The Rose Princess Page 9
Only after he’d finished did the six pieces of sundered flesh fall to the ground. And more horrible than the sight of them was the sound they made as they struck the earth.
“Not good . . . Not good at all . . . I went through them much faster . . . than I would’ve liked,” the White Knight said, the words coming out in a pant. His right hand returned the longsword to his hip as he continued, “And it’s all your fault. You’re that striking . . . That powerful . . . Oh, you wicked man . . . Now I must introduce you to ‘Slayer.’”
A tiny metallic rasping rose from the knight’s hip. The sound was so disturbing that if there’d been anyone else to hear it, they would’ve curled up in a ball and covered their ears. The sword and scabbard were rubbing against each other. All by itself, the blade was sliding out of its sheath, then back, only to repeat the whole process again and again—as if it hadn’t done enough cutting, or spilled enough blood. As if it was too soon for it to settle back into its scabbard. After all, D was still there, wasn’t he?
So, this blade was “Slayer.”
INTO THE FOREST OF DEATH
CHAPTER 4
—
I
—
The warriors stood facing each other in the darkness for a few seconds—the rasping of Slayer in its sheath the only sound to be heard—while a murderous intent no one save these two could sense continued to build. When they crossed naked steel, who would prove the better man? D’s coat had been cut by the attacks of the vicious, nimble little homunculi, while the White Knight’s cape had remained unscathed. What’s more, it seemed Slayer itself was imbued with some sort of magic.
The silence was broken by the White Knight as he said, “Time to draw you, Slayer.”
The blade danced out. The motion was so smooth, it looked as if the sword had leapt into the knight’s hand rather than waiting to be drawn.
D, on the other hand, wasn’t poised for action—he had neither relaxed nor tensed his body, and his arms hung by his sides.
“You’re good . . . ,” said the White Knight. “Simply by standing there, you’re nearly enough to make my blood freeze. I doubt I shall ever again face such an opponent in a battle of life or death.”
The knight suddenly wheeled his horse around. Without a backward glance he rode on, the hoofbeats growing fainter and fainter.
Though his foe’s actions were perplexing, D didn’t move from where he stood.
What was he waiting for?
The dwindling hoofbeats began to ring louder and stronger. The rider was coming back. And as the strides of the approaching mount resounded, they echoed a faint yet unshakable determination to kill.
He kept coming. One hundred fifty feet . . . One twenty-five . . . One hundred . . .
D was motionless.
The rider’s blade would come crashing down like a tidal wave. But what would happen when it was met by another sword whipping up from the ground like a gust of snow and ice?
Thirty feet . . . Fifteen . . . Ten . . .
The gorgeous form was eclipsed by a massive figure and the wild pounding of hooves. And then—there was the most gorgeous chime in the world, and a flash of white flew off like a shooting star.
Who would’ve thought that D’s blade would snap off at the hilt?
Sparks shooting from his horse’s hooves as it came to a sudden stop, the White Knight turned and laughed.
“No blade can stand up to Slayer,” he said. “Now you’re finished.”
And what did D do? He remained in the same spot while the enchanted blade once again groaned through the air, this time aimed at the Hunter’s skull.
A bloody spray shot out.
“Oh!” the knight cried in surprise when he felt his sword do something other than sink into flesh.
Slayer’s blade was pinned between the palms of the hands D had clapped together over his head. However, a dark liquid was also gushing from those same hands. The Hunter’s own fresh blood rained down on his forehead, streaming down the side of his nose.
Slayer sank a bit deeper.
“Die, damn you! Die! All who do battle with the Slayer die,” the White Knight bellowed, his eyes tinged red with insanity.
Was this knight’s strength actually a match for D’s? Or was it his sword’s enchantment that gave him the edge? The blade was slowly sliding down between the palms of D’s hands, releasing a shower of blood on the Hunter in the process.
Screeching like a crazed raptor, the White Knight let his cry become the force behind his blade as he brought it down. His bloodshot eyes reflected a hue that was far deeper. Yes, D’s eyes. The blood that’d coursed down off the Hunter’s forehead ran in a crimson line to his lips.
D pivoted.
“Oof!” the knight exclaimed, the cry stretching from the back of the mount he’d been sitting on to the spot fifteen feet away where he thudded to earth again.
As D prepared to stalk over to the fallen knight, a gigantic white form leapt in front of him—the White Knight’s steed. It stood stock still, blocking the way.
“Outstanding!” the knight exclaimed with apparent pleasure from where he lay, and his horse dashed over to him at full speed. Gory blade dangling limply from one hand, the White Knight grabbed the reins that hung by him and finally managed to pull himself up. Giving a rough shake to his head, he said, “You’re a powerful brute. I believe I may have broken some bones . . . It can’t be . . . that you descend from the same sort of blood as our princess . . . You’re the Vampire Hunter I heard about . . . aren’t you?”
“How right you are!” a voice cried from the darkness. Needless to say, it was that of the princess. She sounded like a little flirt, but her presence had gone undetected by the White Knight, and even D himself hadn’t noticed her.
“Oh, my . . . Princess . . . ,” the knight stammered. As demented as he seemed to be, his mistress apparently merited special treatment. Putting Slayer back on his hip, he went down on one knee, his head already bowed. Evincing not a trace of madness or mockery, the act was one of pure loyalty.
With a dance-like movement the pale and lovely princess appeared from a spot about fifteen feet to the left of the Hunter.
“Well, I trust you had an interesting experience, did you not, my White Knight?” said the princess. If ever a face glowed, hers did now.
“Yes, milady,” the knight replied succinctly, sounding like a completely new man.
“There are men of such power out in the world. I wonder if even your Slayer could best him.”
The white helm rose.
“Begging your pardon, but I believe you’ll find—”
The princess hastily waved her hands, saying, “You needn’t say a thing. I was mistaken, and please forget I mentioned it. This will be decided at some other time. D, that goes for you, too. Now that you’ve lost your sword, you couldn’t possibly go on,” she said, but as her eyes studied D’s profile, the fear in them was evident.
D’s eyes were ablaze with blood. Still empty-handed, he advanced.
“Don’t stalk over to me with that frightful expression. Off with you!” the princess said as she backed away. “Why don’t you go back to the village instead? The flowers I scattered there should be causing quite a furor.”
A whistle pierced the air.
“Princess!” the White Knight exclaimed, deftly drawing his blade and cutting down the rough wooden needle.
However, the reason the princess moaned as she pressed down on the left side of her chest was because another needle had eluded her knight and penetrated not her breast, but the back of her hand.
“Isn’t that something,” she said with a grin, no doubt highly appreciative of the way the Hunter had managed to get one of his missiles past Slayer, although the lovely princess’s skill in narrowly stopping the needle he’d just thrown with her bare hands had probably impressed D in return.
Still, a second later the hem of the gorgeous Hunter’s coat billowed out as he dashed at the lovely vampire princess.
The White Knight was ready to meet him.
It was just then that the earth rumbled. Six hundred feet underground, the floor of this subterranean chamber was braced by an unspeakable mass of earth, yet it thrashed like a giant serpent.
D’s body flew into the air and was swallowed by the darkness before it ever touched the floor.
—
Light had returned. D was surrounded by a sea of stars.
“Looks like we’re okay,” said the Hunter’s left hand. It didn’t sound at all apprehensive. If anything, its tone could’ve been described as matter-of-fact.
Giving no reply, D surveyed his surroundings. The darkness was almost kin to the young man.
He was on top of a huge rounded stone. A long line of similar stones continued downward, their faces glimmering in a manner reminiscent of the crescent moon. The lights that flickered far off in the distance must’ve been those of some community.
“We’re on top of a mountain,” his left hand said incredulously. “Judging by the strength of the winds and the direction they’re blowing, we’ve gotta be a good two miles up. Looks like our little friend can teleport stuff. Well, she sure caught us napping!”
D was looking up at the stars, but he quickly lowered his eyes again and began making his way down the rocks without a sound. The way he leapt from one rock to the next, he seemed like a master of dance.
Based on the positions of the stars, he must’ve been at the northern extreme of the princess’s domain. It would probably take a whole day and night of hard riding to get back to Sacri.
—
“That’s an interesting tidbit,” the old woman said as she tossed a whole bundle of herbs into the dirty brown liquid boiling in her cauldron.
They were in the dispensary she ran out of a back room in her house. Not one of the village mayors had ever seen the inside of it, and as Elena stood there by the crone’s side telling her all about what had transpired at the castle, she was actually the first visitor the room had seen in fifty years. The noon daylight speared the sooty lace curtains.
“To think that the princess would ask the Hunter to get rid of her four knights. Well, anyone as handsome as him could probably do it, too.”
As the conversation seemed like it was about to take a strange turn, Elena tried to get it back on track, saying, “I thought you’d be more surprised, Mama Kipsch. I mean, the princess asked him to kill her knights, of all things! What the hell could she be plotting?”
“She’s not plotting anything,” the aged witch doctor said purposefully as she took three tablespoons of red powder from a glass jar and added them to her pot. “She’s probably telling the truth.”
“You mean she seriously wants them dead? Why?!”
“For the very reason you said. I suppose she wants to be free now.”
“The Nobility abandoning one of their castles?” Elena said. Shrugging her shoulders, she continued, “I’ve never heard of such a thing. They’re connected to their fortresses, like light to shadow. One can’t exist without the other. Isn’t that why we’ve been put through hell?”
“There is no hell,” Mama Kipsch muttered, her tone once again heavy with meaning. “We humans grow some odd ducks. Like you, or my grandson. It’s not so strange to suppose it’s the same for the Nobility. After all, they look pretty much the same as we do.”
“Then that bitch might really mean it . . . ,” Elena muttered. Mama Kipsch was the village’s great repository of wisdom, and her words made the girl finally appreciate the grave import of what the princess had said.
“But listen—you’re not to mention that to anyone else,” the witch doctor said, her forcefulness bringing Elena back to her senses.
“Why’s that?”
“Because in this village, there are those who wouldn’t be too happy with the news.”
A horrible expression briefly passed across Elena’s face.
“I suppose you’ve got a point there.”
“But enough about that. Help me think of some way to deal with the crisis at hand. I simply don’t have enough blue yaki moss to finish making this medicine,” Mama Kipsch said as she folded her arms.
“Blue moss . . . Do you mean the stuff I think you do? From the Shamballa Forest?”
“Oh, forget I mentioned it,” the old woman told her. “I’m sure I’ll find something else I can use instead.”
A thought seemed to occur to Elena, and she said, “There’s nothing else to use and you know it. You’ve always been a lousy liar, you know. Okay, I’ll go get it.”
“Don’t. It’s high noon already. Even on your bike it’d be two hours to the forest and another hour to find the moss—You’d be lucky to make it back by five o’clock Night. And the forest is far too dangerous.”
“Hell, I’m not going alone. That’d be nuts. I’ll bring my boyfriends with me. Luckily, they were off drinking at a warehouse on the edge of town, so some of them didn’t get the vampire rose baptism.”
“You’ll be throwing your lives away,” Mama Kipsch told the girl.
“We’ll never know if we don’t try. Your own grandson lost his life doing what he believed in. And not even for his girlfriend, but for an unrequited love. We all respect the hell out of that.”
Turning her eyes to the floor, the old woman then placed a hand on Elena’s shoulder and thanked her. “Okay, you’ll get some for me then?” she asked.
“Of course. I wanna do whatever I can to make things miserable for those bastards.” And with those words, Elena ground her back teeth together as if testing the firmness of her own resolve.
—
II
—
Going outside, Elena headed toward the square—it was less than a three-minute walk from Mama Kipsch’s house. A hastily improvised tent had been stretched over the spot where so many of the village’s inhabitants had buried themselves. Needless to say, it was there to ward off the rays of the sun. Though there was a facility for people who’d been turned into Nobility situated on the southern edge of the village, it couldn’t begin to accommodate them all. The tent had taken the villagers who remained unaffected a good five hours to put up after sunrise, and it still hadn’t been large enough—a third of the covering had been improvised from blankets and fabric.
As she got closer to the tent, odd cries began to beat against her eardrums. Scowling alone wasn’t going to accomplish anything, and she didn’t want to plug her ears. She had to listen to keep feeding the rage she felt toward the bastards responsible for all those moans.
As one of the villagers standing at the entrance to the tent noticed Elena, his expression grew stern. He adjusted his grip on the spear in his right hand. It was a farmer by the name of Gary.
“I’m not a Noble, you know,” Elena said, showing him a smile anyway.
“Why is this happening to us?” Gary asked, his expression unchanged.
“I don’t know.”
“That young feller comes along and all this shit happens on the same day. Someone saw the two of you taking the road up toward the castle.”
“Well, we turned around before we got there,” the girl replied. “Since we don’t get many lookers like him in town, I thought I’d take him on a little date.”
“Bah, you lousy whore,” the man spat as he turned away in disgust. No one in the community really appreciated the wild behavior of Elena’s group.
“Pardon me,” Elena said without letting the expression change on her face, but once she’d slipped in through the flap, she unleashed a vicious kick with her right foot.
As always, her instincts were spot-on. Most likely, not even the rough-and-tumble farmer had ever taken a kick to the genitals through a layer of canvas before. Groans of pain could be heard coming from the ground outside.
“Learn how to talk to a lady, you damn limp dick,” said Elena. And though that kick should’ve lifted her spirits, her voice was heavy.
The moaning in the tent had grown deafening. It took quite an e
ffort on Elena’s part just to keep from shutting her eyes.
Half-buried in the earth or caked with dirt, the villagers were writhing on the ground. On their backs, necks, and foreheads, roses of four different colors opened unexpectedly. Even if the villagers who hadn’t been afflicted pulled them out, more roses would rise from the sundered flesh to flower in beautiful displays of red, blue, black, and white. Apparently, this abnormal method of infection hadn’t made them true servants of the Nobility, as they didn’t sleep through the day but rather writhed in agony when the rays of the sun penetrated the thick canvas tarp sheltering them. That was why they were being protected instead of having stakes driven through their hearts, Elena told herself. If these people had received the kiss of the Nobility, they’d have long since been dispatched. It was the law of the Frontier.
“E . . . le . . . na . . . ,” a voice sobbed down by her feet.
Saying nothing, Elena just kept looking straight ahead.
“Help . . . It’s me . . . Decoy . . .”
“And me . . . Seren . . .”
“It’s so hot . . . The pain . . . My body . . . is . . . burning . . .”
Something caught hold of her ankle. A cold hand. Elena didn’t move.
“Just wait a little longer. I’m sure we’ll get you back to normal.” But as the girl spoke, her body trembled. From the ankle in her friend’s grip, an evil chill that beggared description was needling into her. Her flesh was starting to crawl. And that voice—
“E . . . le . . . na . . .”
“You damn freak!” she snarled, the words coming out in a tone even she couldn’t have imagined. Her right hand slid down to her hip and took a length of weighted chain. She hauled back with it, and then whipped it down hard, all intentionally. A sickening sound was heard, and unpleasantly warm spray flew in her face. But she just kept bringing the weighted end down. Time and again she swung it. And between the blows, the voice continued to call her name faintly, almost as if intoning a curse.
Perhaps that was what the weight on the end of the chain was meant to bring to an end.