“Shit!” he cried, but not because the hand that came to rest on him was palm up. Rather, the surface of the palm had rippled and twisted, and what could only be described as a human face had risen to the surface.
“Y-y-you . . .”
“What about me?” the countenanced carbuncle spat back at him from its tiny mouth. Seeing how pale blue flames blazed in the depths of its maw, Sergei almost fell over backward. Its fingers closed tightly on Sergei’s fingertips.
“You wanna see this? If so, give me your blood.”
“Wh-what the hell?”
Human beings couldn’t help but be horrified by the word blood—it was inextricably linked to the Nobility. This was particularly true when something was asking you to give it your blood.
“You damn sissy! Have you forgotten he’s a dhampir? To him, it’s just like you eating bacon and eggs. So hurry up and open a vein. He needs a lot of it.”
“I, uh—I can’t do that!”
“Oh, what a pain you are.”
Before Sergei could avoid it, D’s left hand had seized his right, and a sharp pain shot through the underside of his wrist. As he cried out, the warm fluid flowed from him. Or rather, what he felt was it being sucked out! His body was swiftly overcome by an indescribable floating sensation. Everything faded into the distance, and he fell at a terrific speed.
Just as his consciousness was about to be swallowed by the darkness, he clearly heard the hoarse voice say, “Okay, that’ll do.”
And when Sergei opened his eyes less than ten seconds later, a strapping man in black stood by his side looking down at him.
“D!”
“It seems I’m in your debt.”
“No—don’t be silly.”
“I’ll repay you for this sometime. We’re leaving the forest!”
“But it’s getting dark now,” the man started to say, but then he recalled D’s heritage. This was his time. That he recalled—and one more thing.
“D—your eyes . . .”
The Hunter had his eyelids shut.
“Not to worry. With my instructions and his instincts, we’ll manage somehow.”
Sergei decided to put his trust in that hoarse voice.
“Just so you know, I’m the only one who’s still mobile,” the transporter said.
A bunch of plants was tossed down at the man’s feet.
“That herb is the antidote. Make a tea with it and have them drink it. And here’s one more for you,” the hoarse voice said.
__
As Sergei boiled the herbs, D came over to him. His movements were so smooth, he didn’t look blind at all. Around them hung a stench to turn anyone’s nose up.
“I’ll thank you not to get in the way now since this is the trickiest part.”
“Where’d you get the transfusion equipment for Gordo?” D inquired.
“Huh?” Sergei said, his suspicious gaze wandering through space for a second, but he soon understood. “Oh, that? As you probably know, pretty close to here there’s a buried supply depot that the Capital’s forces used during their campaign against Gaskell. That’s where I appropriated it. And the flower I stuck in that little girl, as well.”
Drained to the brink of death by Lady Ann’s vampire bloom, the fallen Gordo had been saved by the Noble device that rested next to him.
“You know where it is, right?”
“Sure,” Sergei replied, bringing a spoonful of the medicine he’d just brewed up to his lips.
“Jeez,” he sputtered, spitting it out again. “That’s some potent stuff!” he said with a grimace.
Looking right at him, the blind D told him, “Then after you’ve had the other two drink it, you’ll have to show me the way.”
The medicine had a dramatic effect—one or two mouthfuls was all it took. Sergei held their mouths closed so they were forced to swallow it instead of spitting it out, and as he watched, the flushed hue left Juke’s face and his agonized expression faded. Sergei’s eyes nearly popped out at the way the man’s incredibly shallow breathing instantly returned to normal.
After the medicine had been administered but before the Hunter and his guide could leave, Juke sat up on his cot. On hearing from D what they were up to, he told them, “Yeah, I’ll look after things here. Get going already.”
__
With Sergei in the lead, D headed further into the forest. After advancing about three hundred yards, Sergei halted. “There it is,” he said, pointing at the towering accumulation of rock and soil up ahead. It looked like a high, sprawling fortification.
“But then you can’t see it, can you?”
“No, I see it,” the hoarse voice replied. “Yes, indeed.”
“Getting through it’s a little tough, but the entrance is over here,” Sergei said, though for some reason he looked somewhat jaded as he guided D over to the crack running up the right side of the door. From where the two of them stood it looked like no more than a thin thread of a crevasse, but circling over to the right showed it to be wide enough that an adult should be able to fit through it.
“It was originally sealed up, but at some point it cracked open. The Nobility sure are a strange race,” Sergei sighed.
D, after his habit, said nothing. And he was still blind.
__
III
__
In a sense, Sergei’s observation was correct. The contradiction most vividly demonstrated by the actions of the Nobility was their love of all things medieval. Their architecture, clothing, decorations, paintings—every field of artistic endeavor had a Gothic flavor. The Nobility were so immersed in it, it occasionally caused them to do the strangest things. Although they could probably erect a metropolis along the lines of the Capital anywhere if given three days’ time, they left the desolate mountains, wild rivers, and shadowy forests of the Frontier just as they found them, raising old-fashioned castles covered with pinnacles and gables instead of modern buildings and domes. All of their roads were paved with stone, although highways were occasionally built exclusively for ultra-high-speed transportation.
And here was a prime example of this contradiction. This installation could easily withstand a direct hit by a hydrogen bomb, yet its entrance was sealed not by doors of some supersteel alloy but instead by a colossal stone slab. Long years had weathered the great stone and cracked it. And that was an open invitation to intruders.
“I’ll go first,” Sergei said, turning sideways to slip through the crack. The giant slab was a good thirty feet across.
The place he managed to enter was a spot left scarred by the legacy of a horrible destruction. The ceiling and walls buckled in as if they’d taken a great blast from outside, and Sergei actually trembled. And yet, thanks to a light that radiated from nowhere in particular, he had no trouble seeing. He sensed D behind him.
“When I first saw this, I was heartbroken, but I went in a little further anyway. And then—”
After they cut through an area where pillars that looked to be as big as buildings supported the crumbling walls, the passageway took a hard right, and Sergei then led the Hunter to a golden door. There was a switch for it. Once Sergei pushed it, the door opened with a grinding sound.
The only way to describe what lay inside was to call it an enormous warehouse. Innumerable metal shelves stretched in rows for as far as the eye could see, and on them objects of various shapes were systematically laid out so they might be seen from afar. Devices large and small, wooden boxes, iron crates, things that seemed to be metallic containers—some of these were only the size of a ring box, yet they were grouped together with enormous machines that looked like construction equipment and towered to the heavens. Off in the distance, there even lay a multicolored field of flowers with what looked like leech grass. It seemed like it would take more than a thousand years to try everything here.
“According to some data, there’s enough synthetic blood stockpiled here to sustain a million Nobles for a millennium. And that doesn’t even take into ac
count the million blood synthesizers here.”
Satisfied at finally having someone with whom he might share his knowledge, Sergei had become quite garrulous.
“This one machine alone could supply enough blood for ten thousand people indefinitely. Incredible, isn’t it? Apparently it tastes like muddy water, but if that’d been enough for them, things might’ve gone better between them and the human race.”
Going over to the nearest shelf, Sergei slapped one of the machines on it. It was the same kind of transfusion device he’d got for Gordo. A small blood-synthesizing tank and the transfusion equipment were combined in a single unit.
“Convenient little sucker, this.”
Sergei threw a switch at one end of its base, and the complicated-looking device instantly folded in on itself, compacting down to the size of a lunch bag.
“At this size, you can haul a whole bunch of these out at once. It’s just like the pictures in the account I read. Leave it to the Nobility to have these closest to the door—that sure came in handy.”
D remained silent, listening to the man.
Perhaps overwhelmed by the sheer volume collected here, Sergei felt surprisingly good.
“I mean, out of all this stuff, not even you could—”
The man turned around. On realizing that it wasn’t D who stood there, it took about a second for the expression to leave his face.
So thin he called to mind a scarecrow, the man wore a helmet and combat suit. Even without seeing the bloodless visage, eyes dim and cloudy as a dead fish’s made his nature clear. He was one of the Nobility’s warriors. Nearly as immortal as the vampires themselves but like mindless automatons, these creatures had been chosen by the Nobility as highly valued soldiers.
“The living dead . . .”
How long had he mistaken it for D? And where had D disappeared to?
Without time to ponder these questions, Sergei stared at the ghostly pale hand stretching toward his throat. Its fingers sank into his neck. The flesh snapped open under its nails. Sergei was conscious of the blood trickling from him. His throat was seized roughly. Terror seared his brain, but at that instant, the undead soldier before him convulsed for a second, then stood bolt upright. Sergei had seen a gleaming white tip burst through the creature’s heart.
The soldier crumbled, helmet, clothes and all, but without looking at the blue-gray detritus it left, Sergei turned his gaze instead to the handsome youth who was sheathing his sword.
“What the hell happened?”
At the question he’d finally managed to pose, D raised his left hand and pointed to a relatively close shelf.
“That urn? Sure, I opened it.”
With the transfusion equipment over one shoulder, Sergei had taken a white china urn from the shelf and opened its lid. However, nothing had appeared. The urn had been filled with what looked like white salt crystals. Spilling some on the floor, Sergei had watched it for a while, but after there was no change he’d just let it be.
“Impossible. That’s what was inside it?” said the astonished Sergei.
“Fifty of ’em to an urn,” the hoarse voice responded.
Sergei looked all around them.
Where they’d been or what they’d been doing was a mystery, but from between the shelves and from the far reaches of the room pale figures were now closing on them with swaying steps.
In ancient times, some had thought the essence of a human being was salt. The Nobility had probably pursued that line of thinking with a savage diligence.
“What’ll we do, D?” Sergei asked, his own face growing as pale as those of the undead soldiers as he drew the rivet gun from his hip.
“I’ve got what I came for. Get going.”
Now that he mentioned it, D had a silver container dangling from his left hand. Though a curiosity was building in him that threatened to make him forget all else, the faces of the pale undead that’d started to come into view brought Sergei back to reality.
“Down,” D said just as soon as the man had decided to do whatever the Hunter told him. He hit the ground as fast as he could, and a wave of crimson raced overhead, scoring a direct hit on the wall with the door. It was a particle cannon. The wall took the blistering ray of accelerated particles without even changing color.
The air whistled; an undead soldier in the back collapsed. D’s needle of rough wood had pierced him through the heart.
Apparently, none of the other soldiers carried weapons. Unconcerned by their compatriot’s demise, they mutely closed on D and Sergei.
Sergei had been about to run for the door, but he’d twisted his ankle. If he couldn’t stand, he was finished. He fell over.
D had already reached the door.
When Sergei got back on his feet, cold fingers clasped his shoulder.
“Waaaah!” he screamed as he spun around. One of the faces was right in front of him.
It was pure reflex and survival instinct that brought his rivet gun up to the soldier’s forehead.
Blam! The pressurized gas cap burst, firing off a three-and-a-half-ounce iron rivet at a thousand feet per second and blowing the whole back of the dead man’s head out with it. Long ago, Sergei had been in a similar situation and dispatched a zombie in the exact same manner.
I did it, he thought.
But the dead man didn’t fall.
Feeling like he could actually hear the bones creaking under the pressure from the fingers digging into his shoulders, Sergei let out a scream. Unexpectedly, the pain abated. Wildly shaking his shoulder free and leaping forward, Sergei turned and spied the naked blade that protruded from the chest of the undead soldier.
D had come back.
“Go,” the Hunter said, pointing toward the door, then squaring off against another of the approaching soldiers. He was a placid figure with his sword lowered.
The living dead didn’t know what fear was—it was just the way they’d been created. And that was why they were the ideal soldiers. However, before this powerful man standing there, quiet and beautiful, the dead grew tense. Perhaps they glimpsed in the figure of D something more fearful than death. Nonetheless, they prepared to advance.
Sergei had just reached the door and was turning back for a look. He saw D’s right hand paint a gleaming arc. It mowed right through the neck of the nearest soldier and went on to remove the head of another behind him before sliding back into its sheath. The crisp clack of its guard against the scabbard seemed poorly matched to the sound of those heads rolling around on the floor. Was that the power of the source of the hoarse voice, or skillful swordsmanship based on D’s superhuman instincts?
As D came running over to him, Sergei got the feeling the Hunter might lop off his own head as well, and he dove out through the open door. Crossing the rubble-strewn chamber, he squeezed out again through the crack in the giant stone. But just before doing so, he saw D lob a silver cylinder into the center of the chamber.
No sooner was he through the suffocating bottleneck than he was grabbed around the waist and carried a good fifteen feet. And as his feet touched the ground, a rumbling in the earth shook him.
Fire spouted from the giant stone. Virulent, oily flames split the rock, and the earthen fortification itself started to swell out. The instant the molecules lost their cohesion, flames shot from the ground, and stones and earth were broken into even finer pieces that erupted into the void.
Having made two more leaps that carried them into the depths of the forest, D and Sergei were soon cloaked in the dark shadows of trees cast on them by the pale glow.
“Don’t tell me the whole warehouse is gonna—” Sergei began, breaking off but gazing at D with terror-filled eyes. “If you did that, it’d blow this whole neighborhood sky high!”
“I sealed the entrance,” D replied, drawing a sigh of relief from Sergei.
And soon enough, true to what he’d said, the light faded and the rumblings dwindled in the distance.
“Let’s go,” D said, spinning around.
“Huh?”
“Before everything comes back down.”
“Oh!” Sergei said, his eyes opening wide with fear and surprise.
Roughly forty seconds later, white hot rubble and other material sent up by the flames from that atomic grenade came back down in the section of forest the pair had fled, instantly transforming it into a sea of flames.
__
Arriving at the campsite, Sergei found D, who’d gotten there just a little bit earlier.
“What’s the story? There’s nothing here!”
Wondering if they had the wrong spot, Sergei looked all around, finding tracks from their wheels on the ground and signs of their camp. Nearby, a chunk of scorched stone fell, sending up white smoke. Little flames sprang up here and there.
“That bastard Juke’s run off on us. Damned coward!”
“His job is transporting that cargo. He only did the natural thing,” D said, sending the hem of his coat fluttering out as he deflected a piece of burning iron.
“Which way did he go?”
“That way,” the hoarse voice responded, but Sergei didn’t notice anything weird about its tone. With all the swiftness of a wild beast he started running in the direction D’s left hand had pointed.
GASKELL APPEARS
CHAPTER 4
I
__
How fared the Duke of Xenon?” Baron Schuma inquired, his jeering tone drifting through the intense darkness that dominated the space.
“He botched the assignment. Not only that, but his daughter fell into the humans’ hands.”
The groan that bore down on the inky blackness was like the roar of a lion. However, the speaker was undoubtedly a million times fiercer than any lion, and a billion times more malevolent.
“Isn’t that something,” Schuma said, his voice carrying neither regret about the results nor sympathy for the duke. Naturally, what became of his daughter was no concern of the baron’s. “Madame Laurencin has been slain and the Duke of Xenon’s beloved daughter taken captive, all without scoring a single victory—a sad state of affairs.”
“Will you go out, Baron?”
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