by T. C. Rypel
Gonji was stung by the young smith’s reminder of how he had set Julian to watching Phlegor as a diversion. But he saw Wilf’s shoulders bunch as he added in a near whisper:
“I’m...sorry, Gonji. I didn’t mean—”
“What I meant was that Mord would love to have another subject to ply his evil magick on. Go off like a child in a tantrum and that’s how you’ll end up.”
Wilf nodded glumly. “What did he do to him...to Phlegor?”
Gonji shook his head. “It would be well to keep the news of his fate from the others, neh? Simon stayed back to bury him.”
“What happened to your horses?” Wilf asked.
“Mine met with an accident, and he didn’t have one. Did you find Tora for me?”
“Hai,” Wilf responded, bright-eyed and smiling. “He’s with the others we were trying to bring up when those rogues stopped us.”
They rounded the bend and could see in the murky distance the place where the brief action had occurred. There was no movement there now.
“They’re gone,” Wilf said in mild surprise.
“That’s good. Your shooting may bring more soldiers.” Gonji leaned over Wilf’s shoulder and scanned the road ahead. Seeing nothing threatening, he continued: “Quickly now, tell me what’s happened since yesterday.”
Wilf recounted the busy hours: the surreptitious movement of armament and supplies from the now unsalutary catacombs; the securing of Vedun by Klann’s troops; the beefing up of the city garrison; the restriction of movement to and from the city—Klann’s paranoia ran rampant now, as well it might; the systematic search throughout the city for Gonji (which amused the samurai no end; Julian’s discomfiture was a balm to his anguished spirit); and the surrender of the location of a weapons cache in the foothills by the now penitent and cooperative craft guildsmen.
Gonji received the news of the unblocking of the catacombs access tunnels with enthusiasm. The catacombs were yet of strategic usefulness. The southern valley tunnel had been unblocked to permit Gonji to journey to Simon’s cave. It had been reshaped to admit one horse and rider at a time. In addition, the northern foothill tunnel and the passage to the vestibule chamber that led up into the city had now been opened to allow humans through; however, creatures of unnatural size from Mord’s mystic arsenal would find it difficult to pass the formidable spiked redoubts constructed in some of the tunnel’s arches and adits.
“That’s good,” Gonji agreed. “I should have thought of it. Whose idea was it?”
“Michael’s.”
“Mmm. Encouraging to see that he’s in a military state of mind. We’ll need that. How is his leg?”
“Better, but he’ll limp, there’s no doubt. Lydia’s with child,” Wilf added matter-of-factly, forgetting it almost at once.
Gonji was struck by this news; the reality of the Benedettos’ marriage and its stumbling block to his desires was abruptly driven home with the unrelenting finality of a death sentence. He smiled crookedly, had to backtrack swiftly to catch up with Wilf’s train of thought.
“—pole-arms were dismantled and hafts were brought up separately from the weapon heads.”
“Eh? Oh—good idea, for ease of movement. Very clever.”
“Ja, that was Roric Amsgard’s. Then the armor, and the big weapons, and the really dangerous materiel—pistols, shot, powder, bows—those were a problem until....” Wilf shook his head, wincing at some indelicacy.
“Well?” Gonji pressed.
“God forgive us. Poor Master Flavio would have—”
Wilf peered back over his shoulder, knowing the pain of the memory he had evoked. “Sorry, Gonji.”
The samurai stared down at the racing, rain-stippled track, making no reply.
“But anyway,” Wilf continued, “there were so many dead after the craftsmen’s rebellion. The chapel—the city—filled with coffins until the funerals. A lot of those coffins...don’t contain bodies....”
Gonji’s face brightened. He chuckled dryly. “And whose ghoulish idea was that?”
Wilf snorted. “Your braying chum Paille’s.”
“Hah! I might’ve known.”
“Gonji—” Wilf grew deadly serious. “Have you given any more thought to the traitor? To whom it might be?”
Gonji was slow to respond. “Hai.”
“You don’t think it’s my father, do you?”
The odd frankness of Wilf’s question surprised him. “Iye—why do you ask?”
“Oh, nothing. I’ve just...overheard talk. Well, not talk, exactly, but...you know, the way people look at someone they don’t trust. And Papa sure hasn’t done much to inspire trust lately, what with all these secrets of his. He hasn’t made a move to appeal to Klann for peace or to tell him about Mord’s treachery—what we suspect, you know? He wants to take my head off when I bring it up. He’s become unapproachable.”
Gonji thought awhile before answering. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Wilf,” he said, scratching an itch beside his sore belly. “Words of caution against Mord are going to be hard to form without tipping the militia’s hand. And I certainly don’t suspect your father of being traitorous. No spy would behave as mysteriously as he has.
“Nein....” His gaze lofted to a distant vision. “I don’t think it’s anyone in the council. Only the council members knew that there was no hope of Rorka raising outside assistance. So eliminating him was a futile action. It must be someone in the rank and file, I suppose, who reports to Mord. But who?” His fists balled up on his thighs.
“Do you have a plan now?” Wilf asked. “Do you know what we’ll be doing next?”
“Hai, sort of a plan,” Gonji allowed, exhaling wearily. “I doubt that it will be very popular among your countrymen.”
They reached the area where the fight had transpired. Quiet now, but for the falling rain. Dark blood-streaks whirled and eddied in puddles under soft moonglow. Drag marks and myriad hoof prints filled in rapidly with water.
“Who did you leave in charge?”
Wilf blinked, embarrassed. “I—Nagy, I guess.”
“Come on,” Gonji said. “If they were smart, they took the horses back down into the valley.”
They cut a virgin path through tangled congeries of shedding larches that left them soaking by the time they reached the valley floor. Turning eastward for about a hundred yards, they found the party of four with the shuddering horses in tow, awaiting Wilf’s return with short-tempered uncertainty.
“Gonji!” several voices whispered in relief. Happy wet faces glowed aboard prancing steeds. Only Vlad seemed sullen and unimpressed.
“I see they’re delighted to see me back,” Wilf said sarcastically.
Gonji snickered. “So how do you like the mantle of leadership?” They could make out the swathed body lashed to Tadeusz’s saddle. “Who’s that?” Gonji asked. Wilf told him who it must be, and he nodded grimly, but then the others were shushing them and waving them closer.
“Helmets,” Nick Nagy grated harshly when they had closed the distance. “Across the ravine to the south. Jiri saw them.”
“Klann’s troops?” Gonji inquired.
“I don’t think so. The helms were sort of...spired.” Jiri described a pointed effect in the air above his sallet.
Gonji mounted a dead mercenary’s horse and, waving off accompaniment, trotted to the ravine some small distance to the south, swords at the ready.
The trees parted at the northern end, and the samurai immediately espied the mounted party at the farther end.
Turks. Three of them. An armed military scouting party. This was the northernmost incursion by Turks Gonji had seen in his considerable time in the territory. They were growing bolder, their fears of the haunted Carpathians melting in the heat of acquisitive passion. With the instinct of vultures, they had sniffed out Vedun’s harrowing situation and now lay back in wait.
The locals would call this a bad omen at the very least, and Gonji decided to minimize the import of the sighting.
<
br /> The Turks saw him and halted at once in their low chatter. Eyes and armament gleaming, they held their steeds steady. Gonji made no effort at concealment, his posture as stony and imposing as the mountains behind him. He had left his longbow with Wilf, but he had not come to fight. Looking back over his shoulder and hissing as if in command, he swept his long sword out of its sheath and pointed it at the Turks. Instantly, they wheeled their mounts and clumped off into the forest.
Rapacious bastards. Scouting, no doubt, and ordered to avoid any fight. Could Vedun be any more oppressed?
A peculiar feeling seized Gonji. He suddenly found himself wishing for one last swoop by the dead wyvern. One strafe at the Turks’ departing backsides.
He shook his head to reclaim his senses. Turning and trotting back toward his comrades, he acknowledged to himself the awesome scale of the dark powers now arrayed against the ancient city on the Carpathian plateau. Experienced a fatalistic portent of doom. Cursed the karma that had befallen Vedun, his loyalty to the city aroused anew.
When he returned he found Wilf and Vlad embroiled in an argument over the farmer’s having brought a forbidden pistol along, instigating the deadly incident.
“They recognized his horse,” Dobroczy kept repeating, indicating Tora, who had now turned his head and was pawing in docile approval of Gonji’s returning presence.
“And we might have convinced them otherwise,” Wilf argued. “Now we can’t get these horses up tonight whether—”
“I like staying alive,” Vlad snarled.
“Shut up, idiots!” Gonji railed. They all snapped to attention. He seemed different now. Sterner.
“You’re in more trouble than you realize, and there’s no time for your petty quarreling.” The samurai fairly strutted before them astride the borrowed horse, his eyes like marbled lava.
“Now I’ll give you your orders, and there’ll be no more...squabbling.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The vestibule chamber, a massive cavern that led to the catacombs, smelled of huddled bodies, pungent moss and earth. Dirty yellow light lapped the stifling air from torches ignited in wall cressets. Hats were removed and jerkins pulled open among the men. Sweat glistened on foreheads, and eyes glittered with anxiety.
Coughs erupted in the thick smoky air. Voices muttered like the gurgling cross-currents of intersecting brooks. In several languages it was rumored that the mighty man of valor had returned. The tall man with the super-normal powers. He who had battered the huge Field Commander Ben-Draba, broken the warrior’s neck before whole companies of his men, in broad daylight; then had leapt the fifteen-foot curtain wall that girdled Vedun, despite the arrow that had found its mark in his flesh.
Simon, they said his name was. Simon, the Beast-Man.
The by-now well-known, accented voice came in German, speaking words that muffled their chatter, mesmerizing them:
“So it’s come to this—fight or die.”
The samurai stood on a table near their center. He was dressed in only his breeches and sleeveless tunic. His daisho were sashed at his waist, their hilts in that ominous near-horizontal angle. Arms crossed over his chest, topknot bristling, he looked down at them imperiously.
An overseer. An accuser.
Some among the massed citizens glared back to hear his tone.
“Fight or die,” he reiterated. “Or perhaps there’s another way. One that nonetheless involves fighting...and dying.”
His gaze lofted over their heads as he turned slowly on the table. Stopping when his glance fell on the iron door that leaned against the rock wall, he peered into the gloom of the catacomb. Knew that his posted guards would be on watch within—faithful bushi who stood on duty at the tunnel exits. He had told them what to expect.
He rolled his vision back again over the audience, arranged in a semicircle of rough-hewn tables. No one dared sit too near the vestibule doorway, the portal through which Baron Rorka had so recently fallen in unnatural death.
Long faces and hollow eyes looked up to meet his stolid gaze. They were all here. All those he had called for. Those Gonji trusted the most—and the least. Few had known that he would be presiding over the conclave. For now whatever secrecy and surprise he could muster would be necessary.
Front and center sat Michael and Lydia Benedetto. The young heir apparent to Council Elder Flavio’s position cradled a crutch at his side. Flanking them were Garth Gundersen and his three sons on the one side; Milorad and Anna Vargo on the other. On Gonji’s left Roric Amsgard sat, an arm around the shoulders of his oldest son. Near them were Jiri Szabo and his betrothed, Greta. On the opposite side were Aldo Monetto, the lithe axe-wielder, and his ever-present companion, the dour archer Karl Gerhard. Deeper in the crowd were the sullen faces of Vlad Dobroczy, heading up a small contingent of farmers; and Paolo Sauvini, accompanied by his master, the blind wagoner, Ignace Obradek. Paolo seemed uncomfortable this night, withdrawn. It was rare indeed when the swarthy, ambitious Neapolitan eschewed the front ranks. Behind him Gonji could make out the hateful black eyes of Boris Kamarovsky, and Gonji wondered what those eyes would register to see the state of his late boss, the ill-fated Phlegor. Berenyi and Nagy sat at either hand of Nick’s wife, Magda. Nary an insult passed between them, for the moment. The bald pate of Anton, last surviving Rorka Gray knight, reflected the lambent torchlight from where he sat near one wall, at the end of a bench on which the entire Eddings family was ensconced, the faces of the men like facets of the same gem: father Stuart, brooding son William, brother John. John’s petite, fair-haired wife, Sarah, seemed dwarfed and frightened by it all. All on that side of the cavern appeared comically tugged as if by invisible strings, their ears cocked toward the cold, red-veined wall, where Alain Paille leaned with hands behind his back. Vedun’s quirky genius, the city’s most versatile translator, snapped out impatient interpretations in any language needed.
“What do you mean, sensei?” Monetto queried tentatively. “About...another way?”
Supportive murmurs.
“I mean that it is like this,” Gonji clarified. “We can foster no more hope of surprise, and time has failed us as an ally. There will be no more training. Every one among you must trust to what he has learned in the training thus far. All Garth’s efforts at seeing Klann have been rebuffed, so sorry. Even I had great hope for such a meeting. For Garth was supposed to make it clear to Klann that we suspect Mord of treacherous and evil designs against both Vedun and his liege lord, Klann.” Gasps of surprise at this disclosure, but more at the samurai’s next: “And that is not the worst.... The fact is that there is a traitor in our midst, who has compromised all our secret endeavors, revealed our plans to the sorcerer.” He waited for the exclamatory hissing to subside.
“You see, my friends, we tread now on the backs of turtles. Never knowing when the ground will shift under our feet. We cannot tell how much of our preparation is known to Klann. Only that Mord knows, and that he can use that knowledge against us whenever he wishes. Add to this burden the fact that the baron and his knights are dead—all save the worthy Anton—and with them died all hope of allied intervention on our behalf. No army will come in rescue of you. You must do what you must as an army unto yourselves. We must do what we must. I am committed to your cause unto death. Many of you know the burden I carry, the stain of failed duty. My burden of karma. Now I must die in this place, if necessary, to make amends. And a man committed to acceptance of death can accomplish much....”
Many eyes tilted groundward under his level gaze. No one doubted his sincerity. Thus fortified by their tacit understanding, Gonji continued:
“But those are the things which weigh against us, and I have not accounted the factors in our favor. We shall yet have unexpected help in our cause—”
“The Wallachians and Moldavians,” a man in the rear shouted, standing and raising a clenched fist. “They’ll come to our aid!”
“Quiet now!” Michael shouted, pushing free of Lydia’s helping hand and leaning o
n the crutch. “Gonji has the floor.”
He moved up to the table and turned to face the gathering.
“It’s all right,” Gonji objected. “Let him speak.”
“Ruman unity will see the territory freed of invaders,” the man added.
Gonji shook his head morosely. “Iye, the Ruman independence movement is still too disorganized, too concerned with internal problems. No effective leader has arisen who can command the loyalty of all the provinces. There is simply not enough time. This place has gone rotten for you. It crawls with greed and evil on every hand.”
“So what can we do?” Vlad Dobroczy hotly pleaded.
Gonji knew that he could delay the issue no longer. He clasped his hands behind his back and sighed as he paced around the table top.
“Evacuation,” he rasped in High German, the word echoing in half a dozen translations amid head-shaking and confused hand-waving.
“But—but I thought—” Aldo Monetto stammered. “You said that we’d have to abandon that idea after—” He weakly indicated the portal leading to the huge training chamber, wherein lay the torched carcass of the great worm.
“Hai,” Gonji agreed, “that’s true. We can no longer risk hiding the non-combatants down here for the duration. Not with the filthy sorcerer’s knowledge of the place.”
“So what then?”
“I mean that everyone must evacuate.” A hushing bled off their breaths as they stared, disbelieving what they had heard. “My friends, you must leave Vedun behind until it can be cleansed.”
“That’s lunacy!” someone cried.
“Leave our homes? Everything we’ve worked for all these years?”
“Flavio’s work of a lifetime?” Lydia spoke in unwonted dismay.
“For a time only, perhaps,” Gonji answered gently.
“Never!”
“We’ll not be driven from our homes!”
“What will we do?”
Gonji scowled. “Hey—is this the only world you can conceive? The only one you’ve ever planned for? A life of oppression and stoic acceptance of death, without raising a hand in your defense? You’ll do what you must, take up new lives elsewhere, if need be, until you can return to Vedun.”