The Rose Princess (18 page)

Avoiding the flames, D retreated to the entrance to the ruins.

More fire arrows went up, giving rise to additional walls of flame. The wind grew
fiercer. The plains were burning. And as the flames spread as far as the eye could
see, they somehow looked like water. Like a glittering sea stretching out to the night
horizon.

From their steeds, the wraith knights nocked more fiery arrows. Twice as long and
twice as thick, they were set to spread the blaze not only to the ruins but into the
very village of Sacri itself.

It was at just that moment that the earth rumbled. One after another the horses threw
their riders, and then the mounts themselves fell over. The shaking was more than
that of a simple earthquake. Unseen waves surged through the air, and the knights
caught up in the turbulence were knocked flat in the blink of an eye. White masses
wriggled out through gaps in the gray armor, but as a second wave washed over them
they went into spasms, and then moved no more. And the waves were equally ruthless
as they assailed the wraith knights that’d already taken flight.

“That will be quite enough.”

D turned in the direction of the voice and found the princess and Elena.

“And here I believed all this time that I was the only one who knew the secret of
these ruins. You don’t miss a trick, do you?” the lovely princess said with a shrug
after looking at what had seemed to be nothing save humble remains.

The fortification had been constructed centuries earlier by a human sect with wisdom
that put them on par with the Nobility, yet it still retained its ancient capabilities.
Naturally, the only reason those forces had gone into action just now was D’s own
supernatural powers.

“Hand over the girl,” said D.

“This girl,” the princess replied, “is already one of my kind. Though to be honest,
I just finished doing the honors. Are you going to try and save her, D? It won’t be
as easy with her as it was with the others. I’ve dealt her a harsh blow, you see.”

Elena’s expression was vacant. Tears wouldn’t even flow from her eyes.

“I’ll give you the girl. You needn’t do anything about her, D. Your job is to kill
me, is it not? This waif is no part of that. Just leave her to grow paler night after
night till her fangs pop out and she runs amok, drinking blood indiscriminately. Even
if you do nothing, I’m sure the villagers will be good enough to dispose of her. You
did well to send my wraith knights into retreat, but apparently you weren’t up to
the task of destroying them. Oh, my lovely visitor,” she laughed, “today’s festivities
are but a dress rehearsal. The main event will come tomorrow or the next day, or perhaps
a year from now.”

“Didn’t you want me to get rid of your knights?” D asked in a tone like ice.

As if it’d just dawned on her, the enchanting princess responded, “Oh, that’s right!
I did, didn’t I? Then I’ll bring them out tomorrow. Three against one would simply
be too dangerous, so we’ll take them one by one. I’ll start sending them tomorrow
night. You’ll just have to wait and see which one I choose to send first.”

And with a haughty laugh, the princess turned the rose she held in her hand upside
down. Tiny flecks that glowed in the moonlight rained down on the earth.

“Very well, that shall be all for this evening,” she said. “Oh, I’ll thank you not
to run after me with that ratty old sword. Well, as they said in one of the ancient
tongues, ‘
Zaijian!
’”

As the princess headed for her manor, D galloped after her. Although her horse practically
flew, his mount was swifter. But he’d only chased her for a few yards when the ground
suddenly swelled up before him. The soil had taken on four hues. It was a wall made
of roses. High and wide it stretched, like a barricade to check D’s advance.

“That’s my rose rampart. Can you get by it?” the princess sneered in the distance,
and D halted before a wall of flowers easily thirty feet high and half a mile long,
even the very presence of the Noblewoman faded away.

“There’s just no figuring that woman,” his left hand said. “She’s seriously out to
kill you, yet she also meant it when she asked you to take out her knights. I don’t
have a clue what she’s really thinking. Anyway, what are you gonna do about the girl?
You just gonna forget about her?”

—

I

—

D
carried Elena’s limp form to Mama Kipsch’s place. The crone who’d come out rubbing
sleepily at her eyes had performed an examination
on the girl and immediately discovered the rose on her chest.

“This is much more serious than those flowers the other night. Based on what I’ve
just seen, it looks like it goes all the way down to the bone.”

“Can you cure her?” asked the Hunter.

Looking at D with visible surprise, the old woman said, “Are you worried about her?
I’d gotten the impression that the life or death of anyone else was a world away from
you. You mean to tell me our cries actually reach your ears?”

“I just asked if you can cure her.”

Shrugging her shoulders, Mama Kipsch replied, “You should know a lot more about that
than me. As things stand, there’s not a thing that can be done for her.”

“Well, I leave her to you,” D said, and then he turned and headed for the door.

“Hold on there! You’re the only one who can make her better.”

“I thought you said nothing could be done,” D remarked.

“I was talking about the way things are right now. With the right trappings, I should
be able to do something.”

Although the woman truly expected some sort of response, she grimaced on receiving
none and said, “On the western edge of this domain there’s a village called Zamba.
In the Temple of the Inner Body, there blooms a single prismatic rose right about
here
—in what would be someone’s gut. And it’s been there for the last two thousand years.
Bring it back here. The village and temple haven’t known human habitation for a good
three centuries—the only things to get in your way would be monsters and evil sprites
and the beasts of the plains. And that stuff should be minor league to you.”

“My job is to destroy the lady of the manor,” D stated flatly.

“Heck, I know that. At my age, I wouldn’t ask anyone to step into the jaws of death
just out of the goodness of their heart. I’ll offer compensation. The princess has
put that tattoo pretty deep on the girl. In trying to get the same result as biting
her without doing it the old-fashioned way, she’s drained a lot of the life from her
victim. Seeing how sharp the tattoo is should be proof enough of that. I could try
to get rid of it, but the girl would just wind up an invalid. Of course, she’d be
a Noble invalid, but even I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

Here the witch doctor gave a big belly laugh, but when D didn’t so much as crack a
smile, she awkwardly continued, “At any rate, it doesn’t matter how good of a Hunter
you are; getting rid of an invalid Noble must be a heck of a lot easier than taking
out a healthy one. Here’s your compensation. What do you say?”

“You’ve got a deal,” D replied easily.

With a wry smile, Mama Kipsch said, “You know, you’ve got a very, very unfortunate
character. At this rate, you’ll go through your whole life being chalked up as a cold-hearted
brute. Granted, I’m sure you probably don’t give a rat’s behind about that. Count
on no one but yourself—of all the folks I’ve ever met, only you and two others could
honestly say they live that way. And I don’t think I’m likely to see another anytime
soon.”

And then she stood up and placed her hand on D’s shoulder. For some reason, he made
no attempt to avoid it.

“I know you think you’re doing this as a cut-and-dried business deal, but that’s just
not the feeling I get. I was banking on that when I asked you. Do what you can for
us.”

The crone suddenly realized she couldn’t feel anything under her fingertips. The youth
of heavenly beauty had disappeared through the door—out into the darkness that suited
him far better.

“D . . .”

The muttered name made Mama Kipsch turn.

Elena stood in the doorway of the examination room. One look at her eyes was enough
to show that her consciousness was fragmented. In her present state, the only thing
that could’ve carried her this far was the man whose name had just spilled from her
bloodless lips.

“Please . . . don’t . . . leave me . . . ,” Elena mumbled as tears began to roll from
her eyes.

—

It was dawn by the time D arrived in the village of Zamba. The kind of pony express
that handled ordinary mail deliveries would’ve taken an estimated eight hours to make
that run, but he’d done it in less than five. During the trip, a number of people
had seen D and hidden themselves by the side of the road. Galloping along with a cloud
of dust in his wake, the Hunter in black must’ve been a terrifying sight for the average
traveler.

As Mama Kipsch had said, it was a desolate region of mountains and rivers, without
a single timber remaining to mark where the village had been. But the Temple of the
Inner Body still survived in the hilly region on the western extreme of the village,
a building constructed with a technique that allowed stone and iron to be blended
together. And yet, the parts with high stone content had been eroded by wind and rain,
leaving great holes gaping sinisterly in the structure.

As its name suggested, the temple was the sixty-foot-high and hundred-foot-long image
of a giant deity in repose carved untold ages ago from the heart of one of the hills—literally
formed from the core of the hill, with an entrance in the head that allowed visitors
to go inside. But in this case, “inner body” also had a second meaning. Similar structures
dotted the Frontier—in the southwestern sectors they were particularly prevalent—but
the fact was that none of them were very well-preserved, and almost all had become
the dens of supernatural beasts or the lairs of criminals.

Leaving his overworked cyborg horse outside with its cooling systems on, D entered
the body/temple of the gargantuan god with nothing save the sword on his back. His
weapon was one of the blades he’d hidden around the ruins on the outskirts of Sacri.
As he was leaving the village, he’d swung by the blacksmith’s place, and a woman who
must’ve been his wife appeared to tell the Hunter her husband had gone off to a special
site known to him alone to put a soul into the sword he’d been charged with making.
He’d left the night before, she said, and still hadn’t returned.

A strange sight greeted D.

If an artist or sculptor of exceptional talent were to visit this place, the supreme
heresy inherent in its design and the wealth of horrifying imagery—not the stuff of
nightmare, but bald-faced reality—couldn’t help but drive them to lunacy. A human
being couldn’t conceive of what the inside of a god looked like. If they wanted to
find out, they had no choice but to come here.

Opening the door in the top of its head and stepping inside what must’ve been the
brain of the deity, the Hunter found row upon row of pleats in a barely translucent
wax-like alloy. The creases housed statues of this god or other deities with a rich
patina, as well as talismans carved with unsettling pictographs. The passageway suddenly
narrowed into what was apparently the esophagus, and once a visitor had passed from
there into the torso, the human sense of direction could no longer be trusted.

Was this actually how the internal organs of a god were laid out?

The terribly flat floor suddenly became a series of wild grooves. At one point D was
actually walking across the ceiling, and the passageways that’d clearly existed vanished
when he took his eye off them for a second. Nothing here had been constructed in a
straight line, and yet the curves didn’t really feel like they curved either. While
he was certain he’d been advancing in a straight line, he also got the feeling he
was going around in circles. The very fact that he could feel like he was going in
a straight line and running in circles at the same time was truly bizarre.

Neither the human body nor its mind were meant to deal with this. As proof, the skeletons
scattered at D’s feet had rusty red knives and swords poking from their chests—either
wounds they’d inflicted on themselves or each other. The remaining human and monster
bones were most likely left by creatures who’d wandered into this maze that defied
Euclidean geometry and had fallen to exhaustion and starvation.

D advanced down that inhuman, maddening path without the slightest delay.

What manner of being had carved all this? As if to praise the greatness of their faith,
the ceiling, walls, and floor were all engraved with secret incantations or covered
with colorful murals.

Finally, D halted in a certain vast section. Apparently light from the outside world
was somehow channeled into this chamber, as there was sufficient illumination. What
D saw was a gaudily hued dais of a lumpy, misshapen material like cooled lava with
a metallic altar set on top. The altar in turn was crowned by a clear, prism-shaped
container enclosing a single rose that evinced the loveliest hues.

Reaching out for the bloom with his hand, D then stopped as if he’d had some portent.
The mistress of a rose garden that bloomed in splendor on moonlit nights, and the
prismatic rose that could be considered the symbol of the very deity around it—it
didn’t seem likely these two could both exist in the same remote area and not be related.
There had to be a common thread connecting them somewhere.

“There’s an awfully primitive trap built into the altar. It has the odor of machine
oil,” said a hoarse voice.

“I’m aware of that,” D replied, once again reaching out for the container and touching
it. Before he’d even raised the bloom, a switch must’ve been triggered, and there
was the whine of a motor that then quickly died out.

“Looks like it’d be best to get out of here fast!”

Not appearing to have any objection to the hoarse voice’s suggestion, D started back
the way he’d come without so much as a backward glance.

The walls warped abruptly, taking new forms, making different ridges and crevices,
forming other passageways. Apparently the rule was that no intruder was to leave again.

“Oh, my! I guess the spirit of whatever built this thing still remains here,” the
Hunter’s left hand groaned. “It’d be a discredit to the god to let its symbol be taken.
Looks like getting out will be tough.”

D turned around.

The area around the altar remained unchanged, utterly fixed. Approaching the platform,
D casually drew his sword. The blade he was about to sink into something was then
crossed by a band of light that raced toward the altar. Split in two, the altar thudded
to the floor.

Turning to the wall where the light had originated, D said, “Black Knight.”

It wasn’t a question. He could tell from the flash who’d cut through the altar. Still,
there was no sign of his foe.

“A strange place this is, and this is one of its amusements,” the Black Knight said,
his voice holding no surprise at the fact that his identity had been deduced. He’d
understood from the very start that D was capable of as much. “Two foes, each trying
to cut an opponent he can’t see—although in the case of you and I, we can see even
if we can’t
see
. Shall we continue?”

“Very well,” D responded.

That was rare. This young man was more likely to meet such an offer from his opponent
with a blow from his sword rather than a single word.

Not budging a step, D stabbed into a point on the wall. His sword moved with blinding
speed. There was a sharp
ching!
of steel that seemed to bite right into the marrow of the listener’s spine—D had
just parried another flash of light coming from a different position. But it wasn’t
even clear when he’d had time to pull his sword out of the wall.

D ran along the wall—this was the path that led to the gigantic figure’s abdomen.
It showed no further signs of changing.

Flashes of light raced from the wall in two places. The two streaks shot up, and D
halted. His left arm came down, a stream of red spilling from his sleeve across the
back of his hand. That was courtesy of the two streaks of light.

The air froze. It was taking on the very same nature as D’s body—every molecule could
tell that the gorgeous Hunter had his concentration focused on his foe. If someone
were to touch him just then, the merest contact would’ve literally cut them, and blood
would’ve gushed from their flesh.

Despite being on the other side of the wall, the Black Knight had said that they could
see each other. That being the case, was D trying to see something new? Or would he
attempt instead to see things differently?

The Hunter’s right hand limned an arc. The second that same line was traced across
the wall, D’s body dropped off to the left side.

A hole had opened in the ground. The floor had not rotted out—rather, this was one
last act of resistance against the one who’d defiled this holy place.

With his mind brutally focused on other matters, even D couldn’t react instantaneously.
A wide swath of light came from beyond the wall to slash deeply into his reeling form.
Into the nape of his neck.

As vermilion stained the world around him, D plunged feet-first into the darkness.

—

II

—

It was pointless to wonder whether there could really be a never-ending hole within
this gigantic effigy of a recumbent deity. The pit the Hunter had fallen into actually
seemed to be bottomless. At least, there was no bottom that D’s eyes could detect.

“You’re okay, aren’t you?” a voice inquired in a tone that could’ve been taken as
either lackadaisical or hurried—though it was probably the latter.

“I’m going up,” D replied.

Here were the recuperative powers of a dhampir in all their glory. Though his neck
had been cut halfway through, the wound had already closed, and all that remained
was a whitish line. He’d thrust the sword in his right hand into the wall to end his
fall—and while that may have sounded all well and good, the fact of the matter was
he was in an extremely delicate, horrific predicament. Less than four inches of his
blade had gone into the wall, and the longsword was gradually levering lower and lower
under D’s weight. If he were to fall again, it wouldn’t be a question of whether or
not the Hunter would be up to another attempt, but rather whether his sword could
endure it.