Fortress of Lost Worlds

by T. C. Rypel

  A spate of laughter, Gonji hissing them to stillness. He and Corsini nodded to each other and began launching alternating shots. Their shafts whistled off into the cloud-mounted night air, and they gradually found the range. Corsini was the first to strike the felucca’s deck, as Gonji’s wounded shoulder made the powerful pull difficult. “Looks like your contest,” he conceded, watching the unhurried shuffling on the small craft that came in response to the implanted shaft.

  “What the hell are those things running around the deck?” someone asked.

  “Dogs?”

  “Too fast for dogs.”

  “They’ve got their own werewolves, maybe,” Luigi Leone whispered, looking over his shoulder at the huge straining back covered by golden fur.

  “Shut up,” Gonji warned.

  They resumed their volleying, as the felucca magically picked up speed and tacked eastward to flank them on the port side.

  Thwack! The first crossbow bolt slammed into the galley’s hull.

  “They sure as hell have the range in their pockets,” Corsini noted.

  Gonji and his old battle-mate ran down to take up a new position at a portside shield. As they began firing again, the felucca now judged at about two-hundred-fifty yards off, a steel-tipped quarrel skimmed through a scupper and shattered a screaming mercenary’s ankle.

  “Block those scuppers with barrels or chests,” Orozco ordered. Several women and a few men off the oars scrambled after blocking objects.

  Corsini’s next shot caught one of the eerie boatmen in the side, ripping through his arm and biting into the rib cage, pinning the arm.

  “Yo-ho!” Corsini shouted, his mates pounding him on the back. Their excitement abated as they watched the event that followed aboard the felucca.

  The stricken man’s cohorts gathered round him. One of them tore the arrow from his body and flung it overboard. The man who’d been hit moved to the starboard rail and nonchalantly set one foot upon it, leering out toward the galley. The magnificent bowshot had apparently caused him not the slightest discomfort.

  Terrified looks passed from one observer to another. Gonji felt their failing courage, knew it for the enervating foe it was. He breathed in short gasps, trying to steady his reeling mind, to concentrate on some useful plan that would at least forestall panic.

  “Here—look here,” he commanded. “Those things that walk the deck. Let’s try one of them.”

  “What for?” Corsini asked disconsolately. “Target practice?”

  Two bolts bit into the hull just below Corsini, startling him. A third sizzled by overhead to splash into the sea, starboard.

  “Target practice, then,” Corsini said resignedly as Gonji cast him a censuring glance.

  They drew a bead on one of the slithering creatures as it coursed a rail with quicksilver litheness. Both shots missed short, the creature paying them no heed. Gonji’s next release slammed into the hull directly beneath the apparition, which now resembled a tarred lynx as the felucca drifted nearer. They watched with fascination as it looked out languidly toward them. Then they crouched with sudden shock as two bolts chillingly struck their shield, almost simultaneously.

  “You think their quarrels are as harmless as our shafts?” Corsini asked jestingly.

  “They’re closer now,” Gonji noted. “The rest of you archers grab your bows and get over here. Let’s try some concerted fire.”

  While the men scurried to comply, the pair tried another volley. Startling results—

  Gonji’s shaft sped just over a creature’s head as it reclined, preening itself atop the prow. It tipped its shadowy head sharply to allow the arrow to fly by, nearly striking a crossbowman behind it. Corsini’s shaft arced downward, the shadow-cat following its course until, at the last instant, it withdrew a paw with a lithe recoil that barely evaded the thunking arrow. Unconcernedly, the creature stood and stretched itself, then resumed its slinking walk around the rail.

  “Fast,” Corsini rasped. “Damn, they’re fast!”

  The archers assembled, now ten in all, and Gonji thought a moment before fanning them out for maximum crossfire effect.

  “Now, everyone—concentrate your aim on that prowling beast,” he directed. “Forget the men for now.”

  They demurred a moment, then came to agreement. They waited behind their shields, out of sight, until the murky creature lithely padded around to their side of the felucca’s rail again. On Gonji’s signal, they all swung into the arrow loops between the shielding.

  The Dark Company had been waiting for them. A half-dozen arbalests clacked just as the refugee archers drew and fired.

  “Polidori!” Corsini shouted beside Gonji, his eyes jacking open with abrupt recognition. Then several things happened in rapid succession.

  The shadow-cat skipped backward to avoid two shafts, but another, from an oblique angle, skewered it through the shoulder, belting it off the rail. Shouts of triumph, smothered at once, altering into cries of alarm—

  Corsini turned his back to the shield and clutched at the bolt embedded in his chest, his hands clawing slick and red at the front of his shirt. His gurgled moan of distress was choked with blood. Gonji lowered him to the deck, ran a hand through his hair helplessly, breathing his friend’s name.

  “Poli—dori,” the Italian brigand choked out at him, grabbing Gonji’s jerkin with a bloody hand as his eyes glazed over in death.

  The samurai removed the stiffening fingers and pushed up to the rail, climbing defiantly between two shields. Lances of hate beamed from his dark eyes, burning into the relentless pursuers.

  “Bastards!” he roared. “Come and face meeeeee!”

  Orozco tried to pry him away for his own safety, but Gonji pushed him off. Buey wrapped him up in a mighty bear hug, and the two began to struggle, stopping when they heard Del Gaudio’s shout.

  “Hey-hey, she’s pulling away. Something happening.”

  They all pushed in between the shields to see, even the rowers leaving their posts. Simon leapt from the deck and powerfully scrambled up onto the topmast, clinging by taloned hands and feet.

  It was true. The felucca was drifting off now, the dwindling figures on the deck huddled together curiously.

  “It worked—Jesus-Maria, it worked—”

  “Kill the cats, then, no?”

  Gonji ignored the celebration, skeptical of the hard-won victory’s ultimate meaning. “Luigi—Del Gaudio—what did he mean? Polidori?”

  Del Gaudio growled and shook his head, as if banishing some delusion. “Si, I saw it, too. The plumed hat, his trademark. For a minuto I thought it was Polidori, also. But it cannot be.”

  “Who is this Polidori?”

  “You never heard of him? Cattivo uomo—a very bad fellow. A Milanese duellist. Some say the greatest of all. Killed—what, Leone?—a hundred fifty men, or more? Men…some women…” He went on bemusedly as one-eyed Luigi tearfully shrugged him off, bending over the fallen Corsini. “His specialty was killing over the ladies—other men’s ladies. He liked killing much more than loving, but I guess he liked the two together best of all because he would seduce or otherwise dishonor married ladies to force their husbands into dueling with him. The widow-maker, his amici used to call him. Then he killed more than a few widows who tried to avenge the husbands they’d cuckolded with him!”

  “I know his type,” Valentina said disgustedly, “and you’re right, Del Gaudio, they do like the cuckolding and the killing more than the bedding. What that sort needs is to encounter the right kind of woman. One with a sense of honor and the means to extract vengeance. Those pampered Milanese ladies you speak of ought to be hung, every one. Some people aren’t happy unless they’re wallowing in the gutter.”

  She turned on her heel and stalked off, the venom in her tone still hanging in the somber air.
No one spoke for a time, her candor taking them by surprise.

  “Well, someone did him in,” Del Gaudio finally added.

  “Eh?”

  “Polidori—that’s why it couldn’t have been him. He was murdered finally, so I heard.”

  Gonji’s eyes narrowed. He squeezed the hilt of his katana as he looked out to sea. “Sometimes the dead—won’t stay dead.”

  Simon Sardonis brayed a canine laugh from the topmast. They all eyed the monstrous werewolf uneasily to hear the uncharacteristic sound.

  “You need to take a firm hand with the dead,” he rasped down eerily, his laughter fracturing the morbid quiet on the deck as his snout angled at the moon.

  “Don’t you go mad on me now,” Gonji fired up at him, pointing a finger. The irony of his own statement didn’t register on him until he’d had time to decipher the meaning of Simon’s renewed outpouring of barking laughter.

  Tomorrow night would bring the full of the moon.

  * * * *

  The Night of Chains, Simon was wont to call it. For during the full-moon nights of his youth, when the orphaned wolf-child was raised in a French monastery, he was habitually shackled to the wall of a locked and barred cellar.

  The galley provided no such sure deterrent to his madness on this night, and it had been this more than anything else that Simon had dreaded. For on the night of the first transformation under a new full moon, the demon within him held sway. Simon’s spirit was consigned to some dim recess of their sphere of cohabitation, and there was no end to the savagery the primitive Beast might wreak. If it killed on this night, the agonizing transformations that ostracized him from normal humans would occur each night until the next full moon; albeit, Simon would then assume control of the Beast. If he was prevented from killing, he would be a normal man for the duration of that moon, freed of the horror with which he regarded the sun’s decaying light.

  It was Gonji who had shamed him out of his self-pity, a few years earlier, proving to him that he possessed the strength and courage to take control of the raging Beast even on the Night of Chains, once the Beast had slaked its blood-thirst. The struggle for control was a terrible thing to behold. It was an ordeal that Simon resisted, much preferring the horrible madness to play itself out while he thrashed about while helplessly chained, unable to kill. And it seemed necessary on this full-moon night, when he must be prevented at all cost from allowing the Beast to kill, in these circumstances.

  Gonji, for his part, dreaded the loss of the werewolf’s power during this increasingly deadly journey. It boded ill to eschew the werewolf’s raging fury. But what was there to be done about it? He had avoided voicing the gruesome thought he had very briefly entertained—that one of them should be chosen as a sacrifice that night, such that others might live. He knew how Simon—not to mention the others—would react to the unthinkable idea, for he hated the Beast’s savagery and wished earnestly to be like other men.

  So as night drew on, a grim-visaged Simon, who once again refrained from meeting the eyes of the others, was bound into the dinghy with heavy rope and rigging, lashed to the boards and cleats in an effort to hold the Beast at bay. The dinghy was lowered into the sea, and the mooring rope that connected it to the ship was paid out to its full length. Pistols and bows brandished in sweating fists, the tense squad led by Gonji took up its dual vigil in the stern: They would at once watch for the reappearance of the Dark Company’s felucca and guard against the uncontrolled Beast’s breaking free and trying to climb the rope to the ship. He would not be able to swim to them, for a stiff breeze carried them on their course now, and the oars had been shipped.

  As anxiety gave vent to sporadic outbreaks of temper, the violent struggle on the dinghy came to their attention. They saw the shredding of the canvas, the lateral tossing of the small boat as it skimmed the waves. There came to their ears a crunching and snapping din. A cleat broke loose on the dinghy and sprang into the air. Then they heard the terrible bellowing of the ensnared werewolf, the sounds of internal conflict that manifested themselves in cursing and shouting in two different voices.

  There was a moment’s respite. Then, suddenly, coils of rope burst upward, savaged by fang and claw, and the monster that was not Simon Sardonis loomed up over the dinghy’s bow and regarded them all with bloodthirsty red eyes.

  An epidemic gasping broke across the deck of the galley, the confidence they’d learned to feel in the werewolf s powerful presence utterly dashed.

  “Sharp eye,” Gonji cautioned without taking his eyes from the baleful monster. “Keep watch for that ship.”

  The werewolf seized the mooring rope and began to climb.

  “Simon,” Gonji shouted, “take command. You know you can.”

  “Ja—come and help me, little slope-head.” The voice that issued in reply from the Beast, speaking in High German, was not Simon’s but another’s. Chilling in its foul appetite; in its eagerness to kill, to devour with sadistic savagery. Simon had long ago told Gonji of its desire to destroy the samurai, how it sometimes whispered without voice that Simon should rend him. How, in a dreadful, unguarded moment of lost control, Simon had very nearly tried once.

  “Should we shoot it?” Orozco said, his pistol shaking in a nervous grip. “Or what?”

  Gonji deliberated, thoughts galloping in several directions, shaking his head vigorously at last. “Got to wound him, that’s all.”

  “What? In this sea? How you going to sight straight enough?”

  “Just let me try,” Gonji shot back. “He’s my compadre. My responsibility. You just hold your fire unless it becomes necessary.”

  The Beast’s back skimmed the water’s surface as he climbed upside down along the heavy rope. Then its form disappeared altogether, plunging beneath a wave. It washed back up, roaring at the elements, its fur matted and glistening in the full moon’s harsh reflection.

  Gonji launched an arrow, missing low, the shaft darting into the cold gray waters. He nocked another razor-tipped shaft, rotated his bow downward, and trained it on target. Fired—

  The Beast howled and spun in shock and pain. It nearly lost its grip on the lanyard. It ripped the war arrow from its shoulder, twining its furred legs about the rope for uneasy purchase. Its savage roaring was repeatedly drowned by the creature’s helpless dips below the rolling waves.

  “That won’t stop him,” Buey cried.

  “It might slow him, make him think,” Gonji reminded. “If he’s capable of thinking.”

  Then bedlam broke loose near the bow.

  All eyes had been trained on the outre drama at the stern. No one noticed when or how the soaking intruder in caftan and burnoose had boarded. But they soon learned for what purpose.

  A Morisco woman turned at the sound of splattering seawater and screamed. She extracted a poniard from her belt and raised it to defend herself, but the evilly grinning stranger’s scimitar licked out and plunged into her belly, a vicious curved wedge of Damascus steel yanking out slick and red through her grasping fingers as she fell.

  Screams of shock and bellows of rage. Two pistols barked, one on either side of the crumpled form, lead balls tearing into the swarthy killer from point-blank range. He peered down at the black holes in his caftan and snaked out with his blade, relieving one startled mercenary of his arm, up to the elbow, and tearing through the windpipe of the other. The deathless assassin came on, rotating his scimitar in invitation.

  The warriors circled him warily, lunging in with bared steel. The Moriscos among them shouted at him in their language, calling out threats and demands that he surrender. The intruder took a dozen sword cuts that had no effect as he swept on through them, felling three more men with his deadly slashes. Unhurried, a relentless, indestructible juggernaut.

  By now Gonji recognized that the ship had been invaded by the Dark Company. He looked back and f
orth from the slaughter on the deck to the oncoming werewolf, who still dangled from the mooring rope.

  “What do we do?” his men were crying.

  “I’ll tell you what we do,” Orozco replied, his pistol booming in the night, the ball tearing into the howling Beast that had been Simon Sardonis. “We fight for our lives!” he roared.

  Gonji swore at the sergeant but loaded his bow and sighted on the Beast again. He stayed his breathing, fighting the rolling of the sea to find a non-vital spot on the werewolf. He fired. His shaft struck the creature in the thigh. It bellowed and lost its leg-hold, one raking paw of a foot striving to catch the rope again.

  Then the samurai turned from it and bounded down onto the deck, shouting for the others to make way. His daisho came out as one as he rushed the sneering Arab, whose undying body now bore the tattering marks of a score of sword and pistol wounds.

  Gonji stopped sharply, then stamped forward, catching the deadly scimitar’s beheading arc on the ko-dachi and turning it overhead. He dropped to one knee and whirled the katana low, severing the assassin’s leg at the knee joint. The monster registered no pain but only surprise as it toppled to the boards. It lost its scimitar, and the samurai descended on its downed form in fury, his next stroke severing its head, wrenching outcries of revulsion as the head rolled against the rail, its eyes open, the mouth still working.

  A rasping hiss issued from that mouth, which formed words that seemed to come to their ears out of the air itself. Gonji stalked the head as though it were some loathsome cornered vermin that might spring.

  The shadow-cat’s claw raked at him through the scupper where it had been clinging to the hull, unseen, as silent and deadly as nightshade. The claw scored his boot, scratching his ankle. He bounded back two paces, then bolted at it with both blades lashing in twin-fanged wrath, striking only wood as the cat withdrew with unearthly speed.

  The dismembered parts of the assassin began to move, to slither along the deck like ungainly vipers.