At the Foot of the White Mountain
chapter 1
I
Whiteness dominated their entire field of view. Moreover, they were being madly tossed by seemingly impossible turbulence, which had left the aircraft groaning for the last thirty minutes.
“This is bad! If we don’t lose some altitude, she’ll never hold together!” the pilot said, taking the cheap cigarette he’d long since smoked down to the filter and crushing it against the floor before grabbing the yoke again.
Suddenly, the door behind him opened. The pilot clucked his tongue. Leave it to the most worthless guy he knew to show up at absolutely the worst time. Of course, there was no one else riding with them besides the guy in the coffin. The man had just stepped through the doorway when the aircraft lurched wildly to the right. More than the screams of the pest clinging to the door, it was the creaking coming from the aircraft’s panels that concerned the pilot.
“Hold on tight. I’m taking her into a dive!” the pilot shouted without bothering to turn around. He rapidly pushed the yoke farther and farther forward.
“Wh-wh-wh-what the hell is going on?” the pest asked, his teeth chattering.
“Damned if I know,” the pilot replied while desperately working the yoke. Half of his remark was him trying to put a scare into the man, but the other half was serious. It was too late to escape the turbulence, the aircraft’s screams were telling him. “Well, if we’re lucky we’ll pull a crash landing in the mountains, but if we’re out of luck we’ll break apart in midair. Hell, this crate wasn’t built for flying this time of year.”
“And you were paid a good sum on account of that. You’re in no position to complain about it now. You knew that before you took off.”
“Yeah, whatever. You’re right about that, egghead. But us fliers are a superstitious lot. We’re carrying that coffin—and if we go down, I’m blaming it on what’s inside it.”
“That alone will be saved!” the spindly pest—the archaeologist Geeson—shouted angrily. He was so determined, it moved the pilot for a moment. “Any researcher of Nobility on the planet would give their life or soul for a look at what’s inside. I don’t care if we end up smashed to pieces—we’ve got to get it safely to the Capital.”
“In that case, why didn’t you use the highways?” the pilot shot back. He focused his attention on the stark scene outside his windows, but he immediately turned back to the aged archaeologist. He’d felt a weird presence. Some part of the aircraft was groaning horribly—the panels that always worried him.
The face of the gray-haired and gray-bearded archaeologist in his midfifties had become a rictus.
“Why . . .” the man began in a voice like a specter. “Why . . . did you ask?”
“Huh?”
In front of the wide-eyed pilot, the scrawny, crane-like face cocked at an angle.
“Why . . . did you ask . . . such a thing? Oh, I hadn’t given it any thought . . . but now I’m forced . . . to answer . . . what shouldn’t be said.”
The man’s voice was joined by the brief sound of a signal. A radar warning.
The pilot turned his eyes forward again in regret. From the far reaches of that world of white, an even whiter shape was approaching. A mountain.
Given our location, that’d have to be Mount Shilla, wouldn’t it? he thought. Fuck! I’m not doing any damned emergency landing. I’d rather cut my heart out right now than try to survive up on that mountain.
Setting the fuel pumps to their maximum output, he focused his attention on the radar screen.
Altitude: thirty thousand feet—damn it, we’ve dropped too much. Gotta pull it back up soon.
As he shouted at the pest to get out of there, he heard the man cry out, “At first . . . it was my intent . . . to transport it via the Ghost Highway . . . But . . . there wasn’t time for that . . . No, that’s not right . . . Someone . . . ordered me . . . to go by air.”
The yoke wouldn’t move. Part of the problem was mechanical—the other part was that the pilot’s hands were frozen, so unsettled was he by the egghead’s tone.
“Who was it?”
In the distance, he heard a hard, rattling sound. The body of the aircraft told him they were losing altitude with ever-increasing speed, even without him touching the controls.
“Flaps down. Maintain oil pressure. Pulling her nose up.”
His words overlapped with another hard clank.
“The chains . . . are off,” the archaeologist said behind him, his hoarse voice trembling.
“So, what am I supposed to do about it? Damn it, grab hold of something! You’ll get tossed in the air!”
Bam! A terrific change in air pressure hit them head-on. The diving aircraft started leveling out.
“This can’t be . . . How could the chains come off?” the archaeologist said in a crumpled little tone. The sudden g-forces he’d experienced had left his body sore. Yet his voice carried a different fear.
In the pilot’s field of view, the fuel gauge lit up.
“Shit, it’s at zero. Did we have a leak? We had plenty of fuel a minute ago! We’re in trouble. Okay,” he told the archaeologist, “we’re making an emergency landing. Get back there and buckle into your seat!”
“I don’t want to!” the archaeologist shouted. “The chains have been cut. He’s awakened! Oh, I wish I’d never discovered those ruins. I positively refuse to go back there!”
“You idiot—in that case, hold on tight. Secure yourself to something. We’re going in nose first!” the pilot shouted, and then he felt his whole body freeze.
There was no reply.
He turned around.
The archaeologist’s back was just disappearing through the doorway.
“Where are you going?” he shouted after turning forward again.
“I’m going back.”
“What?” the pilot said, his ears barely catching the words. “Huh? What’s that? You’re being called? Hey, pull yourself—”
He didn’t have time enough for the final “together.” His field of vision had been filled with white. The side of the mountain! The instant the pilot realized what he was seeing, his body was jolted by a terrific impact.
–
“—And that’s why you’re here. We had radio communication from the pilot who crashed into Mount Shilla four days ago—just once, at the time of the crash, and then we lost contact. He’s probably dead by now.”
A man with a spectacular beard that came down into two points opened a desk drawer and pulled out a white cloth sack.
“Here’s thirty thousand dalas. Half is from us in the village of Mungs; the other half was fronted by them.”
The Hunter’s dark eyes shifted, capturing an old man in a suit and bow tie seated beside the man with the forked beard. The old man’s expression quickly melted into one of rapture—he’d essentially been out of his mind since looking into those dark eyes. About a half hour earlier, he’d introduced himself to the young man in black before him as Federico Marquis, director of the Frontier Ruins Excavation Department of the Noble Research Foundation, which was headquartered in the Capital.
“It’s a sizable expenditure for an impoverished foundation like our own, but the item that aircraft was carrying is irreplaceable. We ask that you somehow bring it back in one piece.”
“Let’s hear what this item is,” said the owner of those dark eyes—a young man in a long, black coat—speaking at last. Aside from giving his name at the beginning, it was the only thing he’d said.
“I must request that you refrain from asking that. It’s of the utmost secrecy. I’m unable to divulge that information to anyone.”
The figure in the black coat stood up. He inten
ded to leave. Yet the way it looked like he was coming at them instead had to have something to do with his Noble blood. And in a strange way, both men unconsciously welcomed his approach.
“Please, wait,” Marquis called out to him. “I beg of you. Can’t you just do it without knowing?”
Though there was no wind, the hem of the Hunter’s coat flared out.
“Oh, very well—I’ll tell you!”
Still the young man in black continued to walk away.
The voice pursued him, saying, “The aircraft’s cargo was—”
A different voice shot him down. “That’ll do.”
It was unclear what the young man in black made of the girl who stood in the doorway. The other two saw a girl in her teens dressed in a stunning poncho embroidered with silver and gold threads. She wore gold boots that came up a foot past her knees, and a knife was tucked neatly into one of them. Her gracefully curved longsword adorned her back, just as the black-clad man’s did. The blue eyes set in what could be described as a beautiful and pure visage spoke volumes about the girl’s true nature. So deep, so hard, so thoroughly nihilistic—she could only be a Hunter.
In a low but definitely female voice she spelled it out, saying, “Pleasure to make your acquaintance. I’m Lilia. I’m a Hunter.”
Her boots clacked loudly as she walked past the young man in black to stand in front of the desk.
“You’re the mayor and the archaeologist, I take it. Well, you’d be better off hiring me instead of some guy who’s going to sweat every little detail.”
Displeased, the mayor said, “I don’t know what sort of Hunter you are, but we’ve entrusted this matter entirely to that man right there. We were just about to enter formal negotiations. You’d better leave.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said, though her radiant expression didn’t change in the least. In fact, her blue eyes were ablaze with defiance as she continued, “Tell me, Mr. Mayor—what’s the difference between him and me? Sex? Looks? Name? Achievements? Reputation?”
“It’s ability.” The reply came not from the mayor, but from Marquis.
“Really?” An innocent smile spread across the face of the girl, Lilia.
The blood drained from the faces of both the mayor and the archaeologist. They didn’t know why.
“In that case, why don’t we do a little comparison? If it doesn’t work out, I’ll throw in the towel, no problem. How does that strike you?”
Her rosy lips allowed a faint gasp to escape. The figure in black was just going out the door.
“Hey, wait a second—you can’t go now. If I don’t beat you, they’ll never hire me. Wait!”
The mayor and the director saw the girl’s right hand reaching over her shoulder for the longsword. A blue streak split the glow of the gaslight in the mayor’s office. A cry of agony rang out.
II
The mayor and the director craned their necks, looking upward. A heartbeat after that cry, there was a terrific thud at the pair’s feet as an enormous ocher insect landed. The creature’s segmented body resembled a caterpillar’s, but of its six bristle-covered legs, the two nearest its head were shaped like human hands, and each of them clutched something resembling a nearly three-foot-long sword. A pair of weapons were now lodged in the abdomen of the six-and-a-half-foot creature. One of them, a rough wooden needle, came from D. If the other one, an eight-inch-long throwing dart, was one of Lilia’s weapons, she must’ve hurled it with the same speed as D. And judging from the way the weapons formed a V at the single point where their tips met—right in the creature’s heart, most likely—she was just as accurate as D, too.
The mayor and the scholar both let out a scream. Without a second to spare, the two Hunters raised their hands, and the bizarre bugs that fell one after another from the ceiling began twitching in their death throes.
The mayor was left speechless, but in his stead the gray-haired scholar said, “Those look just like the western Frontier’s—”
“That’s right. They’re gladiator bugs,” Lilia replied. “Recent weather anomalies and frequent geological shifts have caused changes in the home ranges of some creatures. This must be one of them. Usually they make their nests up in attics, so we’ll have to watch out.”
As she enthusiastically explained the situation, two more of the insects flew down right in front of her. These came down differently. They weren’t wounded. Standing erect on their lowest pair of legs, they pointed the swords they held in their hands at the two Hunters.
Gladiator bugs—as the name suggested, these insects used real swords. Needless to say, they weren’t a product of the natural world. Nobles in the western Frontier had created them for their own amusement, monsters born in their laboratories to do battle with human slaves. After the fall of the Nobles’ civilization, most of them were exterminated, but it was said the less than ten percent that escaped into the Frontier gave rise to the hundreds of thousands that now lived there. As specialists in combat, the Nobles had input formidable swordsmanship skill into the bugs’ brains.
Slashing down from a high position, the blades locked together, and Lilia’s expression became one of mild surprise. One of the swords made a horizontal slash at her abdomen. As Lilia leapt back, about four inches of her coat were torn open.
“Not too shabby,” she said, her voice faltering.
The body of the insect that lunged at her from an angle to her right then pitched forward wildly. A heartbeat later her blade slipped into the crease beneath its head, removing that segment neatly from the insect’s body.
Quickly shifting her eyes from the twitching bug to D behind her, Lilia pursed her lips in apparent dismay, saying, “What’s this?”
D was just sheathing his blade. At his feet lay an insect that’d been quartered by horizontal and vertical slashes.
“Quicker than me? You’re good, stud,” Lilia said, jabbing D’s shoulder with the longsword she held. “Sorry, but I need you to draw again. We need more than bugs to settle this once and for all.”
“Perhaps this little business has changed his mind. Why don’t we negotiate?”
D turned his back to them and headed for the door.
“Just a—” Lilia caught herself. Once D had left and the door had closed, she said to no one in particular, “Great. I picked a fight with him when I shouldn’t have, and now I regret it. He cut that bug down without moving an inch from where he started.”
–
“Um, excuse me!”
Hearing the voice of the woman chasing them, the hoarse voice from the vicinity of D’s left hip remarked, “It’s her. What are you gonna do?”
“Just let it be.”
“But she sounds all fired up. I don’t think she’ll just let it be. Hell, she’d follow you into the men’s room!”
Ultimately, Lilia caught up to the Hunter where he had his cyborg horse tethered to a hitching post.
“I told you to wait, didn’t I? Didn’t you hear me—partner?”
“Partner?”
The reply caused Lilia’s eyes to go wide with a look of uncertainty. She’d heard two voices. One from D, up in the saddle, and one from his left hand gripping the reins—a hoarse one.
“That’s right. Right after you left, the mayor hired you and me both! Probably had something to do with the way we hacked apart those gladiator bugs, naturally.”
“Unfortunately, I haven’t hired on with anybody.”
Cracking the reins against the cyborg horse’s neck, D started forward on his steed.
As she looked back and forth between where she’d left her own horse and the young man riding away, Lilia said, “Let’s do this. Let’s work together. The mayor told me to get you to stay. That was his first job for me.”
“You’ll get a smaller cut,” the hoarse voice said.
“That’s not a problem. They agreed to thirty thousand dalas each, and not a dala more. But they said if it was just me, the chances of success would decrease, so it’d only be twenty thous
and dalas. That’s why I can’t have you running off anywhere else!”
As Lilia walked alongside the cyborg horse, she seemed to have run out of things to say.
“What was the aircraft carrying, anyway?” the hoarse voice inquired.
“Huh? I haven’t asked yet. I’ve had all I could do just catching up to you.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m leaving,” D said in a voice like exquisite ice. As he made a move to leave the grounds of the mayor’s estate, he appeared emotionless, as if he’d already abandoned them.
“So, you mean to tell me the guy who bothered to ask what it was carrying doesn’t care anymore? Something doesn’t add up here. Stop playing me for a fool!”
Saying nothing, D left. The air seemed to be stirred with shattered ice as it took on a bluish tinge, trying to lend the same hue to the silvery chain of mountain peaks in the distance. The village was surrounded by a mountain range.
Once he’d gone through the gates, Lilia stopped.
“I haven’t given up, you know. I’ll chase you down through the very gates of Satanus’s hell!”
–
On the way down the road back to the village, the hoarse voice said, “Peace and quiet at last, but she’ll be coming again. Not that I have anything against that type. Why, before I wound up like this—well, it was quite a long time ago, but I seem to recall chasing one or two like her.”
“A long time ago?” D said, looking up at the heavens. The moon was out. The moonlight seemed to lend a white glow to his face, but that was because D’s beautiful face radiated a light of its own.
“Yep, a long time ago,” the hoarse voice replied. “But then, what’s a long time? How long have the two of us been alive? And what about you know who? Could you even call what we do or what he does living? What are life and death? I suppose only he can answer that. You know, D, I have to wonder if we aren’t chasing after him to get him to tell us that.”
“Are you tired?” D asked, turning his eyes to the silvery chain of peaks. “If so, I can take you off right here. You can go wherever you like.”
Vampire Hunter D Volume 22 Page 1
