Grabbing hold of him by the collar and hoisting him to his feet, D asked in a low voice, “What happened?”
The man’s only reply was a frantically powerful struggle to move forward and an unexpectedly shrill scream.
“It’s no use. Don’t bother,” the hoarse voice told the Hunter. “Why, he’s lost his mind. Looks like he must’ve been through hell.”
“Can you help him?”
“It’ll be risky. Trying too hard to set him right might destroy his mental functions. He’s under some kind of supernatural pressure. The best thing to do is fix him little by little.”
The left hand caught the still thrashing Quinn by the neck, and his expression of otherworldly terror quickly grew placid. All the strength then fled Quinn’s body, which slumped to the ground.
“What happened?” D asked once again.
A flicker of intelligence spread through the man’s vacant gaze. Quinn’s brain had begun to sift through his memories for a response to the question. After his eyes had lit up several times, he finally said, “General Gaskell was . . .”
“General Gaskell? That monster? Come to think of it, this is pretty close to his territory. But he was supposed to have been turned to dust a long time ago. Hey! Did you really see him?” the hoarse voice asked.
“His face was outside the window . . .” Quinn replied in a ghastly tone. “He was gigantic. Had a number of other guys with him. They were all huge, too. Gaskell rapped on the glass. When I asked who it was, he gave me his name. Said it so prim and proper it made my stomach turn.”
“Why’d you open up?”
“I didn’t intend to at first. There were weapons, so I planned on plugging the bastard through the face or the heart. But before I could—”
There Quinn broke off.
Before it could prompt him for more details, the hoarse voice gasped—Quinn had begun to fade away. His whole outline had grown oddly vague, and the scenery behind him was becoming visible right through him.
“No! Stop, damn it! Wait!” the left hand exclaimed, its fingers finding only empty space now that Quinn was becoming one with the air. Finally just his two eyes were left in midair, and those too quickly vanished.
“You know how General Gaskell died, right?” the palm of the Hunter’s left hand croaked. “Maybe he survived, or maybe this is the work of his vengeful spirit—anyhow, making people physically vanish was the best way he had of terrorizing those under his rule.”
THE GENERAL’S LEGACY
CHAPTER 3
I
__
General Gaskell was the name of the Noble who’d ruled over the largest domain in the southern Frontier. None could compare to him in coldness and cruelty, and it was said the mere mention of his name was enough to cause even his fellow Nobility to cringe in fear.
About three centuries earlier, another member of the Greater Nobility had invited General Gaskell to a ball. Smitten with one of the lovely young women in his host’s domain, he spirited her back to his own castle and struck a preemptive blow against the Nobles he knew would cause trouble, invading their lands and slaughtering not only the vampire clan and their supporters, but the entire dominion.
When there was a drop in the human serf population across the whole Frontier two centuries earlier, he’d sent artificial plasma praised as being indistinguishable from real human blood to the neighboring Nobility, poisoning them all. His intent had been to add their lands to his own fiefdom, and in order to get permission to do so, he sent word to the Capital that their deaths had been caused by a plague that singled out Noble DNA. However, the Nobility’s House of Peers was understandably skeptical, dispatching a large group to conduct an inquiry and, on uncovering the general’s villainy, ordering that he be destroyed by sunlight.
The resistance General Gaskell offered in light of their orders was known as “The G Revolt,” and after fifty years of fighting military forces from the Capital the general was captured, exposed to sunlight in ancient ruins at the summit of Gaskell Peak—the highest point in his domain—and reduced to dust. Due to the devastation of the G Revolt, sixty percent of human serfs in his Frontier sector died and vast areas polluted by radiation and biological weapons were sealed off for all time. The Capital had even considered cordoning off that entire portion of the Frontier.
However, Gaskell’s most heinous deeds involved the slaughter of his harmless subjects. While it was perfectly natural for a Noble to feed on his serfs, this is also where the varied characters of the Nobility and their views on humanity became most apparent. On feeling the thirst for blood, the majority of the Nobility would send a servant to the serfs to select a human sacrifice. Those chosen would meet with what in the medical sense was the relatively peaceful death of being drained of blood, although some were only partially drained and returned safely to villages, while other serfs became vampires and were either burned as something abhorrent or taken on as servants of the Nobility. Among the minority, there were some Nobles who negotiated with their subjects and maintained congenial relations while regularly receiving blood. In return for the humans’ sacrifice, their parents and siblings were given considerable wealth or shared in the Nobility’s highly advanced technology.
Gaskell was a villain who belonged to neither camp. Though he might’ve thirsted for blood at times, the things he did to torture his subjects seemed based solely on whim. He even went so far as to tear open the throats of fifty women and children in a single night, drinking no more than a single mouthful of blood from any of them and simply murdering the last ten. Worse yet, he gathered his clan and proposed that they have a contest to see who could drain the most residents of a given village in one night. By dawn, the entire village had perished.
In addition, the general deciphered ancient scrolls even the Greater Nobility in the Capital knew nothing about, and then went on to test the power he gained from them on his own subjects. A meteor he called from the depths of space with pinpoint accuracy had obliterated a certain village, and even now a crater thirty miles wide remained at the site. Causing earthquakes and floods or releasing new varieties of beasts and monsters was easy enough for him. On one occasion he moved an entire mountain to crush a village of rebellious subjects, and after using preservation equipment on the corpses of those he’d tortured and killed, he piled them into a pyramid that was said to have grown ten thousand feet high over the course of five centuries.
However, what Gaskell used so well to keep the forces from the Capital at an overwhelming disadvantage for fifty years of fighting was the ability to make matter disappear. Through whatever means, he was able to make a given creature or object vanish without any kind of energy conversion at all. Thousands at a time vanished from the army of emotionless soldiers bearing down on the general’s stronghold, with wide holes quickly opening in the ranks as if something had taken a bite out of the spot. That was how an account from a soldier at the front described it.
As might be expected, this apparently consumed a vast amount of power, and frequent “erasures” were impossible. Also, although many of Gaskell’s weapons were left inoperable and his forces were forced to surrender to the invaders, the Capital demanded nothing short of the general’s capture. It was due to this that the battle dragged on for fifty long years. The Capital’s aim was to make the ancient treasures General Gaskell possessed their own, at least according to common and not-so-furtively whispered rumors. The general was caught and tortured in ways that frightened even the bloodstained Nobility, but he vanished into mist on that mountaintop without ever telling them anything. What D and his left hand had just witnessed was indisputably General Gaskell’s form of erasure.
“So, maybe the general survived, or maybe this is the work of someone who picked up where he left off—whatever the case, someone definitely erased that guy. But what would they want with those two?”
“Is this the general’s domain?” D inquired.
“No, the closest part of it is a good twenty miles to the nort
h. Even then, thanks to the unbridled use of nuclear and mystical weapons back in the G Revolt, it’s a wasteland not fit for even an ant to live in.”
“Was erasure the only trick the general had?” D said, his question echoing in the blackness.
Silence descended. His left hand showed signs of surprise.
“So far as I can remember, according to computer records and data in the scientific facilities in the general’s castle, plus official findings from the yearlong investigation scientists from the Capital ran after the castle was taken. But according to one theory in a tome on extremely ancient practices the general had, in addition to this erasure, there was also a fragmented description of recovery. And it’s said that the general had for the most part succeeded in deciphering it.”
Sucking in a mighty breath, the hoarse voice immediately continued, “Hmm—maybe what we just saw was him still experimenting?”
Then the left hand took the tone of a celebrated detective who’d just solved a riddle. “If that’s the case, the key that unlocked the door to that mystery would be in the ruins of the general’s castle, eh? Interesting. Should we go have a look?”
“This has nothing to do with me,” D said, getting back on his horse. As he stared straight ahead, his expression didn’t betray so much as a hint of concern for the man and woman who’d briefly accompanied him.
“Oh dear,” the hoarse voice declared with calculated surprise.
It was unclear if D had already noticed the silvery flow silently creeping closer from all sides. Water.
“It’s rising, is it? The second you got here, I—oh!”
The hoarse voice couldn’t help but gasp. The next thing it knew, the encroaching water had risen to the cyborg horse’s belly.
D didn’t move. To his right, there was the pop of bursting bubbles.
Thirty feet away.
One after another the little bubbles popped. And they were slowly getting closer.
Thirty feet . . . Twenty-five . . . Twenty . . .
When they came within fifteen feet, D turned his eyes toward them. The trail of bubbles stopped moving. A few seconds later one huge bubble burst and, following after it, a human the same color as the water emerged from the waist up. It was a child. Dripping with muddy rivulets, the face was that of someone perhaps twelve or thirteen. The oddly distended abdomen and swollen limbs made it clear that this was a drowning victim. Though the boy kept the lightless eyes of the dead trained on D, his lips quickly twisted into a strange shape, and then he sank again into the water with the same speed as he’d first appeared.
“He smiled at you!” the hoarse voice remarked with amusement. “Probably a kid from the village. You should hurry up and put him out of his misery.”
Before the voice had finished speaking, the cyborg horse was jerked underwater. As D narrowly managed to leap into the air, below him the body of his steed was crushed as if it were a bubble being sucked into a tiny hole. In no time at all, it’d been drawn beneath the surface. Accompanied by a pillar of water, horrible chunks of the mount shot into the air just as the tips of D’s toes landed on the edge of a farmhouse roof.
Perhaps having somehow seen the dismembered limbs and head that’d fallen into the water, the hand commented in a hoarse voice, “Every last piece was all twisted up. Looks like it was pulled into one hell of a whirlpool.” Despite the ghastly scene it’d just witnessed, it still hadn’t lost the ring of amusement to its voice.
The cyborg horse’s skeleton was made of a high-polymer steel that could bear up to fifty tons. What kind of force did it take to warp and tear apart something like that in under a second?
On the rooftop, D bent his knees easily for another leap. And at exactly that moment his footing gave way. In the blink of an eye, dozens of streaks of white shot up from below to riddle the roof of the house—or rather, the entire structure. With the hem of his coat billowing out, D flew like a supernatural bird. Fearsome and beautiful was the only way to describe the sight of him, and probably no one would’ve noticed that his form was only slightly off.
A round face had appeared from the water. The face of the drowned boy. His thin and rotting lips pursed, and then a streak of white shot at where D hung in midair.
Ordinarily the Hunter’s blade would’ve flashed out to deflect the attack in a manner that exceeded the limits of human mobility yet was at the same time effortless. However, the slightest twist in his body meant that his hand was just a little too slow as it reached for his sword, and before he could touch the weapon, the streak of white stabbed through D from the left side of his stomach to the base of his right arm.
The village square was about thirty feet wide, and D headed toward the enormous tree that stood at its center. The instant he landed on one of its great outstretched limbs, he was assailed by a second attack. Silvery light flashed out, and the streak broke into thousands of drops of water that faded like a thin mist.
“Water?” the hoarse voice remarked, but before it could finish, D staggered and slumped back against the tree trunk.
Three times streaks shot at him from the water, easily ripping through the ironlike bark of the tree or else sailing off into space. They returned to their original state a mile or two up, scattering in midair and probably falling again as raindrops.
Water—that’s precisely what it was. Thanks to the powerful suction power the bloated corpse of the drowned boy had been given, he could create tiny whirlpools that tore apart whatever they pulled in, and by his own expiration he could discharge liquids at supersonic speeds, turning them into a spear that could penetrate a steel plate. Further aided by the ability to move with the swiftness of a fish, he launched more liquid spears in rapid succession from underwater at various locations and different angles all around the massive tree, piercing and shredding the ten-foot-diameter trunk as if it were tissue paper.
“There was something about this in the records in the Capital, you remember?” the hoarse voice said. “A passage in A Catalog of General Gaskell’s Arsenal—the one about submarine attackers that make use of the dead. Turning dead people into weapons is a hell of a thing to do.”
Bringing his left hand up to his face, D whispered something to it.
“Huh?” the hoarse voice said with surprise. Ripples ran across the center of the palm, and what should rise to the surface but a human face complete with eyes, a nose, and a mouth. “I’m not saying I can’t do it or anything, but that’d take a hell of a lot more energy than usual. You won’t have enough left for more than one swing of your sword. Try to think of—”
The rest was muffled and incomprehensible.
Bending over, D had thrust his left hand into the muddy water that’d risen to just below the great branch, then quickly pulled it out again.
The face in the palm of his hand let a great belch escape.
As if that were the signal, two streaks shot out of the water, piercing D at an angle.
__
II
__
With thick streams of blood pouring from both sides of his abdomen, D stood up and pointed his left hand at the surface of the water. The countenanced carbuncle had already risen in his palm, and it threw its mouth open wide.
It was at just that moment that a tiny fireball fell from above D’s head. On making contact with the massive tree, the flames spread out like oil thrown onto water, swiftly covering the trunk and branches. The part of it that struck the water set off an immense shower of sparks that rode the wind back toward D.
“What the hell was that?” the left hand exclaimed.
D was already looking up again. Apart from where the light of dawn was bleaching the eastern sky, the heavens for the most part allowed themselves to be ruled by darkness. D’s eyes caught a blurry object—indiscernible as bird or human—flying gracefully through that black space. Flying first toward the east, it then turned around and sailed over D’s head before hurling down a fireball. The surface of the water was burning. Even farmhouses and barns that
barely protruded from the water were engulfed in flames, which spiraled up into the heavens like dragons. Burning branches rained down on D from above, while below him the fiery water grew closer.
About fifteen feet away, something black sprang from the depths, limned a small arc, and then dropped into the water again. It was the boy.
“Finally decided to show himself, did he? But why? It’s not like he needs to breathe. Come to mention it, it seemed like he was prattling on about something. Did you hear it?”
D said nothing as he gazed at the wildly blazing surface of the water. Both his bloodstained lower body and his paraffin-pale brow were the color of flames.
“Here it comes—this time from both sides!” his left hand warned him.
The aerial shape turned once again, and the submarine form moved into position below D. Would the gravely wounded Hunter have enough strength left to get through this?
The watery spear slashed through the air. When D’s blade deflected it, the world grew pale blue, for the left hand he’d extended had disgorged flames. Pale blue in color, they must’ve had incredible energy, because the instant they touched the water it evaporated, leaving a gap a good thirty feet deep. A split second before that, the svelte figure had leapt like a little river fish.
As the boy seemed to throw himself back into the water, D’s sword raced toward him. The tip of his blade narrowly missed the child, but then it stretched further. The instant the arcs of the blade and the boy met, there was the thud of meat being cleaved and a faint cry of pain rang out. Shortly after that, two splashes went up—one large, the other small. D’s sword had separated the head of the dead boy from his torso. In midair the boy’s eyes had sought his foe, though they held no profound emotion regarding the death he’d just suffered.
No ball of fire fell. D had witnessed the shadowy form sailing away toward the river, and a thin line ran through its body at an angle. What had kept the thing in the sky from attacking at the same time as the thing underwater was one of dozens of arrows that’d come flying out of nowhere.
Vampire Hunter D: Dark Road Parts One and Two Page 5