by Spoor, Garry
“Eyes up front.” The large man in the back of the room shouted.
Kile turned forward to face the man on the platform. He seemed very comfortable in front of his audience. His hands clasped behind his back, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. He waited until he was sure every pair of eyes were on him before he started to speak.
“For those of you who do not know me, my name is Mathew Latherby, and, should you be fortunate to survive this examination, I will be your boss. Fail the examination and …well… you get the picture.
“The headmaster of the Hunter’s Academy is Sir Oblum Hanson, knight of the realm and certified level one Hunter. He is unable to be here today do to his obligations to the Academy so I have agreed to step in for him. The rather scary gentleman in the back is certified level one Hunter Garret Boraro. He will be your weapons master and self defense instructor should you pass the examination. The lady to my left is also a certified level one Hunter. This is Erin Silvia, an active member of the Academic Council. These are but two of the people who will be judging your performance through the rest of this examination.”
He paused for a moment, mostly for the drama, letting his words sink into the minds of his listeners, but the only thing Kile had heard was the word ‘survive’. She knew failure was a possibility, she did not think death went with it.
“What is a Hunter? I’m sure you all have an idea of what a Hunter is, what a Hunter does, but do you really know what it means to be a Hunter. The Hunter stands alone, out there, beyond the walls of the cities. He is the first line of defense against the terrors that await the unwitting traveler who wanders into the dangers of the wilderness, unaware of what evil lurks in the shadows. The Hunter is a beacon of light. A guiding force to bring the lost home again, the Hunter is…”
“Getting impatient.” Boraro remarked from his corner of the room.
“Yes, quite right.” Mathew replied as he stroked his neatly trimmed beard. He started to pace the length of the raised platform again, before turning back to his audience.
“Long ago, sometime around the year 810, a young man by the name of Moran Leafter of the small town of Littenbeck became the first true Hunter. Being a Hunter wasn’t his first choice, no… but he wasn’t very good at anything else. He couldn’t farm, he couldn’t fish, he wasn’t very good with his hands, couldn’t sell water to a thirsty man, he even managed to burn down his own blacksmith shop, but Moran Leafter was determined, and kept looking and kept trying to find that one place in the world that only he could fill, and eventually it came to him. He saw there was a need for an individual… an individual to stand apart from the common people, to live… outside the system, outside the walls of the cities. He could provide a valued service to the citizens of the city of Littenbeck by leaving… and of course living… out there. He would protect them… whether they wanted him to or not.
“After a while he gained quite a reputation, and soon the citizens of Littenbeck were seeking his services. As his reputation grew, so did the requests, to such a point that he could no longer keep up with the demand, he could no longer help the people that really needed him. So, being ever so pragmatic, he rounded up a few… like minded individuals and taught them the ways of the Hunter, and so the first Hunter’s Academy was born. As the kingdom expanded so did the Hunter’s territory and soon it became necessary to organize the Hunters into a unified force for both practicality and profit, and so the Hunter’s Guild was formed. From that point on the Hunter’s Academy and the Hunter’s Guild have undergone significant changes and have taken on greater responsibilities, it was deemed necessary by the Hunter’s Guild to permit the entry of undesirables into the Academy, so the Hunter’s ….”
“Excuse me sir.” Erin interrupted. “Don’t you mean to prevent?”
“Prevent?”
“Yes sir… as in… to prevent undesirables from entering the Academy.”
“Well yes, that would make more sense… yes to prevent undesirables from entering into the academy, the entry examination was created, and even that has undergone changes.
“The first examination took over two months to complete and was designed to test the cadet’s skills, strength, intelligence, integrity and his ingenuity. Those that survived would then be allowed to train at the Hunter’s Academy and learn the ways of the Hunter. Those that didn’t…. well…
“Lucky for you, with the aide of the mystics of the mystic’s tower, we have been able to condense the same grueling tests down to a mere three days. Unlucky for you, you won’t notice the time difference. It only gets harder from this moment on.
“At this point you will see a pen and parchment on your desk. What we want is for you to write down why you wish to become a Hunter. As there is no right or wrong answers to this part of the examination, we request that you be as honest as you can. Remember, what you write will go a long way into determining whether or not you have the qualifications to become a Hunter, and we have mystics that can tell if you’re lying.”
Kile looked down at her desk and sure enough, a piece of parchment, a quill pen and an inkwell were all laid out for her. She looked around at the other cadets and they appeared to be as surprised as she was.
“Don’t you just love magic?” She heard Alex whisper, she glared at the smaller boy, but he never noticed as he started scratching away at his parchment. A looked around the room showed each of the boys eagerly writing down their own stories.
Kile reached for the quill, half expecting it to disappear when she touched it, or have her hand pass through it like one of Alex’s illusions, but as her fingers closed over the plume it was solid enough.
Why did she want to be a Hunter? That was actually a hard question to answer, she wasn’t really sure herself. She had thought she knew what it was to be a Hunter but just going through the first stages of the examination she realized that there was a lot more to it than she had previously thought, the question should be did she really have what it takes to be a Hunter.
So where do you begin? The obvious place would be at the beginning, when she first decided she was going to be Hunter. That part was easy. It was five years ago, she was only nine at the time. She remembered it so well because it was the time she had gotten lost in the woods outside of Riverport. Actually, the way she remembered it was not so much as her getting lost as it was more like her brother Leon loosing her. He was sixteen and she would hang around with him and his friends whenever she could, although they didn’t always see it that way. It was more like she would tag along and they would try to get rid of her, but for the most part, they just tolerated her…except for that one day.
They had decided to go down to a new fishing spot that Bobby Cooper had found just that morning, and like usual, Kile had decided to join them, that is if by joining them meant following a few yards behind. Leon told her to go home more than once, but Kile refused, so as a form of punishment or just out of spite, the boys ran off in the opposite direction of where they had intended to go. When they were well ahead of her they hid in the woods and waited until she passed, then they backtracked taking the path down to the river. They had expected her to turn back when she could no longer find them, but Kile was nothing if not persistent and kept looking. It wasn’t until she started to get hungry that she realized she was lost. She wasn’t really scared, not at being lost. She was angry that she was lost, angry that she could have been fooled so easily, angry that she couldn’t find her way back. She was scared of what her father would do.
Harold Veller didn’t have much use for his daughter, and he never hesitated to let her know. He wanted sons. Sons could carry on the farm, sons could carry on the Veller name, and that was more important to him than anything else. He often spoke about the Veller name and how it meant something in Riverport, although Kile never knew what, they weren’t a wealthy family or one that had any real influence in the town. The only person who honored the Veller name was Mr. Fen at the dry good store and that was only because of the tab
her father had run up there over the years. Still, her father was much more patient with Leon than he ever was with her. Leon could do no wrong and wrong was the only thing she could do in her father’s eyes. It wasn’t that he was abusive, not physically anyway, in fact he never laid a hand on her, never hit her, never struck her, never hugged her. She had always just been somebody in the way. Kile was just another mouth to feed, another body to clothe, another pair of feet to put shoes on. She had tried to help out as much as she could on the farm, but all too often it would end in disaster and he would always dismiss her as being ineffective or incapable of doing any real work. To her father, Kile was useless.
She was actually the third child in the family, Leon was the oldest, and then there was Andrew. Andrew lived to the age of four before being taken by fever. Kile’s father took the death of his son hard, so when Kile was born about a year later, it only added to his disappointment that she was a daughter and not another son. Kile had to grow up in the shadow of Andrew, the brother she had never known.
She knew exactly what would happen when she didn’t return home that night. Her mother would start panicking as mothers always do. She would demand that they send out search parties to try to find her little girl. Groups of town’s people would start sweeping the forest looking for Kile, and all the while her father would be complaining about how much time he was loosing and how much work still needed to be done on the farm, how much of the harvest still needed to be brought in. Not to mention the fact that it would be a huge embarrassment for him that the entire town had to come out to help him solve one of his little problems. That would be something he could never live down and it would nag at him each time he looked at his daughter, how he would now owe so many people for their time and effort. Kile had thought that it might be better if she was never found, or if she was found… not in the same manner as when she was lost.
It was well into the night when she heard the sound of someone calling her name. Her first instinct was to run, not toward the caller, but away from them. That was the point when she realized something was seriously wrong in her life. That was the point that all the anger she felt toward herself was suddenly turned toward her father, so instead of running, she found a flat rock overlooking a small creek. She sat there and waited, neither running towards nor away from home.
As the caller got closer Kile realized that it wasn’t her father as she had feared, but a woman’s voice, but not her mother’s. That was when she first met the Hunter Erin Silvia.
Silvia had been in the area hunting down a rogue script; she was passing through Riverport on her way home when she heard about the lost girl and offered to help. Harold Veller was reluctant to accept the help of any Hunter, let alone a female Hunter, Kile’s mother Beth on the other hand was very insistent and so Erin set off to find Kile. It had not taken the seasoned Hunter long before she finally found the lost child.
Erin Silvia was everything Kile wanted to be. She was a strong, intelligent, capable, independent, female, and for the first time Kile realized that there must be more to her than what her father made her out to be.
She never remembered much after that point, everything seemed a little hazy. She did recall Erin setting up camp and making a quick stew which was the only thing she had eaten all day. She could also remember Erin wrapping her in a blanket and sitting her by the fire to keep her warm and giving her a peppermint imp, the first time she had ever had any kind of sweet. Then there was something about wolves, about Erin chasing them off, and how in awe she was of the Hunter. That was probably the definitive moment in time that Kile decided she was going to be a Hunter.
The next morning Erin took Kile back home and her mother sent her directly to bed. The doctor was called in soon after and Kile was found to have a slight fever but nothing serious. Her father had exchanged words with Erin about something to do with the wolves and Kile, but whatever the outcome was she never learned. Erin left without Kile being able to thank her.
As the days followed, Kile talked more and more about being a Hunter, although nobody took her very seriously. She knew about the entry examination that was held in Littenbeck each year, but you had to be at least fourteen to take it, which gave her five years to prepare for it. She tried to train herself in mind and body, and at first her brother would take every opportunity to ridicule her about it, but when he saw her dedication he not only stopped the mocking but actually started to help. Her father was not nearly as encouraging as the rest of the family, calling the dream foolish, and saying that there was no chance she would ever make it as a Hunter.
It was when Kile turned eleven that things got out of hand. Her father had taken it upon himself to make other plans for Kile’s future, plans that did not include what she wanted. Oric Tallon owned the bottom land adjacent to the Veller farm, a piece of ground that Harold Veller coveted greatly. Oric Tallon also had a son, a little troll of a boy four years older than Kile, named Pordist. Pordist was a cruel and vindictive child that delighted in the torture and misery of others, but Harold Veller didn’t see this, nor did he truly want to, all he saw was an opportunity to expand his farm to more fertile grounds, and so an arrangement of marriage was made between Kile and Pordist. It would take place on Kile’s fifteenth birthday as stated in the charter of the Province of Shai. Kile was furious and it was the first time she ever stood up to her father, the discussion ended in a heated debate that marked the only time her father ever touched her.
What happened next, Kile wasn’t really sure. She had thought, at that moment, her dreams were dead, but by the next day, her father had changed his mind. The change wasn’t complete and it wasn’t without its conditions. Harold Veller would allow Kile to take the Hunter’s examination when she turned fourteen, but when she failed, as he believed she would, she would have to return home and marry Pordist Tallon and never speak about becoming a Hunter ever again. This was the best and only chance she was going to get and she agreed to it. The only problem was her father was not going to aid her in any way. That meant she would have to come up with the money and the means of getting to Littenbeck for the examination by herself.
The means of getting there were simple enough. The supply wagon that passes through Riverport stops in Nortonville. From there she could easily get a ticket and a carriage straight to Littenbeck. The money for the venture was not as easy to come by. She had saved every coin she had earned but it wasn’t nearly enough. If it wasn’t for her brother Leon, she would never have been able to pay for the ticket.
She remembered the day she set off to Nortonville, of course she should have since it was only four days ago. It was her brother that saw her off on her journey. Her mother was not well enough to make the trip into town and her father had made it quite clear that he wanted nothing more to do with her.
Kile set her pen down and looked over what she had written. It was a lot more than what she had originally intended, and somewhere in there must be the reason why she wanted to be a Hunter; she just hoped it was as clear to them as it was to her. She looked around the rest of the room to see most of the boys had already finished writing. Alex was still scribbling away at his parchment, as was Daniel. Carter looked to be finished but as Daniel described it, Carter had always wanted to be a Hunter, so this assignment should be easy for him. She even glanced over to where Eric was sitting. He too had finished and was leaning back in his chair tapping the tip of the quill pen on his desk. Three times was all Kile could think about, he had taken the exam three times, or actually two times, this would be his third time, but that was still two more times than anyone else in the room. Did it give him that much of an advantage, and how did he fail it the last two times?
“Is everyone finished?” Mathew Latherby asked from the front of the room. There were a few murmurs of “no” and “just one more minute” but for the most part everyone had finished. The parchments were then collected by two mystics in white robes that, for some reason, Kile had not seen in the room prior to or during the ex
amination, but by now she was starting to get used to them popping up unexpectedly.
“You will now proceed to the next stage of the examination.” Mathew replied as the mystics handed him the parchments. “Go through these doors, proceed down the hall and wait for further instructions.”
A large set of iron bound double doors opened behind Mathew as the cadets slowly got up from their desks, each one looking a little nervous, no one really wanting to be the first to pass through the doors into the darkness beyond, there was no telling where they would end up. It was Eric that took the lead as he pushed past a few of the younger boys. It’s easy for him, Kile thought, he knew what was on the other side, but she was not going to be shown up by the likes of him and quickly followed.
It was one thing for the oldest boy who had taken the examine twice to pass through the doors with confidence, but when the only girl, who was already doomed to fail follows, everyone else is considered dead last as they all rushed to catch up.
As Kile stepped through the door she had expected to be whisked away again, maybe to another room or another test but that wasn’t the case. She had actually entered the room beyond the door. She turned around to look back into the classroom and saw the other cadets coming in behind her. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed. It seemed like a bit of a let down after what she had gone through so far.
The room itself was quite large, larger than what should have been in the tower, but then all the rooms she had seen put together were bigger than the tower’s base and she had never gone up or down a flight of stairs yet, so none of it made much sense. There were huge stone columns every fifteen or so feet, set out in a large grid like pattern, reaching to a vaulted ceiling high above. Some of the columns appeared on the verge of collapsing, some may already have, as large stones littered the floor. Small globes of swirling mist cast an early light that danced and flickered, bending the shadows of the pillars into swaying serpents, but the light was isolated to one side of the room. The far side remained cloaked in total darkness. It was difficult to tell exactly how large the room was, but it was a room, and that was a problem. Master Latherby had told them to go down the hall and wait for instructions, where was the hall? It wasn’t that Master Latherby was a bundle of information, to Kile’s way of thinking he seemed a few sandwiches short of a picnic, but even he should be able to tell the difference between a room and a hall. Maybe the room was a lot longer than she had previously thought, and then it could actually be a hall, but it would have been the largest hall she had ever seen.
