Chapter One

Chapter One

Three days had passed since Setsura had been sucked inside Tonbeau’s body. In that short span of time, several significant events were unfolding in the world outside Shinjuku.

Fifty terrorists planning an attack on a solar energy research facility in Europe set out from the Middle East.

A nuclear reactor under construction in Mozambique melted down, exposing a thousand people to deadly amounts of radiation.

The world’s first semi-permanent deep-sea oceanic research center was established over a mile down the Marianas Trench off the Philippine Islands, but disagreements over leadership issues fueled an ongoing secret feud between Japan, France and the United States.

Unexpected wildfires scorched twenty-five thousand acres of old-growth forest in Quebec province in Canada and had not yet been extinguished. The cause was traced to a malfunctioning ranging laser on a British reconnaissance satellite. The Canadian government claimed it was deliberate, in retaliation for the denial of fishing rights off the coast of Newfoundland. The dispute was ongoing.

In Tokyo, a thief stole into the official residence of the prime minister, released canisters of laughing gas, and with the personnel debilitated by the chemically-induced mirth, left behind a letter that only said, “Borrowed it.”

What had been borrowed left the prime minister and the cabinet of the ruling party trembling with fear. The SDF explosives recovery team was immediately mobilized.

And meanwhile, in Shinjuku—

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything back?” asked Tonbeau Nuvenberg, during her daily visit to the hospital.

From a corner of the gloomy Resurrection Room came the answer, “Unfortunately, no,” said the Doctor, his strangely beautiful voice more haunted than usual.

“The mayor had me in for a chat today. He says hello. After this incident is tidied up, he’s going to recommend that I be granted official certification as a witch. Hey, consider the possibilities! Open chain of Czech-style divination shops and cash in on all those idiot tourists!”

The fat lady did a little dance.

“How is General Ryuuki faring?” Mephisto asked.

Rare for him to inquire about somebody not in his care. Ryuuki was his vampiric sire, something Tonbeau was still in the dark about, though she probably wouldn’t care deeply one way or another if she knew. Finding out that his blood had been taken by a vampire had panicked her for about five minutes.

She was highly—perhaps horrifyingly—adaptable. It was doubtful at this point if she had any idea what “tidying up” this “incident” would actually involve.

“Aw, gentle as a little puppy. The doll girl has taken a liking to him. She waits on him hand and foot.”

“In that case, it would appear that Princess has not been in contact with him.”

“No surprise there, what with the way she’s been jonesing after Setsura.”

“That woman is the epitome of whimsy. So that might not necessarily be the case.”

“Naw,” Tonbeau said with great confidence. “He’s out of the frying pan and into the fire. She’s also the epitome of a little lust bunny. Things must be getting very sticky for Setsura about now.”

Usually a woman with an apparently poor grasp for the meaning and effect of her words, she interrupted herself at that point. “Man, it’s cold in here,” she said, hugging her shoulders.

“You’d best get on home and look after Ryuuki like a hawk,” softly advised the voice in the darkness. “He cannot refuse a command from Princess. When that happens, the doll girl could not handle him on her own.”

“True, true. I’d better be on my way.”

As if she’d come here only to boast of her good fortunes, the witch turned herself around, like a dump trunk in a narrow alley. Keeping Princess’s retainers on a tight leash would go a long way to “tidying up” this incident.

She stopped and look back. “By the way, what are you up to, Mephisto? The receptionist tells me she hasn’t seen hide nor hair of you for the past three days. How’s that vampire transformation going for you?”

“I am fashioning a certain something.”

Tonbeau felt the hairs inexplicably stand up on the back of her neck. “What?”

“You will see soon enough.”

“Yeah, but I’d rather find out now,” Tonbeau said, turning all the way around.

“Now is not the right time to make any announcements.”

“Not the right answer.” The witch rolled up her sleeves, exposing her hamhock-sized arms, the product of washing and cleaning and assorted heavy lifting. “No lover of mine can remain silent on such a subject. Out with it. Or I’ll start making a nuisance of myself around here.”

“Who is whose lover here?”

“You are.”

Tonbeau answered in a tone of voice that suggested all was according to the will of God. She jabbed her hands through the blue darkness. An invisible miasma spilled from her crooked fingers tracing a whirlpool in the air.

The opposing reaction was—silence. “Hah!” Tonbeau waved her hands.

The flash of lightning cast a purple glow across the azure gloom. The bright, jagged bolts coursed again and again through the blue arch, acquainting the darkness with the unknown light.

“All right, then. I will tell you.”

The fat lady said with a complacent smile, “See? There’s no need to resort to violence as long as we all understand each other.”

“Come this way.”

Without any evident signs of suspicion, Tonbeau stepped into the darkness. The blue glow stained the world around her. Doctor Mephisto glimmered like a white shark prowling the depths of the sea.

Next to him sat what appeared to be a brass mechanism of some sort. Pipes jutted out in all directions from a surface covered with rivets, along with levers and knobs. It looked extremely old.

“What in the world is that?”

“It is a device that governs the summoning powers you demonstrated.”

Tonbeau hiked her eyebrows almost to the vertical. “I don’t believe it.”

“Exactly.” His porcelain smile widened in the azure gloom. “Manipulating the Akashic Records with magic as you have done imposes severe time limits, making necessary the use of a manmade mechanism.”

“An Akashic Records controller, eh?” Tonbeau muttered, her voice like bubbles dissolving in water. “I’d heard of such things being created, but never thought I’d see one for myself. You truly are a hardcore citizen of Demon City. So is it complete?”

“Almost.”

“When do you think it’ll be complete?”

“There is only one bolt left to tighten.”

Tonbeau audibly gulped.

“Time is of the essence. There is another man out there thinking the same thing.”

“You mean that bearded old man called Kikiou.”

“Exactly.”

“Any evidence that he’s still here?”

“Just a feeling.”

“I believe you. But where is he hiding?”

“He is a scientist. In a situation like this, he’ll come up with a scientific solution, for which he’ll need the right tools and the right amount of space.”

“So, I imagine you got informants and the like out there looking for him?”

“The search is being undertaken by a third party.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll take care of it. I’ll bill the mayor.”

“Do as you see best.”

“So when are you fastening the last bolt on that contraption?” Tonbeau asked eagerly. She took an inherent delight in all things strange and out of the ordinary.

“Tonight at midnight.”

In Mephisto Hospital, it seemed that time as well influenced the completion of a mechanical device.

“There’s no way I’m gonna miss that.”

Tonbeau turned her backside to him, swathed in a long skirt, and chuckled. “Hmm, perhaps another machine will spring to life about the same time. The Akashic Records being fiddled with from two separate locations—that should be interesting. I’m definitely not going to miss it.”

Mephisto quietly watched as she clomped off like a big Holstein. This time it was weirdness all around, though a particular spark of concern glowed in his eyes.

Even Doctor Mephisto was anxious about what the future held in store, and Tonbeau had put her finger right on the cause.

Where was Kikiou? In fact, he had secreted himself in a most unexpected location. An underground room made of stone. It resembled a warehouse. A mountain of wooden boxes and furniture lumped together with glass implements and machine parts of unknown origins or purposes.

At a glance, they clearly had nothing to do with the everyday life of ordinary folks.

What was this unordinary warlock doing there? He was building something. The result of which he held in his lips that—boldly, cautiously, delicately—moved and wriggled like no old man’s ever should.

He had lost both arms in his fight with Mephisto. Using only his mouth, he demonstrated a fineness of control a normal person could never hope to achieve with his fingers.

The shape of his creation was impossible to discern, a tangled mass of glass and steel tubes, odds and ends joined and connected with needle and thread, like the useless product of a child’s unbridled imagination.

And yet without hands or fingers, he finished delicately binding two bolts together with colored cords.

“Hmm,” he said, his eyes burning with evil knowledge. “This leaves just one more to join to the body. The deadline is tonight at midnight. Shall I check on the condition of the other?”

With these encouraging words, the great scholar and warlock shoved what appeared to be a pile of junk between the boxes with his feet, and then with a nimbleness that belied his years, proceeded to the door a good six feet above him and started up the stairs.

The door was made of copper. Through the door, a quite narrow hallway appeared. Compared to the vastness of the warehouse, the space was so confined as to make a visitor doubt the architect’s sanity.

Mumbling imprecations to himself, he made his way down the hallways and after a number of twists and turns, exited in another room. A room like a laboratory.

Among the antique instruments and generators were arrayed articles well beyond human imagination. The object Kikiou was after sat on a large lab bench. With no concern for his surroundings, he leaned forward and licked a protuberance wrapped with a coil of wire.

“Energy was injected through the Records. I don’t see a fundamental problem here. As was to be expected.”

His words evaporated into the air. He whirled around like a leaf struck by a brisk wind and hid behind a distiller.

The door opened a second later.

A fat, mountain-sized woman entered the room, followed by a small golden-haired girl. A strange vibe filled the still room as the residents of this house approached the same contraption that Kikiou had been working with.

The fat one twiddled with the same protuberance. “The one Doctor Mephisto made would appear to employ the same mechanism. My big sister wrecked the converter. There’s no sense trying to make it good as new, but if that alone is attached, it should work well enough.”

“I believe you are correct,” said the small girl in the satin dress.

Tonbeau Nuvenberg and the doll girl—they were in the basement of the home of Galeen Nuvenberg in Takada no Baba.

Hiding behind the steel distiller, Kikiou smothered a smile. Three days before, having been driven out of Mephisto Hospital, he had returned here on foot and snuck into this underground room.

The visitor identification device in the foyer, the intruder detection and prevention networks, the lethal, magic-powered weaponry—none of them activated or even clued into his presence—breaking into this house in broad daylight was the kind of trick only a four-thousand-year-old warlock could pull off.

He must have crossed paths with Tonbeau, who was visiting Mephisto Hospital at the time, leaving the doll girl behind.

Kikiou’s objective was a return route to that world. For a variety of reasons the usual methods would not work, making that particular device an absolute necessity.

Even in Demon City Shinjuku, this was the only place that could provide the tools and the raw materials and the workspace to make it.

Nevertheless, this was a high-risk endeavor of incredible boldness and daring, not to mention waiting for the doll girl to drop her guard so he could filch materials from this laboratory and complete his project in the dimly-lit warehouse. And without any arms to boot.

Not noticing this oddest of all squatters, Tonbeau easily picked up the device. “Nothing wrong with leaving it here, but it just doesn’t feel right. Let’s stick it in the warehouse. Heave ho.”

She tossed it to the doll girl, who caught it readily and without a stumble, though it must weigh a good two hundred pounds.

After the two of them left, Kikiou came out from behind the distiller, a cheerful smile on his face. The owners were carting the crown jewels off to the thief’s own lair. If this wasn’t a stroke of extraordinarily good luck, then nothing was.

However, after the two proceeded to the staircase to the warehouse and left for the upper floors, he hurried to the hallway, only to stop in stunned silence in front of the wooden door.

A white cross was affixed to the door. At first glance, it appeared to have been applied with masking tape, but the warlock discerned a design of considerably more enormity hidden inside it.

“The mark of the Yellow Emperor. There’s no underestimating that Czech witch. She got her paws even on this.” His hoarse voice crawled down the long hallways.

The Yellow Emperor was currently considered the most ancient of China’s dynastic rulers preceding the Shang Dynasty, hailing from the mythological era of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.

Five thousand years before the present, the Yellow Emperor give birth to Chinese culture and civilization, invented sailing, the wheel, musical instruments, the ten “stems” and twelve “branches” of the Chinese zodiacal calendar, and discovered a system of medical treatment using the qi pathways, recorded in a book known as the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon.

It was said that when he met the strongest of the opposing tribes in battle, led by the legendary “Flame Emperor,” weapons called “pestles” flew through the air and exploded on contact in the enemy camps, killing and wounding scores at once.

In order to defend against these attacks, the Yellow Emperor had his armies build ramparts miles into the sky. Although they began by simply piling earth and stone atop each other, the Yellow Emperor imbued these earthworks with the rigidity of an iron wall using bands of rough cotton provided by Qibo, the mythological doctor employed by the Yellow Emperor as his minister.

According to volume thirty-nine of the Canon, these bands were divided into fifty-five varieties, ranging from six inches to hundreds of yards wide. Steeped in a special chemical bath, they imbued the most brittle objects with adamantine strength.

The high technology, used on one hand to mend broken bones and on the other to construct cities, died with the Yellow Emperor. And yet here it was in the basement of a house in Takada no Baba, binding the feet of the great warlock.

“That bitch—” He ground his teeth. Not even his qi cannon could break through the impenetrably hard seal of the Yellow Emperor. “I’m powerless by myself. And while I sit here doing nothing, midnight approaches.”

He brooded darkly on his predicament. His spirits lifted almost immediately. His downcast face smiled broadly. An idea popped into his head, along with the name of the person who could cut through this Gordian Knot.

“Ryuuki, you are surely around here somewhere.”