Apex

by Mercedes Lackey

  As it turned out, I had plenty of time to sit and fret. They were in the air for a good hour and a half before the choppers came in hot. Bya’s pilot must have been something special; he slid in sideways, just at grass height, exactly right for them to be able to brace themselves, keep their balance as they sucked their tentacles back into themselves, and launch themselves out the door.

  They formed a wedge, with Bya, Myrrdhin, and Gwalchmai leading and big Dusana bringing up the rear in his full size, and surged through the grass, heading for the rally point. This was another walled city, and it must have had better defenses than the last one, since the walls hadn’t been breached and the Othersiders were still stuck outside. Flashes of artillery fire lit up the outside, on top of the walls. Spotlights picked out some of the enemy. There were muffled booms as the Othersiders battered at places they perceived as weak.

  Suddenly all the noise of artillery and fighting went muffled. I was alarmed until I realized that the Hounds must have grown themselves some hearing protection, in case another Banshee turned up.

  I tried not to let my thoughts impinge on Bya’s. He had more than enough to do with directing the pack and all. He didn’t need me distracting him.

  The team was not going to allow a repeat of the last time when the Othersiders had gotten inside the city; they headed straight for the spot where there were Gogs and Magogs battering at a weak point in the wall. Now I “heard” his orders along with the rest of the pack. Myrrdhin, take Hold. Gwalchmai, take Strike. Go left and right around the walls and look for the… There was no English equivalent of what Bya named, but I knew what it was. They were looking for the Folk Lord. That’s exactly what I would have done.

  And those four were a good choice to go hunting; they were off-black, exactly the color of shadows in the darkness, where true solid black shows up almost as well as white to someone who knows what he is looking for.

  Bya and the rest were heading straight for Scarlet and Cielle, whose flying Hounds were doing the same hunt for the Folk Lord, but from the air. Without me to protect, they were free to attach themselves to anyone else who needed some coverage. As they swirled around my two friends, I felt a surge of gratitude to them. Dusana, let us add our Shields to theirs, Bya ordered, making me even more grateful.

  Then the Hunters hit the line of defenders around the Gog and Magog, and the real fight began. Immediately, our weaknesses showed.

  They showed in the fact that so many of us were carrying RPGs and using them instead of magic, because the night shift was just too tired to use the magic their Hounds were shunting to them. They showed in the gaps that developed in our line. My heart sank as I understood just how big a handicap we were fighting under—tired, demoralized, with our numbers thinned.

  I wanted to do something, but there was nothing I could do except watch passively through Bya’s eyes.

  There were two Gog and Magog pairs trying to breach the town wall; one duo went down pretty quickly, thanks to surprise and several lucky RPG shots. The second pair, however, were not cooperating. I squirmed where I was sitting, wanting desperately to tell Kent to lead them away from the walls so the missiles on the choppers could get shots in on them—

  But then I realized that Kent must have thought of that and dismissed it—because these two weren’t acting like the usual dumb-as-dirt giants. They were using abandoned vehicles as improvised physical shields, blocking the RPG fire. They were looking for the muzzle flashes and sending well-aimed chunks of debris at whoever had last fired an RPG. They were not charging blindly, roaring with pain when a hit got through. Someone was controlling them directly.

  I clenched my hands hard in the sheets. I wanted to be there. I needed to be there!

  Dazzle lit up the Gog, but instead of reacting with confusion, it hurled the vehicle it had been using as a shield at the last place an RPG had fired from. And there was nowhere for anyone in the target area to run to.

  In the nick of time, Hammer and Steel redirected their Shields like an umbrella to cover the five or six people in the impact area.

  But that left them open because they had to move their Shields away from themselves to cover the Hunters in danger, and was just what the Manticores had been waiting for.

  Before anyone could move or react, a huge monster leapt over the combat lines and landed next to them. Its stinger came down twice, and Hammer and Steel collapsed.

  The Manticore bent down to seize one of them in its mouth, just as Mark Knight, shrieking with fury and looking like one of King Arthur’s medieval warriors swinging an ax, grabbed his AR by the barrel and swung the metal stock down at the monster’s head.

  He caught it right in the eye.

  The Manticore dropped Hammer, shrieking. Dusana! Bya cried, but it was too late. The Manticore’s lightning reflexes had already sent its stinger plunging through Mark’s chest.

  Dusana bamphed to his side and hosed the monster down with fire, as Kent and three others dragged Mark, Hammer, and Steel away.

  I pulled out of Bya’s head with a wrench. I heard a crack and felt sudden pain in my left hand as I hit the bed railing, and realized dully that—as I’d been warned—I’d just broken a bone.

  But it didn’t matter. The pain didn’t matter. All that mattered was I should have been there.

  I howled like a bereft dog. Orderlies and medics slammed open the door to my room, hit me with a hypospray, and the last thing I remember was someone screaming.

  But it wasn’t me.

  It was Jessie.

  When I woke up again, my throat was raw, and there was a cast on my left hand.

  I also wasn’t alone. Cielle was sitting in the chair next to me.

  “Here,” she said, handing me tissues, and I started bawling again. She kept talking. “Kent figured you were doing some kind of telepathy thing with your Hounds?” She made it a question, so I nodded, between sobs. “So…yeah. This makes sense, then.” She made a vague gesture at my face and my hand in the cast. “We won, by the way. Well, us and the army Mages. Scarlet’s Hounds found that pissant Folk Lord, the army Mages all unloaded on him at once, and he bugged out.” But I could tell from the sound of her voice that it wasn’t a “We won!” but a “We didn’t lose,” and that just made me bawl harder.

  She could have excused herself and left, but she didn’t. She stayed right there with me until Bya and Shinje nosed their way in and jumped up on my bed. She left then, but came back with a fresh stack of tissues and sat on the edge of my bed, while Bya stretched out on the other side and Shinje sat on my feet. Cielle put her arm awkwardly around my shoulders and passed me fresh tissues. I wanted to tell her to go, but I couldn’t. My insides were all knotted up, my hand hurt and my head hurt, and I was glad they hurt because I deserved to hurt—but I was also grateful, in a cringe-worthy sense, that she was there, because I was afraid to be alone with this grief. I was afraid if I was alone, I—I didn’t know what I’d do.

  “That was the bravest and stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said finally. Which pretty much summed up how I felt about it. I nodded, with a wad of soggy tissue held to my face. “I—miss him too,” she said, and her face crumpled like the tissues I was holding, which set me off again, and we clung to each other and cried until we were both hoarse and horrible-looking. An orderly came in and handed Cielle off to someone standing outside the door, and gave me a liter of water and a pill. “Drink all of this, and take that,” he said sternly. “I’m standing right here till you do both.”

  To get rid of him, I swallowed the pill first, drank down the water as quickly as I could without throwing it all back up, and handed him the bottle. He took it and left, dimming the lights as he did so. I lay back in my bed with my tissues clutched in my good hand.

  I should have been there. I should have. I was rested. I didn’t need to do things that would have stressed my skeleton; I could have done nothing but pure magic. I could have protected Hammer and Steel while they protected the others, and they would never ha
ve been hurt, and Mark would never have needed to defend them—

  And there was a bigger source of guilt. I was sitting on top of the knowledge of a reserve of some of the best Hunters and Mages I had ever seen, and I had said nothing about it to anyone. Oh gods, how wrong had I been? I had been protecting the people on the Mountain and the Monastery, but it was at the expense of everyone here! Would the Masters even want to be protected if they knew what kind of a cost we were paying down here without their help?

  And now that Mark was gone…Jessie would surely blame me, and she’d be right to do so. But would she take her anger at me out on the Mountain? She surely knew about the extra Hunters there, Hunters that, had they been here, would have prevented this disaster. Would she betray her new home, the Mountain, and all those Hunters? Was it even betrayal when we needed them so badly?

  I had to do something. I wasn’t sure what….I couldn’t break my word to the Masters, but this couldn’t go on. I couldn’t keep this up without at least trying to get some help down here.

  Bya, get me paper and a pen, please? I asked silently as my throat threatened to close up again. He looked at me with his head cocked to the side, then jumped down off the bed and trotted out. About five minutes later he returned with both in his mouth.

  I took them from him and began to write.

  I told the Masters how desperate things were. That we were afraid Drift’s ambition would lead her to finding a way to rid herself of the Hunters, leaving the city open to invasion. That the Othersiders were thinning us down, bit by bit, to the point where Drift might not have to do anything. That Mark was dead. How every other source of help was drying up, and I didn’t think we could hold out much longer. It was less than coherent, I was afraid, but I hoped they’d understand and figure out a way to help us. Because if they didn’t, I was completely out of ideas, and from the sound of things, so was everyone else.

  I rolled it up and gave it to Bya, then opened the Way for him. He looked at me as if he was going to say something. Then I got the mental equivalent of a hug from him, and he stepped through and was gone.

  With my arms around Shinje, I cried for Mark until the pill knocked me out.

  I felt exactly the same waking up as I had going to sleep the night before. I didn’t have any appetite at all, but I guess the medics had already figured that part out, because the orderly brought me a huge glass of some thick, creamy liquid and stood there until I finished drinking it. “Thank you,” I said when I gave him back the glass. He waited for me to ask for something more, but I wasn’t the person who really needed support now, and we both knew it. He left after a moment, which was probably a relief for both of us.

  He had also brought me a fresh stack of tissues. At this rate, I was going to deplete the stock for the entire medbay.

  I wanted to talk to Jessie. The last thing I wanted to do was to talk to Jessie. I took the coward’s way out and sent her a vid-message, babbling for a while about how sorry I was—and how even sorrier I was that I couldn’t think of anything that seemed right to say to her. And I cried, which I thought about erasing, but they didn’t look like phony tears so I left it and hit send.

  And just as I did that, Kent came in. He looked like hell, like he hadn’t slept in days, and I had no idea how many callouts he’d been on since the one where Mark was killed. All of them, likely.

  “How you holding up, kid?” he asked.

  I opened my mouth to say okay, but what came out was a bleat of “I don’t know what to do!” and a gush of tears.

  “None of us do, Joy,” he said, sitting down heavily. “I didn’t come here expecting you to hand me a miracle.” He made a helpless little gesture that only made me feel worse, if that was at all possible. It was like seeing one of the Masters without an answer. “There’s…This all just feels wrong. Like there is a big picture here that we’re just not seeing…but damn if I have a clue.”

  His face was a mask of despair. And seeing him like that, I just couldn’t put any more burden on him, so I mopped up, stiffened my backbone, and said, “I’d like to go back on duty, sir.”

  His instant reply was, “Absolutely not! Look at what you did to your hand—in bed!” He gestured at the cast on my left hand. “The kick of a rifle will shatter your collarbone. The kick of a handgun will shatter your other hand. If you fall down, you’ll break an arm or a leg—”

  “Hear me out, sir,” I pleaded, because even if I couldn’t go back in time and fix what had gone wrong, at least I could do something about now. “I’m all rested. I promise, I won’t do anything but magic. And my Hounds will make sure that if for some reason I fall, I’ll land soft. Please!”

  “The docs are going to murder me for this,” he muttered, then sighed and nodded. “All right. You sit here and I’ll see if I can get them to release you. We’re so thin now that half of us are walking wounded anyway.”

  So I stayed put while he went to talk to the medics. And that was when Jessie came in.

  She’d been crying a lot, that much was plain, and she walked as if every step was taken in pain. But the first thing she said when she got in the door was, “You’d better not be doin’ some damn fool way of killin’ yourself.”

  That accusation took me entirely flat-footed. “What?” I said stupidly.

  She waved at the medbay outside the door. “Talkin’ Kent into puttin’ you back on duty. This better not be so you can go get yourself killed outa guilt.” She didn’t let me say anything. Evidently she had a whole speech built up, and she wasn’t going to stop until she had it all out. “Ayup, I tried t’blame you. I blamed you ’cause if it wasn’t fer you, he wouldn’t have gone Elite. But if he hadn’t gone Elite, I’d still be with my folks, and we’d never been married. So that didn’t work. So I blamed you fer not bein’ there at that fight, but that was damn fool nonsense an’ I knew it, ’cause I was takin’ care of you myself. If you’d’a been there, somethin’ woulda snapped you like a twig, an’ the boys woulda still be stung, an’ he’d still be…” Her face spasmed a moment, then she got control again. “So iffen I can’t blame you, then you don’t dare blame yerself. So don’t you dare go killin’ yerself.”

  She stalked out, having said her piece. And I was left speechless.

  I was released back to my quarters on the condition that I wouldn’t go on any small callouts. Nothing but the full-scale ones. And I would wear a set of arm and leg braces that were almost like casts, except they were also shock absorbent. I agreed to all of it. After the surprise of Jessie’s speech, a vague idea had emerged. Maybe Kent was right—there was a bigger picture that we were all missing.

  And maybe I knew someone who could tell me just what that picture was.

  But first…I had a big confession to make, and it wasn’t going to be easy. It was past time to end some of the secrecy.

  So I sat down on my bed. My hand was shaking, and it was not just from weakness. Armorer Kent, would you please meet me at the usual place at your earliest convenience? I texted, not expecting to get an answer for a while.

  But instead…I got one in five minutes. Half an hour, usual place, came the answer, so knowing I was going to want to steady my nerves some more, I headed for the koi garden.

  A half an hour later he showed up while I was feeding the fish and trying not to remember how Mark had told me not to betray their faith, and completely failing. I just hoped that salt tears in their fresh water wouldn’t do the fish any harm. I hastily wiped my eyes on my sleeve as Kent came in. “I know you better than to assume this is trivial, Joy,” he said, and locked the door behind him. Then he turned to face me. “So, what is it, and—”

  “Please, sir,” I said, holding up my hand, the one without the cast on it. “First you have to promise me you won’t interrupt me, no matter how provoked or angry or outraged you are, until I’m done.”

  His tired face got a strange expression on it, and he sat down. “All right. That, coming from you, tells me no matter what, this is going to be interestin
g.”

  So I started from the beginning, the first encounter with Torcion, at the train. Then how I had been feeling as if he was stalking me for weeks after that, catching glimpses of what might have been him during my Hunts. Then the second encounter, when he tried to warn me about Ace. Kent looked as if he was going to say something right then, but he remembered his promise and stayed quiet.

  But by the time I was finished, with that last encounter out there in Spillover, he looked as if he was going to explode.

  I had been very careful not to speak Torcion’s name, only to say that he had given it to me, and allowed me to use it to summon him. Because if all this had been some kind of elaborate ruse to get me to give him a gateway into the Hunter HQ…well, at least I was smarter than that.

  “All right, that’s all,” I said, looking down into my lap. And waited for that explosion. Strangely…I wasn’t tensed up. More like resigned, mixed with a little relief.

  But the explosion didn’t come.

  “You say your Hounds claim this…person…is trustworthy,” Kent said, after a long moment of silence. I looked up. His expression had changed to one of wary calculation.

  “Myrrdhin and Gwalchmai particularly, yes, sir,” I confirmed.

  “Ace’s Hounds.”

  “Yes, sir.” I thought I could see where this was going, but I kept my mouth shut and let him think out loud.

  “This could be a very long con on their part—theirs and Ace’s, to get us to open up to the Othersiders,” he pointed out, his voice very neutral and level.

  “Except my original Hounds trust Myrrdhin and Gwalchmai,” I pointed out. “So do Karly’s Hounds. I really don’t think Hounds could fool other Hounds. If we’re going to start doubting our Hounds, we might just as well take down the Barriers and invite the Othersiders in right now.”

  He wearily ran a hand over his hair. “You have a point. And what this…person…has told you so far is damned interesting. In fact, it’s got the preliminary shape of that big picture I said I thought we were missing.” He took a very deep breath. “So. What do you think you want to do next?”