by T. C. Rypel
“Soldiers just escorted my father to the castle,” the young smith said in an awed, fearful whisper. “Klann sent for him....”
CHAPTER FIVE
Lottie sat staring absently into the crackling hearth fire. Anna Vargo crept up behind her and wincingly draped a quilt around the girl’s shoulders. Then she padded to the butler’s pantry, where Milorad huddled over his broth. He pulled at a chunk of brown bread and sipped a cup of mead.
“Lottie all right?” he asked, looking up when his wife entered.
“Ano—yes, but she’s very shaken by her ordeal.” She eased into a chair across the table from her husband, grimacing a bit.
“This blasted rain. It increases your pain, doesn’t it, mily—beloved?” he asked.
“No,” she reassured him, forcing a smile, “not very much.”
Milorad drifted off, muttering into his bowl of broth, something that ended with “...Flavio.” It might have been a prayer. He missed his old friend greatly. Leaving his meal half completed, he pushed away from the table and retrieved a cloak from the foyer closet.
“The Japonsky never brought back my good capote, did he?”
Anna shook her head. “Going out again so soon?”
He nodded sullenly. “I’m to join with Ignace and Paolo on this alert business. Can’t see why they need me along, though.”
“Gonji trusts your experience,” she reasoned. “I think he fears Ignace’s doddering, and Paolo is young and over-eager.”
Milorad grunted, but his chest puffed with pride. “Get it done with, then,” he said in an official voice. “Not so many houses on our list.”
“Just be careful. Are you dressed warm enough?” Anna rose and rearranged the folds of his cloak such that nothing showed but his face. He impatiently pulled it open against the abrupt stuffiness.
“Anna,” he said, his anguish deepening the age lines in his face, “we’ve had a good life, haven’t we?”
She embraced him. “Done many things few will ever do. We’ve much to be grateful for.”
“It doesn’t make it any easier, does it?”
She closed her eyes and kissed him. “God is with us.”
He slouched to the door, but when he opened it and stepped out into the rain, and public view, conditioned reflex reshaped his frame into the dignified, courtly posture on which he prided himself.
Anna smiled at his back, the smile melting all too quickly. She moved to the table and began to clear it. When she got to the half-empty cup of mead, she raised it in her palms and drained it off at a single gulp.
* * * *
His risky meeting with his confidant in the Provender’s storm cellar completed, Gonji crept through the rain-slicked alleys and byways of Vedun like a nimble thief.
So many matters to attend to; so many apprehensions. And so very little time.
Sleep had come with difficulty, though his body had begged for it, and it had lasted all too briefly. His eyeballs felt burned and twisted, as if they’d been screwed into their sockets. He wore Milorad’s huge, billowy capote over his tunic and breeches—plenty of room in the loose folds for his daisho, which he now wore almost vertically in his sash so that their telltale angles would not protrude—and the broad, foppish slouch hat Wilf had loaned him. This curious concession to the dandy’s appointments seemed ill-befitting Wilf, who had blushed when Gonji had chuckled to see it, topped, as it was, by the splendid feather Wilf had gruffly allowed him to remove. The slouch now sagged and buckled under the hood of the capote, concealing most of Gonji’s face.
Good old Wilf.
Gonji darted to the head of an alley and peered out from behind a downspout at a passing dragoon squad. Few soldiers were about, driven indoors by the rain and the funerary cast of the city: much of the commerce was arrested in favor of the drawn-out process of burying the many dead. The sham seemed to be working well.
But now as he peered at the Llorm dragoons, something bothered the samurai. What was different?
Ah—the circles. A third circle in Klann’s crest was now filled in with purpure on their uniforms and standards.
He ducked into the alley and doubled back toward the south to check in with the metal founders. A shutter cracked open above his head, giving him pause an instant, but he moved on at once. Had to be citizens, in this quarter.
He heard a bump through the rain sputter. Then something struck his left shoulder, and a noisy splat sounded on the paving stones just short of the gutter that cut through the center of the narrow lane. His nose at once picked up the acrid stench.
“Damn it!” he swore low. “Damned filthy Europeans!”
The shutter slammed closed. Someone had chosen that moment to empty a chamber pot into the gutter below. Milorad was going to adore the new stain on his capote. Gonji rubbed the cloak’s shoulder against a rough stone wall, grimacing at the fecal stench, and moved on.
A clutch of wagons lumbered along Provender Lane, their drivers somber and circumspect. They were escorted by a few citizens on horseback. No soldiers in sight.
As the first wagon ruddled past his alley, Gonji burst out of cover to run alongside, startling one of the mounts. He clambered up to drop into a seat beside the city’s tall, slender undertaker. The man lurched in surprise, did a double-take, then smiled and bowed.
“Fine weather for an interment,” the man said in Italian.
Gonji scowled. The undertaker’s assistant pushed his head through the burlap curtain, red-eyed from fatigue.
“Gonji!” he gasped. He was one of the bushi.
“Ohayo—good morning. What are you carrying?”
“One corpse,” the mortician apprised him, “and one magazine of shot and powder.” He showed his large white teeth.
“Whew,” Gonji breathed. “Don’t invite any gunfire your way, eh? And keep that casket from getting too wet. Seepage will ruin the powder, if the dampness hasn’t already.”
The undertaker bobbed his head, rolling in his seat as the wagon bounced up onto a wooden bridge over a sewer culvert.
“They say Garth Gundersen’s been called to the castle,” the assistant said animatedly.
“I’ve heard,” Gonji replied.
“Maybe we’ll be spared the evacuation, the...fighting.” The young man’s raw eyes swerved from Gonji’s. His Adam’s apple pistoned once in his throat.
“That’s a fond hope we should maintain,” Gonji said. “But in the meantime we must prepare for the worst, neh?”
The young bushi nodded morosely. The undertaker hmmed. Whether in affirmation, reflection, or by virtue of his sinister dispensation, Gonji could not tell.
“Drop me off at the foundry,” the samurai said. The undertaker touched the brim of his black slouch.
Gonji had been forced to sit with his left side stretched uncomfortably because of the sashed swords, so he found it easy to roll off the wagon and bound into a small courtyard about a block from the foundry when they saw the mounted mercenaries before the smoke- and steam-spewing building.
“Godspeed, sensei!” he heard the raspy voice utter behind him as he ducked behind a corner. His tongue worked at his moist upper lip as he chanced a peek.
Three brigands. None he knew. Could they still be searching for him? No, that was silly. The scuttlebutt at the Provender was that he had gone for good. Cleared out for safer pickings, like the scavenger he was. And the more who were convinced of that, the better off he was.
The rain slanted down like a dirty gray curtain, soaking the city. The culverts had begun to fill, waste rising to street level. The sluice gates were thus opened early, and the fortuitous sound of their cranking nearby caused the mercenaries to turn their heads away from Gonji’s position.
He sprinted across the street and wove his way nearer the foundry. He was fairly close to the Gundersens’ now, he knew, as well as Tralayn’s dwelling, and the mercenary garrison in the southwest quadrant. Caution.
Loping to an alley adjacent to the foundry, he slowed to a fast wal
k, listening intently, pulling the slouch hat’s brim lower.
So intent was he on the foundry clamor to his left, that he didn’t notice the mounted man seated motionless in the lane to his right until it was too late.
An electric tremor ran up and down his back, his nape prickling so that he thought he must fairly glow. He strode across the man’s field of view, then angled into a doorway, ignoring the soldier’s curt shout in a language he didn’t know. Gonji leaned into the doorway—a side entrance to the foundry—listening to the approach of the splashing hooves. One hand on his hip, he placed the ridge of his right over his eyes as if dazed or in pain.
The mercenary dismounted and said something twice in an inquiring tone. The metallic snick of a sword being unsheathed—
Gonji felt the firm hand on his shoulder—
Then the Sagami flashed out from under the cloak—up over his head in a two-handed grip, slashing the sentry from clavicle to hipbone, through his cloven breastplate. His scream was muffled by the closed buffe of his Flemish burgonet, and Gonji’s finishing stroke cut it short. He dragged the body into the doorway and shooed the horse back into the lane. Cast about for some divine suggestion as to his next move....
The armed party at the front of the foundry pounded off—five of them now. All of them? He had to take the chance. Battered on the foundry’s side door. Waited. A second, harder knock—
The door swung open.
“Holy—!”
“Quiet,” Gonji growled at the founder, pushing him back with a palm-heel and dragging the dead mercenary inside. There were gasps of shock, amid a few anxious greetings. Jiri Szabo moved to the fore.
“Gonji, what—what—?”
“Never mind that,” Gonji said brusquely. “What are you doing here?”
“We finished our alert list, so I came back here to help. But I must tell you, people are finding it hard to accept—”
Gonji snarled at him. “I told you to stay in pairs. Where’s Anton?”
“Staying with the Yuschaks,” Jiri replied defensively. “I thought that was only for the alerting.”
The samurai waved a hand. “Damn it all! Is it clear outside?” He discarded Wilf’s sopping slouch hat and donned the dead man’s burgonet. It felt uncomfortably tight.
“Ja,” one of the others answered nervously.
“How goes it?” the samurai asked. “What did those free companions want?”
“Just to see about weapons orders, that’s all,” Jiri said. “They gave us a start, though.”
“How’s that?”
“We were bolting sheets of steel to the insides of those wagons out front when they arrived,” a muscular founder with a fire-scarred face replied. “They didn’t check, though.”
Gonji nodded, tight-lipped, and indicated the dead sentry in his pooling blood. “Get rid of this body.”
“Where?”
He thought a moment. “How about one of the empty coffins after the armament has been removed?”
Someone laughed coarsely. “Ja—if there are any left when Paille gets done.”
“Eh?” Gonji puzzled.
“He was here at ten bells,” the scarred man explained. “We had three sides of one of those damned heavy cupola-things riveted together when he came pounding in here and screaming at us to stop. Said something about figuring that they won’t work—too heavy—something.”
“Said they’d topple on turns,” Jiri appended. “Some sort of...new calculations he did.”
The scarred man grunted in assent. “Went to the woodcrafters with another crazy idea—he’s got ’em making wooden cupolas now out of those same empty coffins you’re talking about!”
Gonji shook his head.
“Madman’s gonna get us all in big trouble,” the founder judged.
“We’re already in big trouble,” Gonji reminded.
They spoke a bit longer about matters of imminent concern. Like the others Gonji encountered during the day, the founders fostered earnest hopes of Garth’s success at convincing Klann of Mord’s treachery. Gonji tried hard not to shatter their optimism, but he could not help recalling Simon’s discouraging reminder of how potentially volatile such a meeting would be. But Gonji did find himself hoping grimly that Garth’s diplomacy was equal to the task. The militia seemed too apprehensive for his comfort.
He reconnoitered the city all day, having commandeered the dead mercenary’s steed. With the buffe of the helmet snapped shut, he was recognized by no one and asked nothing. The dampering rain helped him considerably, and he discreetly avoided areas of heavy military traffic.
The heavens offered no sign that their outpouring would cease, and Gonji was reminded of the monsoon season he had witnessed, when most activity that was not of a vital nature came to a halt. In Vedun, such activity had barely begun.
At the Hour of the Monkey, hunger having come to him in fluttering waves of nausea, he turned into the back lane that would bring him to the Benedettos’ rear courtyard. There he would huddle with Michael over tactics, insinuate himself into their evening meal, and—
The wet slosh of hooves and the jangle of bridles turned into the lane behind him. Three horsemen? Four?
“Jof,” came a shout, followed by a high voice jabbering in Low German.
Cholera, Gonji thought, striving to regulate his rapid breathing.
“Jof,” again—a man’s name. They had perhaps taken him for the brigand whose horse he rode.
He reined in and yanked the animal around to face them. Three. Flemish burgonets, shields lashed to their backs. Looking grim. He kept the buffe in place, Milorad’s tent-like capote concealing the rest of him. The man who had called out was waving a soggy parchment in his right hand.
They closed the distance swiftly, cantering confidently toward their fellow soldier.
Gonji emptied his mind of all thoughts but one as he clopped near: no witnesses. He saw where they carried their swords and spied a crossbow slung across one man’s back. When they were twenty yards distant, they peered suspiciously through the pelting rain. One of them suddenly jabbered at the others. By the contortion of the mercenary’s face, Gonji knew instantly that he had been pegged for an impostor.
The centermost brigand tore his cloak open and clawed for a pistol. Gonji jabbed his mount’s sides and launched at him, the folds of the capote flapping like wings as he wrenched free the Sagami.
He heard a shout and the sputter of the pistol’s misfire as he swung his bulk behind the horse’s head to shrink the target. Then he was on top of the pop-eyed assailant. His slash tore through jack and ribcage, a crimson spray accompanying the mortal scream.
Yanking right, he engaged the crossbowman, whose blade became entangled in his heavy cloak. But the free companion’s frantic spurring caused his steed to lurch out of Gonji’s range. The man leaned hard left, and his horse skidded on the slick cobblestones and toppled with a fierce whinny into a courtyard wall.
Gonji wheeled his mount, saw another pistol leveled in his direction, lashed the beast toward the crossing lane from which the three had emerged.
He heard the explosion behind him, felt a jolting impact as the horse bucked under him, the shock racing straight through his loins.
Then his seating fell out from under him—the horse had been struck in the left flank by the pistol ball and went down, shrieking, to its knees. Gonji bounced off and slammed face first in a muddy pool, cracking his knee, a sudden exquisite pain erupting in his mouth as he rolled with the fall. He scrabbled for the downed katana, picked it up in a bleeding hand, and, stumbling once on the hem of the billowy capote, sprinted in ungainly fashion toward the corner of the intersection.
He heard the “hyah!” behind him and the splash of determined hooves. Tasted blood in his mouth, felt the stiffening of the knee as he reached the corner and turned right.
The Sagami poised in his burning grip, he took his stance and waited.
The rider swung his mount wide on the slick paving stones. Gonji
had cut the short distance in half before the man espied his approach and hoisted steel. The mercenary’s heavy blade arced downward. Gonji deflected it with a high parry, whirled and completed the circle with a slash that knocked him, whining, from the saddle.
The samurai grabbed the horse’s reins, calmed its skittish stamping, and, cursing in a low growl, pushed himself achingly atop the animal. Riding back into the lane where the initial confrontation had occurred, he came to a jarring halt.
“Cholera-pox!”
The crossbowman had wasted no time righting his horse and pounding away for help. And already he could hear interrogative shouts provoked by the report of the pistol.
“Come on, you sway-backed nag,” he growled painfully in Japanese, the inside of his mouth throbbing where he had bitten his cheek in the fall.
He rode madly on a zigzag course, back toward the southwest for about two blocks. Abandoned the steed in an alley when he heard stamping hooves along a perpendicular lane. Wiping the blood from his cut hand on the cloak, he scaled a crumbling wall near a narrow arch. Pulling himself cautiously over a cornice, grunting, he scanned the streets for as far as he could see.
A Llorm column rode double along a lane not a hundred yards from his position. Bad. Gonji snapped open the burgonet’s buffe and spat a mouthful of blood into the lane below, then dropped down with a grimace, the aching knee protesting.
He scampered westward again, away from the mounted party but into perilous territory—the granary-turned-garrison billet and the west gatehouse. But Tralayn’s house was there. The nearest access to the catacombs. And the Gundersens’ stables, where he had known refuge from pursuit once before.
He hurried southward, through the commerce area—the slaughterhouse, the metal foundry.... He avoided all contact, wishing to involve no citizens, should he become trapped. When he came in stealthy view of the stables, he saw mercenaries about the grounds. Wilf was among them, tending their horses near the corral. Gonji skirted the place and continued on toward Tralayn’s.
The clangor of a mounted party along the south bailey wall’s adjacent lane—