Fortress of Lost Worlds (43 page)

“The aquamarine growth. A fungus. Three applications, one each by the suns of this sphere. You first inhale its vapors long enough to induce sleep. The second day you drink a distillate of a small quantity. The third day, you fast, and at nightfall you indulge in a quantity, raw, no larger than will fit into your palm…and you are cleansed.”

She was thunderstruck by the simple, saving eloquence of what he said.

“It is evening. Will you…sleep here tonight?” Shem’s voice, breathless, had diminished to the volume of a moth’s wing-beats.

And then Valentina began to quiver, for thoughts of her syphilitic affliction had now jarred something loose among her guilt-bound memories.

She had at last remembered the face—the touch—the sweating grasp like so many others she’d known. The same boorishness, braggadocio. Another virile specimen who would ply her the way he just knew she was born to be plied. She remembered all but the name of
Fernandez.
And she knew what she must do.

“Shem—” she said, fighting for control. “Shem, you must send me back to my friends. I have an—an unfinished quest.”

“
No
,” he protested. “Did you not listen? I told you they were
doomed
. Something is happening in that tortured nexus of worlds. You cannot go back there!”

“But
why
?” Valentina’s eyes went wide with apprehension.

“
Because the gateways are closing in this place.
That fortress is enfolding back into its center. All inside it will share the fate of the meddlers who fashioned it so perversely.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’ll be compressed—
crushed
within it.”

“Shem—
you must do something
!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

They were naked sacrifices for the entertainment of a leering cosmos.

To the perspective of the inhabitants of the Fortress of the Dead,
Wunderknecht
and assassin alike, it seemed as though they’d been jolted by the whim of some capricious god, their tilting grounds wrenched apart, such that they stood in awe aboard chunks of flying debris in an immense ether-bound arena.

Just as things had appeared to revert to normality, there had been a jarring impact, knocking them all off their feet. When they had gathered their senses, they found themselves floating in a shimmering, murky void on fifty-foot sections of the exploded castle. The jagged segments drifted slowly on straight lines—vertical, horizontal, and skewed—passing one another until each reached the edges of their mist-bordered sphere of containment. Moving through the barrier, they would find themselves momentarily disoriented, realizing finally that they had resumed their inexorable course at the extreme opposite end of the line from which they’d begun.

But the next pass brought each piece of castle ground or wall or turret nearer to the others than the last. And nearer to the trembling center of that sphere. It was a shrinking, spherical arena, with a dreadful core that looked like a living void. A hungering darkness.

For a brief interval all thought of combat was forgotten.

Gonji stood with his swords lashed to his back, his retrieved bow hanging limply in one hand, peering outward from a chunk of middle bailey ground bordered on one side by a sheared-off section of the main gatehouse’s tall inner towers. He scanned the incredible phenomenon with less sense of doom than of wonder. He could make out figures on the truncated air vessels, but none seemed near enough to engage, whether friend or foe. His mass of debris was on an outer plane, cutting a short arc from the enveloping sphere, but growing larger with each pass as he moved toward the center.

But Gonji and his band all soon noticed what occurred when a fragment reached the exact center of the sphere: It dissolved into nothingness, as if fed from front to rear into an invisible devouring maw.

Gonji could make out two figures on a horizontal path near the center, racing about in frenzy on the bakehouse roof. He recognized Simon first, then saw that it was Cardenas with him. They had perceived their peril and were frantically searching for a means to survival. Gonji could only watch helplessly, from perhaps hundreds of yards away.

He saw Simon’s leap down onto a section of marble floor that passed below. Cardenas lost his nerve, waiting until the next agonizing pass to drop down through twenty feet of air, nearly missing the banquet hall section, shrilling with terror as Simon grabbed him, near an edge, and pulled him to safety.

And then a crossbow quarrel shattered on the wall behind the samurai. Gonji searched below him—the undead murderer Jurgen Kleinhenz was reloading from a fractured piece of the kitchens and larders.

“No steadier hand than a dead one,” Gonji taunted, nocking, aiming and planting a shaft in Kleinhenz’s chest—with no effect save moral victory.

There would be no truce with the undead, even in these mutually destructive circumstances.

Kleinhenz passed through the barrier, his perch reappearing far above, the killer well covered. No opportunity to try anything else.

Gonji looked back to where Simon and Cardenas crouched near Klank LoPresti’s dead body, and the samurai gnashed his teeth in anger. The ground they’d occupied before had now diminished weirdly in perspective as it neared the arena’s deadly center. Another chamber’s broken wall descended past Gonji’s viewpoint on an oblique angle. On the floor was the corpse of Nassim Patel, his head in grisly ruin.

* * * *

Luigi Leone had come face-to-face with the savage Ottef Abu-Nissar just before the massive shock that heralded the unfolding of the castle. When he recovered his senses, he flicked horrified one-eyed glances from his amazing circumstances to his strangely inert opponent. Abu-Nissar’s cat had strayed too far from him and now occupied a different purchase: the crenellated disc of a turret below them.

Abu-Nissar lay still, and the trembling Leone drew his sword and began to slash at the unmoving form, hoping desperately that hacking it to pieces would prove lastingly effective.

Buey drifted by, still sorting himself out, quaking with disorientation. He was on the overturned ceiling of a bedchamber, shards of glass from a chandelier all about him.

“Hang him, Leone!” Buey was shouting, recognizing who it was. “Strangle him.”

Ahmed Il-Mohar descended on a bizarre perch—the steps of the central keep, about eighty feet above and to the right of the right-angled wall of the ward on which Leone hacked frantically.

“No, he must be hanged!” the Morisco bellowed across the ether, concurring with Buey.

Ahmed eased toward the jaggedly crumbled edge of the stairs, then scrambled back again when he saw the ghastly, fathomless space beneath him. He hugged an ashlar block to forestall his vertigo. His staircase’s course drew him nearer to Leone, but as he passed he forgot the scene rising past him now and could think only of the proximity of his own death.

* * * *

Sergeant Orozco believed himself trapped in a nightmare. He recovered consciousness, his head caked with blood, every joint aching from his fall. He was in a now-exposed dungeon chamber, tipped slightly such that the drop into an abyss, below, yawned up at him. Fighting back a seizure of nervous tremors, he took stock of his situation. He saw the flatter, broader crag of stone-jutted land looming up below him like a rising leviathan. He would have to jump
outward
to make it. Quickly, before the moment passed—

He leaped, slamming down among the headstones of the
graveyard
that had occupied the grounds beyond the barbican.

Breathing heavily, heart thumping, he saw Wiemer clutching Lola around the neck on a strangely listing portion of the banquet hall gallery. It was wobbling slightly, like a spun platter. Rubbing his eyes, still refusing to believe the physical evidence of his bizarre environment, Orozco took aim with a pistol.

It had to be risked. The woman was likely lost anyway. And why not try it? None of this was real. He steadied his hand on top of an ancient gravestone.
Clack.
The pistol was empty. Orozco swore, as he vaguely recalled discharging it earlier.

This was not a dream. His mind screamed in rejection of it. But it was all too real.

He saw Cardenas on the banquet floor. Saw the leaping form of the now lupine Simon Sardonis, bounding atop a floating piece of the outer bailey wall to try to give chase to a temple cat and its assassin, several fragments away.

Orozco shook his head and licked his parched lips.

“Cardenas!” he blared, seeing the man hefting a pistol. “
This
one, Cardenas! Shoot
this
one!”

And then he lost his view of Wiemer and Lola, who screamed as she was wrenched back by her hair again.

* * * *

Cardenas looked up to the chunk of gallery that drifted by in a pattern that would cross the crumbled banquet hall’s, where he clung. He dimly heard Orozco’s shouts, wishing he could be left alone to die, caring nothing now for these people who had led him away as a captive, torn him from his family.

But in his bitterness he wished passionately to lash out at something,
someone
in this grotesque nightmare. It might as well be one of the undead assassins. His wheel-lock pistol clutched in a sweating fist, he drew a bead.

But then he saw that Wiemer used Lola for a shield, and he was moved by concern for the woman. Shaking as he was, he knew he couldn’t chance the shot. They passed by, Wiemer holding a grimacing Lola tighter and hissing his unholy laughter, as Cardenas withheld fire.

The solicitor cursed, then saw two deadly visions: Abu-Nissar’s scrabbling temple cat traversed a course toward its lifeless charge—chopped to pieces by Leone—that would soon bring it into Cardenas’ range. Secondly, the banquet hall chunk he occupied would soon pass through the sphere’s devouring center, taking him and Klank LoPresti’s corpse with it.

Cardenas raced about the rough-edged floor, saw the rising roof of the granary, thirty feet below. Shrieking a prayer for deliverance, he threw himself atop the thatched roof, crashing partway through, knocking the wind out of him. But he was safe from the center for now.

He passed through the misty barrier at the sphere’s edge, found himself moving upward through utter blackness for a long time, babbling in terror. He gasped with relief to pass back into the arena again but almost at once caught sight of the walking corpse Fernandez, who exchanged crossbow fire with an unseen archer. Then the gallery was descending toward Cardenas, though farther away now. He heard shouting—a shot behind him somewhere.

Sergeant Orozco was passing him on the far side of the gallery portion. He saw the sergeant aim and fire a pistol, cursing. He had missed his shot.

Now Wiemer was returning, much closer to Cardenas now, holding a knife at Lola’s throat, searching his late banquet-hall vessel for him. He saw the dead killer’s alarm in not finding him there. Cardenas laughed inside. He had fooled the dead creature. He had him dead to rights.

But then he glimpsed the temple cat falling—sailing down from above him like a bat, in a ghostly ballet, eerily slow, its limbs outspread. And on the periphery he saw Lola make her move, twisting out of Wiemer’s grasp to throw herself down on the gallery floor as they passed, very near. Wiemer snarled and went for her with the knife.

Cardenas made his decision. He held the pistol in both hands and fired the passing shot just as Wiemer took shocked note of his new position. The assassin was thrown back against the gallery wall, as Lola shrieked and shrieked hysterically, venting both revulsion and relief.

But then one of the snarling demon-cats slammed onto the granary roof near Cardenas, shook itself and charged at him with ferocious vengefulness. Cardenas brought out his dagger and braced for its charge. But the powerful beast bowled him over and found the unprotected flesh of his throat.

The solicitor from Barbaso’s last conscious thought was a crib memory of the broad moon-face of his paternal grandmother, looming down at him. And then vision and memory and breath were all stilled at once.

* * * *

Having found the courage to leap, Ahmed, and the temple cat, arrived on Leone’s side-tipped bailey wall at almost the same time.

Leone and the Morisco angled their blades at the beast, keeping it at bay. The creatures were heart-freezingly lithe. Like a huge feline shape composed of fuming, sinuous smoke with lethal edges all a-gleam. Until they
struck
, with that awful predatory mass that seemed to form in the material world only when needed for savage mayhem.

Neither man possessed a pistol now. And Abu-Nissar was reviving, his severed parts rejoining, though displaying the hundred slash-marks of Leone’s concerted effort. He rose behind the embattled fighters, to hiss in ghoulish glee. His familiar had again brought him back to blasphemous life.

“Engage the killer,
senor
,”
Ahmed said. “I will deal with this creature.”

“He’s too fast,” Leone said. “Anyway, I haven’t got any rope. We’ll have to kill that
devil-cat
.”

They lunged alternately at the temple cat, their timid thrusts falling short or evaded by the lithe creature. It was somewhat injured, though, either from its long fall from the granary to the bailey wall, or from a fellow warrior’s shaft or lead ball. Its limp was echoed in Abu-Nissar, who nonetheless came at them, minaciously tossing his scimitar from hand to hand.

Luigi steeled himself with several quick breaths and, abandoning all reason, tried to drop-kick the temple cat in a madly desperate move he’d often seen his dead friend Klank employ. But the cat lurched back effortlessly from the plunging swordsman and his wildly flashing blade.

Luigi nearly fell off the wall and into the abyss, his momentum carrying him between two merlons, from where he snared a one-armed purchase and sucked in a ragged breath, peering down into endless space below. He was helpless, as the temple cat came for him.

With a great bellow, Buey leapt down and across from the passing bedchamber, arms circling like windmill vanes, to drop behind the stalking Abu-Nissar. The temple cat saw this new menace and growled, turned from the dangling Leone. It launched low at Buey as he stumbled back onto his haunches with the force of his landing. The big man shook his head, stunned. He recovered, roaring, to barely ward off the cat with his saber and batting coil of rope.

Ahmed joined him, charging the cat. It tossed menacingly, to and fro, between them for a moment. Parts of it appeared to shred, like wisps of black smoke—it was leaking something vital, and now more vicious for the wounds.

In a trice it chose to attack Ahmed, barreling him backward, clawing at him. But the screaming Morisco’s blade staved off its searching jaws, and an instant later Luigi Leone came on with a fierce howl, his good eye blazing with fury as he slashed down, cutting open the scrambling cat in a spray of blood—from up close more like
steam
—saving Ahmed’s life.

The evil familiar curled into a defensive ball, all fang and claw, as it lay bleeding a vaporous substance that dissipated in the air, hissing its hatred at them from a dark corner beneath a merlon.

In his teeth-clenching rage, Buey never took note of the crossbow bolt, fired by Kleinhenz from a nearby drifting loft, which narrowly missed The Ox, clattering amidst the ruins of the castle allure. He forgot his rope as he raked the scimitar from Abu-Nissar’s now limp-hanging arm and caught the Butcher of Oran about the throat with a powerful hand.

“Hang him! For God’s sake, use the rope!” Luigi was shouting.

But Buey dropped his sword and broke Abu-Nissar’s grip on his wrist, then caught the undead killer about the throat from behind with a huge forearm, squeezing, crushing… Buey’s eyes bulged with strain and hatred, as he bellowed at the struggling assassin the names of the friends he’d lost to these defeaters of the grave.

“You’re no problem, are you,
hombre
?”
Buey ground out as he clamped ever tighter, his massive thews now approximating the effect of the discarded rope. “This is one of my specialties—this is for what you did to little—Pa
-tel
!”

With a tremendous wrench and a sickening snap that caused both Luigi and Ahmed to wince, Buey broke the Arab’s neck. He held his grip for a long time, paralyzed with loathing, wishing for the moment to be repeated again and again.

Long after the temple-cat familiar had wafted away in ghostly tendrils of silver-black mist, Buey still held his death-grip, as if he feared the reanimated assassin would presently return.

* * * *

Orozco saw Kleinhenz fire the crossbow at Buey, wincing to see how near the shot came to skewering his friend. Rubbing his palms together in frustration, he watched Kleinhenz float downward to safety amidst his embracing kitchen larders, wondering how many more assassins remained. He saw the strangely altered Simon Sardonis, bounding among the floating, crisscrossing ruins with superhuman leaps, trying vainly to reach the remaining cats. Simon trailed bloody strips of clothing and bandages, like some apparition from a freshly erupted grave.

Kissing his wheel-lock pistol and praying for some reachable target, Orozco passed through the ethereal barrier of luminescent mist again, and wound up beholding the approach of those fragments he’d left behind.