Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves

by T. C. Rypel

“The snowstorm,” she went on, heedless of his objection, “and the water—the flood—the—”

  “Flood?” By Simon’s look, she might have just grown another nose.

  “Non, not a flood…a wave…a tidal wave.” Her reverie dissolved. She shrugged and smiled pertly. “I tell you these things because I need to tell someone, and you are a man of sorcery. I mean, of great spiritual power. Favored by God, they say. But I don’t believe any of it myself, of course.”

  A slow, mirthless smile creased Simon’s lips. “Favored by God…”

  He jerked suddenly, spasmodically. “Leave me.”

  “Ooh!”

  Gabrielle watched the eruption of the flesh along Simon’s arm for just a second. Then she excused herself and darted from the cellar.

  * * * *

  Yvonne Dusseault heard the Wunderknechten message while returning from dinner with friends. Her face was a mask of intensity as she hurried home to do what she must.

  She was shocked to enter the small stone dwelling in the southeast quarter of Lamorisse and find the witch curled atop her own bed.

  Smiling with feline cunning. The picture of narcissistic satisfaction.

  “Where is my husband?” Yvonne demanded coldly.

  “Your husband? He has no use for you. Perhaps you didn’t know, but…he never really did.” Her voice purred tauntingly.

  Yvonne took a menacing step forward, her heart pounding.

  The witch flashed a handful of long, dark nails. “Careful. These can be used to deal out pleasure…or pain.” She drew a long, slender leg from beneath her reclining form and extended it. Already, with the impending nightfall, her toenails had grown, hardened, curved into talons. “One for Jean, and one for you—”

  Yvonne’s lips drew back in revulsion and loathing. She reached down into her boot for a dirk. And sprang.

  * * * *

  Jean Dusseault strode inside the house purposefully. He’d received his orders to report to Dijon, and it wouldn’t do to keep the lords waiting.

  He lit a cresset lamp from the hearth fire and moved into the bedchamber. Failing to recognize his wife at first, he nearly dropped the lamp, raising a balled fist defensively.

  “Damn you! Are you crazy, sitting in the dark like that? I might’ve killed you. What the hell are you dressed for? What—what happened to you…there?”

  Anxiety crept into his eyes, along with dawning realization. Yvonne was armored like a light infantryman: brigandines with mail sleeves and a morion helmet. The long haft of a halberd lay across her lap. Three long gashes scored her cheek.

  “I want to talk with you, Jean,” she said gravely. “But first—” She indicated the corner behind the door.

  Her husband gasped to see the witch—now a half-transmuted black leopard—lying on her back in a pool of blood. Her throat was sliced open, and several knife wounds attested to Yvonne’s late rage.

  “You…bitch!”

  “Listen to me, Jean,” she said evenly, meeting his emotional gaze with the deadly calm of her own, “I know the Farouche plan to attack Lamorisse. And I also know of your allegiance to them. There’s nothing left between us now except a few precious memories. But it was all wrong nearly from the start. We both knew that. I’m not asking you to be my husband again. In God’s own eyes, that marriage must have been abolished a long time ago—”

  He knelt before the dead cat-woman, quaking with anger. His hands were shaking as his betrayed wife went on.

  “All I’m asking now is that you prove yourself willing to seek God’s mercy and forgiveness. Will you rejoin us? We humans who seek to overthrow these invading monsters?”

  “You—must—be—mad!” His lower jaw jutted wildly, as though he were regarding some vile mass bubbling before him. “The Farouche will see you all dead. You want me to give back things you can’t even understand.”

  “Oui. I am asking you—pleading with you, Jean—to trade back all those things they promised you in exchange for your eternal soul.”

  He rose ominously. “If you could hear yourself the way I do. It is as the Farouche say—you are all stupid children who have no knowledge of the true eternal realities.”

  Yvonne glanced at his right hand, which now gripped his rapier’s hilt. “Would you kill me over our differences, Jean?”

  “I should have killed you when she first told me it would be necessary…”

  A single tear fled the corner of Yvonne’s eye. “I’m sorry, Jean. There’s nothing left to say—”

  She reached behind her and drew the pistol belted against her spine. Its flash exploded in the room as Jean’s rapier snaked out of its scabbard.

  For a space, Yvonne sat alone in the dim light cast by the waning lamp glow, shedding bitter tears and baring her soul to her God. Then she collected herself and moved out to do her duty.

  * * * *

  “O mon Dieu!”

  Gabrielle’s hand went to her mouth and she gnawed at her knuckles, as she watched the enormous golden form gradually, painfully burst from the body of Simon Sardonis. Few had ever witnessed the eerie phenomenon.

  Blood matted the Beast’s fur where Simon’s wounds had again been traumatized in the metamorphosis.

  “I didn’t realize—” she prattled on.

  But Simon halted her. “No one ever does. You should not have watched. Spare me your shocked platitudes and tell me the news. What is the commotion above?”

  Gaby caught her breath and quickly adjusted to the awesome apparition and the bizarre quality of its semi-human voice, laced with just a touch of wine-fuddling. There was no disguising it to her practiced ear.

  “There is something going on at the far side of town. It’s the garrison, I think. Something’s happened to the troopers.”

  Simon held up a great black-taloned hand. Her eyes were drawn first to the white cross in his palm, then to the corded muscles and tendons under the golden fur of his arm, which seemed to pulsate with raw energy.

  “Do you hear that?” he whispered with a sound like dry leaves rattling through a gutter.

  “Non—what?” She clutched at her throat.

  “Wolves.”

  * * * *

  The wolf pack poured out of the side lanes and massed along the main street at the center of Lamorisse, spoiling for mayhem, directed by a powerful, evil will. They arrogantly prowled stoops and shop fronts, red eyes searching out victims who were slow to seek cover, their powerful jaws slavering, seeking to slash at anything that moved.

  The overture to the rape of Lamorisse was a display of the directed savagery of the unearthly hunters, disciplined to commands from their master that were beyond human hearing.

  The mercenary company followed, astride snorting chargers. They splintered off into small squads that randomly broke down doors and searched for rebels bearing weapons. Their battle cry was echoed on the night air: Someone had slaughtered the garrison, and there’d be the Farouche to pay.

  At their rear came the horrible hulking shape of Serge Farouche. Lord of all wolves. A black-furred bipedal monster, nearly eight feet in height. The silver tinge to the coarse hair of his ruff looked like a smoky aura about his neck. It stood rigid in his battle-frenzy.

  Serge hung back and observed, now and again issuing commands to both wolves and obedient brigands. He took no action himself until the Wunderknechten resistance finally showed its defiance. Pistol and bowshot broke out sporadically from windows and behind cover, felling unsuspecting wolves and mercenaries.

  Serge’s head snapped around when he saw a timber wolf downed by pistol fire on the periphery of his vision. Red-streaked lips drawn back in a canine grin, the werewolf sprang across the cobblestones in a low crouch, arms spread wide. He lithely scrabbled under the window from which the shot’s flash had issued.
>
  Unleashing his blinding speed, he vaulted upward and crashed through the window to seize the man who’d fired the deadly pistol. A woman screamed over and over inside the house as Serge dragged the man out and raked out his viscera in a mad whirl of pawing strokes and splattering blood.

  A moment later, the creature’s head loomed once again in the shattered window frame. Inhumanly keen night vision fixed on the dead man’s now-catatonic wife with cruel surety of purpose.

  * * * *

  Claude Aucoin reluctantly permitted his daughter, Francoise, to assist him in the loading of pistols. They huddled beneath the softly diffused light that gleamed through the glassware crowding the shelves of the shop.

  “Your wine fountain,” Francoise whispered breathily, wiping the perspiration from her eyes. “It’s beautiful, Papa.”

  He glanced over at the nearly finished cristallo masterwork, a tribute to the gaffer’s art.

  “No need to make small talk now.”

  “I meant it,” she said earnestly.

  He nodded stiffly in gratitude. “It can never be the same as the one that inspired it.”

  “Nothing can ever be the same, Papa. Everything changes. Dreams get broken. But sometimes you can replace them with new ones.”

  He glanced sharply at her. “So now you’re the family philosopher, eh?”

  She smiled uncertainly. “I only—”

  There was a heavy thud and the squeal of broken hinges in the living quarters at the rear of the shop. Aucoin’s wife screamed from the back of the house.

  “Christ Almighty—stay here!”

  But Francoise was already pushing toward the door ahead of him. She reached the hall and gasped. Her mother was being shoved toward her by a brigand who used the woman for a shield.

  “Don’t kill her! Don’t kill her!” Francoise cried out, throwing down her wheel-lock piece.

  “Ohhhhhhh!”

  Aucoin flinched as he heard the blare of the gun from the hall before he could emerge to see the horror that had transpired. Francoise moaned pathetically and fell back toward him.

  The killer had shot her mother in the back of the head.

  Claude grabbed his daughter and threw her down on the shop floor. The murderer came through the archway with a cockeyed leer on his face. He’d decided that Francoise was alone and dropped his guard.

  Claude’s pistol boomed at the brigand’s face from a scant five feet away, splitting it open like a rotten red melon. Francoise cried out again to see a second person dispatched in such nightmarish fashion. But almost at once she brought herself under control and sought out a weapon.

  Her father caught up his second pistol as two more mercenaries barged through the archway, scrambling through low, firing their guns as they broke for either side of the shop.

  Aucoin returned fire but missed them both, crying out as a searing lead ball lanced through his side in erupting blood. He sought another gun with pain-blurred vision.

  The vicious intruders chattered a deluge of surly speech in an unknown tongue. Seeing that Aucoin was injured, they roared with glee and came on. One charged Claude, who heard the snick of a drawn sword in the darkness. The other enemy made for Francoise.

  The mercenaries were served a dual surprise.

  The man who caught Francoise around the waist from behind pulled her close, snarling at her yelping pleas. She grabbed a pointed chipping tool from her father’s workbench and lashed back over her shoulder. The mercenary screamed. Blood gushed from the deep wound in his neck. He lurched about the darkened shop, eyes agape, his voice gurgling as he tried to stanch his spurting blood. He reached for Francoise with a bloody hand, almost imploringly, then dropped to his knees and emitted a long, choking note of agony before falling silent.

  His partner’s attention was thus drawn from Claude momentarily. When he hissed a shocked breath to see the other’s fate and then turned back to the wounded gaffer, Claude smashed the cristallo wine fountain into his face. Crystal shards exploded all about them as the brigand screamed and flung away his blade, grabbing at his glass-splintered eyes.

  Aucoin found another loaded pistol. A shot rang out as Francoise blinked and hugged herself reflexively. Gasping for breath, she ran to her father.

  “Papa—”

  “It’s not so bad—it’s not so bad,” he assured, pressing at his injured side. “See to your mother.”

  He himself was afraid to see. When he heard Francoise’s hysterical sobbing from the corridor, he rose numbly. A violent shuddering seized the glass-blower as his own tears of anguish began to fall.

  Aucoin still gripped a piece of the wine fountain in a blood-stained hand as he shuffled out to the hallway.

  * * * *

  Reynald and Faye Labossiere had taken refuge in the upper rooms of the clothier’s shop when that doughty soul had departed to join his Wunderknechten blade-brothers.

  The pair now huddled among the rolls of cambric and tables piled high with a fresh consignment of fabrics from foreign lands. They listened to the sounds of carnage, the clash of steel, the feral cries of the beasts, from the streets below.

  Somewhere nearby, the ravening wolves had cornered some unfortunate quarry. Pistol shots and screams mingled in sharp counterpoint to the melody of the battle skald that composed itself in the nighted streets of Lamorisse.

  “Jesus God Almighty,” Reynald swore, crossing himself. “So many lives lost foolishly. If only—”

  “If only what, Reynald?” Faye shot back, eyes shut as if to eradicate what her world had become. As if their reopening might somehow create a world without fear. “They’ll die, that’s sure. But no more foolishly than we will once they find us here…” She rambled on, not seeing her husband’s tensing. “We’re too much alike for our lives to have worked out together. Two people like us can only—”

  “Shh.”

  Faye opened her eyes and glanced at him. He held a finger over his lips. Boards creaked on the stairway that led up to the storage rooms. Lambent torchlight could be seen through the crack under the door.

  Faye’s expression contorted, terror crinkling her eyes.

  “Hey! Down here!”

  The shout had come from the floor below, and footsteps clambered back down the stairs in response.

  But the torchbearer remained to inspect the upstairs shop. A door was kicked open on the landing. Then another, nearer.

  “Wait here,” Faye told him quietly, rising stiffly. “Maybe it’s…someone I know.”

  Reynald’s hand shot out and grabbed her ankle. He shook his head. “Not in my presence,” he whispered.

  “Well then, what are we going to do?”

  Wild light shone in Labossiere’s eyes.

  “Watch,” he replied, meeting her gaze steadily as he pushed up from the floor. He moved in front of her as the door to their sanctuary burst open under a stamping boot.

  The torch flared the room into shadowy luminescence. One of Serge Farouche’s hand-picked killers strode inside. He bore a pistol in his other hand.

  Recognizing Faye and then Reynald, he began to laugh softly. “Monsieur…Labossiere, non? Out looking for another beating? Perhaps this time his last.”

  The brigand put up the pistol and drew his saber.

  “Please,” Reynald pleaded, “leave us be. We’re not part of this—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Reynald, don’t beg him,” Faye said with revulsion.

  The mercenary scanned her vertically, evidently pleased by what he saw. “By all means, do beg, monsieur. I like a humble man…a man who knows his place…” He popped buttons off Reynald’s shirt with the saber as he spoke. “Now…on your knees. Both of you.”

  “Stop this now,” she replied. “Just stop it, and I’ll go with you. I’ll do whatever—�
��

  “Non,” Reynald said in a whining voice, “not again.” He bowed his head submissively and slumped as if to bend his knees.

  The brigand relaxed, laying his blade casually on his shoulder and lowering the torch to admire Faye’s form again. That was his undoing.

  Labossiere’s foot shot out and kicked the flambeau straight back into the man’s face. He shrieked as sparks coruscated about his burned face. His pot helmet flew off, and his beard fringe and eyelashes had caught fire. Reynald snatched the man’s wrist, twisted the saber out of his grasp with a grunting maneuver, and yanked his arm hard behind him.

  Faye fell back against the wall in shock. “Kill him, Reynald. You’ve got to kill him!”

  When he hesitated, the stricken killer pulled his pistol from his belt and aimed it over his shoulder at Reynald. Labossiere’s head snapped out of the way as Faye screamed and the wheel-lock fired with a thunderous report. Reynald dislocated the man’s elbow with a sharp twist, then ran him through with his own saber.

  Faye’s eyes goggled. She pounced on the pistol. “Get his powder flask and shot,” she ordered breathily.

  She paused and looked up at her husband, who still stood gazing down at the dead man. The saber fell from his fist.

  “Who are you, Reynald?” she asked, mystified. “What are you? Why do you play at being the coward, the world’s whipping boy?”

  “No one understands,” he replied somberly. “It has taken me more courage to embrace Christian convictions than it ever did to…” The glazed look melted from his eyes. They heard shouts and heavy footfalls. “We’ve got to get out of here fast!”

  * * * *

  Three huge timber wolves caught the scent as one. They drew back from their savaged and half-eaten prey in the alley—a local merchant—and turned to bare their fangs at the threatening presence that stalked them with upraised broadsword.

  The great golden werewolf, Simon Sardonis, glared at them, silver eyes beaming like twin prongs of cold vengeance.