The Hunter's Story
The Hunter was in a panic. She patted her body and sleeping bag down several times, looking for any place she might have stashed the knife. Then she turned in circles, her eyes darting across the ground. Running to the top of a dune, she gazed back the way we had come.
“I can’t believe it,” she said, coming back down. “It’s like they vanished.”
I was shocked to see tears brimming in her eyes. Before that moment, I would have thought she never cried, just as she almost never smiled. Her skin had seemed as tough as leather—tougher than her own armor. Now she looked vulnerable and young—not the kind of person who would wrestle down a giant lizard and eat it.
“Were they valuable?” I asked.
“Only to me,” she said.
Later that day, as always, she didn’t speak while the pilgrims settled down to camp. But this time her silence infected everyone around her. The Fool was openly weeping, but somehow no one seemed to think this was suspicious.
Just as I was about to lie down on the sand, the Hunter grabbed my arm. “Come with me,” she said, dragging me away from the rest of the pilgrims—away from safety. I staggered behind her, unable to get my arm free. Her grip was almost inhuman.
Finally—strengthened by my terror and images of my impending murder—I wrenched free. She wheeled on me, finger in my face.
“Who took it?” she said.
“H-how should I know?”
“People talk to you. They tell you things. Or they fail to notice you, giving you the chance to see things…”
“No one has said anything.”
“No one?” Her finger was one inch from my eye. “You know nothing?”
“No, I—”
“If you lie to me, I swear I’ll kill you. That set of knives… you don’t understand.”
“No one has said a word about taking it,” I said. It was the truth, but I still felt dirty.
“Swear to me,” she said. “Swear it.”
“I swear. If there was a plan, I wasn’t told. You have my word.” I said it all without hesitating. That was the trick with bullshitting. If you pause to think, people smell the bullshit in the hesitation.
Her finger dropped. Whenever lightning flashed, her eyes—red and puffy—shimmered. “I know it wasn’t you. You’re the only one I trust.”
“I… I don’t know what to say about that. Thank you, I guess.” I was trying to make my brain not interpret “you’re the only one I trust” as “you’re too dumb to trick anyone.”
“I need to tell you some things,” said the Hunter, “just so you understand the gravity of the situation here. But Nial, I need you to promise me something. Promise me you will never write this down. For one thing, if you do, I will kill you personally. For another, well, you’ll see. The survival of our entire race may depend on what we do over the next few weeks. And that means it may depend on who knows what.”
“Of course,” I said.
> Dear Human, this conversation being during the day, I was at a safe distance and would never have known the details if not for good ol’ Nial’s compulsive need to write things down. I dare say that his compulsive need to be special is itself what made him so special. His own “boringness” made him obsessed with other people’s stories.
“This happened only a little more than a year ago. It concerns a necromancer who allegedly killed the heiress of an agricultural empire two decades back. And to make matters worse, he allegedly reanimated her body with his lover’s soul. For twenty years, they went undetected, simply assuming the life and privileges of the supremely rich. He got away with it for a long time, slipping out of sight of Father Ori’s organization. During this time, the necromancer had a daughter. Ah… That expression tells me you already know. Good. I figured.”
“Are you going to out her?”
“Of course not!” she said. Then she reconsidered: “Unless she took my knives. In that case, I’ll kill her. Anyway, as I’ve told you, my organization watches the morls that watch humans like the Five. This led us to take an interest in Overlai Tobacco the moment they took an interest in it.
“A little over a year ago, I was assigned to observe this necromancer in his coastal estate in Lopesa. For weeks, I watched, following him whenever he left the house. He had a cave a few miles away. Necromancers often have a cave, from what I understand. This one was filled with machinery. I don’t know what the machines did, and I don’t want to know. Still gives me nightmares. There were places to strap people down. Blood covered the gears, cogs, and straps. All of this, mind you, is very illegal,” said the Hunter. “There’s a reason that necromancy is banned at the Academy. It’s weird and it’s gross and it kills people. And worse. But that’s not really the point.”
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She took a breath and I heard a tremor in her chest. She went on, speaking in the barest whisper, eyes never ceasing to scan the desert from horizon to horizon. In the meager sunlight that filtered through the flashing storm clouds, would a morl be visible? I wasn’t sure.
“I was watching from a ventilation shaft that fed the cave with cool air from the beach outside,” said the Hunter. “There was a vent in the ceiling, and I was watching the necromancer from above when a morl entered the laboratory. Obviously I didn’t know at the time that it was Father Ori. I can’t tell the difference between morls any better than you can.
“The necromancer sensed him the moment he walked in. He ceased tinkering with a dynamo and stood up, wrench in hand. Without turning to face the intruder, he said, ‘Ah, a visitor.’ The morl replied, in a voice that I would later hear again on this very pilgrimage. If I had known on that day that I was within knife throwing range of the Father Ori, I might have tried something dramatic and probably gotten myself killed. But I didn’t know, so I just listened, assuming this was any old morlish operative.
“I remember his words well. He said, ‘Torin Thanata, you have been very difficult to find. I believe you are in possession of a book of mine. If you give it to me, I will let your daughter live.’
“The necromancer said something like, ‘And I suppose I will not be so lucky’ to which the morl said something I’ll never forget. ‘You will be very lucky indeed. I shall keep you in my hand forever. My gift to you.’”
“In my hand?” I said. “What does that mean?”
She went on as if I hadn’t spoken, eyes still scanning the dunes. “The necromancer still hadn’t turned around, and I realized from my vantage point that he was twiddling his fingers and murmuring under his breath, weaving some kind of spell. In one corner, there was a cage containing a pile of corpses. Suddenly the iron door to the cage burst open and the first corpse staggered out, lurching toward the shimmering air where the morl stood. Several more reanimated corpses followed, one by one. Father Ori impaled the first one with his sword, but it felt no pain, just kept walking forward into the blade, clawing for the morl’s face. He abandoned the sword and dashed across the room, colliding with the necromancer, subsuming him in the shimmering air. I couldn’t see either of them from my vantage point. But I could hear the necromancer screaming and Father Ori laughing. When Father Ori stood up, the necromancer was dead. The corpses were standing around, confused, waiting for orders.
“I waited for hours after he left. Then I climbed down into the laboratory. There in the corner was the body of the man who had owned half of Lopesa.”
I felt my heart sink. Lilly was destined for a tragic discovery when she reached the shrine. I had to tell her.
“No,” she said. “You shouldn’t be sad. You should be terrified. As I am.”
“What?”
“There are two morlish secrets that my organization knows, secrets that the morls have kept since our nations were founded. The first is that all human magic comes from morlish gifts, passed down hereditarily from human to human. The second is that the morls think of us as cattle or farmland. The best way I know how to put it is…” She leaned close and spoke in the barest whisper. “…they have the ability to take us into their mind when they kill us. The word they use for this roughly translates to ‘Gather.’ They Gather us into their mind…”
“What does that even mean?” I said.
“We believe that the Gift and the Gathering are related operations: Gifts are given to humans, which often grow in power from generation to generation, and then… one day, a morl Gathers that power back.”
I shivered. And I changed my mind. There was no way I was going to be the one to explain this to Lilly.
“I explored the necromancer’s cave,” she said. “My intention was to take a sampling of the machines with me back to my organization. In the process, I found Du Vreil. She was in a side room adjoining the cave. She was wearing a black veil and seemed to remember nothing about who she was or why she was there except that ‘the nice man was trying to bring her back to life.’ I can only imagine that Torin Thanata was performing some kind of experiment on her. As you can see, she’s quite a sophisticated zombie. She did whatever I told her to do, so I took her with me, figuring she might have information locked away in her head. She’s been with me ever since. She’s proof of the levels of power that some humans can come to possess.”
She said nothing else, so I prompted, “What does this all have to do with the knives?” If I could bring the conversation back there, maybe I could find a way to smoothly transition into telling her what had happened with Jonny last night. Perhaps if I did it smoothly enough, she wouldn’t kill me.
“Many years ago, my wife gave me a set of five knives,” she said. “I’ve lost two over the years. I gave one to Du Vreil. Then my last two went missing last night. I fear that Father Ori himself may have taken them. If it is true that morls can Gather the minds of humans into their own, then Father Ori likely has access to powers that we cannot even fathom. Magic is the only explanation for how they went missing without my waking.”
I braced myself to tell her. For some reason, I found myself stalling, realizing just how little I still knew about her. “You have a wife?”
“Had,” she said. Then she gripped my arm. “Everything I just told you, about the morls, the Gatherings, the Gifts… Keep these secrets in your mind. And one day, if it’s safe, write it all down. There are some things that shouldn’t be forgotten.”
Suddenly, I realized why everyone seemed to be telling me their stories, first Lilly, then the Wizard, then the Singer, then the Fool, and now her. Everyone secretly knows that there’s something about them worth remembering. Everyone, it seemed, except me. Perhaps my role would simply be to remember. “I will,” I said, strangely touched, “and I need to tell you something too…” But she was already turning to walk away. “Asuana, wait!”
She ignored me, shuffling glumly across the sand, back toward camp. “Wait!” But she was already cresting the dune. I cursed myself for missing the opportunity to come clean. Deciding that the pressure was too much, I buried the invisible knife in the sand right there and made my way back to camp. At least she would never catch me with it. As for the Fool, he would have to fend for himself. The whole knife-theft thing was his idea anyway.
> Dear Human, I overheard very little of this conversation and was quite surprised to learn from Nial’s manuscripts later that Asuana had been tracking me for so long. She must have been quite the hunter, practically a morl! Naturally, I dug up the knife Nial buried. The next night, I would slip it into his boot again. There would come a time very soon when I would need to divide the pilgrims into two groups, and the stolen knife would certainly cause distrust and chaos. Perhaps Asuana would even kill him and simplify things for me.
>
> As for Asuana, I had decided to Gather her, even though I hadn’t intended for her to even be here. Some opportunities are too hard to pass up! I know that greed is a sin, and I know that unnecessary risks are foolish, but I wanted her very badly in my hand. Furthermore, I felt in my bones that this is what the universe wanted. Her entanglement with my mission was too strange to be a coincidence. Yes, when we reached the shrine, I would Gather her along with Lilly Overlai, Gwen Florence, Otto Octavius, and Jonny of Davenport. I could hardly wait.