge, in spite of
his desperate scanning of the cliff face. In the darkness and flood, nothing looked as he remembered. He would not have recognized the trail if he hadn’t caught the silhouette of a dead foal, lying half in and half out of the water. He splashed down and swam the last few lengths to the foot of the cliff. The trampled foal was clear evidence of the panic here earlier, but nothing was stirring now.

  Storm raced up the path. He noticed things that he had not considered in his youth. The path was set into the cliff. It had been worn so by countless animals, and the overhang sheltered climbers from wind and falling rock.

  Storm had never traveled this trail during his explorations. It led only to the bridge, and he’d considered it a potential trap. He wished now that he’d made its acquaintance on sunnier days. He was forced to slow as the path narrowed, growing steeper and taking turns with which he was not familiar. He came up one such switchback and spotted another animal bounding along ahead of him, higher up, caught for a moment in a flash of lightning. A creasia.

  Storm felt a jolt of…something. It was the first time he’d come near a creasia since the battle by the lake. He found that he was not afraid.

  Storm focused on running. The path was growing narrower, the switchbacks steeper. He caught intermittent flashes of the creasia up ahead. He was gaining on it. He was certain that it had not seen him.

  Storm was flying over the stone now. He felt almost as though he were floating—the terror of the storm distilled into white-hot speed. He had not run so hard in…how long? Since Arcove chased me? For the first time since leaving Tollee beside Mylo’s ravaged corpse, Storm felt truly alive.

  He mounted the last steep switchback and saw the narrow straight-away that lead to the bridge. The creasia was there, squarely ahead of him, running as fast as it could, but not fast enough.

  Storm closed with a burst of a speed that should have cost him, but he was too excited to feel the strain. He jumped—just a little to the cliffward side of the cat—and lashed out with a back hoof. He caught the creasia with what must have been a numbing blow to the shoulder, and the animal went head over heels. Storm thought that it was going over the edge, but then the cat managed to catch itself on the lip of the precipice.

  Storm darted forward before the cat could regain the trail. It was clearly having trouble with the shoulder he’d damaged. It scrabbled desperately without managing to pull itself over the edge. The cat looked up at him, wild-eyed. “Truce…during…the storm,” it managed.

  “Is there?” asked Storm. He leaned forward, and the cat gave another desperate surge, almost as though it expected him to help pull it onto the path. Storm remembered the seal. His jaws closed around the creasia’s throat. He set his back legs and jerked.

  The animal’s scream, so close to his ears, nearly deafened him. It broke off with a wet crunch, and then Storm stumbled backwards against the cliff face with a mass of fur and meat between his teeth. The creasia hung on for a moment longer. It opened its mouth, but only a spray of red droplets came out. Its eyes, still fixed on him, lost their focus. Then it fell.

  The rain ran red over the edge of the cliff in front of Storm. He stood there a moment, staring. Then he dropped the evidence of his first creasia kill without looking at it. He turned and ran for the bridge.

  * * * *

  Sauny tried to run for the tunnels that lead to the Dreaming Sea. She tried, but Valla could tell that Sauny’s uneven gait would soon exhaust her. To make matters worse, the drop in water levels had created an unfamiliar landscape of deep chasms and steep climbs over wet stone slick with cave mud. Most of the acriss had vanished when the water levels dropped. In the darkness, with the pools all confused, Valla wasn’t certain they were even going in the right direction.

  “Sauny, maybe we should just climb to the highest spot and wait. There doesn’t seem to be any immediate danger.”

  Sauny’s voice in the darkness sounded winded. “Keesha said that when the water levels drop like this, sometimes they come back—”

  There was a sudden loud gush and grinding noise. Water swirled around Valla’s legs.

  “Fast,” finished Sauny in a whisper. “Valla, just swim. Try to find something to climb on and wait and…and thank you for being my friend.”

  The water was rising with terrifying speed. In desperation, Valla sloshed towards Sauny’s voice in the darkness. “Shaw!” She shouted. “Ulya! Keesha! Anyone!” Her voice echoed weirdly in the tunnels, but nobody answered. “We are not going to drown,” she informed Sauny as the floor dropped away beneath them. “You’re a strong swimmer. I’m a strong swimmer. We’re smart.”

  “Then save your breath and look for high ground,” flashed Sauny.

  * * * *

  Storm hesitated when he reached the bridge. The night had grown, if possible, even blacker. Waiting won’t make it any easier. One look. Just one, and then I’ll go. One look was almost too much. Lightning lit the sky from rim to rim, and he saw what he remembered—a thread of stone, impossibly narrow, slick with rain and without shelter from the wind. Now, he commanded himself. Go now before you lose your nerve.

  Storm staggered when he moved from the lee of the cliff. He paused, readjusted his balance, and then stepped onto the bridge.

  This is where you don’t hurry.

  There were no animals shoving behind him this time, no ferryshaft backside inching along in front of him. Take your time.

  He did—careful step after careful step over the wet stone in the dark, leaning just a little into the wind, and making himself as flat as possible against the stone bridge. Storm was well over halfway and congratulating himself, when the pitch of the wind changed. The howl rose an octave. Oh, no.

  Another flash of lightning, and he risked a glance away from his feet towards the sea. Something was coming up the Garu Vell—a wall of wind and water.

  Storm abandoned caution. One, two, three desperate leaps. And then it was on him. Storm plastered himself instinctively to the stone. No good. He was slipping. I did not survive Arcove to be killed by my own namesake!

  Storm scrabbled for purchase, anything. Still slipping. Something Pathar had said long ago flashed through his mind. Don’t fight the wind. Use it.

  Storm slipped over the side of the bridge…the windward side…on purpose. Instantly, the force of the gale pressed him against the bridge. He was able to stop struggling and catch his breath. He was half-off the bridge. If the wind stopped now, he’d fall. However, he was, for the moment, not slipping. Storm inched forward again. He knew he had to be near the cave. He might be mere lengths away in the darkness. Just a little farther.

  An irregular shape came into view on the path ahead, perhaps half a length in front of him. Storm squinted. He thought he saw wet fur. A body? That couldn’t be. Anything lying on this slick rock would be instantly swept away. But the shape wasn’t moving. Storm was almost on top of it now.

  And he saw what it was. A cub—hardly bigger than a rabbit—pressed flat to the bridge, every claw extended, hanging on, but barely. Beyond the cub, Storm glimpsed the massive outline of the Great Cave.

  The wind dropped a fraction, and Storm inched quickly back towards the center of the bridge. It gusted, and he barely managed to shift his weight to the windward side. If the gale began to change its intensity, he would not be able to find a balance. Unlike the cub, he did not have claws to aid him.

  Storm considered. The cub did not seem to be moving, and he could not get around it. He thought that a mere tug on its tail would probably break its fragile grip. Lightning struck again. The cub was not well-nourished. Storm saw clearly the shape of its ribs beneath its saturated fur. It was smaller than he would have expected. Ferryshaft were never born so small. Not even me.

  What am I waiting for?

  He found himself wondering what happened to creasia orphans—whether they had cliques, how they found food, whether adults helped them or hindered them.

  No matter. This cub will grow up to kill ferryshaft just like all the others. I
just killed a creasia. This is no different.

  “No different,” Storm reminded himself softly. “No different at all.” He took a deep breath and inched forward.

  Chapter 8. Out of the Storm and into the Surf

  Kelsy lay beside Itsa, feeling miserable as the Volontaro howled outside the Great Cave. He wondered if Storm would have come for shelter if he had not approached him. Probably. I made him angry. Common wisdom said that mortality for animals who remained outside the Great Cave during a Volontaro was around fifty percent.

  Storm has survived worse odds. Still, Kelsy felt responsible, and this particular storm looked bad. He’d lain down within sight of the bridge, hoping to see Storm come in along with the rest of the stragglers. But the last light had died, the wind had grown fiercer, and Kelsy hadn’t seen any stragglers in a while. He couldn’t even see the bridge anymore. I hope you’re safe in your cave, Storm.

  Kelsy’s eyes had started to drift shut when a silhouette materialized at the spot where the bridge met the cave. Kelsy started up. For a moment, he could not make sense of the shape, although he caught the gleam of pale fur. Lightning streaked across the sky, and Kelsy glimpsed the startling image of Storm flinging away a creasia cub…as though he had been carrying it by the scruff. Kelsy blinked in the new darkness. Storm’s silhouette staggered, shook itself, and then bounded away into the shadows. An instant later, Kelsy thought he saw a smaller silhouette following after.

  * * * *

  Valla wondered, as her nose brushed the ceiling of the cave, whether any other ferryshaft bones rested in Syriot. Surely not many. Will Ulya carve a few characters for us in the Cave of Histories? ‘They were Valla and Sauny, ferryshaft who lived among Telshees.’ Is that too long? Valla tried to work out how the characters should fit together. It was easier than thinking about how she would soon not be able to breathe.

  Light! Valla blinked. A faint glow had begun in the water. “Sauny! Sauny, do you see that? The acriss have come back. Maybe we can find… Sauny?”