The voice stopped there for a moment. It had to calm itself from its agitated state. Soon it continued, “Not you. You don’t measure up to Gilzen yet. The only thing in our favor is that your power increases day by day, but still you’re only a match for what he was ten thousand years ago. You can’t compare to what he is now. You can’t fight him!”
“My job is to rescue survivors, locate the cargo they carried—and dispose of its contents.”
“And that’s why I’m telling you not right now. You’ll get your chance, guaranteed. You just have to bide your time.”
“His castle was on this mountain. The aircraft crash-landed here. That’s no coincidence. A tremendous will is working toward Gilzen’s revival. If he gets into his castle, it’ll be the end of the world.”
“A land of endless night, you mean? But . . .”
“I’m going.”
Before he’d even spoken, D was in motion. The instant he stepped from the fuselage, gusting snow enveloped him, but since the aircraft itself was riddled with holes it wasn’t much of a change.
“Where are we headed?”
“To search for his castle. It should be up there.”
“What about the others? Oh, that’s right, you said they’d be better off not going. Took all that into consideration when you left them behind, didn’t you? But I didn’t think Gilzen would come into this.”
As if to say all that would depend on their fate, D headed forward without even a glance back at the rocky ridge. The rock shelf snaked along the mountainside.
“Looks like the poor crew was out of luck,” the hoarse voice said. Its tone wasn’t exactly maudlin. Luck was luck—nothing to get emotional about there. “There were some bloodstains, but nothing that they couldn’t survive. No doubt Gilzen carried ’em off when he got out of his coffin. With some repairs, the bird might fly again. They weren’t quite as lucky as it was.”
After following the line of the mountain for fifty yards from the aircraft, D halted. The rock shelf abruptly ended there. His beautiful, if not glowing, visage looked up at a rockface that was nearly vertical. Though enough to daunt the average person or even a professional climber, the mountainside didn’t seem a serious obstacle to this young man. The only reason he looked up was to determine the most direct route for his ascent, and less than five seconds later D was reaching for a protrusion from the rockface with one hand. Gliding up the wall of rock like a heavenly reptile, the figure seemed to take the blustering wind and snow like a lovely serenade to his beauty.
“He comes, the one from earlier,” a wrinkled, withered old voice said. Though the voice seemed to be that of an old man, the face and form that rose from the faint gloom were those of a crone. Dressed in what appeared to be dozens of layers of cloth, each stitched together from multicolored scraps, she resembled the sort of vagabond women that could often be found in Frontier villages. But she didn’t have a vagabond’s eyes. Or a vagabond’s nose. Or even a vagabond’s mouth. All of these features she lacked. The face crowned with hair that frizzed out like broken springs had nothing save a single blood-red eyeball set in the middle of it.
“What do you make of this?” a different voice inquired.
Darkness loomed by the crone’s side. And not in the sense of a person merely dressed in black. The square room was split down the middle, with the old woman in the light half and the other half filled with darkness. Where the crone was, white held sway. Here and there were glimpses of a lustrous sheen in what seemed to be an unusually cramped room, but then behind the crone it seemed to go on forever—spreading to the very ends of the earth, as it were—and before long the lustrous things that’d seemed to prove how tight the quarters were had changed their positions, so that the space bounding the old woman looked to be infinite. Where was this place? And who was it that lurked in the darkness?
“He is a fearsome opponent,” the crone replied. Her gray complexion turned paler still. “At present, his highness the duke is stronger, but even this old woman can’t say if such will be the case tomorrow.”
“Do you mean to say he might become something greater than me?”
There was no reply.
“Before being interred in the cold, dark earth, I heard something. A success had been born to him, they said. I think this one can be none other than that success. The shot that one got off—that worthless piece of lead shook me with bone-breaking force.” The voice halted. When it rang out again, it held an unexpected feeling— remorse. “I’m afraid I must ask you to die again after all, Sunya.”
“As you wish,” the crone replied joyously, bowing. Tears glistened in her eye. “Ten thousand years ago I lost this life along with you, milord, but I was raised sooner than any other. That is enough to satisfy this old woman. To perish once more is nothing to me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why should you apologize to the likes of me? Tell that to every last living thing as they all meet their ends by your hand. That, an eternal curse on an entire planet, should be sung of you, and you shall be showered with praise from the hereafter.”
Her voice rose and dipped, a paean of interchanging gentleness and fervor.
The crone didn’t wait for the nothingness that would follow. From garments that resembled an accumulation of resplendent trash there appeared an arm like a withered tree. In her fist she gripped a slender dagger. Her other hand appeared, joining the first, and the crone used them to plunge the dagger into her own heart. A second later her body exploded into a hundred billion drops of blood. The fog of blood eddied.
At that point an arm appeared from the depths of the darkness. Sheathed in a long glove, it was stained with blood up to its black sleeve, but it held what looked for all the world like a single stone key. Extending the key into empty space, it was instantly shrouded in vermilion gauze.
“A baptism of blood, so that the castle may be restored.”
The words came in the voice of the crone.
As if in response, from somewhere that could’ve been either quite distant or very close, there resounded a strident clank of hard objects meshing together.
II
A bit of the twilight yet remained.
The villagers of Mungs couldn’t get through the day without drink, and with the strange group that’d called on the village the previous night as their grist they were taking their cups in the one privately owned barroom and the hotel bar when shouts unexpectedly rang out. As if chased by monsters, everyone in both places raced out into the street, where a girl stood, pointing and murmuring like a lunatic. “The castle . . . There’s a light in a window of the castle . . .”
Following the fingertip that trembled with surpassing terror, what should the villagers see—
–
“What’s that sound?” Standing before a half-pitched tent, Vera pricked up her ears. Vibrations seemed to be rising beneath her feet—a rumbling in the earth.
“There’s going to be an avalanche! D and the aircraft are in danger.”
Before Crey had finished shouting, everyone turned their eyes to the peak soaring behind the ridge.
“What’s that?” Lourié murmured in dumbfounded surprise.
“The mountain’s changing!”
–
An intense jolt hit D’s body. It was so fierce it seemed it would shake the flesh from his bones, but it didn’t stop the Hunter. Chunks of rock came free, striking D’s shoulder and hat as they fell. More than a couple of times the protrusion he was clinging to broke off. Each time, his feet halted his fall.
After a drop of over fifty yards, his left hand squeaked, “You lucky bastard. Just once I’d like to see what’d happen to you if you fell a thousand yards and slammed into the ground.”
Before long, D reached the summit. An ordinary pinnacle of rock challenged the sky. That was all there was.
“Forget the castle; there ain’t signs of so much as a tent up here.”
D turned the palm of his grumbling hand downward.
“Huh?” A little cry of surprise rang out.
What D had seen had vanished without a trace. The rock shelf now jutted out much farther, forming a gigantic crucible of boiling lava that was spreading in all directions.
“So, rock gives birth to rock?”
The hoarse voice’s muttering stopped when it saw objects rising from the lava. Muddy walls and iron beams swiftly took shape, fitting together to form chambers large and small. All were cast from the red molten rock—or rather, from the iron it contained. Both the pipes that dripped hot slag as they carried molten metal and the colossal ladles that scooped the necessary amount of iron from the crucible for other forms of transport caught the breeze of cooling fans formed from melted iron, swiftly cooling and taking final shape.
“This is an incredible system. Looks like he intends to build his home from scratch, starting with the smelting of the raw materials!”
Before the voice had finished speaking, the rock that loomed before D split. Though D covered himself with the hem of his coat, he was still blown back thirty feet, and as he flew, he saw the flaming iron beams tower higher, the cords wrap together, the tubes fit one into another, and the parabolic antenna of an interstellar communication system take shape.
“All of this must be powered by anti-energy. How will he make an antiproton reactor? Molding all the circuits, getting and refining the raw materials—what a pain in the ass!”
The hoarse voice, sounding almost casual, streamed into the air. D, without anything to grab hold of, was going straight down—falling toward the world of molten metal below, where the work continued.
“So, what are you gonna do?”
“If I burn up, can you bring me back?”
“Hmm. That’d probably be worth a shot. In the past, there was a Noble who fell into the mouth of a volcano, but then, you’re not quite like him.”
“What became of that Nobleman?”
“He didn’t return to normal.”
Heat buffeted D’s face. He was less than five seconds from a swirling morass of fiery steel heated to tens of thousands of degrees.
Three seconds.
Two seconds.
One.
–
“Did you see that just now?” shouted a man peering through a telescope in the village lookout tower.
The villager next to him didn’t even have time to finish asking, “See what?”
“There’s a rock shelf around the fifteen-hundred-yard point. It’s turning into a castle up there. I saw a person fall down into it. But just as they were about to go splat, they sprouted wings!”
“You’re out of your mind!” the man beside him spat condescendingly, but the man with the telescope just leaned forward, using his free hand to wipe the perspiration from his brow. It was cold sweat.
“It was just like they turned into this huge, pitch-black bat or something. When I was a tyke, I heard about that from my granny time and again. Real Nobles can turn into bats, she used to say. That was a genuine Noble.”
–
The Hunter made a soundless landing on top of a partitioning wall. Bluish smoke began to rise from the soles of his boots. The wall was still burning.
One of the hundreds of enormous, red-hot cranes carried a burning iron plate. Leaping without a sound, D landed on top of it. A black shadow loomed over his head, and then the snowstorm stopped. The ceiling had been completed. It covered an area that was clearly even vaster than what D had looked down upon. Already several hundred floors’ worth of corridors had begun snaking out in all directions.
When an iron beam made contact with a nearby floor, D jumped for it. He’d just barely make it—the jump was about fifty yards. There was even a handrail. His left hand reached out. But not far enough.
His right hand flashed into action. Striking in the same motion, the blade bit into the handrail. All D had to do was put some strength into his right arm, and he was over the rail. The spot where his sword and the handrail met was tinged with crimson.
“A beam cannon?”
Even before the hoarse voice asked that question, the figure in black tilted deeply, dropping down once again like a bird of unearthly beauty—falling this time into a bottomless abyss. Again, the hem of his coat flared out. He dropped quickly, like a stone—and landed like the snow, seemingly without weight or sound.
White smoke and flames spouted from the chest of D’s coat. During the fall, he’d been blasted with lasers. Crimson flashes streamed in front of D and behind him, to his right and to his left. Walls and pipes were vaporized, reduced to ions and nothingness.
D was standing on a passageway that jutted from a stone wall. The Nobility preferred classical materials and architecture to ultramodern styling.
“Hurry up. Once you’re inside—”
D had broken into a dash before he even heard the hoarse voice. Running fifty yards in less than two seconds, he charged through a black entranceway. One shake of his body was enough to extinguish the flames that burned on his back and waist. The laser blasts had been ferocious. His dash had put out most of the flames, and the shake took care of the last remnants.
“You were shot in fourteen places. Forget humans; even a major Nobleman would need four or five days of complete bed rest after that, on account of how the cells get burned right out. I’m surprised you could still run.”
It was unclear what D made of that voice as his feet pounded down the stone pathway, racing around a seventh corner before halting. Unlike the path he was on, the stone walls ahead were undulating.
“From here on, it’s incomplete,” said D. “Give me an analogical inference of this castle’s layout.”
A moment later, the hoarse voice replied, “You’re a regular slave driver. If I do that, my brain will be fried for two or three days!”
“If your head needs cooling off, I can do it anytime.”
There was another silence. And then, the voice said, “Ooooooh. Did you just tell a joke? Well, I can die now without any regrets!”
Squeezing his left hand tight once to choke out the disagreeable voice, D turned down a corridor where the walls rippled like waves.
By “analogical inference,” he meant that he wanted his left hand to come to a precise conclusion from insufficient data and commit it to memory. Because this overtaxed part of the brain, reaching an incorrect conclusion could leave a person broken and useless. Once the castle was complete, data relating to it would have to be taken from the master computer, but the defensive systems surrounding it would undoubtedly be fully operational. The quickest way to get that data would be to read it from an as-yet-uncompleted area, like drawing a blood sample from a vein, so to speak. And it was necessary to do so before its defensive armaments were fully installed.
Bending down in the rippling corridor, D extended his left hand toward the floor. Five seconds passed—then ten.
“Good enough!” The words escaped weakly from his left hand.
D stood up.
“My head’s burning . . . Can’t take anymore . . .”
The Hunter said to his groaning left hand, “Do you know what room Gilzen would occupy?” His voice was cold, showing not the slightest concern for anyone else’s circumstances.
“More or . . . less . . .”
“I need that, and the central control room. First, to the former.”
D turned around.
Countless figures were barreling around the corner.
“So, has the castle’s security finally risen again?” the left hand murmured unconcernedly.
At the fore were a number of guards in rough armor who carried rifles. Purple streaks of light stretched from them. Particle beams. Though the beams flew straight, you could hardly say the shooters’ aim was true.
D charged like a black cyclone through the enemy fire. Naked steel flashed out. And helmeted heads sailed through the air. It was a horribly comical tableau.
III
With the first four slain, the rest of the men backed away am
id much chatter. The words that reached D’s ears were strange.
“Oh, how odd. That’s the language of the ancient Crystal Palace. Now, this is a Noble who’s on par with the Sacred Ancestor.”
What the hoarse voice was driving at was this: the Sacred Ancestor—holding by far the highest position in the ancient Noble society—and the Elders that were the next rank had relaxed in a city of darkness, stillness, and ice at the world’s northern extreme while laying plans to rule the earth. These people had conversed in a special language unknown not only to humans, but to all save those who dwelled in the Crystal Palace. This was the language of the Crystal Palace, at times taken as the word of God bestowing praise and prosperity, and at other times abhorred as the devil’s edicts commanding ruin and death. It was also said that the retainers of the chosen ones who gathered at the Crystal Palace spoke a rudimentary version of that tongue.
“Don’t kill ’em all. Leave one alive so we can ask where Gilzen—”
As he listened to the hoarse voice, D headed back down the corridor he’d just taken. Spears assailed him from three directions. The men who held them wore smiles of delight on their lips.
D displayed ungodly speed in his movements. Split-second timing allowed him to slip between two spears aimed at his chest and abdomen, while a third stopped in the grip of his left hand, with the Hunter sliding up the weapon’s shaft as his right hand reached over his shoulder. Though he was poised to slash in a diagonal fashion, his blade limned a horizontal semicircle that mowed through the torsos of the men. Their upper halves tumbled off in whichever direction the impetus of each dictated, scattering fresh blood and entrails as they rolled across the floor.
Vampire Hunter D Volume 22 Page 10
