Tyrant's Stars: Parts Three and Four (6 page)

Sue remembered everything. Though the things that had happened while she was under the hypnotic gaze of her android guard had seemed like a dream, the memories themselves were clear. The spell had been broken when she was immersed in the subterranean river. She’d been immediately pulled out and lifted high in the air—such was the strength of Seurat’s powerful arms. She had no idea how far the dark water had carried her. Perhaps she’d been swept along for two hours or more. Suffering a terrible blow, Sue had lost consciousness.

Apparently it was the sunlight that awakened her—the light that now hung around her was the glow of dawn. Sue was in a rocky area. Her joints ached, but she was able to move. She looked all around. Seurat’s enormous form had fallen at her feet. He rested there like a stone, not moving a muscle. As he lay flat on his back, Sue pressed her ear to the left side of his chest. A beating came through like a rumbling deep in the earth. On realizing that she was relieved, Sue was terribly surprised. This giant had held her up out of the water the whole time they’d been swept downstream. Although it was his duty, it couldn’t have been an easy thing to do.

By the girl’s feet yawned a crevasse that looked to be a good thirty feet long. The strange stones and towering boulders that surrounded it appeared to point toward the chasm. A splash resounded. Seurat must have pulled Sue from the subterranean waterway and crawled this far before his strength failed him. He was probably injured.

Running her eyes over Seurat, Sue gasped. A red stain was spreading in the area just beneath the right side of his chest. Something pale jutted from the center of the stain.

“One of D’s?”

It was a needle. He’d probably been pierced by it as they were falling into the subterranean waterway.

A strange feeling took hold of Sue, and the girl was surprised that she was ready to act on it. Though it was a perfectly natural instinct under the circumstances, Sue knew she would be inviting her own destruction.

You have to help those who are suffering,
she thought. The giant was an assassin sent to drag her into Valcua’s deadly trap. They were fighting for their lives, and D’s needle had been intended to stop him. If she were to act on her impulses, it would completely defeat the purpose of D’s battle.

Make a run for it,
someone whispered in her head. It was someone Sue knew very well.

Turning around, Sue took a few steps. Then she halted and took a breath. Looking back, the young girl had a certain resolve on her face. Without any further hesitation, Sue ran back to the giant. Squatting down, she grabbed D’s needle with both hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She planted her feet on the giant’s chest and took a deep breath.

“Come on!” she exclaimed, simultaneously letting out a gasp. The needle came out with astonishing ease, and, thrown off balance, Sue fell over and whacked the back of her head against the ground.

“Ow!” she groaned, hand to her head as she sat up, her eyes glittering while she stared at the giant. She got up on her knees. Raising the needle high over her head, Sue swung it back down with all her might.

D needed to find a horse. His body was failing—water was the bane of dhampirs. And now the light of dawn sprayed like a shower through the interlaced branches and seared D’s flesh.

After he’d slain the water witch Lucienne, he’d floated nearly an hour before the water carried him to a subterranean shore. Resting for a while and finding a crevasse to get back out to the surface had taken an additional two hours. Still, he knew where he was. Needing to return to their coffins before the light of day reached them, the Nobility branded the ability to judge times and distances into their DNA. He’d come out about sixty miles north by northwest of where he’d fallen into the subterranean waterway. The stream was moving at more than forty miles an hour. If he kept going straight, he’d soon be out of the forest, and—

There was the sound of footsteps approaching. D advanced without hesitation. Before another minute had passed, a girl in a white blouse and ankle-length skirt appeared. Her blond hair glistened in the light spilling through the trees, and her vermilion skirt seemed ablaze. With her left hand she carried a wooden basket. It was filled with flowers of every imaginable color. The instant she saw D, her willowy form became a sculpture of ice. The fear and tension that ordinarily would’ve gripped her were blown away by a rapture that colored every inch of her body.

“Are you from around here?” D inquired, halting.

The girl’s mouth fell open in a gasp a few seconds later. “Yes. I’m from the village of Toja, and I. . .”

“Have you seen anyone? A boy of sixteen and a girl of fourteen?”

After some thought, the girl shook her head.

Thanking her, D began to walk away.

“Please, wait,” the girl called out when he was about thirty feet away. “Are you—are you a Hunter?”

“That’s right.” The reason D bothered to reply was probably because she’d answered a question for him.

“In that case, please come with me. I beg of you. My village is in trouble!"

As the girl rushed toward him, the figure in black suddenly began to move away.

“Oh!” the girl exclaimed, but she followed him regardless. The young man in black seemed to be walking at a good clip. But the girl quickly noticed something unusual. Even though she ran for all she was worth, she couldn’t catch up to him. The young man never quickened his pace—he just kept walking at the same speed. He was close enough she probably could’ve reached out and touched him. Nevertheless, she couldn’t close the distance between the two of them.

The girl halted. She’d realized if she ran any further, she’d never be able to speak. Her lungs felt like they were on fire as she squeezed a mix of words and air from them.

“Not too long ago—near our village—something unbelievably huge—went by. And after it did—a big pit formed—like thirty feet across—and out of it came some monsters—like bugs and snakes or something. Somehow or other—we managed to kill some of them—but villagers got killed, too—and others were injured. There are still monsters—outside the village. I managed to slip out without them seeing me—so I could collect medicinal herbs. But now—I’m scared to go back.”

D remained at a distance from her. The girl’s desperate cries meant no more to him now than distant baying borne on the wind. But he halted.

“Please wait—D.”

He turned around. The girl was hunched over, her hands resting on her knees as she struggled to catch her breath, when the Hunter asked her, “Where’d you hear my name?”

“When whatever it was passed by—”

The girl’s voice failed there, and she struggled to fill her lungs with oxygen. When she finally managed to speak again, her voice was hoarse, as if coming up through her throat had wrung all the moisture from it. “I heard it—then. That a Hunter named D—would be coming soon. And that we—should ask for your help.”

“You were the only one who heard this?”

“No—a bunch of the villagers did. But all were people—with an affinity for spirits.”

“Did this voice identify itself?”

The girl shook her head. After resting a little more, her voice was finally back to normal when she spoke again, saying, “No. But it was really huge and scary. Whatever it was, it was not from this world. Pm sure of that.”

A shudder passed through the girl. Overwhelmed by the fear of the unknown being, she forgot all about her village and the injured people there. D alone knew what it really was.

“If I were to go to your village, could I buy a horse there?”

Waves of hope swiftly broke against the girl’s face. “If you help us, I’ll give you all the modified horses I own!”

As she stared, enraptured, at the young man approaching her, she suddenly felt a sharp tug at her waist. Without asking for the location of her village, the young man in black took the girl under one arm and sprinted off like an exquisite wind, as if he’d known where he was going all along.

Less than ten minutes later, the village’s palisade came into view outside the forest. Screams and inhuman howls were carried on the wind. Undoubtedly the creatures had attacked again.

D quickened his pace.

Just before the rear gate, a caterpillar with a red shell was engaged in deadly battle with a number of villagers. Looking like a dozen bumps fused in a row, its body was a good twenty to twenty-five feet long. The caterpillar’s weapons were the half-dozen semicircular bladed mandibles jutting from its round head. Two vermilion-stained villagers lay on the ground, and another five were also covered with blood. Proof that they weren’t completely ineffectual came from the yellow and red ichor that dripped where a number of spears had stabbed into the bellows-like membranes linking one segment of the caterpillar to the next.

The villagers cautiously surrounded the creature and took aim at its head, but suddenly its body twisted with incomprehensible speed and assailed the men to its rear, who had let their guard down. Taking one last swipe with his longsword, a middle-aged man felt a bladelike mandible drive right through him. The shell where his longsword struck gave a hard ring. The mandibles parted, and the mouth opened, devouring the man. The crunching sounds made the other villagers cringe.

Without warning, the caterpillar changed direction, looking down. D was by its feet. Still carrying the girl, he didn’t even reach for the hilt of his longsword with his right hand.

A command sprang into the brain of the caterpillar, filling it with cruelty and hunger and a lust for battle. It bit through the prey in its mouth and flung down half of it, swallowing the other half, and then it launched an attack on the vision of beauty below it without hesitation. A silvery streak of lightning struck its head—splitting its armor with a vicious crack. Its great lump of a head split in two by a single blow, the caterpillar crashed face first into the ground. With none of the quivering death throes that might be expected from a lower organism, it was reduced to a lifeless piece of meat.

The villagers, dumbfounded, stared at its corpse. The very same monster that had given them such a ferocious battle had been rendered a harmless insect with a single blow—literally with one stroke from a sword. So great had been the change in the situation, their minds couldn’t keep pace. Their brains didn’t have the means to comprehend it.

The sudden silence was broken by the girl as she said, “D . . . You’re . . . you’re just incredible . . .”

Letting go of the girl, D walked over to the caterpillar without a word. He kept only his thumb around the hilt of his sword, cupping the other fingers to catch the ichor that spilled from the cut he’d made in the creature. When the girl saw him bring it up to his lips, her eyes went wide. His handsome head arched back. She saw a thin stream of blood fly from his lips and up into the sky.

Dhampirs must be able to spit with great force, because the geyser of blood reached some thirty feet into the air, where it scattered in a red mist. Once D had finished disgorging it, he wiped the back of his right hand across his lips and then simply stood there. And all the while the villagers remained frozen in place. Not because the young man who’d suddenly appeared to slay the hellish beast with a single blow had entranced them with his swordplay, and not because they were shocked or terrified, but because their very souls had been taken by his beauty—or so it appeared to the girl.

Finally, one of the villagers went over to the young woman and said, “Hey, Maquia!”

Just then, a weird howl shook the air. As the villagers turned to look at the defensive palisade, a shadow fell across them. It belonged to the enormous creatures that had sailed through the air and over the fence: a colossal arthropod that looked just like a scorpion gifted with a nauseatingly gaudy coloration and a mollusk that seemed to be no more than a knot of innumerable sucker-covered tentacles. Each of the creatures was the size of a small hut. The claws of the giant scorpion were wet with fresh blood.

“How many of them are left?” D inquired, but at that very instant tentacles streamed toward him like weeds underwater.