Fortress of Lost Worlds

by T. C. Rypel

  “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.