Noble Front Read online

  “What are you?” she asked, and at that point she noticed that the gorgeous young man she’d helped bring inside was missing his left hand from the wrist down.

  “Falling from the heavens has left him drained. No use trying to bring him around with medicine. Just let him lay there a while. I’ll handle the rest. By the way, don’t tell anybody about this. Say one word about it, and you’ll be cursed for all time!” the hoarse voice said in a menacing tone, and naturally Marcella could do nothing but nod in acknowledgment.

  As soon as Marcella left the room, the left hand climbed down from D’s chest, working its fingers skillfully to turn itself in a full circle. It had surveyed the room.

  “Hmm. They’re on the move,” the hoarse voice murmured. Pointing a finger at D, it continued, “But you’re not.”

  A man working for the deputy mayor brought an envelope containing a note to the inn where Professor Chaney was staying about a half hour after D was carried into Marcella’s house. Tipping the man and sending him on his way, the Professor read the note, at which point his expression changed.

  “So, that little Peeping Tom couldn’t help hanging around her window, eh? Well, if this is true, we might slay him.”

  The Professor’s orders were that his four henchmen were to set out. One of them was injured, and another was out drinking, however, so only two of them mounted up on their cyborg steeds.

  “They’re closing in,” the left hand murmured. It had spent nearly ten minutes motionless, apparently trying to detect their presence. “Hey, can you hear me, or are you still asleep?” it asked D. “Shit. I’m in rough shape, too. Gonna take me a little longer to refuel. If they get here now, we’ll be in serious trouble. Guess I don’t have much choice. Hey, woman—come over here. Shit, are you asleep or something?”

  Marcella was by no means asleep. She sat on the living room sofa staring into space. Though her eyes were trained on the wall of her house, her mind was wrapped around the image of that exquisite young man.

  She came over in a sort of stupor.

  “Finally decided to grace us with your presence, did you?” the left hand said petulantly from atop the young man’s chest.

  “Who made you so high and mighty?”

  “Gimme a little help here. I need you to put me on his face.”

  “What are you going to do?” the woman inquired, feeling her heart beat faster in her chest.

  “Never mind that, just put me there. He’ll do the rest.”

  Marcella had no reason not to comply. Her brain wrapped in a feverish membrane, she placed the severed limb on that gorgeous face with a trembling hand. A split second later, a sharp pain shot through her pinky.

  Shrieking with alarm, she pulled her hand back, fresh blood dripping from the ball of her finger.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” she bellowed, her rage directed at the left hand, which she’d seen scurrying off into one corner of the room. Its tiny mouth was lined with still tinier teeth.

  “Damn it, just hold on,” it said.

  Pressing down on the wound to stem the bleeding, Marcella was just about to stand up again. So she could get a broom to clobber that thing. But a cold hand reached up and caught her by the wrist.

  “What in the—?!”

  Rather than be shocked by the realization that the hand was that of the young man who hadn’t even seemed to be breathing, Marcella was enraptured.

  Just look at him, slowly getting to his feet. His pale, handsome face is right in front of me, and he just opened his eyes. But why are they red? How come he’s got a pair of teeth poking from his lips? And why are they pointed? Oh, you . . . you’re a Noble . . .

  “They’re here,” the hoarse voice groaned sharply.

  The door’s hinges creaked.

  II

  Marcella hurriedly took a place in front of the door. “Who is it?” she asked.

  There was only one visitor she ever got in the middle of the night. And she’d sent him packing nearly an hour ago.

  A voice rougher and much younger than that individual’s announced her visitor’s name. “I’ve got a message to deliver. Open up!”

  As she hesitated, there was a violent banging against the door, and its hinges squealed in protest.

  Marcella was terrified by the explosion of anger she envisioned.

  Just as she undid the bolt, a pair of shadowy figures piled in like an avalanche. One man was abnormally thin—and the other wore an iron mask. The skinny one put the nails of his right hand against Marcella’s throat. They were strangely long and sharp. The one in the iron mask headed for the door to the back room. A bundle of fine chain gleamed in his right hand. Turning toward the other one, he gave a nod.

  Skinny gave a nod in return, telling the woman, “Not a peep outta you,” and taking up a position on one side of the doorframe, opposite the one in the iron mask. The two of them waited until they were in synch, and as soon as they were, the one in the iron mask hit the door with his shoulder.

  Once they were done searching the house, the skinny one went back into the living room and reached for Marcella’s throat with his right hand. The tips of his strangely elongated nails pressed into her flawless, pale skin.

  “We’ve been authorized by the deputy mayor. Tell us everything.”

  “I . . . I don’t know anything,” Marcella replied. She would sooner die than be responsible for the young man falling into their hands.

  “Is that a fact? Watch this,” the skinny one said, his other hand flashing into action.

  A tiny form darting across the floor was split in two. A house rat. Its head and body twitched violently in separate locations. And they seemed to continue doing so for ages.

  “When I cut something in two with my claws, they’re in a world of hellish pain forever. Until I kill ’em again, that is. Can’t even lose their minds. On account of the pain’s too bad. You think I’m shitting you?”

  “Don’t . . .”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know . . . really.”

  A shadowy fire sparked in the skinny one’s eyes.

  Just then, the one in the iron mask said to him, “Give it a rest, Valen.”

  “Stay outta my way.”

  “Were we sent here to toy with women?”

  “Don’t get in my way, Mask.”

  “Oh, you think you want to throw down with me? You mentioned before how you were curious whether those claws of yours could cut through my mask, didn’t you? What do you say we find out right now?”

  “You son of a bitch . . .”

  “Let’s hit the road. I’ve heard about this happening. They say every woman who sees D’s face becomes his slave. Seems you can torture them all you like, but they’ll never give you anything that might put D at a disadvantage.”

  “Interesting. Let’s see if that’s really true or not.”

  “Push it too far and she’ll bite her own tongue off. We were told not to lay a hand on any of the villagers, or have you forgotten? The grand duke might not have a problem with losing the support of the villagers, but the same can’t be said for the Professor or the deputy mayor. That’d be the end of everything.”

  “Like I give a damn.”

  “I give a damn. The better this goes, the more we get paid!”

  “Shit,” the skinny one said, taking his claws away from her.

  In a tone that was ten times calmer than the skinny one’s but a hundred times more unsettling, the one in the iron mask said, “Lady, if you’d like to remain under the deputy mayor’s protection, you’d better not pull any more funny business.”

  Marcella nodded.

  Once she was certain the two of them had left, Marcella bolted the door again and stared at the center of her living room. The gorgeous young man lay there. Closing her eyes, Marcella then opened them again. There was nobody there.

  All that—was it just a dream?

  Somebody had come into the room earlier. Then the left hand had press
ed against her brow, her head spun around and around—and the next thing she knew, she was standing by the front door. She’d known exactly what she was supposed to do.

  “Yeah, it must’ve been,” Marcella said, convincing herself. There was no other way to accept the night’s events. “It was all just a dream.”

  She had to catch a little sleep before dawn. After all, working at the bar in the village was pretty exhausting. Reaching around to massage the bottom of her aching back, she turned out the living room lamp and headed off toward her bedroom.

  †

  Looking up at the carefully stacked stones of the walls and ceiling, it was clear that the long subterranean road was man-made. The caverns that appeared along the way were probably entrances to side roads.

  “Hell of a scale to it, isn’t there?” the left hand said, resting on D’s shoulder.

  Perhaps feeling the strange flow of air, one of the tiny flames that were set in the walls at critical points wavered.

  “And made quite a long time ago—more than five millennia. Most likely there was a gap formed by shifts in the earth’s crust that they excavated in spots to make their way, or else they reinforced it after leveling the place.”

  The reply came from someone who’d given D a shoulder to lean on. He sounded young. A lot younger than those three rebels—you could say he was no more than a boy. The white lab coat suited his thin frame. Though he sounded like a man of science, whether or not he had the face of one was unclear. Purple cloth shrouded his head and shoulders, hiding them from prying eyes.

  “Go to her house a lot, do you?” the hoarse voice asked.

  “No. Nor had I intended to go there today. I just happened to hear you talking through the intercom tubes.”

  “Hmm, an eavesdropper, eh?”

  “Call it a most necessary return to service for the eavesdropping system put in during ancient times when the place was being carved out, if you don’t mind. I had absolutely nothing to do with their creation.”

  “Which means, what, that whoever made this road is responsible for that, too? Even five thousand years ago, humans were all sick little busybodies.”

  “I’ll reserve comment on that. I don’t know precisely why they dug these paths, but they’re ideal for moving about unobserved.”

  “Just how far do they run?”

  “By my measurements, a good forty miles. There’s a web of tunnels exiting in all the key structures in the village. Town hall, the school, the mayor’s home, the spiritualist center, the forests and swamps on all four sides of us, and more—there are more than twenty destinations, all told. They weren’t added later, but rather lead to points on subterranean energy lines, where our key facilities were built as a matter of course—you could say the choice of those locations was inevitable.”

  “Still, I’m surprised no one’s found them in five thousand years.”

  “The entrances are all concealed by both physical and psychological camouflage. Do you remember where I came out of?”

  The youth had appeared from a wall through a wooden door that absolutely hadn’t been there a moment earlier, informing the people and the limb there that trouble was coming and taking D and his left hand away while Marcella remained behind.

  “When I throw the bolt on this side—the passageways—no one on the outside would ever know it was there. You could destroy the whole wall and probably still not find anything.”

  “Hmm. Humans might’ve been more advanced five thousand years ago than they are now.”

  “It wasn’t necessarily human beings.”

  “You saying Nobles dug this? If so, what for?”

  “I don’t know. Was it humans or Nobles? What’s it for? I don’t know anything at all.”

  “You gotta know something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Who you really are.”

  “Don’t pry into matters that don’t concern you—isn’t that the code for travelers on the Frontier? Especially one like the Hunter known as D. I hear that he’s particularly sticky on that matter.”

  “Oh, so you know who he is, do you? I suppose you’ll tell me that was inevitable, too?”

  “Precisely,” the youth said, a tinge of fatigue bleeding into his tone. He’d been carrying D ever since they’d left that house—and that had to weigh heavily on a slight frame like his.

  Suddenly the walls to either side of them were much further back. The place overflowed with light. They were in a clearing of about eighteen hundred square feet. A number of bare lightbulbs hung down from cords strung across the place, shining on the huge doors set in the wall. They were steel without so much as a fleck of rust on them.

  “Finally getting to the main course, are we? What’s behind those doors?”

  “Nothing special,” he said through his purple hood, striking a certain key on the control panel set in the steel doors.

  The doors slid off to either side, exposing an unbelievable sight beyond.

  “Well, I’ll be—” the hoarse voice said, the way it petered off a testimony to that.

  Up until now, they’d been thirty feet below the surface at most. And they’d been moving across level ground. But at the end of that lay an enormous facility that could best be described as a factory or a research center.

  “One of the Nobles’ factories?”

  In that case, it wouldn’t be surprising for three-dimensional space to have been folded to accommodate it. However, it was so utterly at odds with the words and deeds of the youth who’d led them there—the apparent master of the place. After all, outside the door had been a chamber lit by bare lightbulbs.

  “To the medical center,” the purple hood said, and at that same instant the floor began to move. There wasn’t a single crease in it. In fact, it might’ve only been the people on top of it that were actually moving.

  Moving on to another corridor, they continued on a bit, at which point the floor—or at least they—halted in front of a white wall. The wall glowed, and the glow became an elliptical doorway. Off in the distance, a lump formed, took on human shape, and became a nurse dressed in white. A woman so beautiful she’d make you want to sigh.

  “A liquid metal android?” said the left hand.

  The beauty gave D a shoulder to lean on, leading him to a bed in the back.

  Quickly moving over the shoulder of the purple-hooded youth, the left hand said, “Computers gotta be in control of all this machinery. So, you can make ’em do whatever you like, can you?”

  “I suppose—or so I’d tell you, but even I don’t know for sure.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m human. There’s no way I’d be able to comprehend every facet of the Nobility’s technology. I can operate perhaps one millionth of what’s in this facility.”

  “Just how far back was this place built?”

  “That I do know. According to the memory banks, it was roughly seven thousand years ago—which would make it about the time they were at war with the OSB, right?”

  “Ah.”

  “What do think drives scientific progress?”

  “War.”

  “You say it so easily. You’re right, though,” the purple hood said with a laugh. “This was a research facility for weapons. Not a manufacturing plant. It was used primarily to study OSB weapons and develop countermeasures.”

  “I’ve heard about that. At the tail end of the OSB War, it seems the Nobility were using OSB weapons as their own.”

  “That’s right. The OSB shape-change ability is an example of that,” the youth said, aiming a purple-gloved finger where the nurse stood.

  “Hmm. The floor, too, eh?”

  “Yes. I’m sure the Nobility’s science probably would’ve developed liquid metal at some point. However, I question whether they could’ve come up with something as complex as this. Françoise, I’m sorry, but would you be so kind as to bleed a bit for us?”

  “Yes, sir,” the beauty replied in a voice like moonlight, perfectl
y suited to her resplendent features, and with that she extended her left index finger. It was immediately transformed into a keen scalpel, which then slid into her right wrist. A silvery liquid dripped out, becoming a bead that spattered against the floor. And there it turned red.

  III

  “If you were to analyze it, you’d see that its composition doesn’t differ in the slightest from human blood.”

  “You don’t say,” the left hand remarked, not sarcastically but with admiration. “Well, I don’t know about all that. You can’t play Nobles for a fool, you know. By the way, how’s he doing?”

  “There’s no problem. Give him some blood and he’ll be back to normal in no time. But it must be human blood.”

  “How about that metal blood?”

  “There are still things about the Nobility, legends and facts, that aren’t completely understood. Though its components are exactly the same as human blood, drinking it wouldn’t help a dhampir recover. It’s not a matter of the composition, the problem is it must be human blood. A Noble can stand under an artificial light that creates rays exactly like the sun and he won’t be turned into dust. Because, ultimately, that is artificial light, not the light of the sun. These very issues are something the surviving Nobility investigate even now. And probably will until the end of time.”

  “Hmm. Got any blood lying around?”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  “What about you?”

  “I have none to offer one of Noble descent.”

  “Then why’d you bother helping us?”

  “Because it looked like he could help destroy the Nobility,” the purple hood replied, as if the answer was obvious. “That being the case, I can call someone in. I could get that woman from earlier, but she’s already linked to dangerous matters unbeknownst to herself.”

  “Hmm, you know everything, do you? What are you doing down here, anyway?”

  “Living. I have nowhere else to go.”