Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (43 page)

And now the night had come. Michael Benedetto kissed his sleeping wife and child good-bye.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Capt. Salguero, Sgt. Orozco and Brett Jarret followed in the wake of their moon-maddened leaders. They led the remnant of the former Vedunian adventurers through the mountains and across the Empire, back toward Austria, all the while wondering at the source of the obsessive strength that must have driven Gonji, Wilfred, and Monetto for days on end without sleep.

Those three had withheld their fearful speculations from the others, wishing to avoid a fearful, chaotic return to Noricum; yet they themselves had acted as men possessed in their eagerness to cover the same vast distance themselves at breakneck speed.

Orozco soon learned why Gonji had entrusted Nichiyoobi to the ex-sergeant’s charge: The three riders left a string of lame, lathered, and dead steeds along their trail, constantly taking to the extra mounts they led.

At last they had exhausted even these. Grinning horse traders along the old Roman road gleefully related tales of the three madmen—one of them perhaps a Mongol—who had lavished gold on them as if their animals were the last such on earth.

* * * *

“So long in returning, my son?” Brother Xeno asked in his small, dispassionate voice. But his eyes seemed to bear a quickened light of wariness.

Michael swallowed. “I had to…go off for a time. To deal with my feelings. I fear, master, that I am still lacking in matters of the will. Such things come only with difficulty.” He turned his back to Xeno, anxious, fear in his belly…

“I see.”

“Tell me again,” Michael said on a tremulous note, “how the oriental savage seduced my wife. How the two of them laughed together to think how they’d shamed me. Help me to shed these emotions that mark my weak—”

“There is no need to continue for my benefit,” Xeno said softly. “I know that you didn’t destroy her.”

Michael jerked about, eyes shining like a discovered thief. His breath hitched in deadly expectation. But the hermit remained seated before the lambent glow of the fire, emotionless.

Michael forced himself to still his trembling as he spoke.

“Why do you…why do you think that?”

“Tell me,” Xeno asked evasively, “how, then, did you do the deed? Did you assume the shape by which you’ve spread terror in Noricum? Did you shatter her unfaithful breast with a thrust of your—”

“Stop it!” Michael shouted into the misty night air. “I resisted you in the end, Brother. You couldn’t cast your evil spell over me as you did when I killed those other poor folk. You couldn’t make me harm her. My love for her was too strong, you see. Something you could never understand. I fell under your spell, but my love for her broke it at last.” He emitted a strained, nervous laugh, discomfited by Xeno’s failure to register any reaction. The master seemed in control, as ever. “Just tell me one thing—why? Why was it necessary to make me kill my own people? What evil pleasure did you glean from it? And why try to make me murder my wife and leave my child motherless?”

Xeno smiled chillingly, displaying no teeth but only a sliver of dark amusement. “To sow discord. To cause the Wunderknechten presence to be seen as an ill omen. Such that your roots might never sink. Never foster resistance to the powers who seek to control this strife-torn sphere. And as for your wife—
you
yourself marked her for death when you related the useful information that the samurai had looked upon her with desire.”

Michael sneered. “I never believed what you told me for an instant. He may indeed love her, but he is a man with a unique sense of honor, and her love is mine alone—”

“And yet you doubted—enough to permit me to poison your mind against them both.”

Michael’s spine flared, for it was true. “You wanted to kill
my
wife in order to cause grief to another man,” he said, seething anger igniting his volatile temper of old.

“Don’t place too much importance on it. You were but a pawn trapped in a struggle of exalted forces.”

Michael gritted his teeth, tried to fire his will. “You forget—
you’ve
initiated me into a higher plane,” he said, extending an arm and forming his fingers as he’d been taught.

But nothing happened, though he strove to exercise his concentration and will.

Brother Xeno smiled. “No. It doesn’t work, does it, my son? You see, that’s how I knew you didn’t kill her. I told you to employ your new power. If you had followed my order, you’d have discovered for yourself that your shape-shifting skills have always been merely the
illusion
of what mine are…in reality.”

Michael’s mouth gaped to see the extruded claws that tore through the sleeves of the evil hermit’s robe. Behind the seated man, something burst free in a rending of fabric.

Xeno rose on wambly new legs, smiling until his mouth was no longer human.

Michael drew his dirk and pistol and bellowed at him in vented rage, sobbing and cursing as he charged.

* * * *

The three figures in dark
ninja
camouflage scampered between the houses, muted blades bared repeatedly against shapeless horrors conjured by their imaginations.

They went to Anton’s house first. The old Gray Knight from Vedun was gone, his home showing no evidence of habitation for some time.

Next they warily slipped into the Benedettos’ two-storied stone dwelling, the placid
basso rilievo
sculptures on the small portico looking mournful in the dull moonlight.

Again, there was no sign of life within, though there was scattered evidence of disturbance or haste.

“Cholera,”
Gonji whispered with uncommon emotion.

“Oh, Christ—” Monetto was staring at him, his dark eyes moist in the pale light slanting through a window. “Sylva and the children…”

Wilf looked to the samurai imploringly. “Gonji—”

“I know,” the samurai replied curtly. “Go. Both of you. See to your homes.”

“You’ll wait for us here?”

“Hai.”

As soon as he was sure they’d gone too far to see, Gonji took to horse and galloped toward the forest lair of Brother Xeno. His mind whirled with tortured fragments of hope and fear and memory as he pounded over the spongy earth. All three of them had something to lose, if Balaerik’s foul agents had laid a trap for them here, but only Gonji had something to gain.

He prayed to the
kami
of vengeance that Balaerik himself awaited him at the end of the breakneck journey.

He quit the horse at the run when he caught sight of the campfire’s glow, yanking it around and sending it off in retreat. Creeping stealthily through the underbrush, he found the dead body of Michael Benedetto.

Gonji was electrified with wrath. There was no envy or resentment in his heart now. Only compassion. Angry wounds shone darkly all over the man’s corpse, sickly moist in the moon’s glow, and raised around their edges like anthills.

The nightmarish creature scuttled out of the underbrush, padding straight for him on its multitude of bony legs—

A monstrous arachnid, a
scorpion
the size of a bull, whose sight chilled Gonji to the marrow as he raised his blade defensively—

Long, pincering claws snapped and jabbed. Overhead, the wickedly curved sting which had savaged Michael Benedetto dripped venom as it poised to plunge down at Gonji. The samurai slashed and parried desperately, seeing no line of counterattack through the monster’s superior reach. He fought against his atavistic terror as well as the all-too tangible three-pronged assault.

The scorpion hissed, its ugly obsidian eyes fixed on him hungrily. He raked and slashed in a fury of skillful strokes, the claws retracting on contact, too supple to take injury. The carapace about its head and back looked impossibly thick.

The tail darted down at him, a quick, probing stab. His sword cut missed it narrowly as he reflexively shrank back from it. Gonji scampered behind the fire now, keeping its protective flames between him and his hellish foe for a moment. He toed out a burning log, kicked it onto the creature, which pattered backward in shock, its eight legs drumming on the matted grass.

Emboldened, Gonji drew his
tanto
knife, sought an opening, cocked and threw it with snapping fury—

The blade clacked off the armored head, the scorpion hissing again viciously.

Gonji pulled his
ko-dachi
now—the short sword used in
seppuku,
the ritual suicide. The Katori
ryu
had taught him to use it in skillful conjunction with his
katana.
Now it was
two
weapons against three.

The scorpion charged him as he backed toward the elm tree where he’d seen his first glimpse of Brother Xeno. He parried an angry pincer with the
seppuku
blade, bound it high. As the other scissoring pincer came into play, Gonji raked it sharply with the Sagami, driving it out of line, and then slashing hard at the head. The creature shrilled a catlike note as one of its opaque eyes exploded amidst splintering carapace.

The deadly barbed sting shot downward furiously, but Gonji anticipated it and cut off its end with a mighty upward twisting stroke. The bound-up pincer lashed at him, smacking him to the ground.

His eyes flared wide as the stingless tail reared for a clubbing strike and the second pincer seized his right arm, cutting the arm even through his vambrace. Fierce mandibles worked toward his downed form, seeking an opening to bite and shred.

Gonji twisted out of its grasp, the stingless tail pummeling the ground where his head had rested. The
katana
raked the scorpion’s hideous face as he rolled to his feet, bounding behind the tree.

He drew it in with a feint, the creature losing control of its attack now, as it gave in to its pain. Gonji herded it against the elm tree and unleashed a sequence of double-bladed attacks at its side, shattering plate and bone, unhinging first one leg, then a segment of its erect tail, then a second rigid leg.

It raised up on its injured side and sought support against the tree trunk. When it did so, Gonji struck off one pincer at the slender joint behind the hinge. Then he tore into it in a raking fury, beyond the revulsion its touch inspired now. Carapace exploded in black shards—another leg dropped off—it fell on its side, hissing and oozing a greenish ichor from multiple wounds—

And Gonji slit its soft underbelly with a howling X-cut delivered by both gleaming blades. The scorpion thrashed for a long time before it lay still.

For a long moment, Gonji could not relax his clenched jaws, so fierce was his residual tension as he stared at this dying
thing,
this abomination from a world of grasping sorcery. At last he recovered control of his center and regulated his breathing.

Gonji cleansed his blades, for a space awaiting the reversion of the monster. He thought to cast one final look of loathing at the human sorcerer it would become, to see what his swords had done to this agent of evil.

But it didn’t revert. And so instead, he set the carcass ablaze, his thews a-quiver with roiling emotion.

“Balaerik!”
Goni roared, at last, into the sky. “If you can hear me, Balaerik, then listen well—I know you fear me. You don’t dare face me yourself, do you? But that’s good. Because I’m enjoying frustrating your feeble efforts. I will destroy whatever fiend or monster or twisted thing you throw across my path. And then I will come for you, Balaerik. Wherever you hide—if it be Hell itself!—I will find you, and I will have your evil heart at the end of my sword. And they’ll say that when the time came,
no one ever screamed louder than you!”

* * * *

The exhausted samurai rode back into town, towing the horse bearing Michael’s corpse, even as he had with the councilman’s young brother, a few years before. Aldo Monetto was there to greet him, along with his wife, Sylva, and their children, who were unharmed.

Wilfred and Genya stood by, as well, tearfully reuniting with him—seized by mixed emotions of joy and sorrow. Wilf clutched his infant son eagerly to his breast, seeming awed at the evidence of his new fatherhood.

Genya came up to Gonji and embraced him warmly, kissed him. He found great comfort in her vivaciousness and sincere gratitude. But it was fleeting.

His soul was swamped by anguish.

Genya drew him aside. “Oh, Gonji—I don’t know what more to say. I’m so happy. We’ll be able to name him now. I hate to say this—I love you so, for everything you’ve done—but I hope Wilf doesn’t insist on naming him Gonji.” She smiled, her deep brown eyes tear-filled as she took his hands. “No offense?”

Gonji exhaled sonorously. “It would be a very poor mix, I think. Unpoetic.”

Genya laughed breathily, then grew somber. “Listen…I know what you feel for Lydia, so I’m going to break a trust. She went away with her daughter, Miriam. Anton the Gray Knight went with them as their bodyguard, two nights ago—”

“Where?” he asked, his vaunted self-control abruptly dashed.

“No one knows where. Michael told Lydia to make her own way and tell no one of her destination. I’m sure
he
knew, but he instructed her not to say. That’s all she would tell me. He said—” Her dark, liquid eyes brimmed with tears again to see his eager expression.

“Hai?”

“—he said that that’s the way
Gonji
would do it. For security, to avoid detection. That no one must know where they were going…”

Gonji swallowed and pulled away from her.

“Gonji,” Wilf said, striding up to him, holding his son. “Look at him, Gonji. Can you believe I have a son?”

“Ja, mein Freund
—a fine, strong son…”

Gonji brushed the sleeping child’s cheek gently. “You are very fortunate indeed.”

His smile remained on his lips long after its spirit had withered in his heart.