Pilgrimage of the Sacred and the Profane (21 page)

“Don’t do it!” Toto shouted from behind her, but even as he did, she was reaching
for the doorknob.

A split second later, the girl turned right around with her hand still extended and
dashed back across the room. Stopping in front of the counter that served as both
the bar and the front desk, Wu-Lin was frozen stiff in amazement, but the rest of
the group didn’t
get to see it. For at that very instant on the other side of the
door—
right in front of the lodging house—two kinds of footsteps collided, and the night
was filled with the howling of beasts.

Wild dogs with hides like blue steel made straight for the poor
traveler and his horse. A bladed weapon swung down at the beasts,
only to bounce off them in vain. Flesh-rending fangs and blood-spattered muzzles—it
was a tragic scene any of them could easily
imagine, but a second later it was over. The howls of the bloodthirsty
beasts were suddenly cut short, and the thud of one heavy body after another hitting
the street echoed out—and then silence . . .
or almost silence. There was only a hard, faint sound steadily
fading in the distance. The sound of hoofbeats.

No one moved, or even said a word.

After a little while, Toto got up and quickly walked over to the door.

“Hey!” the innkeeper called out in a voice that was tiny and
hoarse. He could only imagine what had transpired outside.

Toto roughly threw the door open. The warm nocturnal air was heavy with the scent
of aromatic night grasses. The wind struck
Toto in the eyes but couldn’t tarry there, and the young man
caught another of the night’s scents.

The moon was out. On the road, the scenery was a stark contrast of
black and white—but black seemed to be the stronger of the two.

The smell was coming from a number of pools of blood. The
heads and torsos of the bronze-covered wild dogs had already
ceased twitching.

“One, two, three—” Toto said, extending a finger with each
number. “Exactly ten of the beasts! And all of them put down in less than two seconds—”

Leaping out into the road, Toto gazed in the direction the hoof-beats had gone. The
howls of the night wind made his well-trimmed hair and the hem of his coat billow
in the same direction.

“It might’ve been
him
. . .” the others in the doorway heard Toto
mutter as he faced the darkness that swallowed the end of the
road. “He can travel by night. And all alone.”

.

II

.

Early the next morning, Wu-Lin left the lodging house; she
didn’t even bother to eat. The innkeeper and the other guests were
still asleep, and the eastern sky was just beginning to shine with a watery light.
Dressed in the same clothes as the night before, she was shouldering a vinyl backpack.

After walking for three minutes, the girl reached the edge of
town. Beyond the fence, a cedar so huge it would take three men to get their arms
around it stretched up to the blue sky. In this region, it was customary to grow enormous
trees on either side of the main
road through town. It was hoped that doing so would bring the
community some of the same mysterious vitality the trees possessed.
Further past that massive tree, the rows of cedars continued.

Opening the gate and then shutting it again behind herself, the
girl was just about to walk off when someone appeared from behind
the trees.

“Professor Krolock?” Wu-Lin said.

A gray-haired head bobbed at the receiving end of her tense gaze.

“Good morning, young lady. Off to an early start, I see.” Placing one hand on his
chest, the professor bowed elegantly.

“So are you,” Wu-Lin replied. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be out before me.”

“Actually, I couldn’t get much sleep. At any rate, if it pleases you, would you accompany
me to Cronenberg?”

“Are you headed there too, Professor?”

“Actually,” the old man said, “I am. My carriage is parked behind yonder tree.”

“You sure I wouldn’t be intruding?” Wu-Lin said, staring intently at him in his scarlet
cloak.

“Whatever could you possibly mean?”

“Why ask me way out here?” the girl inquired.

“I might’ve suggested it back at the lodging house, but there was a certain boisterous
individual around.”

“And you wanted me all to yourself?” asked Wu-Lin.

“Precisely,” the old man replied, a smile forming on his lips.
“Approaching you in town was going to be troublesome, so I simply waited out here.
I wouldn’t be so cruel as to say I don’t care what happens to a young lady like yourself.
Please, join me. All I ask in payment is that bead you have in your possession.”

“I thought as much. I guess it’s a good thing I showed it off so no one got too curious
and slit my throat while I slept.” Wu-Lin then asked the old man, “Do you know what
it’s worth?”

“Probably better than that rabble last night,” the professor said, closing his eyes
and nodding to himself. “But, as yet, I don’t have a good idea of its true value.
To really ascertain as much, I’d need you to hand it over to me.”

“Sorry. I’ll travel alone.” As if in jest, the girl bowed exactly as the professor
had, and then a second later she sprinted off like the wind.

Not bothering to chase after the girl as she swiftly dwindled in
the distance, the professor muttered, “Such a tempestuous child,”
and thrust both hands into his cloak. What they came out with were very strange items
indeed. His right hand held a quill pen;
his left hand held a brownish scrap of paper—a dried piece of
animal hide.

Returning to the tree and leaning against it, he raised his right
hand. Without seeming to particularly conceal himself for the
task, he took the sharp tip of the pen and stabbed it into his left
wrist. Not even glancing at the gore that spread across his skin when he pulled it
out again, he took the blood-dipped pen and
began to draw something on the surface of the parchment—what
looked to be a human face. After about ten seconds, the pen’s
movements ceased. Running his eyes over his handiwork at length and nodding with
satisfaction, the professor then embarked on an even stranger course of action. Lovingly
bringing his face closer to the portrait of darkening red, he began to whisper something
in a low voice.

Having already run more than a hundred yards, the girl
suddenly found her feet getting heavier. A hue of bewilderment rose in her
face. While she didn’t stop, she had noticed a rather
odd phenomenon—her legs seemed to be gradually losing their
strength, to the point where she couldn’t run any longer.

“I—why is this happening . . .?” With those weary words, Wu-Lin squatted down right
then and there.

Less than a minute later, a wagon drawn by a pair of cyborg
horses rumbled along with a sound that hardly suited a road at daybreak, stopping
right behind the girl as she crouched down
, cradling her knees. It went without saying that the man who sat in
the driver’s seat holding a whip was Professor Krolock. The
grotesque parchment was rolled up in his left hand.

From his lofty perch, the professor said, “You mustn’t keep
these problems to yourself. I’ll be happy to hear them. Won’t you
climb into my carriage so the two of us might mull over your
dilemma? Come.”

All exaggeration aside, the old man’s tone truly swam with
affection. At the sound of his voice, Wu-Lin got up and began to walk toward the
wagon without the slightest hesitation.

And then something equally bizarre occurred. The professor’s
right hand abruptly shot out, and with a sharp crack from his whip, the wagon made
a wide turn toward town—back the way they’d come. Odd as it may seem, the professor
who’d taken the trouble
to follow Wu-Lin there then cracked the whip again and, scattering
fragments of the dawn’s light like dust and ice, started off in the opposite direction
in a great hurry.

As the old man and his wagon vanished down the road, another
figure stepped out from behind the trees that towered by the
roadside. He was leading a horse as he came into Wu-Lin’s paralyzed
view. His right hand was clearly toying with a pair of gold rings
that kept clinking together.

Waving his left hand before the eyes of the mesmerized Wu-Lin, the mysterious young
traveler—Toto—made a wry face. “He calls himself a man of learning, and then he goes
and puts some weird spell on a girl like you—that’s really tempting the wrath of heaven.
That said, I must confess I’m after the same thing myself. Don’t
take it too hard,” he told the girl. “Looks like I was right when I guessed that
bead was really something after all. Allow me to be of some assistance.”

Wu-Lin seemed to have had the very soul drained out of her, and at this point a baby
probably could’ve taken what it wanted from her. He tapped her pale cheek with his
right hand as if humoring her. The man was reaching for her pouch with his left hand
when something hot whizzed right by the end of his nose.

“There she is!”

“Don’t let her get away!”

Not only could a cacophony of shouts and hoofbeats be heard
coming from the direction of town, but the sharp whistles that
came from the figures closing on the pair soon became steel arrows in flight.

“Just as I thought—we’ve got company! And here that old
innkeeper was trying to come off so friendly and all. The world’s a nasty place.
Sorry, but this is where I make my exit,” Toto said.

But as the young man’s hand reached once more for the pouch, it
was caught by Wu-Lin’s. Just as the shock was altering Toto’s com-
plexion, his wrist was expertly twisted back against the joint and he was physically
thrown a good ten feet down the road. And yet, the way he executed a skillful one-hundred-eighty-degree
roll and landed
lightly on his feet was certainly an eye-opening display of acrobatics.

“Hey! Wait just a second!” Toto shouted, but just as he was
about to charge back to the girl, a number of arrows flew over his head. As he hit
the ground despite himself, the sound of iron-shod hooves and excited shouts reached
his ears.

A shadowy form leapt over his head. Needless to say, the rider
holding the reins of Toto’s cyborg horse was none other than Wu-Lin.

“Thanks for the horse. See you!” With that brief shout, the
girl—who’d escaped from the professor’s spell before Toto even realized it—slammed
her right heel into the mount’s flank and
galloped away as fast as she could.

Riding for a full hour at breakneck speed, Wu-Lin was a few
miles from an intersection with the main road when she finally let her horse rest
its legs. It was an area still lit with the cold, clear rays of dawn. At any rate,
she considered herself safe for the moment. She never would’ve thought those two men
would be lying in wait
for her, and it’d certainly been a mistake to fall under that
mysterious spell, but since she’d managed to extricate herself from the situation,
none of that mattered anymore. Having acquired a horse in the bargain, it was likely
she’d reach Cronenberg at just past noon instead of in the evening.

Recalling the stunned look on Toto’s face as she’d thrown him,
Wu-Lin smiled innocently, but it took less than two seconds for
that smile to freeze. The sound of hoofbeats was growing nearer.

She thought it might be the “professor,” but there was no squeak
of wagon wheels. What she saw were a number of horses—and
racers, at that. They wouldn’t be out delivering mail at this hour. Was it the last
group that’d shown up as she was leaving?

Just as Wu-Lin was about to give a kick to her mount’s flanks,
something whistled through the air as it dropped toward her. Sparks
shot up on the right half of the road about ten feet ahead of her, and
a fierce shockwave knocked both horse and rider down on their
respective sides. It was the work of a portable firebomb launcher. An expert could
hit a target the size of a brick from more than two hundred yards away, but if they
were only trying to blow something up, all they had to do was increase the amount
of gunpowder.

Wu-Lin immediately got up. For the time being, her foes were
only trying to slow her down. Fortunately for her, they seemed to be concerned about
damaging the bead and they had adjusted the amount of gunpowder accordingly. As a
result, the girl hadn’t been fatally wounded, or even broken a single bone.

As Wu-Lin tried to get her horse back on its feet, she coughed and felt the urge to
vomit building within her. In truth, she’d taken a blow to the stomach when she fell.
Jamming a finger down her throat, she retched immediately. As she vomited, she realized
her horse was a lost cause—its neck was twisted grotesquely. If it had
been one of the models cherished by the Nobility, it would’ve
continued to run even if the entire head had been torn off, but this one was intended
for humans. Wiping her lips, Wu-Lin shouldered
her bag and looked all around. The woods were thick to either side. Behind her, the
silhouettes of riders formed hazily in the
white light. She couldn’t afford to hesitate.

Wu-Lin ran to the right—the woods might serve to restrict the
movements of horses. The trees and bushes would probably provide
her with some cover from the explosives as well.