The Rose Princess (12 page)

“Well,
I
saw it,” Nichou replied. “It had on a green shirt and striped pants. That was always
old man Geppe’s favorite outfit.”

Tan fell silent.

A year earlier, ninety-year-old Geppe had ventured into the forest to find a plant
called “regression grass” that was said to bring back lost youth. But he was never
heard from again. Nichou had lived near the old man’s house.

“Then it looks like the head-taker really did get old man Geppe after all,” Tan finally
said.

Rubbing his neck all the while, Nichou replied, “I saw something else, too. On the
arm it had around my throat. The whole thing was pretty hairy, but it had a scar by
the fold of its elbow. It was exactly like the one Geppe got splitting wood back when
I was maybe four or five years old.”

“You mean to tell me that thing . . .
that
was old man Geppe?!” Tan said, his voice thin as a thread.

Nichou shook his head, saying, “It couldn’t be. It had a face just like a monkey.
There’s no way it was Geppe.”

“That’s enough creepy talk out of the two of you,” Stahl suddenly interjected.

But the two bikers didn’t look startled by his remark. Rather, their expressions suggested
he’d saved them from something, as they said no more.

—

III

—

The wall of trees ended as abruptly as the stroke of a knife, and their field of view
was suddenly dominated by a bizarrely shaped mountain of rocks. But more than the
mound of smooth cube-like rocks that literally looked to have been polished with mechanical
precision, it was the area around it that drew the eyes of the group. This was their
destination.

“Hey, it ain’t here!” Stahl called from the lead.

Everyone quickly gazed in the same direction, finding neither blue moss around the
rocks nor anything else but black earth.

“How do you like that! It must’ve died off,” Tan clucked.

Throwing her gaze on the mountain of rocks, Elena said, “That can’t be. I saw some
just last year—up there!”

Her finger pointed to the summit of the rock pile some sixty feet high, where a patch
of blue that could’ve easily been missed clung to the surface.

Turning around, Stahl asked, “Who’s going up after it?”

“Me,” Elena replied.

“It’s gonna be crazy-dangerous,” said Nichou.

“And it’d be any safer for the rest of you?”

Still massaging his neck, Nichou shrugged his shoulders.

“The head-taker might come back. Keep your eyes open.”

And leaving them with that, Elena grabbed hold of a nearby outcropping of rock. As
she nimbly climbed, a dark gauze seemed to cling to her body. The dusky eve was drawing
closer.

Holding his firearm at the ready, Stahl anxiously scanned his surroundings. “The wind’s
picking up,” he said.

“Hell, the wind’s gonna be the least of our worries,” Tan replied.
Looking over at Nichou, he said, “You don’t look so hot. You
okay?”

Rubbing his neck all the while, Nichou wiped the sweat from his brow with his other
hand.

“You know, I heard this story from Mama Kipsch once,” Tan said as he adjusted his
grip on the metal nozzle of his weapon. “Ages and ages ago, it seems the Nobility
used this pile of rocks for certain experiments. That’s why it looks all neat and
artificial.”

“What kind of experiments?” asked Nichou.

“Well, in order to make the monsters they spread all over the Frontier, they needed
to collect normal animals first. Breeding stock, I guess you could say. This rock
thingy was supposedly a conning tower for that. They say that’s how new species like
head-takers, toothless suckermouths, and whatnot got made.”

“They sure did screw things up for us.”

“Hey, you’re sounding a little better now, Nichou.”

“Yeah, finally,” he said, grinning at his friend but never taking his hand away from
his neck.

Cupping one hand by the side of his mouth, Stahl shouted toward the sky, “How’s it
going, Elena?” Of course, he’d watched to make sure Elena had sure footing before
he said anything.

“I’m okay. Just a little further to go.”

Relieved at her reply, the second-in-command had just turned back toward the woods
when a shriek drifted down to him.

Stahl grunted in alarm as he whipped around, and his eyes were met by the sight of
Elena with a number of tendrils that could’ve been vines or ropes wrapped around her
body. Spilling down from the very top of the mountain, they clearly showed signs of
moving of their own volition.

But it was Elena who’d been really surprised. Just as she was reaching for the moss
that clung to the underside of a rock, the things had reached down from above and
snared her. Naturally she’d been unnerved and had nearly fallen. But irony still abounded
in the world, and it was these very same strange tendrils that’d saved her from that
fall. And the second they’d twined around her, Elena had noticed the most surprising
thing. They were cold and hard to the touch—metal. This was no living creature.

“Don’t shoot, guys!” she shouted down to her gang as she pried off the wriggling tentacles,
while her right hand slid down to the cylinder that hung on her belt. It was an incendiary
grenade her late father had purchased in the utmost secrecy from a merchant out of
the Capital. Once she pulled the pin and threw it, it would char everything within
a hundred-fifty-foot radius with ten thousand degrees of heat five seconds later.
Or melt it, it this case. Although it was probably crazy of her to use it in this
situation, she had no alternative.

Elena grabbed the pin with her teeth. Suddenly, the rest of the grenade was pulled
away from her. Clutching the silvery cylinder, a tentacle of the same color was thrashing
around just above the girl’s head. The sound of the burning fuse was painfully audible.

Four seconds to go.

“Hurry up and take the damn thing already!” the girl shouted.

Cold as the situation made her blood run, it was astonishing she could speak at all.
More surprising yet was the fact that she didn’t ask her friends below for help.

Of course, even if she had called out to them, there was some question as to whether
the three men would’ve been able to aid her. For just then, the trio had grown tense
at the sight of a bizarre figure coming out of the forest.

Its torso was that of a human male, bare-naked and well-muscled—but below that was
a long tail that twisted along behind him. Even with him fifteen feet out of the woods,
the end was still hidden among the trees, like a snake. The blue-green scales that
reflected the evening afterglow covered a lower half writhing as sinuously as a serpent.
It actually
was
a snake.

Though the creature had a vacant gaze until it reached the trio, when it halted and
slowly appraised the men, its eyes began to blaze with a phosphorescent green.

“You have the ssstink of head-taker blood about you. But you’ll be my meal, not hisss!”
it declared, its sibilant tone like the air rasping from a punctured tire.

And with that cry, the serpent man suddenly tried to grab Stahl.

A huge black hole opened in its face—right in the middle of its forehead.

Failing to expend all its energy inside the creature’s brain, the three-quarter-inch
ball of lead Stahl’s firearm had sent through the serpent man’s brow had burst from
the back of the thing’s head along with a vast quantity of gray matter. But in less
than a second the entrance and exit wounds both closed and the serpent man smirked
at the burly biker.

This was the descendant of creatures the Nobility had created, and its ability to
regenerate damage was staggering. The expression it wore was no longer that of a human,
but rather was the face of a fiend. As its mouth snapped open, a thin ribbon of tongue
slid out, the end of which was forked.

A gout of orange blew into the creature’s face. Flames. They billowed from the nozzle
Tan held. The tank strapped to his back was filled with an oily substance that burned
at high temperatures, and when it was discharged by compressed air, the liquid ignited
from friction with the atmosphere. In other words, it was a flamethrower.

Apparently this supernatural creature that seemed so inured to being hit or stabbed
or even shot couldn’t regenerate the damage from burns, for as the flames enveloped
it and its skin quickly baked and peeled, its ophidian form began a wild dance in
the throes of death.

“I got it!” Elena shouted, but Stahl was the only one who could spare a look up at
her.

Elena was coming back down, and the item tucked under her arm was definitely a big
chunk of blue moss. Her eyes declared her delight at this accomplishment while flames
flickered in their depths.

Just as the girl groaned with the effort of her descent, flames whooshed madly from
the rocky summit and the whole mound rattled.

“Hurry up! That thing’s ready to collapse!” Stahl shouted to her.

“I know, so get ready to make a catch!”

And once she’d said that, Elena didn’t toss down the moss as expected, but rather
threw herself into the air.

Not completely prepared, Stahl managed to catch her shapely form but wound up flat
on his ass.

“Damn, that hurt,” he groaned while Elena promptly got to her feet.

The girl’s eyes went wide at the sight of the weird serpent creature writhing before
her. Its tail looked to be a good thirty feet long, and in its wild thrashing it struck
the ground repeatedly. Every time it did so, the rumble seemed to reach the very heavens.

Suddenly, a mass of rock landed on the creature’s tail. Smashing it
flat, the boulder went on to bounce once or twice more on the ground.

Fighting desperately to maintain her balance all the while, Elena raced for the woods.
Behind her, the mountain—or rather, the rock pyramid—had come tumbling down like a
pile of dominos.

“What the hell’s going on?” Stahl asked as they made a mad dash for the path that’d
brought them there.

“That stupid tentacle grabbed the incendiary grenade from me—with the fuse going—and
pulled it back into the rocks. It must be some kind of animal catcher or something.
I wonder what it looks like under all those rocks . . .”

“Oh, so you wanna see the Nobles’ machines up close, do you?”

“Are you kidding me?!” Elena shot back, and then she heard the
undeniable sound of hoofbeats behind them. But why was it the Frontier woman pictured
not the Nobility, but rather the Hunter in black?

Turning to look, Elena froze.

The horse seemed to be running in slow motion just to keep pace with her friends as
they fled, and on it sat the Black Knight. She’d seen him many times before. And although
she found the might of the leader of the four knights as intimidating as always, she
had no time for such emotions with him on their tail. He was a veritable grim reaper.
But, what would he be doing out here?

“Shit!” cried Tan. He, too, had frozen in his tracks, but he pointed the nozzle of
his weapon at the Black Knight. It spat a ball of fire.

Not even trying to avoid it, the Black Knight rode straight into the blast, then through
it. The flames slid right across his armor and cape, and then vanished.

A streak of light zipped up from the ground toward the sky. Without so much as a cry
of pain, Tan was sliced right down the middle. The iron-shod hooves trampled his body,
splitting the brave man into two separate pieces before he fell in the brush.

Elena halted. Turning, she glared at the knight following her. Stahl and Nichou both
followed her lead, and the Black Knight stopped at the same time.

“So it’s you after all. You’ve been on our tail ever since we first set foot in the
forest, haven’t you?” Elena asked in a demanding tone after the flutter in her chest
had subsided.

“Indeed I have,” he replied, his voice like a rumbling from deep in the earth.

“Why the hell were you following us?”

“The answer should be obvious. I can’t have you bringing that moss back to the village.
Because then I wouldn’t be able to dispose of all those abominations.”

“But this will put them right!” Elena cried. “They won’t be your kind any more.”

“They are filth!”

A beam of light shot out, shattering the ground right in front of Elena. But even
as the soil showered her, Elena didn’t recoil.

“Hold on just a minute!” the girl shouted, her mouth open as wide as it would go.

Perhaps her bluster actually worked, for the Black Knight
stopped moving.

This was a do-or-die situation. With new determination, Elena said, “I’ll let you
in on a little secret. Something concerning the wonderful princess you’ve sworn allegiance
to.”

“Something about the princess?” the Black Knight muttered dubiously, though there
was laughter in his voice. Undoubtedly he was convinced this was some fabrication
on her part to stall for time.

“That’s right, I’m talking about that bitch. Does your precious princess approve of
what you’re doing?”

The Black Knight said nothing.

“That’s what I thought. Honesty is a virtue, you know. But the way you pretend to
be all loyal and stuff yet run around disobeying orders behind her back is why she’s
gonna put you out like so much trash.”

“Like trash? Me?” the Black Knight asked, his tone naturally sounding suspicious.
These were remarks no one could’ve imagined coming from this man.

“No, not
just
you—all of you!” Realizing the upper hand was now hers, Elena let her strength flow
into her voice as she said, “I’m telling you this as a special favor. Your precious
princess actually asked me and D to get rid of the lot of you.”

After blurting out the words, Elena was frightened by the response they might bring.

Silence descended, and the beating of the girl’s heart rang through her head like
a gong.

The shoulders of the Black Knight trembled. A low voice spilled from somewhere in
his armor.