by T. C. Rypel
And the enfilades of bow and pistol and arquebus fire were directed not only at the defenders of the square; some missiles fell among the innocents pouring into the chapel as well.
“Get that wagon moving—fall back toward the chapel—protect those people, for God’s sake!”
The blaring roar of the cretin giant sounded in the distance over Anton’s frantic commands.
* * * *
The explosion in the east shattered what remained of William Eddings’ modest life. All that had afforded him scant sense of belonging in the hostile cosmopolitan city of Vedun.
Glassware crashed about the sundrier’s tiny shop, bursting into shards. Trinkets, knickknacks, and cheap jewelry fell about him where he knelt, rocking back and forth in his lament, inconsolable. For his tearful petitions had failed to move Providence to breathe life back into the limp form of his father.
Now he was alone. He’d last seen his brother John among the armed family men escorting non-combatants to the chapel. Among them had been John’s wife, Sarah. But there’d been fighting. A nightmare. People screaming, dying. For all he knew, they were dead now, too.
They’d left him alone.
No, they hadn’t left him. They’d been taken from him. Just as that dragoon in the mud had wrested his father from William’s life, John and Sarah had been torn from him by order of that yellow bastard. That imperious oriental barbarian.
But the bloody dragoon had paid dearly. Yea, William of Lancashire had discovered that he could kill, after all. Could kill and had. And would again....
As soon as he found Gonji.
* * * *
Another party of mounted mercenaries bolted their steeds through the front door of the millinery shop, whooping with destructive glee as they tossed their torches. Fabric caught fire in spots, as the free companions continued riding through the wider rear door, slashing at any bushi who impeded them.
Some men tossed buckets of water on the swiftly spreading blazes. Paolo spun, sighted along both pistol barrels, the crashing reports blasting two brigands from their horses. They fell to the buckling floorboards to be trampled by their fellows or sworded by frenetic rebels. Shelving collapsed like dominoes from the crashing body of a fallen horse that kicked and screamed in its death throes.
“How do you like that, you sons of bitch-es!” Paolo roared in mad glee at the brigands who’d escaped, as he cleared his spent charges and frantically reloaded.
“Good shooting, Paolo,” Klaus called from across the room, where he clanked about in the jangling remains of his heavy, shining armor, his battle-axe on his shoulder as if he were out on a simple jaunt after kindling.
“Who asked you?” Paolo jeered.
Two more hired bandits pounded through the shop’s exploded door frame. One threw a dagger that caught a rebel in the thigh. He spun down, howling. Klaus lumbered forward and swung his axe gamely. The mercenary deflected it with a cursing parry, his saber’s return blow falling short of the buckle-maker, who tripped backward and landed with a metallic clangor on his backside.
Paolo’s single reloaded pistol barked, the lead ball tearing through kettle hat and cranium. The rider’s mount whinnied and tossed the corpse next to Klaus. A warrior slashed at it needlessly, weeping with madness.
“Either get them or stay the hell out of the way,” Paolo blared at Klaus.
“Sorry, Paolo. I—”
“Next time I’ll just blow your goddamn head off—look out!”
Two more yelping adventurers galloped through with clacking arbalests—a third—the sharp report of a wheel-lock—a militiaman dousing a fire screamed and clawed at the back of his neck as he fell face downward, choking on his own blood—
Another mercenary—flinging his torch onto the bolts of silk veiling, then triggering a pistol that sputtered and misfired, burning his hand. Klaus’s axe chopped horizontally—a horse shrieking and slamming down, kicking in pain. Bushi falling on the downed soldier with pikes—
Klann’s free companions were playing a daring game of pheasant-shoot with the trapped bunch in the millinery shop. But now their own numbers were considerably thinned. Their powder was failing them all too often. So they’d wait for the flames to force the rebels out into the open.
The cannonading blast from the east quaked the shop, knocking loose objects from all the standing shelves. The rebels collected themselves and pressed their fight against the creeping flames. Assorted hats and headdresses lay everywhere.
“How in hell did I ever get stuck here with you?” Paolo grumbled as Klaus moved in beside him while he continued reloading wheel-locks.
Out in the street the attacking mercenaries suddenly came under fire from nearby homes. The sector’s evacuation had begun. Women threw cooking pots and dumped boiling water and oil; men tossed stoves from upper floors. Household objects cascaded to the streets. Dirks and shafts began to whistle through the drizzling rain.
“Good shot, Petra!” Paolo shouted, as a woman with a crossbow spilled a rider at full gallop. “How did you like that?” he roared, raising a pistol and firing again. He missed an Austrian highwayman, cursing and tossing the piece aside to aim another.
“Shit, there’s fighting at the chapel now,” one of the bushi on the second floor called down.
Paolo dropped a passing mercenary, whose side burst in a spout of blood. “You just earned your pay,” he called at the falling man.
“What was that explosion?” Klaus asked.
“They must’ve done it, after all—the Hussars,” Paolo spat in forced contempt. “Berenyi and Nagy and those other jesters. Said they were going to send up the armory. Wouldn’t trust me to do it. No—had to be one of the precious officers. Their leaders. Screw them all!”
He spannered a wheel-lock, dropped the spanner and stopped to retrieve it, as nearby spools of fabric roared up in yellow flames.
“More water!”
Two mercenaries on foot stormed in the rear door with swords and shields thrust forward like battering rams. Klaus and another man hurried to engage them. A harpin’s vicious needle point, thrust forward by a concealed rebel, disemboweled one brigand. The other, finding no opening in Klaus’s figure-eight axe pattern and spotting the pistol in Paolo’s hand through the smoke, retreated at the run. Klaus helped the other militiamen overturn a tall section of shelving in front of the rear door.
“Will you stay the hell out of my field of fire?” Paolo yelled.
Klaus returned, apologetic. “You’re a good leader, Paolo. Even Gonji knows that.”
“Screw him, too—oh, look—!” He pointed at a band of evacuees, married men in armed escort, moving toward the now freshly embattled chapel. They were carrying a woman who had just given birth to a child, the midwife jabbering as she ran with the swaddled infant. “Zurek’s wife? She would have it now—”
A steel-tipped bolt zipped out of the darkness, tearing through Paolo’s throat and out the back of his neck. His head snapped back as Klaus screamed. A single high whistle escaped the rent in Paolo’s windpipe. His eyes glazed over. Blood gouted from the wound, from his gaping mouth—Then he fell hard atop a counter and lay still.
“No, Paolo! Nooooo! You can’t die now. It’s not fair. You’ve got to lead us—!” Klaus’ sobs turned to a choked growl as he grasped two pistols and ran into the street, clanking toward two wheeling mercenaries. One wheel-lock was unloaded, but the other cracked off a shot, its unfamiliar recoil jarring Klaus’ wrist.
One soldier was struck in the leg. The other spurred off. Klaus threw the weapons in his lumbering dash. He reached the wounded man, waited for the horse to stop its frightened stamping—for the pistol ball had struck it also. The growling mercenary’s saber sang off Klaus’ heavy body armor. And then the gentle buckle-maker was dragging his foe down from the saddle, and beating him with his gloved fists, madly wrestling the saber from his grasp. Strangling him...until his tongue protruded, swollen and mottled purple.
Klaus never even bothered to retrieve
his battle-axe from the smoking millinery shop before he mounted the dead man’s horse to pound eastward after his partner.
* * * *
The 1st Rumanian Hussars howled as a body, clinging to their startled mounts, when they saw the violent fulmination that scattered the detonated armory all over the now evacuated northeast sector.
“How do you like that—the little shit did it!” Nick Nagy shouted with pride, blinking at the blinding secondary bursts. “Well, that’s one I suppose I gotta congratulate him on.”
They continued with the task of herding evacuees into wagons. More privately owned carts, coaches, and drays were arriving all the time, as the plan gathered momentum. Mercenary ranks were thinning, it seemed, and more important, the soldiers-of-fortune seemed progressively less willing to see a fray through, as the night wore on. Only the Llorm continued to battle fang and claw, and the occupation army was concentrating its strength nearer the gates, which aided the procedure of picking up stragglers. For the first time during shi-kaze, old Nagy was feeling optimistic. There was just a chance that—
“Oh, Nick—look—!”
Nagy turned in the direction the warrior indicated. Berenyi’s roan destrier pounded past on a frothing, erratic hell-ride, shrieking in pain-fraught terror. The heroic young hostler’s form lay slumped forward in the saddle, tangled in reins and stirrups. Festooned with shafts and bolts.
The animal ended its nightmare ride fifty yards beyond the horrified Hussars, where it collapsed and rolled twice, breathing its last. Stefan Berenyi’s lifeless body lay twisted beneath its carcass.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Wilf skidded to a halt in the street, raising Spine-cleaver high in both hands; moist palms, spread six inches apart, curled about the hilt. He slashed as the dragoon rode past, nearly getting stomped by the crashing hooves that spattered him with mud. Something struck Wilf’s helmet, dazing him an instant, white specks dotting his vision. He looked up to see the soldier doubled forward, broadsword falling from his slack hand.
The young leader whoofed out a breath and shook his head, then sped for cover at the other side of the street. His own smith-shop livery was in view, down the lane behind him. Ahead, to the west: the besieged west gatehouse, their next vital objective.
As he caught his breath, he experienced a pang of fear for his brothers. Strom—unseen for days—the black ram found among his flock. Lorenz—detained, or hauled away—no one was sure.
His own recurring fear swept over him again. The fear that he would not make it. Would not live to invade the castle fastness in the mountains to rescue his Genya. Caution urged him to run off and hide. Wouldn’t it be wise to conserve his strength for the castle assault?
Nein. Gonji would have been mortified to hear such thinking. The survivor was he who took the threat to his survival by the horns.
He looked up the street and saw his father, fighting like a demon. He swelled with pride. What a warrior he must have been in his youth! Beside him, still astride Tora, fought Gonji. The samurai occasionally pressed at something that hurt his side, but only when he thought no one was watching.
Wilf cast about for a horse. His black gelding lay dead a block behind under the tangled smith-shop canopy, whose struts it had knocked loose in its fall.
Another dragoon pounded through the moon-glinted puddles. Sucking in a breath, Wilf charged out of the shadows. The soldier veered his mount, but Wilf closed the space swiftly. His circular slash undercut the francisca’s vicious swipe, striking hard in a splash of blood and a chilling mortal outcry.
Wilf dragged the dying mercenary from his saddle and rolled onto the animal, kicking off for the west gate, toward the others.
He caught up with them in the midst of the wide killing ground before the gate, strewn with the bodies of horses and men, the dead and the pleading maimed, unknown enemies and boyhood friends. He gagged momentarily at the sight, tossing the reins from side to side, unsure what to do, where to strike. Thanking God that he was not in command, that no decision of how to sort tactics from this chaos would fall to his responsibility.
When he looked around him to see how few militiamen seemed alive and active in the environs of the gate, an overwhelming sense of futility suffocated him. How many warriors left? How many family men would depart with the wagons? How would they ever mount a besieging force to deal with the castle garrison and its formidable defenses?
A sensation of betrayal. It quickly passed. Nein—Gonji did not lie to him. Did not deceive him in his passion to save Genya. There would be a way. Somehow. Gonji would know.
Then it was all forgotten. He saw the pitched defensive phalanx set up by a renegade German Landsknecht detachment—the bushi who fell before it—The Landsknechts were deployed in two ranks; the front leveled lances from between tall escutcheons that covered them completely. Shattered arrows lay uselessly about their line. The second rank coolly launched their own shafts from behind them, additionally covered by crossbow fire from the Llorm sentries up on the girdling wall’s allure.
The militia took to cover, thwarted for the nonce. Gonji pranced Tora at the head of the lane that led out onto the killing ground, momentarily indecisive.
But then, as a sudden stiff wind swirled through the city, the massive werewolf was loping along the allure above them, diverting the startled crossbowmen, shredding them with fang and talon. A grisly nightmare. A forest fiend come to prey....
Nothing he had heard quite prepared Wilf for the sight of men unlimbed, screaming, their torn bodies used for battering their fellows off the walls. Some lost heart and leaped or hang-dropped outside the wall for temporary safety. Others held fast in their duty, to their mortal chagrin.
Arrows from the unseen Llorm contingent outside the walls whickered between and above the merlons. A few struck the raging Beast, but it was scarcely slowed, a spectacle of supernatural fury.
Only part of Wilf believed this thing to be Simon Sardonis. No man could become such a thing. It must have stretched to seven, eight feet in height—and an unguessable weight of pure animal savagery and sinew. The head was the head of the largest wolf he had ever seen, and it walked upright like a man. Naked, and covered with a golden coat and black-tipped ruff, it was streaked with blood. But whether its own or that of its victims, Wilf could not tell.
No, this thing could not be a man, could not be spoken to or trusted as one might trust any man born of woman. Yet he could not deny that its eyes were indeed the eyes of Simon Sardonis.
He shook off its spell and, in his fashion, decided that the less he pondered the phenomenon the better. There were other things more meet for human thought.
A long line of wagons careened up the street now to join those the bushi were using for cover. Many of the new coaches carried refugees who could not reach the chapel, or those whose duty had kept them in Vedun. The Benedettos rode in the lead wagon.
The draft horses stamped and swerved to a halt to catch the scent of the werewolf, whose snarling rage in their proximity unnerved them.
Now the Beast had dropped into the midst of the Landsknechts, sundering their disciplined ranks. The pinned militiamen, resurgent, charged out and launched their volleys. On Gonji’s order, ashen-faced archers skirted the sentient monster and mounted the stairs to the allure. They fired down into the reinforcement troops outside the walls.
Through spotty clashes and occasional pistol fire, the militia at last took control of the west gatehouse. The evacuation procedure was about to begin. The night-fiend that strode with the deliberation of a man lowered the short drawbridge and readied to open the gates on Gonji’s command.
Wilf looked for Gonji, breathless with anticipation. So near. So very close to his desire—but how? How could it be done?
* * * *
“The god-cursed bastards,” someone cried.
From farther along the walls, where troops had scaled to mount a fresh high-ground attack on the rebels, flaming arrows sizzled through the mist to lob downward among the wag
ons.
“Get loose armor—grain sacks—anything,” Gonji ordered. “Cover them over. Bring water buckets from the troughs—soak them down. Keep all the children’s heads down. Simon—let’s see what we’re facing—”
The huge bipedal figure, its erect lupine posture eliciting gasps and mutterings all along the wagon line, cranked open the gates.
Outside: a gauntlet of waiting cavalry.
“Do you want to try for Tralayn’s instead?” Michael yelled out. “Descend through her passageway?”
“There’s fighting there, too,” someone up the line apprised him.
“The giant’s there!” another voice called in finality.
“Iye,” Gonji announced softly, “there’s no time. No other way. The best chance is still through this gate. Galioto will have his hands full down there, as it is.” He sent messengers to order the city tunnels barred to further entry.
“Well, that’s the end of that, then,” Michael observed. “Maybe we’d better stay back with you and—”
“No, my friend. They’ll need you to lead them....”
Gonji exchanged wistful goodbyes with the Benedettos. Mercifully brief, for his part—just a flash of something like regret, he fancied, in Lydia’s anxious eyes. And as he assembled the escort party of family men, it seemed to him that the backbone of the militia was about to depart. Somehow, during the training, the illusion had formed that a majority would remain behind to take back the city. Futile, ill-conceived hope, it was clear now....
Gonji tossed out curt well-wishes to the people as he moved along the wagon line. More carriages, coaches, and drays arrived, some under embattled escort. But Gonji was encouraged to see the occupation force diminished and disheartened, their units in disarray.