Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves

by T. C. Rypel

  Brett tore open the front of his greatcoat. Both his pistols came out in gauntleted fists. Taking careful aim as he lay on his back, he shot one winged horror low in the abdomen. It shrilled and careened down toward the street. The second arced sharply out of his line of fire.

  The two farther along the roof finished savaging the unfortunate rebel. They turned to Brett Jarret now, insidiously pushing another tub of flame-heated oil onto its side, but the boiling liquid failed to reach him, great clouds of steam rising from the melting snow. Brett focused on them through the wafting steam as they took to throwing burning logs from one of the fires.

  His barking pistol shot pitched one over the edge of the roof. Jarret drew steel from his back harness and came down on the other with gritted teeth, but it lofted up into the sky, evading his fury. When the gargoyle saw him grab the bow and quiver of a dead warrior, it joined its fellow on a spiraling course away from the mercantile building, yapping back at him impotently.

  Brett caught his breath and reloaded his pistols in the frigid wind. His eyes narrowed when he saw a building farther down the street that had been set on fire by the gargoyles. Screaming men, set to blazing in their own flaming pitch, lashed about in frenzy like living torches.

  * * * *

  Roman Farouche, the white lynx, immediately made his presence felt, though he eschewed direct combat, using his natural camouflage to avoid detection as he turned his sorcerous energies against the defenders.

  His telekinetic power, extended to its limits, swirled snow into cyclonic spouts that confounded the rebels, dashed them against buildings, doused their bonfires. Exerting more power, Roman uprooted the snow-embedded spears and calthrops and spiked snares, sending them crashing back into rebels in pitched positions behind them, clearing the way for the pounding hooves and lethal axes of the giants, who roared ahead in sadistic mirth.

  Channeling an enormous store of cosmic force through the focus of his adept’s mind, Roman rocked the foundations of an entire street, caving in whole storefronts, collapsing doors and windows on Wunderknechten who waited in ambush.

  Seeing the table set for the Farouche horde, as injured people staggered out of the shops and dwellings, Roman sat exhausted in the snow, with his claws retracted, long arms drawn up about his knees.

  He took no pleasure in what they did. It was a necessary expedient, or so he’d come to believe. But deep inside he wondered. What was the sense of wasting so much energy in an effort to control beings who fought so fiercely to maintain their freedom? It was inefficient—indeed, unwise, for creatures so enlightened as his own people.

  Balaerik was wrong. These beings didn’t crave control or direction over them, however superior their lords. They gladly died resisting any such notions.

  So rapt was he in his introspections that Roman failed to see the bowman on the sagging rooftop who took deadly aim at him where he sat upon the snow. The thirteen-fist armor-piercing arrow struck him beneath the left shoulder blade. Roman shrieked and clutched at the offending missile, terrified by the pain, the sudden harrowing knowledge that, despite his mystical power and arcane skills—despite the hardy bestial form he’d taken on—he might die at the hands of these creatures. The promise of immortality might soon be exposed as a fleeting dream.

  He cried out wildly as he tore the shaft from his body with elegant, white-furred fingers, now red-stained and dripping darkly, wetly. He saw his own blood and was driven to mad despair, unable to think clearly enough to perform any charm of healing he’d ever learned. He could only run in anguished panic through the snow, irrationally holding back the gushing blood, wondering how Serge and Rene and Belial had ever been able to live with such wounds as those they’d always boasted of. It was horrible to have one’s body pierced thusly.

  And now he knew why it was necessary to control the people of this ignorant sphere: They were savages. They had to be controlled before they ever re-learned for themselves the means of transit through the gateways to contiguous spheres.

  * * * *

  Raking fire from their comrades came to the aid of Wilf and Wyatt as the barbarian berserkers closed in on them at the market stalls. Two giants were struck repeatedly by musket and bowshot, finally falling from their wounded mounts to blare impassioned cries and search out their weapons in the snow. They staggered on in their bloodlust as the human warriors turned their attention to more of the oncoming, monstrous weapon-flailers.

  Near the snow-mounded market stalls, Wyatt lurched aside and swung, his guisarme slicing through the forelegs of a juggernaut steed, throwing its rider. Wilf descended on the downed giant in three bounds and split his skull with a mighty whirl of Spine-cleaver.

  Another giant quit his mount to tear after Wyatt on foot with his wildly arcing battle-axe. The ex-mercenary slipped the razored steel as it burst the flimsy wall of a stall and became entangled in shattered wood. Wyatt speared the giant in the side, blood erupting through the seam in the hulking killer’s cuirass. He howled and pulled from his belt a long sword with an ornate gilded handguard, whirling it overhead for a mighty strike. Wyatt feinted at him but twisted away, taking flight through the snow banks between the stalls.

  Wilf ducked an axe blow from a wounded barbarian, darting in low to hamstring him, sending him crashing to earth. The second wounded giant came on, in dazed fury, blood leaking into his beard from a musket ball that had taken him through cheek or jaw, a horrible wound to behold.

  Wilf stamped back defensively, emptying his mind as best he could, for he was besieged by thoughts of how vile it would be to die here, smashed to pulp by such a giant foe, to take wretched, painful wounds in this frigid nightmare land and watch himself die in a pool of his own blood, far from his wife and infant child. Alone. For so he was now.

  Icy, atavistic terror coursed his spine…

  The wounded giant bore down on Wilf wildly, carried by legs the size of ale casks. His girth was incredible, and the power contained in that lumbering form was too brutish to ponder.

  Wilf had an advantage in quickness, but it was somewhat compromised by paralyzing panic, and the barbarian giant growled as he backed him against a stall. The huge axe arced downward as Wilf unfroze his twitching legs in time to throw himself backward over the low wall. The axe blade crashed through splintering wood and snow as the shaggy warrior stumbled forward with the momentum of his swing.

  Wilf came up lunging, the horizontal slice of his katana plunging into the barbarian’s yawning, bloodied mouth to rip through the back of his head. Wilf cried out to see the damage he’d done, revolted as he yanked his blade free. He skittered back as the heavy body fell inward at him.

  He gasped and stared a moment, swept by an overwhelming sense of his own savagery. Then he heard the shots behind him—Wyatt had been joined by a small band of mounted rebels. Wilf cackled out a high laugh that sounded like someone else’s voice. He suddenly remembered his own pistols, still unused, kept warm and dry inside his jack. He shook his head in wonder.

  “Come on!” Wyatt was shouting, mounting a horse and holding the reins of another for Wilf.

  The smith took to the saddle gratefully, glancing back at the carnage in their wake once more. A slaughterhouse on a snow field. Then they were riding, slashing and shooting as they rode, dealing death and suffering it, as their party fell, one by one. They passed scores of ravaged forms—human, half-human, and gigantic. Just as they happened upon the corpse of Alphonse—nearly sheared in two by a giant’s axe, one leg unnaturally crossed over his head—they witnessed an amazing sight.

  The werewolf Simon Sardonis, wielding a long halberd, had plucked a passing giant from his mount. Though the barbarians rivaled him in size and outweighed him, the blood-matted golden wolfman had lofted his quarry into the air at the end of the vicious polearm…

  Lofted him and raised him in triumph like a speared, trophy fish.


  * * * *

  Buey watched his detachment drop in the reddening snow as the battle raged. They easily matched the boar-men in firepower, for the half-human horrors used only arbalests against their guns and longbows. The latter’s rapid firing capability gave Buey’s men the edge.

  But in the close combat that followed, the boar-men turned the tide, slashing with short sword and goring with their angry tusked snouts.

  Still the rebels held sway until the three barbarian giants joined the fray on their hairy-legged, mammoth steeds, churning the snow into head-high eruptions. They looked like vengeful Norse gods as they charged into the middle of the skirmish with burnished, singing blades.

  Buey evaded a charge with a circular dodge and then took the giant backward off his mount, hooking his backplate with a ranseur’s curved blade. The giant jangled hard down onto the snow, his crescent-winged helm bouncing past Buey’s feet. An Italian mercenary from Gonji’s company spilled the barbarian’s brains with a swing of his heavy schiavona.

  Buey cried out with a rush of emotion, then turned to see a man’s head lopped nearly off his shoulders by a scything berserker axe. The barbarian roared and pointed at the falling human form, the man’s head hanging over his back by stringy sinew.

  The Ox bellowed an oath and took after the mounted assailant, who turned and laughed into the night sky to view the puny man’s charge.

  Buey slipped a great upward swooping blow and raked the prodigious shaggy horse in the hindquarters. It whinnied in pain and lurched and kicked madly. The giant fell sidelong from the saddle and abandoned the injured animal. He pounded toward Buey on apelike legs, switching his axe from hand to hand, blaring voice promising mayhem in an unknown tongue.

  One of Buey’s men shot him in a burly upper arm. The barbarian veered and ran down the attacker, who screamed as he slipped and fell in the snow.

  Buey emitted an anguished outcry to see the man brutally dispatched, blood and gore erupting as the axe clove through him to strike the snowbound cobblestones. The Ox-man speared the turning giant hard through the backplate, but his ranseur’s blade snapped as the howling barbarian giant jerked with pain.

  The Spanish lancer’s huge form was shockingly overwhelmed by the giant’s, to the men who watched in awe. The savage outworlder laughed into Buey’s face as he caught him in a bear hug, squeezing the Spaniard’s breath from him.

  Buey bellowed a war cry as his ribs cracked. Still roaring against his fierce pain, Buey dug his thick fingers into the giant’s throat, cutting off his wind. They matched strength for strength, an agonized minute going by, and then another, both battlers singing out in conjoined death-hymns to the gods of war.

  In the end, Buey’s storied might could not match that of the barbarian monster. Just before his spine snapped, the bold warrior thrust his knifing fingertips into the giant’s eyes, blinding him, clawing, pushing deeper through the yielding moistness.

  A last breath escaped Buey’s lips as he fell.

  The blinded giant, wounded and casting about in terrified darkness, could only await the killing stroke that presently laid it low.

  * * * *

  The swift, muscular werewolf form of Simon Sardonis ran at the head of the rebel pack. He halted them suddenly, sniffing a scent in the icy wind.

  There was a shout from the rooftops—Brett Jarret hailed them and descended, first tossing down his edged weapons, then hang-dropping into the snow.

  “Christ Almighty, am I glad to see you people alive,” Brett said as he collected his weapons and took the reins of a riderless horse.

  Wilf and Wyatt jabbered with him a moment, but Simon hushed them all with a canine rasp, gesturing for them to follow. Weapons leveled in benumbed, gauntleted fists, they cantered after him grimly. They were in the north end, the attacking fiends having spent their violence here and pushed on as they combed Lamorisse.

  Now Simon was tracking blood in the snow. It stopped abruptly near a heaped snow bank at the side of a wrecked dwelling.

  Simon’s lips curved back from his snout, and he began digging frantically. He uncovered the wounded and shivering white lynx, Roman Farouche.

  Brett Jarret scowled and threw a leg over his mount’s head to approach the creature menacingly.

  “Defiler! This was my homeland!” Brett shouted at him. He readied his blade for the killing stroke. “What—no sorcery now?”

  Roman made a hacking sound, gazed up at him blearily. “I feel no pain now,” he said weakly in a sibilant voice. “Can this be death?”

  They watched him closely, glancing at Simon, who seemed relaxed, imperious, anticipating no trick. He loomed over the cat in an almost arrogant posture.

  “I—I am sorry, you know,” Roman continued. “Sorry that we ever came here. This place cannot be controlled. You are all such…savages. Simon—Simon, you…belong here…among these common men.” Roman laughed, in pain and despair.

  Brett cried out and struck the shape-shifter. Despite the carnage they’d witnessed throughout the night, the party winced, to a man, to see the feline form awash in blood.

  “Father!” Roman cried out, his eyes then glazing in death.

  No one spoke.

  Simon’s ears perked, and his snout lifted into the whipping wind again.

  “Something?” Wilf asked him urgently.

  He turned eyes of molten silver on the smith. “Serge…”

  * * * *

  Darcy Lavelle raised a hand to the weary battlers inside Wyatt’s tannery shop as he peered through a broken fragment of frosted glass. “Here they come again!”

  “Jesus!”

  Serge Farouche’s elite mercenary company had followed in the wake of the off-world creatures, preying on the shocked and injured. They’d met their match when they’d fallen on the tanner’s shop.

  Well-deployed guns exploded in a tattering volley that rattled the broken shop front. The disciplined rebels came up from cover and returned fire from shattered windows and doors on both floors as well as from the roof. More enemy bodies fell amidst the many stilled forms without.

  Another exchange—

  Darcy took a lead ball that exploded his shoulder, lurching back from the window. His wife, Blanche, cried out from the rear of the shop, stippled with his blood, dropping the musket she was charging.

  “It’s all right—it’s all right,” he shouted, waving her back. “Keep at it.”

  A badly wounded man was lowered from the second floor and tended to.

  “Look!” Luigi Leone shouted to see the small band of Wunderknechten that clattered toward them, lending aid.

  There was a cheer in the tanning shop—short-lived, as the mounted detachment immediately fell under crossbow fire from swooping gargoyles. Two creatures separated from the others and laced the shop’s openings with deadly bolts.

  One man was struck through the clavicle, and the already wounded Darcy’s thigh was pierced cleanly, a ragged chunk of flesh appearing through the rent in his breeches with the bolt-tip’s exit wound.

  “Darcy!” Blanche screamed, moving to the shop front, when she heard her husband cry out with the new wound. “Mon Dieu—Darcy!”

  The sweating, teeth-gritting Darcy Lavelle looked to the other victim, saw that he was dead. “Shit,” he swore, wincing in pain. “Well, now I’m not so all right—God, that hurts—”

  “I’m going out,” Leone shouted. “Give me those two guns.”

  “What for?” Darcy yelled in a labored voice.

  “For some fresh air. I can’t stand it in here anymore.” Luigi peered out into the street, adjusting his eye patch. “It’s too boring in here. I’ll just sneak out the back way and see what excitement this town has to offer.” He rubbed his hands rapidly against the cold and moved to a heavily barred rear door, trying to a
ct with as much bravado as he’d tried to pump into his arch words.

  “All right—let him through,” Darcy ordered.

  “Just watch your back, for God’s sake,” another man said.

  Blanche shook her head and wept to see her husband’s wounds. “I don’t know which to treat first,” she howled.

  “Let’s get out of the firing line first, at least—”

  More pistol shot rocked the shop front as the couple stumbled to the rear, arm in arm. Blanche eased her hip in front of him on the side of her game leg. “Trouble walking, monsieur? Just lean on me.”

  Darcy coughed out a broken laugh. “Oui…you’ve said we…never do anything together anymore,” he joked, before emitting a pain-filled moan.

  * * * *

  The windows of Chabot’s Inn burst in a shower of glass and a whistling of wind. Two wolves bounded through the apertures to growl in the dark hall.

  Serge Farouche tore the front door from its hinges and stood framed against the outer whiteness. Crouching to clear the lintel, he carried the door before him as he padded into the inn.

  “Labossiere,” he rasped upon seeing the solitary figure at the bar. “You again. Don’t tell me they’ve set you out as bait.” He sniffed, canine lips drawing back in a feral grin to scent the concealed warriors. “Such pathetic efforts…”

  His ears flicked, and the two timber wolves scurried off in search of the man-scents. One took to a side doorway; the other bolted up the stairs to the landing.

  A man screamed behind the door frame amidst sounds of scuffling. Two shots rang out. A wolf howled over an unseen thudding of heavy bodies. The other wolf had scarcely gained the landing when Henri Chabot appeared and, hurling an oath for courage, fired two pistols into the creature’s leaping attack. Tattered fur and blood flew as the animal spun in midair to crash into the balustrade, its ululation still in their ears as Chabot began clearing his guns frenetically.