Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (41 page)

Gonji slipped a mighty arcing axe-blow and slashed a giant through the thigh. The monster bellowed in rage and turned on him with a great display of jagged teeth, determination shining from red-veined eyes.

The samurai fled Nichi to fight on foot for a space, the tactic unexpected. The wounded giant took up the challenge and did likewise, quitting his wheezing charger the size of a small elephant to limp after the lithe samurai through the tangled carnage.

Gonji took a tortuous route over bodies and through matched pairs of fighters, his
katana
striking down two—three—a half dozen unprepared foes with scintillating sword cuts, no two blows alike.

He fell at last into a pocket of boar-men, who warily timed his charge and then suddenly sagged back, encircling him. Gonji raised the Sagami high overhead as they hooted in premature triumph and bore in at him, snorting with anticipation.

Gonji spanked a tri-bladed sword wide and slashed, fanning hot blood from the throat of the first hooting, boar-headed savage to reach him. The second beast, committing itself to a backward-straining high arm cock intended to lay the samurai low from behind, was caught by an upward twisting sword-lick that came from nowhere and buried itself deep in the squealing creature’s groin, Gonji having dropped to one knee.

A third raked a blow across Gonji’s belly as he sprang back up. But the samurai deflected the blow with a twisting, point-groundward parry and executed a vicious right-left series of cuts that spilled the boar-man’s innards.

The last boar-man missed badly with a powerful arcing cut aimed at Gonji’s head. The samurai’s spinning low slash screeched through splintering bone, severing the beast’s right dog-leg joint, blood gouting from the stump as it squalled in shock.

But now the wounded giant, bellowing for vengeance, was almost upon him, the blood from his thigh wound already drenching his boot. And the giant was joined by a fellow barbarian on horseback.

Gonji surprised them both by wheeling and charging them, blade high.

The bleeding enemy timed the charge and scythed his great axe—struck air, as the samurai tumbled into a roll and came up behind him to slash through the hamstring of the same thigh. The giant fell, howling in agony, as Gonji took after his mounted ally. The berserker reined in, awkwardly turned and fired a short, fiercely feathered lance that sizzled the air as it passed wide. Gonji tore open the shoulder of the barbarian’s enormous steed with a mighty swing of his
katana.

The animal shrilled and bucked the rider off its back. The second giant jangled to earth, stunned. He threw up a thick, fending hand as Gonji leapt astride his chest. He lost his hand with the first blow and half his jaw with the second.

Gonji tumbled off the writhing enemy, sprang back onto his feet, and cast about him for another foe to engage. He snarled out a general challenge. Saw no takers in the immediate area. He caught up with Nichi again, took his longbow and quiver from her saddle, and bounded atop two dead steeds lying draped over one another.

Crying out with battle-fervor, he began to launch powerful, sizzling shafts, one upon another, dealing out hissing death on all sides, as the carnage mounted.

He caught sight of Monetto, not far away, ripping with axe and sword through foes who were falling back, daunted by his speed and tireless skill. Gonji shouted to see his friend’s valor, then took to launching again. Two more clothyard shafts shattered plate and hide before he saw the battle take a necromantic turn.

Gonji saw that a wide swath had been cut through the invasion force by his company’s gallant action. The enemy survivors were swinging clear of the heaped bloody ruin to join the main body that assaulted the castle, explosive fire from the gorge now evincing the foe’s efforts at crossing the rock bridges. Their tactic was a useless, desperate one—they were now trapped between the field and fortress companies.

But much of his command had succumbed to horrible death, and now Gonji swung aboard the fighting black mare, Nichiyoobi—
Black Sunday—
to join with the contigent of his warriors that crossed weapons with evil death itself.

* * * *

Nick Nagy cursed his fatigued thews, then cursed again when he saw the small mounted force in his charge pull to a halt in the face of the strange new menace.

Balaerik’s reanimated dead, trudging along on foot, had finally reached the battleground.

Bearing a variety of edged weapons, their armor now clanking in its ill fit about withered, rotting bodies, the dead shambled after anything that raised arms in resistance. Bulging eyes stared without truly seeing. Sere lips drew back around large, clamped teeth. Dried blood caked slashed throats and other former mortal wounds in ominous portent.

The blood in the rebel warriors’ veins turned to ice as, to a man, they understood: These Farouche slaves could not be killed.

Nikolai Nagy bellowed at their timidity and plunged into the center of the dead killers’ line, which accepted the challenge with a nightmarishly casual, spiritless crowding effort. Steel edges oozed limply, or whirled languidly, toward Nagy and his mount as he slashed over the horse’s head from one side to the other, ducking blows, beating back weapons, smashing dead flesh aside, only to have it turn back on him. Slower. But no less deadly or inexorable.

The men saw Nagy encircled, his horse buried under a clumsy, spearing press of heavy dead weight. Nagy’s flailing energy was the single focus of life in the midst of the forlornly savage tableau.

Hearing his impassioned cries, seeing him fall, his men were at last galvanized, exhorting one another to join the chilling fray.

In moments, Gonji was in their midst, striking from Nichi’s saddle, the mare herself kicking and biting in instinctive terror at the caricatured life that sought out her rider with sword- and pike-point; touched her own flesh with cold, lifeless hands.

The samurai quit the saddle, spanking the mare away for her safety, as he tore into the shuffling dead forms. When cut, they didn’t bleed; nor did battering impede their mindless pursuit of the living. But Gonji showed the desperately hacking band the tack they must take.

Disengaging a spear with a circular parry, he riposted furiously, striking the assailant’s brittle head from its dry shoulders. He dealt with another similarly. And then another. The headless corpses staggered on grimly, though their motion was less directed and they were now slower still.

Now the samurai swooped in low, evading poor thrusts by stiffened muscle and unhinging the liches’ limbs, arrogantly deflecting their weak blows and concentrating on severing arms, legs, and ghoulish heads.

His men followed suit, their bellies churning as they took to the slaughter resignedly, even as they were snared by useless clutching hands and lunged at by bodies that reeked of corruption. The men grimaced and gasped, tearing and pushing away the grasping undead, as if scouring themselves of some plague-ridden vermin.

Moments later, the grounds were strewn with twitching torsos and searching limbs that still crawled on, fueled by hellish sorcery. The surviving men worked at prying loose their unfortunate wounded fellows from dead fingers and mechanically clacking jaws.

Gonji’s face was set in a twisted expression. He breathed in short gasps through his mouth to evade the awful stench. Searching out Nick Nagy, he averted his eyes from the sight of his old sword-brother’s multitude of mortal wounds.

“Cholera,”
he
ground out, kicking a dismembered torso that arched itself rhythmically as it lay across Nagy’s legs.

“Damn it—
God damn it!
Not you, Nick…” Gonji hissed out something like a suppressed sob to see the state of his valiant ally from the Vedun campaign. He knelt for a long moment beside the body of the steely warrior Nikolai Nagy.

The few walking dead who remained at large now shuffled with failing strength. They ceased their dogged pursuit of the living. Balaerik’s spell faded, and soon the creatures of his foul handiwork dropped in their tracks and duly took up their place in the Land of the Dead. The severed body parts ceased their spastic motions.

Gonji rose heavily and scanned the grounds, shouted a rallying command to the exhausted survivors. He took to horse. Leading the shattered company toward the clash at the gorge, he took heart to see Aldo Monetto still able to climb astride a big destrier, not far away, though the agile biller had taken many a bloody wound.

* * * *

The defenders of the castle, arrayed at banquettes and turrets, behind weathered stone blocks and wall niches, poured their determined fire into the siege force of giants and beast-men. A few scattered human mercenaries were still among their number as the off-world attackers stormed the outer curtain over the narrow rock bridges and receding waters.

Corbeau’s cannon boomed repeatedly, wreaking havoc at the rim of the gorge, where huge, hastily fashioned rafts were tossed over the drop and into the receding waters, their intended giant riders hastily lowered by ropes and vines and branches. Some simply dove into the cold, dark water to swim after the rafts.

The rebels at the Frankish castle, seeing Gonji’s victory on the plain, roared with glee and fired their smoking,
whizzing
volleys all the more lustily. Hulking barbarian forms erupted with bloody holes caused by shot and shaft, some tumbling into the swirling wash, their watery graves on an alien sphere. Those who reached the shore rarely gained the outer curtain wall before they were torn and spindled, the walls and grounds now draped with unearthly bodies.

Those creatures that chose the firmer routes over the bridges were dealt with still more harshly. Alternating squads with pistols and muskets sprayed their forefront with lead shot. The front rank would fire, then scamper behind the second to reload. The bridges soon piled high with blockading corpses.

As Le Corbeau’s formidable cannon blasted great holes in the gorge and sent enemy forms flying in every direction, Carlos Orozco tended the multiple-barrel musket like a raving madman. He sped back and forth between muzzles and breeches—clearing, charging, loading, touching off wicks, and then swiveling the barrels about to draw lethal bead on the nearest pocket of embattled attackers. The guns would fume and blast in sequence, and Orozco quickly learned to vary the lengths of his wicks until he had adjusted the firing order to a near single spray of heavy shot.

“Hey, Corbeau—this thing works
magnifico!”
he cried out enthusiastically once he’d grown familiar with its workings. “Hell, I could do this all day!”

“You best not get too trusting of those charges,” the Crow called back. “She’s touchy about residue. Harder to clear every time—”

Orozco swiped a hand at him scornfully.

Two charges later, one of the breeches spluttered and misfired, the sergeant cursing and bounding after a water bucket, having taken powder burns about the face and hands.

Father Sebastio and another man at the northeastern tower tended the few rebels who took wounds. As they anxiously worked at a man who screamed and jerked in agony—a crossbow quarrel having split his clavicle—they were suddenly set upon by a spear-bearing bipedal ram.

Sebastio’s partner shrieked as the deadly barbed head ripped through his backplate. The creature jerked at his haft cruelly as it stuck in the wailing man’s spine.

Kuma-san sucked in a harsh breath to see the nature of his satanic adversary, the first such monster he’d seen close up. He drew his
schiavona
and raised it before him in both hands.

The ram hissed at the falling body it had kicked free with a cloven hoof. Seeing Sebastio’s crucifix, it leered at him and made a gesture that could only have been obscene.

Teeth gritting in defiance, Sebastio set himself for the charge, for the first time in his life wishing that he’d spent more than cursory effort at fencing practice.

The ram lunged forward tauntingly, feinting at Kuma-san’s face and then his bowels, uttering a mocking hooting sound. The priest reacted to the feints with jerking twists of the heavy blade, gasping with the exaggerated efforts, trying hard to maintain control of his quivering arms.

Sebastio heard the sickening slap of water-logged flesh behind him—a floating corpse had escaped the detection of the preoccupied sentries to pull itself over the ancient stonework. Spongy gray fingers groped at his feet.

The priest’s courage fled. He panicked and tried to run. But the ram was quicker, darting at an angle to cut off his retreat across the ward. With a taunting cackle, it steered him back toward the bloated fiend that peered up at the priest with eyes like jellied eggs.

Sebastio shouted in sudden rage, his hatred of evil inflaming his soul. He batted aside the spear, arcing his blade violently from side to side, the ram respecting the danger of a flailing attack. It fell back and allowed Sebastio to spend his fury, watching for an open line to a vital spot.

“Hey!”

The ram spun. Captain Hernando Salguero stood behind it, leveling a
ranseur
for imminent engagement. In that instant, Kuma-san slashed the distracted creature from shoulder to hip. It whirled about with an expression of shock and dismay.

The priest plunged his bladepoint through its thick-napped belly, withdrawing the bloody sword at once as if caught in some embarrassing indiscretion. Blood from the backlash splattered his face. He dropped the
schiavona
and clapped a red-stippled hand over his mouth, his stomach rolling over.

“Good work,
padre
—now look out—”

Salguero moved to the wetly slapping corpse on the tower’s ground floor. The ex-
capitan
of Spanish lancers swallowed his disgust and wondered how best to engage this ponderously crawling perversion of sacred life.

But it stopped moving forward now. Its pulpy fingers laboriously groped ahead, yet it gained no ground. And in seconds, even the slowly pumping arms stopped reaching. Presently, it ceased all motion.

Sebastio looked to it, then to Salguero, and finally back to the otherworldly ram-fiend he’d dispatched. “Thank God for you, Hernando. I shouldn’t have been able to do such a thing alone, I fear.”

“Ah, your faith would have seen you through,” the former captain replied distractedly. “I must get word of this outside.”

Quickly the word spread. Their enemies’ black sorcery was failing, its energy drained off at the unguessable source. On the distant plain, at that same moment, the last reanimated corpses of the throat-slitted mercenaries were jerking spasmodically, falling, their last moments of evil quasi-life spent in harmless thrashings.

Le Corbeau’s cannon thundered over the cheers of the Wunderknechten.

Soon there was no shot left for the great cannon to spew. Nor was there anything left to fire upon.

* * * *

Simon was the only man in the reunited forces who glared at the carnage with an anger that would not be defused. Heavily bandaged, clutching the hilt of a broadsword, he cursed the coming night that would soon see him undergo another transformation into the Beast.

The Beast within would not be needed now, and Simon’s old attitudes of shame and misanthropy returned. He moved apart from the company, inconsolable, taking to the forest after a brief, edgy exchange with Gonji.