by T. C. Rypel
Contempt filled the glade as they stalked each other cautiously, the wind a vortex that sledded around the clearing. Simon seemed about to respond, but Gonji grimaced and cut him short. “You think you have just reason to be bitter because your fellow man has made you an outcast? I could teach you a thing or two about loneliness, Herr Beast-with-the-Soul-of-a-Man—or is it the other way around? You think you’re the only man who ever felt starved for the approval, the companionship, the affection of his fellows? Do you know what it’s like to be a half-breed, to have no life of meaning on any continent? Those people are going to die back there in Vedun, and their deaths will be owing much to you, you and your misdirected vengeance—”
The samurai broke eye contact with him, turned his head away, his breath coming in strained pulls now. “To so lose control like this goes against all my noble training, and I would as lief die by my own hand in this spot as bare my emotions. Yet I can do nothing right now to disguise my revulsion for you....”
Simon stopped pacing and glared at him, his hard gaze transforming, for just a moment, into a curious mix of sympathy and uncertainty. But Gonji saw nothing of it.
The tall man looked down at the bow and quiver at his feet. “Why don’t you pick up your things...and go now.”
The sheathed katana’s hilt was squeezed in a grip that might have throttled a man, as Gonji spat a choked curse and regained his harmony after a struggle. Again he met the mystery man’s eyes, and now his own eyes of black marble flashed with implied threat.
Do what you’ve come to do, by whatever means....
“How can you worship as you claim?” Gonji queried. “You make a shrine of your self-pity and worship there.”
Simon’s eyebrows arched in quiet, rising petulance. “You’ve said what you’ve come to say. Now go—”
“Aren’t followers of Iasu supposed to band together for their common good, for the struggle against the evil things in the world? Even the civilians in Vedun have abandoned their hand-wringing for—”
“The things of which you speak are quite complex,” Simon responded hotly. “I doubt that you’re qualified to discuss them.”
“So?” Gonji affected a coy archness. “I believe I’m educated enough in your worship to make such comment. But no matter....” He considered something, nodded resolutely. “If you refuse to help, maybe I’ll go back to Vedun and tell everyone what kind of a...thing they harbored.”
Dangerous territory. Simon began ambling toward him unsteadily, mayhem stirring in his eyes of flaming iron.
“I can remedy that right now, infidel,” he grated. “I can tear your wagging tongue from your throat.”
Gonji stopped and steeled himself, returning Sardonis’ wilting gaze. “Ah, intimidation—the bully’s stock in trade. You think you can frighten me the way you frighten other men?” Wisdom. Although the bold words had caused Simon to halt and study him closely, Gonji changed the subject without transition: “Will you help these people?”
“Nein.”
“Will you help them for protecting your secret all this time, for suffering because of your vendetta?”
“They care nothing for me; I care nothing for them. They hate me, as do all other men.”
“Nonsense!” Gonji roared. “You hate yourself, what you are, but you can’t deal with it like a man so you punish others for your guilt. Will—you—help undo the trouble you’ve made for them?”
“What’s happened has happened—I’m not to blame. What about your meddling, slope-head?”
The samurai bridled at the insult. “I’m trying the best I know how, using whatever power I can claim to help. You’re sitting imperiously in a cave and slithering out at night to satisfy your bloodlust—Christian! Is this what your faith means to you? The prophetess spoke of you as the Wrath of God. I look at you and what do I see—a symbol of impotence. Even the priest Dobret told me to tell you to help.” Simon froze, taken aback by the statement. “Hai,” Gonji continued, “it was he who became my last link in the journey which led to you. He said that I should enlist your power against the evil that’s descended here, and that you should avoid personal vengeance.” His voice trembled slightly in delivering the half-lie. But conviction rushed back fast; the priest couldn’t have known what would become of this business, and surely he would have urged assistance.
Simon emitted a small gasp. “By the Christ and all the saints—I swear that Tralayn’s restive spirit has infused itself in you. Don’t you understand—any of you—that what you ask of me is utter madness? Leave me be! Leave me alone with my shameful curse before it destroys you all!”
Deadlocked, stubbornly determined each in his way, they stood not ten feet apart, expressions set like treasure-vault doors.
Gonji knew he was defeated, his blustering performance failing him, his appeals to reason muddled and ineffectual, his last-ditch effort at trenchant emotional probing unable to penetrate this enigmatic being’s lifetime conditioning of self-centered defense. He sighed at length and voiced something that had been nagging him.
“All-recht. I’ve wasted enough of my time on you. But something bothers me—”
“I’ve nothing more to say to you,” Simon stated flatly, turning his back to him and starting for the cave. “Take your gutless animal and ride off.”
Gonji raised his voice, a sarcastic quality seeping in. “I know that the chains in the cave are broken, and the full moon is scant nights off. Yet you stay. What are you planning to do on the Night of Chains?”
Simon halted, his shoulders bunching with tension, the hair at his neck bristling eerily in the moonlight. “What I plan,” he said haltingly, “is no concern of yours, infidel.” He stepped toward the cave again, more deliberately now, the limp marring the smoothness of his gait.
Gonji’s wrath seethed within him like a riptide, to be so dismissed. “So?” he cried. “Then you’ll continue to skulk around like some kind of a night-fiend, kill whom you please, and slink back to your cave, neh? That’s very gallant of you. Meanwhile, others will be put to the sword for your crimes. My, what a hero! And then on that night—on the full moon—you’ll give the beast his head—” His voice rose in irate pitch, crashing through the bleak space between them until Simon turned, an ugly grimace on his countenance. “—and there’ll be kills a-plenty, you dung-eating bastard!”
Might as well finish it....
Gonji’s eyes narrowed as Simon stalked him now with teeth grinding. “These people don’t need monsters to help them. They need men.”
The air filled with ozone as a terrible arc of lightning shattered the sky above the hills, and a hot blast of wind buffeted Gonji’s face just ahead of the man’s charge.
“I’m not a monster, you yellow devil!”
And suddenly the samurai was falling back, sword drawn, against the other’s vicious attack. Simon’s short blade lashed at him with propeller fury, a crude, emotion-charged power behind the broad, wild strokes.
Despairing, uncertain, Gonji gave ground, slipping and deflecting the mighty blows with deft two-handed parries. Simon’s rudimentary berserker style, all cursing and animal strength, repeatedly offered openings by which Gonji might leave him unlimbed; or so it seemed—the return speed of his sword arm was remarkable.
Yet Gonji found his head filled with conflicting thoughts, the enemies of the ken-jutsu fencer. He could not empty his mind, relax, and allow instinct free rein. He had lost. Failed, in his intent in coming here. And the mocking thought that he had forged no alternative to failure recurred, staying his thews. For he had not come here to kill this mysterious being, the possible object of his time-honored quest.
But neither had he come to this place to die....
Wicked blue sparks showered the battleground as the blades sang off each other, and Gonji pressed an attack of his own aimed at breaking the tall man’s frenzied resolve. Somehow he had to bring this senseless engagement to an un-fatal end. He must disarm Simon, wound him if necessary.
But fi
rst and foremost he must remain alive himself. A sensation of bone-deep weariness responded to his need for renewed strength and second wind.
Gonji leapt back a pace, whirling the Sagami in a flashing figure-eight of deadly steel, flicking the katana from one hand to the other with an effortless grace intended to distract, to divert, to intimidate his opponent with the masterful skill the motions bespoke.
Still Simon advanced. Slashing, growling, his unschooled but effective technique losing nothing of its surging, predatory energy. His eyes of chipped silver bored into Gonji’s.
The samurai tried a new tack: He stood his ground, the Sagami at middle guard before him, and attempted to address Simon’s whirling blows with small efficient parries alone. But the passive stance failed him; Simon’s brutish power tore through each parry in such a way that Gonji was quickly forced to fall back bodily or be struck by the barely deflected strokes. He could hear the fierce whinnying of the roncin at his back now. Made out the pounding thumps of her hoof-falls and knew his danger of being trampled—
With a spinning high parry, he twisted Simon’s broadsword over his head and spun around the tall man, passing his opened ribs without riposting. Now Simon’s back was to the mare as he half-turned to reengage. She cried out in fear of his demonic presence.
“There!” Gonji shouted, dropping the Sagami into earth-pointed rear guard. “I could have spilled your bowels. Stop this now.”
Simon snarled. “Not so easily done as you think, infidel.” He charged again. A deep lunge that Gonji turned aside, flicking his blade arrogantly at the other’s chin.
“Again!” the samurai stormed. “Stop this madness and we’ll—”
A rapid feint and vicious cutover that Gonji barely evaded—
He could taste the tang of steel as it sizzled past his eyes. His stomach rolled and leapt to his throat. Now thought fled and impulse reigned.
They were at last united in purpose: One of them would die.
A bone-rattling clash of arcing swords, followed by another. Gonji caught Simon’s next hard sally on his shrieking blade and turned it, but the powerful blow defeated his parry and slapped him solidly on the left arm with the broadsword’s flat forte.
The sharp sting galvanized him. The samurai shot forward and twisted his katana with a whiplike snap, cutting open his opponent’s shoulder.
Simon growled and contorted with shock and pain, Gonji drawing back a step and holding his blade steady before him. The beast-man looked slowly from the wound to Gonji, and on his face there dawned the sudden terrible resolve of the wounded animal. His lower jaw thrust forward in a display of primitive anger and glinting teeth. A devil’s-breath wind lapped the clearing again, then—
What followed came in fragmented sensory impressions to Gonji: Simon—the wind—silver-gray eyes looking past him, washing over with a new focus—bristling hair and lobeless ears flattening like a cowed dog’s....
Simon abruptly dropped the sword and launched into Gonji like a bighorn ram. The samurai saw a fleeting glimpse of the frenzied gray mare, stayed his descending katana. Then Simon’s head butted his midsection, and he went down hard on his back, losing the Sagami’s grip, breath whoofing out of him, knees jerking up reflexively, coruscating lights filling the black sky above him.
And he felt, more than saw, the great dark shape that soared overhead, skreeing in premature triumph. The treetops bent stiffly into the sucking draw of the wind, and the wyvern flapped upward on supernatural wing-strength, looped across the face of the waxing moon for the return dive.
“Get out of here, idiot! Get into the trees!” Simon was howling in French. But Gonji couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Simon’s life-saving tackle had knocked the wind from his diaphragm. He could only lie, paralyzed, listening to the screams of the roncin in its death throes, the sizzle of burning horse flesh. The skirring of thirty-foot batwings....
“Come on—crawl—do something!”
Gonji sucked hard for breath, but little came. He saw Simon dart across his limited field-of-view and heard him begin calling out to the flying dragon, words of challenge and insult. Then the memory of the creature’s ruinous saliva and excrement pushed him through his paralysis and into a desperate scramble over the pine-scented earth. He found the Sagami and dragged it with him toward the tree line.
Behind him, Simon dared the wyvern’s strafe. The monstrous familiar of Mord took up the challenge, knifed down at the poised mystery man, flaming saliva roiling in its throat glands.
Simon held his ground, cursing the beast. Then when he could wait no longer, he began to dart from side to side into the center of the glade, against the creature’s flight path, closing the ground between them rapidly. He snatched up his downed sword. The wyvern’s head coiled back; unused to dealing with a prey that chose to advance against it, it jetted two quick darts of crackling saliva that splashed the glade, searing the grasses but missing the bold adventurer.
In one motion Simon cocked and threw his short sword like a dagger, just as the creature passed above him, not a rod above the ground.
It squalled and twisted its sinuous neck as the blade glanced off a taloned hind leg. Serpent eyes of solid black—Mord’s eyes—riveted Simon with spears of demon-hate. Blatting a clump of corrosive excrement that landed twenty yards from the scrambling Gonji, the monster undulated its leathery wings, twisted into a tight arc for a return engagement with its new tormentor.
Gonji reached the trees, panting, on his knees, rubbing his aching abdomen. He drew breath in hungry gulps, grimacing at the reeking stench of the beast’s waste that burned the grasses in a spreading circle nearby. He saw Simon race toward the center of the glade after his fallen sword.
The wyvern bore down on him.
“Iye,” he whispered helplessly. “Run, you fool! Run like the wind!”
Feeling desperate and helpless, he watched Simon slide on the ground, retrieve the useless steel, then launch into a mad zigzag sprint toward the nearer, eastern side of the glade, as the wyvern arched its long neck and began to spit rapid darts of lethal yellow fluid.
The samurai’s heart froze when it seemed the man had been struck. But the jet had passed him by, and with that amazing sprinting speed Gonji had seen from him once before, Simon gained the trees.
But the forest was sparse to the east. And the wyvern’s night vision was keen.
Gonji remembered the bow and quiver, ran after them, his breath regulating now. Grabbing up the weapons, he lashed the quiver to his back and ran toward the sound of the monster’s flight. In the trees: the chilling hiss of its fulsome armament.
Gonji paused to listen an instant, staring overhead, cautious both for the beast itself and the crackle of its foul excreta. With startling suddenness the wyvern barrel-rolled over his concealed position. Gooseflesh flared over his body as he broke from the trees and into a smaller clearing; anything to avoid its direct flight path.
He nocked one of the shafts impregnated with worm’s venom. “Simon,” he called. “Are you hurt?”
No response.
The wyvern cried out keeningly and in a flash was nearly over him again, blotting out the gibbous moon with its tenebrous bulk.
It spotted him. Too late. It was already past when its bowels erupted in an errant dropping that melted the upper branches of a shielding pine, running down its trunk in unnatural putrefaction.
Gonji scowled. Sighting and pulling with desperate speed, he launched the poison-tipped shaft. He missed, the creature’s ponderous bulk already covered by the eastern pine-peaks.
“Cholera,” he swore, slapping his thigh in frustration. He rubbed his sore abdomen, fought back a mild nausea. Drew another arrow and began to run deeper into the intermittent bower, his sashed swords scraping through the brush.
“Simon,” he spat in a growling whisper. Still no answer. He could hear the wyvern’s wind-rush low over the treetops, but its position was lost to him.
A brook trickled through a delve on his left, the
trees thinning more now. Thoughts whirling, heart racing, Gonji sprinted along the bank where a stand of oaks lent partial cover, though the farther bank lay bare to the raining death from the skies. At the eastern end of the brook the enormous trunk of a fallen oak, split by lightning, bridged the delve at head height.
“Skreeee!”
Gonji leapt about, saw Mord’s shining black eyes in the antlered head that careened down with a vengeance. The jaws gaped as it sailed in, slowing to aim, neck poised. It hawked a hissing stream of saliva. Gonji was on the move, cutting, jigging, gurgling with the frantic effort, a clothyard shaft nocked on the run.
The wyvern slowed to a flapping hover, short yapping barks aimed at the samurai as it poised its bowels to blat their filth.
Gonji pulled hard and fired as he ran—
The beast cried out in shock, the war arrow needling a wing. The same wing Gonji had penetrated once before. It flapped hard, gaining altitude, the shaft ripping free. But now...a new sensation to the sorcerer’s familiar: the worm-thing’s potent venom. Spreading, irritating, even with the arrow loosed.
The wyvern began to shriek and flap at an ungainly stroke, battling the numbness in the wing. It circled erratically, squawking its fear and wrath.
It turned, favoring the injured wing, to reengage the hated samurai, who reloaded and awaited it in the delve.
“You,” came the shout from the forest.
Gonji half-turned. “Simon?”
“Hit it again. Challenge it. Bring that bastard lower.”
Gonji could ponder his meaning but briefly as the flying demon roared down on the delve, a hundred yards off, already spewing rapid-fire jets of burning saliva. The distance closed, the scorching saliva darts blazing nearer with a tracer-effect in the bubbling stream.
Breath held in check, Gonji pulled, arced the bow downward in the time-tested Zen manner, becoming one with his bow, one with his purpose. He gritted his teeth—
A seething splash of feces between his feet in the brook—Gonji’s face a mask of open terror and revulsion—