Hunter's Beginning (Veller) Read online

  She looked around at the other cadets to see what they were up to, but they appeared to be as lost and as confused as she was, all but Eric who was just leaning against one of the pillars, which only put her more on edge if that was possible. Eric was waiting for someone to come or something to happen. He must know what he was doing she thought. He had been here twice before.

  Daniel was standing with Carter and the two were in the middle of some heated discussion. It looked as if Carter wanted to keep going, but Daniel wasn’t in so great a hurry. She found Alex standing not too far away and looking a bit more confused than the rest of them. He was staring up at the ceiling then down at the floor then at his hands all of which appeared to inspire some sense of wonder in him. She had just started to walk over to where he was, when a loud grinding sound filled the room and vibrated the floor, Kile stopped dead in her tracks. It was the sound of stone on stone and everybody suddenly looked up, thinking that maybe the roof was about to cave it, those large stones scattered about had to have come from somewhere.

  Unfortunately it wasn’t coming from above them. It was coming from in front of them, from somewhere in the darkness. The sound suddenly stopped, and there was a brief moment of unnatural silence before the screaming. It came from the far side of the room where a few of the boys had dared to go, they had gone to look for the mysterious hall that Master Latherby had spoken of, or possibly the illusive further instructions, but what they found was something they did not expect. Out of the darkness, shapes moved, and those boys who had dared to go forward were now running back.

  Kile couldn’t make out what the boys were yelling, but she could hear what she thought was the sound of flapping wings like large bats, she even started to scan the ceiling once again before she realized that the sound she was hearing was not the beating of wings, but the sound of bare feet on stone, and a lot of them.

  “Get out! Get out!” One of the boys was yelling as he practically flew past her. She would swear that his feet never touched the ground as he ran to the back of the room.

  The cadets behind Kile were the first to start moving, but there was no door for them to ‘get out’ of.

  “The door’s gone.” One kid yelled.

  “It can’t be! It was right here.” Another one screamed in panic.

  “Get out, hobgoblins.” Another boy yelled as he came running out of the darkness. This boy Kile recognized as the kid with the long neck and sharp nose that had been picking on Alex earlier. Kile looked over to where Eric was still standing beside the pillar. The older boy didn’t look scared enough, and in fact he appeared almost excited. She thought for a moment that this may be a practical joke. It wasn’t until the long necked boy with the pointed nose crashed to the ground with a large spear sticking out between his shoulder blades that she realized it wasn’t.

  Sure enough, the slapping of bare feet got louder as it echoed through the vaulted ceilings, and then Kile saw it. One at first, then two, followed by twelve and then too many for her to even want to count.

  Gulrik, otherwise known as hobgoblins, a scourge that had crawled into the underworld of Aru ages ago and thought gone with the passing of time, and yet here they were. They stood about five feet in height with barrel like bodies, long arms and short legs. Their skin was the color of wet stone, their large eyes almost shining in the dark.

  They charged the cadets in great number, most of the boys turned and ran to the back of the room, scratching and clawing at where the door had once been, stepping on or running down their slower companions in the process. There was no way back and no way forward. Was this what Master Latherby meant by surviving? Kile wasn’t going to debate it as she looked around for something to defend herself with. She couldn’t turn back, turning back meant failure. She may survive but she would end up married to Pordist Tallon and that wasn’t much better than a gulrik.

  She grabbed the only thing she could find, a rock, since there were quite a few of them scattered on the ground, and she threw it at the first glowing pair of eye that she saw, it struck him dead in the head and he went down hard actually taking two more of the creatures with him, but there were three more behind them. Kile quickly picked up another rock and threw that one as hard as she could, but her aim was sorely lacking and it went wide. She was reaching for a third stone when another one flew past her as it bounced off the chest of the gulrik. The creature was staggered but only for a moment as it continued to charge, holding over its head what appeared to be a rusted sword.

  Soon more rocks came flying past as more boys took up the assault, but it was very one sided as the rocks did little to deter the destructive nature of the gulrik.

  The creatures came in on both sides, there was no tactics to their attack, there never was. It was all out aggression. Kile waited until they got closer and then threw another stone, striking one on the side of the head. It spun as it went down giving her enough time to run out and grab the rusted sword that it had been wielding. She poised to deliver the killing blow but faltered, she had never killed a living creature before and she couldn’t bring herself to kill this one. One could argue that the gulrik wasn’t a natural living creature, but it didn’t matter, she backed away, still holding the sword in both hands, never taking her eyes off the gulrik that was even now beginning to stir. It rose slowly, but was too dazed to even notice Kile. It staggered for a bit before another stone hurled by another boy put it out of its misery.

  The gulrik slowed their assault and actually retreated just beyond some imaginary line that only they could see. Kile surveyed the room. A lot of the boys were already down. Whether they were dead or not, she couldn’t tell. Were these the ones that failed the test? It seemed rather final she thought. Most of the other boys were standing with their backs pressed against the wall. That would mean that they were the ones that passed, it just didn’t seem fair.

  Off to her right Daniel was helping a few of the wounded. Alex had said that Daniel had the ability to heal as she watched him lay his hand upon the forehead of one of the injured boys, but it didn’t appear to be working as well as he thought it should. There was a look of confusion on the young man’s face. Kile began to move slowly in his general direction, she knew she couldn’t be a front line fighter if she didn’t have the instinct to kill, but she might be able to give Daniel a hand.

  Suddenly the ground began to shake more violently than before, and she heard the familiar sound of bare feet on stone again, only this time it was a lot louder, as they were larger feet.

  From out of the darkness, beyond the gulrik another threat emerged, and Kile didn’t need anyone to tell her what these were. The valrik had come. Valrik were larger, faster, stronger and if possible meaner and uglier than their gulrik cousins. Each valrik stood just over six feet tall with long narrow heads and large mouths filled with razor like teeth. Small black eyes and large ears that lay flat against the sides of their bald heads. They were the foulest of creatures. They had no regard for life or the imaginary line that the gulrik had stopped at. They charged the ranks of the cadets tossing them aside like rag dolls.

  Kile saw one moving toward Daniel and the wounded. She reacted without thinking as she ran alongside the valrik, throwing herself between it and Daniel. It was a clumsy attempt to stop it and she really wasn’t sure how she was actually going to do it, but she grabbed at it and wrapped herself around one of its legs. As it tripped over her, it came down hard, landing on the stone floor and on Kile, knocking the wind out of her. Carter was there within seconds with a large rock to quickly finish it off. He grabbed the fallen valrik’s weapon and even gave Kile a nod of approval as she staggered to her feet. At least that was something she thought as she retrieved her own rusted sword from beneath the dead creature.

  Before she could reach Daniel she heard Alex cry out and quickly scanned the room for the smaller boy, she found him, and then she found him again and then once more. There was three of him and they were all trying to stay out of the reach of a very large valri
k with a very large blade. Kile wasn’t sure if she was actually seeing three Alexes or if being landed on by a five hundred pound behemoth addled her brain.

  By the time she had reached them, the valrik had already taken out one Alex, while the other two were trying desperately to escape as they dodged around one of the many columns. Alex didn’t die so much as he just disappeared as the sword sliced through him, which bewildered both the creature and Kile but not for long. The valrik turned quickly and brought the large blade down again, cleaving yet another Alex it two, that one disappeared also.

  The third and the last Alex was all too real and all too scared as he scrambled to get away. The blade came down again and this time it met with the rusty sword held by a rather surprised Kile. The connection felt as if it shattered every bone in her body as it drove her to her knees. Her first thought was how did I get here? Her second thought was how do I get out of here?

  “Get back Alex!” She cried as she tried to maintain her grip on the hilt of the blade that was now actually bending under the shear weight of the valrik as it pushed down harder. He was larger than she was, he was stronger than she was and she knew that this wouldn’t end well. It broke off and swung at her again and again she held up the sword to absorb the blow, but this time it wasn’t enough. She felt the sword shatter in her hands, and the last thing she saw was the valrik’s large cleaver blade heading directly for her head.

  ***~~~***

  3

  There was no blow, no pain, and by all accounts she should be dead, and as far as she could tell, she wasn’t. Kile slowly opened one eye then the other. She was no longer staring at a valrik, but at a tall thin man dressed in flowing yellow robes.

  Great, just what she needed, another mystic.

  He had a narrow face with a pair of wire rimmed glasses perched upon a thin pointed nose. His eyes were rather small and sunken giving him a very sallow appearance. His hair, what he had of it, was a sliver white and grew in tufts around the ears leaving his head completely bald.

  She had no idea where he had come from, why he was there or how he had gotten there in the first place. At first she had thought that maybe he was there to save her, but he appeared to be more interested in a piece of parchment that he was reading than with her, so she ruled that scenario out quickly. She looked to see if Alex was alright and that was when she realized she was no longer where she thought she was. Not only was Alex missing, but the entire room was gone.

  Kile was sitting in the middle of a completely white chamber. The ceiling, the walls, even the floor was completely white. There didn’t appear to be any texture on any of the surfaces, sort of like a room of mirrors, yet they didn’t reflect anything. There were no windows or doors not even a piece of furniture, save for a small wooden box and the two overstuffed wing backed chairs, the one she was seated upon and the one across from her where the mystic in yellow sat reading his parchment. Alex, Daniel, Carter, the boys, the valrik, even the gulrik were all gone. She never did like the mystic arts.

  “Ah yes, you’re finally awake.” The Yellow Mystic replied as he slowly rolled up the parchment and slipped it easily into the small wooden box seated on the floor beside him.

  “What just happened… am I… dead?” She asked, not really wanted to hear the answer.

  “Dead? Dead? Of course you’re not dead. Do I look like a necromancer to you? Do you think I would converse with the dead? Do these look like the robes of one who is influenced by the sphere of darkness?”

  She only understood about every other word in that rant, mostly the word “Dead” since he practically shouted it.

  “Uh… no… I guess not.”

  “I should say not, dead… please, a necromancer indeed.”

  “But sir, where am I? What did just happen?”

  He pushed the wired rimmed glasses further up his nose as he studied Kile carefully. He didn’t seem very old, probably in his late forties, his face was carved with deep wrinkles, giving him the appearance of a man older than his years.

  “An illusion.” He finally said as he leaned back in his seat.

  “An Illusion?”

  “That is correct.”

  “What was an illusion sir?”

  “Everything of course.”

  “Everything?”

  “The valrik, the room, your friends, everything. You never left your seat after the essays were collected.”

  It was all a test, obviously it was a test, in this place everything was a test, but what was it testing, her courage, her skill in battle? She was scared out of her wit. She couldn’t kill when she had the chance and worse of all she died. Any way you add it up, her test scores couldn’t have been all that great. Was that why she was here and not with the others?

  “I failed.”

  It was a mixed feeling of relief and dread. Relief in knowing that it was all over, she had come to terms with herself, she was not cut out to be a Hunter. She didn’t know half of what was expected of her, and the half she did know confused her even more, but it was the dread that weighed the heaviest in the pit of her stomach. The idea of going back home in disgrace was bad enough, but to admit to her father that he was right all along was worse, not to mention there was Pordist, the one driving force in her mind that kept her going.

  “What? Who failed?” The Yellow mystic asked, staring at her as if she had just said the most absurd thing he had ever heard.

  “Me… I failed.”

  “Who said you failed, I didn’t say you failed.”

  “I didn’t fail?”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  “Then… why am I here?”

  “Well, isn’t it obvious?”

  Kile looked around the room again, thinking that maybe she had missed something important, but there wasn’t anything in the room to miss, there wasn’t anything in the room at all. When she didn’t reply, the yellow mystic sighed in annoyance.

  “You are here to take you mystic arts evaluation.”

  At that moment Kile wished that the valrik had hit her. Valrik she understood, valrik were real, although that particular valrik the one swinging for her head wasn’t real, but she still understood him. The mystic arts were something entirely different, something that she couldn’t grasp and she was sure she never would. It was ethereal, it wasn’t there and yet it was. She preferred something a little bit more solid a little bit more reliable something she could lay her hands on, or in the case of the valrik, something that could lay their hands on her.

  “I… don’t know any… mystic arts.” She replied without looking up at the Yellow Mystic.

  She didn’t want to tell him, not outright like this. Her original plan was to try and bluff her way through the test, but that wasn’t really a possibility now that she had seen this man. He radiated the mystic arts, there was no way she could put one past him. She had thought about trying to convince him to look the other way, to cut her a break, but why would he do that. He didn’t owe her anything and she didn’t have anything of value to offer him as a bribe.

  “Nothing?” He asked as he rubbed his chin. That was something that all mystics did when they were contemplating something or trying to look intelligent. There must be a mystic handbook or mystic classes where they learn such body language.

  “I’m sorry sir, but it’s true. I don’t have any special gifts.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” He said as he reached into the small wooden box and began to pull out a series of objects. He placed them in front of him, one by one, even if there wasn’t a table for them to sit on. They just hovered in the air, defying every law known to man, and he did it with such ease, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  She hated the mystic arts.

  “What do you know about the arts child?”

  “Um, not much really.” She said rather meekly. She didn’t really want to try and repeat what Daniel had told her. For one thing she knew she would get it wrong and it would make her appear more foolis
h than she actually felt.

  “Well… that is refreshing.” The mystic replied. “Somebody who actually admits when they don’t know something. There is hope for you yet Miss. Veller. Most of these little upstarts think that they can come in here and teach me a thing or two about the mystic arts, I assure you… they can not.”

  Now that he had the items arranged before him, floating above the floor about the height of a normal table, she could make out what they were. There was a glass of water, a rock and a single white candle. It would have been just as easy to have placed them upon a physical table, but Kile was starting to believe that mystics liked to show off their skills whenever they could. Living among other mystics the way they do, they probably don’t get much of a chance.

  “In the past there were many schools of magic, but under the guidance of the Magi Canton, we have learned to limit them to a mere eight, and then sadly just six.”

  “I thought there were only four.”

  “And I thought you didn’t know anything about the arts.” The Yellow Mystic replied raising one bushy eyebrow.