“I would rather ask the darkness.”
“Well, then,” said General Ryuuki.
“Well, then,” said Doctor Mephisto.
Chapter Two
Ryuuki moved first, the trailing dust forming a brilliant comet’s trail.
Less than ten feet separated them. Mephisto’s cape spread out like a white butterfly’s wings and fluttered hauntingly skyward as he waved his left hand.
Ryuuki took note less of the bottle he was holding than the streams of liquid scattering from it. He jumped backwards. A black stain ran across the asphalt like an open wound.
Mephisto shouldn’t have time to retreat. The one-armed man reached out his hand toward him. The colorless, odorless power poured out. The aim was true and struck the white-cloaked figure dead-on.
It hit the white cape. The demon qi—that had felled even Setsura Aki—bounced off as if hitting a castle wall. Except that, wrapping around him, left him with no time to retreat.
Ryuuki leapt forward, vaulting the stain on the asphalt, and landed in front of Mephisto.
The ground gave way under him. Startled, Ryuuki glanced down. He’d sunk down to his ankles. Things were popping out of the stony gray surface—the gray faces of men and women, old and young alike. Their mouths rose up to grasp his feet.
Faces appeared from beneath the ground
Faces of the lonely and infirmed
They appeared as if out of a fog
Truly suffused with certain sadness
So a poet had once written. It was unlikely he ever dreamt that what he imagined would come to life. The gray, sickly faces sucking on Ryuuki’s feet were not of one simple mind. A myriad of emotions played across their faces. The purple night shook with their laughter.
“My faces are less gluttons than scholars under the skin,” Mephisto said, slowly lowering his cape and showing his serene countenance to the moonlight. “Nothing more than that. However, I shan’t be keeping you company until dawn. They are more than willing to while the night away chatting with you.”
This time Ryuuki answered the doctor’s curt declaration in an unexpected fashion. “Stop, Shuuran.”
The sparkling dust that had begun to flow in Mephisto’s direction reversed direction.
“That is—” Mephisto started to say, and understood the reason for Ryuuki’s command—with his ears.
Ryuuki reached around his back with his left hand. A sound came forth. Ryuuki turned his shoulders. His hand held a small koto. The ghost koto Silent Night. The quiet weapon that Mephisto had not actually seen him play.
Mephisto pointed to his ears. “Earplugs. Oh, but these faces—”
The strings sang out.
“So sad,” one cried.
“I’m so sleepy,” said another.
“A winter’s night.”
“The moon is lovely tonight.”
“I really must sleep.”
“So sad.”
“So sad.”
The notes floated in the air, playing out above the dusky faces. The faces sadly closed their eyes. Their lips slackened. Ryuuki softly stepped away and turned his eyes on Mephisto.
“My playing is not frustrated by earplugs.”
Mephisto’s closed eyelids opened barely to slits.
“The Demon Physician also should wait here until morning. Nothing would make me happier, if I do say so myself.” He again strummed Silent Night as he stepped past Mephisto. “You cannot lay hands on one who drank your blood. All the more so one who set me free.”
He took several more steps before the thin ring tightened icily around his neck.
“The earplugs supplied by Mephisto Hospital are not perfect. But neither are they useless ornaments. You should have played your entire repertoire, from every era, past and present.”
Ryuuki tried to look back at him. The ring tightened with a ferocious force. Ryuuki’s whole body trembled. Silent Night fell to his feet.
“Will you continue to live if I sever your head? A technique Setsura Aki did not try. But I shall explore the possibilities.”
At that point, Ryuuki’s head should have fallen off his shoulders. Except that Mephisto was engulfed by a gray mist that caused even the self-assured Demon Physician to hesitate for a split second. In that split second, Ryuuki caught hold of the wire around his neck.
The forces acting on this strand of silver momentarily reversed themselves. The white-caped figure soared into the air like a bird riding an updraft. As Ryuuki aimed his killer qi at the world’s most beautiful target, he was overcome by a fierce bout of coughing.
Though the effectiveness of his strange and ancient fighting technique was weakened, Mephisto just managed to find purchase on the ground with one hand and parry it. Ryuuki sprang forward, readying to deliver another blast of his demon qi. Mephisto wouldn’t have time to dodge it this time.
But instead he stared up at the sky. As did Mephisto. From far away came the cock-a-doodle-doo of a rooster announcing the impending morn. The darkness began to brighten.
Neither of them said anything. Fighting was not the imperative now. Without a sound, Mephisto rushed off through the steel-gray mist to his secret haven.
Leaving Ryuuki behind. “Yonder is the east,” he said to himself, facing the glowing horizon. “Long, long forgotten.” It was the color of fortitude and solitude. “As long as Princess is not here, there is no reincarnation should I turn to dust. This may be the best place of all to die a nameless death.”
The gray mist around him stirred.
“Do not trouble yourself, Shuuran. The only reason I sought out this city was to find a place of repose. I have known all along—I used up my life that day at the reaches of the wastelands.”
The cock crowed again.
He stood there like a statue brimming with heroic self-denial as the world around him welcomed the new day.
The door behind Setsura closed. A strange sight unfolded before him.
The abrupt change from the luxurious splendor of the preceding room and passageways was like a clash of cymbals. The fading gloom rose to the high ceiling. Every other dimension was far more cramped. Stained paneling lined the walls and floor.
A sharp scent assaulted his nostrils, definitely the smell of blood and organic decay. About the time he noted that the shadows stuck here and there to the floorboards were drips and splotches of one sort or another, a distressed sigh issued from Setsura’s shapely mouth.
“This is my kingdom.” Kikiou’s voice radiated from above and below. “Look up.”
Setsura raised his head. Where his line of sight met the ceiling, the gloom evaporated, revealing two huge pots dangling from a thick rope. “Contained within are heaven and hell of my own making. Direct your desires. The results will surely foretell your fortune and your fate.”
Far more than the Demon Princess or Ryuuki, this voice was filled with human emotions that put an altogether greater chill into the blood.
In contrast to which, Setsura grumbled, “Red-bean soup or sake—which do you think I prefer?”
After a moment of silence, Kikiou said, “Funny man. If you do not choose, then I will. There should be no need to tell you which.”
“Is that so?” said Setsura, with a look that suggested the answer had come to him. “Soy sauce or sake—now that’d be worth mulling over.”
“Idiot.”
As if severing a connection, Kikiou’s voice disappeared.
“I suppose I’m not taking this seriously enough,” Setsura said with a smile. His presence, in fact, betrayed no sense of impending danger.
The rope creaked as the mouth of the big pot on the right—almost ten feet in diameter—tipped toward him. “Hold on a minute.” He held up a hand. “I was thinking of the other one.”
A cloudy, viscous clump jutted out from the mouth of the pot. The gray insides throbbed with breath-like pulses, proof of some sort of life. Not waiting for the mouth to come to level, the thing oozed out and spilled onto the floor.
; An elliptical blob of jelly three yards long and three feet in diameter at its widest fell through the air. It struck the ground and quivered violently. With a plopping sound, the tapered end turned toward Setsura.
If the eye on the end of the stalk couldn’t see, then it must hear or smell or sense electrical or infrared waves. Vein-like ripples ran across its surface and vanished. In turn, beads of sweat appeared on Setsura’s forehead. His devil wire should have trisected the “torso” of the living jelly into three sections.
“You will never cut it with that devil wire of yours,” mocked Kikiou in high-pitched laughter. “Having fought General Bey, you must be aware of his regenerative powers. I studied him carefully during his five hundred years of confinement, and came up with that. There is a very primitive component unique to his family line. Historically, it was triggered by those infamous acts of brutality. However, within those powers are substances entirely suitable to my ends. Biology teaches us that the more primitive the structure, the more powerful its properties.”
Setsura gazed up at the ceiling and then down at the creepy thing creeping across the floor. “So this thing is General Bey’s sibling?”
“A relative of sorts, I suppose.”
“Give them four thousand years and there’s no end to the weird shit people can develop a taste for. A scholar living forever might not be such a good thing.”
“I would agree. But apparently it thinks that even a senbei shop owner deserves the privilege.”
“What an honor,” said Setsura, in a manner that suggested it was anything but. “In any case, what sort of powers does it have? Perhaps a few particulars before I journey to the great beyond?”
“Fine.”
A large shadow dropped down in front of the blob. Even Setsura was taken aback by the unexpected appearance. It was about as long as the blob, but its shape was far more complex—and more than complex, mysterious. The ferocious face of a tiger, the body of a lion, the scaled legs of an alligator, the tail of a snake coiled upwards.
“A chimera, eh?” Setsura observed in a slightly bored voice.
The magical beast said to inhabit not only Ancient China but Japan as well. Unlike the fable, though, this one was quite real, Kikiou’s handmade bit of man-made life.
The monster would have made the ordinary man faint dead in his tracks. It turned its face toward Setsura and growled. A sound that had once shaken the city of Chang’an. The old boards shuddered. At the sound of cracking wood, Setsura looked down and saw it was caused by falling rusty nails.
As if provoked in turn, a hissing came from the opposite end. The snake-tail rose up, flicking its flaming red tongue at the blob hugging the floor.
“Over there, over there,” Setsura said under his breath.
He hardly expected such admonitions to meet with any success, but after two or three more steps, the chimera came to a halt and twisted its body around.
The room filled with a blue glow. Setsura groaned silently. He felt a fierce numbness in his face and hands. A burst of St. Elmo’s fire.
He didn’t have to ask where it came from. Back during the Heian Era, whenever a chimera called a nue appeared in the Imperial Palace, the skies clouded over and flashes of lightning rained down for miles around.
The burst was followed by an explosive slap of air. Blinding lines of blue streamed between the ceiling and the blob. The lines of light separated and scattered in all directions, and then disappeared. From the slashing lines arose coral-like coronas that trailed off in gleaming beads.
Setsura raised his arms to shield his face. He didn’t feel numbness, but waves of heat. But before it could grow to an unbearable intensity, the heat abruptly dimmed. The slicker’s insulated, heat-resistant threads did their job.
Disregarding the wafting white smoke, he turned his eyes on the magical beast. The chimera had plainly decided that the blob was its first order of business. Hugging the ground, muscles tensed, readying to jump like a stalking cat, it surveyed the situation.
In front of it, the blob’s unceasing pulses had reached from its innards to the translucent waves on its surface. The charge of many thousands of volts must have caused changes in its inner workings. Or was this an expression of anger?
The twinkling points of lights inside it suggested not so much the product of radioactive luminescence as that of a compact nuclear reactor. The chimera’s tail stood up. The balance of its emotions had apparently tipped in favor of the snake.
A third flash of electrical fire stained the world blue. Flames spurted from the coral-colored outcroppings on the floor and walls. Pierced by the bolts of lightning, the blob of jelly convulsed violently. Blue smoke shrouded the flickering radiation. It soon extinguished, leaving only a glowing point of light, as if struggling to balance the deadly surge of power.
This point of light suddenly reached out. If the creature had a “light of life,” this was it. It entwined itself around the chimera’s snout.
The chimera’s alligator forefeet trembled. When the sharp claws touched it, it disappeared. But the light soon advanced. In the next moment, another ribbon of light bound the chimera’s forefeet.
The chimera slumped forward onto the ground. Its fighting spirit did not slacken. This time, the sparks of electricity severed the ribbon of light. Apparently effective, the blob spit out the severed end and oozed backwards.
The chimera didn’t move. It knew this was no ordinary foe.
The blob glowed. The particles of light formed a tail and grew outwards. Sensing what was coming, the chimera leapt to the side. The ribbon of light swerved and zeroed in on the creature’s body. Blue flashes of light knocked it away. One beam remained.
It didn’t entwine. It penetrated. The end was clearly visible inside the lion’s torso. The magical beast arched its back and roared, desperately countering this otherworldly attack with its otherworldly life force and body mechanisms.
The globe of light lost its color. The magical beast’s fierce face brimmed with vigor and drive. As did its roar.
Light shot toward that mouth.
It spun around with an expression that would frighten the devil. The ribbon of light was sucked into the mouth of the rearing snake tail. The light twisted down the snake’s gullet and reached the middle of the creature’s body.
The chimera didn’t have the strength to resist this second shock of light. Its forefeet collapsed. The hind legs followed. The tiger’s face still glared defiantly at the blob. But the light went out of its eyes and it slumped to the floor.
The far more gruesome scene unfolded after that.
The chimera spun around. The snake tail ejected a stream of light. In an opposite and equal reaction, the eight hundred pound beast slid effortlessly along the floor and into contact with the shivering blob.
Setsura had to wonder how it would absorb all that mass.
Exactly the opposite. With a sound like a squeezing bladder, the chimera’s body split neatly in half, from its head to its tail, and turned completely inside out, right down to its internal organs.
Chapter Three
“How old school,” Setsura said to himself.
It was his turn next.
Whether the inside-out trick itself proved sufficiently satisfying, or that was the way the blob harvested a prey’s energy, the living jelly withdrew its ribbons of light from the magical beast’s corpse, oozed over it, and started after Setsura.
“This is certainly a bit of a pickle,” Setsura observed. And in fact, at that moment his brain did feel like it was being stuffed into a pickle jar. “Is slicing and dicing going to work here?”
But cut what? The uselessness of attacking the blob was quite clear by now.
A little over a dozen feet separated them. The points of light poured out. Half that length was cut in half. The ends flew into the air.
“The light can be cut.”
As if tracking the sound of Setsura’s voice, the blob reached out with a dozen more gleaming lines. But Setsura ni
mbly vaulted past their reach, landing behind the blob.
He’d wrapped his devil wires around the ropes and beams holding up the pots and judged the range of the enemy’s light at fifteen feet. In the process, his attention was drawn to the next threat waiting for him.
There was another pot.
Ropes and gears ground over his head. In front of him stood a person, her back to him. A naked woman.
“Hey, the deal was one pot,” Setsura protested to the formless Kikiou. Heaven and Hell, the alchemist had said. The beauty of her back alone suggested heaven.
She turned around.
She was as pretty as a peony. Firm breasts like ripe fruit. A tight waist and round hips that were the crystallization of all the beauties of ancient China. And yet her charms faded like mud in front of this young man.
She licked her raw red lips. Her hands reached toward him. Come to me, she cried out silently. Come into my arms. Let us sleep together.
Her blazing allure shook Setsura’s frame. The desire to rest comfortably and sleep in that embrace. It would have been improbable normally, so he knew that he was reaching the limits of his fatigue.
The woman stepped forward. Her arms were about to wrap around him when he slipped backwards.
A thin line of red from the corner of his mouth stopped her in her tracks. At the last moment before he fell under the spell of this mysterious beauty, the young senbei shop owner had bitten his own lip, yanking him back to reality.
He had one foot in the grave already. Together with his gray skin, his sickly but comely countenance created a mad kind of beauty. The bright red trickle from his mouth only exacerbated his otherworldly appearance.
“I’ve heard about you. You appeared in the city of Nanjing, embracing men one after the other, luring them into a sleep from which they never awoke. The Hugging Maid, didn’t they call you? Sorry, but I’m just not that into you. That guy, though, is more your speed.”
Setsura pointed to the woman’s right. She turned. As if seeing the blob for the first time, she blinked.
Perhaps because she was fifteen feet away, the blob monster didn’t shoot one of its ribbons of light at her. But when she stretched out her arms, its movements ceased. The Hugging Maid’s powers seemed to extend beyond fifteen feet.
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