Читать книгу Gonji: Deathwind of Vedun - T. C. Rypel - Страница 9

CHAPTER ONE

At the Hour of the Monkey, Mord determined that Gonji must die.

The sorcerer had gained a grudging respect for the samurai. By his sword skill, cleverness, and steely nerve, and now with the proof of his training of the militia—witnessed in the extermination of the worm—he was turning the game to his favor. His continued presence might confound Mord’s purpose, might compromise the plotting of the Grand Scheme. What might his next devious move be?

The militiamen had destroyed the worm as had been expected, but not at the anticipated blood-cost; not out of desperation but out of determined fury and confident might-of-arms. They had learned well. And they had not followed the worm’s destruction with a precipitate rebellion stemming from their fear of the catacombs’ discovery. Instead they had fired the castle tunnel.

What did they suspect? What would they do now?

The traitor’s word might come too late. Mord had to know what the wily samurai was doing and he must eliminate the oriental’s threat, even as he had done with Baron Rorka and his potential for enlisting Church forces.

The sorcerer stood in the dungeon chamber before his articles of magick and arcane gramarye and performed the ritual. At its culmination he ingested the scrapings of Gonji’s blood he had obtained after the samurai’s duel with Julian. Then he reclined on the stone altar so that he might depart his body, stretch out with his astral being at the end of the long mystical silver cord, find the unwitting fool wherever his barbarian blood pulsed.

As always, the blood-search rewarded him: The oriental rode through the valley on a southerly course.

But something else could be felt—the pulsing of the great key, that mystery object that had baffled Mord, troubled him with its conflicting emanations for weeks. As the oriental rode on, the supernatural radiations grew stronger. Could he be riding toward a meeting with the elusive Being that exerted its enigmatic presence in the territory?

Mord’s unsavory mind smiled. For the longer he followed, the more certain he became.

Abruptly the wyvern was awakened from its demon sleep atop Mord’s tower high above Castle Lenska. Screeching in response to its master’s call, it flapped from its perch on thirty-foot wings and careened about the castle twice, eagerly accepting the controlling mind of Mord. Mord’s eyes of baleful ebon supplanted the flying beast’s red orbs as it pushed off with a tremendous gush of wind toward the south.

Toward the lone rider who thundered through the sylvan valley.

* * * *

Flavio swings from a gibbet, and Tralayn’s been dragged off in shackles—how does that sit with your self-pitying—Iye. No, that was no good....

You ignore the plight of these people who are dying for you—

Gonji cursed and shook his head as the gray roncin mare clumped through the enshrouding forest. His jaw set with grim determination, swords jiggling in his sash with the bouncing motion of his ride, the samurai pondered glumly: Exactly how did one shame a legend that walked hand-in-hand with death?

Gonji had long since left the southern valley’s main trail, angling off along the path he had ridden scant days before with Tralayn, the path which led to that sinister cave concealed at the base of the northern foothills of the Carpathians’ lower curve. The steed snorted as it stumbled over snaring vine and eruptions of scrub and bramble.

The samurai felt uncertain of his mount; she failed to respond to his subtle pressures on bridle and flanks as the goodly Tora would have. But Tora had not been found in the catacombs after the battle with the venomous slithering beast, and the thought that his prize stallion might have become a meal for the loathsome monster inflamed him with a shapeless, futile anger. He would have to bring such disruptive emotion under control for the meeting to come, if come it must.

And his roiling feelings were not his only enemies this night: the long day had exacted a toll; his whole body ached and sagged. The drinking bout and purging emetic had left his insides twisted. His belly churned with nausea. The brief, feverish sleep during the night of abortive rebellion in Vedun had done little to replenish his strength, and the day’s battle with the worm-thing from the underworld returned its impressions with fresh pains of half-remembered bruises and abrasions, cuts and lumps.

Yet nothing so disturbed his harmony as the poignant memory of his failed duty on behalf of Flavio and the Elder’s city.

Cursing the despairing voice within that bade him surrender in the name of graceful failure, he rode on.

Clenching his jaw, Gonji warded off the pine boughs that sought his face along the path, brushing and scraping at him and his mount, now and then twining about his mighty longbow so that he would be forced to halt and disentangle it. The forest seemed to grasp at him, hold him back from his purpose. But at whose behest?

The roncin picked her footing in the cloying darkness. The path twisted through the lush, rich-smelling blackness of the forest, the horse’s hooves thudding over the spongy pad of pine needles and fecund earth, the verdant scents intoxicating.

The night lay deep, heavy clouds mantling the treetops. Animals and insects ceased their trilling and chirruping as the man-beast clump crashed through their sanctum, only to take it up again, beratingly, at their backs as they rode on. Goatsuckers warbled their plaintive cry, and a judgmental owl hooted from the high limbs of a great oak that demarked a fork in the path. The air was cool but damp as sea spray.

Or was it his own fear-sweat that chilled Gonji’s skin wherever his half-kimono brushed it?

He growled low in his throat and spat out a gnat. The forest shroud thinned a bit, pilfering a few lonely rays of gray moonlight. Ahead the trees grew more sparse, disdaining to negotiate a knoll in the immediate distance, overgrown with dwarf pine and furze, creeping vines and wild berry bushes.

Gonji paused to see the dance of silver light at the head of a knoll. And what might lie over the rise? Elven carousal in a private midnight amphitheater? Or was it a grim drama the creatures of the wood awaited, lacking only the arrival of the human participant?

(further on you will meet our brothers)

Gonji licked his dry lips and bared his teeth at the fanciful notion born of his wrath, almost wishing it were true, as he spurred the roncin into a canter and clumped up the knoll, his left hand resting on the Sagami’s hilt.

Why does Mord let you live?

Cresting the slope, he peered down into a moonlit delve, a gurgling brook meandering along its nadir. An open wound in the forest. For an instant as he sat aboard the steed, squaring his shoulders against an unbidden feeling of aloneness and vulnerability, he imagined that his faulty sense of direction had betrayed him: He could not recall having passed this way with Tralayn.

But it abated at once when he caught sight of the ominous rise of the foothills before him. The sleek-faced escarpment he sought was scarcely a kilometer distant.

And now—a new awareness: The forest whispers had receded; he had penetrated into a sphere of paralysis, for although he could sense the shapes of staring things all about him, not a living thing moved save for the trees, nor did any sound come to him but the murmur of the brook and the slow, heavy soughing of the wind at his face, ruffling his clothes and hair. A deep note of warning, as of a watchdog’s growl.

A misshapen frustration, topped by a many-headed anger, rose up in snarling defiance within him. He set his jaw against the press of the wind, his face an inscrutable Eastern mask; but the Western half—the tameless, emotional Western child part of him—jabbed the roncin’s flanks, harder than necessary, directing her down into the delve.

Gonji eased down off the shuddering horse, allowed her to drink from the brook as he paced the bank from side to side like a predator spoiling for a fight. Weary and eager to drink though it was, the animal repeatedly paused in its slaking to cast about with rolling eyes, nostrils quivering in the wind, ears flicking to snatch at sounds beyond Gonji’s range. The samurai watched her closely, keeping near lest she flee to leave him alone on foot.

Then the moon tore a hole in the scudding cloud sea and emerged in silvery glare. Gonji peered up to see the soft white ring that dimmed its edge. A portent of more rain. Leaden wisps skimmed over the moon’s surface, obscuring it again, making its shape indistinct. It was bloated, bulbous. Almost full....

Full?

A sudden screaming chill along the ramparts of sanity.

Iye. No. Not full. Not for two—three days yet. The last full moon had nearly seen him dead. This one must find him very much alive. Oh, very yes. There was much that must be done before he could pass with honor into the land of the dead.

The roncin nickered, trembling and stamping. Gonji spoke to her reassuringly and caught up the reins, calming her as she stamped back against his gentle pressure. He brought her under control and leapt astride, riding out a brief spate of anxious bucking.

The wind gusted through them again, swirling about, buffeting them as if shaking a fist against their continuing. Gonji experienced a momentary unbidden vision of the monstrous beasts of the nether world he had encountered in his time, few so terrifying as those he had seen in Transylvania; of the strangling white clutch of the Weeping Sisters, those foul blood-lusting things which had tried to feast on his unwilling person; and of their prophecy that he would die in this land. Hollow threat of the evil Deceiver, or oracle of certain doom?

But then came the fortifying thought of the fulfillment of his destiny, so close at hand, if deadly in promise; and of his hatred for the fulsome Enchanter, who had toyed with him, had so casually regarded his prowess and his courage. And lastly he thought of the lamented dead, and of the fighting hearts of the men and women of Vedun....

Karma....

With a grunt he kicked the steed across the brook and up the delve’s far side.

The trees soon parted. Before him lay the broad glade that fronted the concealed cave. The Cave of Chains. Frosted lances of moonlight slanted through the treetops to dance over the tall, still grass. Cool and quiet it was, the pines and larches that rimmed it as implacable as a court of inquisition. The forest at Gonji’s back seemed to his heightened sensibilities to recede of its own accord, abandoning him, having offered its fair warning.

The roncin’s snorting was the only sound, the wind having died away now. The animal’s pounding hooves clumped forward three strides into the glade and came to a confused halt. She tossed and whinnied fretfully, such that Gonji drew on the reins to steady her. But the more he tried, the more recalcitrant the horse became, tossing her head and curvetting, then clattering a full circle before he yanked her, shivering, to the fore once again.

(Deathwind) Stop it. That means nothing now.

(He is here) He’s a man, that’s all. And by all the spirits of my ancestors, I aim to learn what he’s about....

The samurai whispered in calming tones to the steed and dismounted, lashing her tightly to a stump at the eastern end of the glade. On an impulse, he removed the longbow and quiver of poisoned arrows, looking about him circumspectly all the while. These he brought with him as he strode lightly across the grassy clearing.

Halfway to the boulder-strewn base of the hill and the cave entrance covered by tangled overgrowth, Gonji was seized by a sudden conviction of the alienness of his presence in that place. The same skin-prickling sensation he had experienced on the day he and Tralayn had entered the secret cave. At the center of the glade he lay down the bow and quiver and began pacing laterally before the cave entrance, adjusting his swords and striving to control his breathing and pulse.

He would have called it caution and not fear, and he would have been at least partly justified. For the cave emanated so palpable an aura of menace that Gonji dared not enter. So he made his stand, came to terms with the longtime focus of his destiny, there in that dread moon-limned clearing. A low rumble of thunder in the mountains both preceded and emboldened his voice:

“Hail to you, storied cave-dweller! I am Sabatake Gonji-no-Sadowara, and I would have a word with you.”

The ringing mock greeting, spoken in Simon Sardonis’ native French, lingered in the chill air. Gonji stood motionless, facing the cave entrance, hand lightly fisting sword hilt. When his call was not answered, he released his captive breath and began to pace laterally again, more confidently now, the spell of the glade broken by the new assurance in his presence, the fresh reminder of his conviction of destiny in fulfillment. His face was the impassive mask of an aggrieved master awaiting the accountability of an underling. There was no sound but the thin wisp of the wind in the trees and the anxious snorting of the horse.

“The time has come for an accounting, monsieur. I think we both know whereof I speak.”

A light rippling chill teased at Gonji’s skin to hear the bold sound of his own words. He paused in his pacing and squinted at the play of moonbeams over the cave entrance.

He stiffened. There had been motion, but not from the cave. Something in the corner of his eye, something moving along the tree line at the western side of the glade. When he focused his eyes on that spot, it was gone.

He expelled his breath in a long choppy exhalation and began to rotate slowly clockwise, scanning the forest. When he caught a glimpse of the thing that caused the tethered steed to whinny and buck, he froze.

A gleam of eyes. Baleful, pale eye-slits that regarded him coldly a moment, then disappeared in the brush.

By the horse’s tossing, Gonji marked the presence’s continued clockwise movement for a long interval. Then the mare’s bulging eyes cast about her in all directions, confused and terrified. A cloud bank swallowed the moon.

I am samurai, and my swords are with me. He swallowed hard, affecting a battlefield scowl, and the burden of fear plummeted through him to vanish into the earth.

“I grow weary of this coy game,” he growled in High German, now facing the eastern end of the clearing. “Declare yourself, if you be a man, and let us speak of Vedun.”

The heraldic dash of wind at his back turned his blood to searing frost, matting his clothes to his sweating back, raking his hair and topknot. He shouldered about, grasping the belted katana’s hilt with both hands, to face the terrible sight of Simon Sardonis. The man of mystery. Cold-blooded killer of the giant commander Ben-Draba, and of untold others in Klann’s employ. He, of whom Tralayn had spoken her awful tale.

The tethered steed whinnied and stamped as the tall figure began to circle languidly in her direction, scowling at her instinctive panic.

Approaching Gonji at a lazy pace, the man spoke.

“Calm yourself.” His voice came soft but commanding, the language a recognizable French dialect, a coarse rasp in its undertone. “What do you want here? Who told you of this place?”

Calm yourself. The cavalier accusation failed to penetrate at once, for Gonji’s mind had exploded in flaming pinwheels of disjointed thought. In his anxious state, no coherent words would come, so he merely kept his silence and permitted instinct to move him. The glade seemed transformed, timeless. Overlays of impression unfolded to the samurai’s wary consciousness. First, the soldier’s assessment: Sardonis wore a short sword thrust through his wide belt, much in the manner of Gonji’s own swords. No other armament was apparent. The man was alone. He strode with an air of confidence and command. His face, though, bore the occasional twitch of barely contained curiosity or unease. And when he began to move laterally again once he had approached to within about forty feet of Gonji, his movement betrayed a definite limp; he was favoring his right side. The bowshot he had taken in the buttock had left its agonizing reminder.

Next Gonji took in the man’s overall appearance. Under the broad belt he wore a light-colored tunic, slashed and blood-stained on the left sleeve, a thick wrap bulging beneath the ragged tear. His narrow-cut breeches and well-worn walking boots were of so similar a dark hue in moon-bathed night as to look of a piece. He was hatless, his coarse golden hair lying back stiffly, darker now than Gonji remembered, its blackened ends stirring like the ruff on a dog’s back.

Finally came the insistent impression he had experienced upon entering the concealed cave with Tralayn: Gonji was an alien here, an intruder. Unwanted. Out of place. And his foreignness bore less of a cultural association than a metaphysical.

Gonji eased his hands off the Sagami’s hilt and stood regally straight, turning slowly to keep Sardonis in the center of his vision. The longbow and quiver of envenomed arrows lay a rod away. Small comfort against the chilling memory of the speed of this man of legend: Fleeting glimpses of the event at the city’s square returned to Gonji. The killing of Ben-Draba...the lightning escape on foot...the scramble up a sheer fifteen-foot wall...the Night of Chains...the full moon....

He is a man. Still a man. He—

“Well, monsieur?” came the grating voice again. “Has your bold blustering been so easily retired by—”

“Speak German,” Gonji shot, “or Spanish—anything but French. I care as little for your native language as I do for your hermit’s self-pity.” Gonji felt the momentary singe of the harsh words, and then it passed. He was beyond regret now. Beyond diplomacy. Beyond fear.

Sardonis’ hair began to bristle like a hedgehog’s. The strange man’s swept-back eyes became a gleaming silver line, curving angrily. To Gonji’s mind, so similar to his own. Yet different; the difference being less one of race than of...species.

“You’ve already crossed over a boundary from which few men have ever returned,” Simon asserted coldly. “Once again—who sent you here? And what were you told?”

Sardonis had spoken in German now, and Gonji would continue in kind.

“Tralayn,” he replied softly.

“So,” Simon said smugly, relaxing somewhat, “the holy woman betrays her oath. The sanctimonious—”

“She’s dead,” Gonji shouted, “or likely so by now. Dragged off in shackles to Castle Lenska. Or is this old news to you? Were you there watching from your godlike vantage, the way you’ve watched all our puny mortal struggling from the beginning?”

Simon grew rigid again, a slight coloration creeping into the paleness of his cheeks. Caution, Gonji-san....

But when Simon spoke in reply, it was in a tentative voice, his eyes for the first time falling from the samurai. “No, I—I didn’t know,” he acknowledged, his voice dwindling to a verbal introspection. “So that’s why it wouldn’t let me....”

Gonji was emboldened by the turn, the icy barrier of apprehension melting, his anger and frustration and sense of futility surfacing: “Hai, Tralayn—dead, Mark Benedetto—dead, Flavio—dead—” At this disclosure Simon’s angular, predatory eyes became a silver line of menace, snapping up to lock onto Gonji’s own again. “Dead,” Gonji repeated. “Swinging in the square from his beloved cross, that holy symbol under which you’d call yourself his brother. And it needn’t have happened,” he accused, pointing a finger at Simon for a second but almost at once lowering both his hand and his voice, for with the words had come a fresh flooding of guilt-ridden recrimination. And he continued in a near whisper:

“The priest, Father Dobret...dead.... But I suppose you already know that.”

Simon quaked with an inner fury at the words. “Ja,” he replied with a tremulous breath, “I’ve been there.”

Gonji experienced a rash of gooseflesh. Could the strange man have learned of Gonji’s own participation in the outrage at Holy Word Monastery?

Simon’s trembling subsided, and he glared at Gonji.

“What did Tralayn tell you...of me?”

“Enough,” Gonji replied evenly, gauging the reaction. Then: “Everything. Enough to know that you shirk your responsibility, your duty. You resist your destiny, Monsieur Thing-of-Legend—Herr Grejkill—shi-kaze...Deathwind!”

Gonji’s pulse raced, and he began to pace as he spoke, circling about Simon imperiously, their roles subtly reversed now, as the man of folklore and legend cast his eyes groundward again and flushed with a look that resembled shame. Or guilt. Or self-loathing.

Simon swallowed with noticeable difficulty. “She broke her vow.”

“What is a vow,” Gonji proposed, ambling with hands behind his back, “when measured against the lives of men?” A poignant stab: You speak in tarnished, hypocritical assertions, Gonji-san. Does not bushido itself demand—Iye, I must maintain the upper hand. He must be made to see. These people—they matter. “She broke a vow for the higher value of saving the city and the people she loved. She knew that your great power might be—”

Simon hissed him to silence with a flash of gleaming white teeth, abruptly hostile once again. “Leave this place,” he shouted. “Go away from here. All I ever asked of men was that they leave me alone. Alone with this accursed burden I bear like some scourge out of Hell. My every crossing with men has brought death and destruction. Now you come to me, an infidel, blaring like a herald of Death that all those I could call friend are dead. Leave me now!”

Simon turned his back to him, shoulders bunching with tension. But Gonji continued pacing around him, sweating palms rubbing over the fabric of his half-kimono as he picked over his words, like a man traversing a thicket of deadly thorns.

“Ah, so desu ka? Is that the truth?” Gonji probed. “You care for people only after they’re dead, so that you can play godling with your aroused sense of vengeance? Why don’t you try doing something for the living now and again?”

Simon whirled and transfixed him with the silver darts of his eyes as the pale moon burst through the cloud cover. A searching wind whirled into the glade.

“Infidel,” Simon intoned venomously, “you have no idea what you’re saying. If you’ve been told what you claim, then you must know what you ask is impossible. You could never understand my lot. And I don’t like you. You...or your idiotic methods—what in God’s name was your plan the other night? What kind of rebellious action was that? Yet you attack my sense of responsibility?”

His words stung Gonji deeply. Rampant visions swelled: The vulgar drunken spectacle he’d made of himself; his failed duty; his shame and embarrassment at being forbidden even the saving stroke of seppuku.

He strove to lay at rest the mocking voices, to come to terms with painful honesty.

“Hai...you’re quite right,” Gonji replied with a thin, tight smile. “At least half-right. The action was not of my order. But I, too, have failed in my duty toward these people. Yet if I can I’m going to salvage what’s left of their way of life. When I came into their service it was unbidden, owing them nothing, at least at first. But you—you—they’ve been protecting your secret, harboring you, sheltering you, some of them, for a year now. Abiding all the while your anti-social contempt. Now they’re dying in the streets by sword and pistol and sorcery, crying out for assistance, and what do you do? Nothing but lash out on your own, strike down Klann’s troops as it pleases you by cover of night, only to have citizens beaten and shot for your crimes—ja, crimes—”

Simon’s scalding eyes followed him. “Mind your tongue, barbarian—” The ensorceled hermit began to circle warily again, such that they now described orbits around each other. The roncin mare shrilled and bucked as Simon neared her tether.

Gonji’s own anger rose again. “An old Polish farmer once told me of a proverb spoken in these territories. Something about the filthiest bird being the one who befouls his own nest. From my vantage you’re a pretty filthy bird these days—”

“Have a care, heathen swine.”

“Hai, call me ‘heathen’ as well you might. But if it’s insults you crave, then call me fool for having sought you out these many long years. Ten—miserable—karma-laden years as a worthless ronin, wandering this backward continent in search of the legendary Deathwind—him who would guide me to my destiny!” Gonji snorted and spat noisily behind him. “That’s for the trail I’ve ridden. If your wish is to insult me, then laugh at the way the gods mock my every effort.”

“That’s your problem.”

“Ha! Mine and that of the people of Vedun, now that their lives have become entwined with mine,” Gonji sneered. “How easy for you to cast aside the troubles of the world you move in, with a simple swipe of your legendary aloofness. And you’re wrong, Sir Hermit—there are those who still care about you. Tralayn saw to that with her constant insistence to them that a powerful Deliverer would be coming to their aid. Despite all my efforts on their behalf, with all the scratching and clawing and dishonorable compromise of principle I’ve had to bear just to win some measure of respect, they still wait for you.”

Contempt filled the glade as they stalked each other cautiously, the wind a vortex that sledded around the clearing. Simon seemed about to respond, but Gonji grimaced and cut him short. “You think you have just reason to be bitter because your fellow man has made you an outcast? I could teach you a thing or two about loneliness, Herr Beast-with-the-Soul-of-a-Man—or is it the other way around? You think you’re the only man who ever felt starved for the approval, the companionship, the affection of his fellows? Do you know what it’s like to be a half-breed, to have no life of meaning on any continent? Those people are going to die back there in Vedun, and their deaths will be owing much to you, you and your misdirected vengeance—”

The samurai broke eye contact with him, turned his head away, his breath coming in strained pulls now. “To so lose control like this goes against all my noble training, and I would as lief die by my own hand in this spot as bare my emotions. Yet I can do nothing right now to disguise my revulsion for you....”

Simon stopped pacing and glared at him, his hard gaze transforming, for just a moment, into a curious mix of sympathy and uncertainty. But Gonji saw nothing of it.

The tall man looked down at the bow and quiver at his feet. “Why don’t you pick up your things...and go now.”

The sheathed katana’s hilt was squeezed in a grip that might have throttled a man, as Gonji spat a choked curse and regained his harmony after a struggle. Again he met the mystery man’s eyes, and now his own eyes of black marble flashed with implied threat.

Do what you’ve come to do, by whatever means....

“How can you worship as you claim?” Gonji queried. “You make a shrine of your self-pity and worship there.”

Simon’s eyebrows arched in quiet, rising petulance. “You’ve said what you’ve come to say. Now go—”

“Aren’t followers of Iasu supposed to band together for their common good, for the struggle against the evil things in the world? Even the civilians in Vedun have abandoned their hand-wringing for—”

“The things of which you speak are quite complex,” Simon responded hotly. “I doubt that you’re qualified to discuss them.”

“So?” Gonji affected a coy archness. “I believe I’m educated enough in your worship to make such comment. But no matter....” He considered something, nodded resolutely. “If you refuse to help, maybe I’ll go back to Vedun and tell everyone what kind of a...thing they harbored.”

Dangerous territory. Simon began ambling toward him unsteadily, mayhem stirring in his eyes of flaming iron.

“I can remedy that right now, infidel,” he grated. “I can tear your wagging tongue from your throat.”

Gonji stopped and steeled himself, returning Sardonis’ wilting gaze. “Ah, intimidation—the bully’s stock in trade. You think you can frighten me the way you frighten other men?” Wisdom. Although the bold words had caused Simon to halt and study him closely, Gonji changed the subject without transition: “Will you help these people?”

“Nein.”

“Will you help them for protecting your secret all this time, for suffering because of your vendetta?”

“They care nothing for me; I care nothing for them. They hate me, as do all other men.”

“Nonsense!” Gonji roared. “You hate yourself, what you are, but you can’t deal with it like a man so you punish others for your guilt. Will—you—help undo the trouble you’ve made for them?”

“What’s happened has happened—I’m not to blame. What about your meddling, slope-head?”

The samurai bridled at the insult. “I’m trying the best I know how, using whatever power I can claim to help. You’re sitting imperiously in a cave and slithering out at night to satisfy your bloodlust—Christian! Is this what your faith means to you? The prophetess spoke of you as the Wrath of God. I look at you and what do I see—a symbol of impotence. Even the priest Dobret told me to tell you to help.” Simon froze, taken aback by the statement. “Hai,” Gonji continued, “it was he who became my last link in the journey which led to you. He said that I should enlist your power against the evil that’s descended here, and that you should avoid personal vengeance.” His voice trembled slightly in delivering the half-lie. But conviction rushed back fast; the priest couldn’t have known what would become of this business, and surely he would have urged assistance.

Simon emitted a small gasp. “By the Christ and all the saints—I swear that Tralayn’s restive spirit has infused itself in you. Don’t you understand—any of you—that what you ask of me is utter madness? Leave me be! Leave me alone with my shameful curse before it destroys you all!”

Deadlocked, stubbornly determined each in his way, they stood not ten feet apart, expressions set like treasure-vault doors.

Gonji knew he was defeated, his blustering performance failing him, his appeals to reason muddled and ineffectual, his last-ditch effort at trenchant emotional probing unable to penetrate this enigmatic being’s lifetime conditioning of self-centered defense. He sighed at length and voiced something that had been nagging him.

“All-recht. I’ve wasted enough of my time on you. But something bothers me—”

“I’ve nothing more to say to you,” Simon stated flatly, turning his back to him and starting for the cave. “Take your gutless animal and ride off.”

Gonji raised his voice, a sarcastic quality seeping in. “I know that the chains in the cave are broken, and the full moon is scant nights off. Yet you stay. What are you planning to do on the Night of Chains?”

Simon halted, his shoulders bunching with tension, the hair at his neck bristling eerily in the moonlight. “What I plan,” he said haltingly, “is no concern of yours, infidel.” He stepped toward the cave again, more deliberately now, the limp marring the smoothness of his gait.

Gonji’s wrath seethed within him like a riptide, to be so dismissed. “So?” he cried. “Then you’ll continue to skulk around like some kind of a night-fiend, kill whom you please, and slink back to your cave, neh? That’s very gallant of you. Meanwhile, others will be put to the sword for your crimes. My, what a hero! And then on that night—on the full moon—you’ll give the beast his head—” His voice rose in irate pitch, crashing through the bleak space between them until Simon turned, an ugly grimace on his countenance. “—and there’ll be kills a-plenty, you dung-eating bastard!”

Might as well finish it....

Gonji’s eyes narrowed as Simon stalked him now with teeth grinding. “These people don’t need monsters to help them. They need men.”

The air filled with ozone as a terrible arc of lightning shattered the sky above the hills, and a hot blast of wind buffeted Gonji’s face just ahead of the man’s charge.

“I’m not a monster, you yellow devil!”

And suddenly the samurai was falling back, sword drawn, against the other’s vicious attack. Simon’s short blade lashed at him with propeller fury, a crude, emotion-charged power behind the broad, wild strokes.

Despairing, uncertain, Gonji gave ground, slipping and deflecting the mighty blows with deft two-handed parries. Simon’s rudimentary berserker style, all cursing and animal strength, repeatedly offered openings by which Gonji might leave him unlimbed; or so it seemed—the return speed of his sword arm was remarkable.

Yet Gonji found his head filled with conflicting thoughts, the enemies of the ken-jutsu fencer. He could not empty his mind, relax, and allow instinct free rein. He had lost. Failed, in his intent in coming here. And the mocking thought that he had forged no alternative to failure recurred, staying his thews. For he had not come here to kill this mysterious being, the possible object of his time-honored quest.

But neither had he come to this place to die....

Wicked blue sparks showered the battleground as the blades sang off each other, and Gonji pressed an attack of his own aimed at breaking the tall man’s frenzied resolve. Somehow he had to bring this senseless engagement to an un-fatal end. He must disarm Simon, wound him if necessary.

But first and foremost he must remain alive himself. A sensation of bone-deep weariness responded to his need for renewed strength and second wind.

Gonji leapt back a pace, whirling the Sagami in a flashing figure-eight of deadly steel, flicking the katana from one hand to the other with an effortless grace intended to distract, to divert, to intimidate his opponent with the masterful skill the motions bespoke.

Still Simon advanced. Slashing, growling, his unschooled but effective technique losing nothing of its surging, predatory energy. His eyes of chipped silver bored into Gonji’s.

The samurai tried a new tack: He stood his ground, the Sagami at middle guard before him, and attempted to address Simon’s whirling blows with small efficient parries alone. But the passive stance failed him; Simon’s brutish power tore through each parry in such a way that Gonji was quickly forced to fall back bodily or be struck by the barely deflected strokes. He could hear the fierce whinnying of the roncin at his back now. Made out the pounding thumps of her hoof-falls and knew his danger of being trampled—

With a spinning high parry, he twisted Simon’s broadsword over his head and spun around the tall man, passing his opened ribs without riposting. Now Simon’s back was to the mare as he half-turned to reengage. She cried out in fear of his demonic presence.

“There!” Gonji shouted, dropping the Sagami into earth-pointed rear guard. “I could have spilled your bowels. Stop this now.”

Simon snarled. “Not so easily done as you think, infidel.” He charged again. A deep lunge that Gonji turned aside, flicking his blade arrogantly at the other’s chin.

“Again!” the samurai stormed. “Stop this madness and we’ll—”

A rapid feint and vicious cutover that Gonji barely evaded—

He could taste the tang of steel as it sizzled past his eyes. His stomach rolled and leapt to his throat. Now thought fled and impulse reigned.

They were at last united in purpose: One of them would die.

A bone-rattling clash of arcing swords, followed by another. Gonji caught Simon’s next hard sally on his shrieking blade and turned it, but the powerful blow defeated his parry and slapped him solidly on the left arm with the broadsword’s flat forte.

The sharp sting galvanized him. The samurai shot forward and twisted his katana with a whiplike snap, cutting open his opponent’s shoulder.

Simon growled and contorted with shock and pain, Gonji drawing back a step and holding his blade steady before him. The beast-man looked slowly from the wound to Gonji, and on his face there dawned the sudden terrible resolve of the wounded animal. His lower jaw thrust forward in a display of primitive anger and glinting teeth. A devil’s-breath wind lapped the clearing again, then—

What followed came in fragmented sensory impressions to Gonji: Simon—the wind—silver-gray eyes looking past him, washing over with a new focus—bristling hair and lobeless ears flattening like a cowed dog’s....

Simon abruptly dropped the sword and launched into Gonji like a bighorn ram. The samurai saw a fleeting glimpse of the frenzied gray mare, stayed his descending katana. Then Simon’s head butted his midsection, and he went down hard on his back, losing the Sagami’s grip, breath whoofing out of him, knees jerking up reflexively, coruscating lights filling the black sky above him.

And he felt, more than saw, the great dark shape that soared overhead, skreeing in premature triumph. The treetops bent stiffly into the sucking draw of the wind, and the wyvern flapped upward on supernatural wing-strength, looped across the face of the waxing moon for the return dive.

“Get out of here, idiot! Get into the trees!” Simon was howling in French. But Gonji couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Simon’s life-saving tackle had knocked the wind from his diaphragm. He could only lie, paralyzed, listening to the screams of the roncin in its death throes, the sizzle of burning horse flesh. The skirring of thirty-foot batwings....

“Come on—crawl—do something!”

Gonji sucked hard for breath, but little came. He saw Simon dart across his limited field-of-view and heard him begin calling out to the flying dragon, words of challenge and insult. Then the memory of the creature’s ruinous saliva and excrement pushed him through his paralysis and into a desperate scramble over the pine-scented earth. He found the Sagami and dragged it with him toward the tree line.

Behind him, Simon dared the wyvern’s strafe. The monstrous familiar of Mord took up the challenge, knifed down at the poised mystery man, flaming saliva roiling in its throat glands.

Simon held his ground, cursing the beast. Then when he could wait no longer, he began to dart from side to side into the center of the glade, against the creature’s flight path, closing the ground between them rapidly. He snatched up his downed sword. The wyvern’s head coiled back; unused to dealing with a prey that chose to advance against it, it jetted two quick darts of crackling saliva that splashed the glade, searing the grasses but missing the bold adventurer.

In one motion Simon cocked and threw his short sword like a dagger, just as the creature passed above him, not a rod above the ground.

It squalled and twisted its sinuous neck as the blade glanced off a taloned hind leg. Serpent eyes of solid black—Mord’s eyes—riveted Simon with spears of demon-hate. Blatting a clump of corrosive excrement that landed twenty yards from the scrambling Gonji, the monster undulated its leathery wings, twisted into a tight arc for a return engagement with its new tormentor.

Gonji reached the trees, panting, on his knees, rubbing his aching abdomen. He drew breath in hungry gulps, grimacing at the reeking stench of the beast’s waste that burned the grasses in a spreading circle nearby. He saw Simon race toward the center of the glade after his fallen sword.

The wyvern bore down on him.

“Iye,” he whispered helplessly. “Run, you fool! Run like the wind!”

Feeling desperate and helpless, he watched Simon slide on the ground, retrieve the useless steel, then launch into a mad zigzag sprint toward the nearer, eastern side of the glade, as the wyvern arched its long neck and began to spit rapid darts of lethal yellow fluid.

The samurai’s heart froze when it seemed the man had been struck. But the jet had passed him by, and with that amazing sprinting speed Gonji had seen from him once before, Simon gained the trees.

But the forest was sparse to the east. And the wyvern’s night vision was keen.

Gonji remembered the bow and quiver, ran after them, his breath regulating now. Grabbing up the weapons, he lashed the quiver to his back and ran toward the sound of the monster’s flight. In the trees: the chilling hiss of its fulsome armament.

Gonji paused to listen an instant, staring overhead, cautious both for the beast itself and the crackle of its foul excreta. With startling suddenness the wyvern barrel-rolled over his concealed position. Gooseflesh flared over his body as he broke from the trees and into a smaller clearing; anything to avoid its direct flight path.

He nocked one of the shafts impregnated with worm’s venom. “Simon,” he called. “Are you hurt?”

No response.

The wyvern cried out keeningly and in a flash was nearly over him again, blotting out the gibbous moon with its tenebrous bulk.

It spotted him. Too late. It was already past when its bowels erupted in an errant dropping that melted the upper branches of a shielding pine, running down its trunk in unnatural putrefaction.

Gonji scowled. Sighting and pulling with desperate speed, he launched the poison-tipped shaft. He missed, the creature’s ponderous bulk already covered by the eastern pine-peaks.

“Cholera,” he swore, slapping his thigh in frustration. He rubbed his sore abdomen, fought back a mild nausea. Drew another arrow and began to run deeper into the intermittent bower, his sashed swords scraping through the brush.

“Simon,” he spat in a growling whisper. Still no answer. He could hear the wyvern’s wind-rush low over the treetops, but its position was lost to him.

A brook trickled through a delve on his left, the trees thinning more now. Thoughts whirling, heart racing, Gonji sprinted along the bank where a stand of oaks lent partial cover, though the farther bank lay bare to the raining death from the skies. At the eastern end of the brook the enormous trunk of a fallen oak, split by lightning, bridged the delve at head height.

“Skreeee!”

Gonji leapt about, saw Mord’s shining black eyes in the antlered head that careened down with a vengeance. The jaws gaped as it sailed in, slowing to aim, neck poised. It hawked a hissing stream of saliva. Gonji was on the move, cutting, jigging, gurgling with the frantic effort, a clothyard shaft nocked on the run.

The wyvern slowed to a flapping hover, short yapping barks aimed at the samurai as it poised its bowels to blat their filth.

Gonji pulled hard and fired as he ran—

The beast cried out in shock, the war arrow needling a wing. The same wing Gonji had penetrated once before. It flapped hard, gaining altitude, the shaft ripping free. But now...a new sensation to the sorcerer’s familiar: the worm-thing’s potent venom. Spreading, irritating, even with the arrow loosed.

The wyvern began to shriek and flap at an ungainly stroke, battling the numbness in the wing. It circled erratically, squawking its fear and wrath.

It turned, favoring the injured wing, to reengage the hated samurai, who reloaded and awaited it in the delve.

“You,” came the shout from the forest.

Gonji half-turned. “Simon?”

“Hit it again. Challenge it. Bring that bastard lower.”

Gonji could ponder his meaning but briefly as the flying demon roared down on the delve, a hundred yards off, already spewing rapid-fire jets of burning saliva. The distance closed, the scorching saliva darts blazing nearer with a tracer-effect in the bubbling stream.

Breath held in check, Gonji pulled, arced the bow downward in the time-tested Zen manner, becoming one with his bow, one with his purpose. He gritted his teeth—

A seething splash of feces between his feet in the brook—Gonji’s face a mask of open terror and revulsion—

He fired.

The creature’s shriek exploded in his ears as he flung away the bow and dove like a gymnast to roll under the oaks. Arrows spilled about him from the quiver. He looked up quickly as the cold rush of reeking wind pelted at him.

The beast had dropped down, hit the water with its raking hind claws, slogging through the stream, now, at an awkward run. Wings flapping madly, its beaked jaw twisted downward toward its underbelly, where Gonji’s thirteen-fist armor-piercer arrow had sunk to half the length of its stole. Splashing through the moon-glinted water like a downed seagull, the wyvern cried to the skies in panic to feel the swift spread of the earth elemental’s deadly venom.

Approaching the blockading tree bridge, the stamping horror increased the length of its stride, unfurling its rodent-furred wings for the great push it would need to again become airborne. It launched upward, hind-claws still gouging mud and water, lofting over the fallen oak.

As it passed the massive trunk, Simon Sardonis broke from concealment in the forest and bounded up the oaken bridge and onto its back with an eye-popping leap.

Gonji shouted in wild glee to see the bold maneuver. Laughing with battle frenzy, the samurai scooped up his arrows and dashed down to the brook. He grabbed up the bow again to sprint after the nightmare struggle. For an instant he lost sight of the fray, cursing in frustration. Then he passed under the oak and picked up speed along the bank, the forest again yielding up snatches of the battle to his fevered vision.

Simon straddled the wyvern’s serpentine neck as it labored to gain height. He struck repeatedly with his blade, slashing it open so that inky fluid sprayed in the wind. It shrilled in pain. When it coiled about to spit or snap at him with its razor-sharp, chitinous beak, he would cling close and stab at an eye or at its soft throat glands, which bulged behind its lower jaw.

They floated ponderously through the groping branches, only the creature’s frenzied wing-lashes keeping them aloft. It craned its head sharply and hissed at Simon. Its barbed tail whipped forward wickedly but could not reach him.

There came a fierce snap as the man’s steel struck full force against the familiar’s beak, splintering it. Squalling in pain, it lost its concentration, and its left wing tore through an ensnaring pine, skewing the beast and its unwanted rider groundward.

Tearing over the rugged terrain fifty yards behind, Gonji howled in bloodlust to see the object of his hatred and shame brought to earth. Sweat poured into his burning eyes as he pounded to catch up.

The beast ripped out of a pine thicket and into another small clearing beyond. Still Simon clung fast, climbing to its antlers now, slashing with the aroused fury of a starved mountain cat.

The wyvern leapt and bounded about the glade, the trees imprisoning it with its turnabout prey. Blatted clumps of searing excrement splattered the ground.

The monster shrieked its terror into the wind.

Gonji nocked another arrow and guided his bow, sighting on the savagely wounded beast. But at this distance he might hit Simon while the thing scrabbled about. He had to engage it head on.

He ran nearer, awaited its turn. The unearthly cries of the demon-spawned beast electrified the night. And now it turned at last—Saw him. Remembered.... Gonji could see the recognition in its eyes, the ophidian eyes of Mord that supplanted the monster’s own.

And it bore down on him, energized by its hellish hatred of the human that had brought it such pain.

“Damn you, Mord!” Gonji cried, sighting along the shaft. “Damn you to the foulest chamber of Hell....”

It lumbered near, spraying its burning saliva in a weak semicircle, unable to direct the stream of yellow death. Simon dropped off its back, and Gonji fired—

“Arrryeeeee—!”

The wyvern spun down with a heavy thump. Its great hind legs had gone totally numb. Black ichor spewed from between its snapping, curved jaws. Still it lived, though it bled from a hundred places. It pushed up on its wings and crawled toward Gonji.

Cholera, the thought harped. What if it can’t die? What if—? Gonji reloaded, sneered, pulled....

“Sado-war-aaaaa!” Roaring his clan’s mighty battle cry, he unleashed another arrow. It chunkered into an eye, sank six fists deep into its brain.

Its final cry choked off, the wyvern was stilled at last.

Gonji dropped his bow and drew the Sagami. Running up to the fallen beast in a crouch, he circled it once warily, heart pounding. He stopped when he had returned to its gargoyle’s head. Gasped in a shuddering breath.

He mopped the sweat from his eyes and assessed the girth of the sinewy neck: too thick. His gaze falling on the left outcrop of its strange antlers, he raised the katana high in a huge arcing strike, lopping the antler off cleanly. Bobbing his head curtly, he returned the Sagami to its scabbard.

In that instant he wondered at the meaning of what he had seen just before the final arrow had struck the creature’s brain: Mord’s evil obsidian eyes had departed, leaving the creature’s own volcanic red orbs to lance down at its attacker, feverish with animal fear.

But then Simon had moved up beside him, panting heavily from his valiant exertion. He was bloody and slashed, and in spots his clothes had been burned through, the skin beneath raw and blistered. But in his eyes Gonji could see the twinkle of triumph.

The samurai turned and bowed to him. “Shall we begin again?” Gonji advanced. “Simon Sardonis, I presume?”

Simon’s eyes narrowed, softened to a warm liquid gray. He nodded and extended his hand, which Gonji took firmly. Gonji smiled, and Simon’s lips became a fine line, unreadable. A moment later they sank to their knees, exhausted, each man dealing with the aftermath of the event in his own way.

But both in respectful silence.

* * * *

Still quaking, Mord lay on the stone slab, the minutes parading by in mockery of his helpless confusion. Frustration, loathing, and unwonted terror alternated across the arid climate of his bleak soul.

It had almost dragged him under. The wretched wyvern had resisted his efforts at departure as it twitched in its death struggle, clinging to him against the loneliness of the death experience like a frightened child to its mother’s skirts. And it had nearly pulled Mord’s consciousness into the gathering darkness.

But no.... No, that was impossible. He had been a fool to fear. Had not the Dark Master promised him immortality? He could not die. His fears were unfounded.

He collected his senses and laughed, finally, a throaty cackle that echoed in the dank dungeon chamber. Echoed hollowly as Mord recalled the intrepid attack of the meddling pair. That despicable, arrogant oriental. And the other. The powerful stranger, he of the superhuman abilities who had once dared to invade the castle fastness itself. He, who was likely the legendary Deathwind, that name which was whispered in the mountains and the conclaves of secret plotting. Toward him Mord felt a gnawing fear and perplexity. He sensed the contentious spirit trapped within the human frame, that shape of evil that cried out to its dark brothers in a nameless voice that pleaded for freedom. What allegiance could it possibly owe these cross-worshippers?

The simple resolve formed: Now both must die. Quickly, without fail.

The agonizing memory of the worm-venom welled up, infuriating him. How dare they employ his own effects against him! Puny mortals! But now they would know....

They’d piece it all together, reason that Mord worked at cross purposes to both the city and Klann. He hadn’t counted on their destroying both the worm and the wyvern. Now they’d be inspired by their accomplishments—which could work in favor of the Grand Scheme, if Klann could be moved to swift military retaliation against their future efforts.

But most vitally he must prevent the king from meeting with any citizens who might broach their suspicions of Mord’s treachery. Must prevent Klann from receiving any messages.

Soon. In three nights—the full moon, the faith rite, and a new imputation of power that would render him omnipotent. He would bleed the faithful of their life forces when they pledged him their belief on that night of nights, and he would additionally provide for the vital mana he would need by claiming the human sacrificial victims the effete king had denied him. Then the Plan would be complete, and the Dark Master glorified.

And the sorcerer’s centuries-old desire for vengeance would be satisfied.

He removed the golden mask, moved to the dingy silver mirror on the moss-and-slime-streaked wall. Gazed at what the ancient priests had done. Trembling, he smiled to think of what was now within his grasp.

When he had presently pondered the problem of the mysterious stranger, he gave thought to the ambitious invocation he had never dared consider before. Would there be power enough on that night? Almost unthinkable, yet....

Seductive. In that way only the challenging powers of evil can be. Yes, he was ready for it. Ready to call up a fragment of Hell itself.

But only—only after his powers had been revitalized in the full-moon faith rite.