“That they are. Ten of them, I’d say. On horseback. But what I sense isn’t the knights. With those guys, you can’t tell if they’re dead or alive. But these characters are all definitely dead.”
“Wraith knights,” D muttered.
“Bingo. And they’ve got this awfully powerful energy protecting them. That’d have to be the woman’s doing.”
“Are they coming?”
D turned to the entrance of the ruin and replied to the girl who sat there with an electron lantern in hand. “They’ll be here soon.”
Elena got right up, without nervousness, hesitation or even fear.
“This is what I’ve been waiting for,” said the girl. “Where did you figure we’d fight them?”
“You’re going to be here.”
“What do you mean?!” Elena cried.
“It’s not the knights that are on the way, but a band of dead men. And those who’ve died once can’t be killed a second time.”
“Well, what are you gonna do then?”
“I have no choice but to kill them.”
Although Elena found that to be the very epitome of contradiction, on reconsideration she decided this young man’s skill with a blade probably would be enough to kill the dead once more.
“At this point, I’m not about to sit back and be a good little girl. Take me with you,” the biker told D. “Hell, if you insist on turning me down, I’ll just go off and fight anyway.”
“Staying in the ruins is part of the battle, too.”
“That’s just double-talk,” Elena said as she searched in the bike for another weighted chain.
“We’ll see soon enough. But when the time comes, I need you to be right in here.”
“Really?”
“Really,” D replied.
“I believe you. And I won’t have you worrying about me at a time like this.”
Not saying a word, D left her and set off across the plains that lay between them and the castle.
There was a breeze. The green grass swayed in the moonlight. And there stood the Hunter—that alone formed a picture. Any artist who could’ve committed to canvas the inner thoughts of the young man as he stood there between life and death would’ve become a prisoner of his own madness, although the resulting painting would surely endure forever as a treasure of the art world.
“Here they come,” a hoarse voice said some five minutes after the Hunter had taken that position on the plain. The ruins were roughly five hundred yards away.
The riders approaching across the grasslands seemed to float in a horrifying sort of slow motion. Both mounts and riders were covered by dull gray armor. Reaching a spot about thirty feet shy of D, they halted. Their movements were so quiet that all but the most intent of listeners would’ve missed the sounds completely.
“The wraith knights—I’ve heard of them,” said the Hunter’s left hand.
There was no reply at all, as if it had been addressing the moon.
The ash gray figures lingered there in the moonlight like veritable ghosts. Shreee! squealed the leader’s blade as it slid from the scabbard on the knight’s hip. At the same time, the other nine drew their weapons in unison. Three had swords, three more bows, and the last three had lances. Their weapons differed little from those of the four knights.
“Where are the princess and the others?” asked D.
One of riders raised its head and laughed. But no voice came out. Its laughter had stopped.
D was up over its head. The Hunter’s thirty-foot leap had no doubt been faster than the wraith knight’s eyes could follow. With a grating sound and a shower of sparks the blade of D’s sword crumpled, but it also plowed right through the knight from the top of its head all the way down to its abdomen.
As he came back to earth, D looked at his foe. The feeling he’d gotten from his blade hadn’t been ordinary resistance.
Something like a white fog poured from the crack in the iron. In places, the cloud glittered as if it were laced with silver. Once the fog had fallen from the horse back to the ground, it took on a human form. An insect on the plain came into contact with the fog-like being and suddenly fell over.
“Death essence?” said the Hunter’s left hand.
Some might’ve called it a supernatural aura or an eerie miasma. But as it took the life of anything that touched it right on the spot, “death essence” seemed the most fitting name. This was the true form of the band of ghostly riders.
The hazy mass moved toward D, seeming to be both borne on the wind and fighting it at the same time.
The Hunter no longer had a sword. And even if he’d still possessed one, it would’ve been impossible to cut this amorphous and unearthly cloud.
As for D—he did nothing but stand still.
—
Elena had no knowledge of D’s deadly battle. The darkness had already grown quite heavy, and her eyes couldn’t see more than a hundred fifty feet. An unsettling mist seemed to billow up around her, covering her skin with goose bumps. Giving a shudder, Elena held out her electron lantern.
Something suddenly dampened the light. A single white rose had landed on the top of the lantern. And Elena discovered that its thin stem had sunk right through the metal roof of her light.
“But this is—,” she began to say, and then her lantern went out.
There in the darkness, with nothing save the moonlight, the rose alone glowed as if it were ablaze.
“A gift to replace that boorish light of yours.”
Raising her gaze from the rose that’d kept her riveted, Elena found the lovely princess standing before her. Aside from D, she had to wonder who else would’ve looked so perfect standing out in the moonlight. Elena got the feeling she could see the scenery behind the woman right through the surpassing paleness of her countenance.
“What are you supposed to be, the vanguard or something?” the biker asked. She felt strangely calm.
“I suppose I may be, at that. My interest was piqued when I learned you were out here. No doubt that was all D’s doing. There’s no way a lowly human could understand the significance of this place, even though it was humans that constructed it.”
“Two thousand years ago, right?”
Donning a somewhat surprised expression, the princess said, “Information courtesy of D, I presume. He’s also bound to notice me here sooner or later.”
“If I finish you off before that, it won’t matter either way,” Elena said as the weighted end of a chain spilled from her right hand. This one was a lot thicker than what she usually carried.
Still staring fixedly at the princess, Elena began to spin the chain in a circle with her right hand. The growling whup whup whup of it became a whistling shooshooshoo, and then it moved beyond the realm of sound.
“My, aren’t you the skillful one,” the princess declared, clapping her hands.
Though Elena realized the woman was needling her, she couldn’t afford to get angry. Her consciousness was focused solely on destroying the lovely princess.
Without making a sound, the princess moved behind a stone pillar to avoid the shrilly whistling weight at the end of the chain. But the chain went right after her.
“Dear me!” the woman cried in surprise, her exclamation mingled with the sound of steel biting into stone.
While it was unclear what kind of trick the girl had used, the chain that pursued the princess had wrapped around both the Noblewoman and the pillar with enough force to dig into both flesh and stone.
“You fell for it, sucker!” Elena roared with delight as she raced over to the princess.
There wasn’t a shred of mercy in the girl. In her right hand she held a finely honed stake of unfinished wood. Raising it high over her head, she shouted, “Here’s your ticket to the afterlife, your majesty!”
But as Elena brought the weapon down, four shades of light shimmered before her eyes.
“Oh!” the girl cried when the hand she waved through the glowing blobs told her they were no il
lusion. They had substance.
There were red roses. And blue. And even black.
Though Elena batted them away time and again, more and more new flowers surrounded her, obscuring her view and, worse yet, forming a dazzling riot of color that assailed her brain and left her dizzy.
“Damn it all!” the biker growled.
From the madly eddying flowers a length of chain looped out and wound around a lintel that connected two of the stone columns. As Elena swung up on it, the four-tone stream flowed after her.
Up on the lintel, Elena pulled a tiny oilpaper packet from her shirt pocket and shook the white powder it contained over her own head. And it was a sight to see as every flower that touched her then curled its petals and lost its color before falling back to earth.
“Mama Kipsch’s special herbicide! Have some!” Elena shouted, and she was about to scatter the rest of the powder over the princess down below when the breath was knocked out of her.
The other chain was tangled on the ground, and there was no sign of the pale figure.
“Here I am! Over here!”
As she whipped around to face the voice she heard behind her, Elena let fly with the chain she still had.
Winding it around her right hand, the princess smiled elegantly. “It would be so easy to kill you,” she said to the girl. “Like so.”
With one tug of her hand she easily snatched away Elena’s chain.
“Would you like me to strangle you with this? Or would you prefer that I tear your limbs off one by one?”
Beads of sweat formed at a furious rate on Elena’s brow.
—
III
—
The wind began to sweep across the plain—a wind that carried death. Borne on it, the death essence might drift anywhere. And any living thing it touched would perish.
At present, it was squaring off against D. The white humanoid shape spread into an amorphous cloud, then gusted at the Hunter. As D leapt backward, he raised his left hand as if to ward off his attacker, and the fog enveloped it. The hand turned a dull brown color, but quickly returned to its original hue.
“That’s one hell of a death essence, all right,” a pained voice said. It was still coughing. “There’s no way to kill this thing from the outside. I might be able to handle one or two, but if I were to suck up any more than that, I could be a goner. Wait a sec and I’ll look into a few things.”
At that point, one of the other riders tumbled noisily from the saddle. A white substance seeped from the armor and circled around behind D’s back.
Several streaks of light flew from D’s left hand at a terrific speed, yet after piercing the man-shaped cloud of fog, they wobbled lazily for another three feet before falling to the ground. Now stained black, the bare wooden needles crumbled, rotten to the very core.
By the look of things, any weapon—be it a sword or even a bullet—would be utterly useless here.
The fog laughed. No, it might’ve just been the fault of the wind shaking its upper body a tad, but the night air had definitely carried a sound that was not a sound, and it had resembled laughter.
The fog slowly drifted closer to D from the front. Behind him was the other mass. A split second before the latter could wrap its pale arms about D’s body, the Hunter rose into the air. As part of the death essence closing on him continued to flow forward, the rest of the mass spun around with terrific force, while the cloud of death essence to D’s rear backed away with equal decisiveness.
As D landed, he twisted his body. The blow he’d narrowly escaped split the tail of his coat as the lance jabbed into the earth. In rapid succession a second and a third followed—and though the attacks came at a speed no average person or even professional warrior could’ve dodged, D narrowly slipped through them without incident and dove into the very ranks of the wraith knights.
Two swords flew up with a metallic rasp, and a pair of the wraiths were unhorsed. It’s doubtful even the wraith knights could believe that the lance D held in his hand was the same one that’d just been aimed at him. However, even D would find it impossible to destroy a shapeless cloud unaffected by any weapon. How would he fight it? And how could he kill it?
—
Elena quickly wiped the sweat from her brow with her left hand. If it were to run into her eyes, it would be the death of her. The princess was ten feet ahead. And she’d taken away one of the biker’s chains. She glared at the princess for all she was worth. If she let the Noblewoman break her spirit, she’d be beat.
The princess looked back at Elena.
“I remember you,” the princess said with a knowing nod. “Your parents and siblings all ended up on my dinner menu. And I believe the White Knight gave you a wound you’d carry for the rest of your life. How interesting.”
Her grinning face was as bewitching as the moon, yet as innocent as that of the purest maiden. And that was why Elena was as chilled as if she’d been doused with ice water.
“Now that I think of it, crushing you alone would accomplish nothing. Perhaps I should find another use for you. Oh, I know,” she laughed. “I shall give you a different wound.”
As the smile on the princess’s lips grew broader and more unsettling, Elena turned away out of reflex. The more beautiful a Noble’s smile was, the stronger the human urge was to look away. And because of that, the girl didn’t notice the white rose flying from the princess’s right hand. When it stuck in her left breast, she felt a slight pain and looked down. But the rose was already gone.
“What did you do?”
“See for yourself. Look at your chest.”
Like a woman possessed, Elena tore open the front of her shirt. The revolting “x” was fading. But in return, something smaller but even more terrifying had been etched on her left breast—a tattoo of a white rose so exquisitely detailed it seemed it could only be the handiwork of an angel.
Despair sucked the strength from her very cells. For in Elena’s eyes, nothing could’ve been crueler than being marked with this symbol of the Nobility. Staggering, she fell from the rock lintel. The princess’s hand caught her by the scruff of the neck.
But even as she was hauled back up, Elena couldn’t so much as manage to ask the princess to kill her. Her face was like that of a corpse, and a cheery voice whispered in her ear, “No need to be so despondent. Soon you’ll feel ever so much better. Once you’ve experienced the privileges of one of my servants with your own flesh, that is.”
And as she finished speaking, the princess suddenly looked down below her. A slight tremor had reached her through the ground.
“An earthquake?” she muttered as a shadow spread across her beautiful countenance. “Does this hateful fortress yet live? Impossible!”
Her body swayed as the quaking of the earth and its related rumblings overwhelmed the night.
“Oh, my—this is quite a pickle,” the princess said, although where she’d learned such an expression was anyone’s guess.
Putting Elena under one arm, the princess leapt down to the ground. From above her, tiny fragments of stone rained down.
“I don’t have the time to wait around and see what happens next. I’m also curious to see how D and his playmates made out.”
The woman then started off across the plain. Elena never left her grip for a second.
—
Knights were closing on the Hunter from either side. The one on his right had a lance, while the one on his left had a longsword. Just as they were about to bring their weapons down on D, the knights swapped armaments—the one on the right took the sword and the one on the left the lance.
When the weapons in play changed, an opponent had to alter his strategy accordingly. And if the exchange could be done in a matter of seconds, it could only result in confusion on the part of the person preparing to defend himself. In the case of simultaneous attacks, there would really be no way at all to defend oneself.
The lance and sword swung home.
Surprise was not an emot
ion the wraiths possessed. Nevertheless, the vibrations that swept through the air in that instant were nothing but pure shock. The sword blade slashing down from the right was caught by D’s left hand, while a lance in the Hunter’s other hand parried the lance that came at him from the left. That would’ve been strange enough if the Hunter had been facing them. But just before the wraith knights launched their attack—in the very instant they traded weapons—they saw D turn his back to them. Though they realized he’d seen through their plan of attack, they’d been unsure of what to do next. They’d already struck at him with the lance and sword.
Once he’d snatched away the longsword, D made a bound. But who in the world could leap onto the back of a horse as it was galloping by?
D could, and he did. Standing on back of the steed carrying the sword-wielding knight, he kicked the rider off the mount and seized the reins. Seeing this, the other knights charged him en masse.
“D, give me some of your blood,” his left hand said. “It’s only a temporary measure, but I’ve come up with a substance these boys aren’t gonna like. Hurry!”
Taking his hand off the reins and holding his longsword with his teeth, D put his right wrist against the blade and gave a hard pull. The warm liquid that spilled out landed in the palm of his left hand. And his palm opened its mouth and gulped down the fresh blood.
“Stick out your sword!”
Taking the sword he clenched between his teeth in his right hand, D ran his left hand along the blade. When vermilion smoke billowed from his palm to discolor the blade, the riders ahead of him launched a number of arrows at him. They weren’t wooden—even the shafts and fletchings were iron. If they were to strike a human body, the impact would rip the flesh apart.
D stopped every last one of them with his left hand. It looked more like he was catching paper airplanes. As the Hunter rode right by the knight, who’d been paralyzed and without a chance to nock another arrow, his longsword flashed out. The wraith’s torso ripped open.
Without even looking back, D raced toward his next opponent—a white fog was closing on him from the fore. Apparently, it’d realized it would only be at a disadvantage fighting him in its armor. Pulling on the reins to circle around to the right, D swung his blade.
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