The Tiger in Winter

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  To Valerie, it seemed as if the new guy’s eyes were blazing in the darkness. “Well, I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said.

  “See if I don’t. After all, this time I’ve got a great partner.”

  “Spare me. I’m not about to take up a stake for the sake of mankind.”

  “I’m not saying everybody has to. All you’ve gotta do is help us in your own way.”

  “I’m not helping you at all. Basically, we’re doing this job because we got permission from the Nobility. If they ever found out I poisoned my boyfriend so you could be on the team, they’d exile me to the damned moon!”

  “He was too stubborn. But I’m grateful to both of you. Is he gonna be okay?”

  “Three days of bed rest and he’ll recover. If we find anything, I’ll bring him out to the site.”

  “By all means, see that you do.” The new guy took a short sip of water from his canteen, but then he turned a stern look upward. “Another thing—are the others gonna be okay?”

  “Okay how?”

  “Well, I’m not gonna say I have an eye for people or anything, but I do notice things.”

  Swallowing some jerky, Valerie then looked down at her feet and replied, “To be honest, I wouldn’t call it the best of all possible teams. Most of them aren’t so much interested in uncovering an accurate picture of Noble history through these artifacts as they are in finding some valuable loot.”

  “Are they that hard up for help in the Capital?”

  “Don’t get me wrong. They’re all really talented archeologists. It’s just that the greed can run even deeper. I don’t put my complete faith in them.”

  “Want me to bring in some of my people for protection?”

  “No way. We can’t thin the party any more than we have.”

  “Looks like we really asked a lot of you. Don’t worry. I’d never forgive myself if anything were to happen to you.”

  “Sure you’re not a little too soft for someone heading up a group that’s picking a fight with the Nobility? You’ve got to be ready to let a woman or two die along the way.”

  “You know, I think the same thing. According to my father, I get that from my granddad.”

  “That’s destiny, then.”

  The pair’s laughter reverberated from the bowels of the earth.

  Just then, from up ahead there came a most distinct sound.

  “You heard something, didn’t you?” Valerie said, drawing the pistol from her hip.

  “Yeah. Something alive,” the new guy said, and he started putting his food away.

  When they listened intently, the sounds were steadily drawing closer. And there were lots and lots of them.

  III

  Shortly before the two members of the survey team went underground, the duke and D had once again set out to make the rounds in an aircraft. This time they were going to mountain villages much further north than the previous day. As always, patients had come from all the surrounding villages, and they cried out in wonder at the speed with which the makeshift hospital and medical equipment were set up, their pain and despair turning to the hope of recovery before the visitors’ eyes.

  “The rebel army also supplies human doctors, but they’d be hard pressed to make it all the way out here. Once I’m gone, treatment can continue, though they’ll probably destroy this equipment too.”

  “That’s right,” the hoarse voice said, agreeing with the duke. “Frontier rebels are mostly sickos half out of their minds. You oughta catch ’em all and help ’em get—gaaaaah?!”

  The duke gazed at D’s left hand with interest, saying, “Do you collect rent from him?”

  “Nope.”

  “He’s the type to take advantage of the situation,” said the duke.

  “I know.”

  And saying that, D looked over at the hospital.

  A sun-bronzed man was racing toward them from it, spurred by the sweeping gestures of a number of others. When he came to the duke, the man suddenly began to tremble.

  “What is it?” the duke inquired with a thin smile. “If it’s an outbreak of the common cold, you shouldn’t come to me but head over there.”

  “D-d-don’t think this makes up for all the things you’ve done!” the man shouted, terror squeezing the words from him in a shrill tone. “You come here like some kindly old man, but we all know you’re living off our lifeblood. How many have you killed so far? Everybody else might be blinded by your acts of generosity, but I ain’t fooled!”

  Normally the fear would leave someone as they bellowed like that, but in this man’s case the trembling only grew all the more violent.

  The duke was just staring at him in silence.

  “One of these days, I’m gonna put a stake through your heart with my own two hands, you got that?!”

  He wasn’t able to say any more than that. A number of villagers had jumped on the man, then dragged him away. The only one who stayed behind was the white-haired mayor of the village.

  “My humblest apologies. I can’t say how sorry we are. Please, take this old gray head and let that be the end of it,” the old man said, bowing desperately.

  The duke clapped the man on the shoulder and told him, “I’m accustomed to it.”

  “Oh, thank you,” the village mayor said, clinging to the duke’s arm.

  “Bysan and Lota, Trofall and Sengen—I believe patients from all the local villages have lined up here, but are there any other isolated individuals?”

  “No, this is everyone,” the mayor said, shaking his head so hard it seemed it would tear free. “And they’re all so happy. Thanks to the medicine you gave us, there isn’t a single patient who can’t move any more. The ones who came are all there are.”

  “Then that’s just fine,” the duke said with a nod. It was a practiced motion. “I shall see you again in a month’s time. Tell everyone I said as much.”

  The Nobleman looked over at D. But the young man of unearthly beauty had vanished.

  D was in the nearby forest. It was a spot about seven or eight minutes on foot from the hospital.

  In the more northern parts of the northern Frontier sectors, stands of trees had to be able to weather temperatures as low as a hundred below zero. Species like white birch and acacia wouldn’t stand a chance. The Nobles who created the bitter cold had also made forms of life appropriate for it. These were species of trees that had hot sap circulating through them, keeping them warm enough to survive the severe cold.

  D went over to one such tree. In a number of places its charred brown surface was sending out shoots that were nearly scarlet.

  “Oh, would you look at that? If it ain’t a ‘Hell-and-back,’” the hoarse voice remarked with surprise. “I wonder if the locals even know about it. If they did, they’d dig it out quicker than—”

  The voice died there. D had turned around.

  A girl of about twelve or thirteen was just stepping out from behind a tree trunk roughly five yards to his right. Perhaps it was due to the sunlight in the north, but like the other villagers, her skin was nearly black. She was so tense, it gave her large eyes a certain hardness.

  “You’re with our lord, aren’t you?” the girl asked. Her right hand clutched the handle of the knife she wore on her hip.

  “Right you are, cutie.”

  Her large eyes rattled back and forth. “That’s a horrible voice for a face like yours,” she said.

  “Is it?”

  The girl’s expression suddenly became tranquil. The last remark had been in D’s voice.

  “That one’s much better.”

  “You have business with the duke?”

  “Yep. Now, everybody’s getting checked over. Will he be leaving when they’re done?”

  “Yes, if there are no other patients.”

  “There are,” the girl said, almost slapping him with the words. Her teeth were blindingly white.

  “Where?”

  “On the side of that mountain over there. Me and my bi
g brother have a house up there. The villagers or doctor won’t come up. You think maybe our lord would go there?”

  “What kinda shape’s your big brother in?”

  The girl grew confused at the hoarse voice. The eyes she trained on D were reeling with rapture and puzzlement.

  “How is he?” asked D.

  “He’s been bedridden for the last four days or so. Mountain snake venom did it to him. And there’s nothing I can do for him.”

  “Come with me,” D said, and he brought the girl to see the duke.

  “Glia’s my name,” the girl said, introducing herself politely, but even then her eyes kept flitting somewhere else. The hospital.

  On hearing the situation, the duke agreed without another word. “Just leave it to me. We’ll head up there right away.”

  “But there are still villagers to see.”

  “Never fear, the androids and their medical equipment will take care of them.”

  “But, um—we won’t have a doctor.”

  “There’s equipment in my airship. Rest assured.”

  “Great,” Glia said, and she collapsed on the spot.

  “That all she had in her?” the hoarse voice said in disbelief.

  Just then, small voices reached them. Small but angry. And more than just one.

  Glia got to her feet. Her right hand went for her knife—then stopped.

  Three or four villagers were running toward them. And they were all pointing at Glia. Slamming on the brakes, they tried to shout something. But they couldn’t get it out at first. They’d run over at full speed.

  Huffing for breath, one said, “What brings you around here?”

  “Did Cotil kick the bucket or something?”

  “My brother’s indestructible!” Glia shouted. And then, almost triumphantly, she added, “And the lot of you sure as hell know it.”

  Sanity suddenly returned to the faces of the crazed villagers. The girl’s older brother was most certainly no average person.

  “At any rate, you know what we said we’d do to you if you came down off the mountain, don’t you?”

  “Come here. We’ll show you we mean business.”

  “It’s just this once, and I won’t do it again!”

  Once again a madness gripped the villagers.

  “We’ll have no trouble here,” the duke said, stepping between them.

  The strength immediately drained from the villagers.

  “Is there some problem with me going to the girl’s home?”

  “No, it’s just . . .”

  “The two of ’em are outsiders,” another said, glaring at the girl with loathing. “So they ain’t got no right having you look at ’em, my lord. Please, just leave ’em be.”

  “I’ll settle with them once and for all,” the slim girl said, standing poised to fight in the face of such intense hatred. She didn’t seem frightened. Every inch of her burned with the fires of battle. Such was the life she’d led.

  “I have already promised to go,” the duke said, settling the matter. Looking at each of the four villagers, he continued, “And none of you intend to interfere with that, do you?”

  Terror turned the four of them into statues.

  “Very well, then. In that case—” The duke used the staff in his hand to point toward his aircraft. “D, what will you do?”

  “I’ll go.”

  “Well, what do you know. Child—does that please you?”

  At the duke’s query, Glia looked at D. In an instant, she went soft all the way to her soul. Having served its purpose, her stony tension melted away.

  “Well?” the duke asked again.

  “Yep!” the girl replied with a hearty nod.

  Glia’s house was a log cabin on the slopes of Mount Kaiser, which boasted a height of almost fifty thousand feet above sea level. Unlike those in the villages at the base of the mountain, it didn’t make any use of modern building materials. The gaps were filled with mud.

  Since there wasn’t an open space large enough to land, the aircraft hovered about sixty feet above the house, and the three of them descended on a beam of magnetic force.

  With one look at the house, the duke let out a gasp. The walls and roof were riddled with damage. The roof also showed large scorch marks.

  “Marks left by more arrows, swords, and bullets than I can count,” the hoarse voice said, sounding impressed. “And fire arrows on the roof—no, looks more like Molotov cocktails. Just how old is this brother of yours?”

  “How old is he?” D asked.

  “Sixteen.”

  “And you’re twelve—who’d come all the way up here in the mountains to start something with a couple of little kids living on their own?” the hoarse voice mused.

  Glia went over to the door, put her mouth to a gap in the wall, and said, “You all right, Cotil? The lord of the land’s agreed to come to see you. We’re coming in now.”

  She took out a little key and slipped it into the keyhole. There was the sound of a deadbolt sliding back.

  Glia, the duke, and D went into the dark room in that order. A powerful scent struck their noses. About five hundred square feet in total, the space had shades drawn over all the windows and flowers sitting on tables large and small.

  “I see,” the duke said purposefully, the words escaping in a murmur.

  Three pairs of eyes were trained on the face of the young man sitting up in a bed at the far end of the room. A green scarf covered his mouth. And with that, they knew.

  “No matter how you might try to mask it with the scent of flowers, nothing in the world is stronger than the stench of blood,” said the duke. “Remove that covering. I want to be sure.”

  Groaning a little, Glia walked over to the bed. When the girl reached out her hand, her older brother stopped it, reaching for the scarf himself.

  Even in the gloom his face would be termed pale, and his unusually red lips in particular stood out. Along with the pair of fangs that jutted from them.

  “So, he’s an ‘incomplete’?” said the hoarse voice.

  “Let me see your throat.”

  The boy took off the scarf, exposing his throat for the duke. There was no mistaking that the two scars over his carotid artery were teeth marks.

  “When and where did you come to be bitten?” the duke asked, covering his mouth with a handkerchief. But it wasn’t to shield himself from the smell. Nothing was more effective than the stench of blood at bringing out the true nature of a blood-starved Noble.

  Bloodsucker

  Chapter 5

  When a Noble—that is, a vampire—drank someone’s blood and they died, the human returned as one of their kind. This was a principle immutable in both heaven and earth. Though there were humans who would die and not be revived due to the wishes of the Noble, the principle remained unchanged. However, in the rarest of cases, due to either some tiny variance in technique not even the Nobility themselves could quantify or else just the caprices of the universe—in other words, by sheer accident, or perhaps due to the capricious nature of the Noble in question—there were some victims who were left drained but didn’t die. “Incompletes” was the name they were given.

  In one sense, there could be no more tragic creature in the world. Since they hadn’t been completely transformed into vampires, they still had a human psyche but, while human, had been given the inclinations of a vampire. Their human minds were plagued with guilt as they were unable to keep from attacking others in their lust for blood. Consequently, when the sun went down, they would creep into the bedrooms of their former friends and drive a Noble’s fangs into throats coursing with hot blood. When they did, half of the time their victims would become Nobles, while the other half would immediately die. Whether their fate was the former or the latter, it was always a great tragedy for the victims’ families.

  From knowledge accumulated over ten millennia, almost all the surviving victims of an “incomplete” were left imbeciles, and since it’d been confirmed that not only wa
s there was no danger of them attacking humans, but also that the survivors’ bite wouldn’t turn anyone into the Nobility, said victims would be confined to a secure building on the outskirts of town, where they would be given blood taken from their families. A kind of life support system would be established. Through it, someone would be safely kept in captivity for the rest of their life—or they could be, though in most cases their family ended up driving a stake through the heart of the victim. Because the family couldn’t escape the most negative association with the Nobility and the act of drinking blood—that it was dirty.

  It began as a creeping suspicion that their neighbors no longer looked at them the same way, growing into delusions that the rest of the village no longer even viewed their family as human. The only way to escape it was to destroy the source of it. And then, their father or mother, child or wife would head to the edge of town with hammer and stake in hand. And once they’d done what they had to do, they would seek an outlet for their anger—the “incomplete” who was the cause of it all.

  Naturally, it was impossible for someone like that to live in a community or even near one. Their habitations had to be frozen wastes where humans never passed, mountains where no man had ever set foot, desert islands, and the like. However, the greatest misfortune for the “incompletes” was that they needed to drink the blood of human beings. Though one might live a thousand miles from human habitation, when night came he would seek someone’s blood. For the craving was a thousand times stronger than the human hunger for food. No amount of self-restraint could curb it. As a result, the tragedy played out time and again, leaving them no choice but to wander eternally until they met their fate at human hands.

  “How long have you been here?” the duke asked, his question carrying misgivings—and a modicum of admiration. Because after a bloodsucking incident, or after their hiding place was discovered, an “incomplete” had to immediately go on the run. No matter where they might hide, humans would track them down. They were given three months at best in any one place. Yet this log cabin showed all signs that the siblings had inhabited it for far longer than that.