Gonji: Deathwind of Vedun: The Deathwind Trilogy, Book Three
Page 36
The young smith’s eyes were red and swollen. “That’s the castle road up ahead,” he said, pointing along the bend.
Gonji inhaled a deep breath. “Cholera,” he breathed in exasperation. “You’re unbelievable, friend....”
He looked back. The pursuers, pushed by their officers, were beginning to resume the chase.
“Hyah!” He kicked Tora onward at a gallop. He gave it no conscious thought in his bone-weariness, was aware of no decision on his part, but when he reached the rugged north trail to the castle, he swerved right and loped up into the hills. He heard Wilf’s gurgled shout of triumph somewhere behind him. Then he was guiding them off the trail and into the tangled forests, still tracking northward. Their steeds complaining with every stride, they circled upward, higher and higher, until they again crossed the potentially dangerous trail and headed for the northern tunnel to the catacombs, heedless of its possible compromise.
The samurai gave way to let them pass, having no idea who still followed. What he saw both surprised and troubled him:
Wilfred and Garth Gundersen—Aldo Monetto—the erstwhile coward named Arvin—the hate-driven William Eddings—and the fisherman Miklos Zarek, slumped over his mount’s withers, bleeding freely and near to death.
They tethered their steeds a safe distance from the concealed tunnel entrance and helped Zarek to the now abandoned, though still fortified, tunnel.
Barely dragging inside, they collapsed almost as one. There was sobbing, but nothing spoken, and the merest effort made at comforting Zarek.
Deathlike sleep overwhelmed them.
* * * *
It would be dawn soon. There was no cheer in the thought for Genya. She longed to be a bird, to slip between the bars of the window grating and—
The clink of keys startled her. A tremor of terror chilled her to the core of her being. She turned, her back to the wall, and sucked in a cold breath to see the familiar face in the door’s loophole.
“Lorenz,” she whispered.
He smiled, tinkled the keys before his face, then held a finger to his lips. The lock scraped and clicked, and the portal squealed open.
“I’ve come to bring you freedom,” he said, stepping inside and leaning back so that the door slowly swung shut behind him. “To rescue you, if you will....”
But then he studied her face, saw the fear in her eyes, and his smile faded. His urbane manner fled before a dawning malevolence, as of one betrayed. “So...you know.”
She ignored the remark, licking her lips with an equally dry tongue. “Where is Mord?” she asked, gathering her composure.
“What is that mark you wear on your forehead?” he asked with childlike inquisitiveness. He ambled toward her, his mood changing to amusement. He was freshly scrubbed and scented. His garments were new, down to the polish of his imported riding boots.
“Lorenz, what’s happened in Vedun?”
He stopped and held up a hand. “Listen—can you hear?” he whispered dramatically, eyebrows lifting. “The night wind tells the tale.”
Genya’s tears began to stream. “What—what’s become of Wilfred?”
Distaste etched his cruel mouth. “Wilfred,” Lorenz repeated with disdain. “Really, my dear, is he truly so important? Isn’t he just one of many who look upon you with hunger?”
She felt panicky, sweat breaking out, beading her face, her palms. Lorenz was quite mad.
“Why, Lorenz?” she sniffled. “What could they possibly offer you?”
“Come now, my dear,” he fawned. “You’re no ordinary peasant. I’ve always known that about you. You understood games of power and influence. I’ve seen you utilize that knowledge. It’s for power that I strive, for the position my abilities warrant....” His words were filled with bitterness now:
“For the lofty birthright I was denied.”
She sobbed, unable to comprehend this strange and evil transformation of a person she thought she knew. “So much death and destruction,” she said. “Why?”
“The deaths of peasants!” he exclaimed. “Of common men. Blacksmiths and shepherds and simple-minded tinkers. Inferiors and barbarians, all. And there I was in the midst of them, raised by them in a cloak of secrecy so that they might bleed me for my gifts like leeches. Can you imagine? With my noble heritage? Is it any wonder I found it child’s play to become the chief administrator of their economy, to cause their community to thrive?”
She was perplexed, trying to piece it together. “Herr Gundersen...is not your father?”
“He is the father to fools—and a king of fools!”
She blinked and stiffened at his outburst, which cooled as suddenly as it had been stoked.
“Nein, not their king,” he amended calmly, “merely their jester. You really don’t know it all, do you?”
Genya started to shake her head, but checked herself and gathered her strength. “Lorenz, you were always so gracious. Bitte, help me to get away from here. If I could just get to Wilfred, I feel I could be free—”
“Wilfred—bull-headed, uneducated Wilfred—what do you find so attractive in him? Don’t you know what I could give you? Haven’t you ever seen how I’ve looked upon you, studied your ways, knowing that only I could be a fair match for your cleverness?” He grabbed her long hair in fistfuls and yanked her head back. A small outcry escaped her parted lips. “That only I am fit to be your consort? Has Wilfred ever done this for you?”
He squeezed her close, a hard, smothering embrace that forced the air from her lungs. His lips traced a moist path along her throat.
“I—love—Wilfred,” she cried, twisting in his clutch.
“Then you love a corpse,” he snarled.
“Nein—if he were dead, I’d know it,” she cried out, feeling his hands claw at her back, raking, tearing.
She reached under her torn skirt, finding the sheath, the dagger’s hilt. With her eyes shut tight, a confused prayer in her mind, she drew the blade and stabbed at him, cutting through his doublet and shirt, notching his ribs with a deep gouge.
Lorenz howled in shock and pain, flinging her away. She fell to one knee, the dagger held before her threateningly. He began to laugh. A cold, eerie sound. As if she’d abruptly been forgotten. He turned and gripped the window grating, pressing his face against the rusted iron.
Genya eased out, locked him inside, and fled the tower.
Lorenz cackled and strained to peer down at the fragment of the tiny, smoldering city he could make out by pushing against the rusting bars until his face was a hideous distortion.
“All gone—all dead—no more deceivers.... Morning’s coming. A new day, a new me.... Yes, Your Highness, I did sleep well....
“And you?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Throughout the night, the lupine Simon Sardonis loped through the forest on the north side of the Roman road, covering the loading and evacuation of the non-combatants. The elements raged in concert with his actions, the wind and rain following him, adding superstitious terror to the physical effects of his assaults.
Staying clear of the wagon teams as much as possible to avoid catalyzing their animal fear of his huge lupine form, he terrorized Klann’s troops, stampeding their mounts, running amok among them; now with axe or sword, now with fang and claw. Bounding into their midst from unexpected places.
Not far behind him ran failing courage; the soldiers’ trepidation soon caused them to become less interested in the fleeing wagons than the easier prey in Vedun.
The occupying army’s duty stations shifted with the movement of battle. As new waves of wagons broke from the city or up from the south valley, fresh troops would give chase awhile, only to find the Beast slavering out of the forest to level the unfortunate, his frightful speed an amazing blur, at first sight.
Though they struck him occasionally with bowshot, the invaders began to lose heart, believing the werewolf invulnerable. He would tear their shafts free with an agonized howl and come at them again, seemingly invigorated
.
They did not suspect how badly they had hurt him, despite his supernatural resiliency. He fought on in severe pain and gnawing fear, his strength waning with the passing hours. More than once he thought to retreat, lest he die and thus fail to achieve his vengeance, freeing the Beast’s corpus to fall under its submerged soul’s control, unleashing it upon the world unchecked.
But he gambled on God’s mercy, knowing the people’s need of his awful power, drinking in the rare and strangely wonderful sense of belonging, and reveling in the energumen’s now buried frustration and wrath.
He fought on in his pain, knowing that it purchased life for the innocents of Vedun. He even found himself longing for their safe passage, though they feared him as much as they did pursuing troops.
And there were few losses along the road to the west.
When the last wave of wagons had passed a mile beyond the northern castle trail, the escort party led by Anton and Nagy joined in exhausted rejoicing with the Benedettos, who had hung back in their wagon, along with a squad of anxious cavalry.
“Did everybody make it?” Galioto fretted, brow creased.
Nagy cleared his throat. “Most did, I think.”
Anton passed him a wineskin. “It’s not as bad as it might have been,” the knight judged.
“Bad enough,” Lydia replied wistfully.
“A lot of good young men left back there,” Michael added.
“Too many,” Nagy agreed, looking back along the road regretfully and thinking of his dead friend Stefan Berenyi.
Anton hummed thoughtfully. “What’s the matter, Nick? Nobody to call you stary baba—old grandma—anymore?”
“Nobody but women, brats, and old farts left,” Nagy mused.
“Everybody out of the catacombs?” another late arrival asked.
“Everybody,” Galioto assured emphatically, as if he’d been accused of failure. “I went back three times and checked—” He rambled on for a time, repeating the details until he had assured himself of the others’ confidence. When he was done he rode off with some of the men to rejoin their families.
“We’ll be back, Vedun,” Michael said wistfully. A few turned to regard him in surprise.
Then someone spotted the eyes.
“Look—the werewolf.”
Simon’s angular eyes gleamed in a stray moonbeam, staring down from the woods above them, motionless.
“He still unnerves me,” Lydia breathed.
They saw the eyes turn away sharply as he scrambled back east several yards with a rustling of foliage. The clumping of hooves sounded back along the road, beyond a curve.
“Let’s get out of here—!”
“Wait,” Michael commanded. Something was happening on the road between them and the approaching band of soldiers.
A dark blot appeared, swirling like an inky cyclone. Their vision could not penetrate the growing stain in the air. They saw the soldiers now in the distance, jangling to a sudden halt, their commander cursing at their failing courage. And then they, too, were reacting to what began to take shape in the abyssal blackness, swathed now in red flames that emitted no sound.
And then the sound that did come caused them to cover their ears.
“Oh my God—”
There issued from the phenomenon a wailing, as of souls in torment, and around the darkly glowing—seemingly saurian—apparition, there appeared the reaching, pleading forms of the eternally lost. A forgotten corner of damnation had been released to move among men.
The mercenaries broke their ragged ranks. Some began fighting the loyal but outnumbered Llorm, having had enough of this mad work. A few deserters began to fight their way back along the road, toward the valley trail that would take them to the southern curve of the Carpathian range and out of this forbidding territory.
“They’ve opened Hell!” a man screamed in Hungarian, pointing, from the Vedunian party. And when the thing began to move, their panicked steeds would wait no longer. They were borne away on hooves that scarcely touched earth, peering back in horror until they disappeared around a bend in the road, toward refuge in the west.
* * * *
Simon also saw the dark shape begin to move, blacker than the night, amidst the whirling chaos that accompanied it. And he was struck with a terror he had never known before.
For something sparkled where eyes might have been. And it was gazing up at him as surely as if he stood before it. The trees could not hide him. He instinctively knew that nothing in nature could—it had been invoked from the nether world to destroy him.
Wolverangue, the energumen’s soundless voice formed, upon seeing it through Simon’s eyes. There was no rejoicing in the possessed spirit’s recognition, though it tried to mask its own demon-fear.
The Hell-Hound began to move, and the trees flared in its passing, though they were still drenched from the long rain. Slowly it stalked upward toward him, its footfalls searing the ground with unearthly smoke and flame.
With a prayer for his immortal soul’s deliverance, Simon moved down to engage the chaotic Thing, circling it cautiously. Uncertain of what it was he engaged, though it at times assumed the shape of some great lizard. Simon was shaken to the core by the wailing of the damned that cavorted about it like satellites, their torment increased by the fresh sight of the natural world they could never regain. The sum of the demon’s presence seemed to burn an unholy space into the natural world that encompassed many fathoms—a sense of terrible fiery depth, as of the Underworld, raised despairingly high above the world of men....
With axe and sword the werewolf laid into the near-amorphous Hell-Hound, and before he had seen the first blow pass through it without effect, he understood the futility of his effort: Wolverangue did not live in this realm, nor could it be destroyed here.
The lycanthrope’s weapons cut a swath through flaming air again and again, each time emerging from the vaguely reptilian blackness hotter than the last—until the axe and sword began to glow with a dull redness, becoming, at last, too hot for Simon to grasp. He growled and looked in wonderment at the smoking of his palms, smelling the scent of singed hair.
Wolverangue’s occasional suggestion of damning yellow eyes suddenly glowed down upon him, stoked by Hell’s furnace. Tenebrous teeth and hooked claws took soul-withering shape at its extremities—not in one place but many—and the werewolf was suddenly seized and borne aloft, though he seemed beyond the demon’s reach. Flaming needles seared his body in a hundred agonizing spots. He roared and struggled to escape that tormenting clutch, fearing that he would be dragged down into the Pit with it.
The Hell-Hound began to take more definite shape, solidifying as it more surely gripped its quarry. Simon lashed out, tearing with the savagery of the doomed predator, fur and skin burning black wherever they touched. He had to get free from the agony which by now would have rendered any normal man insensible.
Pain-maddened, he twisted and kicked, flipping backward out of its nightmarish talons, to land on his muzzle. He shook himself, vision filled with flashing lights.
Unhurried, the Hell-Hound stalked him, tireless, pressing toward the end for which it had been invoked, with evil calm. Glorying in the chance to wreak destruction while it moved across the face of the world. Along its burning path, nothing would ever again grow. A charred scar for the world of men to mourn and avoid.
Simon took up the sword again, howling in desperate fury, the weapon now cool enough to wield but heavier than it had been: for dawn approached; the slow and painful reversion to human had begun.
Simon poured all his remaining strength into a tremendous twisting blow. It struck the creature’s lower portion without a sound, but the impact jarred his teeth, and the blade sheared in half with a shower of sparks. He was left holding the hilt and a jagged fragment of forte.
The demon’s fulminating breath descended to his nostrils as the unspeakable mouth gaped wide to engulf Simon’s animal face—again with that sense of frightfully compacted space.
And thrust the broken sword upward mightily. It lodged in the spreading maw of the Hell-Hound with a blinding red iridescence, and though it appeared to the grounded Simon to float in the air of its own accord, it stayed the descent of the gaping mouth.
Wolverangue paused, confounded. The cruciform hilt, wrought in the ritual fires of holy men in a Vedun long past, began to glow with a blazing white light too bright to gaze upon. The Hell-Hound’s yellow eyes receded to pinpoint; the claws and teeth and nebulous form followed, whirling smaller and smaller. An imploding vacuum, a vortex that dwindled to a ball of black fire. And vanished into nothing....
Simon lurched in pain, not caring whether it had been the holy symbol or the dawn’s first flicker that had banished the demon back to the Pit. He knew only that the agony of return was upon him.
Running madly in his effort to smother the pain, dragging the battle axe behind him unconsciously, he bolted across the road and down through virgin thicket into the southern valley. He ran until he could run no more, until he fell and tumbled down a hill and into a stand of larches beside a boulder-strewn brook, where he screamed his pain into the bubbling clear water for the space of half an hour.
Crisp, cool morning sunshine filtered through the dizzily spinning branches overhead when he recovered his sight. Pale light played over the scores of punctures and vicious burns that covered his naked form. Healing scar tissue had already begun to form.
* * * *
“How do you like it?”
Simon Sardonis blinked awake in the lengthening shadows of late afternoon. A gentle breeze ruffled the trees, but no life buzzed or twittered near the brook. His head felt squeezed in a vise, and his body protested every movement. But most of the pain was gone. It would return, he knew, when night fell...for he had killed under its power.
He rose on an elbow, wondering for an instant at the voice he had heard. Then he knew what it must be, just before he saw it.