Tyrant's Stars: Parts Three and Four (43 page)

No one knew when he’d moved to Valcua’s side. Or perhaps it was Valcua who’d gone over to him without even realizing it.

The two bodies overlapped.

“What in the—” Braujou shouted, his cry a showcase of overwhelming surprise and despair. The body of the Sacred Ancestor had slipped right into Valcua’s.

“That damn Valcua—is he getting the power of the Sacred Ancestor?”

It was Count Braujou who responded to the hoarse voice. His long spear leaped into action, but then a crimson streak pierced the count’s body. Valcua’s retainers had fired their beam cannons on the count, and every blast sank into his skin or clothes.

As the fusillade continued, Braujou’s long spear limned an arc. The flashes reversed direction. The retainers they penetrated were instantly reduced to ions—all of the deadly flashes had been deflected back at them by the head of Count Braujou’s spear.

“He must be slain now!” the count exclaimed, the words spilling from him like a gout of blood as fierce determination clung to his face. The count knew exactly what this weird unification would mean.

Though he was well within striking distance, he simply couldn’t follow through. Adjusting his grip on the spear, he prepared to hurl it.

Valcua balled his right hand into a fist and raised it. His fingers opened just in front of his chest. A crimson sphere less than two inches in diameter floated there.

The long spear flew. It could have penetrated Valcua’s heart, but it scored a direct hit on the sphere instead. As it did so, the great twenty-foot spear never slowed down, and the crimson sphere swallowed it up.

“This is the Sacred Ancestor’s—I mean
my
—blood sphere,” Valcua told them in a tone of wonder. His wounded abdomen had ceased bleeding. “In days long past, the Sacred Ancestor was my sworn foe. The reason for that you wouldn’t know. I wasn’t simply

some bloodthirsty fiend. Everything I did was in rebellion against the Sacred Ancestor—but I don’t expect you to believe that.”

His eyes turned to D, and then bored through Braujou. They weren’t the eyes of the old Valcua.

“I—” he began to say, and then he squinted. His gaze was focused on the doorway far to the rear of Braujou.

Braujou turned around.

A pair of figures was standing there.

“Miranda?” he said with a sort of nostalgia.

“Matthew!” Sue said, barely squeezing his name out. “Matt—I’m so glad you’re here!”

“I got him out of prison,” Miranda informed them, shooting a scornful glance at Matthew to her left. He carried a large crossbow.

“I snuck into the castle through the basement. Fooling the defense systems was child’s play. And in one of those subterranean cells I found this boy. I’ve had nothing but trouble every time I meet this man—I mean, this
child.
I was going to leave him to his fate, but since that seemed too cruel I brought him with me. I even armed him with a weapon from one of the guards. So stay right there, and don’t make a move.”

Given the duchess’s keen senses, it must have been quite easy for her to find the group here.

Her pale visage turned toward Braujou. Her face had a red line running between the eyes to the tip of her chin. Her favorite white dress was stained red.

“I heard what you were talking about. Braujou, there’s no longer any way to stop this bastard Valcua. Now that he has the power of the Sacred Ancestor, not even D could do that. As a result, we must combine our powers now.”

She was so lovely, and her words so shocking. This beauty had been bisected from the crotch to the top of her head. Just look. Step by step she moved toward Valcua, but at her feet she left a vivid trail of blood. As she walked, her right hand reached down the neck

of her dress. When Braujou saw what it held when it came out again, he let out an astonished groan.

It was a blood-smeared but still beating heart.

“I shall go first—Braujou, you follow after.”

And saying this, Miranda poised herself to throw. A great shudder ran through her body. The sounds of a spring discharging and an arrow knifing through the air came after. Deep red spread from the spot where an iron arrow jutted from the left side of her chest.

“Matt?" Sue said, staring in disbelief at her brother as he stood with the crossbow leveled.

“No ... I can’t let you throw that... at the great Valcua.”

The possessed look in Matthew’s eyes told of the influence the Ultimate Noble still had over him. However, shooting an arrow into a Noble who was trying to save him for the sake of another Noble who wanted him dead was simply too great an act of treachery.

Still clutching the arrow, Miranda took one step forward, then another. Her gait was steady. Turning to Matthew, she laughed.

“You can’t slay me without running me through the heart. And my heart is right here,” she said, and as she did, she swung her right arm.

Her heart collided with Valcua’s tiny sphere, disappearing in a terrific burst of white light.

“Braujou, I leave the rest to you!”

And then she tumbled forward in her red dress and moved no more. The instant her heart was gone, her immortal life reached its conclusion.

After watching her meet this unnatural end, Braujou turned a terrible gaze on Matthew. “Am I to defend this wretched human?” he said, spitting the words like so much gore.

The count bit his lips. His teeth tore through them, spilling bright blood.

“As a Noble I shall keep my word. D, I leave the two of them in your care!”

His massive form kicked off the ground.

Matthew, who undoubtedly remained out of his mind, took aim at the count and fired an arrow at the speed of sound.

A silvery flash intercepted the missile in midair, becoming D’s blade as he landed in front of Matthew and struck the boy over the head with the flat of his sword.

As Braujou bounded, his hand raised a longsword with a ten-foot blade. He must’ve had it under his robe. He brought the blade straight down on Valcua’s head, but the second the Ultimate Noble blocked it with his left hand, the weapon vanished. That was the work of the other little ball that floated in front of Valcua’s left hand—another blood sphere.

“So, I’m really no match for him? Well, my blood has a few tricks of its own!”

Braujou did an about-face. Turning his back on the Ultimate Noble, he reached his left hand out toward D.

“Lend me your sword!”

D threw him the same longsword that had laid out Matthew. Catching it, the count used both hands to take it in a reverse grip.

“Valcua, this is from Miranda and me!”

With a shout that shook heaven and earth, the count stabbed the blade into his own body. Its tip went through him and stretched toward Valcua’s heart with calculated precision.

The Ultimate Noble seemed to be waiting for this, moving his blood sphere up to meet it as if it were a force field. The tip of the sword was stained with gore—there was a sound like a pop as the blood sphere vanished, and the deadly blade proceeded right on target to pierce Valcua’s heart, the same blade that had pierced Braujou’s heart and absorbed his blood.

A shout that was nothing shy of a death rattle flew from Valcua’s throat, and then he fell flat on his back. Grabbing the blade with both hands, he tried to extract it. Given the girth of Braujou’s chest and the distance between the two men, the grand duke couldn’t have had more than eight inches of the blade in him. But it didn’t come out. Not only that— “Well, I’ll be! It’s still sinking into him, isn’t it?”

Just as the hoarse voice had indicated, Valcua’s struggles were in vain as D’s sword—covered with Braujou’s blood—slowly but surely sank into the men’s overlapped forms.

His strength perhaps spent, Valcua took his right hand away from the blade and reached up into the air. It snatched at the drifting fog. A second passed, then two—and the hand fell limply.

Sue raced over to D. Before showing any concern for Matthew, she said, “I wonder if he’s dead.”

The first words out of her mouth were what concerned her the most: Valcua.

“Nope,” the left hand said curtly. “He’s still clenching his fist.” When Sue’s eyes finally focused on Valcua’s hand and the bit of white that spilled from it, the Ultimate Noble’s eyes opened and gave off a golden light. The light shot up into the void. Like a magnificent but vain attempt to contact extraterrestrial life, it connected the dark heavens with the earth.

“Take Matthew and go outside,” D told her, pulling out needles of plain wood and hurling them at Valcua’s heart. They struck him, or at least they appeared to for a second, and then they reversed direction and were stopped by the left arm D held up. The five needles stuck in him from the wrist to the elbow, and bright blood coursed out.

When D lowered his arm, he looked over at Valcua. He stood like an angry deity with Braujou’s longsword- skewered corpse at his feet and his face turned up to the void.

In a tone that carried true astonishment, the hoarse voice said, “This clown took the part of the akashic record that shows his death and squashed it in his hand.”

“Precisely,” Valcua responded. His voice was transmitted directly to D’s brain without his lips ever moving. “I’ve acquired telepathy. Do you know how? It was given to me by creatures in another galaxy using a hyperlight communications system faster than a laser. Oh, here comes another one! It seems they simply can’t restrain their desire to make their existence known and share their knowledge and power.”

D ran. The Ultimate Noble was getting powers from extraterrestrial civilizations. He had to be destroyed before he truly became the ultimate form of life!

As the Hunter dashed, his right hand reached down. Getting a grip on the longsword with his fingertips, he made what was literally a do-or-die strike—driving the sword hilt-deep into Valcua’s heart. For a second, the hyperlight communication ceased.

“Ah, the power’s leaving me. So, this is how Glencalibur feels?” Valcua’s magic sword pierced its own master.

“Destroyed,” Valcua said, staggering. “I am destroyed . . . No, I would’ve been destroyed ... once upon a time. D, I’ve received the power of immortality from countless millions of miles away.” Without a sound, Glencalibur flew straight at D. The instant that D got a grip on its hilt to stop it, Valcua slowly opened the eyes he’d had shut. His eyes had no pupils, just a golden glow.

“I can manipulate the akashic record as I choose, tapping the knowledge of the universe—I’m more than just a living being now, D,” Valcua said, his voice clear and resounding.

In the depths of the white fog a golden light glowed. The leak from the record was growing stronger.

“What are you, then?” D asked. Valcua’s declaration should’ve been shocking, but neither it nor the mysterious vigor that accompanied it seemed to shake the young man’s psyche in the least.

“What you see before you—call me an
entity.”

“Are you trying to say you’re the pinnacle of evolution?” the hoarse voice said, adding in a sneering tone, “Another name for that might be
has-been."

Valcua’s eyes stared at the Hunter’s left hand.

“Gaaaaah!” it screamed, its tiny face sinking back into the palm at the same time D made a horizontal swipe with Glencalibur at Valcua’s neck. Though the Hunter felt it make contact, the grand duke didn’t fall. A minor spasm passed through D’s right hand. It was a very bizarre reaction. Searing pain burned in his brain.

As the young man in black fell backward without a word, Valcua said, “Ah, the death throes of one so beautiful are an entertaining sight. However, that’s just proof that I haven’t yet become the Ultimate Noble. The fact that something like beauty can still affect me . ..”