He stood still in defeat.
“Messed up, didn’t you?"
Seurat looked to the right. A form in a crimson, hooded robe stood among the interwoven trees. The figure sounded vaguely like an old woman, but neither its face nor its hands could be seen.
“I am Kima—an instrument of the grand duke’s power,” the crimson figure said. “The load you bear is too heavy for you to bring the rest of the way. So I have orders to assist you.”
The giant didn’t know how to respond to this.
“I won’t act directly. I’m here strictly in a support capacity for you. You should keep that in mind. Now, as to the car you’re after—I’ve arranged so that Count Braujou won’t make it back to the fortress. Once you’ve thought of a way to slay him, you may pursue him at your leisure.”
He sensed someone entering the room. It was probably Sue. Matthew opened his eyes. His eyelids didn’t sting as much as they had before.
“My, but you’ve been hurt badly.”
Every inch of the boy stiffened immediately, and not because the hoarse voice reminded him of D’s left hand. Rather, it was due to the malevolence of its mocking tone.
“Who . . . are . . . you?” he managed to squeeze out in a thread-thin voice. Due to the strength of his medicine, his lips wouldn’t move.
“An instrument of the grand duke’s power,” the voice continued. “And my job is to bring you and your sister back to the grand duke’s domain. You see, those initially sent to do this proved unexpectedly inept or else got themselves slain . . . though that does reflect the power of those guarding you. Don’t move, boy. You’ll split your skin open again just when it’s starting to heal. My name is Kima.”
Matthew was at a loss for words.
“I’ve come here to get you, but I won’t force you to go. I’ll just arrange it so you choose to go to the grand duke of your own free will. Oh, you mustn’t get up!”
The old, hoarse voice suddenly became a youthful, buoyant one, and the presence the boy sensed morphed into that of someone else entirely.
“I told you you weren’t supposed to move. You’re such a handful.” “Is that you . . . Sue?”
“Yes, it is. Okay, now roll over onto your side.”
With the girl pushing against his shoulder, Matthew’s hand hit the hard floor.
“Wasn’t there . .. someone else ... in here . .. just now?”
“Not a soul. But now that you mention it, when I first came in, for a second I thought I saw something red—but it was only my imagination.”
Life on the Frontier was hard. People couldn’t be bothered to worry about the harmless visions or dreams that evil spirits or mirage beasts made them have.
“Medicine time—I’ll change your dressings.”
Sue’s ministrations were warm and personal. Removing his bandages, she wiped away the old ointment with gauze before carefully sponging his body off with warm water.
“You’ve gotten a lot better. It’ll be fine for you to talk now. I suppose it might be okay for you to walk around, too.”
“This is your house, isn’t it?” Matthew asked, his mouth finally free again.
“It sure is.”
“You sure it’s okay for me to stay here and everything?”
“I’m all alone anyway. Don’t worry about it.”
“And people in the village—they won’t say anything about it?” “Never mind about them,” she replied, sounding somewhat peeved. “That shouldn’t concern you. I’ll be sleeping on the sofa anyway. Don’t try anything funny.”
Applying new ointment, she wound the bandages around him again, but this time he only needed them on his chest and part of his back.
“Okay, that should do it!” she told Matthew.
“Thank you—but I’ve got to leave.”
Sue’s eyes went wide, and she said, “Excuse me?”
“I don’t wanna impose on you any more than I already have, and I have a little sister to get back to. I’ve gotta get back to her as fast as I can. I’m sorry, but could you loan me some food and a horse?
I promise I’ll get them back to you later.”
“You don’t have to give them back to me,” Sue said. The terribly grave expression she wore stunned Matthew. “But in return, you have to take me with you wherever it is you’re headed.”
“Why’s that?”
“Tomorrow, my husband’s coming back.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I was already planning on leaving, but then when I saw you, I had a change of heart. I thought I’d show you to him and tell him what a good man I’d got myself.”
“Just a second now—”
“Relax,” Sue told him with a laugh. “On further consideration, that didn’t seem like such a smart thing to do. Besides, my husband’s big and he likes to hit things. When he went off to the Capital to do some sightseeing, the whole village got together and petitioned the sheriff’s bureau, and they ended up throwing him in jail there.” “So, this husband of yours—what does he do?”
“He’s a Fire Dragon Hunter.”
Matthew was speechless.
There were various kinds of Hunters. Those who excelled at fighting vicious monstrosities had to have great skill, and they were assured both fame and fortune. The general consensus was that after Vampire Hunters, Fire Dragon Hunters occupied the next rung on the ladder.
Fire dragons weren’t merely creatures that could spit fire from their mouths. With flames that turned their bodies scalding hot, the creatures could run at speeds in excess of thirty miles an hour as they burned a mountain clear of trees or dried up a small lake in ten seconds’ time. In recent years, an area that was referred to as their “graveyard” had been discovered deep in the mountains. It was said there were surprisingly few bones, but instead large holes beyond number gaping in the ground. The holes were said to be all that was left when fire dragons approaching death used the last of their strength to turn themselves red hot and bury themselves deep in the earth. One theory had it that the holes ran all the way to the planet’s core, and that’s why there were so many volcanoes in that region.
Naturally, the Fire Dragon Hunters who tackled these supernatural creatures possessed sharp minds and powerful bodies, but more than a few of them also visited black-market doctors in the Capital to have their bodies mechanically augmented—to be turned into cyborgs. When they were done with work they ran wild at local watering holes, frequently getting into fights, causing bloodshed, and even murdering people. The chances of finding a moderate and sensible individual among men of that temperament were about as good as those of locating a given leaf in the middle of a forest.
You could say that Sue’s husband was the epitome of his profession. Every time he came back to the village he got into brawls with other men and caused major fights by making passes at other people’s wives and daughters, and those villagers that he beat half to death streamed out of the community. They’d made the petition to the Capital when the village was no longer able to put up with him. And now he was coming back. His heart would be boiling with rage directed toward his wife and the villagers.
“Men from the village are prepared to go out and fight him off, but he’s more than half cyborg parts. Sure, the Capital’s sheriff’s office was able to take him into custody, but out here, it’d be like striking a brick wall with spitballs. Let’s hit the road.”
“Yeah, I guess that’ll work,” Matthew replied, but the situation had changed so drastically that his response was halfhearted. If she was going to ask him to run off with her, why’d she say anything
about introducing him to her husband? There were too many things about this young woman that Matthew couldn’t fathom.
“I didn’t think you’d recover from your burns so fast, but it looks like you’re gonna be all right. I suppose the first thing he’ll do is come right out here to kill me. Well, let’s take off.”
“You—you mean right now?”
“Of course. I
said he’s coming back tomorrow. That means we should go tonight. We could stay here, but folks in the village know you’re staying at my house. There’s no telling what they might say.”
“Hey, you’re threatening me!”
“It’s not like I’ve got much choice. What’s it gonna be?”
“We’ll go.” There was no way he’d give any other answer.
Less than an hour later, a pair of figures on cyborg horses hastily fled the slumbering village.
The Frontier by night was an unholy world. They carried weapons for that reason, and Matthew gripped a flamethrower with hands that still bothered him. The tank of oil was on his back.
Once they reached the highway that ran out of town, Matthew learned that all Sue’s work had been for nothing. When he told her the location of the fortress, Sue said, “That’d be this way,” and pointed to one end of the white ribbon of a road, but then she suddenly froze. Matthew followed her finger, and then he too was left immobilized.
By the light of the moon, a figure on a cyborg horse was slowly approaching.
“Your husband?”
“Yeah,” Sue replied absent-mindedly. Riding up beside the boy, she leaned over and told him, “As soon as he comes into range, blast him.”
“But that’s—”
“Do you wanna die? It’s kill or be killed!”
How he wished the other Sue were here.
The horse stopped. The figure on its back raised one hand to eye level. Matthew noticed he wore a heavy helm and goggles. From the neck down he was covered in armor. Cold sweat ran down the boy’s cheeks.
“Over there—is that Sue I see?” the man said, his voice rolling through the night air like a wild and heavy howl. “Your darling hubby has returned. You had some nerve letting me stay locked up in that hole all those years.”
“I don’t wanna hear it,” Sue shot back. “They should’ve kept a savage like you in the Capital for the rest of your life. Don’t you get it? This here is my new fella. And unlike you, he’s really nice. Why’d you bother dragging your sorry ass back here? Why don’t you run back to prison?”
“You little bitch!”
Matthew saw the man’s right hand sweep out. There was easily thirty feet between them. Did he have a rifle?
The wind whistled. Something long and thin uncoiled in the man’s hand—but Matthew only realized this when the flamethrower tucked in his belt had been knocked away.
“Is that—a whip?”
“It sure is,” the man snickered. “It’s made of a special steel that can pull the legs out from under a fire dragon or wrap around its neck to choke the life from it. It’ll rip your head right off your shoulders.”
“Make a break for it, Sue!” the boy shouted as he wheeled his horse around to the right. The forest lay there dark and deep. He gave a frantic kick to his mount’s sides.
Right by Matthew’s ear, a shot rang out. It was a heavy sound that numbed his eardrum—the blast of a shotgun.
The man’s cyborg horse slumped forward.
“Into the forest!” Sue cried out, wheeling her own steed around. Purplish smoke spilled from the shotgun in her right hand. The barrels had been sawed off so it could be used to deal with multiple opponents at close range. Each shell held twenty balls of shot.
The dozens of yards between them and the forest would be hell.
Looking back, the boy shouted, “He’s not chasing us!”
“He’s coming, all right!”
At the woman’s unexpected reply, Matthew followed her gaze. As Sue rode alongside him, her eyes were riveted to her left and below—trained on the ground that lay between the two of them. Matthew’s own eyes bulged in their sockets. Something like a snake was rushing through the grass. A whip. The steel whip had come after them.
Suddenly it leaped up toward Sue. A blast from the shotgun struck the earth, snapping the whip off. The way it writhed on the ground, it seemed to be in pain as it fell further and further behind them.
“You did it!”
“Did what?”
Matthew was about to tell her she’d snapped off the whip, but at that moment a black shape loomed over them on the right. The instant they passed beneath it, a thud followed after them. It was the trunk of a weir pine twice as big as a man could get his arms around.
“How in the—”
“There’ll be more—break right!”
Jerking the reins, he found the world shaken by a titanic specimen of solitude oak.
“What the hell is doing this?” Matthew asked, his tone nearly a scream.
“My husband’s whip. He told you it could strangle a damn fire dragon! To keep him safely out of range, it can stretch three quarters of a mile.”
“Holy—” Matthew screamed. A figure with red eyes leaped up from the ground in front of him. A second later, it was blown back with the sound of a gunshot and fell to earth.
Without a second’s pause, another tree fell toward them. Running on and on, pursued relentlessly, the next thing the two of them knew, they were flying out of the forest.
Abruptly, their horses pitched forward. The riders hit the ground head first—or they should have, but they narrowly managed to fall safely, since both were accomplished riders thanks to their lives on the Frontier. Still, they got banged around enough to leave even their brains numbed.
“Damn!”
“Ow!”
When they looked up, a giant of an armored man stood before them.
“This is—right back where we started!”
As Matthew stared in amazement, the man replied with delight in a vulgar tone, “Right you are. My whip chased you in a big circle through the forest. You can’t get away.”
The whip cracked in the man’s right hand. It appeared to be only ten feet long, and Matthew found it hard to believe it’d stretched over a thousand yards in pursuit of them.
“Oh, I was just kidding earlier,” Sue said, on her knees but moving in front of Matthew as if to shield him. “This guy’s just some traveler. Since he said he was in a hurry to leave the village, I brought him out here.”
“For a traveler, you ain’t got a hell of a lot of baggage, boy,” the man said. Apparently his words were going through a speaker in his helm, because his voice was somewhat muffled. “Well, no problem. I came back here with the intent of killing everyone in the village. One or two more isn’t going to make any great difference.”
“Don’t do this.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take this boy’s head off with one shot. But it ain’t gonna be like that with you. I’ll take a hand, then cut off a foot, and kill you by inches. Now get out of the way.”
“No, I won’t!”
The air whistled around Matthew’s throat and the boy reeled back without saying a word. The man’s whip had maneuvered around Sue to coil about Matthew’s neck.
On seeing Matthew’s face turn blue, Sue leaped at her husband like a maniac and slammed her right fist into his face. His helmet was a special metal alloy that could ward off million-degree flames for a few seconds. Rewarded only with a dull thud, Sue doubled over and nursed her fist. And with that, her fruitless battle was at an end.
An impressive crash came from the ground, and on turning her pain-wracked face in its direction, Sue gasped.
Her husband had fallen.
“H—how?” she mumbled, while behind her Matthew coughed. He’d been freed from the whip’s constraints.
Walking unsteadily over to her husband’s head, Sue opened the latch on his mask.
“He’s dead.” She’d intended to shout the words, but her fear had crushed them down into a whisper.
Her husband’s face had turned ash gray, and it was withered and covered with countless wrinkles.
“He—he’s a damned mummy! How’d this happen?”
Despite her shock, she was still a woman of the Frontier. The way she ran her fingers over the face of her husband, who looked like someone who had died a hundred years ago, was remarkable. She e
ven opened his eyelids and checked his pupils.
“I can’t believe it. It’s true—my husband died a long time ago.”
“But..Matthew stammered, kneading his bruised throat while he slowly made his way over. “I mean, I saw him move, heard him speak—”
“He was under a spell. He must have been dead for years. But to have his revenge . . . Hold on. Why’d he keel over right when he had us where he wanted us?”
“I don’t know. At any rate, we’re safe now. You can go back to your village—I’ll go on alone.” “Just a minute—you think you’re leaving me here?” Sue said accusingly.
“It’s for the best. I’m in your debt.”
As Matthew started to back away, Sue hooked her arm around his and glared at him. “I’m not saying you have to spend the rest of your life with me. All I want is to get out of this village and go somewhere else. We’ll go together part of the way. You know, I didn’t want to bring this up, but I did save you.”
Matthew gazed at Sue’s face. She didn’t know that the Sue he saw gradually became someone else.
“That’s not right,” Matthew muttered, sounding terribly wounded.
To that, Sue could only reply, “What?”
“That’s not how it was, Sue. I kept you safe. From the day you were born right up till now. Yet you’re trying to get away from me.”
Powerful fingers sank into the throat of the Sue -who -was-not-Sue.
“Letting yourself be tempted by that Vampire Hunter from God knows where, of all people! What kind of position does that leave me in? I can’t let you do that, Sue. I absolutely cannot let that happen.”
His voice trembled. Matthew’s shoulders and arms shook, too, and Sue’s body quaked. At the same time Matthew’s trembling ceased, the body fell face up on the highway. It was several seconds before Matthew noticed that it was the same woman who’d saved him.
“Sue?”
After desperately clinging to the person to whom he owed his life, shaking her as if trying to start a fight, then giving up, only to go back to shaking her again, he heard a hoarse voice say to him, “You don’t know when to give up, do you?”
Tyrant's Stars: Parts Three and Four Page 7
