Scenes from an Unholy War (13 page)

“Mr. Mayor, just what do you intend to do?” Deputy Mayor Odama inquired triumphantly. “We can’t allow anyone who’s been bitten by a Noble to remain within our defensive perimeter—not even Sheryl. It would mean diverting essential personnel to keep watch over her, and we have no guarantee she wouldn’t attack them too.”

“I know,” the mayor answered with resolve. There wasn’t a trace of remorse to be seen in him. “Sheryl’s to be transferred to the quarantine facility to the west. I’ll leave the rest to the sheriff.”

No one voiced any objection. The correct course of action was laid out for just such cases as this. They all recognized that the deputy mayor was justified in what he said, and the mayor’s instructions were appropriate.

With a toss of his chin, Rust indicated that D should join him in the neighboring sickroom. It was vacant.

“Do you know who did it?” Rust asked D. He’d seen D place his left hand against the pair of fang marks on Sheryl’s neck. He had a hunch about what the Hunter had been doing.

“It was the work of someone bitten by a pseudo Noble. Gil, most likely.”

“Wow, you can tell that much? Did you get a location for him?”

“Don’t ask for the moon.”

Slapping his hand to his forehead, Rust said, “You’re right. We need to hunt him down as fast as we can. In the meantime—” He cut himself off without mentioning the need to escort Sheryl into quarantine.

The lawman was just about to leave when D told him, “Hold on. Where can I find the village laws in writing?”

“Pretty much anywhere—see, there’s a copy right there.”

Eyeing the thick volume bound in black leather wedged into the bookshelf, D asked, “Have you read the whole thing?”

“Well, all the parts that are still pertinent.”

“Give me five minutes.”

“For what?”

Saying nothing, D went over to the bookshelf, took the volume in question, flipped through all its pages, and then returned with it tucked under one arm. Ignoring Rust, he stepped out of the room. When he returned, he had the mayor and the others with him. Before the skeptical group he thumbed through the regulations, saying, “There’s no need to banish your secretary.”

Everyone’s eyes widened.

“How can you know that?” Odama suddenly snapped at him.

“Because Sheryl was drained of blood. And Gil was bitten by a pseudo Noble. And it’s all in your regulations, in the most basic laws, codified when the village was established and still in force today.” D pointed a finger at the page. “It’s in the oldest laws, article four, paragraph eight.”

Tapping the passage in question with his finger, the Hunter slid the thick tome down the table, and it stopped in front of Odama. Furrowing his brow with suspicion, the deputy mayor ran his eyes across the page. A look of astonishment twisted his pudgy face.

“Read it,” D told him, his low voice reverberating in the silence of the sickroom.

After some hesitation, Odama picked up the volume, scanned it once more, and began to speak. “
Article four: On the handling of victims of the Nobility. Paragraph eight: When a surviving victim of a Noble’s bite perpetrates the same act on another, the banishment of the latter victim is prohibited.
That’s all it says.”

The mayor broke into a smile. “We have our predecessors to thank, Odama!”

“No, not so fast, Mr. Mayor!” Odama shouted, pointing at D. “How do we know it was the victim of a pseudo Noble who got Sheryl? Who can prove to me that this man isn’t a colossal liar and a cheat—aaaah!”

D’s left hand had latched onto the wrist of the hand the deputy mayor had extended. To all appearances, he held it lightly and gently—yet the deputy mayor was unable to move a muscle.

“Come with me,” D said, leading the flabbergasted man back into Sheryl’s room. The physician on duty greeted them with an odd look. Taking the hand of the speechless deputy mayor, D pressed it to Sheryl’s wounds.

One second passed and became two.

The deputy mayor’s entire face suddenly relaxed. Looking as if he’d just been exorcised of a demon, he looked at Sheryl and D, confessing in a dazed tone, “Yes, I see. The culprit was exactly as described in that article just now. My apologies. Also, the killers who attacked the mayor at the stables were working for me.”

The physician gasped.

Shock clung to the deputy mayor’s face. Bowing his head to the mayor, who stood by the door, he stepped out as if to escape D’s grasp.

No one bothered to ask what’d happened. On the Frontier, they learned to keep quiet and accept it when a miracle occurred.

“I’ll go around and check out the rest of them,” D said, turning to leave.

“Hey!” Rust called to him. “Was that some new kind of hypnotism you just used? And another thing—were you able to memorize all those rules and regulations just by flipping through the pages?”

D said nothing.

“Oh, one thing more. How’d you happen to notice what that particular article was about? For a second there, I thought you might’ve written it.”

“I watched it being written.”

“What?” That must have been fifty years earlier. Rust was stunned, but then he remembered something. “Oh, that’s right . . . You’re a dhampir, aren’t you?”

D turned away again and started walking. He simply shut them out. It probably didn’t matter to the Hunter anyway.

“He’s a hell of a man, isn’t he?” Lyra exclaimed. “All those good looks . . . and apparently everything else about him is just as incredible.”

“You can say that again,” Rust concurred.

At this point, the mayor said, “He’s so damned handsome, I forgot to thank him.”

“Well, we have to be heading out on patrol,” Rust told him, and he and Lyra walked away. After going about a dozen paces, they turned and looked.

The mayor had both hands straight by his sides and his head bowed low with respect.

chapter 7

I

—

D
traveled around to see the remaining eight aged or infirm
villagers, who were spread out over six households. In less

than an hour, he had pared his list down to one: Sergei Roskingpan.

“He’s also a suspected sleeper agent for the enemy,” the hoarse voice said with apparent relish. “The other two suspects—Miriam Sarai and Codo Graham—weren’t on our list. The sheriff says he’s got someone keeping an eye on Roskingpan, but there’s no telling what’s happened in all this commotion. Well, looks like you could wrap this up neatly, eh?”

The cyborg horse carrying D trotted beside a thin stream. The moon glittered on the water’s surface. D’s form was bleached by a stark glow. A swarm of ball-lightning bugs had just passed by him. Then the glow came back again. They lingered around him for a while, and presently flew off. Darkness tinged his handsome features.

A dilapidated shack of a farmhouse came into view, squatting over the running water. The house leaned to one side, making it look like a parallelogram with a roof set on top. Judging by the way light spilled from its window, its occupant apparently was going about his daily life.

“It’s that old man, Sergei Roskingpan—there’s proof he’s involved in something. Watch yourself.”

To the left of the road was a field of vegetables. D’s eyes could make out orderly rows of globe cabbage against the dark earth. While the Hunter was still forty or fifty feet away, the door of the house opened, allowing faint light and a stocky figure to spill out. It had to be Old Man Roskingpan.

“You’re a sleeper agent, after all, aren’t you?” murmured the hoarse voice in a tone so low D alone could hear it.

The old man didn’t even look in their direction. He cut straight across the street and into the cabbage patch. And then, after sizing up a number of them, he grabbed the biggest cabbage with both hands and pulled for all he was worth. It came out of the ground with ease. Though reeling drunkenly, the old man narrowly managed to maintain his balance, hurrying across the street again and into his house. The door closed.

“What the hell’s his story? He’s a cabbage thief? That’s just pathetic!” the left hand griped.

Getting off his cyborg horse in front of the house, D wound his steed’s reins around the hitching post and knocked on the door.

“What do you want? Get outta here!” the old man shouted as rudely as he could through the door.

“Pardon me,” D said, pushing the door open and going in.

Suddenly, there was a bang. Pioneers had carried Pullois handguns for self-defense, and the one the old man had in hand had just put its first round through the ceiling, where it would need to be patched later. The pistol shook like a leaf as he managed to bring it to bear on D’s chest.

“Stop,” D said, taking a giant stride toward the old man.

“Stay back, you cabbage-swiping bastard!” the old man shouted, tossing in every curse he knew as he fired a second shot.

Though the bullet came out, it didn’t hit D, and the gun exploded. The barrel blew apart, its fragments embedding themselves in the walls and ceiling. Knocked on his ass by both the concussive force and surprise, the old man found his gray hair tinged even grayer by powder drifting down from the explosion.

D clapped his hands together. They were filthy from smoke and gunpowder. By putting the palm of his left hand over the barrel of the gun, he’d caused the gas to reverse direction when the weapon was fired, making it explode. At the same time, his right hand had shielded the old man’s face. The iron fragments stuck in him rained down onto the floor, where there was a foot-and-a-half-wide wooden plank running from below the south window to below the north, probably intended to allow the old man to scoop water from the stream that ran beneath his home.

“Settle down and hear me out,” D said, gazing at the old man. “Or else I’ll eat that cabbage you’ve got there.”

It wasn’t often that the young man joked like that.

The result of the Hunter’s interrogation was that nothing was out of the ordinary. As D’s dark eyes threatened to swallow his soul, Old Man Roskingpan had shaken his head to every question. D excused himself and was about to leave when Roskingpan offered to serve him up some tasty fried cabbage if he’d stay and talk awhile.

“Ah, the folks in town are a cold bunch. When I was a young man, people used to suck up to me and tell me my muscles were the pride of the village and such, but now that I’m old and broken down, only the old lady from the welfare department comes by, and only to chant prayers for my soul. Ha! As if I’d be happy about going off into the next world.”

The Hunter said he was busy and had to be on his way, but the old man caught hold of the belt of his coat and wouldn’t let go. That was partly the reason D took a seat on the patch-covered sofa, but he also wanted to find out about something else.

“Seems it’s been about ten years since you came to the village, hasn’t it?” D asked.

“Oh, you’re right about that. I can tell you all about anything that’s happened since, right down to whose cat’s screwing whose.”

“Have people been going missing over the last decade or more?”

“How’d you know that, young fella? The village worries merchants and sightseers might stop coming, so they keep it pretty hush-hush, but just between you and me, lately about eighteen people a year have disappeared.” Most of them were traveling merchants, he said, but every year or two one of the villagers would also vanish. Age or sex didn’t seem to matter; in one case it was a farmer’s daughter who’d just turned three, and in another the eighty-year-old man who looked after the water wheel. “This is a hard life,” Roskingpan continued. “Most folks say they probably ran off or got taken by some supernatural critter.”

“Didn’t they?”

“Hell, I don’t know. This is the Frontier. Nothing should come as any surprise. The most surprising thing of all is how anybody stays alive.” Belting back the whiskey he’d poured himself, the old man stared at D. “Why does that interest you?”

“When we went to the Black Death’s encampment about thirty miles south of here, there were a lot of human bones buried out there.”

“I’ll be damned!”

“From what I saw, the oldest were from about ten years ago, the most recent from last year. There were marks on them from being cut with a blade.”

Those must’ve been the same skulls that’d been thrown down in front of Toma and his men.

“So, what’s that supposed to mean? Whoever killed ’em buried all their bodies in one place? Wait a second!” Fixing his eyes on the sky as if tracing back through his memories, the old man quickly slapped both hands down on the table and said, “I’ve got it! You said this was thirty miles to the south, right? I know that a weird farmer and his wife lived out there.”

D could recall the farmhouse that’d stood where the Black Death gang had made their encampment for the night. Along with the outlaws’ ammunition, it’d gone up in smoke.

“They settled in there right about the time the disappearances started. I remember being surprised when one year, all of a sudden there’s this house standing out in the middle of that wasteland.”

“Didn’t anyone get suspicious?”

“Well, I guess they looked into it. I didn’t go, but the mayor at the time sent a party to check it out. They went over that farmhouse real good, but it seems they didn’t turn up anything. Anyway, it was thirty miles from here. Those people never came into town, and I didn’t even remember ’em until you mentioned it just now. The rest of the village probably doesn’t remember ’em either. But there was a pile of bones near there, you say. You figure it was them?”

“Couldn’t grow much in the way of crops out there,” D said. “It’d be impossible for a couple to support themselves. What do you think they fed on?”

The old man’s pupils shrank down to pinpricks.

D continued, “Some folks like to live way off from civilization. But there are only two types that choose to live where no one else could.”

“Nobles . . .” the old man said, staring at D.

“That, or else pseudo Nobles.”

“Then you think that couple came into town and got all those . . .”

“If anyone had suspected anything like that, the villagers would’ve gone out there and torched the place.”

The old man didn’t know what to say.

“When someone’s fallen under the influence of the Nobility, either as the genuine article or as a fake, their goal is to drink blood. But those remains were the victims of someone who
enjoys
killing.”

The old man stiffened, as if something were creeping up the nape of his neck. When the sensation was gone, he said, “Then what you’re saying is this: there’s a murderer in the village, and pseudo Nobles were living thirty miles to the south? Oh, gimme a break! What the hell kind of place are we living in? I need me a drink!”

D watched the man patiently as he loudly rattled a glass and a bottle of booze. Emptying the tumbler he’d filled to the rim in one shot, the old man let out a long sigh. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he said, “You know, I still don’t get it. Are you telling me it’s a coincidence that there was a murderer in town who dumped the bodies out by that farmhouse? I don’t think the culprit would need to haul ’em thirty miles.”

“You’re right.”

The old man shrugged his shoulders.

D dealt the coup de grâce. “Pseudo Nobles don’t grow crops for food. And a murderer has no need for dismembered corpses. Or the blood they spill.”

After a few seconds, the old man made a ridiculous face. “So, he brought the blood of the folks he killed out to the couple . . . and had ’em get rid of the bodies?”

“The killer might’ve gotten something else out of it as well. Thirty miles each way is a hell of a trip just to dump a corpse. Maybe he got some way to get close to his victims without anyone noticing him. Even fake Nobles can use a kind of hypnosis.”

“I see. That way, he could take somebody’s kid right before their very eyes, and they wouldn’t even know it.” The old man looked terribly weary. He asked in a fuzzy voice, “What became of that couple?”

“Their house was blown away. Before that, they’d probably been put down by the Black Death.”

“If so, that’d be one thing taken care of, eh? To think we had freaks like that living just thirty miles from here for a decade!” Some of the tension drained from Roskingpan, but then he said, “Wait a second. That means the village—”

“The village still has a murderer on the loose.”

“Heaven help us. Hey, you’ve gotta find him!”

“My job is handling the Black Death.”

“Does the sheriff know about this?”

“Not yet.”

“What are you doing, then? You’ve gotta let him know as soon as you can. Off with you, now!”

“Actually, I’ve got urgent business.”

“Why, you—okay, I’ll go do it myself!” Running for the door like his life depended on it, the old man stopped halfway there and turned. “And don’t be taking my cabbage!” he said, just to be on the safe side.

—

II

—

Lyra advanced straight down the darkened road on her steed. As for her destination—she had none. However, from the way she rode, she seemed to be in a hurry.

Gil was now a fiend, and he was somewhere in the village. For all she knew, his glowing eyes were watching her as he followed along behind her, ready to strike. Swimming in the same fear all the villagers felt, Lyra went down the moonlit road. It was a summer night, with chirping insects, the gurgling stream, and moonlight raining down. There was no one covering her. Rust had tried to send backup, but she’d refused. “I’ll thank you to remember I’m a warrior.” And with these words, Lyra had set out in her role as bait.

If she were to just wander aimlessly, Gil would see right through the ruse. That was why Lyra rode as if she had somewhere to be. Almost an hour had passed since she’d set out on horseback for the western fields, the most isolated area within the walls. She wasn’t in a hurry. If Gil were watching, he’d undoubtedly do so for a while to make sure Lyra was really, truly alone. Lyra wanted to slay the enemy within their borders as soon as possible and lighten the load on Rust’s shoulders.

If Gil showed himself, she was quite confident she could put him down. Her sole fear was that she didn’t know what Gil’s unique ability was. Most wandering warriors and mercenaries had an ability—a deadly skill they’d acquired. Out on the monster-strewn Frontier territory, these served as a shield to protect them, a tool with which to earn their daily bread, and a weapon to slay their foes. As a result, they absolutely hated to have anyone else learn what their ability was, and in more than a few cases they’d gotten rid of anyone who found out. Lyra hadn’t seen Gil’s ability in action yet.

If not tonight, Lyra was confident he’d come after her sooner or later. The whole point of Gil hiding there had to be to cause chaos. The most effective means of accomplishing this would be to strike at the core of the opposition. In the case of the village of Geneve, the central figures would most likely be the mayor, Rust, Lyra herself, and D. In which case, the logical thing to do would be to get rid of those people, starting with the one that was easiest to strike. And Lyra didn’t have any backup.

Suddenly, Lyra felt her cheeks flushing. Touching her hand to them, she found them hot. “No, it can’t be,” she muttered, sounding half-dazed. She’d been thinking of the mayor, Rust—and then D’s face had skimmed through her mind.

At that instant, Lyra felt a sharp pain spearing through her right shoulder.
You’re kidding me!
she thought as she dove from the saddle into the woods to her right. Guessing the danger of the situation, her cyborg horse galloped off to safety.

The second she circled around behind a thick tree, she heard a sharp impact on the trunk. Embedded in it was a dart just like the one stuck in Lyra’s shoulder. Swiftly extracting the first dart, the warrior woman threw it down. She was so angry she could’ve spit.

Me, of all people, caught thinking about a man . . .

She focused all her senses on locating her opponent. But she didn’t catch anything. Her foe was one with the darkness.