But then it tumbled out of its orbit.
In the moment before impact, a white ghost flew into its path. Setsura sprang away as well. The hilt of a dagger protruded from the left side of his chest, as if the white moon had planted it there. Just beneath the moon floated a woman, her other hand pressed against the side of her face.
Setsura fell from the soaring heights and plummeted to the earth, his black slicker flapping in the rushing air like a bird that had lost its wings. Princess watched until the darkness swallowed him up. She hovered silently in the sky. The wispy, ephemeral gossamer on her back fluttered in the wind.
“Close call,” she said to the general on the roof. She made no attempt to hide the sarcasm in her voice.
“What the hell are you talking about? I only lost my footing.” The general didn’t try to get up. “More importantly, what happened to him?”
“He fell. I didn’t detect any rescue lines.”
“I will believe it when I see the dead body.”
“No need. This hand stabbed him through the heart. Such a meaningless loss.”
“He was bearing great wounds. And yet was capable of casting his wire at me thusly. Do not take this wrong, Princess, but the only reason your blade found its mark was because his struggle with me had already drained him of his life force.”
“Whatever. He’s dead. The monsters down there are making a meal of him now. Kikiou will undoubtedly be delighted.”
“Where did he fall?”
“There.”
The general got to his feet and looked hard where her white finger pointed. He pressed his right hand against his neck.
“What?” Princess asked.
“He did not sever my neck but did cut my blood vessels. Here is the best evidence of that man’s skill. Who can say how long the blood will keep flowing?”
The general removed his hand. Princess focused her one eye on the spot. A black line cut halfway through his sturdy neck—otherwise a proud manifestation of his immortal, regenerative powers—from which fresh blood spurted.
“He was examining this place before he battled me. He might have planned his own death. I should offer him a prayer of my own.”
The general raised his left hand. From the tips of his fingers slipped thin, glittering strands of light. Princess watched as they scattered into the darkness from a gap in the chain-link fence.
Setsura wasn’t floating. Neither was he on solid earth. He was spread eagle, face up in empty space some yards above the ground. He looked like he’d suddenly been released from the pull of gravity, and the price of such sorcery was the weight of his own soul.
In reality, Setsura had fallen into a kind of suspended animation. With the dagger still penetrating his chest, that was the only way to keep from crashing dead into the ground.
The position, orientation, and angle of his body had all been calculated from a fall of five hundred feet, coming to rest on a single strand reaching from the hotel to the building facing it.
He’d cast that line from the roof of the hotel, from the perimeter of the chain-link fence, while raking his fingers casually through his hair and looking down at the world. Not as an escape route. Setsura had considered slamming the general against it. Princess’s intervention had necessitated repurposing it as a lifeline. He’d limited himself to one wire due to the general’s powerful eyesight. He was as powerful an opponent as Setsura had ever encountered, so he couldn’t be sure it’d go unnoticed.
If he had, Setsura would be shit out of luck now.
The single, micron-thin thread had absorbed the impact and supported his weight after the five hundred foot fall. It took all his powers of concentration to keep from dropping the rest of the way. In the process, he’d drained the last reservoirs of his strength and succumbed to this half-dead state. Move a finger, wiggle his toes, and the wire would bisect his body and send the parts flying.
He was a corpse on a string.
An entirely remarkable coincidence robbed him of his next move. A gremlin no bigger than a toad crossed the road beneath the splendid silhouette carved into the sky.
Before making it to the other side, the sole of a white shoe crushed it to jelly. The gleeful face delighting in the creature’s squirming death throes—a sacrifice of sorts to the coming slaughter—belonged to none other than Shuuran. She raised her head. The Chinese girl saw Setsura suspended there in the air.
“Princess’s telepathy told me that you were dead, but I didn’t believe it. I came here to make sure. What a frightening man you are, Setsura Aki. But I will eliminate the cause of our distress. I will obliterate Sir Ryuuki’s foe.”
Shuuran reached into her hair. Her hand extended skyward. A flash of light shot past Setsura’s head, cutting through his devil wire. He dropped to the asphalt. Shuuran extended her right hand. The arc of light curved around and flew back into her hand, as if inexorably drawn there. The silver comb gleamed in the moonlight.
“First, I’m going to rip out your throat. Then your head. And your arms and legs. You can wait in hell for us forever. But don’t count on visitors anytime soon.”
She walked toward him. Her feet abruptly came to a halt. Behind her a bird sang. A cawing crow. Shuuran looked back over her shoulder.
A small silhouette approached from the direction of the Mitsui Building. At this time, in this place, it was unbelievable that any human being would come to meet her face to face. But the demon Shuuran drew her brows and stared at the girl walking toward her. The girl was wearing a purple satin dress. She didn’t look more than seven or eight years old.
The ghostly animosity radiating from her ivory-white face told Shuuran at once that she was a creature no less magical than her, and an enemy. The girl continued walking forward. Shuuran waited.
A purple dress and a dark green Chinese dress. Eyes like the deep blue sea and eyes as black as a winter night. One on behalf of the black-clad genie and one on behalf of those mercenaries of the night.
Wagering without regret not only their lives but their souls, this was a once-in-a-lifetime meeting between an unnaturally beautiful girl and an unnaturally beautiful young woman.
“You’re here representing Setsura?” Shuuran’s voice rang across the half-dozen yards separating them.
The girl stopped walking. Her blue eyes looked up at the sky. From somewhere in the gloomy night came a man’s hoarse voice.
“She came right to his side without even the courtesy of a phone call.”
“In that case—” The girl again turned her eyes on Shuuran. “You are the one responsible for scarring his beautiful throat? That is why I despise living things of flesh and blood.”
The girl was a doll, Galeen Nuvenberg’s pretty little servant.
Part Two: Clockworks
Chapter One
Shuuran sneered, “What’s this? You’re not even human! I don’t know why you’re rushing to his rescue, but get in my way and you die. If you want to live, then leave now.”
“I was the last person to meet with him,” the doll answered in silky tones. The blue flowers on the front of her satin dress trembled. Roses. Did blue roses bloom anywhere in nature? No, but the large indigo blossoms glowing on her chest were definitely of the species. “When he returns from the dead, I wish to be the first person he meets. Get in my way and—”
“You’ll kill me? Do you know how long I have lived? I am Shuuran.”
“I do not have a name. Please remember me as the servant of Galeen Nuvenberg.”
Shuuran’s face went blank. “That name—I’ve heard it somewhere. It is definitely on Sir Kikiou’s list. Well, even better. I’ll hold onto you until your master comes to fetch you. As bait.”
“I cannot agree to that,” the doll girl said softly. “Moreover, I cannot allow my friend to suffer. You are the one who will go to her grave.”
A flash of silver hummed through the air and grazed the doll girl’s neck. The girl just stood there.
“Alas and alack.” Sharp can
ines peeked from the corners of the girl’s mouth. She closed the space between them. Her white stocking feet didn’t move. She glided across the ground. And raised her right hand.
“Ah!” Shuuran cried out as the familiar streak of silver slightly brushed her cheek.
Deflected by the doll’s hand, the silver comb disappeared into the eternal darkness. Shuuran barely dodged the flash of light at her throat, found her footing, and leaped forward. Next came the sound of ripping cloth. The doll twined her hand into the front of Shuuran’s dress and ripped away a large swatch.
Shuuran landed next to Setsura. A white patch of heaving flesh was exposed from her chest to her stomach. Her generous left breast shone in the entrancing moonlight.
“I underestimated you,” the vampiress growled under her breath. A fraction of a second slower and that hand would have removed all the flesh underneath. “No mercy—”
A black rivulet fell from the line in her cheek. The fresh blood dripping from the wound left by the comb gathered on the ground in considerable volume. The blood spread out like a drop of oil falling into a pool of water.
“It’s no time to gloat,” said Shuuran, towering above the doll. “That blood is no ordinary blood. Look—that clay thing forming itself out of the solid asphalt. Oh, a human head. A human hand. A porcelain doll.”
There was an ironic barb in that last word. It was indeed a human-looking doll. The same human doll that had engaged Doctor Mephisto in the Shinanomachi ruins—this time wearing Shuuran’s clothes and face—rose out of the black and bloody mud.
“Pretty little girl. Let me give you a hug.”
She vanished and reappeared poised at the nape of the girl’s neck. The girl was a doll too. But fine glass tubes instead of blood vessels ran through her body, though which circulated a nourishing ambergris-like substance that granted her the facsimile of life.
The porcelain doll attached her mouth to the white neck like the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner attached itself, with a gagging-like sound. The girl froze. A jet of blue water shot up into the air.
Shuuran looked on and grinned.
A puff of smoke like a punctured radiator, a geyser of the doll’s blood. Befitting this fairy tale girl, it created a rainbow in the air.
Another spurt. The porcelain doll sank its fangs into the girl’s head. The girl shook her head, but the doll held on like a Doberman. The curls of smoke spun around dreamlike, climbing higher and higher into the sky, dimming the face of the moon.
“This is the end for you,” laughed Shuuran, her voice rising to the heavens in a shriek.
At that moment, a different sound echoed like a reverse tide. The spectral haze shrouding the three of them parted to the sharp beating of wings. A black bird plummeted downward. Its sharp claws sank into the shoulder of Shuuran’s doll.
The startled doll tried to leap away, but couldn’t move its body. The girl held her legs. The raven crowed shrilly and took to the air, the two dolls dangling from its claws. Before Shuuran could react, it soared up and disappeared into the swirling miasma.
Shuuran glanced at the vanishing trail and immediately initiated another strategy. Drawing alongside Setsura, she reached for the dagger, prepared to deliver the finishing blow. No matter how magical a being, it shouldn’t be able to survive being stabbed through the heart.
She braced herself to yank out the blade. A greenish clod came out of the sky and scattered in all directions, the pieces of Shuuran’s look-alike porcelain doll turning back to clumps of clay as they fell to earth.
The sight distracted her for a moment. Then Shuuran felt a prick of pain on the back of her neck. She reached up to her neck and retrieved the object. A blue rose. She cast it aside contemptuously, grasped the hilt of the dagger and pulled it out.
“Die.”
As she thrust down and felt the blade penetrate, Setsura’s body and black slicker dissolved into a heap of roses.
“Still performing parlor tricks?” Grinding the flowers beneath her delicate shoes, Shuuran came to her feet.
The girl was standing on the road less than ten feet in front of her. Her body was stained from the neck down with her own blue blood. The black raven perched on her shoulder. It was a weirdly beautiful and perversely cheery sight.
The girl laughed. A sound like an angel singing. She extended her right arm. The bird opened its beak and coughed up what appeared to be a wooden stake. The end was planed to a short point like a lance. How a regular-sized raven could store a stake two feet long in its belly was anybody’s guess.
As the girl raised her right hand over her head, Shuuran flung the dagger at her. The girl’s arm traced a broad arc in the air as the dagger buried itself in her left breast. Shuuran’s lunge forward to throw the dagger left her off-balance and unable to move out of the way.
The stake rent the air like a flaming arrow. With a strange, soft sound it pierced her voluptuous chest and jutted out of her back. As she crumpled to the ground in a mist of blood, Shuuran heard the high-pitched cry of that sinister raven.
A man’s face rose to the back of her mind. Behind him, the sun was setting on a vast and distant plain. He reached out to her. Come with me, he said to her. Shuuran knew that this was a desire he had harbored for two thousand years.
She nodded. The fulfillment of that long-hoped desire. “Sir Ryuuki—” And she quietly began walking to the west, toward the sun setting into the distant horizon like a scarlet Chinese lantern.
The raven peered down at the white, still face. “Did she say something?” it muttered in human language. “A person’s name.”
The girl shook her head. “You must be imagining things.” She crossed herself. There were certainly other appropriate funeral rites, but that was all she was capable of.
The dagger embedded in her chest changed to a blue rose. It glimmered hauntingly, as if relieved to finally return to its rightful owner.
“So how’s lover boy over there?”
The girl shot the raven a scalding look. “You shan’t address him like that.”
The raven flapped its wings in annoyance and floated up a few inches. “Well, excuse me. If it walks like a duck—”
The doll girl ignored it, took five more steps and squatted down. Setsura was lying where he’d fallen. He hadn’t moved an inch. The hilt of the dagger still protruded from his chest. Poison on the thorns of the blue rose had tangled the thoughts of the vampiress Shuuran.
The girl pressed her ear against his chest and then straightened.
“Well?” asked the raven.
The girl said cheerfully, “The blade missed the heart. And before the dagger struck, his metabolism sank to the lowest possible extreme. No different than the dead.”
“You can’t kill the dead.”
“There is that, too.”
“I’m so happy I could cry an ocean.”
“You shan’t make fun like that.”
The raven flapped its wings and soared skyward. “Whoa—” came its voice. “You’d better hustle. That woman’s blood is raising a stink. Those cowardly vultures are on the move.”
“I know that.”
The girl put her arms around Setsura’s waist. The servant of Galeen Nuvenberg possessed impressive magical powers of her own, and easily lifted up Setsura’s body.
“You gonna carry him home?” the raven asked, intrigued. “He’s lost a lot of blood. Isn’t lugging him along like that going to cause more harm than good?”
“We’ll manage. Once we get out of here, I’ll have a taxi pick us up.”
“You think a taxi will pick up a fare like you?”
“I think some will do anything for money. What do they call this place?”
“Demon City Shinjuku.”
“Then they must give rides to demons too.”
“Good point.”
A girl, a body and a bird—this strange troupe made its way towards Koshu Avenue. They had proceeded a short ways when the doll girl glanced back over her shoulder. There was alre
ady nothing to be seen where Shuuran had fallen. Steel-blue dust coated the tattered clothing. The silvery dust wafted to and fro in the breeze until it drifted over the street.
“Westward,” said the girl. In the direction of the wind.
“Yeah, to the west,” the raven replied.
Towards the setting sun.
Yakou took the incendiary bomb from the back of his belt. He hesitated. He couldn’t shake the vexing feeling that he was missing something important. After killing Kikiou, he’d searched the magnificent manor house for the enemy’s private quarters and turned up nothing.
All the doors opened readily. None required a key. The other two were nowhere to be found. Finally Yakou resolved to trigger the explosive. Seeing that the Demon Princess had established her counterfeit graveyard here, the real thing must be present as well.
And so he descended to the first floor and primed the incendiary. What stayed his hands were those lingering questions about this world. This world—this house of cards the vampires had built—this phony Shangri-La. It seemed a great waste to burn down the manor house without knowing its true nature, without comprehending the clockworks that made the whole thing go.
Where was this in the first place?
The top floor of the manor house afforded a magnificent view of the surrounding countryside. The endless green, the crystal-clear blue lake, swiftly flowing rivers and crashing waterfalls. The distant, slate-blue mountain ranges. Over and over he had to tell himself that it was all an illusion.
It’d be naive to believe that knocking out a single pillar propping up the reality of this world would make the rest of the edifice fall over like a row of dominoes. That’s what his intuition told him, what the DNA in the legendary blood flowing through his veins—the same as theirs—whispered to him.
And as long as this world was not utterly destroyed, they would continue on forever. Hence the vexing indecisiveness that caused Yakou to hesitate at the makeshift destruction of this makeshift world, even while brandishing the weapon intended to deliver the fateful blow.
Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 3 Omnibus Edition Page 4