Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (39 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Blaise Farouche had no stomach for combat. He left that to his boorish brothers, knowing what foolish chances they took while so many more pleasurable pursuits were available.

Indeed, should any more of them suffer unfortunate demises at rebel hands,
his
position in this desirable world would be all the more enhanced. He took steps to ensure that it would be so.

During the first night of the storm, he slipped into the sleeping chamber of his father-in-law, Duke Cordell de Plancy, and drained him of enough blood to assure that this time…he would not awaken.

The marchioness’ husband would now soon assume the position of power that went with the power he wielded in actuality.

* * * *

Aimee de Plancy considered the phial of poison as she readied for bed in the early evening.

As long as her father had remained alive, though withered and senile, there had been some tenuous link to her former happy life. Now, robbed of his presence as well as any semblance of self-respect, she knew that she could no longer continue.

All that stayed her hand was the knowledge that Blaise’s evil will alone would rule over Burgundy once she was gone. And there would be no justice in his ascension to power, for she was sure that it had been Blaise who had slowly murdered her father. And she suspected how, though she could not bring her conscious mind to frame the unspeakable thought.

Why has God allowed this to come to pass?
she thought as her fingers worked at the small bottle.
Non.
It was not God’s doing. People allowed this. People like her father, and herself, and the common folk, who even now were taking steps to rectify it, if only too late.

Her father…

She swallowed back the rising bile as she thought about his death again.

Change.
Nothing can be the same as it was. All things must submit to change. Death was not change. One must
live
in order to change.

Control,
her mind told her.
You must fight Blaise for control.

But how?

By
changing…

Aimee smashed the phial of poison against the mantel. Then she began to pray for forgiveness for the perversion she’d allowed entry in her life, and for those things she might still have to do. But there was no choice. She must live, and to live she must fight Blaise for control, by whatever means.

That evening she sat under the canopy of her bed, regarding one empty bottle of wine and a second that was well on its way to matching it. She was clad only in the peignoir that was Blaise’s favorite. Silk from the Far East, and blood-red in color.

Exquisitely fitting,
she thought dimly, now pulling herself to her feet unsteadily as evening gloom collected over the snowy land below.

Snow in September…or is it October? Drunk. You, milady, are stinking drunk…

She would have to be drunk to see it through. That was very important. Blaise hated drinking—he seemed to irrationally fear it—and she thought she knew why. But she would have to be drunk to see it through.

She staggered to the door, saw the loathsome servant girl she’d sent for waiting impatiently, wondering what business the marchioness might have with her when she was Blaise’s personal servant.

“You—Brie,” Aimee heard herself blare. “Come here.”

The girl approached, a sour look on her face.

“Bring my husband here—
directly.
Not by way of your little trysting places.”

Brie smirked. “I answer to His Lordship alone.”

“You answer to
me,”
Aimee growled. “Now get along.”

She watched the insolent servant girl shuffle off sullenly, surprise and revulsion informing her expression in equal measure.

“And if you want to move like the walking dead,
I’ll
see that you have a place among them—move!”

Aimee gurgled a laugh to see the girl break into a scamper, though she continued to scowl over her shoulder.

She went back to the wine bottle and tipped it high, nearly falling over backward.

As Blaise presently entered Aimee’s chamber, the first tugging of the transformation perked his features, around that telltale eye patch. He focused on his commoner human wife curiously.

“Dousing your grief won’t bring your father back,” he said, glancing at her with the first flicker of desire in his single, backswept eye.

He was shirtless. The curling growth of downy hair on his chest presaged the slow change into the faun. Watching the transmutation had always been a bizarre erotic experience for Aimee.

“My father is gone,” she slurred. “It’s time we reached a better understanding…” She lay back on the luxurious softness of the coverlet.

Blaise’s breath quickened. “Indeed? How so?” He had chuckled a bit. But he was intrigued.

“The—the blood exchange, Blaise,” she breathed, moaning slightly to hear herself say it. “Take mine first. This time—this time it will be…different…”

His eyes widened as he gazed at her creamy flesh. Narrowing as he came near, they fell finally upon the soft pulsing of her throat.

She whimpered slightly as her soul cried out to think of seeing this perverse act through. But she drew him close.

The minutes dragged into hours. Twice she slipped into unconsciousness, uncertain of what he’d done to her, knowing only numbness, alternating with periods of white waves in her vision. Dizziness. Vertigo.

She could feel the soft fur of his thighs and buttocks, fighting sleep now as she became increasingly certain that he himself slept. His mouth was at her throat, piercing it, clamping about the left side without pain. She had no idea how she would dislodge him. Or whether she could.

Perhaps to do so would kill her—

No. That was the ingrained fear of his terrible will talking. Sapping her own will.

She lay in a helpless languor for a time, her resolve leaking out of her with her life’s blood. Perhaps the
will
itself was in the blood, along with the life energies Blaise so often spoke of craving. If so, then she was doomed.

With a great effort, she at last succeeded in overcoming her weakness and nausea, her failing determination. At the dark hour before dawn, Aimee rolled Blaise’s lust-filled, bloated satyr-form off her, disengaging him at last.

Her throat began to throb, as though warning her that he himself must seal the rift in her body that he’d created. She emitted a muffled sob, black streaks shooting across her vision.
Dizziness, swooning
—

Collapse. She would simply collapse into sweet, peaceful sleep. What was the sense of it all? He could do anything he wanted with her—

Non!

Dignity welled up inside her. Dignity mingled with wrath. She stood and gripped the bedpost. Saw his extruded fangs, which dripped her own blood.

Aimee began to gag. She vomited on the floor beside the bed, then regathered her courage, fueled with hatred now. She forced herself to look at him. Engorged, now. No longer a figure of irresistible male sensuality—

A great hairy leech.

A
vampire.

Wambly, her strength infantile, Aimee opened the armoire beside her dressing table and withdrew the sharpened stake and the heavy tome of prophetic writings she’d plucked from her father’s library.

Moving to the bed, she reeled as she laid the point of the stake against Blaise’s heaving chest. Her hand trembled violently, and the other could not lift the book from her side.

She stood that way for long moments, awaiting discovery, or unconsciousness, or Blaise’s sudden awakening from his sonorous slumber.

She whimpered, whispering a harsh prayer for strength.

Blaise’s breath hitched, and his eyelids fluttered as she leaned on the stake, the pressure digging its point into his chest. He seemed to be quivering with internal effort, trying to chase the heavy narcotic effect of the wine in her blood—the effect she’d striven to achieve. His mouth, his neck, his chest were awash in
her
blood.

She screamed internally, tried to fire her paralyzed thews.

Blaise’s good eye gaped wide. He pawed his face and drew the eye patch askew. Blood was luridly seeping into the black hole that marked Simon’s gouging stroke of the year before. His upper lip curled back—

Aimee’s arm was abruptly empowered, the book in hand. It rotated up and then down, hard, on the poised stake.

Blaise screamed and lurched, his back arching as the stake tore through his ribcage and into his heart, with a gouting of dark, rich blood. His thrashings knocked the stake clear of his body, but dark blood continued to spray about the room from the ragged hole in his chest.

He flopped on the bed, trembling as Aimee fell back heavily on the floor.

More than ever now, Aimee feared for her life. She knew what the commoners whispered about the Farouche outworlders—that they could raise the dead for their fell purposes.

Could they not, then, also defeat death themselves?

She drew her father’s broadsword from under the bed. The heirloom blade of his warlike forefathers. It was immensely heavy in her pale hands and childlike grasp. But she brought it to bear on her flailing, crimson-gushing husband. Merely a monster now. A shape-shifting fiend come from another world to pervert and
subvert
her own.

She struck with the blade, again and again. When Blaise’s lifeless head rolled off the bed and thudded on the floor, Aimee dropped the blood-stained sword and collapsed.

* * * *

“Help me, Captain,” Aimee said to the commander of the palace guard.

He took the marchioness’ arm again, steadying her. The soldier’s eyes gleamed expectantly, a bit hollowly. The commander was still in shock over what he had seen in the bedchamber, what he’d been charged to fabricate.

“Tell me again what you must do,” she said as she took his arm for support. They eased down the winding stair.

“I
, milady?”

“Oui.”

“Ah…yes. I—I must report to the king that the marquis met with a most…unseemly accident—”

“An accident?”

“Oui,
he—he suffered the misfortune of walking beneath a falling…sword rack, you see, and—”

“A sword rack?”

“Well,” the captain went on, “it was…a most well-equipped rack with a variety of deadly ancient edged weapons that…”

Her flitting eyes and quick headshake stopped him. “I think perhaps it may have been the marquis’ poor
diet
that did him in at last,” she said daintily.

“Ah,
oui
—of course,” the captain agreed, bowing with cavalier elegance, “his well-known intemperate appetites. How stupid of me.”

The Marchioness Aimee de Plancy later strode out onto the balcony, as steadily and regally as she could manage, to address her command. The troops below eagerly accepted word of the changing order in Burgundy: The Farouche were to be considered Enemies of the State. Messengers would be sent to Paris with word of their treachery, their surreptitious efforts at fomenting rebellion against order in France. All in the name of an as-yet unknown enemy leader.

By the second day, the marchioness’ strength and color were slowly returning, and with them, her will. Never again would she allow subversion to disturb the harmony of her province.

Her first act was to send troops to restore order in the province, relieving the garrisons whose complacence had cost them dearly in failed vigilance. The common folk were to be placated for the outrages they’d suffered, and efforts would be made at restitution of what they had lost under the Farouche regime.

She next turned her attention on two individuals: the servant girl, Brie—who was restored to her former duties as a scullion; and Anton Balaerik, who was ordered arrested.

The lay brother of the Order of Holy Piety was brought before her, along with his blank-eyed bodyguards. He regarded her smugly as Aimee spoke.

“You will stop the trouble my husband and his brothers have caused Burgundy, and you will disband your mercenary troops—at once!” she commanded, pointing an accusing finger at him.

Balaerik began to laugh, and Aimee reacted with aristocratic outrage, shouting an order. He strode about the room like an actor in search of his cue, motioning with his hands but saying nothing intelligible, as the sentries closed in with drawn weapons.

A rift in space—a whirling dark votex—suddenly appeared above their heads, a slender black seam, shimmering at its edges. Balaerik reached up to it and was abruptly drawn upward and inside it, as if by invisible hands, his body disappearing into a contiguous sphere in which he was safe from the foolish pique of inferior beings.

And when he had disappeared and his power was withdrawn from them, Balaerik’s bodyguards jerked about, blank-eyed, and split open with the reaving wounds once dealt them by Simon Sardonis’ vengeful axe. They fell, bloodlessly, in broken and twisted caricatures of their once lively, human forms.

* * * *

Dijon was lost. And with it, the foothold on the Terran sphere.

Balaerik lay exhausted on the spongy grasses of a peaceful world, gazing up into the star-shot heavens. He had done all he could; yet the native humans of that sphere remained defiant. And still full of their misdirected faith.

The Frankish castle had stood against the deluge from an alien sea. Unpredictable checks and balances had been maintained in the metaphysical order. Gonji and his Wunderknechten followers would have to be taken by siege. Barbarian, beast, and walking undead would have to do what Balaerik, for all his power, could not.

And if they failed, Balaerik would have to make explanations to his sorcerer kin, Grimmolech—most especially for his failure to keep Grimmolech’s sons alive in their inchoate efforts at becoming interspheric overlords.

He began to prepare his explanations, even as the eternal struggle raged on in the other, unenlightened world.