Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves

by T. C. Rypel

  “ ‘He ascended into Heaven’,” Grimmolech quoted as he lofted slowly upward toward the blurred light, as his minions above gasped to see it. “I want you, Simon,” he said, smiling down benevolently. “I want you for my son. More than the son who resides within you, I fear.”

  Grimmolech disappeared through the hatchway. The grating slammed shut. Simon closed his eyes to stave off tears of fury and confusion. His only solace was the anguish of the energumen when it heard its father’s words.

  When evening caressed the land above with fragrant breezes and lilting shadows and the peacefulness that was ever denied him, Simon was treated to a new level of abject horror in his black underground cell.

  Blaise Farouche raised the grating and leered down at him from the dungeon chamber overhead. “Greetings, brother. An eventful night lies ahead of us. Satyr’s Moon, you know—always a good one. The lunar goddess displays a special majesty on Satyr’s Moon. I daresay you’re hungry—” He feigned indulgence, as if having been remiss in his duty as host. He pulled up the rope used to lower Simon whatever they chose to feed him.

  Simon felt the rejoicing of the energumen—both at the proximity of its brother Blaise and the coming full moon. He crushed it back with an exercise of will, cutting himself open painfully, again and again, on a jagged edge of the oubliette’s wall.

  Then Simon began to plumb up memories of Vedun. Of the connection between tragic King Klann’s dark sorcerer Mord and Grimmolech himself. The subsequent knowledge of their common roots in the mystical isle of Akryllon, which floated between worlds. Perhaps if Simon had listened to Gonji sooner, if he’d acted more quickly on behalf of the Vedunian rebels, he might have somehow trapped Mord into helping him ensnare Grimmolech. Then none of this would have come to pass. Perhaps…

  “Mon Dieu—” He was unable to control his pitiful outburst. A convulsive shiver coursed through his entire body to see what Blaise lowered to him via the rope. Twisting down in a slow air ballet, like some helpless marionette, was the battered body of…Simon’s Uncle Andre. He seemed barely conscious.

  Simon’s mind exploded in red rage over the portent of this heinous act.

  “Blaise—get him out of here!”

  “Father wouldn’t like that,” Blaise replied archly. “He wanted you well fed while he was gone. These mountain men are tough, though.” Blaise dropped lithely through the hole in the ceiling.

  “Andre,” Simon breathed from where he lay chained, “for God’s sake, Andre—get out of here!” He bellowed an irrational outcry. “By all that’s holy, save yourself somehow!”

  “Oui,” Blaise added tauntingly, “do that. I shan’t make a move to prevent you.” He laughed with sadistic glee.

  “Ohhh, Andre…” Simon wailed, unconcerned now with his emotional display in front of his bitter enemy. “Come close, uncle,” he wept. “Swing close so that I can strangle you now…quickly…before night falls. Why has God allowed this?”

  “Why, indeed?” Blaise mocked. “This is your world, Simon, as my father has told you time and again. Though I can’t imagine why he would want you among us. And if you do open your eyes, I fear that you and I must square accounts.”

  Andre’s swollen, bloodied lips moved. He seemed sedated, his speech slurry. “Simon, for the love of God, let me go to my grave knowing that all was not for naught. You must die here before…”

  “Enough talk, old man,” Blaise ordered, slapping him sharply. “You mortals bore me so. Don’t they bore you, Simon?”

  Simon looked at Andre earnestly. “What have they done to you?”

  The mountain man coughed wetly, tried to smile. “I…can’t remember. I think, maybe, they broke my back…No pain, though. The joke is on them, n’est-ce pas?” He began to laugh and cry at once, still in evident pain.

  “This world is so boring,” Blaise went on, extracting a knife from his brocade jacket and slitting Andre’s trouser leg. Simon lurched toward him, stopped by his jangling chains.

  “NO!” Simon roared.

  Blaise jabbed the knife’s point into the exposed flesh of Uncle Andre’s leg, blood trickling from the wound. But the mountain man didn’t react.

  “Stop it!” Simon yelled.

  “Be at ease, brother,” Blaise minced. “Don’t you see? No pain, just as he said. Ahh, well…You’ve got to keep exploring for new horizons of fleshly pleasure and pain to keep from dying of boredom here, on this pathetic sphere…”

  “Stop it, you god-cursed devil!”

  Simon strained at his shackles, but Blaise remained just out of reach.

  “Haven’t you ever learned to revel in the heightened sensibilities of the bestial form?” Blaise asked. “The taste of blood, of warm flesh—”

  “Vile monster!”

  Simon caught hold of Andre’s leg, pulled his uncle out of range as Blaise stabbed at the man again, missing intentionally, merely a perverse tease. Simon clutched Andre close to him with his manacled arms as Blaise chuckled.

  “How touching,” Blaise said. His upper lip curled back as he reached up and felt his patched eye. “My depth perception has suffered since you put out my eye last year. I think of you every time I clutch at some object of desire only to find my grasp fall short.” He peered up at the still bound and suspended Andre, a feral grin spreading across his face.

  Blaise came around and probed upward with the knife. Simon cursed and swung his hanging uncle one way and another to forestall Blaise’s tauntingly evil intent.

  But he couldn’t prevent the blade’s cruel thrusts from inflicting their intended damage.

  Uncle Andre howled once, then again, his cries diminishing to mad, whimpering sobs. Simon trembled violently as he held fast to the man’s dead legs.

  Blaise looked down to the slimy floor, coldly regarding the grisly result of his sadistic work. With the toe of his boot he crushed one of Andre’s splattered, gory eyeballs.

  “Two eyes for an eye. Superior beings exact superior vengeance.”

  “Why don’t you free me and try it with me next, you sonofabitch?” Simon said in a voice that warbled with roiling emotion.

  “All in good time. But now I sense that night draws near. Enjoy your dear uncle’s company, won’t you?” He moved under the doorway, motioned for the ladder to be lowered. “I know that I shall enjoy this night to its fullest.”

  * * * *

  I must keep my sanity…

  Deep in the night, eyes shut tight against the unspeakable deed the unleashed Beast had done, Simon fought to maintain the rationality that returned once the creature he became had sated its bloodlust.

  Must stave off madness. God, grant me vengeance…if it be Your will…

  He thought cold and distant thoughts, not the least of which were memories of the samurai’s words. Things Gonji had said that had always rankled him. Suggestions that Simon might somehow be a vessel of divine retribution. The Wrath of God…

  He choked on the stench. Gagged on the taste of blood, relieved somewhat when he began to vomit uncontrollably. Knowing that this wretched, human misery was all he could claim as vindication that he was not at all the monster Blaise Farouche intimated. He was a man first. An angry, forlorn, confused man.

  But a man. He had his faith, and his defiance of evil.

  Simon began to gnaw at the iron shackles, gouging them, scoring them over and over in the same places until rusted iron was all he could taste in his roiling belly and aching jaws. In his vented rage and madness of purpose, he finally broke off three of the Beast’s fangs, knowing that when he had need of them again, they’d be grown anew.

  * * * *

  When Blaise Farouche came to taunt him during the day, Simon feigned a strangely subdued persona, almost a mindless state of shock. Blaise could not raise a violent response out of him, despite every needling
remark about the foul deed Simon had perpetrated as the Beast. The energumen within him knew about the half-gnawed chains and sensed that Simon was engaged in some devious ploy, but it could not free itself enough for expression, to warn Blaise. Simon’s full energy was focused on subduing it.

  In the evening the one-eyed lord from another world returned to lower a basket into the oubliette. “Good eating” was all Blaise said, and still Simon refrained from responding. He sat amidst his shackles, displaying no emotion, though his heart ached to hear the puling cries of the human infant in that abominable wicker basket.

  Blaise stared down curiously. “I’d have brought you the mother, too,” he added viciously, “but I’m afraid she didn’t survive the night’s activities.”

  Simon’s jaws remained clamped tightly shut. Blaise presently departed, infuriated to be so ignored.

  When the agonizing transformation had concluded, Simon was in command of the great bipedal wolf again, and he alternated between helplessly attempting to comfort the now wailing child and working at the chains again with his restored canine teeth. By the morning reversion back to human form, he’d worked nearly through them.

  Mercenary guards came about eight bells of morning to peer down into the dark oubliette. The hoarse voice of the babe rasped out in the murky stillness. And Simon lay facedown on the dank stone floor, a length of heavy chain wrapped about his neck.

  “Shit—he’s done it!” one man blared.

  “Easy,” another advised. “He may be faking it.”

  The first guard ignored it. “God damn. He finally did it, just like they said he would. I just can’t believe how long he held out.”

  “What are we supposed to do now?” a third brigand asked.

  “Darien—you run up and send a message to the marquis. You two go down and check him. Don’t get too close and don’t harm the body. Tonight, they say, their brother will rise from the corpse. They’ll want to know about this quickly. Get moving!”

  The ladder was lowered, and the two who’d been ordered descended warily, pistols held at the ready. A polearm was lowered down, and one man caught it and gingerly prodded Simon’s body as his partner covered him. The baby’s cries were weak but keening in the tight space.

  “Shut up, kid! Dammit, but that eats at your nerves!”

  They rolled Simon over. His tongue hung from one corner of his mouth. They moved closer. His eyes stared up lifelessly. But only for a second.

  Sinewy hands grabbed each man by one leg and spilled them both backward. One pistol barked off an errant shot; the other cast away to clatter in a dark corner. The third man shouted from above, aiming down into the shadows with his wheel-lock piece.

  Simon grabbed both men by the hair, ripping their scalps to bloody ruin, and held them before him for protection. He glared into their faces as he clutched them close, though they struggled gamely against his supernatural strength, beating and clawing at him uselessly with their fists.

  “This—is—my—world,” the accursed warrior whispered in mocking echo of his tormentors’ frequent words. He crashed their skulls together as the pistol’s echoing report from above tore into one man’s back.

  The ladder snaked back up. Simon cast the dead men aside and in two bounding steps leaped up and snared the edges of the trapdoor jamb. He was weakened by his long imprisonment—there’d been a time when he might have cleared the doorway in the leap, without levering himself at all. As he tried to push up into the dungeon above, the panicked guard threw the grating down at him. It swung on creaking hinges. He tucked his head and took the heavy blow on his shoulder, losing his grip on one side but shoving the grating back to slam down at the mercenary’s feet. The brigand drew steel, shouting to his fellows in the upper reaches of the castle.

  Simon could waste no time searching out a weapon. He bounded over the trapdoor and feinted, catlike, drawing an awkward lunge that he sidestepped. He parted the guard from his blade with a lightning clutch and seized him by the front of his cuirass. A powerful overhand right smashed into the man’s nose, breaking bone, exploding blood and cartilage, driving splinters into his brain.

  Simon scooped up the sword, catching his breath, reeling now with the unaccustomed exertion. Blood pounded at his temples. He listened. Slapping footfalls from an indeterminate distance—

  Remembering the baby, he reached down and quickly drew up the basket. The child had fallen silent, probably exhausted and starved. He peered in at it an instant, his heart plummeting to see the incongruity of its sweet innocence in this stronghold of evil. Shushing it needlessly, he bounded up the stairway to the next level.

  The iron-clad door was locked, the keys likely on one of the dead men below. And now footsteps and voices approached rapidly from a corridor that crossed the one he could see.

  He set the child down on the landing, out of weapon reach. The energumen began to laugh mockingly inside him, assuring him that it was useless to try to escape. He cursed and gritted his teeth. Brigands appeared down the corridor, brandishing pikes and broadswords. They were bellowing and pointing. The baby began to cry softly again.

  Simon’s soul cried out for divine aid.

  Then he recalled the lesson in shape-shifting he’d suffered at the hands of that old desert holy man. The mufti in Africa, whom he’d regarded as a lunatic, though Gonji had urged him to listen to the strange man. And, in truth, some unfathomable nexus of mystical principles had vindicated the old mufti’s wisdom: Simon had found that in moments of great emotional duress and pressing need, he could achieve at least a partial transformation into the Beast even by day.

  He watched the sweating faces and flourished weapons coming on beyond the grating. Heedless of their threat, he began to batter the heavy door with a shoulder. Again and again he pounded the portal, catching flashes of his own erupting fur and protruding black nails, feeling his jaws distend into a snout, his voice becoming increasingly bestial as he growled out challenges to the mercenaries, who watched with dawning horror, uncertain of their next move.

  A pistol ball grazed his neck, galvanizing him. With a mighty howl of wrath he grabbed the bars and wrenched the door free of one squealing hinge. A second pull broke it from its mooring. Simon charged the retreating warriors with the formidable makeshift shield.

  He ran them down, crushing two screaming men in his first charge. Ripping into a knot of soldiers trying vainly to gain the exit corridor, he savaged them in seconds with their own weapons, the ancient stonework strewn with bodies, splashed and dripping with blood and gore. Simon kept the largest broadsword he could find amid the carnage and went back for the baby.

  Gaining an inner ward without further incident, Simon stopped sharply and gurgled low in his wolfish throat to see the ashen squad of men who massed at the next gatehouse, duty-bound to prevent his escape. Two arbalest bolts shattered on the wall and floor around him. He doubled back inside the central keep, frustration inflaming his back-swept eyes of molten silver.

  He set the child down in a safe place, knowing its ultimate safety depended on the outcome of the fray. Chattering out a favorite prayer in a rattling, guttural voice, he spotted and retrieved the huge double-bladed battle-axe of antique vintage that decorated a wall niche above the stair to the armorer’s tower.

  Then he went out to engage the spreading mercenary detachment that moved to outflank him, as sweat glistened the brows of every man, betraying their fear. With a look to the crossbowmen sparsely arrayed on the walls above the ward, he roared in animal fury and surged out into the blinding sun-glare.

  Old ghosts stirred in the fastness of the long-abandoned prison fortification, their battle-fervor gleefully aroused at the prospect of clashing steel where none had been heard in centuries.

  Minute by minute, the unfolding spectacle swelled their ghastly, spectral numbers.

  * * * *

>   Yvonne Dusseault hurried along the avenue, watching the evening shadows merge and deepen over Lamorisse.

  She stopped at a crossing lane as a riderless horse bolted past, wild-eyed and snorting, splashed with blood. Staring after it for a few anxious seconds, Yvonne abruptly found her attention drawn to the sound of an infant’s weak cries.

  Swallowing, she lipped a silent prayer and turned into the dim, narrow lane, taking cold comfort in the weapons under her cloak.

  She spotted the basket before she heard the strange voice.

  “Take it,” the voice rasped, “and care for it.”

  Yvonne halted, licked her dry lips, and ambled nearer, pulling out and fisting a wheel-lock pistol in bold warning.

  “Stop there!”

  “Who are you?” she asked. “Come out from behind there.”

  The nearly naked figure of a man slowly crawled from behind a clump of rain barrels. He’d been savaged and left for dead. He bled from a score of wounds. Incredibly, the stubs of crossbow quarrels studded his flesh in at least three spots, yet he lived.

  But then she saw his eyes and knew he could only be a Farouche, her bitter enemy. She raised her pistol and leveled it at his head in both hands. “What have you done to this infant, you God-damned—”

  She unclenched her teeth and raised the pistol barrel out of line. For now she saw the white cross emblazoned in his upraised palm and knew who this wretched man must be.

  * * * *

  “Don’t watch me,” Simon pleaded from the bed. “Don’t watch when it happens…” He felt the first tremor that preceded the werewolf transformation, saw the pale disk of the Satyr’s Moon, reveling in her third night of life.

  “Easy, Simon,” Wyatt Ault told him as the surgeon tended his myriad wounds. “You must return to health. We need your help.”