Читать книгу Gonji: Fortress of Lost Worlds - T.C. Rypel - Страница 13

CHAPTER SIX

“Looks like the table is set for something,” Moon prattled in a singsong voice.

He cavorted about the area, unconcerned with the forms suspended in living death. Now and then he would glance into the sky, cackling nervously. Bounding through the snow with amazing energy, Moon suddenly cartwheeled up to a hitching rail before the abandoned farmhouse, which stood beside the nearer tree. Never stopping, he made an acrobatic leap over the rail, a tumble through the snow, and then a springing double somersault that landed him feet first onto a blood-stained skeleton in the snow that had been picked nearly clean.

Brittle bones exploded in all directions.

“Hee-heeeee!”

Gonji gritted his teeth but said nothing, as he looked again at the hanging forms, mortified. Their eyes had been gouged out. They seemed paralyzed, their exposed heads lolling in slow motion, slack mouths emitting idiot sounds.

He dismounted and began to cut the wretched victims out of the cottony black cocoons, one by one. “Help me here,” he commanded.

“Are you loco?” Moon replied. “Forget them. Their cause is lost.”

“That’s no way for a warrior to die. Honor demands that—”

“What rubbish!” Moon scoffed. “Name me a good way to die! They’re just hanging meat now.”

“They’re soldiers. A warrior deserves a better death.”

“You’re loco, as I thought,” Moon said. “What land do you come from that rates one death as better than any other? Come on, there’s a warlock’s treasure to loot. And if you let this bother you so much, you’ll never make it that far. There are worse things waiting up the road.”

“I’m not here to loot anything,” Gonji said coldly as he went about his grim business.

Moon bobbed his head scornfully. “As I thought—you’re on the side of the soldiers. The warlock will make you regret that, methinks.” He crowed a laugh and bounded away toward the farmhouse’s rear.

The samurai gathered the wretched troopers—fifteen in all—and ritually beheaded them. He piled them before the windmill, wrapping their heads in their jacks. The mystical cocoon material was strange, dissipating when shredded gently, like heavenly dust. But opposed by resistance such as dead weight, it had been strong enough to suspend full-grown men. Gonji labored over an hour at the grisly task, feeling a mixture of fatigue, wrath, and emptiness of soul.

Ambling grimly to the farmhouse to find dry wood, Gonji found the door bolted from within. In no mood to trifle with resistance, he removed his swords from his obi, drew back, and skipped toward the door. A hard side snap-kick slammed it open with a thunderous report.

“Not bad,” Moon said from a short distance away. He wiped his lightly bearded lips with the long tassel of his cowl. “Your feet are almost as limber as mine.” He sat among the soldiers’ effects, sipping from a wine jug. They had been using the farmhouse as a station or command post.

“The back door was open, though. Still—not bad.”

Gonji cast him a scowl and set to gathering the wood. Outside again, he constructed a blazing bonfire that became the funeral pyre of the soldiers. The cocoons went up like dry chaff. Moon pranced up to him.

“Something’s not going to be happy about that,” Moon warned. “You’ll probably be taking their place for dinner, senor warrior. Look up there.”

Gonji followed his gesture. The sky had indeed become still filmier, gauzelike; webbing over with ethereal patterns that seemed to radiate from the moon, now reaching almost to the ground in spiraling tracks. Tora, too, had begun to sense the waxing peril, tossing and curvetting from his tether.

“Who are you?” Gonji demanded of the other.

Moon snorted. “I told you—I’m a thief. I would steal the warlock’s treasure that some would preserve and others would destroy. Those are the choices for any who would course this valley. Neutrality is impossible.” He looked up to the sky again, chuckling. “And now I see that escape for you is also impossible; so you’ll no longer be needing your horse.”

He grabbed up his staff and ran toward Tora. Seeing Gonji draw his katana and race after him, he let out a whoop and pole-vaulted over the anxious steed.

“Hah-hah! I don’t need a horse—stupid, noisy, nervous animals! I just wanted to show you how altogether impotent you are.”

Gonji stamped toward him, sword clenched vertically for a two-handed strike. His mind reeled, trying to make sense of the madman’s mania, and thought cost him reflex. Moon somersaulted over him and struck him a passing blow, high on the back, with his staff.

Moon alighted, squared up, and they faced each other, came to engagement. The thief executed a series of feints, then a rapid high-low-high spearing attack. Gonji slapped the staff aside easily each time. He timed the next strike and parried, slashing the staff aside with a vicious counterattack, then whirled into a figure eight of glinting steel that drove Moon backward.

With a derisive titter, the thief somersaulted backward, using the staff for leverage, then sprang into a low lunge that Gonji leapt over. The samurai moved to attack an inside line as the long staff arced around. His foot slipped in the snow, but he managed to deflect the circling blow aimed at his midsection. They clashed and clacked, neither gaining advantage.

“You fence pretty well for a man who insists on keeping both hands on his sword,” Moon taunted.

Two circling parries chipped wood from the staff. Then a sudden underhand snap of the Sagami chopped six inches from the staff’s end, leaving a sharpened point.

Moon brayed a laugh and blew him a kiss. “So be it, then—you die by your own device.”

But when Moon lunged, Gonji snicked out his ko-dachi with an eye-blurring movement, catching and turning the now deadly staff in a twisting X-block with both swords. He drove its point into the snow, and his one-handed swipe with the Sagami forced Moon to release his grip or lose his head. The samurai bore down on the now unarmed, backstepping thief with crossed blades.

“Too late,” Moon gasped. “You’ve lost anyway—look.”

Horsemen ringed them in, descending from the hills. They bore no recognizable colors or uniform. Even in the dark it was clear that this was some mercenary bunch. They must have been forty in number, but they were still quite distant and spaced too far apart to close the trap.

What sort of cavalry technique is that? Gonji found himself wondering.

“I’ll let you ride with me,” the samurai declared, “but if you offer me one—”

“You still don’t understand, do you, fool?” Moon said, laughing, backing away in the direction of the house. “I know the way out of here. You don’t. You can’t escape them. They’re the warlock’s men. You think they’ll stop for that cross you hang on your horse? The warlock doesn’t fear any symbols of the Church. Maybe they’ll let you join them—if you throw yourself on their mercies.”

Gonji untethered Tora and mounted. When he scanned the approaching band again, he had to resist an urge to rub his eyes. Had he momentarily fallen asleep? Had he been bewitched?

They were almost upon him now. No more than a hundred yards distant!

What foul sorcery—?… What horses could move so swiftly?

Their hooves seemed to touch earth, yet their advance was uncannily fast. They grew in the vision like a spreading stain upon water.

The samurai walked Tora toward the bonfire, uncertain how he would meet this final assault, dashing away the lifetime of memories that vied for audience, the juggled factors of the meaningless equation of his life. Then he abandoned all thought, which dragged the bushi down in battle, with its weight.

He decided to stand his ground before the blaze. He drew his longbow and a fletched shaft, preparing for a shot at the advancing riders. He could hear those who approached from behind—there, a second shaft would find ready nesting.

“Hold there!” the leader commanded him, trotting near, his approaching motion now normal, as though he had left sorcerous ground for that of the earth Gonji trod.

The band was composed chiefly of mercenaries, that was sure: Theirs was a motley array of weapons and garb, much as he’d seen in numerous free companies he’d ridden with and against. But three men were clad of a piece. The one who came near, as well as the pair who flanked him, wore a thin-shelled back armor of an obsolete design. There was a strange, soft shimmer to the armor. Its surface looked murky, as if encased in flat black mist. He had seen its like before…where?

The leader rode up to within ten paces, unconcerned with Gonji’s bow. He removed his burgonet. A youthful, serene face gazed into the samurai’s.

“You can put up your bow,” he said in a cultured voice. “I’m afraid you’d find it ineffectual.”

Gonji said nothing but complied, for he had by now recalled what armor this must be, and if its lore were true, the black knight’s claim would be borne out. The knight smiled and bowed curtly in gratitude.

“I represent the Archmage Domingo Malaga y Colicos,” he said, pausing before going on. “You probably know him as Domingo Negro. A terrible name, if you represent the rapacious Church.” He indicated the cross that depended from Tora’s neck.

“I represent no church,” Gonji replied evenly. “And I feel no terror.”

“Indeed?” the knight said, plainly impressed. “No terror of so many arrayed against you? Of the Moonspinner, who descends at midnight?”

Moon. Gonji briefly wondered whether the thief, if indeed he was a thief, had found a way to somersault out of this trap. But then his thoughts were otherwise engaged.

“My life has always pointed toward such an end, if it be ended here.”

The knight seemed to ponder something before speaking again. “It needn’t, you know. We’ve observed your progress for some time now. Since you first entered the valley. I’m sure you know that forces are at war here. You’ve meddled, without making clear your intentions or your sympathies.”

“I wish only to continue on my way.”

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple. You’ve angered the Archmage, trifled in his business, weakened his defenses by your knowledge of their operation. You have, then, two choices: Join this mercenary company that was formed of men similarly recruited, or remain here for the imminent descent of the Moonspinner. You have little time to decide. Midnight approaches.”

“I need no time to decide,” Gonji replied steadfastly. “I am ronin. For now, I choose to serve no master. The choice reverts to you.”

The knight blinked at Gonji’s boldness. “You are an unusual warrior.”

“I am samurai. You will not find our like anywhere on this continent.”

“Your words are filled with bravado, senor…samurai. Yet I wonder if you truly understand the meaning of valor. I see that you are interested in the armor I wear. Have you ever seen armor like it? It has wonderful properties. No weapon can penetrate it.”

“I know something of this…Armor of Valor,” Gonji noted. “Like most sorcerous working, it relies heavily on the faith and courage of the user.”

“Very good,” the knight said, riding up beside Gonji with a confident demeanor. “And it has served me well, even as well as I have respected its spell. See here.” He pointed to a spot on his breastplate. “The tiny pockmark? A bold-speaking bandit’s pistol, fired from just about the distance between us now.” He let the implication hang in the air a moment.

Gonji never took his eyes from his adversary’s. “The pistol is a poor weapon to use against so worthy an armor.”

The night’s eyebrows lifted. “And do you bear a stronger weapon?”

With reverence, Gonji drew the Sagami. “This goodly steel has struck righteously against both man and beast, sorcerer and demon. But I’ll spare you its edge, if you let me ride on uncontested.”

The knight was stung by the implied insult. His eyes narrowed and his head tilted in amazement. From his look, he might have just been told that his mother and father were sister and brother.

“Strike, then,” he rasped in a tremulous voice.

Gonji hesitated, then shockingly rotated his blade over his head in a broad, torso-twisting slash that ended against the knight’s right pauldron. He froze at the end of the motion for a long moment, the Sagami’s gleaming edge jammed to the knight’s shoulder. Their eyes never broke contact.

Slowly, the samurai drew his blade away, and the young knight’s defiant smile faded. A thin line of blood traced the Sagami from mid-blade to point, although no mark could be seen on the knight’s armored shoulder.

Gonji replaced his katana without cleansing it. He spoke just above a whisper: “I do not wish to shame you. I know this sorcery born of faith, and my faith is no weaker than your own. I stayed my blow short of killing you.”

The knight’s look of horrified disbelief was fleeting. He replaced his burgonet and wheeled his steed.

“He chooses to face the Moonspinner,” he shouted to his charges. Laughter and catcalls came Gonji’s way. “Hurry now, before we become entangled in her web.”

They spread out and rumbled off the way they had come, scattering uphill, still in their widely spaced ring, receding from Gonji with that same bizarre spatial distortion that had marked their approach. But they stopped and turned on the surrounding hilltops, and he could see the intent in their poised pistols and crossbows.

He would be coerced into dealing with the “Moonspinner”—whatever that entity might be, whose darker-than-night webs now gently spun down to touch the snow itself.

* * * *

Two bonfires seethed and roiled in stark relief against the backdrop of the tattered windmill. A breathless midnight stillness crept into the valley, as if the brightening orb of the moon were a greedy eye that would claim any creature that dared exercise the fullness of life beneath it.

Gonji sat in the lotus position between the blazes, stern of countenance. His bow and quiver lay at one hand, his daisho lashed to his back. The angry edge of the stropped halberd loomed over his head, the shaft leaning against his shoulder, his arms crossed over it. He was helmetless and stripped to his short kimono, riding breeches, and boots. His pauldrons and vambraces were his only armor. He glared back, unblinking, at the ominous moon’s sickly glow.

When the dark shadow stirred on the surface of the moon, the samurai rose slowly. He jammed the halberd’s butt end into a snow mound and took up his bow and sheaf of war arrows.

The shadow deepened, assuming a solid shape that was unidentifiable. But it moved. First, it traced a path across the moon, then seemed to leap off the glowing surface to begin a spiraling descent, like a sky coach on an invisible road.

The gossamer black webs fell more heavily now, vibrating, heralding the Moonspinner’s deadly advent. But the windmill area remained clear of them: When they settled near Gonji’s fires, they were rent by the heat, sent billowing into the sky like ignited silk.

Gonji watched the apparition become a dark finger wriggling along the webbing, then a hideous grasping arm that even from its vast distance searched him out unerringly. It was approaching with that same mystical speed, that same spatial disruption evinced in the entrapment by the warlock’s army. The latter had built their own fires on the surrounding hillocks, where they sat dismounted, anxiously watching the developing spectacle.

On an impulse Gonji bounded toward the farmhouse as far as he dared venture without becoming entangled in the snaring, ladderlike black web. He could not move very far, he found, and quickly returned for a torch. The flambeau seared through the web eagerly, and he returned his attention to the monster’s descent.

Moving to his left through the incendiary whumping of the web, he observed a spine-chilling sight. Changing his perspective caused the monster’s form to elongate conically, from the pinpoint of its rearmost portion to the outsized projection of its horrible head—from this vantage the only part that seemed a living thing.

Gonji was not fond of spiders.

But there was no comfort in the surprising discovery that, although he had expected one, this was not a spider. Rather, it was something worse. Something that filled him with an atavistic revulsion.

He began to hear a distant sound from far off in the sky. At first it was like the wind pouring through a gorge. Then it seemed like a million goatsuckers trapped in a mile-deep cavern. And, as he ran back toward the bonfires, it took on the blood-lusting murmur of an onrushing Saracen charge.

Back before the fires, he could make out the growing definition of the head: triangular, half the size of the moon now, mandibles snapping in anticipation.

It was hungry, and the samurai had destroyed its feast.

He scurried past the fires, beyond the truncated, inverted cone of the windmill’s housing. He could see the shuddering of the webbing by his torch, the thickening of its translucent film; the mercenaries’ fires now ebbed in his vision, through the bowl of the creature’s snare. He could barely make out the figures of horses and men.

But the Moonspinner became still more distinct, and in spite of his effort to maintain control, Gonji found his mouth gaping. From the gambrel-roofed stable, Tora began to whinny and kick.

The conical shape grew with increasing acceleration. It was an armored nightmare, a vicious bug with a long segmented body and an indeterminate number of legs. Clearly it had been conjured from some nether world rather than sired by any natural forces.

He resisted a wild urge to flee, the firebrand shearing a panic-propelled course to safety. But there was, he knew, no safety from this thing. And it was not the way of the warrior. This creature was an obscenity; a perversion of the wonder of nature. It offered death most foul, the dishonorable death of a trapped animal. If he fled it now, the way he had once fled the wyvern’s first attack, he would have no peace until he returned to face it.

Ever concentrating on the creature’s rapid approach, he made a touch count of his clothyard shafts: six left. He nocked one lightly in his powerful longbow and eased to his right, where he planted a torch in the snow. The Moonspinner stopped and peered down at him; black, horned eye wedges fixing on him from its bony death’s-head. It reared up at a ninety-degree angle to its long hind segment, fierce mandibles dripping something like venom; clacking sharply, like staffs crossing on a plain below a battlement.

When it came on again, it was about the size of a whip scorpion at arm’s length.

Gonji could only guess at the precision of his depth perception in this space-distorting arena.

Breathe and pull. Rotate. Launch—

His war arrow hissed away through the cold air. Arced toward the alien horror. There was a chilling foreshortening effect; he felt an instant’s nausea and disorientation. The spatial distortion made him feel like the participant in a dream. The arrow winked out of sight—

A miss.

It seemed he had aimed too high, but he couldn’t be sure. The creature came on, weaving through its ethereal support like a wave-tossed galleon. Above his head, the wondrous bracework of black webbing began to vibrate heavily at the center. Gonji strove to regulate his tight breathing, fixing on the web’s vibration as a reference point. The hideous head bore down eagerly, large as a cat’s now—but how far off? It ran on the four legs attached to the rear segment. The front pair, pincered and lined with needlelike filaments, poised to clutch and rend.

How in hell far?

Teeth clenched, Gonji loaded his three-man bow and pulled again, sweat coursing his jawbones. When the Moonspinner’s head was so large that only the corona of the moon could be seen behind it, he launched.

The incredible speed of the shot—the strange flattening of perspective again—

A hit.

The tiny thorn of the thirteen-fist arrow, studding the monster’s skull, gave Gonji perspective on its size as its shrill rasp of outrage rippled the sheath of webbing.

He calculated, emitted a gasp of hot breath, and abandoned the bow. It was too impossibly large for the arrows to inflict much damage.

He seized the halberd, felt the reassuring heft, hoping it would avail him. Then he backed between the twin blazes and took up a defensive stance. In the stable, Tora’s hooves pounded the brittle boards.

All at once, like something extruded from an unseen fissure, the monster hovered above him, filling the sky with snapping, hissing horror. The ground shook when it leapt down into the snow. It seemed relentless, unstoppable, as it came straight for the tiny fire-framed sentinel.

Gonji held his stance before the oncoming monster. It stopped short of the flames, its battle cries like a cathedral full of shrikes. It lashed over the licking flames with an extended pincer, Gonji parrying that hinged vise with his halberd. Its forelegs were lined with stiletto bristles like those of a mantis.

The samurai feinted at its face, again and again, maddening it. A second sweeping claw sparked in the fire, and the Moonspinner cried out in shock, reeling back on its hind members. Gonji lunged forward two sharp steps, nearly engaging a mandible with his halberd’s spear-point. The creature’s claws scissored together over his head as he dove beneath them and rolled almost into the flames. Grabbing a firebrand, he chucked it at the looming monstrosity and scrabbled behind the bonfires.

It flinched, then its ponderous bulk rose up to seize him over the top of the flames. But Gonji used them as a fiery rampart, moving in as close as he could stand to the fierce heat. He whirled his halberd in a pattern that nearly unhinged one of the searching pincers. It jerked aside, and the samurai’s sudden bold foray around one bonfire’s edge opened a line to its thorax.

Gonji lunged forward to full extension, but the halberd’s spear-point caught only air as the monster leaned away. Its snapping mandibles nearly snared the pole-arm’s shaft as it riposted viciously. Gonji fell back behind the bonfires again, cursing his poor thrust.

The Moonspinner ripped a hitching rail from its cradle and cast it toward him with unsettling intelligent intent. The post crashed down amid the flames, sending sparks coruscating over the snows. Then it bent forward and, with a further eerie display of sentience, began shoveling snow forward with both claws. In seconds one bonfire was hissing out in steaming ruin.

The hollow-eyed death’s-head, its ragged-edged mouth working all the while, kept Gonji at bay as it worked with waxing frenzy upon seeing its success. The samurai made two useless attacking gestures, intending to arouse it into resuming the chase. He picked up a flambeau from the second fire, shook it at the monster’s face in a gesture of defiance.

It started to move toward him again as it saw him draw away from the second fire and back toward the windmill.

And then Tora kicked free of the stable and pounded up to the killing ground.

“Not now, stupid beast!”

A mixture of primitive fear, Gonji’s peril, and his own enjoyment of battle had driven Tora to join with his master. The steed circled in front of the bonfire, bolting, rearing, flailing.

The Moonspinner eyed the new, larger quarry and lumbered after it.

Gonji swore and took after the enormous creature with a vengeance, seeing his plan in collapse, his only hope of conveyance about to become an appetizer.

Tora slowed eerily as he entered the webwork, moving through ever-darkening clouds of fever-mist, from Gonji’s point of view. Curtain after curtain of inky silk coated the struggling horse until finally, twisting in a supernaturally slow ballet, Tora hung nearly upside down in the night air. Kicking and shrieking, he sank gradually groundward, as if suspended in quicksand.

The monster stopped and reared over him. Something licked out of its mouth and seized an end of the webbing. With a strange reverse motion, it pulled the strands of web toward it, Tora compelled to draw ever nearer the dripping mandibles, his binding sac swaying like the subject of a snake charmer.

Gonji’s full-circle halberd slash parted one of the creature’s legs at the bottom joint.

The Moonspinner emitted an unearthly cry and stopped reeling in Tora. It made a motion as if to climb the air itself, lost its balance, and nearly fell back upon the samurai.

Gonji slipped and fell, gathered himself and sprinted back toward the bonfire, where he scooped up another firebrand without pausing. The pain-maddened monster, maimed now, barreled after him with a now-ungainly stride.

Gonji kicked open the door at the base of the windmill. Laughing with insane glee, he bounded across the straw- and chaff-strewn floor in three strides. Rounding the millwheel, he started up the spiral staircase that clung to the wall all the way to the windmill’s cap.

Six steps up, he was knocked to one knee by the impact of the Moonspinner’s leap onto the side of the ancient structure. Wood cracked and masonry spilled. The shaft and gearing that rose from wheel to cap began to creak as the monster’s progress nudged the great vanes into a half turn. Gonji almost dropped the flambeau, his heart skipping a beat.

Not yet.

He scrabbled up the stairs, saw the great bulk through a window on the next turn. He mounted the stair to where the abdomen of the beast moved by, exposed. He set down the torch and lanced the creature with a thrust that sent it clawing sideways for a new purchase, screaming in pain.

Gonji grimaced to see the green ooze that coated the halberd’s point. But then he was swinging wildly at an out-of-reach pincer that extended through another aperture to grasp the great wheel’s shaft, scoring it horizontally. The monster’s savage instinct was simply to destroy him now by any means. The torchlight seemed to guide its thrashings.

Gonji wedged the torch into the iron railing. He bounded upward again as the structure of the windmill shook from the Moonspinner’s pummeling without.

He was so intent on watching for glimpses of the beast through the windows that he nearly tripped over the crouched figure of Luna Invierno.

“Moon!” Gonji gasped, heart hammering. “What the—”

“I presume you have a plan here,” Moon said matter-of-factly.

Gonji bobbed his head. The monster began gnawing at a window framework, gouging it into broad roundness in seconds.

“Torch the windmill, what else?” the samurai responded.

“As I thought.”

“I have to get it higher.” He started up the steps.

“Did it never occur to you that all it has to do is leap down from the wall?”

“I’ve got straw piled all around the base. It should go up pretty fast,” Gonji shot back.

“Bah—a fool’s wish,” Moon said. He produced a coiled rope. Tearing free a rusted section of iron railing, he went on: “Anger it—get it to reach in again.”

Gonji scratched his itching beard a moment, then nodded and scampered up to where the Moonspinner had turned the window into an archway.

Silently gliding up the last few steps with his back against the wall, he timed his movement, whirling the halberd around and down. His blow cracked the end off a mandible as it lay on the sill. The creature hissed, its evil proboscis licking in reactively. Gonji lashed at it but missed.

The monster adjusted its position again, the outer shell of the windmill crackling under the stress as if assaulted by a hailstorm. Gonji climbed past the window. Just overhead now was the boardwalk around the great gear assembly in the cap.

A powerful pincer reached through the enlarged window, snapping about randomly. On the stair below, Moon whirled the iron bar at the end of his rope and tossed it up. His aim was true. The heavy end acted like a grapple, snaking around the pincer arm and binding it.

“Here,” Moon called out, tossing up the coiled rope. Gonji caught it on the halberd shaft and yanked it in.

“Secure it up there.”

The pincer’s flailings nearly pulled him off balance. He gave the rope more slack and took the stairs by threes until he had gained the windmill’s cap. Muttering to himself, he entangled the rope in the huge gear-work.

Gonji stood back a pace. The hissing behind him so startled him that he dropped the halberd to the boards. The Moonspinner leered in through a cap window. Its proboscis darted in at him. His evading leap carried him off the boardwalk and onto the horizontal shaft that suspended the propeller vanes. Sixty feet of empty air lay beneath him.

Balancing, he leaped back straight at the monster’s horrid face, drawing the Sagami from its harness and sidestepping in the same motion.

The next lick of the proboscis was its last, the Sagami’s razor edge slicing off its end. The creature’s keening cry made Gonji wince.

Gathering up the halberd, he replaced the katana at his back. The windmill began to shudder violently as the Moonspinner struggled against the rope that tethered its claw.

Gonji made one errant pass at the monster’s horn-shaped, black-fire eyes as it wrestled the rope with terrifying contortions. Then he smelled the smoke.

Moon had set the windmill afire. The mill floor was already ablaze, the flames licking up the walls. Gonji’s own trap had been set against him.

He cast about futilely for a second or two, then calmed himself. He ran to the opposite window, which overlooked the bonfire, the tilting ground of moments ago. Tora, lying on his side, kicked uselessly at the black cocoon.

More immediately below: the long hind body segment of the Moonspinner, clawing and pushing; and one of the windmill vanes.

Gonji exhaled a determined breath, feeling the rising heat waves at his heels. Throwing the halberd as far from the burning windmill as he could, he poised in the window, praying to the kami of good fortune that the monster wouldn’t free itself. Better to die in the leap.

He launched himself from the sill, caught one edge of the vane, his breath jarred from his lungs. But the vane began to shred from his weight, and he slid down the framework. The shaft turned slowly, lowering him even more. Now he neared the struggling bulk of the monster’s lower half. His flesh crawled at the anticipation of its imminent touch.

When he brushed the shrieking monster’s smooth back carapace, he could stand no more. He pushed off and landed in the snow, his back flaring with pain as he rolled hard over the harnessed daisho.

But he was on his feet now. Free. And alive.

He looked up at the blazing windmill. The flames had reached the cap now and engulfed it. Infernal tongues belched from the windows. The monster’s frenzied efforts still had not freed it.

He found his halberd and took up a torch from the bonfire. He ran to Tora, finding his left ankle sore from the fall but paying it little heed.

“Tora—hold still!” he cried. “Easy, I’m not going to hurt you.” He burned the terrified animal out of its restraining cocoon, had some difficulty steadying him, and could not mount until Tora had become reoriented. Rearing, nostrils and eyes flaring against the patches of webbing that still clung, Tora at last allowed his master to take to the saddle.

They made slow progress at first as Gonji burned them a path through the magical webwork. But then the flames spread, preceding them, and all at once Gonji could see into the distance. Into the clear, cold night air. An invigorating chill swept through him as the wind poured through the widening hole.

He wheeled and looked back. The Moonspinner had been burned free of the windmill, losing its claw in the flame’s progress. It scrambled about the base of the fuming windmill in mindless insect terror on its surviving appendages. Then it made two unsuccessful leaps skyward before finally catching the underside of the web and laboriously working its way upward, dangling upside down.

Gonji remembered his bow and quiver and took the opportunity to ride back and collect them, though he had to dismount and pick them up on foot, for Tora would not approach the blazing windmill.

They rode off a hundred paces, and Gonji felt a lunatic thrill to see the awesome spectacle of the flames racing up the webbing with volcanic fury. It was a sight like none he had ever seen. The relentless fire raged through the network in beautiful patterns of heavenly tracery. An ephemeral work of art to please the sky kami. The searching flames at last caught up with the diminishing figure of the Moonspinner, flaring it incandescent. It fell to earth on an angular path, like a shooting star. Gonji gasped to see its supernatural effulgence as it grew in his vision with the amazing speed caused by the weird spatial distortion. For an instant he feared it would engulf him, then it crashed into the snow before the roiling windmill with a shower of sparks and steam.

With a bellow of triumph Gonji dismissed all thought of it to concentrate on the new problem: the mercenary troop on the hills, massing at the east end of the road to meet him. Their distance, he knew, was an illusion; they could be upon him in seconds.

They would have to catch him. His way lay westward; he would not abandon his course over the temporary inconvenience of a monster insect and an army of cutthroats.

Gonji laughed aloud to hear his own thoughts. It was a display he would not have liked others to observe, least of all his father, Old Todo. But his Norwegian mother would have appreciated it. It was the sometimes uncontrollable Western child part of him. He permitted it a moment to breathe and stretch.

Tora kicked up snow as they passed the shriveling carcass of the Moonspinner. Gonji had time for a momentary glimpse of the orange dart of bright flame that pierced the heart of the moon—a sight to inspire waka poetry in some future time of serene reflection. Then he focused on the road ahead. The road to Barbaso. A ribbon in the hills miles away, in a normal spatial framework.

He gained the gentle slopes in a minute’s ride. Several mercenaries angled down and closed in from both sides to snare him. The main force charged from behind.

At full gallop, he nocked an arrow and drew back on his longbow, the flames he’d left behind now rekindled in the depths of his dark eyes.

* * * *

The leader of the black knights gestured for his two comrades to remain at his side. His hand went thoughtfully to the shallow wound at his shoulder as he watched, with amazement, the whirlwind engagement on the hillock three hundred yards to the west.