D ran as well.
The distance between the two remained unchanged.
A shooting star in silver!
With one of the most exquisite sounds in the world, D’s blade was parried by the longsword the figure wielded. Like the scattering sparks, the two faces grew fainter and farther apart.
At the same time they landed, a series of noises echoed in the space between them. Iron caltrops the figure had launched in midair as he gripped his sword in his teeth had intercepted the needles thrown by D.
Each caltrops was a mass of iron spikes radiating out in all directions. Though traditionally spread across the ground by ordinary huntsmen or Hunters specializing in land-bound beasts, with practice they might be used as missiles. An expert could hurl three in a single second and pack them in a two-inch-wide bull’s-eye from a distance of some thirty feet. When coupled with the horrendous strength unique to the Nobility, caltrops could achieve the stopping power of a magnum gun—a weapon renowned for its ability to pierce the armor of greater dragons.
A streak of crimson coursed down D’s left cheek.
But the shadowy figure who’d dealt the wound slammed on the brakes as well. He backed off. Perhaps the moon finally peeping through the bank of clouds had revealed to the figure the fact the left hand he held over his face had lost its thumb clear down to the base.
The opponents held their longswords at eye level, in the tradition of Asian fencers. Preparing for battle, neither moved.
Borne on a wind that howled of winter’s imminent demise, no one could say how long this battle to the death between a superhuman and a demonic fiend would go on.
A deafening report called a sudden close to the duel.
D’s upper body jolted ever so slightly. The tension was broken. About to make a thrust, the figure halted. An instant later, the figure leapt through the air, cleared a stone wall, and melted into the darkness with a speed that shamed the wind itself.
Not that the figure feared the gunfire which had just put two rounds into D’s body. Rather, the figure had seen D take the massive slugs through the side of his chest without letting the point of his sword quaver in the least bit.
The especially strong wind scattered all trace of the enemy, so D limned a fluid arc of silver that returned his longsword to its sheath. On the right flank of his coat the material was rent wide, marking the spot where a magnum gun had scored a pair of direct hits, but there was no trace of emotion whatsoever in his exquisite face.
A tangle of angry shouts came from the direction of the window. The voices of Lina and the mayor churned against vehement protests from the sheriff that it had been an accident that his shots had gone wide.
D approached Cuore’s weakened body and lifted the boy effortlessly. Though the most distinguished Hunters were renowned for never using their sword arm unless it was absolutely necessary, D coolly disregarded that convention.
“No use giving chase,” he said to keep the sheriff from clambering out through the window. “What about the woman?”
“She’s still alive,” Lina replied from her place at the bedside of the sleeping woman.
D climbed back into the room without a sound.
“Get this boy to bed.”
“Weren’t you hit?” the sheriff asked as he alternated his stares between the weapon in his hands and D. Without responding, the Hunter passed Cuore into Lina’s arms.
“D, you’re bleeding!”
“It’ll heal soon enough. What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Shaking her head, Lina looked at the sheriff. He seemed unharmed. There was a large lump rising on the mayor’s forehead. “Something happened, that’s for sure—all of a sudden we’re floating in midair, then the next thing I know we’re dropping to the floor headfirst. Believe you me, I’d like to know what the hell that was all about!”
“What about Mr. Meyer?”
“Over here . . . ” The speaker was slumped by the threshold of the shattered door, breathing heavily. There were a number of scratches on his cheeks. Judging by the way he held the back of his head, that was the severest of his injuries. “At least this should get rid of any lingering doubts about me and Lina,” he muttered, then his eyes went wide as he saw Cuore.
The trio of vigilantes tottered toward them, and, in the wild confusion of the room, D could be heard murmuring as if nothing at all had occurred. “So we’ve finally flushed it out, have we?”
-
THOSE WHO DESIRE DARKNESS
CHAPTER 3
-
The pale rays of the sun had melted most of the light snow on the slope. Young sprouts raised their heads from the ground, diligently drawing to themselves the energy they would need to send out shoots in the season to come.
Like a pastoral painting, green already covered the gently rolling terrain, and off in the distance a young Adonis stood in stark relief against the blue sky, walking as the wind fluttered the hem of his coat.
One only had to draw a step closer, however, to be struck by the ineffable eldritch aura swelling from that tall, black-clad form to realize he was an otherworldly entity thoroughly in keeping with that perfectly preserved beauty.
Vampire Hunter D—in spring, in summer, his emotionless eyes reflected a demon-haunted darkness.
Halfway up the slope D stopped.
A wagon was approaching from town. It was Lina, with her black manelike hair streaming out behind her. Realizing that D had caught sight of her, a smile suffused her face and she waved.
While he didn’t wave back, it was still unlike the youth to wait while Lina halted the wagon, gathered up her long, blue skirt, and climbed up the hill to him. It seemed not just humans, but all living creatures had difficulty traversing the hill.
“What brings you out here?” he asked with a dour look.
“Oh, aren’t you Mister Personality. It just so happens I was going to ask you the very same thing. But the least I can do is keep you company. After all, you were kind enough to wait for me and all.”
Though her breath was ragged, an untroubled grin rose on Lina’s lips.
It wasn’t just that the young man was so gorgeous he gave her gooseflesh, but also that she found standing by his side fun—or if “fun” wasn’t exactly the right term, standing by him was certainly intriguing. Lina had no way of knowing what a mighty Hunter he was, or how the roughest characters on the Frontier cringed at the mere mention of his name. She was seventeen—girls at that stage tended to view boys their own age as punk kids, which is probably how Lina saw D. But, appearances to the contrary, who could really say just how old the Hunter was, springing as he did from the ageless and undying blood of the Nobility?
“I wasn’t exactly waiting for you,” D said frostily. “I was going to tell you to turn around. You should go home.”
“Not a chance,” Lina pouted. “I’m a lot safer with you than I’d be back in town.”
That was certainly true.
“Have it your way.”
D turned without another word. Though his leisurely yet deliberate pace remained unchanged, no matter how Lina scrambled she could not close the gap between them. On reaching the summit of the hill she collapsed in the shade of the ramparts. Cruel as it may seem, D immediately slipped into the ruins without so much as a backward glance, and was gone.
“I don’t believe this! Of all the cold-blooded— ” Lina was shouting and stomping her feet when something white fell from her breast. Hurriedly snatching it up, she brushed it off gently and slipped it into the front of her blouse. And then, with a cry of, “Wait for me, you cold-hearted ninny,” she slipped through a breach into the ruins.
Humans remained afraid to enter the castles of the Nobility. Their owners having disappeared for reasons unknown, the homes and the untended grounds were usually overrun by weeds and rats. In some cases automated maintenance devices had broken down, in others the Nobility had disconnected them before they vanished. Such actions seemed to state that these were still place
s no human hand should ever touch. Seeing these ruins with that in mind was enough to send chills climbing the viewer’s spine.
Ramparts not withstanding, the main gate and tabernacle, which had once been the principal edifices here, were all blown from their foundations. Even the pitiful figure of the belfry, top half now lost, glared at the blue empyrean vault. Stony heaps of rubble and the remains of buildings formed from mysterious materials were scattered throughout the snow-covered central courtyard. The courtyard also barely retained its original shape, though it did an excellent job now of slowing Lina’s pace.
Of course, Lina didn’t know when the castle had been reduced to this state, or by whose hand. All that was shrouded by the dark veil of history, and, aside from the tentacles of unknown terror it sent out, this place had no relation to the humans’ existence.
Even within, the history of these ruins remained elusive. Every part of it was a mystery.
A great many castles had been built by the Nobility in the Frontier region, all of them for the express purpose of providing a base from which they could rule over the mortals. The Nobility usually chose a spot on high ground to build their castles, so they might look down and see the humans toiling at their feet. Consequently, descriptions of those castles, and tales of their tenants, became part of the oral tradition of the humans who worked below. The stories were inevitably passed down through the ages, but nothing like that had happened in the village of Tepes.
How the Nobility had lived, and what work they had undertaken in this valley locked in by snow and darkness, were questions the villagers did not want to consider.
D was in the darkness of the same hall where Lina first met him. At the sight of him silently studying something on the wall, Lina got the distinct impression the pale blue stream of time had ceased to flow.
“One of those pictures strike your fancy?” she called out as she approached. D, who hadn’t answered no matter how she’d shouted, turned toward her. At last she could relax a bit.
“Oh, yes, I have to remember you can climb up here normally. You come here often, do you?”
“Uh-huh,” she said with an affirming nod. “When it comes to the castle here, I’d have to say I’m the best-informed person in town. You know, I’m not sure what you came here for, but why don’t we look at some of these together?”
For the briefest instant, D scanned the face of the innocuously grinning girl, then nodded.
The two of them played their gaze across one piece after another in the prodigious collection of paintings set in the walls.
As she looked at these paintings, all made sufficiently mysterious by the mere fact they’d been left behind, Lina felt the same profound emotion as the first time she’d seen them. Her breast flooded with heat as she looked at them anew.
Lovers, wrapped in the gossamer wings of some flying machine, gliding through the pale shadows of a moonlit grove.
A wan Noblewoman laughing as she chases a glowing, moonlike orb through the thick fog of a lakeshore.
A black-clad Noble spurring on the unearthly beast that draws his hover-carriage, while flashes of lightning from the eddying pitch-dark sky bathe them both.
Moonlight glinting off the horn of a unicorn, prismatic dancing girls scattering flower petals, the land is transformed to a garden of luminescent grasses in those paintings, which showed shadow and light, symphonies of light and shadow . . .
“Nobles painted all of these?”
Lina did not address this question to anyone in particular, but it felt like a song ringing from her mouth.
“The setting is always darkness and blackness, night and moonlight and mist—so why do they look so gorgeous? How could they paint that world so softly, so surreal, when we can’t set foot outside the village without getting so scared we collapse in a heap? Is the Nobility’s night somehow different from ours?”
D watched the girl silently. Her eyes were big and bright and sparkling with an abounding curiosity that stripped away the veil of innocuousness—this girl of seventeen who would learn about the future in the Capital.
“From the time we’re little kids we all grow up hearing about how fierce the Nobility are, how frightening,” Lina continued, forgetting that D stood by her side. “Civilization doesn’t produce anything that isn’t fit to serve it. That’s why the evil Nobility have died off, they say. And yet, when I look at these paintings, my heart races. The first time I saw them I even thought, ‘If this is what they can paint, then make me a Noble any day.’ After that, I studied up on them on the sly. Mr. Meyer, who was missing with me way back when, well, he’s interested in the Nobility, too, and since he’s collected all sorts of literature he’s loaned me a couple of books—though lately he’s been telling me to just buckle down on the math and he won’t let me have any more. For the most part, they’re all things humans have recorded about Nobility and pretty much all of them were from the same point of view the grownups in town have, but there was this one volume, a book about the history of the Nobility. Oh, what was it called now . . . ”
“Dawn of the Nobility, by J. Sangster. It was banned as soon as it saw print, and the author was exiled to the Frontier.”
“I’m impressed. That’s exactly the one I meant!”
Lina snapped her fingers sharply, not so much surprised that a drifting Hunter would know such an arcane tidbit as she was delighted to find a thread for conversation.
“As I recall, it analyzed art the Nobility had left behind—paintings and holographic images and three-dimensional music of some sort—and brought some of their civilization’s finer points to light. I read it and reread it till it was falling apart. I wanted to learn about the other world, the night civilization, and the Nobility of course. About the knowledge they had and their beauty. And I . . . ”
At this point the girl’s words died as if she were returning to her senses, and she turned again to face D.
“It’s already been decided I’m to study mathematics in the Capital. But what I’d really like to get into is the history of the Nobility.”
-
For a while, the pair stood studying each other’s faces as they felt the crush of the darkness.
“Just kidding,” Lina laughed suddenly, like the gust that snuffs a candle. “Oh, it’s true I want to study their history, but as a candidate I have to get up in front of a panel from the Capital and state for the record just what I intend to major in. Math, physics, music, art—hell, I could even choose gymnastics and they’d be fine with it. But if I ever said anything about the history of the Nobility . . . ”
Lina didn’t have to say that it would mean the end of her hopes for the future. History had been penned in the blood of those crushed by an unbearable weight of fear, and the oppressed would never forgive that.
“Well,” D began, “I hear policies in the Capital are gradually changing. It seems the director of the Ministry of Education is a man with some appreciation of the Nobility’s heritage.”
“Not a chance,” Lina laughed mischievously, flitting behind D like a butterfly. “I’m not about to lose my only ticket out of this town. The final decision rests on the feelings of the panel, you know. I’m going to tell them ‘mathematics,’ and that’s that.”
D said nothing in reply, but turned to face a painting several yards distant.
It was a picture Lina herself had always wondered about. Of all the paintings left behind, only this one had had its entire ten-foot-high, six-and-a-half-foot-wide surface painted over pitch-black. It seemed to radiate the most sinister intent.
“I recall seeing this sort of thing a couple of times in my travels. Out of tens of thousands of paintings, hundreds of thousands of pieces of art, I’ve found an oddity like this mixed in from time to time. Some have been completely destroyed, some have been burned. Of them all, only one had ever been restored again.”
Though Lina was unaware that having this youth relate his personal experiences was not only unparalleled but bordered on the miraculou
s, her eyes sparkled nonetheless.
“Don’t keep me in suspense. What’s the painting of?”
“Nobles rising from their coffins, their hands reaching for the sun.”
The most fruitless of dreams.
Who could’ve painted it, Lina wondered.
Who painted it, who ruined it, who restored it? Could this painting here be another? Did the Nobility really want to be like us?
There were no answers.
Unbeknownst to her, the hem of her skirt had begun to flutter. There was a breeze coming in from somewhere.
“Why did you tell me that, D?” Lina inquired softly. “You say I’m strange, but if so I guess that makes you plain loony. No matter what I ask you, I know you won’t give me an answer, but there’s one thing I’d like to know just the same. When I first met you, mister big bad Vampire Hunter, you were here looking at the paintings, weren’t you? Are you sure you really hate the Nobility?”
D looked back into the darkness.
“I’ve wasted more time than I intended. Time for me to get back to work, so wait outside.”
“Not on your life. Not after coming this far. I’m going with you—it’s as simple as that.”
“You’re on your own if anything happens. I won’t bail you out.”
“No, you’ll save my bacon sure enough. I’m your valued assistant, after all.”
“Hey, don’t fool yourself,” D shot back with agitation. Lina was something of an expert at causing miracles.
“For the time being, kindly tell me what brings you to these ruins, Boss,” she said with a grave face. D heaved a sigh. Once again, it looked like a mere slip of a girl had him right where she wanted him.
“To find out just what happened here ten years ago.”
“Knew it,” Lina said with a heavy-hearted nod. “No matter how you look at it, there’s something strange about us. There’s no way Nobles are walking around in broad daylight. And then there’s the shape Cuore’s in.”
Vampire Hunter D: Raiser of Gales Page 6
