Fortress of Lost Worlds

by T. C. Rypel

  “The church is cold,” Anita said at last. “Ever since the warlock burst the windows. Colder than the mountain nights. It’s so much warmer in here, no?”

  “Why hasn’t the town seen to its repair?”

  “Why don’t you?” she parried. “You’re the military governor. Why doesn’t God, if He wants it used again?” She smiled placidly. “Why don’t you just forget the whole thing and come jump on my belly, mi amore?”

  “Silencio, bitch!”

  Salguero smashed his mug against the lintel of the archway, startling her so that she cried out.

  “Are you loco?”

  “Si, loco,” the captain snarled. “Why don’t you give me space for what’s left of my morality to breathe one guilty breath?”

  She laughed and walked toward the center hall. “Ah—a poet, then. Morality’s last poet. Morality,” she repeated scornfully. “What do you suppose those friars who so fill you with fear are doing behind locked chamber doors?”

  “Sacrilege!” Salguero roared. He stalked after her as if to strike her but was paralyzed by her calm withdrawal to the kitchen and larder area.

  He pounded a fist into his palm as he bemoaned his fate. He was jaded and broken in spirit. The failed campaign against the warlock’s power had produced diabolic effects in his life that he would not have believed scant months before. His command decimated, degenerated into roistering rakehells; his days spent in debauchery; his sleep troubled by terrible nightmares of unimaginable death. The world was going to the Devil.

  And worst of all, Salguero no longer cared. His world had ended when Port-Bou, his home garrison and his family’s adopted town, had been given over to the French. Bartered away over dinner, in the Lancers’ absence, by the fat architects of power. Even he had begun to believe that was true.

  What was left? Who was left to believe in, save the God who had set him adrift?

  The discordant ringing of the chapel bell snapped him out of his reverie. He moved out onto the icy portico again as a rider pounded past the manse and skidded his mount to a halt, turning at the sound of the bells.

  Down the cobblestoned street, snow-packed and tracked by wagon rut and muddy hoof, a mixed band of soldiers and townsmen gathered across from the church. A woman emerged from the vestibule, wearing a shawl and a crookedly tipped morion. Hands on hips, she bent at the waist and brayed in Salguero’s direction.

  “Ahhh!” the swerving rider growled in mock anger, kicking his steed to give chase. He seemed not to notice his commanding officer, who at once recognized him:

  Montoya. Born-to-the-stockade Montoya.

  The woman down the lane shrieked in feigned panic to see Montoya’s clattering approach. The band of observers howled at the spectacle.

  “Corporal Montoya!”

  The trooper reined in at the sound of the commanding tone. Grinning slyly, Montoya glanced at his compadres, then walked his mount toward the magistrate’s house. He affected a penitent air, rendered all the more ridiculous by his appearance: white flannel breeches tucked into his riding boots; a half-clasped cuirass flopping over a silk nightshirt; and, most absurdly, a long nightcap trailing down his back. This he removed as he cast Captain Salguero a ragged salute.

  “Si, mi capitan. I was just—”

  “Silencio, idiot. Were you not posted for the night at the east end?”

  “Si, mi capitan, but there was—”

  “Has an order been issued changing the uniform of the guard?”

  “No, mi capitan, but I—”

  “Shut up, soldier,” Salguero ground out coarsely. His voice lowered in an effort to control his seething temper. “You disgrace your king and your country by your very presence here. You will dress in a uniform befitting a king’s lancer and proceed to the headquarters compound, where you will present yourself for arrest to the Officer of the Day. Is that clear, corporal?”

  “Si, mi capitan. I go right away, si,” Montoya minced, apparently unconcerned with the grave matter. “Saludos, mi capitan.”

  Again that half-assed salute. Salguero didn’t return it. He would gladly have broken the man’s arm. But his sense of dignity prohibited any further quibble with so trifling a matter as a sloppy salute in view of what was happening in Barbaso. He was, he quickly noted, out of uniform himself.

  Salguero watched Montoya casually trot toward his sniggering amigos. Before he reached them, another mounted lancer intercepted him, remonstrating with Montoya as the captain had, it was clear from their body language.

  Sergeant Orozco. Good old Carlos, Salguero thought. The sole answer to my prayers.

  He moved through the house aimlessly for a time, encountering Anita again leaning in the doorway to the larder. She was eating one of the accursed golden fruits again. These strange, spherical winter-ripening fruits were highly prized in Barbaso. The townsfolk called them a species of granadilla, though they seemed nothing like it. No one would say where they grew but for the fact that it was in a secret grove in a wonderful valley that had been theirs until the warlock seized power in the territory. Eating one of them produced a glorious energizing effect. A warm and euphoric vigor and sharpness of the senses. But eating more than one brought on intoxication and languor by stages, the ultimate state sometimes lasting days. Salguero had at last been forced to proscribe their consumption among his troops. As with everything else these days, his order had gone the way of full-plate armor.

  “Are you going to arrest me?” Anita asked coyly, her dark dewdrop eyes moist and teasing.

  “What do you really know about that fruit?” Salguero asked. He eyed it with distaste.

  She held it up to him tantalizingly. “I know that it prolongs the act of love.”

  His eyes narrowed, and he slapped the half-eaten golden granadilla out of her hand. She cursed him and caught up the rolling fruit like a starved predator. Salguero strode from the room, but she followed close on his heels.

  “Are we finished then, Hernando?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Will you throw me out into the snow? Any of your subordinates would be happy to take me in.”

  “This is your father’s house,” he replied in a flat tone. He began to dress and gather his belongings.

  “Even the warlock—even Domingo Negro himself—would be glad to have me, I think.”

  He trained on her a look so full of smoldering contempt that she faltered in her tack. She eased back against the doorpost of their bedchamber, looking over the golden granadilla thoughtfully. When she spoke again, there was softness in her voice.

  “You’ve been dreaming of your wife again.”

  Salguero stiffened. “Eat your…magic apple before you say something we’ll both regret. I will, anyway.” He donned his half-armor and strapped on his rapier. Then he began working on a black wheel-lock’s priming pan.

  “Your former life is gone, Hernando,” she whispered. “I thought a soldier accepted the fortunes of war.”

  “We’re not at war with France.”

  Anita drew a deep breath. “I’ll tell you something. And you must swear to tell no one where you heard it.”

  He looked up from the pistol and eyed her curiously.

  “This fruit,” she went on, “it comes from Domingo Negro’s own magic grove. There are many more wonderful things there, in the valley near Castle Malaguer. Things that could be ours, if only you’d finish your campaign and kill the warlock. Hasn’t the king commissioned you to rid us of this unholy sorcerer? Haven’t the holy men sanctioned it? The Inquisition heats its irons in wait of the Archmage’s evil flesh.” Her eyes shone, huge and gleaming like a doe’s. She moved near and laid her hands on his chest.

  “Do this thing,” she breathed, “and untold wonders will be ours.”

  Salguero knew n
ot what to say, but her words evoked a primal terror and dread he’d not felt since last he tilted with the warlock’s forces.

  There was a knock at the front door. The captain opened it to admit a somber Sgt. Carlos Orozco. Salguero’s friend since childhood entered with a terse greeting. He declined Anita’s offer of refreshment, nor would he lock eyes with the woman, for whom his disdain was well known. Only when she had left the two men alone would the sergeant speak his business. His voice was thick with irony and resignation. The way a man speaks when he no longer believes in what he does but can do nothing about it.

  “I’ve made the rounds, checked the outposts, for what it’s worth.” Orozco extracted a bandanna from a pocket of his cloak. He dabbed at the frost-melt in his drooping mustache as he spoke. “No blood in the streets. No night fiends about, so far as I can tell. Maybe we were lucky, eh? Of course, only half the posts were attended. Maybe the others are dead, or dragged off to be eaten by—but the only way I can tell is with a roll call. Do you want me to have them fall out from the inns and their adopted beds or whatever—?”

  Salguero shook his head morosely. The sergeant turned away, directing his voice at the wall as he went on.

  “This business with Montoya—the slovenly bastard. He’s a troublemaker, Hernando. You know what I’d do with him, if I were in command.”

  “No. Place him under guard. Suspend all pay and privileges.”

  Orozco grunted. “A leave of absence for him, then.”

  A tense silence passed between them. The sergeant selected two pistols from Salguero’s small arsenal and began loading them.

  “Time to mount another patrol, I think,” Orozco said airily.

  “Don’t do it, Carlos. Don’t bother.”

  “Someone must.”

  “I need you here. You’re my only…link to sanity.” There was faint pleading in the captain’s tone.

  “Don’t come apart on us. You’re too good a soldier, too fine an officer, to succumb to this place. What you need right now is what I need—a good fight.” Orozco triggered the wheel of a pistol, sparking the empty priming pan. “I can’t stand it here any longer, Hernando. I won’t waste another day in this living hell. I take the last few good lancers and mount a party. We fill the column at gunpoint, if need be. I load one pistol for the first pig who runs with loaded breeches. One for the enemy—whatever shape it takes this time. And a third…a third for myself. In case I need it.”

  They eyed each other tellingly.

  Salguero’s lips parted twice before he found words.

  “I can order you to stay.”

  “You can,” Orozco allowed hollowly.

  Anita hovered at the doorway. Without another word, Sergeant Orozco gathered up the pistols and strode from the chamber to depart into the snow. The captain listened to the receding drum of his hoofbeats.

  “Brave hombre,” Anita sneered.

  “What is it that you want of me?” Salguero demanded, turning on her sharply. “This town has destroyed my company as surely as any of the warlock’s foul magic.”

  “Just be nice to me,” she replied, sidling up to him.

  Salguero felt the heat in his loins, but there was no true passion in it. Just melancholy surrender. The admission of weakness before a superior force.

  He bent to kiss her, but she snatched his rapier from its scabbard and placed the needle point against his chest. She laughed, cold and derisive, to see his shock. Her voice was full of jeering accusation.

  “Go out and catch me a warlock. I’ll keep the bed warm for you here.”

  “Capitan!”

  The cries sprang from several throats near the house. The beating on the portico door came simultaneously with the keening wind and the sudden darkening of day that they’d come to know so well.

  The hideous harridan. The ghostly hag. The banshee.

  The door burst open and terrified faces confronted the captain. Among them was Orozco’s. Captain Salguero ran out onto the front steps to stare pop-eyed down the road to the west. The gray-green filmy apparition, her ethereal gowns flowing down over the housetops, swept toward them.

  The harbinger of death, whose charnel stench sometimes brought violent illness, whose burning touch inflicted on her victims’ flesh gray-mottled patches of infection that produced pustules and trembling paralysis, followed by rigidity and death.

  Salguero heard screams and the slamming of doors and shutters from all points in the town, though he could not tear his eyes from the strangely hypnotic death-shade who turned the west end of Barbaso sickly translucent.

  “Get inside, capitan—now!”

  Orozco and another lancer dragged Salguero into the house and bolted the door. They crouched with backs to the walls until the ghastly apparition passed, their eyes shut and lips trembling in silent prayer, as they had done many times before.

  It was long after the wailing wind had ceased, and the gloom that penetrated even the very walls had passed from the sky, that they tentatively went out to the silent street.

  In the wake of the banshee rode the corpse.

  It wore the uniform of the pistoleros, and its decapitated head was fixed in the crook of one rigidly tied-down arm. Its sightless eyes stared in empty, eternal horror. The other death-stiffened arm was twined about a slashed regimental pennon, its shreds flapping listlessly in the breeze.

  Salguero himself halted the lathered, wild-eyed steed. Steadying it, he gazed with lip-twitching disgust at the blood-drained, bearded head; the black, swollen lips and sickly-white boiled-egg eyes. A military pouch dangled from the corpse’s chest in grisly fashion, pinned there by the long thin blade of a misericord.

  “Oh, Jesus—” The lancer behind Salguero began to vomit.

  The captain tugged out the blade and gingerly grasped the pouch. Beneath it there was no heart, just a grisly hole in the corpse’s chest. His heart would turn up later, they knew, in some sick-joke revelation, after the fashion of their tormentor’s morbid sense of humor.

  The pouch identified the knight as a Corporal Alcala. The message he bore from Madrid was simple. Alcala had been part of a detachment of handpicked pistoleros who were to aid Salguero in ending this tedious campaign against the warlock who called himself Domingo Negro. High Command, it seemed, had grown impatient. Salguero was ordered to press an all-out attack on Castle Malaguer. But that was not what concerned the captain and his aides. It was, rather, the fresh, chicken-scrawled postscript, appended in blood below the king’s own seal:

  “You have your orders.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  As soon as Gonji crossed the bridge over the Segre River, he experienced something of a second—if secondary—homecoming. The windswept snowy plains of Aragon were a sight that stirred familiar memories. He knew this place, knew its people, its lore and legendry, its monsters and magics.

  He felt control and wariness in equal measure. Weakness here would surely usher one to madness or death or grim fates unsuitable to such rational description. But neither would it serve one to proceed with fatuous overconfidence.

  Thus, when he happened upon the body of a slain Spanish lancer, the samurai bowed somberly in deference to whatever valor the man had expended in his duty, and then appropriated the lancer’s razor-edged halberd, to supplant the one he had lost in the harsh mountain passes.

  Gonji left behind lands of Reformation strife, where it best availed him to remain neutral in his commitment, for a country ruled by the Roman Church. Here, faith in Iasu was sometimes strong, sometimes corrupted by fervent perversity of design, and always countered by faith in the formless Dark Power, here personified in Satan.

  Christian symbology was employed with uncertain power in certain circumstances. Where its power did not obtain, the warrior was left to his own resources: the might of his sword arm, the strength of
his courage, the depth of his experience.

  Tora’s hooves thumped easily across the crusted, barren plain as they departed the river road for the less traveled southwest track Gonji sought. Gaining it at mid-morn, Gonji soon encountered a small caravan of traders bound for Barcelona. These hucksters took a dim view of this singular foreign warrior with his formidable array of weaponry. Gonji doffed his eye-slitted sallet and bowed, engaging them in curt conversation. They cast many an edgy glance at his pistols, wicked halberd, and matched set of swords before considering selling him the few provisions he requested.

  The tinkle of his gold and the advantage of their numbers had just about won them over when a leathery-faced old duffer pointed out the wooden crucifix tied about Tora’s neck.

  “Sacrilege,” the merchant declared.

  “How do you know what my horse believes?” Gonji queried archly. The jest was lost on them. “In truth, I believe the power of Iasu this cross declares will ward off the evil ones. I can think of no simpler, more direct way of showing vampires and werewolves not to waste their time on me.”

  They sold him the few meager goods he asked for, charging prices that reflected their low esteem and drawing the line at the black powder he needed for his pistols.

  “Whatever your business,” one of them told him in parting, “mind that you steer well clear of the Valley of Barbaso.”

  “Hai. Domo arigato,” Gonji replied, to their befuddlement. He bowed and rode on, with their gun barrels quietly leveled at him until he was nearly out of sight.

  Later that same morning, a band of mounted hunters sold him a sinew bowstring for a fee that caused him to wince—the only change of expression he’d shown them, though their bows had been aimed at his breast for an uneasy while.

  They further offered to help him string the difficult three-man longbow for an additional charge. While Gonji had long since developed a bending method for stringing the great longbow unaided—though it was tricky—their mild jeering at his claim aroused his competitive instinct. So Gonji instead proposed a display of his skill in exchange for their free assistance.