Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 3 Omnibus Edition Read online

  “And that wasn’t all.” The woman smiled. She spoke in a low whisper, but it could almost turn the darkness to ice. “We have existed in countless places and times and lived through all of them. Don’t you understand? War is the natural state of this world. If this world is truly a whole rather than the sum of its various parts, then it has always been at war with itself. Cities fall, forests burn, men and beasts die alike. We count it all a blessing. Death brings blood and blood rides on the wind. It steeps the water that quenches our dry throats. When the fires of war die down, it is up to us to fan the flames.”

  Old memories came to mind and her eyes smoldered in ecstasy, the happy afterglow from a sweet past.

  “Men and women alike are such delicious and pliable things. I bring my lips up to their ears, bite gently on the lobes, thrust in my tongue and murmur softly. And a myriad of soldiers pick up their spears and the blood flows like water. Do you recall what happened in France in 1572? That idiot Catherine di Medici inspired the Cardinal of Lorraine and his nephews the Dukes of Guise to launch a massacre of French Protestants. And who inspired her? Me. A Mongol chasing sheep around the steppes became intoxicated with me, took my will as his own, and invaded Western Europe. The color of blood is beautiful in every case, its taste sweet beyond belief.”

  “The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and Genghis Khan,” Setsura said, more to himself. “In this city, your legions of pussy-whipped big shots have met their match. Besides, at any moment, the mayor is going to push the panic button. In the full light of day, Shinjuku’s citizens will hunt you down with wooden stakes. There will always be more where they came from. Maybe you should give world conquest a rest for the time being.”

  “Bring it on. It makes no difference to me.”

  “Eh?” responded Setsura.

  “Ruling the world is Kikiou’s ambition,” she explained. “We don’t see eye-to-eye on everything. He remains a man of ordinary human passions. His unique kind of immorality is as well the product of his implacable tenacity. However, his desire is not to fill the world with his servants. But rather to govern all those lives of flesh and blood according to his own hand. As far as that goes, it’s fine with me.”

  “I do find that surprising,” Setsura said, tapping his temples with his knuckles. He couldn’t have known that Yakou had just posed a similar question to Kikiou and received a completely different answer. “So what’s in it for you? Drinking blood is enough?”

  “Exactly. I only increase the stable of my servants so that I may do with this world as I see fit. The means to that end do not matter. I only wish to live according to my own terms. Sleep when I want, satisfy my hunger when I wish, make love when the mood strikes me. Do you understand why I have increased our number only by two in four thousand years?” The woman’s glowing red eyes flashed at Setsura. “Because the more commoners I see and hear, the more attractive an eternal sleep becomes.”

  “In that case, then why not leave Shinjuku as soon as possible? And go back to pulling the strings behind the scenes as you’ve always done?”

  “The world is the same to me everywhere. Besides, I’ve taken a liking to this place. The smell of blood is different. I dream different dreams. Coming here has proved a real pick-me-up.”

  “My, my. I guess trouble really is your business. Well, go looking for it and it will find you.”

  “Enough with the chitchat.” General Bey’s voice shook the darkness. “No matter how much Princess fancies you, I have a job to do. You are standing in my way. The faster we settle things here the better. After five hundred years, now it is my turn to be free.”

  “And what are you going to do about that?” Setsura asked blandly.

  The emotions on General Bey’s face shifted for the first time. “Princess and I crossed paths five hundred years ago in Constantinople. Whatever her reasons, I have been sealed away in a cell since, out of sight and out of her mind. Once you are dead, this city shall be my oyster. Pondering who my opponent would be, I knew he must be a man among men. More than that, one with the kind of power that makes the blood run cold.”

  “No need to worry about anybody turning coward and running away. This is Setsura Aki.” The woman laughed like a ringing bell.

  “That’s me. And just so there’ll be no fretting about hostages, return Miss Kanan.”

  “Hoh. You read my mind,” the woman said, with a touch of admiration.

  She undid the front of her cheongsam. Not starting at the top, but around her stomach. As soon as she undid the hooks, a white hand flopped out. It didn’t belong to her.

  A moment later, by means entirely unclear, all the hooks released. With a heavy thud, the naked body of a young woman fell onto the floor. Takako Kanan pressed her cheek against the concrete as if in love with its cold, midnight touch and didn’t move.

  Setsura looked only at the nape of her neck, at the lines of fresh blood flowing from the throbbing wounds in the bloodless, translucently beautiful skin of that neck.

  “Don’t worry. I haven’t made her my slave. Yet. She needs but one more kiss. Until then she will sleep. Once you are dead, I will quickly send her after you.”

  Her shrill laughter stirred the blood-drenched darkness. And just as suddenly ceased. The transformation born in its place was accompanied by an outpouring of antagonism. The woman could clearly discern that the young man occupying this patch of black belonged to a different world from herself.

  He appeared no differently than he had before. Only his essence had changed.

  “Do not fear that I will take my leave of you now. On which stage do you wish to act out this play?”

  He meant the place of their combat. His voice hadn’t changed. Nevertheless, this Setsura wasn’t the same as the one before. He said, “Miss Kanan is with me.”

  “If you survive your duel with the good general, you may come and get her,” the Demon Princess said with a thin smile. Her eyebrows arched slightly.

  “Not here,” General Bey said.

  His voice grated like creaking hinges through the congealed, claustrophobic air. He had felt that something too.

  “Where?”

  General Bey pointed his forefinger up and down. “Higher or lower. Either direction. Where there’s room to breathe.”

  Watching the two march off toward the elevators, the Demon Princess became aware that she was casually brushing her right cheek with her fingers. She took away her hand and looked at her fingertips. She could make out a color darker than night, like tiny red pearls.

  Drops of blood.

  Chapter Four

  The elevator doors closed. This time it was General Bey who posed the question, “Where to?”

  “There is no down,” Setsura stated plainly.

  “Then up it is. What floor would suit you?”

  “Do as you please.”

  The general’s finger pressed the button for the roof. “If you wish to get off anywhere in between, now is the time.”

  “And how about yourself, Kazikli Bey?”

  The man’s somber face briefly registered surprise. “So you do know who I am. But then again, I should not be surprised that you would.”

  “Ah, but you could have spent eternity in the palace of the Turkish Sultan, staring up at the endless sky. Why did you return? Did you come all this way just to see me?”

  “Well—”

  “And having found freedom in this city, what will you do?”

  “Knowing what you know about me, you should not have to ask that question. That woman would not put it so crassly, but this place is overflowing with corruption and the stench of blood. There is no reining me in here.” He grinned toothily, baring his unsightly fangs. His eyes glowed red. “The more I see of you, the more you seem to belong here. It is no wonder that Princess hides her face out of shame. Even in front of me.”

  A dull thud slowly rocked the floor beneath their feet. The elevator came to a halt.

  “Where I come from, it is customary for the dead to
leave the room first.”

  Setsura walked wordlessly out of the elevator. The wind tousled his hair. They were on the roof of the Keio Plaza Hotel, five hundred feet above the ground. Few signs of the Devil Quake could be seen here, except for these dark and shadowed remnants of the supernatural.

  Setsura approached one corner of the fence that enclosed the roof area. The black-clad figure seemed to light up. As if the Man in the Moon had decided to point the spotlight at him. Shinjuku Station and the surrounding buildings shimmered like tiny toys in the gaudy brilliance. Some parts of this city never slept.

  Setsura raked his hand through his tangled hair. He returned to the center of the stage where the general was settling into a fighting stance. His left hand hung by his side. His right hand was tucked into the collar of his gold and silver embroidered robe.

  “It doesn’t seem like the time for sightseeing. Feeling better now?”

  There was no change in his voice. Setsura didn’t answer. The silence was an additional invitation to the scene of supernatural battle spreading out beneath the moonlight.

  The general raised both hands to the height of his shoulders. If an onlooker squinted, he might see a faint, glimmering line—like a fine, wet wire—from his wrists to Setsura’s fist. The general had caught Setsura’s devil wire with his bare hands.

  This confrontation was not going to end as those had in the darkness a short time before. The general’s arm—that had previously batted away Setsura’s wires—didn’t budge an inch. Drops of blood dripped from his wrists and from between his fingers.

  “Where’s that bloodthirsty man from the basement who yet showed some sympathy for the devil? This man’s soul cuts straight to the bone.” The two points of light from inside the general’s skull transformed from demonic red to a raging scarlet.

  “Haa—!” The roaring yowl burst forth from the black cave of his mouth.

  Setsura leapt to his right. Faster than the eye could follow. Had it been visible and on public display, exclamations of praise would have followed. And though invisible to the eye, the transfixing afterimage of Setsura’s elegant movements was left in the air.

  Changing into one more shadow flitting through the darkness, he glided across the roof and sprang into the air. A silver line split the moonlight. Another shining ray flashed down and rebounded.

  His black slicker resembled the wings of a magical raven. His countenance shamed the moon. But when Setsura again alighted on the ground, the hem of his slicker was mangled like the edge of a postcard pulled out of a paper shredder at the last moment.

  A dozen yards away, General Bey said, “Nothing surprises me about you. That was your wire.” He thrust out his bloody right hand.

  Setsura’s severed devil wire. Wielded by the general, Setsura’s weapon hadn’t been able to do the same. The same titanium fiber that cleaved muscle down to the bone had been severed by itself—and by somebody other than its true owner. What manner of man was this warrior?

  Setsura still held the end of the devil wire in his right hand. It constrained the general’s left arm, which became at the same time a shackle around Setsura’s. Setsura had the use of his left hand, the general his right.

  Given Setsura’s greater familiarity with the weapon and the general’s bloody hand—but taking into consideration his remarkable skills and talents and the compromised physical condition of the young man in black—both sides of this equation poised in a precarious balance.

  “I saw your portrait in Innsbruck Castle,” Setsura breezily observed. “A mounted knight at the head of his army. Now I understand why you did not carry so much as a pocket knife on your person.”

  “Live by the sword and you die when the blade breaks. Fight with a lance and you become a stuck pig without it. But make the weapon of your enemy your own and you will live a long, long time.”

  The general’s voice flowed proudly through the night. Coming at the height of battle, such a grand and solemn revelation was almost enough to make this beautiful genie forget the nature of the attack.

  From time immemorial, it was said that in the furthest reaches of the forests of Eastern Europe—where darkness engaged daily with light—there existed a practitioner of the black arts, an outlaw knight who had cast away his soul and held in his hands secrets that made him invincible.

  During the late sixteenth century, Gyorgy Thurzo, Count Palatine of Hungary, recorded in A History of My Sister, Elizabeth that she had been led into a life of depravity by a blond, blue-eyed knight, who ruled over her more thoroughly than the Devil ever did Faust. Wrote the Count:

  He had slender hands that in any other knight might invite derision. But face him once and he would without difficulty rob his opponent of his weapon and in the same moment use it against him with an identical skill. And by the same token, that man’s wife—however praised as a rock of fidelity—would, upon being taken to the marital bed, sing like a bird and bay like a wolf and expire in ecstasy under the ministrations of those golden hands.

  That was the very least of it:

  The diabolical nature of the training required to acquire these skills cannot be satisfactorily put into words. As evidence of his soulless state, after engaging in a degree of ferocity that left a mountain and river stained with blood, he trekked for ninety-nine days across the untamed countryside, slaying every man he met.

  “Haa—!”

  The gold and silver shadow vaulted off the earth. So did the black-clad young man. Moonlight scattered all around them—seemed to freeze solid—and then rained down shards of shattered ice. The two silhouettes switched positions, sticking their landings like two diamonds still locked in kimberlite.

  They didn’t move. Couldn’t move.

  “You are a beautiful beast,” said the general, in a voice that sounded like a growl rumbling out of the ground.

  Each repelled the mutual midair attack of devil wires. The general sensed invaders attacking from all sides—the devil wires Setsura had cast with his free hand.

  They floated suspended in the air, and then fragmented and fell to the ground. Reacting only to the blast of wind and shudder in the concrete when the general landed, these simple flecks of metallic thread transformed into whirling scythes.

  The general’s face, neck, chest, hands and feet were slashed with dozens of thin, black lines—that grew fatter and fatter. Setsura’s fingers didn’t move. The wires responded to his will alone, dutifully sawing into the general’s skin, eating into his flesh, tightening down to the bone.

  Setsura remained frozen in place, down on one knee. Ryuuki’s malevolent qi smoldered in his gut and pounded him with agonizing chills and waves of nausea. He’d come this far on the strength of his intestinal fortitude alone. The powers of concentration required to face down an enemy of unprecedented strength pressed him to the limits of his endurance.

  In that condition, the ability to predict the general’s jump and landing point and then execute such a degree of martial artistry of those titanium strands was truly remarkable.

  “That was fine work,” the general said in a rasping voice. “For all my strength, I would die if I lost my head. But you are already fighting with a handicap. The time has not come for us to say goodbye.”

  Setsura heard a hard sound. The sound of steel eating into bone—the threads cutting through bone. The general’s lips trembled. But it wasn’t pain. It was glee. An expression of evil Setsura had never seen before.

  The general raised his right hand and traced the black bloody line crossing his neck. Beneath the smeared blood, the wound left by the wire disappeared.

  “I possess this ability too. That is why we who drink blood are called immortal. Though had this wound been inflicted by you in prime fighting form, you would have likely cut my head clean off. If you wish to make my beheading permanent, you must first make the body forget how to regenerate itself.”

  The general placed his right hand over his heart. The fingers sank into the skin, burrowing into his chest. P
ain distorted his ferocious expression. Blood stained the silvery fabric.

  With a guttural howl, he wrenched out his fingers. A thin line like a string of bloody beads stretched from his thumb and forefinger to his chest. Setsura’s devil wire. It had penetrated to the bone. He calmly gouged it out.

  “Nice piece of craftsmanship. Keen edge. If sleep ever comes for me, I would wish for a blade like this to finish the job. But before that—”

  A sharp ringing sound sang through the air. Setsura sidestepped the strand of devil wire aimed at his feet and soared into the air. His left hand glittered. A faint line of blood bisected the general’s face from the crown of his head to the tip of his jaw. But he only smiled.

  It seemed that the dawn would never come. Five hundred feet above the ground, the demon combat spilled across the roof of the skyscraper. Setsura ran along the top of the chain-link fence toward the elevators. Beneath his feet the fence tore apart, vertical fissures yawning open like reptilian mouths.

  The general sensed Setsura’s uncertain steps through the wire connecting them. He pulled on that wire.

  Setsura staggered and dropped his guard. He did not have an immortal body.

  The general was about to send the killing strand at him when, for some reason, he looked up at the night sky. The moon was out. By the time he’d realized that Setsura had released his end of the wire, he heard it humming through the air at his neck.

  A shudder of crimson fear. He was sure he was dead.

  Managing a physical feat that would have been difficult with all his facilities intact demanded an unimaginable degree of self-control and force of will. Setsura Aki’s devil wire followed the arc calculated to intersect precisely with the general’s neck.