Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves

by T. C. Rypel

  “Jesus—look at the size of those…things,” a man fretted, licking parched lips.

  “Steady,” Gonji called back without looking. “This is for your families, for your homeland…For Simon Sardonis. And for our slaughtered sword-brothers of last winter. Archers—ready!”

  Gonji himself stood at their head, unlimbering his mighty longbow and plucking a clothyard shaft with a vicious arrowhead from his quiver.

  “Drop them in the fore, if you can—throw their line into chaos.”

  He nocked, held Nichi firm, performed a powerful draw, and launched. Three hundred yards off, a red-maned monster steed was struck in the head, crashing into the mount next to it, both falling.

  Whistling fusillades tore into the pounding foes, animals and giants crashing to earth; loping boar-men and goat-headed demon-fiends crushed under their allies’ hooves or taking armor-piercer arrows through breastplates and helms, flesh and bone. The center of the rolling attack was thrown into disarray, its momentum diffused.

  At one-hundred yards, some drew muskets, praying for steady hands and unerring accuracy. They could fire each piece but once before the clash’s outcome would fall to their skills in close mounted combat. For that they held their pistols in check.

  Monetto’s column fired first, followed by Gonji’s. The besieging horde was raked by the musket and archer fire, many creatures falling, their places quickly filled by still more beasts from alien spheres.

  At a prearranged signal, the two columns of warriors swung near to each other to draw the enemy horde into a massed clump that drove toward the center of the enemy skirmish line like a living wedge. But when they were thus concentrated, just as steel was about to clash, the center of the rebel line broke and swept to the sides again, opening to allow the foremost giant flailers to pass through without a tilt. Scores of the mounted barbarians bolted past on heavy horse, slowing their charge in confusion, such that their fellows ran up their backs, thudding into each other and tumbling into an entangling chaos of bodies and buckling armor.

  The Wunderknechten swept back from engagement again, turning to launch another lethal volley of bowshot at the bewildered beast-men on the enemy flanks, who replied with their short crossbows.

  Then Gonji’s company charged, volleying again at the run in a wild, howling attack.

  Shields sprang up; axe and sword and halberd were unleashed, as the fray was joined in a screaming din of exploding metal.

  The invaders’ rafts were pulled wide around the armed clash, unbothered, as Gonji had ordered his men to leave the castle siege force to the capable attention of their entrenched fellows at the ruins.

  Men and mounts, giant berserkers and snorting beasts went to ground in the first shattering, blood-spurting impact of clashing lines, bodies and armor exploding in a shock of mortal cacophony. The rebels skirted the giants’ lethal axes with shining eyes of fearful respect, when possible. They concentrated on the beasts afoot, especially the boar-men, who took a toll of Gonji’s troops’ sturdy destriers with their low-slashing techniques and fearlessness against horse charges.

  Gonji’s twirling halberd alternately cut and pummeled the raging humanoid beasts as his weapon’s blurring figure-eight employed both its ends, in the time-honored naginata techniques of his homeland. The creatures kept their distance to see their fellows thus slashed and battered. And when any took to frontal attack on Nichi, she reared and flailed her hooves, bit and butted with her lowered head.

  Aldo Monetto wound up quickly unhorsed, fighting on foot atop heaping, mangled corpses. His axe whirled over his head, hewing any assailant in its redoubtable path. He took a glancing blow that severed his shoulder coupling, his cuirass hanging half off.

  Monetto ripped it free and flung it at a spearing ram-headed horror. He fell backward over a mammoth horse’s carcass—landed in a pool of swirling mud and horse blood—came up firing a pistol that downed an oncoming attacker.

  He pulled his other primed pistol, screaming with bloodlust now, panned the area, saw the giant bearing down on Perigor’s unprotected back—

  Monetto’s shot split the nosepiece of a huge battle helm, tore through an eye and out the side of the bearded giant’s head. He barely had time to draw a satisfied breath when he was forced to whirl, stagger back, reclaim his downed axe, and bind another spear shaft with a deft, upward stroke…

  * * * *

  Armand Perigor took a spear thrust in the side, roaring in pain and jerking his mount around to engage the lancing boar-man that had wounded him. He fixed on it in his maddening agony, heard it bray a blood-curdling note of challenge as he kicked his horse the short distance toward it.

  But an unseen enemy downed his steed with an evil-edged blade thrust. The animal screamed and crashed to earth in its own gore, spilling Perigor, who cracked his head against something solid, losing his pot helmet. He lurched to his feet to engage another spearing monster. Sidestepping its lunge, Perigor skewered it through the belly with his rapier, pressing his bleeding side with the other arm.

  Three boar-men surged toward him with short, tri-bladed swords that were poised for mayhem. Primitives, they were unskilled in fencing technique. The vicious blades they whirled had evidently been bestowed upon them—they smashed them downward like cudgels.

  The beasts crowded too close as they rushed him, and the sweating Perigor engaged all three with his dancing blade as his left arm pressed his rent side. Darting in and out, grimacing and yelping in pain, he parried and riposted, again and again.

  All three were lanced by the slim, snaking blade before the first had finished his fall.

  But now three more came at him, seeing the imposing threat of this canny foe. Perigor drew a pistol in his left hand—his eyes grew bleary now—and shot the nearest through its fur-timmed breastplate. Cursing and hurling an insult at them, Perigor spent his flagging energy in a flashing, sparking swordplay that saw him drop the other two. They were no match for a skillful bladesman, but Perigor’s wound was draining him.

  Again he was fallen upon. Now two wounded, boar-headed monstrosities were joined by a spear-hefting, satyr-like, blaring ram and a charging giant on foot.

  Perigor sucked in a ragged breath, knowing he must try to flee. He grabbed at some tossing reins, tried to swing astride a bucking horse, but failed in his terrible pain.

  Holding the saddle-bow for leverage, he lashed out violently with a booted foot and struck a boar-man in the snout, turning its charge. Next he weakly slashed his sword over the head of a ducking foe. Drawing back for another strike, he felt the new, searing pain in his back.

  Perigor dropped his rapier, pulled a dirk from his belt, screamed in battle frenzy and hurled it toward the face of the hulking giant…just as the great broad-axe sheared the air over his head.

  Armand Perigor saw, as much as he felt, the burst of white agony that flashed suddenly crimson, in his stricken vision, and then swallowed his consciousness in a shroud of darkness.

  * * * *

  Gonji slipped a mighty arcing axe-blow and slashed a giant through the thigh. The monster bellowed in rage and turned on him with a great display of jagged teeth, determination shining from red-veined eyes.

  The samurai fled Nichi to fight on foot for a space, the tactic unexpected. The wounded giant took up the challenge and did likewise, quitting his wheezing charger the size of a small elephant to limp after the lithe samurai through the tangled carnage.

  Gonji took a tortuous route over bodies and through matched pairs of fighters, his katana striking down two—three—a half dozen unprepared foes with scintillating sword cuts, no two blows alike.

  He fell at last into a pocket of boar-men, who warily timed his charge and then suddenly sagged back, encircling him. Gonji raised the Sagami high overhead as they hooted in premature triumph and bore in at him, snorting with anticipation.r />
  Gonji spanked a tri-bladed sword wide and slashed, fanning hot blood from the throat of the first hooting, boar-headed savage to reach him. The second beast, committing itself to a backward-straining high arm cock intended to lay the samurai low from behind, was caught by an upward twisting sword-lick that came from nowhere and buried itself deep in the squealing creature’s groin, Gonji having dropped to one knee.

  A third raked a blow across Gonji’s belly as he sprang back up. But the samurai deflected the blow with a twisting, point-groundward parry and executed a vicious right-left series of cuts that spilled the boar-man’s innards.

  The last boar-man missed badly with a powerful arcing cut aimed at Gonji’s head. The samurai’s spinning low slash screeched through splintering bone, severing the beast’s right dog-leg joint, blood gouting from the stump as it squalled in shock.

  But now the wounded giant, bellowing for vengeance, was almost upon him, the blood from his thigh wound already drenching his boot. And the giant was joined by a fellow barbarian on horseback.

  Gonji surprised them both by wheeling and charging them, blade high.

  The bleeding enemy timed the charge and scythed his great axe—struck air, as the samurai tumbled into a roll and came up behind him to slash through the hamstring of the same thigh. The giant fell, howling in agony, as Gonji took after his mounted ally. The berserker reined in, awkwardly turned and fired a short, fiercely feathered lance that sizzled the air as it passed wide. Gonji tore open the shoulder of the barbarian’s enormous steed with a mighty swing of his katana.

  The animal shrilled and bucked the rider off its back. The second giant jangled to earth, stunned. He threw up a thick, fending hand as Gonji leapt astride his chest. He lost his hand with the first blow and half his jaw with the second.

  Gonji tumbled off the writhing enemy, sprang back onto his feet, and cast about him for another foe to engage. He snarled out a general challenge. Saw no takers in the immediate area. He caught up with Nichi again, took his longbow and quiver from her saddle, and bounded atop two dead steeds lying draped over one another.

  Crying out with battle-fervor, he began to launch powerful, sizzling shafts, one upon another, dealing out hissing death on all sides, as the carnage mounted.

  He caught sight of Monetto, not far away, ripping with axe and sword through foes who were falling back, daunted by his speed and tireless skill. Gonji shouted to see his friend’s valor, then took to launching again. Two more clothyard shafts shattered plate and hide before he saw the battle take a necromantic turn.

  Gonji saw that a wide swath had been cut through the invasion force by his company’s gallant action. The enemy survivors were swinging clear of the heaped bloody ruin to join the main body that assaulted the castle, explosive fire from the gorge now evincing the foe’s efforts at crossing the rock bridges. Their tactic was a useless, desperate one—they were now trapped between the field and fortress companies.

  But much of his command had succumbed to horrible death, and now Gonji swung aboard the fighting black mare, Nichiyoobi—Black Sunday—to join with the contigent of his warriors that crossed weapons with evil death itself.

  * * * *

  Nick Nagy cursed his fatigued thews, then cursed again when he saw the small mounted force in his charge pull to a halt in the face of the strange new menace.

  Balaerik’s reanimated dead, trudging along on foot, had finally reached the battleground.

  Bearing a variety of edged weapons, their armor now clanking in its ill fit about withered, rotting bodies, the dead shambled after anything that raised arms in resistance. Bulging eyes stared without truly seeing. Sere lips drew back around large, clamped teeth. Dried blood caked slashed throats and other former mortal wounds in ominous portent.

  The blood in the rebel warriors’ veins turned to ice as, to a man, they understood: These Farouche slaves could not be killed.

  Nikolai Nagy bellowed at their timidity and plunged into the center of the dead killers’ line, which accepted the challenge with a nightmarishly casual, spiritless crowding effort. Steel edges oozed limply, or whirled languidly, toward Nagy and his mount as he slashed over the horse’s head from one side to the other, ducking blows, beating back weapons, smashing dead flesh aside, only to have it turn back on him. Slower. But no less deadly or inexorable.

  The men saw Nagy encircled, his horse buried under a clumsy, spearing press of heavy dead weight. Nagy’s flailing energy was the single focus of life in the midst of the forlornly savage tableau.

  Hearing his impassioned cries, seeing him fall, his men were at last galvanized, exhorting one another to join the chilling fray.

  In moments, Gonji was in their midst, striking from Nichi’s saddle, the mare herself kicking and biting in instinctive terror at the caricatured life that sought out her rider with sword- and pike-point; touched her own flesh with cold, lifeless hands.

  The samurai quit the saddle, spanking the mare away for her safety, as he tore into the shuffling dead forms. When cut, they didn’t bleed; nor did battering impede their mindless pursuit of the living. But Gonji showed the desperately hacking band the tack they must take.

  Disengaging a spear with a circular parry, he riposted furiously, striking the assailant’s brittle head from its dry shoulders. He dealt with another similarly. And then another. The headless corpses staggered on grimly, though their motion was less directed and they were now slower still.

  Now the samurai swooped in low, evading poor thrusts by stiffened muscle and unhinging the liches’ limbs, arrogantly deflecting their weak blows and concentrating on severing arms, legs, and ghoulish heads.

  His men followed suit, their bellies churning as they took to the slaughter resignedly, even as they were snared by useless clutching hands and lunged at by bodies that reeked of corruption. The men grimaced and gasped, tearing and pushing away the grasping undead, as if scouring themselves of some plague-ridden vermin.

  Moments later, the grounds were strewn with twitching torsos and searching limbs that still crawled on, fueled by hellish sorcery. The surviving men worked at prying loose their unfortunate wounded fellows from dead fingers and mechanically clacking jaws.

  Gonji’s face was set in a twisted expression. He breathed in short gasps through his mouth to evade the awful stench. Searching out Nick Nagy, he averted his eyes from the sight of his old sword-brother’s multitude of mortal wounds.

  “Cholera,” he ground out, kicking a dismembered torso that arched itself rhythmically as it lay across Nagy’s legs.

  “Damn it—God damn it! Not you, Nick…” Gonji hissed out something like a suppressed sob to see the state of his valiant ally from the Vedun campaign. He knelt for a long moment beside the body of the steely warrior Nikolai Nagy.

  The few walking dead who remained at large now shuffled with failing strength. They ceased their dogged pursuit of the living. Balaerik’s spell faded, and soon the creatures of his foul handiwork dropped in their tracks and duly took up their place in the Land of the Dead. The severed body parts ceased their spastic motions.

  Gonji rose heavily and scanned the grounds, shouted a rallying command to the exhausted survivors. He took to horse. Leading the shattered company toward the clash at the gorge, he took heart to see Aldo Monetto still able to climb astride a big destrier, not far away, though the agile biller had taken many a bloody wound.

  * * * *

  The defenders of the castle, arrayed at banquettes and turrets, behind weathered stone blocks and wall niches, poured their determined fire into the siege force of giants and beast-men. A few scattered human mercenaries were still among their number as the off-world attackers stormed the outer curtain over the narrow rock bridges and receding waters.

  Corbeau’s cannon boomed repeatedly, wreaking havoc at the rim of the gorge, where huge, hastily fashioned rafts were to
ssed over the drop and into the receding waters, their intended giant riders hastily lowered by ropes and vines and branches. Some simply dove into the cold, dark water to swim after the rafts.

  The rebels at the Frankish castle, seeing Gonji’s victory on the plain, roared with glee and fired their smoking, whizzing volleys all the more lustily. Hulking barbarian forms erupted with bloody holes caused by shot and shaft, some tumbling into the swirling wash, their watery graves on an alien sphere. Those who reached the shore rarely gained the outer curtain wall before they were torn and spindled, the walls and grounds now draped with unearthly bodies.

  Those creatures that chose the firmer routes over the bridges were dealt with still more harshly. Alternating squads with pistols and muskets sprayed their forefront with lead shot. The front rank would fire, then scamper behind the second to reload. The bridges soon piled high with blockading corpses.

  As Le Corbeau’s formidable cannon blasted great holes in the gorge and sent enemy forms flying in every direction, Carlos Orozco tended the multiple-barrel musket like a raving madman. He sped back and forth between muzzles and breeches—clearing, charging, loading, touching off wicks, and then swiveling the barrels about to draw lethal bead on the nearest pocket of embattled attackers. The guns would fume and blast in sequence, and Orozco quickly learned to vary the lengths of his wicks until he had adjusted the firing order to a near single spray of heavy shot.

  “Hey, Corbeau—this thing works magnifico!” he cried out enthusiastically once he’d grown familiar with its workings. “Hell, I could do this all day!”

  “You best not get too trusting of those charges,” the Crow called back. “She’s touchy about residue. Harder to clear every time—”