A MERE SKIRMISH

A MERE SKIRMISH

chapter 7

I

—

D traveled around to see the remaining eight aged or infirm
villagers, who were spread out over six households. In less

than an hour, he had pared his list down to one: Sergei Roskingpan.

“He’s also a suspected sleeper agent for the enemy,” the hoarse voice said with apparent relish. “The other two suspects—Miriam Sarai and Codo Graham—weren’t on our list. The sheriff says he’s got someone keeping an eye on Roskingpan, but there’s no telling what’s happened in all this commotion. Well, looks like you could wrap this up neatly, eh?”

The cyborg horse carrying D trotted beside a thin stream. The moon glittered on the water’s surface. D’s form was bleached by a stark glow. A swarm of ball-lightning bugs had just passed by him. Then the glow came back again. They lingered around him for a while, and presently flew off. Darkness tinged his handsome features.

A dilapidated shack of a farmhouse came into view, squatting over the running water. The house leaned to one side, making it look like a parallelogram with a roof set on top. Judging by the way light spilled from its window, its occupant apparently was going about his daily life.

“It’s that old man, Sergei Roskingpan—there’s proof he’s involved in something. Watch yourself.”

To the left of the road was a field of vegetables. D’s eyes could make out orderly rows of globe cabbage against the dark earth. While the Hunter was still forty or fifty feet away, the door of the house opened, allowing faint light and a stocky figure to spill out. It had to be Old Man Roskingpan.

“You’re a sleeper agent, after all, aren’t you?” murmured the hoarse voice in a tone so low D alone could hear it.

The old man didn’t even look in their direction. He cut straight across the street and into the cabbage patch. And then, after sizing up a number of them, he grabbed the biggest cabbage with both hands and pulled for all he was worth. It came out of the ground with ease. Though reeling drunkenly, the old man narrowly managed to maintain his balance, hurrying across the street again and into his house. The door closed.

“What the hell’s his story? He’s a cabbage thief? That’s just pathetic!” the left hand griped.

Getting off his cyborg horse in front of the house, D wound his steed’s reins around the hitching post and knocked on the door.

“What do you want? Get outta here!” the old man shouted as rudely as he could through the door.

“Pardon me,” D said, pushing the door open and going in.

Suddenly, there was a bang. Pioneers had carried Pullois handguns for self-defense, and the one the old man had in hand had just put its first round through the ceiling, where it would need to be patched later. The pistol shook like a leaf as he managed to bring it to bear on D’s chest.

“Stop,” D said, taking a giant stride toward the old man.

“Stay back, you cabbage-swiping bastard!” the old man shouted, tossing in every curse he knew as he fired a second shot.

Though the bullet came out, it didn’t hit D, and the gun exploded. The barrel blew apart, its fragments embedding themselves in the walls and ceiling. Knocked on his ass by both the concussive force and surprise, the old man found his gray hair tinged even grayer by powder drifting down from the explosion.

D clapped his hands together. They were filthy from smoke and gunpowder. By putting the palm of his left hand over the barrel of the gun, he’d caused the gas to reverse direction when the weapon was fired, making it explode. At the same time, his right hand had shielded the old man’s face. The iron fragments stuck in him rained down onto the floor, where there was a foot-and-a-half-wide wooden plank running from below the south window to below the north, probably intended to allow the old man to scoop water from the stream that ran beneath his home.

“Settle down and hear me out,” D said, gazing at the old man. “Or else I’ll eat that cabbage you’ve got there.”

It wasn’t often that the young man joked like that.

The result of the Hunter’s interrogation was that nothing was out of the ordinary. As D’s dark eyes threatened to swallow his soul, Old Man Roskingpan had shaken his head to every question. D excused himself and was about to leave when Roskingpan offered to serve him up some tasty fried cabbage if he’d stay and talk awhile.

“Ah, the folks in town are a cold bunch. When I was a young man, people used to suck up to me and tell me my muscles were the pride of the village and such, but now that I’m old and broken down, only the old lady from the welfare department comes by, and only to chant prayers for my soul. Ha! As if I’d be happy about going off into the next world.”

The Hunter said he was busy and had to be on his way, but the old man caught hold of the belt of his coat and wouldn’t let go. That was partly the reason D took a seat on the patch-covered sofa, but he also wanted to find out about something else.

“Seems it’s been about ten years since you came to the village, hasn’t it?” D asked.

“Oh, you’re right about that. I can tell you all about anything that’s happened since, right down to whose cat’s screwing whose.”

“Have people been going missing over the last decade or more?”

“How’d you know that, young fella? The village worries merchants and sightseers might stop coming, so they keep it pretty hush-hush, but just between you and me, lately about eighteen people a year have disappeared.” Most of them were traveling merchants, he said, but every year or two one of the villagers would also vanish. Age or sex didn’t seem to matter; in one case it was a farmer’s daughter who’d just turned three, and in another the eighty-year-old man who looked after the water wheel. “This is a hard life,” Roskingpan continued. “Most folks say they probably ran off or got taken by some supernatural critter.”

“Didn’t they?”

“Hell, I don’t know. This is the Frontier. Nothing should come as any surprise. The most surprising thing of all is how anybody stays alive.” Belting back the whiskey he’d poured himself, the old man stared at D. “Why does that interest you?”

“When we went to the Black Death’s encampment about thirty miles south of here, there were a lot of human bones buried out there.”

“I’ll be damned!”

“From what I saw, the oldest were from about ten years ago, the most recent from last year. There were marks on them from being cut with a blade.”

Those must’ve been the same skulls that’d been thrown down in front of Toma and his men.

“So, what’s that supposed to mean? Whoever killed ’em buried all their bodies in one place? Wait a second!” Fixing his eyes on the sky as if tracing back through his memories, the old man quickly slapped both hands down on the table and said, “I’ve got it! You said this was thirty miles to the south, right? I know that a weird farmer and his wife lived out there.”

D could recall the farmhouse that’d stood where the Black Death gang had made their encampment for the night. Along with the outlaws’ ammunition, it’d gone up in smoke.

“They settled in there right about the time the disappearances started. I remember being surprised when one year, all of a sudden there’s this house standing out in the middle of that wasteland.”

“Didn’t anyone get suspicious?”

“Well, I guess they looked into it. I didn’t go, but the mayor at the time sent a party to check it out. They went over that farmhouse real good, but it seems they didn’t turn up anything. Anyway, it was thirty miles from here. Those people never came into town, and I didn’t even remember ’em until you mentioned it just now. The rest of the village probably doesn’t remember ’em either. But there was a pile of bones near there, you say. You figure it was them?”

“Couldn’t grow much in the way of crops out there,” D said. “It’d be impossible for a couple to support themselves. What do you think they fed on?”

The old man’s pupils shrank down to pinpricks.

D continued, “Some folks like to live way off from civilization. But there are only two types that choose to live where no one else could.”

“Nobles . . .” the old man said, staring at D.

“That, or else pseudo Nobles.”

“Then you think that couple came into town and got all those . . .”

“If anyone had suspected anything like that, the villagers would’ve gone out there and torched the place.”

The old man didn’t know what to say.

“When someone’s fallen under the influence of the Nobility, either as the genuine article or as a fake, their goal is to drink blood. But those remains were the victims of someone who enjoys killing.”

The old man stiffened, as if something were creeping up the nape of his neck. When the sensation was gone, he said, “Then what you’re saying is this: there’s a murderer in the village, and pseudo Nobles were living thirty miles to the south? Oh, gimme a break! What the hell kind of place are we living in? I need me a drink!”

D watched the man patiently as he loudly rattled a glass and a bottle of booze. Emptying the tumbler he’d filled to the rim in one shot, the old man let out a long sigh. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he said, “You know, I still don’t get it. Are you telling me it’s a coincidence that there was a murderer in town who dumped the bodies out by that farmhouse? I don’t think the culprit would need to haul ’em thirty miles.”

“You’re right.”

The old man shrugged his shoulders.

D dealt the coup de grâce. “Pseudo Nobles don’t grow crops for food. And a murderer has no need for dismembered corpses. Or the blood they spill.”

After a few seconds, the old man made a ridiculous face. “So, he brought the blood of the folks he killed out to the couple . . . and had ’em get rid of the bodies?”

“The killer might’ve gotten something else out of it as well. Thirty miles each way is a hell of a trip just to dump a corpse. Maybe he got some way to get close to his victims without anyone noticing him. Even fake Nobles can use a kind of hypnosis.”

“I see. That way, he could take somebody’s kid right before their very eyes, and they wouldn’t even know it.” The old man looked terribly weary. He asked in a fuzzy voice, “What became of that couple?”

“Their house was blown away. Before that, they’d probably been put down by the Black Death.”

“If so, that’d be one thing taken care of, eh? To think we had freaks like that living just thirty miles from here for a decade!” Some of the tension drained from Roskingpan, but then he said, “Wait a second. That means the village—”

“The village still has a murderer on the loose.”

“Heaven help us. Hey, you’ve gotta find him!”

“My job is handling the Black Death.”

“Does the sheriff know about this?”

“Not yet.”

“What are you doing, then? You’ve gotta let him know as soon as you can. Off with you, now!”

“Actually, I’ve got urgent business.”

“Why, you—okay, I’ll go do it myself!” Running for the door like his life depended on it, the old man stopped halfway there and turned. “And don’t be taking my cabbage!” he said, just to be on the safe side.

—

II

—

Lyra advanced straight down the darkened road on her steed. As for her destination—she had none. However, from the way she rode, she seemed to be in a hurry.

Gil was now a fiend, and he was somewhere in the village. For all she knew, his glowing eyes were watching her as he followed along behind her, ready to strike. Swimming in the same fear all the villagers felt, Lyra went down the moonlit road. It was a summer night, with chirping insects, the gurgling stream, and moonlight raining down. There was no one covering her. Rust had tried to send backup, but she’d refused. “I’ll thank you to remember I’m a warrior.” And with these words, Lyra had set out in her role as bait.

If she were to just wander aimlessly, Gil would see right through the ruse. That was why Lyra rode as if she had somewhere to be. Almost an hour had passed since she’d set out on horseback for the western fields, the most isolated area within the walls. She wasn’t in a hurry. If Gil were watching, he’d undoubtedly do so for a while to make sure Lyra was really, truly alone. Lyra wanted to slay the enemy within their borders as soon as possible and lighten the load on Rust’s shoulders.

If Gil showed himself, she was quite confident she could put him down. Her sole fear was that she didn’t know what Gil’s unique ability was. Most wandering warriors and mercenaries had an ability—a deadly skill they’d acquired. Out on the monster-strewn Frontier territory, these served as a shield to protect them, a tool with which to earn their daily bread, and a weapon to slay their foes. As a result, they absolutely hated to have anyone else learn what their ability was, and in more than a few cases they’d gotten rid of anyone who found out. Lyra hadn’t seen Gil’s ability in action yet.

If not tonight, Lyra was confident he’d come after her sooner or later. The whole point of Gil hiding there had to be to cause chaos. The most effective means of accomplishing this would be to strike at the core of the opposition. In the case of the village of Geneve, the central figures would most likely be the mayor, Rust, Lyra herself, and D. In which case, the logical thing to do would be to get rid of those people, starting with the one that was easiest to strike. And Lyra didn’t have any backup.

Suddenly, Lyra felt her cheeks flushing. Touching her hand to them, she found them hot. “No, it can’t be,” she muttered, sounding half-dazed. She’d been thinking of the mayor, Rust—and then D’s face had skimmed through her mind.

At that instant, Lyra felt a sharp pain spearing through her right shoulder. You’re kidding me! she thought as she dove from the saddle into the woods to her right. Guessing the danger of the situation, her cyborg horse galloped off to safety.

The second she circled around behind a thick tree, she heard a sharp impact on the trunk. Embedded in it was a dart just like the one stuck in Lyra’s shoulder. Swiftly extracting the first dart, the warrior woman threw it down. She was so angry she could’ve spit.

Me, of all people, caught thinking about a man . . .

She focused all her senses on locating her opponent. But she didn’t catch anything. Her foe was one with the darkness.

“Then I guess I’ll just have to flush him out.”

Lyra gave her left wrist a squeeze. A black mass about an inch in diameter fell from her sleeve, landing in her hand. Bringing it up to her lips, the warrior woman blew on it lightly—so lightly it seemed she was just exhaling. Like the weightless fluff of a dandelion, the mass rose into the darkness and was lost.

“Hey, little lady!” a voice called down the road to her. She recognized the bass tone. “What was your name again—Lyla? It’s Lyla, right?”

Lyra turned her face toward an enormous eastern mountain cedar that towered on the opposite side of the road. “It’s Lyra,” she said. Her voice seemed to come from the trunk of the cedar. She’d used a kind of ventriloquism that made her voice echo off an object so it seemed to emanate from a different direction. In some cases, it was possible to make it seem like it came from twenty or thirty yards away.

“Oops, sorry about that. But you’re such a pretty thing. I never paid attention to much but your face. I’m sure you remember a handsome cuss like me—well, I don’t suppose I’m on par with that Hunter, though.”

“Oh, and who might you be?” she asked, throwing her voice five yards ahead of her real location.

“Gil, baby! It’s Gil! I’m a pretty famous mercenary in the southern Frontier sectors. So, what do you say to us getting reacquainted?”

“Sure thing. You can come out whenever you like. I’ll give you a nice, warm welcome.”

“That’s nice to hear. Okay, how about we both come out at the same time?”

“That works for me.”

“Well, step out onto the road on the count of three. Okay? One, two, three!”

Gil’s colossal form appeared far down the road.

“What’s this?” he shouted, pointing in her direction. “I’m the only one who came out? C’mon out here, you coward!”

“It’s not my fault you’re gullible,” Lyra replied, her fingers occupied by the most delicate work. Though she couldn’t move her right arm much, her left hand would suffice. “Goodbye, fake.”

Focusing all her attention on her left index finger, she moved it just a hair.

Gil’s body suddenly blurred. Both arms snapped down by his sides as if he were standing at attention. At the same time, a terrible scream issued from the mouth of the fearless giant of a man. Lyra’s eyes alone could make out the black gore that gushed from his body as the bright blood that it was. The blood streamed from him in perfectly spaced horizontal and vertical lines, marking him like graph paper.

“Try to move and ‘Lyra’s strings’ will just cut into you all the deeper. This foolproof technique was only used on a certain street in a certain city in a long-vanished land—and the sole surviving master of it started teaching it to me back before I can remember.”

As Gil cried out in agony, his eyes quickly began to give off a red glow. 

A slight sadness was seeping into Lyra’s heart, unbeknownst to the warrior woman herself. She hadn’t had anything against the easygoing mercenary.

“Okay, tell me something. If you do, I’ll end this for you quickly. How many of the enemy are in the village, aside from you? Give me the names they’re using and where they live,” the woman warrior said in a tone so cold, it seemed likely to freeze the warm air of the summer night.

“O . . . kay . . .” Gil said, his fragmented words reaching Lyra’s ears. At the peak of his agony, he barely managed to squeeze them out. “I’ll talk . . . So . . . gimme . . . a little . . . slack . . .”

The last word trailed off, and the massive form toppled to one side—or it began to, but it stopped at a sixty-degree angle. It was as if he were snared in an invisible net. In fact, his body actually was wrapped in an unseen net of tens of millions of metallic threads.

Lyra worked her index finger.

“Okay, start talking. I loosened it up some for you.”

There was no answer. The eyes of the massive figure had rolled back in his head, and his tongue was hanging out. Had she pulled it too tight?

Despite her misgivings, Lyra made no move to step onto the road. She was well aware that Gil had shown himself not out of stupidity, but rather because he was brimming with self-confidence. That wasn’t the sort of thing a professional mercenary did.

Once more, she applied force to the threads. Gil’s body twitched, but he didn’t cry out. Lyra narrowed her eyes. Fresh blood was dripping from Gil’s wrist. Though she believed she’d been careful to avoid cutting any arteries, she might’ve made a mistake.

“Guess I’m still not as good as my teacher,” she said. It wouldn’t do to kill this man yet. “A vampire dying of blood loss—sounds ridiculous.”

For a second, she wanted to see what that would look like, and as this thought shot through her brain, Lyra stepped out from behind the tree. The giant was unarmed. Even if he’d been wearing any weapons, he wouldn’t be able to use them, so that made little difference.

“Come to me,” she said, hooking her index finger toward herself.

This time, the giant fell over on his side. Shaking the earth when he struck it, he rolled toward her. Who would’ve thought the lithe beauty that stood there in the moonlight could’ve accomplished all this with just one finger? Lyra’s finger traced a horizontal line, and the gigantic figure halted at her feet. He was eighteen inches from the tips of Lyra’s boots—and her finger had also moved exactly eighteen inches.

“Okay, big boy, open those little eyes of yours and talk to yours truly,” she said to him, sounding disgusted.

Gil opened his eyes. They were burning red.

Lyra didn’t even have time to jump back. She clutched her heart as she dropped to one knee. The reason for this went without saying. Gil had used his ability—the power to kill with his gaze.

“Now, loosen up this spider web of yours,” Gil said gently. The thick tongue that protruded from his lips never stopped moving. It was lapping up the lifeblood streaming down his face. After all, that was the source of limitless power. However, as his tongue slurped, it also bulged out. Lyra hadn’t loosened the net; in fact, she’d made it cut into him even deeper. Gray matter was leaking from his head.

“So . . . we’re playing chicken . . . are we?” Lyra said, grinning. Now chalk white, her face was covered with beads of sweat. “Well? You feel . . . like talking . . . now?”

Gil’s lips contorted. “Don’t . . . make me . . . laugh . . . You want me . . . to kiss you . . . don’t you? Fake or not . . . being a Noble . . . is pretty sweet.”

“It . . . probably . . . is . . .”

“You really . . . want it . . . I bet . . . I should . . . know . . . There are . . . tons of folks . . . who’d like to go . . . from the ones being bit . . . to the ones doing the biting . . . Lots of warriors like you . . . are really . . .”

“I wouldn’t have a problem with becoming one,” Lyra said, falling flat on her face. Her breath was like a thread dragging across the dark earth. “But a kiss . . . from you . . . doesn’t interest me.”

A cry to shake the night spilled from Gil’s mouth. In that instant, his body broke apart into tens of thousands of pieces. A choking stench of blood swirled through the air in a steaming cloud.

The moon crossed the sky over the motionless field, and before long even the scent of blood dissipated. Around that time, a monster caught the scent of blood and worked its ten legs, drawing closer to the bloodied corpse, but suddenly it squealed and dove into the bushes.

A colossal figure had risen. From what seemed to be the head spilled a strange, thick mockery of a voice. “I . . . win . . . Ly . . . ra . . .”

But what was truly strange was the figure’s appearance. While it looked like a human being, the right half of its head was gone, the right arm was missing from the shoulder down, and the left arm had no flesh on the elbow and biceps. These pieces hadn’t been hacked off; they had been removed in neat little cubes, and more cubes of flesh continued to fall away. The bloody fragments were of bone and viscera. If the man were to pick them all up and put them back together like a jigsaw puzzle of the human body, he would probably regenerate. Actually, the figure did bend over and scoop up the fragments spread across the ground. While he did so, more cubes fell off his body, and bright blood dripped everywhere.

“This is the power of a Noble!”

Apparently some parts of him were regenerating, and his voice was back to normal. The figure—Gil—brought his hands up to his eyes. Both hands lacked fingers, and his face lacked eyes—in fact, his head was missing from the nose up.

“Well, I’ll be good as new soon enough . . . See, the retina’s forming . . . and the cornea, too . . .”

When his right hand came away, a face that hadn’t even had a socket now had a gleaming eye.

“I only need the one to stop your heart. No, I think I’ve got something better in mind.”

Lyra lay there face down, and Gil reached for her back with his right hand. His fingers had grown back down to the second joint, but when he tried to put any strength into them, they dropped off at the knuckles.

“Damn, I guess it can’t be helped, then. I’ll have to give ’er the look after all—”

His eye began to glow with a red and unholy light. Lyra’s body twitched faintly in the throes of death.

It was at that very moment that a gunshot was heard in the distant night air. Judging from the time it took to make impact, the shot had come from more than five hundred yards away. A small hole opened in the middle of Gil’s brow. His head exploded.

For a few seconds his gigantic form stood still like an angry temple guardian, but before long it collapsed. Palau had recovered from a similar wound, but Gil’s heart was already sliced into cubes. His regenerative powers as a pseudo vampire were finally overtaxed. He literally fell to pieces. A small mound of cubes remained in the middle of the road; briefly, a crimson mist rose from it, but it soon scattered in the night breeze.

If the average human stride is thirty-two inches, enough time then passed for a person to cover five hundred yards. As if beckoned by the moonlight, two figures appeared from the same direction Lyra had come, two new players stepping onto the stage of night.

—

III

—

Deep in his heart, his blood was racing. Probably the very blackest blood, Billy thought to himself. Though he’d considered trying to stop himself, the weight of the sword stuck in the back of his belt wouldn’t allow that.

“I’m heading out,” he called to Elena through the door to the kitchen, and then from behind him he heard Agnus say, “See you later, Daddy.” The boy stood in his pajamas before the open door to his bedroom, rubbing his eyes.

“Did I wake you? Hurry back to bed. I’ll be back home again soon.”

“Oh, all right,” Agnus replied with a yawn, turning. His too-big pajamas had belonged to his elder brother Jed, who’d died two years earlier. The younger boy had always been rather small, but someday these would no longer fit him. But Billy wasn’t entirely sure he’d live long enough to see that. The villagers weren’t complete idiots.

Elena came out of the kitchen and told him to be careful. Wiping her hands on her apron, she took the doll that hung on the wall by the door and rubbed it over his torso. A prayer for his safe return escaped her dainty lips.

“Why do you have to go out at this hour? There are plenty of other young people in the village,” she grumbled as Billy reached for the doorknob.

“Can’t be helped. This is no time to be making a fuss about age. We’ll be at war soon.”

The second he was outside, delight filled him. All foreboding about his fate disappeared without a trace. Who cared about pseudo Nobles or the Black Death gang? A person had to savor the moment.

A campfire burned down the road. People sat around it. People made of flesh he should drive his steel into, people filled with blood he should spill. As he reached back and felt for his blade, he thought that his eyes were probably ablaze with blood-red light, just like a Noble’s.

—

His run had got the alcohol coursing through him, so Roskingpan’s speech was slurred, and Rust couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, but little by little he pieced together the story of the murderer. Deciding he’d better go talk with D, the lawman was just about to leave his office when two men and a woman brought Lyra in.

“Oh, D—and Codo and Miriam!”

The long rifles they carried made it clear they hunted for a living. Not everyone who lived in the village was a farmer—there was game to be hunted not only in the mountains, but on the plains as well. That’s how it was on the Frontier.

A mercenary who happened to be present was dispatched to the medical center, and then the long-haired Codo Graham explained that the woman and a pseudo Noble had apparently taken each other out.

Codo was an excellent huntsman, and although a mere four years had passed since he’d come to the village, his generosity in buying rounds at the bar with his proceeds after taking down a big animal had made him popular. The only problem was he was good looking and only twenty-six years old, and there’d been repeated whispers of him fooling around with some men’s wives and daughters.

“The guy’d been chopped into stew meat,” Codo continued. “Thanks to our handsome young friend rushing to the scene, we were able to find out who it really was.”

At the sound of a gunshot, D had hurried there. Though the report had been faint, it was no doubt loud enough for the young man to catch.

“Gil?”

D nodded in reply to Rust’s question. “But it was this girl that finished him off. They say she took him down at a range of five hundred yards.”

Rust turned his eyes to the third person—Miriam Sarai, who stood there looking somewhat embarrassed—and then smiled. “Well, that’s not surprising for Miriam. She was born to hunt, and she never misses. I saw her in action on my first day in the village.”

It was a scene from his past that would be difficult to forget. Miriam had stood on the eastern plains with her hunting rifle braced against her shoulder. She hadn’t moved a muscle even as Rust and Lyra approached, and following the muzzle of her weapon, they could find no sign of anything moving out on the vast plain. They stayed there with the strange huntress for thirty minutes, but it was well worth it. With nothing visible for any distance in front of her weapon, it looked as if she fired at a phantom, but when the woman blew into her whistle, a hawklike form flew toward the churning black and silver clouds over the plain, returning before long with a burrow hog the size of a calf clutched in its talons. Judging from its length, Miriam’s gun had a range in excess of two miles.

The physician came immediately from the medical center, declared that Lyra had suffered a minor heart attack, and then helped the mercenary carry her away.

“We’re losing fighting strength,” the hoarse voice jeered faintly, not that anyone else would’ve heard it.

“Sheriff, we just finished our watch on the eastern wall and we’re headed home, but we’re ready to take on a new post immediately if you need us,” Miriam offered. “Just say the word.”

While he appreciated that, Rust told her they were all set at present and that the two of them could head home, sending them on their way with profuse thanks before settling back in his chair with a sigh.

“To be honest, we’re in trouble,” the lawman said, drawing a finger across his neck. “Lyra alone was worth fifty villagers in a fight. We’ll have to rework all our defensive strategies.”

“She’ll be fine by tomorrow.”

“What do you mean?”

“You needn’t worry about her too much. Her heart was about to stop.”

“And you fixed her up, did you?” Rust looked up at D, saying, “I thought you were more than just an average Hunter. Every time I’ve seen you, I’ve turned to ice.”

“Because you’re a pseudo Noble?”

Though the silence seemed to last forever, it was actually broken right away.

“You noticed, did you? When was that?”

“The first time we met.”

“Did I seem as dangerous as all that? I don’t recall ever showing my fangs, and miraculously enough I don’t have fang marks on my neck.”

“Just a hunch,” said the hoarse voice.

“For the love of God, don’t use that voice,” Rust said, waving his hands and grinning wryly. “Do you want to hear the story?”

“Before I do,” D said, turning his eyes toward the door, “could you tell me more about this huntress who can blow someone’s head apart from five hundred yards away on a dark night?”

—

“That was something else, Miriam,” Codo said to her as they walked down the darkened road.

“All your tutelage really paid off,” Miriam replied, a haggard ring to her voice.

“So, the student has surpassed the master? Well, you’ll get a chance to show what you can do soon enough!”

“Who do I have to shoot?”

“Like a travel hawk soaring across the night sky, like a glow wolf racing across the earth.”

Codo used one hand to tap the weapons on his hip. They were silvery disks about a foot in diameter. Made of metal as thin as a sheet of paper, a stack of a hundred of them was only four inches thick. He carried a stack on either hip, two hundred in all, and he was better at hunting with them than with a rifle.

“First of all—D.”

His right hand flashed into action. Reflecting the light of the moon, the gleaming disk sailed away, returning several seconds later. Catching it with ease, he returned it to his hip, saying, “Next, the sheriff.”

His left hand flashed out.

“And finally, the mayor.”

Two gleams of light vanished, then returned.

“Understood.”

Miriam’s reply was dwarfed by a louder sound. Far off in the distance—in the forest more than a thousand yards away—a colossal bole had toppled.

“I’ve had to wait a long time, but it was worth it. And I even found you again, my little protégé.”

Codo Graham was the last of the Black Death’s sleeper agents.