Tyrant's Stars: Parts Three and Four Page 5

  “Take him!” Callas cried from the back of the giant eagle, making a ferocious sweep with her right hand.

  No matter how good a Hunter he might be, there was no way D would be able to hold off hundreds of monstrous beasts. Imagining the handsome features of the young man in anguish as innumerable claws and fangs ripped him apart, Callas became intoxicated by her blood-soaked vision. And her besotted eyes did indeed detect a pale object flying from the forest. Mentally and physically Callas was too swept away to dodge it, and it was moving too quickly for her to bat it aside.

  Some might call its speed ungodly. Made from the pointed end of a branch, the missile penetrated the body of the giant eagle with ease, piercing Callas in the throat and poking out the nape of her neck. Her anguished cries mixed with those of the bird, sending ripples of sound through the air.

  Watching the gigantic bird wheel in circles as it fell, the Hunter cut down the last of a dozen tigons just as it was about to pounce, and after slaying three more creatures he turned his gaze in the bird’s direction again, but the avian form had already vanished into the distant forest. At the same time, the herd of beasts that had closed to about a dozen yards from him lost their singularity of purpose, the confusion plainly eddying in them, and then in the blink of an eye they scattered. Though a number of them went for D, they achieved nothing, becoming sacrifices to his sword.

  Once stillness had returned, D got back on his unharmed steed and put the forest behind him. After he’d gone, all that was left behind was a thick branch with a vine strung from one end to the other, making it into a bow. It went without saying what had become of its sole arrow.

  Branches and vines—what kind of skill did it take to fashion a bow from these materials alone, use it to fire an arrow that was just a thin branch honed to a point, and score a direct hit on a siren fifteen hundred feet away? And there was more to it than just that. D’s left hand was missing from the wrist down, but fresh blood dripped from where a vertical cut had been made in the stump, because the Hunter couldn’t use the bow with just one hand. He’d actually split open the end of his left arm and wedged the bow’s riser in it while his right hand drew the bowstring. And as he pounded from the deadly ravine into the forest, the reason he’d listened hard was so his superhuman hearing might deduce Callas’s position in the sky.

  That, in a nutshell, was what it meant to be “D.”

  CHAPTER3

  I

  On regaining consciousness, Seurat must’ve been surprised. The face of the giant, who stood more than thirteen feet tall, was awfully blank. It was unsuited to expressing thought or emotion. Nonetheless, he was surprised—that was clear from his eyes as he gazed at Sue. Not only hadn’t the girl run away when D’s needle had struck him in a vital spot and rendered him unconscious, but she’d also extracted said needle and then used it to dispatch a venomous lizard that had been drawn by the scent of his blood. He agonized over the matter of what to make of her actions, and for a while he could do nothing but stare at Sue as she stood by him.

  “It looks like you’ll be okay, right? Wait a second and I’ll go get you some water.”

  Sue turned around without waiting for a response from him. The water was nearby. After all, until thirty minutes earlier, they’d been floating in it. By the bottoms of Seurat’s massive boots was a crevasse, and a mere fifteen feet away the silvery flow ran noisily by the base of a slope.

  Sue didn’t have a canteen. Taking care not to slip on the grass, she went down to the water’s edge and put the hem of her now-dry skirt into the water. Once she’d scooped up a good amount, her

  face was reflected in the water’s surface. This would serve to let her check on her appearance.

  Her face was rippling. Seeing that it didn’t look terribly haggard, Sue let out a sigh of relief.

  The face smiled—the face on the water’s surface, that is. Sue herself wasn’t smiling.

  The water witch?

  No sooner had the name Lucienne and the woman’s appearance come and gone in the girl’s head than her watery reflection reached out with both hands. As if drawn to it, Sue reached out her own hands, submerging them to the wrist. There was a jerk, and before the girl could make a sound she was pulled into the water—only she didn’t go under. Huge hands held her ankles up in the air.

  Turning, Sue shouted, “Oh, it’s you!” Her tone was one of surprise, pleasure, and excitement.

  Still crawling across the ground, the giant made an effort to pull Sue back. She rose about a foot into the air.

  The thing clinging to Sue’s wrists was being pulled up. In the sunlight, it glittered like a fascinating piece of glasswork. Seurat kept pulling. In no time, a face emerged ... but it no longer looked like Sue. Due to a trick of the light, parts of it vanished while others shimmered. This bizarre entity had eyes and a nose and a mouth that the girl could make out whether she wanted to or not. It must’ve been some kind of demonic creature that inhabited the river. Its shoulders appeared, and then its chest.

  Was Seurat to be praised for his strength? Was the water demon to be admired for its formidable size? Seurat had already hauled Sue back to the top of the crevasse, but no more than the shoulders of the huge, semitransparent form had emerged yet. The only thing that kept Sue from crying out in pain was that for something so large, the creature weighed little.

  Seurat’s right hand reached into his robe, and then a longsword that Sue hadn’t noticed when she was tending to his wound appeared. A striped pattern ran down it from the tip to the hilt.

  Seurat swiped it through the arms of the watery giant who wouldn’t let go of Sue. Spray shot out, but its hands didn’t come off. As if the man had been cutting through water, the wounds he dealt the water demon had closed immediately.

  “It hurts!” Sue finally cried out. The more the watery colossus was pulled from the river, the greater its weight became. Their foe seemed determined to drag its prey into the depths.

  Seurat swung his longsword again. The blow seemed entirely wasted.

  Sue was watching intently when the gigantic form of the water demon suddenly vanished. At the same time, she went flying through the air, landing softly in a high clump of bushes. Seurat had thrown her. Frantically getting to her feet, Sue saw Seurat making three swipes of his sword, and the tremendous glistening form taking a blow to the head in the very same spot where it’d disappeared, then falling back into the flow without a sound. Seurat must’ve been quite confident, because he didn’t even bother to check the river before going over to Sue with his longsword in one hand.

  For the first time, Sue was gripped by a chilling fear. The giant was no longer the wounded person she’d helped, but rather a servant of a Noble who wanted her dead. She tried to get to her feet, but her back wouldn’t move. Though she’d had a soft landing, her back had still taken quite a jolt.

  Before her fear-widened eyes, a titanic hand reached closer with fingers spread wide. An intense pressure closed about her waist, and her body rose. She saw a powerful chest covered by what seemed to be leather armor, and the giant’s face above it.

  Sue recalled clay figures she’d seen at the village school a long time ago. Among the expressionless horde, there’d been one that looked a little sad. To all appearances it had the same face as the others, but Sue felt it was an exception. The giant before her brought back that memory.

  Sue felt the lump of icy fear thawing.

  “Are you—” she started to say, and then the giant’s face became that of another person entirely. A tremendous killing lust rose from every inch of him, billowing out like dancing flames, and Sue could actually feel the heat on her cheeks.

  Every single sound died out. Even the noise of the water stopped. As all of creation seemed to hold its collective breath at D’s beauty, Seurat’s will to kill was shaken.

  Not knowing exactly what had happened, Sue quickly tried turning her head and body to look all around.

  Seurat went into action. Still holding onto Sue, he p
ulled out his club, put its blunt tip against the ground, and began to scribe a gentle curve. When finished, he had a circle a good thirty feet in diameter—only the two ends of it weren’t joined, but rather the final part he’d drawn slipped into the circle a bit. Stepping out through that opening, he went about fifteen feet, then drew another incomplete circle that was about six feet across before setting Sue down in its center.

  Once Sue had watched Seurat step back into the first great circle, she saw a figure appear from the forest to her left without making a sound.

  “D—uh, Mr. D!”

  The girl was naturally overjoyed. However, her heart didn’t leap as much as she’d imagined it would.

  D shot a quick glance at her. Perhaps that was enough for him to assess her condition, because he didn’t ask Sue if she was okay before heading toward Seurat. Having ascertained the safety of his charge, all that remained for him to do was slay his opponent. He was a handsome huntsman braving the raging flames of murderous intent.

  Once he’d closed to within fifteen feet of his foe, D reached for the hilt of his longsword with his right hand. He made no attempt to learn Seurat’s name or background. The will to kill emanating from the giant was all the proof the Hunter needed.

  “D!” Sue called out. She didn’t know what she wanted to say to him.

  She saw a second D pull away from the first—Sue had no way of knowing that this was due to his speed, which was so great it left an afterimage emblazoned on her retinas. His sword whined through the wind. It seemed Seurat would be cut in two. However, Sue’s eyes went wide.

  The blade that should’ve made contact with Seurat had suddenly vanished. There was no attempt at a second stroke—D was making a great leap to narrowly avoid the club swinging at him. In midair the Hunter launched a rough wooden needle, and then made his landing. But the needle vanished as well.

  Sue heard herself gasp aloud.

  The blade in D’s right hand had returned.

  “Look at the ground!” Sue shouted. “He did something—drew a circle. That has to be the secret!”

  Seurat glanced briefly at her, and then quickly returned his gaze to D.

  D had probably seen through what Seurat was doing already. Both his blade and his needle had vanished into thin air right over the edge of the circle Seurat had inscribed on the ground. However, the circle wasn’t complete. The line that should’ve closed it deviated instead. If D’s left hand had been there, it might’ve croaked, “Why, it’s a maze!”

  If ordinary mazes were intended to confuse the senses of those who entered and keep them wandering around endlessly, then it would come as little surprise that an assassin in the service of the Ultimate Noble might draw up a maze that could befuddle not only people but objects as well. And when those objects lost their way, they vanished from this world—going off in another direction entirely. Only the mazes Seurat drew could do such a thing. Any physical attack would be nullified the instant it crossed that line, while Seurat, on the other hand, was free to strike at will.

  “Uh, excuse me,” Sue called over to the giant. “That’s cheating. Fight him fair and square.”

  She never thought her words would make a difference. But something astonishing happened. Seurat stepped out of his circle. He did it of his own free will, but his timing was perfect. Sue was ecstatic.

  “Best of luck to both of you!” she called to them in a manner that was both innocent and carefree, but her cheers were frozen a second later. As the pair squared off once more, the waves of murderous intent that crashed together in the space between them were intense. It was nearly noon, the ground was blanketed in green, and every time the wind blew the sunlight seemed to highlight the colors around them—but here alone the forest was frozen with the lust for killing.

  However, the battle was short. D didn’t make the first move, but the instant the giant’s blow was about to smash down on him, he made a bound that left him standing next to Sue.

  “D?” Sue shouted as the Hunter brought his right foot down on the circle that surrounded her—she’d felt him enter it.

  When D disappeared from the right foot up to the right shoulder, Seurat raced over and swung his club. Without time enough to dodge, D took a blow to the left side of his chest that was like an explosion, sending him flying head first several yards down into the same spot in the river at the bottom of the crevasse where the water demon had met its fate earlier.

  “D?”

  Driven by emotion more violent than she could’ve imagined, Sue was about to rush forward. But something odd happened to her. For an instant, it felt like she’d just spun about a full three hundred sixty degrees, and her field of view was painted white. Every sound faded, and Sue realized she was in another place entirely. If she remained there, she might’ve vanished completely from the real world without anyone ever knowing it. However, her return took place almost immediately. As Sue stood, dazed, the enormous figure had stooped down in front of her, erased the broken line, and completed the circle.

  Catching the unsteady Sue, Seurat trained his gaze on the silvery flow that had swallowed D. More than satisfaction at victory, it was the solitary air of a huntsman who’d lost the game he’d long pursued that shrouded his massive frame.

  II

  The boy opened his eyes, and suddenly a face he knew well was peering down at him.

  “Awake now, are you?”

  Sue. He meant to say it, but nothing came out.

  “You mustn’t move,” she told him, but he’d already moved both hands and felt an intense pain shoot through them. “You’ve got burns all over your body. I’m surprised you survived.”

  Finally Matthew realized he was lying in a bed much like his own, and his entire body was wrapped in bandages like a mummy’s. However, that wasn’t what slammed him deep into a pool of despair.

  It’s not her. This girl—she’s not Sue.

  Her hair was the same color. There was some resemblance in her features, too. But when he looked at her on fully regaining his senses—she was someone else.

  “Just three hours ago, you were lying by the entrance to the village. You took the Heat-Ray Road here, didn’t you? Didn’t anyone warn you about that?”

  Matthew’s memory returned to him. After having been rescued by Duchess Miranda, he’d wandered around in search of help, coming at last to a kind of depressed region. Suddenly the light of dawn had become a blistering beam. Though he’d tried desperately to escape, it was so hot his skin cracked, and he’d swiftly become deranged. Even after that, he could recall wandering a good deal longer. That he’d managed to do so was thanks to the strength he’d built up working on his family’s farm.

  “Wh . . . wh . . . where ... am I?” he asked, and the words came out more easily than he’d expected.

  “You know the central Frontier?” the girl who resembled Sue inquired.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Well, near its northern edge. In the village of Rushall.”

  “The northern edge?”

  From the fortress, it was a full week on horseback to the northern Frontier, according to what Count Braujou had told them back at Lamoa. When had he traveled so far?

  Perhaps sensing Matthew’s question, the girl continued, “Scientists investigating the Heat-Ray Road have established that its secret lies in a distortion in physical space. The atmosphere that should buffer the sunlight is twisted, so the rays come straight there instead. Apparently the same thing happens in a few different places around the world. I don’t know how many people like you I’ve had to help.”

  For a second, Matthew’s mind drifted away. The northern edge— that was the place he and Sue had the most cause to fear. His own feet had ended up carrying him right into hell. Flames of what might be described as pity flared up in Matthew’s heart, and he groaned. The flames had taken the shape of Sue’s face.

  “Don’t cry,” the girl said, gently stroking the corner of his eye with a pale finger. “I don’t know who you are or where
you come from, but I’ll look after you until you’re able to walk again. The medicine I put on you works real well. Why, in three days’ time you’ll be good as new.”

  “Thank . . . you . . .”

  “Don’t mention it. When the going gets tough, we’ve gotta help one another. They call me Sue. Um, what’s the matter?”

  “I’m . . . Matthew.”

  And having managed to reply, Matthew shut his eyes. This Sue’s face vanished, but the face of the other Sue was still in his heart. He silently prayed to God that Sue’s face wouldn’t be replaced by this one’s.

  Damn that boy—hasn’t he shown up yet?” a voice muttered from an enormous coffin.

  Lacking even a single window, the room was sealed in darkness. Nevertheless, the occupant of the coffin couldn’t come out because it was still midday.

  We’ll meet up soon enough. Get your car to go a little faster,” another voice replied in the darkness. If it’d been light and any human had been there to witness this scene, it would’ve scared the living daylights out of him. Sitting on top of the coffin was a disembodied left hand.

  “It’s not as if you don’t know what kind of condition these Frontier roads are in,” the voice from the coffin responded. Needless to say, it belonged to Count Braujou.

  That s the fault of you Nobles,” the left hand countered sharply. You used metals that would last forever to build the major highways your carriages took, while you frustrated the humans’ efforts to make roads by leaving tangled forests and supernatural critters everywhere. You made a world of medieval horrors, leaving contemporary people to suffer like serfs, powerless in the midst of monsters and magic. The production of artificial blood had already been perfected. Why didn’t you just wipe out the human race in one fell swoop? Your world has no need for human beings.”