by T. C. Rypel
Cursing, kicking their steeds into a wild charge, they found that they could not outdistance their winged attackers. The gargoyles cried out in triumph, as one of Moreau’s escorts was struck, shrieking, by a crossbow bolt, and he tumbled from his mount.
The creatures now tightened their circling attack, spiraling down in a maneuver that kept the humans in easy firing range.
Yvonne shouted for them to halt and tend to the fallen warrior. Moreau was torn between desperate flight and compassion, the former shamefully tugging at him harder. But only Yvonne had dismounted to lend aid. The rest all broke for cover.
“Moreau—get Guy off the road, for God’s sake!” Yvonne bellowed.
Moreau nodded and swallowed hard as he caught sight of the bleak barricade of the thickening tree lines at either hand. There was no sense of sanctuary in the forest’s gathering darkness.
Two bolts whizzed down. One struck Guy’s mount in the hindquarters. The animal whinnied and bucked, throwing the yelping boy backward. Guy hit the ground and scrambled to his feet at once, limping. Electrified into action by his son’s plight, Moreau scooped him up from the saddle and broke for the forest murk, heedless of fear now.
“Moreau!” came the cry behind him.
There was a scream. The other rebel, who had doubled back to Yvonne, was struck in the thigh by a quarrel.
“Get out of here—he’s dead!” Yvonne yelled, indicating their downed companion. She regained her steed’s saddle and galloped for the trees. The wounded man followed, gasping in pain, stanching the blood that lapped from his upper leg.
They rejoined Jacques and Guy and pounded into the wooded fastness.
“There’s a chapel—” Yvonne cried breathlessly. “—that way—outside the village—a chapel with a graveyard.”
They rode for it with all good haste, hearing the eager cries of the winged hunters who kept pace above the treetops, though they could not be seen. Now and again a leathery bat-wing would flash across a ragged patch of moonlit night sky.
Yvonne led them on an uncertain, tortuous path, sometimes quitting the trail for a rough ride over rooted clumps and treacherous underbrush. She reined in once, then sent up a shout of thanks: Her memory was vindicated; the chapel loomed before them in a large clearing, the headstones of the cemetery eerily limned in the bulbous moon’s jaundiced glow.
But they’d have to cross the clearing, and their foes were aware of their intention. Two gargoyles broke from their fellows and streaked for the chapel spire ahead.
“Let’s go! Split up. Don’t give them a good target—wait!” Yvonne halted them again.
First she saw it, then they all did. A huge, black slithering form, waist-high to a woodsman. Sinuous and scaly, its locomotion making their skin crawl. And it was long. Endlessly long.
The great serpent that had caught Simon Sardonis helplessly in its coils now cut a swath across the forest floor, crushing foliage in its directed path toward the chapel. It would intercept their own.
“Let’s get out of here,” Moreau commanded.
“Non!” Yvonne shouted back. “I’m tired of running. We need a defensible position. Out of this forest. They own the forest. God knows what else lies in wait here. Take Guy that way—wide around the serpent. Edouard—can you fight?”
The stricken rebel assented dazedly, sweat droplets pouring off his chin.
“Go!”
Moreau clutched his whimpering son before him on the saddle. The next several moments were a blur to him. He heard gunshots, the clacking of crossbows. The horrible sibilance of the enormous snake, and then its hideous sight—as it rose up out of the churned earth, reconnoitering, and then bore down on the pair who covered the escape of Jacques and Guy.
“Papa—I’m afraid!” Guy called out, sobbing.
“We’ve got to reach the church. We’ll be safe there.”
“I’m afraid of those devils!” Guy’s voice hitched with tears and the jolting action of the ride.
“The church,” Jacques assured. “They’ll fear the church.”
They crossed the graveyard and tumbled from the snorting horse’s saddle, gaining the side door to the nave in a desperate, stumbling run. Moreau pushed Guy with one hand and carried his rapier in the other. A crossbow bolt from a screeching gargoyle struck the lintel above their heads. Guy screamed and grabbed his father tightly about the waist.
The door flung open—a rail-thin old country cure admitted them.
“Hurry, my son,” the priest said, slamming the door. He was half dressed, his clerical collar undone, eyes still tight with interrupted sleep, hair pressed in a tangle.
“I have seen such monsters before,” the priest said fretfully. “Heard them. The villagers have exchanged shot with them. But they have never attacked the chapel before.”
“They grow bolder, mon pere,” Moreau replied.
Moreau was more deeply disturbed now, suddenly wondering whether they’d been set upon him personally, to torment his craven soul.
A rose window burst as a quarrel sleekly lanced through and embedded in the pine flooring. Guy screamed again.
“Courage, little man,” the old priest told Guy. “Lie down there beside the altar. God will protect you. You, monsieur—help me place the crucifixes at the windows while I anoint them with holy water. Come now. We haven’t time to waste on fear!”
Moreau stumbled through the placing of the sacramentals, wondering what good their spiritual efficacy would do against the all-too-tangible horrors outside. He helped the cure light candles, then absently charged the two pistols he scarcely remembered bearing, as he sat beside his trembling son.
At least the boy had stopped crying. He was kneeling on a prie-dieu, clutching a small wooden crucifix to his breast and whispering an infantile prayer of protection against evil that his mother had taught him.
“That’s good, Guy,” Jacques told him. “You just keep repeating Mama’s prayer. We must be strong…” He pondered the wisdom a moment before deciding to hand Guy one of the pistols. “You know how to shoot this, right? Use both hands. Aim carefully. The pull is very heavy. You’re a Wunderknecht now, n’est-ce pas?” He smiled, then sighed, a somber set to his face. “Guy, I—”
“Monsieur—a moment,” the priest whispered harshly from a window.
Moreau joined him.
“May God have mercy on their brave souls,” the cure intoned.
Outside in the darkness there sounded a terrible male scream of anguish. They saw flapping movement. A frenzy of unnaturally hideous wings. Heard Yvonne’s desperate bellow of defiance. Then her own scream. Moreau winced, as he could see her now. Two gargoyles struggled with her on the ground, piping shrill sounds at her. There was a wild flash of valiant steel—
One of the creatures keened a piercing note and lurched backward, clutching at its belly. The other also drew back. It seemed that Yvonne was rising, but there was something unnerving about her gait as she strove to run from the cemetery toward the chapel.
And then two more gargoyles swooped down at her, joining their monstrous kin.
Abruptly, Yvonne was forgotten—
The watching men gasped in horror and fell back from the window. The huge slithering mass of the serpent coiled about the circumference of the chapel as if it would crush the walls themselves. Its shining back oozed past the sill, carrying an oily rodent-like stench mixed with the smell of plowed earth.
A gray gelding cried out as it was swarmed over, out in the yard. A bacchanalia of hellish feasting ensued in the churchyard, as the gargoyles slaked their unholy thirst and hunger on the horse.
Moreau grimaced and whined a pitiful note, grabbing the priest’s arm. He looked back to his wide-eyed boy.
“Father…s’il vous plait—say a prayer for my coward’s soul. I—”
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br /> “Faith, my son,” the cure breathed, grasping Moreau’s other arm. “Muster your faith. In that alone is there deliverance from these fiends. That…and your goodly weapons. Give me something to use, my son.”
Moreau handed the old priest his sword and squeezed his own moist fists about the rough, knurled hand grips of his pistols. His creeping fear of tight spaces began to eat at him as he listened to the scraping of the serpent’s undulating mass against the chapel’s creaking outer walls.
Faith…
Moreau peered over at Guy, who was staring back with eyes full of childlike faith in the dim light of a votive candle.
“Wait,” the wiry and wizened priest said, scowling at the rapier Moreau had handed him. He tossed it aside.
At once he hurried into the sacristy. When he returned, Moreau was strangely cheered to see the infantryman’s pike and sturdy broadsword the old holy man brandished with a surprising deftness and a self-satisfied snarl.
“Weapons of old temper and substance…” he said. “Now we are ready.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
South of Burgundy, the French band led by Armand Perigor and Sgt. Carlos Orozco began to encounter resistance as their journey outdistanced Perigor’s influence.
They’d already had one firefight with a small detachment of the French king’s cavalry, who took a dim view of the free company that ruddled over the roads of their territory with Corbeau’s heavy ordnance in tow.
Now the king of France, blind to the horrors supposedly inflicted on superstitious peasants by some fanciful enemies from another world, would also be seeking to stamp out these “revolutionary” brigands, Gonji’s Knights of Wonder.
“Shit, Armand,” Brett Jarret complained, “have you given thought to how we’re going to get out of Burgundy with this stuff? Or even with our worthless skins?”
“We’ll have to abandon the cannon, obviously, eh, Corbeau?”
The Crow shrugged resignedly.
Normand Gareau chuckled dryly and looked at Orozco. “I suppose you gentlemen have considered that it might all be academic once…we’ve seen things through.”
Grim silence accompanied the observation.
“I just wish we’d get a chance to try these crazy guns of yours,” Orozco said at length. “I could use a good explosion or two. I’ve got this itch…”
“Perhaps you should have stayed back with Jenny Giguere,” Corbeau replied. “You seem to be itching ever since you met her.”
Orozco scowled at him, and one or two men fell to gibing the sergeant.
But now the Saone River was in view, and each warrior drifted into private reverie, wondering whether this placid clime could indeed mark the same place where they’d faced the demonic foes who’d hit them during that freakish snowstorm of the previous winter.
* * * *
Gonji executed a dreamlike, balletic turn, the Sagami held in horizontal high guard.
Seven men lay dead about him. But he knew one more was somewhere about the grounds of the springhouse, for the blow had not killed him. The lowing of the wandering cattle made it impossible to detect the foe’s location by sound. So Gonji took to cover and stalked his foe on foot. He was not long in finding him.
The brigand in pikeman’s pot and cavalry jack lurched out from behind a dray and leveled his pistol at Gonji from twenty paces. Gonji tilted his katana downward across the front of his body.
The wounded Farouche adventurer sneered painfully and pressed at his riven side. His pistol wavered in a blood-dripping grip.
“Looks like a standoff,” Gonji said evenly, slowly lowering his blade to his side.
The man’s eyes widened. He gazed at Gonji as if the samurai had sprouted horns.
“You—you’re crazy, you slant-eyed bastard!”
His quaking arm pushed forward preparatory to the pistol’s barking shot.
But Gonji reacted to the labored movement. He darted laterally out of the line of fire and in the same motion drew a poisoned ninja dart from his boot. The dart hissed through the space between them and pierced the man’s trousered thigh as the lead ball split wood on the springhouse wall beside Gonji.
Gonji sprang forward—unnecessary…the brigand trembled with the paralysis that preceded death. The samurai exhaled a sharp breath, snapping his sword to clear the blood grooves, then relaxing and cleansing the blade on a horse blanket. He replaced the katana with a sharp two-step motion, cupping his lacquered scabbard with his left hand and drawing the dull forte of the storied blade through thumb and forefinger, gliding the blade point, edge heavenward, down into its place of readiness.
He went to the springhouse and slaked his thirst with the crisp, cool water. Then, grimly ascertaining that the farm family were all beyond assistance, Gonji tended to his horse. He watered the black mare and spoke calmingly to her—she was uneasy, still snorting and champing with battle tension. At length he climbed aboard Nichi, patted her affectionately, and took up the chase again.
Unlimbering his longbow and laying it across the saddle, Gonji left behind the spoor of the brigands he’d surprised and killed. They’d been a poor fighting lot, incompetent. It had been but a brief interlude in his pursuit of the crossbow-wielding flight of gargoyles.
They were his primary targets, for the nonce. He’d seen first-hand the abominations committed by those winged vermin who filled him with loathing and vengeful fury.
* * * *
Jacques Moreau was sweating heavily and his hands were numb and clammy as he knelt on one knee beside his son.
“Guy…listen, I—” He swallowed back the lump in his throat. “I want to explain to you something that…something that’s bothered your pere for a long time. You see, I am not the great hero you seem to think. I never was. I ran away from a great battle once, when I was in the service of the king. A mighty exchange of bowshot. Arrows like a rain of death from the sky. Something happened, inside me. I became afraid, you see, all at once…So I ran…No one ever found out, so I thought I got away with it. But I didn’t really. Do you know what I mean?”
The boy’s gaze was filled with wonder, and he nodded slowly. Moreau wasn’t sure whether the moistness brimming Guy’s eyes evinced fear or resentment or simple disappointment.
His voice cracked as he went on. “I was afraid then. And I’ve been afraid since. Do you remember when you fell down that hole, when we were out falconing with the Richards? You were little then. Not the big brave fellow you are now. You cried—remember? You slid down and couldn’t get out. And you were calling for your pere to come save you—”
“You pulled me out,” Guy said softly.
“Non. I did not. I was afraid again. I’ve always feared tight, small spaces. I couldn’t find in me the courage to go down after you. The hands that pulled you out were not mine. They were Monsieur Lavelle’s. Oh, I was there to hold you when you were drawn up. And you were too small and too…confused to know that it wasn’t I who had rescued you. But I knew. And it has always troubled me. You see…I always wanted to tell you. And now seems a good time. Because now I’m afraid in that same way again. I’m afraid that you’ll see your father a coward. And I’m going to do everything I can so that doesn’t happen. Do you understand?”
Guy nodded, very deliberately. “Will you stay with me?”
Moreau felt the stinging tears welling up in his own eyes now. “I will stay with you forever, my son. Nothing will ever take me from your side.”
They hugged each other tightly.
There followed a few moments of peaceful sharing. And then two stained-glass windows exploded inward at nearly the same instant, lethal crossbow missiles thunking into wood and masonry inside the chapel.
Guy screamed to see the satanic face of a gargoyle leering in through a shattered, wind-blown portal.
“You
may not enter this holy place!”
The old priest surged at the ghastly visage, broadsword held high in both hands. When he reached the window and slashed with all his might, the creature launched upward and soared away. Edged steel splintered the lacquered frame in its wake.
Moreau left Guy’s side. He shouted in warning. Another gargoyle had descended from the sky to aim its arbalest at the window. The priest cringed out of the way of the bolt that whizzed by and lodged in a splintered confessional door.
There was some comfort in seeing how the gargoyles hissed and spat when they caught sight of the hanging and propped crucifixes. They were indeed thus far denied entrance, perhaps by dint of the arrayed sacramentals and blessed objects, or by their innate superstitious fears. But their deadly missiles were not barred from the chapel’s sanctuary, and they were growing bolder, as if empowered anew by the waning faith of the refugees.
“Faith,” Moreau said to himself on a deep note of resolve.
He slunk along the wall to a broken window, turned suddenly along the frame to face the outer darkness and blasted his pistol at the nearest gargoyle.
Fiery pain accompanied the lead ball’s rocking impact as the creature fell from its low hover. Its fellows nattered in surprise and wrath. They brought their weapons into bead. A fusillade of bolts tattered the pews where Moreau had stood a second earlier.
“Faith, Father,” Moreau cried out as he frantically reloaded. “Faith and courage and the sting of righteous weapons—”
The cure summoned a weak smile from where he hunkered in the pews, squeezing the crucifix about his neck with one hand and the hilt of the sword in the other.
As Moreau spannered his wheel-lock, laughing with the rush of adrenaline that drove his fear before it, the great fanged head of the monster serpent appeared at the window nearest him.
