Gonji: The Soul Within the Steel: The Deathwind Trilogy, Book Two

by Rypel, T. C.

  Paolo nodded resolutely. “All right—rebellion, then,” he said to his companions. “Kill the invaders.”

  They mounted and surged into the twisting, narrow lanes, bloodlust in their eyes. Soon the revolt was joined for fair.

  Phlegor’s killing grounds were hastily established but effective in the early going. Pockets of mercenaries were lured into alleys and culvert lanes to be tripped up with ropes or blocked by debris, arrows and bolts raining down on them in their frenzy. Their armament was swiftly appropriated and used against other bands.

  Word of the revolt spread through the city, people closing their shops and sealing their homes against the upheaval. Confusion reigned. Some of the actual city militia began to wander out to investigate, unsure of whether to become involved. An alert plan for such a rebellion had been established, but no relay teams had spread the word that this was a sanctioned action by the council; yet the fighting was fierce, and it was spreading in both outreach and intensity.

  Soon there was open clashing of arms in the main streets. Screams could be heard from all points of the city.

  The turning came quickly. It began with the mercenary messenger who alerted Captain Sianno at the Llorm garrison. The captain turned out the skilled troops and sealed off the city gates against all traffic. The Llorm dragoons’ disciplined search methods, coupled with their hard-hitting tactics and superior firepower, soon turned the tide against the insurgents. The craftsmen’s inadequate weapons and numbers, and the shallowness of their planning, began to tell.

  Sianno deployed his dragoons in long lines of skirmishers in the broad avenues, infantry troops with arbalests climbing walls and roofs to establish high-ground dominance. The renegade element from the German Landsknechts, adroit with the pole-arm, plus bowmen and pistoliers, established solid defensive positions. Now mounted mercenaries were directed into a containing posture, sweeping across the city from east to west, surely and methodically, enveloping the rebels, containing them toward the center of the city again. Volleys of bowshot and pistol fire rooted the ambushers out of their killing grounds, some wisely seeking cover where it was to be found in houses, shops, and available niches; other unfortunates scrambled out into the streets to be slaughtered by Sianno’s positioned troops.

  The rout was on.

  * * * *

  Lorenz Gundersen pulled up to the stables just as Julian led his band of mercenaries away. The captain scanned him closely, recognizing Garth’s eldest son and, seeing no weapons, gestured to him with a head toss.

  “Get in your home and stay there,” the captain commanded. Lorenz tipped his hat with foppish grace and dismounted, entering the shop through the canopied portal as the troop thundered away to the east.

  The parlor was empty, and his father was not in any of the chambers. He was drawn to the soft scuffling sounds in the cellar. Descending warily into the damp enclosure, Lorenz saw his father seated on the trunk in the dim gray light. He was gripping the haft of his old broadsword with one thick hand, the other feeling along the cutting edge. A strange expression was set on the smith’s face, stony and grim.

  “What did they want?” Lorenz asked uneasily.

  Garth didn’t look up from the sword. “Gonji,” he said simply.

  Lorenz’s eyes shrank to slits. “To arrest him?”

  “Ja.”

  “What’s on your mind, Father? Will you, too, join in this madness?”

  “Kings can change whole lives, their own and others’,” Garth answered evasively. “Why can’t common people change their minds?”

  “Can Christians change their minds, where violence is concerned?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think our beliefs apply here. Anyway, I wasn’t speaking of my faith....”

  Lorenz watched him for a time. “All right,” he said finally, running up the steps to return moments later, strapping on his rapier. “Then maybe the time has come—let’s go out with the rest.” And then Lorenz was gone, leaving Garth to shift through his clashing thoughts, to examine his feelings.

  His sons were out in the violent streets. Wilfred was no doubt somewhere with Gonji, who was to be arrested. Garth held the sword before his eyes and stared at its dull sheen, his face twisting with the coiling of his innards. Then he flung it against the wall and slumped forward, burying his head in his hands.

  * * * *

  The criers had begun to call out the mandate in the streets: All citizens were ordered indoors until the rebellion was quelled.

  Vlad Dobroczy was among the first to hear the order.

  He knelt in a woodshop near the chapel, his sword resting against his knee, squinting through a chink in the shutter. He heard the chilling cry of the wyvern as it skirred past overhead, then strained to see the source of the growling, as of some monstrous dog, that accompanied the tattering hoofbeats that rushed through the postern gate.

  A long double column of mercenaries pounded through, escorting the barouche in which Mord had ridden out of the city the night before.

  And following the coach, bearing on its shoulder the most terrifying weapon Dobroczy had ever seen—a huge, spiked tree trunk—came the cretin giant, Tumo.

  * * * *

  Paolo rode at the head of twelve men, a mix of Gonji’s militia and Phlegor-trained craftsmen, who galloped frenetically back and forth through the southern sector, seeking escape from the seine of troops that methodically hemmed them in. They would pound toward the west, only to clatter to a halt at the massing of bowmen who readied their volley farther on. Swerving hard, faces betraying their terror of inevitable entrapment, they’d race madly to the east again, their way blocked just as menacingly by mounted pistoliers.

  “This way!” Paolo shouted at last in desperation, nodding to a long, sinuous walled alley, whose farther end could not be seen. “Down the lane and disperse—get under cover.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere—it’s every man for himself now,” Paolo yelled, belting his discharged pistol.

  They clumped into the lane, snaking through its turns, past barrels and reeking chamber pots, tools and hanging laundry. A horse stumbled in a gutter, slamming its rider against the sharp rock wall, leaving him stunned, his arm and face badly abraded. The horses shrilled and jostled as the other riders guided around him in a shuffling knot. They pushed off again, seeking shelter. Ever nearer to Provender Lane, the avenue they would soon intersect, which ended at the Inn, they knew their dire peril when they heard the clatter of hooves and shouts of command in an adjacent alley.

  They lost the race.

  Out of a branching alley just ahead, a band of mercenaries emerged, blocking their path, jamming their steeds flank-to-flank, swords and lances upraised in gauntleted fists. The Flemish brigands carried shields, which they linked in a warding wall. Their smiles were portentous, promising something somehow worse than a skirmish.

  The rebels yanked to a halt, appraising the enemy, and Paolo was about to wave them through the blockade when the formidable Salavar the Slayer turned into the alley to rein in at the front of his men. He sat aboard the great destrier, scowling at the rebels through the view-slit of his sallet; a shimmering apparition of death in the sultry heat waves, bedecked in his array of weapons.

  “Better get out of here,” Paolo whispered. “Better not get involved with—”

  And then behind them, blocking escape and riding up slowly and with a terrifying calm in his eyes, was Captain Julian Kel’Tekeli.

  “Welcome to the hunt, gentlemen....”

  A few of the men began to whine. Two scrambled down from their mounts, pleading for sanctuary, and pounded at the rear doors of dwellings lining the alley.

  “Get hold of yourselves!” Paolo shouted, seized by panic himself.

  A door was cracked opened for one of the frenzied rebels, but before the man could push inside, Julian drew a pistol and fired a shot that tore through his back. A woman screamed from inside the house and slammed the door. The rebels’ horses, startled by th
e echoing report of the pistol, whinnied and bucked, jolting men off their saddles.

  Julian and Salavar walked their horses toward the trapped band of twelve, the rest of the occupation troops reining back to watch.

  “We can—we can take them!” Paolo cried, wincing at Salavar’s spine-chilling smile. The Slayer drew and cocked two pistols and dropped the men on Paolo’s right and left. His comrades went down hard, the terrible screams of one of them shaking Paolo’s courage.

  A mounted rebel, maddened by desperation, charged Julian with drawn steel. The captain calmly emptied his other pistol at the rebel’s steed, which fell to its knees as the ball shattered its skull. The rider tumbled painfully onto the cobblestones, landing with a groan, nearly under the stamping hooves of Julian’s black charger.

  Then other rebels were quitting their saddles, some throwing down their weapons in surrender, as the pair of killers advanced. Others climbed the walls and facings of the houses in their mindless terror. Paolo watched one man’s head nearly disappear in the roaring, smoking discharge of Salavar’s arquebus; the shred-headed, crimson-spurting corpse was knocked from a wooden arch by the impact. Two other climbers, witnessing the sickening sight close at hand, fell prey to sudden paralysis and also lost their purchase. The last man had gained the top of the wall when Salavar’s feathered lance whistled through the air to skewer him through the lower back and burst through his belly.

  Julian had by now dismounted and was already withdrawing his saber from the body of the man whose dead horse had thrown him over.

  Paolo looked around him with a strangling fear. They were now six. At his harsh command they all dismounted and drew steel, splitting up to engage their terrible foes. Salavar belched a short laugh and swung his leg over the destrier’s crest, dropping lightly to ground. He yanked a battleaxe from its sheath and swung it in a wide arc, switching hands effortlessly, when it pleased him. He bore down on the three sweating rebels who engaged him with ashen faces. Without warning, he charged the nearest man, a metal-founder, who lost heart and twisted away, stumbling. Salavar ran him down with surprising speed, for his bulk, the two companions shrinking away, rather than lending aid. The axe’s cleaving twirl cut through flesh and sinew, rending eight inches deep into the screaming rebel’s torso. A second man—a Squire from the militia—turned to flee, but the milling horses blocked his way. The obstruction sealed his doom. The sweep of the razor-edged axe tore his head from his shoulders, in a grisly display of splattering blood and raggedly exposed vertebrae.

  The third rebel dropped his sword and fell to his knees, blubbering in terror and pleading with Salavar for mercy. The Slayer dropped the axe-head toward the earth and approached the broken-spirited rebel, who sobbed and threw away his kettle helmet. Seeing the lowered axe, the man experienced an instant of hope, babbled words of surrender. Salavar accepted it and bowed with cavalier grace, then swung his muscular leg viciously in a sweeping, stiff-legged kick that knocked the man flat.

  The battleaxe whizzed high over his head and down, ending in a horrible crunching of leather and flesh and bone that nearly divided the shrieking rebel in half at the waist....

  But Paolo had seen none of it, his own engagement a nightmarish blur. He was the first to take a superficial sword-cut from the toying, arrogant captain, who snaked in with his blade, wounding men at will. And then Paolo was leaping, in a blaze of pain-filled bewilderment, up the rear steps of a dwelling, clutching at the door lintel, groaning with the agony in his ribs, his feet scraping the rough stones as he climbed like a frightened insect; his bloodied hands clutched at anything solid, as he scrambled for some grasp on a shred of life, in the noisy carnage.

  He heard the shouts, the report of pistols—the sizzling of balls and shafts rending the air all about him—horses stamping and shying in terror—

  All he could do was climb and run, and cry out in his terror and run some more, at last collapsing in an exhausted heap on a rooftop. He had no idea where he was or how he’d gotten there, and he didn’t care.

  All that mattered was the beating of his heart and the air he sucked into his lungs like a thirsting nomad.

  * * * *

  The metal founder lay beneath the straddling Julian, bleeding from numerous wounds all over his body. The saber point pressed against his throat.

  “All right, craftsman,” Julian said coyly. “You want to live? Tell me where the oriental is. Where is Gonji?”

  “I—I don’t know. I haven’t seen him,” the founder gasped through pain-wracked sobs. “I swear to God, you must believe me. Have mercy, sir—they—they made me do this—they—”

  “Come, now. You’re not protecting him, are you? He told me about you. He fingered you craftsmen as the rebels. He sold you out to me for gold.”

  The founder swallowed. “The Gundersens’. He stays at the Gundersens’. Please....”

  “Mmm, I’m afraid you’re behind the times. That’s old news. Ah, well—I presume you have nothing left to barter,” the captain said archly, shrugging.

  He jabbed the saber point past fending hands and through the man’s throat, withdrawing it deftly. A gruesome, whistling death-note sounded through the bubbling red puncture....

  * * * *

  The marketplace had become an arena of ghastly sport.

  Bands of rebels, routed out of the side lanes, were chased into the main avenues, where they found the fresh mercenary companies waiting. But the adventurers held back curiously, giving the townsmen pause. With dawning desperation they realized that they had been led into a killing ground. But they were not prepared for the full reality of it. When a squad of about twenty craftsmen had been herded, some mounted and some on foot, before the market stalls, the slavering cretin giant lumbered out from between two shops. His awesome spiked club leaned on one flabby shoulder, a dozen feet above the ground.

  Now they understood—and broke in panic in all directions.

  The soldiers watching roared their anticipation as the giant bounded forward to swing his fearsome weapon. Men were crushed to pulp under the monstrous blows of the club, horses shrieking in terror and throwing riders, who were repulsed by sadistic troops in their efforts at gaining freedom. They were turned back into the game of slaughter.

  Tumo blared at the rebels in his excitement, which had begun to stir as soon as the soldiers had dressed him in his great plate armor. His kettle-sized helm bore a pair of animal horns that enhanced his atavistic presence.

  Sweeping one horse and rider into the air on the skewering spikes, Tumo ran down another screaming man and squeezed him until blood issued from his mouth and ears, then flung him down and stamped him in a manner that caused even the mercenaries to flinch.

  Men who tried to fight their way through the cordoning troops were dropped by arrow and pistol fire. And the wyvern swooped overhead, strafing individual runners, skreeing in triumph whenever its searing saliva and jetting corrosive waste would ravage a man or steed.

  And when no rebels remained alive in the center of the city, the mercenary companies dispersing to engage remaining pockets of resistance, Mord directed the giant against people watching from windows. Shutters and doors were bashed in, and the bawling creature’s massive arms thrust inside dwellings and shops to crush and gouge even the un-militant, the innocent.

  Then, to the surprise of the now thinned troops in the corpse-strewn market square, a band of militia and non-militants alike, led by Aldo Monetto, streamed out of the granite building that housed the weaving looms. They began to shout at the giant, some firing arrows and stolen pistols, others hurling rocks or hefting tools. One shaft struck the giant in the bulging fat of a thigh, causing him to yowl and charge toward the offender.

  Aldo Monetto watched in helpless horror, knowing his axe would be useless against the monster. Squads of mercenaries began to return to the marketplace in response to the din. And the wyvern slashed down suddenly to strafe the scattering mob. Aldo thought he saw Roric, but then the figure disappeared. He had
no idea what the council had decided to do. Few militiamen seemed to be taking part in the melee; yet the rebellion had begun. Where was Gonji? Aldo had to find him. Without Gonji they couldn’t succeed in this mad display of undirected anger.

  * * * *

  Captain Sianno returned to the market stalls, sought out the leering sorcerer standing atop the barouche.

  “Mord, that’s enough,” the captain shouted.

  “They need a good lesson,” the enchanter replied.

  “Enough, I say! Their spirit is broken. They’ve suffered enough. This isn’t warfare. This is vile sport. Even animals wouldn’t sink to such brutality. Call off your beasts!”

  Mord regarded him sullenly. He bowed, stiffly and not without a trace of mockery.

  Calling out to Tumo to desist, making a sign in the air that caused the flying dragon to veer out toward the river with a final raucous cry, he climbed down from the coach. Sianno pulled on the reins and guided his horse away. He regarded the slaughter with a heavy heart and a military mind that knew the point of no return had been surpassed.

  * * * *

  The sorcerer watched him plod away. So close...so near to achieving his purpose had he been. Still there was a chance—the sounds of isolated conflict could be heard throughout the city. No. No, it would soon be brought under control, and the damnable captain had ended his effort at incitement before they could be driven mad enough. Mutual slaughter had to be inspired. Crush Vedun; break Klann.

  Tumo lumbered up to the coach on his knuckles, crying like a timid child over his superficial wounds.

  “There-there, my big fellow, don’t whine. Pull it out—pull the arrow out of your leg. Do it now, you sniveling coward, or it will hurt worse later!”

  Tumo grasped the hunting shaft by its stole and gave it a tug. The barbed head tore his flesh as it was withdrawn, and the giant wailed in agony and began to sob, slumping to the ground with a jangling din like the collapse of a hardware hawker’s wagon.