Vampire Hunter D Volume 13: Twin-Shadowed Knight Parts 1 and 2 (2 page)

In no time at all, the thin strains of a melody echoed from the instrument, moving to the ceiling and walls as it flowed through the room.

“First layer of the subconscious—passed,” Origa muttered in a low tone, although how she managed that with the flute still to her lips was a mystery.

The melody changed.

The secrets of the famed flute that could restore lost memories were its inner workings, mechanisms that made the memories replay, and this tune, which was known only to the sorceress's clan.

D didn't move. Was he sleeping? Was he even breathing, for that matter?

As if entranced by his handsome visage, the crone said, “Second layer—no, let's just dive straight down to the mystic layer.”

There was a ghastly ring to the voice of Origa the Sorceress, like she was sick from the smell of blood.

The mystic layer—that was a mysterious zone of the human mind only those of her line could reach.

Adjusting her grip on the instrument, Origa began to pipe a short, strange rhythm wholly unlike what she'd played thus far. Accompanied by light, the arrows of sound slipped into the ears of the gorgeous Hunter—no, they battered his brain directly.

Origa's features grew indistinct—blurred by the sweat that had covered every inch of her in a split second.

Look what kind of misery had to be endured to call back lost memories! The body of the sorceress contorted and grew dehydrated, and she might have shed as much as a tenth of her weight. In exchange for that fearsome price, the notes produced by the magic flute seemed enough to make even a rock shudder, echoing in an eerie melody like the marching tune of a demonic army, orderly and awe inspiring.

At that moment, the first thing that could be called emotion suddenly raced across the face of the sleeping D. His right hand reached for the sword by his side.

“Don't!”

Whose shout was that?

The woman's screams, exploding from the little black house, were swallowed by a far deeper darkness. The sounds dragged long, long tails after them—then vanished unexpectedly.

Aside from that, this had been a particularly quiet evening.

-

Past noon on the following day—when the Hunter in black was more than 120 miles from the village—a villager who called on the home of Origa the Sorceress was left standing frozen and speechless upon discovering the crone's body in pieces in the blood-spattered room.

-

II

-

Surprisingly, there were many types of travelers that one could expect to see on the highway. Medicine peddlers dressed in white with drug cases of the same hue slung from their shoulders and tricolored pennants of red, white, and blue flying high off the poles on their backs. Contract fighters in old-fashioned armored cars that had heavy machine guns and the barrels of rivet guns protruding from them and the words Warriors Available written in large letters on their sides. Traveling performers who did flips on top of carriages, disgorging flowers from their mouths, then striking them down with knives or gouts of flame. And so on, and so forth. And the eyes of all of them bulged in their sockets.

What some saw from the front and others from the rear was a cyborg horse galloping at terrific speed. But even those who recognized it as a horse still didn't believe it. Cyborg horses couldn't keep that kind of pace, and what was more, as it was passing them, a number of people saw a figure of unearthly beauty . . . and to some it looked as if said figure was actually running right alongside the horse. Whatever the case, by the time they could focus their eyes, both the cyborg horse and the human figure were dwindling in the distance.

Not even the bands of warriors astride their vaunted steeds or the riders of the Pony Express—who were said to have the fastest horses on the road—felt like challenging that pair, who had literally galloped along as if possessed by the dark lord of the winds.

It was D. However, the gorgeous young man had never raced like this in the past. Whenever he commanded his mount to run at full speed, the cyborg horse entered a mad gallop, as if in the grip of some unearthly spell. As a result, his horse moved as swiftly as a swallow in flight. But it couldn't continue like that forever. If he saw that his cyborg horse had grown exhausted, D dismounted and ran alongside it to lighten its load. Needless to say, those times were few. His horse slowed down a bit, but keeping pace with a wildly galloping horse was something no human—or even Noble, for that matter—could do.

Nevertheless, the horse had been ruined.

Near the towns and villages, there were rest stops along the highway where travelers might obtain cyborg horses or energy bikes. The proprietor of the shop D entered glanced at the cyborg horse that'd collapsed after it galloped in, but by the time he realized it had died of excessive exhaustion, D had already selected a new mount, left a pile of coins that would also cover the burial costs of the old horse, and then disappeared into the distance in a cloud of dust.

In the past three days, he'd ridden twelve hundred miles without a moment's rest, and he was on his third cyborg horse. He truly was riding at an insane pace. D's unearthly aura took hold of the steed. But what was the purpose of that aura, and at what was it directed? Where was he going? And what was waiting there?

The far end of the desolate night plains had begun to take on a watery hue.

Wherever this young man went, people always met their fate. But whose might it be this time? Would it be D's?

-

In the village of Sedoc—or to be precise, on the outskirts of the village—an incredible change took place on the twenty-sixth day of the third month of season A——. A group of elderly women on a pilgrimage from the east were staying at Sedoc House, the village inn, when all twenty of them suddenly suffered heart attacks in the night and died. After the sheriff's department wrote up a perfunctory report, they were carted off to the morgue.

In the middle of the night, the janitor from the morgue rode to the sheriff's office with bizarre news. One after another, the corpses in the morgue had gotten up, smashed through a stone wall, and begun to march off in single file toward “the red wasteland” on the village outskirts, by his account.

The sheriff railed about how they'd been bitten by a Noble and grilled the janitor on what the hell he'd been doing, but the poor janitor insisted there was absolutely no way a Noble could've gotten near them.

At any rate, talk soon turned to forming a search team and rounding up the corpses, but just then, the caretaker from a cemetery near the sheriff's office bolted in with a face as pale as a dead man's. He told them that every corpse in the entire cemetery had risen from its grave. After clawing up through ten feet of heavy dirt, they reached the surface and started walking.

The sheriff asked him where they were headed. But he already knew the answer.

“The red wasteland,” the cemetery caretaker replied.

An urgent appeal went out, and more than thirty men responded immediately, taking up their inevitable task as residents of the Frontier. They came with sharpened stakes and spears and bows in hand, quickly proceeding toward the outskirts of the village.

They were a third of the way to their destination when the massive earthquake struck. Heaven and earth rumbled. The ground undulated like waves across fabric, rapidly pitching from side to side. You could say it was a miracle that no one in the search party was harmed. Not even the horses had been able to flee, and they'd fallen to the ground and rolled around on their sides for what'd seemed like an eternity, though it was later learned that the trembling of the earth hadn't lasted five seconds.

Still, the sheriff and a number of other brave souls were to be lauded for the way they decided to press on less than five minutes after the great quake had passed. Driving their cyborg horses as fast as they could, they arrived at the edge of a red plain where the composition of the soil made it look like blood, and were struck by a terror that effaced all other thoughts of strangeness as they froze on their mounts—or rather, with their mounts.

The red ground was missing.

What they saw was an outer ring that seemed to go on forever, dropping at a sharp angle into a great mortar-shaped depression. From the standpoint of natural phenomena, such an occurrence wasn't inconceivable. What terrified the group was that along that vast brink—later the hole would be found to be a mile and a quarter in diameter—there was a mob of shadowy figures. Some clad in rags, others fairly well dressed, and still others nearly completely naked, they stood peering down at the bottom of that subsidence without moving a muscle, irrespective of age or sex. There was nothing about them that had the slightest semblance of human life—they had eyes as cloudy as those of dead fish, sunken cheeks with bones laid bare, and pale shapes wriggling in holes through their chests and bellies that could only be maggots.

All of the village's dead.

“No,” the caretaker said in a flat tone. “That's not right. They aren't just from our village cemetery. There are too many of them.”

At that point the sheriff sensed the presence of countless people behind him and heard their footsteps.

“Corpses,” someone shouted. The moonlight drank up his voice.

Behind them, dead beyond numbering were coming down the highway. And although the sheriff and his men didn't notice it, they must've traveled quite some distance, since each was stark white with dust from the ankles down.

“What are they up to? What the hell are these things?”

Ignoring the sheriff's muttered remarks, the walking dead marched on, trudging right past the living. And then, as if they'd been given a push from behind, all the dead who stood at the brink of the mortarlike depression leapt in at once. The row behind them followed suit, as did the one after that, and another, and another.

Their brains assailed by rank horror and the foul stench, the entire search party passed out. They were brought back to the village by the remaining members of their group.

And for two full days after that, the sheriff watched the procession of the dead to their mass grave.

Were there really that many bodies buried around the area? How much longer would this go on?

These concerns ate at every brain, leaving the townsfolk on the edge of madness. The next thing they knew, the procession of the dead had ended, but the villagers were left in a state of shock, roaming the streets like the newly dead.

A young man in black with heavenly beauty and an exhausted horse came into town with the wind whirling in his wake. Halting his horse in front of Sedoc House, the rider grabbed one of the unsteady villagers and asked, “What happened?”

The young man's tone and his handsome features returned the stupefied villager to his senses. He told the young man everything he knew, from start to finish.

“Am I too late?” D muttered in a tone devoid of emotion—a voice of iron—and he prepared to get back on his horse.

“Wait!” someone called out to him. Though it was low, the voice had a faint tinge of something to it.

Not even looking, D put his heels to his horse's flanks.

As the gorgeous rider and his mount tore up the ground, the voice called out once more.

“Wait, D!”

-

III

-

The girl introduced herself as Mia. She said she was the daughter of a fortuneteller who lived about sixty miles to the north. Her smock and the skirt she wore below it were both embroidered with a mysterious crest representing where she came from, and her numerous necklaces and bracelets were set with stones with a deep luster that seemed to hold a dark history. She knew D's name because when her mother predicted a strange occurrence in this region, she'd told the girl that would be the name of the man who'd race there from afar.

“From what Mother says, the key to solving this mystery is held by a man who comes from far away,” Mia said in a hard tone. “This case is something no one can handle. No one except the man named D. D—if that's the name that you go by—what in the world are you?”

“Can you see the future?” D asked.

“A little,” Mia replied, her voice betraying restrained pride and self-confidence.

“In that case, do you know how this all ends?”

“No, not even Mother knows that. But it's not because she's not powerful enough to see it. Something interfered.” After a short pause, the girl continued. “As far as what happened, I asked the villagers before you got here. Mother had pointed to a spot on the map and said that an incredibly evil power was at work. It was the same area where there was that massive subsidence. That's probably the center of it.”

“What kind of power?”

“An evil one is all she said.”

“It probably would've been better if your mother came.”

“I think so too,” Mia conceded, not seeming the least bit angry. “But unfortunately, she can't do that. Right after predicting this incident, Mother coughed up blood and collapsed. She's probably passed away by now.”

“And you came here instead of tending to her?”

“Mother's orders were explicit,” Mia replied, with her eyes focused straight ahead.

Her age had to be sixteen or seventeen. Some childlike innocence still remained on her face, but a strength of will that hardly suited her had also spread across it.

“She doesn't view this incident as merely another catastrophe. Mother said it's a major event that could have repercussions on a global scale. Ordinarily, she'd have gone herself. Even though going might not accomplish anything, as someone with the power to catch a glimpse of people's future—society's future—she has to try and do whatever she can. But since she couldn't possibly move, she told me to go.”

A mother who sent her own daughter into an incident that might shake the very world.

A girl who'd raced here even though she knew her mother was fated to die.