Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Setsura was in a forest. The back of the manor house had a southern exposure. The sunlight streaming through the leaves and branches painted ribbons across the ground. He was perspiring after walking for thirty minutes. The sweat yielded to a cooling breeze that sprang up from time to time, suggesting that fall was waiting in the wings.

Strolling through the dappled sunlight, the melancholic solitude of the figure seemed to beckon the season.

What Mephisto and the Demon Princess were up to right now in their little assignation—he’d thought of leaving a few of his threads behind, but they were who they were and it’d be a waste of time from the start.

“A bit of them bad-mouthing me won’t hurt anybody. But that’ll hardly be the end of it. That man is impossible to get a handle on, especially now.”

He’d probably be more cheesed off knowing that Mephisto was saying the same thing at the moment. Grumbling about the substance of their imagined conversations, Setsura suddenly came to a halt.

The forest parted into a clearing, revealing a pile of rubble. The remains of the collapsed roof and rotting pillars of an old wooden mansion.

“A palace from the Hsia or Shang Dynasties, eh?”

The wind whistled in response to his musings, sending a green wave through the overgrown grass. Perhaps here was where the Demon Princess drank wine with Emperor Zhou and indulged in the debaucheries of the Sumptuous Feast.

“Where the hell is this place?” Setsura wondered, casting his eyes around the clearing.

Light and shadow played across his cheeks. They were a whiter shade than pale, the complexion of an ill man. The qi in his gut was cold and heavy, sucking up his life spirit. And yet at times the sickly flower, assaulted by mold and bacteria and fetid water, was more beautiful than the blooming gardens of summer.

Poison flowed through the veins of this young man whose visage brought to mind a finely crafted but brittle glass. His falling shadow was losing its shape and definition.

Setsura suddenly noticed how tired he was. He had to sit down and think over what kind of world this was. An inclined square pillar in the shape of a bed was planted among the roots of a giant tree.

“Ah, just the thing,” he said with dour cheer.

He stretched out on the stone pillar. When he thought about it, the only occasions he’d had time to rest these past few days was while being treated by the doll girl, and several hours when he was a prisoner of the Demon Princess in her manor house.

It hadn’t been his intent to rest while in the enemy’s clutches but he couldn’t say he regretted it.

He felt the cool hard surface against his back. This was the real thing. As were the overhanging leaves and branches. There was no other word for this world but reality. Beyond those blue mountains, the green hills and valleys probably went on and on.

But for the time being only two people called it home.

Yakou and Mephisto and Setsura were unwelcome guests. What did Princess and the others think of this tranquil, bountiful and endlessly lonely world? What sort of lives did they lead?

His thoughts slowly turned to warm mud and filled his head. His eyelids grew heavy. His right hand rested on his chest. His left arm hung down. He began to breathe the whisper-like breath of sleep.

A young man in black sleeping in the shade of a tree, patterned in light and shadow. In a sublime painting of the scenery, flowers would sing, the wind would reach out to touch him. Who knew that he was the lone warrior capable of saving the world from the evil influence of the vampires?

The body beneath the beautiful face was exhausted and the peaceful picture was in fact a blood-soaked battlefield in repose. A bird sang far away. A cloud scuttled through the blue sky. Time passed. But the sunlight evinced no signs of approaching darkness.

Here time never ended, and this war was an endless war. In a conflict where eternity would determine victory or defeat, who could say whether Setsura would triumph?

Wings flapped above his head. Like an unwelcome omen, the descending silhouette turned into Yakou.

“Get out of here,” Setsura said, not opening his eyes. He could still be asleep.

“Sorry, but I’ve been appointed your watcher.” Yakou shrugged and folded his wings across his back.

“Tell me where the weapons are stored or get lost.” Setsura made the imperious demand in a sleep-voice.

“You want to blow this world up? Those mountains and that lake are real. You’re going to destroy them all by yourself?”

“You’re being awfully sardonic for a traitor.”

Once they were both prepared to rain down blood and fire on this place. Setsura had just entrusted Mephisto with the moon lilies from which the elixir could be extracted that would restore Yakou to normal. But for the time being, he’d be following Princess’s orders.

“C’mon. Don’t be like that. I would feel remiss if I failed to teach you about the true nature of this world.”

“That’s why I can’t stand these expat types. They all fancy themselves wandering Dutchmen, attached to no one country.”

Yakou didn’t take the dig personally. He stood on the root that held up the stone pillar. A gentle breeze floated between them, casting off a glitter and a fragrance where it brushed against the black slicker. He looked down languidly at Setsura, who still had his eyes closed and was breathing slowly, making no effort to scope out his enemy.

Even that strange fragrance could be sensed in the scene.

“Let me leave you with a warning,” said Yakou, as if remembering something. There was no answer. “This is not a good place to sleep. Princess says you’re liable to dream bad dreams.”

“When’s the last time you took a nap?”

“Not ever.”

“Stop letting women tell you what to do. Now and then I become a dream. Don’t you want to see what sort of dream I become?”

Yakou shrugged. “Do as you please.”

“G’night,” Setsura said.

But the night didn’t come. Peals of laughter crystallized into the forms of women darting through the grove of trees. Naked. And naked men running after them in hot pursuit.

Setsura rapped his head with his knuckles. “A dream?”

Or rather, the nightmares Yakou had warned him about.

More laughter reached his ears. He glanced over his shoulder. Castle ramparts soared out of the pile of stones and rubble. Great numbers of men and women peeked out from the gates and drawbridges, their faces given over to the vulgar laughter, focusing on the object of their attention.

“You! Man in black! Get naked too!”

They spoke in Chinese, but the dream rendered the meaning clear.

“You women! What are you doing? Strip off his clothes!” ordered an official wearing the purple robes of high office.

The woman wove through the trees and darted toward Setsura. They must have already coupled with the men, for their bodies were flushed with arousal. Panting, lips wet, tongues lolling from their mouths, like bitches in heat they were ready to swoop down on any man they saw.

When Setsura came into view, they stopped in their tracks. At a certain point, physical beauty crossed all generations and all social contexts and psychological boundaries.

“Which idiot emperor is it this time?” Setsura asked from the stone slab.

“Kill him!” somebody barked.

Setsura saw a long, thin rod streaking through the air at him. Spears. The intent was to skewer him along with the women.

But something funny happened. An invisible hand gathered up the shower of spears in midair, turned it a hundred and eighty degrees, and rained them back in the direction from which they’d come.

The soldiers at the top of the ramparts screamed and ran for cover as the spears clattered down on the parapets and walls one after another.

“Archers! Fire!”

A second later, a cloud of arrows flew from the ramparts. And just as unbelievably, all were returned to sender.

“Not such a bad dream so far,” Setsura said, finally climbing down from the rock. He stood up and turned around. Behind him was some sort of tank. The turret and wheels were painted bright red. The real problem was its source of propulsion—a long, crocodile-like creature crawling on all fours.

It opened its mouth wide. Its body shuddered. The oval scales glimmered in the broken sunlight, casting off a silver glow. But what set it apart from the normal animal kingdom was its thirty-foot length and the Fu Manchu mustache drooping from below its nostrils.

One of those legendary dragons.

The armored soldier riding it cracked a huge whip. The earth shook as the creature surged forward. According to the legends of the Shang and Hsia Dynasties—and further back into the mists of time—in one part of China lived dragons who, in exchange for gold, would level mountains and make the rain fall and contributed to the rise of civilization.

When the Hun attacked from the north they would retaliate without mercy, tearing the enemy asunder with their fangs, and breathing fire that burned them to crisps. Some were still left during the era of the Demon Princess. Or maybe this too was a dream.

The dragon reared up. Its torso was as wide as the outstretched arms of two men. Its chest swelled. With a roaring sound, it sucked in a great volume of air, inhaling the leaves of the trees and clouds of dirt and dust. The branches bent like twigs.

In a flash, Setsura was a black shadow soaring into the sky.

The inward rushing of air changed as quickly into an outrushing hurricane. The legend of fire-breathing dragons turned from dream into reality.

The column of violet flame first mowed down the stands of trees. The women were sent flying to their instantaneous deaths as their bodies thudded into the trunks of the trees and the stone walls of the ramparts. Death as merciful as could be hoped for, perhaps.

The dancing inferno burned the flesh like tissue paper in a kiln, and turned the bones to dust.

Setsura lashed his devil wire around a branch and soared upwards. The earth and the undergrowth and the castle walls themselves seemed to be spitting fire.

The blast flung the men and women from the castle walls. The whip cracked again. The giant dragon wheeled around and fixed its golden eyes on them. Blue teardrops filled its eyes, then gushed out in a torrent. The frothing tide swept inside the castle, catching the onlookers up in the roaring currents.

The tank’s driver roared with laughter. To a dragon rider, the grisly fates of ordinary folk was all comic relief. His attention now turned toward the grove of trees where his target must have hidden himself.

The flooded castle rocked and trembled and the water poured forth.

“Hah!” The dragon rider kicked against one of the scales. The dragon stamped its feet and bounded into the sky. Whether the powers of flight were contained within the dragon, or whether it was equally mysterious to the driver, all that mattered now was that it could fly.

Strange as it may seem, he’d noticed as well that everything in this world, including himself, was somebody else’s dream. Perhaps he was driven by a curiosity about what would become of an enemy vanquished in a dream.

The dragon glided lazily through the burning trees. Charred branches and stumps crumbled at the touch of the driver’s whip. Calculating the arc, he traced a line in the air before them. With a slight shiver, the dragon’s neck lowered, and the fire burst forth at the optimal angle.

The flames descended like a red stream of water. A mile ahead, the crimson wall engulfed the spot the driver had calculated, at the precise point along the path that Setsura had taken.

The driver brought the beast to a halt several seconds later. Among the trees were large stone statues, the work of some previous generation of craftsmen the driver knew nothing about.

They were over thirty feet tall. The dragon banked and approached a statue of a soldier wearing a different kind of armor than what the dragon rider wore. It was cracked and eroded, shot through with fissures. A particularly large crevice ran vertically through the waist, large enough to hold a man.

The driver tried a different approach this time. He kicked against a different scale. The dragon wrapped around the statue like a thick strand of leather. In an instant, its body began to heat, baking the rock. The hard granite took only ten seconds to crumble and pour out of the crevice like sand.

As its body cooked the stone, the dragon’s feet scraped at it like chisels. The rock turned to ashes and the ashes turned to dust. Anybody hiding inside would regret the decision as his bones turned to charcoal.

Praising the dragon’s fine nose for prey, the driver wheeled around the way they had come. The driver’s armor and the tank’s paint protected him from the dragon’s own fierce heat. The dragon lifted its head and looked at the trees to its right.

A stab of fear went through the driver’s chest just as the dragon’s neck separated at its shoulders, not completely but halfway through.

A fountain of blood whooshed upwards. The scarlet liquid, boiling with latent heat, splashed down on the creature’s extremities, sending up a curtain of steam and smoke.

The dragon writhed. Perhaps because of the scales, the invisible blade dug in deeper, opening the wound wider, tormenting the magical beast with the pains of hell. As the turret bobbed like a small boat driven before a tsunami, the driver peeled his eyes for any sign of the weapon or its wielder.

The dragon’s feet struck the earth, and ripped the trees asunder. A mist of blood shrouded the world. The driver lost control and was flung from the turret just as the titanium threads severed the legendary creature’s neck. The scales scattered through the air like gold-plated snowflakes.

Setsura observed the torso writhing in its death agonies from a large tree. He stepped out on a big branch. “Helluva dream,” he said.

“That’s for sure.”

Recognizing Yakou’s voice, Setsura opened his eyes.

Yakou said, “I warned you. What happened to your coat?”

Setsura looked suspiciously at Yakou’s face and touched his chest. He was the same as when he fell asleep, except his slicker was gone.

“You?”

“Don’t start casting aspersions,” said Yakou, rather testily. “Maybe you took it off?”

Setsura cocked his head to the side. “That’s right. In order to deceive the dragon’s sense of smell, I left it in the statue. It must have gotten burned up. In the dream, at least.”

“A dream dreamed in Princess’s world.”

“Can’t a fellow get a good night’s sleep? Without a little Harry in your pocket?

“What’s that?”

“Old school magicians of a sort. What you Limeys call a Subway Sam.”

“I see,” Yakou said with a grin.

His face transformed into the dragon rider’s. His arm flashed down and buried the short sword into Setsura’s throat. The white-hot pain strangled the erupting scream and woke Setsura from his sleep.

A brown shaft was jabbed into his throat.

“Looks like you were having a nightmare,” Yakou said, coolly casting aside the tree branch in his hand.

“Still playing games, dragon rider?”

“Who’s that?”

“Can you prove to me this isn’t a dream?”

Yakou pretended not to understand. “It is all a dream. Don’t you think?”

“I guess so.”

Setsura sat up. He was still wearing his slicker. “How long was I asleep?”

“About a minute.”

“A long nap, that.”

Just then a woman’s scream rent the air.