Mysterious Journey to the North Sea, Part 1

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  As D landed several steps below his foe, his coat tore open without a sound. And not just in one place. The collar, the shoulders, and the back were all rent with long thin slashes shaped like bamboo leaves.

  Something sliced through the air, then returned to the open launchers on the carapace of the giant crab. It was only a second later that the gnarled tree trunks to either side of D toppled to a roar of rustling foliage. The stumps were cut so smoothly it seemed like it must’ve been the work of some enchanted blade. Another bole not far off was split halfway through, and from the slice in it something like a thin black string dangled limply. That was the one D had parried with his sword in midair just a split second before landing.

  Clearly a complex machine, this giant crab had used powerful compressed gas launchers to unleash dozens of metallic lines at the same time. Roughly three feet long, they had flexible blades so thin they were almost undetectable to the naked eye.

  How many people could have avoided dozens of little whips shooting at them at almost four hundred miles per hour—or half the speed of sound? The fact that D hadn’t been mortally wounded was entirely to the credit of his exquisite skill with a sword. However, the foreboding red flowers blooming in confusion at the Hunter’s feet were drops of blood. The flesh was rent in a dozen places on his body. Could he weather a second assault? A single vivid streak of vermilion slid down from his right temple, following the line of his cheek.

  Compressors whined within the giant crab’s launchers, and steam billowed from vents on either side of the creature. It came at him again. But suddenly, the giant crab grew scared.

  Although it was a machine and it didn’t move an inch, Su-In could tell from behind the big tree that it was frightened. Every fiber of the woman’s being was eerily chilled, and her eyes were drawn to D. What had struck fear into the soulless machine emanated from every inch of him. The trickle of blood from his forehead vanished at the edge of his lips. His eyes were ablaze, burning with the color of a vampire’s gaze.

  The next sight left Su-In wondering if this was the work of a dream demon running amuck in a world where time had stopped.

  D kicked off the stone steps. Unlike his earlier leap, this time the hem of his coat opened like the ominous wings of some mystic bird as he soared through the air, and Su-In thought she must be hallucinating. As the shadowy figure came down again, there was a flash of white light from him on the way. Soft as the flash was, it had an incredible weight to it, and even after it had sliced deep into the dome on the giant crab’s carapace, the enemy’s weapons still didn’t go into action. The slice went halfway through the shell. Sparks shot out through the gaping wound, and the giant crab disgorged blood that looked like glistening oil.

  Three hooks launched a jerky attack on D, but in a heartbeat they were severed at the second joint and clattered against the marble. D pulled his sword to the right.

  With the whir of a motor, the giant crab spun itself about. A crack shot around its center, and while the lower half stayed as it was, the top half rotated ninety degrees. That was where the steel wire launchers were located. There was the sound of a discharge, and the black lines shot off into the treetops.

  D made a thrust—a thrust of ungodly speed. It met only empty space.

  The hulking form of the giant crab had taken to the air with a gust of wind—and it was flying off into a grove, this thanks to the wires it’d wrapped around the distant trees. Branches snapped and were pushed aside, and as they swung back into place to conceal the black saucer, the sound of trees being torn apart could be heard in the distance. And then there was silence.

  Su-In remained behind the tree. “D . . . ,” the woman said with concern, though her voice was hoarse. The name came from her unconsciously, and she didn’t even hear herself saying it. She was looking at his eyes. That crimson gaze. The pair of fangs that poked from his lips. Here was a Noble the likes of which she’d never seen before. She was scared. He was positively terrifying. Yet this same person was now drenched in blood from his battle to protect her.

  Concerns for his safety and another emotion finally overcame the woman’s otherworldly horror. Su-In came out from behind the tree. At the same time, D gave his longsword a single shake and returned it to the sheath on his back. Black oil dotted the pathway.

  “D . . . ,” she said to him, and as she did, D wiped his mouth with his hand. Terror lanced through Su-In once again and she was paralyzed, standing there with one foot on the stone steps.

  “Just a moment,” D said in a tone that sounded like he was struggling with agony. But it wasn’t the pain of his wounds. Gradually, bit by bit, the blood light was fading from his eyes. In the time it took Su-In to blink, his fangs had vanished.

  Realizing that the atmosphere around her was pure once again, Su-In let the tension ease from her body. Somehow she managed to walk over to him. “D . . . ,” she said, “you’re hurt bad . . . But you were incredible. I—I couldn’t move a muscle,” she stammered.

  “The bleeding will stop soon enough,” D said impassively.

  “What was that thing?”

  “I don’t know. It could be one of the five sent here, or it could be something else. I’ve fought three of them, and you met a woman who’d be the fourth. All of them were alive. But that one was dead.”

  “You mean the machine?”

  “There was someone inside,” D said, eyeing the grove where the giant crab had disappeared. “Someone who was neither dead nor alive, to be precise.”

  “Well then—was it a Noble?”

  “No, it wasn’t like them. It wasn’t a dhampir, either.”

  “I just don’t know anymore.”

  “I’m sure we’ll probably see it again,” D remarked, turning his gaze back to the top of the staircase. As if to say that was all he’d been interested in from the very beginning. “Let’s go.”

  The two of them started off again. As they climbed the slope, they saw gardens that were frozen in time. In Su-In’s eyes, the yellowed grass was lush and green, and her ears echoed with the sound of elegant horse-drawn carriages rolling across the marble roads. It was dusk on a perfectly clear day. A trace of blue yet remained in the ink-black sky, and the breeze that blew through the gardens carried tidings of summer life. Like blossoms, women in white dresses snuggled beside men in black capes, and together they walked the stone paths without shadows at their feet.

  Closing her eyes, Su-In could smell the perfume of the night-blooming flowers. On the white terrace of an equally white lodge, a songstress with lengthy tresses sang “The Days You Were Gone” to the accompaniment of a piano. In lighted halls silhouettes danced with gentle steps, while those who’d tired of waltzing stepped out onto the terrace to discuss things in the language of the night, knowing nothing of what was spoken during the day.

  At one point Su-In noticed that she’d been crying without even knowing it. A hand came to rest gently on her shoulder. Su-In shook her head from side to side. Though she wanted to turn around and cling sobbing to the chest of the young man behind her, she got the feeling that she really shouldn’t. All she could think about was what’d been lost. Her grandfather, her sister, and the Nobility. She would have to live on all alone while conversing with those who decayed. Tomorrow would be another day in this northern village.

  Wiping her tears away after a time, Su-In said, “Let’s go.”

  Reaching Meinster’s castle in thirty minutes required taking a somewhat dangerous shortcut. Cutting through a garden where grotesque vines wriggled, then crossing over a river on a bridge on the point of collapse, and now taking a path along the edge of the jagged cliff posed no problem for D, of course. Su-In, on the other hand, was astonished that the worst thing that’d happened to her was she was short of breath. Now their eyes were met by the ruins of a stone castle as different from the elegant homes that surrounded it as the heavens were from the earth, and a good deal more unsettling, too. Seen through the narrow slits carved in the outer walls around the gr
ounds, the calm northern sea looked like it’d grown wild, and the clouds that had merely covered the horizon now eddied around the summit of the shattered watchtower.

  Su-In softly pulled the collar of her wool coat closed. “It’s so cold,” she said. “I’ve come this way before, and it’s always been like this. That’s why even us locals don’t come out here.”

  As D trained his gaze on the massive fissure ahead of them, he said, “Wait here.”

  Su-In was speechless. “I didn’t come all the way out here just to play tour guide,” she finally shouted. “Given what I know about the person who used to live here and the fact that you’ve come out here, there’s got to be some connection to the bead. I need to know what it is. My sister and grandfather were both killed—I mean, they both died because of it.”

  The woman said nothing more, and D walked away without a word. Su-In went right after him. Slipping through the crack, the two of them halted. Su-In gasped.

  Before them lay a tremendous pit. It was as if some colossal landslide had happened right in the middle of the castle, leaving only part of the outer walls standing. Round and covering acres, the maw of the chasm yawned like a black and bottomless abyss. The circumference had to be a few miles. It was immediately apparent that the remaining walls and ceiling maintained a precarious balance. There was a sense of overwhelming destruction, devoid of pity or restraint.

  D walked to the brink of the hole, and the hem of his coat danced back up like a butterfly from the wind. Was it blowing straight out of Hell?

  “The man in the black cape . . . ,” Su-In muttered in a cramped tone. “But who would go to such lengths to utterly destroy a fiend feared even by his fellow Nobility? There’s not a single trace of anything left. It’s almost as if it couldn’t be allowed to remain here.”

  D said simply, “I hear waves.”

  Su-In strained her ears, but could hear nothing.

  “I’m going down,” D said as he surveyed their surroundings. He’d just been checking whether or not there were any foes around.

  “How?” Su-In asked him. “It could be thousands of feet deep for all we know.”

  “The sides aren’t cut perfectly smooth,” D said as he peered into the pit below.

  “You don’t seriously mean—you’d climb down bare-handed?”

  “Wait here.”

  Swallowing hard, Su-In donned an expression as grave as anyone on a suicide mission and said, “I’m going.”

  “If you fall, I won’t save you.”

  “I’ll be okay as long as I’m with you,” she replied, though the words were delivered in a monotone. “Carry me on your back.”

  D turned around without a word. More than Su-In’s determination, it may have been the thought of strange creatures attacking her if she were left up there alone that motivated him.

  Su-In pressed herself against his powerful back. Even through his heavy coat she could feel his muscles of steel. As she wrapped her legs around his waist, she felt a warm ache deep in her loins.

  D bent over—he was at the brink. Lightly they took to the air. As the darkness swallowed her head, Su-In shut her eyes. A second later, she got goose bumps. The wind was hitting her forehead—D was making the descent headfirst. While she wanted to ascertain just how he was doing it, Su-In couldn’t open her eyes. Even if she had opened them, she probably wouldn’t have believed what she saw, and the circumstances were so extraordinary they might’ve left her senseless.

  The pit walls that seemed perfectly smooth at first glance actually had irregularities of a fraction of an inch. The tips of D’s long, pale, and even delicate fingers found those crevices, and like a veritable lizard he made his way straight down the rock face. His speed was unbelievable considering that he had about a hundred pounds on his back. Above them—or below them, going by the way their feet were pointed—the hole grew smaller, dwindled to a little white coin, and then could be seen no more. This darkness had to be artificial.

  In place of the light was a wind that blew up from below with increased and annoying strength, and Su-In’s ears distinctly caught the sound of breaking waves. The crash of them grew closer and closer, and they were going to hit them any minute—and just as Su-In thought that, her body turned over easily, her hands slipped off the Hunter, and her legs went into the cold water ankle-deep. She was about to latch onto D again without a thought, but then the soft ground that supported her feet kept her from sinking any further.

  Su-In opened her eyes. While she was terribly afraid, her curiosity was also quite strong. She couldn’t see anything. There was only darkness and the waves that lapped at her ankles.

  With the sound of a striking match, there was light. D had just lit an illumination cord designed for travelers. A quarter-inch thick and based on a blend of magnesium and carbonized zirconium, the cord would light just from friction and could even be used underwater. And if left out in the sun for an hour, the cord could also provide warmth. It was an absolute necessity for anyone on the road.

  And the sights that came into view with that dazzling light made Su-In gasp.

  —

  II

  —

  Normally inactive even by broad daylight, the main street of the village was now filled with bizarre characters.

  With a palette spattered with a dozen colors in his left hand and a brush in his right, the traveling artist rendered scenes of one exotic land after another on an oversized canvas and a portable easel supported by his belt, then tossed the pictures to the children who lined the street.

  Turning flips forward and backward, and then leaping seven feet into the air to twist and turn before landing again softly as a bird, the acrobats were greeted with applause from the people.

  With a cheap cigar in his mouth, a troubadour in a silk hat and a swallowtail coat played a violin and sang to the echo lizard on his shoulder:

  —

  A love decided on a summer’s eve is a tragedy,

  Like a maiden’s blood, swooning at the beauty of a young Noble, pale and gloomy,

  Or the serenade of the darkness played on the winds of the sad highlands . . .

  —

  Though reciting the same lyrics any street musician would know, he received a shower of coins from every woman from the youngest maids to the old ladies with bent backs.

  In addition, there were also vendors of ice cream, snow cones, watermelon, and candy treats, and though they didn’t seem very suitable for the village at present, their expressions brimmed with confidence as they pushed their garishly decorated carts.

  Each and every one of them was part of the procession of attractions and hucksters here for the season about to begin in this northern village—that short, week-long summer.

  Particularly noticeable in the group was the human pump—who spat out not only flames but water, fog, flowery petals in all the colors of the rainbow, and ultimately little moons and planets—and a little child of about five who rode on a motorized float. Covered with a red sheet, the latter transformed in the blink of an eye into a saber-toothed tiger, a Neanderthal, a fire dragon, and then into a seven-foot-long unicorn the sheet couldn’t possibly have concealed. Wherever these two acts went, they were surrounded by the local children, so it took them nearly ten minutes to move forward even three feet.

  All of them were out to stir up as much excitement as possible for the summer festival that would begin with the start of summer the following day, and their tents would be pitched out by a certain temple near the edge of town. Following after the seemingly endless succession of performers, the people moved on, leaving the street filled with cheers and dust. Beginning early in the morning, the procession would continue all day, a cheery and bustling sight welcome anywhere on the Frontier.

  The showy performances and promotions went on for some time, but after they had died down, only one strange figure remained: the white-haired and white-bearded old man wrapped in a scarlet cloak faced a collapsible metal easel, seated on a shabby folding
stool as he moved his pen across the canvas. Unlike the performers here for the festival, he seemed to be a traveling painter merely out to earn a living, and the reason the crowd around him didn’t disperse even after the gaudy promoters had gone was because it was rare to see such a scholarly tableau in this fishing village, and the pen, canvas, and ink he was using were unlike those any artist who’d ever been here had used in the past.

  In place of a brush he used a sharp quill pen, and for a canvas he had some sort of thin hide. Even more surprising was the ink into which he chose to dip his pen. Sticking his pen into a vein in his own left wrist, the old man dabbed it in the blood that poured out before moving it to his canvas. Knitting their brows at first at the sheer weirdness of this, the villagers had only to take one look at the picture he’d apparently been working on for some time when their shock gave way to enchantment. The women in particular stared raptly at that dangerous face.

  One cried, “I want it!”

  “Let me have that one!” said another.

  “How much do you want for it?” asked a third, offering a handful of coins.

  The picture was a portrait of a young man—just the face, not a full-length portrait. Yet the women were all clamoring for the same image as if they couldn’t wait for him to finish it, their eyes bloodshot and breath snorting out of their noses.

  “You fancy this one, do you?” the old man muttered morosely while etching delicate lines onto the hide with precise movements that seemed unimaginable from his rough-looking hands, where muscles and tendons bulged to the surface. “I can’t say I’m overly fond of it myself, so take it if you wish. Put the money in that bag there.”

  Bending toward the leather bag where the clink of coins instantly began, the old man pulled out the wooden box that was next to it, took off the spring lock, and pulled out a bundle of similar canvases.

  The women’s eyes were alight like those of savage beasts. All of the parchments in the roll had drawings of the same young man’s face. Hands reached in wildly, and a brief but bitter struggle ensued. Though there were surely more canvases than spectators, all of the artwork was carted off, and perhaps because of this there was cursing and tugging and women shouting at other women to give them their pictures back as they all dispersed.