Another example was the “Nobility-specific maze” that was said to exist somewhere in the eastern section of the Capital. For any humans that entered, it was merely a honeycomb of passages. But when anyone of Noble blood set foot in it, the structure instantly became a labyrinth from which they could never hope to escape. Why did it elect to trap only the Nobility? The reason was unclear.
“I’m cold,” Miska mumbled as she hugged her shoulders.
D and the baron could both feel it, too. From the very second they’d set foot inside the stronghold, an unearthly aura had buffeted them.
“What do you think it is?” the baron inquired.
“There’s no need to ask,” D informed him, his gaze still angling off to their left.
Though the edifice, more massive and bizarre than the rest, melted into the darkness, these three of Noble blood had eyes that could see as clearly as in broad daylight.
“This warrants some investigation, doesn’t it?” the baron remarked as he began to walk off. Turning after he’d advanced about ten paces, he said, “Stay close to the lady,” and then continued walking.
“Please, take me with you,” Miska said as if summoning up her courage. “I am loath to be left in such an eerie place with a lowly dhampir.”
“It’s still safer than going with me.”
“No,” she replied in a tone that sounded almost doleful.
Though he was clearly rather disliked, D stood there completely expressionless.
“Very well, then. However, if you become a burden, his first priority will still be to protect me.”
“I understand that,” she said, glaring cruelly at D.
Miska went next, and D brought up the rear as the group began to walk toward a shared fate. As his guard, D should’ve stopped the baron. Ordinarily, that’s precisely what he would’ve done. He hadn’t simply because he’d decided that they really did need to find out what made the atmosphere so chilling. The air was that unearthly.
In the foyer of a building with hornlike protuberances that seemed to have sprung out with a crazed disregard for spatial relationships, the trio came to a halt. Not surprisingly, there was another liquid metal door. D was about to step forward when the baron stopped him.
“This time, I’ll give it a try,” the Nobleman said as he stepped to the fore.
As he set his right hand against the somehow limpid silvery surface, it suddenly sank up to the wrist. Almost simultaneously, the door began to slowly recede.
“You are a natural, Baron—very nicely done,” Miska called out, even her words seeming to glow. With a heaping load of sarcasm, she added, “Any trick a common half-breed can do comes easily enough to you.” With a brief gasp, she said, “Could it be that the Sacred Ancestor was one of your—”
“Regrettably, we’re not in the least bit related. The Sacred Ancestor is truly like a god to me,” the baron said in a coolly refreshing tone. There wasn’t the faintest trace of vanity in his words, and his last remark trembled with boundless fear and respect.
“Follow me,” said D.
As this was perfectly natural behavior for a guard, Miska held her tongue even as she remained vexed.
And with that, the young man in black stepped into pitch darkness eddying with an unearthly aura, his steady manner making it seem as if the pair behind him didn’t even exist.
__
II
__
The trio was greeted by a vast space, perhaps even a void. There was nothing. Not a single thing. They could see only numerous protrusions on the walls, floor, and ceiling that all looked like old lava flows.
“It was melted,” Miska said as she looked down at the nearest deformity. “Everything has been melted. And yet it looks completely normal from the outside. Whatever could have happened in here?”
As he surveyed their surroundings, the baron suggested, “A battle? But if that’s the case, it’s odd that there isn’t a single body left, and the way everything’s melted has a strange orderliness to it. I get the feeling someone merely intended to destroy the interior.”
“It had to be destroyed,” D said, taking over the discussion.
Miska looked at him in astonishment. She felt like the gorgeous young man was the one behind the destruction.
Whether or not he knew what she was thinking, D continued, “They didn’t want the equipment in this factory to ever be used again. That was as far as their intentions went.”
“In other words, they never wanted to make another such weapon. And what kind of weapon was it?”
But the baron’s remark wasn’t really a question.
This was the arsenal of the Nobility, as they’d mentioned several times. It was not merely a place for storing weapons; a look at the equipment made it clear they’d also manufactured them here. Production had been assisted by androids, but Nobles had been in charge.
The cruel masters of earlier days were haughty fiends who knew no fear. What sort of weapon could they have created that would’ve made them destroy their equipment so they could never create another?
“At least, this is how I understand it,” the baron mumbled, answering his own question. “Naturally, I don’t know exactly what kind of creature they created, but development of their weapon took centuries. Each and every attempt in the first two stages of development died off, but in the third attempt they finally achieved success. But I’ve heard that the instant it was completed, the one in charge gave the order that everything was to be destroyed, and so it was done.”
“A Destroyer created merely so that it could be destroyed?” D muttered.
There in the darkness black as spilt ink, the two Nobles were momentarily left speechless.
D steeled his jaw. In this darkness rife with death and destruction, their destination was the wall up ahead.
“That’s it.”
Nodding, Baron Balazs turned to D and asked, “What are you going to do?”
D advanced as if the other two were forgotten, and on reaching the wall, he placed his hand on its surface. As proof that the same miracle that’d opened the fortress gates was at work again, his arm slipped into the wall up to the elbow. After about five seconds, he turned around and went back to the other two.
“That was a brief trip,” said the Noble in blue. “Are you just going to leave it at that?”
“I saw that ‘the Destroyer’ hadn’t been eradicated.”
Miska’s breath was taken away.
“It’s somewhere beyond our reach. And it will never have any effect on the outside world.”
“Never?”
D nodded.
“Some things simply can’t be understood,” said Miska.
The two men looked at this pale flower of a beauty.
“The sense I got was that the eerie aura began shortly after we passed through the gates. Up until that point, these had been mere ruins. Might there not be some reason the Destroyer has been reactivated?” the Noblewoman asked, her eyes turned toward the baron.
“Perhaps. Someone of the Sacred Ancestor’s line might be capable of such a thing.”
Looking to either side, the baron remarked, “I don’t believe we’ll be able to rest here very peacefully. Let’s go.”
__
On exiting the building, a bird could be heard crying in the distance.
“‘Children of the night?’” the baron said as his gaze narrowed. “Even they won’t come into this lair of the Nobility.”
“Whatever are you talking about?” Miska countered. “‘The children of the night’ and all those other creatures are our creations. It is awe that keeps them from coming to us.”
“Awe becomes simple fear all too easily. And when it does, what does that leave but hatred?”
“So it would seem. But isn’t that good enough? It is an honor for the superior to bask in the hatred of the inferior.”
“I was taught the very same thing. By my father.”
“And a superb father he must be!” Miska replied. S
he didn’t know that the baron was on his way to slay the man.
The bird cried out again.
The baron turned to one side. He’d caught D’s voice from off in that direction.
“What is it singing about?” the Hunter had said.
“It is singing praises to the glory of the Nobility,” Miska said, her comments clearly directed solely to the baron.
“What do you think?” the baron inquired of his beautiful guard.
“To glory and awe,” said D.
Miska smirked.
“To extinction.”
Though Miska was certain to voice some objection to this, she was stopped by a nod from the baron and another cry from the bird—this one seeming to bid them farewell a second before it flew away. Out with the moonlight, the wind, and the darkness, time was the only thing still moving.
D suddenly realized that he’d been sleeping. He was weary, of course. However, what had drawn him down into the depths of slumber was something unlike any exhaustion he’d ever known, physical or mental. Even his dhampir’s sixth sense had unconsciously been swallowed by the darkness.
Pulling away from the carriage he’d been slumped against, the Hunter looked over at the baron. The sight of him just getting up from the ground only served to make this unwanted sleep seem all the more strange.
“Did you hear that?” D asked as he turned toward the factory building.
Although an ordinary person would’ve heard nothing at all, he’d been awakened by a cry like the leaves of a tree riffled by the wind.
Without any prompting at all, the baron looked in the very same direction. Both men had noticed that there was no sign of Miska. The two of them sprinted ahead, leaving the wind swirling in their wake.
The door was open.
D leapt through it first. His darkness-piercing eyes could clearly discern a circular opening in the wall he’d examined earlier, agape like a screaming mouth. The unearthly aura no longer gusted from it. The interior of this factory ruled by devastation was terribly still. Something fearful lurked there.
“There!” the baron exclaimed as he raced over to the right.
Catching sight of the pale beauty that lay out of the corner of his eye, D then went over to the hole in the wall and stepped through it without the slightest hesitation. It was ten feet high, and it ran straight into the heart of the darkness. Whatever Miska had released had come out of there. More precisely, she had probably been lured by it, and D and the baron put to sleep by it as well. That which had been sealed away had waited thousands of years to foil the efforts of those that’d put it there.
As if to challenge this tremendous stretch of time, D sprinted deep into the darkness.
__
The gorgeous figure that appeared from the factory was met by the baron. Miska was nowhere to be seen. An hour had passed since D had disappeared into the far reaches of the hole.
“Miska is in her coffin,” said the baron. He knew his guard in black would never inquire about the welfare of a Noblewoman with whom he had nothing to do.
“How is she doing?” D asked, easily betraying all the baron’s expectations.
“She’s terribly weak. Her biorhythms have dropped to extreme levels. The rest is up to the RS.”
The RS, or Rebirth System, was an indispensable piece of equipment installed in the coffins of the Nobility. Though the Nobles prided themselves on being ageless and undying, the axes and wooden stakes humans used proved they weren’t necessarily indestructible. The Nobility’s efforts to counter this were nothing to scoff at, the greatest of which were crypts and coffins that ensured a “blood sleep” in perfect safety. Resting places might be secured by DNA-keyed locks, multilayered psychological defense systems, or perhaps best of all, doors comprised of thousands or even tens of thousands of layers of ultra-dense alloys. Even if human ingenuity managed to get past all of this, the passageway leading to the coffin’s resting place might be a false passage or an endless hallway that would usher the intruder into a pocket dimension where brutal mechanical soldiers or robotic beasts no living creature could withstand would be waiting.
However, if a stake of rough wood pierced their heart or their head was lopped off, someone with a Noble’s superhuman vitality could manage to pull the stake out or replace the severed head—even incorrectly—on the wound. In that case, before the final embers of the vampire’s life force died out, they might be returned to their coffin, where the product of their intellect and foresight—the RS—would do everything in its power to keep them off the road to destruction. The DNA of darkness would be reconstructed and revitalized, and though it might be a week or a year until the true indestructibility of their immortal form could be confirmed, when the coffin’s lid opened once again, the fearsome creature supposedly destroyed by humanity would return.
While the reason for Miska’s loss of strength was unknown, something as simple could be cured in the course of a night.
“We should dispose of her,” D said, making his fearful proclamation in a stoic tone.
“Why is that? Did you see something at the back of the hole?”
“A sealed sanctum.”
That was the kind of place where treasures and inventions not meant to see the light of day were locked away. Constructing one required the permission of the Nobility’s House of Peers.
“It was buried a mile and a quarter deep in the mountain.”
__
III
__
What D had seen was a space that extended for several miles in all three dimensions. The sanctum had been lent a religious air by the fifteen-foot-long and six-foot-wide bed that had been set in the center of it, and by the bizarre objects filling its immediate vicinity.
“What did you find?” the baron inquired.
“A library of mobius books, a blood fount, and a multilayered battlefield. Those three things took up most of the sanctum.”
“So whatever awakened there had books to read, could slake its eternal thirst for blood, and could exercise its fighting skills in endless battles, eh? That seems like the best conceivable way to keep it contained. And yet the one sealed away inside still wanted to be released.”
D must’ve had the very same thought.
Mobius books had no end, and the volume would be back at the first page without the reader realizing it, except the contents had changed completely so the reader would never become bored—to the contrary, their intellectual curiosity would keep them reading forever. However, there was one chance out of all the infinite possibilities of something going wrong with the print, and it seemed likely that the entire wall full of such books D had seen was to guard against that very occurrence, for the Nobility had feared that one case out of an infinite number of times.
The blood fount was a device to satisfy thirst, and it went without saying that part of the enormous machine would continue to operate and produce an infinite supply of blood from a finite stock of materials. And surely other machinery was in place to maintain that part of the equipment, and still other machines existed to keep those support devices functioning.
However, all the books D had seen had been read and discarded, and the supposedly bottomless blood fount had run dry. In that case, the awakened Destroyer would have nowhere to direct its curiosity but to the last of its creators’ redoubts—the multilayered battlefield.
While the Nobility hadn’t mastered the secrets of time, they’d narrowly come to control space and had used that knowledge in a number of fields. They were able to transport materials by teleportation, or to put an entire lake or valley into a tiny box. This knowledge also gave rise to game technology that could spawn limitless amounts of foes. Troops and arms were prepared in a space, and thousands or even tens of thousands of these areas could be stacked one on top of another, until even the most enthusiastic combatant would be satisfied—or could at least go on fighting for all time. Perhaps it was only natural that such a device would be left in the resting place of the ultimate Des
troyer even the Nobility had feared.
“You don’t mean to tell me the battlefield was malfunctioning, do you?” the baron asked, his question also perfectly natural.
“No,” D replied. “Everything in it had been destroyed.”
“That’s incredible,” the baron said, his words carrying boundless awe—and murderous intent.
It was said that the more powerful the opponent one faced, the more an individual burned with cruelty and the urge to fight. This crowning characteristic had dominated the Nobility’s civilization.
“There was only one thing left.”
D’s remark did more to stir up the baron’s curiosity than it did to quell the rest of his psyche.
“Oh, and what was that?”
Pulling something from his coat’s interior, D held it up before the pale face.
About eight inches long, the crystalline object was a pale purple color, and it had a metallic sphere set within it.
“That’s a communication crystal from roughly five thousand years ago. Did you view it?”
“No, part of its decoding system has been damaged. Looks like it could take a while to fix.”
“There must be tens of thousands of levels to the battlefield. How did you ever find it?”
“It was held in a subfield. And it had a buoy on it.”
“So that the Destroyer wouldn’t notice it? There are few even among the Nobility of the lineage that could uncover such a thing. D—what are you?”
“It must be starved,” said D. “For blood and for destruction. The passageway I took went on for a mile and a quarter. The whole thing had been filled in with a polymer paving material. And the Destroyer spent five thousand years tunneling back through it.”
Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts One and Two Page 9
