Scenes from an Unholy War Read online

  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.<
br />
  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 thi
s 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.”