by T. C. Rypel
Gonji pondered this while they exchanged banter a while, trying to guess at what might lie ahead, filling in his mental portrait of the enigmatic sorcerer. The roasting horse was done, and Urso tore into it with a zest that had the soldiers gaping and elbowing one another. Orozco and the giant seemed to strike up a curious rapport, and the sergeant fell into his cups, despite Salguero’s piercing glances. It would become a private joke between them in the future: If Salguero pushed him too hard, Orozco would tell his friend the giant to reduce him to meal.
But now Salguero had moved apart from them, slumping against the cliff base, withdrawn and introspective. Gonji came close and knelt in the snow, tipping a waterskin to his old comrade.
“We’ve had no chance to speak,” the samurai began. “It seems—does it bother you, senchoo, that the men are looking to me for leadership? So sorry to be so frank—”
Salguero’s eyes widened, and he smiled. “Ahh, don’t be ridiculous. We need you right now. They need you, just as you are. There are other things troubling me these days. I’m tired of leading men into battles I don’t believe in. Paying lip service to allegiances I don’t feel. I know that stings you, amigo, with your exalted sense of duty. I just don’t know what to do about it. I think much of my wife, my children. Of what might be happening to them in Port-Bou.
“If we live through this madness—I just don’t know…” His voice drifted off, drowned by the bizarre human-giant revelry. Gonji felt his pain and was moved by compassion. But he knew not what to say that might comfort his old friend.
They deemed it wise to allow the troopers to vent their tensions. More wineskins appeared—though they had been prohibited, at first—and the relaxation seemed to do the lancers some good. They stayed the night in the grotto, keeping minimal watch while in the comfort of the giant’s presence, though Gonji himself eschewed any strong drink and slept only in short snatches, ever vigilant and suspicious, keeping his swords always at hand.
The morning dawned, gray and bleak, and as they mounted to leave, Urso pointed the way ahead.
“I see you’re within sight of your destination,” he said. Castle Malaguer shifted ominously in and out of the shroud of mist on the horizon. “This is as close as I’ve come to it. I hope the wizard knows what he’s doing.”
“Why don’t you accompany us?” Gonji inquired. “Your presence in our midst might spare more bloodshed. We might gain a peaceful audience with Domingo Negro.”
“No. I’ve had my fill of involvement with tiny folk for a while. In any event, I can’t leave this area. Perhaps he’ll open the doorway for me into my own world before you…destroy him, or whatever you’re about.”
Gonji nodded and wheeled off to rejoin the column.
“If you find any other little men seeking wonders,” Urso called after him in his booming voice, “do me a favor and don’t send them in this direction, eh?”
His bellowing laughter followed them for a long time. When it had dwindled to an echoed memory, anxiety again crept over them. Nervous eyes flickered on somber faces, scanning the unknown trail that twisted off before them.
CHAPTER NINE
The terrain changed again before noon.
A timber forest swallowed the track the lancers coursed, its alien strangeness setting the column to buzzing. Gonji advised steering around the obvious killing ground, taking to the treacherous hillocks to its right.
As they negotiated the tricky slopes, all eyes riveted on the treeline, day turned to night with the swiftness of a cloud enveloping the sun.
The banshee’s spine-chilling wail preceded her appearance in the sky above. She descended with directed menace this time, her filmy gray gowns spreading their deathly pallor to encompass the column.
Gonji shouted orders, reminding them of their need to hold fast, to face their terror with all possible courage. He pushed Tora up to the hillock’s summit, where he drew the Sagami and postured defiantly before the grisly apparition.
Some of the men began to back their steeds as they muttered incomprehensibly, sounds of childish fear puling from trembling lips. Salguero and Orozco, swallowing their own fears and tearing their eyes from the death-witch, yelled for them to hold their ground. But two or three broke ranks and ran. Their panic began to spread through the column. Others shuffled backward, earnestly begging their fellows to join them in the hollow safety of flight.
The imposing figure of Buey looped his steed around behind them as he drew his pistol, snarling at them and motioning them back to the column.
“Come back here, you whining dogs!” he growled after the three who had lost their nerve. But they surged off, mindful only of the terror that lashed them on. One horse lost its purchase on the slippery hillside and fell, animal and rider tumbling over and over toward the forest below.
Gonji saw nothing of the scene on the hillside beneath him. For all he knew, he stood alone against the banshee’s eager clutch. A stiff wind leaned into him as he sat with raised blade astride a bulging-eyed, snorting Tora. The wind curled in from the west, flaring Tora’s mane and striving to bowl them over.
He steadied the anxious war horse and clenched his teeth, breathing through them.
“Sado-wa-raaaaaa!”
Roaring his clan’s ancient war cry, he struck with all his strength at the extended skeletal claw of the banshee. He shivered with the chill that shot through him, felt an ever so slight resistance as the keen blade of his katana sliced the air. The claw recoiled sharply, though with no apparent injury, and he wondered what pain this ghastly being might feel from a warrior’s steadfast denial of surrender.
For an instant he saw the death’s-head face alter, become his own, contorted in death agony. Some said that in that moment one saw a vision of his own doom in that face; others, merely an evil illusion that devoured one’s bravery. It did not matter to him. Nor did he fear it while the Sagami was in his hand. He had once before seen his own face courting him to his death. That illusion had died, as this one would, while he would stand alive.
Or die by his own hand.
The face tilted down at him, grinning foully. Gonji executed a blinding figure-eight of steel that ended in a rock-steady high guard. His legs hugged firmly about Tora’s flanks in the howling wind.
The voice that came from the banshee gurgled murkily, as though transmitted through ice water.
“You will die here!” it proclaimed. “You…and that other aberration like you.”
“Karma,” Gonji replied calmly, though venom tinged his tone.
It shrieked at him, the semblance of his face dissolving from its death-mask, and then…it had passed him. He breathed deeply and evenly as he replaced the Sagami and patted Tora reassuringly. Shots rang out behind him. Screams in the wind. He turned and broke down the hillside, side-hopping Tora carefully. From its rear he could see nothing of the banshee, and already the hazy day was replacing the beckoning huntress’ slice of endless night.
* * * *
There was no assisting them. Each man had had to deal with the banshee in his own way. If the death wish was strong in him, if he chose surrender to his fear, then neither was there any help for the effects of her touch.
Six men and five mounts lay in the mottled gray paralysis that preceded death. A lancer quickly and shamelessly appropriated the one valiant mount which had resisted its own master’s panic.
All of them had seen this ignoble manner of death before, yet the captain insisted that a detail of three men be left behind to attend the victims. Nor would he permit Gonji to bring a quick end to their suffering. It was simply not their way.
The samurai pulled Salguero aside, and the two old friends disputed the matter. Gonji’s earnest plea as to the exigency of their situation finally won out: They could not spare men for this pointless vigil; indeed, they would be placing the men left behind in
perilous circumstances; and the victims had already lost consciousness. There was nothing more that could be done for them.
The troop moved on grimly.
They skirted the small forest, paying no heed to the unearthly sounds issuing from therein. Castle Malaguer loomed ever nearer. And now the terrain ahead appeared to change almost with every stride. The hills steepened, became impossible to negotiate in the snow matting. The column was forced to descend to the narrow valley floor again, which almost immediately straitened into a canyon, gorges climbing ever higher up its sides as they advanced.
They crossed a series of rolling mounds on the canyon bottom and followed a gradual curving of its course. The castle appeared to them again, closer now, shimmering on its enchanted hilltop.
But Sergeant Orozco turned their vision skyward, pointing. “Look—the sun shrinks!”
Gonji looked up. The smoky orb of the sun had indeed grown more remote. The spatial distortion again. The sun was too tiny. An illusion, the samurai thought. The cliffs, too, were no doubt much nearer than they appeared.
A fine place for an ambush.
Gonji halted Orozco and waved the column by, instructing the lancers to cling close to their saddles as they rode, minimizing the targets they cut. Then the pair galloped to the front again.
The column gained the next curve, and the wolves fell upon them from all directions, leaping down from rock niches to rake and tear. Savage fangs snapped out from hurtling furred bodies as the troop dissolved into rearing and neighing confusion.
Shots rang out all about him amidst the screams of ravaged lancers as Gonji drew the Sagami and slashed at a bounding predator, crushing its huge skull. The glancing impact of its leap nearly toppled them as Tora bucked and swayed to avert the surging form. Gonji steadied him, caught his own senses in time to engage another set of powerful, dripping jaws.
Limbs were severed, throats shredded, as both horses and men fell like tenpins in eruptions of splashing blood. Salguero and Gonji cried out words of encouragement as they battled, glowering at the vicious assailants from under helmed brows as they lashed out with their reddening blades.
Another din of pistols exploding—wolf bodies dropped in death; crawled away, dragging ruined haunches—the clangor of falling armament and traces—fear-maddened visages on frenzied chargers—
A nightmare had burst across their waking vision.
Then, abruptly, it was over. The creatures bolted for safety as if from an unheard command. The broken column collected itself. Gonji and Captain Salguero locked eyes an instant, counted heads, and rallied them onward again. The mangled dead rode among the living as the horses pounded along the canyon floor, obeying blind instinct more than command. The last wolf body was trampled under hoof, and the mad ride was on for fair.
They had scarcely clattered a hundred yards when the first shots rang out from over their heads. Pistols fired by unseen mercenaries.
“So, it’s to be a gauntlet, then,” Gonji cried. “Ride! Ride for your lives!”
They poured across the canyon bed with fire in their eyes. One man was knocked sidewise over his steed’s flanks by the raining gunfire, boots locked in the stirrups. Now they could see the enemy: the Archmage’s free company. Gonji recognized clothing and armor—one white steed.
The mercenaries’ size grew magically as the cliffs and ledges shrank. The bizarre spatial distortion of the area was sorting itself out now, the illusion fading as they neared Castle Malaguer.
The castle bobbed on the hilltop before them, the canyon ending, the mesa leveling to a broken outcrop of landlocked shoals. Another fusillade. A body fell near Gonji. Swords and arbalests were pointed at them from both sides now as the pincering ambushers broke from cover and closed in.
A whirling, apocalyptic vista now spread before Gonji’s vision as the sky surrounding the castle went awash in a rapidly spreading purple-black stain. Troopers cried out as a flood tide of darkness filled the domed sky, lightning coruscating above the fortress in uncomfortable patterns.
Gonji pulled them to a halt, sword drawn, and stretched up in the stirrups.
“War-loooooock! Have the courage and dignity to speak with me before you do what you must!”
The mercenaries stayed their charge, looking as one toward the castle. The edges of the drawbridge, now some three hundred yards distant, flared with fingers of fire. The bridge lowered without benefit of chains or winches, and out rode the three black knights Gonji had encountered at the windmill. The free companions backed away slowly, murmuring with disappointment, watched closely by the ragged remnant of the First Catalonian Lancer Company.
Fourteen remained, counting Gonji. Their eyes glimmered with insane lights. Their breaths hissed and clouded as they sat aboard snorting, wounded mounts. They surveyed the crackling, bruised sky; the opponents who ringed them in.
The samurai looked them over, eyes flicking to each man in turn as he kept the black knights on the periphery all the while. The lancers bore the wild mien of the death-defiant. There would be no failing arms among them now. When his eyes framed on Buey, the big soldier bobbed his head at him reassuringly, working thick bloody hands over the haft of a pike. Shredded wolf fur still clung to the blade.
Gonji nodded back to him and clopped forward to meet the enchanted knights, the captain swinging beside to join him. Then Sergeant Orozco cantered up behind. The three rode wordlessly until they reined in to face the strange young knights on their richly caparisoned steeds. The centermost knight removed his hinged helm and peered at them each in turn. It was the knight Gonji had tilted with.
He met Gonji’s eyes last. “Dost thou speak Latin?” he asked curiously.
Gonji pondered before replying. “With little practice. Poorly,” he responded haltingly, then added: “Language of spells.”
The knight’s eyebrows arched. “Yes. Then thou dost understand that invulnerability is mine.”
“I—have displayed—that mine own faith…in arms—equal be—to thine armor of faith.”
The knight blinked. “Nevertheless,” he sighed, “I must kill thee. Dost thou seek death with such eagerness?”
“Karma. I have no quarrel with thee. But would see thy lord.”
The black knight dismounted and drew his broadsword. His fellows caught up the reins of his steed and bore it away to give them space.
“Thy quest endeth here. Engage.”
Gonji aimed a thin, desolate smile at Salguero and climbed down from Tora, handing Orozco the reins. He approached the knight, who now spoke in Spanish as he replaced his plumed helm.
“I am Sir Hugh, scion of Malaguer and firstborn son of Domingo Malaga y Colicos.”
“I am Sabatake Gonji-no-Sadowara,” the samurai replied as the Sagami snicked out of its scabbard, “son of the most noble daimyo Sabatake Todohiro of Dai Nihon.”
“And so do I unhinge you, Man of the East—”
Sir Hugh disengaged from middle guard and lunged into an attack with his longer broadsword. Gonji skipped out of range and trapped the blade twice with his katana before it was out of range. His expression remained impassive, all thoughts dispersed before Zen oneness-with-arms.
The knight’s long heavy blade swept around for a high blow, which Gonji deflected overhead, only his wrists seeming to move. Again the broadsword circled, this time in a low, leg-severing arc. Gonji easily leapt over the blade’s course, stamped in close and whirled his katana into a belly-slash that raked off the knight’s magical armor ineffectually, with a metallic skreek.
The samurai skipped back with catlike grace, parried another blow, riposted with an overhead slash off an armored shoulder. Again—this time his counterattack delivered two sharp blows that would have unlimbed an ordinary opponent.
The knight came on with increased confidence. Their blades clashed and sang off e
ach other, sparking the gloom with scintillas of hard-edged fury. Again and again the knight’s attacks were repulsed with speed and skill, the samurai’s fencing clearly overmatching the black knight’s, though no wound was opened.
Sir Hugh breathed heavily as he dropped back a step, relaxed and brought his blade into low engagement, inviting attack. The audience seemed widely divergent in its reaction to the duel. The Spanish lancers looked on apprehensively; apparently Gonji’s efforts were futile. The mercenaries, on the other hand, joked and jostled one another in their saddles; they’d seen many an enemy fall before the black-armored elite knights of the warlock.
Gonji, too, now relaxed as he eyed the knight, his stance even more open than the other’s.
“You’re an arrogant sort,” Sir Hugh declared. “Surely you’ve seen that your pathetic blade can do nothing to harm me. You fight well; but it’s only a matter of time before I wear you down and drive my steel through your bones.”
“Indeed?” Gonji replied. “I thought I demonstrated when we last crossed that my magic is equal to your own. You bear my mark on your flesh. You’ve worn your armor of valor too long. The true heart that once made it strong has given way to conceit. Your armor fails. So sorry, but I’m trying my best not to injure you. I won’t dishonor you by simply ignoring your empty attack and going round you. Why don’t you see the wisdom of declaring it a draw and arranging for me an audience with your lord?”
Sir Hugh flushed and came at him with blind wrath. Gonji retreated and fended his blows with snaking circular parries that mocked his efforts, as he spoke to him all the while.
“You force my hand with your pig-headedness—”
