Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (33 page)

“Sensei!”

At last—a spoken word Gonji understood, though its incongruity here caused him some small wonder even in his present bizarre circumstance.

He looked to the window. A pike was tossed out to him. He grunted in appreciation and took up the weapon.

The raging serpent’s head slammed downward at him. He tilted at the monstrous beast, clashing with its hissing and clamping jaws. When he severed one fang at the upper jaw, the front half of the creature fell to wild convulsions.

Gonji jabbed it again and again, deflecting its vicious attacks, its madness now driving it to try to swallow him whole, something its cavernous maw might have been quite capable of.

But Gonji held it at bay. His skillful assault sliced its tender mouth parts to ribbons. And in the end, its frustrated contortions spending its energy, its head lolled near the ground.

Gonji lanced the pike from upper snout through lower jaw, driving the razored point through soft masonry, lodging it in the chapel foundation. The enormous head dripped and throbbed like a gaffed fish against the chapel wall.

Gathering his breath, he let go of the skewering pike and stepped back to appraise his work. Nodding once in the understated fashion that was all his breeding usually allowed, he turned to confront a deeply bowing Jacques Moreau.

“Mon Dieu
—the Great
Sensei
himself!” Moreau said for the third time. He spoke German, to Gonji’s considerable relief.

The samurai smiled thinly, rather glad for the renewed company of like-minded sword-brothers.

“Amazing…how you handled that thing…just amaz—”

Gonji bowed slightly and held up a silencing hand.
“Arigato.
Thank you—enough about it,
neh?
Serpents don’t bother me. It’s
flying
monsters I detest.” He nodded his creased brow toward a gargoyle’s corpse, shuddering with revulsion. “So…Wilfred Gundersen is alive, the last you heard,
so desu ka?”
Gonji took comfort in Moreau’s eager affirmations.
“Yoi
—that’s good. And Simon Sardonis? Thank the Great
Kami
for that—”

“They said he ran from Serge Farouche in Lamorisse,” Moreau advanced gingerly, raking Guy’s tousled hair, as the boy regarded the gigantic dead serpent with marveling eyes.

“If so, then he must have had a sound reason,” the samurai averred. He also turned his attention to Guy and, in passable local dialect, said: “You are a brave young lad,
neh?”

“Oui, monsieur.
I helped
mon pere
fight those devils.” The boy was still visibly shaken, his large eyes fractured with red streaks of exhaustion and shining with wonder. And he constantly averted his gaze from the dead gargoyle forms strewn about the churchyard, sharing Gonji’s distaste. His father laid an arm about his shoulders and hugged him protectively.

Gonji’s eyes narrowed as he glanced about. “Simon will be back. Wilfred has his woman in hiding, and I think he hates these Farouche more than any of us can truly appreciate.”

“Gentils,” the
cure
interjected softly, “now that we’ve disposed of these creatures, what shall I do with them?” There was a trace of relieved humor in the priest’s tone.

Gonji looked to the carcass of the great serpent, girdling more than half the chapel like a scaly necklace. He winced, curiously cheered by the offbeat realization that abruptly struck him: Responsibility for cleaning up his handiwork never fell to the hero.

* * * *

Sgt. Carlos Orozco and the French mercenaries clattered into the village, the heavy cannon and ordnance wagon rumbling along behind them. It was several minutes before they could draw the fearful citizens from their homes. Once they’d established that they were Wunderknechten turned out in defense of Burgundy’s rebellion, it was several
more
minutes before they were able to make sense of the cacophony of anxious voices.

“Calm down! Calm down!” Armand Perigor urged. “Where is this chapel you speak of?”

“How many people trapped there?”

“What
kind
of monsters?”

“Yo-ho!”
Normand Gareau shouted, spanking his horse into anxious motion and waving to the others. “Sounds good to me! Let’s use this equipment before the army strips us of it! Come
on,
Armand!”

They thundered out of the village and took to the forest, the ordnance wagons barely squeezing through the narrowest turnings of the trail.

“Discretion be damned!” Le Corbeau roared in the din. “Let’s hit them!”

Gareau leapt from his horse to the wagon bearing the multiple-barrel musket. Uncovering it and swinging it about, he lit an oil-soaked match from the ever-burning stone-pot lamp in the wagon. Bouncing with the ride, singing a battle chanty, he held the match ready to ignite the gun-wicks.

* * * *

“Take my horse and get the boy out of here, up into those hills,” Gonji ordered Moreau. “I will find you. You—priest—get inside the church.”

He belted his pistols and seated his swords in his back harness. Charging one gun, Gonji prepared to fire on the point man of the horde whose approach vibrated the churchyard.

But the point man was Armand Perigor.

“Yoi!”
Gonji exclaimed. Then, to the fleeing Moreau: “Come back—these are my
ronin!”

Moreau trotted Nichi back beside Gonji and dismounted along with Guy.

“Damn it all! Begging your pardon,
padre!
But…damn!” Orozco swore again, behind Perigor, as he gazed at the carnage around the chapel. “You mean we still drag this cannon around for nothing? Don’t you leave
anything
for anybody else, Gonji-san?”

A spate of good-natured laughter ensued.

Perigor swung down from his mount to shake Gonji’s hand warmly. Le Corbeau followed, bowing in perfect Japanese fashion. Brett Jarret cast the samurai a slap-dash salute, grunting a greeting. Gareau drew his sword and saluted with more courtly grace. Sgt. Orozco beamed him a sour smile.

Gonji bowed to them all. The massed party of newer French adventurers, who’d never seen Gonji before, held back respectfully and whispered, fascinated to at last meet the legendary oriental.

They exchanged news of the road.

“These people are really suffering here at the hands of these sorcerers, eh?” Perigor observed, sighing heavily.

“Hai,”
Gonji agreed. “I’m afraid this is a running battle. These rebel actions are never easy to coordinate and always costly. And we can’t even know the foe’s limits in this one. Plus, as usual we’re more unwelcome here than the Farouche themselves, as far as French royalty is concerned. But…we’re this far along—”

“A lot farther than last winter,” Gareau added.

Grunts of assent at the grim reminder.

Corbeau spoke. “It’s rather important for tactical planning that we try to find the Wunderknechten leaders here quickly. Learn what they know. Get these people moving in the same direction. At the very
least
start securing the towns and villages.”

“Well, I can vouch for Lamorisse’s fighting folk,” Moreau said. “It’s in good hands, and they’re either digging in or evacuating.”

“Oui
—but to
where?”
Corbeau fretted. “Sorry we couldn’t get here soon enough to be of assistance to your city.”

Moreau thanked him silently, lips set in a thin line.

Gonji strolled as he spoke, hands clasped behind him. “These villages won’t be safe, though the larger towns might fend for themselves. If all the Crown’s garrisoned regulars haven’t been murdered like those in Lamorisse—and that seems unlikely; how many mercenaries can the Farouche employ?—maybe they can be won over. They’re French first and Burgundian second, one would hope…”

“The king’s regulars don’t want to hear our claims of ‘invaders from faerie realms,’” Perigor said bitterly. “To them,
we
are the invaders.”

“Why not attack Dijon?” Jarret asked. “Go right for the seat of—?”

“Non
—nothing could make us look more like the insurrectionists they take us for,” Gonji replied.

“We lack strength for that, anyway,” Corbeau added.

“And the loyalist soldiers there are sure to be under Farouche influence,” Moreau put in. “We’d be fighting the good and the bad at once.”

Perigor made a scoffing sound. “Our fight is with these shape-shifting Farouche tyrants, not the order of our own country’s society.”

“We need a rallying point,” Gonji said thoughtfully. “Something highly defensible…”

“How about the battered Frankish castle in the mountain gorges?” Moreau advanced.

“Oui,
I know the place,” Corbeau said on an excited breath. “Abandoned, crumbled by siege, but still useful, I think.”

“Unless Farouche sorcery has meddled there as well,” Orozco reminded them.

“It’s haunted,” Guy said fearfully behind them.

“What?”

Moreau translated for Gonji, as his son recounted the regional superstitions surrounding the place in their regional dialect. The lad’s words held the rapt attention of the company of battle-hardened warriors.

“Mmm,” the samurai intoned pensively, “not
another
castle like the one in Africa, I trust. But it seems the best chance. Let’s do it.
That’s
our sanctuary for those who have nowhere to run, our base of operations. Moreau, you’ve done your part. Take your boy and ride with this company. Perigor, have them get this ordnance of yours to the castle. We need a reliable map of the province from you, Moreau—all areas of Farouche activity since this rebellion started. The six of us will ride out in pairs on a general alert, try to…bring some organization to this madness. I want to learn where Simon and Wilfred Gundersen operate. Their aid is vital. Oh, and—Armand, will you set some of your people to helping the
cure
clean up his churchyard?”

“Don’t look at me,” Orozco said wardingly when he saw Gonji glance at him. Subdued laughter accompanied the Spaniard’s remark.

“All-recht, ronin
—let’s move. Moreau, what is it?”

Jacques seemed troubled. “I was—I was just thinking how fortunate I am to have my son…and about those others who…weren’t so lucky. In Lamorisse…”

An arrow stole snapped sharply behind the listeners. Le Corbeau had yanked it from the corpse of a gargoyle and cracked it in two, scowling. The Crow’s teeth ground at the memory of Jacques Moreau’s tale of outrage concerning the abducted children of his town.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Serge Farouche left the abducted children of Lamorisse in the hands of a mercenary column.

The wolves had carried the twenty-seven terrified children to two waiting oxcarts in the forest north of the town. The young ones were loaded and locked into the wooden cages and given food and drink. But many were still in shock, and most partook of neither.

The mercenary band trundled them off toward the mountain grotto used by the Farouche in their foul rites. The wolf pack loped along in escort, and a small flight of gargoyles flapped overhead, serving as both scouts and aerial cover fire.

But the foul company had been watched.

Gonji’s other adventurer company, under the command of Buey, had trailed them from a safe distance, keeping to the depths of the forest to avoid being spotted.

When the opportunity finally presented itself, the Wunderknechten struck like an iron fist of providential wrath.

When the mercenaries briefly left the child-bearing carts with the wolf pack and took water from a mountain well, the first fusillade of longbow shafts riddled them. The second sent their tattered remnant scurrying for the cover of boulders and sparse brush. A pitched bowshot battle ensued, the determined adventurers’ uncanny accuracy dropping more brigands with every volley.

The gargoyles fell from the sky like scorched bugs, their short arbalests no match for the longbows in either range or firepower. They soon abandoned the fray and winged toward Dijon to report the incident.

Buey led the bulk of the company down toward the well, closing fast with the disheartened mercenaries, who now cracked off pistol shot, their fear of the Wunderknechten’s vengeful fury daunting their aim, their frenzied reloading efforts costing them time and ground.

The battle ended swiftly in a brutal clash of edged weapons as a handful of mercenaries took to scattered, ravaged, jangling flight. Buey himself engaged the leader, a massive Dutchman whose scarred armor evinced his experience in the field.

Their brief, steel-sparking, hand-to-hand dirk fight climaxed in a thunderous exchange of fists and booted feet near the well, as both had lost their blades in the melee that had left them cut and bleeding from numerous wounds.

Buey’s men shouted repeatedly for him to stop, for the mercenary commander might be useful alive. But the Ox was beyond rational counsel. In the end, he clutched his foe’s throat and tried to crush it in his iron grip as the brigand pounded him futilely, with weakening thews.

“Steal
—
children
—
you
—
sonofabitch!”

“Buey—no!”

The Ox slammed his enemy against the side of the well. Grabbing him by one leg, he flipped him over the stone wall to plunge headfirst, screaming, into the watery depths.

“Buey!”

They gathered to peer down. An echoing, scream-filled
splash…
Then silence, and a soft lapping of water, was all they heard.

“Jesus-God-A’mighty—look!”

Gasps and shouts of horror. They ran as a body toward the band of six, led by Father Jan Sebastio and Luigi Leone, who had gone after the wolf-ringed children.

Gonji’s old friend Kuma-san, the priest who had tutored him in Japan, was past hope—half the wolf pack had sprung on him en masse…

* * * *

As the battle raged about the well, Sebastio and Leone warily approached the snarling wolves who poised threateningly around the imprisoned children. The little ones were crying, certain something awful was about to happen. They huddled together inside the oxcarts as one wolf leaped atop each canopy, snarling toward the savage fighting at the well.

“Christ,
padre,
what the hell can we do?” Leone said, grimacing, his blade and pistol brandished in either hand in useless display.

Kuma-san swallowed, shuddering as he considered something, briefly shutting his eyes against the sight.

“We can’t fire on ‘em,” another warrior declared needlessly. “Might hit those youngsters.”

“If they charge,
I’m
shooting,” another man said in a strained voice.

“No.”

Father Jan put up his stout-bladed
schiavona
in its scabbard
.
Waving the others back, he gripped the crucifix that depended from a leather thong about his neck. He began to walk slowly toward the red-eyed beasts, whose jaws slavered in anticipation of tearing frenzy.

“You’re crazy,
padre!”

Sebastio plodded on, holding the crucifix before him. He spoke softly as he walked, his voice murmuring words that could not be heard over the growling of the wolf pack, the menacing clack of bared and stained white fangs.

“Yes,” Kuma-san was whispering, “you know not human speech, but you know this symbol. And you know your true Lord…” His breathing became choppy, but he forced a deep breath and steeled himself, closing his eyes an instant when terror threatened to engulf him. Sending up a prayer for strength and courage in his faith, Sebastio commended his spirit to his God.

“You dare not harm these innocents, for they are God’s own children,” he said more clearly now, his voice rising in volume and pitch as his eyes began to shine with the flooding of faith, of conviction…of resolution, that drove his spirit and steadied his footsteps.

“They’re going to spring—”

“We’ve got to shoot!”

“No
—
let him be,”
Leone ordered, holding up a now weaponless hand. His face glowed with astonishment at the priest’s faith and valor as he swallowed back a ball of burning fear.

“Leave these children,” Sebastio commanded the wolves. “By the power of God I
demand that
you spare these children. Avaunt, power of Satan! Avaunt, spirits of Evil!”

The wolves at the fore spread out and encircled the priest, heads lowered as if to charge. The rest pawed about the oxcarts, spoiling for a fight. And the two on top of the carts snarled down at the puling children.

Sebastio stopped, his conviction momentarily failing him to see the predators’ intent. He was unsure of how to proceed now that the wolves had held their ground.

Eyeing the pathetic little ones, he took another step toward the carts, and then another—

The wolves closed the circle.

“If you must spill blood in your demon-lust, then let it be mine!”

Sebastio spread his arms wide, glaring at the circle of eager carnivores. “Take me, and let these children live.”

There was a breathless instant of stillness, as the drama at the well played out to its conclusion. A man beside Leone muttered an oath.

And the wolves sprang at Father Sebastio.

“Noooooo!”

Luigi and his men opened fire on the wolves at the oxcarts, felling four or five with pistol shot. There was nothing they could do for Sebastio. Unleashing their bows, they took out three more of the beasts as they strove to rip the wooden carts to shreds and get at the children.

Then something eerie occurred.

All the wolves tearing at the oxcarts cringed as one, as if by some unheard directive of the nameless principle that compelled their actions. The six who had descended on Father Sebastio in primitive fury now backed away from his downed form.

Leone stayed his men’s fire and stared in horror at the supine priest, whose hands—bloody now—covered his face. Like a phoenix, Kuma-san rose shakily from the position in which the others had conceded him to death. Marked by many fangs, his flesh punctured shallowly through his garb in scores of places along his upper body, hands and arms, he was nonetheless relatively unharmed.

He stood with bowed head, as wolves and men alike focused on him in awe.

The wolves slunk backward, turned quietly, and padded off along the slopes toward the forests below, those about the oxcart joining Sebastio’s attackers in an outre single line of orderly retreat.

Convinced that they’d been privy to a manifestation of the power of faith, the company fell to quiet whispering and private introspections a moment, some of the men falling to their knees to give thanks for what must surely have been divine intervention.

Leone circled Sebastio twice before speaking. “God,
padre
—I could never do that. I doubt that I’ll ever have such faith.”

Sebastio hacked a breathy laugh, still running his fingers over his mild puncture wounds, incredulous to find his parts intact.

“And I doubt that I could ever do such a thing again,” he replied, his voice trilling as if speech came with the greatest difficulty. “Gonji will be disappointed, no?”

“Why?”

“I’ve still not used this to kill.” He touched the pommel of the belted
schiavona,
then rushed toward the oxcarts with the other men. “Oh, my God—the children…”

The captive children of Lamorisse were now released and comforted. Like the wolves, they seemed to sense a special power about Father Sebastio. This, coupled with their understanding of his importance as a man of the cloth, caused them to gravitate toward him like trusting sheep, hugging him en masse.

After speaking with the older children, the men agreed upon a course. Buey was determined to see the children safely home; so he and Leone led half the company and the oxcarts to Lamorisse in escort of the little ones, many of whom doubled up aboard mercenary mounts. Sebastio took the remainder of Gonji’s adventurer command southward, toward the abandoned castle, for they’d by now encountered several bands of refugees who’d heeded Wilfred Gundersen’s rapidly spreading tactical advice.

* * * *

Kuma-san swiftly headed the thundering band of sixteen fighters over the southeastern foothill trails, picking up knots of refugees and small detachments of rebels as they rode. Two days later they caught their first glimpse of the brooding fortress in a lower Alpine gorge.

It was a vast and breathtaking spectacle. The castle turrets and tumbled-down outer curtain stood imposingly on a great ridge that jutted from the dim floor of the gorge. The centuries-old fortification was rather like the hub of the sprawling, elliptical natural cleft in the mountainside; the only approaches to the hub were afforded via the spokes—three sinuous rock bridges, terrifying in their illusion of fragility, as they stretched over the yawning chasm of the gorge’s dizzying bowl.

Looking down over the brink, experiencing a sense of vertigo, Kuma-san conceived an equally terrifying thought: It was clear that someone had once successfully besieged this apparently impregnable place.

Refugees streamed across the disconcerting rock bridges. The adventurer band joined them, halted by local Wunderknechten sentries, who questioned them. Kuma-san answered their inquiries truly, and runners were sent to the castle on the double.

Captain Salguero came out to greet his old comrades personally, along with Aldo Monetto and Nick Nagy. The arriving band was led through the crumbling outer barbican and shown the in-progress effort at refitting the Frankish stronghold as a modern defensive bulwark and a base from which to strike out against the evil Farouche.

Kuma-san took grim note of the moldering corpses that had been gathered for burial in a common grave—down in the depths of the gorge itself—and learned that the castle had late been wrested from a small company of mercenaries working for the otherworldly invaders, their Farouche Clan masters.

The priest’s first act was thus to perform a ritual ablution, a benediction presumed to purify the castle of any residual evil power. The bodies were then consigned to the fathomless depths.

Sharing a meal presided over by Claire Dejordy, the new comrades exchanged tales of their dealings with Gonji, the singular samurai warrior who had so amazingly affected all their lives; who had unearthed the sublime knowledge of a cosmic scheme beyond any previous comprehension.

As well as mad lore concerning the ghastly plotting of off-world sorcerers, who were said to have enslaved numerous worlds mystically touching upon the present earth—the only one they all knew.

The meal and its converse ended first in awed silence…and then with a solemn prayer that this present campaign with Gonji would save many souls from the dreaded minions of the Evil One, whatever his true shape and wherever lay his spatial core, the center of his corrupted realm.

And with bowed heads, each rebel prayed further that this action would not be their last.

* * * *

Wilfred Gundersen sat in a back room at Chabot’s Inn, pondering his next move in light of the outrage committed against Lamorisse, the unthinkable stealing away of the children, for what vile purpose, no one cared to speculate.

Henri Chabot filled him in concerning the grisly events, the divided thinking of the populace. Lamorisse looked like a ghost town, the streets beset by a morbid calm like the hush before a violent storm. Many had fled. Those who remained were digging in for a siege. All hope of unified effort seemed lost.

Gabrielle perched on a stool beside them, alternately embellishing her father’s tale of woe and making Wilf uncomfortable with her searching eyes. The needless lurid details she eagerly imparted seemed calculated to prove her toughness to Wilf, who received them with feigned interest and sheepish smiles.

“Will you be staying here or going straightaway to the castle?” she asked, twining a lock of her hair around a finger.

Wilf grunted. “I don’t know. The castle seems best. My friends are there. We may need to plan further before taking any action. It’s damned frustrating that Simon’s run off. I could wish he were along with me.”

“We’ll be going to the castle,
non,
Henri?” she asked her father. “Perhaps we could ride along with Wilf and his men.”

She bobbed a bared, crossed leg up and down as she spoke, catching Wilf’s eye in spite of their circumstances. He tried gamely to avert his gaze whenever it fell on that fetching limb.

Henri shrugged and shook his head in response to her question.

Wilf chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Might not be such a good idea,” he said lamely, mopping his brow and adding: “It’s warm in here, eh?”

“It won’t be for long,” Gaby said airily.

Wilf eyed her quizzically.

“What—another of your visions?” Henri asked, chortling. “She
dreamed
the castle, you know. About everyone running there. She has visions.”

“Ah—that’s all blather, really,” she explained. “I just imagine things, or dream them, or even luckily guess them, and they all think I’ve got some power of foresight.”

“What else have you dreamed?” Wilf asked.

Her indulgent smile faded. “Things…I hope I am
not
so lucky about.” Her expression brightened again almost at once. “You know, I
did
dream some other things. Nicer things that I wouldn’t wish away. Like about the valiant young swain who carries me off from this place on his sturdy charger—”