Vampire Hunter D Volume 13: Twin-Shadowed Knight Parts 1 and 2 (15 page)

“Well, we got them outside, at any rate,” a hoarse voice said in the darkness. “So, what do you plan to do next?”

“Destroy it,” D responded casually.

In fact, he said it so matter-of-factly, the other voice replied with a nonplussed, “Hmm, I see.” But that was quickly followed by an agitated, “What? Y-you mean this joint?”

“Where else?”

“Forget I asked! How could you take out such an enormous complex, anyway? By my estimates, it goes down around twenty miles, and stretches at least that far in each direction.”

“I'll reverse the flow of the energy line.”

The hoarse voice fell silent. A short while later, it remarked, “Hmm. If you were to do that, the backflow of energy would definitely collect in the core, and once it ran over its capacity—boom! It's just—”

“Just what?” D said, asking a rare question.

“Honestly, it seems like an awful waste,” the voice told him. “Even for him, setting up this place must've taken tons of time. Yeah, I'd say roughly a thousand years.”

“Sixty days.”

“What?”

“From the start of construction, it was completed in exactly sixty days.”

“You are such a liar! Who said so?”

“This place.”

“Is that so? Now that you mention it, he made it. It wouldn't be surprising for you to be able to tell that. The memories of all the years are imprinted on this place. But I was just thinking . . .”

“What?”

“Have you forgotten the promise you made to the other you? If even one of Kuentz's group made it out of here alive, you weren't supposed to go into the facility for three days.”

“That's exactly right.”

“But—” the voice began, and then it broke off.

The tone it took next carried such terror it would've frozen any who heard it. “Seriously, tell me you didn't do that . . .”

-

II

-

After traveling to a spot that was about three hundred feet from the mountain's summit as the crow flies, the pair halted. Footing was treacherous on the route along the exposed rock, and they were exhausted. More than anything, their feet ached. Their hands were also injured from where they'd grabbed the boulders every time they started to lose their balance.

“You're pretty tough,” Kuentz said with admiration after watching Mia start to wrap a handkerchief around the palm and back of one hand. Blood instantly seeped into the white fabric.

“No, not really.”

“Those shoes are for level ground. Yet you move like a bird in them anyway.”

“I'm just used to mountain climbing from all the time I spent collecting plants and herbs to use in spells.”

“Just the same—”

“Never mind about me. If you'd be so kind as to figure a way for us to safely reach the bottom, brave sir.”

“Uh, sure,” he replied, somewhat flustered by her “brave sir” remark. Whether or not that was Mia's intent, it'd had a special impact on Kuentz's heart and his head. As he gazed at Mia, his eyes were feverish and his cheeks flushed. Apparently this was the first time the stalwart young man had been in love.

However, despite how hotly his youthful ardor blazed, the one who'd ignited it extinguished it in no time with her next comment. “Somehow, I've got a strange feeling about this.”

“Oh yeah, you're a fortuneteller, right?” he said, having heard about Mia from folks in the village.

“My mother's the fortuneteller. I'm more like the reserves.”

“I bet she must've been beautiful.”

Mia laughed unconcernedly, saying, “Thanks. I appreciate that, even if you don't mean it.”

The only problem with that was she didn't look all that pleased, but Kuentz didn't seem to mind. He'd been under a great mental strain after seeing the demonic lair deep underground and he hadn't noticed much more about her other than that she was a cute girl, but looking at her out in the sunlight with a new sense of freedom, her lustrous hair and blushing cheeks, the dainty line of her nose, and her lips as red as roses seemed to cast a kind of golden glow over her that was like a breath of spring. For a second, Kuentz was lost in a fantasy that instead of fleeing with Mia from danger, the two of them had agreed to scale the silvery peak together.

A white wind struck his cheeks. It stabbed at him with a chill that seemed to slash at his skin. Turning to look in the direction from which the wind had blown, he saw a form that looked like an eerie statue standing in a stark white fog.

“We'd better hurry,” he said, turning back toward Mia, but the fortuneteller's daughter was kneeling down on the black rock, in the process of pulling an iridescent bag out of her coat pocket.

“Hey!”

“Hold on. I'm trying to divine if there's anything blocking our way.”

“You think you could do that?”

No sooner had he asked that than a loud whap! resounded from his cheek. He'd been slapped without a second's hesitation. The girl had been so close to him and the action was so beyond his imagining that he hadn't been able to avoid it. In part, it was because Mia hadn't broadcast her intention in any way, shape, or form.

“What was that for?” he shouted, and while his voice certainly had force to it, Mia's reply was even more commanding.

Glaring at Kuentz, her lovely cat eyes giving off a vicious gleam of light, she said, “You could've asked if it was possible, but don't make it seem like I don't know what I'm doing. That's so rude!”

Her words were thrust at him like a stake she'd drive into his heart.

“I see. Sorry,” Kuentz said, backing down easily. Although he didn't completely understand, he got the feeling he was in the wrong.

Mia suddenly smiled again, saying, “It's okay. Look at this.”

From her bag she pulled a black stone that'd been cut into a polyhedron and a number of iron needles. Sunlight reflected dazzlingly off the stone.

“What does it do?”

“This stone's been cut to have a total of sixty-two facets. They can show us just three of the main problems we might encounter next. If there are none, it'll show that too, of course. So I take a needle and jab it into the stone. I really shouldn't be able to do that, but it'll go through it just once. The position of the facet will give us the route we should take—we'll know which direction to go.”

“Sounds interesting. Go to it,” Kuentz told her, his expression filled with curiosity and expectation. The things this girl could do put a sweet, sad pounding in his chest. The magic of love.

Mia closed her eyes. Her body was shrouded in a kind of unseen force. Blindly but without hesitation, Mia took up a needle and raised it above the black jewel she'd placed on a rock. Feeling the kind of ceremonial solemnity only a true fortuneteller could inspire, Kuentz was left breathless. A second later, without uttering a sound, the girl stabbed down with the needle. Kuentz got the impression that below it, the black jewel shifted direction.

“You did it!” he gasped in spite of himself.

The needle had indeed pierced one of the facets clear through to the other side.

However, what should follow close on the heels of that but Mia's stunned cry of “It cracked?”

The entire surface of the black jewel was strung with white lines like a spider's web, with the part the needle had pierced at the very center of it all.

“How strange. That's not supposed to happen. According to this, we don't have any direction to go in.”

Kuentz didn't respond to Mia's horrifying words. He couldn't. Because just then he felt a hellish agony, as if his torso had just been bisected below the nipples.

Due perhaps to amazement brought on by the jewel, Mia didn't even notice. Bringing the stone closer, she stared at it so intently her eyes seemed to bore into it.

“I see something. The obstacle—it's a face.” Just a heartbeat later, she screamed like someone who'd caught a glimpse of hell, “D?”

-

The hard clangs that rolled from far off like waves broke in the vast space.

“Can you hear what's happening? The sound of bolts tightening, snapped laser cables weaving together again, electronic circuits flicking open again—this facility is trying to come back to life.”

D remained staring into the darkness before him as he replied to the hoarse voice that issued from his left hand. “That's the way he built it. Surely the need for reconstruction was taken into account.”

“Well, I'm sure the destruction of this facility must've come as quite a shock to him. Who wrecked it? Some opposition group within the Nobility?”

“Me.”

“What?” the voice exclaimed with a tinge of astonishment, and then, in a lower tone, it fairly growled, “I didn't know that.”

“And you knew something I didn't. That makes us even.”

“Hold on. My memories of the very beginning are like those of a baby fresh from the womb. Is that the time you're talking about? No, wait just a second! When I joined up with you was right—”

A pale light tinged D and the voice. From somewhere high in the heavens broad streaks of light were being launched down into the subterranean darkness. At some point, D had started across a walkway that spanned an enormous pit.

“This is only one trunk off the energy line. And it carries only a tiny fraction of the energy,” the hoarse voice said. “Roughly 4.5 terajoules. If released all at once, it'd probably be enough to blow up a planet or two. Really not much at all.”

At just about the midpoint of the walkway, D halted.

“It's under here, isn't it?”

“Right you are. The reactor's online.”

Saying nothing, D walked over to the handrail on the left side.

“Hey! What are you doing? You planning on heading down there from here? Even for you, that's just too—”

The way the Hunter vaulted over the handrail, it looked as though he was completely weightless. With the hem of his black coat spread like a pair of wings, the figure of unearthly beauty descended into the pitch black depths like some mystic bird. Even if hell itself awaited him, that young man would make its masters quake.

In a blue storm of light, with the wind howling by, the hoarse voice was heard to say, “I'm a little concerned about what'll become of that young couple.”

There was no reply.

-

Laying Kuentz out in the shelter of a boulder after his sudden collapse, Mia slapped his cheeks repeatedly, but there was no response from him at all. When she hurriedly checked his pulse, there was none, and his pupils were fully dilated.

Was he dead? He couldn't be. Yet all Kuentz's signs suggested nothing else.

“Why this, all of a sudden?” Mia asked, and to be honest, she was completely at a loss.

As she looked out, windblown snow that might be mistaken for a dense fog was flowing down the slope to her left, while to her right, she couldn't be completely sure, but it looked like the snowpack was beginning to give way. Under these conditions, Mia wouldn't be able to climb down alone, and she had no intention of abandoning Kuentz either. That being the case, there was nothing she could do but bivouac. She'd wait out the gusting snow. Although she couldn't be sure the billowing snow wasn't the harbinger of a blizzard, there was no point in dwelling on the matter.

Seeking an appropriate place to camp out, Mia ran her eyes over her surroundings. As far as snowy mountains went, she'd climbed them plenty of times with her mother, and she'd camped out before. Kuentz was sure to have tools for hollowing out an area in the snow. Mia hadn't given up yet.

Turning and looking over her left shoulder, she made out a structure with distinctly crafted lines atop a sheer rock wall quite some distance away.

“Excellent!” Mia said, snapping her fingers.

“C'mon, get up already!” she told Kuentz as she shook him, but she quickly stood up again.

“It's no use, as I might've guessed. No choice but to carry him myself. Lucky for me there's snow on the ground,” she muttered.

The mistlike cloud of white slapped her cheeks.

“Here it comes!”

This was no time for standing about. However, she had no spell that would carry Kuentz, and she wasn't about to just leave him there. The billowing snow grew denser.

“What's that?” Mia exclaimed, focusing her gaze in the direction from which the demonic whiteness gusted at her. Off in the distance, where a haze hung like silky white gauze, she'd spotted humanoid shapes.

“We're—” she began to cry out with joy, but she stopped short of waving her arms when she saw that the cluster of shapes showed no signs of acting like a group of humans out in the snow. They had nothing in their possession that resembled mountain-climbing gear, and they didn't even raise a hand to wave to her as they silently made their way across the snowdrifts. Strangely stocky in build, they all looked as if their necks had sunk into their chests. They stooped over terribly.