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

by T. C. Rypel

  On a sudden, sighing whim, he planted the blade through the lid of that chest, with its arcane secrets of lost Akryllon. Then he climbed out of the cellar, replaced the rug, and departed from the Gundersens’ house. He would remember, in future days, that strange impulse by which he had symbolically committed his life to probing the secrets of a place few believed in....

  Not even a token effort at martial law was enforced in the streets of Vedun. The looting continued, drunken soldiers braying in celebration of their prizes. Perhaps all the captains of free companions were dead; perhaps they were numbered among the pillagers. He noted at least one party of the hated Ottoman Turks, sniffing about the ruins. Soon there would be more, and a new order would lay its stranglehold about the Carpathians. Gonji could not bring himself to care.

  He rode on glumly.

  The flood waters had receded, the exit sluices having been opened. Bloated bodies, their skin mushy and gray-mottled, lay about the walls of the central culvert, the waters streaked and eddied with the blood of both the loved and the hated. Now uncaring and unallied, the dead were everywhere, in every imaginable attitude; piled and twisted, some still straddling the saddles of downed mounts. No Llorm dragoons were about; no presence suggesting order or policing. Nothing had been done in the way of clearing the carnage for future habitation. Only the looters had inherited the broken city. And tomorrow they, too, would be gone, their work finished or not. For no one would hazard to move amidst the putrid decay. There was none to bury Vedun.

  Gonji spotted Tumo’s massive spiked truncheon in the debris and wondered whether, farther on, he would find the cretin giant finally among the dead. And the grim thought came: Was it really I who fought here only last night? Or some usurper who possessed my sleeping form for actions in a battlefield out of nightmare?

  Passing the smashed market stalls and gutted millinery shop, he saw a band of thrill-seeking wastrels setting houses afire while they drank and cavorted before the spectacle. One of them pointed him out to the others. They began to follow menacingly, hurling insults at his back.

  He wheeled the steed and aimed both pistols into their number. They shuffled to a halt.

  “Looking for bounty?” he said in Spanish. “Who will pay it, swine?”

  “Hey—you got a point there, slant-eyes,” their leader agreed. With mollifying gestures, they backed away from him and returned to their sport. He rode off, turning south into the next main street.

  Gonji found himself approaching the manse of Flavio. Bandits were loading a half-shattered wagon with the late Elder’s furnishings: his ornately carved mirrors; the decorative, leather-upholstered Italian dining set at which Gonji had supped; his huge, hand-loomed tapestries; silver services and gold ornaments—

  They saw the angry pistol barrels before any of them recognized the impassive face. The band froze and looked from one to the other.

  “Leave it,” Gonji ordered in High German, cocking both wheel-locks.

  One of them started to gurgle a laugh. It rose to a gravel-toned guffaw, the others taking it up slowly. There were six of them, all sporting firearms.

  “It’s the Jappo! Aw, give it up, mate,” the man said in disbelief. “What’s the sense of it anymore?”

  Gonji’s right-hand pistol exploded, blowing a large hole in the center of the looter’s forehead.

  The others lurched backward and dropped what they were carrying, some clawing for their pistols.

  “Who dies next?” the samurai inquired calmly, tossing the spent piece and whisking out his katana.

  It was clear that there were no volunteers. Slowly they dispersed, glaring back at him as they mounted and clopped away, grumbling threats of returning. Gonji replaced his sword and the unfired pistol, knowing the futility of it all. They’d be back later for their spoils, whatever he did. He sighed wearily.

  “Hey, you men!” a man’s voice cried as he walked out onto the portico. “I can’t save this man!” It was Dr. Verrico, Vedun’s surgeon. He held his hands before him. They were covered with blood, as was his apron. He looked like a provisioner from Roric’s slaughterhouse. He had been working inside over the severely wounded companion of the departing bunch, who lay dying on Flavio’s settee.

  He blinked to see the band ride off, then peered at the helmeted Gonji, his brow darkening. “Oh, so it’s you. The sensei,” he growled. “You think this exonerates you?” He pointed at the staring dead man in the street. “More killing? Where do I begin, oriental butcher, eh? Show me which of these men you need to raise from the dead, and I’ll start to work! Well? No lofty words of exhortation to valor now?” Verrico’s voice rose in pitch. “What’s wrong? I say to you, which ones shall I patch together for your use?”

  Gonji turned, gritting his teeth and kicking the horse into a trot, forcing back the sting of the tears and the sick feeling at the pit of his stomach. Dr. Verrico called imprecations after him until he had turned into a side lane far down the street.

  “You are the Deathwind you seek!” was the last pronouncement he heard behind him.

  Not long after, his teeth still grinding involuntarily, Gonji passed the fallen forms of Karl Gerhard and Stefan Berenyi, which someone had laid side by side on a flagstone walk. In war, men fall, he told himself, but there was no consolation in it—this place, this conflict, had somehow been different. It took an exercise of will to stop the trembling in his jaw.

  He continued eastward, drinking in the brutalization of it all, trying to achieve a surfeit of it, or an understanding, a relief from the confusing sense of guilt. In Dai Nihon, no such feelings would have been attendant on the aftermath of a war. But he was not in the Land of the Gods now. He knew these people, their ways. And he could not disperse the feeling that he had brought evil karma into both their lives and his.

  He reached Provender Lane and saw the heaped bodies without the scorched façade of Gutschmidt’s inn. Warily, he wondered whether some brigands weren’t enjoying some perversely dishonorable jest. But the corpses stacked at both sides of the door, like entrance columns, were all those of slain soldiers. Entering cautiously, he found, to his relief, Gutschmidt and Klaus, packing satchels.

  “Gonji!” Klaus exclaimed heartily, almost in exhilaration. His armor was gone. He moved forward to bow to the samurai, who returned the greeting in perplexity. “You made it,” Klaus continued with sincere relief.

  Gutch nodded to him. “You did good,” the innkeeper assured. “You got ’em out. Now what—for you, I mean?”

  Gonji glanced around the inn. It had been cleaned and swept, looking ready for business, except that most of the beverage casks were gone. “I don’t know,” he responded dimly. “What about you?”

  “Me and Gutch tidied up the place,” Klaus answered for him. “We thought we’d head west and check in on the townspeople. You know—see what their plans are in Austria. Then maybe we’ll head to Augsburg or Frankfurt for awhile—right, Gutch? We’ve got all Gutch’s good stuff loaded out back, so that—”

  “All-recht, bimbo, I’ll do the talking,” Gutch cut in. “And let’s belay this ‘me and Gutch’ business. I said we’d see, nicht wahr?”

  They exchanged small talk for a space, Gonji bemused by it all. Of all the unlikely friendships to develop out of the night’s grim events, this one was the oddest he could imagine. But he was briefly glad for the sound of their good-natured banter.

  “Do you need all those pistols?” Gonji asked, indicating the long row on the bar.

  “Help yourself,” Gutch offered.

  “You have powder and shot?”

  Klaus chortled in his nasal voice. “Do we have powder and shot, he wants to know!”

  And shortly they were loading a pack horse for him with the weapons and ammunition, from their considerable cache. At length they shared a parting toast out of Gutch’s finest stock. Then the samurai took his leave of them, with all due well-wishes. At last sight the pair were lighting the funeral pyres outside the charred Provender. “Gutch leaves no
thing untidy,” the stylish innkeeper explained.

  And then Gonji took a last turn through the maze of ancient alley canyons, morbidly counting the dead bushi who had held their posts to the end to buy time for their neighbors, the evacuees. He soon abandoned it when the pointless task had begun to make him feel as unclean as a gravedigger, the lowest of the untouchable caste in his homeland. And just when that analog occurred to him—that by his arguably poor planning he had, in fact, become akin to a gravedigger—he found Hildegarde.

  He stared down at her a moment, then left the horses to drop on his knees beside the lifeless form of that magnificent warrior-maid. And what began as a quiet meditation ended as an emotional storm. He clutched at himself and curled up beside her, weeping bitter tears and trembling in the alley. He’d known no such moment since his youth.

  He felt lonelier than ever.

  * * * *

  Aldo Monetto set his food aside when Zarek fell into his hysterical delirium. The end was nigh. Garth rushed up in support of Aldo, rubbing his palms helplessly on his thighs.

  “I don’t want to die,” Miklos Zarek repeated again and again, tossing from side to side in his fever sweat. “I’m afraid to die! Not yet—not like this—I’m not ready—I’m not ready!”

  Monetto panted with apprehension, desperate for something to do to ease the man’s travail. He tried to give him water, but it wouldn’t pass Zarek’s throat.

  Arvin sat a good distance from the dying man, hands over his ears, banging his head against his knees. Eddings mumbled to himself, eyes averted. Wilf watched, arms stiffened behind him as if he would spring should they call for his assistance.

  “He’s coming for me—and I’m not ready!” Zarek screamed.

  “Miklos—Miklos,” Aldo comforted, grimacing and supporting his head, “call out to God, man. Scream His name—beg Him to take you to His breast—”

  With a final arching of his back, Zarek breathed his last in Monetto’s arms.

  Gonji returned in time to see the man sag back onto the tunnel floor. He glanced about at all of them grimly, dropping his gaze to share their long silence.

  At length he spoke. “Garth—come with me, bitte. There’s something...I must show you.”

  “More secrets?” Wilf asked petulantly as they shuffled out through the tunnel entrance and into the forest. “Are there any left?”

  They paid him no heed, Garth eyeing Gonji anxiously, his aching heart signaling to him in precognition. They gained their steeds and clumped through the forest circumspectly, arriving at the place where Strom’s flyblown corpse lay under a bush.

  Gonji walked off, allowing Garth space and time to vent his pitiable grief, Gonji himself being touched in a way he had rarely felt in such matters.

  When he returned he found Garth still struggling with spates of choked sobbing as he knelt beside his son. When the smith’s sorrow had been spent, Gonji spoke with great difficulty.

  “Garth, I...I would take my life by my own hand, if it would spare you the burden I must add to your grief. I think...cholera...I think it must have been Lorenz who murdered Strom. Can you tell me why?”

  “Nein,” Garth replied, anguished, shaking his head in denial. “It cannot be....”

  Gonji recounted the evidence against the city’s Chancellor. Garth still refused to accept his son’s guilt. Gonji sighed and showed him the partial word dug in the mud, Strom’s reed pipe still angling out of the uncompleted second letter.

  “What do you suppose he was trying to tell us?” the samurai asked gently.

  Garth extracted the pipe, cleaned it absently as he thought, and a slow burning anger clouded his brow. His tear-stained cheeks began to redden.

  “M—” Gonji read, throwing up his hands “—something.”

  “M-U,” Garth said with certainty. “Mutter—mother.” His tone was filled with an uncharacteristic contempt.

  Gonji’s eyes widened. “Explain, bitte. I thought your wife was—”

  “I prayed she was. How I prayed she was. Oh, I never truly believed it, but I prayed that it might be true....”

  Gonji folded his arms, breathing shallowly, absorbed.

  Garth’s voice drifted back over the years.

  “When I was a young, brash officer under King Klann, you see, I thought the world was mine for the taking. I had my choice of any number of women to take to wife. And of all the beautiful camp followers and titled ladies from among the Akryllonians themselves, from all those I might have chosen in conquered duchies and principalities, I chose perhaps the worst. Olga. My Olga. Lady Olga Thorvald was the most beautiful and exciting woman I had ever seen. Always too beautiful, too damned desirable for anybody’s good. Not so different, perhaps, from Wilfred’s young hoyden, Genya. You understand? I forced myself to pretend that her appetite for the attentions of men would stop at innocent flirtation once we were married. I was a fool. A young, lovesick fool. A warrior out in the marches, fighting campaign after glorious campaign, sometimes is not equipped to fight the battles in his own life, nicht wahr? Once, we sailed off in search of lost Akryllon, while Klann’s people, the army’s families, remained on a sympathetic island kingdom. When I returned, Olga was heavy with child. She gave birth to Lorenz not long after. She tried to convince me that he was mine. But I knew. I knew that he could not be.”

  Garth fell to silence for a time. Gonji grew impatient.

  “Why have you and your sons maintained this story about your wife’s being dead all this time? Why was Strom murdered? What has happened here, Garth?”

  The smith peered at his dead son’s body. He shuddered. “They didn’t know, at least until recently,” he breathed with remorse. “I explained to you, I wasn’t sure myself. I only hoped that it were true. But now....”

  “You’re losing me,” Gonji pressed.

  Garth struck his palm with his fist and coughed out an angry sob. “Gonji, I feel great affection for you, almost as much as for a son. But as God is my witness, I declare that He must have set you the desolate task of breaking old men’s hearts—”

  Gonji was taken aback; he hadn’t needed that. “There are a lot of broken hearts back there—”

  “Ja-ja,” Garth agreed sharply, “but none worse than mine. It must be that...that you’re right. But I can’t believe it. Olga and Lorenz.... He was always her favorite. He would have been the one she would have sought out. Yet he gave no indication of knowing. Why? What could they possibly have had to gain? How did she even learn that I was here in Vedun? I took such great pains to close the book on my former life.”

  He saw Gonji’s confusion and suspicion, and went on. “All-recht—the whole story, then. When I knew that Lorenz was not my son, I determined that I should not make the innocent bastard pay for his mother’s wrong. I loved him as my own. But I was given in those days to ill temper and a vengeful spirit. In all fairness I must say that these dire consequences are as much my fault as Olga’s. Though I persuaded myself that I could forgive her infidelity, my pride, as the aggrieved cuckold, drove me to take steps against her ever hurting me again. I took her repeatedly—brutally, I suppose. I quickly impregnated her with Wilfred, and soon after his birth, with Strom. All the while watching her mounting hatred for both me and my sons—”

  “And Lorenz,” Gonji interrupted, on sudden inspiration. “Is he...Klann’s son?”

  Garth laughed harshly. “Nein, that’s the irony of it all. If it were true, this might make sense. But one of the unfortunate side effects of the enchanted coupling of the seven children was that they were rendered sterile, so it is said. The House of Bel dies with the last Klann personage. I fancy that it was Olga’s exalted opinion of herself, as well as her attraction to Klann’s kingship, that ultimately did drive her to his bed. It would have been like her to entertain the notion that she alone, among all women, might defeat that side-effect of the spell and deliver him an heir. By the time of which I speak, I know that she had approached him, but he resisted her charms, out of friendship for me.
This, of course, was the royal personage I served, whom none of you saw. Had he lived, Mord would never have worked his filth with this army....”

  He drew a deep breath. “It was during the end of Klann’s true glory years, when the quest seemed noble, when the Llorm force alone outnumbered the army you saw here, when small kingdoms were won as easily as the peaceful city of Vedun. We were marking time in a duchy on the continent. Lorenz’s true father tracked us down, maddened, demanding him back as his sole heir. He was a minor prince, a fop and a dandy, given to womanizing and a life of dissipation. His family suffered a curse of madness transferred through the males of its line. I think he would have left it lie, had the hereditary madness not been upon him—surely Lorenz could not have been the only child of his seed. But he wanted the boy, tortured, I supposed, by his memories of that red-headed seductress. So he came, making his demands. And faced with the truth, sneering and posturing before me, I killed that prince in a violent rage. Him, and all his party with him. Klann was angered that I had brought us to war with the island kingdom, forcing us to move on. And Olga—Olga began to fear for her own life. And in hatred and fear, one does what one must.

  “She seduced Klann, at last, while he was still furious with me. I knew it, though I made no issue of it with the king. Perhaps all that kept him from my simple, expedient murder was the fact that we shared so much. His sense of gratitude over my shielding his life—who can say? But not long after, while I was on a campaign, I received word that Olga had died suddenly, that the mages and surgeons had been helpless to save her. By this time I had become sufficiently sickened by the fruits of my own brutality. I had begun to find killing so repulsive that I was considering resigning my commission. It took little urging to convince me to retire to raise my sons. Klann was going to set me up with a house, a piece of land, and a generous stipend to sustain us comfortably. And, I suppose, to ease his conscience. But I suspected the truth of it all, though I wouldn’t admit it. So I left, with my sons, leaving no word with anyone as to where I could be found. I journeyed here to Vedun, befriended Flavio, became a follower of the Christ, and said nothing more of my former life.