White Devil Mountain (15 page)

II

A bit of the twilight yet remained.

The villagers of Mungs couldn’t get through the day without drink, and with the strange group that’d called on the village the previous night as their grist they were taking their cups in the one privately owned barroom and the hotel bar when shouts unexpectedly rang out. As if chased by monsters, everyone in both places raced out into the street, where a girl stood, pointing and murmuring like a lunatic. “The castle . . . There’s a light in a window of the castle . . .”

Following the fingertip that trembled with surpassing terror, what should the villagers see—

–

“What’s that sound?” Standing before a half-pitched tent, Vera pricked up her ears. Vibrations seemed to be rising beneath her feet—a rumbling in the earth.

“There’s going to be an avalanche! D and the aircraft are in danger.”

Before Crey had finished shouting, everyone turned their eyes to the peak soaring behind the ridge.

“What’s that?” Lourié murmured in dumbfounded surprise.

“The mountain’s changing!”

–

An intense jolt hit D’s body. It was so fierce it seemed it would shake the flesh from his bones, but it didn’t stop the Hunter. Chunks of rock came free, striking D’s shoulder and hat as they fell. More than a couple of times the protrusion he was clinging to broke off. Each time, his feet halted his fall.

After a drop of over fifty yards, his left hand squeaked, “You lucky bastard. Just once I’d like to see what’d happen to you if you fell a thousand yards and slammed into the ground.”

Before long, D reached the summit. An ordinary pinnacle of rock challenged the sky. That was all there was.

“Forget the castle; there ain’t signs of so much as a tent up here.”

D turned the palm of his grumbling hand downward.

“Huh?” A little cry of surprise rang out.

What D had seen had vanished without a trace. The rock shelf now jutted out much farther, forming a gigantic crucible of boiling lava that was spreading in all directions.

“So, rock gives birth to rock?”

The hoarse voice’s muttering stopped when it saw objects rising from the lava. Muddy walls and iron beams swiftly took shape, fitting together to form chambers large and small. All were cast from the red molten rock—or rather, from the iron it contained. Both the pipes that dripped hot slag as they carried molten metal and the colossal ladles that scooped the necessary amount of iron from the crucible for other forms of transport caught the breeze of cooling fans formed from melted iron, swiftly cooling and taking final shape.

“This is an incredible system. Looks like he intends to build his home from scratch, starting with the smelting of the raw materials!”

Before the voice had finished speaking, the rock that loomed before D split. Though D covered himself with the hem of his coat, he was still blown back thirty feet, and as he flew, he saw the flaming iron beams tower higher, the cords wrap together, the tubes fit one into another, and the parabolic antenna of an interstellar communication system take shape.

“All of this must be powered by anti-energy. How will he make an antiproton reactor? Molding all the circuits, getting and refining the raw materials—what a pain in the ass!”

The hoarse voice, sounding almost casual, streamed into the air. D, without anything to grab hold of, was going straight down—falling toward the world of molten metal below, where the work continued.

“So, what are you gonna do?”

“If I burn up, can you bring me back?”

“Hmm. That’d probably be worth a shot. In the past, there was a Noble who fell into the mouth of a volcano, but then, you’re not quite like him.”

“What became of that Nobleman?”

“He didn’t return to normal.”

Heat buffeted D’s face. He was less than five seconds from a swirling morass of fiery steel heated to tens of thousands of degrees.

Three seconds.

Two seconds.

One.

–

“Did you see that just now?” shouted a man peering through a telescope in the village lookout tower.

The villager next to him didn’t even have time to finish asking, “See what?”

“There’s a rock shelf around the fifteen-hundred-yard point. It’s turning into a castle up there. I saw a person fall down into it. But just as they were about to go splat, they sprouted wings!”

“You’re out of your mind!” the man beside him spat condescendingly, but the man with the telescope just leaned forward, using his free hand to wipe the perspiration from his brow. It was cold sweat.

“It was just like they turned into this huge, pitch-black bat or something. When I was a tyke, I heard about that from my granny time and again. Real Nobles can turn into bats, she used to say.
That
was a genuine Noble.”

–