He didn’t get to ask Borgoff anything, as his words died down to muttering when he
saw how the oldest of the clan was completely focused on the mirror, to the exclusion
of all else.
Perhaps it was due to this unprecedented sorcery, a magic that could choose one scene
at will from the moon’s gaze—which was privy to all things on earth—and then use cloudbanks
as a screen for projecting that scene, but, for whatever reason, every scrap of flesh
on Borgoff’s colossal frame seemed to have been chiseled off. He looked half-shriveled,
almost like a mummy.
When Nolt turned his eyes once again to the screen in the mass of clouds, he muttered
a cry of surprise. At some point, the scenery rushing by D on either side had become
desolate rocky peaks. “Well then, big bro, you thinking of maybe starting a landslide
or something to bury the bastards?”
—
At last, Mayerling’s darkness-piercing vision caught the black rider. The tail of
his coat sliced through the wind, billowing out like ominous wings.
Could he face and beat this foe on equal terms? While he was fairly self-confident,
anxiety was beginning to rear its ugly, black head in Mayerling’s bosom. Though they’d
only met for a split second, the force and keenness of the blade that’d assailed him
from overhead lingered all too vividly in his left hand even now. The numbness was
finally beginning to fade. But more than that, the distinct horror of learning the
steely hand-armor that could repel laser beams had been cut halfway through rankled
him, and caused him concern.
Vampire Hunter D could not be underestimated.
Mayerling’s eyes glowed a brilliant crimson, and the curving black claws creaked as
they grew from his right hand, which still clenched the whip.
Perhaps anticipating the new death match about to be joined, even the wind snarled.
Up ahead, a wooden bridge was visible. The sound of running water could be heard.
The current sounded rather strong.
Mayerling’s gaze was drawn up. Quickly bending over, he pulled a pair of black cylinders
from a box beside the driver’s seat. They were molecular vibro-bombs, complete with
timers. The molecular particles within them were subjected to powerful ultra-high
speed vibrations, and they could destroy cohesive energy to reduce any substance to
a fine dust.
Raising a tremendous racket, the carriage started across the bridge. The span was
about sixty feet in length. Some thirty feet below, a white sash raced by. Rapids.
He halted the carriage as soon as it was across, then turned. Grabbing the molecular
vibro-bomb’s switch with his teeth, he gave it a twist. They weren’t exactly a weapon
befitting the Nobility.
D was on the bridge roughly five seconds later. He rushed ahead without a moment’s
hesitation.
He didn’t think he was being foolish. This Hunter must’ve had the self-confidence
and skill to deal with any situation. There was no choice, then, but for Mayerling
to exert every lethal effort in return. “I had hoped to settle this like men, one
on one,” he muttered as he listened to the thunder of the iron-shod hoofs. “See how
you like this, D—”
But the instant he jerked his arm back to prepare for the throw, lightning flashed
before his eyes. It’d flashed down without warning from a black mass of clouds clogging
the sky, aiming to strike the top of the bridge—and the road right in front of D.
Sparks flying without a sound dead ahead, how could the Hunter avoid the gaping ten-foot-wide
hole that suddenly yawned before him? The legs of his horse clawed vainly at air,
and D, keeping his graceful equestrian pose, plummeted headfirst toward the fierce,
earth-shaking rapids below.
—
III
—
Just as Nolt shouted, “You did it!” Borgoff’s greatly withered frame suddenly slumped
forward.
On hearing the commotion, Kyle sluggishly stuck his head out, too. “What happened?”
He looked out the window and up at the sky, but the screen-like properties of the
clouds had been lost along with Borgoff’s consciousness. “Oh, man, bro—you went and
used it again, didn’t you? And you’re the one who’s always going on about how it takes
three years off your life every time you do.”
Feeling the derisive jibe, the oldest brother said in a halting voice like that of
the dead, “He fell into the river. Dhampirs ain’t swimmers . . . Nolt, find him and
finish him off.”
A few minutes later, after he’d watched the second oldest depart in a cloud of dust,
Borgoff gave Kyle the order to drive. He headed for the bedroom in the rear to rest
his weary bones. There was one set of bunk beds on either side for his siblings. His
alone was especially large, and located the furthest in the back.
As he was making his way down the aisle, trying to keep his footsteps as quiet as
possible, his meatless but still sizable arm was grasped by something eerily cold.
Borgoff turned around.
A white hand that could easily be mistaken for that of a genuine mummy stuck out from
the bottom right bunk.
“Hey, I didn’t know you were up. I’m sorry if that idiot Nolt disturbed you with all
his hollering.” Where the eldest Marcus normally kept this gentle tone of voice was
a complete mystery.
The person in the bunk turned over, though it was clearly painful to do so. He was
a pitifully small lump beneath the blankets. “I’m sorry, bro . . .about not carrying
my own weight . . . ”
In response to the frail voice, Borgoff shook his head without a word. His bull neck
creaked and looked like it might pop. “Don’t talk nonsense. The four of us are more
than enough to take anyone on. You ought to keep quiet and get your rest.” After he
stroked it lightly, the slender hand finally pulled back into the blankets. “So,”
Borgoff added, “it doesn’t look like you’ll be having any seizures for a while then,
eh?”
At this entirely sympathetic question, the other man let the covers he’d pulled up
over his head slip back down smoothly. “I’ll be okay,” he said. “I think I’ll be able
to keep it under control on my own.” His face was smiling as he answered feebly. His
brother knew he had to be smiling, but the expression turned out to resemble nothing
so much as a rictus. His cheeks were hollowed, his terribly cloudy eyes were sunken
in cavernous sockets, and the breath that leaked out with his voice from lips the
color of earth was as thin as that of a patient at death’s door. The feeble body belonged
to Grove, the infirm younger brother Nolt mentioned when the clan first met D.
However, if he were to catch a glimpse of these corpse-like features, even D himself
would have been surprised. Grove’s face, which held a childlike innocence, was etched
with exactly the same features as the vital young man who’d slaughtered the army of
attacking vampires that day in one blow, and then left.
—
Mayerling watched almost absentmindedly as his fearsome pursuer was sucked into the
dirty torrent below the bridge and was lost from view in a matter of seconds. Mayerling
didn’t notice that the girl had opened the light-impermeable curtains and poked her
head out the window.
“What happened?”
Turning around at the sound of her anxious voice, he replied, “It’s nothing. Just
one less thing to bother us.”
Seeing the bridge behind the carriage, where flames and black smoke were still rising,
the girl’s face clouded quickly. “What on earth—” she gasped. “Did you make that hole?”
Mayerling wouldn’t answer. He could feel in his bones that this was the work of another
foe.
It wasn’t lightning that’d bored a hole through the bridge, but a destructive energy-beam
of another sort. Even now, a swarm of over two thousand satellites loaded with beam
weaponry continued their long slumber in geostationary orbit some 22,500 miles above
the Earth. Many of them had been launched by the government to help keep the human
rebellion down, but there were also numerous privately owned satellites. Each of them
was equipped with a means of generating beams that were decidedly man-made. What they
fired was quite unlike the natural energy generated by storms. Judging from the beam’s
accuracy, and how it seemed to be only aiming at D, it’d been fired by a human, and
one who undoubtedly felt some animosity toward D. That much was evident; any who would’ve
wished to help Mayerling had long since perished.
It was probably another Hunter. A foe who should be feared for different reasons than
D. But was it just one?
Training his boundlessly cold and dark pupils on the silver serpent of current, Mayerling
presently turned to face the girl again. “Be assured . . . with the passing of but
two more nights, we shall be at the gateway to the stars. Sleep well. Relax, and trust
everything to me.”
When the girl nodded and pulled back inside, Mayerling looked up at the moon hanging
in the heavens and muttered, “Two more days . . . but daylight will come shortly.
I wonder if I’ll encounter this new foe before those days have passed?”
—
Even a torrent that flowed with enough force to split rocks lost its ferocity when
it had come so far, and when it hit the shore here it no longer bared its fangs. The
river widened, and here and there the glimmer of silvery scales from fish leaping
out to seek the light of the moon rippled along the surface of the water. Occasionally,
the water ran translucent all the way down to the riverbed, and the way colossal snakelike
shapes swam upstream on a zigzagging path was rather unsettling.
On the trail that ran just a little way above the riverbank, a rider muttered, “Well,
this should put me right in the neighborhood now.” The rider, Nolt Marcus, the oldest
of the clan, halted his mount. In accordance with Borgoff’s orders, Nolt had set off
to find and destroy D after D had been swallowed by the muddied current. This is how
far Nolt had gone.
The spot was about two miles downstream of the bridge. Along the spine of the eastern
mountains, a foreshadowing of the thin blue light of dawn had come calling, but the
darkness swathing the world was still thick and black.
Scanning his surroundings, Nolt reached for his hexagonal staff with his right hand.
“I don’t think I’ll find him any farther downstream. So, did the bastard make it out
without drowning then?” the Marcus brother wondered aloud. “Then again, I don’t see
how a dhampir could manage a stunt like that . . . ”
The tinge of displeasure in Nolt’s voice was due to the fact the species known as
dhampir had many of the characteristics of supernatural creatures. As a blood mix
between the Nobility—the vampires—and humans, dhampirs inherited some of the physical
strengths and weaknesses of both. From the Nobility, dhampirs inherited the ability
to recover from injuries that would be considered lethal to a human being. On the
other hand, dhampirs lost up to seventy percent of their strength in daylight, they
felt an unbridled lust for the blood of the living when they were hungry, and, perhaps
strangest of all, not one of them could stay afloat in water.
At the beginning of the era of mankind’s Great Rebellion, the vampires’ utter lack
of buoyancy was prized as one of the few possible ways to dispose of them. However,
when it became clear that drowning itself had markedly milder results when compared
to stakes or sunlight, a much dimmer view of immersion’s value as a countermeasure
was adopted. Drowning caused the heart to stop functioning and the body to cease all
regeneration, but these effects were easily undone with the coming of night and an
infusion of fresh blood.
But so long as a vampire was denied either blood or the onset of night, it would be
impossible for him to recover from drowning. In other words, after an immersion, it
was possible to put the comatose Nobility to the torch or to seal him away in the
earth forever. Because vampires were so vulnerable after drowning, running water still
served mankind in reasonably good stead.
That’s what Borgoff was talking about when he told Nolt to “Finish him off.”
“I’m glad you could make it.”
The low voice made Nolt’s whole body stiffen. Just for an instant, though. His hexagonal
staff ripped through the air behind him—in the direction of the voice. It was as if
his right hand had become a flash of brown. The strange thing was, the arc his weapon
painted with the speed of light was a full circle. Surely enough, the hexagonal staff
had grown to nearly twice its former length, stretching toward the spot from which
the voice had issued.
However, when Nolt spun around dumbstruck by the lack of contact, the pole in his
hands was no longer than normal.
“That’s quite an unusual skill you have, sir,” the youth of hair-raising beauty said
in a voice of steel from atop a cyclopean block of stone that loomed by the side of
the road.
No reply was given, but a flash of brown shot out. The spot it touched blasted apart,
and in the midst of the scattered chips of stone D flew through the air like a mystic
bird. Had his gelid gaze caught the mark the pole left on the rocky surface?
In Nolt’s hands, the staff that plowed through almost diamond-hard stone like it was
clay changed direction easily and raced for the airborne D.
There was a glimmer in D’s right hand. The arc of brown was countered by a flash of
silver, and there was a dull thud. Not giving Nolt time for a second attack, as soon
as he landed right in front of the Marcus brother, D swung his blade down.
Tasting the blood-freezing fear of that blade all the while, Nolt leapt backward.
The attack he unleashed as he leapt was not a swing but rather a jab, and his staff
seemed to grow without end as it struck for D’s face. Though he didn’t seem to move
a muscle, the pole missed D by a fraction of an inch as he launched himself into the
air.
A flashing sideways slash. The blade that would’ve put a diagonal split down the middle
of Nolt’s face bit instead into the pole that shot up, and the two figures broke to
opposite sides.
The end of his staff still aimed at D’s chest, Nolt was breathing hard. Tidings of
his fear. A thread-thin line of vermilion ran down the middle of his face from his
forehead, and it widened at his jaw. That was the work of the blade D brought down
as soon as he’d landed.