Читать книгу Gonji: Red Blade from the East - T. C. Rypel - Страница 8

CHAPTER ONE

To be alone among companions is the most dreadful sort of loneliness.

Yes, that is so.

The rider clopped along the dusty street as he thought on these things, the nagging itch of heat rash in his privates and a saddle kink in his spine. The chestnut stallion’s hooves kicked up swirling eddies of dust, and the animal’s ears flicked back to ward off the buzzing flies.

Man and beast alike sweltered under an unmerciful late afternoon sun. The horse’s sauntering gait attracted a yapping dog, which quickly darted away in obedience to its master’s harsh reprimand. Somewhere behind, mutton was being roasted. Probably at the village’s sorry excuse for an inn.

The warrior snorted, his lip curling in disgust.

Stupid fools. He had had to eat stale dried beef.

The road widened at the edge of town, and he could see the track ahead, meandering through the thickening larches until it disappeared into the forest in a sloping curve. Ahead, the pine-blanketed foothills that rose upward, ever upward. Another world seemed to beckon from beyond the mist on the lofty horizon.

Passing the last of the humble village dwellings, the warrior glanced lazily to right and left. Sullen eyes, fearful faces. He spurred Tora onward at a bit faster pace, suppressing an urge to wheel around and snarl at the ignorant peasants, just to see them scramble for cover.

What was the sense?

That would mark him for a lesser man. Instead he pulled himself erect in the saddle and shifted his swords to a more comfortable position. He spoke affectionately to his mount and urged him forward under a lush green umbrella of shade-dappled forest, the hot sun at his back only slightly more searing than the hostile eyes that burned into him like brands. He could imagine them crossing themselves in their superstitious way—but not out of concern for him, he was sure; more likely in gratitude that he was on his way.

Stale beef. What ignoble fare. No doubt the Englishmen were eating better right now.

Ah, but the few hours he had spent with them had been enjoyable. For the short span until they had ridden into town it had been the same old thing; another village of ignorant peasants, another impossible dialect, more suspicious stares and mutterings.

Then the two Englishers, merchants traveling to Turk-held Buda and Pest, had clattered into town with many a hearty laugh and trifling concern over dirt and discomfort. The affable, red-raced Goodwin, with his ready horselaugh, riding a splendid Arabian charger on which he looked positively ridiculous; the somber walking-stick Lancaster, with his bloodhound eyes and ironic wit; their three dourly officious bodyguards, grimly sizing up the onlookers with darting eyes, rapiers bouncing comically on their hips like clinging waifs.

They had spoken French—loathsome, twisted language!—and the warrior had found them eager to exchange tales of adventure. They had tipped many a flagon of wine and ale to each other’s good fortune and to surcease of evil and all manner of mortal terror. The merchants had been intrigued by the strange warrior who had mastered tongues so alien to him, eagerly drawing from him the endless tales of a life of high adventure, of bone-shattering clashes of men and steel; of fragile love, won, lost, and squandered; of monsters and magicks and valiant death. And the warrior had found companions.

But then he had pressed matters too far.

When they announced their intention of riding on into the nighted hills on a course matching his own for a time, he had thrust forward his sloshing flagon in a grinning toast to their continued fellowship on the road.

No cup was proffered in return. The smiles melted. Undisguised glances passed from one Englisher to the next. Nervous throat clearing, followed by all manner of illogical arguments to the contrary. They began excusing themselves from the table.

The clown had finished with his entertainment.

What had it been this time? The hair tied off in its peculiar topknot? The narrow, angular eyes? (anxious whispers) Did he wear his swords too confidently? (nervous hilt-clenching by the bodyguards)

Damned ignorant fools! Snobbish, money-grubbing merchants! I’m no highwayman. If so I could have hefted their burden of gold with little trouble. I’m not some hell-spawned satyr come to ravage the countryside. Let them stumble along their course, then. Let them trust to those three dolts with the dangling rapiers—probably each with a virgin edge, neh? They’ll be fair game for bandits and night fiends before long. I need no puffy-faced riding companions with sagging behinds. They’re a burden, worthless in a fight—a bane on all of them! Friends often turn traitor. More often turn up dead. If I’m to ride alone, then that’s my course. Chosen. Ordained. That is karma. Am I not my father’s son? Above them all in the scheme of things, firstborn of the great daimyo of the Sadowara clan, birthed of the womb of the storied golden she-wolf of the northern ice lands?

I am Sabatake Gonji-no-Sadowara....

...and I am samurai.

He had sat alone for a time, feeling the tension grow thick at the inn, staring into his sullen reflection in the pale wine. Guarded whispers wafted over to him through the musty smell of rotting floorboards. The fat innkeeper fluttered about the Englishmen like a wet nurse, jabbering in mixed French and Slovak: “Pan Goodwin! Pan Lancaster! Let me put you up for the night. Do not venture into the hills after sunset. It is not safe, good sirs!”

More toadying, more simpering. (The clink of their coins was truer than his.) Then a snatch of something barely whispered:

“—the Weeping Sisters—”

A pang.

He had risen with an appropriate flourish, cast some coins noisily on the table, (hearts skipping a beat) and strode out of the squalid inn with a pride born of his noble heritage.

Done with them. And glad to be alone.

* * * *

They tracked upward into the mountain foothills, the samurai lost in his thoughts, the sturdy animal sure-footed even in the increasingly rugged terrain. Long shadows pointed the way before them. Cool draughts of pine-tinged breeze washed down over them, but the heat of the dying sun held fast at their backs.

A mile or so into a sloping stand of timber Gonji reined in and swung lightly to the ground, patting Tora’s shuddering haunches. The horse shuffled and nodded with relief, poked at the wild grass. Unhitching his swords, Gonji removed his damp kimono with a grimace that evinced aching muscles. He stretched elaborately a few times, then replaced the swords at his waist.

He paced laterally along the banked earth a few yards, sniffing at the fragrant air, the rugged sandals laced about his thick tabi crunching sharply in the stillness.

He froze.

Both hands shot to the hilt of the killing sword as he crouched slightly in a defensive posture. He fixed the target in his vision. The Sagami sang free, scarcely touching wood, and cleft center of the object.

The samurai snatched the blade back into its sheath with an efficient two-step sliding motion, then set himself. Again. Off a bit this time. A third time—quicker, sharper. Again—better still. Several more—real time was all but forgotten. A final blurring pass—

Excellent.

Silver death in a mote of time.

He executed a leaping full turn, drawing and slashing in midair, a growling kiyai roaring from deep in his chest, echoing through the hills. He had landed with feline grace and splendid form, breath held in check, his mighty challenge unanswered.

Tora kept nibbling and paid him no heed.

Gonji picked up the heaped kimono and returned to his mount, breathing deeply, feeling the tension flow out of him, the light rippling of his well-toned muscles. A mild breeze feathered his damp armpits, causing a brief outcropping of gooseflesh. He tied the kimono around the spare killing sword lashed to the saddle and tugged loose a square of white cloth. He rubbed his face on a tunic sleeve.

“Again you ignore me, eh?” he spoke, stroking Tora’s neck. “What’s become of us? You used to find me so amusing!”

Tora nickered and shot his head from side to side, and Gonji chuckled, fishing a bag of oats from a pouch and sifting the last few handfuls. “See? Plenty for everyone, neh? Eat, proud fellow.”

The glowering orb of the sun pressed the western edge of the world.

“Do you know something?” Gonji said, sighing expansively. “We’re heading back the way we came again. Yes, that is so. Oh, not so far north this time. Through the mountains. This time we’re looking for a—how did he say?—‘stone sanctuary perched on a mountain aerie.’ Sanctuary...do you think it will be a sanctuary for us, Tora, eh? Do you think those mad Hungarians are still looking for us? Ahh, you don’t think at all, do you, dumb beast? Or you’d have slowed and let them catch us and you’d probably be in stud right now!

“Strange people. Strange. Bad as Mongols. Give them what they hire for and they try to kill you. For a while there I thought we had a home for a time....” He gazed wistfully into the distance, his face a mask of sadness.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said cheerfully, “if we meet in the next go-around, I’ll have a turn at the bit and you do all the thinking! How does that suit you, eh? You like that, don’t you? You like that....”

Gonji hopped backward a few merry paces and affected a passable imitation of the innkeeper’s bloated carriage. He waddled about Tora, bowing obsequiously and flapping his arms in mock solicitude.

“I go to get some food now, Pan Tora, yeh?” he mimicked, puffing his cheeks.

Taking the white cloth, he loped off to a nearby thicket in which he had spotted some wild berries. He ate a few handfuls to appease his grumbling belly while he filled the cloth, then scanned the hills ahead to determine the best shot at a stream near which he might make camp for the night. Perhaps there he might catch some fish.

A vague unease gradually cost him his interest in hunting for his dinner. Then with the graying shadows of hazy twilight came the dark and nameless fears he had known since the first night in this territory. The thought of another campfire shared with the things that rustled and coiled and stared from beyond the fringe of light brought a surge of bitterness that he fought to swallow back. Something was happening in these mountains. Something evil. And it was aware of the intruder.

Gonji’s eye caught a fallen limb.

Could it be that downed tree? Had he circled back to the same wretched spot—No. It wasn’t, he was sure. Days past. Miles away. There would be in that place a shriveled corpse, by now worried by the beasts that thrived on carrion.

A man. An ancient, withered hermit. Dying. The stench of death, ugly death. The horrid odor of some racking, consumptive disease. Leaning against a fallen limb, arms spread along the wood. Reclining in crucifixion.

Circle wide, circle cautiously, wear the scowl of distaste only a warrior knows at thoughts of such plague-ridden death. He stares, eyes bulging like rotted eggs. A sere hand trembles free of the supporting limb. Is it a twig or a lean brown finger that points (at me!) as the slack jaw works:

“Here there be...monsters!”

(vile wretch!) Draw and kill the ogre! How dare he? Step carefully forward and rend him (still pointing)—rend him.

A long rattling sigh.... His last. Already dead. You’ve been the fool. Stupid, fearful, mistrusting fool. Still he points, but not at you, no, not at you but at....

...the road you travel.

Gonji’s eyes refocused, and he shrugged off a sudden chill. Bounding up to Tora and swinging into the saddle he glanced about him in a wide arc.

“I am Sabatake Gonji-no-Sadowara,” he stormed to the mute hills. “Ride with me if you will, against me if you dare!”

And with a hearty laugh he spurred Tora onward at a gallop. Deep into the forest they rode, the wind in the trees whispering and murmuring at their passing.

* * * *

Night encroached.

The fire crackled in the tree-rimmed clearing, its lambent glow pulsing and ebbing at the encircling blackness, now parting the veil, now shrinking before it.

The samurai sat cross-legged in the radiant warmth, a sullen frown tugging at his lips, arms limp, elbows on knees. He waxed meditative in the flickering patterns of color, the charring twigs becoming dying memories he sought to quicken, to order, to understand.

Always the needs, the nagging aches in one’s head and heart. The needs and...the search, the search back and forth and up and down this angry continent....

The Sagami lay naked along his left side. To the right, two things he had crudely fashioned: a torch of dry grass tied to a sturdy limb; and the mystical implement made from his seppuku sword and the spare killing blade. A dirk was lashed to his thigh. Apart from these, there were none to call friend this night. Loneliness washed over and through him like waves lapping an eroding shore.

Tora snorted peevishly and stamped at the carpet of pine needles under his hooves. Although he had been unburdened of the saddle, he was unused to being tethered. But something else was making him skittish—something that had cost both horse and rider a good deal of sleep over the past few nights. Gonji could only guess at what the animal felt. But to him the sensation was of entrapment, the predator studying its prey from silent vantage.

Gonji yanked a slab of beef from its perch over the fire. No luck in the stream, and even the flame hadn’t helped the beef; it tasted like stropping leather. He tossed it aside with a scowl and munched the last few berries. Leaning back on his arms, he regarded the tattered patch of sky the jutting treetops allowed him.

A pale yellow moon nestled between twin pine peaks. From the lowlands the moon spread a cheery glow over the earth. Here in the high hills it was different; sharper, hard-edged, glowering, offering little comfort. In a few days it would be full. In its present aspect it looked about as friendly as a bloated leech.

Gonji drank deeply from a skin filled with fresh water. He had chilled the wineskin in the stream and would have much preferred the heady drink. But after pulling at the skin once, he had decided to forego the pleasure, caution tugging at the back of his mind.

At length he stretched himself. Loose, circular contortions. He growled and sneered, baring his white teeth casually, like a languidly reclining lion. Confidence. Always display the swagger of dominance in the face of the enemy.

Gazing at the starry pitch above, he wondered whether, as the people on this continent believed, the dead lived on somewhere beyond the heavens. If so, was his mother there now—she who had both blessed and cursed him? Did she watch him from above, guide his meanderings? Had she, in her incredible voyagings, traveled farther than he? Had any man journeyed as he had? seen what he had seen? if so, lived as long as he to tell of it? Was it, as some said, that the sky above was a great wall which no man can pass, the stars but portals through which the gods may peer at the folly of men?

Kojimura thought that way. Kojimura....

The wind moaned on the slopes, alluring and deceitful in its movement, as if diverting the attention. An unnatural stillness settled over the forest.

I am, the grand thought came, a man of destiny. Why else would my life become such a mad whirl of ironies, tragedies, misbegotten motives, ridiculous quests? Can I not see into my own head, the good and right that is there, the thoughts of others lost to me? Perhaps they have none. Is not all illusion? Then, if it is my illusion, why can’t I change it to suit me?

And as Gonji thought on these things, ominous clouds gathered at the fringe of his consciousness, and he saw the images of his mind through a murky haze, a rolling tapestry of bitter loneliness—mutual hatred—friendless death—all manner of foulness from bottomless hells—the good suffering, the evil triumphant—swords raised in skeletal fists—starving children—ravaging plague—creeping things that stole the peace of death—eternity without purpose—life without duty—empty souls that shared nothing—kills, endless kills—rivers of blood—the Weeping Sisters....

The samurai’s soul cried out in its pain.

And the children of darkness heard its cry.

They had come at midnight, sensing his anguish and acute vulnerability. Never had they been able to approach so closely before. The glade became an unholy arena, crouching and slithering shadows pressing forward anxiously. He had felt their presence before. Never in the vision, always just at the periphery. The eyes. The hot red eyes that burned with forbidden hunger; the cold yellow slits, dispassionate, commanding, beckoning with...promise...lust....

As one they moved inward.

Gonji could hear Tora’s frenzied bolting. The animal’s fierce whinnying carried challenge, bordered on madness. Brave steed. The visions that had stolen Gonji’s will departed, but he had been a fool. The meditation had lulled him, allowed them to penetrate his defenses. Still in a half-trance, he could only stare into the flames. The fire had burned low.

They sighed, and as a body moved closer.

Gonji tried desperately to strain against the icy chill that numbed his flesh, his sinew, penetrated to the core of his being. Sweat beaded on his brow, trickled down his arms, lidded his eyes in a way that bade sleep. Sweet, peaceful sleep—no! Fear. Rampant fear....

It is a power, Gonji-san. A force which may be used like any other. Learn to use it. The predator knows well its strength....Have you ever known such fear, Master Oguni?

Still Gonji stared. He reeled slightly with his effort to move, nausea roiling in his belly. Behind, Tora stomped and screamed, lashed backward with his hind legs. The embers burned lower. When they were spent—

When the first soft tinkle of the Sisters’ sobbing came to him, Gonji was able to raise his head, focus his spotted vision. They advanced to right and left, two of them, white as the lotus blossom in their nakedness, sinuous and hypnotic as only the sea can be when it courts one to floating death. First came the deep longing, the searing heat in his loins. Then the mellifluous voices that gently massaged his aching mind. Their weeping was for him alone....

—See how lonely he is, tiny, fragile man!

—Let us ease his burden, sister, touch him with soft comfort.

Another wraithlike step, and he could smell their caressing scent, a wisp of cherry blossom, a hint of fragrant verdant hills. Takayama Province—he dreamed a dream of home....

—So sad, so sad is his longing, it thickens the life in his veins....

—His heart is heavy with the death wish, I shall set him free....

Hulking shades gasped and groaned with passion, swaying in rhythmic accord, as the Sisters floated nearer on unsoiled feet.

Their wan song cleft Gonji’s spirit, setting two forces in motion: The bitter needs and desires that gnawed at him sensed the surfeit of sweet peace promised by surrender; the yearning was intense. But beneath them rang the ever-vigilant alarm, the pounding pulse that thawed unwilling muscle, the rush of adrenalin.

As deep draughts of air swelled his chest, Gonji at last saw clearly the face of the nearer Sister. She smiled a familiar smile.

Reiko. Sweet, gentle Reiko, her casual allure, perfumed hair—

—Let me touch you, Dear One, it has been so long, so very, very long....

—Come, let us make love, weary, hungry little man....

He staggered to his feet, slumped, found something to support him, leaned forward on it tentatively. His head began to clear. He looked at Reiko. Different, different—hai. The blood thrummed feverishly in his brain. His eyes strained to part the misty blackness that cradled the advancing white sirens. The night, the glade, the heavy sweetness in which he swooned strove to wilt and crush him. A womb. A monstrous womb engulfed him. He would emerge stillborn.

If it must come, then let it come—

The face of Reiko swam close. Great swashes of silken hair, delicately twined. Full, red lips. A radiant glint of ivory teeth. Lovely, inviting, passionate eyes. Weeping....

—I have waited so long for you, beloved....

...without tears.

A slender, nailed finger coursed his throat. (no tears for me) Warm wetness trickled down to his chest, mingled with the clammy moistness. (illusion) Her mouth yawned with the hunger she could no longer disguise...(deceit!)

“Cho—ler—aaaaa!”

Gonji’s roaring imprecation inflamed the night. With surging fury he drove his fist into the cold hoariness of the creature’s chest, knocking her back. The other hand tightened on—the Sagami!

Hideous snarls raked the air from all directions, and the vampire hissed threateningly. Her eyes rolled back and flushed with red rage, lips snaking back almost to the ears to bare a savage display of canine teeth.

“Vile, lying thing!” Gonji screamed.

His leg snapped out—a deep lunge—blue steel whickered in a slashing arc, froze impossibly at the end of its course. The useless clawed fingers that had sought to fend the blade pattered to earth ahead of the gushing crimson spray, the heavy thud. And for a scant instant the nighted world held its breath, the keening wail of the rolling head the only sound.

The things that troubled sleep had tasted the blinding speed of the master swordsman.

The other Sister sprang. The Sagami was twisted from his grasp. Gonji grunted with the wrenching pain in his arm. The two fell backward in a heap, and the samurai’s left arm instinctively shot upward, his ridge hand slamming into her throat. He growled in defiance of her hiss like a fierce mountain cat. Her strength was awesome.

He held one wriggling claw at bay, but the other found his throat with a viselike grip that squeezed a thin gasp out of him. Planting a foot, Gonji rolled them both over once, twice. He landed on top of her, tried to use his weight advantage to hold her still. But he had brought them nearly under the madly kicking hooves of Tora. He lost his positional advantage, slipping to the side.

The vampire’s knees knobbed at his midsection in a thundering tattoo. He was forced to surrender his hold, lurch back. The vampire lunged without a pause, snarling, and his short straight punch smacked sharply into her forehead, hardly slowing her. He dropped back into a solid stance and met her low charge, bulling her upward until they locked in a show of straight-ahead force.

Gods! She was as slender as a willow!

Their feet dug and scraped at the packed earth, and Gonji felt himself slowly giving ground. His sweat poured freely. His rough palm, forcing back her chin, began to slip its bracing hold. The vampire’s nails dug into the soft flesh of his throat, penetrated his taut-muscled resistance, choked him off.

The circle of leaping and gibbering shapes tightened about them. When she was done, they would worry the carcass....

With a sudden new burst of teeth-gritting fury, Gonji snapped back the demon’s head. The fanged rictus of a mouth gaped wide at the sky. But her taloned grip clutched his throat relentlessly.

“Monster!” she screamed in a cracked voice. “Mortal bastard!”

From somewhere deep within the samurai a fiery bellow issued forth, breaking through the anguish of her death grip. He snared great handfuls of her hair, yanked down with bestial madness, and stared into the thing’s face, heedless of her foul carrion breath.

“I’m—no—MONSTER!”

Time. He dropped back and kicked her viciously in the breast. A cracking report of something shattered. She howled maniacally, stunned.

In the instant’s respite, Gonji snatched the dirk from his thigh—slashed, lunged, retreated. She clawed the air with catlike strokes, whining, backing away. Diverting her attention with a leaping snap-kick, he lashed into a figure-eight of whirling steel, catching and lopping off half an undead hand. She whined shrilly, weakening, backing, something akin to what mortals call fear creeping into the animal snarl.

Gonji’s warrior instinct sensed the turn. Without a thought he launched low, drove down and in, buried the knife in her abdomen. Her wailing ripped into the hills.

Now began Gonji’s own long ragged-edged cry. Drowning hers. Breathlessly galvanizing his ensuing actions. Smothering his pain. It sang of terrible passions. Only a kill could silence it.

Scrabbling over the loosened earth, Gonji scooped up the device made of lashed swords—a rude cross. Seizing the right-angled hilts, he charged the staggering Sister and powered her backward. He ran her down, plunged the killing sword through unburied flesh and bone, through pine carpet and moist soil, the hilt knocking him breathless as he tumbled head over heels, muzzling his mighty cry.

Gonji drew one hard breath, spied the Sagami and pawed over to it. He pushed himself to his knees and cocked the slim blade for a strike.

The beasts held back, eyes glaring. Uncertainty. The samurai recognized their meaning.

Is the prey spent?

Slowly, steadily he rose. His piercing eyes were narrow slits of defiance, blinking back the burning sweat. By sheer will alone he stilled the trembling of the two-handed sword clutch. A complete, deliberate turn. One moment of unreal time. Easy, graceful, balletic. Motion was his to command as his level gaze passed over the baleful watchers.

He had gained a measure of respect, but he wasn’t fool enough to believe he could hold the impression for long. He glimpsed the campfire. The erstwhile flaming jig had dwindled to a dying minuet. Lowering his sword with mock contempt for them, he strode confidently to the fire and, praying for time, rolled the torch into the embers. It didn’t fail him; the dry grass caught at once. The flaring torch evoked a sibilant rumbling from the ghoulish assemblage. They fell back to the rim of the glade.

Gonji strode to the impaled vampire Sister and laid the flambeau on the ground. Then he casually rested the cold steel of the Sagami on his shoulder and addressed the haunters of night as he knew he must:

“I stand before this sign of good and might.” Here he indicated the sword cruciform. “My sword strikes with its power. Let any who dare face me come forward—now!”

His nostrils flared. He brought the killing sword to the ready. But almost before the last words had drifted off on the wind, the dark things slunk away, dispersed. Gonji stood like a silent sentinel until the creatures of the natural world quit their places of hiding to chirrup and flutter and bring peace to the night.

He relaxed. Something shuffled behind him.

Tora.

The stallion was wild-eyed, shuddering along his entire bulk. A tattered gray mass lay stiffening under his hind legs. Gonji eased forward and called softly in reassurance. Glistening splotches mottled the ground near the horse’s hooves, matting the torn gray tufts with red ruin. A wolf had tested him—valiant brute!

With some difficulty he calmed the skittish horse, then wiped him down. Undoing his topknot, he shook his own tangled mane and emptied the water skin over his head. He tramped across the pine carpet to the stream some fifty yards off and refilled the skin—sword in hand, but neither expecting nor finding any danger. This night was his.

He watered Tora and took a pull at the skin himself, but the welcome warmth of the wineskin beckoned, and Gonji swigged at it gratefully. So shocked was he by the cackling that little runlets of the precious liquid fled the corners of his mouth.

The impaled Sister choked on her own thick wet laughter. She muttered something hoarsely in an eldritch tongue. Gonji found his lip curling involuntarily at the vileness of its sound. She cackled again wetly, and for an instant Gonji’s blood froze; a staccato clacking issued sharply from the teeth of the dismembered Sister’s head.

Amazing! Both still alive—with whatever half-life fired their night-cloaked stalkings.

Burn them, he thought, send them up in flames before talons grope back to their stumps, before dripping neck rejoins twitching body....

As the earth-staked Sister took up a cracked refrain that fulsomely twisted their siren song of earlier: “Come, little mite, let me suck thy bowels....” Gonji gathered brush and twigs to revive the fire. Curiously, he found himself moving slowly, deliberately. Behind him Tora neighed anxiously, as if to spur him to complete the job.

He took from a satchel the small earthen bottle given him by a priest. Uncorking it, he sampled the blessed water with his tongue. Warm and tasteless. He laved his fresh wounds, gritting back the purgative sting without an outcry as an exercise to help restore his harmony of body and soul.

The impaled vampire’s blackening tongue chattered on all the while.

“Why do you dally, man of the East? Do you want me still? You may yet have me, even as I am! Hee-heeeee—!”

Gonji strolled up calmly and looked down at the slender form now framed in black blood. He grimaced. A few moments ago this tiny creature might have rent him like some monstrous beast of lore. Her neck was bridged unnaturally, eyes rolled back to avoid the sight of the glinting cruciform.

“Further on,” she purred, “you will meet our brothers. Perhaps you would prefer their ministrations, ahhhh—?” Her taunting trill pitched ever higher as Gonji’s lips arched back in a snarl of disgust. He realized that he had been listening to her for a long time. Could he be so forlorn that even in such a voice he found comfort?

“Cholera,” he said with edged softness, resorting again to the popular epithet of the territory, descriptive of a rather vile, intestinal disorder, that had become his favorite.

He sloshed holy water on the vampire. She shrieked and lurched, red welts blossoming on her alabaster flesh.

Gonji strode to the fire, rekindled the torch. Without another thought he set the screaming creature ablaze, turning the night incandescent. It burned like dry wheat, flaring so swiftly that Gonji was singed as he pulled free the lashed swords.

He turned to the headless vampire corpse, ignited it likewise. Then he regarded the head that reposed sidelong on the ground. The bulging orbs and clacking fangs still were set in the face of Reiko, though the features were gradually resolving into something else. Settling, elongating into...someone familiar.

He hesitated with the torch. He had to know.

The teeth stilled, the eyes receded. A thin smile creased softening lips, the smile that had pledged the love of its wearer countless times before when doubts and fears had threatened the nurture of a young half-breed samurai. They threatened now.

Then the voice came, though the lips didn’t move. It was a deep, resonant, masculine voice; cold and malevolent. It issued so unexpectedly, so incongruously from the beloved face that Gonji’s heart hammered in his breast. It said:

“You—will—die—in—this—land.”

Gonji swallowed back a surge of bile and spoke a single word:

”Karma.”

He thrust down the flickering torch, and the vampire’s own voice returned, howling shrilly a long anguished note that died in the hills.

Then, once again, his mother’s face was laid to rest in sacred memory.

* * * *

The fire’s red glow pulsed steadily, warm and reassuring. Somewhere in the domain of eagles a tufted cloud obscured the moon. The samurai lay back on his bed of pine needles and contemplated the wax and wane of the stars, his eyes lazily sweeping from one to another, assigning brightness values.

Sleep pressed close. A nighthawk squalled in triumph and dove through the tree line at some unfortunate prey.

Gonji let his mind drift, sensing a bit of respite from unholy assault. No night fiend’s eyes glittered in the brush, no hunter of souls hissed or gibbered or slithered at his back. The charred remains of the Weeping Sisters lent a perverse air of special comfort. Even Tora snorted in satisfaction like some fiery equine god who had been appeased.

The moon reappeared from behind the cloud cover, and Gonji reached up a hand and cupped it for a time. He thought of his mother, that storm-tossed Nordic woman whose birthing had both blessed and cursed him. He thought of his repudiated—and by now surely lost!—heritage in Japan. The lands, the wealth, the samurai who would die for him. He must be a man of destiny. Who had lived such a life? Who had braved a thousand kinds of death and emerged the victor? Yet he was in self-imposed exile on the continent of his maternal roots. A landless nomad, a warrior duty-bound to himself; a man of vast accomplishments in warfare, of fleeting glories and countless kills and (of this he was sure) the toast of balladeers in far-flung lands!

He laughed mirthlessly.

Nothing matches this Europe for horrors, he mused. But if the evil is great, then so must be the good...somewhere. The needs, always the needs. Companionship. Brothers of the sword. Love that doesn’t die. Friends—true friends. And duty, sacred duty—the only worthwhile duty here is to oneself. It seems nothing can be shared as inviolate for very long. All is shattered. But that is karma, neh? So here I am, a poor victim of self-mockery, pursuing my silly quest, a quest in name only by now—if indeed it was ever anything more. Where are all those priests, Buddhist, Christian, some I never even heard of before, who have put me on my way, eh? And what next on my tortuous trail? Vedun. Ah, Vedun. The storied city nestled on a cliff in the mountains. Wonderful. More sullen faces, more distrust, more cold steel raised in threat—hai, and mine is colder still, neh?

“And what say you, spirits of my fathers?” he asked of the indifferent night. I go on, as always I go on. I seek what is not, glory in the moment, and damned be tomorrow! Twice cursed past and thrice ahead! When my time comes, then that is karma, but I’ll strive to end it on my terms. Hai, that is good.

And as sleep overtook him, Gonji’s mind succumbed to the futile urge to try to divine those things that lay ahead on his course, for this was surely preferable to dwelling on his present state of stoical misery.

His last waking thought was of the name. The name of that evasive thing whose trail he dogged, the name that had captivated his fancy and enticed him with its very perversity:

Deathwind.