by T. C. Rypel
“Is he dead?” she asked with surprising indifference.
Simon pondered the evil inhumanity the Farouche Clan had inculcated in these people before he nodded in reply. He felt a sharp pang of remorse over his own savagery, dispelled at once by the mockery of the demon spirit. He smothered its thoughts. The woman was speaking again.
“I won’t ask why,” she said softly. “You’re the lords of this province. Will you kill me now, too?”
Simon brushed it aside with a wry expression. “What’s your name?” he asked mechanically, annoyed to be recognized for his resemblance to the evil family, though it eased the burden of explanation.
“Faye,” she responded, her curiosity perked for the first time. “Faye Labossiere. Why do you ask? Am I to be your woman now?”
“You have a husband,” he said scornfully.
She chortled glumly. “Oui, and what of that?”
“Why do you dally with these vermin? That was the third man I’ve seen you with in this wood.”
Faye shrugged, uncertain of where he was leading. “Life is full of sorrow. We do what we must to fill up the days. Why do you question me like this? I’ve broken no laws. Your brother the sheriff himself once happened upon me when I—”
“And where was it that you last saw…my ‘brother’ the sheriff?” Simon rolled his shoulders, dark emotion coiling and uncoiling inside him. He half-turned away from her so that the moonlight would not reveal what was in his eyes.
“I—I speak of a night some weeks ago.”
“Oh. You are, are you not, from Lamorisse?” He trembled slightly.
“Oui.”
“I will ask you something now, and you will answer me truthfully—I will know if you lie. And then when you’ve answered, you will return to your husband, and forget everything about this night—your meeting with me, all that you’ve seen and heard and said, that mercenary who lies dead. You will forget it all, as it is not your concern but only that of the Farouche Clan. If you dare breathe any of this to any other soul, I shall come to you in the night and kill you. Do you understand?”
“Oui, milord,” Faye breathed fearfully.
“Tell me what you know of the present whereabouts of the woman named Claire Dejordy.”
Faye swallowed, her eyes flashing as she sifted through her thoughts, her memories. “I…all that I know—truthfully, I swear—is that she vanished from Lamorisse. Weeks—months ago, now, it must be. That is all I know. I swear it.”
Simon absorbed her words with a sense of finality, of doom, of mounting vengefulness. It must be true. So carefully had he searched, choosing his informants, confronting them with the menace of his presence, charging them under pain of grisly death…Each had told him the same thing. There was no discernible reason for them to lie. Indeed, they’d been eager to cooperate with a Farouche.
Claire Dejordy was gone.
Simon ground his teeth, not hearing the woman as she spoke again. Cajoling words, entreating him to leave her unharmed.
He dismissed her angrily, watching her hurry off along the hedgerows, casting terrified looks over her hood-mantled shoulder. He heard—felt—apprehended the taunting laughter of the energumen again. It dared not assail thoughts of Claire; something about her—Simon’s love for her—caused it to wither, muted its mockery.
But now the imprisoned soul was at once rejoicing in Simon’s despair and—more despicably by far—sharing in his yearning for his lost love.
He cursed and slapped himself stingingly across the face, knowing well the creature’s loathing of discomfort. Then he knelt and, drawing a dirk from his boot, performed the act of mortification that his companions found so unsettling. He began to cut himself. On the arms, on the face. Pausing before each keen, cleansing jab of the knife’s point to relish the dreadful, helpless agony of the demon spirit. Its hatred of pain drove it deep inside; it dwindled into the nuclear fastness of their joint being to which it always repaired, giving him surcease of its presence until such time as it could stand no more the bitter loneliness of its nameless state.
He would be free of it for a mercifully long time, he knew. For though he was ravenously hungry, he would fast until he could stand no more, until his ribs protruded from withered skin. Keeping the demon too weakened to beg or to curse or taunt. Then, when he must replenish his strength with food, he would wash it down with a river of wine, as had become his wont.
Thus had Simon’s life become—an endless round of perverse actions designed to anguish the creature, though they were in tantalizing proximity to its own kin.
Sniffing into the wind, Simon caught the scent of the approaching party long before he heard them. A cavalry column, it seemed. The useless knights of Duke Cordell de Plancy—impotent in the thrall of the dark powers that had seized control—riding in escort of a fiacre.
He took to shadow as the party approached. Noting that he had caught sight of several predatory animals during the night, he decided it best that he take to horse and return to the higher ground of the mountain foothills.
Even the hawks and jackals could be suspected of unholy converse with the demons that haunted Burgundy.
* * * *
Simon Sardonis had fought his way through the hellish winter gauntlet that had claimed most of the samurai’s company. Disappointed, betrayed by their cowardly retreat at first, he had come to his senses and realized that Gonji would return. Must return. The samurai’s deep-seated perception of duty as a divinely compelling force would see to that.
And thus fortified, Simon survived. He was unsure of how, having taken many wounds in the combat, at last accepting with horror that he had been allowed to survive, granted a sadistic reprieve until such time as the demon-father Grimmolech would ensnare and confront him.
He lived as a fugitive in his own homeland, amid the plains and foothills of his violated, saintly mother and murdered father. He took his living from the land by fang and talon and goodly steel, keeping to the realm of shadow. His unearthly skills and instincts, the cunning of a lifetime’s evasion of the powers of evil, served him well.
By stages he renewed his acquaintance with the Burgundy of his monastic youth as well as that of the previous year. The year of Claire. He immersed himself in the fell atmosphere of the province, knowing that his nemesis, Grimmolech, and the demon’s wicked sons, were likewise aware of him. They seemed unhurried about their pursuit, raising no general alarm. It was almost as if they expected him to surrender willingly. To submit to their wish to have their nameless kin, which he bore like a canker, delivered into unholy alliance with them.
His chief concern was for Claire’s safety. It was unthinkable that her importance to him might be discovered. The terror of that thought shaped his nightmares during the remaining weeks of the alien winter that had been conjured in Burgundy. He knew he dared not approach Lamorisse until he was certain of his situation.
He traced the energumen’s brothers by their workings. A simple matter, as it happened, in view of the ease with which they’d taken over all affairs of state: The boorish Serge was now marshal of the entire central plain; the wily Rene, minister of commerce, whose shape-shifting ability in the full of the moon and penchant for terrorism rivaled those of Grimmolech himself, was feared by all who had need of the forest roads; Lyle, a shire-reeve—whose true name, Simon knew, was Belial—lurked in the forests of the Alpine regions, ever surrounded by his cohort of predatory beasts, himself the most predatory of the lot; Roman had become chief tax assessor and special delegate to the duke, but his primary concern was the refinement of the black arts of his father; and the lustful Blaise, whose carnal appetites and amazing animal magnetism had cast him as a prodigious seducer and a being of indomitable will, had insinuated himself into the palace at Dijon itself. He had somehow conspired to marry the Marchioness Aimee, daughter of the Grand Seigneur de Plancy.
Simon lived an ascetic life, denying himself all comforts, fasting, spending days and nights in prayerful meditation, exposing himself to extremes of cold. His intent was three-fold: He would purify his body and thereby sharpen his senses for the conflict to come; he would mortify himself to atone for his sins; and he would confound and torment the energumen, that parasitic being within him, who tortured his own bitter life.
For a long time after his carefully structured seclusion had begun, Simon tried not to think of Claire Dejordy, fearing that the energumen might somehow convey knowledge of her to its fellows or that his thoughts themselves might mystically wend their way to the evil wardens of this troubled land.
It was when the lycanthropic spirit discovered Simon’s wish and began to call out Claire’s name while he slept, or while he performed indelicate bodily functions, that the accursed fugitive enhanced his mortifications with the practice of self-inflicted wounds.
As he adjusted to his severe, hermetic life and went about his clandestine observations in Burgundy, Simon also was forced to deal with the ever-present specter of the full-moon transformations. By the end of his second week in the province, the moon was nearing her ripeness, and he had yet to find suitable refuge wherein he might be safely removed from any human lives the night the demon held full sway.
And there was a second, equally pressing concern: He was sure the creature would seek out its father straightaway once it was in power. Simon’s soul would then only watch helplessly as he was delivered into the Farouche Clan’s infernal hands.
On the day before the full of the moon, he retired to the eastern border of France—the Alpine frontier whose rugged peaks stood between the French and the Holy Roman Empire. Casting about in futility for much of the day, he at last happened upon a deep, long-abandoned well that seemed his only hope of sanctuary.
At first the notion he entertained seemed absurd. But the well was deep and narrow, and its steep sides were coated with moss and slime and ice.
At length he threw up his hands, at a loss for any other reasonable plan, and, as evening shadows settled over the snowy, pine-scented land, he cast a prayer up to heaven and dropped feet-first into the well’s murky depths.
The energumen mocked him in his pathetic effort at isolating its unleashed ravings, but as he settled into the muck at the bottom of the well, its waxing despair perked his own spirit. Simon’s human shoulders were nearly wedged into the tight confines, and he knew what this boded for the near doubling in size his form would soon undergo.
Night gradually descended, the moon rising in rounded fullness. Simon suffered the agonizing birthing of the Beast—an hour-long ordeal of erupting lycanthropy. He was never certain whether it was the heady taste of freedom or a second possessing demon-spirit that caused the madness of the cohabiting soul during those violent full-moon episodes. He always preferred to interpret it as the latter, lest anyone call him the possessed. But on that well-bound night, the monstrous golden creature spewed its wrath with a frustration Simon had seldom seen before, though he had subjected it to a wide assortment of daunting ploys during full moons past.
The werewolf howled maniacally in its dashed hopes at venting its bloodlust. It called its father’s name repeatedly up the tunneled shaft to the distant surface. When it had worked its arms over its head at last, shoulders rubbed raw and fur matted with blood and slime, it began to claw desperately toward the circle of freedom high above. Frosted earth, masonry and stone exploded amidst its thrashings. Its talons were broken and caked with mud. But despite its prodigious strength, it could gain no hand- or foothold. In the end it slumped back into the muck to whimper and curse and rage its promises of vengeance.
The morning reversion presently returning his human form, Simon succumbed to exhaustion and relief. He slept for a time, then was awakened by sounds unmistakably, alarmingly—human. He strained to make out the forms in the far-off disk of light, his red-veined eyes watering and befouled with dirt. He could see heads peering down, knowing they would not be able to see him in the darkened well.
Deliberating a moment as they called down to him in the patois of the region, realizing that these might be his enemies, he finally surrendered to the reality of the situation: He had to get out somehow, and if they were foes, then better to face them—whatever their nature or number—than be destroyed like a sewer rat.
A rope was sent down. Simon allowed himself to be drawn up. He was weaponless. He scanned their number and armament first—six surly and suspicious brigands sporting muskets and pistols, longbows and blades. Their dress was rugged; their gear, a motley array adopted for its suitability to mountain living. Mountain men. Hunters. And Andre…
Uncle Andre.
He remembered the face, the voice that had come to cheer him with its smiling promises of reunion during those bewildering youthful years Simon spent imprisoned at the monastery. The liquid blue eyes whose sadness had always left him with the distinct impression that the voice had lied. The tall, wiry frame, much like Simon’s own. The large, strong, weathered hands that examined his wounds, the tatters of his garb.
Simon found himself smiling. It was, all things considered, a major victory over the confounding powers of darkness. He was reunited with Uncle Andre, brother of his murdered father.
His sole living blood relation.
* * * *
“Things happened to those who made trouble for the Farouche,” Uncle Andre was saying as he stirred a thick, pungent ragout.
Simon studied the appointments of the mountain cave. Lambent firelight flickered over the walls, the burnished faces of the hardy mountain dwellers. The stuffed wall niches and crowded corners of the cave, mounded high with supplies and bundled equipment and outfitted with an assortment of scarred weaponry, bespoke its longtime use as both a lair and a base of surreptitious operations.
He felt, for the first time in years, at home among these denizens of his homeland. They were his countrymen, his kin. They shared his faith and his earnest desire to rid France of the evil growth that had begun to devour it. It was a strange, welcome feeling, this intoxication of belonging, enhanced by the work of the wine, as he sat on a rough-hewn tabouret and sipped from a bejeweled goblet—souvenir of some foray against a corrupt noble.
“Farouche,” his uncle repeated with disdain, spitting as if to scour his mouth from the taste of the name. “Even their very name speaks to their savagery. They bring us foul sorcery from their demonic world, you know. Things prowl the forests that ought not to live among men. When we saw that—we hunting folk, we did something about it. The king forgot about Burgundy—or feared it. And the Grand Seigneur threw in his lot with ‘em. So we little people fought back. Pretty soon hunting was outlawed. That god-cursed shire-reeve, Lyle Farouche—he made poaching a crime punishable by death, he did. Poaching. Since when is it poaching to shoot the innards out of a werewolf? Eh…begging your pardon, nephew. I mean, of course, evil werewolves, non?”
Simon smiled, unoffended at such an intimation, feeling no discomfort at the open mention of his curse, for the first time ever among men. It was a rare and wonderful experience that actually caused him to feel something of the reveling in his potential power that Gonji had always urged him to consider.
“They do everything they can to keep the people down,” the old trapper Pierre was saying now. “You know—break their spirits. Seems they change the official regional religion every fortnight or so. First we’re Catholic, then the Huguenots have it right, then we’re Catholic again for a spell—the cures of every parish are like weathercocks anymore. Them that are still alive…”
“Oui,” Andre added, “but most of them are too scared to do anything about it. They send word…to the king, to the bish
op, God knows where else. No one knows whether news of the territory ever leaves. We’re not bothered much up here, though. I don’t think the Farouche are too eager to tangle with the Empire. Not till they’ve consolidated their power, or whatever they’re planning.”
“Of course not,” Simon advanced. “The Empire represents power backed by righteous faith.”
“Maybe,” Andre allowed. He sipped from the stew ladle, then cast in another pinch of seasoning. “Even the goddamn soldiery supports the Farouche Clan. It’s like—like Burgundy is another country. An antagonist to France…”
“People cower in their homes. Afraid of the night,” Pierre observed glumly. “Women and children disappear. For what reason they’re taken, only Satan himself knows…God knows,” he appended, crossing himself and nodding somberly, “and He’ll visit His wrath on ‘em.”
“He already has—we’re it,” Uncle Andre said, evoking a hearty laugh full of staunch brotherhood.
Wine cups and skins and bottles were tipped in toast, and Simon’s goblet was refilled. His eyes brimmed and his head spun with the rapidly spreading warmth. He was unused to drinking, fearful of the lost control that accompanied it; yet he was loath to commit any act that might disaffect him with these spirited companions. And soon, as he had noted when Gonji had once cajoled him into a tilt with a rum cup during their crossing of the sea, the demon spirit inside him was lulled to sleep.
He was mercifully freed of its presence and its antagonizing thoughts.
Andre served the stew. Two men pulled out a board and playing pieces and pursued a game of tric-trac while they ate. There was contented banter for a time, Simon’s uncle plying him gently for news of his legendary meanderings, steering the conversation to more pleasant subjects when it seemed he grew uneasy.
