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

by Rypel, T. C.

  Gonji fingered an ear pensively, frowning.

  Monetto bounded up. “Better let it be me, I suppose....”

  Gonji eyed him sidelong. “Ever kill before?” he inquired softly in Italian.

  “Did you have to ask me that?” Monetto replied quietly. He winced, averting his face from the others.

  The horse Gonji had called for was brought to him, a roan mare. “I may have to use your beauty here for cover,” he told its owner. “So sorry, but Tora is too valuable to me. Don’t worry, though. My plan is to avoid endangering her.”

  Gonji removed his swords from their back harness and seated them in his obi, which was still cinched about his middle. They moved ahead stealthily as a group to watch the operation from concealed vantage. Monetto circled behind the rocks and scaled the boulder behind the encampment. When he was above the brigands, he waved a signal. The sun strobed the raiders’ faces through the brush, causing them to squint from its glare in the peaks, as Gonji led the mare back through the trees a few hundred yards, finally emerging onto the road and leading her by the bridle toward the outposted sentries.

  “Come on, damned horse!” Gonji was calling petulantly to her as he dragged her along, leaning forward, panting and wheezing. “Come on!” He jogged with her now, twisting and turning back to shake his fist at her muzzle, then pausing either to rub his buttock or relieve the friction of a feigned heat rash.

  When he had about reached the sight line of the concealed raiders, the mercenaries heard him, two of them moving out to investigate.

  “Sonofa—!” Gonji gasped, waving to them and half-smiling as he fought for breath, clutching at his throat, his chest heaving.

  The lead mercenary drew a pistol and spannered it tight, checked its charge and load. Replaced it in his belt. The second sentry palmed his belted sword’s hilt. The watching raiders held their breaths. The seated man had set his plate down but remained in place, watching his fellows’ backs from the rocks, somewhat out of Gonji’s sightline. He leaned over and hefted another pistol, readied it, then stuck it behind him.

  The raiders witnessed that and sucked in their collective breath.

  “They’ll blow him a new asshole,” Anton whispered harshly.

  “Hssst!” Roric ordered, the knight scowling in response.

  Gonji waved to the sentries affably, still panting in affected exhaustion, and drew near to them.

  “Julian—I—he—” he rasped, holding his chest, “—damned horse—Julian—”

  “What do you want, slopehead?” the pistol-wielder demanded. His partner gripped his sheathed broadsword suspiciously.

  “Ohhhh!” Gonji dusted himself off, two yards away, his breath still choppy as he bent over. “I’m—supposed to—”

  “I said whaddaya want?”

  “To relieve you,” he said, looking up. The bandit cocked an eyebrow and leveled his pistol.

  The raiding party gasped as one and lurched forward.

  In the instant Gonji swept the Sagami out of its scabbard, Monetto dropped down on the seated mercenary. With a slash right off the draw, Gonji sliced his opponent’s arm off at the elbow, blood spouting from the wound, the pistol and severed arm still in the air while the returning glint of steel tore open the second sentry’s belly before his blade was half drawn. They lay on the ground writhing in agony, Gonji’s finishing strokes silencing them. He turned at once and peered at Monetto, who rose shakily from the slumped sentry at the boulder. There was blood on the biller’s shirt. Not his.

  “Aldo—you all right?”

  Monetto waved weakly and bobbed his head. The rest of the band charged forward excitedly, Roric sending several of them after the horses. Gonji saw the horror etched into their faces at the sight of the carnage.

  “There can be no witnesses, nicht wahr?” Several heads assented mutely.

  Monetto shambled up to them unsteadily, eyes still gleaming from the adrenaline rush, blood throbbing at his temples. He blew a whistling breath and smiled crookedly at Gerhard. “That’s one for me, neh?”

  “A fine attitude for a Christian, blustering like that before the Lord,” Gerhard said, scowling.

  “These are evil men!”

  “Oh, and you presume to judge them?”

  “Sie still—shut up!” Gonji commanded. “Let’s move. Get the horses, and let’s ride like demons. There should be only one more outpost to take.”

  Roric and Anton took up the pistols of the dead men, and the rest of their weapons were loaded, their horses taken in tow.

  “Shouldn’t we bury them?” Jiri asked.

  Gonji looked over their anxious faces. “Hai. We’ll keep it civilized, then, for as long as we can. But quickly. No time to dig—in the rocks, over there.”

  They found a cleft beneath the beak of the great crow formation of Borgo Pass. There they consigned the corpses of the sentries to the earth’s keeping, piling rocks atop them to confound the scavenger beasts. With muttered prayers and signs of the cross they edged away from the common grave and remounted, pounding away along the mountain trail on a westward course.

  * * * *

  Gritting his teeth against the jouncing ride, Wilf wondered to himself whether it ever went away. The tightness in the stomach, the constriction in the throat; the parched mouth and sweating palms and prickling spine.... The symptoms which added up to fear of battle, of dying by searing wound of pistol ball or sword. He wondered what it had felt like to be one of those unfortunates Gonji had dispatched so swiftly, so coldly. Gonji hadn’t looked at him accusingly when he had failed to volunteer to join him against the sentries, but he thought he could detect a certain disappointment.

  Got to get over this, Wilf, he told himself. It’s a long way to Castle Lenska...and Genya....

  * * * *

  The old man had been driving his rickety dray on his annual visit to Vedun, there to sell the modest surplus yielded by his small plot of land. With the money he might lay in his winter supplies. Not that he cared much anymore. Nothing was the same since his wife had died.

  It was the Turks. Her fears of the blasted Turks and of the bandits who ravaged the countryside had finally sent her to the grave. Ever since, the old man had felt his zest for life ebbing from him, and with it had gone certain other things. He couldn’t remember what, but they had been important once...he thought. Boh—God, but he could scarcely remember even his beloved wife anymore.

  When he saw the devils attack the small campsite, he guided the swaybacked draft horse off the road. There he cowered in fear until they had gone. Bandits, that was sure. They’d taken everything. He hated bandits. He’d seen their leader—a Mongol, and he hated Mongols. He’d have to tell the authorities, that was what he’d have to do. But who? Who was it that ran this territory? Some....

  Baron. A baron, that was it. Baron—Ruka, or Hrurka? Something. The one who lived in the castle not far from Vedun.

  He’d go there. Go and tell the baron about the Mongol with the hair tied like a tulip bulb on his head. The one who had killed the men camped at Borgo Pass.

  * * * *

  “My turn?” Paolo asked sarcastically.

  The samurai eyed him up and down. “Go,” he said simply. “And no needless heroics. Just get it done quietly.”

  The wagoner made no answer but grinned foxlike and ambled off with a cocky strut. He disappeared up the slopes, as the others waited, a half kilometer from one of the two passes that led into the mountain valley wherein lay Zarnesti. Nestled with their steeds in the lee of a cliff off the mountain trail, they waited for a time that seemed too long to some, while others prayed that it might continue forever, if that would keep them from what was to follow.

  “Monetto, you’re Italian, too,” Gonji said, squatting down next to the biller. “What’s itching this Sauvini? What are his aims in all this?”

  “Glory...ambition, I suppose,” Aldo answered.

  “To be a big man in the city,” Nagy added in German, “like this smirking brat here.” He
indicated Berenyi.

  Berenyi sneered. “Drop dead, old man, and I’ll be happy to pile stones on you like we did to those brigands. Don’t listen to him, Gonji. Sauvini’s just a...blowhard nobody likes. Always braying that he’s going to be important someday. Thinks all the women love him, too, when really they love this old fart here.” He jabbed a thumb at Nagy.

  “You mean he’s not the...sullen, quiet kind, the way he poses in training?” Gonji asked, mildly surprised.

  A few knowing laughs issued from the men.

  “That’s just when you’re around,” someone spoke farther down the line.

  Jiri Szabo piped in: “Usually he asks too many questions. Always nosy—‘What are you doing? What’s going on? Tell me what happened—’ ”

  “Ah, so desu ka? Like Klaus, eh?” Gonji said, chuckling affably. His congeniality spread quickly to the others, who were anxious to stave off their apprehensions. Quick translations were followed by nervous laughter. “Klaus is a fine, honest fellow, though, neh? A lovable lummox.”

  “At least him you can put off, if you show he’s annoying you,” Monetto said.

  “Ja,” Gerhard agreed, “Paolo always wants to fight.”

  “I feel sorry for his wife, though,” Roric said sadly. “Good woman. Made the mistake of falling in love with what Sauvini is, instead of what he wants to be. She’s too good for any man to think his dreams are too high and mighty to include her.”

  Then—the sibilant whistle of an arrow—thuck! It planted itself in the road. To a man they hushed and stared at the shaft. Something was affixed to it. A shred of cloth.

  Gonji clopped out onto the road and peered up. Sauvini stood there grinning with self-satisfaction. The samurai looked down at the arrow, dismounted and pulled it free: Tied to it was a piece of bloody bandanna, a souvenir of Paolo’s sally. Gonji shook his head.

  Seconds later they were on the road again at a gallop. They passed the post of the now-dead sentry, and the cliff cave where Gonji had shivered on the night he had nearly been killed by the 3rd Free Company. When was it? Ah...the full moon, the last full moon. The Night of Chains....

  They found the delve through which Captain Navarez had taken Klann’s mercenary company, negotiated the rugged climb, their mounts whinnying in protest. And soon they were descending the treacherous shale-and-bramble slope into the misty mountain valley. Gonji cautioned them to guide carefully, recalling a nasty horse fall he had seen there. Evening shadows lay across the valley when they dismounted and made their plan. Six men were chosen to hold down the village perimeter with bows, pole-arms, and a pistol, lest any mercenaries escape.

  They crouched on the south of Zarnesti, just across the meadow. Gonji’s pulse pounded when he recalled the rainy sprint he had made there in darkness on a night so buried by recent memory; and his eyes narrowed to think of the swarthy Navarez and his toady companion Esteban, and of insults he suffered; Riemann, who’d tried to shoot him....

  And Jocko. That crazy old bastard Jocko. He’d best tell the others what to expect....

  * * * *

  Captain Francisco Navarez slumped in a chair in the former magistrate’s two-room fieldstone dwelling. His feet were propped on the pine table, his dark face skewed by the drunken torpor that sagged his whole being. He felt sluggish and useless, jaded by the carnal excesses of—what? three weeks? a moon?—in this backwater mud-hole. He looked around at the woman, crumpled into a heap on the blanket-strewn floor. Snoring. The bruised eye angled up on the side of her face he could see. Whore.... He was tired of this, tired of easily taken women and dispirited men who knelt on command or fought their neighbors at gunpoint to save their worthless skins. Tired of local wine and slovenly, calloused peasant women and horseshit and cold quiet nights under silver mountain moonlight.

  Tonight the moon danced behind scudding clouds, and a whistling wind snaked out of the mountains. Good. He’d go out in a few moments and clear his head. Then...then? Then maybe they’d leave this place. Sí, why not? King Klann had abandoned them here. No relief, no word.... Dios, maybe Klann and the whole army were in—

  The screams and shouts dispersed his confused thoughts, but at first didn’t cause him to move. Probably just the company trying to dispel their boredom again. Then more screaming—he thought he heard his name called. He sat upright and listened.

  It was the gunshots that finally sent him lurching for the door, reaching for the pistol and shot on the table.

  * * * *

  Peter Foristek was the first to strike.

  “Let me take that one, sensei,” the big farmer had asked of Gonji while they hunkered in a ditch, as darkness fell. They saw the brigand having his way with a young girl in the tall waving grass behind a barn.

  “Call me Gonji,” the samurai had responded. “You’re not on the training ground now.” Pete had interpreted the grin as an assent to his request.

  It was a timed operation. They all counted as they darted into position around the village, readying themselves for the strike. The single bandits and pairs first. Watch for pistols, most of all. Try not to let any be fired. What else? Oh, the old man, Pete recalled. That’s right. And leave the Spaniard with the big black mustache for Gonji....

  Then his count was finished, and his crawl had brought Pete to the corner of the barn. The wind moaned in the mountains. Laughter and shouting in the street, and the screams of men in pain: villagers made to fight each other for the mercenaries’ entertainment.

  Then the girl’s small whimper. And Pete peered around the corner, squeezing the shaft of his great halberd, and he saw.... Revulsion roiled around his stomach. The girl couldn’t have been more than thirteen. She wasn’t even struggling, the brutalization of these people having had time to take its toll. She only emitted tiny whimpering sounds as the bandit lay atop her, thrusting and grunting, his breeches down around his ankles. And all Pete could think was how much the girl reminded him of his sister, whom the occupation troops had once tried to assault....

  “Tuh!”—The small puff of breath escaped his hot throat despite his effort to contain it, but the bandit never heard it in his ecstatic throes. Pete stood over him, easing the razor-sharp halberd point against his ribs.

  “Yeeooow!” the bandit cried, rolling off the girl and grabbing at his side. Then he stared at the angry giant above him in disbelief. He panted, grimacing in shock and confusion.

  Then he reached for his pistol, but Pete anticipated the move, the quick lash of the halberd tearing the pistol loose and splitting his hand open. He didn’t scream but rather lurched to his feet and stared in horror, a rhythmic gagging sound coming as he held the wretchedly injured hand.

  Pete growled and threw down the halberd, clutched the man’s throat with both hands, and lifted him off his feet. He slammed him hard against the barn and squeezed with those hands that could uproot saplings. The bandit flailed and tried to kick with his bound up legs. Foristek raised his knee and pinned him against the rough wood. The bandit turned red, then purple, his bloodied hand smearing Pete’s face and cuirass. The farmer gritted his teeth and squeezed harder, grunting. Something snapped, and a gout of blood blubbered out from between the man’s lips when Pete relaxed his death grip. The bandit’s eyes bulged, and his head fell like a sack onto his chest. His bowels loosed in death.

  And the girl started tossing and screaming on the ground, the horror of it all penetrating her numbed mind, welling up buried emotion. Pete called for her to hush, fearing that she’d compromise the raid. But already the sound of conflict in the street had begun. And the gunfire.

  * * * *

  Jiri Szabo scuttled between the huts, lithe and circumspect. One hand touched the hilt of the sword strapped to his back. He knew he’d have to be careful, would have to choose his opponent and the tilting ground. Conditions would have to be right, or he feared he couldn’t see it through. Terror rippled through him like an undulating serpent, threatened to paralyze his will and, worse, his thews.

  Suffer me
not the death of a coward....

  Just remember what Gonji taught, relax, empty your mind—

  He heard the surly laughter and shouting from the street. Da, you’ll be laughing when we.... Before the huts he could see water troughs and part of a canopied well, loose objects fluttering by in the wind. It seemed safe. He peered around the corner.

  The mercenary nearly bumped into him, snarling in surprise. Omigod—! Jiri’s first impulse was to run when he saw the man claw at his belt, but there was no pistol, only a saber and dirk. Jiri leaped out from the cover of the huts and drew steel, came to two-handed middle guard, eyes popping.

  “So you wanna fight, eh, kid?” the mercenary said in German. “Hey, Eugie, look at this!” But the partner the man had left several huts down the street was already dead, two militiamen standing over him with bloody swords.

  They engaged, the mercenary probing, testing with his saber. Jiri parried his every attack crisply, but his iai-jutsu technique lacked completeness: he wasn’t finishing the circle, riposting after his parries. He fought totally in defense, backing, retreating, too timid to take the offense and dare the man’s blade.

  Then he noticed the figure creeping up behind his ever more confident opponent. Jiri maintained his concentration on the man’s eyes, all the while sure that he would be dead in seconds if it were another free companion who approached.

  But it wasn’t. It was Paolo Sauvini. The wagoner moved forward with catlike strides, the whites of his eyes shining in the darkness, both hands clutching his sword in a horizontal thrusting posture taught by the samurai.

  There was a sickening sound of rending flesh and innards as Paolo’s running, driving lunge shot his blade completely through the man’s torso. And what came out of his belly with the point of the blade caused Jiri to grimace.

  He turned away, gagging, as the brigand’s soul-chilling scream shattered the night.

  * * * *

  The village of Zarnesti exploded into violence.

  Some of the brigands, assessing the raiders’ number and seeing their own hopeless plight, scrambled to the stables for their steeds.