D maintained his silence.
Smith looked away.
“You used explosives to kill them all?” asked D. True to his nature, the young man said nothing about the brutality or cruelty of the action.
“They resisted arrest. Fortunately, we were able to take this Noble into custody without injury.” The new Smith showed them pearly teeth. Black cylinders hung from the belt around his waist. Hand grenades. “We’ll take charge of him and escort him back to the Capital. Okay, on your way, now.”
“I’ll bring him there,” D said softly.
Smith’s mouth dropped open. Eyes narrowing to bug-like specks, he asked, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” His manner of speech had changed completely.
The lawman raised his right hand. It was unclear whether or not D knew that the men on the slopes brought their guns to bear in unison, but the Hunter said, “A patrol’s duties don’t include transporting Nobles. It’s quite a distance to the Capital. Do you intend to abandon your mission so you can go there?”
“Why, that’s . . .”
. . . None of your damn business, Smith thought, but he swallowed the rest of those words. This young fella—he’s got such a look in his eyes. You can see all the fires of hell in them! The only things that beautiful are angels, or else . . .
Blinking repeatedly, he tested the firmness of the ground beneath his boots, then continued, “That’s the orders we got from the Capital.”
“What did the orders say?”
That really was none of his business. However, Smith didn’t fight him. “Actually—”
Silence fell.
The hoarse voice was heard to say, “Pulled a switch, eh?”
At that instant, the spell was broken. Either that, or the men were purposely set free.
“Kill him!”
The second Smith shouted, he felt a burning-hot sensation pierce his chest. His feet dangled in the air.
The six-and-a-half-foot giant still impaled on his sword, D flipped around on his horse’s back, piercing the first man he encountered through the chest as well and easily lifting him off the ground.
A heartbeat later, the man’s back caught a hail of bullets from either side. Twitching madly in his death throes, the man expired. Smith’s body shook, too—he’d been struck by bullets that went clean through the other man. Using others as a shield. Two of them, at that, and impaled on his sword. There was no way to describe D’s strategy except callous, if not impossibly cruel.
As Smith jerked backward, taking one bullet after another as they passed through the first man, D looked at him. At his rictus. Its look of infinite hatred was trained on D.
“We have to make a break for it . . . but you’re not doing that. You idiot,” the Nobleman cried, “you’ll die here, too!”
“Go on ahead,” D replied. “I’ll follow along later. If I can, that is. You’d do well to wait for me.”
The baron didn’t know what to say to that.
“Besides me, there’s probably a lot of other people after you. Good luck.”
D’s left hand went for one of the grenades on Smith’s belt. When he pulled the pin out of it, Smith’s muddied eyes filled with incredible horror.
The shooting had stopped. The men on the rocky slopes had begun shifting into spots that would offer a clear shot at D.
“Stop . . . Are you trying . . . to blow me to bits?”
“Oh, looks like we’ve got a follower of the plains faith here,” the left hand said, sounding intrigued. “In which case, he believes he can’t move on to the next stage of existence if his body is left in more than ten pieces. I can see where that’d get him worked up.”
“Please, don’t do this . . . You can cut off my head . . . tear me limb from limb, even. Just . . . don’t blow me to pieces . . . Please . . .”
“Get on,” D ordered.
The baron had taken cover behind a rock a short distance away, but he dashed over and hopped up on the steed behind D.
The pin was out of the grenade. The striker inside it would hit the percussion cap and ignite the fuse. D had also activated the grenades on the corpse behind Smith.
A bullet whizzed by just above his head. It came from the side. Apparently his foes had successfully repositioned themselves.
D’s right hand went into action. He made a swipe of his sword—or rather, made the short, flicking movement of throwing a knife—and the impaled corpses slammed against the rocky hills to either side. Right in the middle of the men. By the time they’d realized his intent, his cyborg horse had broken into a gallop.
There was only the slightest difference in the timing of the explosions. As dirt and chunks of rock rained down, D raced through them. The baron, who had his arm wrapped around the Hunter’s waist, continued to wail.
Once the road was clear of the rocky slopes, D halted his cyborg horse and looked back. Rough piles of stone from the embankments blocked the road, while the rumbling of the earth echoed far behind the rubble.
“So, you killed them all?” the baron murmured in a dumbstruck tone. “You’re a bloodthirsty one, too, aren’t you? It’s a degenerate world we live in. Hey, what are you doing?”
D had wheeled his steed around and was now approaching a rocky slope. The reason soon became apparent. There was an opening between the ground and one of the massive crags. And a figure was trying to crawl out of it.
Getting down off his horse, D stood in front of the man. It was the first Smith. His face was strangely pale. At the toe of D’s boots, he stopped moving. His bloodied body seemed to suddenly shrink.
“I’m begging you,” he groaned at D’s feet. “Get that Noble . . . to the . . . circuit court . . . Make him pay . . . for his sins . . .”
“What are you talking about?” shouted the baron, who’d come up behind D. “That was seven thousand years ago! The statute of limitations has already run out.”
“Crimes . . . have no . . . expiration date . . .”
When Smith said that, bright blood spilled from his mouth. On seeing the unbelievable quantity that soaked the ground, the baron swallowed expectantly.
Smith’s face turned upward. His eyes met D’s. “I need you to do this . . . D.” His voice was clear.
Smith’s head dropped, and he moved no more.
“My fee will be paid by the court?” D asked, and then he said, “I see.”
“Hey!” cried the baron, recoiling.
“Mount up,” D said, pointing to the cyborg horse.
“You don’t seriously intend to let one of your own kind be put on trial by humans, do you?”
D’s firm lips broke for a moment. The expression one of your own kind had drawn a wry grin from him. “Well, it’s a job.”
“What do you mean? He’d already croaked. All that business about your fee, you came up with on your own.”
“That’s one interpretation, I guess.”
The baron was about to leap away when a stark flash of light zipped out. His Achilles tendon severed, the Nobleman fell to the ground and writhed in pain.
“You’ll be good as new in five minutes.” Looking down at the blubbering “one of his own kind,” D gave a toss of his chin to the cyborg horse.
—
Once darkness had fallen, the cyborg horse picked up speed.
“Indeed, you really can’t fight your blood, can you?” the baron jeered. D ignored him, but the Nobleman continued, undaunted. “Night rather than day—this is best for every course of action. But one thing has amazed me. You don’t sleep by day, so when do you rest? The average dhampir could never manage this. You really must be his—”
There he shut his mouth and gave a grunt of admiration.
“He never gives that mouth a rest, does he?” whispered the fist that gripped the reins. “What do you say to strangling him before we get to Zappara?”
“What are you mumbling about?” the baron snapped. “Talking to yourself is one of the warning signs of madness. Talk to me. No, you needn’t t
alk at all. I’ll tell you about the Sacred Ancestor. Okay, first of all, he stands six and a half feet tall—what’s that?”
Whatever the baron had perceived, D, too, sensed it. Two pairs of eyes pierced the darkness ahead.
“Why, it’s a kid.”
A small figure seated by the side of the road had come into view. It was a boy around ten years old. Though he wore a shirt and pants so filthy the dirt was evident even at night, there was a certain determined look to his features. When the riders had closed to within ten yards of him, the boy noticed them and got to his feet, then jogged over to them.
“Please, help!” he cried, looking up at them.
The cyborg horse went right past him. Even a boy seeking help in the darkness of night was nothing to D.
The boy followed after them. Even through the darkness, the desperation of his expression was clear.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” the baron called out to him. Not because he was concerned. He was merely curious.
“We were on our way to the Capital to work when my sister went missing somewhere around here. Please help me find her!”
“Oh, my, that is quite a predicament you’re in. Hey, D, aren’t you going to help him out?”
Of course, the Nobleman didn’t mean what he said. And knowing that, D rode on in silence.
“Oh, I feel sorry for you. Poor little kid! This fellow here, you see, doesn’t care a whit whether anyone else lives or dies. So sad. Farewell!”
There was no one there to reprimand the baron as he cackled and waved goodbye, but suddenly a female scream was heard, drawing a little shriek from the Nobleman. The scream didn’t come from the forest. It came from above.
D’s right hand shot up. A single glint of reflected moonlight zipped up in the air.
Gasping, the baron turned around, and at that instant, not ten feet up ahead, a girl landed on the ground with an unpleasant thud.
After a brief silence, the stunned boy said, “Sis?” and broke into a run.
“What in the—”
The baron never got the chance to finish that rhetorical question.
D’s left hand reached over his head. A silver arc shot up into the moonlight.
An indescribable cry shook the night air: a scream of agony. His second wooden needle hadn’t missed its mark. As the cries of its victim’s pained convulsions echoed, the baron heard the clamor dwindling in the distance.
“You did it! It’s gone. Won’t be showing itself again, eh?” the baron chortled. His expression soon grew deadly serious. “But, I say, I had no idea such strange monstrosities had proliferated while I slumbered. How rude. What in the—”
As the Nobleman was grumbling, D had gotten down off the horse. He walked over to the two children without making a sound.
The boy had already run over to the girl. Truly a child of the Frontier, he didn’t grab and shake his sister, but rather merely called to her. “Sis, what’s wrong? It wasn’t supposed to be this way. You’ve gotta be strong, and get up!”
The girl lay there utterly motionless, like a doll, as black-gloved hands reached out and lifted her up. The boy’s eyes might have caught the bizarre thing in D’s left hand as the five fingers spread. The girl was dressed in a filthy shirt and shorts just like the boy, and D ran his hand over her head, neck, chest, hips, legs, and toes before saying, “She’s alive.”
He wasn’t addressing the boy. He’d merely confirmed it for himself. Nonetheless, the boy’s eyes gleamed with wonder.
“Really? But she fell so far—”
“No internal or external injuries. Was she being protected?”
“By what?” The boy’s wide eyes gazed at D, then immediately shifted to the skies above.
“Tonight, we’ll just let her sleep through the night,” D said, then told the baron up on the horse, “We’ll take a break until morning.”
“Oh, now this is interesting. You seem so stalwart, but you’re really quite a soft man. Have a weakness for kids’ tears, do you?”
“Amen to that,” the hoarse voice agreed.
“That thing was a ‘human taker’ made by the Nobility. It evolved further on its own,” D said.
“What are you getting at? I don’t recall ever making anything as disgusting as that,” the baron protested.
“In your time, human takers were already in use. I’ve heard every last Noble worked on coming up with machines to abduct humans. It’s not all that surprising there’s something like that around.”
—
III
—
The group went into the depths of the forest—back to the clearing where the boy and his sister had made their camp. The wreckage of a wagon and a cyborg horse lay there.
Turning in the direction in which the creature had vanished, the Hunter said, “We’re dealing with one of the Nobility’s machines here. It may come back.” Facing the boy, he then asked, “Do you want to hire me?”
Without even a moment’s thought, the boy nodded. “But—what’ll I do for money?” he asked, turning his eyes toward the ground.
“How much do you have?”
“I’ve got fifty dalen, and my sister’s got about two dalas.”
There were a hundred dalen to one dala.
The boy raised his face. He shouted, “But if you take it all, we’ll—”
“You’ll earn more. It beats dying, doesn’t it?”
The boy had nothing to say to that.
“You’ve got ice water in your veins,” the baron said, snorting in utter contempt.
“Sure does,” a voice said to him, causing him to look all around once again. The baron seemed rather dim.
Ultimately, the boy agreed. He was more concerned about his sister, now wrapped in a sleeping bag D had provided, than in arguing about money.
“I’m D,” the Hunter told his employer.
Smiling, the boy said, “I’m Piron. My sister’s Leda.”
Watching them with a gloomy look in his eye, the baron remarked condescendingly, “Isn’t this a heartwarming reconciliation. But, D, were these ‘human takers’ really as prevalent as you say they were? I don’t know anything about them!”
“Where were you back in those days?”
“Where else would I be? I spent three hundred and sixty-five days a year focused on research, never setting foot outside my castle. Why, in those days, I once went a record three years without sleep or rest. And of the times I holed up in my castle, the longest was for a period of three centuries. Ha, ha, ha!” After about ten seconds of boastful laughter, he noticed that D didn’t seem impressed. “But my goal was a lofty one. I can’t imagine any other Nobles ever undertaking anything similar. What did they use those things for?”
“Sport.”
“Why’d your voice change all of a sudden? Are you a master of mimicry or something?”
“Your fellow Nobility took the captured humans and transformed them into various creatures. Humans combined with lions, humans with fire dragons, humans with snakes—they made every last thing your moldering brains could imagine. And if that wasn’t enough for them, your kind performed vivisections on men and women, young and old, just to pass the time.”
“What stupidity!” the baron spat. In a doleful tone he continued, “There’s no more interesting research specimen in all the world than human beings. You say they used them as the basis for chimera, or chopped them to pieces like dolls? The idiots! He was right about them all along.”
“He?” D said softly, looking at the diminutive figure.
“That’s right. Him. He said the Nobility were not long for this world. And he was exactly right. Who needs the damned Nobility?”
“Do you really feel that way?”
“Stop changing your voice back and forth, would you? Do you make a hobby of spooking old people, you creep?”
“Are you serious?” D asked, a quiet light in his eyes.
The baron suddenly grew flustered, saying, “I sure am. I’m all the Nobility this world
needs. The rest of them are just in the way, so let ’em turn to dust. The next time we run across a Noble’s grave, I’ll tear the thing apart! Let ’em have a baptism of sunlight,” he cackled.
The people he cursed were his own kind. The flames of the campfire threw shadows on his round face and bald head that were exceedingly disturbing. Looking as if he were about to cry, the boy—Piron—inched closer to D.
“He’s sick, that one is,” the hoarse voice whispered.
“Where are you from?” D asked. Piron was his employer. A certain amount of conversation was required.
“The village of Kibiaji. About four months back, our mother and father died in an accident, so Sis and I were going to the Capital to work.”
“Do you know anyone there?”
“We heard our mother had a much older sister there.”
“Oh, you poor little things,” the cackling baron said, a disagreeable grin rising on his face. “How would you like to be part of my experiments? I guarantee your older sister will be taken care of for life.”
Something whizzed by his nose.
“Oww!”
Jumping to his feet, the baron clutched the end of his nose, the blood seeping between his fingers lent a crimson hue by the flames.
As D sheathed his blade with a clink, the boy stared at him in amazement. Apparently he’d thought D and the baron were compatriots.
“I have to warn you: he’s a Noble,” the hoarse voice said.
Eyes bulging, the boy looked at the baron and D. There were the two of them, plus that hoarse voice. It came as little surprise he was confused.
“I’m a Hunter. I’m taking this Noble to Zappara. There should be scheduled flights to the Capital from there. You can catch one of those.”
Nodding, the boy said, “That Noble is a bad guy, isn’t he?”
“Yes, from the human point of view.”
“Is the Noble point of view any different?”
“That’s a good question.”
“Don’t the Nobility have any bad guys?”
Record of the Blood Battle Page 9
