Elite: A Hunter novel (23 page)

But Mark must have been very used to bowing to authority, because his answer was honest and immediate. “Yes, sir,” he replied. “That is a promise. My word on it.”

Kent relaxed and tilted his glass to Mark, who clinked his own against it. “Good enough. You’ve still got your Trials to win. There’s no Mrs. Knight here yet, and sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof.”

Mark’s jaw dropped. Kent chuckled. “What? Think you Christers are the only ones to read your Book?”

I could tell that Kent went up double in Knight’s eyes for that. So could Kent, and he seemed to be amused. “Don’t go trying to convert me,” he warned. “I read a lot of things. I read about paintings, but that doesn’t make me an artist.”

“Yessir,” Knight said. “No, sir.”

I begged off and went off to my room after that, so I don’t know what else happened. I was not only tired; the liquor had given me a relaxed, slightly buzzy feeling. Besides it was about time I wrote my Masters about all of this. Or at least wrote it all down in my journal. Somehow putting things on paper makes it easier to think.

So I opened the Way as soon as I got to my room, and Bya popped through. I knew he could go to Master Kedo and be back by dawn because there is a permanent Portal in one of the deep sanctuaries at the Monastery that allows Hounds to come and go as they please. It’s something we have to have, since we never know when we’ll have to repulse a huge attack, and this way none of the Hunters that live there have to take the time to open separate Ways into Otherside to bring their Hounds over. Sadly, such a permanent Portal is not something you can make easily; it takes at least nine Hunters, Mages, or both together to create one, and it has to be recharged with manna regularly, which is why I didn’t have one in my room.

Bya looked at me and gave an amused snort.
Perhaps you should go have a drink more often
.
You worry too much.

Hush, you,
I replied, but with a little chuckle at myself.
I know Master Kedo would say the same, but the other Masters would not be so amused.

Some would,
he countered, which I also knew, but I ignored him as I dug out my writing materials.

I wrote stuff, by hand, the really, really old-fashioned way, in a bound book of blank pages. I did this almost every night. The stuff I wrote, I really didn’t care about someone else seeing, so even if someone came in here and took pics of the pages while I was out on patrol, it wouldn’t matter; it was just a sort of diary of what my Hunting that day had been like. But my writing in the book helped me think, and it also helped to cover the messages I was writing to Master Kedo, setting it up so that it wasn’t unusual for me to requisition old-fashioned handwriting materials. So, once Bya was across, I took my book and the loose paper I had hidden in it, and went to bed. With the book propped against my knees, I wrote down everything that had been happening, in the order it had happened: the
Nagas
, the dead Psimon, the orders not to talk about it from PsiCorps, right through to Ace’s escape. I also wrote in the book, about training with Knight, Hammer, and Steel.

I put the book on my nightstand, ordered the lights out, then, under the cover of the dark and the concealment of the covers, I slipped the message to Bya.

After that I cuddled with him until I fell asleep. I’d been doing that a lot since Ace vanished. I’d been having nightmares on and off. I would leave the Glyphs burning on the floor, and at some point, when Bya was sure I wouldn’t have nightmares, he’d slip out of bed and go Otherside, and the Glyphs would vanish. Tonight, he’d just go carrying my message as well.

Knowing that, and knowing that even if they didn’t have any answers for me immediately, at least I had been able to consult with the best Hunters and finest magicians I knew of (not to mention the people I trusted most in all the world). For the first time in a couple of days, I fell asleep easily.

I could tell by the look in Bya’s eyes when I brought the pack over for the sewer Hunt that he had
some
sort of message for me. There was that
knowing
look he got. The way he looked right at me and held my eyes for a good long moment before nodding slightly.

Urgent?
I asked.

No,
he replied. He yawned casually, as we all formed up in our usual order.
I will give it to you some place where there is no distant eye.

By “distant eye,” he meant a cam, of course, and it would not be too terribly hard to avoid them down here. Cams were placed farther apart in the storm sewers under the Hub than they were out where the regular Hunters patrolled. Before things started getting weird, this part of the storm sewer network was supposed to be safe, so you wouldn’t need full coverage. Hunters hadn’t come down here, only Apex police and maintenance workers.

This tunnel was in another section of the storm sewers where we hadn’t been before—but it
was
going to end up very near where we’d found that dead Psimon. I wondered if there would be anything at that site left to investigate.

There might be. If magic had had anything to do with the Psimon’s death, there might still be traces of it about. Unless PsiCorps had brought a magician down here to get rid of such traces.

“Stupid,” I said aloud, chiding myself. Of course they would. I wasn’t thinking. There wouldn’t be anything there; I wasn’t dealing with feral Folk, or amateurs. PsiCorps was nothing if not thorough. And I had better keep my mind on Hunting and not off on some other tangents that had nothing to do with Hunting, because a Hunter with a wandering mind generally doesn’t get a second chance to make that kind of mistake.

There wasn’t a trace of moisture down here today, and it wasn’t even all that humid. There wasn’t a trace of scent either, and the ’crete of the tunnel was so clean it looked scoured. In fact…I noticed as I looked more closely, the ’crete
had
been scoured, most likely by stuff carried down here in the storm. I wondered if we were going to get another day of Hunting for next to nothing.

We don’t mind,
Myrrdhin told me.
When you get calls to go outside the Great Fences, we eat like kings.

Now I wondered if Myrrdhin and Gwalchmai had talked as much to Ace as they did to me.
“Great Fences.”
Well, that is as good a way of describing the Barriers as any.

I was glad Myrrdhin had told me that. I worried about my Hounds, worried that so big a pack would never quite get enough manna to eat. I guess I needn’t have worried.

“Myrrdhin,” I asked as we began our long walk, “did you talk much to Ace?”

He looked back over his shoulder at me.
No,
he replied, and I got the faint hint of…sadness?
No, he gave orders, and we obeyed. There was not much talking.

“You guys speak up whenever you want, all right?” I said impulsively. “I like hearing you. And I prefer partners to drones.”

Thank you. We will.
The sadness had lifted. When he looked over his shoulder at me again, his eyes were warm and he was doggy-grinning. So was Bya.

We were thorough, and that was how we always worked. We checked out every side tunnel routinely, so no one would think anything out of the ordinary when we ducked down one out of sight of the cams. I got out my water bottle for a quick drink, and Bya trotted up to me, the note in his mouth.

I took it from him (grateful Hounds have nice, dry mouths) and unrolled it quickly. It was not from Master Kedo, but from Master Jeffries, the actual head of the entire Monastery, the most senior Master. He didn’t waste any time on salutations; he cut straight to the chase.
Your information is troubling, and we will need to study the situation and our records before we can give you detailed advice. We do not know what the death of the Psimon you found means, but the mere fact that a senior Psimon gave you such explicit warnings suggests that this was not an accidental death and PsiCorps has a vested interest in hiding it. As for the new monsters appearing, I can tell you that this has happened before. It should be in the Apex records since it is in ours. This has always happened when the Othersiders found a way to counter human defenses, and we here have no reason to think that is not the case now, since you are also finding monsters where none should be. We believe that the defection of Mage Sturgis is a part of this; we will need to consult some very old records to determine if humans lost to the Othersiders have ever appeared again as allies of Otherside. The fact that the One you encountered at the train offered you a sort of position suggests this is possible. But as for the high-ranked Othersider who warned you…we are baffled. Nowhere, in any records we have, is there such a thing as an Othersider that has taken it upon himself to do such a thing. It may be a deception, although on the face of things, none of us can reckon what such a deception was intended to accomplish.

When we know more from our studies, we will have more for you. In the meantime, trust your Hounds, even when you can trust nothing else.

IT TURNED OUT
NOT
to be an uneventful trudge through the storm sewers after all. About halfway into our patrol, we ran into trouble, definitely the sort of trouble a squad of APD would not have been able to handle.

This time it wasn’t something new; it was an Ogre and its mate. I’d Hunted Ogres before this; they are not uncommon in the mountains around the Monastery, and unlike Trolls, they can handle sunlight just fine. I did manage to knock the pair into the wall of the tunnel and unconscious, and then the Hounds finished both of them off.

Ogres
do
turn to stone when they die, and then the stone crumbles into gravel, then sand, leaving a pile of sand on the floor of the sewer tunnel to be washed away with the next big rain. Or the next time maintenance sent down a remote-operated cleaner—whichever came first. We were very near the spot where I’d found the dead Psimon, and I wanted to be sharp when I got there, in case (against all odds) there was something subtle left behind that I could pick up on.

I needn’t have worried. “Subtle” was not going to be an issue.

The Hounds practically ran over the top of another dead Psimon when they turned down the shunt tunnel that linked the one we were patrolling with the one we’d been in before. We all stopped stock-still and stared, and the Hounds all came skittering back to me. For a while, we all clustered together, staring, while I calmed my stomach back down again. Then we backed up in a group, fast, so we’d hopefully avoid muddling evidence too much.

This
time, before I called it in, I looked the body and the area over for signs that anyone had been performing magic in the area…but there was nothing. Just a pathetic, too-slender corpse in a PsiCorps uniform, lying in a tangle of limbs as if she (it was a woman this time) had just dropped dead right where she stood.

Dropped dead—where she stood.

I suddenly realized that was what was odd about it. The body was not lying in a way that would have made me suspect that someone had murdered her elsewhere and brought her here to hide the body. I might not be a police person, but I have seen far too many dead human beings in my short life. I’ve seen bodies hauled and left, bodies dropped and left, and bodies deliberately hidden. And this one, like the first, if I hadn’t known the Psimon was dead, I’d have thought she’d just passed out cold for some reason. The clothing wasn’t disarranged. The hair lay splayed on the ’crete properly. I could go into more boring detail, but I
knew
that Psimon lay just as she had fallen, and just
where
she had fallen.

I stood there after I finished looking for magic traces, just staring, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Because it didn’t make sense, just like the first time. It didn’t make sense that a Psimon would be
here
in the first place, given that there was a Hunter, an Elite at that, assigned to check down here. It really didn’t make sense that there would be a
second
dead Psimon down here. Sure, the Psimon could have picked up the Ogre’s mind and—then done what? Come down here looking for it?
Why?
That was the job of a Hunter. Unless for some reason the Psimon was supposed to try and take control of the Ogre’s mind….