Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Setsura lifted his head. White light suffused the world around him. There was no night here. He had to rely on his internal clock. And that told him it was ten to midnight.

“The lady is indefatigable. She should be dropping by again anytime now.”

His voice devoid of vim or vigor, he stared at the calm water and the peaceful sky. He was stretched out on a small boat floating in the lake. The craft was equipped with a bed for two, though Takako wasn’t there. Because the Demon Princess had left with her.

Though she had promised not to take the last drop of her blood, Setsura was hardly willing to take her at her word. But neither did he have the means of stopping her.

The light wavered above his head and shattered into a thousand drops that reassembled in human form, as if the brilliant shades and colors were inherent in the light itself.

“Tonight is the fourth night.”

The Demon Princess smiled brightly. The long robe wrapped around her like a rainbow was touched by not a single drop of water. She must have flown here through the air. This was perhaps the same brutal smile that had destroyed three dynasties and consigned millions to a dusty death.

“You’re incorrigible,” Setsura said, scratching around his collar.

“Call it my trademark. Make thousands cling to a red-hot iron shaft, slice open the bellies of tens of thousands of pregnant women, and I’m still game for more.”

“I can’t say I’ve heard a stranger boast. I assume Kanan-san is unharmed?”

“You should care for the condition of your own body more than that girl’s.”

“Oh, shut up,” he said, waving his hand at her with a dismissive gesture, a hand that looked like a piece of sculpture stolen from Madame Tussauds.

“Hoh. So those mortal ambitions are still alive in you. All the better. I’ll drink from you as is. Once you become my servant, all that malice and loathing will persist. You will mourn your outcast state, and that anguish will fill my heart.”

“You don’t have to be such an ass about it,” Setsura said, lying on his back on the bed.

The dazzling waves of color swept across him as Princess covered his body with her own. Her pale fingers undid his collar. Directly above his carotid artery on the left side of his neck, the two small red holes opened up.

Her hot breath and red lips caressed the skin around them. Setsura, the beautiful genie, was being devoured by this creature from hell. Whatever his sacrifice in order to save Takako, that accursed star that Kikiou saw had now fallen to earth.

Three nights had passed since that first encounter, making this night her fourth feeding. And Setsura had run out of recourses. Takako was being held hostage. When, after the first kiss, he demanded that Takako be set free, Princess told him to stop talking such rubbish.

“If I returned that girl to you now, you would hunt me for the rest of your life. Another three days must pass until you are my servant completely. A little patience.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Hardly. I have never done it with a man so cool and collected as you. Perhaps that explains this sense of obsession. But don’t worry. I won’t lay a finger on her. When you become my servant, I will send her forth. Although that city now is a much more energetic place than here.”

The two streams of blood trickling from Setsura’s neck shone in her crimson eyes. Tonight was the last time she would take his blood. From tomorrow evening on, the black and white pair of silhouettes would wander through the beloved darkness.

And so she did not sate her hunger all at once. She pressed her bountiful breasts against his chest, her thighs snaked around his waist. Her slender finger touched his face. And when he pulled away—

“Oh? You find that disagreeable? So you should. As long as the girl is within my grasp. No, crossing that third threshold and receiving that third kiss, you will be fated to venture eternally into the night, with me by your side.”

“Not a chance.”

An object from the overhanging cliff was drawn silently into Setsura’s hand. A wind-tossed leaf.

“Little by little, this Potemkin Village is falling apart. Look—”

He held the leaf up before her eyes. It had already lost its vibrant color and changed into milky-white flake. A waxwork leaf, or rather one carved out of ivory.

“That, too,” Setsura said with a lazy wave of his hand. A fish leapt from the water, was split lengthwise, and in a flash turned into a weird kind of ivory vivisection, the fine bones of its skeleton like an intricate carving.

“And this one.”

This time he flung his devil wires between a distant stand of trees, cutting in half what appeared to be a tapir. The result was the same.

“How about them?”

His devil wires slashed through the waves on the lake, casting the triangular whitecaps into the water like chunks of white marble.

“If you’re in the mood, we can try the sun and the light and the wind. This is the true face of your world. And this is where you will continue to live?”

“This world will do as well as any other. As long as there is a night, I will continue to live. I could happily spend my lifetime living out of that casket.”

“I don’t plan on joining you,” Setsura promised. “First of all, how can you spend a lifetime if you don’t plan on dying?”

“Exactly. And you’ll know the feeling soon.”

“I hope not.”

“A little late to start complaining now. You are my servant.”

“That gets old, you know? Quit crowding me.”

He shooed her away, but Princess was already on top of him, her ardor inexorably rising up. Anybody chancing upon the scene would have taken them for lovers. Except it wasn’t his metaphysical heart at stake, and not even his life, but his very soul.

With Takako as hostage and Princess on the prowl for blood, there wasn’t much else he could do.

Fragrant breath tickled his nostrils. Her red lips touched his chin. The sky was as blue as the day of creation. Sunlight and wind filled the seemingly infinite space. The dreadful circumstances aside, this was a backdrop perfectly befitting the countenances of this young man and woman, a love scene to steal the breath away.

“Now is the time for you to become mine, my beloved man.” Her sultry voice wafted up from his neck.

In that moment, heaven and hearth shook.

A single black dot blossomed in the sky and covered the world, as if this world were a stage and the stage lights were suddenly dimmed. Ten-foot waves kicked up. The boat tossed and turned. The waves broke.

“What’s going on?” Princess gripped the side of the boat, her eyes shining.

“That’s what I want to know,” Setsura said. He was no longer calm, cool and collected. Due to the bloodletting, his physical strength had reached its limits.

The small boat bobbed in the rough seas like a leaf in a waterfall as waves the size of small mountains beat against the gunwales. As it danced up and down, Setsura cast off without a second thought.

Two pale hands latched onto his shoulders. “What a troublesome man you are,” she grumbled as they flew through the gray skies.

“I don’t recall anybody asking me to save them. Let go.”

He tried to shrug her off but lacked the strength to make a convincing effort, and could only hang there limply. Princess skimmed across the waves and climbed into the sky. A fierce gust caught them sideways and sent them spiraling down. She corrected her trajectory in time to shoot upwards to a dizzying height.

“Hoh! Take a look at this, Setsura! The end of this world. The Armageddon promised by the prophets has arrived.”

“I’m not blind.”

The hint of pathos in his voice arose from something apart from simple fatigue. When the end of any world arrived, what words could possibly suffice?

Dark rivers of black mud assaulted the forests and the hills and the manor house. The lake spilled out of its banks. Mutant life forms squirmed from the plains to the mountains. Giant snakes writhed in the black waters.

The beautiful silhouettes glittered in the sky. Thousands of lightning strikes shattered the peaks of the blue mountains, cleaving off the cliffs, sending them crashing down on the fleeing animals.

Fires erupted in the forest. The torrential rain only seemed to spread the flames. But the end was coming faster than the inferno could consume the world.

Setsura dodged between the shards of ivory lightning. The thunder died away. All movement ceased. The animals and forests and lakes and the manor house were surely seeing dreams carved in ivory.

He reached out and grasped a solidified white dove immediately to his left. Wings spread wide, the bird floating in the air swept easily into his hand, without him resorting to wires or weapons.

“What are you going to do after this?”

He grasped each wing in order—intricately carved, to the soft down of each feather—between his fingers and waved it back and forth.

Princess shook her head. “I don’t know. Kikiou made this world. Ask him.”

“Where is he?”

“Must still be outside.”

“Give him a call. No matter who you are, lose the world you’re attached to and there’s no place else you can go.”

“Oh? So now you’re concerned for my well-being?”

“I’m stuck here too, you know,” he shot back. Followed by a startled look.

“Hey, even the wind is solidifying.”

“I know that.”

Princess’s eyes filled with an eerie light. If the wind could turn to ivory, then so could the air. There was no telling what would happen to these two next as they flew through the air like a pair of dazzling, demonic angels.

The most beautiful pair of eyes in the world focused on the mechanism, sitting there like a silent, black lump of parts.

“What do you think?” Tonbeau Nuvenberg asked.

“It’s been tampered with,” said the lord of the Resurrection Room, Doctor Mephisto.

“Kikiou?”

“So it would seem.”

Mephisto’s confidence was not mistaken.

“What a pain in the ass that old geezer is. The next time our paths cross, I’m giving him a piece of my mind.” She pressed her sausage-like lips together and delivered several karate chops to the air with her hand. When she’d calmed down a bit, she said, “What are you looking at?”

“There’s a woman here in Shinjuku you remind me of. An information broker.”

“Oh, well, she must be a real piece of work then.”

“That she is indeed.”

Tonbeau nodded contentedly, then said in a flurry, “What about Setsura?”

“That world has separated from the nexus and I have attempted to reestablish a connection. But there’s been outside interference. That world is—”

The smooth flow of his words came to an abrupt halt. A cold chill ran through Tonbeau’s body. “What’s become of it?”

Mephisto didn’t answer. With a wave of his right hand, the particles floating in the air solidified into a projected image. “Ah!” exclaimed Tonbeau. They were looking at the director’s office of Mephisto Hospital. Two pairs of eyes were drawn inexorably to the object lying akilter on the floor.

“That’s—that’s the box! And the lid—!”

The lid was open. It had fallen into the wooden box.

“Just barely managed to get it back.”

Not listening to him, Tonbeau ran for the door. “What are you doing? Hurry up and examine what’s inside! It’s gotta be worth a fortune!”

Paying no attention to the big woman galloping out of the room, Mephisto examined the image hovering in the air.

“It’s back, but where are the contents?”

Exactly as he’d observed, when Tonbeau barged into the director’s office—that hardly anybody was allowed into or even knew where it was—this very powerful witch stared inside the box and shouted in surprise.

She said to Mephisto, a few steps behind her, “How do you explain this?” And thrust the wooden box in his face.

The box wasn’t empty. When Tonbeau had calmed down, Doctor Mephisto reached out and took the milky-white lump out of the box and set it on the table.

From its shape and size, everything was a half of itself, a bas-relief. The fine details were amazing, breathtaking. It was a garden carved in ivory. No, far more than any sculpture, it was imbued with the look and feel of an entire world—the lake brimming with water, the green woods and verdant forests, the blue mountains—

Every last one of them revealing only half of what it was. And yet Doctor Mephisto could feel the blue sky enclosing that world like a dome, just as Tonbeau Nuvenberg could see the white clouds floating through it.

The delicacy of the whitecaps on the lake, the boldness and ferocity of the animals peeking out from the trees in the forest—the sharpness of each cross-section, neatly divided down the middle, was rendered with such perfection as to suggest the work of an artist who’d sold his soul to the devil to achieve it.

The history of ivory carving in China was said to have begun in the Ming Dynasty. Up till then, bamboo had been the standard material. One of the prized items in the collection of the National Palace Museum was an ivory carving known as the “Dragon Boat.”

The length, width and height came to a mere two-point-five by three-quarters by one-point-five inches. The tiny vessel was equipped with paddles and oarlocks, masts and rigging, pagoda-like decks and staterooms. The miniature windows could be opened and closed.

Approaching the ideal of a “world in a box” was a Huang Zhen Xiao ivory landscape from the Middle Qing Dynasty. The sculpture, rendered from a single tusk, created the illusion of sublime mountain ranges far in the distance, men fishing in the lakes dotting the foothills, animals frolicking in the fields. people lounging in gazebos and teahouses hidden within the stands of pine, bamboo, and plum.

An unbounded world that could be contained in the palm of the hand. Except even those treasures were crude facsimiles compared to what had appeared before the eyes of these two wizards.

“There’s no manor house,” said Mephisto. “And no boat. They must have disappeared somewhere.”

“The boat sank.”

Tonbeau Nuvenberg pointed to a single point among the cresting whitecaps. A thin dark line, a shadow painted with India ink beneath the water’s surface.

“One of the waves is severed. That slit is not supposed to be there. The only person who could have put it there is—”

“Setsura Aki.”

He spared no praise for Tonbeau Nuvenberg’s eyesight, able to discern a single imperfection from the sea of waves rising the barest fraction of an inch above the surface, and instead stared off into space.

“Where is the other half of your world, Setsura?”