Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (13 page)

The mountain men roamed the territory, protecting the innocent and rescuing the oppressed, disrupting black magic rituals and razing the ubiquitous symbols of demonic power where they found them—cabalistic tracings, Farouche crests drawn in human blood, goat-headed staffs raised over sacrificial altars. It seemed the Farouche drew sorcerous power in much the same fashion as had the evil wizard Mord, whose manipulations had destroyed Vedun. They gathered strength both from the perverse faith of their followers and the dynamic energy derived from living sacrifices, human and animal. Realizing this, Simon soon turned the rebels’ attention toward ambushing mercenary patrols bearing the wolf-charge banner, for these paid acolytes would be the mainstays of Farouche military strength and sorcerous faith.

The seasons passed, the shapes of evil changing even as Hugh Thibedeau had said. The rapacious stalking beasts of the fierce winter were gradually supplanted by the shadows of cunning horned forms in the dripping spring forests; by frightening prints of cloven hooves under the burgeoning bower; by huge, dark swooping forms in the treetops and slithering sinuous creatures that churned the pungent marshes and meadows in mockery of the teeming life that burst from the earth’s womb.

A doorway had been opened, and Burgundy had become the Devil’s playground.

Despite their noble efforts, their sparing of regular French troops in their forays against the Farouche, and their attempts at justifying their purpose, the mountain men learned that with each passing season the price on their heads increased, from both the Crown and the invading usurpers of the territory.

Simon knew the Farouche Clan was aware of his presence. He was cheered to realize how vexing it must be to Grimmolech to have his demonic son’s lupine strength and craftiness turned against him. But Simon did not employ the great golden werewolf form as he settled into his vigilante existence. He feared that by virtue of some aspect of the Beast’s unleashed life, the Farouche might contrive to search him out and entrap him.

He continued leading his ascetic life-style, even keeping his distance from his uncle’s band, for the most part. The mountain men assisted him in his evasions of the werewolf transformations by appointing a cave in the Alpine slopes in the manner he had found most useful. They fastened into the walls of the cave a series of enormous manacles by which he might be bound during the full of the moon until the Beast had impotently spent its violent rage of first release. Someone would free Simon the next morning. With this denial of blood-spilling in the full of the moon, Simon would be spared the agonizing, despised transmutations until the next full moon.

As spring became summer, animal violence randomly erupted in the province Simon loved, both in the withering heat of the day and the cloaking mantle of night. And the ensorceled warrior became emboldened by his longing to find the woman he loved.

For he learned at last that she had flown from Lamorisse.

None could, or would, say where, though he effected shaky confidences with several people by dint of his obvious resemblance to the Farouche. He could only wonder how many had kept their trembling vows of silence.

It was by gradual stages that Simon Sardonis took to drinking heavily. His feeling of good fellowship for Uncle Andre’s bunch had quickly ushered him into sharing their love of the grape. At first, he drank in moderation, both out of a lifetime’s cultivation of the solemn dignity with which he carried his curse and a deep-seated fear of what he might do once he had relinquished control.

But as he became disheartened over the growing certainty that he had lost Claire, he took to slugging at his wine when apart from them, soon preferring to drink alone. Rum and ale casks took their places next to his wine stores, and in time the energumen inside him began to panic more when Simon caught up a goblet, than a dirk, for some episode of self-torture.

Strong spirits, Simon learned, exercised a sedative effect on the creature that cohabited his soul’s space. And that became a justification to drink more heavily. Though Simon himself suffered dearly in lost faculties, it soon became a daily ritual for him to engage in righteous swilling, melting away the presence of his personal demon with the trickling warmth of his cups.

But sweet victory was short-lived under the burden of a heavy brow. For soon he was left alone to his maudlin thoughts.

Claire was lost to him. Gonji was never going to return.
Never trust a woman or a heathen. Never…

Almost—
almost,
in those moments before merciful sleep overcame him, the notion would come to fullness: Even the taunting of the demon spirit might sometimes be preferred to the terrible emptiness he felt.

CHAPTER TWO

A tigress wind thrashed all but the hardiest trees as storm clouds swallowed the orb of the moon. Hulking shadows and swarming shapes loomed about the onrushing beast, its fell purpose undaunted.

Indeed, its drunken resolve was fortified by the fury of the coming midsummer storm. Its mad bellows burst forth from the roiling lust in its belly, inflaming the night with evil passion. Predatory creatures, drawn by instinct and anticipation of imminent violence, took up the chase, gathering in its wake.

He had been warned against this by his fellows. But in his yearning for the girl he had cast aside the fetters of control, assumed the form of the mighty bipedal wolf, and foregone the constraints against strong drink. The rum had done its work well. Reason fled before the lash of animal passion.

The werewolf broke through the edge of the pine stand as the first sheet of hot rain slanted across the environs of the solitary farm, whipped by a banshee wind. Lightning inflamed the night. The penned cattle bleated and puled in primitive terror, crashing through their fences. Horses kicked and whinnied in their stalls inside the gambrel-roofed barn.

But the beast had eyes only for the two-storied farmhouse, flickering lamplight beckoning to it from the windows.

* * * *

In the upper story, the children began to cry in their beds.

Hercule Cochieu steeled himself as he fumbled with the loading and charging of his musket and pistol, sweating, grinding out imprecations through clenched teeth.

“Mon Dieu
—
O mon Dieu!”
his eldest daughter cried, trembling at the window.

“Get away from there,” Cochieu shouted. He brought his voice under control and moved beside Nadine, easing her from the window with a firm hand and peering outside. “Now, girl, go up and see to the children. Quietly.”

“Non, mon pere.
They’re safe. It is me that he wants.” Her words were laced with hitching sobs.

“What?” Cochieu turned from staring at the growling two-legged beast that preened itself on the path, strutting eerily in the rain as if engaged in some unthinkable mating ritual. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

There was a thump and an outcry over their heads—one of the three children had fallen out of bed to shriek more insistently now.

“It is—it is Rene Farouche, father. I
spurned
him.
He said—he said—” She couldn’t finish, averting her eyes from the slow-spreading rage that tinged her father’s features.

“Get upstairs and see to the children,” he said, paternal ire coming to a boil as his daughter’s words sank in. “I kept us here too long. I should have moved you all to the town—
get upstairs!”
He raised his wheel-lock pistol beside his jaw and strained to see through the driving rain and huddling darkness, out beyond the spattered window to where the monster bellowed at the door.

“Non,
I stay here to fight beside you,” she railed. “I am the cause of this.”

“Damned stubborn girl!”

A thunderous shock rattled the door—the heavy bar held the portal in place under the shoulder charge of the beast. But now it pounded the oaken planks with shuddersome blows. Nadine rushed to a back room and returned with an axe and her father’s rapier. She tossed the latter on the floor at his feet and hefted the axe defiantly.

A center plank split high on the door, just below the lintel.

Cochieu mouthed a desperate prayer, cast a glance up at the ceiling in response to a scream from the bedchamber above. He threw aside the shutter and crashed a stool through the window. Leaning out into the rain, he caught sight of the werewolf s jaws, agape with deadly promise. Red-veined silver eyes. A flash of black talons—

Cochieu’s pistol barked and fumed, hissing in the rain spatter. But the shot fired truly. The beast was struck full in the chest, the impact knocking it backward. It howled maniacally, slipped in the mud and fell, scrabbling back up and spinning in its pain as it clawed at the darkly leaking wound.

It lunged for the broken window, lurched through—its shoulders wouldn’t pass the aperture, though it strained and raked savage gouges in the frame.

Cochieu swore, staving off his terror. He grabbed up his rapier, stutter-stepped forward a pace. Two paces. He slashed at the werewolf with his slim blade, scoring its muzzle and forearm deeply. Nadine screamed sharply behind him, still gripping the axe, shuffling anxiously.

“Leave us alone!”
she shrilled.

The monster bellowed in pain and fled the window as Cochieu tossed aside the rapier and brought his heavy musket to bead on its canine head.

It disappeared into the rain a moment. Hercule and his daughter eyed each other, thinking the same thought.

“The rear—”

“Bolted!”

“Are you sure?”

A thud. The rasp of claws against the side of the house. A window exploded above them. A chorus of children’s screams—

“Jesus God Almighty
—
”

Before they could move, a jackal leaped through the broken parlor window.

* * * *

The vigilante band out of Lamorisse had been hastily raised in response to hysterical word of a rampaging night beast terrorizing farms on the outskirts of town. As usual the small garrison of French regulars had responded in lackluster fashion, receiving the alarm with sullen disinterest, a small squad being dispatched in the wrong direction. And the townsfolk were told to report such information to the shire-reeve, Lyle Farouche, in the future.

Thus, there no longer being any hope in appealing to the powers that held control of Burgundy, the Knights of Wonder took matters into their own hands.

A dozen men pounded along the rain-rutted southeast track under the command of Jacques Moreau, who outwardly exuded the confidence he knew the others needed to see but was internally troubled on many fronts. The worst of it was that he’d been intercepted by his friends while returning from an evening visit. There had been no time to escort his son safely home. So young Guy now rode along at the center of the pack, bundled against the storm in his father’s cavalry jack, wild-eyed with childish anticipation of seeing the men he so admired in armed clash with Satan’s goblins.

“There—listen,” someone grated as they all reined in. “Must be Cochieu’s place.”

An electric thrill coursed through them to hear the bellowing of the werewolf a mile off, even through the woods and the wind and the rain.

Moreau mopped his brow and sniffed, spitting into the muddy road. “All right…All right, let’s go. Guy—ride close to the Richards now,
garcon.”

Moreau swallowed hard, his eyes glazing with a sudden fear of what lay ahead, and kicked his steed into a gallop.

* * * *

A tremulous murmur escaping her throat as she ran, Nadine bounded up the stairs in three lissome strides, brandishing the axe before her. Her fear turned to blind rage and concern for her sisters and brother. Despite the prickling terror that threatened to paralyze her legs, she snarled out a defiant threat and came on flailing at the huge monstrosity that had fractured part of the window frame and wedged itself into the aperture.

Little Clarice, huddled into a corner of the bedchamber, eyes blank with shock, was nearly in reach of a scraping, straining, taloned paw.

Nadine’s father lurched into the room behind her, roaring for her to clear the way. But she was galvanized by the children’s trenchant wailing. She swung the axe in scything arcs, inching ever closer to the wetly snapping jaws of the werewolf.

“Nadine,”
the creature hissed, flinching back.

She froze. Her heart seized up, to hear her name pronounced in that horrible, unearthly voice.

Screaming to ward the onset of madness, flushing with the wave of nausea that preceded her faint, she struck the beast full in the lower jaw, shattering half a row of darkly stained teeth.

The werewolf howled in ear-piercing agony, and the children screamed in chorus.

Hercule Cochieu’s hair bristled, and when Nadine crumpled to the floor between them, clearing his view, he discharged his musket at the beast’s head. The report was deafening in the tight quarters. Cochieu’s ears blocked, and the musket ball ripped fur and flesh from the werewolf’s neck.

Dark, slick blood gouted from the wound.

Cochieu gasped and hurled the musket into its ghastly face. He surged to the corner where Clarice lay quivering. He caught her up, kicked free of the claw that wildly shredded his boot. The werewolf suddenly went slack, seemingly dead. And Cochieu then dragged the other two small children along with him and Clarice.

The jackal met them at the base of the stairs, frothing and hissing. Cochieu tensely pressed it back with his drawn dagger, whose menace it respected. After what seemed an eternal standoff, the children mewling in utter panic, Cochieu warded the jackal back and locked the children into a larder.

When he returned for the slack Nadine, his scalp crackled to see the werewolf revived now, and clawing its way, with one bloody paw, through the hole in the wall that had late been a window. It barked and growled in animal fury, thrashing at the splintering wood of a shutter, its smoldering eyes on Nadine.

But then—

It lurched with an unseen impact. Then another.

Cochieu frenziedly dragged his daughter down the stairs, uncertain of the phenomenon’s meaning. Uncaring. Survival—the children’s survival alone occupied his scattershot thoughts.

Outside, horses whinnied and bucked in primal terror. The Wunderknechten under Moreau were not surprised to find that their guns would not fire in the rain. Undaunted, they unleashed deadly bowshot at the werewolf, spindling its hide with clothyard shafts. A mighty shot by Darcy Lavelle pinned the creature’s thigh to the wall. Its howls raised gooseflesh.

But it was still wedged half-inside the burst lattice window.

Two men beat at the still-barred rear door until Cochieu gratefully admitted them.

Wyatt Ault, an ex-mercenary who had seen his share of night-haunters in the forests of Prussia and Bavaria, quit his skittish mount to race past the farmhouse. With practiced ease he scaled the sodden wall of an adjacent outbuilding. From there, he executed a dangerous leap to a low edge of the farmhouse roof, shingles breaking free and splashing into the pools below as he scrabbled for purchase.

Two hawks, under some dark-powered direction, broke from under an eave and strafed him, describing ungainly arcs on rain-burdened wings. Ault fought them off with drawn sword until they retreated.

Unlimbering his longbow, Wyatt eased to the front of the treacherous roof. Drawing from an awkward position, he planted an arrow deep into the werewolf’s lower back, cursing with battle-glee to see it wrench like a speared fish.

Another shaft hissed from the bow, almost splitting the first, as gunshots vibrated the roof beneath his feet—

In the children’s bedchamber, the two men who had entered the house stilled the monster’s spasmodic frenzy with pistol shot. It lay motionless, draped over the sill, jerking with involuntary muscular reaction.

Outside, the remainder of the party dismounted and steadied their anxious horses.

The two men in the farmhouse who had shot the creature exhaled as one and appraised their kill. One urged caution, but his partner, convinced that the battle was won, moved forward to examine the awesome form.

The werewolf’s upper body snapped erect, its riven form charged anew with hellish life, one act of perverse defiance left to it. The man was dragged down and mangled under a maelstrom of razoring talons, his face gashed and flayed beyond recognition. It would be several minutes before his already stiffening corpse could be separated from that of the werewolf.

Dazed, their wrath spent and their fear of the supernatural dulled by fatigue, the armed party finally gazed about them in exasperation. They were drenched with rain and sweat, splashed with mud and blood, breathing hard with exertion and expectancy. But their eyes shone with a glimmer of hopeful realization.

This was indeed a significant accomplishment. It boded present change in Burgundy—whether for better or worse, no one seemed to care for the nonce.

Three men with polearms and staffs levered the werewolf’s ravaged body out into space. It crashed into a swirling pool of muddied hues beside the front door. They all gathered slowly to stare at it. Then, gradually, they began jostling and chattering the way men did after great achievements and brushes with death. Here they had experienced both.

Inside the house, Nadine worked at calming the sobbing children. Cochieu set a stew pot to boiling and broke out an ale cask. Darcy Lavelle and another man rolled the form of the dead jackal—dispatched by Darcy’s pike-point—onto a horse blanket for disposal.

The rest grouped around the rain-pelted, shaft-spindled bulk of the werewolf. It lay twisted in death, its tufted and matted fur obscuring its former outlines. But no one hurried to rearrange the monster for better viewing.

Lantern shields, their flames spared the rain by housings above the arm couplings, clustered like faery lights about the front of the farmhouse.

Jacques Moreau took note of the predatory eyes that rimmed the forest in growing numbers. He signaled for the Richard brothers to bring young Guy down from the road. As he watched his son approach, Moreau was assailed by worry and doubt. The men had taken to his new leadership well enough, that was sure. Intrepid warriors, one and all. But what had they done here? What price would they pay? Had anyone noticed how little he’d contributed once that familiar clutching feeling inside had paralyzed him? And in what light would young Guy see his father cast in the days to come?

Moreau watched his son’s expression as the doughty Richard brothers brought him near, swinging past the emptied animal pens. With Marie gone, who would care for the boy should anything ill befall Jacques? Wasn’t that a father’s first concern—the protection and raising of his son? Did anything else really matter?

He drew off his soaked hat and cast off the excess rainwater with a wrist snap. He smiled at his son.

“Hide your eyes,” he said to Guy, futilely and too late, for three men now brought out the partially wrapped remains of the man killed by the werewolf.

The optimistic banter of the Wonder Knights abruptly ceased.

* * * *

Little Guy Moreau was swept up by the import of it all. His father was a great leader now, engaged in the business of hunting down the monsters people whispered about when they thought no children heard. And here was one of them. It looked like a man rolled into an animal skin. All tangled and bloody. Its insides were oozing out like something the butcher-man had prepared for roasting. It didn’t look like a monster at all. Just a huge, dead forest animal.