by T. C. Rypel
Ophidian eyes of black pearl fixed on him with cold animal lust. It opened its gaping maw in hungry promise, the cavernous expanse consuming the entire view from the window.
The sharp report of a pistol sounded at Moreau’s right. The ball struck the back of the serpent’s throat. It hissed and clamped its fanged jaws tightly shut, snapping its huge head back from the window.
Guy stood beside his father, the gun still smoking in his two-handed grasp.
“Go away from mon pere, you bad snake,” Guy shouted, his voice high-pitched and tremulous. “Heart of evil / Hie away / Choirs of angels / Thy power stay—!”
“Get down, Guy,” Moreau shouted. “Under the pews—”
The fanged head loomed in at the window again, this time squeezing its bulk through the ruptured aperture to search out the offending humans.
Moreau gritted his teeth and took up the priest’s pike. He lanced the polearm at the oncoming triangular head, his vision focused on the terrible curved fangs. The pike-point skewered the serpent’s lower jaw. It hissed in pain and tugged free with a shuddersome twisting motion. The sinuous beast raked itself bloody as it fled the jagged glass fragments in the frame to squirm and hiss in pain on the grounds outside.
More crossbow bolts whistled through the windows.
“Come ahead, servants of Satan!” Moreau blared. “You would deny my son the fullness of life? This is God’s own fortress!”
He saw the priest take up a position at a window, raising the broadsword for a strike as the gargoyles grew bolder again. His soul now fired with both fervent righteousness and cold inevitability, Moreau clambered to another wind-blown shattered orifice and drew a bead with the reloaded pistol. His shot bowled over an alighting gargoyle.
His bellow of triumph was cut short when he saw the strange figure pounding over the grounds astride a dark horse. Eyes narrowing to slits, he felt his heart sag in anticipation of hellish reinforcements.
But then Moreau’s vision penetrated the murky shadows without, and he knew who this rider must be.
* * * *
Gonji’s back stiffened with the powerful kyu-jutsu draw of his bow.
The first gargoyle to take an armor-piercer shaft was slammed into the chapel’s wall so hard that its wing snapped at an upper brace, tearing it open.
A second winged monster hovered above the steeple, shrieking at Gonji in futile menace. The fourteen-fist arrow sliced through its abdomen and protruded several inches beyond its spine with a gout of dark blood.
A third lofted upward, drawing and reloading its crossbow by means of both fore- and hind-claws. As it eerily pushed the bow with its feet and yanked the steel string back with its gnarled claws, the creature danced tantalizingly in a flight path designed to confound the samurai’s aim.
Gonji’s powerful shot tore its head from its shoulders.
The last living gargoyle sought safety in the skies. It beat its vaned wings for the star-shot patch of aerial harbor above the clearing.
Moments later—two mighty bowshots later—the gargoyle’s squalling, primitive cries and spiraling plunge into the treetops lent testimony to its failed endeavor.
But now the writhing monster snake speared over the flattening grasses, arching its neck from side to side as it bore down to strike at the back-stamping Nichiyoobi.
Gonji held the mare’s panic in check with knee pressure. Nichi snorted in defiance of the oncoming horror, lurching up to kick defensively.
The samurai tossed away his bobbing sallet to glare into the merciless black eyes that sought to wither his soul. He drew both his pistols and fired them at once. The bucking horse caused both shots to miss their targets, the serpent’s opaque orbs, though one lead ball erupted the flesh on its snout.
Gonji quit the saddle, taking his bow and quiver, and spanked away the whinnying mare. She circled the slithering mass and began to stamp at its prodigious uncoiling length until forced to retreat by the serpent’s reactive thrashings.
Gonji sprinted for the chapel, hearing voices within shouting unclear words. The monster angled for him but could not match his speed and deceptive veering. He turned a corner and drew it close to the walls, where it slithered close behind. But at the second corner, he heard the warning shout that it had cannily anticipated his circuit of the chapel and doubled back along its own body to intercept him.
“Cholera.”
Gonji jump-stopped and tore back the way he’d come. He caught up with, and then passed, the giant serpent’s doubled mass. Saw the fanged head rising to surprise him at the front of the chapel.
Again he took up his great longbow.
Two shafts pinned the monstrous snake’s lower jaw before it flinched back and returned to the original direction of the chase, now maddened with pain. This time he had to swing wide of its undulating coils and lost time. The great maw nearly cut him off at the second corner. But he beat its fanged strike with a scalp-prickling gasp, plunging on in a crouch along the next wall, nape hairs bristling and gooseflesh running rampant.
He passed the shouting human voices again, heard a shot, felt the snake’s barreling form shudder. He turned another corner, and another—twice he was slammed by lurches of the undulating, scaly bulk.
Now the serpent’s tail was beside him. Gonji paused a moment. The white fangs presaged the appearance of the ominous head, behind him. It had nearly lapped its tail and was rearing in triumph—
“Now, stupid monster—surprise-surprise!”
Gonji sprang forward and angled away from the snake. From beside the scale-crusted hindmost portion he fired two rapid shots into the serpent’s tail, pinioning it to the wall of the chapel. A third—
With the first deeply embedded war arrow, the great reptile’s head had jerked back from the whiplash effect. The second and third caused it to writhe in blind fury. Its tail skewered to the wall, it was unable to move forward.
The serpent bent back, undulating in a frustrated effort to retrace its path again. And now the samurai pursued. Gonji emptied his quiver of armor-piercing arrows into the creature’s head and neck. Dark, greenish fluid leaked from a dozen wounds.
“Sensei!”
At last—a spoken word Gonji understood, though its incongruity here caused him some small wonder even in his present bizarre circumstance.
He looked to the window. A pike was tossed out to him. He grunted in appreciation and took up the weapon.
The raging serpent’s head slammed downward at him. He tilted at the monstrous beast, clashing with its hissing and clamping jaws. When he severed one fang at the upper jaw, the front half of the creature fell to wild convulsions.
Gonji jabbed it again and again, deflecting its vicious attacks, its madness now driving it to try to swallow him whole, something its cavernous maw might have been quite capable of.
But Gonji held it at bay. His skillful assault sliced its tender mouth parts to ribbons. And in the end, its frustrated contortions spending its energy, its head lolled near the ground.
Gonji lanced the pike from upper snout through lower jaw, driving the razored point through soft masonry, lodging it in the chapel foundation. The enormous head dripped and throbbed like a gaffed fish against the chapel wall.
Gathering his breath, he let go of the skewering pike and stepped back to appraise his work. Nodding once in the understated fashion that was all his breeding usually allowed, he turned to confront a deeply bowing Jacques Moreau.
“Mon Dieu—the Great Sensei himself!” Moreau said for the third time. He spoke German, to Gonji’s considerable relief.
The samurai smiled thinly, rather glad for the renewed company of like-minded sword-brothers.
“Amazing…how you handled that thing…just amaz—”
Gonji bowed slightly and held up a silencing hand. “Arigato
. Thank you—enough about it, neh? Serpents don’t bother me. It’s flying monsters I detest.” He nodded his creased brow toward a gargoyle’s corpse, shuddering with revulsion. “So…Wilfred Gundersen is alive, the last you heard, so desu ka?” Gonji took comfort in Moreau’s eager affirmations. “Yoi—that’s good. And Simon Sardonis? Thank the Great Kami for that—”
“They said he ran from Serge Farouche in Lamorisse,” Moreau advanced gingerly, raking Guy’s tousled hair, as the boy regarded the gigantic dead serpent with marveling eyes.
“If so, then he must have had a sound reason,” the samurai averred. He also turned his attention to Guy and, in passable local dialect, said: “You are a brave young lad, neh?”
“Oui, monsieur. I helped mon pere fight those devils.” The boy was still visibly shaken, his large eyes fractured with red streaks of exhaustion and shining with wonder. And he constantly averted his gaze from the dead gargoyle forms strewn about the churchyard, sharing Gonji’s distaste. His father laid an arm about his shoulders and hugged him protectively.
Gonji’s eyes narrowed as he glanced about. “Simon will be back. Wilfred has his woman in hiding, and I think he hates these Farouche more than any of us can truly appreciate.”
“Gentils,” the cure interjected softly, “now that we’ve disposed of these creatures, what shall I do with them?” There was a trace of relieved humor in the priest’s tone.
Gonji looked to the carcass of the great serpent, girdling more than half the chapel like a scaly necklace. He winced, curiously cheered by the offbeat realization that abruptly struck him: Responsibility for cleaning up his handiwork never fell to the hero.
* * * *
Sgt. Carlos Orozco and the French mercenaries clattered into the village, the heavy cannon and ordnance wagon rumbling along behind them. It was several minutes before they could draw the fearful citizens from their homes. Once they’d established that they were Wunderknechten turned out in defense of Burgundy’s rebellion, it was several more minutes before they were able to make sense of the cacophony of anxious voices.
“Calm down! Calm down!” Armand Perigor urged. “Where is this chapel you speak of?”
“How many people trapped there?”
“What kind of monsters?”
“Yo-ho!” Normand Gareau shouted, spanking his horse into anxious motion and waving to the others. “Sounds good to me! Let’s use this equipment before the army strips us of it! Come on, Armand!”
They thundered out of the village and took to the forest, the ordnance wagons barely squeezing through the narrowest turnings of the trail.
“Discretion be damned!” Le Corbeau roared in the din. “Let’s hit them!”
Gareau leapt from his horse to the wagon bearing the multiple-barrel musket. Uncovering it and swinging it about, he lit an oil-soaked match from the ever-burning stone-pot lamp in the wagon. Bouncing with the ride, singing a battle chanty, he held the match ready to ignite the gun-wicks.
* * * *
“Take my horse and get the boy out of here, up into those hills,” Gonji ordered Moreau. “I will find you. You—priest—get inside the church.”
He belted his pistols and seated his swords in his back harness. Charging one gun, Gonji prepared to fire on the point man of the horde whose approach vibrated the churchyard.
But the point man was Armand Perigor.
“Yoi!” Gonji exclaimed. Then, to the fleeing Moreau: “Come back—these are my ronin!”
Moreau trotted Nichi back beside Gonji and dismounted along with Guy.
“Damn it all! Begging your pardon, padre! But…damn!” Orozco swore again, behind Perigor, as he gazed at the carnage around the chapel. “You mean we still drag this cannon around for nothing? Don’t you leave anything for anybody else, Gonji-san?”
A spate of good-natured laughter ensued.
Perigor swung down from his mount to shake Gonji’s hand warmly. Le Corbeau followed, bowing in perfect Japanese fashion. Brett Jarret cast the samurai a slap-dash salute, grunting a greeting. Gareau drew his sword and saluted with more courtly grace. Sgt. Orozco beamed him a sour smile.
Gonji bowed to them all. The massed party of newer French adventurers, who’d never seen Gonji before, held back respectfully and whispered, fascinated to at last meet the legendary oriental.
They exchanged news of the road.
“These people are really suffering here at the hands of these sorcerers, eh?” Perigor observed, sighing heavily.
“Hai,” Gonji agreed. “I’m afraid this is a running battle. These rebel actions are never easy to coordinate and always costly. And we can’t even know the foe’s limits in this one. Plus, as usual we’re more unwelcome here than the Farouche themselves, as far as French royalty is concerned. But…we’re this far along—”
“A lot farther than last winter,” Gareau added.
Grunts of assent at the grim reminder.
Corbeau spoke. “It’s rather important for tactical planning that we try to find the Wunderknechten leaders here quickly. Learn what they know. Get these people moving in the same direction. At the very least start securing the towns and villages.”
“Well, I can vouch for Lamorisse’s fighting folk,” Moreau said. “It’s in good hands, and they’re either digging in or evacuating.”
“Oui—but to where?” Corbeau fretted. “Sorry we couldn’t get here soon enough to be of assistance to your city.”
Moreau thanked him silently, lips set in a thin line.
Gonji strolled as he spoke, hands clasped behind him. “These villages won’t be safe, though the larger towns might fend for themselves. If all the Crown’s garrisoned regulars haven’t been murdered like those in Lamorisse—and that seems unlikely; how many mercenaries can the Farouche employ?—maybe they can be won over. They’re French first and Burgundian second, one would hope…”
“The king’s regulars don’t want to hear our claims of ‘invaders from faerie realms,’” Perigor said bitterly. “To them, we are the invaders.”
“Why not attack Dijon?” Jarret asked. “Go right for the seat of—?”
“Non—nothing could make us look more like the insurrectionists they take us for,” Gonji replied.
“We lack strength for that, anyway,” Corbeau added.
“And the loyalist soldiers there are sure to be under Farouche influence,” Moreau put in. “We’d be fighting the good and the bad at once.”
Perigor made a scoffing sound. “Our fight is with these shape-shifting Farouche tyrants, not the order of our own country’s society.”
“We need a rallying point,” Gonji said thoughtfully. “Something highly defensible…”
“How about the battered Frankish castle in the mountain gorges?” Moreau advanced.
“Oui, I know the place,” Corbeau said on an excited breath. “Abandoned, crumbled by siege, but still useful, I think.”
“Unless Farouche sorcery has meddled there as well,” Orozco reminded them.
“It’s haunted,” Guy said fearfully behind them.
“What?”
Moreau translated for Gonji, as his son recounted the regional superstitions surrounding the place in their regional dialect. The lad’s words held the rapt attention of the company of battle-hardened warriors.
“Mmm,” the samurai intoned pensively, “not another castle like the one in Africa, I trust. But it seems the best chance. Let’s do it. That’s our sanctuary for those who have nowhere to run, our base of operations. Moreau, you’ve done your part. Take your boy and ride with this company. Perigor, have them get this ordnance of yours to the castle. We need a reliable map of the province from you, Moreau—all areas of Farouche activity since this rebellion started. The six of us will ride out in pairs on a general alert, try to…bring some organization to this m
adness. I want to learn where Simon and Wilfred Gundersen operate. Their aid is vital. Oh, and—Armand, will you set some of your people to helping the cure clean up his churchyard?”
“Don’t look at me,” Orozco said wardingly when he saw Gonji glance at him. Subdued laughter accompanied the Spaniard’s remark.
“All-recht, ronin—let’s move. Moreau, what is it?”
Jacques seemed troubled. “I was—I was just thinking how fortunate I am to have my son…and about those others who…weren’t so lucky. In Lamorisse…”
An arrow stole snapped sharply behind the listeners. Le Corbeau had yanked it from the corpse of a gargoyle and cracked it in two, scowling. The Crow’s teeth ground at the memory of Jacques Moreau’s tale of outrage concerning the abducted children of his town.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Serge Farouche left the abducted children of Lamorisse in the hands of a mercenary column.
The wolves had carried the twenty-seven terrified children to two waiting oxcarts in the forest north of the town. The young ones were loaded and locked into the wooden cages and given food and drink. But many were still in shock, and most partook of neither.
The mercenary band trundled them off toward the mountain grotto used by the Farouche in their foul rites. The wolf pack loped along in escort, and a small flight of gargoyles flapped overhead, serving as both scouts and aerial cover fire.
But the foul company had been watched.
Gonji’s other adventurer company, under the command of Buey, had trailed them from a safe distance, keeping to the depths of the forest to avoid being spotted.
When the opportunity finally presented itself, the Wunderknechten struck like an iron fist of providential wrath.
When the mercenaries briefly left the child-bearing carts with the wolf pack and took water from a mountain well, the first fusillade of longbow shafts riddled them. The second sent their tattered remnant scurrying for the cover of boulders and sparse brush. A pitched bowshot battle ensued, the determined adventurers’ uncanny accuracy dropping more brigands with every volley.