The Last Hunter: Collected Edition (Antarktos Saga #1-5)

“What happens if one of our masters dies?”


Ninnis looks at me with a raised eyebrow. “Such a thing hasn’t happened since the death of Nephil. Killing warriors is near impossible, but it’s also forbidden. They are the strongest. And will lead the battle against the topside. By your side, of course.”

I make an effort to puff up my chest with pride, but I’m really just trying to keep myself from passing out. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Without a master,” Ninnis says. “You would be free.”

A genuine smile fights to spread my lips. I resist it, but the twitch in my facial expression hasn’t gone unnoticed. “You find that pleasing?”

“Not at all,” I say. “I will be free soon enough.”

He turns fully toward me, confusion and anger tensing his forehead into a maze of crisscrossing lines. In that moment I am reminded of how old Ninnis is, despite his physical ability. “When I accept the spirit of Nephil,” I add. “I will have no master.”

Ninnis pauses. And then laughs. “Right you are!”

When we reach the bottom of the stairs, I feel positively puny, like I’ve been shrunk down to the size of an ant. The ceiling is so far above me. Even the smallest of the Nephilim, the gatherers, stand taller than me. And the tallest, Enki and the other warriors, tower over me, even when they’re sitting on the floor.

But all of them bow. Every single one, until we reach the fat one.

She (I call her a she because her eyes are vaguely feminine) is revolting. From a distance, I could not see the details of this thing. Where a nose and mouth should be, there is something that looks more like a beak. And indeed, there are feathers on her head instead of hair. The body is composed of rolls of fat that have enveloped her arms and legs almost completely. I think I see wiggling fingers protruding from a spot half way up, but it’s impossible to tell. She could just as easily have stubby wings. Her head sits atop the mass of flesh like a cherry on a fifteen foot tall ice cream sundae.

“She does not bow,” I observe.

“Breeders are unable to move,” he says, pointing to what looks like a massive stretcher beneath her body. “They cannot move without assistance and only the warriors are strong enough to move them. Gaia is here because she was your breeder.”

This last statement stuns me twice. The first is the revelation that this sickly blobbish bird-woman-thing is Gaia, the Greek fertility goddess otherwise known as Mother Earth. She’s depicted so beautifully in the books I’ve read. The second is that she is somehow associated with me. “My breeder?”

“Where do you think all the feeders came from?”

“Feeders?”

Ninnis chuckles. “That’s right. You call them egg-monsters. She was far above you in the pit. She could not see you, but she could hear you, and smell you. The feeders hatch from her eggs.”

This is far beyond anything I’d expected. I scan the room quickly and see several roast feeders on spits. “They’re Nephilim? They eat their own young? I ate their young?”

“It is the purpose for which they are born,” Ninnis says. “True Nephilim are born of human mothers, not Nephilim mothers.”

I can feel my stomach tensing and keep talking to distract myself. “What happens if they are not eaten? Do they die?”

“If a feeder escapes into the wild and survives, they become insatiable eating machines larger than any Nephilim.” He glances at me. “May you never run into one.”

My eyebrows rise. “There are loose feeders?”

“Three,” he says. “They roam the largest, deepest tunnels underground, eating everything that crosses their path.”

With a shake of my head, I look back at Gaia. “What do the breeders eat, if they can’t move?”

He stops. “Watch. It shouldn’t take long. They’re always eating.”

We stand there for a moment. Then I see a centipede crawl out of a crack in the wall behind the breeder. It crawls up her feathered backside and scrambles toward the head.

“Is she emitting a pheromone?” I ask.

“A what?”

I have to remind myself that Ninnis’s education is a hundred years old, and I would guess didn’t include much science to begin with. “It’s like a scent. Something that attracts the centipede.”

He nods. “I think so.”

The centipede stands beneath Gaia’s open beak and rises up, its antennae twitching. With a snap, the beak closes down over the creature, consuming half of it with one bite. She tilts her head back while the centipede’s legs twitch madly. With a flex of her throat, the centipede vanishes.