Gonji: Deathwind of Vedun: The Deathwind Trilogy, Book Three

by T. C. Rypel

  He heard the hiss of an arrow, helpless to heed it, as he twisted the katana down and under his armpit with his right hand alone. The attacker shrieked in his ear, skewered through the chest.

  A man plunged toward him, and Gonji slashed him needlessly through his corded neck tendons—a Llorm—a war arrow embedded in his back.

  He ducked an arcing schiavona and sliced deeply into the shrieking attacker’s thigh, blood bursting from the wound in a crimson spray. A pistol cracked—Julian’s, in the hand of Gutch—another sleek shaft parted the air and sheared a brigand’s hauberk and ribcage, knocking him off a table and onto a companion—Gonji’s fanning left-right sequence finished another foe.

  Now one cursing bandit was surging for the bar, where Gutch had brought up a rapier and was calling him on. Another bolted from the Provender; his yowl of pain followed seconds later.

  The remaining six assembled, panting and perspiring, some of them nursing small injuries. They glared at Gonji, who stepped lithely at their center, katana snapping before him from hand to hand in a display of confident skill that terrified them, made them reticent to advance.

  The clash of steel from Gutch’s engagement—a clothyard arrow sizzled and chunkered through the flesh between Stanek’s shoulder blades, emerging from his clavicle in a dripping, red razored point—

  The five remaining revelers were ignited by the imminence of death. With a howl of battle-frenzy they stormed down on Gonji.

  The samurai moved as they did, whirling and taking on the startled man at his left rear, slipping his lunging blade and slashing down through the man’s shoulder so that he fell, blocking the man next to him. A wrist-twisting high parry, and he was breaking from their midst, gaining more favorable ground. He felt the fiery line of cold sweat and stinging pain as a mercenary’s swipe tore through the back of his kimono, opening a wound in his lower back.

  Running past the bar, now, where Gutch and his quarry dueled over the counter, spilling goblets and snarling. Bounding over bodies, Gonji leaped over a forest of upset benches and stools behind a table. They would have to pick their way through to him.

  Coming from right and left, they went down under Gonji’s flailing, snapping, sparking steel. A circular parry and jaw-splitting upward slash—a high block covering his apparently unprotected back—two lunging feints and a roaring kiyai, energizing a ripping slash that knocked a man off his feet in a fan of crimson droplets. Then up onto the table, the Sagami singing off two blades, swatting them aside as the samurai sprang over their heads and landed with sword at the ready.

  Hurling his clan’s war cry at the ceiling, Gonji descended on them with sword held upright like the sting of the scorpion, driving them back in their flinching fear, slashing the first man such that he spun like a weathercock; the second took the full brunt of Gonji’s charging lunge, gurgling a choked scream and slamming backward into the table and over, his blood pooling the floorboards.

  Gonji jerked around to the bar, blade in high-guard. A mercenary held both hands at the spot where the innkeeper’s rapier still stuck in his breast. Red wetness dripped between the goggle-eyed brigand’s clutching fingers.

  The fighting innkeeper brought his face near the enemy’s. “Hey, bimbo, you’re bleeding all over Gutch’s doublet.” He pushed the soldier’s face away, sending him reeling off the rapier’s point.

  Gonji exhaled with relief and fell back onto a stool, head hung low, but only for an instant as he recovered his breath. He assessed the carnage. The Provender lay awash in blood, its scent thick and cloying, churning his stomach. He grimaced and removed the hachi-maki, shuffled to the body of Julian, and dropped it thereon.

  “Danke, Gutch,” he said bleakly.

  “Ja—now look at my place.”

  “Well done, gentils,” came Paolo Sauvini’s voice from the doorway. “And you needn’t worry about the one who tried to go for help.” He stood posturing like some hero out of picaresque fancy, hand on hip, longbow leaning beside him, his brown cloak’s hood framing his glowing face.

  “You—so it was you again—idiot!” Gonji growled, eyeing him angrily. But he sighed, and at once added wearily: “Arigato.”

  “Hey, you pinhead,” Gutch grumbled at Paolo, “every time you come in here you’re lookin’ for trouble. What do you think you are? Some fairy-tale hero? You better get that twinkle outta yer eye, Manfred, this ain’t no glory game.”

  Paolo cast him a wry look and fell into step with Gonji, who was gazing out into the street, listening.

  “Pass the word, gents,” Gutschmidt was saying at their backs, as he finished reloading his pistols, “the Provender is now open to business—for citizens only! Good luck, boys!” Then the dapper innkeeper laughed gruffly as he began to brush the blood and sweat from his long, wavy hair.

  Outside, Gonji executed two quick, efficient cuts that freed the dangling bodies of Vlad and the other militiaman. He covered them with a tarp from near the troughs.

  “Let’s go,” he said grimly. He and Paolo mounted two of the tethered horses. The rain was dwindling to a spray again, the enshrouding cloud breaking over the mountains. “Where’s your wife?” Gonji asked.

  “She’ll be okay,” Paolo replied, shrugging.

  “Then I take it you want to ride with the city defenders—”

  He never finished. The hidden Hussars had broken from cover to begin freeing and hitching the wagons. And now Stefan Berenyi and Nikolai Nagy were shouting from down the street.

  “Mercenaries coming down Charity!”

  “How many?” Gonji shouted.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Nagy bellowed.

  “Take a stand and stop them,” the samurai commanded. “Archers, set up a crossfire—”

  “We haven’t got many—”

  “They’ll have to do.” Gonji fought with the reins to steady his nervous mount. “Berenyi and Nagy, get those wagons hitched and rolling. Half back here to pick up stray refugees later, the other half split between the Streets of Faith and Charity. Roll them to the marketplace. Then get them going from Wojcik’s Haven—all of them—”

  The mounted mercenary assault party emerged, howling, from the Street of Charity. At least five and twenty, but they were already besieged from windows and rooftops, as the militia holed up at the eastern end had begun to receive word and turn out. Crossbows laced the invaders with bolts. They went down bellowing, horses rearing and tumbling, throwing their column into disarray. Chamber pots and other heavy objects flew from windows to smash into their midst, one brigand clobbered by a flying maul, his face split like a gourd.

  But now the Llorm sentries on the walls were converging above and behind the Provender to launch arbalest volleys down at the rebels. Some scrambled off the rooftops, others dashing for cover.

  “Damn—you’re sliced open,” Paolo shouted, seeing Gonji’s bloody kimono back.

  “It’s not what it looks—come on.” They surged ahead to meet the leading pair of cavalrymen, taking them down almost simultaneously.

  Paolo shouted in triumphant glee.

  “Never mind that,” Gonji cried impatiently, casting about for an orderly plan to the rapidly spreading chaos. He ordered Paolo to alert the militia leaders to turn out their bushi in full force, concentrating on the key strongholds, particularly the square, where the armored wagons and confiscated weapons were being held.

  “But the giant!” Sauvini objected.

  “Don’t worry about the giant. Distract him, draw him off—something. We’ll deal with him later—I will, if all of you together can’t handle it.”

  Paolo looked offended, nodded resolutely. Then a savagely wounded rider approached up Provender Lane from the south—an enemy mercenary. The adventurer clung to the neck of his frothing, lurching steed, whose eyes bulged hideously.

  “Monsters!” the wounded man was screaming at no one and everyone. “Monsters attacking the garrison—!”

  Thirty paces from where Gonji and Paolo sat with drawn swords, the horsem
an tumbled off the falling mount, bouncing hard before landing face first in the mud. He was knocked unconscious—or mercifully dead. They could see from their vantage the gruesomely flayed and bloody flesh on his darkly-soaked left thigh and back. The horse was dead on impact, its flanks savagely gouged.

  Gonji stared back along Provender Lane, eyes straining at the distant darkness. The thuck! of a crossbow quarrel landing beneath his stamping horse’s hooves scattered his thoughts, galvanized him.

  “Get going,” he snapped as he kicked the mount into a gallop.

  Paolo watched him dwindle as he rode in the direction from which the rider had come. Then a wounded mercenary was nearly on top of the fiery wagoner, drawing back his mighty battle-axe for a strike.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Wheeling his steed into the byway from which he thought the wounded harbinger had emerged, Gonji rode with all the speed caution would allow, toward the hoarse cries of orders in military voices.

  His breath hissed between his teeth and his heart thrummed blood past his ears as he wended his way southwest, shortcutting dangerously through an antiquated alley canyon that outletted into the color and grace of the Italian district. In the drizzle and din he could make out the idiot blaring of Tumo. Gunfire here and there, and the clash of steel. The city was coming to full, desperate life, aroused to a realization of its dire peril. Lamplight flared houses bright with illumination as he clattered past windows.

  Shouts and cries. Now and then the sound of his own voice being called as he rode past. Whinnying horses, in the distance that loomed ahead darkly, full of the animal terror they projected only when threatened by fire or predators.

  He thundered by several scurrying bodies who paid him no heed, exchanging one ineffectual sword clash with a passing mounted adventurer. Then he swung left into a lane in the slaughterhouse district. And saw....

  A Llorm squad, or the remnant of a column, had established a hasty pitched position. Drays and furnishings torn from houses, a few animal carcasses—these were being heaped together by desperate, sweating men who growled and cursed their fate.

  But there was no exchange of volley, no clash of arms at all in the dim lane. Torches in spots played over fevered eyes and tortured brows. So enraptured was he to see their desperate action, to hear—as they heard—the savage snarling that echoed from the next crossing lane, that Gonji didn’t so much as raise his katana in challenge.

  He watched with fascination, skin prickling, as a few mercenaries in the troop’s number now banged on doors, begging sanctuary. A bureau drawer, dropped from a high window, plunged downward onto a Landsknecht’s helmed skull.

  Gonji laughed, a curt, humorless trill at the surrealism of it. Then he locked eyes with the Llorm commander. There followed the strangest of tacit communications, both men realizing as one that they were not enemies for the nonce; rather, they were allies in the struggle between human and supernatural forces.

  He inched his steed forward gingerly, seeing the archers along the blockade ready their arbalests toward a darkened lane, knowing that they might turn to spindle him in a second, should they choose. Yet knowing that they would not. For the snarling of the Beast was at the crossroad now, its fell shadow spanning the lane in dim moonlight, as it sniffed audibly and sensed the strength of the ambushers.

  Gonji held his breath, seated on horse behind the double line. He had just caught sight of the butchered sheep and pigs on which they had hoped it would pause to feed when he abruptly realized his exposed position—tallest object in the street now.

  And then the shadow was suddenly withdrawn, and the Beast was looming on a rooftop above the defensive line, snarling in unbridled fury. And leaping into their midst—

  Four hundred pounds of streamlined power and cunning, canine teeth in jaws that could shear the leg of an ox. Black fore-claws and hind talons now streaked lurid with gore. A thing fashioned of solidified nightmare that walked upright like a man, though the shoulders were surmounted by the head and ruff of a wolf larger than any spawned in nature.

  It sprang laterally in explosive jolts that raked through the paralyzed Llorm like a scythe. Two bolts rent its golden fur and thick hide with punishing impacts. It howled to the moon and tore them free as if they were straw, a furred chunk of its own flesh clinging to one bolt. Then it resumed its attack with renewed wrath. Some men dropped their weapons and fell back, staggered by the sight. Others broke ranks and ran, streaming prayers from raw throats.

  Gonji’s horse bucked and threw them both down in the mud. He looked up quickly to see the creature bear down on him, a bare-fanged dynamo of primordial power whose eyes were the red orbs of the demonic energumen within. Simon’s soul was subordinate to it this night. Clearly, he hadn’t exaggerated the consequences of unchained transformation.

  His nerve ends flaring, Gonji scrabbled through the muck, past trash bins and onto a rear stoop. He turned on an elbow, the Sagami held overhead defensively. The werewolf had leapt onto his struggling, shrilling horse and was savaging it. Men ran in all directions in the street.

  Gonji beat on the rear door of the house, calling out his name in identification. The last thing he saw before he fell through the opened portal was the steel-trap snapping of wolf jaws that crushed his late mount’s neck.

  He lay on a storage room floor, smelling spices and musty larders, his ears ringing with the almost sentient mortal plaint of the horse. He had heard the sound before. A stallion downed by the Black Forest’s nocturnal hunting fiends....

  “A torch,” he gasped to the milling bodies around him. “Do you have a torch?”

  Voices jabbered. A man’s, a woman’s, an older man’s—He thought he recognized a face, a voice. Language unknown—

  “Do you have a trap on the roof?” he was shouting.

  And then, dreamlike, time passage meaningless, he was carrying an ignited flambeau, and ascending a rickety ladder. Emerging to the night sounds of human terror. The crackle of the mist that worried the torch’s flame. The coppery taste in his mouth. Blood. Or fear.

  At the roof’s ledge, now—The Thing below. Huge.... Huge and muscular. Golden-blond of coat. Broad at the shoulders, slender at the waist.

  Feeding....

  “Si-moooon!” Holding the torch out over the street.

  Red eyes panning up. Pink lips drawn back over darkly dripping fangs.

  “Remember yourself!” An unnatural bellowing issued from the next lane. Gonji registered it only later, in memory, so intense was his concentration on the creature below. “Remember meeeee!”

  He patted his chest. An instant later he sucked in a whistling breath and backpedaled, drawing the Sagami again in his right hand. The Beast scaled the side of the house with a scrape of chitinous nails. And then it was padding toward him in the crouch that preceded the spring. Dripping talons rotating with anticipation of mayhem—

  “Sim—”

  Gonji hurled the torch awkwardly with his left, and dove through the narrow aperture, a woman’s shriek passing him as he fell. Tucking, he thudded on the attic floor a short distance below, a sharp pain in his side. The werewolf’s bestial head and arm groped for him through the tight aperture. It growled maniacally in frustration, the great shoulders unable to pass the hatch.

  In an instant it was gone.

  “Obor,” one of the men yelled from the ladder below. Gonji recognized the local word: giant.

  From a second-story window they observed the brief clash of monstrous foes. Tumo hooted a challenge at the werewolf, tongue slavering over flaccid lips and splay teeth. He hefted his spiked club on one round, plate-armored shoulder. The Beast circled Tumo warily, half the giant’s size, but with bloodstained jaws dripping foaming saliva. Its back was arched, ruff bristling in warning, looking much the more aggressive monster.

  Tumo brayed and smashed downward with the bludgeon. The werewolf slipped the resounding blow easily and bounded at the much larger attacker, ripping a chunk of whitened flesh from Tumo’s forearm, b
lood streaming from the wound.

  The cretin giant reeled with the pain, its wail keening in the ears of the wincing human observers. With the strength of a bull elephant in its panicked, humanoid frame, the wounded giant seized the snarling Beast by leg and ruff and flung it thirty feet to slam into a building cornice and drop to the rutted cobblestones.

  The golden werewolf shook itself and, with a final growl, disappeared into the shadowed lanes in search of easier prey.

  “Cholera,” Gonji breathed, watching the Llorm escort try to prod the giant after the creature with pole-arms. It slapped at them, whimpering, wagging its head negatively. Before it padded back the way it had come with great splashing footfalls, helm ridiculously askew, Gonji caught sight of the large white patch peeking through its armor at the spot on the ribs where his poisoned arrow had pierced it without serious effect. There was no satisfaction in the discovery.

  Kami, he prayed, if only they could hit the square while it’s undermanned, the giant absent....

  He pushed past the questioning citizens and made for the street, where he bounded astride a straggling horse amid halfhearted notices of his presence.

  He galloped off for the stables, spreading hysteria as he went, calling out disheartening words to bewildered occupation troops. But by the time he arrived at the stable area, he led a small retinue of pursuing mercenaries, effectively bringing reinforcements against the already beleaguered rebels fighting for control of the southwest quarter.

  His appearance was so sudden that his own men very nearly opened fire on him when he dismounted in nearly full stride before the smith shop.

  “Hey, that’s Gonji—!” Wilf cried, staying the archers.

  “What the hell’d you bring them for?” a warrior called out from the wagonage window, firing his pistol in the next breath.

  Gonji kept running, against the grain of the splashing cavalry troops who’d followed him, who now crisscrossed the broad space between the Gundersens’ livery and the wagonage, under fire. He unseated a dragoon with a slicing blow, kept racing, zigzagging through the mud between the pounding hooves of the disorderly free companions, ripping them off their steeds with flashing steel. The bushi, seeing him, took heart, some leaving their cover for an emboldened counterattack.