by T. C. Rypel
The Moriscos took note first: They were no longer in the Sahara of the only world they all had known.
The fortress compressed, enfolded, shriveled inside itself, somehow, from without—that was the only way their tortured minds could process the visual phenomenon. The graveyard ended. The sky changed to a sharper, deeper black, the stars shifting their patterns, a cold wind arising out of nowhere to buffet them as they plunged into its seethe—
“No-no-no!”
They reined in. Their quest had ended. They dismounted before the solitary granite block that alone broke the surface of the ashen ground. It was perhaps twenty feet wide and three deep. The top of a gatehouse. At the front of its base could be seen the grating of a portcullis, whose greater portion lay buried in the ground. There was no sense to it, even were this the sand-blown ruin of an ancient fortification. For there was no housing into which the portcullis could be raised.
The Fortress of the Dead was a sham, a senseless fragment of a castle’s unrelated structures.
They were speechless, emotionally benumbed. And then Cardenas, circling the stone with widening eyes and a tremble on his lips, began to laugh. He laughed the laugh of the moon-maddened. Of the victim of fortune’s sardonic turnings.
“Here, then,” he cried out, “is our castle!” Cardenas let himself fall from the saddle he shared with a lancer, landing in the black powder to pound it with his fists and laugh and laugh until his laughter ground into tears.
Gonji dismounted. Simon stole up behind him, speaking softly. “They’ve gone away.”
“Eh?” The samurai spun and peered back toward the track of their momentarily forgotten pursuers. “Do they always withdraw when one of them’s been killed?” he wondered in a rush.
The form of the wygyll grew suddenly and eerily over their heads, further evincing the spatial distortion they now occupied. It was the female. She cascaded down in a pain-filled descent, streaming blood from the leg where a bolt had split her feathered flesh and flown on. Tears moistened her eyes, angled down her beak. She held her midsection as she landed softly in a crouch, furling her wings about her and repeating the same twittering sound over and over. Valentina and Lola, the only other woman left alive among the fourteen humans, moved to comfort her, though they were uncertain how to approach this strange creature they had only heard of, from Gonji.
“She’s hurt,” Valentina said, motioning for what water remained to cleanse the wound. “Sounds like—kiri,” she said, imitating the sound of the wygyll-word the female uttered repeatedly.
The wygyll locked eyes with her and cried the word again.
“Her mate?” Lola asked.
“Or her own name,” Luigi Leone advanced, peering at this strange creature in amazement, with his good eye.
“Come now—Kiri,” Valentina said comfortingly. “Is that your name—Kiri? Can you say Tina? I am Valen-tina. Come, let me have a look at your belly, dear.”
“Valiant creature,” Gonji said. “She must have killed one of them. One of the cats, neh?”
Cardenas laughed again behind them, without humor, prancing about the granite block, now, and blaring mock-heraldic outcries: “The Castle of the Wonder Knights—Wunderknechten Keep!” He postured like a conqueror with one foot propped on an edge of the stone. Then he dropped down and peered into the exposed portion of portcullis, speaking idiotic commands that the gate should be thrown open to the returning conquerors.
Valentina cried out. The wygyll had raked her arm with a taloned hand. Now the bird-woman clutched her belly again.
“Kiri!”
“Oh, my God…” Valentina whispered. “She’s about to give birth.”
There was a scream behind them, muffled to an echo in some lofty chamber in the twinkling velvet sky, far overhead. A dull thump.
And Cardenas was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Simon Sardonis shouldered the others aside and crouched at the portcullis fragment where Cardenas had disappeared moments before.
“What sorcery—” someone whispered without finishing, as the ensorceled man bent his towering frame to the portal to peer in where the blackened earth met the armored framework. He looked like an animal tracking a scent, his ears and nostrils quivering.
He reached a hand inside, found that it astonishingly passed through the iron of the grating itself! A look of surprise crossed Simon’s angular face.
“Simon?” Gonji probed. But he was ignored.
A moment later, setting his expression with stoic determination, the lycanthrope slid out of sight, headfirst. From his companions’ perspective, he had magically passed through solid matter.
“Dios!” Orozco exclaimed.
Gonji hushed him. They all pivoted their heads toward the sky, toward the point in empty air where Simon’s voice called out to them as if from a great height.
“I can see you,” he was shouting. “Can you see me?”
“Iye—where are you?” Gonji answered.
“It’s best you see for yourselves. Lean through the grating slowly. You’ll fall headfirst. Don’t worry. I’ll slow your fall.”
With a skeptical glance at the others, Gonji dropped to all fours and felt his way through the insubstantial grating. A cold wind washed over his reaching hands as they began to vanish through the portcullis. He felt a gentle tugging of the air, which increased to a suction. And when he gingerly extended his head and shoulders through, he emitted a strained cry to feel the vertigo and loss of directional orientation: He was sliding uncontrollably into thin air, facing what appeared to be the sky, then plummeting headfirst. He felt his swords slip past, as they quit his sash, and then he struck something that gave way under him as it grabbed him.
It was Simon, clutching at him and lurching backward from the impact. He dropped Gonji on his side.
The samurai cast around on all fours, caught up his swords, and regained his senses. They were on a rampart, the crenellations of a bailey wall extending around them on both sides. A still higher, inner wall towered over them. Cardenas lay groaning, to Gonji’s right, having badly sprained and bruised an arm.
“Best let the others down by rope,” Simon was yelling down from the parapet, between cupped hands. Gonji came up beside him and saw that they did indeed enjoy a vantage not shared in reverse by those below. The horizon, dark and starlit, was lost to infinity. A velvet mist seemed to enshroud the surrounding territory. The headstones of the spatially twisted graveyard were the only reference points, leaning back toward the castle in warped perspective, as if drawn by ages of unseen force.
They were prisoners of a wholly alien world.
One at a time, the others began to come through, their expressions betraying their fears. The remaining supplies were brought through, but the horses were lost to them.
“Gott in Himmel,” a mercenary from Augsburg—Herrmann, by name—gasped out, as he surveyed the rampart sentries.
“No need to fear,” Simon assured. “They’re all quite dead.” He walked up to a leaning pikeman guarding a merlon with a rusted harpin. Grabbing the top of its helm, Simon swiveled the skeleton’s fleshless head to face them. He grinned ghoulishly, to see their discomfiture. “Then, again—”
“Sacrilege,” one of the Moriscos decided, making a sign against Evil.
“We’re all dead,” Lola said in a trembling voice, stifling a sob.
The winged form of the gravid wygyll was carefully lowered from above. She fluttered and cried out as Buey slowly paid out the rope, several hands cradling her gently.
Gonji looked them over, gauging their worth in the survival struggle to come. Some of them moved to the embrasures. Shifting the skeletons more reverently than had Simon, they wedged in to look back and forth from Buey, far below, recovering the rope, to the invisible doorway ten feet over their heads, wher
e the hempen strand snaked up like some fakir’s illusion, to whisk back into the space the Ox occupied on the black soil fifty feet beneath them.
It was a while before every aspect of the magic phenomenon stopped eliciting breathy gasps and bulging eyes.
Gonji caught Simon’s smug “What now?” look and averted his gaze, looking down to where Valentina tried to make the wygyll Kiri comfortable. Lola’s face registered terror and revulsion as she scanned their bizarre surroundings. Orozco and Cardenas stood at one embrasure; Klank LoPresti and Luigi Leone—checking over their weapons—at another. Herrmann knelt on one knee and gazed about him with dim hostility, rubbing his chin with the back of a pistol-clenching hand. Jaime Gonzaga, a lancer who had been with Salguero’s company in Barbaso, stood nearby, looking expectant, awaiting Gonji’s next order. The three Moriscos left alive—Ahmed and his friends Nassim Patel and Abdulla el Kerim, whose names Gonji had learned only yesterday—whispered anxiously near a turret archway.
Ahmed saw Gonji looking and pulled away from the others to speak with him. “They fear that these dead soldiers will also come back to life at any moment. Have you any such—expectation?”
“We have more pressing worries,” he replied, turning his attention to the others. “Gather the supplies here. Let’s eat quickly and make a plan. I’m eager for your suggestions. Let’s divide the remaining water among us in case we’re—separated.”
Buey came into view, hanging over their heads, his body appearing by jerky stages. He slid partway down the rope headfirst, dropped right-side up as the “new” gravitation took over. Then he reached back through the mystical portal to cut the rope free of where he’d tied it and fell with a thud into their midst.
“I set the horses free,” he told Gonji quietly, to which the samurai nodded glumly in agreement.
“So there’s to be no escape?” Cardenas asked, his face twitching.
“This was our destination,” Gonji reminded him. “And our pursuers would only kill them, anyway. Perhaps later we can…catch them…”
“And so now what do we do?” Orozco asked.
The samurai saw the question mirrored in the eyes of all of them. He looked up to the high towers that loomed out of sight in the mist, and considered.
“See that fog?” Luigi was saying. “Is it foul to breathe?”
“At least we know the Turks won’t come here,” Klank noted, clicking the hammer of a wheel-lock. “Scared of the dead, they are.”
“Not like us, eh?” Simon interjected in a rare moment of social participation. The Italian brigand snickered at the grim reminder.
“Gatekeeper,” Gonji shouted at the turrets above, stilling the others.
After several seconds of breathless silence, Herrmann engaged their attention. “Listen,” he gasped. “Movement—the earth—”
“Sounds more like the sea,” Cardenas corrected.
The sound they heard was more a vibration they apprehended through their teeth, their inner organs. A shifting of great masses.
“This fortress itself might be moving,” Gonji said. He called out again: “Who is it that rules this domain?”
Simon chuckled. “Well challenged, friend samurai. But don’t you understand yet? This is the domain of the dead, hence its name. Our stubborn hunters may well have led us here, one way or another. Have you given thought to that?”
“You’re not helping, Simon,” Gonji said.
On an impulse, Klank LoPresti pushed open the door to the turret. It gave with a grinding of long-dormant hinges. He licked his lips and stepped through with weapon raised, as if expecting to encounter an unseen obstacle.
“Klank?” Leone called out, taking an uneasy half-stride forward, sword drawn, as his friend vanished from sight.
They heard wild laughter over their heads. Klank peered down from an embrasure sixty or seventy feet still farther up. “I am LoPresti the Magician!” he shouted down.
“No doorway can be trusted to lead into what it serves up to the eyes,” Cardenas said in wonder. His gaze licked about, an expression of rapt fascination working its way through the solicitor’s unease over these strange events. “I suggest—I suggest, Gonji, that we explore—cautiously—every aspect of this castle.”
Gonji exhaled sonorously. “It’s certain that we can’t stay here. We’ve got to prepare to defend ourselves.”
He spotted the rusting hulk of an old multiple-arrow catapult once used in the defense of the walls against some unguessable enemy. This they pushed under the invisible air-bound portal by which they’d entered, propping it such that the verdigris-encrusted arrowheads set into the perpendicular bank now pointed upward, rather than horizontally. Any intruder dropping in would find the fall rather more perilous than had Cardenas.
They began to explore this magically gifted fortification, their immediate need being to learn its properties apropos of their defense, their eventual escape, any lurking menaces, and a haven for Kiri, for the gallant bird-woman’s time was near at hand.
The questing band crept circumspectly into the enveloping space distortion of the immense and ageless castle. Wary of every fresh mystical phenomenon, weapons ever at the ready, they gradually overcame their wide-eyed wonder over each new manifestation of its grotesque, sense-defying architecture.
The fortress was composed of massive stone and ashlar blocks, whose towers and turrets seemed to rise forever, from certain perspectives. Surely, in a normal spatial frame, they agreed, this hold would have proven impregnable. And it was with a good degree of consternation that they noted the size of the doors and archways, whose height and breadth might have been adequate to admit the passage of minor giants.
The place was cold and dank, unwarmed by the radiance of life for so long that the band feared what unearthly stirrings they might inspire by their passage. The walls crawled with fungus and lichen, and in certain odd corners of the inner wards, miasmic vapors were agitated into chilling motion upon their entrance. These they studiously avoided, as they did the heavy portals whose closure against certain outer wards did not completely seal out the pungent odors that clogged their nostrils as they edged by.
Their explorations seemed to bear out Cardenas’ assumption: No doorway, once crossed, served up the actual scene viewed from without. Forward passage usually advanced one deeper into the fortress, though the progress was more often vertical—to higher or lower recesses—than straight ahead. But sometimes, they discovered with alarm, such passage regressed one to a chamber or rampart or bailey he had been in before. Left, right, or oblique turnings through the maze of passageways were still less to be trusted. These could resolve—in a sudden breathless overlay of new space—almost anywhere, sometimes turning one in an opposite angle from the one he’d been proceeding on.
And these were the most treacherous. Once Jaime Gonzaga, leaning through a gunloop with reasonable caution, found himself sucked out through a prison tower window grating on a sheer wall far across the middle bailey! He was forced to cling by his knees, upside down and bawling for deliverance, until Buey found the magical access to the top of the tower above him, nearly a half-hour later. The Ox pulled him up by rope.
They were thus reminded of two things: the directional disorientations sometimes experienced in passage; and the drawing action the new space exerted once one had committed more than half his mass to passing through.
The brush with death gave them pause. They stopped where they were, widely spread now in the environs of the vast middle bailey—the length of three cavalry practice grounds placed end to end—and gathered their unreliable wits. A profound despair accompanied this loss of trust in the senses. It seemed to sap their will to even move.
Luigi Leone’s amusing discovery that he could spank the wall with his blade and hear the sound echoed in various disassociated parts of the castle caused smiles that soon fa
ded. One at a time, they realized gloomily what this could mean should one of them fall prey to danger as had Gonzaga, while out of sight of the others.
“This middle bailey will make an effective killing ground,” Gonji said, “should we encounter—opposition.”
“How can we be sure of our shots?” Orozco asked, gazing down into the ward.
“We can’t. But as with any other castle defense, we rely on the advantage of high ground. Seek what cover is to be found up here. Gauge the action of our shots. It would be difficult for an enemy below to locate us up here with any speed or reliability.”
The military men shrugged in unconvinced concession of the point. Gonji ordered them into pairs and set them to exploring further and committing every detail of their passage to memory or mapping. He watched them move off to try to find the positions from which the teams were to proceed as one. Ahmed, Gonji’s partner, waited beside him. Simon Sardonis and Pablo Cardenas were to remain as a rear guard. The solicitor had retrieved a torch from a wall sconce and fired it alight.
“It’s always night here,” Lola observed aloud as she stared into the unfriendly star-shot sky, drawing her cloak close about her. Valentina cast her a critical glance from where she knelt beside the softly groaning Kiri.
Cardenas began to draw a layout of the fortress on a wall, using a charred stick. Gonji took note and drew near.
“You understand something of this place?”
Cardenas clucked impatiently. “Certainly not. What can anyone know? Just entertaining a notion.”
Valentina patted the wygyll comfortingly and came up to Gonji.
“This is the place the witch spoke of, through me?” she inquired. And when Gonji nodded, she went on: “Then perhaps I should be the one to lead the exploration? I mean…she might have left some…spell upon me, or—”
He shook her off. “She seemed to be wrong about Cardenas’ place here. So sorry, but I believe she must only have used you to convey her message.”
