Fresh flesh wounds very quickly became Renquist’s only way of measuring the passage of time in the dreamstate. How long the experience was set to last defied
even the most approximate guesswork. Marieko seemed to have precipitated him into an eternity of slow and painfully voluptuous teasing that, each time he was provoked to a response, carved another slice into his bleeding body. Although he couldn’t see them, puddles of blood were already forming on the flagstones beneath the bed of swords, spreading, soon to become a single pool. Perhaps the slow but languorous weakening might have gone on until he was actually consumed by the dream, and Marieko would have revealed a true dominion over the arts of the succubus, if the situation had not abruptly and radically changed.
The fanged group of ninja came out of nowhere. He heard a snarl from behind the silver mask, which indicated they were absolutely not of Marieko’s conjuring. The creatures were more easily distinguished by their smoke trails of visibly destructive vibrations than by their actual forms. Their glowing red eyes served as the finite centers of their shadowy, exterminating-demon presence. An agony of immobility was suddenly transformed into a violent and whirling vortex of motion. The ninja came with a full variety of weapons to cut, impale, or stab: pikes and lances, axes, swords and daggers of all lengths and shapes. Somewhere above and beyond the confines of the dungeon and the walls of the fortress, Renquist could hear the dull crump of what had to be large siege guns, as though the castle itself was under attack. It was the wrong technology for the wrong culture in the wrong era, but Renquist didn’t expect total authenticity in any dreamstate, and the sound of the guns definitely added to the sense of menace and impending doom. The undead ninja themselves might be elusive figures, hooded and robed, but the surgical finish on the cutting edges of their deadly steel glittered in the dancing flames of the brazier. Renquist reminded himself that all was but a dream, and yet the purpose of the ninja seemed too deliberate. If cut down in what was so clearly an outside attack, he and Marieko might not return
to the waking world with their minds and bodies totally intact. A dream—but he was convinced the danger should be taken seriously.
Marieko obviously felt the same way. She rose from the bed as though by a form of speed levitation, but not without badly gashing her thigh on the exposed edge of one of the swords. She didn’t, however, appear to notice the injury, and dropped to her feet in a defensive posture, fully ready to face the undead ninja alone if need be. Blood streamed down her leg, but twin-bladed butterfly knives appeared in both her hands. Renquist didn’t know if the weapons had been somehow sheathed in the armor on her forearms or if she had simply dream-invoked them in response to the emergency. Right then, though, he didn’t especially care. He was free of her weight but still bound at the wrists and ankles, and functionally helpless. In any normal setting, he should have easily been able to rip himself free from any restraint of wood and leather, but the dream environment appeared to have been adjusted to render him unnaturally helpless. Fortunately, though, the environment itself was under attack. As he watched, the smoke-trail vibrations of the ninja had a direct and corrosive effect on the dream’s reality. As blades clashed, striking electric sparks in the gloom, and Marieko, plainly a consummate martial artist, faced two and even three ninja at a time, previously indestructible stone pillars were being eaten away like soft chalk by the enemy backwash. A swirl of dark foulness wafted across the bed frame that was holding him fast. He felt the stubborn bonds weaken, and he wrenched at them with all his might. It was time to exert his own dream control.
The strap holding his right wrist snapped first, and after it, the others were disposed of in less than a second. Now he, too, was on his feet, first ripping two swords loose from his bed frame of love and torture, and then swinging round to face the enemy, spraying blood as he turned. He moved close to Marieko, covering her back
with his whirling blades. For a while, their almost balletic, high-speed moves kept the ninja at bay. Jeté, pirouette, and slash with the backhand stroke, but—although they coordinated perfectly and cut down the attackers by the dozens, blades describing bright afterimage arcs in the air around them—the enemy kept coming as though part of an inexhaustible supply, and they found themselves being pressed back, constantly on the defensive.
Renquist also began to feel he was at a distinct disadvantage. Even with a weapon in each hand, a naked man in a sword fight is uncomfortably akin to the long-tailed cat in the old American adage that finds itself in a roomful of rocking chairs. Marieko’s scanty armor left her almost as exposed, but he saw no chivalrous reason why he should remain that way. In dreams, no matter who designed the original configuration, many more things were possible than in harsh reality. In the real world, nosferatu shape-shifting had been a lost art for millennia. In a dream, who knew? Renquist concentrated and willed himself to assume the form of one of the Original Beings, the ancestors of all contemporary nosferatu, the genetically engineered warrior subspecies of Nephilim experiments fifteen thousand years in the past. The Original Beings had proved a disaster for their alien creators, but in this context, their remnants in Renquist’s DNA might prove to be his dreamstate salvation. He fixed on all that he could detect of the ancient ones inside himself and willed it to rise.
Initially all he experienced was indescribable pain as his entire skeleton ground and groaned, the long bones in his legs and arms, and individual vertebrae extending so his height increased by a full ten inches. The shape of his skull altered, and fangs projected down into his mouth. His skin thickened to an armored hide; his fingers became talons. Finally his mind clouded with a subliterate, hostile fury, and he knew nothing but an inbred rage. This thing he had become in no way thought the
way Renquist did. Indeed, it hardly thought at all in the accepted sense. Its sole motivation was to damage and destroy its enemies and to protect and assist Marieko, whom it saw as a partner and confederate. His swords fell from claws unable to properly wield them, and he advanced on the ninja with a grunt and a snarl, ready to do battle with nothing more than his natural assets. Although Renquist was beyond perceiving it, his transformation had an immediate and unexpected effect on the attacking ninja. They actually fell back, as if his dreamstate shape-shifting had given pause to whoever or whatever was creating the invasion.
He seized the nearest one and simply ripped its head from its body. The Original Beings had been supremely powerful but highly lacking in precise refinement. Indeed, their implacable brutality had made them totally uncontrollable and prompted the Nephilim to declare their creation a failure, attempting to exterminate it with deathrays and sunbombs. Mercifully for the continuing survival of nosferatu-kind, the mutant cleansing was less than a total success, and the genetic foundation of the few survivors had remained intact—if diluted—clear down to the contemporary undead.
The thing Renquist had become seemed satisfied with its first kill and repeated the decapitation process, this time with two of the enemy, simply grabbing a head in each clawed hand and twisting. Its intense and relentless ferocity relegated Marieko, despite her exquisite handling of the butterfly knives, to a secondary role of protecting the Being from ninja attempting to work their way behind him. Most of the time she succeeded, but one ninja, although she had managed to disarm him, leapt onto Renquist’s back, sinking its long yellow fangs into his armored hide and hanging on like a pit bull.
At first, the beast Renquist had become failed to notice the tenacious attacker, but finally pain and the insistent weight made itself known through the singular will to slaughter. The Original Being let out a bellow of rage
and sought to dislodge the attacker by the simple but effective maneuver of spinning rapidly round. Executing a tyrannosaur windmill, both arms extended like rotating hammers, the beast not only whirled loose its immediate opponent but also felled two more with its huge fists. On a superficial level, Marieko and Renquist’s beast were holding their own, if not actually prevailing against the seemingly endless inhuman waves of attackers, but unfortunately, the fight itself was severely damaging the very vision-fabric of the dream. Its reality had become increasingly tenuous, shimmering and undulating like the air over a heated highway. Structure was misshaped and twisted into the outlandish and angular distortion of a German Expressionist movie. Had Renquist been himself, he would have known instantly the dreamstate was fragmenting into nightmare and recalled how being caught in a fragment of nightmare could be a shortcut to madness. Shifted as he was, though, into the Original Being, he was insensible to everything but the enemy at hand. He hardly heard Marieko, even when she started screaming at him.
“Victor-san! You must shift back.”
The sound of his name caused a dull recognition, but it only hung and twisted in the void his intelligence had vacated when he’d changed form.
“Change back now, Victor-san. We have to leave this place. We remain at our peril.”
Fortunately, as the dreamstate spoiled, so did Renquist’s faux ability to shape-shift. He started to revert to his normal, quasi-human form. Now he suffered the pain of return.
“Victor, we have to get out of here.”
“I …”
For immeasurable moments, the blind agony was too great for him to move or speak. The dark and indistinct ninja closed in a circle around them but waited, as though savoring the moment, anticipating, before they
moved to end it all with the final kill. At the same time, the siege guns fell silent.
“Victor-san, help me. I don’t know if I can find a means of escape.”
Renquist looked at the vaporous ring of black swordsmen. His head still hurt where the fangs had protruded and his skull had changed its form, and he saw no reason to be charming or even polite to Marieko. “There ought to be some kind of penalty—”
“What?”
“—exacted of those who interfere in the dreaming of others and then fail to provide an adequate exit.”
Still the deadly encirclement held and waited. Marieko looked round helplessly. “I stand humiliated, Victor-san.”
“And so you should. You were taught well, but not well enough.”
Renquist stared intently at a single spot on the floor. A corner where four of the dungeon flagstones met. “Let go of any control you may still have over this.”
“But Victor-san—”
“Just do it. Now!”
Marieko closed her eyes. Renquist concentrated for a few more moments and then snapped at Marieko. “Open your eyes and look.”
A whirlpool of matter had opened at their feet. Marieko was unable to prevent a sharp gasp of shock as she began to fall. Renquist actually laughed. “In every dream, there’s a way out—no matter how crude. Remember that.”
“But where are we falling to?”
“To simple oblivion. Which is where I intend to remain all the way to sunset.”
And, indeed, he did remain in simple oblivion until after sunset, when he woke to find the origami dragon and Marieko departed. Perhaps it was just as well she’d left. To face each other in reality, after such dreamstate intensity, would require a degree of effort beyond him
so early in the night, and following the Jungian day they had just experienced.
“I left him sleeping. What else was I supposed to do?” Marieko strongly resented the other two putting her on the defensive. “Something invaded the creation. Something external, deliberate, and overtly hostile.”
“But not overly skilled at dreamweaving?”
“The ninja were crudely crafted, like something out of a bad Hong Kong movie.”
“More force than finesse?”
“The illusion relied on speed and motion, a smoke mirage of indistinct fury. Beyond that, it was pure cliché. Their eyes even glowed red.”
Columbine came close to a sneer. “But, of course, your vision of Edo Castle was perfect in every detail.”
Marieko turned the near-insult back on her. “Naturally. What else would you expect? I had a job to do, and I did it.”
“But you succeeded in learning nothing.”
“I learned that no single one of us should attempt to challenge Victor Renquist. Much the same lesson as you learned last night when you tried to run him through with a saber.”
Destry glared at Columbine and Marieko. “Will you two knock it off?”
The troika had gathered in Columbine’s bedroom. She had insisted. Marieko would have preferred to meet in the kitchen, as she and Destry had always done in the first important hour after sunset. It was a time when stock was taken, missions considered, plans and lists made, and plots hatched. Columbine had always lacked the early rising, practical determination of her two companions. All too often she would be content to loiter in slow and sprawling serpentine dalliance with her live-in victim of the moment until well after the stars were out. Since the young boys had been banished for the duration, she had instituted the idea that the trio should
gather in her boudoir while she conducted what she liked to call her
toilette
, which mainly consisted of fussing and fretting with a tray of perfume bottles. Columbine constantly proved herself incapable of abandoning these irritating throwbacks to the eighteenth century. Seemingly Marie Antoinette had held similar audiences in what had probably been an equally vast expanse of cushions and coverlets.