Gazing at his graceful profile absentmindedly for a short while, Su-In then finished getting out of the wagon. Even once she was down on the ground, she remained in a daze. There was a ring of people around her in no time.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” the mayor said almost unintelligibly, his back permanently hunched under his morning coat. “This is the first school we’ve had in the village. We couldn’t very well start without our most distinguished guest.”
“I’m sorry. Now, what do I—”
Patting Su-In on the shoulder, the sheriff winked at her and said, “Not to worry. You only have to give a short address today. The kids are waiting inside. Right after you say your bit, the party starts. Granted, there’s nothing stronger than soft drinks.”
There was a chorus of “Teacher! Teacher!” and Su-In looked over at D as she was whisked into the schoolhouse.
Parking the vehicle to one side of the garden, D climbed down. The sunlight that leaked through the trees cast a faint shadow for him, and D began slowly walking around the garden.
After about ten minutes, a burst of applause echoed from the schoolhouse windows. Su-In’s opening remarks had finished. At almost the same instant, the door opened.
“Stud, what are you doing skulking around out here?” someone asked the Hunter. It was Dwight. His morning coat was stretched to the bursting point in a desperate battle to contain his powerful body. Seeming a bit self-conscious about it, he tugged at his cuffs. “You’ll freeze if you stay out here. Come on. Su-In will be safer with you inside, too.”
“Indeed,” said Ban’gyoh, his face suddenly appearing over the fisherman’s shoulder. He was supposed to have headed off to another village right after the funeral was finished. “Being the only priest in town at the moment, this humble servant found himself invited to the festivities. If they have no qualms about a shabby holy man like me attending, I see no reason why they couldn’t use someone working for Su-In. You should go see your employer in all her glory.”
“Come on,” Dwight said with a smile. “No one’s gonna have a problem with anyone who can take out a pair of giant killer whales with one shot. Hell, we’ll be glad to have you!”
Stopping for just a second, the tall and handsome form of the Hunter then quickly headed toward the door. The other two flanked him. The white floor creaked under his black boots.
Seeming somewhat awkward, Dwight nevertheless had his chest puffed out as he said, “This was all volunteer labor, you know. That part there was done by O’Reilly the grocer, as I recall. Just to let you in on a little secret—the boards have the names of the guys who put them up written on them. My name’s on some of them, too.”
“Oh, where are they?” asked Ban’gyoh.
“The bathroom floor,” Dwight answered with a wry smile, but then he indicated the little door on the left. The classroom. The one on the right was the office and staff room. He already had a big grin on his face again.
Saying nothing, D walked over to the door and turned the knob. The door creaked louder than the floor had.
“You’re an odd one,” said a voice that only D heard as it came from the vicinity of the doorknob. “You could’ve crossed the floor and opened the door without making a sound. What’s the story—you like to do things like ordinary folks every once in a while?”
D pushed the door open without saying a word. A fair number of little eyes concentrated on him from the orderly rows of desks and chairs, but they soon turned forward again.
There were fewer than twenty desks, and five of those were empty. Nonetheless, the mayor and parents were all along the walls and stuck between desks laden with large plates of sandwiches and snacks. Behind the adults, blue sky and the grove of trees could be seen through the windows.
Not seeming to mind the indescribable looks the parents gave him, D stood at the very rear of the classroom with his back to the wall. Dwight and Ban’gyoh came over to him.
Su-In was just stepping down from the lectern. In her place, the mayor stood before the group and declared, “Let the party begin!”
With that, the rigid atmosphere disappeared and people began to mingle. The desks were pushed together, and plates of food were passed around.
Su-In came over to D and said, “I’m so glad you came. I was going to go get you. But I thought you wouldn’t go for the idea.”
“Yeah, I know,” said the fisherman.
“Thank you, Dwight.”
As Su-In stared at him, this man of the sea bashfully returned her bow.
Poking his head out from behind the giant fisherman, Ban’gyoh pointed imploringly at his own grave face.
Su-In laughed despite herself. He certainly was an odd priest. “Thank you, too,” she told him. The holy man gave a satisfied nod in return.
“All they’ve got is juice, but let’s have a drink,” Dwight said when he came back with a bottle. Not carrying a single glass, he proffered the whole bottle. And D accepted it.
“The grownups will get tired of this pretty quick. Let’s go somewhere and get ourselves a real drink,” the fisherman suggested. “You wouldn’t have a problem with that, would you, Su-In?”
“I’m afraid we can’t.”
“Why not?” Dwight asked irritably, his gaze fixed on D. “Oh, I see. Well, you might be handsome enough to make folks weak in the knees, but you don’t seem too hospitable. Certainly don’t seem cut out to be a teacher.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” the smirking Ban’gyoh countered. “He’s quite an extraordinary man. As you saw, it’s not like he has any particular dislike for children, nor do they have any for him. To the contrary—he’s probably just the kind of man children would respond to. Because their eyes only see what truly matters.”
“Just between you and me, why don’t you stay here and get yourself a boat?” Dwight said to the Hunter without preamble, making Su-In’s eyes go wide. That was exactly the same thing she’d been ready to propose to D the night before.
D was expressionless, almost as if he hadn’t heard the remark at all.
“With your skill, you’d be the top fisherman in the village in no time. Hell, there ain’t anyone that good in any of the villages around here. I swear, you’d be the best harpooner on the Frontier inside of six months. What do you say?”
Dwight’s invitation didn’t carry a speck of empty praise or social obligation. He was genuinely intent on getting D to join him and his friends. His ardor seemed to be sufficient, as even Su-In—who’d given up similar hopes the previous night—watched the black prince with a feverish gaze that seemed to devour him.
“I don’t care how good you are, there’s a limit to how long you can go on making a living as a bodyguard or a warrior. Once you get old, your muscles all tighten up and you can’t move right. All the young pups coming up will drive you off, and the next thing you know, you’ll be dying like a dog all alone out in the wasteland. Our town might not be big, but there are still houses here where you could settle down. There’s land, too. Hell, give it a couple of weeks and you could make yourself a few friends. Now, I don’t know what kind of situation you were born into or how you’ve lived your life, but it can’t have been all that great. Isn’t it about time you started giving some thought to your future?”
Having expressed himself with a fluid eloquence quite at odds with his outward appearance, Dwight watched D for some reaction with eyes that brimmed with expectation.
The answer came quickly, and it was brief: “I’m looking for someone.”
Su-In’s shoulders fell faster than anyone else’s.
“Not a girl, I take it? You’re not the type that’d do that,” said Dwight, who also sounded quite weary. “I had a feeling it was gonna be something like that. Despite what I just said, I never thought for a minute you had the same sort of upbringing as the rest of us. I just thought it’d be worth taking a shot, on the off chance. Don’t take it the wrong way.”
“No one’s ever asked me to become a fisherman
before,” D said as he looked at Dwight.
Somehow, it made the seafaring young man swell with pride.
Just then, a diminutive figure dashed over to D. It was the boy who’d chosen Ban’gyoh’s flute over D’s at Su-In’s house.
“Say, mister—do you still have that flute you made me?” asked the boy.
“A flute?!” Su-In exclaimed as she and Dwight exchanged glances. More than the mention of the flute, it was the fact that he’d made it that left them dumbfounded. This young man—a construct of darkness and ice—had crafted a flute for a child.
Bending over, D pulled the instrument from an inner pocket of his coat and handed it to the boy.
“Wow! Thanks!” the boy exclaimed as he snatched it from the Hunter.
Without warning, the boy was then surrounded by envious cries of “Oh, you lucky dog!” and “No fair! You get all the good stuff!”
“What happened to the one the priest gave you?” D asked unexpectedly.
Staring sternly at the holy man’s wrinkled face, the boy replied, “Oh, that old thing? It sounded real good, but it broke in no time.”
“While he’s still here in the village; ask him to make you another. I’m sure he’ll give you a lot of them.”
“Sure thing!”
Watching as the boy rid himself of his surly look and went over to Ban’gyoh dripping with affection, D then turned to Su-In. “Shall we go?” he suggested.
“Yeah.”
“What, are you going already, Su-In? Don’t tell me you’re getting all cold on us, too,” said Dwight. “This sucks.”
“Sorry. I’ll see you later.” Walking over to the mayor and sheriff, who’d been watching her from a distance, Su-In said good-bye to them, then left the school accompanied by D.
“School starts tomorrow, doesn’t it?”
“Do we have school tomorrow, teacher?”
Su-In didn’t answer the questions that followed her. She couldn’t. While her village was about to begin its sunny summer tomorrow, in the shadows a duel to the death of unrivaled ghastliness was playing out. She had chosen to throw herself into this whirling vortex, and the voices of these darling children were echoes from the land of light she couldn’t approach now.
“Soon,” Dwight reassured them.
When they exited the schoolhouse, the fisherman’s nose suddenly caught something, and he turned and looked at Ban’gyoh. The aged priest was also wearing a strange expression on his face, and he took in great rasping breaths of air. “How odd,” the holy man said.
“This is strange. For a while now, I’ve been thinking I smelled flowers.”
“Not like a woman’s perfume.”
“I heard in the Capital they’ve come out with some for men recently. It’d have to be the grocer or the sheriff. I’m almost ashamed to call them men,” said Dwight. “I’ll have to knock whichever it is on his tail later.”
“It’s me,” a hoarse voice announced proudly, but it then vanished with a muffled cry.
The aged priest and fisherman didn’t seem to notice the latter noise as they stared at the person they thought was the source of the voice. Neither of them said anything.
Approaching the wagon without a word, D climbed into the coachman’s perch first, then pulled Su-In up as well. Not even glancing at the two men who stood motionless at the entrance, he turned the wagon around and raced off.
After the vehicle had disappeared into the woods, Dwight and Ban’gyoh looked at each other and laughed until their sides ached.
.
III
.
The village’s sole inn also had an outbuilding. Built more than a decade before the main structure, it barely served to keep out the rain and the sunlight now. The innkeeper had just been thinking about finally tearing it down when an old man who appeared to be some sort of traveling painter had come along and inquired if there was an especially cheap room available. Happy to be able to press the building into service one last time, the innkeeper agreed to let the artist stay there for half price. Although it’d been connected to the main building by a covered passageway, that corridor had collapsed in a heavy storm six months earlier, leaving the building a completely independent structure now. It was the ideal spot for someone of dubious character, as the innkeeper had been perfectly aware when he loaned the old man the place.
The far-removed sea could be heard through parts of the roof and walls of the jerry-built structure, while in his room, Professor Krolock applied something to the wound on his back to keep it from festering. The medicine’s principal ingredient was iodine from the seaweed that could be found practically anywhere in a seaside town like this, and the mixture was quite effective. The location wasn’t an easy one to reach, and due to his age the professor’s body was far from flexible, so he put some of the dark blue ointment on the end of a paintbrush, and then slid it along the sword cut that ran in a straight line from his right shoulder down to just over his lumbar vertebrae. The flesh had swollen slightly—it was a shallow wound. Given the fact that he’d been sliced by the man known as Glen, his good fortune was almost miraculous.
Before long, the professor must have finished applying the medication, as he put the brush down on the cloth before him and screwed the lid tightly onto the medicine jar. As he seemed to recall something, his face—which some would find as kind as that of a doting patriarch—suddenly churned with a chilling evil.
“My movements haven’t been hampered at all. And I know the location of the woman’s home. I warrant I should take care of this before any strange interference crops up,” the professor groaned. “Though all sorts of weird characters are flocking to the bead, they’re only ignorant brutes, of course. They can kill people well enough, but they can’t read a single chemical symbol. Pearls before swine! In this entire wide world, the only person who understands the incredible importance of the bead and can make use of it is me,” the old artist muttered in a way that made him sound completely self-absorbed.
But then his voice was joined by another that said, “Well then, maybe you can enlighten me, too?”
“Who goes there?”
In his great shock, the professor leapt up from where he’d been sitting cross-legged on the bed, while right before him, an old man in a red cape descended from the ceiling. Standing by the side of the bed without making a sound was someone who only came up to the professor’s chest now that the artist had straightened his back—someone no taller than of a boy of fourteen or fifteen. His face was hideous, the cadaverous hue of his skin dotted with age spots that looked like the maws of tiny caverns, and when he grinned, he exposed a row of yellowed teeth. He thrust the point of the dagger he held out before the professor’s eyes. But no sooner had the aged artist seen it than it raced out with a gleaming trail, knocking aside the pillow the professor was reaching for and disabling the trigger of the gunpowder firearm hidden under it at the same time.
“Samon tells me you have some strange power, though I don’t think you use that hog leg to work your tricks.”
Perhaps the professor saw from the dexterity of the grinning old man that it would be useless to resist, because he then softly inquired, “Who are you?”
“We haven’t met before. I’m ‘Shin the Manipulator.’ Ever heard of me?”
“Yes. I know you’re a warrior that uses a strange power of your own. I’m Professor Krolock. Or rather, I’m a traveling artist too destitute to even afford proper lodging. But what may I do for you?”
“Don’t play coy with me,” Shin said, his eyes emitting a strange light. “You remember Samon, don’t you? The woman you were up against just before you got that wound. I was tailing her and saw the whole thing. And since I followed you when you ran off, I found out where you were staying, too. What brings me here today is that it’s occurred to me that, since you’re after the bead too, you might actually know what it’s for. True enough, I don’t know any chemical symbols, nor do I fathom the riddle of that bead. But you’re going to impart s
ome of your wisdom to me. Don’t argue with me about this.”
“I’d have no problem with that,” the professor said plainly. “But on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“From a phrenological standpoint, you have a truly fascinating head, though it has piqued my interest as an artist even more. Kindly permit me to do a sketch of you. It won’t take long.”
The professor’s proposal came because he suspected his opponent only knew that he faced someone who used an unusual spell of sorts. In fact, he was sure of it. Samon must’ve been the name of the seductive female warrior. When the professor first engaged her in the forest, he’d caught her completely off-guard, and while he’d let her see the thin animal hide he used in place of a canvas the second time, she had no way of knowing what’d been scrawled on it.
“If you’ll indulge me in that request,” Professor Krolock continued, “I’ll be most happy to tell you everything I know. Chances are I possess the world’s most detailed information on the subject.”
“You think you’re in any position to be bargaining?” Shin said, his vile lips forming an even more unsightly grin.
“Well, I suppose you’ll kill me if I’m averse to telling you said information, will you? I’ll offer some resistance, and even if you should manage to kill me, you’ll never learn the secret of the bead then. To the uninformed, it’s just a worthless lump.”
“My compatriots and I are working for someone else. I’m sure he’ll know what to do when we bring it back to him.”
The professor smiled a bit at Shin’s rebuttal. Although he seemed much more human than Shin, that only made his cruelty all the more disturbing to those who witnessed it. “In that case, why have you called on me?” asked the artist. “I believe I understand your mindset all too well. You don’t truly intend to share the secrets of the bead with your lot, do you?”
A whitish line zipped to the base of the professor’s throat. Before he could even draw a breath, a bit of vermilion seeped out onto the center of the blade, swelling like a leech into a long, thin blob of blood.
Mysterious Journey to the North Sea, Part 2 Page 5
