Pilgrimage of the Sacred and the Profane (7 page)

The men didn’t even exchange glances with one another.

“Is that a fact?” the leader said. “In that case . . .”

Seeing the middle-aged man’s hand go for the firearm in his belt, Clay swung his right
hand up from below. The broadsword he’d hidden up his sleeve became a flash of white
that pierced the man’s throat. The man’s hand was on his gun; Clay saw the muzzle
of it turn toward his chest. It disgorged flame. The breechblock moved back, and a
sleek empty cartridge flew from the weapon.

Taking a hit from an explosive round that could’ve easily blown a human head apart
on impact, Clay just smiled. The inner lining of his shirt came from the bark of the
armor oak, which was harder than rock. His right hand flowed across the strings of
his harp releasing a tremendous sound.

The man at the fore of the group became an ash-gray statue, and an instant later the
same fate befell his horse. They both fell to the ground in a dusty cloud. There would
be no further attacks; the three others behind the leader had turned to dust, too.
Perhaps the only reason one rider and mount at the very back still retained their
original shape in this sandy form was because they were at the very end of the audibility
range for the sound.

“Maybe they don’t die, but they seem to turn to dust just fine,” Clay said as he raised
his right hand and hacked off one of the motionless horse’s legs. Not bothering to
watch the new pile of sand the collapsing figures created, Clay looked up. He had
no idea where they’d been hiding, but another horse and rider now galloped away about
fifty yards from him. “Son of a bitch!” he moaned, cursing his own carelessness.

Taking his harp in hand, he turned it toward the rider fleeing over a rise. The device
generated ultrasonic waves that destroyed the molecular structure of any material,
and as if to compensate for the cruelty of those sound waves, the vibrating strings
also created splendid melodies.

However, Clay didn’t have a chance to unleash another deadly attack with his fingers.
The one surviving attacker suddenly saw a figure standing in the road before him.
His horse didn’t stop. The moment it looked like the beast’s iron-shod hooves were
going to trample him, the shadowy figure leapt up. Even after D landed, with his long
coat spread out around him, the horse and rider kept right on running. But when the
longsword clicked smoothly back into the sheath on D’s back, the rider’s head finally
left his shoulders and rolled across the road.

“Glad you could pitch in at the end there,” Clay said as sarcastically as possible
to D, who walked toward him without even glancing at the results his own skill had
wrought. “Where the hell did you run off to after you found out the girl was missing?
Weren’t trying to get a preview of my skills, were you? No, you wouldn’t do any petty
shit like that. Went to check out the neighborhood, right? You’re a cold customer.
Didn’t you give any thought to what’d happen if I found the girl? And you left me
to handle all of them, too. If I got killed, the old bag and girl would’ve both been
goners, you know.”

“You didn’t get killed,” was all D said.

Clay had no reply, and that was the end of it. But three pairs of frightened eyes
greeted the approaching beauty in black.

.

I

.

The man said his name was Lance and that he was part of a farm group improving crops
in the northern Frontier. The group had developed a new strain that would bear fruit
even in cold areas without water; they’d selected this desert to stage their experiments
some five years earlier. Traveling in a caravan of five trailers bearing a hundred
thousand seedlings, the farmers fell victim to a sandstorm and were attacked by a
pack of bandits. Regardless of whether they offered any resistance or not, all were
slain. Lance himself had been hit, but for some reason the bandits pulled out the
gun they’d shoved in his mouth and brought him back to their hideout. The reason Lance
went along with all of this was because, in the heat of battle, he’d seen that no
matter how many times the bullets and blades of his compatriots had found their mark,
the bandits had been utterly unfazed—and he valued his own life. As soon as they arrived
back at the bandits’ lair, however, Lance realized he’d been drawn into a world beyond
imagining.

“You see, the first thing they did was tell me their age. The leader said he was going
to turn two hundred that year. And the other bandits did the same, saying they were
a hundred, or a hundred and fifty, or whatever the hell they felt like. I laughed
at them—at least I had enough backbone left for that. It’s what they showed me next
that tore the very soul out of me.”

“And what was that?” Granny asked eagerly.

“Their stomachs. One by one they took off their shirts. And then . . .”

Lance pressed both hands over his face. They were in a cave they’d found in a rocky
mound. The air was sultry, but it was better than being outside. Luckily, they also
found Granny’s wagon intact, so for the time being they were set as far as food and
weapons went.

“What did you see?” Granny asked, growing pale as she did so.

“They were mummies, you see.” Under the fresh new shirt of every last one of them,
the stomach-wrenching remains of desiccated flesh clung to their bones. “Yet they
were perfectly normal from the neck up—as you saw earlier. They turned their ordinary
faces at me and grinned. I tell you, I thought I was done for then and there.”

The mandate Lance got from them was strange and cruel; he was to work alongside these
living corpses as they carried out their mission of slaughtering any travelers who
ventured into the desert. How could Lance refuse them?

“In the past five years, we’ve attacked four parties,” Lance said. “I killed folks,
too. Men, women—people I didn’t know at all. If I didn’t do it, they would have killed
me. One of them was a girl about your age, too, Miss. Now, I won’t tell you I was
out of my mind when I did it. I puked my guts up every time I did someone in. But
that didn’t mean I was happy with the way things were going, either. When I heard
you’d been brought here, I decided I’d get away for sure this time no matter what
happened to me.”

“You said we were brought here. What do you mean by that?” Clay asked as his eyes
moved to the cave’s entrance.

D was leaning against the rock wall. At that distance, it was difficult to tell whether
or not the Hunter could overhear the group’s conversation. As he’d helped cut down
Lance’s pursuers, one would think he’d be quite interested in this discussion, but
he didn’t ask a single question or even move from where he stood. Ordinary expectations
couldn’t begin to apply to the Hunter.

“So, who the hell controls the tornado? You’ve been living out here for five years.
You gotta at least know that much. And those freaking mummies gotta be working for
the same person, right?”

“No doubt,” Lance replied, nodding feebly. “But I can’t even begin to guess who—or
what—might be behind all this. All those years I watched them carefully, hoping to
get some clue as to who it was, but I don’t even know if it was someone human or not.
Something tells me they don’t work for any mortal.”

The reason Lance believed this was because of the way he’d been kept alive. His sustenance
had consisted of one meal a day of some unknown leaves and berries that were left
piled unceremoniously in front of his quarters. Though he tried, he was never able
to see who placed the meal there. Lance’s meals usually were brought to him while
he slept. If he stayed awake to keep watch, nothing would come. After a few weeks,
a strange sensation came over Lance. No matter where he was, he had the feeling he
was being watched constantly. Even out in the barren desert without another creature
around, the feeling remained with him. Of course, escape was impossible. When they
weren’t attacking travelers, the mummies lay in their cave. Any getaway plans Lance
might’ve come up with were always foiled by sandstorms—or something even stranger.

“And what the hell was
that
?” Clay asked.

Lance merely shook his head at the question. “I don’t know. Well, I’d heard about
it, but I’d never seen it before. It was water that just stretched on forever. I guess
it must’ve been that ‘sea’ thing folks talk about.”

Clay and Granny exchanged glances.

The Nobility’s transportation system was still operational in the Capital, but the
further away from the city one went, the worse traveling conditions got. Aside from
a few exceptions, people had only the most primitive means of transportation to rely
on almost everywhere on the Frontier. Not only did most people live their entire lives
without ever seeing the sea, but many died without ever setting foot outside their
own village.

Lance’s words were sufficient enough to amaze both Clay and Granny.

“There’s no sea in the desert,” the old woman groaned. “It might’ve been a spell,
or something set up by the Nobility, I guess. What do you think?” Her query was aimed
at D.

Lying down in a hollow about ten feet from the rest of the group, Tae turned her eyes
toward the Vampire Hunter for the first time.

“The tornado is under someone’s control,” D said, his eyes still trained on the vista
before him. “Whoever controls it brought all of us here. There can only be one reason
for that—to have us do the same thing it made him do, I suppose.”

“What, you mean plundering?” Clay blurted out without the slightest reserve. “But
nobody’s loony enough to try crossing this desert anymore. No one other than this
old bag, my brother, and me, that is. Anyway, we haven’t been attacked by the freaking
mummies. What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That the desert has some purpose other than killing us, and so it lets us live,”
D replied plainly. “The man said he was being watched. Now, it’s our turn for the
same.”

“Wait just a minute there!” Granny interrupted. “Just now, you said something about
what the desert wants. What’s the story? You mean to tell me everything that’s attacked
us so far is following orders from the
desert
?”

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise. I told you about the moving forest. And I suppose
you know about the living mountain in the northwestern sectors of the Frontier.”

“Sure,” Granny said, shivering at the thought of fifty billion tons of rock moving
along the horizon. “But that’s just a simple mineral-based life form that can’t do
anything aside from move. Of course, it only occurs maybe once in a decade, but then
again, thousands of people get crushed when it does.”

“It wouldn’t be that unusual for a more complex creature to exist,” D said, though
it hardly sounded like a rebuttal. “Because the metabolism of mineral-based life forms
is greatly restricted by their weight, they really can’t hope to develop any further.
But the same might not be true for the desert.”

“You keep talking about this desert, but I just don’t get it. You mean to say—”

“It could be a living creature with a developed nervous system and circuits for thought.
But even I can’t say exactly what either of those would be like.”

“Okay, let me see if I’ve got this right. You’re saying that the tornado was some
kind of ‘hand’ that brings what the desert needs here? That it had ‘eyes’ that watched
this guy? Just where are the nose and mouth then? Oh, I suppose you’re gonna tell
me those were the globes and butterflies we ran into at the start?”

D didn’t respond.

“See, I’ve got another theory,” Clay said, brushing off the dirt as he stood up. He’d
been kneeling there listening to what Granny said. “For the time being, let’s just
forget why this character might’ve been brought here. But the reason other travelers
were robbed and killed is pretty obvious. It’s because whoever’s pulling the strings
is greedy, of course! And so far as I know, there ain’t nobody with that kind of greed—nobody
but humans.”

“You know, you just might have a point there,” the old woman said matter-of-factly.

But it was Lance himself that refuted the younger Bullow. “If you turn south from
here,” the man said, “there’s a huge depression in the ground. Everything we stole
is sitting in it, rotting or rusting.”

Granny and Clay exchanged glances.

“You mean to say someone just chucked it all?” the warrior asked incredulously.

“I really can’t say, as I never actually saw it being thrown away. But every last
thing we took went off to the dump after about a week.”

“So, what did they do with the goods while they had them then?”

Lance just shrugged at the old woman’s query.

“At any rate, the first thing we gotta do is get the hell out of this hole in the
wall,” Clay said, looking around at his companions. “Hey, old lady—get in your wagon.
We’re getting out of here.”

“It’s no use,” Lance said in a weary tone. “Hell, I tried a hundred times myself.
But sometimes there’d be sandstorms, other times it was mirages of the sea. Oh, yeah—there
were times I’d walk out and nothing at all would happen and I’d think to myself I
was in the clear. And then there’d be this big damn mountain towering right in front
of me.”

“Well, this time it’s gonna work just fine,” Clay spat back. In his eyes, Lance must’ve
been nothing more than a coward. “I hate to break it to you, but if we don’t get out
of here, you ain’t either. According to what ‘pretty boy’ says, it seems we were brought
here to take your place. Meaning, whoever controls this here desert don’t have any
further use for you.”

A look of incomparable horror shot across Lance’s face.

“Those creeps didn’t come here to take you back earlier—I bet they came to kill you.
Hell, we can leave you here and let them finish you off, if you like.” Watching with
relish as Lance’s shoulders drooped, Clay then turned to D and said, “You’re coming,
too, right?”

“It’s no use.”

Realizing that the Hunter’s frosty response was exactly the same as Lance’s, Clay
got a gleam of light in his eyes—a vicious spark. “What do you mean it’s no use?”

“Is your wagon still in one piece, Granny?” D asked.

“Yeah, she’ll move somehow or other. Horses are fine, too. But I don’t think either
could go through that again.”

“If we get picked up by another tornado, her wagon will be ruined. Then we’ll be out
of luck.”

“Well, what do you suggest we do, then?” Clay asked, suddenly kicking at the ground.
A few small stones vanished into the dark reaches of the cave. “Are we just gonna
sit here with our thumbs up our asses? You planning on staying here for the rest our
lives, eating nuts and berries like this chump?”

“Do whatever you like,” D said, pulling away from the rock wall. It was probably his
way of saying he’d handle things his own way. Silently, he moved to the cavern’s entrance.

“Is something coming?” Granny asked, squinting her eyes.

“Horses. Ten or so, with riders. His compatriots, no doubt.”

“Came to shut him up, did they?” Granny replied, putting her right hand on her jar.
“Hell, if there’s only a dozen or so, I can take care of ’em one-handed,” Granny quipped,
but her words met only the empty space where D had been.

“D,” Tae mumbled softly.

.

II

.

D stepped out into the light, although it was really only light in comparison to the
cave. The sky, as always, was shrouded in clouds. At the entrance to the cave, the
Hunter looked up at the sky. It was dim—so dim that it merely served to make D’s gorgeous
countenance seem all the more radiant. He stood quietly, without moving. It was as
if he was looking at something beyond the lead-gray sky. But what? Glistening green
plains or bright tropical lands would surely mean nothing more to this young man than
an arrangement of air and land and colors. What of life, then? Or death? Or fate?
Darker than dark and colder than cold, his crystal-clear eyes reflected nothing save
the dusty cloud that had twisted around the rocky crag.

There were ten riders. They were the living dead, and a fair bit cleaner than Lance.
Surely they’d come here because their earlier colleagues had failed to return. They
didn’t look at the faces of the four men that Clay and D had dispatched. It appeared
the false life the desert had given them once couldn’t be theirs a second time.

The living dead formed a semi-circle in front of D. A man with a mustache took a half-step
forward. For all intents and purposes, he appeared human. “You’re all going to be
staying,” he said in an almost mechanical voice. A gunpowder pistol hung at his waist.
The rounds it could hurl from its six tiny chambers would go right through a tree
trunk. “If you give us the man, you have our guarantee you’ll be allowed to live here.
You’d be wise to take us up on that,” the man said flatly, and then he waited.

There was no reply. He was dealing with D, after all.

“Then I guess we can’t avoid this, can we?” the man with the mustache said, raising
his right hand.

The air was filled with the sounds of gears meshing. All the men on horseback had
cocked their guns.

“You, in particular, interest us greatly,” he told the Hunter. “If at all possible,
we’d like to avoid a confrontation.”