by T. C. Rypel
Buey cuffed the Jappo with a short left. The samurai dropped back a step, cocked his injured leg, began snapping out with it, re-cocking, feinting high and low jabs. Then—
A quick straight front kick hit Buey just above the groin. His arm dropped reflexively. A curling left roundhouse kick blasted him in his already inflamed ribs. Breath whoofed from his lungs. The samurai changed legs again—he’d been bluffing—the right came round and cracked into Buey’s rib cage on the other side. A feint with a low kick—
A staggering wheel-kick crashed into Buey’s jaw, strangling his hooting supporters down to gasps. He heard whispers through cotton ticking, saw harsh scintillas in a blur of taper light. Dazed, he took a backward stumbling step. And landed hard on the floor again, his arms extended behind him, palms flat.
Layers of gauze lifted from his vision. The samurai stood before him, gathering his breath, hands on hips.
“No mas?” the Jappo asked softly.
Rage and adrenaline coursed along with the blood that pounded in Buey’s temples. He staggered to his feet, spat out a tooth, and came on. As he closed with the swaggering samurai, he saw Montoya raise a stool behind the tough little bastard and poise it for a blow.
Buey waded in quickly.
* * * *
Gonji had been forced to fight Buey. After two days of futile attempts to instill discipline in Salguero’s dissipated First Catalonian Lancers, he’d decided there was no other way.
Taunts and insults, poor efforts and intentional incompetence had greeted his endeavors to train the company for all-out engagement with the warlock’s powers. Fighting the champion around whom the soldiers rallied was the last recourse—short of killing one of them—at Gonji’s disposal by which he might win their respect. Apparently it had worked. They now set about their training in more businesslike fashion. But it had not been easy: Buey had possessed a surprising quickness to go with one of the hardest punches the samurai had ever suffered. One blow had rung his skull and left him with a headache for hours after the fight. And the poor landing after the jump-kick had hampered the healing of his already tender ankle.
In the sober aftermath of his victory, Gonji could not be sure what Buey’s anger and shame might bode for the future. But at least The Ox had proven himself a man of some honor:
He’d stopped the nefarious Montoya from crushing Gonji’s skull, grabbing the stool from the trooper’s hands and knocking him out with one meaty punch.
* * * *
As soon as Gonji had hired on as Salguero’s military adviser, he’d implemented a program of discipline and training at arms that immediately proved unpopular with the lancer company. He’d set them to rectifying their shiftless habits—from tending to personal cleanliness and unkempt uniforms to purging their rancid barracks; from setting the disgraceful stables aright to oiling and polishing their weapons.
The weapons training was undertaken with sullen skepticism as to its value: Of what use were swords and bows to the trooper equipped with the modern accoutrements of war—muskets and pistols? Gonji’s arguments concerning the long-range and rapid-fire advantages of bow and arbalest, as well as the close-range and mystical dependability of forthright steel in certain circumstances, were dismissed with snickers.
He nonetheless had pushed them through the training until his patience with their wayward attitudes had run out and he’d been forced to win their grudging respect and fear by taking on their champion.
Following the fight with Buey, Gonji succeeded in gaining their attention. They worked harder with their dusted-off bows, and both the samurai and his former mates took a nostalgic satisfaction in the mounted archery and fencing drills. Gonji, for his part, felt the creeping indifference and raw survivalism of the past weeks lifting before a renewed sense of duty and purpose. He threw himself into his leadership responsibilities lustily, though in quiet personal moments he was given to spates of melancholia: Bittersweet memories of the training of Vedun’s valiant militia troubled his sleep, made him mindful of the spiritual vacuity of the present tactical pursuits. He was glad, in these moments, for the presence of his old friend Captain Salguero and the wry wit of the loyal Sergeant Orozco.
The lancers proved to be quite capable marksmen with their pistols and arquebuses, and they took easily to the technique of alternating firing lines. But powder supplies were running low, and little could be wasted in the training. Similarly, many of them showed an aptitude for mounted archery; they were skilled horsemen, and some quickly learned to hit moving targets at considerable distances while in full gallop. However, arrows and crossbow quarrels, too, were in short supply, and Barbaso’s querulous fletcher grumbled incessantly at being pressed into working overtime at producing them. Gonji discovered with frustration that the more the man and his apprentices were pushed, the poorer the quality of their work became. As a youth in Japan, Gonji recalled, he had become accustomed to firing a thousand arrows daily during kyu-jutsu training; on a good day the troopers in Barbaso were fortunate to be able to launch two dozen.
Close combat training with sword and axe and halberd was unpopular from the outset. Less favored still, after a lancer’s shoulder was unhinged in a mounted pole-arm training accident.
Discipline and fighting ability increased rapidly as the days passed. A sudden warm spell graced the land, invigorating the lancers, making them mindful of the coming spring thaw. They worked still harder.
Some, though, were a constant problem, particularly the faction led by the insidious Montoya, who were ever lacking in sincerity and responded neither to coddling nor strictness. Montoya himself boasted the personality of an arrogant jackal and spent more time in the stockade than on duty. It was with vindictive satisfaction that Gonji received the news of Montoya’s ultimate removal from action: Ostensibly relieved of duty because he was ill, Montoya was discovered in the cellar of a private home, irretrievably drunk and in the embrace of a woman. The incorrigible trooper was detained pending a proper court martial for malingering and dereliction of duty. And it was only by virtue of Captain Salguero’s mercy that he was spared field execution, given the present dire circumstances. Divested of his malignant influence, even Montoya’s cronies now reluctantly displayed a fresh vigor in the training.
The townsfolk took a dim view of Gonji’s importance. He knew their thinking, for it was mirrored in their eyes, and he’d suffered it many times before: How could an inferior—and a heathen at that—be entrusted with a military advisership whose actions might decide Barbaso’s future? He heard secondhand that Father Robles was spreading discord among the town leaders over Salguero’s trust in this oriental killer with the reputation of a cold-blooded fiend.
Anita, the spoiled daughter of the late magistrate and Salguero’s erstwhile paramour, had taken up with Ferrugia, the ostler who tended the lancers’ horses. She never failed to be about the stables when the steeds were being retired for the day. Always ravishingly attired and scented—in a fashion that was almost pathetically comic in the earthy environment of the stables—and suggestively sidling up to the blushing Ferrugia, she would aim cold stares at the captain and at Gonji. The soldiery found her an amusing object of desire and took to calling her The Minx.
The solicitor Pablo Cardenas was an enigmatic figure. He said little and betrayed less by his actions, but he seemed ever present during the training, and Gonji fancied that he could always feel the man’s critical stare at his back. And in that respect Cardenas was much like the general citizenry.
They were an indolent lot, it occurred to Gonji. They grumbled endlessly about dwindling winter stores, the long absence from Barbaso of chapmen and merchant caravans, and the terrifying oppression of the warlock who called himself Black Sunday. But they seemed curiously content, he had decided, if apprehensive.
Something troubled Gonji. These people were quite possibly not telling all they knew of the w
arlock’s works and intent. It made no sense for the warlock to attack them, for it seemed he had nothing to gain. And their vituperative rebuff of Gonji’s curiosity—their dismissal of his question as meaningless on the grounds that evil never needed a rationale for its slitherings—satisfied him not at all.
They distrusted him, as he did them. But as far as he could tell, they hadn’t yet sold their humanity or their souls. Or those of their children. Not like that town near Avignon, where he had waited too long to act upon his suspicions.
And as for the Archmage Domingo Malaga y Colicos, he remained a mysterious presence, hovering over the territory and inspiring nightmares. Yet during the two weeks of tactical and weapons training, there were but two supernatural incidents.
Once, after a morning hunting party had come running back, shaken and empty-handed, the midday sky turned as dark as the ocean’s unplumbed depths. A hollow, mocking laughter rang out in the sky, diminishing gradually as the sun burned away the darkness.
The second occurrence was more deadly.
During a practice cavalry skirmish on the plains to the west of the town, Gonji saw his first glimpse of the hideous wailing banshee who brought the trembling death. Upon seeing the unfurling of the banshee’s ghostly cloak, which spread across the width of the valley, the troop ignored Gonji’s shouted order to stand their ground and broke for town in mass panic. Gonji remembered something of this apparition’s meaning, but when he saw the cold fury in the banshee’s fathomless, hungry eyes, when he smelled her graveyard stench and felt the sudden nakedness of his companions’ abandonment, his confidence was shattered.
He, too, fled her icy gray clutch and her blood-freezing wail, cursing all the while.
When they were huddled in the stables, breathless and sweating, Gonji berated them for having run, angrier with himself than with the troopers. He roared at them to overwhelm the nagging voice of his own guilt. He recounted the banshee’s lore, asking why they had panicked and why they now felt safe; further, explaining what they must do when, surely, they must meet her gaze again.
And he knew that he must prove by example the truth of what he claimed, if truth it was.
Two men and their mounts were overtaken by the banshee that day. Her hand had touched them, tainted them with her curse, knelling their premature doom. Their quivering agony had seemed interminable, abated later by paralysis. And at long last, death.
A woman looked into the eyes of one of the dead men, and what she saw there drove her to hysterics.
It was the imprint of the banshee’s face.
* * * *
“Remember,” Gonji shouted to the marshaled column of thirty lancers, their horses shuddering and snorting in the chill morning air, “this is a military expedition, si, but not a siege force. If attacked, we defend ourselves, but we do not initiate attack. If possible, I want to talk with this warlock, reason with him, if he’s a reasonable man.”
The excited townsfolk had turned out en masse in the cold blue dawn to see them off. They swarmed along both sides of the main street, hushing one another to hear the samurai’s words, whispering anxiously, speculating as to why the Oriental rode at the head of the troop alongside Captain Salguero. Military protocol seemed to have been swept aside before this arrogant heathen who went by many infamous names.
Gonji had arranged the display with Salguero’s sanction. Though the captain was still in command, it was Gonji who was fortified with the only useful experience of Domingo’s wiles. He was their scout, their guide—and, by his own choice, their point man, chief target of whatever menaces they would encounter. He spoke long and loud before the gathered throng, laying out their plans in a manner anyone of military experience would find foolhardy, confounding of all security measures.
But that was his intention. The past had taught him to be suspicious, and he acted under the assumption that the warlock would have operatives in Barbaso. If he could convince Domingo of their peaceful intent, it could save many lives.
Any advantage would be welcome.
They rode out of town to cheers and well wishes. Soon their thundering hoofbeats and clanking armament drove the sounds of Barbaso from their ears.
They proceeded north through the valley, the plains rising gradually toward the hillocks where nestled the dread Castle Malaguer. Pennons snapped in the crisp air as they rode, their colors proclaiming King Philip’s Royal Lancers. Gonji and Sergeant Orozco rode to the right of the column, wary of the track ahead. Captain Salguero headed the lancers, looking both proud and battle-weary in his gleaming cavalry armor. Now and then he would cast Gonji questioning glances, as if he were an unseasoned officer appealing to a superior for direction. Gonji was a bit unsettled by this nascent indecisiveness in a once forceful commander. It made him mindful of the nervous young lieutenant named Valdez, to whom Salguero had entrusted the fortifying of Barbaso. Well into the previous night, Valdez had persisted in asking Salguero to advise him of what to do in the face of sundry imponderables. Cluttering his thinking with the shapes of nameless fears.
That was how Salguero looked now, and it boded ill.
They rode without incident till the noonday sun glared off the hard crusted snow. Stopping to eat and rest the horses, the men exchanged pointless banter while looking to the hills apprehensively. In days to come, Gonji would often recall the shortness of that morning’s ride, compressed in memory by the enormity and number of the wonders that followed during that eventful day.
As they rumbled over the snowbound savannah in early afternoon, the terrain began to alter. Subtly at first, copses of trees and outcroppings of rock where none should have been. But then the horizon line began to shift, to grow, to sprout new features seemingly with every stride of their mounts. Mesas could be seen now in the distance, stuttering across the lower edge of the hazy sky. The soldiers muttered in disbelief and rubbed their eyes as the cliffs grew unnaturally before them. There could be only one explanation: The troop was riding through another spatial distortion like the one Gonji had experienced at the windmill.
The samurai had warned them of this phenomenon, had cited it as one example of a situation wherein their guns would not avail them, for they could not follow the trajectory of a bullet to gauge target distance. But even so forewarned, Salguero slowed his column, his courage failing at the eerie sight, until at last he stopped them.
He clumped across to Gonji and Orozco, his face ashen as he spoke in a tremulous voice.
“This—this is not Spain.”
Gonji nodded curtly. “It seems that way. But by the sun we see that we still travel northward. I say we go on.”
The captain seemed about to expostulate, but he bobbed his head and wheeled back to the column.
They advanced at a slower gait, the mesas nonetheless creeping upward strangely against the hem of the sky, minute by minute.
The trees thickened. Gonji halted them and steered them off the trail to swing wide through deeply packed snow. The lancers ceased their grumbling over this inconvenience when Gonji pointed out to them the coiling tendrils of a dormant luna carnivora plant. His graphic explication of its habits silenced their carping and instilled more confidence in the samurai’s guidance. Many troopers now watched him to catch his reactions to the trail ahead.
The column was thrown into whinnying, curvetting disarray when the first of the faery-ring maidens appeared under the naked poplars at their left, to be followed shortly by two more. The ring-stones glowed garishly on the powdered snow, sparkling with rainbow hues like hypnotic diamonds.
Gonji raised a hand, and Salguero shouted orders that the men should reassemble without a look to the seductive apparitions.
Gonji rode toward the ring that held the first seated, pouting maiden. Mournful blue eyes regarded him from under a languid sweep of long golden hair.
“Ride on,” she said in a
mellifluous voice. “You have not the courage to free me from my bondage.”
Orozco shuffled up beside Gonji, eyeing the woman suspiciously. “Is this—”
“Hai,” Gonji answered, and then to the woman: “But it’s not courage that will free you, is it? Orozco, do you have silver for me?”
The faery-ring maiden’s eyes widened, and her lips parted to bare her teeth. A look of inhuman madness etched her face.
The sergeant reached into a pocket and extracted a silver coin. He held it out to Gonji, one eyebrow cocked in curiosity. “What do you want it for?”
Gonji didn’t respond but pried the coin from Orozco’s tight grasp. “I’ll owe it to you.”
The maiden began to hiss like a viper to see the glint of the coin. Gonji tossed it into the snow about three feet outside the twinkling ring. The woman executed an inhuman leap, as if launched by a concealed spring in the snow where she sat, landing outside the ring to claw in the snow after the charm-like piece of pure silver.
At once the glow faded from the stones. They winked out of sight. An alarming transformation occurred, the horses bucking in primal terror such that Orozco was thrown back into the snow with a jangle of armament.
The thing that writhed before them, unprotected now that it had left the magical ring, was not a woman. The dead young woman’s body had returned to an erupted grave to resume its eternal sleep. The slug-like monstrosity that had stolen her form now rolled and quivered in the snow, corrupting as the troopers watched, aghast.
Outcries of unabashed horror—gasps of revulsion—as the vicious appendages lashed and twined in impotent rage like willow branches in a cyclone. Never again would they plunge into an unwary traveler’s body to devour him from the inside out as he died an agonizing death, living tentacles boring in and sucking at his still warm vitals.