“Ahhhhh! ” the boy shrieked, trying desperately to get up again, but the pain in his tailbone wouldn’t allow it.
D looked at Matthew blankly. In that dazed but radiant expression, something stirred. The iron rod went up.
Matthew shrieked again.
Rod still raised, the man with D’s face walked forward.
“It would seem he’s not our foe,” Count Braujou said, and though his muscles relaxed as he gazed at the approaching figure, the glint in his eye made it clear he hadn’t dropped his guard.
This strange D fearlessly advanced to about six feet from the count before halting.
“Who are you?” the count inquired. Though the tip of his spear rested against the ground, he had power and speed enough to raise it in a heartbeat and impale his foe if the need arose.
After some time, the man replied, “D.”
“No, you’re not. Your face may look exactly like his, but your build’s different. However, the fact that you can duplicate his beauty so precisely makes you a most intriguing man. What’s your connection to Valcua?”
The man said nothing.
“What in the—” the count exclaimed, suddenly raising his spear.
D’s face had changed unexpectedly.
An impact with a force that seemed like it would knock the earth from its axis startled the count. The man had parried the blow with his iron rod. And the face that grinned back at Braujou was that of Valcua himself.
“You—you freak!” the count exclaimed, swinging his spear around.
Still in the same stance as when he’d parried, Valcua Two was thrown high into the air by the Nobleman’s monstrous strength. He was powerless to stop Braujou’s spear from sinking deep into his flesh. The body that thudded to the ground was like a tiny insect struck down with an enormous stake. As he writhed on the ground, the spear also thrashed about wildly, whistling through the wind.
The sight was so grisly Matthew had to shut his eyes, while the count laughed, “That’s a strange power you have, but while you’re wearing Valcua’s face, I can’t allow you to live. I’ll send you to the next life ahead of your master, so you can arrange a welcome party for him in hell if you like.”
He looked at the man thrashing on the ground. And the man was looking at the count.
“What’s this?” This time, it was a cry of unadulterated surprise that flew from the count’s mouth. “Valcua’s face, D’s face—and now that of the Sacred Ancestor?”
So great was the count’s astonishment, he didn’t even turn when he heard someone say, “Incredible, isn’t it, Braujou?”
When he finally did turn his gaze down the road the man had appeared on, he found a figure in a golden robe that glittered in the darkness. Every inch of the count’s body readied for battle. Finally, he said, “Valcua! The real one, I take it.”
“I needn’t ask, Braujou, but I assume that as you’ve entered my domain, you’re prepared to meet your fate.”
With this remark, the golden robe flew up as his right hand raised Glencalibur, the longsword’s gilded blade glistening in the moonlight.
And in response—a hint of turbulence stirred in Count Braujou’s expression. His long spear was thrashing back and forth against the ground.
“Go ahead and get it, Braujou,” Valcua said with a toss of his chin at the writhing figure. “But be careful. That man—”
Not listening to the rest, Count Braujou dashed over for his long spear. He reached for the shaft, but at that moment the spear disappeared, being driven instead through the giant’s heart and out his back.
“Gaaaaah!” the count howled in unearthly agony.
“I told you to be careful,” Valcua said to him with a smirk.
“Bastard! You lousy bastard!”
Spitting up blood, Count Braujou grabbed the spear with both hands. Though it was his own spear, the Nobleman couldn’t make it move an inch for all his prodigious strength. The reason was simple: another powerful hand gripped the shaft of the spear: the hand of the other Valcua.
No, look. There beneath the moon, the man’s features shifted as if by some magical trick of that mysterious light—his face changing from Valcua’s to D’s, and from D’s to another man’s.
Forgetting his pain, Braujou stared intently at the visage.
“Why .. . why ... are you here ... milord?”
Little by little, a hue of incredible terror had begun to stew in the count’s eyes.
“It can’t be . .. Those other two .. . They couldn’t be ...”
Regardless of what the count might’ve suspected, he didn’t get a chance to say it aloud. A golden god descended from the heavens— or so it appeared to Matthew. Leaping up to be framed against the moon, the Ultimate Noble brought his blade down on the gigantic Count Braujou, slicing from the right side of his neck clean through the left side of his torso in one stroke!
Amazingly, as his upper body started to slide apart, Braujou used his massive arms to pull the pieces back into place.
“Outstanding,” Valcua said as he drew his longsword back. Would the coup de grace be a thrust or—
Just then, a figure in a white dress floated down from the sky, accompanied by a seductive laugh. It was a woman of otherworldly beauty. She stood before them like a fairy, balanced on the blade of Valcua’s sword.
“Long time no see, Grand Duke Valcua,” she said, an alluring smile on her face.
“Why, if it isn’t Duchess Miranda! How nice of you to deliver yourself to me like this.”
“I wonder if even the Ultimate Noble is a match for the combined might of Braujou and me.”
Grinning at the bewitching beauty, Valcua replied, “We shall see—now.”
At that moment, Matthew saw the blade of the sword rise and fall ever so slightly.
Losing her footing, Miranda fell, her body straddling the blade as she did. As she landed, a vermilion line zipped through the duchess from the groin to the top of her head. Blood gushed from that line the instant Glencalibur was through her head.
“This can’t be . ..” the lovely woman said, staggering.
“Wounds from Glencalibur don’t close, no matter how great your molecular regeneration might be,” Valcua sneered.
As she started to split down the middle, Miranda wrapped her arms around herself. Braujou had been sliced through at an angle, and now the seductress had been split in two—such was the might possessed by the Ultimate Noble.
“How good of you to gather here in the valley for me today. I offer you my thanks... with this longsword!”
Once again he drew back his blade. He intended to impale both of them on it at the same time. However, something stopped him. Someone had grabbed the hilt of his magic sword.
Turning around, he said, “D.”
Letting go of Glencalibur, the Ultimate Noble reached into his robe as he leaped ten feet away. What he sent flying like a shooting star was a blade over a foot and a half in length. A split second before it pierced the silvery chest, it was batted down by an iron rod.
While Valcua could tell Braujou and Miranda were getting away, he couldn’t pursue them.
“So, your power is a match for mine and D’s, is it? I wonder what the other you would do now?”
The grand duke raised his right hand. The sky was torn open as blue lightning scored a direct hit on the man with D’s face. Ions and nothingness filled the air.
The two Nobles had already fled to the entrance of the valley.
White smoke and flames engulfed the man.
“Come," Valcua said to Matthew—who’d been left behind— grabbing him by the arm and pulling him closer before raising his right arm once more. He swung it down again in a forceful, powerful gesture.
“Ahhhhh!” Matthew screamed, his cry swallowed by movements of incredible mass.
The mountains themselves were shifting—mountains of steel. Mountains that rose more than three thousand feet above sea level were slamming into each other. The man who wore D’s face was
between them, as were Valcua and Matthew. The collision unleashed a wave of destruction to which the shock waves from the asteroid missile couldn’t begin to compare. Winds pelted the plain and surged into the sky, shifting the clouds and obscuring the moon’s corona. Far across the plain, remnants of the shock wave seemed to travel endlessly.
When the rumble finally grew thin, the mountains moved once again, returning to their original locations. The valley they’d
crushed between them returned to silence in the moonlight as if nothing had happened, with no trace of the mysterious stranger or the Ultimate Noble to be found.
CHAPTER 5
I
As soon as Valcua and Matthew returned to the castle, Kima rushed over to them.
“Lock this rascal up,” Valcua said, handing Matthew over to his subordinate. “Were you watching?”
“Yes, I saw it all.”
“Do you think he’s dead?”
Kima didn’t reply.
“Would you care to bet me that he still lives?”
“Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be much of a wager.”
Valcua recalled what the man who wore D’s face had left behind: a hole carved into the steel mountain range. It’d been less than ten feet deep, but that would be more than sufficient to weather a collision between the two mountains.
Giving orders that no effort was to be spared in the search for him, Valcua left, while Kima brought Matthew to a subterranean dungeon, threw him into a solitary cell, and left again. Although it was “solitary,” the cell was no smaller than the average room and was enclosed by invisible walls. The boy’s vital signs were monitored continuously. There was no sign of any guards.
Walking stealthily, Kima headed for the master monitoring center. Since he’d been there until Valcua’s return to the castle, it would be
more accurate to say he went back to the center. There was almost no machinery in the spacious control room—the main computer controlled everything. Where the actual computer was located was a mystery, and it only recognized commands given by Valcua or Kima.
Filled with a misty fog, the room was reminiscent of the charnel houses of ancient times. In antiquated fashion, the room had towering stone posts in lieu of machinery, a vaulted ceiling, old-fashioned stone steps, and a bed that called to mind nothing save a gravestone—and on that bed, Callas lay on her back. She was no longer breathing.
Whisking the fog away from her, Kima stared at the dead woman’s lovely features.
“You only had a short time left, but you did well. It’s my turn next.
I shall see you in the next world, if the fates allow.”
He looked straight ahead. Milky fog eddied, clouding his field of view. The master monitoring center lay in its depths.
The fog wasn’t really fog. It was the substance that filled the universe—the ether. It was said to be imprinted with records of the entire universe, spanning the past, present, and future. Even the science of the Nobility hadn’t been able to decipher those records, and history contained the names of only a few individuals who could read what was written there. They included Nostradamus, Abramelin, Paracelsus, and Swedenborg. The Sacred Ancestor was also on that list. One theory held that it was after reading the record one night that the Sacred Ancestor began his mysterious experiments. The “akashic record” was the general term given to the great ether that recorded all of creation.
After sacrificing the last of Callas’s life and now adding his own, what was Kima trying to read in the ether?
“Open the door to the vault,” he ordered.
Somewhere there was the creak of hinges that resembled a protracted scream. The milky whiteness crushed in around Kima. No matter how dense the super alloy used to contain it, the ether always seeped through it like some kind of ghostly matter.
“Was bringing him back to life the right thing to do? And what is he? I shall travel as far as my ability allows, Lord Valcua!” And then, after a pause, Kima added, “And Lord D!”
“Cold night, isn’t it?” the hoarse voice said.
Naturally the wind couldn’t find its way into this building, but the left hand seemed to know the weather anyway.
“They could change the temperature with one press of a button. I’ll never understand how the Nobility think.”
Being the living dead, vampires were generally unaffected by the surrounding climate, yet they seemed to prefer the same range of temperatures as ordinary people. In other words, they favored warmth over cold. That they nevertheless left outside temperatures the way they had always been could only be attributed to some odd complex involving the living.
“When that little girl wakes up, she’s gonna try and get to Valcua. She’s still under that brainwashing.” Catching a breath, the left hand continued, “That shock wave earlier—it was like one mountain banging into another. Leave it to a Noble medical facility to stand up to that.”
Though the massive shock wave of unknown origin had shattered the outer walls of the hospital and broken windows, everything had been repaired in five seconds’ time. The repair system was nearly flawless.
“That explosion of power could’ve come from Valcua, but the only ones who’d drive him to do something like that are Braujou and Miranda. Well, I guess there’s one other. Valcua was probably fighting you.’’
“I wonder whether he won or lost,” D said as he peered into the darkness beyond the window.
“Oh, it’s not like you to get curious like that. Whichever it was, the smartest thing to do when Sue wakes up would be to get away from Valcua as fast as we can.”
After her treatment was finished, Sue had gone to sleep in one of the recovery rooms. Losing Seurat had come as a great shock to her.
Quickly stepping away from the window, D walked toward the door. He was in a large hall.
“Hey! Where are you—” the left hand started to ask, but then it suddenly said, “Is he here?”
D went into the center of the hall. Moonlight speared through the skylight, turning the darkness within as bright as day.
Opening the door from the front hall, the man in silver entered. Before the two faces of D, even the moonlight seemed to grow bashful.
The man slowly walked toward D. When he was fifteen feet away, his gait became unsteady. Falling forward hard, he made a thud that echoed through the hall.
“Don’t kill him! He might have information we—” the left hand blurted out. It had noticed that as D walked over to the fallen man, his right hand was going for his scabbard.
A cold and fierce will to kill crushed down on the figure on the floor. This young man wasn’t one to show mercy to a fallen foe.
The man suddenly lifted his face.
D halted.
It was neither Valcua’s nor D’s.
“D,” the man said, using both arms to lift his upper body from the floor.
“Well, I’ll be—” the left hand said before breaking off.
The world underwent a transformation. It was as if it had become a place for pious prayer.
“Do you remember me?” the man asked.
The unearthly air that gushed from every inch of D put his earlier will to kill to shame.
“You and I must—”
D kicked off the ground hard. Powerless to stop him, the man took a deadly blow from the Hunter.
“Remarkable,” the man said. “But that time still flows in a place beyond your reach. You should continue your journey, D.”
The casual manner in which the man got to his feet and walked away would’ve calmed the ire of rougher men.
“I’ve said it before, but you were my only success.”
As the figure strode past, D swung his sword at him once more, but the blade went right through his opponent as if he were made of water, and the man kept on walking without stopping.
“Knock it off,” the left hand told the Hunter.
The man staggered, but just the same he headed for the elevator in the hall.
“Enou
gh with the attacks already,” the left hand said.
Sword still in hand, D followed the man as he walked away.
Once they’d boarded the elevator, the man commanded, “Down.”
About two seconds later the door opened. They were greeted by a space filled with objects reminiscent of purple crystals. The place was swimming in white light.
“This was my research facility,” the man said. “Not even Valcua knows this is here. We’re thirty miles underground—and not below the hospital.”
The purple objects did not take the shape of crystals. Like the boulders in the valley or the equipment in Valcua’s laboratory, they came in various geometric shapes.
Standing in the center of the room, the man raised his right hand.
The various shapes took on unstable forms and began spinning slowly. They produced no sound or even a breeze. However, D could sense that what might be described as an endless power blanketing the whole world had quietly been set in motion.
“A trillion—no, ten quadrillion joules... No, even more ... With that much power, you could create a whole person!” the left hand exclaimed, seeming elated. “It stopped . . . More than a hundred quadrillion. But what’s he trying to do that he’d need to store up that much juice?”
It was impossible for any living creature to contain such an enormous amount of energy. In fact, it would be impossible to store it in any form in this world. All of it must’ve been kept in another dimension or some other place outside real space.
Something like a pedestal rose from the floor by the man’s feet. On top of it was what appeared to be a purple lever.
Taking a step back, the man looked at D and said, “Pull it. That will be enough to drain all the power from Valcua’s domain.”
“Can I ask why?” D said softly. Though his eerie aura had dissipated, it went without saying he could call upon swordplay that would leave gods and demons paralyzed if the situation warranted it.
In the light, the man said, “Don’t you see? This territory doesn’t belong to Valcua. It’s mine. It, and the rest of the world. Valcua has taken his lust for power too far. Dispose of him, D.”
“To suit your purpose?”
Tyrant's Stars: Parts Three and Four Page 21
