The sunlight was waiting to greet the two of them again. Once outside, Ai-Ling locked the door and tipped her head appreciatively to D. “Thanks for the help. Uh, try not to look
at it so much. I mean, it’s not a very pretty hand.”
She wasn’t talking about the hand she’d injured. The hand she covered it with had countless scars on the back, and the skin had hardened in a condition unique to toxic bites so that it was now like the scaly hide of a fire dragon. Perhaps D had noticed from the moment they’d met that she’d been trying to keep it hidden.
“What kind of girl was Sybille?” the Hunter asked, his voice cold and devoid of emotion.
Ai-Ling’s expression grew stiff, remembering again why D was there. “Oh, she was a romantic,” she replied flatly. “And she was so kind. What more could she possibly need? I’m sure she must be having some really nice dreams. If she’s not, there can’t be a God.”
“What kind of dream would be a good dream?”
Thinking a bit, Ai-Ling turned her gaze to the depths of the blue sky. She had a faraway look in her eyes, like something important was up there. “The kind of story that traveling writers come up with for the young girls.”
D remained silent.
Ai-Ling licked her faintly colored lips, and her eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “A dream,” she began, “where people in love hold hands when they walk down the street. Where the library has all the books you ever wanted to read. A dream where no one threatens anyone else, and everyone thinks about other people and does things for them without ever being asked. Where new fashions arrive from the Capital every week. A dream where the pharmacist has all the medicine you need to soothe your child’s fever. Where you can make ends meet without working like a dog. A dream where everyone goes down to the pond on a moonlit night to catch fireflies. And a dream . . .”
The rest of the final sentence was spoken by another voice.
“. . . where humans and Nobility walk down the street side by side?”
Dazed, Ai-Ling stared at her mysterious visitor. “Are you some kind of sorcerer?” she asked.
“The Noble who bit Sybille chose her specifically.”
Ai-Ling’s eyes were glazed with perplexity. “What do you mean by that? Why was Sybille chosen?”
“An ancient mansion and blue light, white evening gowns and black formal wear, a cotillion—does that remind you of anything?”
Something sparkly pooled in Ai-Ling’s eye. “And here I thought we’d just dreamt about you . . . but you had Sybille’s dream, too, didn’t you?” A tear rolled down her cheek. “That was what she wished for—to wear a white gown and dance the night away with a man in a tuxedo in the hall of some old mansion. The night wrapped in a blue light.”
“She got her wish.”
“The night in her dream never ends, does it?” Ai-Ling asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think Sybille is happy?”
D had no response.
Ai-Ling pushed back the hair dangling before her brow. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m satisfied with the life I have now. I really can’t complain. We manage to get by, and I can feel how real the earth is beneath my feet. I may not have lovely dreams like Sybille does, though . . .”
“They may be lovely dreams, but that doesn’t mean they’re good dreams.” D lightly touched his hand to the brim of his hat. That was his way of saying goodbye.
Ai-Ling stood completely still, wanting to say something else; she watched the black expanse of his back as he quietly walked away. The silhouette of her visitor made it quite clear it was all over. His outline was a steadfast refusal.
Not entirely convinced she was ready to say anything, yet realizing something important was on the tip of her tongue, Ai-Ling took a few steps forward. Before she reached him, D stopped and turned. It wasn’t Ai-Ling that he faced, but rather the chickener coop. As her own dark eyes followed his gaze, the steel door burst outward and fell to the ground, pieces of its frame flinging everywhere. The frantic white creatures inside came into view and jostled out into the sunlight in a wild tangle of downy feathers.
.
II
.
The silence was shattered by a shrill cry every bit as horrifying as the roar of a gray bear before it attacks its prey. Seeing the blue light and purple smoke that rose from the white breast of each creature, Ai-Ling shuddered. “But that’s just . . .” she stammered. “How on earth did they get by the high-voltage lines?”
“Go back to the main house. They’re probably after me,” a voice like bronze whispered in her ear, realizing just then that the Hunter was at her side.
“But—”
“Just go.” His order was even gentler than his ordinary speech.
Without waiting to see that Ai-Ling made it back to the house, D turned the other way and sprinted into action. His coat fluttered out in the wind like a pair of huge black wings. Perhaps the reason he moved forward was because he’d sensed that the speed of Ai-Ling’s retreat was far slower than that of the colossal birds as they charged toward her. Chicks or not, each of them was over six-and-a-half feet tall, and a blow from the beak or talons of one of these foul-tempered beasts was enough to punch a hole in titanium . . . to say nothing of what they could do to flesh.
When they had closed within ten feet of the Hunter, one of the death-dealers in downy white bounded up toward the heavens. Built to carry the creature’s seven-hundred-pound frame, the chickener’s legs had enough spring to leap over fifteen feet in the air, even from a complete standstill. With all of its talons spread as wide as they could go, the bird started to drop from the air right at the point where it would intercept D.
Perhaps the eyes of the bird caught the silvery path of D’s weapon as it sliced off both the attacker’s legs in midair. As D plowed straight into the flock of screeching chickeners, more black beaks than could be counted came down at his head. The human skull would be soft as a grape to them, but the parabolic arc of the vicious bird beaks was rewarded not with a taste of D, but with the glittering slashes of his sword. Bright blood scattered in the sunlight.
Less than two seconds later, over a dozen chicks lay on the ground. Fresh blood stained the green grass. Gory blade in one hand, D stood motionless. Though had he slashed away with his sword in the middle of a wild mist of blood, not a drop of it marked his clothes or his gorgeous face. The question was, why not?
Moments later, that small bloody part of the vermilion pasture started to rise without warning. But then it wasn’t alone—the ground around it trembled and began to rise as well. Dirt and grass still sticking to them, these things rolled free of the ground and floated up into the air. They were bubbles, up to a foot and a half in diameter. Given their crimson color, the name “blood bubbles” suited them well. Like lava boiling from a caldera, like poisonous foam spawned by some crazed chemical reaction, these horrific offspring were born from the earth that’d drunk the blood of the vicious birds. Almost like sentient beings, the bubbles stopped at a height of six feet. One by one, their numbers grew. Perhaps that was all they were waiting for.
“What do you make of them?” D asked someone.
“Think maybe we should call them ‘bloody foam eggs’?” someone replied. “I’ve never seen ’em before either. They’re bubbles, so they’ve gotta burst sometime. When they do, shut down your senses. Just a second,” the voice added. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Want me to take a bite out of one?”
“That would be nice.”
“Hey, don’t be so damn casual about it. This concerns you, too.” The indignation of its tone was further colored by swirls of weirdness that knew no depths. “Hey! Come and get us!” the voice shouted.
At some point, D had taken his left hand from his side and turned the palm toward one of his airborne foes. The wind roared. And with that, one of the mysterious blood bubbles quivered and was drawn toward D’s hand. As its rounded contour touched the Hunter’s palm, it stretched thinner,
as if it was being drawn through a hole, and the other extreme of the bubble swelled grossly. The suction didn’t end there. The swollen portion didn’t pop, but appeared to be struggling even as its shape continued to change. In no time it shrank, displaying the sort of fear a drowning creature does, before it sank completely into the palm of D’s hand.
“Wow! Pretty darned tasty,” a voice said cheerily, but a second later, it became a cry of pain the likes of which the world rarely heard.
“Rather strong poison?” D inquired calmly.
“This stuff . . . it’s pretty damn lethal . . . Don’t think even I could take a second one . . . Better fall back.”
And with that, there was movement. Not on the part of D, but by the blood bubbles. Perhaps the groans of their victim had filled them with confidence, or maybe they’d finally amassed the numbers necessary, but the bubbles split into two groups and zipped through the air in a beeline for D.
“Sheesh! Don’t cut those things . . .” his left hand squealed.
D covered his nose and mouth with a scarf at the very same time the first rank of blood bubbles was bursting. A crimson fog stained the air, but there was no figure in black within it. Not making a sound, D ran through a world of red, where one blood bubble after another exploded. Up ahead of him, he saw Ai-Ling frozen in her tracks as other blood bubbles were flying straight for her.
“Hold your breath and hit the ground,” D shouted, coughing a split second later. He’d been hit by the bloody mist from a bubble he’d shattered overhead. The bright blood seemed to pry his lips apart as it spewed from his mouth.
Though his own lifeblood streamed out behind him, D didn’t falter in his pace. Grabbing the vulnerable Ai-Ling around the waist, he bolted for the fence. When the blood bubbles zipped toward the leaping figure, a flash of silver shot out for them. As if pushed away by the wind in his sword’s wake, the blood bubbles receded. D slipped right through their midst. Sprinting a good forty feet, he turned to look behind him. There didn’t seem to be any way to escape the swarm of bubbles fiendishly closing in on them. Just how much of their poisonous fog could he endure?
“It’s okay now,” D said, not seeming pained at all as he let Ai-Ling know it was safe to breathe again. “How about it?” he asked someone else.
“Do whatever you like. You’re a regular slave driver.”
On hearing that irritable reply, Ai-Ling started looking all around them with her flushed face.
Gently setting the woman on the ground, there was no telling what D was thinking as he dashed right for the blood bubbles that were closing in on them. Suddenly, the vermilion globes rose as one. Spacing themselves uniformly, the blood bubbles formed a circular canopy. Anything beneath that ceiling was sure to be attacked and trapped by their deadly mist, but D went right under the center of it. They were forty feet above him, a distance that, for all D’s leaping ability and skill with a sword, would be too much of a gap.
D’s left hand rose. If the blood bubbles had been equipped with eyes, they might’ve seen the human face that formed there. Eyes reminiscent of the tiniest bamboo leaves sparkled wickedly, and thin lips pursed. With a loud whooosh the air began to rush in one direction: toward the tiny lips. Caught in the extreme suction, every last blood bubble sank in a straight line toward the palm of D’s hand. D’s blade danced about and, with no way of escaping, the globes of blood burst wide open. Before the blood raining down from them could cover his body, D leapt back. Bubbles trying to rise to the sky once more were pulled along with the madly howling wind and then popped without ever being able to form a bloody and inescapable curtain around D.
Leaping back from where he’d dispatched the last of them, D drove his blade into the ground and fell to one knee, coughing horribly. A crimson stain spread across the blue scarf covering his mouth. His coughing stopped in a matter of seconds, and D got up. Taking the scarf away, he turned to Ai-Ling. Her deathly white face was struggling to form a smile. “You’ll want to take a bath in the antidote later.” And saying that, D took a few gold coins from an inner pocket on his coat and closed Ai-Ling’s fingers around them. Payment for the chickeners he’d dispatched.
Ai-Ling was about to shake her head, then thought better of it and accepted the money. Out on the Frontier, even a single bucket could be a precious commodity. “What just happened?” she asked. “I’ve never heard of anything like that coming out of chickener blood.” Her voice was tremulous—no doubt due to the fact that while hers was a hard life, up until now it’d also been a relatively uneventful one.
“Isn’t your husband around?” D finally asked her.
“This morning, he headed off to town. He’s got other work to do.”
“Do you want to come with me? I can’t tell you if staying here would be safer, but I can take you to your husband. After all, those blood bubbles went after you, too.”
Ai-Ling bobbed her head with its fright-stiffened features
up and down. After shutting the gate so the meat beasts wouldn’t run off, the two of them got on D’s cyborg horse and galloped away.
“Never seen fighting like that before . . . What in the world are you?” Ai-Ling asked, her arms wrapped tightly around D’s waist.
“You said you dreamt about me, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And what did you think?”
Ai-Ling fell silent. Her hair, already tinged with gray, fluttered in the wind. “Do I have to tell you?” she finally asked.
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“It made me hate you so much that I could kill you.”
One person said he was a dangerous man. Another said she despised him. Who could say that everyone in the village didn’t fall into one of those two camps? Even in their dreams, D was something unsettling, something they found detestable.
“I don’t know why that was,” Ai-Ling continued. “I just found you truly hateful. Like you were going to destroy this life and everything we’ve worked so hard to build—but then, when
I woke from the dream . . .” Her words trailed off there. It was some time before she resumed speaking. “I know I said I was happy before . . . but I envy Sybille. Never aging, just dreaming her dreams . . .”
“They’re not necessarily pleasant dreams.”
“That’s what everyone says. But any dream that you never had to wake up from would have to be better than reality . . . even a nightmare. If she woke up, I wonder what she’d think of him . . .”
How did the first real emotion in the woman’s weary tone sound to D? As he sat there on his horse, his face remained as cold and emotionless as ever.
They came to a road that ran back to the main street. As D was about to turn his mount toward the village, Ai-Ling said, “Go left—to the hospital. At this hour, my husband should still be there.”
The horse galloped to the outskirts of the village, and in no time they were out in front of the white hospital building. Just as D was about to take off, Ai-Ling politely requested that he explain to her husband what had happened. Though this might be the Frontier, the battle that D waged at their ranch was like some conflict from the very depths of hell. No matter what she said, her husband probably wouldn’t believe it. For once, indifference on the young man’s part might cause a lot of trouble.
After some consideration, D got off his horse.
“This way,” Ai-Ling said, walking ahead of the Hunter. After going down a familiar corridor to stand before a door he’d seen before, D realized what was going on. Ai-Ling knocked on the door, and when it opened from the inside, a man’s face peeked out. The Hunter didn’t even need to see him. The solemn face toughened by countless blizzards was that of Sheriff Krutz.
.
III
.
In a hospital room forever locked in feeble darkness, the three of them talked for several minutes. Of the three, it was actually Ai-Ling who explained what had transpired, with D merely offering a terse confirmation at the end that her account
was accurate.
Giving no indication of being disturbed or even surprised, once the sheriff had finished listening, he said, “Earlier, you got into some trouble with Clements and got a hotel room burnt down. Now you’ve gone and killed the chickeners at my ranch, eh? What in blazes did you come to our town to do, anyway?”
“I don’t know the answer to that either,” D replied.
“Ai-Ling—go wait in the lobby,” the sheriff ordered.
The woman wore an expression that suggested she had something she wanted to say, but a shade of something that resembled resignation came over her and she nodded.
When the door had closed again, the sheriff offered a chair to D.
“This is fine,” he said, leaning against the wall instead.
The sheriff threw a dispassionate gaze at D. “Would that be part of the iron code Hunters have about never leaving their back open?”
“Was she the love of your life?” D asked, not answering the lawman.
The sheriff’s eyes shifted to the girl in the bed. “That was thirty years ago,” he said.
“As far as your wife is concerned, she is even now. It must be painful, watching you go off to see your old girlfriend every morning.”
“Drop the subject. What do you know, anyway?”
“I was led to this village by a dream the girl in that bed had. When I tried to leave, something got in my way and someone died. The key to solving these mysteries is held by your old girlfriend as she sleeps. The reason I was called here and the reason I can’t leave seem to be one and the same. That’s all I know.”
“You mean to tell me you don’t care about my personal life, then? Just dandy. Get out of town before you stir up any more trouble.”
“That’s fine with me, but there’s something that just won’t let me leave.”
“Hogwash—I’ll see you to the edge of the village myself. And don’t you ever come back.” Just as the sheriff stood up, D stepped away from the wall. And then someone knocked on the door. The sheriff went over and opened it. “Well, hello there, Dr. Allen,” he said.
The Stuff of Dreams Page 7
