Iriya the Berserker (5 page)

They left the dome in the early morning, and the steam had faded by the time they spotted a battered guidepost. McCrory 20 Miles, it read.

“It won’t even take us an hour,” Iriya said encouragingly to Meeker, who was seated right behind her on the steed.

The boy nodded, then looked down.

“We’ll see you safely that far. Don’t worry.”

There was no reply. After the horse had gone five or six paces, the boy said flatly, “I don’t wanna go.”

“What?”

“My uncle’s my father’s younger brother, but they didn’t like each other. Heck, the only reason he was taking me in was because my father left me a little money. Until the people from the orphanage told him that, he didn’t want me.”

“And you don’t have any of the money?”

“Nadja ran off with all of it.”

“That’s awful!” Iriya said, crinkling her lovely brow.

She knew that having lost the only thing of value he’d possessed, the boy would be branded a burden, and she could well imagine how he’d be treated.

“What does your uncle do for work?”

“He’s the mayor.”

“Seriously?”

“The mayor of McCrory.”

“And yet he was refusing to take you in?”

Though there were plenty of things Iriya wanted to say, she stopped herself. Even though she was on his side, she knew anything she’d say would wound Meeker.

“Everyone except family is dead weight. And when it comes right down to it, killing family’s not a problem either.”

Iriya shut her eyes. To her right, there was an oddly amused chuckle from D’s left hand.

“Even at his age, he’s seen nothing but trouble. Should grow up to be quite a realist.”

“Didn’t your family get along all right?” Iriya said to change the topic.

“Not really,” he said to the warrior woman, who was looking up at the heavens. “My father was in charge of the village treasury, and he and my mother didn’t see eye to eye. They fought a lot. My mother even shot him with a gun!”

“Sounds like a million laughs.”

“But everybody said that was to be expected. Since she was from the Capital, she should’ve known from the start she wasn’t cut out for living way off in a little Frontier village, they said. I think so, too. After all, whenever she had any spare time, my mother would sit by the window and sing songs from the Capital.”

Iriya let out a sigh, taking care that the boy wouldn’t notice.

What did Meeker make of his mother, who had no escape from reality but her songs? How did he feel when he heard her singing?

“So, your mother—”

The boy started speaking, cutting off Iriya.

“She took the village’s money and ran off. When I went to bring my father his lunch, there was no one in the room, but the strongbox had been left sitting on his desk. An official who came to my father’s funeral told me about it. I haven’t seen my mother since.”

“Do you hate her?”

“Not at all.”

Out of the corner of his eye, D saw the little head shake from side to side.

“She wasn’t cut out for that. She was more suited to the automated houses of the Capital and silk dresses and the fine food of expensive restaurants where the staff waited on you hand and foot—not keeping house in a deep forest where the sun never shines or by the lakes where the water beasts live, wearing heavy clothes and working in the fields till her hands were callused. We only get one life to live, right? So it’s clearly right to live in the world that suits you best. My mother made a mistake. She was wrong to marry my father and go back to a village on the Frontier, and she was wrong to have me. And the sooner mistakes can be corrected, the better.”

For a while, Iriya fell silent. “A mistake, eh?” she murmured after a moment. “I think there’s only one mistake your mother made.”

“Oh?”

“Leaving a kid like you behind.”

Meeker laughed sadly. “That’s nice of you to say. I like you, lady. But—”

“We have to put ourselves in her shoes?”

“That’s right.”

“You must take after your father, I’m sure.”

Iriya reached one arm back and patted the boy on the head. Immediately bringing it back again, she trained a trenchant gaze ahead. “D, you see that, don’t you?”

“It’s a stagecoach,” D replied.

Squinting her eyes, Iriya said, “It doesn’t have a driver. No one’s riding shotgun, either.”

“Wait here.”

As he spoke, D nudged his steed’s flanks. Quickly closing on the coach, he seized the reins and stopped the team of four cyborg horses drawing it. Quickly, he opened the door.

Seeing that he was looking in her direction, Iriya advanced on her horse. Pulling up alongside D, she peered in through the open doorway. The seats were empty.

“There’s no one inside! They weren’t attacked, either—there’s no sign anybody was onboard.”

“The horses somehow ran off with the coach.”

“Without anybody noticing? Hardly seems likely, does it?”

Stagecoaches would usually stop for about an hour for feeding and maintenance of the team—ninety-nine percent of which involved work on their legs—at specialized factories in town, as well as to allow the passengers time for a break and a meal. When the passengers were staying for the night, their departure would be put off until the following morning.

Aside from the Nobility’s teleporters and Mach cars, the predominant means of transportation on the Frontier was cyborg horses. There were more than a few cars powered by steam, gasoline, or other fuels, but in terms of range, performance, and dependability, they couldn’t compare to cyborg horses. As a result, horse maintenance was of the utmost importance. Large towns, of course, had factories for upgrading, inspecting, and repairing cyborg horses, while in smaller towns someone could be hired to do repairs, but the purchase of a new steed would usually entail paying a price far beyond legal guidelines. If, while out in the wilderness, someone should meet with an unexpected misfortune that killed their steed, they would have little choice but to walk however many hundreds of miles to their destination. The chance of running into a horse trader roaming the Frontier in search of such travelers was less than one in a hundred.

A full team of four horses with a coach attached didn’t just run out of any town where people were thinking straight.

“Something’s happened in McCrory!” Iriya said, training an even sharper gaze forward.

“I’ll go on ahead. You two wait here. Don’t go near the town.”

As D wheeled his steed around, Iriya protested, “No way. I want—”

D was already galloping away, but his left hand was pointed in her direction. On noticing what his finger indicated, Iriya stopped her right foot from prodding her horse’s flank.

It was Meeker.

As her eyes followed the black-clad figure of beauty rapidly dwindling in the distance, Iriya muttered to herself, “Are you cold blooded? Warm? I just can’t tell.”

The manner of barring the main entrance varied in each town and village, but in McCrory it was a palisade of thick tree trunks sunk side by side. The gates could slide back to the fence on either side, and D turned to the one on the right and pushed it in, entering the opening it left in the great palisade around the town.

Once through the gate, he commanded an excellent view of the main street and the homes lining either side of it.

“No smell of blood—that’s odd,” the Hunter’s left hand murmured as it gripped the reins. It sounded as if it would’ve had its head cocked to one side.

“Of course, there’s no signs of anyone either,” said D. Beneath the black brim of his traveler’s hat, his eyes held a quiet gleam.

His horse didn’t halt. On encountering a weird situation, it was
normal
people who felt an urge to kill. Once through the entrance, the horse and rider started down the main thoroughfare, swaddled in stark sunlight. Not a single soul was on the street, and the Hunter rode without so much as a glance at the rows of houses to either side, his steed not stopping until they were in front of a saloon. Dismounting, D tethered the horse’s reins to a post.

“No one’s here!” the hoarse voice was heard to say once the Hunter had pushed open the door.

The quiet interior of the establishment bore out the hoarse voice’s words. However—

“There were people here about an hour ago,” the hoarse voice continued. “There’s nicotine and alcohol in the air.”

D looked down at an ashtray on the table. A cigarette had fallen from it, burning the table and leaving a long strip of ash in its shape. Most of the tables had glasses and cards on them, though a few had been overturned, spilling their contents. Following the path of the disturbance, the Hunter saw a broken glass on the floor and a half-dried puddle of alcohol.

“There’s half a steak here, with a piece of it still stuck on the fork. In other words, something happened just as they were taking a bite. Something that made ’em drop their glasses and cigarettes.”

D twisted around to face the door. That was the direction most of the chairs pulled away from the tables faced. The patrons had pushed their chairs back and risen to face whatever had come through the door.

“There’s no smell of gunpowder. Somebody might’ve drawn a sword, but it looks like most of them accepted their fate without doing a thing,” said the hoarse voice.

D went over to the bar and looked behind the counter. A double-barreled shotgun still sat in the customary place. It appeared the bartender hadn’t even had time to go for the weapon.

“What came in?”

The hoarse voice didn’t answer.

D went outside.

“What’s this?” the hoarse voice exclaimed, sounding intrigued.

There was no sign of the Hunter’s cyborg horse.

“That’s no small feat, taking that horse without you or me noticing it.”

“You’re the one who didn’t notice.”

“Huh?”

“A formless presence is on the move. It came from the center of town and got rid of the horse.”

“Where’d it go?”

“Back where it came from.”

In less than five minutes’ time, D stood in front of an old cylindrical building. A theater.

Though entertainment on the Frontier wasn’t as rare as those in the Capital believed, anything culturally redolent of the Capital was restricted to the traveling plays and concerts that might visit a few times a year. It was easy to dismiss those who constructed such theaters, both large and small, as bumpkins or pretentious posers. But in a theater much smaller and simpler than this, in a community far more isolated than this town, one Yuna O’Conner—considered the world’s greatest violinist—had packed the house day in and day out from the time he was a child. He referred to the boards of that theater’s wood-plank stage as his “parents.”

The front doors had been left wide open, and D passed through one of the many doors set in the wall within. This had to be the theater’s stage. A stone floor about thirty feet in diameter, it was surrounded by stone seats that radiated out from it and climbed gradually to a height of about fifteen feet.

On the Frontier, theater was like a drug that people had a love-hate relationship with—the genius playwright OX had worked for the Nobility, penning the series of plays called the
Aristocrat Saga
, in which any nameless hick actor could deliver his lines in a monotone, and the seasoned audience members would still offer up thunderous applause that would shake the sunlight, the moonlight, and even the wind.

Regrettably, this time there was no applause at all.

D turned first as if moving his head to catch the sound of the wind, then angled his eyes upward. In the last row of seats on the northern side was a man with his hair pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a leather cape over a reddish floor-length coat.

“Nice of you to come. Thought maybe I was gonna have to go get you!” Grinning from ear to ear, he said, “I’m Isaac Nogia. I’m a drifter and a warrior. I’ve always wanted to meet the great D we hear so much about all over the Frontier!”

“Who hired you?”

“Why, Baron Mitterhaus. I’m sure you must’ve heard of him. He was a big deal back in the day, with two hundred villages and a hundred and forty-eight towns under his thumb in these parts. The first Mitterhaus was attacked and slain by the lousy farmers, but the one who took his place prides himself on his hidden power.”

“He’s not anyone I’ve been hired to deal with.”

“So why is he gunning for you, you wonder? On account of you’re just so goddamn good looking. Nah, just kidding. It’s not you I’ve got business with. It’s the girl.”

“Why?”

“Damned if I know,” Nogia replied, shrugging his shoulders. His ponytail swayed. “But if a Frontier Noble went to all the trouble of hiring me and the rest to catch ’er, he’s probably got a damned good reason. So, if you’ll keep out of this, I won’t mess with you. Just tell yourself you barely know her.”

From the start, she’d been someone D barely knew. But if someone had been able to peer into his mind at that moment, they’d undoubtedly have seen something quite interesting.

The man whose beauty shamed the very sunlight stared silently at the other man. A heartbeat later, Nogia leapt out of his seat like a shot from a gun.

“Well, surprise, surprise! I’d heard D was a loner, through and through. Since when do you side with a woman that’s got nothing to do with you? Oh, I get it. She hired you, did she?” Nogia’s tall frame trembled fiercely. “Now that’s a real look you’ve got in your eye. I’ve come across a ton of assholes saying they’ve been through hell and back, but you’re the real deal. It’ll be an honor to fight you!”

“What happened to the people in this town?”

Nogia furrowed his brow. The Hunter’s gorgeous, steely voice had suddenly changed to the hoarse tones of a geezer.

“You practicing your ventriloquism or something? Well, as for the townsfolk, my pet doggie got ’em.”

“They were gobbled up?”

“Pretty much. My buddy only needs to eat once a month, but you wouldn’t believe how much he packs away. Swallowed everything from cyborg horses to housecats, but in the meantime the stagecoach bolted. If it weren’t for that, we’d have lured that girl in here with you. Not a problem, though. Sorry, but you’re gonna drown in the sea of acid in my buddy’s stomach.”

“Here it comes!” the hoarse voice said.

D stood there quietly. It was as if he hadn’t even heard the voice.

Perhaps frightened by that blossom of black ice, Nogia shouted loudly, “Come on out, buddy!”

D’s eyes reflected something white gushing from the man’s mouth. A shadow passed across the sun. In midair, the form spread like a pink parasol. The umbrella looked to be more than thirty feet across, and a split second before its lower rim could touch the ground behind the Hunter, there was a silvery flash from D’s back. The blade he drew slashed at least six feet into the thing. And then D bounded into the air.

He landed a good six feet from the rim of the umbrella.

“Not good,” an urgent tone from the vicinity of his left hand told him.

D’s body was tinged with white. The brim of his traveler’s hat, the hem of his coat, and more than anything the blade of his sword were giving off a whitish smoke. The instant the umbrella was cut, a transparent liquid had poured like rain from inside it. It was acid strong enough to melt the steel blade of the Hunter’s sword.

“That thing—it’s his stomach,” the left hand whispered. “And that acid could dissolve iron. You’d do well to avoid it!”

D discarded his sword. Before him was a rippling mass of digestive organs the size of a small bog, which quickly began giving off the same white smoke.

From a distance, Nogia called out, “I should expect as much from the man known as D. Will we take each other down now, or call it a draw—aargh!”