The Rose Princess (17 page)

“What are you supposed to be, the vanguard or something?” the biker asked. She felt
strangely calm.

“I suppose I may be, at that. My interest was piqued when I learned you were out here.
No doubt that was all D’s doing. There’s no way a lowly human could understand the
significance of this place, even though it was humans that constructed it.”

“Two thousand years ago, right?”

Donning a somewhat surprised expression, the princess said, “Information courtesy
of D, I presume. He’s also bound to notice me here sooner or later.”

“If I finish you off before that, it won’t matter either way,” Elena said as the weighted
end of a chain spilled from her right hand. This one was a lot thicker than what she
usually carried.

Still staring fixedly at the princess, Elena began to spin the chain in a circle with
her right hand. The growling
whup whup whup
of it became a whistling
shooshooshoo
, and then it moved beyond the realm of sound.

“My, aren’t you the skillful one,” the princess declared, clapping her hands.

Though Elena realized the woman was needling her, she couldn’t afford to get angry.
Her consciousness was focused solely on destroying the lovely princess.

Without making a sound, the princess moved behind a stone pillar to avoid the shrilly
whistling weight at the end of the chain. But the chain went right after her.

“Dear me!” the woman cried in surprise, her exclamation mingled with the sound of
steel biting into stone.

While it was unclear what kind of trick the girl had used, the chain that pursued
the princess had wrapped around both the Noblewoman and the pillar with enough force
to dig into both flesh and stone.

“You fell for it, sucker!” Elena roared with delight as she raced over to the princess.

There wasn’t a shred of mercy in the girl. In her right hand she held a finely honed
stake of unfinished wood. Raising it high over her head, she shouted, “Here’s your
ticket to the afterlife, your majesty!”

But as Elena brought the weapon down, four shades of light shimmered before her eyes.

“Oh!” the girl cried when the hand she waved through the glowing blobs told her they
were no illusion. They had substance.

There were red roses. And blue. And even black.

Though Elena batted them away time and again, more and more
new flowers surrounded her, obscuring her view and, worse yet, forming a dazzling
riot of color that assailed her brain and left her dizzy.

“Damn it all!” the biker growled.

From the madly eddying flowers a length of chain looped out and wound around a lintel
that connected two of the stone columns. As Elena swung up on it, the four-tone stream
flowed after her.

Up on the lintel, Elena pulled a tiny oilpaper packet from her shirt pocket and shook
the white powder it contained over her own head. And it was a sight to see as every
flower that touched her then curled its petals and lost its color before falling back
to earth.

“Mama Kipsch’s special herbicide! Have some!” Elena shouted, and she was about to
scatter the rest of the powder over the princess down below when the breath was knocked
out of her.

The other chain was tangled on the ground, and there was no sign of the pale figure.

“Here I am! Over here!”

As she whipped around to face the voice she heard behind her, Elena let fly with the
chain she still had.

Winding it around her right hand, the princess smiled elegantly. “It would be so easy
to kill you,” she said to the girl. “Like so.”

With one tug of her hand she easily snatched away Elena’s chain.

“Would you like me to strangle you with this? Or would you prefer that I tear your
limbs off one by one?”

Beads of sweat formed at a furious rate on Elena’s brow.

—

III

—

The wind began to sweep across the plain—a wind that carried death. Borne on it, the
death essence might drift anywhere. And any living thing it touched would perish.

At present, it was squaring off against D. The white humanoid shape spread into an
amorphous cloud, then gusted at the Hunter. As D leapt backward, he raised his left
hand as if to ward off his attacker, and the fog enveloped it. The hand turned a dull
brown color, but quickly returned to its original hue.

“That’s one hell of a death essence, all right,” a pained voice said. It was still
coughing. “There’s no way to kill this thing from the outside. I might be able to
handle one or two, but if I were to suck up any more than that, I could be a goner.
Wait a sec and I’ll look into a few things.”

At that point, one of the other riders tumbled noisily from the saddle. A white substance
seeped from the armor and circled around behind D’s back.

Several streaks of light flew from D’s left hand at a terrific speed, yet after piercing
the man-shaped cloud of fog, they wobbled lazily for another three feet before falling
to the ground. Now stained black, the bare wooden needles crumbled, rotten to the
very core.

By the look of things, any weapon—be it a sword or even a bullet—would be utterly
useless here.

The fog laughed. No, it might’ve just been the fault of the wind shaking its upper
body a tad, but the night air had definitely carried a sound that was not a sound,
and it had resembled laughter.

The fog slowly drifted closer to D from the front. Behind him was the other mass.
A split second before the latter could wrap its pale arms about D’s body, the Hunter
rose into the air. As part of the death essence closing on him continued to flow forward,
the rest of the mass spun around with terrific force, while the cloud of death essence
to D’s rear backed away with equal decisiveness.

As D landed, he twisted his body. The blow he’d narrowly escaped split the tail of
his coat as the lance jabbed into the earth. In rapid succession a second and a third
followed—and though the attacks came at a speed no average person or even professional
warrior could’ve dodged, D narrowly slipped through them without incident and dove
into the very ranks of the wraith knights.

Two swords flew up with a metallic rasp, and a pair of the wraiths were unhorsed.
It’s doubtful even the wraith knights could believe that the lance D held in his hand
was the same one that’d just been aimed at him. However, even D would find it impossible
to destroy a shapeless cloud unaffected by any weapon. How would he fight it? And
how could he kill it?

—

Elena quickly wiped the sweat from her brow with her left hand. If it were to run
into her eyes, it would be the death of her. The princess was ten feet ahead. And
she’d taken away one of the biker’s chains. She glared at the princess for all she
was worth. If she let the Noblewoman break her spirit, she’d be beat.

The princess looked back at Elena.

“I remember you,” the princess said with a knowing nod. “Your parents and siblings
all ended up on my dinner menu. And I believe the White Knight gave you a wound you’d
carry for the rest of your life. How interesting.”

Her grinning face was as bewitching as the moon, yet as innocent as that of the purest
maiden. And that was why Elena was as chilled as if she’d been doused with ice water.

“Now that I think of it, crushing you alone would accomplish nothing. Perhaps I should
find another use for you. Oh, I know,” she laughed. “I shall give you a different
wound.”

As the smile on the princess’s lips grew broader and more unsettling, Elena turned
away out of reflex. The more beautiful a Noble’s smile was, the stronger the human
urge was to look away. And because of that, the girl didn’t notice the white rose
flying from the princess’s right hand. When it stuck in her left breast, she felt
a slight pain and looked down. But the rose was already gone.

“What did you do?”

“See for yourself. Look at your chest.”

Like a woman possessed, Elena tore open the front of her shirt. The revolting “x”
was fading. But in return, something smaller but even more terrifying had been etched
on her left breast—a tattoo of a white rose so exquisitely detailed it seemed it could
only be the handiwork of an angel.

Despair sucked the strength from her very cells. For in Elena’s eyes, nothing could’ve
been crueler than being marked with this symbol of the Nobility. Staggering, she fell
from the rock lintel. The princess’s hand caught her by the scruff of the neck.

But even as she was hauled back up, Elena couldn’t so much as manage to ask the princess
to kill her. Her face was like that of a corpse, and a cheery voice whispered in her
ear, “No need to be so despondent. Soon you’ll feel ever so much better. Once you’ve
experienced the privileges of one of my servants with your own flesh, that is.”

And as she finished speaking, the princess suddenly looked down below her. A slight
tremor had reached her through the ground.

“An earthquake?” she muttered as a shadow spread across her beautiful
countenance. “Does this hateful fortress yet live? Impossible!”

Her body swayed as the quaking of the earth and its related rumblings overwhelmed
the night.

“Oh, my—this is quite a pickle,” the princess said, although where she’d learned such
an expression was anyone’s guess.

Putting Elena under one arm, the princess leapt down to the ground. From above her,
tiny fragments of stone rained down.

“I don’t have the time to wait around and see what happens next. I’m also curious
to see how D and his playmates made out.”

The woman then started off across the plain. Elena never left her grip for a second.

—

Knights were closing on the Hunter from either side. The one on his right had a lance,
while the one on his left had a longsword. Just as they were about to bring their
weapons down on D, the knights swapped armaments—the one on the right took the sword
and the one on the left the lance.

When the weapons in play changed, an opponent had to alter his strategy accordingly.
And if the exchange could be done in a matter of seconds, it could only result in
confusion on the part of the person preparing to defend himself. In the case of simultaneous
attacks, there would really be no way at all to defend oneself.

The lance and sword swung home.

Surprise was not an emotion the wraiths possessed. Nevertheless, the vibrations that
swept through the air in that instant were nothing but pure shock. The sword blade
slashing down from the right was caught by D’s left hand, while a lance in the Hunter’s
other hand parried the lance that came at him from the left. That would’ve been strange
enough if the Hunter had been facing them. But just before the wraith knights launched
their attack—in the very instant they traded weapons—they saw D turn his back to them.
Though they realized he’d seen through their plan of attack, they’d been unsure of
what to do next. They’d already struck at him with the lance and sword.

Once he’d snatched away the longsword, D made a bound. But who in the world could
leap onto the back of a horse as it was galloping by?

D could, and he did. Standing on back of the steed carrying the sword-wielding knight,
he kicked the rider off the mount and seized the reins. Seeing this, the other knights
charged him en masse.

“D, give me some of your blood,” his left hand said. “It’s only a temporary measure,
but I’ve come up with a substance these boys aren’t gonna like. Hurry!”

Taking his hand off the reins and holding his longsword with his teeth, D put his
right wrist against the blade and gave a hard pull. The warm liquid that spilled out
landed in the palm of his left hand. And his palm opened its mouth and gulped down
the fresh blood.

“Stick out your sword!”

Taking the sword he clenched between his teeth in his right hand, D ran his left hand
along the blade. When vermilion smoke billowed from his palm to discolor the blade,
the riders ahead of him launched a number of arrows at him. They weren’t wooden—even
the shafts and fletchings were iron. If they were to strike a human body, the impact
would rip the flesh apart.

D stopped every last one of them with his left hand. It looked more like he was catching
paper airplanes. As the Hunter rode right by the knight, who’d been paralyzed and
without a chance to nock another arrow, his longsword flashed out. The wraith’s torso
ripped open.

Without even looking back, D raced toward his next opponent—a white fog was closing
on him from the fore. Apparently, it’d realized it would only be at a disadvantage
fighting him in its armor. Pulling on the reins to circle around to the right, D swung
his blade.

The fog shuddered. The part that approximated a human head split in two, and then
began to fuse together once more. But the pieces didn’t stay together. As it moved
its hand-like portions, the figure lost the details of its shape and became a mass
of fog that dropped to the ground. Two or three spasms shook the mass, and then it
barely managed to rise again. Staggering all the while, it started back across the
plain to the manor. The rider that followed after it must’ve been the same one that’d
been slashed through the torso seconds earlier.

The Hunter’s foes were unnerved and restless. From the very start, they’d known he
wasn’t the kind to meet them with conventional tactics. They all backed away at once.

The survivors then launched arrows—not at D, but toward the sky. Apparently the missiles
had some sort of special mechanism, because in mid-flight the tail ends of them began
to leave glowing trails before they were enveloped in dazzling flames about thirty
feet above the earth. What’s more, they neither rose nor dropped, hanging in the sky
dribbling sparks—and then a second later, they exploded. A halo bright enough to burn
a sharp shadow of D on the ground spread out, and from the center of it a number of
fiery streaks raced out at D and the plains. Flames billowed up. Night became day,
and the flames spreading across the ground quickly melted together and leapt to new
locations like wildfire.