by Nick Cole
“Master Samurai?”
I turn and see a slender guardsman in better armor than the rest. He wears a sheathed long sword. A rakish Vandyke mustache and goatee dominate his face below cool gray eyes that appraise while providing neither assent nor judgment. “If I may…” he continues. “The castellan wishes an interview. Would you follow me into the keep?”
I nod.
We thread the press of concerned villagers, tradesmen bartering and scampering children underfoot, all this under the shadows of the high walls. Walls that guard the known from the unknown. We wind our way to a tall gate. More guards eye us from the somewhat cozy towers that stand watch here. Especially the ones in the two high towers that set the limits of the ancient gate. No doubt they, too, have deadly crossbows that could at any moment send bolts hurtling into my chest.
And then what? What happens in whatever I’m in if I’m shot through?
We pass the shadow of the gate and enter a courtyard warmed by the high morning sun. A sturdy main building, built more for war or watching than fantasy, rises above us. We enter and progress down torch-lit halls and climb steep ancient stone stairs to reach a room with a wide burnished oak campaign desk on which a vellum map is spread.
There is more to the keep. Much more than this inner sanctum I’ve been ushered into after a morning begun with tragedy and chaos. We passed businesses out there, and a distant arch with a beautiful fountain that burbled musically, leading off into other more mysterious quarters. And just before we entered the ancient gate yard before the keep itself, I saw a warren of alleys with all manner of shops and high tiny apartments looming out over narrow, almost picturesque back streets that disappeared off into nothingness.
The room is a study of some sort. Books. Armor. Wine. A beautiful dagger lies beside the map, as do writing instruments of ancient form. Ink and quill.
I study the map as best I can without being too overt. Maybe it will tell me where I am. Where the keep is.
And maybe somewhere written across its length is the reason why I am here. And who I am.
Can the “why” of things be found on a map?
Can a map know who we are?
Beyond all this is some larger question I cannot yet articulate. Another question that seems far more important.
There are mountains on the map. On the ancient fading vellum they are steep and rise up all along the edges. On the map they are simple ink lines and shading, and yet they seem dangerous in their representation. The word “impassable” rushes to the forefront of my mind.
At the center of everything lies the representation of a tiny fortress in a vast wilderness, on the edge of a southern forest named Charwood Wildwood. The words “Lost Keep” appear in curling script beneath it.
So we’re there. And there is here. Wherever that is.
Beyond this tiny castle called a keep, I see other forests. A place marked the Caves of Chaos. A hill marked Crowhaven. And other markings, other places.
Teigel Hall.
Caverns of Thracia.
Barrier Peaks.
The Village of Hommet.
Castle Ravenloft.
In the north is a tall and dangerous peak. It’s labeled “White Plume Mountain.” It smokes like a volcano.
“Sometimes I look at that map…” begins someone behind me.
Then the voice trails away as though overwhelmed by the howling silence of the wilderness and its deeps depicted on the yellowing parchment spread across the campaign table.
I turn. Standing before me is an older man with iron-gray hair. He wears chain mail and carries a helmet.
The man crosses to the other side of the table and sets his helmet down upon an edge of the map. Then he produces a couple of oranges and sets those down as well. They roll across the dried ink in the vellum.
“Have one,” he says. “Please. Just picked them from the grove at Goode’s Farm. I was there… when Alucard escaped this morning.”
He sighs and studies the map with large brown eyes that are somehow sad. His mouth opens beneath a drooping handlebar mustache. His voice is like an ancient creaking spring. Except deep and almost swallowed.
“Where…” he whispers.
Then he looks up at me like he’s just returned from some long stay in another place and sees me watching him.
“Master Samurai, I have a problem, as you may or may not have noticed… this morning. All the commotion?” he prompts.
I am still studying the map. Its rich black ink creates beautiful hills and mountains with mere brushstrokes. Enigmatic unnamed towers are noted deep in areas swallowed by wild forest. The map draws me in, encourages me to explore it in ways I feel on some deep level yet can’t name. Like some well or fountain discovered bubbling deep inside me. Like youth again. Like… the excitement of the unknown. Not fear…
Hatchet Hall.
The Dark Tower.
The Pool of Radiance.
That smoky burnt-leaves-and-scotch voice whispers softly within my head. “In search of the unknown.”
And there is something about that phrase that resonates within my mind. Wherever that is. Wherever this is. To search the unknown somehow makes me feel whole and complete. When I look at the map I see a world of possibilities and adventures. Lost civilizations and stories not told for thousands of years. Danger… and reward. Some forever playground of youth and all the good things it was ever meant to be. Both the terror and the intrigue.
“I would like you to track down Alucard for us… and slay him,” continues the iron gray-haired man in chain mail. A momentary indigestion arises and then passes when he asks me to kill a man. “Will you slay this Priest of Chaos for us, Master Samurai?”
I know this is somehow the beginning of some adventure. Some journey that will make things right. Bring order out of chaos. I feel my hand on the hilt of my katana. I feel its power. I know its name again.
Deathefeather.
I nod.
Just a simple nod suffices when you agree to track down and kill someone.
Yes. I will find this man and slay him inside this dream. Or game. Or wherever, or whatever, this valley is that lies on the map in front of me of all things known and unknown.
Yes. I will go.
Chapter Twelve
In the dream, or the game, or whatever, I ride forth.
That’s what you do in adventures. I am aware of both the phrase’s antiquated nature… and its total normality. As though this is the way things should be here, though I am aware they are not this way in other places I can’t remember. There are “other” places not this one. But none of that matters as I ride away from the keep on a fall day when the air is cold and the leaves of the forest turn the color of blood.
The castellan offered me the use of a horse, in the dream or the game, whatever this is, so I ride away from the mysterious place called the Lost Keep, on the trail of the Priest of Chaos. William Alucard.
“Goin’ after Billy Alucard, are ye?” asked the old soldier who handed me the reins. He told me his name was Corporal Vonnegut. I nodded that I was, kicked the horse, and rode off through the narrow gates of the keep.
I now sense that old guard watching me. Knowing he was once just as foolish as I am now. And wishes he still were. Some bird in a tree beyond the gate seems to agree and says “poo-tweet” above the thunder of the large horse’s hooves.
I have food. Water. And the horse. And of course my weapon.
All of this seems as it should. And I try to think of myself as what I am. What they kept referring to me as all through that keep and the shops we passed through as I supplied myself before journeying out into the unknown. Never to return, perhaps.
In search of the unknown.
A master samurai.
I know what a samurai is.
But somehow, I don’t. I don’t know what it is that I do and I can never remember having drawn my sword in anger much less hunting down a man and killing him.
Even now I have not fully dra
wn the blade.
But I want to.
And killing the man Alucard… the Priest of Chaos…
Well. We shall have to see.
I ride down the twisting hill that leads away from the squat keep that shrinks the farther I ride from it. In time I see it only occasionally over the rises I top as ride out into the tall grass before the forest the road disappears into.
An old man, occasionally pulling at his pipe, told me in the Traveler’s Inn that William Alucard would most surely head for the caverns. And that if I was to be, as he put it, “hot upon his trail,” I would “indeed catch him up” there. He also told me that “Bree yark!” is goblin for “We surrender!” Small smoke rings of some sweet-smelling stuff grew away from the old man, a wizard perhaps, and climbed into the dark timbers of the low-ceilinged common room of that ancient inn.
“That one is tricky,” the old man with the pipe assured me. “You’ll have to go through many others to get to him if he has his way. And…”
He paused. Considered one of the rings as it turned into a dragon and curled about a candle he’d sent it off toward on the table between us. I was drinking a strong dark draught they called Porter’s Stout. There was an herbed cheddar cheese between us and a cold roasted chicken.
“And… he’s about something, say true. Alucard must be stopped,” murmured the old man to himself. And then, “So I guess you’re the one, as much as anybody else, to do it now.”
Entering the dark forest alone, in the late afternoon, I still taste that sharp cheese and the cold meat of the roasted chicken. And the dark beer that quenched my dry throat in this dream. It was all a pleasant start to this journey.
I go deeper into the wood and the night comes on.
It’s later, in the dead of night, with a fat moon, swollen and riding through the twisted branches above, when I begin to think this journey won’t be as pleasant as its start.
I have been riding in the forest for hours. Clearly, I am now lost. The sun had already begun to climb down from the sky at the journey’s start and before long the forest grew cold in the twilight of the fading day. Crows, dark and mocking, called out and raced across the sky in flights, heading off somewhere deeper within the forest. Hatchet Hall. Ravenloft. The Dark Tower. And then darkness and the moon rose above trees that seemed like clutching arms. In time, the bare trail I thought I was following disappeared completely. Or I lost it.
I dismount and begin to walk the horse.
By night and moonlight, what once seemed a vibrant living forest now seems dead and forlorn. A place of nightmares and fear that are more real than daylight has ever been. With one hand I lead the horse, and with the other I hold the hilt of the sheathed blade. I feel the cold. Smell the decay of the woods. See my breath misting along with the horse’s.
“’Oo are you?” croaks a bullfrog suddenly. Or at least… it sounded like a bullfrog. There’s been some unseen croaking in the dark about me. The smell of stagnant water. Odd and intermittent as the air grew colder and even damp. The moon is now directly above like some leering giant face interested in finding out exactly where I am. The forest is fully revealed by bone-pale moonlight, and shadowed by dark shades where the moonlight can’t reach.
I whirl about as the horse gives a start at some sudden rustle within the deadfall. I let go of the reins. It gallops off and leaves me all alone. In those last moments as it rushed away, I saw its eyes, wild, rolling with fear. For a few moments I hear only its crashing through the underbrush, neighing in terror. Fading. And then too suddenly, it whinnies in fright and there is a great splash and it is gone.
So gone it might never even have been there.
Not just gone off beyond the reach of my hearing.
But gone.
Suddenly.
Like something took it all at once.
Visions of tentacles curling outward from a dark pond offer my mind a possibility I’m not too keen about. Fat snake-like tendrils curling about the horse’s girth and dragging it down into the deep where the moonlight doesn’t reach and the dark things live among the shadows along the bottom. Maybe there is a cave that leads to the ruins of ancient civilizations down there. Down where nothing but the dead wait.
I listen for something in these long moments of total silence.
Unreal.
My katana slithers from its sheath, and I realize by the soft razor’s hiss that I’m doing this. An inch at a time.
“’Oo are you?” the unseen bullfrog croaks again.
Honestly, I don’t know the answer. I want to, desperately, as the quiet seconds drip by in the silence of the forest. I want to know who I really am. That seems important. Maybe even more important than catching the Priest of Chaos, Alucard.
The answer to “’Oo are you?” seems very important.
I see bulging eyes staring out from within the hollow of a long-dead tree. The eyes of a madman watching. Glaring and huge. Unblinking. Staring fixedly at me. And of course, in them is no good intent.
That’s plainly clear.
“I’m searching for…” I begin. Then hesitate. I still hear the razor’s hiss of the blade slinking from its sheath. I’m still drawing it up and out. Its edge must be gleaming in the pale moonlight. A silver slice of death. But I don’t know that. I only know it must be so. Instead I remain staring at the two mad eyes staring at me from deep within the hollow of a dead tree.
“Alucard,” I finish softly.
Nothing.
Just the mad unblinking eyes staring back at me.
“No man here,” the hidden voice croaks.
My blood runs cold. Because if it’s not a man, or no longer a man, then what has the speaking voice become?
I feel my blood turn to ice water in the microsecond of hanging time that follows the declaration.
I draw. One motion. The blade flashing in the moonlight like a thing suddenly become electric. A cold, living thing that defines the line between life and death. And it seems to me, in its sudden moonlight flash, that the blade I have drawn is living death. Embodied.
I’m aware that it’s good that I drew it, held it back, ready to strike with both hands gripped around the hilt as they should be. Ready for one diagonal slash that feels so right. As though I’ve been trained a thousand million times to execute only such and in only this fashion. The classic samurai cut.
The cut is good.
It has to be because there is no time.
Out of the gaping mouth of the dead tree rushes a mad old hermit. Bald on top. Stringy hair cascading from the sides of his dead fishbelly scalp down onto his shoulders. Pot belly swinging madly as he rushes me with a wicked dagger glowing a soft malevolent green. He gargle-screams like some ancient sea monster drowning on ten million pounds of sludge. His throat a ragged mess of glottal stops and guttural ululations.
He is stark raving mad.
The eyes that once stared fixedly out from the hollow of the dead tree, like some alien watcher ever watching, are filled with the spite of yellow covetousness and the roaring rage of red murder. He comes at me in a rush and I can hear his thick feet flopping like dead fish on the sand and across the moldy wet leaves of the hollow where one of us will die.
That’s when I strike with just one cut.
Like unexpected lightning.
Instinct.
I strike through him. Not at him as I know I would have if I knew exactly who I was. But through him, as I’ve never trained to do.
Just once.
He screams as the blade bites, and he can no longer scream in the bare second that follows.
Two halves that were once him flop to the ground as his feet once did, and will never do again.
I put everything into that strike and I remain in the finishing pose. Blade held down and ready. Listening for who, or what, will come out of the darkness all around. Two halves of the dead hermit at my sandals drool out onto the dead leaves. Those eyes once more returned to their alien madness. Again, staring up at me and seeming t
o still ask…
“’Oo are you?”
Chapter Thirteen
Hot bright morning light bathes the world in a warm golden glow beyond the darkness of the tomb in which I wake. I turn and hear the expensive Italian leather of the couch Rashid offered me for the night creak. Or croak.
It’s not a tomb. It’s a den.
I’m in the den of Rashid’s shack. Mansion. I think of Enigmatrix. I’d met her online. In combat. Had killed and been killed by her. And last night I finally met her in the dark. And she was still as much a ghost as she’d always been.
I pull on a shirt and find an immense restroom done in cool gray marbles that remind me of ancient Rome. I shower but can’t shave. But I’m clean enough.
Looking in the mirror I wonder what will become of me.
When would I start living?
Where would I start living?
I wander the massive complex that is Rashid’s shack. Everyone is gone. Or at least no one answers my forlorn calls that echo much like those of a lost and lonely explorer in a vast wilderness of strange ruin.
On a bar top near the main room, the cavern where Enigmatrix played her pirates game on the wall, I find a note from Rashid.
It says a car is waiting outside to take me down to the “Cyber Warfare Center.”
I check the walk-in fridge in the massive kitchen. There’s nothing but chilled vodka and a lemon. I grab my messenger bag and leave the quiet mansion.
Outside I find a morning unlike any I’ve ever experienced. Since leaving New York City, and that other life I barely remember, I’ve traveled the world and seen many mornings in many places. Beautiful mornings. Ibiza. Rio. Amalfi. Bermuda. Singapore.
Nothing matched this.
Every green is a vibrant living green. Every color sharp, bright, clear. Cornflower-blue sky and everything golden in the same moment. The wide Pacific Ocean below is blue and lazy. Far out across its gulf I can see a mysterious island shimmering in the distance.
Santa Catalina, I think.
Ecstatic birds call and dash about, unseen in the tropical shrubbery and twisted olive trees that rest across the desert oasis landscaping. Everything about this morning promises life. And adventure. As though great things and endless pleasures are to be had down there along the coast. As though the world in its entirety is here… and waiting to be explored. As though something important and meaningful to carry with me for the rest of my days is about to happen at any moment.