The Sylph Hunter (6 page)

How would we find him?

He’s probably still running in a panic.

He has that air sylph from another hive with him.

Why did we let her live?

Tooie said to leave her alone.

Get Tooie.

Most of them fell silent then, one of them concentrating his voice and calling out.

Tooie came a short while later, dropping down from the dark sky to join them. He already knew what happened from listening to their reports while he approached, but seeing was better than hearing secondhand and he floated over the empty docks, the others following respectfully. He was of an age with most of them, but he was the lead battler, the lover of the queen, and with her support his word was only secondary to her own.

Tooie spent the longest time at the
Racing Dawn,
examining the blood on the deck, walls, and the shattered door. Shifting to the human form Eapha liked, he ran a gentle hand down the wood, barely touching the splinters left behind.

“Humans aren’t strong enough to do this,” he noted. “Someone was pulled out.”

None of us did it,
one of the battlers said.

“No.” If one of them had, it wouldn’t be a problem because there would have been a reason for it. He looked out over the empty harbor. People had been leaving the city, for reasons he didn’t understand, but this emptiness was eerie. As he stood there, a faint whistling tune sounded and all of them turned to see a man walk out from between two buildings and down to the harbor, swinging a waterskin as though nothing at all was wrong. Unaware of the battlers, he kept whistling, happy and relaxed.

Tooie turned away, walking to the railing of the ship and looking down past the cradle she sat in at the dark ocean waters lapping against the seawall only a few feet beyond. The water was dark and impenetrable. “Are there things in these waters that would hunt creatures on land?” he wondered aloud.

The battlers shifted uncertainly.
I’ve never heard of that happening before,
one said.

“Everything has to happen for the first time,” Tooie replied, still watching the waters, so dark and unfathomable. Anything could be under there.

Do we tell the queen about this?
the same battler asked.

Tooie thought about that for a moment. “No,” he said at last. “She doesn’t need to know.”

Zalia returned to the hovel she shared with her father to find he had a fire going and was sitting beside it, carefully toasting a piece of bread at the end of a stick. He smiled at Zalia as she came up and handed him a full water canteen, along with her day’s wages.

“How was your day?” he asked.

She didn’t tell him about the battle sylph. She didn’t think she’d have the courage to tell anyone that, let alone her father. Instead she told him about meeting Devon Chole and what he’d come for. He’d been a nice man, she thought, and far more approachable than Leon Petrule, who had been intimidating beyond belief, even when he was being kind.

Xehm listened in stunned silence, his mouth hanging open and his eyes huge. “He’s here to see the queen,” he gasped at last, “and you didn’t help him?”

Zalia blinked, surprised at her father’s reaction. “What was I supposed to do? I don’t know where she is.”

“He needs help.” Xehm abruptly stood up, almost losing his bread in the fire before Zalia rescued it. “We have to help him.”

“What are you talking about?”

Xehm waved around at the hovels and their neighbors, all sitting destitute and hungry around their own fires. “This isn’t what was supposed to happen. We weren’t supposed to still be here, living like this. I talked to Leon many times; I talked to him after that…woman
…became queen. He told me what it was supposed to be like, and all the gods help me, I can’t stop dreaming of it. Things have only grown worse though. Had Leon never left, it wouldn’t be like this. If he’d had to turn that foolish woman over his knee and spank her, he would have. Now his replacement is here. We
must
help him get to her.”

Zalia gaped at him. She hadn’t seen her father so passionate in years. In fact, she didn’t think she’d ever seen him so determined about anything, except for when her little sister had been sick while Zalia herself was still a child. With their mother long since taken to be a concubine in the harems, she’d thought he’d move the world to save her little sister.

Now she tried not to think about how he’d ultimately failed.

“What do we do, Father?” she asked, sitting nervously by the fire that was their only warmth, burning out of a bed of dried animal dung. “I don’t know where to find him. He could be at her side already.”

Xehm sagged, sighing before he sat down again. Zalia passed him the bread. “I don’t think so. The gods wouldn’t be that kind.” He took a bite and started chewing before handing her another chunk to toast for herself. Zalia took it gratefully. She hadn’t eaten in hours. “If he comes back to the restaurant,” he decided, “bring him to me. Understood?”

“Yes, Father.” Not that she knew what they’d be able to do. It was good to see her father fiery about something though, and good to think again that things could get better, as she’d believed when Eapha first became queen. She sighed and turned her toast over in the fire, daydreaming of better things.

One-Eleven watched the girl, his form hunched to the ground in the shape of one of the lizards that ran across the desert in search of food. In his natural form, his lightning would be too easy to see in the dark and he didn’t want his human appearance to make her feel frightened again.

She was a beautiful woman, but not at all like those in the harems. She didn’t just give what he wanted. He’d been surprised by that at first, but now he reveled in it. To have her, he’d have to prove himself worthy and win her, just like a suitor to a queen. Then she’d give him his name, as a queen would, and the world would be wonderful.

One-Eleven studied her with his reptile eyes, the night air cold against his leathery skin. This wasn’t a nice place to be living, but he’d give her palaces if that was what she wanted.

Distantly, he heard a call, the head battler summoning all of the battle sylphs to a conclave. One-Eleven kept his belly low to the ground, not wanting to leave, but not able to stay. He drank in the shadowed sight of Zalia, committing it to memory, and backed away, sashaying in an odd, reptile walk across the sand until he was away from all the odd little human buildings. There he took on his cloud form again and rose into the air, heading across the city to where the battlers had been called to meet. His thoughts never strayed far from his new love, even when Tooie told them about the suspected sea creature that attacked the harbor and sent out scouting parties to find it. One-Eleven ended up in one of those parties,
skimming the surface of the ocean while scanning as deeply into it as he could and destroying anything he sensed that was larger than a human child. They left the waters behind them thick with dead risen to float at the surface, but still he thought about Zalia, and how he’d win her heart.

Yahe had now been on duty for more than a day and was ready to start killing people if he wasn’t relieved soon.

He was done sweeping overhead through the city. Now, as he had for decades while a slave, Yahe walked the streets of the city, looking for rule breakers. He was a beautifully handsome man, as flawless as his shape-shifting ability could make him.

Not that it was doing him much good out here. He didn’t want to impress the humans in this pathetically shrunken marketplace and he certainly didn’t have to impress the elemental sylphs he saw. The one he wore this shape for wasn’t around to see him.

Disgusted, he looked up at the palace floating in the night sky, lights shining like stars in a few of the windows. Kiala was up there, waiting for him and growing so increasingly impatient that he could clearly feel it. She had reason to be. He was supposed to have been relieved six hours ago, but the idiot battle sylph who was to take over for him tonight hadn’t shown. Yahe knew they were all brothers now that they were in the same hive, but that didn’t mean he was required to like everyone and at the moment, he rather hated Bift.

Bift!
he bellowed along the hive lines, as he had for the last hour.
Where in the chasms are you? BIFT!

A few complaints came along the line back to him, from elementals as well as battlers, but no response from Bift. Yahe fumed, planning what he’d do to the miserable wretch when he found him. At this rate, he wouldn’t be relieved until Bift’s replacement showed up.

Bift obviously didn’t understand duty. He’d been planning to take his master to the ongoing party at the gate to the hive world and had been bragging about it the last time Yahe saw him. Well, he wasn’t the only one who wanted to go there.

In the back of his mind, Kiala’s impatience started to turn to outright anger. Yahe miserably looked up toward her again. He wanted to be with her too, but he couldn’t leave, not without someone taking over. Nothing was going to happen, he knew she’d say. No one would care if he were there or not. Yahe wanted to listen to that kind of logic, but obviously Bift had as well and where did that leave Yahe himself?

Grumbling under his breath and making the few people still cleaning their stalls very nervous, Yahe continued on his rounds, planning his revenge on a battler he didn’t know he was never going to see again.

The winds still wanted to push it out to the ocean.

It had been tired after it reached the shore, its tendrils pulled up close to its body and still almost touching the water. It had never fallen so low, so it gorged itself on the life it found, devouring everything as quickly as it could.