Pilgrimage of the Sacred and the Profane (22 page)

Just when she thought she’d melted into the grove of the trees, an impact slammed
into her from behind, and a sharp pain shot through her back—probably a branch, or
a small stone. The next thing she knew, she was lying on the ground. Putting her strength
into her limbs, she tried to get up.

Right behind her she heard a familiar voice say, “Give up already.
We’ll make it quick for you.” It was the innkeeper.

Wu-Lin got to her feet without looking in his direction. About
five yards ahead of her was a thick grove.
How many seconds would
it take me to get there?
she wondered.

“We don’t wanna blow that doodad of yours to kingdom come, you know. So we won’t finish
you with the mortar. What do you fancy, a sword or an arrow? Or would you prefer we
garrote you?”

More voices than she could count laughed in unison.

Wu-Lin started to make a break for it, and then stopped. At the same time, the laughter
ended as well.

Why is everyone always popping out from behind trees?
Wu-Lin
wondered.

The newest arrival was a dashing figure. He wore a wide-brimmed
traveler’s hat and a long black coat that sheathed his tall form
elegantly. The longsword on his back had a graceful curve to it. For a second, Wu-Lin
had to wonder whether it wasn’t a moonlit night after all. But the reason she and
the men behind her froze there
was because unconsciously they knew that an aura of extreme
danger lingered around the gorgeous stranger.

“Who the hell are you?!” someone asked, his voice quavering.

Wu-Lin swiftly circled around behind the figure’s back. “Help
me!” she cried. “They’re bandits!”

The stranger didn’t move.

“Out of the way, pretty boy,” the innkeeper said.

There were half-a-dozen men on horseback—with the innkeeper
leading the pack—and all of them wore vicious scowls. Surely
their racket consisted of finding travelers with something valuable, then following
them when they left and killing them. They were armed with swords and spears, but
the man to the far right was the
only one with disk-shaped bombs loaded into a crossbow-like
launcher that he had pointed at the ground.

“Well, it doesn’t really matter,” the innkeeper said to the huge fellow to his right.
“Now that he’s seen our faces, it’s not like we’re about to let him live. We’ll send
him to his reward along with the girl.” To the pair he added, “Just consider this
your brief romance, and kiss each other goodbye!”

As she listened to his cruel words, Wu-Lin clung tightly to the
back of the shadowy figure. But something suddenly became
apparent. The man in black wasn’t looking at the other men. At t
he end of his gaze was a grove of trees and sparkling green leaves.
Between him and the other men faint beams of light swayed—
sunlight peeking through the trees. Wu-Lin looked up at his
profile; there wasn’t a hint of sadness on his face. It put Wu-Lin’s heart at ease.

Broadswords and spears glittered in the men’s hands. With wild shouts, they charged
the stranger.

Still, Wu-Lin remained entranced, enchanted by the beauty of this strange young man.

Hammering the earth beneath them, a pair of riders raced by the
stranger, one on either side, and they kept right on riding with
blood streaming out behind them. From the waist up, the riders no
longer existed. Before the rest of the killers realized what had
happened, the upper bodies of their compatriots were lying at the shadowy figure’s
feet. Bloody mists tinged the white sunlight.

When the startled man with the launcher readied his weapon, the figure kicked off
the ground without a sound. The hem of his coat flickered like a dream.

A head flew. The innkeeper’s torso fell in two distinct pieces.

Seeing what looked like the figure’s chest being penetrated by
spears thrust from either side, Wu-Lin cried out. But the shadowy
figure was in midair now. What the murderous implements had
pierced was merely his afterimage.

A circular flash slashed through the necks of the last two men. When the figure landed
on the ground again, there was one more
flash of light as he flung the gore from his blade onto the green
grass, and then the weapon disappeared back into the sheath on his back. A head landed
on the ground far off, and the rest of the body dropped off at the horse’s feet.

The massacre had unfolded in the time it took to blink.

Dazed, Wu-Lin rubbed her eyes. The image she observed wasn’t
the least bit ghastly. The sunlit scene of carnage was like some
shadow-puppet show.

It’s his fault
, she thought fuzzily.
He’s so beautiful; he even makes
death look good.

The shadowy figure returned. His footsteps made no sound at
all—he could walk across water without making a ripple. He was a young man. That
was all she knew. The cool mood the tall man in
black seemed to generate didn’t allow the girl to return to her
senses until he was in the middle of putting a saddle onto a cyborg horse that was
tethered to a tree not far away.

Wu-Lin ran over to the stranger in spite of herself and bowed. “Thank you,” she said.
“You saved my life.”

As the young man loaded what looked to be a sleeping bag
behind his saddle, he asked, “Are you traveling by foot?”

Perhaps any other information about the girl and the circum-
stances surrounding that deadly battle didn’t matter to the young man. They had attacked
him, and he cut them down. Brutal as it was, that was a perfectly natural way to live
on the Frontier.

“Yes,” the girl replied.

“Use one of their horses.”

“Um—” Wu-Lin stammered. Before she could say anything more,
the man in black was on his mount. “Are you going with me?” she
finally managed to say, but her words struck the stranger’s broa
d back as he’d already ridden a few paces.

“I’m looking for somewhere to get some sleep.”

Wu-Lin didn’t understand his reply at all. The world was swimming
in light.

“At least tell me your name. I’m Wu-Lin,” the girl called out, her shouts blocked
by the grove.

And then a reply came from the very same stand of trees: “D.”

.

III

.

Cronenberg was a town that stretched across the plains one hundred and twenty miles
north of the center of the Frontier.
Although this small city, with its population of thirty thousand, was a far cry from
the scale of the Capital, it was a place where goods were collected from all over
the Frontier and thus kept the
roads well-repaired; the community also maintained a decent
level of activity year-round. There was cold storage for seafood shipped from the
coast, vast processing plants for livestock that’d grazed on the plains, drying houses
for vegetables and grains—
and for the rest and relaxation of those involved in the
transportation of all these things, and the guards that kept them safe from bandits
and beasts, there were saloons, hotels, casinos, and women.

The chatter of men and women persisted all day long in the area where the drinking
establishments could be found, but once dusk
settled like a thin wash of ink, the multicolored lights grew brighter,
and the strides of people on the streets got lighter. Because the
number of monsters and supernatural beasts in this plains region was comparatively
low, the streets were full of people from evening until the wee hours of the morning.

And it was at twilight that Wu-Lin arrived at the town. The
cyborg horse she rode was one that’d belonged to the thugs D had killed in the woods.
Asking one of the guards about a certain shop
as he opened the gate for her, Wu-Lin then proceeded to the center
of town.

While it was common for a woman to travel alone, it still came as little surprise
that the remarkably untamed beauty of the girl’s face and body drew the eyes of men
on the street.

In front of a tiny little shop Wu-Lin dismounted. The sign had
the words “Cyrus Curio Shop” painted in letters that were now
almost completely blurred. Tethering her horse’s reins to a pole
outside, Wu-Lin went into the shop.

The dusty odor of old furniture reached her nose. Old-fashioned
tables and chairs, paintings, sculptures, antique mirrors—the
merchandise that rested in the murky light—differed little from
what would be found in any such shop, but Wu-Lin wasn’t there f
or the furniture. When she struck the call bell that sat on the counter in the back,
a door that looked to be something of an
antique itself opened, and a middle-aged man who was little more than skin and bones
appeared.

“Welcome,” the man said as he ran his eyes over Wu-Lin.

“There’s something I’d like you to have a look at,” Wu-Lin said, covering her pouch
with one hand.

“Well, that’s the line of work I’m in, so I guess I’ll take a gander,”
the man replied in a less-than-amiable tone. “But unless it’s
something really spectacular, you won’t get much for it from me. Especially not for
curios—”

“It’s not old.”

“No?” the man remarked. “So you want an appraisal, then?”

“Yes.”

Dubiously eyeing the package Wu-Lin opened in her hand, the man picked up the sphere.
“What is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”

Shrugging his shoulders, the man then held the sphere up to his eye. “Where did you
come by it?”

“Near my house . . . on the beach there.”

The man’s eyes shifted for a second to Wu-Lin. “From the sea?” he muttered. “You know,
I can’t tell much without really looking into it. Would it be okay if I kept it?”

“How long?”

“Let me see—till noon tomorrow.”

“Could you write me up a receipt for it?” asked the girl.

“Sure.”

Taking a form imprinted with the proper information from behind
the counter, the man hastily signed it and handed it to Wu-Lin.

“Whereabouts are you staying?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” the girl replied. “I’ll be back again at noon.”

Pointing down the street, the man said, “Take a right down at the corner and you’ll
find a hotel. Quarters are cramped, but it’s cheap and the service is good.”

“Thank you,” Wu-Lin said with a smile as she turned to leave.

Making sure she’d gone, the man went into the back room and set the sphere on the
desk he used for appraising antiques. Taking
a seat, he didn’t use any of the electronic lenses or microscopes around him, but
rather rolled the sphere around in his hand.
Suddenly seeming to recall something, he looked up and smacked his fist to his forehead.
Several minutes passed before the following words spilled from his lips: “So that’s
it . . . I remember now! I’m sure it was in that book . . . This is a Noble’s . .
.”

As the blood drained from his already corpse-like countenance, the man grabbed his
jacket from the back of another chair, stashed
the sphere in his pocket, and headed for the door with lengthy
strides. What the man didn’t notice as he reached for the doorknob
was that his body had turned in entirely the opposite direction. With
the same tense expression as ever on his face, he walked toward the window on the
far side of the room with a much gentler gait.

The door opened behind him. And who should step in but
Toto, cautiously surveying the room as he entered. Judging from the way he quickly
walked over to the man and fished the sphere out of his pocket, he must’ve seen everything
the shopkeeper had
done since entering the back room. Giving a light tap on the
shoulder of the man who thought he was still facing the door, the mysterious young
man bounced the bead from his right hand and the pair of rings from his left in the
palm of his hand. “Sorry,” he
told the shopkeeper, “but I’ll be taking this. Kindly give my
regards to the little lady. See you!”

With those words, Toto took off like a gust of wind. But even
after he was gone, the owner of the curio shop just kept plodding slowly toward the
window—although in his own mind, he thought he was hurrying toward the door.

.

About an hour later, several men went into a saloon. It was the
one with the gaudiest neon sign of all of the drinking estab-lishments that lined
that bustling thoroughfare. Their fierce
expressions and powerful bodies made it quite evident they were in a dangerous line
of work. Heading straight to the counter in the back, one of them said something to
the bartender, who then used the hand that’d been wiping out glasses to indicate a
door far to the right.

“That little bastard—you’ve gotta be joking me,” spat the man
who’d spoken to the bartender, curses rolling from him like an
incantation. When he tossed his jaw in the direction of the door, the other men started
across the room with a brutal wind in their wake. A pair of muscular men who looked
like bodyguards stood by the door, one on either side, but they let the group pass
without saying a word.

Just beyond the door lay a hallway. There was a row of lewd pink doors on the green
wall. Though no voices or other sounds could be heard, the men knew what was going
on behind the bright pink planks, and it seemed like they could almost see the hot,
dense fog rising from each and every door. After all, it wasn’t at all rare out on
the Frontier for saloons to double as whorehouses.