Pilgrimage of the Sacred and the Profane (11 page)

Knowing all the tricks his foe possessed, the false D readied his sword nonetheless.
Seeing that a prolonged battle would be to his disadvantage, he intended to gamble
everything on one lethal blow. The air whistled with a slash from above one shoulder
to just below the other. He was close enough for that attack to actually work.

D took a step forward. As he did so, he simultaneously brought out his sword. The
instant the false D’s blow had bitten into his shoulder, the tip of D’s blade could
be seen slipping into his opponent’s chest.

“Not bad,” D said. Just as he’d taken a step forward to throw off the balance of the
false D’s attack, so his foe had managed to avoid a thrust through the heart by the
merest fraction of an inch—an exquisite move executed in a hundredth of a second.
Apparently, what the voice had told him was no lie. The two of them were deadlocked.
Whoever made the next move would die.

They leapt in unison. Streaks of light crossed in midair. The sound of blades knifing
through the wind only followed later.

As D landed, a black line split his forehead—the work of a blow from his foe’s blade
as they flew past each other. His foe smirked at him. No one save D could see the
torrent of fresh blood spilling down his opponent’s clothes from the horizontal slash
across the false D’s chest. Such was the difference between fighting with a shoulder
wound versus a hole in the chest.

His opponent dashed into action.

D’s field of view wavered—one of the streams of blood running from his forehead had
changed direction and run into his right eye. The blade meant to meet his foe was
off ever so slightly, shaving the flesh from his opponent’s cheek while the flashing
steel of the false D pierced the real D’s heart. As D dropped to his knees without
uttering a word, the callous blade was driven in much, much deeper from above.

That finishes him, then
, the voice said wearily.

But who would’ve thought the voice would gasp just then, or that the false D’s eyes
would go wide with astonishment? His foe watched as a hand gloved in black grabbed
his blade from below.

D raised his face. His eyes gave off a reddish light.

You couldn’t be . . .

Strength surged into D’s lower body. Perhaps the Noble blood that coursed through
the young man’s veins gave him unnatural power, for even after being pierced through
the heart, he was very slowly rising to his feet.

His opponent struggled to pull the blade free or force it in deeper. It didn’t move
an inch. The balance of power had been broken.

A low moan spilled from D’s lips. Something else accompanied it—a pair of fangs. Did
his foe see how the tracks of the rolling drops of blood from his forehead vanished
at his lips?

When his opponent tried to leap away, it was a second too late, and D’s blade came
straight down to split the other man’s head. Whipping around in a flash, the same
sword then pierced his opponent’s heart. His foe crumbled to the ground.

Expressionless though he was, D somehow seemed satisfied with the way the false D’s
countenance had never betrayed any terror even at the bitter end, when his head turned
to dust.

The pressure of the darkness was suddenly gone. D was gazing down at his feet and
the shadow he cast there. It fell across silver sand.

Having slain the phantasm his foe had conjured, he’d thwarted the psychological attack.
There was no sword through his chest, no blood coursing from his brow, but he was
still holding his longsword. The psi attack had been ingenious; it had managed to
rouse D’s demonic nature. But had even
that
part been real?

“That was a hell of a scary character to deal with. I mean, whoever made him, of course,”
a low, decrepit voice commented from somewhere around D. “With all the power it invested
in that, I’d wager it took a terrible hit just now. If you plan on getting out of
here, now would be the perfect time for it.”

Not replying, D looked around at their surroundings. Three figures were stretched
out on the sand. A diminutive fourth stood ready for battle: Granny Viper. She was
probably still squaring off against an opponent. Apparently, the psychological assault
had affected her much more than it had D.

D returned his longsword to the sheath on his back. At the pleasant metallic song
of it sliding into its sheath, Granny shuddered a bit. Dazedly, she surveyed her surroundings.
Noticing D first, she blinked her eyes. “What on earth did you—? Why, I was fighting
right here and . . . Oh, I get it—you broke the psi attack, didn’t you?”

She quickly turned and looked for Tae, a show of her sincere devotion to the job.
Racing over to the girl with a cry that bordered on a scream, the very first thing
she did was check for a pulse. Having enough foresight to take the possibility of
internal injuries into consideration, she was careful not to move the girl too much.

Seeing the crone’s shoulders come down in manifest relief, D then turned his eyes
to the heavens. The moon was visible in the clear sky. D began walking back toward
the rocky mound. “You can handle the rest,” he told Granny. “We leave in twenty minutes.”

.

III

.

Three hours later, the horizon donned a tinge of blue. In lieu of a rising sun, the
air filled with rising winds. The hard-flung grains of sand beat against the wagon’s
canopy mercilessly, making a sound like the peal of a bell. Granny spat a grit-laden
wad of saliva from the driver’s seat. Both D and Clay had scarves to shield their
nose and mouth, and they rode on either side of the wagon. The vehicle was renowned
for its ability to reach speeds of seventy-five miles per hour on level ground, but
now it barely managed a tenth of that.

Granny was anxious—the damage D had dealt their enemy wouldn’t be enough to destroy
it. Once its wounds had healed, it was sure to make its next move against them. If
it threw out another tornado, they’d be right back where they started from; in fact,
some result even more miserable definitely lay ahead for them. You could say the first
order of business was to get as far away as they could before their foe had a chance
to recover. In her heart of hearts, the crone prayed the enemy’s power didn’t extend
across the entire desert.

But the real question was, just where were they racing now? Though they knew the direction
they were headed, their present location was a mystery.

D was riding ahead of the wagon and off to the right, and as Granny gazed at his back,
she had a strange look in her eye. According to the Vampire Hunter, the town they
were bound for lay more than a hundred miles south by southwest of there. She’d asked
him just how he knew for sure, but he hadn’t answered her. Ordinarily, she’d have
accused him of pulling her leg and raised a big stink. Even Granny herself wasn’t
sure yet why she’d let the matter rest so easily. She knew he was a dhampir. There
was no need to be surprised when a man with the blood of the Nobility in his veins
displayed such an incredible ability. However, she got the impression there was more
to this young man than this fact alone.

Granny was quite familiar with ordinary dhampirs. While it was true that they were
several ranks above humans, they still had their limits. If you tried hard enough
and were willing to die in the process, you could even kill one. But that reasoning
didn’t seem to apply in the least to the gorgeous young man before her. Could he be
killed? The very thought of it had never occurred to her. Like darkness given form,
the young man could send any opponent at all into the depths of the abyss, if he so
wished. From her own intuition, Granny realized the Hunter’s knowledge was surely
instinctive as well.

Finding something disturbing about the black back of the man they were supposed to
be relying on, Granny finally decided to speak to him. “Tell me something, D. Just
what do we have to do to stop this desert once and for all?”

As she expected, she got no reply. But she did hear another voice from off to her
left.

“Sheesh, how the hell would he know? How could anybody possibly know anything that
crazy?” Perhaps feeling somewhat humiliated after learning from the old woman that
he’d been used like a puppet on a string, Clay sounded more vindictive than ever.

Granny just smiled sweetly at him and cooed, “Now, don’t go saying that. After all,
he had a little part in saving you, you know.”

“Hmph. I’ll square things up with him sooner or later.” Clay then turned and looked
at the wagon. “All that aside, you sure it’s a good idea having them two riding in
there together? That sodbuster might look all well-behaved, but down deep he could
just be some hot-handed operator for all we know.”

“We don’t really have a choice. Unlike you, the two of them are ordinary folks. See,
they still haven’t shaken off all the aftereffects of the psi attack. But just let
me warn you—”

“I know already! If I go touching your precious goods, you ain’t responsible for what
happens next, right? Shit, if you’re that worried about it, why don’t you put a chain
around her neck and keep a hold on one end of it? I ain’t promising you a damn thing.
To tell the truth, I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to put it to one of
the hidden
. Oops…” Clay said, smirking as he pulled away. No doubt he’d felt the urge to kill
radiating from every inch of the old woman.

Turning forward again with a disapproving cluck of her tongue, Granny then stiffened
with tension. D had come to a halt. “What’s wrong?” the old woman asked with fear
in her voice, though that was just a part of a plot she’d set in motion to get his
pity.

“It’s a sandstorm. A little more than a mile ahead of us.”

“Not a twister?”

“No, a sandstorm.”

The old woman squinted her eyes. “Well, I can’t see anything.”

“If we keep going straight, we’ll run right into it,” said D. “This calls for a detour.”

“But, wouldn’t that put us behind schedule? I mean, that’d be a problem for you too,
right?”

“If we’re lucky, it’s just a normal sandstorm.”

“Stop feeding us this load of crap,” Clay snapped. “I don’t see a damn thing either.”

“I can see it.”

That one softly spoken phrase was enough to silence even the irrepressible Clay.

“Or would you rather try and risk it?” the Hunter ventured.

“Great idea!” the old woman exclaimed, slapping her knee noisily. “That’s just what
we’ll have to do. I mean, what’s a sandstorm or two? Let a little thing like that
stop you, and you could hardly call yourself a man the rest of your days.”

“You gotta be shitting me. I’m completely against this,” Clay groused.

“Oh my! I thought you were one of the greatest warriors on the Frontier, but I guess
you ain’t all you’re cracked up to be.”

Granny’s retort brought immediate results. Blood rushed into Clay’s face. “Don’t make
me laugh,” he snarled. “I ain’t saying I’m afraid. I just gotta find my brother, is
all.”

“Oh, you poor thing, you. Say, D—how far is it from here to the place we got scooped
up?”

“About seventy miles, I’d say.”

“Now, I don’t care how chock full of fraternal love you are when you gallop off, you
won’t be able to cover that kind of distance. You’ll just have to leave your brother’s
fate to the heavens. If luck is on your side, who knows—you could run into him again
some-where outside the desert in two or three years. And if it’s against you, he’ll
bake in the sun and die like a dog.”

At that point, a bizarre reaction came over Clay. A smile that really had no business
on a wild beast of a man like him—a smile some might even call spooky—spread across
his whole face. “My brother Bingo baking in the sun? Did you say something about dying?
That’s just too funny. I’d sure as hell like to see that with my own two eyes,” he
spoke in a voice like a corpse, with a grin that was almost unimaginable from someone
with such a ruthless, fearless image. Even Granny’s expression grew stiff.

Just then, the back door of the wagon suddenly started to open, leaving the crone
at a loss for words.

Scrambling down the built-in set of steps, the pale figure kicked up the sand as she
ran down the right side of the wagon.

“Tae!” Granny shouted, standing like a vengeful demon. “Get her for me, D!”

In response to her cry, the Hunter wheeled his cyborg horse around. It was a heartbeat
later that the horse tumbled forward, just as he was about to gallop off. From its
back a figure in black flew like a mystic bird. Landing in a spot some fifteen feet
away, D plunged the sword he’d already drawn deep into sand at his feet.

“What’s going on?” Clay asked as he looked all around.

“It looks like it’s come back around,” D told the younger Bullow. While he was speaking,
the figure of Tae dwindled between the dunes with a speed never anticipated from such
dainty little legs.

“Wait up, Miss Tae!” Lance cried, clutching his head as he tumbled from the back of
the wagon.

“What on earth happened?”

Stopped short by the question Granny had barked, he replied in an almost tearful tone,
“I don’t know. We were talking, and then all of a sudden she whacked me over the head
with a wrench.”

“You stay right there. I’ll do something about this,” the old woman said. Still standing
in the same spot, she reached for her jar with her right hand. D, however, didn’t
move, and Tae just kept getting farther away—she was already more than a hundred yards
from the wagon.

Granny’s hand came out of the jar balled in a fist. From behind her, Clay saw that
countless multicolored particles had begun to trickle smoothly from between her clenched
fingers, but the flow quickly ended. And just what had become of those particles that
fell on the floor of the front seat by Granny’s feet and down onto the desert sands?
Driven by what might be called a warrior’s instinctive curiosity, the younger Bullow
was just about to spur his mount forward when Granny bent low. For a split second,
it seemed like a flash of blue light shot by her feet.