Powerful enough to char a lesser dragon through tough scales otherwise impervious to blades, the electromagnetic barrier set off a shower of sparks that turned blackest night to brightest day for a fleeting moment. Bursting through a giant, white-hot blossom of fire, the ball of white light forced its way onto the farm. The horse, the driver, the wagon wheels—white flames clung to them all. It was an outlandish sight, like a carriage from hell that had suddenly appeared on earth.
“They’re through. What in the world?...” Doris’ puzzled exclamation came as she watched the cyborg horses—as soon as they’d broken through the barrier, she’d expected the four of them to tear right into her front yard like a veritable hurricane, but not a single hoof was out of step as they executed a brilliant stop right on the spot.
The magnetic flames swirling around them quickly dispersed. The enemy was protected by a more powerful barrier.
“Not yet. Look! He’s getting out!” Once again, her hand was checked by the physician’s hopeful command, but in his voice Doris caught a ring of both tension and fear that outweighed the former emotion by far. Embodiment of courage and intellect that the elderly physician was, the damage of scores of centuries of brainwashing by the Nobility had seeped well into his subconscious.
The black door opened, and a massive figure garbed in sable trod down steps that automatically projected onto the ground.
“He must be some kind of idiot—look at him, jumping out like he doesn’t have a care in the world.”
Ostensibly encouraged, Doris’ voice still lacked strength. Her foe knew that any defenses she might be ready to spring on him would pose no threat. When the villain that had left his filthy mark on her neck bared his pearly fangs in a grin and started toward the house alone, Doris pulled the lever.
All over the farm there was the sound of one spring releasing after another. Black chunks flew through the air toward the Count, only to bounce back inches shy of him. What fell to the ground were boulders a good four feet in diameter. Fired in rapid succession, all of the rocky missiles were robbed of their kinetic energy by an invisible barrier, falling around the calmly advancing Count.
“Just as I thought—he’s no pushover.” Doris pulled a second lever. This time it was steel javelins the launchers disgorged. All of the first ten bounced off him, but the eleventh and final javelin pierced the Count’s abdomen.
“I got him!” Doris exclaimed, squeezing the lever so hard she threatened to break it. What froze her smile was the way the temporarily motionless Count gave a horrible grin before he resumed his deliberate stride, the steel javelin still protruding from his stomach and back.
The bastard’s trying to tell me he doesn’t even need his force field to stop my attacks!
It felt like an icy paw of fear was stirring her brains as Doris suddenly realized that there was no need for a vampire to “go get” a former victim. For those who’d felt the kiss of blood on their neck but once, a single word from a fiend outside their door would suffice to call them out into the waiting arms of Death. That was precisely the sort of thing D was guarding against when he rendered her unconscious the first time she had unwanted guests.
“He’s toying with me!” Doris pushed and pulled levers like a woman possessed. So long as nothing pierced its heart, a vampire would not die. Though undoubtedly aware of this immutable fact, seeing the fearsome power in action with her own two eyes had completely robbed the girl of the cool judgment the daughter of a skilled Hunter should possess. She was robbed of her reason by the same fear that slumbered in all mortals, the fear of unknowable darkness.
Machine guns concealed in the shrubbery spat fire, and explosive-tipped arrows set aflame by a lens on the solar storage unit fell like rain.
Through the oily smoke, the fiery explosions, and the deafening roar that surrounded him, the Count grinned. It was clear this was the stiffest resistance humanity could currently offer. Their kind remained on earth, tough as cockroaches, while his species slid silently and inevitably toward extinction, dwindling like the light of the setting sun.
Suddenly, his anger flared, consuming all the admiration he’d felt for the resistance his prey offered. His eyes became flame. As he gnashed his naked fangs together, the Count dashed to the porch, took the stairs in a single leap, yanked the javelin from his abdomen, and heaved the weapon at the door. The door burst off its hinges and toppled into the house. Beyond the door hung a black, iron netting. The instant he heedlessly thrust the steel javelin into it to sweep it out of his way, there was a flash at the point of contact, and the Count felt a violent burning sensation flowing into his body through the hand he had around the weapon. For the first time, the flesh beneath his black raiment shuddered in agony, and his hair stood on end. The vampire’s accursed regenerative abilities did their best to counteract the vicious electric shock, and then set to adjusting the molecular arrangement of the cells that needed to be removed. The shock he received came from a transformer that converted energy collected in the solar panels on the roof by day into a high-tension load of fifty-thousand volts. Even as he felt his cells charred and nerves destroyed by the precipitous electrical shock, the Count swung the javelin. With a parting gift of fresh agony and a shower of sparks, the conductive net of interlaced wire tore and fell to the floor.
“Well done for a lone woman,” the Count muttered with admiration, his eyes bloodshot. “She’s every bit the fighter I thought she’d be. Child, I must have your blood at all costs. Wait for me.”
Doris knew she had exhausted all means at her disposal. As the monitor was switched to the interior of the house, the visage of a thirsting demon filled the screen. Suddenly the living room door was knocked back into the room. Doris leapt up from the control console and stood in front of Dr. Ferringo to shield him.
“Child,” the figure in the doorway said, “while you fight admirably for a woman, the battle is done. You must favor me with a taste of your hot blood.”
The snap of a whip split the air.
“Come,” the Count commanded in a penetrating voice.
The tip of her whip lost its impetus in midair, and the weapon fell to the floor in coils. Doris began walking with the shaky steps of a marionette, but the elderly physician grabbed her shoulder. His right hand covered her nostrils, and the young woman slumped to the floor without a sound. The physician had kept a chloroform-soaked cloth concealed in his hand all along.
“So you intend to interfere with me, old fool?” the Count asked in a stark, white voice devoid of all emotion.
“Well, I can’t stand back and do nothing,” the old man responded, stepping forward with his left hand clenched. “Here’s something you hate—garlic powder.”
A wave of unrest passed across the Count’s face, but he soon gave a broad grin. “You should be complimented on your discovery—but you truly are foolish. True enough, I am powerless against that scent. You may slip through my grasp this night. But the instant you confirm how effective it is against me, that confirmation shall cost you all memory of the very thing you hold in your hand. And tomorrow evening I shall come again.”
“I’m not gonna let you do that.”
“Oh, and what shall you do?”
“This old fool had a life once, too. Thirty years back, Sam Ferringo was known as something of an Arachni-man Hunter. And I know a thing or two as well about how to do battle with your kind.”
“I see.” There was a glint in the Count’s eyes.
The elderly physician gave a wave of his hand. Powder and a strange odor swirled through the air.
Gagging, the vampire reeled back with his cape over his nose and mouth. He was struck with a horrible urge to vomit. He felt utterly enervated, as if his brains were melting and life itself was draining from his body. The cells in his sinus cavity—the olfactory nerves that make the sense of smell possible—were dealt a devastating blow by the allicin that gives garlic its distinctive aroma.
“Your kinds’ days are over. Back to the world of darkness and destruction with you!” At some point, Dr. Ferringo had pulled out a foot-long stake. With the rough wooden weapon in his right hand, the physician advanced. Right before his eyes, a black bird snapped its wings open. It was the Count’s cape. Like a sentient being, it wrapped around the elderly physician’s wrists, then swept around wildly to hurl the man clear across the room—all without the Count appearing to lift a finger. This was one of the secret tricks of the Nobility. The Count had learned it from no less than the Sacred Ancestor of his race.
Scrambling desperately to rise from the floor, the elderly physician was horrified to see the still wildly coughing Count climbing onto Doris.
“Wait!”
The Count’s face eclipsed part of the girl’s throat.
What the physician saw astonished him.
The Count fell backward, his face pale. Perhaps no one had ever seen a Noble wear such an expression of stark terror as the elderly physician now witnessed. Ignoring the awestruck physician, the figure in black disappeared through the door, his cape fluttering behind him.
When the elderly physician finally got to his feet, rubbing his hip all the while, he could hear the echo of wagon wheels fading into the distance.
Somehow or other, it looks like we’re out of the woods for now.
Just as this tremendous feeling of relief welled up inside him, Dr. Ferringo suddenly got the feeling he’d forgotten something important and cocked his head to one side.
What in the blazes is that smell? And why did that bastard take to his heels?
.
As soon as the sun was up the next morning, Doris entrusted the still slumbering Dan to the elderly physician and left the farm. “Are you dead set on going? Even supposing he’s still alive, you’ve got no idea whether or not you’ll find him.” Doc was referring to D, of course. Doris kept her silence and smiled. It wasn’t a disheartened smile. She’d save him all right, even if it killed her. That was the conviction that bolstered her smile.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be back for sure. Take care of Dan for me.” And with that, she wheeled her horse around toward the vampires’ castle.
She was scared. She’d already felt the vampire’s baleful fangs once, and had nearly been attacked again scant hours earlier. And she’d already lost all memory of the effectiveness of garlic. Having heard from Dr. Ferringo that the Count had run off for some unknown reason, Doris assured herself the powder really had worked. As soon as she came to believe it, however, every memory of the powder was purged from her brain. In its place, Doris remembered how the previous night, the fearsome Noble dealt with every attack she threw at him like it was mere child’s play. The memory of it was etched vividly in her mind.
She couldn’t beat him. There was no way to stop him.
While she raced across the plains with a display of equestrian skill that would put any man to shame, her heart was poised to drop into a pit of the darkest despair until the innocent face of her brother Dan caught her and pulled her back.
Don’t worry, your big sister ain’t about to let that bastard get the best of her. I’ll bring D back, and then we’ll get rid of the lot of them,
she thought.
Beyond Dan’s face, another face flickered. Colder than that of the Count, a visage so exquisite it gave her goose bumps.
Be alive. I don’t care how bad you’re hurt, just please still be alive.
.
Even after the weather controller’s “comfort-control time” was over, the chill-laden morn on the prairie was so beautiful and charged with vitality that the green of the landscape took on a deeper hue. A dozen men on horseback, looking like they’d ridden hard all night, kicked up a cloud of dust as they came to an abrupt halt on a road traversed only by a pleasant morning breeze. The road ran on into the village of Ransylva, stitching its way between prairies of waist-high grass. Seventy feet ahead, four figures had sprung from the undergrowth and now stood in the middle of the road, blocking the traveler’s way.
“What the hell are you trying to prove?!”
“We’re the Frontier Defense Force, dispatched on orders from the Capital. Out of our way!” The eyes of the second man to shout narrowed cautiously. The outlandish appearance of this foursome touched on remembered dangers.
“A girlish little punk, a big freaking bastard, a bag of bones with a pointed head, and a hunchback—you pricks wouldn’t happen to be the Fiend Corps would you?”
“An excellent deduction,” Rei-Ginsei said with a grin wholly befitting the lush, green morning. With that gem of a smile, it was hard to imagine this dashing youth as the head of the brutal bandit gang that had terrorized the northern part of the Frontier. “We came down here to make a little money after our faces got a wee bit too well known up north, but before we can even get started, it comes to our attention you boys are going from village to village posting warrants for us, so we decided to wait for you out here. Kindly refrain from doing anything untoward.”
To the man, the members of the FDF were enraged by his insolent tone. The solemn-faced man who was apparently their commander barked, “Shut your damn flap! We made double-time to Pedros after we got word you pricks had been seen in town there, but we just barely missed you, much to our regret. I can’t believe our luck. You clowns just jumped into our laps. We’re busting you right here. I don’t care if you’re the meanest bandits to ever walk the earth, you’ve all gotta be soft in the head. You know, we’re the fucking Frontier Defense Force, dumbass!” His self-confidence wasn’t a bluff. Dispatched by the Capital at regular intervals to police the entire Frontier, the FDF had been trained to combat all manner of beasts and creatures. They were equipped with serious firepower, and in a fight, each and every one of them was worth a platoon of normal men.
Heavy metallic clinks echoed from the saddles of the squad members serried behind him. That was the sound of shells being automatically fed into the recoilless bazookas each man was issued. The squad members already had Rei-Ginsei and his group in the unswerving sights of their laser rifles. No matter how the bandits’ battle in the saloon the previous day had defied imagining, it seemed unlikely that mortal men like themselves could weather the FDF’s assault.
“How does this strike you—since you went to all the trouble of turning yourselves in, we’ll let you throw down your weapons, okay? That way you’ll at least get to go on living till they get you up on the hangman’s scaffold,” said the commander.
“I don’t fancy that.”
“Why, you little punk!”
“By all means, shoot me if it’ll make you feel any better. But before you do, there’s one thing you seem to be forgetting.”
The commander knit his brow in consternation.
“The Fiend Corps is not a quartet,” Rei-Ginsei said in an exquisite voice.
“What?!”
A stir ran through the FDF members. At some point, the foursome had taken their eyes off the FDF and turned them straight to the side.
“We have a guardian angel the rest of the world knows nothing about.” Still looking off to the side, Rei-Ginsei pulled the corner of his lips up sharply. His was the devil’s own smile. “Oh, here it comes now!” When an unremitting source of terror to the human body and soul appeared right in front of them, the degree of shock each of the victims felt seemed to be directly dependent on their proximity to it.
The instant
the thing
materialized from thin air, hovering over the commander’s horse, the leader died of shock, and the five FDF members within ten feet of him went insane. And that wasn’t all. Apparently even animals could see the thing, or perhaps they could sense its troubling presence; the lead horses forgot all about running away, but instead dropped to a spasming heap on the ground, frothing from the nose and mouth. The rest of the steeds reared up.
Most likely, the FDF members who fell from their mounts as a result didn’t cry out because part of their psyches had already been shattered. Some of them had their heads staved by the hooves of the rampaging horses, while others seemed frozen as they watched it coming closer and closer.
The thing
leisurely made its way from one survivor to the next, touching each of the members in turn.
The Capital’s greatest fighting men quietly died of madness, powerless to stop it.
“Well, what do you think? The fifth member of the Fiend Corps is quite the looker, isn’t it?”
The last member of the FDF was crawling across the ground, but as he listened to Rei-Ginsei’s sardonic laughter
the thing
suddenly vanished without a trace.
“What the—?!”
As the startled Rei-Ginsei looked over his shoulder, the sole surviving FDF member trained his laser rifle on the bandit’s forehead. Thanks to a Spartan training regime, he could still muster murderous intent toward the enemy despite his insanity.
“Boss!”
Before Golem could move, a beam of red light pierced Rei-Ginsei’s brow.
However, it was the FDF member who jerked backwards. Incredibly, the laser beam that hit Rei-Ginsei right between the eyes burst out of the back of the other man’s head. A stench of seared flesh and brains hung in the otherwise refreshing air.
“Are you okay, boss?” the man with the pointed head asked as he cast a loathsome gaze on the soldiers littering the ground. Not merely his head, but the man’s entire frame was streamlined like a shooting-star class rocket. He was called Gimlet.
“I believe I’ll survive,” Rei-Ginsei laughed, rubbing his forehead. There was a black circle about a quarter inch in diameter scorched right between his eyebrows.
While the others inquired no further after his condition, the four fiends looked at each other with concern over another suspicious occurrence.
“Something must’ve happened to Witch,” said the hunchbacked man.
“Chullah’s right,” Rei-Ginsei chimed in. “The only reason I made such a blunder is because I never in a million years imagined that
thing
just disappearing in the middle of an operation.” He certainly had a strange way of covering his blunders. Turning back to the expanse of prairie to his left, he muttered, “If one of her spells should break at her age, she’ll be walking the cold, dark road to hell ...”
“Would you like me to go check it out?” asked Gimlet.
He shook his fine head from side to side. “No, I shall look into this. The rest of you kindly dispose of these unsightly remains. Burn them or eat them, whichever suits your fancy,” he said, smiling at his disturbing orders.
.
And this is what was happening while the gruesome battle neared its conclusion, or rather, to be precise, just before the sudden disappearance of
the thing
that had materialized from thin air.
Racing across the plains, Doris was just about to turn her steed in a new direction when she discovered something unexpected in someplace unimaginable and jerked her horse’s reins in the opposite direction instead. The spot was less than a mile and a quarter from Count Lee’s castle. Bypassing the more circuitous roads, she’d galloped straight through a hilly region, but from here on out, she’d have to take a somewhat less direct route.
Her father had brought her here just once when she was little and she’d seen it from a distance then, but she’d never seen the place from this close before. Half of her frightened, the other half deadly serious, she took in the mysterious scenery stretching out in the morning light. The villagers called this place The Devil’s Quarry. In this part of the endless expanse of prairie, there were countless statues standing like stone forests, or laying on the ground and looking to the heavens. No two had the same face or form, and there wasn’t a single statue that didn’t have the aspect of some bizarre monstrosity. A sculpture of a baldheaded man with incredibly large eyes, a bust of a creature with dozens of arms baring its fangs, a full-length statue with thousands of beastly bristles each individually carved—all these pieces of incomparably detailed craftsmanship were covered with moss, as were the remnants of stone walls and columns that called to mind the ruins of some ancient citadel. Together, they seemed to form a completely alien dimension. Even the morning sunlight, that should’ve breathed life into every hill and valley in the world, lent the faces of the sculptures weirder shadows than it might have, as the particles of light were swallowed by the moss and the desolate atmosphere, or sank with leaden weight. Even the air was dank. People said this was the place where the Nobility had once held their wretched ceremonies, or a quarry used in the construction of the castle, but the latter theory was easily dismissed. After all, there wasn’t any stone in this whole region to be quarried. At any rate, this was a forbidden area, and no one from the village ever entered.
What had caught Doris’ eye was an old woman seated in a deep, bowl-shaped depression near the center of the Devil’s Quarry doing the same baffling gestures over and over. Her age was unclear. Judging by her gray hair and the wrinkles creasing her yellowed skin, both of which were obvious even at this distance, she looked to be nearly a hundred, and yet her body seemed strangely imbued with vitality.
What is this? Some old lady lost in her travels, taking a breather?
Even if Doris couldn’t bring her all the way into town, she could at least give the woman directions back to the main road. But as Doris was just about to give her mount a flick of the reins, she stayed her hand and quietly slipped down to the ground instead.
Wrapped in a dull gray overcoat, the crone’s torso was bent forward at an extreme angle, and there was something about the sight of her—with eyes fixed on her own fingertips as they clutched at nothing—that just felt evil. Of course, Doris was completely unaware that at that very moment on the road a few miles distant, a strange entity that appeared out of thin air was busy delivering death by insanity to the members of the FDF.
Muffling her own footfalls as she led her horse, Doris made her way into the Devil’s Quarry, tethered her mount to a nearby pillar, and came up behind the crone. Apparently the old woman didn’t notice, as she didn’t move at all. As Doris drew closer, she felt goose bumps spread across her flesh.
A poisonous miasma was rising from the crone’s vicinity. Clearly she was using some arcane skill toward foul ends. The sound of a low voice chanting a spell reached Doris’ ears.
“Stop that!” she shouted despite herself as she took a few steps forward. At that instant, something whizzed out of the bushes and glanced off her cheek. Doris dropped to the ground with lightning speed. Holding her breath and remaining alert, she touched her left hand to her cheek. Warm blood clung to her fingertips.
A spirit beast, eh? Looks like she’s got her warded zone set up right around here,
Doris thought.
To her left, Doris felt a keen presence. She made a quick combat roll to one side and let fly with the whip in her right hand. Unfortunately, her deadly strike only kicked grass into the air, but she sensed her opponent changing direction to fall back a good distance.
When conjurers and sorcerers worked their art, they established an area around themselves with a radius of ten or so feet in order to have the best chances of success. This was known as their warded zone. Since their concentration might be disturbed, and, in extreme cases, their spell might even lose its efficacy if someone were to step into this zone while they were working, sorcerers conjured up creatures and set them as watch dogs outside the warded zone, ready to attack intruders. The task often fell to massive hounds, poisonous toads, and serpents suckled on pure malice, but this crone used a transparent creature formed of her own force of will—a spirit beast. And a particularly nasty one at that.