by T. C. Rypel
“Hai…Oh, you should have seen them yesterday—they fought even worse than they smell.”
* * * *
The company gathered around the encampment in the cool night breeze of autumn, making plans. The survivors of the Wunderknechten companies from Italia and Austria gathered near one bonfire with the French mercenaries who’d come with Armand Perigor. They outdid one another with tales of their boldness in the bizarre quest.
Gonji sat cross-legged around another fire with Wilfred Gundersen and Aldo Monetto. With them were Father Sebastio, Sgt. Orozco, and Capt. Salguero; Le Corbeau, Brett Jarret, and Jacques Moreau, who held the sleeping Guy in the crook of an arm.
“So what do we do, Gonji?” Moreau was asking. “We Wunderknechten?”
Gonji shrugged. He scratched an itch at the base of his topknot. “Best to keep a low profile, I suppose. In my heart I feel that the movement is finished, at least as an overt entity. Its time will come. Until then, the Knights of Wonder must live their beliefs without speaking them too loudly, neh?”
“Or to the wrong people,” Salguero added.
“Or to any monsters,” Monetto tossed in. Someone threw a flaming wood chip at him.
“The first and last great battle of the Wunderknechten,” Wilf mused.
“Show everybody your shirt, Wilf,” Monetto teased. They cajoled him into doing so.
Gonji regarded the shirt with Genya’s embroidered message, his eyes narrowing. “Genya seems as I remembered her. And you are a papa now, neh?”
Wilf smiled. “An anxious one. If there’s nothing more to do here, I’ll be heading back pretty quickly. Things were falling apart rapidly in Noricum.”
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Monetto said, pulling out the old Hussar standard their militia had flown in Vedun, “that it might not be a bad idea to see what’s become of Vedun. We could, maybe, clean it up a little…”
“A little?” Wilf countered. But his vision, too, began to serve up images of the city where he’d been raised. “You know, I have thought about that.”
Gonji smiled and rose to stretch his stiffening thews.
“Where will you go next?” Wilf asked him.
“Dijon, I think.”
“What for?” Brett Jarret asked gruffly. “They’re all dead now, non? Our enemies, the Farouche—?”
“All save Balaerik.”
“Balaerik,” Jacques Moreau breathed thoughtfully. “That’s the one they said lodged the complaint that the duke’s daughter had murdered her husband, Blaise Farouche…”
“I’m not surprised. He’s an old nemesis of mine. I mean to get him, sooner or later.” Gonji’s brow darkened. “Sooner…would be better.”
“What is he, a fallen monk or something?” Le Corbeau asked, straining to recall. “He says he’s from some apocryphal order.”
“The Brotherhood of Holy Arms,” Father Sebastio told them wryly. “A perverse order founded by the late—”
“Non—that’s not it,” The Crow said as he and Moreau looked at each other searchingly.
Father Sebratio clucked. “Probably changed the name again in his evil machina—”
But Moreau cut Kuma-san off, remembering the name.
“Holy Piety—the Order of Holy Piety, they said.”
Gonji, Wilf, and Monetto were struck one after the other, recalling now, sharing the dreadful thought—
Xeno.
Brother Xeno of the Order of Holy Piety. The strange mystic who had taken Michael Benedetto under his wing.
“Pray for us, Kuma-san,” Gonji said as the three hurriedly saddled their mounts without explanation. “We ride—now.”
* * * *
The night had come, finally, for Michael Benedetto.
Many months of ascetic practices, intense meditation, and study of arcane philosophy and physical principles had ostensibly led him into a deeper understanding of his true nature and being. It was all calculated, Brother Xeno assured, to help him become a better leader, the patriarch his community had needed since the death of his friend and mentor, the Vedunian council elder, Flavio.
Michael had long suspected that he neared a dangerous turning in his life, but he proceeded in Xeno’s nurture, curiously compelled. And not long before the unexplained disappearance of some of the men from among the Vedunian survivors—and the subsequent reappearance of Gonji—the old hermit had begun to speak to Michael of his relationship with the stars, and vice versa.
“The heavens guide and order your life, Michael,” Xeno would say. “The configurations of the stars impart power, to each according to his sign of dominance. Scorpius—that is your dominant sign. By it shall you be guided into the next phase of control over your fragile corpus…”
They had begun an assiduous study of the lower life forms and their relationship to man. And soon had followed the first discussions of shape-shifting, the first subtle intimations of the existence of the long-lost art. Michael had been quietly surprised to realize that he had come to believe in the arcane practice…without quite remembering when.
And then, one night, not long before Gonji’s arrival in Noricum, Michael had had his first experience with the willful altering of his own form.
By sheer volition and an act of concentration such as he’d never known before in his life, he’d shocked himself into screaming hysteria by causing his own human hand to transmute into a hideous, slender claw.
Brother Xeno had guided him through the darkness of terrified ignorance and into the light of nascent knowledge. And soon Michael began to hear whisperings of the ghastly shadow that stalked the hills and woods by night.
Animals were found mutilated, drained of their vital fluids. Then a herdsman, out on a moonlit knoll with his flock. A hunter, his bow and quiver scattered in broken pieces about his body. Two travelers who dared trust in the fickle illumination of the cunning moon goddess…
The community of settlers from Vedun were quick to be blamed. The Neriah family had overcome their fear of the people’s connection with the storied samurai and the golden werewolf. They’d withdrawn their protective patronage and demanded the prompt expulsion of the community.
Michael confronted Brother Xeno with his natural fear that he himself must be the stalking thing. For he’d begun to sleepwalk, inexplicably finding himself wandering in the night with no memory of what he’d done.
But Xeno denied it vehemently, insisting that Michael was allowing personal strife, fear, and guilt, to destroy his harmony and muddle his thinking. Such destructive elements had to be dealt with. And thus had begun a fresh, still more sinister order of conditioning.
He’d gone too far; he’d begged for help in his weakness, and help, of a sinister order, had found him. There was nothing left to do but finish what he’d started.
And now the night had come. Michael Benedetto kissed his sleeping wife and child good-bye.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Capt. Salguero, Sgt. Orozco and Brett Jarret followed in the wake of their moon-maddened leaders. They led the remnant of the former Vedunian adventurers through the mountains and across the Empire, back toward Austria, all the while wondering at the source of the obsessive strength that must have driven Gonji, Wilfred, and Monetto for days on end without sleep.
Those three had withheld their fearful speculations from the others, wishing to avoid a fearful, chaotic return to Noricum; yet they themselves had acted as men possessed in their eagerness to cover the same vast distance themselves at breakneck speed.
Orozco soon learned why Gonji had entrusted Nichiyoobi to the ex-sergeant’s charge: The three riders left a string of lame, lathered, and dead steeds along their trail, constantly taking to the extra mounts they led.
At last they had exhausted even these. Grinning horse traders along the old Roman road g
leefully related tales of the three madmen—one of them perhaps a Mongol—who had lavished gold on them as if their animals were the last such on earth.
* * * *
“So long in returning, my son?” Brother Xeno asked in his small, dispassionate voice. But his eyes seemed to bear a quickened light of wariness.
Michael swallowed. “I had to…go off for a time. To deal with my feelings. I fear, master, that I am still lacking in matters of the will. Such things come only with difficulty.” He turned his back to Xeno, anxious, fear in his belly…
“I see.”
“Tell me again,” Michael said on a tremulous note, “how the oriental savage seduced my wife. How the two of them laughed together to think how they’d shamed me. Help me to shed these emotions that mark my weak—”
“There is no need to continue for my benefit,” Xeno said softly. “I know that you didn’t destroy her.”
Michael jerked about, eyes shining like a discovered thief. His breath hitched in deadly expectation. But the hermit remained seated before the lambent glow of the fire, emotionless.
Michael forced himself to still his trembling as he spoke.
“Why do you…why do you think that?”
“Tell me,” Xeno asked evasively, “how, then, did you do the deed? Did you assume the shape by which you’ve spread terror in Noricum? Did you shatter her unfaithful breast with a thrust of your—”
“Stop it!” Michael shouted into the misty night air. “I resisted you in the end, Brother. You couldn’t cast your evil spell over me as you did when I killed those other poor folk. You couldn’t make me harm her. My love for her was too strong, you see. Something you could never understand. I fell under your spell, but my love for her broke it at last.” He emitted a strained, nervous laugh, discomfited by Xeno’s failure to register any reaction. The master seemed in control, as ever. “Just tell me one thing—why? Why was it necessary to make me kill my own people? What evil pleasure did you glean from it? And why try to make me murder my wife and leave my child motherless?”
Xeno smiled chillingly, displaying no teeth but only a sliver of dark amusement. “To sow discord. To cause the Wunderknechten presence to be seen as an ill omen. Such that your roots might never sink. Never foster resistance to the powers who seek to control this strife-torn sphere. And as for your wife—you yourself marked her for death when you related the useful information that the samurai had looked upon her with desire.”
Michael sneered. “I never believed what you told me for an instant. He may indeed love her, but he is a man with a unique sense of honor, and her love is mine alone—”
“And yet you doubted—enough to permit me to poison your mind against them both.”
Michael’s spine flared, for it was true. “You wanted to kill my wife in order to cause grief to another man,” he said, seething anger igniting his volatile temper of old.
“Don’t place too much importance on it. You were but a pawn trapped in a struggle of exalted forces.”
Michael gritted his teeth, tried to fire his will. “You forget—you’ve initiated me into a higher plane,” he said, extending an arm and forming his fingers as he’d been taught.
But nothing happened, though he strove to exercise his concentration and will.
Brother Xeno smiled. “No. It doesn’t work, does it, my son? You see, that’s how I knew you didn’t kill her. I told you to employ your new power. If you had followed my order, you’d have discovered for yourself that your shape-shifting skills have always been merely the illusion of what mine are…in reality.”
Michael’s mouth gaped to see the extruded claws that tore through the sleeves of the evil hermit’s robe. Behind the seated man, something burst free in a rending of fabric.
Xeno rose on wambly new legs, smiling until his mouth was no longer human.
Michael drew his dirk and pistol and bellowed at him in vented rage, sobbing and cursing as he charged.
* * * *
The three figures in dark ninja camouflage scampered between the houses, muted blades bared repeatedly against shapeless horrors conjured by their imaginations.
They went to Anton’s house first. The old Gray Knight from Vedun was gone, his home showing no evidence of habitation for some time.
Next they warily slipped into the Benedettos’ two-storied stone dwelling, the placid basso rilievo sculptures on the small portico looking mournful in the dull moonlight.
Again, there was no sign of life within, though there was scattered evidence of disturbance or haste.
“Cholera,” Gonji whispered with uncommon emotion.
“Oh, Christ—” Monetto was staring at him, his dark eyes moist in the pale light slanting through a window. “Sylva and the children…”
Wilf looked to the samurai imploringly. “Gonji—”
“I know,” the samurai replied curtly. “Go. Both of you. See to your homes.”
“You’ll wait for us here?”
“Hai.”
As soon as he was sure they’d gone too far to see, Gonji took to horse and galloped toward the forest lair of Brother Xeno. His mind whirled with tortured fragments of hope and fear and memory as he pounded over the spongy earth. All three of them had something to lose, if Balaerik’s foul agents had laid a trap for them here, but only Gonji had something to gain.
He prayed to the kami of vengeance that Balaerik himself awaited him at the end of the breakneck journey.
He quit the horse at the run when he caught sight of the campfire’s glow, yanking it around and sending it off in retreat. Creeping stealthily through the underbrush, he found the dead body of Michael Benedetto.
Gonji was electrified with wrath. There was no envy or resentment in his heart now. Only compassion. Angry wounds shone darkly all over the man’s corpse, sickly moist in the moon’s glow, and raised around their edges like anthills.
The nightmarish creature scuttled out of the underbrush, padding straight for him on its multitude of bony legs—
A monstrous arachnid, a scorpion the size of a bull, whose sight chilled Gonji to the marrow as he raised his blade defensively—
Long, pincering claws snapped and jabbed. Overhead, the wickedly curved sting which had savaged Michael Benedetto dripped venom as it poised to plunge down at Gonji. The samurai slashed and parried desperately, seeing no line of counterattack through the monster’s superior reach. He fought against his atavistic terror as well as the all-too tangible three-pronged assault.
The scorpion hissed, its ugly obsidian eyes fixed on him hungrily. He raked and slashed in a fury of skillful strokes, the claws retracting on contact, too supple to take injury. The carapace about its head and back looked impossibly thick.
The tail darted down at him, a quick, probing stab. His sword cut missed it narrowly as he reflexively shrank back from it. Gonji scampered behind the fire now, keeping its protective flames between him and his hellish foe for a moment. He toed out a burning log, kicked it onto the creature, which pattered backward in shock, its eight legs drumming on the matted grass.
Emboldened, Gonji drew his tanto knife, sought an opening, cocked and threw it with snapping fury—
The blade clacked off the armored head, the scorpion hissing again viciously.
Gonji pulled his ko-dachi now—the short sword used in seppuku, the ritual suicide. The Katori ryu had taught him to use it in skillful conjunction with his katana. Now it was two weapons against three.
The scorpion charged him as he backed toward the elm tree where he’d seen his first glimpse of Brother Xeno. He parried an angry pincer with the seppuku blade, bound it high. As the other scissoring pincer came into play, Gonji raked it sharply with the Sagami, driving it out of line, and then slashing hard at the head. The creature shrilled a catlike note as one of its opaque eyes exploded
amidst splintering carapace.
The deadly barbed sting shot downward furiously, but Gonji anticipated it and cut off its end with a mighty upward twisting stroke. The bound-up pincer lashed at him, smacking him to the ground.
His eyes flared wide as the stingless tail reared for a clubbing strike and the second pincer seized his right arm, cutting the arm even through his vambrace. Fierce mandibles worked toward his downed form, seeking an opening to bite and shred.
Gonji twisted out of its grasp, the stingless tail pummeling the ground where his head had rested. The katana raked the scorpion’s hideous face as he rolled to his feet, bounding behind the tree.
He drew it in with a feint, the creature losing control of its attack now, as it gave in to its pain. Gonji herded it against the elm tree and unleashed a sequence of double-bladed attacks at its side, shattering plate and bone, unhinging first one leg, then a segment of its erect tail, then a second rigid leg.
It raised up on its injured side and sought support against the tree trunk. When it did so, Gonji struck off one pincer at the slender joint behind the hinge. Then he tore into it in a raking fury, beyond the revulsion its touch inspired now. Carapace exploded in black shards—another leg dropped off—it fell on its side, hissing and oozing a greenish ichor from multiple wounds—
And Gonji slit its soft underbelly with a howling X-cut delivered by both gleaming blades. The scorpion thrashed for a long time before it lay still.
For a long moment, Gonji could not relax his clenched jaws, so fierce was his residual tension as he stared at this dying thing, this abomination from a world of grasping sorcery. At last he recovered control of his center and regulated his breathing.
Gonji cleansed his blades, for a space awaiting the reversion of the monster. He thought to cast one final look of loathing at the human sorcerer it would become, to see what his swords had done to this agent of evil.