Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  Almost anything, that is. That put things into perspective. I really wanted to turn the train around and go back home. For a moment, homesickness swallowed me up. But I kept my Hunt-face on, just as I’d been taught.

  “You choose. I just don’t know what the options are. Something soothing, sweet, and hot with nothing like a drug or alcohol in it,” I said, thinking I was going to get some sweet, hot tea, which I much prefer to the hot buttered tea some of my Masters like. Well, it isn’t real tea—nobody on this continent can get that anymore—it’s herbal tisane. But it’s real butter. Cows can’t live up in the mountains, but goats and sheep can, and we have both at the Monastery. Sometimes we get cow butter and milk from the settlements, but mostly we rely on our own herd for that sort of thing.

  “I know just the thing,” he said, and went to the autobar. He brought back something medium brown and opaque, with an intriguing smell. I sipped it; it was odd but good. Creamy and sweet. “Hot Chocolike,” he said, and gestured for me to follow him. I did, sipping as we went.

  At the vestibule to my car, he paused. “If—if something were to happen to the train—you and your Hounds would protect us, right? We’d be all right with you here, until help came, right?”

  I thought about that. Thought about the likelihood that if there was an attack that involved something big and nasty enough to break through the electrified cage, the train would probably crash, and at the speed it was going, not even the crash-bubbles would save us. And that if any of us did survive, we’d be too injured to do anything, or unconscious. We’d be too far away from Apex for an Elite team to get here in time. I thought about other possibilities that didn’t involve crashing, in which case the armed cars at the front and the rear of the train would do a lot more about protecting us than me or the Hounds ever could. I mean, there were machine guns with armor-piercing, blessed bullets in there, or incendiaries and mortars, and some trains were even rumored to carry small missile launchers with Hellfires loaded. I’m cursed with a very good imagination, and right then, what I could imagine was terrifying.

  But my Masters had told me that when I got out here in the world, the people here would look at me differently from how they did at home. That Hunters were some sort of legendary beings off the Mountain. Not that Hunters weren’t respected on the Mountain, because we were; everyone knows the job we do is dangerous, and we get the respect a warrior merits. But nobody treats us like we’re minor gods or something.

  We didn’t get a lot of live vid on the Mountain; we were off the grid, and our electricity had to be saved for things that mattered, so mostly it was just the officially mandated stuff we warmed up the vid-screen in the community hall for, or old, stored stuff on drives and disks that you can watch on a solar-powered tablet, or things that came in the weekly mail. We don’t lack for electricity, because we can keep the lights and the comm system and the intranet going all the time, but we’re all taught to be mindful, very mindful, of waste. That kind of mindset goes all the way back to the Diseray, when no one had much of anything, and everything was being scrounged. Think twice, act once, is what everyone says. When kids are taught to read and write, it’s one of the first things they print out.

  That was when it hit me: off the Mountain, Cits—that’s ordinary people who live in the cities—absolutely believed what the vids showed them. And the vids showed them that Hunters were able to protect them from anything. Then it hit me that there must be a reason for that.

  I wasn’t going to do him any good by breaking that illusion now, was I? I had to think about this before I answered him. Think twice, act once.

  “Yes,” I said simply. “So long as you forget how young I look and do exactly what I tell you to.”

  Enough of the Hunter mystique must have attached itself to me when I summoned the Hounds that he just got this hugely relieved look on his face and sighed. Then he opened the door for me and waved me through.

  I went back to my seat and perched on it, legs crossed in lotus position, zazen style, sipping the drink. It must have been terrible territory we were passing through, for him to have asked that question. Now I really wanted to see what was out there, even though I had goose bumps all up and down my spine. It’s what’s unknown and unseen that scares me the most. That had almost been the worst of it, that night at Anston’s Well. I mostly couldn’t see what was coming at me. Flashes. Teeth, eyes, claws. I knew some of the monsters of the Othersiders, but by no means all of them—some we still don’t have names for, some came out of other mythologies, ones we don’t have books for. Nothing is scarier than what you don’t know.

  There was a lot of speculation among the folks that depended on the Monastery about just what happened to cause the Diseray—that’s what everyone calls it, the time when the old world that created vids and trains and planes and all of that got turned upside down. It’s been about two centuries and a half, a little more maybe, since it happened.

  I looked over at the steward, who was doing something on the keypad. The lights got even dimmer. I was just a ghost of a reflection on the opaqued window.

  I wondered if people like the steward ever thought about it. I do. The other Hunters tied to the Monastery don’t so much, but I do.

  I knew there were volcanoes and earthquakes, because the Island of California used to be part of the continent, and there’s Old Yeller, a volcano where a park used to be that still sends up ash plumes that ground the Air Corps, and Olympus, another one in the northwest that took out a whole city. Every so often, when the wind blows from the right direction, we still get ash-plumes that mean everyone has to wear masks until they settle, and the ash in the the sky is the reason why there’s snow on the mountains all year long.

  I stared at my reflection in the window, with my dark brown hair making a kind of shadow around my face, glad I hadn’t lived through those times. Bad as right now was, I could imagine how much worse it had been.

  The steward came back over when he saw me looking at him. “Anything I can do for you, Hunter?” he asked. “Anything you’d like to know about Apex, for instance?”

  I thought, well why not? It would be a good idea to find out some of what I should play dumb about. “What do they tell you Cits about the Diseray?” I asked. “I never learned all that much about it. And please sit down; it gives me a crick in my neck to look up at you.” He gave me a funny look, but since I was curled up, he sat gingerly down on the edge of my seat, as far away from me as he could, to be respectful, I think.

  “We don’t dwell on it.” He shrugged. “Mostly they give us a couple days on it in school, so we know to be properly grateful for being safe now. There were plagues, which we cured. Storms got worse, which we couldn’t do anything about, and which is why only the Air Corps flies now and we rely on trains. The South and North Poles switched, which we can’t exactly do anything about either. There was a nuke set off on purpose by Christers on the other side of the world. And the Breakthrough, when all the magic and monsters happened. That’s mostly what I remember from school.”

  I nodded. I’d read the diaries of some of the people who gathered for safety at the Monastery; farmers, hunters—the ones who hunted for food, not my kind—craftsmen, a couple of soldiers—it had been a real mixed bunch. That was when they all pitched together and built Safehaven, the first settlement, the one right at the foot of the Monastery, up in the snow year-round. The Monastery itself predated the Diseray; it was started by Tibetan Buddhists, but by the time things got sorted out, it had turned into a home for every kind of religious folk but Christers. Right now there were some Celtic, Norse, Greco-Roman, and shamanistic traditionalist types, several Native Americans, including my Master Kedo, some Shaolin monks, a couple of Hindus, one lone Sikh, and a couple of Shinto Masters. The one thing they’d all had in common was that there was some magic tradition in their religions, which helped them understand the Othersiders and how to fight them, and that they were all determined to work together to help each other and people who cam
e there for safety.

  “Why?” he asked. “What do they tell you?”

  I told him part of the truth. “Mostly we read the stuff that the people who settled our parts left behind. Out where I’m from, those are kind of like manuals for what not to do. They don’t go into the stuff that happened outside our mountains, or the why, or the parts about what other people did at Apex so much as the what we did, if you get my meaning.”

  I couldn’t tell him the whole truth, of course, that the Monastery had probably the best records around of that time. TheMonastery was a real anomaly; I don’t think there is anything else like it, on this continent at least, but…there’s a lot of continent, and even now, hundreds of years later, there are still holdouts and warlords and places where people hunkered down and survived that no one has run into yet.

  “Well,” he said, “the big thing that saved people around Apex was the military. Over on the East Coast, where Apex is now, there were a lot of military installations; they were the backbone of defense, and the place people went to looking for safety. When the first Hunters emerged, they naturally went there too. That’s how Apex started; a lot of really smart tech and builder people, and the military, and the emergent Hunters, protecting everyone that came to them.”

  He didn’t say anything about the Christers, other than what everybody knows, that some fanatics set off a nuke, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of Christers in Apex from what I’d seen. The Christers of that time thought it was their Apocalypse, and the Masters say they were all confidently expecting to be carried up to Heaven while everyone that wasn’t them died horribly, or suffered for hundreds of years. Only that didn’t happen, even when some of them decided that the Apocalypse must need a kick-start like a balky engine, and set off some sort of nuke in what used to be Israel. They still didn’t get carried up to Heaven, not one; they just died like everyone else, so that’s why it’s called the Diseray instead of the Apocalypse.

  “So what do they say did it?” I asked. “The Diseray, I mean? And the Breakthrough.”

  “Probably the polar switch, maybe the nuke. Maybe both.” He shook his head. “Maybe something we don’t even know about.”

  That wasn’t the way I’d been taught it happened. The Masters say that it didn’t all happen at once, that things just got worse and worse until the bombs went off. And that, they think, is what caused the Breakthrough.

  But even the Masters don’t know that for certain-sure. The only thing they know for fact is that in the middle of disaster after disaster, the Othersiders came through, and with them came magic.

  I sipped my drink. “Sometimes I think it was like the old story in one of the books I read when I was little, where this girl named Pandora opened a box and everything horrible burst out of it and spread over the world.”

  He smiled at me. “So that would make the Hounds as Hope in the bottom of the box? That sounds about right.” I smiled back, oddly glad that he knew the story too. Most of the Othersiders are monsters: Drakkens, Kraken, Leviathans, Gogs and Magogs, Furies, Harpies, things we don’t even have names for. Things that belong to myths and religions from all over the world, and things that don’t match anything at all. Even now, new monsters keep coming across. But when the first of them arrived, the Hounds came too. If it hadn’t been for the Hounds, I don’t think we’d be here anymore.

  “If you could call anything Hope, it’d be the Hounds,” I agreed, and then his station beeped at him and he had to go back to work.

  I sighed and finished my cup of yummy goodness, and wished I could summon Bya back through again to cuddle up with. There wouldn’t be room for him on the seat, though. This was a long trip; it took a lot of effort to keep trains protected, so they couldn’t just whoosh across the landscape or they’d outrun the protections. I had another day and a night on the train, which was taking me from the middle of what used to be called the Rocky Mountains all the way to the East Coast, and then it would arrive in Apex City, which is the center of everything, and I would find out why Uncle had sent for me rather than one of our other Hunters. Another day and night to get used to being alone and lonely, to get used to being homesick.

  It was an ache that wasn’t going to get canceled out by a hundred cups of sweet stuff. I already missed everybody. And I was nervous and scared, and I’ll admit it. But when Uncle contacted the Monastery, he’d said that if we went any longer without sending a Hunter to Apex for training and assignment, they’d send a team to look for one. And I understood. We didn’t dare have a team snooping around the Mountain looking for Hunters, or we’d probably end up losing all the Hunters we had to Apex, and we couldn’t afford that. I just wasn’t sure why the Hunter Uncle asked for had to be me.

  Now, right now, I bet you’re thinking, Well, if these Monastery people are all wrapped up in protecting and helping everyone, why aren’t they in Apex in the first place? Or at least, why aren’t they sending their Hunters there? And I don’t have a lot of answers, but the Masters seem to think that the government has gotten less trustworthy, and I’ve never known the Masters to be wrong. So we have been keeping our Hunters at home, because we can’t count on the government to protect us.

  The last time I’d seen my uncle in person was when he put me into the care of a yellow-robed monk at the Monastery. We must have gotten there by another train, although I don’t remember it. I might have been hurt, or unconscious, or maybe sedated. The monks told me I was one of a huge group of kids that was evacuated ahead of an Othersider Incident. “Incident”—that’s what they call it when monsters avalanche over your town and wipe out everything that gets in the way, like they tried to do to Anston’s Well. One of the last out, they said; Uncle brought me and a handful of other kids who didn’t have any family either. All the rest got adopted quick by families, but I got taken by the Masters. I know why now. They could tell I was going to have control of magic, and thought I might become a Hunter. They’re good at being able to figure that out. I vaguely remember my mother and father from before that, but the Incident itself—nothing. The more I think about it, I was probably sedated. My bachelor uncle was probably not well equipped to cope with a hysterical toddler. But even though he left me there, it wasn’t as if he abandoned me. I remember him from that night, and he wrote to me all the time, at least a letter a week, and presents every time he could think of an excuse, and I’d seen him in news stories over the years, getting grayer and balder. He’s a very important man, prefect of the police, and the Hunters who aren’t in the army are under his command.

  The fact that he is so important is why I’m here in a train full of important people or their relatives instead of being hauled to Apex across the country in a military transport, like most new Hunters are.

  As I sat there mulling over what I knew, it came to me that maybe the reason he’d sent for me was to show that his family was just like any other—that even when it was his own blood-kin that was the Hunter, then to Apex she had to come, whether she liked it or not.

  Well, I didn’t like it, not one bit, but…I could see the justice.

  The warm drink had finally made me sleepy, and it wasn’t private enough here for me to curl up and have a good cry about being sent away from everyone I knew. I pulled the cocoon up over and around me and lay down on the soft surface of the seat. But I didn’t snug the cocoon tight. The steward might just have been a timid fellow—or he might have had a reason for asking if the Hounds and I would protect him.

  I was a Hunter, and a Hunter who wants to grow old always expects the worst. So I had my seat belt on, under the cocoon, and I left my boots on too, and I didn’t snug the cocoon down.

  I wished I were in my little room, with the heavy stone and wood walls of the Monastery around me, and the snow between me and Othersiders. I missed my bed, even if it was a bit harder than this couch, and even if this cocoon was cozier. I missed the sounds of the Monastery—the monks and the Masters often had religious things they got up in the middle of the night to do, whi
ch all became part of the rhythm of day and night, and when you were used to them all of your life, they were like a lullaby. I really missed the smells—incense and snow and breakfast slow-cooking overnight. I missed the warm wool blankets that smelled faintly of sheep, and the faraway sound of wind whistling through the evergreens.

  Most of all, I missed knowing there were other Hunters around me, knowing that I wasn’t alone, and that if trouble came, there would be a bunch of us to meet it. All that missing things made it hard to fall asleep. And when at last I slept, I slept lightly.

  COME MORNING, the important people around me continued to sleep, kept in cozy blackness by their privacy hoods. I came awake and alert all at once; unless a Hunter is sick or drugged, that’s what we do. It’s training so hard and so deep it’s almost instinct. The windows had been transparented, so I finally got my look at what was outside the cage.

  Flat, open fields. Flat by my standards, anyway. I know I keep talking about “the” Mountain, but that’s just the mountain that the Monastery is on. I’m used to mountains that tower all around, mountains that are at least half snow all year round, mountains that take up most of the sky. So, flat…that was new. And kind of cool. I had never seen that much sky before. I knew where we were immediately, ’cause I’d studied the map of the train route and how things used to look there before the Diseray. We were into land that used to hold enormous grain fields and vast herds of cattle. The grain was still there, blowing in the wind, though it was mixed with all kinds of things now: weeds, native grasses, other things like wildflowers and the odd vegetable, something hard to kill and less than tasty to a cow. You could tell because it wasn’t uniform like in the old pictures, where it was almost like an ocean of grain all the same color. It was all patchy out there now, patchy in color and patchy in height. I got kind of an excited feeling in my stomach; I’d only ever seen land this flat in pictures and really old vids, and seeing it in person was nothing like looking at pictures. For the first time ever I could see a flat horizon.