Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 5 Omnibus Edition Page 4

  “Hands against the wall!”

  The detectives were wearing night vision goggles and holding AP-9 model 90 submachine guns against their hips. Barely fifteen inches long, the guns held thirty-round magazines and could be easily hidden out of sight behind the back.

  The suspect merely shifted his gaze from the helicopter to the patrol car.

  “You got eyes on you from above too. If you don’t do as you’re told before the count of three, we open fire.”

  The steely-cold directive was no bluff. Normal operating procedure in this city. There was no telling what even a naked man might do—vomit up beer or acid that could melt glass. His intestines might snake out of his ass and crush a cop’s chest like a python.

  “Stand back!” the man said, in a low tenor voice that would have made any woman passing by stop and ask for his number.

  “One,” the detective said.

  Shutters beneath the headlights of the chameleon louvered open. The nose of a nine-round, 70 mm rocket launcher jutted out. At the same time, a 20 mm laser cannon slipped out from the left fender and turned to fix the man in its sights. The driver was at the controls, but the weapons could be operated remotely as well.

  No matter how fearless the man appeared, the detective didn’t doubt his own abilities. “Two,” he said.

  “I will deal with myself by myself. I will never be so humble as to submit to the orders of another.”

  The man turned around. He hadn’t a stitch on him, but the cool, calm and collected manner in which he did it made the cop’s heart skip a beat. Nevertheless—

  “Three.”

  In the blossoming white flower created by the lights from the car and helicopter, the man went to turn left at the corner of the street.

  “Freeze!”

  The words had barely left his mouth when the detective pressed the trigger on the AP-9. This wasn’t a city where a cop firing on full-automatic was cruel or unusual. He was a good shot too, putting five rounds in a row into the man’s side in a six-inch radius.

  The impact threw the man against the wall. The koto in his left hand raised a clear echoing sound. A pleasant shock ran through the detective’s brain. He staggered, in a flash going from killer determination to looking placidly at the naked man standing in front of him.

  He was holding the koto in his mouth. Red lines of light slashed across his chest, the laser beams piercing bone and muscle and fat and scorching the wall behind him.

  The man lifted his left arm. To the helicopter crew, some invisible thread bound the man and the detective together. No sooner had the detective crumpled to the ground holding his side, but the driver inside the car pressed the trigger on the rocket launcher.

  The 70 mm rockets slipped almost languidly out of the tubes just as something touched the two pods. The fire erupted like a red flower spreading its poisonous petals. As if beseeched by the city for a more appropriate display of destruction, the petals of black smoke and flames painted the ground and sky with mad and garish colors.

  The naked man was Ryuuki.

  A faint look of sadness rose to a countenance that seemed the blessed combination of a wild man and a man of letters. In times past, amidst the bodies of the dead, he had worn a similar expression on the battlefields after yet again pushing his enemies back from the borderlands.

  The gunner in the helicopter armed the fire control computers and then froze. Even a laser cannon didn’t make a dent on the guy. It was hard to see how adding more fuel would help. Pyrrhic victories weren’t his thing.

  Then came the wail of police sirens. The pilot had contacted headquarters about the scope and nature of the conflict. Surrounding the enemy at a distance, the officers piled out of the vehicles and took cover immediately, showing no inclination to inch closer.

  “You there, in the middle of the street, come out!”

  Trying to talk him down—while an intense animosity and thirst for blood filled the narrow street. These were hardened fighters who’d battled the worst of Shinjuku’s monsters, using the vehicle as a shield precisely because they knew the chances of surrender were thin.

  In the moonlight, the multi-barrel laser guns and long-barreled hand cannons that could turn an armored vehicle into Swiss cheese cast off a dangerous glow. The lights of the helicopter overhead steadily drew nearer, until the quarry was directly beneath it.

  “He’s coming!” somebody called out, a bit too eagerly.

  Light filled the narrow alley, washing out the shadows. Eight patrol cars and sixteen weapons drew a bead on the solitary figure.

  A moment later, the helicopter pilot saw something even stranger.

  Chapter Two

  Setsura was in bad shape, but he was feeling fairly upbeat.

  Takako was with Mephisto. Mephisto had vowed that no one would lay a finger on her, and he’d wager his soul to keep his word. Setsura hadn’t lost a whole lot of sleep over him becoming a vampire, and neither had he spent a whole lot of time wondering why.

  Let Mephisto be Mephisto. That was enough.

  However reassuring that might be, his original goals were still up in the air, and the state of affairs on the ground was not reassuring.

  Two hours had passed since he’d come to this world with Princess. Not only hadn’t he escorted Prime Minister Kongodai to safety, he hadn’t even found him yet. The extent of Princess’s powers and whatever her monsters might be up to was entirely unclear, but it was no stretch to say that nothing got his goat more than that.

  However, the most effective course of action was entirely different.

  The young man striding across the balmy field hardly appeared—and not just on the surface—to be driven by such provocations. In the final moments that fate might inevitably deliver to him, he would shrug his shoulders and say: “Well, them’s the breaks, I guess.”

  He was on a street in the village. The mist all around him was so thick it reflected only his own shadow. Now and then, deeper in, the dark shapes of the ruins rose up before his eyes, and then was swallowed in the world of white.

  This time Setsura didn’t shout. Which is to say, he didn’t go scrambling around in a tizzy. More like a portrait of a young man strolling down a street in a London fog.

  “If they’re going to keep their distance, no sense getting on people’s nerves bugging them about where the prime minister is.”

  He sensed being passed by on the right and left. The shapes of people or birds flitted above his head. None of them spoke.

  “Where is the prime minister? Come tomorrow, even this manhunter won’t know.”

  Right now, a myriad of somethings surrounded Setsura. Silent, unbreathing, matching him step for step. Setsura must be aware of their existence. The tension would have driven any normal person mad.

  The cordon tightened. The mist in front of him billowed up. A man’s face poked through the haze. A fearless and rugged-looking man with a splendid Fu Manchu mustache that jutted out from beneath his nose in an inverted V. The thick lips moved. He spoke.

  Setsura didn’t understand a thing he said. It was ancient Chinese. Perhaps he recognized a word that meant “search.” But the grammar was indecipherable. “Looking for somebody?” was a possible guess.

  Grasping that he was not being understood, the man’s face slipped back into the mist. Another appeared. A young man full of piss and vinegar. He pointed at his face with a hand decorated with gaudy rings.

  Setsura understood that. “No,” he said in Cantonese, shaking his head. “I’m not searching for you.” He’d picked up a smattering of Cantonese back when a Hong Kong tour operation was headquartered in West Shinjuku, but never more than that.

  The young man disappeared as well.

  “Who’s doing the deciding here?” Setsura muttered without stopping. “Maybe it’ll be a woman next.”

  With a quiet whoosh, a woman’s face appeared. A voluptuous, indescribably beautiful woman’s face. She indicated herself.

  “Though I do appreciate the c
oncern.” She vanished too. “Is this some kind of speed-dating sideshow? Hey—” Setsura recognized the face that appeared next, one of Kongodai’s bodyguards. He’d seen him get sucked into the ground. “You’ll do,” he said cheerfully.

  The man smiled back. The hand bent as if to seize Setsura by the lapels and reached toward his throat. A hand covered with gray bristles.

  Setsura didn’t move. Blood stained the mist red. The man grabbed hold of his severed wrist with an inhuman scream. At the same time, from the fog around them came the feral roars of wild animals.

  “You were evicted by the Landlord?” Setsura asked the sinking form. “Where’s the prime minister?”

  The man shot to his feet, a gray beast wearing a suit coat.

  “So, Mr. Bear, is it?” said Setsura, in tones suggesting that even he found this a bit odd. With a growl, the big animal turned and was swallowed up by the mist.

  Setsura leaned over, searching for something that had just occurred to him. His finger groped through the haze and touched a hard, ceramic-like surface. It was a mask. From the dimensions and contours and spacing of the eyes and nose, he knew it was the exact reproduction of a man’s, though containing none of the “life” he had just encountered.

  It was a primitive item, made from fired, painted clay. And yet quite a piece of work.

  Setsura pushed aside the fog like wading through a high surf and entered a house on the right. All the things around him whined and whimpered but gave way.

  On the floor was what appeared to be a potter’s wheel. A kiln was next to it. What filled in the rest of the puzzle were the human faces arrayed on the still-standing wall. The finished masks were of men and women, the young and the old. They looked down at Setsura with hollow eyes filled with the anguish of rotting away in a place like this.

  He visited the house next door and found the same thing there. “If you don’t mind,” he said, picking up one of each and going outside. He stopped and said, “What’s this?”

  “Enjoying yourself?” Princess smiled, the mist wrapped around her like light.

  “I gather this is a mask-making village?”

  “Correct.”

  “Bears are that good with clay?” Setsura asked with raised eyebrows, the image rising to his thoughts.

  “One of the animals that lives around here. They are all here.” Princess made a stroking gesture with her hand. Here and there sounded the growls of wild animals. “This village has been here since before the Hsia Dynasty, devoted to the making of masks. You have seen the fineness of the detail for yourself. In time, the technique surpassed mere dexterity and entered the realm of the gods.”

  “Impressive.”

  “Once a person dons a mask made in this village, not only the face but the physical being, down to the soul, becomes the mask, whether that of a human or a beast.”

  Setsura folded his arms and nodded. “Makes sense, I guess.”

  He was being perfectly serious, perhaps because Princess herself showed such intense interest in the subject.

  “But the village was destroyed by a king many centuries before the Hsia. Wiped out to a man. Only the masks remained. And here are their remains.”

  “Why was it destroyed?”

  “For dishonoring the king’s wife. A mask maker in this village was struck by the queen’s beauty and carved a mask of her in secret. Had he stored it away and kept it to himself, all would have been well. But keeping such a work of magnificent art to himself must have driven the man mad. So he secretly delivered it to the queen. How do you think she reacted?”

  “I imagine she was furious. Something like, I am the fairest one of all.”

  “No, she was impressed.” Princess gazed back at Setsura, a toying smile on her lips. “It struck her that though the mere work of a man, the mask held a beauty that could not be equaled anywhere else on earth. Entranced, she gazed raptly upon it. At the beginning of the third month, she begged the king to attack the village of the mask maker and slaughter all of its inhabitants.”

  “Huh,” said Setsura.

  “I’m sure you understand why, her reasons and emotions. Certainly you would understand. The queen was taken by her own beauty, and frightened by it. It seemed to her altogether possible that the mask maker could also discover this perfection in the face of another woman. But no—a woman as beautiful as her could not exist elsewhere. That was not at the root of her anxiety. What if the mask maker continued to live and was asked to again pour his love and devotion into a mask of her? What if it did not equal the perfection of the first? And what if, by chance, another being were to behold it? What if only the maker beheld it? How could such a situation be tolerated?”

  “And exterminating the village was the only answer?” Setsura said, as if bored with the subject already.

  “That is the nature of women. Well, beautiful women.” Princess laughed a radiant laugh.

  “But the village aside, she could not tolerate even one mask remaining. To her mind, she must have thought the most natural thing to do was to destroy everything, down to the last mask.”

  “You can count on a woman to really think these things through.” A sly smile rose to her lips.

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  “The king’s army destroyed every last mask and burned the houses to the ground. After that several centuries passed. The charred remains were carried off by the wind and rain, rendering it a wasteland, visited only by the birds and beasts of the field. The king couldn’t have foreseen the miracle that happened next. It was probably a monkey that dug a mask out of the mud and put it on. The miracle was that this particular mask was that of the mask maker whose creations had so impressed the queen. The results you can see around you.”

  “The monkey wearing the mask became the mask maker.”

  “And so the village was revived. The new mask makers searched their memories and fashioned masks for the villagers and put them on the animals that came here.”

  “Such as the bear.” Setsura gazed up at the sky. He felt a little let down. Scanning his environment he said, “A pretty sad revival.”

  “Animals are animals. However they might don masks that rise to the work of the gods themselves and feign human form, after a while the true nature peeks out. More time passed, and they discarded the masks and returned to the wilds. The few that remained gradually grew deeply steeped in their underlying natures.”

  “You keep dragging me off to one freak show after the other,” Setsura said, almost like an afterthought. He was pissed, but true to his own nature, didn’t let it show. “What’s your game?”

  “Do you think I would tell you?”

  “What the hell did you come here for anyway?” Setsura said, as if asking about the weather. “To take me on a sightseeing tour of this village? That’s not in your nature.”

  “I came here to show you the way.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Keep going straight on this road for as long as it takes. On the way there, no matter what happens, ignore it. Should it stand in your way, turn to the left. Not to the right. That is where the prime minister will be.”

  “And why should I believe you?”

  “I have placed plenty of traps laid in your path, just for you. Better that you step into my snares while in a good mood.”

  “You here for anything else?”

  “That is all.”

  “Got it. Now get lost.”

  Princess took a step back. As if waiting in the wings, the thick fog draped itself around her. In a flash, she had dissolved back into it.

  “Thanks but no thanks. I’ll do it my way.”

  Setsura started walking. It wasn’t his way to give his enemies the benefit of the doubt either. The Setsura that was Setsura was too contrary a fellow. He hadn’t gone ten yards before the voices echoed all around him, beckoning, cajoling.

  “Come over here.”

  “Closer, a little closer.”

  “I’ll make a mask for you.” />
  Setsura didn’t understand any of it. What he felt was a strong projection of will, that an average person with only a strong sense of self-denial would have found hard to resist.

  He wanted to stop. He wanted to turn around. The strange emotions roiled in the depths of his chest and surged unstoppably into his throat, brimming with bitter and woeful thoughts.

  Was this why Princess came here? Something deeper and deeper down, murmuring coolly in a heart stained with curious colors. This was not about snatching his prey from before his eyes. But what was this thing that lay along the path to his right, that he absolutely should not see?

  Chapter Three

  The voices sang out one after the other.

  “Come over here, I said.”

  “I’ll make a mask just for you, the most beautiful mask in the world.”

  “Wear it, and you can become anybody.”

  These were beasts who’d donned the masks of the dead villagers. Having made masks of everything in sight, the desire to fashion and create yet burned in them like hot coals. They would of course see Setsura’s face as the ideal model. Those who visited this village would be inexorably drawn into their abodes and their faces stolen away.

  Perhaps even their lives were taken in the process, and those who returned to their countries and their families were really these creatures in disguise—boars and bears and tigers.

  Setsura stopped, his feet laden with the weight of a long journey made. “Here,” an old woman’s voice said in his ear.

  “Turn here,” a young man whispered.

  He couldn’t search with his devil wires. Every nerve in his body was devoted to fending off the magnetic attraction of the voices.

  “What a beautiful boy,” chattered the girls in the town. “He is so handsome.”

  Setsura raised his right hand. In his hand he held a clay mask. “Ah,” somebody said behind him. The mask clung to Setsura’s face.

  “What—isn’t that Riyan?”

  “I know that face. I carved it so many times.”

  The zeal quickly faded from their words. Their presence slipped away behind him. Released from the spell, Setsura staggered, not simply because of the release of the psychological pressure. At that moment, he experienced the additional surge of an intense mental force.