THE FRONTIER ILLUSIONIST

CHAPTER 6

I

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An hour had passed since they’d come down from the hill. Savaged by the monster cloud and the flood, nearly half of the landscape had been erased, and it was less than three hours before the group was swallowed by the blue mountain that lay ahead of them. This wasn’t to say they were completely out of danger. When traveling out on the Frontier, the plains and mountains could be riddled with fiendish creatures. And yet, in keeping with human nature, the interior of one of the carriages was filled with an air of relief as the vehicles rolled forward in peace for the time being. Needless to say, the cheeriest of all was the boy—Hugh.

“Tell me, miss, where do you hail from?”

At his query, Taki squinted. Sifting through her memories, she soon replied, “I don’t know.”

“What?” said May, her eyes wide.

“Strange as it is, I truly don’t know. Actually, I’d never given it any thought before.”

“How’d that happen? What’ve you been doing up till now?”

“I was a magician’s assistant. To a man known as Lord Johann, the Trail Magician.”

“Never heard of him. So, why did you run off, miss?” asked the boy.

May winked at Taki, but her younger brother didn’t notice.

As the boy continued to badger her, Taki smiled wryly and replied, “My boss was kind of a pain in the neck. He tried to get me to follow in his footsteps.”

“Really? But that doesn’t sound too bad, being an illusionist.”

“Maybe not, if you’re making your money honestly.”

“Huh? You mean to tell me he was a cheat?”

“That’s right. Sleight of hand is his specialty, after all. It was easy enough for him to borrow people’s wallets and replace the contents with worthless fakes. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that.”

“Of course you couldn’t. He sure is scum!” the boy said, his eyes ablaze with righteous indignation. “So that’s why you hightailed it? Can’t say that I blame you. You’d do well to get as far away from him as fast as you can.”

“But I’m still worried,” said Taki.

“Why is that?”

“My boss is a scary guy. I bet he’ll come after me. If I stay here with the rest of you, I’m sure to cause problems for everyone.”

“Ha ha ha,” the boy laughed with his chest thrown out. “Not to worry, not to worry at all. We’ve got that guy out there, don’t we?”

“Hugh!” the boy’s sister snapped, the corners of her eyes rising wrathfully.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? The way he looks and the things he does may seem cold, but he’s really a lot kinder than you think. I can tell. It’s not in his nature to just desert someone who’s in trouble or in pain.”

“You shouldn’t say that. He—he’s a dhampir! There’s Noble blood in him,” his sister said, and her body quaked with good cause.

“So what if there is? He’s half human, isn’t he?”

“And half Noble! That’s why he’s so handsome, and so powerful. The Noble blood in him must be stronger.”

“So what if it is?”

“Sooner or later, he’s sure to turn his fangs on us.”

“That’s idiotic!”

“No, you’re the idiot! Now that you know he’s half Nobility, are you scared of him or not?”

After these words, the girl held her tongue. The expression that’d surfaced on her younger brother’s face was beyond description. It was a look she couldn’t help but regret having caused.

“You think I’m scared?!” the boy cried out in a loud voice, as if to fend off his own thoughts.

As he pressed his lips closed, something dark ran across his face. A shadow. As if following its path, the boy turned his eyes to the other side of the vehicle—and the window that was set in the door.

No longer in the driver’s seat, D looked up from the back of his horse.

He saw a gigantic multiwinged flyer. With two powerful engines equipped on each of its twin pairs of wings, it could carry three hundred passengers. The Nobility’s flying machines had made use of antigravity or magnetic fields, while the human race had devised other kinds on their own. Judging by the craft’s ungainliness, it was clearly one of the latter. Fifty or sixty years earlier, airfields were completed that linked the Capital and the Frontier, and business flights had begun. In fact, aircraft production hadn’t been able to keep up with demand, so those still in the air were dilapidated and had been that way for a good long time. Perhaps that was why the aircraft gliding along off to the left of the carriages seemed to be drawing ever closer to the ground.

It was Hugh that shouted, “It’s gonna crash!”

Most likely the pilot had done all he could do to choose this plain. The craft had too much speed. The massive canvas-covered body tilted downward a bit, and the bottom wing on the left side was the first thing that made contact. It effortlessly snapped off at the base, due to the fact that the wings didn’t run clear through the body of the craft, but rather each one had been independently welded to it. The upper-left wing followed the lower’s example, and, bouncing high into the air, the body of the aircraft rolled to the left in compliance with some unknown principle of physics. Since the forward momentum still remained, these two forces combined to throw the aircraft in an unfathomable angle, and, skidding noisily against the ground, it slid off diagonally into the woods to the group’s left.

Even after the rumbling of the earth subsided, D didn’t halt the vehicles.

“Mister—stop the carriage!” Hugh exclaimed as he hung out the open window. “The flyer crashed! Look, you can see the smoke from it. We’ve gotta go help them before it explodes.”

“There’s a village nearby,” D responded coolly. “I’m sure a rescue party will race out here. We’re in a hurry.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding! That had a lot of people onboard. They could be dying. We’ve gotta help them. If you can’t be bothered to, mister, then I’m going! Stop the carriage, you big coward!”

Before D could turn in that direction, the door opened.

“Hugh!” his sister cried.

“Stop it!” Taki added.

However, the cries of the two girls only seemed to propel him forward as his diminutive form shot out of the vehicle. Landing with a spectacular roll, he stood up and shouted, “You go on ahead. I’m gonna wait here for the rescue party!”

While it wasn’t clear who that cry was intended for, that was all he left them with before dashing straight into the black forest.

“Hugh!” May cried, and she would’ve gone after him if Taki hadn’t held her back. “Let go of me! I’m going, too. Wait for me, Hugh! Let me go already!”

But even as D listened to the girl disgorging these words like she was spitting up blood, he swatted his mount’s hindquarters with the flat of his hand.

__

Hugh was close enough to see the remains of the aircraft, but no explosion occurred. He wondered if it’d run out of fuel and had to make an emergency landing.

The body of the aircraft was badly battered. It looked like some sort of monster that’d been butchered for its meat. The outer skin was torn as if it’d blown free, and through the rips, the infrastructure jutted out in all directions just like real bones. There was no sign of anyone moving.

“Gotta hurry and get them out of there fast. If the fire spreads, that’ll be the end of them.”

If carnivorous monsters were to catch the odor of burning flesh and converge on the site, the boy could well envision the hellish frenzy that would ensue. Checking to see if anyone had been thrown free, Hugh approached the aircraft. He peered into it through the nearest rip.

“Holy!” he groaned in disgust, the word coming out on its own.

Although he hadn’t been able to see anything from the outside, the interior of the craft was a mound of corpses. Most were still belted in and had slumped forward, apparently killed by internal injuries.

“Is there someone—anyone—still alive?” Hugh shouted out before checking.

There was no reply.

Climbing into the aircraft just to be sure, he certainly was a courageous child.

Going over to the nearest body, he put his hand on its shoulder and shook it.

“Huh?!” he exclaimed at the strange way it felt. “Holy smokes!”

As Hugh froze in amazement, the grisly scene around him changed completely.

He was outside. The body of the aircraft was right in front of him. However, it was only a model of a biplane that couldn’t have been more than three feet long.

“What in the world . . .” the boy muttered as he fearfully picked up the plane and folded back the tattered cloth. He wished he were back in the carriage.

The inside of the model was just what Hugh had seen. The passengers were all slumped forward. But each was a wire figure less than half an inch tall. A thin cotton thread tied each wire figure into its cloth seat.

“You mean to tell me what I saw—was this?!”

“Very astute,” said a cheerful voice that caused the boy to jump.

Turning, Hugh found an old man in a black silk hat and tuxedo grinning right in front of him.

“Mister—are you Lord Johann?”

The words came out reflexively, and made the old man bug his eyes in surprise.

“Taki told you about me, did she? It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said with an exaggerated bow before offering his right hand.

Given the cordial atmosphere, Hugh looked back and forth between the man’s drawn face and his hand before extending his own.

“Do you know why I’ve done such a thing?” asked Lord Johann.

The hand that clasped Hugh’s had all the gentleness of someone dealing with a child.

“I—”

“It was actually my wish that another person would come. Well, I wouldn’t exactly say a person. A dhampir.”

“You mean Mister D?”

“Yes, indeed I do.”

“Well, he won’t. He’s not coming at all.”

“You’re right. If an aircraft were to crash, any normal person would rush to the rescue. However, it appears I’m a poor judge of character. He truly is a hard man.”

Hugh tried to pull his hand away, but it wouldn’t budge at all. The magician’s hand remained as soft and powerful as ever.

“But I was fortunate. At least one person couldn’t ignore others in their hour of need and ran out here. How good of you it was to come! You really must stay a while.”

“No! Let me go!” Hugh cried, taking an unexpected step forward.

In Lord Johann’s fist, the little wrist twisted forward with a pop, and a heartbeat later, the dislocated wrist easily pulled free of the confines of the magician’s fingers.

“Why, you little—” Johann growled as he reached for the boy, but Hugh spun once, then a second time, flying away with a series of graceful somersaults.

“I just knew you had to be a bad guy. I’m gonna go tell Mister D right away!” the boy shouted, and he was just about to run back the way he’d come when his body suddenly rebounded with a thud.

“Ooooh,” Hugh groaned, bright blood gushing out between the hands he’d brought to his face. Tripping over his own feet, he fell flat on his back.

Looking with satisfaction at the path—and the boulder that’d suddenly appeared to bar what had been a straight run back to the road—Lord Johann toyed with the flowing beard he was so proud of as he expounded, “The secret of sleight of hand is to focus concentration solely on that which should be seen.”

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II

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It took two hours to reach the next inn. After halting the carriages in front of the sheriff’s office, it went without saying that D was met by the wrathful gaze of May when he opened the door.

“I’m gonna go look for him,” the girl declared resolutely.

“The sun’s going down,” was all D said, but it froze her tiny form.

It would be no exaggeration to say that for anyone who lived out on the Frontier, the movements of the sun meant the difference between life and death. Dawn brought life, and twilight invited death.

“Yeah? Well, what’s gonna happen to Hugh, then?”

D glanced over at one of the carriages. At some point the door had opened, and beside it stood a figure in cobalt. The deep ocean blue of his raiment was truly suited to the twilight that tinged the Frontier.

“You should go for him,” said the Nobleman. “Or that would be my suggestion, but you aren’t about to trust us by night. I should be glad to accompany you, but that would still leave Miska. Even I can see there’s something wrong with her condition. You should keep an eye on her.”

“What?” Taki said, her mouth dropping open as she stood beside May.

“I shall go in search of her brother,” the baron said softly.

The fact that the half-crazed May had her mouth agape at that and even D knit his brow only went to show just what a shocking pronouncement it was.

“I’ll be damned,” another voice muttered, and a beat later Taki gasped and looked around, but she didn’t see anyone who could have made the remark. The voice had been hoarse.

Turning to D, the baron said, “I won’t break our agreement. Rest assured.”

“Fine,” D responded, consenting easily.

“No! Not on your life!” May protested. “You can’t let a Noble go out there. He’ll drink Hugh’s blood!”

“What did you just say?”

Although they’d noticed the door to the sheriff’s office opening, no one had ever imagined that the lawman himself would come walking out with a rivet gun in hand.

Seeing the group lined up on the street and realizing that they had some unbelievable intruders, he discarded his rivet gun and shouted, “Hey, Calco! Get my stake gun!”

A deputy came flying out and handed him a rifle with a magazine of thick stakes projecting from its underside, then quickly ducked back into the building.

“Gutless wonder,” the lawman snarled, his face as red as a devil’s as he held the rifle at the ready. The undisguised hue of terror on his face notwithstanding, he certainly had pluck.

“We only came to drop these two off. We’ll be leaving right away. A large aircraft crashed on the plains about two hours by carriage to the west of here. You should go help,” D said, but that wasn’t the right thing to say.

The sheriff’s eyes were filled with the image of Miska, who’d just opened the door to the white carriage and stepped out. By her side stood Baron Balazs. It wasn’t the sheriff’s fault he got the wrong impression about just who the two being dropped off were.

As soon as he had the weapon against his shoulder, he pulled the trigger. Since the stake gun utilized a powerful spring, its force was most effectively displayed at close range. The stake had an instantaneous speed that was seven-tenths the speed of sound. No god or demon could protect itself from the projectile.

Two blinding streaks of light flashed out like bolts from the blue.

Sliced into three pieces, the remnants of the stake spun harmlessly through the air.

One of the two streaks of light resolved into D’s longsword, which was now pressed against the base of the sheriff’s throat.

The sheriff was already as pale as a corpse when D whispered into his ear, “Don’t interfere with us in any way. We’ll leave the girls here and go.”

But why did the lawman’s cheeks seem to flush?

“Okay,” the sheriff said with a nod of his sweat-slicked face. “But you’d best give up the notion of leaving the women here. Take a look—the whole town’s watching! Even if I tried to protect them, they’d get torn to ribbons just for traveling with the Nobility.”

D quickly nodded. “I see. We’ll take them with us. But see to it there’s no more funny business.”

Though the sheriff’s teeth were chattering, he did manage to say, “I swear it. No one here wants to end up a damned slave to the Nobility.”

As soon as D stepped away from him, the sheriff slumped to the ground. It was then that the Hunter in black realized the baron was nowhere to be seen.

“He’s flown the coop,” said a low voice no one else could hear. “But, I tell you, he sure is a piece of work. From the Nobility’s point of view, he might be a weakling and a human lover, but when he was cutting down that stake just now—he was faster than you!”

__

It was an hour later that the baron arrived at the crash scene. Granted, it was now night, but the fact that he’d covered a distance that’d taken the carriages two hours in half that time had to be attributed to something other than just the powerful legs of a Noble. Needless to say, there was no one there. There weren’t even any fragments of the aircraft.

“An illusion? But who would’ve staged it?” the baron mused, having seen through the deception on the spot.

He went on to thoroughly investigate the area where the aircraft seemed to have fallen, not that he’d expected to find Hugh when he raced out there. Since the boy hadn’t been headed toward town, he was either hiding somewhere or he’d been killed. In either case, at least some trace of him should’ve remained. The baron was conscious of how clever the child was.

After a few minutes, the baron halted. He seemed to have found something, and it was actually at this very spot that Hugh had—

A tremendously chilling aura enveloped the figure whose cape remained blue even through the darkness. Someone with special eyes would’ve undoubtedly seen the demon fires blazing up.

The air whistled sharply.

Before the baron even had time to turn and look, black steel had gone right through his chest. Staggering, he fell flat on his back.

The weapon that’d pierced him could be described as a short spear. Roughly two feet in length, about half of it was taken up by the flat spearhead. But who in the world had hurled it?

Although it seemed like the baron had been killed instantly, at that point a second spear sank into his solar plexus with a dull thunk! The baron didn’t so much as twitch.

A dozen seconds or so passed—and then, from the depths of the darkness where not even the birds sang, a human figure suddenly drifted to the fore. A man dressed in black. The face illuminated by the moonlight looked horribly pale, and it had nothing to do with the source of the light.

“I finally got my turn. Never thought it’d be this easy, though,” a voice entirely lacking in vigor muttered as a man approached with a gait equally devoid of vitality.

When he’d come within ten feet of the baron, the figure in blue sat up with lightning speed and hurled the short spear that’d pierced his chest. Blazing through the air, the spear went right through the man’s heart, just as intended, leaving him standing stock still.

“Oh, so you’re still alive?” the baron said as he got up, pulling the other spear from his abdomen before approaching the man with long strides. “You almost had me there for a second, sir. I should like your name.”

There was no stain on the chest of the Nobleman’s blue garments, for the baron had caught the deadly short spear in flight and cradled it in his armpit.

“Vince,” the man replied, and a mysterious odor began to fill the air simultaneously.

Just then, something strange, or rather very unusual, happened. The baron slowly put his fangs into the neck of the man—Vince—and drank his blood. While this wasn’t at all abnormal for a member of the Nobility, it was something that never should’ve happened in a place like this.

Several seconds passed—and then a cry of agony rose to the night sky.

“Your blood . . . It’s acid . . .” the baron gasped, bringing his hand to his throat and backing away while white smoke rose from his mouth. His lips, mouth, and tongue were all burning.

Smirking at the foe who’d pierced his heart, the man said, “Precisely. It’s also loaded with garlic extract. The first smell was something I was finally able to synthesize—something that would attract vampires alone. You wanted to drink blood so badly, you brought about your own demise.”

“Why . . . won’t you die?” the baron said, his mouth disgorging both the words and a large quantity of blood. The acid had begun to dissolve his internal organs.

“I introduced myself, didn’t I? My name is Vince. As in ‘invincible.’ No mere spear is going to kill me. That’s why I’m able to synthesize poisons in my own body.”

“How informative.”

Saying this, the baron spat out a mass of blood at his feet. When he turned toward the astonished Vince, the Noble’s face was still just as pale, but it was filled with a much greater vitality than before.

“Impossible! You mean to tell me the garlic extract had no effect on you?”

“No, it had an effect. But at present the situation’s not quite so favorable. I’m out of my mind with rage now. And that’s far more powerful than your poisons.”

There in the darkness, a pair of lights began to glow like flames—the eyes of the baron.

“This is simply unforgivable. If you are invincible, as you boasted, none of my attacks should have any effect on you.”

An amber flash of light shot out at the young man from the interior of the blue cape. Without time to dodge it, his head was separated from his body and went sailing through the night air. At the same time, iridescent smoke rose straight up out of the stump of his neck, smothering the moonlight.

Unable to remain upright this time, Vince’s body tumbled to the ground, and shortly thereafter the baron fell to his knees. The poisonous smoke had taken its toll. But only briefly, as the baron soon staggered back to his feet. Considering the potency of the poisonous smoke, he exhibited physical and mental strength that would’ve caused even other Nobles to marvel.

“Where did he go?” the baron muttered. He was referring to young Hugh, of course. “The scent of blood remains. What happened here?”

This was indeed the spot where the boy had slammed into a boulder he didn’t see and fallen to the ground. Although catching the scent of blood that’d seeped into the ground hours earlier was one of the Nobility’s preternatural abilities, it was curiosity about the fate of the missing boy that’d stirred the baron’s ire and made him weather Vince’s attacks.

“I’ll find him if it’s the last thing I do . . . even if it’s just his remains.”

Not long after the baron vanished into the darkness, from the direction Vince’s head had disappeared, a vacant voice distinctly lacking in vigor could be heard to say, “I can see now why one of his own kind would want to murder a Noble like that—this’ll take more than ordinary measures. Of course, I’m not all that easy to kill myself . . .”

†

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D and the three women set up camp in the woods on the outskirts of town. All the lights in the post town had gone out, and not even the cries of the night-singing birds could be heard.

Consoled by Taki, May had finally calmed down a bit, but from time to time, she looked at D with inexpugnable traces of sadness and anger in her eyes. The flames from a fire built with branches they’d collected illuminated her face.

As he leaned back against the blue carriage a short distance away, D stared off into the darkness before him. Though his lips didn’t move at all, that didn’t mean he wasn’t having a conversation.

“Not exactly the most comfortable place to be, is it?” a hoarse voice from the vicinity of his left hand said in a mocking tone. “Even if you finish this job, it’s gonna be a pretty painful one. I mean, it’s not like you’re not worried about the kid, and on top of that—”

Cutting off the voice, D said, “Where are you going?”

His question was directed at the figure who’d just opened the door to the white carriage and stepped down to the ground.

“That’s my own business. Or so I should like to say, but I don’t imagine that would suffice for you, would it? If I told you I was going for a walk, would you give me permission?” Miska said, turning away indignantly. Her right hand carried a fairly large box. The jewels that studded it glittered in the moonlight.

“Don’t go anywhere near the town.”

“I understand that,” the woman in the white dress said before her form dwindled into the depths of the moonlit forest.

“There are no houses over that way. Must just be an ordinary stroll. After all, for them, it’s like the middle of the day,” his left hand remarked. “But all that aside, there is one thing that has me wondering.”

“I know,” D responded.

“That guy back at the arsenal—he got taken out much too easily. I mean, any way you look at it, it doesn’t seem like the kind of monster that’d be feared even by the Nobles who created it.”

There was no reaction from D.

__

Miska maintained her pace for about ten minutes before stopping.

She was in the middle of the forest. Although devious shapes and crimson eyes moved through the branches and behind the trees, none of them approached the pale woman who seemed like some sort of forest nymph. No matter how great her beauty, they could tell she was a Noble.

The place where Miska halted was a circular clearing. Mere coincidence hadn’t formed it. Judging from the faces of what looked to be stone sculptures poking from the ground here and there, it had apparently been a place for rituals of some sort in ancient times.

Standing in the middle of the clearing, Miska looked up at the heavens. As she took a deep breath, the crisp night air and the perfume of nocturnal blooming flowers flowed into her.

“It’s a nice night,” the woman in the white dress said, setting the box she carried down on the ground and gently opening its lid. Extending both hands, she pulled out a single golden disk. The box was a player.

The antique platter seemed like it must have been several millennia old, and Miska gazed at it dolefully as she put it into the player. The three seconds it took before the fifty-thousand-micron memory particles began to play back were by far the most melancholy for this Noblewoman.

A burst of noise enveloped Miska. The pensive melody of a violin rang in her ears. Why did the accompaniment of a waltz always have to be that way? The aroma of an understated perfume filled her nostrils, and the next thing Miska knew, the eyelids she’d held closed had opened quite naturally.

“Hello there!” Baron Krolock said, one hand raised in greeting.

Though he had the avian slimness of a crane, his razor-sharp nails could have killed an armored beast instantly. There was no one more learned in the field of Humanity in the Middle Ages.

Behind him, the couple Mircalla and Adam Karnstein chatted away. Apparently they’d just come back from a trip through the stratosphere in an ion ship shaped like a swan. After another five centuries or so, the two of them were talking about having their coffins put into orbit around the earth.

So many figures glided elegantly above Miska, for the ball had already begun. White dresses and black formalwear spun in graceful circles as blue lighting rained down, and the flowers that adorned the crystal tables swayed in the breeze blowing through the hall.

A handsome young man stood in front of Miska and bowed. It was a son of the Zollern clan. The high, straight line of his nose was to Miska’s liking. Both the way he slipped his fingers into hers and his steps on the dance floor were impeccable. What followed was the sweet strains of a waltz and blue light.

In the distance, there was a woman’s voice. Why is it that we cast no shadow? Glasses, marble pillars, and carriages all throw a shadow on the ground, so why not our kind?

You’re drunk, a different voice said soothingly.

That is the very proof that we are Nobility, yet another voice asserted.

In the blue light, a dance for the people of the night went on and on. They lived outside the passage of time, knowing no springtime of youth and no decay.

Miska turned around suddenly. Quickly pulling the player closed, her left hand hit the old-fashioned kill switch. The shrill notes faded. The hall faded, too. Even the people faded away.

In the clearing in the night woods, Miska stood alone. But not really—in front of the thicket to her left stood a trio of figures. D and the two girls.

“What do you want?” Miska asked softly.

A hot mass was rising from the pit of the Noblewoman’s stomach. Whether it was anger or something else, even she couldn’t say. This wasn’t something to be seen by humans. That was why she’d come out here.

D didn’t answer her.

“He invited us to come out here with him,” said May.

“What is the meaning of this? Did you follow me out here knowing I’d come to relive dreams of long ago?”

If D had thought Miska was going to be in danger, he’d never have brought the girls with him.

“I saw the player,” D replied.

Miska first knit her brow, then laughed haughtily.

“Kindly refrain from your jests. This is a priceless item bestowed upon my grandfather by the Sacred Ancestor. There’s no way the likes of you would know anything about it . . .” she said, but her voice petered out and her eyes quickly opened as wide as they could go.

Left as horribly shocked as if she’d taken a blow to the head, Miska stared at the gorgeous Hunter.

“Is this truly the same player? Why don’t you tell me the name it was given?”

Miska’s field of view was occupied not only by D, but by the two girls as well. And by the look they gave her. It was one of sympathy and understanding. However, that was precisely what invited Miska’s fury.

“Answer me! What was this possession of the Sacred Ancestor called?”

The madness that gripped her was something she herself couldn’t fathom, and it caused her fangs to poke out over her crimson lips.

D put his hands on the two girls’ shoulders. As the three of them turned, the Noblewoman was just about to call out to them—

“It’s ‘Shin-ai,’” a hoarse voice said, stopping Miska from shouting anything further.

That was the correct answer.

“Shin-ai . . .” Miska said, rolling the word around in her mouth. It was bitter as a pill, and sweet as molasses.

Just before they vanished behind a stand of trees, Miska saw the little girl turn and look at her as clear as day. She had the same look in her eye again.

“Shin-ai—how ridiculous!” the Noblewoman spat with rage.

In the language of a country that’d long since been destroyed, that name had meant ‘beloved.’

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III

__

“Has he finally gone?” a tree whispered in the darkness sixty feet above the earth. On a large branch near the top of the tree, a pair of figures stood blended with the shadows. “Even watching him from way up here is enough to give me goose bumps. You sure are lucky to have fought him and lived to tell the tale.”

It was Mario.

“Yeah, I just realized that myself. I thought that if he got in the way when we tried to grab that Noble, we’d just take him on, but then I suddenly didn’t feel like coming down out of the tree.”

Wiping the sweat from his face with the edge of his brown cape was the man D had referred to as Crimson Stitchwort. From what he’d just said, they had planned to abduct Miska and had apparently hidden up on a branch toward that end. But the real question was how they’d made it out here.

Actually, they’d circled ahead. Back before Hichou was slain in the swamp, they’d used the same kind of flight pack he had to cross the swamp, and then waited for his return. Instead, it was D and his group that’d arrived. The death of their compatriot had angered them, but the fiends had exchanged unsettling grins. Any danger of Hichou earning the whole reward for himself had passed.

Knowing D’s fearful strength, they refrained from launching a massed attack on his party and simply watched them go, so that they could learn their route and head them off. When they’d confirmed that the party had entered the Talos arsenal, they’d clucked their tongues and thought that would be the end of it, but when they saw everyone leave again without harm, their fear of this formidable foe only increased. They knew in the marrow of their bones that any haphazard attacks would be futile. The only thing that would slay the Nobles and D was an exhaustively detailed plan with an assault that was swift and precise. And having reached that conclusion, the assassins had hastened to the next post town to buy themselves enough time to come up with a strategy. That was how they’d managed to avoid becoming embroiled with the monstrous cloud and the great flood D and his group had encountered.

On the other hand, they also didn’t realize that D’s party was going to be late, so the pale young man whose turn it was to attack next had grown impatient and gone out to scout for them. Though he’d taken the main road, D had elected to use a riskier but comparatively shorter back road. And that had been so he could drop Taki and May off in town.

Of course, the other three who’d remained at the inn knew that D and his group had paid the town a visit. And from the trip so far, they could well imagine where the Hunter would stop for the night. Then Crimson Stitchwort and Mario had watched the group camping out from the top of a big tree. The preparations had been made. Though their plans were upset when the baron doubled back on the road they’d taken there, it still looked like the assassins could slay D and the Noblewoman.

However, the elderly priest who was supposed to be the next attacker—Yoputz—had suddenly vanished, and that only further complicated their plans.

And that wasn’t all. While they continued their surveillance, they couldn’t believe how harsh D’s unearthly aura felt as he drew closer. Filling with chills, they made excuses about how it wouldn’t be right for them to skip Yoputz’s turn while he was gone, and then decided they should just remain observers.

And then the female Noble had left D and gone deep into the forest. Given this perfect opportunity, they’d followed after her, but D and the girls had soon appeared, and it seemed that their attack on the Noblewoman wasn’t meant to be. However, D had soon left.

The pair’s conversation continued.

“Are we gonna do it?”

“Of course.”

“Well, Yoputz is gonna be pissed. He’ll be all over us for going out of order,” said Crimson Stitchwort.

“The Noblewoman’s of no consequence. From the very start, she wasn’t covered by our contract, so anyone can do whatever they like to her. It’s a hell of a lot less trouble than trying to have a go at D. Besides, when our turn comes up next, it’ll be a lot easier to handle D and the Noble in blue if we’ve got a hostage.”

Oh, so these two were saying they intended to abduct the female Noble?

Far below the pair’s gaze, Miska stood alone, her mind in a haze.

“Well, let’s get to it. We’d better act fast, before D gets wise to us,” Mario said, and with that, he sat down cross-legged on the branch and closed his eyes. Apparently focusing his will on something, he looked as sublime as a monk earnestly endeavoring to grasp the truths of the universe.

Around Miska, black forms came into view less than a second later. Needless to say, they were dolls under Mario’s control. Ordinarily, they would serve as a distraction so the real Mario could attack and slay his opponent. However, even when the shadowy figures approached, Miska stood in a daze, not even bothering to look at them. Although someone clucked his tongue in the distant treetop, that sound didn’t reach Miska, of course.

The next instant, a foglike mass drifted out in the moonlight. Settling neatly over Miska’s pale figure from above, it was clearly a net made of a fine line that was nigh invisible. In less than the time it took to draw a breath, Miska had been hauled into the air.

Once he’d pulled Miska all the way up to the branch, Crimson Stitchwort secured her like an insect in a cocoon.

“She can’t talk now, right?” he asked Mario, just to be sure.

“Yep,” the puppet master said with a nod, his meditative state already broken. “That net’s woven from the same string that controls my dolls. The instant it wraps around something, it sinks right into the flesh and keeps them from even breathing. The woman should be out cold.”

“We’re dealing with a Noble here.”

“I’m well aware of that,” he declared in a tone brimming with confidence. However, suddenly crinkling his brow, he added, “But to be honest, it was just too easy. She wasn’t surprised at all by my dolls.”

The pair’s plan had been to throw her off guard and then release the net, and the results had been satisfactory. However, there was still something they couldn’t understand.

“It looks like she’s Balazs’s mistress. With her as a hostage, it’ll be child’s play to lure the baron out. He’ll probably walk right into a trap for the honor of the Nobility and all that crap,” Mario said, looking down at the woman and laughing. “But from where I’m sitting, she sure is one fine-looking lady. Hey, you ever had a piece of a Noblewoman?”

Crimson Stitchwort was stupefied, exclaiming, “Come on—you can’t be serious!”

“She’s out cold, after all. Plus, we wouldn’t have to take the net off her. Even if we let her loose from the waist down, she still won’t be able to do anything.”

“Count me out.”

“Okay, have it your way. But it wouldn’t be easy for me to do my thing with you looking over my shoulder. Make yourself scarce, will you?”

“I’m not trying to be a pain. Just don’t do this.”

“Stay out of this, okay?!”

For the briefest instant, the two assassins on the branch glared at each other. But Crimson Stitchwort was the first to turn his face away indignantly, saying, “Do what you like, then. I’m going on ahead. Don’t call out for me.”

The next instant, the branch dipped straight down and he was swallowed by the darkness below.

“Sheesh, what a pansy!” Mario remarked spitefully.

Hauling Miska up, he reached over to paw at her body with his right hand—and had his breath taken away.

In the moonlight, the net glowed like some weird fog, and within it, Miska’s body was bound tight by nigh-invisible threads, just as Mario had said. Her right shoulder and breast were half exposed and the left side of her dress had risen greatly, leaving her pale and alluring thigh exposed almost to the waist. But more seductive than anything was the way her face was twisted with pain. She was a veritable work of forbidden sculpture that would never be seen by human eyes except here, deep in the forest on a moonlit night.

The second his eyes saw her damp red lips make an O and his ears heard the faintest moan that O allowed to escape, Mario lost his last fragment of rational thought. One swipe of his nails easily severed the strings, and her pale and damp thighs spilled out onto the branch.

“I wonder what happens when Noble blood and human blood mix? Eh?”

Holding both her slim ankles, the puppet master spread her legs far apart.

What happened then, the moon alone knew.

What D heard was an explosion that sounded like a great hole opening in the heavens. As the girls jumped back up, D commanded, “Get in the carriage.”

Shutting the door, he then raced off with the wind whirling in his wake.

When he arrived at the clearing, there was no need for him to look up above. Miska was standing in the center of the clearing. There was no sign of Mario.

“What happened?” asked the Hunter.

D’s senses told him there’d been no change at all in the sky or on the earth. The wind had been stirred, but that was all. After an explosion, such stillness was difficult to comprehend.

“Nothing,” Miska mumbled, and then she collapsed on the spot.

As D gazed down at her, his face was palely illuminated by the moon. Hard beyond words, his expression still made it clear that even he feared this kind of bizarre development.