White Devil Mountain (11 page)

III

“Hey,” the hoarse voice asked in a low tone, “are you sure you don’t wanna stop this? Now, I’m well aware you didn’t come back because you were worried about them. You came to take care of that wounded monster, right? Still, this is getting serious. Why don’t you stop ’em?”

From D—silence.

After that, the hoarse voice continued in a disgusted tone, “Don’t tell me you wanna see what the two of ’em can do. One’s gonna end up dead! Hell, if things go badly, maybe both of ’em.”

Not so much as an eyebrow raised in that heavenly visage as it gazed at the man and woman squaring off.
So beautiful, and so cold. Is that what you are, D?

However, the truth was made an eternal mystery by the sound of something slashing through the air. And not just one thing. It was the light whistle of innumerable things closing from above. A gleam danced out. Sparks flew, and a metallic clang traveled across the ice fields. All around the group, steel arrows struck the ground. There had to be at least fifty of them.

“Who the hell is it?” Crey said, looking ahead and to the right.

“The mountain folk, I’d say.” Lilia was facing in the same direction.

“Set up the refuge,” D instructed her.

“No, they’ll ruin it. It cost me a fortune!”

As Lilia turned away in a snit, Vera shouted, “We’ve got a child here!”

At the same time there was the report of a rifle, and something hot scraped past the Huntress’s cheek. Everyone but D dove to the ground.

“That does it!” Lilia reached for the folded refuge tucked through her belt. There was no other option.

D’s right hand came up. In the same direction Lilia and Crey had looked, a succession of cries D alone could hear rang out. He’d thrown his rough wooden needles. More than a hundred yards away, a number of red splotches spread on the snow.

“Not too shabby,” Crey said, and when he turned there was a gleam in his eye. Had he known the weapons that’d flown over a hundred yards were light, slim needles of wood, he might’ve wet himself. A fresh gunshot made him turn his head once more. “Sons of bitches! They’ve got rifles.”

“I can’t see them.”

“That’s what the mountain folk around here are known for. They wear chameleon suits.” Vera’s words explained the mystery.

Chameleon suits were clothing that mimicked certain animals’ ability to make their bodies blend in with the coloring of their surroundings. Just as black clothes let one meld with the darkness, these suits would make the wearer suddenly disappear from view. Moreover, they took away the perception of depth, making it impossible to spot them. In the endless expanse of white, a foe like this could close on their prey more easily than a snow panther, then strike with their weapons. It was said that if they could maintain a certain distance, the outcome of the battle was one hundred percent clear.

“Hey, get down!” Dust shouted to the Hunter.

“Leave him be,” said Crey.

“He’s a dhampir!” Lilia added.

Apparently this was something that the two of them could agree upon. This exchange exposed the natures of the three people.

When D bent down, shots zinged over his head. Three of them.

“Six, all told,” the hoarse voice whispered.

“A scouting party,” said Lilia. “Leave this to me.”

“Quit it. You’d just piss yourself!”

A look burning with fierce flames of loathing speared Crey. “You’re going to regret saying that soon!”

“Sorry, but the only thing I regret is being born into this sorry world.”

“Knock it off!” Dust growled in a low voice, and then Lilia stood up.

“What?” someone gasped—Lilia herself.

One step ahead of her, the figure in black dashed by, his right hand swinging around behind him, filling not only his own field of view with white but Lilia’s too. That slash of D’s blade had thrown up a cloud of snow. While it allowed the hot lead to pass, the snow closed on the gunshots like a storm. No doubt the marksmen had underestimated D’s group. After all, it seemed impossible to pinpoint the shooters’ location by the sound of their gunshots alone. D’s needles had already slain four of them. And gunshots had rung out since.

A white whirlwind arose in one section of the snowfield. Suddenly it changed to crimson, and two red figures fell without a word and writhed in the snow.

“Oh!” The hoarse voice was directed at Lilia, who was beside D and had just made a swipe with her longsword. Fresh blood spattered across the snow.

“I won’t have you grabbing all the glory!”

Perhaps the hoarse voice’s cry was a reaction to her smile. At last she had an opportunity to display her skill—her smile said as much. And this woman, too, was a gorgeous warrior.

“Well? Ready to admit I’m every bit as good as you are?”

“Idiot.”

Lilia turned around indignantly. She was greeted by Crey’s sarcastic smirk.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Crey gave a wordless jerk of his chin toward D, who was stripping a coat from a man’s bloodied corpse.

“See? He struck his opponents in the head, so that the chameleon suits could be used. You, on the other hand, had to be the showboat and cut them open from the base of the neck down to the lungs. A coat we could’ve used, down the shitter. That’s the kind of dumb move I’d expect from a woman.”

“Now you’ve done it, you cheap little thug!”

A vortex of hatred radiated from every inch of Lilia. And Crey held a gleaming knife in his right hand.

However, the showdown between the incompatible compatriots was unavoidably interrupted by a grave masculine voice. “Stop. When the scouting party doesn’t return, it won’t be long before more mountain folk come. This is no time for squabbling among ourselves—look!”

Their eyes nearly popped out of their heads as they followed Dust’s gaze, colored first by amazement—and then anger.

Carrying an essentially undamaged chameleon suit and a rifle over one shoulder, D had started walking toward the ridge.

“That bastard’s just doing his own thing.” Crey’s tone was neutral, his anger having passed.

“Let’s go,” Dust called to Vera and Lourié, stepping forward with solemn strides.

“Oh, hell. Next time, then,” Crey spat, following after them.

“Damn it all,” Lilia said, and she was just about to press forward when Dust and Vera turned to face her.

“There’s another set of gear.”

“Oh—the refuge,” she said.

Lilia halted, and with seeming trepidation she began to turn her face to the left. The black dome of the refuge she’d set up at D and Vera’s request loomed on the snowfield. Folding it up was quick enough. With a glum expression, Lilia followed the group with her gaze, watching as they walked away without a backward glance, and then, with resignation, bending over the corpse of a fallen bandit.

–

“Just beyond that ridge, they say that’s the area where Gilzen’s castle was. You should consider this whole region a danger zone. No, make that hell. Those behind you would be better off turning back if they still can—or is it too late?”

“It’s too late,” D replied as he advanced, steadily planting one foot after the other but doing it so lightly he didn’t leave a single track. Although this young man wasn’t the kind to care about the life or death of others, even for him the reply surpassed coldness and entered the spectrum of cruelty.

The group following him was a good five hundred yards back, and D was now about halfway up the five-hundred-foot-high ridge of rock. Suddenly, he halted. His right foot barely pressed against the snow.

“Step on a mine?” his left hand asked drowsily. “Put any more pressure on it, and it’ll blow up. Back off, and you won’t be able to get across. And you’ve got the others coming up behind you. So, what are you gonna do?” There was nothing helpful in the hoarse voice’s somewhat mean-spirited inquiry.

A heartbeat later, the figure in black soared into the air like a mystic bird, landing a few yards away, then executing another leap. He came to rest on the snow some fifty yards distant.

“What the hell? Are you leaving the rest of ’em behind?”

As if in response to the hoarse voice’s sullen tone, the ridge collapsed. Two of the places D’s feet had touched had been depressions in the ground. In each spot, the rock and snow gave way to a depth of a hundred yards.

“They won’t be able to follow you now. What are they supposed to do if the mountain folk show up? Are you gonna feign ignorance and—” The hoarse voice cut out, and then in a somewhat pensive tone it added, “You could do that, couldn’t you? But it might not do any good.”

The meaning of that last remark was unclear.

D began to pick his way along the far side of the ridge. The mountain soaring before him appeared to quietly wait for the Hunter. It was thirty minutes more before the group behind him reached the horrid remains of the ridge.

Attackers

chapter 5

I

I
n front of D soared an almost perfectly vertical wall of rock and snow. From here on out, his limbs would serve as his only tools for the climb.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll manage,” his left hand muttered sleepily. “It’s a good three hundred yards up to the rocky spot where that aircraft crash-landed. There’s no lack of bumps and crevices to wrap your fingers around. The problem is over there.”

Around two hundred yards from the top, the rockface jutted out more than thirty feet.

“That’s not a problem for you. The real enemy—” the hoarse voice gave a yawn, “—is
this
.”

Something white came to rest on the palm of his left hand, then abruptly vanished. A snowflake.

D turned to his right—northwest. Darkness was busy blanketing the sky. Like a strange gas, dark clouds were spreading toward them.

“From the look of that, inside of ten minutes this mountain’s gonna be looking at a blizzard—or more like a hurricane of snow. Dangerous even for me. Good luck! Hurry up and wake me from this sleep.”

“Now we’re ready to start a little cold-weather training before winter sets in.”

Silence descended. Then, a shocked voice inquired in a tone that might even be described as solemn, “That right there . . . Was that a . . . a
joke
?”

Saying nothing, D lowered the backpack from his shoulder and took out a single iron piton. Clenching it in his teeth, he approached the rockface. Apparently he’d already decided where he would start his climb.

Oh, but D was a sight to see! To climb a vertical wall of rock usually required a hammer, pitons, and vast quantities of rope. D challenged this rock wall with no rope to save him from a fall, no hammer to drive in pitons, and no more than that one piton, for that matter. It wasn’t even clear if he intended to use it. In fact, he kept the piton between his teeth and reached out for the rock wall with both hands. If anyone had been there to see him, they’d likely have let out an admiring sigh. His hands reached for the rock, and without seeming to apply any force at all, he began climbing smoothly. Smoothly? Hell, he began to climb that vertical rockface like a reptile that’d lived on that wall for millennia.

A hundred yards up, he reached the stony overhang. Not reducing speed in the slightest, he moved on to the underside of the rock. His fingers caught hold of the tiniest protrusions and reached into the faintest depressions. All his actions were carried out with lightning speed. Clinging to one knob, he reached his right hand out and touched another outcropping. The rock fell away beneath him. The Hunter arched his upper body like a bow. D moved with ungodly speed. Taking the piton from between his teeth with his left hand, he jammed it into the rockface. Of the footlong piece of iron, all but just enough to grip sank into the surface of the rock. Like a black bagworm, D hung there by one arm, but a heartbeat later his body became a spring, and he stuck to the rockface. Less than two seconds later, he began to move again.

After climbing another hundred yards, he found his back hammered by snowy winds that seemed to have been waiting just for him.

“Pretty much . . . made it . . . eh?” his left hand remarked torpidly. It sounded like someone babbling in their sleep. The wind and snow scattered the words.

–

D was standing on a fairly wide rock shelf. The emotion that should’ve been radiating from every inch of a gorgeous young man at such a moment wasn’t evident in the least. Not even struggling for breath, without a single hint of emotion in his eyes, D was staring straight ahead—at an object that rested on its side about twenty yards away. With one wing sheared off and its fuselage crumpled, the savaged aircraft bore faint resemblance to its original form. He had finally arrived.

Heading toward it, D was walking across rock still bearing the scars of the crash landing when a faint sound reached his ears. Gunshots. For only a second he halted, turning his face toward the edge of the rock shelf, but he immediately turned back again and resumed walking forward.

–

After less than an hour of waiting at the base of the collapsed ridge, the group came under attack by the mountain folk. On seeing how few of them there were, the attackers should have unleashed a fierce fusillade—but they didn’t. This wasn’t like back on the snowfields. Here avalanches had to be taken into consideration. Instead, arrows rained down on them. Not surprisingly, both Lilia and Dust were able to deflect any that looked likely to hit themselves, but Dust had to protect Vera and Lourié as well. As he was defending them with javelin and axe, an arrow took him through the shoulder. Lilia clucked her tongue.

“Set up the refuge,” Vera called out to her.

“No can do on this slope. Not enough room for its footprint. It’d fall down the ravine!”

“Should we charge ’em?”

Lilia grinned at Crey’s suggestion. “Can you see who we’re fighting?”

She was entirely correct. No matter how carefully they looked, they could see no sign of anyone out in the endless expanse of white. That was the chameleon suits at work.

“We’re not dhampirs. We get our heads cut off, and that’s all she wrote. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“What the hell are you trying to pull?”

“I’ve decided to do my job as best I can. Our association must end here.”

“What?”

“Godspeed.”

Knocking down more incoming arrows with her longsword, Lilia made an unexpected dash for the rocky ridge.

Lourié let out a scream.

Throwing herself off the collapsed ridge, the Huntress appeared to be committing suicide. In midair, a black globe appeared. The refuge. Lilia’s form was engulfed by it. It would have been impossible to keep it from falling down the mountain if it were set up here, and she probably didn’t have time enough to allow the others to get in as well, so her shocking solo effort was somewhat unavoidable. But would even the handiwork of the Nobles’ civilization be able to survive a drop of several hundred yards into the ravine? Lilia was betting everything on it.

Snow billowed up from the bottom of the slope.

“Lousy bitch,” Crey cursed as an arrow jabbed into the ground right in front of him.

“How are you faring?” Vera called out.

“I’m good,” said Dust.

“You’re not good. You can’t use your right arm,” Vera countered.

“Take the kid and run for it.”

“Where?”

Crey somehow weathered the silence that came next. Their surroundings were already full of arrows. “How about we surrender?”

Dust shook his head at Crey’s proposal. “You fancy being eaten?”

“What?”

“What do you think the mountain folk eat up on a snow-covered peak like this? The flesh of climbers and fugitives. I’ve heard when they don’t have either of those, they draw lots to see who gets eaten.”

“If they’re as hungry as all that, why the hell don’t they just move somewhere else, then?”

“I don’t know much about their circumstances. But they say they were connected to the Nobles who used to live on this mountain.”

“Hmm. Ever catch any of ’em down by the foot of the mountain?”

“Nope. We have found remains, though. The toothed-up bones of five or six of them.”

“That’s sick!”

Just then, the world darkened. As flecks of white blew around them, Crey groaned.

“Just perfect! A snowstorm!”

“Relax. At least we don’t have to worry about the cold anymore.”

Sensing something in Dust’s tone, Crey glared at him. But he understood what the man was saying. Now that Lilia had run off and Dust was wounded, they wouldn’t be able to hold off their attackers the next time there was an assault. No matter how good Crey was with his Deadman’s Blade, an attack by invisible cannibals would spell certain death. A tinge of despair colored the outlaw’s still-intrepid face.