Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves

by T. C. Rypel

  Aimee gurgled a laugh to see the girl break into a scamper, though she continued to scowl over her shoulder.

  She went back to the wine bottle and tipped it high, nearly falling over backward.

  As Blaise presently entered Aimee’s chamber, the first tugging of the transformation perked his features, around that telltale eye patch. He focused on his commoner human wife curiously.

  “Dousing your grief won’t bring your father back,” he said, glancing at her with the first flicker of desire in his single, backswept eye.

  He was shirtless. The curling growth of downy hair on his chest presaged the slow change into the faun. Watching the transmutation had always been a bizarre erotic experience for Aimee.

  “My father is gone,” she slurred. “It’s time we reached a better understanding…” She lay back on the luxurious softness of the coverlet.

  Blaise’s breath quickened. “Indeed? How so?” He had chuckled a bit. But he was intrigued.

  “The—the blood exchange, Blaise,” she breathed, moaning slightly to hear herself say it. “Take mine first. This time—this time it will be…different…”

  His eyes widened as he gazed at her creamy flesh. Narrowing as he came near, they fell finally upon the soft pulsing of her throat.

  She whimpered slightly as her soul cried out to think of seeing this perverse act through. But she drew him close.

  The minutes dragged into hours. Twice she slipped into unconsciousness, uncertain of what he’d done to her, knowing only numbness, alternating with periods of white waves in her vision. Dizziness. Vertigo.

  She could feel the soft fur of his thighs and buttocks, fighting sleep now as she became increasingly certain that he himself slept. His mouth was at her throat, piercing it, clamping about the left side without pain. She had no idea how she would dislodge him. Or whether she could.

  Perhaps to do so would kill her—

  No. That was the ingrained fear of his terrible will talking. Sapping her own will.

  She lay in a helpless languor for a time, her resolve leaking out of her with her life’s blood. Perhaps the will itself was in the blood, along with the life energies Blaise so often spoke of craving. If so, then she was doomed.

  With a great effort, she at last succeeded in overcoming her weakness and nausea, her failing determination. At the dark hour before dawn, Aimee rolled Blaise’s lust-filled, bloated satyr-form off her, disengaging him at last.

  Her throat began to throb, as though warning her that he himself must seal the rift in her body that he’d created. She emitted a muffled sob, black streaks shooting across her vision. Dizziness, swooning—

  Collapse. She would simply collapse into sweet, peaceful sleep. What was the sense of it all? He could do anything he wanted with her—

  Non!

  Dignity welled up inside her. Dignity mingled with wrath. She stood and gripped the bedpost. Saw his extruded fangs, which dripped her own blood.

  Aimee began to gag. She vomited on the floor beside the bed, then regathered her courage, fueled with hatred now. She forced herself to look at him. Engorged, now. No longer a figure of irresistible male sensuality—

  A great hairy leech.

  A vampire.

  Wambly, her strength infantile, Aimee opened the armoire beside her dressing table and withdrew the sharpened stake and the heavy tome of prophetic writings she’d plucked from her father’s library.

  Moving to the bed, she reeled as she laid the point of the stake against Blaise’s heaving chest. Her hand trembled violently, and the other could not lift the book from her side.

  She stood that way for long moments, awaiting discovery, or unconsciousness, or Blaise’s sudden awakening from his sonorous slumber.

  She whimpered, whispering a harsh prayer for strength.

  Blaise’s breath hitched, and his eyelids fluttered as she leaned on the stake, the pressure digging its point into his chest. He seemed to be quivering with internal effort, trying to chase the heavy narcotic effect of the wine in her blood—the effect she’d striven to achieve. His mouth, his neck, his chest were awash in her blood.

  She screamed internally, tried to fire her paralyzed thews.

  Blaise’s good eye gaped wide. He pawed his face and drew the eye patch askew. Blood was luridly seeping into the black hole that marked Simon’s gouging stroke of the year before. His upper lip curled back—

  Aimee’s arm was abruptly empowered, the book in hand. It rotated up and then down, hard, on the poised stake.

  Blaise screamed and lurched, his back arching as the stake tore through his ribcage and into his heart, with a gouting of dark, rich blood. His thrashings knocked the stake clear of his body, but dark blood continued to spray about the room from the ragged hole in his chest.

  He flopped on the bed, trembling as Aimee fell back heavily on the floor.

  More than ever now, Aimee feared for her life. She knew what the commoners whispered about the Farouche outworlders—that they could raise the dead for their fell purposes.

  Could they not, then, also defeat death themselves?

  She drew her father’s broadsword from under the bed. The heirloom blade of his warlike forefathers. It was immensely heavy in her pale hands and childlike grasp. But she brought it to bear on her flailing, crimson-gushing husband. Merely a monster now. A shape-shifting fiend come from another world to pervert and subvert her own.

  She struck with the blade, again and again. When Blaise’s lifeless head rolled off the bed and thudded on the floor, Aimee dropped the blood-stained sword and collapsed.

  * * * *

  “Help me, Captain,” Aimee said to the commander of the palace guard.

  He took the marchioness’ arm again, steadying her. The soldier’s eyes gleamed expectantly, a bit hollowly. The commander was still in shock over what he had seen in the bedchamber, what he’d been charged to fabricate.

  “Tell me again what you must do,” she said as she took his arm for support. They eased down the winding stair.

  “I, milady?”

  “Oui.”

  “Ah…yes. I—I must report to the king that the marquis met with a most…unseemly accident—”

  “An accident?”

  “Oui, he—he suffered the misfortune of walking beneath a falling…sword rack, you see, and—”

  “A sword rack?”

  “Well,” the captain went on, “it was…a most well-equipped rack with a variety of deadly ancient edged weapons that…”

  Her flitting eyes and quick headshake stopped him. “I think perhaps it may have been the marquis’ poor diet that did him in at last,” she said daintily.

  “Ah, oui—of course,” the captain agreed, bowing with cavalier elegance, “his well-known intemperate appetites. How stupid of me.”

  The Marchioness Aimee de Plancy later strode out onto the balcony, as steadily and regally as she could manage, to address her command. The troops below eagerly accepted word of the changing order in Burgundy: The Farouche were to be considered Enemies of the State. Messengers would be sent to Paris with word of their treachery, their surreptitious efforts at fomenting rebellion against order in France. All in the name of an as-yet unknown enemy leader.

  By the second day, the marchioness’ strength and color were slowly returning, and with them, her will. Never again would she allow subversion to disturb the harmony of her province.

  Her first act was to send troops to restore order in the province, relieving the garrisons whose complacence had cost them dearly in failed vigilance. The common folk were to be placated for the outrages they’d suffered, and efforts would be made at restitution of what they had lost under the Farouche regime.

  She next turned her attention on two individuals: the servant girl, Brie—who was restored
to her former duties as a scullion; and Anton Balaerik, who was ordered arrested.

  The lay brother of the Order of Holy Piety was brought before her, along with his blank-eyed bodyguards. He regarded her smugly as Aimee spoke.

  “You will stop the trouble my husband and his brothers have caused Burgundy, and you will disband your mercenary troops—at once!” she commanded, pointing an accusing finger at him.

  Balaerik began to laugh, and Aimee reacted with aristocratic outrage, shouting an order. He strode about the room like an actor in search of his cue, motioning with his hands but saying nothing intelligible, as the sentries closed in with drawn weapons.

  A rift in space—a whirling dark votex—suddenly appeared above their heads, a slender black seam, shimmering at its edges. Balaerik reached up to it and was abruptly drawn upward and inside it, as if by invisible hands, his body disappearing into a contiguous sphere in which he was safe from the foolish pique of inferior beings.

  And when he had disappeared and his power was withdrawn from them, Balaerik’s bodyguards jerked about, blank-eyed, and split open with the reaving wounds once dealt them by Simon Sardonis’ vengeful axe. They fell, bloodlessly, in broken and twisted caricatures of their once lively, human forms.

  * * * *

  Dijon was lost. And with it, the foothold on the Terran sphere.

  Balaerik lay exhausted on the spongy grasses of a peaceful world, gazing up into the star-shot heavens. He had done all he could; yet the native humans of that sphere remained defiant. And still full of their misdirected faith.

  The Frankish castle had stood against the deluge from an alien sea. Unpredictable checks and balances had been maintained in the metaphysical order. Gonji and his Wunderknechten followers would have to be taken by siege. Barbarian, beast, and walking undead would have to do what Balaerik, for all his power, could not.

  And if they failed, Balaerik would have to make explanations to his sorcerer kin, Grimmolech—most especially for his failure to keep Grimmolech’s sons alive in their inchoate efforts at becoming interspheric overlords.

  He began to prepare his explanations, even as the eternal struggle raged on in the other, unenlightened world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “What if they just make those rock bridges disappear?” Armand Perigor posed to Gonji. “Poof—no more Wunderknechten.”

  They all peered down to the now water-filled curtains of age-old rock whose narrow tops served as the only land-bridges to the surrounding territory.

  “And no more refugees,” Father Sebastio reminded, for hundreds of them now crowded about the upper reaches of the old fortress’ central keep, or stood in a long line along the banquettes behind the debris-strewn southern ramparts.

  Gonji mopped his brow with the back of an arm, his katana still in his fist. He undid his topknot, shook out his hair, and scratched the nervous itch at its roots. Retying it hastily, he listened to their anxious counsel.

  “They might—they might just knock down this whole crag we stand on,” another man proposed.

  “Oh, I think not,” the priest countered. “If they had such power, they’d have done that already.”

  “Look,” Monetto cried out, pointing with an axe. “Still more at the eastern bailey break.”

  The dead had again quit their watery grave.

  They were like a plague of humanoid slugs. Ghastly and bloated, relentlessly groping for human flesh to rend. Hard to dislodge in their sorcerous charge to pursue the living. Impossible to kill in their frustrating lifelessness. And apparently endless in number.

  They crawled up out of the murky waters that swirled about the castle and slithered up the walls and gates in a ponderous ascent, as if possessed of some hideous suctioning power. At first they were little more than a revolting nuisance, men atop the walls prying them from their eerie purchase with polearms and levering them back to splash down into the waters.

  But two of them had squeezed through breaks in the walls, and, though their milky white orbs seemed sightless, they had been guided by some unerring sense to wreak mayhem among the refugees. One woman had been torn asunder by the surprising strength in one creature’s sodden thews and decomposing hands. And a man had been grabbed in another corpse’s squishing grip. Before he could be separated from the creature’s foul embrace, a pulpy hand had clamped his nose and mouth shut long enough to suffocate him with its foulness.

  “Nagy—can’t you keep those things at bay?” Monetto yelled to the growling old ostler, fifty feet along the wall.

  Nikolai Nagy prodded one of the three invaders back through the gap in the wall with a grunting lunge of his halberd. It tumbled down the roof of an outwork and knifed headfirst back into the churning waters.

  “God damn it anyway, Monetto! I’m doin’ what I can!” Nagy tore off his helm and threw it in Aldo’s direction, then joined his defenders against the other two forms that slid into the ward on their bellies, their flesh almost gelatinous as they conformed to every surface like evilly imbued sponges.

  “Well, hold them in check,” Gonji shouted to him. He turned his attention to his leaders again. “All-recht, here’s what we do…”

  A squad was sent through the miller’s gate, pushing a string of heavy, unhitched wagons, to test the safety of the southern rock bridge. Though sodden and crumbling from the eroding action of the deluge, the bridge seemed stable enough. An orderly evacuation of non-combatants, as well as those who chose not to remain and fight the siege force, ensued under the leadership of Jacques Moreau. The evacuation proceeded without incident, after good-byes and well-wishes were exchanged. The refugees were led across the rock curtains that were the only roads from the fortress and into the surrounding Alpine passes, to await the outcome of the battle for Burgundy.

  The defenders dug in and waited apprehensively, hatching and discarding numerous battle plans before at last choosing the tactics proposed by Le Corbeau.

  For the nonce, they waited.

  By the second day after the evacuation, the snow from the freakish, other-worldly storm the Farouche had summoned was well on its way to melting.

  “So much for their big storm,” Perigor noted smugly.

  “Hai,” Gonji agreed, watching the snowmelt drain into the waters of the chasm below the rock bridges, finally deciding that The Crow had been right: The water was receding in the gorge, draining off slowly through an unseen fissure, likely to swell the banks of the Saone to unprecedented flood levels. Eventually all thoughts of escape via water were precluded, as the incredible new lake visibly subsided. And the unstable rock bridges, like the spokes of a wheel with the Frankish castle at their hub, remained vastly important to those whose duty would keep them at that crumbling citadel.

  The next night, the Farouche siege force’s vanguard, a brute army of Terran mercenaries and monsters from alien spheres, reached the forested slopes beyond the rock bridges and at a much lower elevation, as the bridges gradually sloped downward. It was suggested that there was some advantage to fighting an army that proceeded uphill.

  No one derived much comfort in the notion, as Gonji’s company watched and speculated as to the nature of their entrenching enemies, judging by chilling sounds and distant glimpses alone.

  “Any volunteers for reconnaissance?” the samurai asked archly.

  “Hell, I’ll go,” a young warrior said quietly, swallowing back his fear of the crashing sounds in the pine shroud.

  “I was joking,” Gonji responded. “No one goes out there until they show themselves. We can’t afford foolish losses. We don’t even know what awaits us.”

  “You’re getting soft,” Aldo Monetto taunted gently.

  Gonji waxed serious. “We’re fighting sorcerers, my friend. Anyway, there comes a time when you’re struck by the fact that you’ve survived so much precipitous action that—that
there must be a reason for your karma. And your continued survival. So you start slowing down and planning things a little better. I’m just learning that.”

  “You mean you get less valiant?”

  “Iye—you get more cunning. Look—”

  They all strained to see and hear through the cloud-darkened night and yawning distance. Some sort of frenzied berserker action was taking place in the monstrous Farouche army’s forest camp.

  “What the hell are they doing?” Monetto whispered in wonder.

  No one cared to offer a response.

  * * * *

  The two heavily armed mounted columns under Gonji split to right and left once they had crossed the rock bridge and entered the plain of scree-rubble and tufted grass.

  Some lumbering, some sprinting with terrifying speed, the eerie siege force on clawed foot and cloven hoof and monstrous hairy steed broke from the tree line in their grotesque array. Men, shaggy giants and beasts of foul origin shouted their mixed cries of blood-curdling battle-fury and appeals to alien gods of war as they rumbled toward Gonji’s rebel cavalry.

  Gonji slapped on his sallet at the head of one mounted column. Monetto called out words of encouragement to the band he led at the other flank. They would madly attempt to pincer the outnumbering force on the plain, while Le Corbeau and Salguero trained the fortress’ guns and bows on the attackers who might make it to the gorge.

  The angry muzzle of the cannon trained on the canyon rim. Muskets and bows, polearms and spear-points bristled the turrets and embrasures of the castle.

  “Just make damn sure you don’t blast all the bridges, Corbeau,” Sgt. Orozco was heard to shout.

  The Crow tilted a crooked grin his way. There could be no such assurance.

  Out on the plain, Gonji sat grimly astride Nichiyoobi, watching the barbarian giants approach like hurtling thunder. Nichi stamped under him, eager to fight, to stomp and kick and bite. She was aggressive by nature, and she could feel her rider’s tension.