Gonji: Red Blade from the East (3 page)

—Let us ease his burden, sister, touch him with soft comfort.

Another wraithlike step, and he could smell their caressing scent, a wisp of cherry blossom, a hint of fragrant verdant hills. Takayama Province—he dreamed a dream of home....

—So sad, so sad is his longing, it thickens the life in his veins....

—His heart is heavy with the death wish, I shall set him free....

Hulking shades gasped and groaned with passion, swaying in rhythmic accord, as the Sisters floated nearer on unsoiled feet.

Their wan song cleft Gonji’s spirit, setting two forces in motion: The bitter needs and desires that gnawed at him sensed the surfeit of sweet peace promised by surrender; the yearning was intense. But beneath them rang the ever-vigilant alarm, the pounding pulse that thawed unwilling muscle, the rush of adrenalin.

As deep draughts of air swelled his chest, Gonji at last saw clearly the face of the nearer Sister. She smiled a familiar smile.

Reiko.
Sweet, gentle Reiko, her casual allure, perfumed hair—

—Let me touch you, Dear One, it has been so long, so very, very long....

—Come, let us make love, weary, hungry little man....

He staggered to his feet, slumped, found something to support him, leaned forward on it tentatively. His head began to clear. He looked at Reiko. Different, different—
hai.
The blood thrummed feverishly in his brain. His eyes strained to part the misty blackness that cradled the advancing white sirens. The night, the glade, the heavy sweetness in which he swooned strove to wilt and crush him. A womb. A monstrous womb engulfed him. He would emerge stillborn.

If it must come, then let it come
—

The face of Reiko swam close. Great swashes of silken hair, delicately twined. Full, red lips. A radiant glint of ivory teeth. Lovely, inviting, passionate eyes. Weeping....

—I have waited so long for you, beloved....

...
without tears.

A slender, nailed finger coursed his throat.
(no tears for me)
Warm wetness trickled down to his chest, mingled with the clammy moistness.
(illusion)
Her mouth yawned with the hunger she could no longer disguise...
(deceit!)

“Cho—ler—aaaaa!”

Gonji’s roaring imprecation inflamed the night. With surging fury he drove his fist into the cold hoariness of the creature’s chest, knocking her back. The other hand tightened on—the Sagami!

Hideous snarls raked the air from all directions, and the vampire hissed threateningly. Her eyes rolled back and flushed with red rage, lips snaking back almost to the ears to bare a savage display of canine teeth.

“Vile, lying thing!” Gonji screamed.

His leg snapped out—a deep lunge—blue steel whickered in a slashing arc, froze impossibly at the end of its course. The useless clawed fingers that had sought to fend the blade pattered to earth ahead of the gushing crimson spray, the heavy thud. And for a scant instant the nighted world held its breath, the keening wail of the rolling head the only sound.

The things that troubled sleep had tasted the blinding speed of the master swordsman.

The other Sister sprang. The Sagami was twisted from his grasp. Gonji grunted with the wrenching pain in his arm. The two fell backward in a heap, and the samurai’s left arm instinctively shot upward, his ridge hand slamming into her throat. He growled in defiance of her hiss like a fierce mountain cat. Her strength was awesome.

He held one wriggling claw at bay, but the other found his throat with a viselike grip that squeezed a thin gasp out of him. Planting a foot, Gonji rolled them both over once, twice. He landed on top of her, tried to use his weight advantage to hold her still. But he had brought them nearly under the madly kicking hooves of Tora. He lost his positional advantage, slipping to the side.

The vampire’s knees knobbed at his midsection in a thundering tattoo. He was forced to surrender his hold, lurch back. The vampire lunged without a pause, snarling, and his short straight punch smacked sharply into her forehead, hardly slowing her. He dropped back into a solid stance and met her low charge, bulling her upward until they locked in a show of straight-ahead force.

Gods! She was as slender as a willow!

Their feet dug and scraped at the packed earth, and Gonji felt himself slowly giving ground. His sweat poured freely. His rough palm, forcing back her chin, began to slip its bracing hold. The vampire’s nails dug into the soft flesh of his throat, penetrated his taut-muscled resistance, choked him off.

The circle of leaping and gibbering shapes tightened about them. When she was done, they would worry the carcass....

With a sudden new burst of teeth-gritting fury, Gonji snapped back the demon’s head. The fanged rictus of a mouth gaped wide at the sky. But her taloned grip clutched his throat relentlessly.

“Monster!” she screamed in a cracked voice. “Mortal bastard!”

From somewhere deep within the samurai a fiery bellow issued forth, breaking through the anguish of her death grip. He snared great handfuls of her hair, yanked down with bestial madness, and stared into the thing’s face, heedless of her foul carrion breath.

“
I’m—no
—MONSTER!”

Time. He dropped back and kicked her viciously in the breast. A cracking report of something shattered. She howled maniacally, stunned.

In the instant’s respite, Gonji snatched the dirk from his thigh—slashed, lunged, retreated. She clawed the air with catlike strokes, whining, backing away. Diverting her attention with a leaping snap-kick, he lashed into a figure-eight of whirling steel, catching and lopping off half an undead hand. She whined shrilly, weakening, backing, something akin to what mortals call fear creeping into the animal snarl.

Gonji’s warrior instinct sensed the turn. Without a thought he launched low, drove down and in, buried the knife in her abdomen. Her wailing ripped into the hills.

Now began Gonji’s own long ragged-edged cry. Drowning hers. Breathlessly galvanizing his ensuing actions. Smothering his pain. It sang of terrible passions. Only a kill could silence it.

Scrabbling over the loosened earth, Gonji scooped up the device made of lashed swords—a rude cross. Seizing the right-angled hilts, he charged the staggering Sister and powered her backward. He ran her down, plunged the killing sword through unburied flesh and bone, through pine carpet and moist soil, the hilt knocking him breathless as he tumbled head over heels, muzzling his mighty cry.

Gonji drew one hard breath, spied the Sagami and pawed over to it. He pushed himself to his knees and cocked the slim blade for a strike.

The beasts held back, eyes glaring. Uncertainty. The samurai recognized their meaning.

Is the prey spent?

Slowly, steadily he rose. His piercing eyes were narrow slits of defiance, blinking back the burning sweat. By sheer will alone he stilled the trembling of the two-handed sword clutch. A complete, deliberate turn. One moment of unreal time. Easy, graceful, balletic. Motion was his to command as his level gaze passed over the baleful watchers.

He had gained a measure of respect, but he wasn’t fool enough to believe he could hold the impression for long. He glimpsed the campfire. The erstwhile flaming jig had dwindled to a dying minuet. Lowering his sword with mock contempt for them, he strode confidently to the fire and, praying for time, rolled the torch into the embers. It didn’t fail him; the dry grass caught at once. The flaring torch evoked a sibilant rumbling from the ghoulish assemblage. They fell back to the rim of the glade.

Gonji strode to the impaled vampire Sister and laid the flambeau on the ground. Then he casually rested the cold steel of the Sagami on his shoulder and addressed the haunters of night as he knew he must:

“I stand before this sign of good and might.” Here he indicated the sword cruciform. “My sword strikes with its power. Let any who dare face me come forward—now!”

His nostrils flared. He brought the killing sword to the ready. But almost before the last words had drifted off on the wind, the dark things slunk away, dispersed. Gonji stood like a silent sentinel until the creatures of the natural world quit their places of hiding to chirrup and flutter and bring peace to the night.

He relaxed. Something shuffled behind him.

Tora.

The stallion was wild-eyed, shuddering along his entire bulk. A tattered gray mass lay stiffening under his hind legs. Gonji eased forward and called softly in reassurance. Glistening splotches mottled the ground near the horse’s hooves, matting the torn gray tufts with red ruin. A wolf had tested him—valiant brute!

With some difficulty he calmed the skittish horse, then wiped him down. Undoing his topknot, he shook his own tangled mane and emptied the water skin over his head. He tramped across the pine carpet to the stream some fifty yards off and refilled the skin—sword in hand, but neither expecting nor finding any danger. This night was his.

He watered Tora and took a pull at the skin himself, but the welcome warmth of the wineskin beckoned, and Gonji swigged at it gratefully. So shocked was he by the cackling that little runlets of the precious liquid fled the corners of his mouth.

The impaled Sister choked on her own thick wet laughter. She muttered something hoarsely in an eldritch tongue. Gonji found his lip curling involuntarily at the vileness of its sound. She cackled again wetly, and for an instant Gonji’s blood froze; a staccato clacking issued sharply from the teeth of the dismembered Sister’s head.

Amazing! Both still alive—with whatever half-life fired their night-cloaked stalkings.

Burn them, he thought, send them up in flames before talons grope back to their stumps, before dripping neck rejoins twitching body....

As the earth-staked Sister took up a cracked refrain that fulsomely twisted their siren song of earlier: “Come, little mite, let me suck thy bowels....” Gonji gathered brush and twigs to revive the fire. Curiously, he found himself moving slowly, deliberately. Behind him Tora neighed anxiously, as if to spur him to complete the job.

He took from a satchel the small earthen bottle given him by a priest. Uncorking it, he sampled the blessed water with his tongue. Warm and tasteless. He laved his fresh wounds, gritting back the purgative sting without an outcry as an exercise to help restore his harmony of body and soul.

The impaled vampire’s blackening tongue chattered on all the while.

“Why do you dally, man of the East? Do you want me still? You may yet have me, even as I am! Hee-heeeee—!”

Gonji strolled up calmly and looked down at the slender form now framed in black blood. He grimaced. A few moments ago this tiny creature might have rent him like some monstrous beast of lore. Her neck was bridged unnaturally, eyes rolled back to avoid the sight of the glinting cruciform.

“Further on,” she purred, “you will meet our brothers. Perhaps you would prefer
their
ministrations, ahhhh—?” Her taunting trill pitched ever higher as Gonji’s lips arched back in a snarl of disgust. He realized that he had been listening to her for a long time. Could he be so forlorn that even in
such
a voice he found comfort?

“Cholera,”
he said with edged softness, resorting again to the popular epithet of the territory, descriptive of a rather vile, intestinal disorder, that had become his favorite.

He sloshed holy water on the vampire. She shrieked and lurched, red welts blossoming on her alabaster flesh.

Gonji strode to the fire, rekindled the torch. Without another thought he set the screaming creature ablaze, turning the night incandescent. It burned like dry wheat, flaring so swiftly that Gonji was singed as he pulled free the lashed swords.

He turned to the headless vampire corpse, ignited it likewise. Then he regarded the head that reposed sidelong on the ground. The bulging orbs and clacking fangs still were set in the face of Reiko, though the features were gradually resolving into something else. Settling, elongating into...someone familiar.

He hesitated with the torch. He had to know.

The teeth stilled, the eyes receded. A thin smile creased softening lips, the smile that had pledged the love of its wearer countless times before when doubts and fears had threatened the nurture of a young half-breed samurai. They threatened now.

Then the voice came, though the lips didn’t move. It was a deep, resonant, masculine voice; cold and malevolent. It issued so unexpectedly, so incongruously from the beloved face that Gonji’s heart hammered in his breast. It said:

“You—will—die—in—this—land.”

Gonji swallowed back a surge of bile and spoke a single word:

”Karma.”

He thrust down the flickering torch, and the vampire’s own voice returned, howling shrilly a long anguished note that died in the hills.

Then, once again, his mother’s face was laid to rest in sacred memory.

* * * *

The fire’s red glow pulsed steadily, warm and reassuring. Somewhere in the domain of eagles a tufted cloud obscured the moon. The samurai lay back on his bed of pine needles and contemplated the wax and wane of the stars, his eyes lazily sweeping from one to another, assigning brightness values.