Gonji: The Soul Within the Steel: The Deathwind Trilogy, Book Two

by Rypel, T. C.

  Upon Julian’s flashy command, echoed by the subordinate behind them, the delegates joined with the soldiers in the long double column that clattered over the paving stones to the gate. A cheer rose from the crowd as they started off, and Gonji recognized several faces among them: Paolo Sauvini, Aldo Monetto and Karl Gerhard, Lorenz Gundersen on the steps of the Ministry; then he saw Lydia Benedetto, and felt the smile that crinkled the corners of his mouth, and only realized that he had been staring when he saw the smoky eyes of her husband, Michael, over her shoulder. Then he squared his shoulders and set his face in grim dignity, snorting to chase his mild embarrassment and nodding to the waving crowd on both sides of him.

  And in an effort at employing the crowd’s positive energy, he imagined that it was for him that they were cheering, for their champion.

  * * * *

  The farmer Vlad Dobroczy stared hard at Gonji as the delegation party pounded past with clumping hooves and jangling traces and armament.

  “I still can’t believe Flavio took him along. As if he meant anything to Vedun. That horse’s ass Wilf Gundersen probably had something to do with it, through his old man.” Dobroczy scowled after the long column as they rode through the gatehouse, where Old Gort waved them through, smiling toothlessly.

  Peter Foristek towered at Vlad’s side, shifting his scythe from one shoulder to the other. His face was just returning to normal, the lumps shrinking, the bruises fading, from the savage beating he had received at the hands of Ben-Draba.

  “You still think he’s one of them, Hawk? He’s a good fighter, that’s for sure.”

  “He’s a stranger,” the hook-nosed Dobroczy growled. “And no stranger can be trusted, not anymore. Don’t forget it. Remember what they tried to do to your sister.”

  Foristek’s face darkened. He shifted the scythe again and nodded solemnly.

  * * * *

  “So say it already,” Michael whispered to Lydia as he gazed at the departing column over her shoulder.

  She half-turned. “Say what, Michael?”

  “Whatever’s on your mind.”

  A studied calm crept into her large blue eyes, and she smiled sweetly. “There’s nothing on my mind right now—really.”

  Michael pursed his lips and pushed off through the crowd, Lydia watching him go for a moment and then peering back toward the postern gate, a puzzled frown creasing her soft features.

  * * * *

  Tralayn the prophetess stood on the northern rampart, the Llorm sentry casting her a sidewise glance as he passed. Her arms were folded into the ample sleeves of her long jade robes. Her green eyes were sullen slits, heavy-lidded and dreamy, as if she were about to doze off even as she stood. But her thoughts were of dreams that could never be, of the vain and misfit hope of peaceful coexistence with the minions of evil.

  * * * *

  Strom Gundersen and Boris Kamarovsky sat with the former’s flock on a hilltop northwest of Vedun’s encircling walls, gazing down at the delegation and its military escort.

  “There goes Papa. He’s not too happy about this,” Strom observed. “What a grouch this morning.”

  “Look at that monkey-man,” Boris sneered, “riding like he’s the cock of the yard.”

  They shared a laugh, and Strom piped a merry little tune on his reed pipe in accompaniment of the trotting hoofbeats.

  “Monkey-man,” Strom said then. “Where’d you get that?”

  “That’s what Phlegor calls him.”

  “Well, he better not let Gonji hear it.”

  “Gonji,” Boris spat. “What the hell kind of name is that?”

  “He’s pretty tough.”

  “Aw, hell, that’s just when he fights with his feet like a rooster. Know what the soldiers’ll do if he starts any more trouble?”

  Strom looked at him questioningly.

  Boris sighted along his hand, which he shaped like a pistol.

  “Boom.”

  * * * *

  The north road out of Vedun was paved only as far as the old Roman road it intersected about half a kilometer from the walls. At this point the plateau melded into the foothills of the Carpathians, and the north road continued as a broad, packed-earth track that meandered through the timbered hills toward Castle Lenska, whose tallest spires and towers could barely be made out from the flatlands.

  The banquet delegation rode past the hillock on the left, where Strom’s sheep scurried like windblown down. On the right began the checkerboard expanse of cultivation and orchards that fed the province. Beyond, the distant roar of the river that swept past the city to the cataract that emptied into the southern valley.

  The road swung left into the hills, and for a time the castle towers were lost to view among the bristling forested woods. The road coursed ever upward, the horses laboring with the increasing strain. The party emerged from a delve in the hills, and suddenly the facade of Castle Lenska lay open to view.

  Gonji was momentarily breathless. This was the closest he had ever been to the storied fortress, and its legends seemed indeed warranted. It rose imposingly atop a pine-crowded peak, shimmering in the mist against the jagged gray-white caps in the northern mountain fastness. Men on horseback were dwarfed by even its outer bailey wall, and that one, crowded with soldiers, crouched before a still taller inner curtain, which was also dotted with moving figures.

  “Whew,” Gonji breathed. “Marvelous.” It was not so sprawling a place as Japan’s incredibly complex fortresses, which were composed of acres of mazelike walls. But here in Europe there were none so formidable as this one. The thought struck him again that Lenska should have proven impregnable to so small a command as Klann led. And he was stirred with an eagerness to get a look inside.

  A lark cried in the treetops nearby, and the bird’s call mingled with the memories of Japan to raise up the long-buried details of an occasion he had thought of earlier that day.

  The song of the lark, and his death poem. The waka he had recited to Paille, which hadn’t passed his lips in many a year....

  He was twelve, charged with tending a garden at the teahouse of a cousin. The cousin’s wife, a lusty, voluptuous woman of about seventeen, was alone within for the afternoon. Gonji’s awakening sexuality and spirit of mischief had caused him to sneak a look at her through a shoji screen while she undressed. But then she had spotted him. And had smiled. He had been seized by fear of discovery and the certainty that his cousin would surely dispatch him upon his return later that day. At the moment of discovery a lark began to sing in a nearby tree. It had remained with him the rest of the afternoon, trilling its song incessantly as he composed his death poem and completed his work in the garden, which he had been sure would be the last duty of his short life. His cousin had returned, but when he had called Gonji inside, it was merely to commend him on the fine work he had done. The matter of his voyeurism was never brought up....

  A nostalgic smile impishly perked Gonji’s lips.

  The beating rush of great batwings surged up behind them, shattering Gonji’s reverie. All in the party craned their necks and fought their panicked steeds into control as the wyvern soared by. Its shrill cry echoed through the foothills as it flapped toward the castle on its monstrous leathery wings, then orbited the walls in a slow, wide arc.

  “Welcome, delegates,” Gonji said to the others, grinning nervously. The old fear was rekindled, the hatred for the beast and the fear of the loathsome death it carried in its glands and bowels. Gonji ground his teeth at the fleeting memory of his mad ride from its first strafing attack at the monastery.

  Then he noticed that it still carried the broken shaft of his arrow in its belly, and his eyes narrowed. He nodded and patted Tora to calm him. Round one was the wyvern’s; round two had been his. He wondered again why it hadn’t fried him when it had alighted behind him with devilish stealth that night and only hoped that it wouldn’t recognize him today and finish the job.

  “All right, the king awaits,” Julian called back to them. “Let’
s go!”

  The road steepened and the surrounding terrain grew rockier as they neared the castle. They swung left and right through hillocks and delves and craggy outcrops of granite or shale, now and again losing sight of all but the tallest towers of the fortress.

  Then they emerged onto a flat table of land, the castle yet a kilometer distant, and took in a sight that set their stomachs churning:

  “Misericordia!” Milorad cried.

  “Great God in heaven!” Flavio gasped, reining in.

  The stench was stultifying.

  Bodies of Baron Rorka’s soldiers, the castle defenders, had been heaped into a shallow common grave to the east of the road. The grave was rimmed by crucified forms hanging on leaning gibbets. A party of mercenaries, their faces covered by bandannas so that only their eyes could be seen squinting out from under chapeaus and helms, was toppling the crucified corpses into the grave. Oil was hauled to the grave in buckets and sloshed over the piled liches, while one man readied a torch for the funeral pyre. Judging by the condition of the bodies—some already bursting with corruption—they were none too soon in getting around to the grisly task.

  They pushed on, each man casting a last ambivalent glance at the wretched charnel scene.

  Just before the final rise to the outer bailey, the castle road became paved again with cobblestones, and they clattered up a sparsely-treed tor to be greeted by the spectacle of Castle Lenska’s dwarfing facade.

  Gonji’s eyes were alight with anticipation, and he clenched his teeth to suppress his undignified thrill. “An aerie on a wind-lashed precipice,” he had heard it called, and it lived up to its reputation. Swirling mountain winds churned about the jagged peak they had surmounted, tugging at their clothes and flapping the column’s pennons. Atop the central keep’s spires, Klann’s banners fluttered wildly. But for the road they traversed, the castle was unapproachable to horses or siege engines. It rose from a depression in the crag on the south and west and backed against a steep incline on the east and north sides. Attack via the latter two directions was out of the question: The slopes were all shale and scrub and bramble, the rushing river rapids at their base, and foot-soldiers scrabbling up their uncertain purchase were target game for the archers on the battlements. On the south and west sides, rocks had been heaped so that besiegers would be forced to mount them, again becoming easy targets, the prize for survival being a plunge into the wide moat that gleamed with oily scum from the southeast corner to the northwest.

  They rode past lines of wagons and staring troopers and finally rumbled over the drawbridge and through the raised portcullis of the barbican, the outer gate. A squad of Llorm saluted Julian and the Llorm captain at the head of the column. Gonji began calculating troop strength and committing the castle’s defensive deployment to memory when the bellowing roar echoed from around the corner on their left.

  Gonji’s hand shot to the hilt of the Sagami in reaction to the flaring of his spine. From beyond the southwest drum tower in the outer ward came another awesome bellow of rage, this time mixed with hoofbeats and slapping footfalls—then laughter, both from the approaching clamor and from the escort.

  Three mercenaries with pole-arms, only one on horseback, tore around the base of the tower toward them, peering back over their shoulders with a curious mixture of terror and mirth. The hulking shadow came fast behind them, then the monstrous bulk that tumbled head over heels with a resounding thud that boomed dully in the ward. Soldiers on the ramparts laughed and pointed, but the delegation from Vedun could only stare in shock. For here was their first glimpse of Tumo, Mord’s cretin giant.

  “Cholera,” Gonji whispered hoarsely, still gripping the Sagami’s hilt.

  The giant pushed himself aright on short stubby legs the thickness of barrels at the thighs. At full height he must have been nearly a rod, but it was difficult to judge because of his stooped, apelike posture. Hairy arms like cannon barrels hung to his knobby knees, which were coarse and callused like the knuckles on his ale-cask fists.

  He leaned forward on a fist and peered around him dimly with a face out of a child’s nightmare. Then he lurched toward the mounted party on all fours like a gorilla. The horses that were unused to the bestial apparition began at once to demivolte and sidestep, some curvetting and jostling their riders, neighing and snorting nervously. The three mercenaries who had tormented the giant had split up, one rider and one footman now angling toward Julian soberly and penitently, while the other foot-soldier crept backwards along the middle bailey wall. Tumo caught sight of him and made an idiotic caterwauling cry, pushing toward him with a vengeance.

  The mercenary screamed as Tumo cornered him, roaring through his yawning, flaccid mouth. The man broke from the wall, but the giant batted him back with a gnarled hand. He hit the wall, breath gushing from his lungs. Tumo tapped him again with a short open-handed blow that knocked him on his side.

  “Tumo!” Julian cried out, then said something to the giant in an unknown language. The great beast looked to the captain, bellowed once more at the mercenary, then lumbered over to the delegation party.

  A free companion’s horse bucked and threw its rider over. It was all the Vedunian party could do to keep their mounts in line. Even Tora, who had seen his share of the unnatural, tossed fretfully under Gonji.

  Tumo stopped a short distance from them upon Julian’s command. The cretin giant stood erect on his massive bowed legs and regarded them vapidly.

  “This is Tumo,” Julian said with amusement over the noise of the whinnying steeds. “Tumo is one of our...deterrents.”

  Gonji relaxed his grip on the Sagami as the captain remonstrated with the soldiers who had been prodding the giant into his rage. The samurai could see the disheartening effect Tumo had on the others. The chord it struck in the human heart was difficult to define in all its terrifying complexity, for its appearance had been well designed by whatever dark power had formed it: Slavering lips and grinding splay teeth were continually worked at by an overlong red tongue. The face was broad and squat at the base, the skull so small as to be almost pointed. The giant’s brow lay low and heavy over dim, angular eyes. His nose was no more than a tiny stub with pinpoint nostrils. The mouth was the focus of the monster’s face. Its body was a great mass of rolling layers of blubber; its weight beggared the imagination. It was naked and hairless, but for knotty tufts on its head and arms and genitals. The overall impression was of some unholy mutation of an idiot child, a perverse mockery of human misery that caused one to flinch in terror and repugnance.

  Gonji recalled that Jocko and Jacob Neriah both had spoken of a giant traveling with this army. He had been hoping the tales were exaggerated. Then he remembered the words of the drunken soldier at the inn: Hey, Cap’n, he reminds me o’ Tumo.... He felt the anger over the insult working up inside him.

  “Tumo will be feasting tonight, too, only he likes his meat raw, don’t you, Tumo?” Julian said portentously. The giant ground out a few subhuman syllables that sounded like reproductions of the captain’s speech. Milorad shuddered and whispered something to Flavio.

  On Julian’s command the cretin giant turned and waddled away toward the drum tower, issuing a final warning bark to the prostrate soldier.

  “Pathetic creature,” Flavio said as they clopped to the middle bailey gatehouse.

  “Indeed so,” Milorad agreed.

  “I hope that’s not the king’s brother,” Gonji jested, leaning toward them. But no one had found it amusing, save Garth, who tsked and cast him a sidelong glance. Gonji shrugged and looked once more after the departing giant, wondering what other marvels, strange and sinister, this day might unveil.

  The gatehouse was a heavily guarded checkpoint at the entrance to a long tunnel cut completely through the central keep’s lower level. Its flanking towers were enormous defensive outworks of the middle bailey wall, which rose like a mighty curtain of stone twice the height of the outer wall and rendering the outer ward a broad killing ground for any besieg
ing party that might breech the outermost obstacles. The towers were cut through with arrow loops and croslets. Archers manning these and walking the ramparts above peered down lazily. At the southeast drum tower far down the wall, Gonji could make out the barrel of a bombard or mortar.

  Gatehouse guards saluted the captains and admitted the party. Gonji had just passed through when he was halted by a fierce command at his left hand. He pulled up.

  “Remove your weapons and leave them here.”

  The Llorm guard had spoken in German. His white-knuckled fist gripped the hilt of his sheathed broadsword. Hot eyes glared up at Gonji from under a burgonet helm.

  “I’m the Council Elder’s bodyguard,” Gonji replied evenly. “My weapons go where I go.”

  “You heard the commander of the guard!”

  A pole-arm probed dangerously close to Gonji’s ribs.

  Gonji turned slowly to face the soldier on his right. His eyes narrowed menacingly. The Llorm lancer was an ugly man whose bulbous nose looked as if elven troops had late used it as a training prop.

  “Careful with that pike, fig-nose,” Gonji said.

  Flavio, sensing imminent trouble, began to intercede. Gonji and the pikeman glared at each other. The samurai, remembering his promise to Flavio, felt the dull pang of helpless capitulation rising. But Captain Kel’Tekeli dismounted and strode back to the hold-up.

  After a brief explanation, he said to the guard, “I think we can trust the Elder’s bodyguard to behave himself, can’t we?”

  Gonji bridled at the other’s patronizing tone but smiled thinly and nodded.

  They continued through into the central ward, which was a frenzy of activity, last-minute preparations being attended to by scurrying servants and scullions. The ward was large enough for cavalry practice to be pursued simultaneously with archery and swordsmanship, and Gonji admiringly appraised the training facilities. Only a handful of troops, mostly Llorm, plied their weapons on the grounds now, and the samurai observed their techniques with great interest.