An unearthly cry rang out. Raising their snakelike necks into the air one after another, the monsters glared down at their prey.
Hichou didn’t have time to get off a second shot.
Not even giving the monsters a chance to lower their heads, the hovercraft sped at Hichou. There was no impact, as a wine-red streak rose into the sky. Because the man had flown off to one side instead of straight ahead, D had drawn just a fraction of a second too slow to hit his mark, and the rough wooden needle he got off a little too late was avoided without any problem. Hichou rose like a veritable bird in flight to some sixty feet off the ground, then halted. Flames and smoke flew from beneath either arm.
“Damn!” the ferryman growled as he worked the wheel, but a tenth of a second later the missile scored a direct hit on the stern of the ship. A section of the handrail was blown away, but that was the extent of damage, due in part to the compact size of the missile and in part to the skill of the ship’s captain. However, the pair of carriages tilted wildly, the white one skidding toward the stern.
Seeing that the section of railing that’d been destroyed was wider than the vehicle, the girl managed to cry out, “Oh no!”
D became a bolt of lighting as he bounded over and grabbed the reins of the blue carriage’s lead horse. The blue carriage advanced, and the white carriage followed suit. But above them, black snake-like heads and suckermouths were coming down.
Still keeping a grip on the horse, D lashed out with his sword. Despite his predicament, the Vampire Hunter’s skill was peerless. Each of the heads fell, with one of them rolling across the ship to the bow. D was about to dash off—and then the stern of the ship dipped appreciably. The carriages moved backward again, and D tried to get the horses to stop—and then he halted.
A scream went up.
The severed head that’d rolled across the ship had popped back up and latched its suckermouth onto the ferryman’s right shoulder. As the old man tumbled backward with a loud groan, his face swiftly shriveled like that of a mummy. These monstrosities subsisted off the bodily fluids of other creatures.
A rough wooden needle whizzed through the air and pierced the monster’s brain.
As soon as the creature let go of him, the captain fell—and then got back up again. Clinging to the wheel for dear life, he steered it to port. He had no choice but to try and cut through part of the waterway where there were relatively few of the monsters.
The path before them was already barred by a tangle of tapering necks. But due perhaps to the ungodly skill of the ferryman, the ship advanced through the seeming jungle without stopping once, finally escaping the herd.
“You did it!” the boy shouted in a manner that was only fitting.
However, his sister was facing the stern, and she quickly cried in terror, “They’re coming after us!”
While it was unclear just what shape their bodies took below the waterline, the creatures had their lengthy necks craned at a sixty-degree angle, and they gave chase at a rate that conceded nothing to the ship’s sixty knots.
Perhaps due to its outrageous speed, the ship rocked violently and bounced, and there was little D could do as he steadied the carriages.
“Captain—they’re gonna catch us!” the girl shouted.
And at that very moment, the ship’s movements changed. But it wasn’t the ferryman’s doing. Something about the muddy water was different.
“Ohno-ohno-ohno-ohno—” the brother and sister screamed in terror, their cries hardly sounding like anything human.
Ahead of them the swamp was swirling. Three hundred feet in diameter and still expanding, the vortex had at its center a funnel-like depression that kept growing deeper and steeper at the sides. The ship was near the outer edge of the vortex, pinned there by centrifugal force.
Was this it? Was this the Sturm that the ferryman had mentioned?
The same sort of massive whirlpool that could be caused in the sea when the tide went out was happening here in the muck. The time it’d taken them to slip through the herd of monsters—and the path they’d chosen to escape—had conspired to send the ship right into the center of that muddy vortex. And it wasn’t the ship alone that was threatened. The monstrosities that pursued them felt their black snakelike necks twist together as they struggled and slipped down the muddy incline of the whirlpool and were sucked to the bottom, one after another. As chilling as the scene was, it was also somehow comical.
Laughter rained down on everyone from above.
Looking up, D and the siblings saw a caped figure roughly fifteen feet from the edge of the whirlpool floating about thirty feet above the ship. While it was unclear what kind of power his cape possessed, Hichou hovered in the air without so much as flapping his wings.
“What do you think, D? I set this whole trap myself. I got the monsters all worked up, sent the ship right into them to buy some time, and even spaced the critters out so I could drive you right this way when I fired that missile at you. I want you to remember all my hard work as you sink into the muddy depths. Or will you find some remarkable way out of all of this?”
Hichou doubled over with laughter.
“There’s only one way for you folks to get out of there. And that would be for me to fire one of my missiles down into the whirlpool. Unlike the ocean, if the bottom changes, the flow of the mud changes, too. However, my missiles are trained on the lot of you at present.”
True to his word, Hichou had a silver cylinder pointed at them. It didn’t seem that even D would be able to escape this situation.
Just then, two figures bounded straight into the air. Or rather, because the ship was nailed to the sloping sides of the whirlpool, it’s more correct to say they flew up at an angle. One figure made contact with the other in midair, and from there they bounded once again. Hichou never would’ve dreamed that it was he they were headed toward, because the pair moved with such speed, nor could he have imagined that anyone possessing such skill was on the ship.
For a second, the three figures converged, and the missile spat flames. Its trajectory threw it right into the center of the vortex. A pillar of black water—actually, a pillar of muck—went up, and then the vortex lost momentum at an astonishing rate, its sloping bowl pushing out again and setting the ship back down in the water.
Falling toward the vessel were three silhouettes. D’s sword was there to meet them. Without leaving so much as a nick on the brother and sister, the blade sliced Hichou in two at midtorso, and the high-flying assassin scattered fresh blood like red ink as he plummeted headfirst into the sea of mud.
THE TALOS ARSENAL
CHAPTER 4
I
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Having escaped the attacks of serpentine beasts and a giant whirlpool, the ferry reached the opposite shore some thirty minutes later.
D prepared to disembark after he was sure that the two carriages and the children were safely ashore. The ferryman remarked, “I’ll be telling that story for the rest of my life. But you weren’t really the hero who saved the ship and all of us on it . . . though you already knew that.”
The ferryman’s gaze was concentrated on the two tiny figures who stood dazedly with their bags in hand.
“Now I can’t tell you to take ’em all the way to where they’re headed, but the least you could do is stick close to those kids until they get on their coach. Brave little tykes, aren’t they?”
“I’m in a hurry,” D replied, his tone cool.
“Well, their coach won’t get here till after dark. Not everyone who comes by between now and then is guaranteed to be an upstanding person. And I’ve got to turn this thing around and make the trip back.”
“Go, then,” D told him as he turned his back to the man and stepped across the gangplank to shore.
“You sure are a cold one. You’re like a damned Noble,” the old man said, his words jabbing at the Hunter like a knife.
Walking over to the brother and sister, D said, “You did great.”
Taking his eyes off the children, whose cheeks were flushing deeper by the second, the Hunter got on his horse.
As the young man in black rode down the road with the carriages trailing behind him, the brother and sister silently watched him go. They weren’t sad. They didn’t have a mother or father—this wasn’t the first time they’d had to say goodbye.
“I wonder if we’ll ever see him again?” the boy muttered. Although he already knew the answer, he really wasn’t looking for it.
“Let’s just forget we ever saw him, okay?” the girl said, and her brother nodded. Though he wasn’t yet old enough to realize this was a hundred times more painful for his sister, there was nothing else he could do. Still—
“I wonder if he’ll turn and look back this way?” the boy mused.
The back of the second carriage finished climbing a gentle rise, and then the young man could be seen no more.
“He’s got no connections to anyone. He’d never look back,” the girl said, looking at the listing guidepost that stood at the base of the slope. The Capital seemed so terribly far away. And then she looked up at the sky. There was still quite some time until evening. But it felt terribly close.
__
“Can’t you see them any longer?” asked the voice that drifted out of the blue carriage.
“Worried about them?” D said in reply.
“As I dreamt, I saw the battle. It’s thanks to the two of them that we reached here safely.”
“Well, why don’t you go back and thank them?”
“What nonsense!” Miska spat scornfully. “Though the twilight may be upon us, we are still Nobility. I maintain that rather than bow our heads to the lowly humans, we should wring every last drop of blood from them. Ah, a miserable half-breed like yourself could never hope to understand how we feel.”
Her voice suddenly became a bloodcurdling scream.
The four horses had frozen in place.
Though things were back to normal in less than a second, no more of Miska’s abuse was heard. Surely she’d sensed that just one touch of the reins from D had immobilized her team.
“You’d do well to hold your tongue,” the baron said in a sober tone. “His primary duty is to serve me. Not you.”
“What a thing to say! Do you intend to side with some ill-bred Hunter instead of with me?”
“I was merely stating a fact. I don’t know whose blood flows in his veins, but from his prowess and his state of mind—I don’t think it wise to dwell on the subject.”
“You’re growing soft, aren’t you? Using honeyed words with a lowly dhampir.”
“Again, merely stating a fact,” the baron declared in a firm tone that put an end to the dispute.
And in lieu of their exchange, D said, “Another half mile or so and we’ll come to the Talos arsenal.”
“You can’t possibly be thinking of stopping there, are you?” Miska asked, her voice now rocked by anxiety.
“This area is crawling with monsters. That’s the only place we’ll be safe,” replied D.
“Why don’t we just keep going? Is that not why you were hired as a guard in the first place?!”
“The struggle back on the ship has left the horses ready to throw some of their shoes. They’ll have to be taken care of. If any greater beasts were to attack us in the meantime, it’d mean trouble.”
“Resign yourself to it,” the baron said, his voice settling yet another dispute. This time it came from terribly close by—from up in the driver’s seat.
“Leave the carriage to me,” the pale Nobleman said, taking the reins as he surveyed the scene about him.
“Stay inside,” the Hunter told him.
“I’ve looked forward to the twilight for so long. It’s so cramped in there.”
“Pretty odd for a Noble,” croaked a voice, but of course it wasn’t D’s.
Coffins were not only the resting place of the Nobility, but they also occasionally served as their homes or escape pods, and great effort was expended to make the time spent in them as enjoyable as possible. Fifty years previously a study had been conducted on part of an old graveyard, and the people marveled at the fact that nearly two hundred of the coffins unearthed were equipped with circuitry that expanded the interior dimensions. Despite the fact that their owners no longer occupied them, a number of these coffins were still operating perfectly. Time wouldn’t permit enumerating the number of researchers who’d vanished off the face of the earth because they’d become hopelessly lost in the palatial gardens contained within a coffin or had drowned after falling into the middle of an endless sea. In fact, there were even records of Nobility who went their entire lives without ever setting foot outside their coffins. Although what Baron Balazs’s coffin was like was something of a mystery, it was clear that its owner was rather unusual.
Off to the right-hand side of the road, a massive fortification was drawing closer, like clotted darkness. So imposing that even the touch of its shadow made people want to leap out of their skin, it had the power to cow not only those who passed on the road, but even the normally willful monstrosities.
D and the carriages halted before colossal gates studded with iron nails as large as a grown man. As far as the fortifications went, this was merely the main gate that faced the road, while the actual fortress was within the towering mountain of rock to the rear. Looking up, the walls had been scoured by wind and rain, and there was no sign of anyone in the passageways or at the loopholes that resembled vacantly staring eyes. The parabolic antenna vainly scanning the heavens for some voice from the distant Milky Way was the only thing that glittered in the moonlight—the sole respite from this desolation.
“We do the strangest things,” the baron muttered as he gazed at the walls. “Why use rotting masonry on the exterior when we’ve developed metals that can go ten millennia without so much as a flake of rust? It’s almost as if we long for decay.”
The gorgeous men stayed motionless in the moonlight. The wind was whistling. When would the dawn come?
Getting off his horse, D went over to the control box to one side of the massive gates. Opening the rusted iron lid, he stared at the controls intently, but turned back toward the gates without ever touching them.
“It’s no use without a passkey. Why don’t we circle around back?” the baron suggested.
“The gates are unlocked.”
“It still doesn’t matter. They’re made of liquid metal and weigh fifty thousand tons. There’s no way to force them open from outside.”
Ignoring the blunderbuss stored up by the driver’s seat, the baron instead took up the short spear that lay beside it. Although he merely seemed to lob it gently, the spear flew off with the speed of a swallow. His missile sank into the nail-studded gate almost up to the very end. It slid into its target like it was going through water, and sure enough, ripples spread across the surface of the gate from where it’d been pierced. In two blinks of an eye, the spear was spat back out again. The liquid metal of which the gates were composed redirected all force back in the opposite direction. All the energy in the world could be thrown at the gates without even scratching them. To the contrary, it would only repair itself.
“You can see what it is you face here. You would do well to abandon this posthaste and find us someplace else to sleep,” said Miska, who’d taken a place standing beside her carriage.
Not turning to face her, D picked up the fallen spear and threw it back. The baron effortlessly extended his hand, and the weapon landed perfectly in it.
The two Nobles saw that D had placed his right hand against one colossal door. It sank in up to the wrist.
Miska had a smirk on her face, but her eyes suddenly bugged. Unless her vision deceived her, the tremendous door was slowly being pushed back.
“It can’t be . . . It simply can’t be . . .” the Noblewoman in white muttered, stunned not that a fifty-thousand-ton door was being opened with one hand, but that D had done it.
And the woman wasn’t alone
. As he sat there paralyzed in the driver’s seat, Baron Balazs couldn’t even speak.
When his lips finally did move, he said, “I heard something long ago. In every fortress or mansion of the Nobility, no matter how secure, there was something that would allow certain people to come and go as free as the air. And that only the members of that line knew where it was and how to make it work.”
Miska looked up at the baron with fear on her face, for she understood what his words meant.
“It can’t be . . .” the proud Noblewoman said once more, as if those were the only words she knew. “An outcast like him . . . related to him . . . ?”
__
Once they’d passed through, the castle gates closed once more, leaving the group surrounded by the air of devastation. Hemmed by rock on three sides, the space was reminiscent of the bandits’ hideout. However, looking up at the darkened sky in place of the blue heavens, one found an expansive wall of craggy stone that looked infinitely heavy. Aside from the gates, everything else in the castle had been carved from the rock of the mountain. In addition to the buildings that were distinguishable as generator plants, substations, and energy transformers, there were a number of facilities of unknown purpose. The baron remained calm but curious as he focused his attention on his surroundings.
“So this is the Talos arsenal? I’ve never been anywhere that was supposed to be cursed before,” he remarked before long.
During the height of the Nobles’ prosperity, the meaning of those words had been the subject of some debate among humans, but in recent years, they had finally come to see the true extent of the horror. Even those commonly cursed had fearful things upon which they in turn laid curses. For instance, the form of plankton called “the red cloud” that lived above the atmosphere had, one winter’s day, suddenly come down with its body covering twenty thousand square miles and absorbed every living thing beneath it. The only thing that saved the Nobility and the humans from that horrible fate was the fact that due to the leisurely pace of the creature’s descent, they were able to discern exactly when and where it would touch down and evacuate every form of life—plants and animals included. They then simply had to wait three days. The sight of that enormous cloud leaving called to mind a magnificent sunset, as it were. Having descended in search of food and disappeared with its stomach still empty, how the creature managed to subsist for the next two decades was something even the Nobility’s vaunted science had never unraveled.
Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts One and Two Page 8
