The Rose Princess

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  Behind her, a different voice cried out, “Elena—What are you doing?!”

  A thick arm roughly encircled her torso, dragging her backward.

  “Let go of me, you freak! I’ll kill you!” she shouted, the last expression echoing out in the sunlight.

  “Simmer down, you idiot.”

  A slap resounded against her cheek.

  Now free of whatever had possessed her, Elena stood to one side of the square. Out in front of the tent, Gary was still curled up on the ground, and it was one of the bikers that came out from behind the girl to face her. A single strip of hair that resembled an eclair stretched down the center of his otherwise bald head. It was Stahl, the gang’s second-in-command.

  Rubbing her cheek, Elena said softly, “That hurt, you know. Care to be a little gentler next time?”

  “Sorry about that,” Stahl replied, baring his pearly teeth in a smile. His eyes told her, That’s more like it.

  “How many of us are left?” Elena asked him.

  “Seven came down with this thing. All that leaves is me, Tan, and Nichou.”

  “Counting me, that makes four. That’ll be enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “To go into the Shamballa Forest and find some blue moss,” Elena said as she stared off in the exact opposite direction from the Noble’s manor.

  Her words made Stahl’s eyes bulge.

  “You mean now? It’ll be night by the time we finish!”

  “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

  “Going out there near dark is just plain suicide,” said Stahl. “We’d be throwing our lives away.”

  “I wish to hell I knew why that’s all anyone ever has to say. If your life’s that dear to you when push comes to shove, maybe you’re not cut out for playing the tough guy even in a little hick village like this. Run on home and hide under your blankets.”

  “I’m just saying . . .”

  “My ears are gonna bleed if I hear any more excuses,” the girl told him. “Fine. I’ll go by myself.”

  “And if you get the moss, what happens then?”

  “Then everyone goes back to normal—probably. That all depends on Mama Kipsch.”

  Stahl was at a loss for words.

  Turning her back on her still silent compatriot, Elena walked off toward the houses. The only thing on her mind was where she’d be able to find the weapons she’d need. That, and one thing more—the figure of a young man in black whose garments whirled out in the moonlight danced across Elena’s eyelids, but she pushed the image to the back of her brain with willpower . . . and perhaps a little sadness.

  —

  Racing along at just under a hundred miles per hour for exactly two hours, she could finally see a fog-like blob of black beyond the red clay plains. Just as she was going for the accelerator to increase her speed, she heard the tinny whine of an engine coming up behind her. She rode on regardless, but a few seconds later three more bikes pulled up alongside her so their vehicles advanced in a perfect line.

  “Welcome back, wimp,” she said, still facing forward.

  To her right, Stahl rubbed his own head and said, “Aw, don’t say that. I’m here, ain’t I?”

  “Maybe I should give you a medal or something.”

  “Cut ’im some slack already, Elena,” moon-faced Nichou said from the bike to her left, giving her a wink. Like his face, the man’s body was plump and round. “Why didn’t you come get us sooner? Me and Tan chewed his ass pretty good, you know.”

  “Stahl was just worried about all of us,” said Tan from the other side of Nichou as a smile rose to his lips. He and Nichou were thick as thieves, but physically they were complete opposites—he was a mass of lean muscle.

  “Well, I suppose you didn’t want or need me worrying about any of you. Anyway, I don’t think even we’re low enough that we’d let our leader go off all alone to fetch that stuff,” Stahl said, bashfully pawing at his one remaining strip of hair.

  Without so much as cracking a grin, Elena said to him, “Just as long as we’re clear on that. This might be the only chance we ever get to do something for somebody else. Your lives are in my keeping now.”

  The only reply she got from her compatriots was the roar of their bikes.

  Ten minutes later, the four of them reached the entrance to a forest where massive black boles reached out with branches and leaves the hue of darkness. Finding the thin thread of a footpath that led into the thickly packed forest was simple enough.

  “We’ve got no choice but to leave the bikes here,” Elena said as she got out of the saddle.

  “Do you even know where this blue moss stuff grows?” Stahl asked as he put a gun that looked more like a cannon and an ammo belt across his back.

  Tan unloaded a thick, three-foot-high cylinder with a nozzle from his vehicle, and Nichou walked along lightly while busily rotating both wrists. Around them spun long, thin gleams of light.

  “Let’s roll!”

  At Elena’s command, the gleams resolved into three throwing knives in each of Nichou’s hands.

  There were cracks in the forest canopy that hung over the group like a black cloud, and through them trickled long, thin shafts of light. Although the patterns of sunlight were the product of nature, they possessed such a strangely geometrical order that it was said many traveling artists came to admire them.

  As Elena recalled, the blue moss grew on a rock pile in the western part of the forest. Cautiously venturing in further, the group found their entire field of view filled by the great variety of plants that called the forest home.

  “Hot damn! Would you look at all that yogari weed, slim green, and stretching bamboo! If we could pick that alone and sell it in the Capital, we’d be living high on the hog for a good six months. A goddamn shame is what it is. You sure we can’t stop and pick some?” Tan muttered.

  “Every second counts,” Elena told him. “Pretty soon, this well-behaved forest is gonna show its ugly side.”

  But even as she reprimanded her compatriot, Elena couldn’t help but share his feelings of what a waste it was to leave such treasures behind.

  The vibrantly colored plants Tan had named—and many more—grew in profusion between the trees or among their roots, and all of them were eagerly sought by merchants from the Capital for their medical applications. Even though the nearby village didn’t have an appreciable amount of land under cultivation, it was quite wealthy thanks to the bounty of the forest. What’s more, due to the special properties of the ozone given off by the trees in the forest and the unique composition of its soil, there were always enough plants regardless of how many were harvested. The path the group was following had actually been worn by people out collecting the various specimens.

  “Notice anything, Stahl?” Elena asked nonchalantly after they’d been walking for about three minutes.

  “Yep,” he replied without as much as a nod of his nearly bald head. “We’ve had a tail on us for a while. My gut’s telling me it could be real trouble.”

  “No argument there. You suppose it’s ‘the forest dweller?’”

  “Damned if I know. But it’s not closing or losing any ground—gotta be pretty smart by the look of things.”

  Although Tan and Nichou must’ve been able to hear every word the other two said, they didn’t seem at all concerned. After all, these young men had not only grown up on the Frontier, but they’d led a rough-and-tumble life in their gang. It took a lot to unnerve them.

  “Should we say hello?”

  “Sure,” Elena replied, and as she spoke, she snapped her fingers twice. There was no reaction.

  The path twisted up ahead and disappeared into the trees. As they took their first step around the curve, Elena and her gang demonstrated their teamwork.

  Turning his torso just a bit to the right, Nichou let a streak of black fly from his right hand. The throwing knife he’d hurled with a speed that could only be termed ungodly was swallowed by the trees. It was only secon
ds later that the barrel of Stahl’s gun and the end of Tan’s nozzle were brought to bear on the same spot.

  And after a few seconds more, Stahl muttered, “It’s stopped.”

  He wasn’t talking about the throwing knife. Rather, he meant whatever they could sense following them.

  Eyes glittering, Elena said, “Your knife disappeared. Was this a bust?”

  “No, we would’ve heard it if it’d been blocked. And there would’ve been the sound of it sticking into a tree if it was dodged. But I don’t think anything could’ve caught my blade.”

  “Then what happened?” Elena asked, not doubting her friend’s ability in the least.

  “Well, it was probably—,” Nichou was saying when a black figure dropped from the sky without a sound. “Head-taker!” he shouted as a hirsute arm wrapped around his neck and he was lifted high into the air.

  Before flame could spit from Stahl’s firearm, Elena had sent the weighted end of her chain whirring after the creature. There was the crack of bone and an almost beastly howl of pain, and with that Nichou crashed back to earth. The snap of branches continued and something rained down on the group like a mist, then stillness returned.

  The sun still hung in the sky. Yet there wasn’t the chirping of a single insect or the song a single bird to be heard in the forest.

  “Shit! This is freaking blood!” Stahl cursed as his fingers revealed the liquid that’d fallen on his bald pate. “At two hundred, that damn head-taker must’ve finally gone senile if Elena was able to catch a piece of him with her chain,” he chided.

  “Hey! Just what’s that supposed to mean?!” Elena said, glaring firmly at Stahl. She then continued, “Well, since I didn’t kill it, it’ll probably be back. There’s no sign of whatever was following us anymore, either. So let’s pull ourselves together already and get going.”

  Their leader brimmed with determination as she started onward, and the three men couldn’t help but grin.

  No sooner had they started walking than Nichou said to Tan, “Notice anything about that head-taker just now? About the funny way it was dressed?”

  “Nah, I was right underneath you, so I didn’t get a good look at it. You mean to tell me it was wearing something?”

  “Well, I saw it,” Nichou replied. “It had on a green shirt and striped pants. That was always old man Geppe’s favorite outfit.”

  Tan fell silent.

  A year earlier, ninety-year-old Geppe had ventured into the forest to find a plant called “regression grass” that was said to bring back lost youth. But he was never heard from again. Nichou had lived near the old man’s house.

  “Then it looks like the head-taker really did get old man Geppe after all,” Tan finally said.

  Rubbing his neck all the while, Nichou replied, “I saw something else, too. On the arm it had around my throat. The whole thing was pretty hairy, but it had a scar by the fold of its elbow. It was exactly like the one Geppe got splitting wood back when I was maybe four or five years old.”

  “You mean to tell me that thing . . . that was old man Geppe?!” Tan said, his voice thin as a thread.

  Nichou shook his head, saying, “It couldn’t be. It had a face just like a monkey. There’s no way it was Geppe.”

  “That’s enough creepy talk out of the two of you,” Stahl suddenly interjected.

  But the two bikers didn’t look startled by his remark. Rather, their expressions suggested he’d saved them from something, as they said no more.

  —

  III

  —

  The wall of trees ended as abruptly as the stroke of a knife, and their field of view was suddenly dominated by a bizarrely shaped mountain of rocks. But more than the mound of smooth cube-like rocks that literally looked to have been polished with mechanical precision, it was the area around it that drew the eyes of the group. This was their destination.

  “Hey, it ain’t here!” Stahl called from the lead.

  Everyone quickly gazed in the same direction, finding neither blue moss around the rocks nor anything else but black earth.

  “How do you like that! It must’ve died off,” Tan clucked.

  Throwing her gaze on the mountain of rocks, Elena said, “That can’t be. I saw some just last year—up there!”

  Her finger pointed to the summit of the rock pile some sixty feet high, where a patch of blue that could’ve easily been missed clung to the surface.

  Turning around, Stahl asked, “Who’s going up after it?”

  “Me,” Elena replied.

  “It’s gonna be crazy-dangerous,” said Nichou.

  “And it’d be any safer for the rest of you?”

  Still massaging his neck, Nichou shrugged his shoulders.

  “The head-taker might come back. Keep your eyes open.”

  And leaving them with that, Elena grabbed hold of a nearby outcropping of rock. As she nimbly climbed, a dark gauze seemed to cling to her body. The dusky eve was drawing closer.

  Holding his firearm at the ready, Stahl anxiously scanned his surroundings. “The wind’s picking up,” he said.

  “Hell, the wind’s gonna be the least of our worries,” Tan replied. Looking over at Nichou, he said, “You don’t look so hot. You okay?”

  Rubbing his neck all the while, Nichou wiped the sweat from his brow with his other hand.

  “You know, I heard this story from Mama Kipsch once,” Tan said as he adjusted his grip on the metal nozzle of his weapon. “Ages and ages ago, it seems the Nobility used this pile of rocks for certain experiments. That’s why it looks all neat and artificial.”

  “What kind of experiments?” asked Nichou.

  “Well, in order to make the monsters they spread all over the Frontier, they needed to collect normal animals first. Breeding stock, I guess you could say. This rock thingy was supposedly a conning tower for that. They say that’s how new species like head-takers, toothless suckermouths, and whatnot got made.”

  “They sure did screw things up for us.”

  “Hey, you’re sounding a little better now, Nichou.”

  “Yeah, finally,” he said, grinning at his friend but never taking his hand away from his neck.

  Cupping one hand by the side of his mouth, Stahl shouted toward the sky, “How’s it going, Elena?” Of course, he’d watched to make sure Elena had sure footing before he said anything.

  “I’m okay. Just a little further to go.”

  Relieved at her reply, the second-in-command had just turned back toward the woods when a shriek drifted down to him.

  Stahl grunted in alarm as he whipped around, and his eyes were met by the sight of Elena with a number of tendrils that could’ve been vines or ropes wrapped around her body. Spilling down from the very top of the mountain, they clearly showed signs of moving of their own volition.

  But it was Elena who’d been really surprised. Just as she was reaching for the moss that clung to the underside of a rock, the things had reached down from above and snared her. Naturally she’d been unnerved and had nearly fallen. But irony still abounded in the world, and it was these very same strange tendrils that’d saved her from that fall. And the second they’d twined around her, Elena had noticed the most surprising thing. They were cold and hard to the touch—metal. This was no living creature.

  “Don’t shoot, guys!” she shouted down to her gang as she pried off the wriggling tentacles, while her right hand slid down to the cylinder that hung on her belt. It was an incendiary grenade her late father had purchased in the utmost secrecy from a merchant out of the Capital. Once she pulled the pin and threw it, it would char everything within a hundred-fifty-foot radius with ten thousand degrees of heat five seconds later. Or melt it, it this case. Although it was probably crazy of her to use it in this situation, she had no alternative.

  Elena grabbed the pin with her teeth. Suddenly, the rest of the grenade was pulled away from her. Clutching the silvery cylinder, a tentacle of the same color was thrashing around just above the girl’s head
. The sound of the burning fuse was painfully audible.

  Four seconds to go.

  “Hurry up and take the damn thing already!” the girl shouted.

  Cold as the situation made her blood run, it was astonishing she could speak at all. More surprising yet was the fact that she didn’t ask her friends below for help.

  Of course, even if she had called out to them, there was some question as to whether the three men would’ve been able to aid her. For just then, the trio had grown tense at the sight of a bizarre figure coming out of the forest.

  Its torso was that of a human male, bare-naked and well-muscled—but below that was a long tail that twisted along behind him. Even with him fifteen feet out of the woods, the end was still hidden among the trees, like a snake. The blue-green scales that reflected the evening afterglow covered a lower half writhing as sinuously as a serpent. It actually was a snake.

  Though the creature had a vacant gaze until it reached the trio, when it halted and slowly appraised the men, its eyes began to blaze with a phosphorescent green.

  “You have the ssstink of head-taker blood about you. But you’ll be my meal, not hisss!” it declared, its sibilant tone like the air rasping from a punctured tire.

  And with that cry, the serpent man suddenly tried to grab Stahl.

  A huge black hole opened in its face—right in the middle of its forehead.

  Failing to expend all its energy inside the creature’s brain, the three-quarter-inch ball of lead Stahl’s firearm had sent through the serpent man’s brow had burst from the back of the thing’s head along with a vast quantity of gray matter. But in less than a second the entrance and exit wounds both closed and the serpent man smirked at the burly biker.

  This was the descendant of creatures the Nobility had created, and its ability to regenerate damage was staggering. The expression it wore was no longer that of a human, but rather was the face of a fiend. As its mouth snapped open, a thin ribbon of tongue slid out, the end of which was forked.

  A gout of orange blew into the creature’s face. Flames. They billowed from the nozzle Tan held. The tank strapped to his back was filled with an oily substance that burned at high temperatures, and when it was discharged by compressed air, the liquid ignited from friction with the atmosphere. In other words, it was a flamethrower.