The Last Hunter - Descent - Jeremy Robinson [76]
“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.
I turn away. To watch any more is to invite intestinal doom.
I see several more different variants of Nephilim, but I never get a chance to ask about them. We have arrived at our destination. A group of ten hunters lounge on the floor, all sharing a roast feeder and cups of water. All are dressed formally in leathers and carry a variety of weapons—swords, knives, hammers, maces, bows and arrows—but nothing quite as unique, or homemade, as Whipsnap and my climbing claws.
Kainda glares at me for a moment, then tears a chunk of flesh from the feeder and gnaws on it. The rest bow and move their limbs to allow Ninnis and I passage to what I assume is my spot. As far as I can tell, it is the only seat in the room, and looks like a throne cut from solid stone. I sit in its fur-covered seat and find it quite comfortable, almost like it can hide me from the monsters surrounding me.
Ninnis sits on the floor next to me.
“Why am I in a chair?” I ask, “While everyone else sits on the floor?”
“This does not please you?”
His question makes me remember that it should please me. I am Ull! I laugh. “It pleases me very much. I was wondering what the significance was.”
“It represents your future throne,” Ninnis says. “After the bonding.”
I see another glare from Kainda shot in my direction, and something inside me snaps. Perhaps it’s a little bit of Ull, I don’t know. But when she takes another chunk of flesh from the feeder, I take hold of Whipsnap, pull it free and send its blade snapping into the meat, pulling it from her hand.
The other hunters fall silent. I bring the meat to my mouth and take a bite. When I’m done, all but one of the hunters is