“Well, then,” the Section Chief said, in a deeply troubled manner, his graceful features darkening.
“In any number of ways, the ordinary rules of government in the neighboring wards don’t apply in Shinjuku. Illegal espers, cyborgs, assassins, spies from every corner of the world make their nests here. Fine. Let’s get down to business. Over these last five days, active energy levels have soared five times. Five times the normal amount of energy is spilling onto the streets of Demon City, of Shinjuku. Even a child would understand the implications!”
“I don’t know. Abilities vary so widely when it comes to children,” said the Section Chief, intent on playing the straight man to the end.
The mayor was mad enough to spit. He was going out on a limb with such an important official in the World Federation government. But there was no way anyone could carry off the duties of Demon City mayor without a few pints of piss and vinegar flowing through his veins.
The kind of people who showed up at city hall weren’t just law-abiding citizens, but gangsters looking to launder their ill-gotten gains, drifters and grifters and cyborgs with fake green cards demanding the rights of legitimate residents, and so on and so on.
Turn them away politely, the usual threats and blusters, and if push came to shove, using all means necessary, up to and including overwhelming force—these were the mayor’s minimal conditions.
The first mayor had thrown down with three killer robots hired by an organized crime family, got badly hurt in the exchange, and resigned. When the first lady of a particular world power opined in an unguarded moment that Demon City was a blot on the natural beauty of Japan, his replacement knocked her flat, in the process felling the president and his press secretary like tenpins. He was out too.
The third and current mayor was rumored to swear blood oaths with his city managers while puffing on a cigar in an underground bunker surrounded by high explosives. At least that was the reputation he’d fostered. In the end, the prime minister gave his predecessor a covert pat on the back and rewarded him with a hefty ministerial portfolio.
“Do you understand what we’re talking about? These numbers don’t refer to the energy output of the local industry—the large-scale greenhouses, the synthetic food processors, the illegal arms manufacturers and the rest. The energy generated by human activity, all the inertia arising out of mass transit, the states of organic and inorganic matter, the sum total of energies emanated in all forms living and dead—the energy balance of Shinjuku in toto. That has risen five fold. Five hundred percent. What in the world could account for this expansion?”
“Um—?” The assistant comptroller poked his cucumber-like face into the mayor’s tirade. “Though the total energy output has increased, the sources and composition of the life energies, inertial energies and projected latent energies haven’t changed. It’s as if an energy radiating device suddenly appeared in Shinjuku five days ago.”
“I could live with that.” The mayor frowned and took a cigar from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. “Hey, a light. Forget the editorializing just now. Only my assistant’s opinion. Not officially shared by the ward government. Our theory is, it’s a catalytic phenomenon, not some other energy source that sprang into being. Demon City itself is exacerbating the increase, catalyzing it and sending it sky high at a whack.”
“But even in the case of Demon City, whatever the nature of this energy, the sources you mentioned don’t exceed the sum total. If the separate energy increases zero out, it’s not physically possible for the totals to increase, no matter what the catalyst.”
“It’s right here in the figures,” the mayor said with a triumphant expression.
“But then where do you imagine this impossible five-fold increase came from?”
Section Chief Yamashina looked into the mayor’s eyes. The mayor’s face twitched. He knew the man wasn’t posing the question as a simple formality. The assistant comptroller gulped down his tea and yelped upon scalding his lip.
“We—” the mayor started to say, when a warning buzzer of some sort interrupted him.
“What is it?” Yamashina asked, turning to an invisible microphone.
What looked like an underling wearing sunglasses appeared in the holograph on the table. “We just received an emergency communication from the Shinjuku Disaster Management Center. Their sensors forecast an earthquake directly beneath us that matches the one that destroyed Shinjuku.”
III
Sayaka knew she was really two. The eyes perceiving the scene reaching out before her were her own—and also those of another woman.
Semiramis. The evil queen who once ruled ancient Assyria. As had so many of the rich and powerful before her, she bound the authority of the secular and sacred into a single weapon of uncompromising might, claiming each new bounty with a fresh tide of holy blood.
What Sayaka was looking at was the miserable state of those sacrificial victims.
This was the city of Babylon.
No building was safe. Even the brick houses were consumed in fire. Those that weren’t coughed up black smoke, charred human skeletons clinging to the skeletal remains of the consumed buildings.
The streets ran red, turning into rusty splotches where falling bricks covered up the blood. The dead were young and old, men and women alike. All of them were missing their heads and hands and feet, and many had their bellies ripped open.
Sayaka felt like throwing up, while her other self was drunk with joy. They both knew that this was their doing.
The scene changed. Sayaka was standing on a large stone platform. In front of and behind, to her right and left, was a solid phalanx of Assyrian soldiers holding spears all pointing at a great line of people some distance away from them.
Prisoners of war. Their arms and legs were bound to shackles and balls and chains, their faces clouded with presentiments of their impending fate. Sayaka raised the staff in her right hand.
No, she cried out. This isn’t right!
But another voice commanded, Do it! They are heretics, fools who raised a sword against my god. The least they can do is atone for their sins by spilling their blood upon this altar.
Stop!
Kill them!
The staff came down.
Three knights appeared among the prisoners. One held a long lance. One had unusually long arms and an equally long sword. The third had six arms. The three horses kicked up a curtain of sand and dust as the three knights attacked the defenseless wave of humanity.
Every flash of the lance speared three or four, flinging them groaning through the air. The sweep of the sword beheaded women and children, cleaved skulls in two, and stained the sky with blood.
Some tried to flee. Despite the iron balls and shackles and chains, the fear of death propelled them forward foot by foot. Several hours later, by then thousands of feet from the place of the slaughter, they may have even felt a sense of relief. And then came steel arrows flying from so far away, and yet piercing their chests like paper.
One arrow shot through ten at a time. After five arrows, the slaughter was over. The remaining people scattered in a different direction—guarded by no one—in the direction of a cliff.
The cliff moved. What looked like the boulder holding up the precipice trudged forward. It was a stone giant in the shape of a man. The boulders on its back were damming up something else as well.
Water. A huge quantity of water was stored inside the cliff.
The prisoners couldn’t remove the balls and chains from their ankles and wrists. They could do nothing but stand there as the raging waves swept over them. The defenseless victims sank to the bottom and drowned in the mud. In less than ten minutes, the wastelands had turned into a marsh.
High in the sky, the sun beat mercilessly down on the desert. But here and there amidst the carnage of the execution site, miraculously, could still be found struggling signs of human life.
The stone giant bearing up the cliff stomped with its thousand-ton feet
, snuffing out what remained of them.
Stop! Stop! Stop! Sayaka cried out.
Kill! Kill! Kill them! That other woman howled with laughter.
Both were Sayaka, both were her.
The atrocities continued. The stone giant destroyed the Chaldean city of Sarrabani by itself. It approached the strongly fortified battlements bearing a polished bronze shield that reflected the sun’s rays. It became a gigantic mirror amplifying the sunlight a thousand fold, burning down the city walls. Everyone within the walls was burned to ashes.
Sayaka’s tears and despair spilled across the endless desert. Her laughter echoed across the moonlit oases. This is what I commanded. Disgust and white-hot anger engulfed her. That woman is me, the both of them said.
You are not going to kill me. Neither will I let you die. I am the one who will wipe you out of existence. When that time comes, I will be free as the wind. For twenty-five hundred years that damned Doctor Faustus has tormented me.
The scenes of carnage continued. Wherever Sayaka went, only celebrations of war and death and destruction greeted her, the God of Death presiding over the rites.
Sayaka sorrowed, and she was delirious with joy. And there she was, slathering her beautiful body with their blood, submerging herself in pools of blood while indulging herself with her many male slaves.
Setting her apart from the other contending tyrants of the time, her youth and beauty showed no sign of receding. The queen’s battles parading before Sayaka’s eyes went on for decades. And yet her white skin lost none of its luster, not a wrinkle marred its surface.
Or rather, standing in the midst of battle, pierced by swords and arrows of the enemy, when the contest was concluded not a scar remained. As she perched at the edge of hatred and anger and sadness, Sayaka’s curiosity was directed toward that puzzle.
One phenomenon came the closest to an explanation.
The day of the massacre, but only after all of the lives were extinguished, the queen strolled off on her own. Nobody accompanied her. Her glowing body covered by a gauzy veil, she walked the battlefield—that was now piled with corpses and running with rivers of blood.
The dead had begun to reek, and the vultures began to eat. Here and there amongst the heaps of bodies—the torsos missing heads and hands, the lifeless sockets in the severed heads filled with infinite loathing—shone the eyes of wolves.
Here in this hell on earth, where the smell of death was the strongest and the dead were the greatest in number, the queen casually appeared and exposed her naked, voluptuous flesh.
As she stood there like a statue in this “valley of death,” as the Psalmist so aptly described it, an even stranger sight appeared. Before the odor could cling to her ample breasts and slender waist and firm thighs, a white mist roiled up, cascaded from the sky like a twisting waterfall, and was silently absorbed into her body.
The outrushing of departed spirits finally abated. The queen serenely retrieved the veil at her feet, wrapped it around herself and walked away, leaving only the dead in her wake.
The truly dead.
Before she came to this hell on earth, the vultures were there. The wolves were there. Things living among the dying. The rotting bodies and stench of decaying flesh was, at the same time, a paradoxical proof of life.
All gone. It had been torn out by the roots. The corpses that remained after she left had turned to mummies, no more alive than a hollow wooden idol. The birds and beasts were no different, lying on their sides in a similar state of depletion. Most noticeably, the smell of death had vanished.
The place had been “purified” in the most literal sense. Here was a true hell, far more demonic than a killing ground piled with bodies, a true nothingness, where the dead lost their souls along with their lives.
The wave of hopelessness assaulted Sayaka. At some point, the Assyrian Queen Semiramis would become the consort of her old nemesis, the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II.
In her dreams, the days and years that passed before her eyes took but a moment. But Sayaka’s fatigue seemed more the accumulation of all twenty-five hundred years.
Can I die? she had to wonder. Can I die in a dream?
She didn’t know.
Except that in order for that woman to reincarnate herself, it was necessary that Sayaka be extinguished. In that case, if Sayaka could end her life first, then that woman would not be released into the world.
Sayaka vowed in her heart. She would not hesitate. She barely understood what was going on, but she understood this much—it was better for her to die than free that goddess of death.
Strangely enough, Sayaka felt a sense of calm as she sought out a means of death. When she was in high school, as part of her anti-terrorist training, she learned how to stop her heart for a short time and play dead. If she didn’t start it beating again, she would never open her eyes again.
What are you saying? Your life is mine. Don’t think you can do with it whatever you wish.
No, I will die. And you too. You will never return to this world again.
Sayaka concentrated her consciousness into her heart. Goodbye, father. Doctor Mephisto. And—
Kyoya-san.
Her pulse slowed. In her dream, her consciousness was wrapped in darkness. A fierce shock made her forget everything and open her eyes.
She was once again in the desert of death. The queen was inspecting the battlefield, accompanied by the three knights and a company of stalwart soldiers. The queen came to an unexpected halt. Two figures appeared before her. One was an old wizard bearing a long staff. One was a stalwart young man.
The moment she set her eyes upon them—two travelers of the sort that could be found anywhere—she stopped in her tracks, as if the earth had frozen around her feet. Not only her, but the three knights as well halted as soon as they caught sight of them.
The soldiers alone sensed nothing alarming about their presence and circled the unexpected intruders, their spears leveled.
“Who are you?” the men demanded. “Identify yourselves!”
The two betrayed no signs of fear. They looked at the queen, then at the three knights. The older of the two said, “Sinners and their sins, drenched in blood.”
“Insolence!” barked one of the soldiers, hurling his spear. Nothing less would be expected of her retainer.
The weapon hummed through the air. The old man’s chest put up no more resistance than tissue paper as it passed through.
“Well, that was rude,” he exclaimed. “But as the monarch goes, so go the retainers. They are no more disciplined than herself.”
The young man rejoined, “Shall we teach them some manners, Doctor Faustus? Perhaps share with them the pain and sorrow of the dead?”
“That would be fine. It would do Semiramis here a world of good.”
“Aye aye,” the young man answered.
As he reached to his waist and seized a long thin shaft of wood, the soldiers finally took note of his Oriental features. The moon at last peeked out from behind the clouds. The soldiers gulped. The queen herself moaned. Such was the comely countenance of the white-haired old man, that transcended time itself.
As a young man, he bragged that his beauty could make any woman his prisoner. He was not proved wrong. The young man’s name was Semulia. The old man was Doctor Faustus.
The soldiers flung a dozen spears at the two travelers. Being struck by one would have proved fatal. They flew as swift as a flock of swallows. The young man’s pole surely flashed faster than lightning.
A collective gasp—from the queen and the three knights.
No sooner had the young man’s spinning pole deflected one spear but the rest tumbled through the air and fell like a pile of sticks at his feet. The spears struck by the young man’s pole almost seemed to come alive, whirling about and striking another, which struck another, one after another—or rather, all at once—falling like dominoes as if self-destructing upon losing sight of their purpose.
“Splendid!” the t
hree knights said together. “Now let us match our skill against yours.”
They lined up and were about to press closer when the queen stopped them. “No. You are no match for these two. I will deal with them myself.”
“But—” The knights wavered.
“No,” she repeated sternly, and stepped forward alone, the hilt of a long sword jutting from her back swaying back and forth with each step.
She reached back and drew it.
And screamed as a line pierced the valley between her breasts. The old man called Faustus had picked a spear off the ground and flung it through her chest. The queen smiled and yanked it out. Not a drop of blood or a bruise marred her skin.
“I should have expected no less from Semiramis,” said Faustus. “An immortal body bound to an evil spirit. There is presently no way of vanquishing such a foe. In time, though, a righteous soul will appear.”
“Enough with your prattling.”
The words hadn’t left her mouth before the queen sprinted at Semulia, the young man. Against a body that could recover so quickly from such a wound, could any form of combat be effective?
The queen’s long sword slashed directly at the young man’s head. He moved, gracefully and slowly, as if pulled into the tearing currents of wind.
Victory! she exclaimed, even as the young man’s rod struck her chest, delivering a blow to her senses like nothing she had ever felt before. The fierce and yet somehow invigorating shock raced through her body, rendering her unconscious.
The soldiers in a row looked on horrified as she was blown backwards ten feet. They must have also felt as if they too were in the dream, and could not believe their eyes.
“Tell King Nebuchadnezzar,” Doctor Faustus said to no one in particular. His voice scorched their ears. “That the death’s dream kingdom you sought—that this woman sought—now comes to an end. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon return to history, to legends, to the dust. Semulia’s strength is not now sufficient to deliver Semiramis to an eternal death. Until that time comes, I will call forth the power to seal the soul of the demoness within the body of one pure of heart. Our work here is done. But we will meet once again in the distant future.”
Demon City Shinjuku: The Complete Edition Page 30
