EXECUTION DAY

CHAPTER 1

I

 

The device that’d been built in the village square for the execution was known as a guillotine. At the top of a fifteen-foot frame a heavy steel blade was set, and when the executioner released the attached rope, the blade dropped onto the neck of the condemned bent over beneath it. It was believed to be named after its inventor, and while it was said that he himself fell victim to the guillotine, the veracity of that claim was unknown.

“I’ve seen them a number of times, but when it comes to be your turn, it’s really pretty creepy,” Juke said from over by the window.

“It sure as hell is,” Sergei agreed, sitting on the edge of the lowest mattress of the triple-decker bunk bed. Gordo was sleeping there. Being a woman, Rosaria was in the cell across from them. They were all in the village jail.

“If I’d known this was gonna happen, I’d have sold a little more of our stock on the side and used the money to really live it up.”

“You seem to know all kinds of weird things. Isn’t there anything you can do?” Juke said to Sergei, giving the bars across the window a good smack.

“Not a blessed thing. The clowns from the village really went through my stuff good and cleaned me out,” Sergei said, showing Juke the palms of both hands. By that, he meant he didn’t have anything.

“What’ll happen to the goods in our wagon?” he asked.

“If these guys don’t pilfer everything, they’ll either deliver it somewhere or have someone come get it. Or they’ll just say we were hit by bandits and make the whole thing disappear.”

“Damn, this is a hell of a mess we’ve gotten into.”

Sergei got up, walked over to the iron bars facing the corridor, and leaned against them.

“Is Rosaria gonna get the ol’ whooosh, ka-chuuung, too?” he said, striking the back of his neck with the side of his hand.

Juke nodded. “On account of they think she’s one of us. If they suspect anyone’s ever had anything to do with the Nobility, then they get no mercy; it don’t matter if they’re injured, a woman, a kid, or what have you.”

“Forget about the Nobility. In a case like this, humans are a lot more savage. At least all they do is drink your blood. I asked a guy who’d been bitten about it, and he said that partway through it, it felt pretty good. Man, I envy that Gordo. If they chop his head off the way he is now, he’ll get an easy death without ever knowing anything about it,” Sergei muttered, and he actually did sound envious right to the core of his being.

Just then, there was the sound of a door unlocking and the creak of hinges. A number of footsteps could be heard crossing the stone floor and coming their way.

Preceding a couple of sturdy-looking villagers who were apparently the jailers was Mayor Camus. Her pale, aged countenance was in stark contrast to the black satin dress she wore. Needless to say, no one there knew that inside she was actually Dr. Gretchen, poison fiend extraordinaire.

“What a sty!” she said, waving one hand before her nose as she gave Juke and Sergei an icy stare. “Your execution will be conducted precisely at high noon. Just remember: at that exact moment, the guillotine will fall on the neck of one of you.”

Though Juke asked her to spare Rosaria, he was met with a laugh.

Glancing out of the corner of her eye at the young lady who slumbered behind the opposite set of bars, she said, “She’s one of you—and that’s all there is to it.”

“You cruel old bitch!” Sergei shouted. His anger was so great that he rattled the bars violently. “Who gains anything by that girl being beheaded? Let her live. If you don’t, I’ll come back as a ghost and wring the fuck out of that baggy old neck of yours!”

“Such language,” Mayor Camus said, grimacing. She looked at him like he was a lowly savage. “We can arrange to have you alone executed earlier. Wouldn’t you like to live even a little bit longer?”

“Shut your hole, you lousy murderer,” he said, trying to reach through the bars and strangle her.

“Knock it off,” Juke said, pulling Sergei back by the shoulders to stop him.

“What kinda scheme are you cooking?” he then asked the mayor.

“Dear me, what a thing to say! I wonder if you’re suffering some sort of psychosis before your death.”

“You know me, right?” Juke asked the mayor as he stared into her eyes.

“Of course I do.”

“I know you, too. You’re just like I remember. On the outside, at least.”

“Oh, really?”

“You were a hard nut, but you weren’t the kind of monster who’d put an innocent girl in the guillotine without doing any checking at all. Are you the real thing?”

“What utter nonsense!” the mayor spat.

Juke didn’t catch the turbulence that flashed through her eyes.

Turning to the guards behind her, the mayor told them, “I wish to speak to these men alone. Remain outside until I call for you.”

Not surprisingly, the pair of jailers were somewhat bewildered.

“Go!” she asserted coldly, and with that they left.

The door closed. Quickly going over to it, the mayor ran her right hand around its edges, and then touched it to the keyhole. Her right hand then went into her gown and pulled out a small earthenware vessel of a muddy brown hue.

“You mean to tell me—” Juke groaned, guessing from that action alone that something wasn’t right.

“Be silent,” the old woman said as fingers like dead twigs took the lid off the vessel.

A pungent aroma filled the jail—a scent so dense it seemed to pollute each and every particle of air choked Juke and Sergei.

“G . . . g . . . guards!” they shouted, but their cries gave way to pained wheezing.

“My name is Mayor Camus. But my given name is Dr. Gretchen,” the old woman informed them in the alluring voice of a young woman. “I wonder if you might’ve heard of the woman who poisoned fifty thousand Nobles? At present, all my energies are devoted to ridding the world of the Hunter who calls himself D.”

Clinging to the bars, Juke and Sergei had already begun to slide down toward the floor.

Poison it wasn’t, but the aroma was that powerful—the scent alone effortlessly pushed their consciousness down into the darkness.

“No matter what you do . . . to us . . . D . . . won’t come,” Juke said, his voice nearly a death rattle.

“Is that what you believe? I’m of a different opinion,” the old woman jeered. The lid was back on the vessel. “I’ve recently become intimately familiar with his actions on the Frontier for the past few years. The details make my hair stand on end. He’s possessed of a cruel and callous mind the like of which isn’t to be found even among the Nobility. He’s even mercilessly stabbed into the chest of a young Noble as the child wept and pleaded to be spared. Ordinarily, he would never come to rescue you.”

Her wrinkled mouth twisted into a grin. Her lips were as glistening red as rubies.

“However, he is no Noble. His blood is filthy yet hot, like a human’s. And so long as that drives his flesh, he won’t be able to leave you to your fate. He’s certain to come to your rescue. And this village will be his grave.”

“Like hell . . . he . . . will,” Sergei said, and then he lost consciousness.

“Stay away . . . D,” Juke added. His hands came free of the bars, and he toppled in front of a broken chair.

“I took precautions to keep the smell from spilling outside,” the mayor remarked. “You’ve only begun to serve my purposes.”

The old woman’s unsightly hand reached for the lock; it came free with surprising ease. Catching it so it wouldn’t make a sound, she set it down on the floor and entered the trio’s cell.

Looking down at the slumped forms of Juke and Sergei, she said, “What a vulgar pose!”

They were bent over not unlike men offering up prayers.

In her hand the old woman held three vessels.

“Each has a different effect. If by some chance you should be rescued, D shall find himself forced to fight me on four fronts. And if you aren’t rescued—well, I also have a plan for that contingency.”

And then she took the vessels and poured their contents into the mouths of the three men. Three different aromas mixed in the air, creating a mysterious scent.

After she finished with the sleeping Gordo, the old woman put the lock back where it’d been and went to the opposite side of the corridor—where she entered Rosaria’s cell.

As she took the lid off a fourth vessel, she felt something on the nape of her neck.

“Huh?”

She turned to look, but there was no one there. Although she’d gotten the feeling she was being watched, apparently she’d been mistaken.

“How unfortunate,” said the mayor. “I can’t even spare you, Sleeping Beauty.”

A golden liquid was poured between the young woman’s blood-less lips.

Presently, Mayor Camus grinned like a little girl and called for the guards, but after she’d left, a certain figure appeared without warning in the narrow passageway. It looked for all the world like Rosaria. But wasn’t that Rosaria lying there in one of the prison beds?

Though the figure in the corridor gazed quietly but forlornly at her own sleeping self, her eyes suddenly became clear with intent and she started forward without a sound. Ahead of her lay a stone wall. Moving without hesitation, she was just about to hit that wall when the door in it opened and a guard came in. It was time for his appointed rounds. For an instant the two figures overlapped, then parted again. Rosaria had passed right through the man.

“Huh?” the jailer exclaimed, turning around, but by then Rosaria had already disappeared through the stone wall. Trembling, he slapped himself with both hands. He then went over to Rosaria’s cell with long strides, peered in, and got a relieved look on his face.

“Must’ve drunk too much of those Tudor spirits,” the jailer said, speaking aloud the most common explanation when a brush with the unbelievable threatened to fracture the mind. He then slumped back against the bars and let out a deep breath.

The smell that’d hung in the air had vanished without a trace.

“I don’t know what it is, but I get the feeling this isn’t gonna go off well,” the man said. Like his life up until now, his tone was small and timid, but somehow he had absolute faith in these words.

 

II

 

The leaden clouds that covered the sky at dawn still lazed about as noon approached, showing no intention at all of moving on. Thinking of the ceremony to come and the odious tasks in its wake, some of the men and women in the village had dour expressions, and they were busily scolding the children who ran around like mad. The guillotine that they’d worked through the night to erect towered proudly in the square, with a thick, sharp blade sitting at the top of two wooden uprights. In the simple hut beside it, the executioners sat sipping coffee and looking disdainful.

Ten minutes before the execution, Juke and Sergei were led out of the jail. Rosaria and Gordo had jailers on either side of them to hold them up. The road to the square had been packed on both sides with villagers. Their eyes gleamed with excitement—out on the amusement-starved Frontier, even a grisly death was a wonderful show. As the four condemned and their jailers moved, the people moved with them. Some acted up a bit, swinging axes and knives, but the guards carrying firearms soon put an end to that.

Mayor Camus stood before the guillotine. In her heart of hearts, she didn’t really know if D would show up. There’d been no way to let him know for certain the day and time of the execution, and despite what she’d told Juke and Sergei the previous night, she wasn’t entirely convinced he would come to their rescue. She’d intentionally postponed the execution one day so that D might learn about it. She couldn’t say for sure that this would work . . . which meant that these four would be decapitated for no reason at all, but this terrifying woman wasn’t concerned by that. If that came to pass, slaying D by her own hand would become problematic, but she possessed overwhelming self-confidence.

The Duke of Xenon and Grand Duke Mehmet were, of course, thickheaded men who’d attained their positions through brute strength alone. They lacked intellect; this was no longer an era when muscle was pitted against muscle. And the way Dr. Gretchen saw it, D was the same as those two, in which case her own wisdom would more than suffice for slaying him. All that remained was to cross paths with him. She’d think of another way to take care of him when she did.

The four prisoners reached the bottom of the scaffold. The hue of the clouds seemed to grow a good deal duller and heavier.

“There’s no point in a whole lot of useless chatter. Let’s get right to it,” declared Mayor Camus. “First will be—”

“Me,” Juke said, puffing his chest.

“We’ll start with the girl.”

“You bitch—what are you, a Noble?” Juke shouted as he tried to grab hold of the old woman, but the jailers promptly wrestled him down. “Kill me first! Do the woman later.”

“This is hardly the place for a display of manly compassion,” Mayor Camus said frostily, taking the chin of the limp Rosaria in hand and raising her face. “Fast asleep. It would be best for her if we got this over quickly, while she remains so. Set her up.”

“Stop!”

Juke and Sergei continued to protest, but they were held hand and foot, and there was nothing they could do as Rosaria went up the wooden stairs, supported by a man on either side. There were thirteen stairs.

On reaching the top, one of the jailers lifted the upper lunette, a wooden bar that had an opening in the center of its lower side. An eight-inch-thick log that’d been brought out expressly for this purpose was set in the hollow in the lower beam, and then the upper one was lowered again. After locking both halves in place, the jailer quickly made his way over to a wooden lever.

A stir went through the crowd like a wave, and it brought a silence that spread across the square.

Well aware of the spectators’ gaze, the jailer waited a moment before pulling the lever. The sound of the falling blade mixed with that of friction from the rope. When the protruding section of the log was cleanly bisected and fell into the basket below, a cry of excitement went up from the crowd, which was clearly impressed.

Raising one hand to acknowledge the throng, the jailer went over to his partner—who’d been drilling him with an envious stare—and with his help bent Rosaria over before the lunettes. The entire process of setting her in place in the same manner as the log was carried out in an extremely professional manner.

Once more, silence returned to the square. Nothing had disrupted the event yet, and everyone hoped the same could be said for the rest of it.

Needless to say, lookouts had been posted around the village, their eyes agleam to keep from missing even the smallest thing. Not so much as an insect was to get through.

The jailer’s hand grabbed hold of the lever. He gave it a rough pull. An atrocious whine dropped from heaven toward the earth.

This was the moment.

The guillotine floated up into the air, scaffold and all. Even the supports that were sunk in the ground pulled free with ease, and the soil they sent flying followed right along after them. A black hole had suddenly appeared in the sky fifteen feet above the guillotine. Before the villagers had even noticed it, the hole began sucking up everything in the area: the guillotine, its blade, Rosaria, and even the jailers on the platform. Still not knowing what was happening, Juke and Sergei also floated up into the air. Unwilling to relent, their jailers started after the men.

Mayor Camus alone saw what was really happening.

“A space eater?” she muttered.

Grand Duke Mehmet alone could control them. Was he interfering with the execution?

“Don’t let them—” the mayor began to shout, but she gave up before she got to the word escape.

Not even the space eater in question knew where its hole would lead. The end of time or the bowels of the earth—wherever it went, anything sucked into it now would be lost forever.

When her thoughts had progressed to this point, she finally began to act like a leader, shouting, “Everybody, run away! You’ll be sucked into the hole!”

Before her words could serve as a guide for those running around aimlessly, they were instead drawn up along with the villagers being sucked toward the void.

 

 

In the woods about five hundred yards from the outer wall of the village, a figure in black sailed down from a particularly tall tree like a mystic bird. More than the way he landed without a sound, it was the way the hem of his coat spread like an ebony blossom just before he did so that made his identity clear at a glance. It was D. In the kingdom of intertwined shadow and light that was the woods, he could be described as a dazzling figure in black—and the figure beside him in equally gorgeous hues watched him with a suspicious yet enraptured gaze. Her expression seemed to inquire, What do you intend to do?

Asking nothing and being told nothing, Lady Ann had merely followed along diligently after D. Though D had said it would be better to have the girl around, he made no attempt to make use of her. And that actually hurt the darling little girl.

“Five seconds to go,” a hoarse voice from the vicinity of his left hand told him. D’s left hand was held up against his chest with the palm facing out. “Three . . . Two . . . One . . . Now!”

A small lump shot from the palm of his hand. A little bug. Flying a good fifteen feet through the air, it landed on a bush and devoured itself.

It was at that moment that a hole opened like a lazy black swirl. The tiny gap grew larger, and a second later the most incredible thing flew out of it. What should make the earth shudder and smash the grass flat but a brand-new guillotine that stuck into the dirt at an angle! Following that, people quickly piled on the ground one on top of another, forming a small mound.

“Exactly forty people,” the left hand reported, sounding quite pleased. “Oh, there they are. Rosaria, Juke, and Sergei. Why, even Gordo’s safe and sound. That was flawless timing. I hope you appreciate it.”

D ignored the hand. He squatted down beside Rosaria to take her pulse and check her pupils, and then he moved on to Juke.

After seeing to all four, D put the lot of them over his shoulders—they had to be between six and seven hundred pounds. Of course, this sort of thing must’ve been natural for a Noble, because Lady Ann didn’t look at all surprised.

Not even glancing at the remaining villagers, D put the village behind them. After all, these were people who’d been on the edge of their seats waiting to watch a girl get decapitated.

Outside the village a cargo wagon and horses were waiting—they’d been purchased early that morning at a neighboring village. Putting the four people in the vehicle, D got into the driver’s seat and took the reins. The team of four cyborg horses ran as if entranced by the bewitching beauty of their master.

“How did you manage to do that?” Lady Ann asked from between the driver’s seat and where the other four lay, her head cocked to one side. She was referring to how he’d gotten the four of them to appear from the hole the space eater had chewed through space.

Strangely enough, she got an answer quite quickly. From D’s left hand.

“Everything sucked into a hole created by a space eater ends up flying off into the depths of time and space. It takes precisely ten seconds for that to happen. It’s exactly the same as the way a person or animal needs time to chew before they swallow their food. And if another space eater opens a hole in a different spot at the instant the first reaches the time limit, everything that was sucked up automatically gets blown out through the new one. However, it takes superhuman skill to do that. I take it you saw the last three or four villagers who came out. They were pretty much reduced to protoplasm. Well, the good news is he was only interested in these four anyway.”

As soon as the left hand’s lengthy discourse ended, Lady Ann muttered pensively, “Controlling space eaters, of all things . . .”

The two bugs in question were ones Grand Duke Mehmet had launched at the newly risen D back in the ruins. D had bisected them instead of dodging them, and by funneling the power of his left hand into them, he’d managed to bring them back to life. This was possible in part because the bugs had an inherently tenacious life force. Nothing up to this point was particularly strange, but space eaters were not easily trained—it was impossible to predict when one would begin to devour itself. On account of this, the number of incidents where people trying to catch the bugs had been sucked instead into their holes were innumerable. In addition, no one but the most accomplished insect wranglers would ever attempt to keep and breed them. The techniques of working with space eaters were a closely guarded secret that was spoken of only in the world of darkness. Yet D had done it easily enough.

“How could you . . .” Lady Ann began, her eyes and cheeks colored with admiration.

“His old man’s special, you see. There’s pretty much nothing any Noble can do that he can’t. Gaaaah!”

The voice died out there, sounding like it’d been strangled, and, after a short time had passed, D unballed his fist.

In the meantime, and even after that, Lady Ann’s doll-like eyes swam with curiosity and anxiety as she pondered something. With a sort of sudden awakening, she then said, “You can do anything the Nobility can, and your father is special . . . Could it be you . . . Your highness is . . .”

As she murmured this, the wagon swerved off the road and started down into the valley on the right-hand side, its tires leaving ruts behind them. Keeping an eye on the steadiness of the cyborg horses that galloped down a steep and narrow path without any sign of danger, Lady Ann soon realized that it was the influence of D at the reins that allowed them to do so, and the girl’s eyes flickered with a deeper gleam of admiration.

Between trees that arched their branches like the legs of gigantic insects, the toppled ruins of a stone fortress seemed to lie humbly under the protection of the boughs. With this as their backdrop, they came before long to a place where there was the roar of a torrent and the dance of white spray. It was a waterfall.

The cyborg horses crashed right into the curtain of water, which was easily three hundred feet high and thirty feet wide, sending water splashing wildly before they reached the massive cavern that lay behind the falls.

III

 

With an area of at least ten thousand square feet and a ceiling some sixty feet high, the immense cavern was something Sergei had heard about before. He said it was the remains of an extremely ancient civilization he’d read about in old documents—a civilization that antedated the Nobility. It was said to be hidden behind a large waterfall and that from long ago those living nearby had been afraid to approach it, so he maintained that it should remain exactly as it’d been for the last ten thousand years. Of course, D had discovered this place because of his ultrakeen senses, but the presence of the cavern was extremely difficult to detect from outside—even at close range. While General Gaskell’s assassins might be a different story, this would most definitely keep them safe from any pursuers from the village.

The interior was just a vast space without a hint of any ancient civilization.

On seeing the strangely smooth surface of the ground and walls, the left hand remarked, “This was melted. Must’ve been blasted with an ultraheat ray of more than a hundred thousand degrees for over a minute. That’d be the Nobility’s doing. They tried to completely wipe out every trace of any civilization older than their own.”

For a while D rode around inspecting the cave on a cyborg horse he’d unhitched from the wagon, and then he returned to the vehicle and laid the four humans out on level ground. When he put his left hand against their foreheads, Juke and Sergei woke up immediately.

D turned his gaze to Lady Ann.

“Yes?” she said eagerly. “Can I do anything for you?”

Though the look he gave her was cold as ice, to the girl it seemed for all the world like a loving glance from the man of her dreams.

“Get him up,” D said, tossing his chin in Gordo’s direction.

“Of course, I’ll be happy to,” she replied.

“She can set him right?” Sergei asked with a dull expression of astonishment.

“Why’d you let it go until now?” Juke asked, blinking.

“If I’d told her to fix him before, do you think she’d have done it?” D said to them. “If I’d tried to force her, she may have taken her own life.”

“Precisely!” Lady Ann cried out. Her voice quivered with excitement. “A Noble would rather plunge into the fires of hell than live with the disgrace of having benefited their foe. Had I been forced to save the very opponent I’d defeated, I would’ve chosen destruction right then and there. Ah, D, you understand me all too well!”

As the girl folded her pale and dainty hands in front of her chest with satisfaction, Juke and Sergei stared at her, dumbfounded, and then shifted their gaze to D.

“Be quick about it,” D told her with his usual gruffness, and then he put his left hand to Rosaria’s brow.

“It’s bad, as I suspected. This is a curse,” the hoarse voice said. “The only thing you can do is finish off the one who did this to her—Gaskell.”

Although Ann had listened to the left hand in silence, she inquired somewhat angrily, “Just who is this woman, anyway?”

“There’s no way you would know her,” D replied.

Ann shook her head from side to side, saying, “No, this woman came while you were asleep back in the ruins. She told you about today’s execution.”

“A doppelgänger?” his left hand muttered.

Such creatures weren’t particularly rare on the Frontier. However, most of them were projections that committed malicious acts against the wishes of the person they mimicked—in many cases they were that person’s negative side. If this applied to Rosaria, then would bringing her along on this trip be tantamount to setting out with a belly full of poison?

Perhaps Lady Ann had reached the same conclusion, because for the first time in an age, a hint of cruelty well suited to the girl flitted across her lips.

“This is a dangerous woman. I shall dispose of her,” the girl said.

Her right hand had already been raised to strike, and scythes like nails stretched from her fingertips. They whistled through the air toward the windpipe of the sleeping woman, only to halt in midair with a sound like a hard slap. The black-gloved hand that held her wrist belonged to D.

“Kindly unhand me,” the girl said, gnashing her teeth and writhing with frustration, an intense look on her face. It was the face of a woman out of her mind with love. It was nauseatingly ugly and beautiful beyond measure at the same time.

“How ridiculous!” she fumed.

As soon as the Hunter’s left hand touched the scruff of her neck, Lady Ann collapsed on the spot.

“I won’t allow this . . .” the fearsome little darling muttered as if goading herself on, her shoulders heaving with each breath. “Any woman who tries to come near you . . . I can’t allow to live . . .”

How did the beautiful Hunter feel listening to the girl’s groans of brutal honesty? Not even glancing at her, he told her, “Wake up Gordo.”

He then turned to Juke and Sergei and said, “What do you want to do?”

“What do you mean?”

The two looked at each other.

“You don’t have any cargo to deliver to the other villages now. And if we part company, Gaskell won’t be after you any longer.”

“Good plan. Let’s do that,” Juke said with a grin, but then he got serious again. “Are you still under contract with us?”

“Of course.”

“Then help us out here. We’re gonna go get our wagon and merchandise back.”

“Hey, hold on a minute!” Sergei cried out in a tone that could only be described as tragic. “We’re going back to that village again? That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard!”

“We’re transporters. We get looted and nearly killed, so you think we can call it a day? Those other villages are waiting on pins and needles for that cargo to arrive.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Say your daughter is dying. Medical supplies from the Capital could save her. But a bunch of useless transporters come along, heads hung low, crying about how all their goods got stolen and begging forgiveness. You think you’re just gonna clap ’em on the back and tell ’em, ‘Oh, that’s okay’?”

The man had a piercing gaze trained on Sergei, who scratched his head uncomfortably.

“I get you. You’re perfectly right.”

“Damn straight he is!”

Turning full speed in the direction of that heavy voice, Sergei let out a joyous cry of, “Gordo!”

“Hey, you came to?” Juke said, following Sergei’s lead and running over to his compatriot.

“Yeah. As you can see, I’m right as rain!”

Now sitting up, the bearded man smiled grandly as he flexed his muscles.

“Hey, Sergei!” he called out to his colleague.

“What is it?” Sergei replied, but no sooner had he brought his face closer than a sudden punch landed noisily against his jaw.

Though he dropped to his knees, he somehow managed to keep his torso upright, nursing his chin as he shouted, “What the hell was that for?”

“Regret what you said now, you big idiot? Any courier who’s more worried about his own safety than the goods he’s carrying is a waste of skin. And that’s the kind of talk you were spilling a second ago. You ever try to turn tail again, and you’d better be ready for the consequences!”

“Okay! I get it! I get it already!” Sergei shouted with a pained smile. “Well, if the two of you aren’t just brimming with a sense of duty! You’ll never live to a ripe old age.”

“Neither will you, dummy,” the other two sneered back.

“How about giving some thought to how to retrieve it?” D said, his words bringing them all back to their senses.

And then, behind the roaring falls, a visage so handsome it seemed to be from another world and three relatively average faces alternately spoke in hushed seriousness or collided in heated debate, finally coming to a consensus when the light outside was fading in hue.

 

 

“I wonder if he’s coming?”

“No, he won’t come.”

“Oh, yes, he will.”

These three opinions mixed in the air, melting together as two travelers and an old woman stared intently at each other’s faces.

Although they were disguised as middle-aged travelers, there could be no containing the intensity of their eyes or the inhuman stateliness that spilled from every inch of them. It was Grand Duke Mehmet and Roland, the Duke of Xenon. An hour earlier they’d left the village, which was in chaos following the incident with the space eater, and climbed to the top of a hill to the north. The silhouettes of birds skimmed across a sky deep blue with the approaching dusk. Their conversation focused on the fate of D and the transporters, and now the trio was of differing opinions.

“Why would they come back to the village where they nearly lost their lives just for their wagon and its cargo?” Grand Duke Mehmet said. Not only his lips but his whole face as well twisted from time to time due to the pain that shot through his arms and back—apparently the pain of the gigantic marionette losing its limbs had been transmitted to his own body.

“He’ll come,” the Duke of Xenon asserted. “I hear that for those who live on the Frontier, death is preferable to the shame of not fulfilling your professional obligations. The way I see it, they’ll definitely return to get their wagon and their goods.”

“You seem well informed as to the human way of life,” said the old woman—Mayor Camus, who was in fact Dr. Gretchen—as she glanced briefly at the Duke of Xenon’s face. It was a sarcastic look, and an equally sarcastic tone. “But this time it serves you well. I also believe the humans will come back. I have no idea why D is traveling with them, and he may be another matter entirely, but the three men will return.”

“If they do, then good,” Grand Duke Mehmet said, looking up. “The Duke of Xenon and I waited outside the village since early this morning. And we swore to ourselves that if D or anyone working on his behalf were to come, this time we would deliver them unto death. But who would’ve thought—I mean, who could’ve imagined he’d do it in such a manner?”

The grand duke removed the patch from his right eye.

In the direction of his gaze a number of birds circled and soared. Suddenly, one of them stopped beating its wings and went into a steep dive as if enamored of the ground. Less than a second later it was joined by a second—and a third. Once the poor birds had disappeared somewhere in the distant woods, Grand Duke Mehmet finally let out a breath and put the eye patch back on.

The power of a look alone—the murderous intent that radiated from his eyes—knocked birds in flight from the sky. This was a perfectly natural occurrence for a member of the Nobility, as was evinced by the fact that the expressions of his two fellow Nobles didn’t change in the slightest.

But the ferocity of the grand duke’s rage and the reason for his mood were painfully clear. They’d been bested using space eaters only the grand duke could control. Moreover, he could only imagine that the bugs in question were the same ones D had cut in two. If so, the responsibility for this tremendous setback all lay with him—Grand Duke Mehmet. That was the source of the rage that caused him to knock birds dead from the sky.

“Though I understand your anger, there is no need for the two of you to engage him once again,” Mayor Camus/Dr. Gretchen said, gazing at the two men.

The indignant looks she drew from them were a response to the undercurrent of derision in her words.

“What do you mean by that?” Roland, the Duke of Xenon, inquired softly.

“What I mean is that I’ve already taken measures. Measures only I might take.”

The men exchanged glances. Though each was an incomparable warrior, they needed no demonstration of this murderess’s skill with poisons. The clouds of discomfort that welled up in their hearts began to take shape, telling them that this woman, of all people, might be able to do it alone.

“What kind of measures?” the duke was prompted to ask, which in itself revealed his state of mind.

“It’s a secret,” Dr. Gretchen replied, true to form, and then she looked up at the rolling blue sky and stretched. “If D should fail to return, then there is someone already under my spell—and that spell is eating its way into them. Ah, the sunlight we cursed for so long feels so good today! There’s something to be said for the daytime, isn’t there?”

One might even say there was an innocent joy in her eyes, but then those same eyes abruptly narrowed as she said, “Oh, there goes a flock of birds. Winged psychopomps, I believe. They’re flying twice as high as the ones the grand duke struck down with his glance just now. Can you do the same to them, Grand Duke Mehmet?”

The man with the look that killed turned away in a snit. Not surprisingly, it was beyond his ability.

“And you, Duke of Xenon?”

As she asked him this, the traveler in red hauled back with his right arm as if to hurl a javelin. At some point, grotesque armor had come to sheathe him from the elbow down to the tips of his fingers. He swung his empty right hand. But the sound that ripped through the air wasn’t that of a hand.

It rose higher. And higher. And higher still.

“You scored a hit,” Dr. Gretchen said with squinted eyes.

About twenty seconds later, it became abundantly clear that a number of the avian shapes were falling. They dropped. Ignoring the rotation of the earth, they landed right in the center of a circle formed by the trio. Roughly a dozen winged psychopomps had been pierced through the breast and out the back by an unseen spear high above the earth.

“Remarkable,” Dr. Gretchen said with a smile. And remaining in Mayor Camus’s form, she said, “But that was only fifteen of them. From six miles away, the Duke of Xenon’s spear could do no better than fifteen birds out of a hundred.”

She punctuated this with a haughty laugh.

“You seriously intend to say you could do better, Dr. Gretchen?” the Duke of Xenon asked, flames of outrage covering him from head to foot like a suit.

“But of course, my good duke—allow me to demonstrate.”

The old woman raised her left hand. A golden ring set with a purple stone glittered on her ring finger. When she flicked the stone up, a mistlike strand rose from the setting and climbed into the air.

Ten seconds passed. Twenty.

Grand Duke Mehmet and Roland, the Duke of Xenon, exchanged despicable grins that hardly suited the vaunted Nobility. They knew what Dr. Gretchen was trying to do. However, there was no way any poison on earth could reach thirty thousand feet into the atmosphere without dispersing. Especially not when what had risen from her ring had been a gas.

The smiles of the pair vanished. For Dr. Gretchen had looked up at the heavens. And laughed.

As she laughed, she made an easy leap, and then a second—and had bounded thirty feet away.

“Stand back!” she told them.

Grand Duke Mehmet made a leap that carried him thirty feet as well.

And a second later, all over and around the Duke of Xenon—who’d been left behind—there was the successive thudding of impacts like the crashing of angry waves, and the Nobleman was shrouded in a crimson fog. The Duke of Xenon had been enveloped by his exoskeleton, but suddenly his shoulders and head were struck and countless chunks went flying everywhere. Beaks. Heads. Eyes. Talons. Wings. Feathers. They were birds. Having plummeted thirty thousand feet, the birds noisily thudded against the duke and the ground. The fog was blood.

“That’s all of them aside from your fifteen,” Dr. Gretchen said off in the distance. “I’ve also arranged to use this virulent poison against D—it’d been dispersed by the wind, dissolved into the air, and diluted to but a millionth of its normal strength when it reached those unfortunate birds.”

The doctor spun around.

“Run if you like. Hide under a rock somewhere. First I shall cover the ground for three miles with the corpses of anything that flies.”

And just as the old woman had said, for the next few seconds birds, insects, and reptiles—anything that flew—dropped by the tens of thousands to blanket the ground around them with their corpses.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hideyuki Kikuchi was born in Chiba, Japan, in 1949. He attended the prestigious Aoyama University and wrote his first novel, Demon City Shinjuku, in 1982. Over the past two decades, Kikuchi has written numerous horror novels, and is one of Japan’s leading horror masters, working in the tradition of occidental horror writers like Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King. As of 2004, there were seventeen novels in his hugely popular ongoing Vampire Hunter D series. Many live-action and anime movies of the 1980s and 1990s have been based on Kikuchi’s novels.

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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Yoshitaka Amano was born in Shizuoka, Japan. He is well known as a manga and anime artist, and is the famed designer for the Final Fantasy game series. Amano took part in designing characters for many of Tatsunoko Productions’ greatest cartoons, including Gatchaman (released in the U.S. as G-Force and Battle of the Planets). Amano became a freelancer at the age of thirty and has collaborated with numerous writers, creating nearly twenty illustrated books that have sold millions of copies. Since the late 1990s, Amano has worked with several American comics publishers, including DC Comics on the illustrated Sandman novel Sandman: The Dream Hunters with Neil Gaiman, and Marvel Comics on Elektra and Wolverine: The Redeemer with best-selling author Greg Rucka.