As Lina watched him from behind with a mystified expression, D asked the girl, “Is it so strange that I crossed running water?”
“Er . . . yeah. After all, you’re a dhampir, right? Oh, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that.”
“To be sure, water poses a problem for me. Nobles have been known to drown in water less than waist deep.”
“I wonder why that is? The biology of the Nobility is so mysterious.” Her questions seemed completely at odds with her innocent voice and naive countenance. For some reason, Lina had an intense curiosity about the Nobility.
Giving no answer, D went to the corner of the dusty shack and set down the saddle and bags he’d brought from the horse, then pulled out a blackish palm-sized package. With a tug on the protruding cord, the package rapidly expanded into a very comfortable-looking sleeping bag.
“You’d better sleep in this. It has a built-in heater. You should get through the night without catching a cold.”
“But what about you?”
“I’ll be resting outside. Being down against the earth suits my nature more. Don’t give it another thought . . . I’ve never even used that before.”
“But . . . ” She was about to say more, but she noticed D concentrating his senses on something outside.
“It seems they’ve come for you,” the Hunter said.
“No way. I refuse to go back there.”
Before long, nearly a dozen men on horseback had arrived at the far side of the brook. Both the mayor and the sheriff were there, and the rest were members of the Vigilance Committee led by Fern. Each and every one wore a strangely stiff expression. What they had to do—and the thought of who might stand in their way—made them look tense. Their opposition was standing in front of the shack.
The blue glint of the pendant on his chest made the men uneasy. Perhaps the horses sensed something, too, for there was no end to their whinnying. Atop their mounts, the men shook ever so slightly.
“State your business,” D said softly. His was a tone well suited to the tranquil afternoon light, but the horses halted at once. Did their riders realize they were frozen with fear?
“As if you didn’t know already,” sneered the mayor, who now sported a black hat, and he jabbed out one arm to point to one of the shack’s windows. “We’re here to take Lina home. No use trying to hide her. If you don’t hand her right over, we’ll make you wish you had.”
“It doesn’t matter to me either way, but I don’t know what she’ll have to say about it.”
Suddenly the wooden shutters of the window swung open, and Lina poked her head out. Well prepared, she had her tongue sticking out already.
“Screw you. Who’d be stupid enough to go back there? I’ll be staying here a while. I’m practicing up on surviving in the wilderness. Kindly keep out of the way, Daddy. Oh, did you know your face looks kind of swollen?”
The special spitefulness she saved for the last bit was delicious. The distended purple face of the mayor donned a look five times more crimson than his wounds. With a glance to his side, he said, “What the hell are you doing, Sheriff? What we got here is a case of a father trying to get his daughter back. We’ll take her back by force if necessary, right?”
“Well . . . ” the sheriff began hesitantly. The rest of the men looked the other way. Every one of them had witnessed D’s swordplay in the village square. “Well, if she says she doesn’t want to go, there’s nothing we can do. And I believe your parental authority over Lina ran out the year before last, to boot.”
Parental authority expired—in other words, an individual became responsible for his or her own actions at the age of fifteen in most communities on the Frontier. Their environment demanded independence.
“Oh, you worthless sack of dung. You’d just stand by and let this half-breed drifter ruin my daughter? Your ass is fired. When we get back to town, the first thing I’m going to do is convene a council meeting.”
The sheriff shrugged.
“Okay, now will somebody . . . ”
“Leave it to me,” Fern said to the mayor, his voice brimming with self-confidence as he leisurely dismounted.
Resting both hands on the baskets on his hips, he had a steady stride as he headed over to square off with D.
“Knew it’d come down to this sooner or later.” He sounded like his position was well covered. “It’s too late, so don’t even think about saying we can have her now.”
D didn’t make a move. He had the air of a young poet listening to the song of the wind.
It seemed as if even the voice of the brook had been silenced.
“Watch yourself, D. He’s got guard beasts in those baskets.” Lina’s words injected tension into a situation that wasted no time in exploding.
Pale flashes shot from D’s right hand, and the baskets still attached to Fern’s waist fell to pieces. Two creatures fell to the ground—a weird spider and a lightning-discharging cloud. As the legs of the spider were free from injury, either it’d regenerated already or this was a new beast.
Fern egged them on with eerie syllables.
A jolt of purple shot through the spot where D had stood, spraying the wall of the shack with sparks; the needles launched by the airborne D stopped halfway between him and the monsters. The instant he realized billowing white threads were twisting around him, D mowed through the wind with the longsword in his right hand.
“Oh,” Fern exclaimed. He’d just watched the adhesive liquid that’d held not only behemoths but the figure in gray cut to shreds like so much cotton thread.
However, D’s body veered appreciably as he tried to leap the brook in a single bound. In the next instant, he landed waist-deep in the current with a splash.
Who, if anyone, had actually seen the tentacle that’d shot from the water and wrapped around his ankle like a whip?
And there wasn’t just one—the second D hit, a number of identical tentacles flew up and wrapped around both his wrists as tightly as possible. Something with what looked like a striped carapace broke the current ahead of D.
“I thought as much—not quite as sharp in the water, now are you?” Fern laughed, showing a lot of teeth. “See, when I heard we’d be going up against you, I went back to my house and picked up one of my aquatic guard beasts. From what I hear, dhampirs are as weak in the water as the Nobility. Okay, so now you get your pick—stay where you are and drown, or let the sparks from my electric cloud shock you to death.”
“Stop it. I’ll go back!” As Lina screamed these words, the cloud and spider approached the water’s edge.
“Don’t do it, Fern!”
“Never mind that, kill him!”
The conflicting shouts of the sheriff and mayor were effaced by an awe-inspiring sight.
The purple bolt aimed at the immobilized D bounced off the oval carapace bursting through the water’s surface.
All of the spectators felt their eyes bulge from their sockets. Who could have believed that the gorgeous youth was rising from the water along with the beast that held him? The one who’d been dragged down was doing the dragging.
All of them had just witnessed the monstrous power of the Nobility, what many said was the strength of fifty men, and now, before their watchful eyes, D’s left hand flashed out. Extending his five fingers and making a slashing motion, every tentacle his hand touched was severed. Free from his bonds, D sailed through the air like a mystic bird.
A silvery light deflected the flash of purple, then bisected the body of the cloud, swinging back with a speed the eye couldn’t follow to sever the head from the giant spider, as well as the web of threads it dropped on him.
The sound of the brook returned to the ears of the onlookers.
Throwing the gore from his blade with an elegant flick, D turned his back as if nothing had happened.
“Too much for you, boys? See how tough my bodyguard is?” Lina jeered in a voice bursting with joy. The men had lost even the will to say anything as D walked away.
-
The dark of night seeped between the trees, and the pale moon came out.
Lina heated some synthetic coffee over a small electronic traveling lamp. She’d brought the beverage from her wagon. The lamp belonged to D. A silver cylinder six inches high and two inches in diameter, the lamp could also serve as a thermostat and heater, or as a refrigeration unit. And, obviously, you could cook on it, too. Travelers couldn’t be bothered carrying around a lot of bulky items.
Deftly lowering the heat-absorbent silicon pot, she poured the contents into two cups made of the same material, then called out to D.
“It’s ready.”
“I thought I told you I didn’t want any.”
“Oh no you don’t. Drink it. It’ll warm you up. Oh, what a beautiful moon.” Going to D’s side, she forced him to take hold of the cup. “I’ll cut us some jerky, too.”
“I don’t want any.”
“And what are you supposed to do if you don’t eat?” But even as she said this, Lina withdrew the offer. “Well, fine then. I don’t have much appetite either, today.”
“Is your stomach bothering you?” D asked without turning around.
“Let me think. I’m not always like this—anyway, dhampirs are really awesome.”
Nothing from D.
“A little while ago, I took a look at the corpse of that guard beast out in the middle of the river. The marks on its tentacles almost made it look like they’d been bitten off. Surprised the heck out of me.”
D was silent. Lina closed her eyes softly and drank in the perfume of the moonbeam grass wafting in through the window. The wind was singing in the trees. Maybe D was listening to it.
“D . . . that’s an odd name. What’s the D for? Devil, death, danger? Any of them would fit you to a T.”
“Tomorrow, you go home,” D said in a subdued tone.
“No way.”
“Surely you know what I am by now. If anyone tells the exam board about this, it’ll probably spell the end for your dreams of the Capital.”
“I don’t care,” Lina giggled, taking D’s left arm. “If that happens, I’ll go off with you. The wife of a Hunter . . . now wouldn’t that be a life of thrills galore?”
When D turned his rightfully dumbfounded face to her, she added, “Just kidding, that was a joke. Just say I can go with you, and that’ll be fine.”
“Quit your nonsense and go to bed. I have to leave early tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll have lunch waiting for you,” Lina joined her thumb and forefinger in the okay sign. She even winked at him. “Give ‘em hell . . . hubby.”
D heaved a sigh. It was a long sigh, the kind that hadn’t once escaped as he battled monsters or the Nobility. It seemed even this youth, who was like clockwork crafted from ice, was subject to the occasional malfunction.
“Tell me, D, where do you come from?” Lina asked with a sober expression. “Where did you come from, and where are you going? Or the Nobility? Or even mankind?”
D turned and gazed at Lina. Perhaps he had caught a certain minute anxiety in the words of the girl. “Tough questions.”
“Don’t you know? Even someone like you, who knows both worlds, even you don’t have the answer? What is it to live by both day and night, what is it to be human, what is it to be a Noble . . . don’t you know?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I really want to know. Tell me.”
The aroma of moonbeam grass wafted around the two of them.
D moved to the door without a word, then leaned his body against one wall. Lina took a seat on a piece of framework hanging a foot off the ground.
The world of the night lay before their eyes.
“To be a Noble, most likely, is to live by night,” D began softly, with his longsword in his right hand and a cup of steaming coffee in his left. “The potential power inherent in the darkness of night and the shadowy influence it has on the Nobility down at the very molecular level are mysteries today—even during the Nobility’s golden age of science, they couldn’t begin to unravel them. The question of why the flesh of the Nobility is invincible, the secret of how they can live eternally, ageless and immortal so long as they’re spared from sunlight or a blow from a stake, or the riddle of why that blow has no effect whatsoever unless taken through the heart. It’s nothing if not ironic that they, the first creatures in the history of the world to reach a measure of longevity that could never be surpassed, were anguished as no others by trying to discover the secret of their powers.”
“I wonder if the field of genetic engineering could’ve offered some clues? Although I did hear the information from every possible gene was collated in the Nobility’s computers.”
“The process of decoding the information contained in every single gene was completed more than five thousand years ago. But that’s not where the problem lies. Once they’d discovered the gene that prevented aging, they must have asked themselves why such a gene had come into existence.”
“Where do we come from, where are we going? I guess that remains the eternal question for all of us. Noble and human alike. But what did the power of darkness you just mentioned have to do with any of this?”
D nodded and brought the cup to his mouth. Noticing how Lina smiled, he scowled and took a drink.
“Is it any good?” Lina asked in a buoyant tone.
“Yep.”
“I’m glad.”
Clearing his throat, D began to speak again. “It’s common knowledge that the vital functions of the Nobility all center around darkness itself. This gave rise to a certain hypothesis. It suggested that the darkness of night might hold the primary cause of the powers of the Nobility, or the gene responsible, if you will. That is to say, perhaps the Nobility absorbed some ghostly information belonging to the very darkness in the form of this gene, or so the theory went.”
Lina’s eyes were sparkling, shining with the expectation and anxiety held solely by those who wrenched open the heavy door of the unknown and beheld the light of truth spearing freely forth. Sparkling relentlessly.
“That’s the gene of darkness, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“If only we could understand the structure of it, the riddles of the Nobility would be solved. ‘Where do we come from, where are we going?’ And the answers would apply to mankind, too. D, didn’t they ever form this hypothesis—that humans are furnished with the gene of light?”
The moonlight caused their neat profiles to stand out stronger and whiter. The song of the wind, the aroma of grass.
“That’s right,” D said. “To be human is to live in the light. When you consider the length of their respective life spans, humans don’t amount to much when compared to the Nobility. From a physiological standpoint, they’re terribly frail as well. But when you take the potential energy of the race as a whole—”
“Light surpasses darkness,” Lina muttered softly.
That was one sort of destiny.
“But the Nobles we’ve been seeing now . . . ” Lina was about to say more, but hemmed and hawed.
In the cockles of her heart, someone was crying out to her. Don’t say it, they said. She got the feeling the dark voice was somehow connected to her fate.
“Nobility who walk in the daylight . . . ”
D brought the cup to his mouth again, and gazed at Lina. Shaking her head as if to reassure herself, she said, “There couldn’t be any such thing.”
Something shiny rose in Lina’s eye. Before it could spill over the rim, Lina threw herself around D’s waist. Sobs rocked her shoulders.
She didn’t understand what made her so sad. She didn’t know what she was afraid of, either.
She felt helpless, like she was alone at night walking down the road. And that night would see no dawn, for all eternity.
D set his cup on the floor and stroked her hair softly.
I just want to get out of this villag
e, Lina wished with all her heart. I want to go to the Capital with him. Just the two of us, together forever.
The song of the wind could be heard. The pair didn’t move for the longest time.
Unexpectedly, tension raced through D’s body.
Lina fell to the floor, still posed as when she’d clung to him.
D stood by the babbling brook.
There was no change to the surroundings.
Perhaps D’s sense of them alone had changed.
Why haven’t you come yet? It was the same presence from the rainy night. I’m waiting for you. Waiting there.
Where is “there”? What’s the significance of those ruins? D asked this without uttering a word, without even thinking.
That was the only rule in this conversation.
I may have failed, the presence said. If so, I must dispose of them all. There isn’t much time. I’m waiting.
Waiting for what, or for whom? D asked. What do you mean by waiting?
There was no answer to those questions.
Come quickly. I must go. This has gone on for such a long time, but it’ll go on so much longer. Much longer . . . So much longer . . .
Somewhere within D, the presence suddenly vanished.
So, it’s the ruins after all then? D looked back at the shack. Lina was standing in the doorway. D’s eyes narrowed.
An expression that was not quite fear nor wholly anger occupied Lina’s face.
“What’s wrong?” he asked as he approached her.
Lina shook her head. “It’s nothing . . . really. You took off so fast . . . I was just a little scared, that’s all.”
Pausing a bit, D then nodded. “You should get some rest.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
Lina wasted no time in returning to the hut and getting into the sleeping bag. It was so warm, thanks to the thermal sensors that read the external air temperature and body temperature and maintained the level of warmth most conducive to sleep.
D’s presence faded away. I bet he’ll sleep with the darkness and the song of the wind for companions, his ear to the ground, Lina thought. Or does he have trouble sleeping at night? What are the dhampirs anyway?
Vampire Hunter D: Raiser of Gales Page 14