Following after him like some bizarre hand was a long streamer from his knees down to his ankles. Falling to the ground, it sent up a splash. The ground had turned to water, and the thing wrapped around D’s leg had been a watery tendril, too.
Sand bouncing up sharply around his feet as he landed, D leapt once more and came back to earth on ordinary ground.
“I thought you’d fall in, but you’re even better than I expected,” Egbert could be heard to say from some forty feet away, and it was obvious from the sound of his voice he was choking back his pain. “But do you think you can reach me here?”
D didn’t answer, and he didn’t move.
Waves were breaking at his feet. The shoreline was over thirty feet away—yet still there were waves here. And who else but D would’ve noticed that tiny ripples were spreading out from Egbert’s feet in all directions? Had there been any moonlight, the small but unmistakable crests on them would’ve glittered visibly. The sands were becoming a sea. A sea forty feet wide, all inside the circle Egbert had scribed.
“Can you reach me?” Egbert asked in a low voice. “Gravity, the woods, and now the sea itself all protect me. And that’s not all. Here’s something else—you have to see this,” he laughed. “The soldiers of my kingdom!”
Something else came into being in the breaking waves. First, black spheres came to the surface. Heads. Their nature was made apparent by the shoulders, arms, and torsos below them as they rose smoothly. Perhaps it was because these “fake” beings had just risen from the sea, but water dripped lazily from the seaweed-like hair that fell over their foreheads, and it wouldn’t have been at all surprising if their eyes had glazed over and fallen right out. From the neck down they were like the soldiers one might see in a hologram collection for children in the traveling library, dressed in primitive armor and armed with crude swords. Completely filling D’s field of view, there were more than a dozen of them.
Coughing and clearing their throats, they spit out blackish wads. Spattering against the waves, these turned out to be sand. They then turned their black faces to the heavens, and the silence was broken by the sound of them inhaling one after another. Spitting out the sand that clogged their windpipes and drawing in the fresh air, these “soldiers” were imbued with “life.”
“I can make mountains, if need be. Or rivers, or even vampires,” Egbert said, his voice inebriated with self-love even as he pressed down on the shoulder wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding. But he could probably do exactly what he said. Inside the ring he’d scribed in the sand—this eldritch zone he’d established—he was the absolute ruler, a monarch without peer. With but a single command from him a stick would become a stand of trees, a puddle became the sea, and mud figurines he’d prepared were transformed into the mightiest of soldiers. Here in his self-made “kingdom.”
The metallic scabbards rasped as the soldiers drew their swords.
D didn’t move. Although the sea didn’t look like it’d come up past his ankles, he’d already determined that it was actually incredibly deep. Now a stranger in this land, he had to consider every possible element his enemy.
“His left hand is useless—attack him from that side!” Egbert shouted.
At his command, his soldiers charged at D with their glittering blades.
But they probably never heard a hoarse voice howl, “His left hand is useless, eh? I’ll show you!”
Suddenly there was a powerful gust of wind. Waves began to build and break on the sea that lay in defense of Egbert, and in the blink of an eye, the vast body of water became a thin layer of liquid suspended in the air. All the wind was blowing toward a single point. Toward D—and his supposedly broken left hand.
And what a powerful gale it was. But it didn’t blow the soldiers through the air. Before it could, the tendrils of wind had already ripped away the flesh and blood that formed their bodies. Necks twisted, arms snapped, and the torsos they’d been joined to broke apart in midair, returning to their original form—sand, to be precise—before they were sucked into D’s left hand.
Perhaps it was the combination of this terrible shock and the pain in Egbert’s shoulder, but his spell seemed to falter as the soldiers, the protective grove, and the surface of the sea all vanished. Huddled on the beach, Egbert was left as exposed as the fairy-tale emperor in his new clothes.
With his blade in his right hand, D paced forebodingly toward his foe. A contest of this sort always ended in death. That was the iron rule for those who made a business of doing battle.
Egbert looked up. In another second, there’d be a bloody horizontal swipe just below his fearful, upturned face.
But D’s blade stopped in midair.
“I’m not going to kill you,” the Hunter told him. “I have a message for your friends. Tell them I have the bead. And if they want it, it’s me they should come after.”
The eyes of the two men met, and sparks seemed to fly. And then there was a surprised cry of “Oh!” from somewhere.
D turned toward the sea.
There was no moon. Not even the stars were visible. But D, of all people, could still see. Over by where the stark waves broke, out in the water less than fifteen feet from shore, stood a caped figure submerged up to his waist. The wind that drove the waves also carried an ineffable aura that buffeted D’s cheeks.
“Baron Meinster—are you back from the sea?” D said, his words drifting far off into a darkness forsaken by light.
However, their confrontation lasted mere seconds. The sea behind the figure seemed to suddenly build, and a massive wave filled D’s field of view. And after that had wiped the surface clean, there was no sign of life whatsoever.
Somewhere, a seagull cried. The surf made the only other sound.
Sheathing his blade, D looked over his shoulder. There was no sign of Egbert. Not even his bloodstains remained. And that was no mean feat.
“Did you see that?” D’s left hand asked.
“Yes.”
“He was pretty intense. In all my days, I’ve never heard of such a thing. Wind up on the wrong side of him, and it could spell trouble for you.”
“Yes, it might.”
“Yeah, but there’s something else,” the voice said introspectively. “I don’t quite know what it is, but he doesn’t seem like ordinary Nobility, either. He’s a Noble, but then again he’s not. Like someone else I know. He had the same feel to him. And another thing . . .”
D turned to look off over the roaring surf., as if something he’d lost lay out there.
The voice said, “He had the saddest eyes. Crazy for blood, but truly sad at the same time. That’s just like someone else, too.”
D’s hair flowed out around him. Apparently the wind had changed direction. The wind coming off the freezing sea was terribly cold.
“The north wind?” said the voice. “The north sea, you, and him. If you were to leave town right now, you might save yourself from something you’ll only want to forget.”
D didn’t reply. A short while later, the gorgeous figure turned his back on the eternal voice of the sea.
When he returned to Su-In’s home, he found there’d been some excitement—it seemed someone had broken into one of the back bedrooms and ransacked it. When D stepped into Su-In’s room, everything was in such disarray it looked like a miniature hurricane had torn through it.
From what Su-In and the neighborhood women helping her said, around the time D went down to the beach they had finished decorating for the wake and everyone was taking a break in the living room when they distinctly heard the sound of one thing after another hitting the floor. Now, these were housewives, but these women not only lived out on the Frontier, but in a village full of fishermen. Not knowing whether this was a burglar out to capitalize on someone’s hour of misfortune or some spirit looking for a body to possess, they took harpoons and machetes in hand and noisily made their way to the back of the house with prayer beads and other talismans held out in front of them. Though burglars and
the vast majority of carnivores would’ve fled at the sound of their footsteps, this thing was completely undeterred, continuing to tear the room apart even as the group pounded away at the door.
Now infuriated, the women wanted to get the door or window open, but that didn’t work—they seemed to be locked. When they asked Su-In about it, she said she’d locked up just to be safe. The key was brought quickly and slotted into the keyhole, where it turned easily enough. But the door itself still wouldn’t budge at all. Someone suggested they try to get in through the window, but that had been locked from the inside and the glass itself seemed to have a sort of semi-translucent film over it. Perhaps that was why when they hit it with a rock the glass cracked but wouldn’t come apart at all.
One short-tempered matron became furious and, shouting that she’d gladly pay to replace the door, hammered away at it with the ax they used to split firewood. Apparently there was none of the weird film there, as the ax sank deep into the door. Even the audacious burglar must’ve been startled by that, as the racket inside ceased immediately, and then one of the neighborhood women with a hint of extrasensory perception informed them that all signs of anyone being in there had already vanished. As the woman declared, “The culprit’s gone,” they broke in the door and the whole group charged in, only a minute or so having passed since the first blow of the ax.
It was five minutes later, after an exhaustive search of the ransacked room, that they learned it was just as the housewife had said. The window was locked, too. Before the ruckus, Su-In had secured it just as she’d done with the door. And the culprit hadn’t left by either of them. How had he or she even gotten in to begin with? The only direct way outside was the window on the southern side, but not only had it been coated with the same strange mucus—probably to prevent anyone from interfering with his or her work—but it was also still locked. As for the door, it had the same mucus on all four edges, which was why it wouldn’t open even after it’d been unlocked.
The mucus—or gelatinous substance—was quite unusual. It was flexible and soft to the touch, like gelatin or a jellyfish, yet once it had been stretched a certain distance it became hard as steel and impossible to cut. Anything set on its surface would stick to it like glue so that no amount of pushing or pulling could budge it.
After the circumstances had been explained and D had inspected the room and the strange substance, he told Su-In, “I know who did this.”
Su-In’s eyes bulged in their sockets. “But—how in the world could someone manage this?”
“That I don’t know,” D said nonchalantly.
The reply was a tad dismissive, but when it came from this young man’s mouth it somehow seemed like he was imparting some great universal truth, and Su-In couldn’t very well complain.
“You don’t know how, and yet you still know who’s responsible?” she asked.
“This is the same as the skin off that character who impersonated your grandfather this morning. It’s in a different state, but the basic substance is one and the same.”
“In that case, you think that impostor broke in here to steal the bead?”
“Undoubtedly that was the aim.”
Su-In made a dubious expression. The blow that’d cut deep into Twin’s shoulder hadn’t sprung to mind. After being wounded that badly, not even the toughest person would feel like coming back there the same day to rob the place. “Okay, then who did it, and how’d they get inside?”
“Is there anyone in the barn?” asked D.
“Mr. Kotoff.”
Accompanied by Su-In, D left the main house. Perhaps sensing that something was wrong, Su-In sped ahead to the barn and opened the door. The coffin rested on a row of wooden boxes, and before it was a man with graying hair who was snoring to beat the band. A bottle of cheap liquor stood vigilantly beside the box on which the man’s head rested. Not surprisingly, only about a third of its contents remained.
D and Su-In made a thorough inspection of the area around the coffin. Nothing was out of place. Even the seal on it to ward off demons was still intact.
“Should we open it?” Su-In asked, looking at D as she reached for the lid of the coffin.
Signaling to the girl to stay back, D opened the lid instead.
Grampa Han lay there in his coffin looking exactly as he had when Sun-In had placed him in it.
“Looks like nothing’s out of the ordinary, right?”
“You should get that guy out of here,” the Hunter told her. “He’s of no use to us like this.”
“D . . .” Su-In started to say, fear swimming in her eyes for the first time as she gazed at the Hunter. Quickly nodding her assent, she lifted Kotoff up. Easily shouldering a body that looked to weigh at least a hundred and seventy pounds, the woman walked out without a backward glance.
Once the door had been shut and Su-In’s footsteps had faded into the distance, D tugged the wool sweater Grampa Han was wearing up over the old man’s chest. Pulling a silver dagger from the inside lining of his coat with his left hand, he drove it into the old man’s heart without a second’s hesitation. There was no reaction at all from the paraffin-pale body.
Whether or not that result was satisfactory couldn’t be discerned from the Hunter’s handsome but emotionless face as D pulled the old man’s sweater back down and closed the coffin’s lid.
“Is that what you were expecting?” D’s left hand asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Burglars these days must be getting pretty clever. At any rate, once they know you’re in possession of the thing, nothing too bad should happen. So, what were you planning on doing next?”
“You saw him, too,” said D.
“Damn. As if the summer wasn’t short enough to begin with, now we’ve got one problem springing up after another. It’s gonna rain blood. That’s what your fortune says.”
“My fortune?”
“That’s right,” D’s left hand replied. “I recently learned how to tell fortunes from the wind. Depending on the direction, the timbre of it, and whether it’s strong or weak, you can tell if good things or bad are coming.”
“And where did you learn all this?” D asked, completely unfazed.
“Right here, of course. Smack in the middle of your grubby little mitt.”
“When?”
“Little bits here and there, whenever you weren’t working me like a dog,” the voice replied grumpily. “After a hard day’s work, most folks whine about how tired they are and how they just can’t wait to get some sleep. But those with willpower show those heavy eyelids who’s boss and go right on working. That’s the only way wise people come to be in this world. The wind taught me that. And it said that before the summer’s over, winds of misery will blow through here colored with vermilion. Any way you look at it, the days are just gonna get harder and harder starting tomorrow.”
—
“You were as powerless as I expected, weren’t you?” asked the voice of someone on an elegantly carved sofa in the darkness. The shadowy figure lay at length on the piece of furniture. The voice was that of Shin.
“He’s a fearsome character, to be sure,” Egbert said with a sigh, not completely admitting defeat. Although there was no hint of pain in his voice, the feeling of exhaustion was undeniable. Whether the compatriots and competitors that surrounded him would believe that was another matter entirely. For these men and this woman, remaining suspicious was the very best way to remain alive. “That’s no ordinary Hunter,” Egbert continued.
“He’s a dhampir,” said Twin. His voice came from beside the black door. “And he’s not an ordinary dhampir, either.”
“You mean to tell me there are different ranks of dhampirs?”
“Damned if I know. At any rate, I’m not sure any one of us could go head-to-head with him and come out on top.”
“See, I told you so,” Shin said in a reproachful tone. “There’s no saying we couldn’t take him out one-on-one with proper planning, but even then, there’s
a strong probability of us being killed. That cold steel and the eerie aura around him—just thinking back on them scares me. I guess the only thing we can do is join forces, right?”
“It’s a little early to be doing that,” Twin interrupted. “Two of the others haven’t come back yet—the mature Ms. Samon and Gyohki.”
“How do you know she’s mature if you’ve never seen her face?” Egbert asked, his voice echoing from the center of the room. “I always thought of you as an old shit.”
Cackling, Twin replied, “Relax. I wouldn’t fiddle around with an old bird like that.”
“Just what are you trying to say?!” Egbert shot back.
Following that outburst that hardly suited his solemn tone, the strange zone fell into darkness.
At that moment, someone with an unmistakably voluptuous figure came in.
“Speak of the devil,” Shin said with amusement. “So, how did it go? Was it worth it for us to hang around here?”
“I was interrupted,” the woman replied in a voice that carried a remarkable weight of scorn—an emotion that was directed at herself.
“You too, huh?”
At Egbert’s remark, Samon snapped back, “For your information, it wasn’t the man known as D. It was someone else who uses a strange power. I was so close to taking the girl captive and getting the bead. The next time I run into him, I’ll tear him to pieces,” Samon said, although she hadn’t even seen the person using that sorcery—Professor Krolock. All she could recall were the eerie suggestions whispered in her ear. Her display of rage was ninety-nine percent genuine, with the last one percent mere vanity.
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see his face.”
“So, in other words, he beat you like a dog and you don’t even know who he is?”
Samon bit her lip. A thin streak of black ran from that beautiful rose petal. Blood.
“Well, no matter who it was, you blew it, too,” Shin said in a tone that seemed intended to cow all the others.
“I wouldn’t be so quick to say that,” she replied.
“Okay, whatever you say. But it’s clear a new opponent has arrived on the scene. If we all go off doing our own thing without knowing who that is, we’ll be leaving ourselves wide open. We may not know who he is, but he probably knows about us. You should be reproaching yourself instead of overestimating your own abilities.”
Mysterious Journey to the North Sea, Part 1 Page 13
