Tyrant's Stars: Parts Three and Four (8 page)

“What is it now? Wait—why did he pause at the entrance to the valley?”

D had already advanced about halfway through the ravine. White mists rose here and there like strips of cloth across the barren wasteland, devoid of a single blade of grass. Suddenly the mists grew thicker. That was when Callas noticed what was happening.

“No—get out of there!” she screamed in something other than her singing voice.

Suddenly, the white mist blanketed the bottom of the ravine. A minute fissure that hadn’t been evident on casual inspection ran across the floor of the ravine. The white mist that issued from it—or rather, the colorless and odorless gas—killed the thousands of avian creatures instantly.

Just look. Only D and his cyborg steed emerged from the far side of the white haze. D had memorized a map of the surrounding area back in the fortress of Lamoa, so it was only natural that he’d remember this deadly valley. Of course, the bottom of the ravine wasn’t always full of lethal gas. It erupted periodically, like a geyser. D had also committed its schedule to memory, and he’d halted just before entering the ravine because it was too early and he needed to kill some time. He’d held his breath while they galloped through the gas. And his horse, which usually breathed the surrounding atmosphere, had been instructed to rely on its internal oxygen supply. That was the signal he’d given the beast when he pulled back on the reins.

Coming up out of the ravine by another road, D got on the highway. Without decreasing speed, he and his mount bounded into the forest to their left. Not a single chirp was heard. All the birds in the vicinity now slept the sleep of death at the bottom of the ravine.

Letting his horse’s breathing return to normal, D swiftly got out of the saddle, went over to the base of a tree about ten feet away, and closed his eyes. Three seconds passed. Five. And then his dark eyes opened and looked up coolly.

“Took refuge in the forest, did he? Ah, such is to be expected from the man who’s stolen my very soul. But I won’t let him get away.

I’ll show him it’s not the birds of the air alone who fall under the spell of Callas’s song.”

After muttering this, the unholy singer gave a little cough and then began to fill the air with a clear and resonant soprano. Like an invisible shower, it rained down to fill the ears of every living creature.

When D was nearly finished with what he was doing, he noticed footsteps closing on him from the distance. This time it was the creatures of the land. Those who were closest would probably come barreling through the forest in a veritable avalanche in less than thirty seconds. Sensing their presence, the Hunter’s cyborg horse whinnied fiercely.

D got up, put what he’d made under his left arm, and wheeled his steed around toward the right side. Its whinnying stopped dead.

Only one irksome task remained. Drawing his blade, the Hunter stuck his left wrist out in front of himself and made an artless chop at it. From behind him, a single black shape sailed forward—with the speed of a shooting star.

“Take him!” Callas cried from the back of the giant eagle, making a ferocious sweep with her right hand.

No matter how good a Hunter he might be, there was no way D would be able to hold off hundreds of monstrous beasts. Imagining the handsome features of the young man in anguish as innumerable claws and fangs ripped him apart, Callas became intoxicated by her blood-soaked vision. And her besotted eyes did indeed detect a pale object flying from the forest. Mentally and physically Callas was too swept away to dodge it, and it was moving too quickly for her to bat it aside.

Some might call its speed ungodly. Made from the pointed end of a branch, the missile penetrated the body of the giant eagle with ease, piercing Callas in the throat and poking out the nape of her neck. Her anguished cries mixed with those of the bird, sending ripples of sound through the air.

Watching the gigantic bird wheel in circles as it fell, the Hunter cut down the last of a dozen tigons just as it was about to pounce, and after slaying three more creatures he turned his gaze in the bird’s direction again, but the avian form had already vanished into the distant forest. At the same time, the herd of beasts that had closed to about a dozen yards from him lost their singularity of purpose, the confusion plainly eddying in them, and then in the blink of an eye they scattered. Though a number of them went for D, they achieved nothing, becoming sacrifices to his sword.

Once stillness had returned, D got back on his unharmed steed and put the forest behind him. After he’d gone, all that was left behind was a thick branch with a vine strung from one end to the other, making it into a bow. It went without saying what had become of its sole arrow.

Branches and vines—what kind of skill did it take to fashion a bow from these materials alone, use it to fire an arrow that was just a thin branch honed to a point, and score a direct hit on a siren fifteen hundred feet away? And there was more to it than just that. D’s left hand was missing from the wrist down, but fresh blood dripped from where a vertical cut had been made in the stump, because the Hunter couldn’t use the bow with just one hand. He’d actually split open the end of his left arm and wedged the bow’s riser in it while his right hand drew the bowstring. And as he pounded from the deadly ravine into the forest, the reason he’d listened hard was so his superhuman hearing might deduce Callas’s position in the sky.

That, in a nutshell, was what it meant to be “D.”

On regaining consciousness, Seurat must’ve been surprised. The face of the giant, who stood more than thirteen feet tall, was awfully blank. It was unsuited to expressing thought or emotion. Nonetheless, he
was
surprised—that was clear from his eyes as he gazed at Sue. Not only hadn’t the girl run away when D’s needle had struck him in a vital spot and rendered him unconscious, but she’d also extracted said needle and then used it to dispatch a venomous lizard that had been drawn by the scent of his blood. He agonized over the matter of what to make of her actions, and for a while he could do nothing but stare at Sue as she stood by him.

“It looks like you’ll be okay, right? Wait a second and I’ll go get you some water.”

Sue turned around without waiting for a response from him. The water was nearby. After all, until thirty minutes earlier, they’d been floating in it. By the bottoms of Seurat’s massive boots was a crevasse, and a mere fifteen feet away the silvery flow ran noisily by the base of a slope.

Sue didn’t have a canteen. Taking care not to slip on the grass, she went down to the water’s edge and put the hem of her now-dry skirt into the water. Once she’d scooped up a good amount, her

face was reflected in the water’s surface. This would serve to let her check on her appearance.

Her face was rippling. Seeing that it didn’t look terribly haggard, Sue let out a sigh of relief.

The face smiled—the face on the water’s surface, that is. Sue herself wasn’t smiling.

The water witch?

No sooner had the name Lucienne and the woman’s appearance come and gone in the girl’s head than her watery reflection reached out with both hands. As if drawn to it, Sue reached out her own hands, submerging them to the wrist. There was a jerk, and before the girl could make a sound she was pulled into the water—only she didn’t go under. Huge hands held her ankles up in the air.

Turning, Sue shouted, “Oh, it’s
you!”
Her tone was one of surprise, pleasure, and excitement.

Still crawling across the ground, the giant made an effort to pull Sue back. She rose about a foot into the air.

The thing clinging to Sue’s wrists was being pulled up. In the sunlight, it glittered like a fascinating piece of glasswork. Seurat kept pulling. In no time, a face emerged ... but it no longer looked like Sue. Due to a trick of the light, parts of it vanished while others shimmered. This bizarre entity had eyes and a nose and a mouth that the girl could make out whether she wanted to or not. It must’ve been some kind of demonic creature that inhabited the river. Its shoulders appeared, and then its chest.

Was Seurat to be praised for his strength? Was the water demon to be admired for its formidable size? Seurat had already hauled Sue back to the top of the crevasse, but no more than the shoulders of the huge, semitransparent form had emerged yet. The only thing that kept Sue from crying out in pain was that for something so large, the creature weighed little.

Seurat’s right hand reached into his robe, and then a longsword that Sue hadn’t noticed when she was tending to his wound appeared. A striped pattern ran down it from the tip to the hilt.

Seurat swiped it through the arms of the watery giant who wouldn’t let go of Sue. Spray shot out, but its hands didn’t come off. As if the man had been cutting through water, the wounds he dealt the water demon had closed immediately.

“It hurts!” Sue finally cried out. The more the watery colossus was pulled from the river, the greater its weight became. Their foe seemed determined to drag its prey into the depths.

Seurat swung his longsword again. The blow seemed entirely wasted.

Sue was watching intently when the gigantic form of the water demon suddenly vanished. At the same time, she went flying through the air, landing softly in a high clump of bushes. Seurat had thrown her. Frantically getting to her feet, Sue saw Seurat making three swipes of his sword, and the tremendous glistening form taking a blow to the head in the very same spot where it’d disappeared, then falling back into the flow without a sound. Seurat must’ve been quite confident, because he didn’t even bother to check the river before going over to Sue with his longsword in one hand.

For the first time, Sue was gripped by a chilling fear. The giant was no longer the wounded person she’d helped, but rather a servant of a Noble who wanted her dead. She tried to get to her feet, but her back wouldn’t move. Though she’d had a soft landing, her back had still taken quite a jolt.

Before her fear-widened eyes, a titanic hand reached closer with fingers spread wide. An intense pressure closed about her waist, and her body rose. She saw a powerful chest covered by what seemed to be leather armor, and the giant’s face above it.

Sue recalled clay figures she’d seen at the village school a long time ago. Among the expressionless horde, there’d been one that looked a little sad. To all appearances it had the same face as the others, but Sue felt it was an exception. The giant before her brought back that memory.

Sue felt the lump of icy fear thawing.

“Are you—” she started to say, and then the giant’s face became that of another person entirely. A tremendous killing lust rose from every inch of him, billowing out like dancing flames, and Sue could actually feel the heat on her cheeks.

Every single sound died out. Even the noise of the water stopped. As all of creation seemed to hold its collective breath at D’s beauty, Seurat’s will to kill was shaken.

Not knowing exactly what had happened, Sue quickly tried turning her head and body to look all around.

Seurat went into action. Still holding onto Sue, he pulled out his club, put its blunt tip against the ground, and began to scribe a gentle curve. When finished, he had a circle a good thirty feet in diameter—only the two ends of it weren’t joined, but rather the final part he’d drawn slipped into the circle a bit. Stepping out through that opening, he went about fifteen feet, then drew another incomplete circle that was about six feet across before setting Sue down in its center.