Noble V: Greylancer

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  “I haven’t finished examining her yet.”

  “That’s a matter of your convenience. I insist you honor our agreement.”

  “According to our agreement, I still have another week.”

  “I’m afraid you will have to accommodate our schedule. The woman is being sold earlier than expected.”

  “What am I to do?” I cried out, gripped by a sudden worry over the girl’s future. “Now look, it’s not too late. There’s still time for anyone who wants to leave. You must understand you are about to rob a craftsman.”

  A wave of unrest stirred among the young women.

  A diminutive shadow quietly crept back toward the doorway. It was a girl wearing a red jewel at her chest.

  “Traitor! Turncoat!” cried a chorus of shrill voices.

  “We let you into our group, you ungrateful wench. You lower district girls are rotten beyond saving!”

  Tears rolled down the girls’ faces.

  “Get her!”

  The steel woman lunged at the traitorous girl. As the girl tried to escape, the android grabbed her arms with one hand, pulled her close, and wrung her neck.

  The red jewel from dead girl’s chest clattered on the ground.

  “We wept for her,” the girls turned to me and said as if in defense of their friend’s cruel end. Then with the steel woman leading the way, one by one, they stepped across the fallen door and entered the workshop. When the last of the intruders cleared the door, I raised my hand.

  The door was lifted upright and back in its original position.

  As the girls cried out in disbelief, I heard Shwann call to me from behind.

  “What is it?” I asked without turning around.

  “According to my calculations, this.”

  I felt something heavy being placed in my outstretched hand.

  The girls’ whispers turned to gasps as I watched their elegant silhouettes dance like a mirage. Suddenly, the look in their eyes wavered from menace to terror and another emotion.

  One of the girls cried out, prompting the steel woman to march toward me.

  My only worry was that the furnace door would not open on command, but my invention worked like a charm.

  I pressed the button on the remote control handed to me by Shwann and watched the molten metal pour down from the smelting furnace and over the steel woman. The red heat spread across her black skin. Her hand, dripping steel like blood, reached out and came within a finger-length of my chest before receding along with the rest of her melting body into the cascade of liquid metal. Within seconds, she disappeared into the orange-colored current flowing toward the door. For many years, the cement floor of the workshop had been severely slanted toward the entrance and was badly in need of repair. So terrified was I by my own prospect of death that I did not notice the shrieks of the girls being burned and swallowed by the lava flow that swept them screaming out of my workshop.

  “Such a cruel turn…” Shwann muttered.

  Though I might have ignored him, I asked, “Do you think so?” curious about how he might answer.

  “No.” His unmitigated response was filled with a greater brutality than I possessed. It was in this moment that I intuited this city would in time become home to the greatest craftsman in history.

  †

  Soon, a rumor floated around the city that investigators had taken up the case of the disappearance of the young women. The rumor was probably true. I didn’t give a damn. After being swept up in the molten flow and into the drainage pipes, their skin and bones should have ended up in the “roving lake” that is said to exist somewhere belowground.

  From the time the sun rose in the violet smoke-filled sky to sundown, I spent my days staring, with unflagging fascination, at Shwann’s creation.

  One day I asked, “What do you think they are?”

  “I believe they’re teeth,” was Shwann’s answer. The two pointed objects that had so beautifully left their mark on the woman’s throat were fitted on either side of a steel model of a dental arch.

  “I believe you’re right. But have you ever seen such vicious bestial fangs in your life?”

  “No.” Shwann’s green eyes were lit with curiosity. “But there is no mistaking. These are what left the marks on this woman here.”

  “Exactly. By God, I am stumped. No human that I know has fangs like these. Which is why I am thinking about creating a human that might rightly wield these teeth.”

  My young assistant was struck speechless, but only for a moment. “That’s—that’s incredible, Master Monde. I hadn’t even considered such an idea. But you will be bringing into existence a being not of this world, an act Lord Voyevoda strictly forbids.”

  “Again with Lord Voyevoda. In the past, thousands of craftsmen died by the guillotine for resisting the edicts of a certain higher noble—beheaded for refusing to aid House Voyevoda’s effort in the Million Year War against an indeterminate enemy. I refuse to cower against such tyranny. On my name and honor, I will neither cower nor back down. Shwann, if you do not feel likewise, I bid you leave now.”

  The young man took one step back and bowed his head deeply. The invincible smile that came across his face was the only answer I needed.

  From that day began what I recognized as the challenge of a lifetime.

  Two teeth must form the basis of an entire being.

  From the shape of the lower and upper jaws, facial form to the size of the nasal and ocular cavities—we could not be even one millimeter off.

  Holing myself up in the musty library, I pored over tomes written by the sages of antiquity and, using a calculator and protractor that were heretofore of little use me, extrapolated the exact measurements of each of the required parts.

  On the eve of our appointed day to begin casting, Shwann and I sat at the table and stared in silence at the teeth.

  As the sky turned from violet to blue, the black teeth gleamed in the moonbeams filtering in from the skylight. What the girls must have felt when they’d first discovered them!

  Suddenly, Shwann snatched the black teeth off the table and shot a piercing gaze at the fangs. He was not yet a full-fledged craftsman. I caught his hand trying to sink the teeth into his own neck and slapped him across the face. When I slapped him for a seventh time, Shwann came back to himself.

  “What…what did I do?” he groaned, to which I shook him by the shoulders and said, “Don’t. You must never repeat what you just attempted. Only the creature that wields these teeth is permitted such a violent act.”

  “Yes, I understand now.”

  I stroked the boy’s hair, pushing my fingers through his gold locks like a hydraulic tank mowing down reeds.

  “Perhaps it would have been kinder to send you back to your family,” I muttered, looking up at the purple constellations through the skylight in the bedroom. “But no. I don’t know where your parents are. I’m not even certain you have parents. In the first place, the very concept of parents is foreign to me. I was a test tube baby, you see. Though I do not know the female and male donors, I harbor no resentment. At least, they had talents worthy of passing on to me.” Whether Shwann understood or even heard me at all was a mystery. When I turned back from my soliloquy, the lad had bundled himself in blankets next to me and was sound asleep as if he were not even breathing.

  †

  The next three months of suffering to complete the face is certainly worth chronicling here.

  When it came time to mold the facial skeleton, I began to doubt my own talents. If my measurements and imagination proved accurate, the completed face should look exactly like the drawing before me. But was I skilled enough to carve these same lips, nasal bridge, eyes, and above all these very pupils into steel?

  I must have considered abandoning my name, rank, and workshop and running away to the oft-rumored neighboring city over a hundred times.

  The chisel in my hand trembled relentlessly as I carved the cheekbones, and the lips that I’d managed to sculpt after much
agony let out a scornful laugh audible only to me. The eyeballs reflected the image of a middle-aged man balled up in a fetal position in a corner of the workshop, terrified by the enormous task before him.

  But it was this task that also saved me.

  Exhausted, Shwann fell asleep with his arms and head spread over the table cluttered with my many failed attempts to produce a face. With more faces scattered about his feet, Shwann looked like a gravedigger who’d enjoyed a night of merrymaking with skulls in a cursed underground cemetery.

  He came in the dead of night. I heard the door creak open, but I was too hopeless and exhausted to raise my head.

  I sensed the visitor bypass the countless faces scattered about, stop before my desk, and take up my latest creation that I’d set down next to me.

  “Exquisite,” I heard him say.

  I lifted my weary head. Was there a savior that reached out to every man drowning in the depths of despair? Even if that savior was a faceless specter shrouded in a shadowy cloak?

  “You have my esteem and trust in your abilities. You must continue the work you have started. Here is my payment for your troubles.”

  I glimpsed a blue hand—the same blue hand I’d seen at the scrap metal yard—withdraw a satchel from the shadows of his cloak, and I felt myself warming to this black figure at last. The satchel left on the desk contained fifty gimli coins.

  After watching the shadow stride out into the dark gray world, I strained to stand.

  Somehow I staggered to my feet.

  I shambled over to the table where Shwann slept.

  “Let’s get back to work,” I said. My assistant picked himself up without complaint.

  Three days later, the face was complete. Then on a snowy day three months later, I hosted an unveiling ceremony for my creation.

  Shwann was the only audience in attendance. The black figure had not visited again since that night three months and three days prior.

  After Shwann alone applauded the unveiling, he gazed at the finished product and asked, “Does such a creature exist?” His voice had the hollow ring of a man for whom the answer was obvious.

  With his hair combed neatly back, his face exuded a refinement rarely seen in upper-class society. The well-to-do citizens of Cité might have seen it differently.

  I’ll say no more about his visage. The parts I had labored over the most were the ties and wrinkles of the cloak. I doubted the being himself would complain about my craftsmanship.

  His forward-bent stance with one foot forward and arms crossed over his chest had also been extrapolated from the fangs.

  At first glance, he looked as human as you and I, from his hairstyle to his facial features, his cloak and the garments underneath. Yet no human grew fangs the likes of which this creature wielded now.

  “So these are the fangs that punctured the woman’s throat,” said Shwann, haggard. I nodded. “But for what purpose? There is absolutely nothing to be gained, that I can think of, from doing so.”

  “Why don’t we ask the victim directly?”

  Shwann gasped, perhaps not thinking to ask.

  “Bring the woman to me,” I said, but Shwann shook his head.

  “She’s not here. She has been missing since yesterday.”

  I stared at my assistant’s drawn face and asked, “Has this happened before?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “While we were working on the face, she sometimes went into the other room. But she may have slipped out of the house several times this last month. And I say may because she has always returned to her room after two or three days, and I have not actually seen her outside.”

  “Why do you suppose she’s run away?”

  “I imagine she doesn’t want to be wounded again.”

  I nodded in agreement and asked, “Do you think she will return soon?”

  “There’s just no telling, although I understand this is rare.”

  “Do you think you can find her?” I asked, reluctant to order him outright.

  Shwann bowed and hurried out of the workshop straightaway.

  Within ten minutes, the front door burst open and a gang of police officers stormed into the workshop.

  “May I help you, officers?” I asked, affecting civility.

  An officer distinguished by his spiral moustache stepped forward and unfolded a metallic-colored document. “By order of the court of Cité, we are here to search the residence of Master Craftsman Monde on Yami Street, Shin Shin District. We have a report filed by ninety-five-year-old Ver Non of 22,605,984 north high-rise district, claiming that his seventeen-year-old niece Ayla Non and nine friends disappeared three months ago after visiting your home…”

  I felt my lips curl almost imperceptibly.

  †

  I had not reported the deaths of the female bandits. Though an interrogation would no doubt find me justified in my actions, clearing my name would take some time, especially against the word of a well-to-do citizen of the high-rise district. There was also the risk that the police might have been bribed. Even if the truth were revealed in time, that might be after I’d been tortured, with molten lead poured into my bloody back at the hands of the police.

  I had only one option. Death. But it would afford me the time I needed before my execution.

  I interrupted the bearded man from pronouncing the date of my so-called questioning and confessed to the charges. “I confess to the murder of the women as charged. I understand that the proper punishment for my crime is death. But I wish to exercise the second of three privileges accorded all confessors—two weeks of unconditional probation.”

  After the bearded man agreed to my terms, I was made to sign several documents and was spared immediate arrest.

  All I could do now was wait.

  As the day wore into night and still Shwann did not return, I began to wonder if I’d sent him on a fool’s errand.

  I woke up in the dead of night for some unknown reason. I crept out of my bedroom and into the workshop.

  A mysterious presence stood in the corner of the room, where the steel woman lay crumpled at his feet trying to back away from the shadow’s clutches.

  I called out my assistant’s name, but he did not appear.

  “So you have returned…of your own volition,” I said to the woman. Naturally, she did not answer. “You escaped on your own and chose to return on your own. For what unearthly reason? Just what is it about this,” I said, gesturing toward the fanged being, “that so terrifies and attracts you? I can only think that you too are some unreal presence who is connected somehow to this—my unreal creation.”

  I left the couple in the workshop and returned to the main house.

  Shwann soon returned from his search, hanging his head. “I could not find her.”

  I led the lad into the workshop, whereupon he gawked, dumbfounded at the sight of the steel woman cowering before my fanged creation. After I explained that she had returned here on her own, Shwann shot me an admiring gaze and said, “How I aspire to your skill, Master Monde. I hope to become the kind of craftsman capable of bringing the unreal into being someday.” He ran a tender hand along the woman’s steel skin, until his fingers stopped at the side of the neck, where the mystery had all begun and would take another turn.

  I noticed the cause of his consternation before Shwann spoke. “Master Monde, next to the holes…are more puncture wounds.”

  On the volcanic flames of Yoga, I swear that the punctures were not there when I had found her earlier. “These must be new. Apparently the same forbidden act is being repeated in our absence.”

  “For how much longer?”

  “I do not know.”

  “For what purpose?”

  When I did not answer, Shwann walked calmly toward the worktable and snatched up the hand drill. Before I could intercede, he plunged the drill into his neck. Drawing it out, Shwann tilted his neck so that I might see. “Anything different?”

  “No,” I answered. I detected only a tiny discolo
ration on his milky skin but nothing that might reveal any earthly reason for anyone to puncture a woman’s neck.

  “What now, Master Monde?”

  “I imagine our client will be by to collect them.”

  “These beings belong here,” said Shwann, shooting me a defiant look for the first time. “This fanged creature is your masterpiece.”

  “I have already been paid a fee.”

  “You must not,” said Shwann, his tone growing angry. “I cannot bear to see you hand over your creation—no, the product of our first collaboration, however small my part, to some stranger.”

  “Only when we deliver our products to the client do we earn the right to call ourselves craftsmen. Apparently your time under my apprenticeship has been wasted.” Then, trying to suppress any hint of sentimentality, I bade him never to darken my door again. Shwann opened his mouth as if to speak. Had he appealed to our relationship, I might have gone to my grave despising him. But the young man had more dignity than that. Saying nothing, Shwann took one step back, bowed deeply, and showed himself out of my workshop.

  †

  It was two days later that my client arrived at last.

  The metallic couple stood before the black-shrouded visitor, as ghostly blue flames from the gas lamps danced off their steel skin.

  “I am greatly satisfied. A recompense for your labor.” The black figure dropped a heavy satchel on the table.

  I slid the satchel back and said, “I’m afraid I have no use for money.”

  “So I have heard. I regret the trouble I have caused.”

  “Then perhaps you’ll answer one question.”

  “Please.” The visitor bowed, which aroused a strange feeling in me. I know now that it was a paradoxical feeling. Something told me that this man was incapable of displaying such deference.

  How could this be? It was the familiar gesture of a man I knew well.

  “Your previous visit also took place when my apprentice was gone.” The black figure might have pulled away had I attempted any large movement. Instead I stepped on the pedal that I’d rigged before my client’s arrival, and a hook swung down from the ceiling and tore off the hood shrouding his face. I had calculated the trajectory of the hook according to the man’s presumed height.