by T. C. Rypel
The chanting rolled through the tunnels, vibrant and vigorous.
And Gonji realized with sagging heart that, even as they made their escape, he had no idea where escape lay: His poor sense of direction had done him in again. Cursing, he moved them in a different direction. They crossed the mountain stream twice before he thought he recognized a cavern they’d been in. Gritting his teeth, he dragged a recalcitrant Tora through the archway.
He stepped on something that gave under his foot, emitting brittle snapping sounds as it seized him by the boot.
The samurai gasped aloud and drew his katana, the keen blade flashing downward but striking empty air. Gonji kicked viciously twice before shattering the maddening thing against the wall. The illumination of the glowstones at last caught up with his slashing vision: a rib cage.
The chamber was filled with bones. A charnel cell filled with discarded skeletons of men, animals, and things that were part of both but altogether neither. There were paintings on the walls, their subjects unpleasant enough that Gonji turned from them quickly and, setting his jaw and concentrating on calming his fears, turned back again. Certain now that no escape lay in that direction.
The savage chanting echoed in the depths of the mountain as they searched for the exit. Gonji kept the Sagami fisted at his side as he peered into one chamber after another, awaiting the framing of each slowly dawning vision in the indifferent light of the magic stones. Blade clenched in two-handed middle guard, he anticipated in each murky glow the attack of some coil-sprung horror. Now and again Tora would stamp back so fretfully from a cavern entrance that the samurai would back away from that haunted cell, sword at the ready, until another would threaten with its imminent adit.
He at last happened on a chamber whose contoured arch seemed familiar. Furthermore, a wash of frigid air pulsed from the cave—by now a welcome sensation; the bite of the merciless winter wind was much preferred to this nefarious place. But when he stepped into the archway, there issued no nascent sparkle, no hint of magic from the ensorceled stones. Only a peculiar odor coming in wisps that the cold air sought to deaden.
Gonji selected a stone about a span in diameter that glowed magenta in his gloved hands. He beat one side of it against a wall until it blazed like the August sun, and he could no longer hold even its farther side. This he tossed into the freezing antechamber.
Even in the bounding, strobing light, the shock of what he saw set his hair to bristling. Carcasses hung in the deathly air of the cave. Animals and men. Streaked with the reflected colors of frost and blood. Suspended upside down to swing gently in the air currents. Some whole, some sectioned. Preserved or curing for obvious future use.
The samurai grimaced, his fingers working over the hilt of the Sagami. A naked man hung nearest him, arms reaching limply for the floor, face set in a rigid distortion by gravity and dishonorable death.
Gonji’s breath came in gasps of frustrated anger as he yanked Tora around and hurried back the way they had come. He moved too swiftly for the rock glow to keep pace, relying now on faulty memory of their steps, pausing scant seconds when he became too disoriented, the chanting welling up through the foreboding mountain tunnels.
He found the stream again and used its splash to set his course, eschewing caution for speed. He felt certain that he must turn off to the left at some point. But where?
After a tortured few moments of plunging through the threatening darkness, he paused and cast about helplessly, straddling the stream gully, allowing the stones to ignite, illuminating the tunnel and drying his wet boots. He regulated his breathing while he calmed Tora with a reassuring hand. Was it his imagination or was the chanting growing louder? Nearer. It was insistent in its pulsating rhythm. Now Gonji fancied that he could discern syllables: huk-huk—huk-huk—Throaty and militant. A chant suitable for the breaking of backs and skulls.
There issued from a cavern farther ahead a soft, shadow-dappled archway flicker. The telltale sign of habitation. It waxed and waned tauntingly, sunset red to burning rust.
Gonji gritted his teeth and let go the reins. He could not resist a look at the enemy, for surely it must lie in wait beyond that arch.
Huk-huk—huk-huk—
He scampered in a crouch toward the cave, blade at the ready. Negotiated the head-high slope to peer warily within.
Nothing moved inside. The outre glow emanated from piled glowstones heaped into four mounds. A branching of the stream—or perhaps another stream altogether—formed a serene raised pool near the cavern’s center. The gnarled branches of a tree—a larger version of the one he’d partaken of—veined the air above the pool. On it the berries grew to palm-sized bulbs resembling tomatoes. Sustenance for a long, cold ride.
Gonji scurried into the cavern and selected several of the ripest fruits, stuffing them inside his greatcoat. He sampled one. They overflowed with sweet pulp and cloying juice. Then he caught the scent—the unmistakable scent of searing human flesh. And he at once understood the meaning of the mounds of glowing stone.
He dropped the fruit he’d been eating and rushed back to Tora. They hurried along the stream. Into an empty cave, and through another. The chanting increased in pitch, the reverberating echo turning Gonji to and fro in search of safe exit. His lips wove a tapestry of favorite imprecations.
(something to kill and the power to kill it)
Another blast of cold air from a passed cavern entrance. This one clean and sharp with the tang of ice. The nerve-racking languid glow filled the entrance at last. He recognized it, knew their location. Through this one into the next—
Blinding silver sunlight—tongues of sifting snow—he’d found it!
Dragging Tora inside, he halted and considered: the stones. Very useful when building a fire was impossible. Nodding curtly, he turned back.
“Hai. Wait here, dumb beast.”
In the adjacent cavern most of the rocks were too large. He selected a few small ones, looked them over as they began to glow, mind racing to fashion an efficient plan. Put them inside his wraps? In Tora’s saddle pouches? What?
He dropped these inside the coat, where they gathered at his belt. He began to feel foolish. He moved into the main tunnel, heedless of the chanting now. With the Sagami in the crook of an arm, he picked up more glowstones of useful size. He was about to turn back when his eye caught the wash of yellow glare spilling from one—two—nearby caverns.
The stones fell from his arms.
The chanting was mixed with satisfied grunting now, and clearly the latter issued from the brightly glowing caverns ahead. More chants split from the main chorus, becoming localized, nearing his position.
He watched the garish light with dawning fear. Remembered the soft magenta tones that had burned in response to his own body’s needs.
Tora shrilled and bucked in the exit cavern, bellows of savage mirth mingling with the sound of animal panic.
The samurai surged back toward his frenzied steed, skin prickling. Stumbling once and then again, he gained the entrance cave’s glaring white hole in time to forestall the monsters from destroying the wildly bucking horse. His roar of fury froze them an instant that would remain locked in his hall of nightmares.
The hunters had returned. Ogros.
Ogros—canibalis.
Two of them. Huge and hairy, whether pelted or sporting their own fur, he could not be sure. They were humanoid, but Gonji’s blood froze to see the slightly elongated snouts that flourished canine fangs and long, red tongues.
Cholera—they might be ten-, twelve-feet tall, judging by their stoop.
The nearer one raised the cudgel with which it had been threatening Tora. With a blare of triumph, it stalked Gonji with the shouldered weapon. The samurai’s thews responded with a high-guard stance that might have been comical in other circumstances, so disparate were their sizes.
He eyed the growling ogre steadily, his peripheral vision sketching out the hefted cudgel’s deadly head. One side featured a sort of razor-edged scoop, partially filled with snow. The other side—just razor edges.
The monster heralded its strike with a bellow, and Gonji dove beneath its arc and tumbled into the cavern. The wall where he’d stood exploded in sparks of white-hot glowstones. Some of them landed in the creature’s fur, and it beat at the scorched spots in primitive fury.
Gonji rolled to his feet with a grimace, burdened by his winter garb. These beasts were faster than they looked. He raised his katana overhead defensively and eyed the second beast, which came on with a vengeance, dropping its slack burden—an all too predictable, human shape.
Tora reared and kicked madly at the second ogre. It hefted its cudgel too swiftly and bashed the cave ceiling, throwing itself off balance. The samurai charged it, stamping left and right, the Sagami gleaming as it whirled through a double feint. The beast swung its weapon awkwardly down on him in a black-taloned simian grip. He spun to avert its descent and slashed the monster halfway through the knee with a wicked rotating blow.
Dark blood spouted from the wound as its terrible shriek blocked Gonji’s left ear. It fell toward him, grabbing at the ruined knee, and when its great form tumbled past, the samurai’s returning one-handed slash shattered its lower jaw, blood and bits of stained tooth peppering the snowy entrance hollow.
Its screams were quickly forgotten in the rush of wind from the first monster’s sweeping bludgeon. Gonji ducked too late. One viciously honed glaive point shredded the fabric of his garb, gouging the flesh of a shoulder. The force of the blow twisted him off his feet. He rolled twice before the creature’s furious onslaught, then ran out of cave floor as he struck rock.
He was trapped in a corner of the cave.
The ogre snarled to intimidate him but eyed the Sagami with respect. It was unused to such speed and skill in the unwary travelers that were its kind’s usual prey.
The monster growled and scraped its weapon menacingly on the ground before the samurai’s niche, like a man trying to dislodge some dangerous vermin.
Suddenly it realized its advantage and sprang like a guard dog, leveling the cudgel for a battering-ram blow. In the same instant Gonji caught up a dirk from his boot, launching it with an overhand snap as he dodged the plunging metal blades.
The monster howled in pain and rage amid splintering rock. It stepped on Gonji’s legs with a clawed foot as he scrabbled away. The cudgel was forgotten. The flesh-eating snow beast tore at the invading knife in its chest.
Gonji cried out with the agonizing effort as he twisted under the monster’s huge padded foot. His scythelike rake of the Sagami hamstrung the flailing creature.
Behind, the other downed monster continued to pule in agony, and other sounds approached from within the cavern system.
Gonji heard none of it. He pushed to his feet, his left leg aching badly. His footwork was imprecise and ungainly but the katana struck repeatedly with awful accuracy as it sang in the icy cavern. He leapt in and out, relieving the creature of half a matted paw, opening deep wounds in both legs. He raised his blade for another strike, but a wild backhand blow batted him against the wall, his breath gushing out of him.
His vision swam, and for a moment he was unsure of where his sword lay. He saw Tora in a blurry haze. And the body of a man—Spanish cavalry jack—caved-in face—
The great hairy fist caught him up by the waist and pulled him close to those blazing eyes. He felt the creature’s hot, rank breath in his face. The crushing grip born of vengeful mortal agony. And he knew its intent. It would crush his head in its canine jaws.
The ogre gurgled something at him in a moist, guttural voice, perhaps a final taunt in its own language. In that instant Gonji drew the seppuku sword in his left hand. His right palmed the short blade’s forte in a circular pushing motion, crisp and wetly arcing through both the monster’s eyes, the bridge of its nose. The foreshortened return plunged the ko-dachi’s fierce point into the screaming predator’s throat, choking off its cries.
Gonji dropped to the ground with a groan. A momentary reflection passed: Again the seppuku blade, which might someday bring him ritual death, had spilled the blood of another.
Then he was snatching up the Sagami and belting both blades as he led the snorting Tora from the cave, out into an angry silver morning. The packed snow of the mountain trail made a welcome crunch under Tora’s hooves as he mounted and kicked the animal past the cave, up the cleared trail that continued the climb through the Pyrenees’ passes. Ridged bites in the snow evinced the clearing efforts of the night hunters—ogros canibalis—and their vicious cudgels.
The samurai could hear them bellowing behind, but the sounds receded, and he somehow knew the nocturnal hunters would not change their time-honored ways out of vengeance. Few creatures but man tempted the Fates thusly.
He who defies nature courts the unnatural. Who had said that? A fellow adventurer of days gone by. Which one? He could not recall.
Nor did he look back. The same saddle-blistered philosopher had also told him the proverb concerning the faces of yesterday’s dead.
He rode on for a time, counting his pains—the shoulder wound was not deep, but his lower leg was throbbing, as was his skull—and, not surprisingly, yearning again for shelter from the cold, the sun’s glare. The storm had ended, and as they passed across to the Spanish slopes, the passes became both less treacherous and less snowbound.
The glowstones, he discovered, were bereft of their sorcerous properties once removed from their environment. He wondered in amusement what an onlooker might think to see him reach inside his greatcoat and toss out chunks of useless stone. And only two of the sweet red mountain fruits survived intact; red pulp stained the entire front of his tunic and kimono.
He fed the solid fruits to Tora and settled comfortably into the saddle. Before long, the day being his normal time for slumber, he nodded off, his salleted head bobbing with the horse’s slow gait. His last thought was of this single similarity between himself and the cannibal ogres.
The only difference being that their slumbering berth never brought them to the icy brink of a parapet, as his did several times that day.
CHAPTER TWO
He’d tracked the wild boar two days and a night now, at last locating and blockading its lair, though it had led him on a merry chase.
Red-eyed and bone-weary, he had found his days and nights at last becoming reordered, though he had slept little for either since descending the barren Spanish slopes of the Pyrenees. He had spent half a night lying in wait of his pursuers, but the Dark Company either had perished in the avalanche or ceased to find the game amusing. A third possibility was dismissed with a curse and a grim resignation: Perhaps their new tactic was to lull him into false security only to fall upon him in their cold fury two nights, three nights, ten nights down the trail.
If it came to that, then so be it.
Karma.
Upon entering Spain, he’d discovered the winter of another world. Milder, evenly snow-crusted, less enervating in its frigid bite. He’d doffed some of his heavy wraps, riding now in tunic and breeches, short kimono, and traveling cloak. His thick tabi and Austrian cavalry boots were sufficient enough to protect his feet.
The northern Spanish winter was an icy natural wonderland. The great waterfalls of the shallow foothill terraces had diminished in force, their torrents abating to sparkle in a clear crystal sheen. The U-shaped cirque valleys shimmered below, their symmetrical beauty and perfection broken only by the brilliance of ice-diamond pools and furrows. By day, a multihued aurora borrowed from the smiling kami of the sky; by night a silent, eerie land of stark shadow, the moon’s face reflecting off the polished earth.
The dull pain of hunger had begun to paralyze Gonji’
s keen appreciation of nature’s art. The poet’s soul was shouted down by the warrior’s belly.
Winter forage was proving no easier in Spain than in France. The frozen land yielded little. He had encountered one heavily guarded caravan from the silver mines which, upon espying his half-breed Oriental strangeness, had taken him for an unsavory character and warded him off with brandished weapons, refusing even to allow him near enough to speak. The single tiny village he’d happened on had been inhabited by the sort of superstitious peasantry that had long been a bane to him. Doors and windows had been locked and shuttered in his face; weapons leveled from arrow loops. He’d found no fish, his efforts at trapping game proved futile, and he’d persuaded no animal to drop dead at his feet—although Tora currently headed the list of beasts upon whom he wished such a fate.
They had discovered the wild boar scrounging for food in a copse of slender trees and hardy scrub. His bowstring having already snapped in the process of stringing, he had placed his faith in his black powder. Loading calmly and quietly, he had approached the boar on foot, gained a surprisingly advantageous position, and squeezed off a pistol shot that flashed and fizzled ineffectually. Cursing the ignoble contraption as he’d done many times before, he’d watched the startled boar run off at an easy gait, snorting scornfully at his effort.
Thus had begun the chase.
Gonji had tracked it on horseback for a day and part of a night, feeling alternately foolish and frustrated, uncertain what he’d do when he caught up with it. He’d lost it once when it went to ground, found its lair in another copse near a fifty-foot cuesta, skimmed its back with his sword when it had surprised him with a sudden erratic charge—and resumed the chase.
He’d lost it again, then found it hours later, worrying the carcass of a small rodent it had caught as if in mockery of his own pathetic hunting luck.
