Eight 2: Chapter 6

On the way back to Voorhei, I came across a mountain lion’s tracks at the village’s border. They showed the animal pacing at the boundary before heading into the woods. I followed for about a quarter mile, just to make sure it wasn’t lingering in the area, and found a cedar with its trunk all slashed up. I checked the cuts against one of the chliapp lion razors that I had with me, and they matched well enough for me to start worrying. Time to get out of here.

I asked the uekisheile to watch my backtrail, then hurried to the village. Fortunately, the rest of the trek was uneventful.

I found Inneioleia at the Hunter’s Lodge. He was surprised to see me, since the initiation ceremony wasn’t due to start for several hours. The surprise turned into a frown when I told him about the possibility of a chliapp lion. That frown turned into consternation when I then told him about the deaths at the sugar-shack-fort place-thing.

He flagged down a couple of the children playing outside and sent them running for Koda and Dwilla. I was answering his questions when the village head and reeve arrived, one after the other, and I had to restart the story all over again.

“Tomorrow,” Inneioleia said, “the lodge will send hunters into the forest. Eight will go with them to show them the way to the chliapp lion. He will use the time to learn from his hunt brothers and sisters.”

“A chliapp lion so close is a danger to the farmers,” Dwilla said. “Will you need the land soldiers?”

“If it is one lion, then no.” Inneioleia looked to me for confirmation.

“There was only one set of tracks. The scars on the tree were a mess, but they all looked of a similar size. I think it was only one.”

“Then we will not need the Musa the Dog Rider,” Inneioleia said.

“I will still send a message to the Knight Ithia,” Dwilla said. “With Bindeise’s death, the chextu to harvest maple sap and make sugar is open.”

Billisha wasn’t around, so I had to ask Dwilla to translate the word that I eventually understood to mean ‘license.’ It had flummoxed her at first, but she came upon the idea of pretending to request permission to do something and receiving it. After a couple of iterations, the meaning became clear enough.

Koda picked up the thread of the conversation. “A sadness is Bindeise’s death. There is no one else in the village with a talent for making sugar.”

“Alda Tulsson has one for cookery,” Dwilla said.

“Alda is afraid of the moon’s shadow,” Koda said. “His taste for sweet things is not as strong as his taste for life.” Koda patted me on the shoulder. “Not all of us are as brave as Eight here.”

I fought to keep from snorting. Look at this guy, buttering me up.

Koda stroked his beard. “Eight, perhaps your family would like—”

“No,” I said, cutting him off. “We will not leave our home in the forest.”

“But there is money to be made,” Koda said. “You can still hunt, and your children can learn to make sugar.”

I shook my head. “We live where we do because of Ikfael, not for money. If we were willing to leave her, then we’d live in Voorhei.”

“I understand,” Koda said. “Then we will wait to see who will step forward. We have time until the first flow of maple sap.”

“Knight Ithia will not want to wait that long to settle this problem,” Dwilla said.

“She will not have to,” Koda said. “The lure of money will eventually overcome a family’s fear. They will find their courage, as well as the taak to pay for the license. All we need to do is wait.”

“I trust your judgment,” Dwilla said.

Of course, the conversation didn’t flow quite as smoothly as all that. There were a number of words I didn’t understand, but the adults were willing to humor me—they explained the vocabulary as they went. The hardest words were the abstract ones. Poor Dwilla had to pretend to face Inneioleia mimicking a lion for me to learn the word for courage.

Koda shook his head. “What I don’t understand is why Bindeise took his own life. He was stubborn, like a rock is stubborn.”

What? I glanced toward Koda sharply. There was nothing in what I said that implied Bindeise killed himself. Maybe it’s a translation problem?

Dwilla didn’t even blink at Koda’s interpretation of events. “That was also my understanding, but perhaps it was because of this other dead person Eight found.”

“Do we know who it is?” Inneioleia asked.

“None of the families have told me of anyone missing,” Koda said. “I will walk the village tonight to ask.”

“And who will attend to the bodies?” Inneioleia asked.

Dwilla grimaced. “It will be me. I need to report on it to the land knight.”

“Then I will send hunters to escort you when the danger of the chliapp lion has passed. Eight will also go and guide you to the second body.” Inneioleia turned to me. “It will be part of your training. Is that acceptable?”

“As long as the lion is dead, then yes.” I didn’t mind. The hike was easy enough, and I was curious to see whatever counted as Voorhei’s CSI unit in action. “But I have a question first. Why do you think Bindeise killed himself?”

Koda sighed. “He was a troubled man, and you said there was fire.”

“Cleansing fire,” Inneioleia said, clarifying.

While the others caught me up on the words I didn’t know, the lodge master left to open the trap door leading underground. On his return, he had a small round cake of coal in his hand, just about the size of his palm. The symbol of the lodge—the crossed bow and spear—was imprinted upon it.

“Hunters carry these when alone, in case they are fatally injured,” Inneioleia said. “The fire uses the qi in them and the area to eat their core, so that they do not rise as zombies after death. People who live outside the village do the same. You found Bindeise in his bed, uninjured. There was no reason for him to use cleansing fire, unless it was to kill himself.”

I frowned. But then what about the other body? Did Bindeise kill that person and then himself? A murder-suicide?

“A gift for you,” Inneioleia said, placing the cake of cleansing fire into my hand. “Tomorrow, when you go out into the forest, your hunt brothers and sisters will be with you. There will be many other times, though, when you will be alone. Do not let yourself become a zombie.”

My initiation into the Hunter’s Lodge was held in two parts.

The first was public, and everyone in the village was welcome to attend. The hunters had gone out earlier in the day and brought back a moose bull to slaughter and share with those attending. He was a beauty—easily nine hundred pounds.

A big cookfire was organized in the large open space in front of the pyramid. The smell of grilling venison drifted between the buildings, and a horn was blown to call people to the celebration.

The bull was apparently a good sign. The animals caught the day of the initiation were supposed to be a measure of the initiate’s future luck as a hunter, so people came up to congratulate me, even though I had nothing to do with bringing the moose down.

While the meat cooked, the hunters sang. Their songs were very different from the children’s songs I’d heard from Billisha and Aluali. The words were long and drawn out, both intense and melancholic at the same time, somehow perfect for a bright fire and dark night.

Before we could eat, they brought me in front of the crowd and anointed me with the bull’s blood. I walked around the cookfire in a circle with his head and showed it off to the crowd. Every villager present reached out to touch it and brought their hands back to their hearts to bow.

Inneioleia met me at the end of my circle to take the head and hand me my spear and bow. I went around one more rotation, and this time the villagers kissed their hands before reaching out to bless the weapons.

Then it was time to eat. In addition to the venison, there were pots of porridge, as well as grilled fruits and vegetables. Someone broke out a barrel of corn liquor, and the singing became more lively. As people finished eating, they got up to dance around where the hunters sat.

About three hours later, the celebration finally started to wind down. All the villagers who’d attended came up to wish me well. Billisha and Aluali sat next to me and received their own congratulations. A hunter stood nearby to hand out portions of venison for the attendees to take home.

People were apologetic that the celebration had been so short. Apparently, it normally went until dawn, but that was in the late winter/early spring when all the lodge’s new initiates joined all at once. During the summer, everyone was busy in the fields—they didn’t have the leeway to stay up all night.

It wasn’t until the last guest left that the hunter families began to clean up. Meanwhile, the hunters themselves led me into the lodge.

Inneioleia unlocked the trap door to lead us down a set of stone stairs to a large, circular room. The air was smokey from the sconces burning around the edges, and there was an iron tang from the pot of moose blood Inneioleia had brought with him. The ground was hard earth in the center, with carpets and cushions on the floor elsewhere. I was asked to disrobe and kneel in the center of a circle of gathered hunters.

Then, the second part of the initiation ceremony began. Inneioleia cupped his hands in the moose blood and poured some over my head. He ran his fingers through my hair to make sure it coated my scalp.

I still had blood on my face from when I’d been anointed earlier, but now he used a fur brush to spread more over the entirety of my body. The only parts of me not red were my eyes.

Inneioleia chanted the entire time. He’d done it earlier too, but underground, surrounded by the hunters, the words took on a different quality. I must’ve been running hot, because the blood steamed on my skin.

Then the lodge master told a story—a harrowing tale from his early years when he’d gotten separated from his hunting party and been counter-stalked in the middle of the night by something called a fang worm. When he was done with the tale, he dipped his hand in the moose blood once more and left a palm print on my already red chest.

He traded places with another hunter—Mulallamu, whom I’d met on my first day in the village—and she told a story about climbing a cliff for eagle’s eggs. She also left a bloody handprint over my heart. Every hunter there—twenty-three in total—told a story and left a print. All the stories were instructive; even the lodge’s other apprentices did their best to share what they’d learned as hunters.

My head started to spin, and I felt myself getting hotter and hotter, sucking in the words and stories. The uekisheile inside me paid close attention to the flow of qi.

Suddenly, pain flared, feeling like a needle stitching the surface of my heart. My breath caught, and I bent over, clutching my chest. Distantly, I heard Inneioleia’s chanting. He had grabbed my shoulders to keep me from falling over.

I nearly blacked out, but managed to hold on, and the pain slowly faded. Point by point, the stitching slowed to a stop, and I was left gulping air, trying not to hyperventilate.

I looked up to see Inneioleia smiling, as were the rest of the hunters. “Welcome, brother,” he said.

On my Status, there was a new soul mark: Way of the Hunter.

Later that night—after I’d washed away the blood and caught my breath from the whirlwind of events, after meeting up with Billisha and Aluali and being warmed by their giddy excitement on my behalf, and after seeing how pleased even Bihei was for me—I finally laid down to rest and checked the notification.

System-Eight? Is that you? There was none of his trademark snarkiness, though I caught a whiff of him from the tone of the language used in the dialogue box. I wondered, because this was the first time I’d been able to read a tool tip about a soul mark. I checked the others, in case this was part of a larger breakthrough in our understanding of them, and I did find something:

The kids had explained to me that an eisendon was what gave people access to their mana. Children underwent the ritual when they were about one-year old, and it left a scar on their chests. Even so, the vast majority of people couldn’t sense mana enough to manipulate it, but the eisendon at least let them infuse their mana into magical tools, so almost everyone had one.

Excited that I might be able to learn more about the other soul marks, I looked at the other entries—God Touched, Spontaneous Formation, and Memories of Another World—but all I found was a tooltip that read:

The three dots of the ellipsis filled in one at a time, disappeared, and then filled in again. Over and over. I waited twenty minutes, but no new information was forthcoming. I sighed, careful not to disturb the others. Everyone was asleep except for me.

And I wasn’t long in following them. I drifted off thinking about the ways necessity had pushed the people of this world to develop tools and traditions to control their paths through life.

Just before dawn, Mulallamu met me at the Hunter’s Lodge. She wanted to introduce me to the members of her team and brief me on how we would be approaching the day’s hunt. My eyes were gummy from the long night before, but the prospect of going after a chliapp lion had me wide awake.

First, I learned that I was to call her Mumu or Sister Mumu but never Aunt Mumu—she was too young for that. As for the rest of the team…

Haoleise was the young archer who had been guarding the villagers with Mumu on my first day in Voorhei. He was just as wiry and lithe as her, but maybe a couple of years older and a little taller too. He asked to be called Haol.

Integnei was of stockier build and likely somewhere in his mid-thirties—wrinkles were just starting to form around his eyes and mouth. He possessed the Braveheart and Patient talents and went by Tegen.

And lastly, there was the team’s other apprentice: a girl about my age named Teila. She had the Wood-Wise talent.

Once the introductions were done, Mumu explained how the Hunter’s Lodge operated in teams of five for small hunts and ten for dangerous ones. As for creatures that posed a danger to the village’s survival, the whole lodge was mobilized. Mumu led this particular team, while Tegen was responsible for teaching the team’s apprentices and keeping them safe.

“But you are only four. There is no fifth member?” I asked.

“You are our fifth,” Mumu said. “The position was open, because of… reasons.” She gestured vaguely with her hand.

“This is not right,” Tegen said. “A hunter must know the land, so that they may walk it safely. You should explain more clearly.”

Mumu scrunched up her face, but answered nonetheless. “It was politics. Do you know that word? People talking at each other, pushing and pulling to get what they want.”

Tegen nodded. “I hear you know of Woldec, yes? He pushed for his son Akbash to join this team, but we judged him not a good enough hunter for us. Woldec disagreed and… how to say…” Tegen mimed a river flowing, and then he blocked the flow. “He interfered, and the position stayed open. We were waiting until the new year and hoped for a new apprentice then.”

“Already, this Eight is our good luck,” Mumu said, and she ruffled my hair. “Our team is complete once more, and with a worthy apprentice. Now let us go. The dawn waits for no one.”

The tops of the walls were turning pink with the sun’s rising just as we arrived at the village gate. It was in the process of being lifted, and there was already a line of people ready to head out to work in the fields. Koda was there to oversee the process, and he chatted with those waiting. When he saw our group, he nodded to us and wished us a good hunt. The other villagers echoed him.

Mumu led us out and through the fields west of Voorhei.

Tegen talked the whole time, his voice soft but confident. He shared what he knew about chliapp lions. They were solitary, except in the spring and summer when they mated and reared their young. Then in the fall they separated, although the cubs stayed with the mother through the winter.

They almost always had five tentacles protruding from their shoulders, each tipped with a sharp razor. Chliapp lions who became dusk or dawn were often larger and had more tentacles. Those that were dark or silvered, at Level 10, were usually faster and more clever. Much faster and much more clever.

Tegen had never seen a dark or silvered lion himself, but there was a story from two generations ago of a dark one ripping through an entire team of hunters. Afterward, a full twenty hunters set out after it, and only thirteen came back alive. It was a bad time for the lodge.

He explained that the patterns he described were only guidelines, since darklight mutated animals in unpredictable ways. That was what was most frightening about it—that every enemy could have hidden cards to play, cards to which ancestral wisdom didn’t apply.

And then if that dark animal should breed, its offspring had a chance to acquire those cards. The children wouldn’t be born high level, but they’d have a head start on the tools and abilities that made their parent successful.

The lecture reminded me of the bashu turkey alpha. In its flock were a handful of smaller turkeys that shared its coloring. I hadn’t seen them shoot heat waves from their beaks, but if they’d gotten a few more levels under their belt? Maybe.

Our team went silent once we reached the village’s boundary. Past that point, if anyone needed to communicate, we did so using Signed Diaksh.

I led the hunters to where I’d first found the chliapp lion’s tracks. From the size of the prints, Mumu was confident that it was under Level 5, so she decided we should continue. She then had me take the team to the tree our prey had marked. From there, we tracked it northwest.

The trail led us on a meandering path through the forest, over a slight rise, and along a crease between the hills. We found another marked tree and a pile of the cat’s scat. Twenty yards north, there was a tuft of fur caught along the edge of a thorny bramble. The occasional paw print and trampled grass kept us on track.

At that point, Mumu took over, with the rest of the team fanning out to search for signs of its passage whenever the trail disappeared. More often than not, it was me that helped us find it again. There was just something—not a feeling, not a hunch, but more a pull on my attention—that drew me. Likely, it was my Uncanny Tracker talent at work.

The hunters weren’t surprised. Part of working together was knowing each other’s talents and skills. My visible Status had become common knowledge in the Hunter’s Lodge.

About ninety minutes after entering the forest, we found an area of flattened grass where the chliapp lion had spent the night. There was no evidence of it lingering, so we immediately set off after it again. The tracks leading away were relatively fresh, and we were likely only two or three hours behind. We moved stealthily, not knowing when we might accidentally stumble across the cat.

The hunters impressed me with how quietly they moved. I couldn’t match them, not at the speed they were demanding. And I got noisier and noisier as our early caution gave way to the need to move faster. The chliapp lion hadn’t meandered after its rest—it had headed directly back toward the village.

We were only thirty yards from the boundary when Mumu signed, “Stop. Hide. Ready.”

Instantly, she faded from my attention. I could still see her, but she was now part of the background scenery—just a minor detail in a broader picture. It was like my at one with the land, but on steroids. My impression was that it wasn’t a spell, though. Maybe something to do with her Wild Sense or Scout-Born talents?

Meanwhile, the archer Haol camouflaged himself. Literally. I felt a blip of qi, and then his skin and hair changed colors to match the scenery around him. A moment later, those colors slowly seeped into his clothes and his bow. It was so cool! If we weren’t about to face a chliapp lion, I would’ve asked him to do it again.

Tegen didn’t seem to do anything special. He made sure his spear was ready while keeping an eye on me and Teila, as well as on our flanks and back trail.

Mumu and Haol snuck forward, and once they were in my peripheral vision, they disappeared. I had no sense of them or their location. It was frustrating—I wanted to see their abilities in action, but I had a job to do: I became one with the land and helped to make sure the chliapp lion didn’t circle back around to counter-stalk us.

Minutes passed with nothing happening. Tegen must’ve been signaled by Mumu at some point, because he had us sneak toward a large oak tree just shy of the boundary. Its trunk was thick enough that it’d need four people to clasp hands around it. We peeked around the sides.

The chliapp lion sat in the long grass, its gaze intent on a group of villagers scything hay not forty yards away. A couple of hunters stood guard, their attention on Tegen, who was signaling them while out of the big cat’s view.

I threw some qi and nature mana into my eyes to see the situation more clearly. The guards didn’t seem panicked or nervous. Instead, they casually—oh so casually—moved between the villagers and the chliapp lion.

The villagers paused their work, while the children organized themselves in rows behind them.

Tegen tapped my shoulder and pointed. Hidden in the brush, barely visible even to my enchanted eyes, I saw Mumu crouched with her spear ready. Next to her, Haol drew his bow. Even though he was camouflaged, I saw that the draw was as smooth as water. Inside me, the uekisheile perked up. They ran some tendrils through my hair, so that they could sense the qi-spiral-straight more clearly.

The qi grew over the next five breaths. The air around Haol’s arrow distorted, spiraling around the shaft. Then, in a flash, the arrow flew and drilled into the big cat’s torso, burying itself fletching-deep and shoving the lion back three feet. The sound of its release was like a rifle firing.

The lion’s body spasmed, the tentacles twitched, and that was that. A heart shot, clean through. It was beautiful. Just beautiful.

Mumu waited to make sure the cat was dead. When it seemed so, she moved out, while the rest of us stayed in hiding. Standing above the body, she let go of her stealth ability and became visible—intentionally making herself a target for anything drawn to the sound of Haol’s spell. Eventually, as the forest settled into its usual quiet, she smiled and signed for Tegen to signal the guards.

She gathered us around to talk about transporting the dead cat to the village. My first hunt with the lodge was done.