by T. C. Rypel
Sebastio smiled warmly and laid a hand on Corbeau’s brass shoulder clasp. “I do indeed. But you honor me too much. These men here did the fighting. All I could do was pray.”
“Oui,” one of the men from Gonji’s company cut in, “but somehow, it seemed it was your prayer that won the day, all the same. The padre brought God’s power down on their heads. You should have seen those wolves cower and run.” Others voices chimed out in support of the man’s words.
Le Corbeau licked his dry lips. “I am what you’d probably call a fallen Catholic. I can no longer accept the Catholic Church’s authority or teaching. I’m a Huguenot now, you see. But I would be honored to receive the blessing of a man of God such as you.”
Father Sebastio conferred his blessing warmly, thanking him again for his kindness.
“While you’re doling out blessings to heretics,” Armand Perigor said amiably, “I’d like you to hear my confession.” They moved inside to the makeshift chapel.
“Sensei,” Monetto called out to Gonji. “Shall we muster our defenders here and see what the hell we’ve got?”
“Hai,” Gonji agreed. And as he strutted toward the inner ward in the fashion so familiar to many of the company, he saw that Jacques Moreau and his son had fallen into step behind him.
“You know, Moreau,” he said quietly, “your Wunderknechten—their actions have made me proud to be associated with them. They’ve proven true to their own beliefs, and true to the spirit of bushido.”
Moreau lipped a silent thanks as Gonji went on in a louder voice, for the fighting command of the broken fortress was assembling.
“Now all you ronin—you drifters—must prove yourself bushi—warriors, neh?” He gazed about the ward, seeing anxious looks upon faces both familiar and new.
At the battered outer curtain wall, Le Corbeau prepared the cannon and multiple-barrel musket for a test firing. He was the first to take note of the great abscess in the sky above the mountains as a monstrous thunderclap split the air and nearly ruptured their eardrums with its echoed report in the canyons and gorges.
In the minds of some of the gaping onlookers, the world must surely be coming to an end…
The cloud-tufted heavens tore open and peeled back like the slow spread of a sky god’s jagged, leering smile. The rift in space between contiguous spheres began to spew water. At first it was only a cataract—the waterfall of another world. The rift widened, the roar deafening as the great sheet of water fanned out and spilled downward into the gorge.
Hearts skipped a beat and breaths stopped up to behold the unthinkably vast phenomenon.
It was not a waterfall. It was a sea.
There was an incredible sense of disorientation, of lost perspective, as the incalculable outpouring crashed into the gorge to rush to its far end. It struck with a thunderous wash that vibrated the spindling outcrop of puny rock that supported the castle. One rock bridge approach to the castle collapsed into the gorge from the sheer power of the vibration. The endlessly surging expanse of water turned back on itself and began rising up the walls of the gorge with staggering speed and force. And still it rumbled from the mile-long cleft in the sky.
Le Corbeau recovered his sensibilities and bellowed at his paralyzed men, who scarcely heard him over the deafening roar of the ascending waves, which now plunged up the sides of the granite crag to threaten them with its returning wash.
“Soute aux poudres! The powder magazines! Grab them and run for the keep!”
Several people and many animals lost their lives, dashed from the two standing bridges or blasted from the castle grounds through breaks in the ancient walls. Others were smashed to pulp amidst the crashing stonework. Most reached safety in the halls and myriad chambers of the central keep, and the stabled horses, while knocked down by the sluicing water, were largely unharmed.
No one could say how long the awesome, shattering event lasted. Le Corbeau swore that it was only a scant few moments. But not a soul among them had believed that they would survive. They clung like tenacious bugs to any solid purchase until long after the wounded sky had sealed itself, as if stitched by the hand of a Titan healer.
The castle stood, as well as two of the bridges—the vital links to land. But the gorge was filled nearly to the top, swirling and churning with debris as the water still sought its level.
Le Corbeau saw that his big weapons remained intact. He joined Gonji and Monetto on the curtain wall, which seemed to sway dangerously on its foundations. They gazed down vertiginously into the water’s murky wash, feeling as insignificant as mosquitoes.
“I shan’t bore you with the obvious jest about this being one helluva moat,” Le Corbeau said archly. “My guns seem all right.”
“Look—” Monetto was pointing at the floating debris. Some of it was uncomfortably familiar in outline.
Human outline.
“Cholera,” Gonji swore. “Let’s see who we’ve lost—”
“Nein—look!” someone shouted farther down the wall.
Spun by the action of the water, rolling and tossing in its seethe, some of the bodies still seemed to be moving their limbs under their own power.
“We’ve got to help them—”
“How?”
“Wait a minute,” Gonji said sharply, halting them.
They stared, aghast, as one of the moving bodies crashed into the rocks just below a redoubt. Its flesh was gray and bloated. The eyes were sightless, milky, ghoulish. But it moved. It dug its blackened nails into the rocks and strove to pull itself up.
The dead Farouche company, once consigned to the bottom of the gorge, had been regurgitated by the sewers of Hell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The cross-world forces of the dread Farouche sorcerers and shape-shifters swept over the snowy plains by night, bloodlust in their eyes and savage battle-cries roaring from their throats. They spanked their weapons of bronze and iron and alien-tempered steel against their armor as they advanced in an unremitting skirmish line. A monstrous, devouring horde, a plague of primitive might, obedient to their lords alone.
Some pounded over the snows on foot, tireless, stamping the track with boots of animal hide and fur-bound hooves. The bearded giants of a frigid sphere clumped beside the company of spear-hefting, horned fiends. These giants were most prominent on the white horizon, for they sat astride huge, shaggy red-maned chargers that dwarfed all horses known to men. Their great size distorted perspective as they surged toward Lamorisse, cloudy plumes of icy breath forming about them as they blared their deep-voiced battle skald.
And at the vanguard came the dark werewolf Serge Farouche, loping along with his mighty pack of flame-eyed timber wolves.
The warriors of Lamorisse said their hopeful farewells to the non-combatants, who shivered before fires set in every hearth of the snow-banked dwellings of the town. Mounting to towers and belfries, rooftops and balconies, the rebellious Wonder Knights assumed their tactical firing positions and took up arms against the invaders.
“Hold back now,” the golden Beast, Simon Sardonis, growled at his awestruck charges on the roof of the guildhall, which was now a fiery beacon scorching the night sky with its bonfires. Every rampart was surrounded by the angry edges of vicious weapons, fixed in position and pointed outward. A bristling redoubt like the spear-rimmed turret of a castle, the guildhall roof was but one of many such defensive outworks.
“Look at ‘em come,” a man gasped, trembling and clinging to his weapons in the ferocious cold of the rooftop. “Look at ‘em! Why don’t they just use their goddamn magic and be done with us?” he whimpered, shutting his eyes against the sight.
“Be still,” Simon shouted, guttural, almost a canine bark. “Stand firm like a man. Your family’s lives depend on it.”
“Why, Simon?” Wilf asked quietly. “He’s right. W
hy don’t they?”
“Because they’re limited by spiritual principles beyond human ken,” the lycanthrope posited. “That’s my experience of them. For terrorizing—causing suffering, discomfort—their powers are limitless, even over great distances. But when they threaten life, they must do so in direct confrontation. Faith against faith. Evil testing the mettle of good…Energies, one sort smacking against another—? I don’t know, precisely. But they terrify you, and then when you’re too scared to fight, they kill you. That’s about as simply as I can state it.”
“And if you refuse to be scared…you win?” someone queried haltingly.
Simon’s pointed ears flicked back slightly, and his great, fanged muzzle half-turned to them. “Sometimes it’s not as simple as that.” He rotated his gaze back toward the onrushing horde. “Unfortunately…”
“So this storm—” Wilf probed on. “—it’s just for intimidation?”
“Probably.”
“I’m not intimidated,” the smith said, his jaw jutting and his breath puffing in rapid gasps, “but I am damned cold.”
“You need a better coat,” the werewolf replied wryly. “Get ready—”
The wolves reached the outskirts of town, leaping easily over the barricades of packed snow as they spread through the streets in a bellowing, jangling surge.
The alarm tocsin rang in the bell tower, and each redoubt was freed to fire at will.
Pistol and musket fire now laced the streets. Needling shafts arced through the air, launched from sturdy bows. The massed wolves danced an impromptu jig as several of them jolted and tumbled in red ruin, furred hides exploding and rending under the concentrated rebel fire.
Serge Farouche barked an order, and the animals split up and took to the side lanes, seeking easier prey. Serge himself ran up a wall to a low balcony in two powerful strides to rip through the party of four men who desperately tried to reload their weapons behind easily shredded mealy bags. In seconds the balcony was splashed with dark stains, the men strewn about like meat scraps. And Serge was gone.
Shouting voices, screams of pain and terror hovered over the rooftops like restless ghosts as the main body of the eerie invasion force reached Lamorisse. Two-thirds of it skirted the town, flanking it to either side, ghastly forms standing motionless in the snow-crusted distance.
The man-beasts and giant barbarians were the main siege force arrayed against Lamorisse. Their arrival coincided with the diving flight of gargoyles that sheared through the frigid wind’s wash to attack the high outposts.
The battle was joined, both sides committed unto death.
The first wave of barbarian berserkers roared their battle-glee under fearsome spiked and winged helms. They swung their massive axes overhead and charged their ponderous, shaggy horses into the mounded barriers of snow. They bellowed in shock and pain as they plunged through the spiked boards and makeshift calthrops—the poised spears and jagged metal edges—the ensnaring ropes and nets fixed under the camouflaging snow. They were spilled from their mounts in a metallic din of thudding bodies and armor.
Rebels burst from concealment to fall upon them with pike and sword, while covered by fusillades of pistol and arquebus and bowshot. The Wunderknechten howled in naive triumph at this first facile victory and failed to gauge the giants’ combat skills.
The second wave bolted over the fallen bodies of the first, and the melee was on for fair. Barbarian axes wielded by mighty arms slashed and whined in the night air, splitting defenders like logs, ripping through the slow of foot like scythes through wheat. The trap now having been compromised, the attackers proceeded with greater caution, for Lamorisse had in effect become a fortification, with hastily fashioned walls in the snow; blockaded, dead-ending lanes that were killing grounds for screaming defenders who fired weapons from rooftops and windows; towers and turrets that rained volleys of steel and leaden death.
The gargoyles attacked by air. The beast-men and barbarian giants raked the town with a crisscrossing ground assault. Serge and his wolves struck like feral lightning in counterattacks against preoccupied warriors. And with the arrival of the white lynx—the conjurer Roman Farouche—sorcery entered the fray on the side of darkness.
* * * *
“I see Serge,” Simon rasped. “They’re going to need help against him and the wolves. I’m going down—”
“You’ll need help, too, nicht wahr?” Wilf yelled. “Some of us go with you—”
“You won’t keep up.” And with that the enormous golden werewolf lithely disappeared over the roof’s embrasure.
“Brett, Wyatt, Alphonse—you like killing wolves, don’t you?” Wilf called out, a wild grin lighting his face.
The three men’s eyes shone feverishly in the firelight as they assented, belting their weapons.
“Cover fire, bitte, gentils,” Wilf requested to the others as he swung over the wall to lower himself to the madness in the streets. “And sharp lookout for gargoyles!”
They had scarcely reached the snow-packed street when the Wunderknechten joined Simon in a whirlwind engagement with leaping and snapping predators.
Wilf slashed straight out of the scabbard, his breath whooshing out of him with the electric thrill that coursed his spine. The timber wolf springing over his head yowled and fell in a grisly spill of steaming blood and entrails. Another leapt at Wilf’s back. His spinning two-handed sword cut nearly separated its salivating head from its shoulders as the heavy body’s momentum knocked him down.
He lurched out from under it to see Simon ripping the throat of a wolf with his huge clamping jaws, two more already dead beside him, one sporting the hilt of his skewering broadsword.
Simon scooped up a double-bladed halberd from a dead warrior and dashed off down the street, Brett and Alphonse hot on his heels. Wyatt Ault grabbed Wilf by the arm and urged him onward in their wake.
Two ram-headed fiends in hoary pelts intercepted them from a side lane near the town hall. Wyatt cracked off a pistol shot that dropped one. The other fell under whistling, thudding bowshot from the roofs. The pair cast up a gesture of gratitude and pushed on.
But three thundering, mounted barbarian giants bore down on them fast as they neared the market stalls.
Wilf and Wyatt could not outrun the snorting monster steeds, and they were by now out of sight of their cover fire.
* * * *
Brett Jarret trailed Simon and Alphonse, who had caught up the reins of a dead rebel’s frantic horse and now pounded after the possessed lycanthrope Simon.
Jarret, flailing wildly with singing steel, had lagged behind due to deadly encounter he scarcely registered in his frantic senses. He suddenly heard human cries above him. A band of gargoyles embattled the warriors atop the fortified mercantile building. But then his attention was immediately drawn to the axe- and spear-wielding giants who pincered him from two directions, braying their hideous glee to see his helpless position. One of them drew back and hurled a spear at him while in full charge. The great barbed head sailed past Jarret with tremendous velocity and crashed into the building wall, splintering in an explosion of stone shards.
“Take to the stoop!” someone was calling from above amidst the din of the gargoyle clash. “The stoop!”
Jarret bounded up to the canopied stoop and thudded into the door with a shoulder blow. It was boarded solid from inside.
“God damn it—!”
Then he saw the hissing, steaming sheet of hot liquid splash against the protecting canopy to shower the giants as they reached the building and angled their weapons at him. Flaming pitch and boiling oil seared the giants and their mammoth steeds alike. The bearded berserkers—each fully four-hundred pounds, sans armor—fell with their neighing mounts to thrash in the snow, savagely burned, some blinded and red-streaked with corrosive agents that cooked their flesh as the
y kicked and rolled.
Jarret gaped an instant, heard the screams from above, saw a human form drop across his vision to slam into the snow.
Two giants who’d taken minor burns came at him from either side, one with a spear at his hip, the other cocking a gleaming battle-axe.
Jarret looked from one side to the other. His escape was blocked. He pulled an axe from his belt and cast it at the nearer giant as it passed under a signboard hung from a corner of the building. The finely-honed axe pierced the huge bearded killer’s breastplate and stuck six inches deep in his chest. The giant screamed and flung away his axe. His wild red beard and shock of hair seemed to radiate from the splay-toothed rictus of his mouth as he screamed, his helm flying off behind him. He dropped to his knees, clutching Brett’s embedded axe.
Jarret jumped out of range of the other’s lunging spear as the giant grunted, stumbling in the snow-pack on the side of the stoop. Without a pause, the French highwayman ran at the foe he’d axed, sprang onto his beefy shoulder, and leapt up to catch the signboard. Swinging himself atop it, he caught a second floor sill and gained the window. More dying screams wafted to him from the roof above him.
The giant below flung an axe at him. Its head buried half a length into the upper frame as Brett ducked, gasping. He grabbed the handle and tugged, a smile spreading his lips.
“Merci, you ugly bastard!”
He pulled himself up onto the firmly embedded axe handle, balanced precariously, and inched to a rain spout. He levered up to the embrasure as the giant bellowed below him. Brett peered over the top. The snow hissed from overturned cauldrons of boiling oil. The last rebel was being shredded by two gargoyles, as two more hovered thirty feet above the roof. One of them spotted Jarret as he rolled up and over the restraining wall, onto the roof. Both creatures squalled and veered into a strafing course at the new antagonist.