“Asteroid AX2894006 disappeared a millisecond after making contact with the Earth’s surface.’’
Valcua’s ears caught Kima’s floating voice.
“Although 99 percent of the shock wave and atmospheric anomalies were absorbed, I believe a small amount of its influence was unavoidable.”
“The new government in the Capital?” Valcua inquired without any real interest.
“Undoubtedly.”
“In retaliation, we shall burn ten million people alive later.”
“Understood, milord.”
After Kima’s reply, Valcua returned to his bizarre task. He was taking the facilities and equipment that remained in his kingdom, consolidating them, breaking things down, and making them more powerful and dangerous—in order to get rid of D. He didn’t for one second entertain the notion that the handsome assassin might’ve been destroyed by the likes of an asteroid strike.
The force of a sudden and violent gale carried D several miles and then dashed him against the earth. Quickly getting to his feet again, he turned his gaze into the still-blustering wind as a hoarse voice informed him, “We’re two miles to the northeast. Sue and Callas both got blown to hell and back. Braujou’s car probably did, too. So, what do we do now?”
Before it had even finished asking this, D started walking. Right back the way he’d come, to be precise.
His gait suddenly wobbled. Like a rag doll dancing in the breeze, the handsome Hunter fell flat against the ground.
“Did you use up all your strength coming back from the stratosphere? This ain’t good at all,” the hoarse voice said with some impatience. “Wind might be all we can get our hands on. Oh, if only we had some dirt!”
A tiny mouth opened in the palm of his hand, and the wind began whistling into it.
One minute passed. Two minutes.
“This is bad. Your heart’s like ice. At this rate, it’ll be impossible to repair your ravaged lungs—if I really wanted to take the roundabout way, I could do it with wind alone, but that’d take a whole day. What to do, what to do ..
The Hunter’s black raiment fluttered in the wind.
“What’s this?” it cried out in a small voice.
Off to their right—from the southeast—several points of light were approaching.
“Are those mechanized scouts? Oh, this could be trouble.”
And then the sucking sound grew more ferocious—it might’ve actually given the Hunter’s location away. As the glowing points headed straight for D, they seemed to move a little faster.
Something cold pressed against her forehead. Sue opened her eyes.
A familiar face was peering down at her.
“Don’t move.”
“You’re—Seurat?” Sue was so surprised her body tensed, causing her to cry out in agony—or she would’ve, but she stopped. That would’ve required her to use her muscles. She was in pain.
“I’ve been following you ... all along . . . Callas said to ... so I’ve just been watching.”
“Why didn’t the two of you . . .” Sue was going to ask why both of them hadn’t come after her together.
“One of us ... to deal with one objective ... At least, that’s how Callas and I always did it... and still like to do it.”
“I intend to see the grand duke.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“Yeah. I finally get it. I see where I have to go,” Sue said, her eyes agleam. Her excitement was so great she moved her upper body, and then let out a cry of pain.
“You’ve suffered contusions all over your body. It’s quite possible you’ve got internal bleeding. You shouldn’t move for the time being.” “Hurry up and bring me to the grand duke.”
“Wait,” Seurat said, looking down at the girl. They were under the bizarre black tree.
“What is it?” Sue suddenly asked.
“What’s what?”
“Why do you have that sad look in your eyes?”
“They always look that way.”
“No, they don’t. They were different before.”
“They were different?” the giant said, smiling thinly.
He’s got gentle eyes, Sue thought. And that was why she said, “You don’t look like a killer.”
“I wasn’t always one. I wasn’t, and neither was Callas.”
“I heard all about her. But you—”
The giant’s whole body seemed to shake as he shifted his position. Sue had thought he was standing, but his massive form had actually been sitting cross-legged all along.
“Callas told you about herself? In that case, I should probably do the same. Are you prepared to hear a boring tale?”
“Sure.”
The giant brought his huge right hand down by Sue’s face. He was pinching something between his thumb and forefinger.
“Open your mouth.”
“What is that?” Sue asked, her brow crinkling with the sense of foreboding that assailed her.
“Don’t worry; it’s medicine. If you’ve got internal bleeding, this will suck it up. I couldn’t do anything to harm you. You know that, don’t you?”
This was the truth. While he’d been with Sue, this assassin hadn’t raised his voice even once.
Sue opened her mouth. A soft mass went into her throat—just in time for her to swallow it. Suddenly it felt like a long string was in her esophagus, and it was working its way down further.
“Gross—what is this?”
Sue wanted to press her hands against her belly, but she was too scared to do so. Whatever the thing was, it dropped down to her stomach, and then suddenly she couldn’t feel it anymore.
“It’s a kind of bloodsucking bug that’s common in the mountains where I used to live.”
Sue was speechless.
“They enter a creature through its mouth and drink its blood, but in the case of humans they only feed on internal bleeding. Very useful bugs.”
“And if I don’t have internal bleeding?”
“Not to worry. You just have to go to the bathroom to rid yourself of it.”
Sue looked up at the sky and cursed her own body. Suddenly, there was a great throb in the very center of her head. Her field of view faded to black, and then her vision immediately returned.
“How do you feel?” Seurat asked, and when the girl pointed to her head, he nodded. “You had a brain hemorrhage. You’re lucky. It got in there and sucked it up for you.” “Got in there?”
“How the bug manages to do that is one of its trade secrets. It seems that after it dissolves a path through the brain, the bug regenerates it and leaves it the way it was before.”
Sue wanted to ask how it did this, but then she gave up. The giant had said he didn’t know.
“I think it’ll take a while before it’s done sucking everything up. Well, this is how my story goes . ..”
Seurat began his tale. In the distance, lightning flashed.
“A long time ago, people used to call me a mountain man.”
Combing through her memories, Sue said, “I’ve heard of them. That must’ve been a really long time ago, huh?”
“A good five thousand years ago.”
Back then, Seurat had lived in the heavily wooded depths of the mountains with his father. His mother had died young, and unable to endure the cruel elements, his siblings had all died as well.
“It was a hard life. We hunted mountain dragons, stone dogs, death bears, and the like to fill our bellies, stripping them of their hides so we could bring them to the huntsmen or woodcutters about once a year to trade for machetes, rifles, and ammunition—and on and on it went. Sometimes we’d help a lost traveler or bring a huntsman, injured in battle with a serpent tiger, back down to the foot of the mountain. In those days, we got along with humans pretty well.”
One day during the winter of Seurat’s fifth year, a Noble suffering from a bad stab wound wandered into the cavern where the two giants lived. When he asked for their aid they had no reason to drive him away, a
nd using feverbane grass and bloodsucking bugs to treat him, they had him nearly healed after a week.
Unfortunately, a group of human soldiers discovered them. They drove a stake through the Noble’s heart on the spot, and because they’d helped him, Seurat and his father were shot.
“My father died, but I was saved when a cigarette case in my chest pocket stopped the bullet. The Noble had given it to me as a token of thanks for taking care of him. Among the people who pumped bullets into my father and me were a man from the village we’d often helped with his farm work, and a huntsman we’d brought back to his home when he was wounded and couldn’t walk.”
Even though that one bullet had missed his vital spot, the giant still lost one eye and had more than a dozen other bullets and rivets lodged in him. As Seurat lay on the ground unable to move, the fire died out, leaving him to freeze to death in the brutal cold.
But in his dreams a figure appeared, telling him, The Noble you helped was a friend of mine who’d been attacked by humans. I shall give you immortal life. Become my servant and kill the lowly humans.
Seurat thought it was just a dream that had come to him in his comatose state.
“Then, you mean to tell me,” Sue began, turning a look of amazement toward the giant, “you still look just like you did as a child?”
The giant nodded.
“I’ve heard that mountain men age the same way human beings do. That’s just too—”
“Only my appearance is that of a child. I’ve seen far too much,” Seurat said wearily. “Much of life, and much of death. To be honest,
I can’t say I wouldn’t like to go back to the mountains.”
“But you’re with the grand duke now, so you can...” Sue fell silent. He had that look in his eye again—a sad and mournful look. And his gaze was trained on Sue. She got the feeling she was terribly mistaken. And the only one who knew it was the giant in front of her.
“Seurat,” she called out to him, but just then Sue caught a glimpse out of the corner of her eye of a white fog drifting her way.
It can’t be! Actually, it wouldn’t be that strange. The night is her world, after all.
Before the girl had even finished these thoughts, the mist eddied, rippled, and took the form of a woman.
Seurat turned around.
“That’s how we made an entrance in the old days. Do you have a problem with that?” Duchess Miranda asked from a spot not ten feet from him, white fangs poking from her vermilion lips.
Oh, what a turn of events! In Sue’s present state, she found the hand the Noblewoman extended to aid her as loathsome as the misshapen paw of any supernatural beast.
The glowing points were the eyes of four beautiful women. Each wore a gorgeous dress as they surrounded D with the graceful movements of seraphim. A flush instantly rose in their paraffin-pale faces.
“How handsome ...”
“Who knew there was such a man in this world?”
“It was worth leaving the castle for the first time in five millennia.”
“We’ll drain you dry.”
The four of them looked at each other. Each was a raven-haired beauty beyond compare. But in the presence of D, they looked like hags.
“Who shall start?”
“The first of us to be made, naturally.”
“In that case, that would be me,” one of them said.
“In that case, that would be me,” said another.
“In that case, that would be me,” the third and fourth said in concert.
“Then—”
“—we shall do it together.”
The four figures descended on D from all sides.
Was his left hand just going to ignore them?
All four of the beauties were sucked into D’s body at exactly the same time.
II
Seurat got to his feet. The impression he normally gave was one of simple calm, but the unearthly air that radiated from his gigantic form now kept Sue from calling out to restrain him. She knew
nothing she could say would make any difference. His opponent was Duchess Miranda—and he knew better than anyone how merciless the Nobility were with their foes.
“Valcua’s seven—are you the last?” Miranda asked, licking her lips. “You needn’t say a word now. You shall learn there is a Noble greater than Valcua when you die.”
The wind whistled against her face as Seurat’s club ripped through the air. The shadowy figure took to the sky.
Sue instinctively looked up. With the moon’s corona glowing around the duchess like a light she herself radiated, the beauteous woman wore a funeral shroud that was an even starker white. Watching her absentmindedly, Sue lay down like a slain Noble, while Seurat waved his club as if to break the Noblewoman’s gaze.
Like a flower petal dancing on a wind sent by an angry season, Duchess Miranda sailed through the air to suddenly stand on the giant’s shoulder. Seurat flailed his arms and twisted his body, but he couldn’t knock her off. Miranda reached out with both hands, her fists gobbling up Seurat’s hair as if they were alive, and then she tugged from side to side as if she gripped a pair of reins. She was like an accomplished rider breaking a wild bronco—but it became clear this rider was too rough with the reins as she relentlessly jerked his hair on one side and then the other, making Seurat’s features contort with agony. What’s more, a kind of ichor filled the air, raining down on Sue’s face: blood, gushing from the roots of his hair.
He was one of Valcua’s seven, an assassin among assassins, yet he seemed powerless against one of his master’s fellow Nobles, with no opportunity to use his strange power to make things vanish. A moment later, the duchess’s pale hands took two bunches of the giant’s hair and tore them out by the roots. Dark blood covered the giant’s head as he cradled it, writhing and screaming. When his back hit the ground she was on his shoulder, when his shoulder turned she shifted to his chest, and as Duchess Miranda relocated effortlessly, a glittering thread
hung from her lips—saliva. The elegant beauty was now completely famished.
Her right hand struck the nape of Seurat’s neck, at which point his body pitched backward and stopped moving. This Noble must’ve had incredible power to do such a thing to the same man who’d once fought off D. Her eyes giving off a red glow, her fangs gnashing, even her nails extending like the claws of a beast, the seductress grabbed the giant’s remaining hair and yanked his head back. She could definitely make out the blue vein running through the nape of his neck. Letting out an inhuman howl of joy, the woman bit into the base of the giant’s throat.
At that instant, a scream to split the heavens rang out. It streamed across the sky like a comet, coming back to earth some fifteen feet away.
“Wh—when did you learn to do that?” the Noblewoman snarled, her wide-open eyes bloodshot with madness, fear, and despair. “I can’t allow you to live—even if I’ve sworn a blood oath, I can’t let you survive with that knowledge. Little girl, from this moment forward I, Duchess Miranda, am your true foe!”
Shouted curses of a sort that threatened to drive her mad reverberated in Sue’s brain as she covered her face with her hands, but aside from that the girl didn’t move. Suddenly the shouts sounded a million miles away, and the form of the duchess seemed to become a blur, and then Sue saw a white mist moving off to the west. It was quite some time afterward that she managed to pull her arms apart. Of course, Sue didn’t realize that when she’d shielded her face out of surpassing fear, her arms had formed a cross.
When the girl had stepped between the two of them, she had shielded Seurat behind her, and she now walked over to the giant and told him, “Hold on.”
But by this point his body had already begun to quake violently.
From nowhere in particular, what sounded like weeping had begun to drift through the area. But it then became a sound that would make an impressionable young girl blush and cover her ears, even if she couldn’t help but lift her hands a little to listen—moans of ecstasy. Fe
verishly twisting around each other like invisible flames, the moans quickly became the unmistakable sounds of women panting.
“Wonderful. . . No, this is so intense ... I feel like I’m going to melt away!"
“Oh ... I’m losing my mind ... Going mad ... I don’t want your blood ... Just take me .. . all the way!”
“Who .. . who in the world ... made a man like this?”
“Help . . . Someone, help me ... I can’t take ... any more ... If he were to kill me ... I wouldn’t even mind it..
All the voices came from within the prone form of D. With all the lust and rapture they conveyed, the speakers must’ve wanted to die.
Like evils freed from Pandora’s box, four pale figures floated into the sky. Three of these resembled white ghosts wrapped in something like black hair as they fell to the ground and moved no more. One remained. But the raven-haired woman’s face and body were halfmelted, and she trailed strings of mucus in vomitous hues as she madly tried to get closer to D.
“How horrible . . . Up until five thousand years ago ... we were the Succubus Squad ... feared by demon and monster alike ... free to drink the blood and seed of the lowly humans when we pleased ... but to be done in like this ... by an unconscious man, in a sleep like death...”
As she murmured this, the woman was the one who sounded like a corpse. From the waist down she’d dissolved completely, yet she was still hell bent on clinging to D, thanks to a vindictiveness that ran in the marrow of her bones—or perhaps it was because of
something her body felt that made her mouth open and close like that of a fish between incessant cries of D’s name. Her left eye dangled from the optic nerve, her nose caved in, her lips split. . . but the expression that remained on her face was the heart-wrenching joy of a woman going to the man she loved. Literally melting away in body and soul, this woman wanted nothing more than to be with D.
“My three companions . . . are dead ... I alone remain . . . You are all mine . . . The least you can do ... is take me to heaven ... with you ..
When she reached D’s chest, the woman looked down and caught her breath. Her face turned up again. Every tooth in her mouth had become a fang. As she was just about to go for D’s windpipe, a stark flash angled up to the woman’s throat. Her remaining eye flew up high, along with the rest of her head, catching a view of bright blood shooting out from the stump of her neck.
Tyrant's Stars: Parts Three and Four Page 18
