While the boy had regained consciousness that morning, his physical strength was depleted to a phenomenal degree, and he hadn’t responded to questioning by the mayor and sheriff.
It was extremely difficult to believe he’d just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time during that incident the night before. Even if he’d heard about the attack on the woman, which was unlikely—everyone involved in the case had been urged to keep silent—he’d still been the object of a manhunt by the entire Youth Brigade. Well, it went without saying they’d thoroughly searched the area surrounding the house. And, the creature that for lack of a better name could be called a “spirit-beast,” had appeared on one other occasion when Cuore was also present.
“Even now everyone still suspects us. It’s common knowledge me and Cuore can climb the hill normally, and I bet Mr. Meyer wouldn’t have any trouble, either. And you know, all three of us have been attacked by goons from the local Youth Brigade, just because they think we might be the Nobles who walk by daylight.”
“You’re lucky you haven’t been hurt.”
“That’s on account of the mayor. He’s the big wheel in this town, no doubt about it. He’s good at getting resources from the Capital, and he gives a lot of thought to keeping us protected from monsters. If it weren’t for him, the village would’ve been wiped out a long, long time ago—though I think that would’ve been for the best.”
Perhaps realizing the harshness of her words, Lina cast her eyes down. The mayor was her adopted father, after all.
“Even he couldn’t prove we’re not connected to these attacks. You see, there hasn’t been anyone around us during past incidents.”
That fact, along with the list the mayor had handed him a night earlier, had been duly filed in D’s memory.
Mr. Meyer was single and living on his own, Cuore of course lived alone in an otherwise deserted house in town, and Lina was in the habit of holing up in her room just after sundown.
All strong-arm tactics by the mayor aside, the real reason the trio had been unharmed thus far was that nearly a decade had passed since their disappearance.
“You’ve climbed the hill before. Has anything else out of the ordinary happened?” D asked as he held his right hand up by his face.
As she wondered at this curious gesture, this apparent testing of the wind flow, Lina shook her head. It was an honest response.
D gave a nod and muttered, “Over here, I’d say.” It was unclear whether the nod was related to Lina’s response or not.
They angled swiftly through the darkness. An elaborately carved door appeared before the pair soon enough. While she knew of its existence, Lina had never been beyond it. She wasn’t quite to the age where curiosity could get the better of her fear.
Though the girl was prepared to be told once more to go home, D promptly pushed his way through the doorway and melted into an even greater darkness. Following frantically, Lina was amazed when she brushed past the door. It was a four-inch-thick slab of a renowned supersteel alloy. Twenty strapping men would probably have a hard time budging it. For the first time, Lina sensed what an uncanny individual the youth who’d gone before her into the darkness was.
She took a step forward, even as the terror of being swallowed by the blackness of an unimaginable world sank ice into the nape of her neck.
-
The woods brimmed with life. Light subdued the aura given off by the leaf-bare trees, spreading from Bess Fern’s lungs to her whole body and adding a cheery spring to her step.
Leaving the path, she found that the air had abruptly assumed a certain dampness. Though it was still winter, this corner of the woods was strangely warm. On the trunks of trees clung mosses and fungi in every shade from blue, green, and purple down to tones that were patently nauseating.
Bess made her way in, taking care not to slip, and at last she dropped to her knees at the roots of a colossal trunk.
Word from the sheriff’s office that no one should be out wandering around alone for the next day or two hadn’t reached her house until after she’d left.
A smile spread across her plump, boyish face.
Just as anticipated, the edible moss that had supposedly been plucked clean three days earlier tightly packed the space between the snaking roots. She hadn’t slept for fear someone might’ve harvested it already, but she’d been right to come check.
In the villages and hamlets of the Frontier, this moss was a valuable food substitute, used in practically any kind of cooking, from steaks to soups and jams. When sun dried, the moss was good for six months to a year. What’s more, the essence of the moss could be extracted using a centrifugal separator. Wounds plastered with this salve closed up almost instantly, and its usefulness in counteracting the venom of poisonous moth men made it an indispensable item for travelers and others afield.
Bess planned on swapping the moss she harvested with the trader, due to come to the village in the first of spring, for some fashionable apparel from the Capital. The teen’s eyes swam with images of herself in her new finery.
Cautiously slipping a shovel in where moss met soil, she put the green spoils in her basket in such a way as not to crumble the friable surface. After ten minutes, the basket was filled to the brim.
There was still a fair patch left. And she was pretty sure those things her father kept must have a sweet tooth for moss, too.
Maybe she’d take just a little bit more—but the hands she extended with that intent stopped halfway to the mark. A cloud had moved across the sun. No, it was no cloud—the inky blackness blanketing Bess was clearly the shadow of something humanoid.
The scream she unleashed was her last act of defiance before losing her seventeen years.
Cyrus Fern immediately recognized the cry rising to echo in the treetops as his daughter’s. On hearing the sheriff’s broadcast, and realizing his daughter had gone out alone, he’d set out after her with a strong hunch she’d be in the mossy woods she talked about so much. His whole body quivered with anger and despair.
Calling his daughter’s name as he dashed onward, he laid his hands to the lids of the fair-sized baskets he had hitched on either hip and unlatched them. The things inside grew ever more restless, and, from the opening of the basket on the right, a base, brutal growl escaped.
Suddenly, violet sparks shot from the mouth of the basket on the left, and Fern wasted no time in pulling his hand away. You’d think he’d be used to it, but these things were always tough to handle. The fingertips of the nonconductive glove he had on his left hand were scorched, and bluish smoke wafted skyward.
The instant he sprinted into the place he sought, Fern’s eyes went wide with outrage.
Cradled in the arms of a figure in ash-colored cloth, Bess vapidly stared into the heavens, as twin streams of lifeblood coursed down her throat. Her skin faded to paraffin. Despair became a torrent of rage that flooded every fiber of Cyrus Fern’s being. He forgot any chance of saving his daughter and he flung open the basket lids.
The ashen figure turned in his direction.
With the thud of Bess’ body falling to the mossy carpet, monstrous things in Fern’s baskets came to rest on the ground.
There was a pair of them, and yet they were hardly a matched pair.
Checked by their master’s monumental anger, a titanic spider, whose octet of firmly planted legs were easily ten feet in length, and a cloud of scintillant purple both glowered at the ashen figure.
Anyone who knew Fern’s line of work would sorely regret ever laying a hand on his daughter. Those who did a lot of traveling needed something to defend themselves against merciless bandits and Nobility-spawned demons, and more often than not it made sense to purchase a supernatural creature of like power—a guard beast. And it so happened Fern, the head of the Vigilance Committee, trained and sold them.
Though the guard beasts descended from the original demons and magical monstrosities propagated by the Nobility, as generations passed, numerous mutations and new species had be
en born. About two thousand years earlier, some extreme rarities, able to be domesticated by the humans, appeared. As far as the beasts’ training went, they were taught from birth to be strictly inactive until some sort of sonic wave or magic formula was used to trigger them—something no one else would understand.
And what monsters Fern had.
If it seemed incomprehensible that the massive arachnid had been shut up in a basket the size of a bird cage, the adjacent purple cloud presented an even stranger sight. The smoky mass boiling up from the heart of the cloud formed a perimeter more than a foot and a half wide, and, every time a light of some sort pulsed in the central portion, violet-hued sparks flew from all over the cloud.
It was one of the most bizarre forms of life on earth—an electricity beast.
Fern let fly an arcane and indecipherable cry—a harsh command to attack.
With speed belying its size, the spider advanced. The coruscating cloud rose in the air.
The ashen figure crouched just a bit.
Silver flashed, and then violet sparks fanned out like touch-me-nots, blending darkness and light in a corner of the woods.
An arachnid leg, severed at the second joint, sailed through the air.
As the figure sheared off the leg of the approaching spider with a single flourish of his longsword, he had also parried an electrical assault by the cloud with one of his sleeves.
Amazement suffused the face of ever-watchful Fern. The cloud’s sparks carried more than half a million volts.
The longsword whirled, fending off the electricity beast’s next two attacks and driving for the beast’s body. The figure’s sleeve was ablaze.
The sword tip came to an abrupt halt.
Though the shadowy figure put all his strength behind it, the blade didn’t quiver in the least, as if it was imbedded in solid stone.
Abandoning his weapon, the figure bounded from the ground in a great leap. Above its head, something like flimsy white threads drifted down to earth, fixing the figure in midair.
Just above the figure’s wildly craning head was the supposedly earthbound spider. But in light of how the thread was expelled from between the massive mandibles rather than from the abdomen, it seemed likely that the monster was actually a mutant that merely resembled a spider. By a single thread—thinner than a true spider’s and of fiercely adhesive mucus—the pseudo-arachnid hung itself from a huge branch on an equally cyclopean trunk. The strength of that silken line was evident; the spider easily dangled the massive form of the figure beneath it, steadily drawing its prey up toward its fearsome giant mandibles.
Perhaps the shadowy figure had already given up, for his motionless body was struck by a number of violet lightning bolts and flames. Black smoke rose from the outline of the form.
“Take that, you freaky son of a bitch. Piece of shit born-again bloodsucker. Either them blasts will burn you to a crisp or my spider’ll crush the life out of you with his big old pincers.” A hatred-filled laugh echoed up from Fern. “But before they do, I’ll have me a look at your face, you little bastard. Who the hell are you? Cuore? Lina? That schoolmarm Meyer? Or are you—”
Another thread fastened itself to the mask hiding the features of the shadowy figure and deftly stripped it off.
“But you’re—?!”
What was it that made his cry of shock die half-uttered? Was it the sight of the burning vermilion shafts of light blazing from the middle of that bared face? Perhaps it was caused by the gentle laying of hands as cold as ice to both his shoulders.
“Oh, Papa . . . ”
The lilting words of his daughter crept across the nape of his neck just ahead of her fangs.
-
From the cover of a titanic tree a short distance away, someone saw the denouement. Having slipped out of bed, Cuore stood with his normally leaden eyes gleaming in his wasted, haggard face, straining with all his might to suppress a scream.
-
When her eyes became accustomed to the dark, Lina found that she and D were descending a wide passageway. The walls and ceiling were stonework, though the corridor was strangely bereft of the usual sense of crushing claustrophobia felt in tight tunnels. To the contrary, Lina got the feeling there were great, spacious chambers just beyond the walls they passed.
At various points on the walls and ceiling, the gleams of what seemed to be intruder sensors and radiation-containing devices could be seen.
“You know, it’s pretty hard to believe there are still underground chambers so big. We must be, like, a hundred yards underground by now,” Lina said in disgust to D, who walked a few paces ahead. They had been walking for about a half an hour, and she was no longer amused by the adventure.
“We haven’t even gone down ten.”
“You’ve got to be joking!”
“You can relax. We’ll reach the end of the line in a minute.”
Just as he said, less than sixty seconds later the pair came to a shutter made out of what seemed to be steel.
D pointed the pendant from his chest at the computerized identification device.
The shutter vanished instantly and the pair went in.
Silence like the blue embrace of dusk awaited them.
Lina’s jaw dropped.
It looked like an enormous laboratory, but there could never be another place of research to match this.
Like the corridor, the walls were stonework, boulder-fashioned ramparts rising to a height of thirty feet. The desks, laid in rows across the floor, were made of sturdy hardwood and adorned with flasks, beakers, and vials of unsettling colored liquids—it looked for all the world like the lab of a medieval alchemist. Here and there, ghastly things appropriate to such a place jutted up, mixing with the bluish light to create a mood that beggared description. But positioned perfectly among that old-fashioned apparatus was what could only be a positron brain, an electro-analyzer, a matter-converter—the very embodiment of superscientific technology. Here was a perfect example of the ambivalence that epitomized the world of the Nobility.
“I can’t believe this place is still intact,” Lina said, scanning the surroundings. “Looks like it was some sort of research center, doesn’t it? Can you tell what they were working on, D?”
Receiving no answer, she looked back over to D, who stood before a bench, intently scrutinizing the flasks and bizarre globes that were heaped atop it. He stepped up to a nearby control panel and his hands began to glide across the myriad keys.
“Don’t tell me you do computers, too . . . ”
Before Lina had finished saying the words, the air began to hum, and all about the room machines began springing to life.
The strangest imaginable designs, unintelligible symbols, and numerical expressions—none in the least bit familiar to Lina—shot in a riotous race across the computer’s screen. D stared at the screen for no more than a second or two before he quickly toggled off the switch and started across the spacious chamber without so much as glancing at the girl.
“Hey, wait for me. You’re being such a jerk. Can’t very well leave your assistant behind, can you?!”
But, just as she was about to scamper after him, her foot slipped and, squealing and clutching a rack of half-filled beakers, she tumbled to the floor with an impressive noise and no small amount of breakage.
“That hurt . . . ”
Luckily, she hadn’t bashed her head open, but, as she kneaded her sharply throbbing backside, she glared at the unavoidably returning D with the deepest loathing.
Her eyes suddenly narrowed.
There. Where the tendril-like splashes of liquid intermingled, wasn’t a wall of mysterious color forming? Wasn’t it rising from the floor in what was neither fog nor smoke? Yes, and it seemed that something was wriggling within the vapor. Struggling. As if bitter and cursing.
As something round and fat suddenly slashed out of the smoke and caught hold of her ankle, Lina screamed.
Crisscrossed with dark red tendons and blood vessels, drenche
d in some unknown slime, it was the gigantic arm of a baby. But it had only three fingers.
Lina tore herself loose with wild abandon, and the fingers vainly clutched at the air before curling powerlessly on the floor.
As she watched in a daze as the arm liquefied to a goo, D caught hold of her and effortlessly hoisted her to her feet.
“That’s a homunculus,” he said. “An artificial life-form spawned by lightning and congealed ether.”
“Yeah? Well, what’s one doing here? What the hell was this place?”
“Better come with me. If that’s all it takes to scare you, you really should go home, but I suppose it’s too late for that.”
“You seriously think there’s any chance of getting me to go home?”
Unruffled, D scanned the laboratory. Without warning he said, “I hear there was another kid lost with you who didn’t come back. Do you recall if anything happened to you here?”
“No. And I’ve tried to remember hundreds of times before. I’ve tried, Mr. Meyer’s tried, even Cuore has.”
“Even Cuore?”
Lina looked up at D. He stood a head taller than she did. Her expression was so disturbed, it made one wonder where it could’ve lurked so long in this young woman.
“Right after we got back, you see, they took us away from our parents and put us in an asylum. For a full week the sheriff and Vigilance Committee examined us. When they realized the drugs and hypnotism weren’t working, they stripped us naked and stuck us with needles. See, that’s a method of finding Nobles unique to our very own village. They put silver needles in your nipples and backside and depending on how the blood comes out they divine whether you’re one of the Nobility or not.”
D said nothing.
“In the case of a girl, ordinarily the wife of someone on the vigilance committee will do it, but no one but men examined me. They were taking turns, trading off—when they stuck me they’d change people. Old Man Gaston from the mill was there, and the boys from the slaughterhouse, and the mayor. I suppose he must’ve taken me in to make amends for that.”
Suddenly Lina smiled brightly and took aim at D’s face with her forefinger.
Vampire Hunter D: Raiser of Gales Page 7