“I don’t know . . . I just thought so . . . I had to obey . . .”
“Obey? Who’d you have to obey?” the smith interrupted.
“I don’t know . . . Just someone . . . important . . .”
“Someone important?” the smith said, glancing at D with an expression of utter confusion on his face. “Damned if I know what you’re talking about. My wife will patch you up in the back room. We’ll have to make do without you.”
“Boss, you think maybe I could lie down for a while, too?” asked the first craftsman he’d reprimanded.
“What are you talking about?!”
“Er, I just thought that . . .”
“That you should? What, did the almighty sun order you to? Or was it someone important in heaven above? Well, I don’t need any of your crazy talk in my shop. Get the hell out of here. And don’t bother coming back!”
“Hey!”
“Shut your hole! Get your ass out of here, and Yama and I will do the rest.”
“Boss,” Yama called out. “Sorry, but I don’t feel up to it, either.”
With the veins rising in the smith’s forehead, D walked off toward the door. Reaching the street, he looked to either side before advancing at a rapid clip in the same direction that the baron had gone.
__
For the baron, a nocturnal stroll wasn’t necessarily sheer pleasure. The stars shone through crystal-clear darkness to make it bright as day for him. The night air was filled with the perfume of nocturnal blooms and the scents of creatures—odors that goaded the cells of his still partially slumbering brain into action. And yet the baron’s expression was stiff, his breathing erratic enough to threaten the stillness of the night. To be precise, he was thirsty for blood.
Perhaps due to the fact that this area had been liberated from the Nobility’s control long ago, lights burned in the windows with undrawn curtains in many homes, and laughter spilled out in the streets along with the glow. The form that flitted by one window was that of a woman with long, flowing tresses. It stimulated the baron, stoking the fires of his hunger.
The baron’s carriage was stocked with dried plasma. Three times a day he dissolved it in water to fill his empty stomach. Synthesized by the Nobility’s science, it didn’t differ in the slightest from human blood in scent or taste or nutrients. But it was still no use. For the Nobility, feeding wasn’t about ingesting nutrients. It was about sustaining the psyche. Victims cowered like rabbits in the sight of a fierce wolf. There were thrills to be found in chasing prey, pushing her to the ground, and searching out the pale nape of her neck. What a joy it was to see the faint blue of her veins. And the instant the baron’s fangs sank in, his mouth would be filled with a sweetness and warmth for which there were no words. When he paid a second iniquitous call on his victim several days later, she would let him into her bedroom and expose her own throat—and then he would taste the rapture of conquest! That was how a Noble fed.
Safe as this region might be, apparently there was no one who ventured out on the streets at night. That, coupled with the promise he’d made D, would serve to keep the baron from drinking any blood.
Just then, a figure appeared before him. It was apparently a young girl from the village. In her right hand she held a basket of flowers. The baron suddenly realized he’d entered an ornamental garden. To either side of the path, pale blossoms reflected the moonlight as a sweet aroma wafted from them.
Spotting the approaching baron, the girl froze in fear. A human could sense a Noble, just as a rabbit always recognized a wolf.
“You . . . you’re . . .” the girl stammered, the words falling from her lips unbidden.
“What are you doing?” the baron inquired.
He could think of nothing else to say. An impulse that was difficult to describe seemed to be building in the pit of his stomach. Restraining it, he asked, “Are you picking flowers?”
The girl nodded.
“Tomorrow I’ll be leaving the village . . . so I thought I’d give them to my friends as a farewell gift . . .”
Eyeing the white blooms that filled her flower basket, the baron came closer and took one, which he then raised to his lips.
The girl was trembling. Waves of fear and a fragrant aroma emanated from her body. And the pale nape of her neck swayed before the Noble’s eyes.
“Such a lovely scent,” the baron said as he returned the flower to her basket. “The night is dangerous. Hurry back to your home.”
The girl looked up at him dumbfounded.
“Why . . . ?” she asked, her tone dripping with perplexity.
The baron smiled.
“You mean why aren’t I going to suck your blood?”
“Yes . . .”
“I would like to do so, but you see, I’ve made a promise. If I were to break it, I’d be left all alone. In my present situation, that would be problematic.”
The girl didn’t know what to say.
“Go.”
The girl backed her way around the baron, finally turning once she was behind him to run off. The sound of her shoes pounding the ground faded into the distance.
The baron let out a deep sigh. Somehow he seemed to have overcome his urges.
He turned back the way he’d come. His cape whirled out. From within it, a fierce flash of light raced off to assail a figure some sixty feet ahead of him.
“Oh my!” the figure cried out in surprise—and the old man in priestly garb threw himself to the ground.
The flash that sailed over his head didn’t vanish into the darkness, but rather spun around and was swallowed by the interior of the baron’s cape.
“What’s wrong? Get a bit too close?”
At the baron’s remark, the aged priest slowly got back up again and sheepishly stroked his bald head.
“Woe is me, it is just as you say. I happened to observe you speaking to that lass from the village, and I’m afraid my zeal to see what would happen next got the better of me. Nice to meet you. My name is Yoputz. I’m one of those that’ve been sent to do away with you.”
“A filthy little Hunter, are we? Well, today is the last day of that for you,” the baron said, his eyes pulsing with a chilling light.
With a loud squeal, the elderly priest—Yoputz—turned tail and made a mad dash in a decidedly un-Hunter-like fashion.
From the baron’s cape shot a golden glitter that skimmed by Yoputz’s neck.
Yoputz didn’t stop. After running an additional thirty feet, he fell limply to the ground. Or his headless torso did.
Once more the flash of light returned to the interior of the Noble’s cape.
“Fool,” the baron spat in a tone as cold as ice. He began to walk toward the corpse, but halted almost immediately.
A darkness deeper and more beautiful than the dark of night took human form and stopped beside Yoputz’s remains—by his decapitated corpse. The old man’s head lay in the road about fifteen feet closer to the baron.
“For your information, he was a Hunter out to get me,” said the baron.
Nodding, D turned around again. He didn’t tell the baron to go back. He’d merely followed Yoputz’s presence out there.
“So he was after him, just like we thought. But the way he took that clown’s head off was something else. I wouldn’t wanna tangle with him,” a voice remarked from the Hunter’s lowered left hand.
There was the sound of footsteps behind him, and then the baron walked to D’s left.
“Why don’t you continue your stroll?” D suggested.
“No, thank you. I wouldn’t call this a particularly pleasant evening,” the baron said in a frosty tone, seeming a completely different person from the terrifying butcher he’d been a minute ago.
__
A short while after the pair walked off, a low voice like that of the dead could be heard down on the dirt road where only the moonlight lay, saying, “Dear me! Chopped in half again, am I? However, I did overhear something interesting in the bargain. My good baron,
it’s not right to deny yourself!”
__
III
__
Early the next morning, D left the village. But before doing so, he parted company with the blacksmith in front of his workshop.
“Good journey to you,” the smith said, his face looking every bit as enervated as his voice sounded.
Surprisingly, D said in return, “We’re in your debt.”
Pulling a little bag out of his breast pocket, he poured the contents into the smith’s outstretched palm. The golden flow continued.
“Hold up a second! You’ve given me too much there,” the smith shouted, his scraggly beard jolted by his cries.
The pyramid of gold that’d been built on his palm was twice the sum he’d initially demanded.
“That’s to get your workers patched up and to cover your hard work,” D said softly.
On returning the previous night with the baron, he’d seen the smith silently continuing solo after all his craftsmen had thrown in the towel. All by himself he’d done a job that four people would’ve barely been able to finish.
“Okay. Since you put it that way, I’ll take you up on your generous offer.”
D mounted up in front of the somewhat bashful-looking smith.
As if he’d suddenly remembered it, the smith called out, “Oh, there’s something you’ll wanna keep in mind. Lately, bandits have been running rampant to the north of the village, and a bunch of travelers have been killed. What’s more, even though we know what kind of characters got them because they’d been cut and their valuables were missing, the immediate cause of death has been drowning or being buried alive in mudflows. Come to mention it, there’ve been a lot of mountain tsunamis, downpours, and thunderstorms lately. I don’t see how they could possibly be connected to the bandits, but you’ll wanna watch yourself.”
D raised one hand lightly. That was his farewell.
“So long. I don’t suppose we’ll meet again,” the blacksmith called out forlornly to the back of the dwindling figure.
But the echoes of his words were soon effaced by the creak of the wheels from the carriage that began to move with D.
__
†
In about an hour, they reached a mountain pass. It was roughly ten feet wide, and as the road climbed, the left-hand side became narrower, as if the ground had been sheared away. If one were to lean over on his horse, he could glimpse the silvery ribbon running one hundred fifty to two hundred feet below. It was a tributary of the three-hundred-mile-long Mertz River, one of the major rivers in the western Frontier. Though they could’ve gone around the pass instead, D had chosen this route precisely because it would make it difficult for pursuers to make a move. As rough as the going was for them, it would be just as arduous for anyone following behind. If they were to ride through the night, they would reach a certain location by dawn. For the time being, that was D’s goal.
Hearing what sounded like a drumbeat nearby, D gazed up at the sky. A shadow formed on his handsome features.
A black cloud churned and spread like a drop of ink falling into water. Purple lightning streaked from one corner. The roar came later.
It took less than a minute for the whole world to blur as a pelting rain assailed the carriage and D. The raindrops struck with such force they would’ve left the average person’s limbs swollen even through foul-weather gear, but the cyborg horse advanced effortlessly. And on the mount’s back, D was completely unaffected, as if he were beneath clear skies on an Indian summer day.
Just then, from the carriage to his rear, a voice said, “Someone’s coming.” Sounding as if it’d risen from the very depths, the voice was terribly low, yet it pierced the pounding rain to reach D’s ears. It was that of the baron.
The vampiric Nobility naturally required physical rest by day. However, there were a few Nobles able to operate almost as they would in the dark so long as they weren’t directly exposed to sunlight, though their biorhythms dipped unavoidably. Extremely rare, such individuals were almost invariably members of the clans that had been dubbed the Greater Nobility. The Balazs family was precisely that.
While it was unclear whether the baron’s unsettling pronouncement had come as news to D, the Hunter didn’t turn around at all but silently advanced on his steed.
It was three minutes later that the white carriage drawn by a pair of horses caught up to them. Naturally there was no driver, and the windows had heavy curtains to block the sunlight.
“Dear me, you seem to be in much less of a hurry than I imagined.”
Shadowy though it was, the voice that seeped from the white carriage was also a bit showy. It belonged to Miska.
“Look who we have here,” the baron’s voice whispered. The way that he spoke made it easy enough to picture his wry smile.
D didn’t even bother to look back.
“For your information, I haven’t come this way in hopes of traveling with the two of you. Even if the opportunity were to arise, I don’t expect I should undertake a lengthy journey requiring mutual trust with the kind of Noble who would leave a frail woman to fend for herself, or with his bodyguard. Therefore, our meeting here is sheer coincidence. You needn’t offer me the slightest consideration.”
Having said all of this without needing to draw a single breath, and delivering the words so coolly they seemed like a prepared statement, the owner of the white carriage then abruptly fell silent. For a while, the only sounds to be heard were the pounding of the rain and the creak of wooden wheels.
“We’ve got trouble now,” the voice from the blue carriage then whispered in a tone D alone would hear. “Can you do something about her?”
After a short pause, D replied, “Yes, I can.”
“What?”
“If she’s interfering with my work, I can always do what you hired me for.”
The baron’s voice fell silent. The implications of the Hunter’s words had dawned on him.
“For a guard, you sure are a dangerous customer.”
“The woman’s a lot more danger to you than I am. Even if she came here by chance, she may cost you your life. This would be the second time one Noble asked me to destroy another, but I don’t mind.”
Call her a Noble, call her a vampire, the beautiful young flower of womanhood in question still only looked to be sixteen or seventeen. Knowing this, what kind of cruel, cold psyche did the Hunter possess in order to say such a thing?
“It would seem you hate the Nobility, too,” a somewhat depressed tone remarked from the blue carriage.
At that moment, the world turned white.
A tree that’d been struck by lightning fell over. Directly beneath it, D gave a kick to his horse’s flanks and raced forward.
Perhaps it was the bole’s impact that made the ground give way. The earth had already been loose, and after the rain had seeped into it, there must’ve been more than enough danger of it collapsing.
Tilting wildly to one side, the two carriages didn’t right themselves again, but rather slowly fell down the incline along with an avalanche of dirt. And then the mountainous terrain beneath the advancing D went as well, with the Hunter maintaining extraordinary equestrian form as he dropped toward the silvery river below.
What awaited him was a raging torrent. There weren’t even banks. Swollen by the sudden downpour, the waters swallowed the shore, covered boulders, and roared like a beast as they continued to rush by. D and his mount quickly vanished from sight, and even the pair of carriages whizzed along like two little arks as they floated away without the slightest resistance.
And when they came to a sharp turn two or three hundred yards later, some sort of net hung down from the rock ledge above and snagged the pair of carriages and their horses. The carriages stopped.
Up on top of the ledge, the other end of the net was attached to a powerful winch, and as the pair of carriages banged repeatedly against the rocky face, they were hoisted up.
There were three men by the winch. Each
wore a vicious scowl and had weapons strapped to his back and waist. As one of them operated the winch, the net went slack and the teams pulling the carriages stood up.
Aiming a powerful magnetic pistol at the horses’ heads, the third man said, “All right, I’ve destroyed their control chips.”
At that, the other two hopped up into the respective driver’s seats.
“Well, this sure is a hell of a thing to have fall into our laps,” the man who’d climbed onto the blue carriage said, sounding greatly impressed. “No doubt about it, this here’s a Noble’s ride. It’s probably still inside.”
“So long as it’s daytime, we’re safe enough. The bastard’s probably still dreaming about sipping someone’s blood,” the man on the white carriage replied, giving a shake to the reins.
The horses changed direction to face the rock ledge, where a hole fifteen feet in diameter opened up. It appeared to be the home, or at the very least an outpost, for the men—the bandits.
“What about the other one—the guy on the horse? We just gonna let him slide?” asked the man who’d gone back over to the winch and was peering down at the raging flow of the river.
“The boss would never let something like that go to waste. We’ve got a net set up just waiting for him a little further downstream. We’ll nab whatever he’s got on him, take his life . . . and then all that’ll be left is a waterlogged corpse,” the driver of the blue carriage declared blithely.
THE DRAGON FANG TRAP
CHAPTER 3
I
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The back of the rock ledge was a passageway—it was a natural cave that’d been widened further. Marks from blasting and chemical melting still marred the rock face in many places. At the far end of the passage was an almost perfectly circular clearing. It had to be easily six hundred feet in diameter. Surrounded as it was by rocky crags on all sides, no one would ever see it unless they were looking down from the sky, and the bandits could use another natural passage in the southern portion of the mountain to get back to the road.
Actually, the bandits had discovered this location from the sky. While searching for a hideout to use for attacks on travelers, one of them had been flying around with a glider pack when he’d made the lucky find. Five huts and a warehouse, all constructed from expandable building materials, formed their domain.
Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts One and Two Page 5
