The Sylph Hunter

by L. J. McDonald

  “Don’t stay here!” he shouted. “Whatever the Hunter is, it’s invisible and it’s deadly! It kills everything!” He tried to remember how to survive it and could only think of needing walls ten feet thick. “Get out of the city if you can!”

  The rumbling rose again, turning into a roar of rage and frustration, as well as fear, and Devon ran, Zalia flanking him as they sprinted for a side street that had been turned into a narrow alley thanks to the dome. He’d just barely reached it when he heard the battlers roar, attracted by the growing riot.

  They couldn’t see Zalia, he thought as he felt their hate, and his heart pounded with enough force it might burst. If they saw her, they’d take her and leave him and Airi here alone. That was unbearable and Devon ran harder, Zalia’s voice panting in his ear as she matched him, both of them slowed by the drifts of sand as they raced down the road and along others, Devon with no idea where they were going.

  The sand was worse on the main streets, slowing them to a crawl as they were forced to struggle through it. These streets were mostly deserted, except for crumbling footprints from people who’d already made their way through, undoubtedly on their way to the dome. The dome itself rose over everything, casting its shadow over them even when they were blocks away.

  “Where did all this sand come from?” Devon gasped, moving through it despite how his sword tangled with his legs and his feet sank ankle deep or more in spots, still tugging Zalia along. Despite the shadow of the dome and the early morning, the temperature was rising steadily and Airi worked to keep them both at least a little bit cool. They should have brought water, he thought. He was such an unthinking fool.

  “There must have been a sandstorm during the night,” Zalia gasped, holding her skirts up as decorously as she could as she labored through the sand behind him. “They can blow in and out horribly fast and if the sylphs don’t fight them, they can just about bury the city.”

  And of course, the sylphs had all been nice and safe in their hive. Devon realized that at the same moment he realized he was holding Zalia’s hand hard enough that it had to hurt, though she wasn’t complaining. In the middle of a sand dune that covered most of the street and all but the sign above a little silk shop, he stopped and let go of her, staring at her in embarrassment.

  “I’m sorry I held your hand so tightly,” he told her, though he felt like an idiot. Now was the chance to be brave and manly. To show her what a wonderful person he was, how much better he was than a battle sylph who could turn her insides upside down. All he could really think was that he’d been tired last night and he’d gone to bed before he bothered to bathe. He smelled, and he’d left his flute on the floor next to his bed.

  Airi snorted in his ear at that and madly ruffled his hair.

  Zalia smiled at the sight, her entire face lighting up for a moment that made her beyond beautiful to Devon. It faded quickly and she hugged herself despite the heat as she looked down and away.

  “You must think I’m such a foolish woman,” she whispered.

  How could she think that, he wondered, though of course, he knew. She had to be thinking that Airi told him what she’d done, which she had. In Zalia’s mind, he must have been thinking her to be loose and worthless, though that was in his mind only because of his realization that it was what she thought.

  His fear of battle sylphs might have made him a coward, but her desire for them didn’t make her a whore.

  “Zalia,” he whispered, his heart suddenly very calm as Airi squealed in excitement and lifted off his shoulders, leaving him alone for this one moment of truth. He barely noticed as he reached forward to cup Zalia’s cheek just as she looked back up, her gaze wondering at his tone.

  He kissed her, his mouth soft against her dry lips, his eyes slipping closed at the contact. Zalia stiffened for an instant, but whether she truly desired him or her affair with One-Eleven had scoured away some of her inhibitions—or even a combination of the two—she returned his kiss, her mouth moving as ardently as his while her arms wrapped tightly around his neck. Her mouth was soft, so dry and perfect, and her tongue darted out to flick against the tip of his own, leaving him to wonder if she’d learned that trick from her first lover. He put that thought away. Her past didn’t matter any more than his right here and now.

  He held her against him, her breasts and belly warm and sensual, sending his heartbeat racing again for reasons that finally didn’t have to do with fear. He kissed her, each touch of his lips against her a gentle benediction about how he loved her. He’d never felt anything so right, so perfect, and her sheer response showed how deeply she felt the same. Most of the women he’d kissed—and there hadn’t been many—had let him do most of the work. Zalia was as involved as he was, and her fingers tangled in his hair as his hands stroked up her sides, the base of his palm just lightly brushing against the edge of her breast. She gasped at that, rising up ever so slightly on her toes, and he felt a surge of gratitude that he’d been able to cause her pleasure.

  Daringly, he turned his hands and flicked his thumbs slowly across the sides of her breasts again. She deepened their kiss and clasped her hands over his own, leaving him to decide he’d gone far enough. A moment later, she brought them around and pressed them fully against the swell of her breasts and nipples for a single moment as she tensed in obvious reaction. Then she pulled them away and moved her head to one side, breaking their kiss.

  “We have to go,” she breathed.

  “Of course,” he answered, even as he took a moment to remember what it was they had to do. Right. Now was not the time for this, no matter how badly he wanted to make love to her. He kissed her again instead, hugging her to him as tightly as he could, now that he knew how sensitive her nipples were, and finally let her go with a last stroke along her arm and a kiss against the back of her hand. Then he clasped his fingers with hers and pulled her past him, letting her take the lead since she was the only one of them who actually knew the way.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  They saw no women while they crossed the city. They didn’t see many men either, but those they did were almost all wandering in a shocked daze, or heading purposefully in the direction of the hive. They did see blood, splattered across the sandy ground in more than one place, though most of it was covered by sand, and they did see battle sylphs. They were all over the city and it was Airi who kept them from being discovered and Zalia rescued by the searching clouds.

  “They’re really taking all the food they can find, aren’t they?” Devon noted, peering around the corner of an alley where they’d hidden after Airi’s latest warning. Zalia stood out of sight of the road behind him, while Airi played with the ends of her long hair. All of them were trying to ignore the splash of dry blood on the wall beside her.

  “The fields must have been destroyed,” Zalia mused, rubbing her arms. Devon looked back at her questioningly. “There are crop fields north of the city,” she told him. “We depend on them for a lot of our food.”

  “You can grow food in a desert?”

  “The sylphs can.” She looked toward the hive. “But none of them were there to protect them from the sandstorm, I don’t think.” They hadn’t seen a single sylph who wasn’t a battler.

  They weren’t, Airi confirmed. None of them will come out while the Hunter is here.

  So the city had lost its largest source of food. Devon watched a battler swoop by, a half-dozen bleating goats held in tentacles below his belly. Goats who’d need to eat from the same crops that were now destroyed. “The bastards,” he growled. “Not only are they leaving all the men to be killed, they’re leaving them to starve.” He turned back to his companions, one that he could see, and the other that he couldn’t. “This city is doomed.”

  Zalia gaped at him in horror. “Is there anything we can do?”

  “Not us. Certainly not me.” He looked up toward the palace, still floating above the hive. “The que
en could, if she wasn’t more interested in sitting around with her friends.” Zalia looked devastated. Devon took her hands, squeezing gently until she looked at him. “We do what we’re trying to do now. Get as many of your friends into the hive as we can.” He shuddered. “And try to convince the battlers that without men, there eventually won’t be any women either.”

  “Do you think they’ll listen to you?”

  The very thought made his gut tighten. “Honestly, no. But if enough women got together yelling about it, they just might.” He smiled at her. “Leading them in that will have to be your job.”

  Zalia’s eyes were huge, her hands pulling away from his and clasping under her chin while she frantically shook her head. Oddly enough, she reminded Devon of himself when Leon had first asked him to come to Meridal. He stepped forward and reclaimed her hands with his own. “Don’t be afraid. You’re a brave woman, you can do this. And no battle sylph would ever hurt you. They love women.”

  She flushed red, obviously remembering the night before, and looked away. Devon leaned in and kissed her cheek. “I believe in you,” he told her.

  The look Zalia gave him at that was one of amazement.

  Battle sylph! Airi suddenly warned.

  Devon tightened his grip on Zalia’s hands, tugging her with him deeper into the alley, which ended at a door into someone’s dwelling. It was already broken open from the outside and they hid in a small room scattered with sand. The battle sylphs didn’t have to see Zalia to recognize her as a woman. They could feel her pattern from a distance, though he hoped not so easily through walls. As Devon peeked out the door, his heart pounding with near panic, Airi wrapped her own pattern around Zalia, flaring it up. It made her more obvious to the battlers, but with any luck, they’d choose to continue ignoring a young, foreign air sylph.

  As he looked down the alley, he saw a man run along the street it branched off. He was only visible for an instant as he ran past, but that was more than enough time for Devon’s frightened mind to remember him, as well as the pregnant woman he towed by the hand behind him. He saw her hand cupping her swollen belly, her hair streaming behind her. Before he could do more than acknowledge that he saw them, a black cloud flecked by lightning flowed past, following them, and his gut clenched with sudden terror, his bladder threatening to empty itself. A horrified second later, he heard a scream of terror, followed by a wail of loss. The battler reappeared again, already gaining altitude as he carried his unwilling cargo away. Worst of all, the man reappeared only seconds after he passed, chasing them, his arms outstretched in a pleading gesture as that horrible sound continued to issue from his throat.

  Devon? Airi whimpered.

  Devon turned toward them both, his arms going around both sylph and woman while he tried to push the memory away. The pain in that man’s voice…and there was nothing he could do. Nothing except hold on even tighter to the woman before him and know that if the battlers found her, there was nothing he could do about it at all.

  “Devon?” Zalia whispered against his ear, her voice frightened.

  Are you all right, Devon? Airi asked.

  Right at that moment, he wasn’t sure he’d ever be all right again. “Let’s keep moving,” he said at last.

  They did, traveling slowly across the city, following back routes Zalia knew that were once used by the lower classes so they didn’t have to be seen by their betters. There was a risk to using them. They hadn’t been abandoned, being too twisty for most of the sand to fill and familiar to the majority of the men and women who were left, but there were a lot of nooks and corners that the main roads didn’t have where they could hide from battle sylphs. The farther they traveled, the more obvious it became that those hiding places and Airi’s efforts were the only reasons they weren’t found, and increasing numbers of battlers rose up over the buildings and returned to the hive with men’s voices following in outrage.

  “There probably won’t be any women left at the hovels when we get there,” Zalia commented.

  “No, but there will be men and they won’t know what’s happening.” They’d warned as many men as they could, not that they were sure they were wholly believed. Still, it wasn’t as hard to convince anyone that there was an invisible predator among them as Devon would have expected. Despite how ludicrous it sounded, a lot of the men believed them anyway, perhaps because they were superstitious by nature, maybe due to the fact that they needed to have a reason for what was happening, and an explanation for all the blood they’d seen. They were cowed by the storm that ravaged the city, something that was never allowed before, and Zalia wasn’t the only one to realize that the food they needed was likely gone as well. The existence of the Hunter was just one more thing to deal with in a world filled with events they’d always believed to be impossible.

  “Where are we supposed to go?” one man asked, standing with his three boys, all of whom were weeping for their mother. “What’s a safe place for us?”

  “I don’t know,” Devon admitted. If every single man in the city went to the entrance to the sylph hive, the battlers still wouldn’t let them in. “Just keep spreading the warning.”

  “Warnings won’t be enough,” the man groused. “Someone better think of a place to go. For me, we’re going to the place what’s got our women. Come on, boys.” He left with them.

  That was the final response of most of them, even those who believed. Whether they believed or not, all they could really deal with was the fact that the battle sylphs were stealing their women and their food, and most of the men were moving toward the hive, for whatever good it would do them.

  Devon just hoped doing so wouldn’t turn them into a target for the Hunter. The thought that it could be anywhere made his skin crawl. They didn’t even know anything about it yet, other than that it killed. That was all Airi knew of the things. Hunters came and they killed and that killing drove battlers mad. Devon could believe that. For a creature designed to take direct action, an enemy such as the Hunter must be unbearable.

  All the three of them could do was continue on, spreading their warning, and hope they didn’t stumble across the thing themselves, even as they continued to pass the blood it left behind. Devon found he kept straining his eyes for any sight of it and suspected Zalia was doing the same. The sun played havoc with his vision though. The day was growing blisteringly hot and bright, making him squint constantly, and all the dust in the air was being twisted by the inconstant wind into bizarre shapes that his mind kept recognizing, just as it would clouds overhead. He saw a nightmarish two-legged cow, a giant with a narrow club over its shoulder, a flat-based ball with a hundred strings hanging from its underside, a massive puppy gamboling; all barely visible, all gone if he looked away at something else. Sweat that had nothing to do with the heat trickled down between his shoulder blades and he gripped Zalia’s hand tightly, despite how warm it was. She didn’t seem to mind; her grip was just as tight.

  Thanks to their need to keep hiding, it took much longer than their original trip in before they reached the edge of the city. The number of women was already dropping hugely; with seven hundred battle sylphs who could pick up a dozen or more women each, it didn’t take long to gather them. Not seeing any women left the sand-filled streets feeling morose and lifeless, except for the anger and confusion of the men who were left. Worse, the hotter the day became, the less any of them were willing to listen to Devon’s warnings. Zalia’s friends, he hoped, would. This was starting to feel as if it were a race, one where the goal was to save even one person from the Hunter, and unlike the battlers, Devon refused to define personhood by gender.

  They paused for a long moment at the edge of the buildings, looking over the sandy expanse that led into the desert itself. The broken wall he’d seen before was now completely buried and many of the hovels were gone, taken by the wind. Those that remained were even more lopsided and half-buried as well. He still saw people, strug
gling to dig their pathetic little homes out of the sand.

  He didn’t see any women at all.

  “They’ve already been here,” Zalia mourned.

  Devon gently squeezed her hand. “Your friends are safe,” he reminded her. “No matter how crazy all of this is, remember they’re in the safest place left. We just have to get the rest of these people to safety too.” He’d been thinking about that. Ideally, they’d go to the hive. If all of the women demanded it at once, surely the battlers would let the men in. If their masters ordered them, they’d have to. So it was a matter of convincing the masters to order it. The only problem was, a lot of the battler masters were former harem slaves who likely didn’t think highly of the average citizen of Meridal. This could get ugly very fast if half agreed and the other half decided the men were cutting into their limited food supplies. There might end up being a civil war in the hive over who was good enough to save.

  If only the queen would get involved…

  Standing in the questionable shade of a building, Devon thought to himself that there was only one place he could think of to evacuate the men, short of getting them to drop everything and travel without food or water to the next city, which would be a death sentence. The only place even close to resembling the hive for the thickness of its walls was the underground complex that led to the gate room they’d been in before. It once held thousands of feeders, and even with the tiers of cages that were destroyed, there was room for everyone there, if not comfortably. The Hunter came from there, but they could block the entrance and it was hundreds of feet underground. Now that he thought about it, not even the walls of the hive were so thick. To survive, they’d just have to find a source of water and collect enough of the food left before the battlers took it all. The men of Meridal would need to work together to manage it and Devon quailed at the thought of what kind of organizational and leadership skills this would take. More than horrified, he shared his epiphany with his air sylph.