Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (19 page)

For he did devoutly pray for a safe return to his wife and unborn child.

CHAPTER SIX

Simon caught scent of the cloying tang of blood long before he sighted the Cave of Chains.

Breath came hard to him as he leapt off his steed and raced for the cave, axe and broadsword held high, the terror of the full moon’s imminent rising seeping into every crevice of his consciousness.

He gained the concealed entrance, by now aware that only the dead awaited him within. A lamp had been lit for him. Surrounding its lambent glow, as if radiating from the magenta flame, was a ghastly bloodbath.

Mountain men. Torn to shreds. Old Pierre. And Hugh. And Jean Godel. Others—an uncertain number to Simon’s feverish gaze, so mutilated were the corpses. His chains, the chains that had afforded him sanctuary from the Beast’s ferocity in the full of the moon, were sundered from their moorings. A body had been laid out amidst them on the ground in mock shackling, its head twisted about on a broken neck such that it faced the rear.

Horrified, expecting the victim to be his Uncle Andre, Simon turned it around with the axe-head. There was little left of the face, but it was not Andre. Yet there was no relief in the discovery, for his uncle had been with this party only yesterday.

Simon emitted a long, forlorn bellow of fury and anguish. Then he stumbled out of the cave to face the waning light of day. Shadows of mountain peaks crept over the valley. Panic-stricken, he knew not what to do as he watched his restive horse back away from him, turn, and bolt from his increasingly menacing scent, his belongings torn from their saddle cinchings as the animal sped through the brush.

Jesus God Almighty, help me…

They know.

He dropped his weapons and clenched his hands in quaking prayer a moment. Then he began to think, with difficulty. There must be something he could do.
Something
to quarantine the monster for the night, lest it seek out its foul kin while Simon was helpless to control it. God alone knew whom it might kill this night. Already he could hear its yearnings for anticipated freedom.

Control
…

Gonji had often spoken of his controlling it. Hadn’t Simon in fact done so in Vedun?
Oui,
but only after unbearable struggle. Many kills.
Kills
—he could suffer the transformation after first bringing it near some enemy. No-no. Madness. There was no guarantee of that. Not at all.
Non,
it would still seek out its evil kin.
Run
—he must run as far and fast as he could manage into the mountains…

Crazy. It would mock his effort all the while and
then
retrace his steps at several times his speed and still have plenty of time to vent its bloodlust.

What to do—
God
—what to do…

Gonji said to control it.

Or, perhaps,
subdue
it. He saw the downed pack a hundred yards down the trail. His wineskin.
Oui…

The demon began to rage within him, knowing his thinking, spewing its vileness at him for daring to consider denying it its fullness of life for a night.

Simon sneered and retrieved the worn leather pack. He uncorked the wineskin and, there on the trail, seated on a rock, he began to guzzle the potent beverage. Before long he lay atop the boulder like a broken-backed doll, singing a French cavalry ditty. Laughing. He was dimly aware that he had never laughed before on the Night of Chains.

The energumen spent its rage and was presently sedated, despairingly receding into its sleeping cell deep within their arena of cohabitation. And when the dreadful hour-long wrenching of his mortal form seized him, Simon discovered that the wine exercised an anesthetic effect. He had never before maintained such semi-consciousness through the agony of the Beast’s lunar birthing.

The seven-and-a-half-foot golden-furred Beast rolled to its feet during the hour before midnight. Simon found himself in command of its imposing bipedal wolf form but hardly in
control
. He began to wonder what to do with it as it teetered about strangely on the trail. There was a curious drunken exhilaration to the whole experience, as forest wildlife fled in every direction from his noisy approach. He growled through his slavering jaws and hacked out a series of barking laughs as he formed a bleary resolve.

Sober and in control, he would have sought sanctuary from the urge to kill. In his present state, with the grim memory of the cave carnage woven into the surface of what little rational thought he could conjure, Simon wanted nothing more than to kill. This, despite his dim awareness that he would thereby be forced to suffer the transformations nightly until the next moon.

But he cared not. He took up the weapons awkwardly, the promise of mayhem charging his bestial rumblings.

* * * *

The mercenary band, ten strong, had late come from northern German lands, where their reputation had been built on the plunder of defenseless villages. The increased pressure of pursuit by knights of the Empire had driven them over the Alps to France, where their love of power and brutality had ushered them into the employ of the controlling Farouche.

The company relaxed near their campfire. In the still of the night, confident in their duty, their raised pennons bearing the fearsome wolf crest of the Farouche family. Mystical power supposedly surrounded them this night, which was theirs due to the barter of souls they scarcely believed in. Their flesh, they were told, now carried a charm of sorcerous power. “High survival probability,” Roman Farouche had explained in terms they didn’t understand. They’d seen it in action, though they were still content to call it
luck.

The young woman, the sacrificial victim, whimpered from the post where she’d been lashed. She was to be the flesh offering to the mighty being whose appearance they presently expected. He would hunger to spill blood this night.

“The Lords say tonight’s the night,” one of them said in a voice full of nervous expectation. “They expect to win back the allegiance of some…lost Farouche brother.”

“They’re sure he’ll stop at her?” another fretted.

“You question the Lords, after what we’ve seen?” his companion blared.

“He’ll know us by their crest, the family crest,” their leader assured. “Stop your stupid grumbling. Remember who our patrons are. Walk proudly under this standard.”

“Shut up, there, bitch,” the first brigand called out to the woman, evoking harsh laughter from a few lounging men. “You want to hear your lover’s soft footsteps tonight, don’t you?” More laughter.

“I’ve heard there’s a marauding bunch from Austria about—”

“Listen!”

They did so, with breaths held in check.

“Kneel to him when he comes—”

The leader and his second-in-command were the first two to move forward and drop to one knee respectfully at the edge of the firelight. The woman’s eyes went wide. She moaned pathetically, all she could summon from a throat raw from pleading. She turned her head, slumping into a near swoon.

That movement spared her a grisly sight as the two kneeling men’s heads leapt off their shoulders under the first savage stroke of Simon’s broadsword.

The rest of the band bellowed in fear and alarm and scrabbled for their weapons, some trying to take to horse. Simon roared his volcanic wrath and tore into their number with flailing axe and sword, hacking men and mounts into bloody ruin. He lurched about unsteadily, his powerful wolfish frame still wambly from the spell of the wine. His strokes were wild and poorly directed, but in the close quarters of the encampment, most of them struck truly.

Two men who reached their shrilling horses wheeled them around for the safety of the trees. Simon plunged after them, shattering one steed’s hindquarters, spilling it to earth. He tore the screaming rider’s throat out with a single snap and wrench of his jaws. Then he bounded off after the warrior’s companion, tripping twice over roots and bouncing off a tree trunk before angling in on the bolting horse from the right flank.

The werewolf’s axe tore open the steed’s belly as it reared and threw its rider, who was knocked unconscious in the fall. Knowing this man to be the last living minion of the hated Farouche still in his grasp, Simon allowed his raging spirit to fully vent itself in a raking, tearing frenzy. Clawing at himself and spitting out blood and rent flesh violently to try to chase the taste and scent of the carnage, he stumbled about blearily a moment. Then he retrieved his weapons and returned to the campsite, alive with the last twitchings of involuntary muscular response.

The probability of survival had not been so high for these men as the Farouche had promised.

The sacrificial victim stared up at him, eyes glazed, her head lowered to her chest in surrender. She was beyond terror now, in shock.

Simon tried to speak, but only guttural growling emanated from his throat. He spat again and made a gesture he hoped would appeal to her sensibilities. Tearing a wild-eyed mount from its tether, he dragged the kicking animal to the post. Raking talons sheared through the hempen bonds that held the woman and she fell to the ground.

Simon growled for her to mount the horse. Again. He was forced to scoop her up in a bloody furred arm and toss her aboard the horse, where she clung to the animal’s neck, her head laid against its own such that she could not see the werewolf’s awful apparition. Stumbling backward and falling again, Simon bellowed at the curvetting mount. It galloped off, the woman holding fast in insensate flight.

Simon regathered his senses, the woods spinning about him. He caught an unwholesome scent mingled with that of blood and entrails. It came from the north. A smell of earth churned by something vaguely verminous.

He bounded off in the direction of the scent.

Behind him, there was a sharp clap, a black rift opening gauzily, like dream-mist, in the space above the campsite.

Anton Balaerik stepped through and landed lightly on the soft mat of pine-needled earth. He gazed off toward Simon’s spoor, a look of grave concern etching his sharply chiseled features. Gonji’s nemesis from a parallel world, who had briefly manipulated the Church itself, now turned his attention on the savaged brigands. He found two who had yet to pass into the Dark Land.

Extracting the round ivory artifact by which he stayed the moment of death, he performed a ritual incantation and in seconds caught up and engaged the dying embers of the pair’s spirits.

“Do you desire life?”

Awed affirmation was exuded in response.

“Then attend on me…”

Their wounds closed as if by the hand of a ghostly surgeon, and the two rose shakily to fall in at Balaerik’s side. A half-life of evil servitude seemed far preferable to the sudden knowledge of what awaited them beyond the curtain of death.

* * * *

Under the moon’s magic influence, Belial Farouche transformed into his favorite persona—a large, hulking faun. His quick-thumping hoofbeats and leering, horned head were a familiar nightmare to the women and children of Burgundy. None ventured out unescorted after twilight for fear of his assaults. For he’d been known to take his pleasure with the unwary and the ill defended, and he found that pleasure in two predilections: lust and sadism.

The latter passion always guided his full-moon meanderings, for like Simon’s Beast, Belial would secure the month’s nocturnal transformations by spilling blood on that night.

He withdrew now from the stiffening corpse of the mountain man, whose head and chest had been crushed beyond recognition by Belial’s stamping hooves. He was anxious to be the first to encounter his long-lost nameless brother, freed by now from the imprisoning body of Simon Sardonis. He wondered how the Beast had found the soft, shapely offering of the young virgin, cackling as he loped along toward the free companions’ camp. This would be a grand night, for their father, whom Belial was always anxious to please, would be rejoining them from the mystical isle that was their cross-world base of operations.

Belial passed the great sentinel serpent in a delve and padded along its body a few steps, tittering as it hissed in annoyance. Then, hearing the deep growling in the distance, he snickered in secret, inane mirth and squatted down to rest while he sharpened his goat’s horns with a file drawn from his pouch. Replacing it, he felt the reed pipe and was seized by the urge to play. The instrument had given him great enjoyment since his discovery that beings of this sphere associated it with satyrs.

It would be a fine jest on his newly returned brother.

Belial pranced through the wood toward the low growling sounds, piping mellifluous notes without melody.

The werewolf’s snarls of blood-frenzy came closer. But something was wrong. Belial stopped playing and listened. Heard the creature make a beeline for him through the forest. Saw the hurtling golden form. And abruptly feared the look in its red-rimmed silvery eyes.

“Brother—?”

The broadsword and battle-axe arced for him like the mandibles of a voracious insect. Blurring speed was Belial’s forte, courage in battle occupying the farther end of his spectrum of attributes. He slipped the enfolding steel edges, back-stepping with rapid stutter-steps, gasping aloud.

The werewolf’s own power nearly knocked the wind out of him as his arms struck his chest from the force of the opposing scythes, intended to leave Belial in three pieces.

Belial yammered at the werewolf insensibly, trying to make it understand that he was its brother. Unknown to him, the energumen still slept within, arrested by Simon’s inebriate spell. But the wine served Simon almost as poorly. He could not match Belial’s speed or lightning evasive moves, and the faun pulled away from him, luring him toward the huge serpent that Simon had caught scent of.

Belial now made a game of it, indignant to be so rudely treated. He began piping an annoying little scale over and over, wringing growls that might have been curses from the werewolf’s canine throat. Simon went at him again and again, swinging, lunging, tumbling head over heels—

Until he struck the scaly mound that rose up across his path, knocking him backward. Simon roared in primitive response to the enormous fanged head that loomed over him. Ophidian eyes gleamed like alien stars, cold and lidless, set at either side of the yawning rictus mouth with its curving white fangs, each as long as a man’s arm.

He scrabbled backward, felt the seething of the pungent earth as the sinuous creature withdrew its full concealed length from the depression in the ground. Massive coils wrapped the werewolf in a crushing grip. Simon
yiped
and howled against the relentless pressure. Belial bounded over the great serpent’s bulk and laughed between taunting notes on his pipe.

Simon saw white pinpoints searing his vision like a swarm of shooting stars. His breath was stayed. Darkness stole over his consciousness…

When he opened his eyes again, his head swimming and the world engulfed in dark murky hues, Simon heard first the triumphant laughter of the energumen inside him. Then:

“Mon fils
—my son.”

He stared up into the smiling visage of Grimmolech, father of demons and architect of Simon’s lifetime of misery.