by T. C. Rypel
Aldo Monetto and William of Lancashire bellowed in triumph. Then Eddings was slapped backward by the impact of a quarrel. He was killed instantly by the shot that penetrated near his heart.
Monetto cried out in anguish, saw the soldiers mounting the stairs to get at him, roaring vengefully at the prison tower. He grabbed a powder keg and poured out a thin line, as bolts hissed by. Snapped up a torch and touched off the trail of black powder as he launched himself off the allure to the bakehouse roof below. Aldo plummeted, struck, tucked and rolled—and as he regained his feet and scurried over the rooftop, the explosion tore the eastern middle curtain’s allure to shreds, bowling him over. He rolled down the slope, caught the thatching at the edge, hung full length, and dropped behind the flaming kitchens.
Already the roofs were catching, the heat almost unbearable. He circled the long way, snapping shut his buffe for disguise. Then he was a Llorm officer again, racing among the panicked men and hurling conflicting orders at them.
He paused to feel the fervent heat that beat the ward in waves; saw the Llorm react to the great hissing column of steam from the moat. The barbican had collapsed, and the portcullis glowed red hot.
“You, there!” he called. “Stay out of the keep—the werewolves are everywhere! No, not the great hall, you idiots—the invaders have taken it!”
He made his way toward the hall into which his friends had disappeared. “Hey—follow me,” he ordered three reluctant mercenaries in Spanish. They gained the hall and turned into the right corridor. He stopped in his tracks—whirled and tore into them with his axe and dagger—downed all three bewildered mercenaries, Monetto gasping and squeaking out pained outcries with every vicious blow he delivered. He spat another’s blood from his mouth, his stomach churning.
But he’d been spotted—
A soldier pointed. Heads turned to view him. Three Llorm. They charged him, shouting that he was a raider, an impostor.
Monetto’s heart sank; he had lost his bow. No pistol. Only his biller’s axe and short blade. He stood his ground.
Then they were skidding to a halt, their attention diverted. With a blood-curdling howl, the werewolf hurtled into the hall, lashing out with his huge broadaxe, scattering them like slaughtered chickens. A horrifying vision. Monetto espied Simon’s scorched fur, especially about the ruff; the many wounds, new and old.
And then the Beast was approaching him. Monetto tore off his helm.
“Hey—it’s me, it’s me—Aldo Monetto! Ho-ho, am I glad to see you! Look—big axe, little axe—we can hold them, huh?”
Simon growled something Aldo couldn’t make out, and then they were under assault again. Monetto clapped on his helm as crossbows clacked in quaking arms, one bolt striking the Beast. A swarm of desperate men, bent on gaining the exit, desperately charged the bleeding werewolf.
Furiously scything his axe through their numbers, Simon hewed a dozen men to pieces, Monetto concentrating on confused stragglers who stayed their hands an instant too long, upon seeing his Llorm uniform. Growling and frothing, Simon now and then stopped to rip bolts or blades from his body. Monetto exclaimed in sympathetic pain to see it.
Then a spearing Llorm pierced Simon’s back, causing the werewolf to shrill at the ceiling and drop his weapon. Monetto charged ahead and felled the attacker.
Aldo was knocked to the floor by a press of frantic, trampling bodies. When he regained his feet, Simon was gone, raging down another corridor. Monetto found himself surrounded by desperate soldiers, some injured, some wild-eyed with the passion to escape.
But he was alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Gonji, Garth, Wilf, and Arvin quietly assumed strategic positions in the locked banquet hall. By the time alert troops had recognized any of them and commanded attention, they had drawn their beads.
“Hold your fire, or the king dies,” Gonji roared above the din, pulling back hard on Gerhard’s powerful longbow. “This is an armor-piercing shaft!”
Only three crossbows were present among the disorganized troops. All were behind the same banquet table that covered Klann from Gonji’s fire. They came up to readiness, but the king halted them and glared at the intruders. General Gorkin and two elite guards raised themselves around the king, but they were caught in a crossfire: Arvin stood on one side of the gallery, his last pistol aimed into them; the musicians scuttled off to see Wilf’s threatening posture on their side of the gallery, shaft nocked and bow drawn; Garth held back four footmen with his axe and broadsword; Gonji’s eyes promised death from his sallet’s ominous slit visor.
“We’ve come for Mord, Klann,” the samurai declared. Women and children could be heard whimpering under tables. “Deliver us the sorcerer, and we’ll go without further trouble.”
Klann looked furious, disbelief creasing his features to see the undying enemies who had invaded his sanctum. He seemed to be struggling in indecision. Quaking with an internal vibration, he raised his long blade when his eyes settled on Garth.
“Iorgens....” The name hissed out between gritted teeth. The primitive bellow of the Tainted One issued from his swelling throat as Klann’s head rolled back to regard the vaulted rafters.
Tension overwhelmed the hall. The soldiers charged.
Gorkin was the first to die, as Arvin’s wheel-lock roared and belched black smoke, ending in a crimson eruption at the castellan’s neck. The banquet hall erupted in frenzied fighting.
Gonji’s shaft tore through a faithful guard who leaped before his king. The samurai began running, a bolt sizzling the space he had occupied to chunk into a wall. He nocked and fired on the run, dropping the nearest threatening soldier.
Wilf poured thirteen-fist arrows down from behind a gallery column, that was quickly studded with crossbow quarrels. An archer fell. Then another. The gaffle-cranking time required to reload the crossbows rendered them useless for long seconds, while Gonji’s raiders exacted their toll.
Arvin began unleashing Gonji’s bow—frantically, erratically, yelping with every released shaft—on the soldiers who scaled to the gallery after him. Garth, positioned on his side of the hall, took men down with bellows of battle fervor, slowing their advance.
His quiver at last emptied, Gonji flung away Gerhard’s longbow and surged into the defenders with raging swords.
Women and children, voicing their terror, took to a rear door and streamed from the banquet hall, joined by free companions who had lost heart and could think only of escape.
Garth’s propelling, razor steel began to waver as his wounds drained his strength. Klann cursed in his wrath, repeatedly calling out the smith’s name, inching toward him behind his battery of protectors.
The samurai engaged in a running swordplay, leaping over tables to cross with Llorm swordsmen by ones and twos, stringing them out, his katana skewering the nearest attackers from unimaginable angles of thrust, while he mystically reacted in defense with the shorter wakizashi to turn the steel of their trailing fellows.
The oriental cut a bloody swath toward the king, implacably, inexorably, though every twist of his body shocked his injured left side and bespoke the pain from new wounds.
A scream from the gallery—Arvin pitched over the balustrade, still clutching Gonji’s bow, dead before he struck the floor.
Gonji leapt over downed bodies of his foes as he made his way toward Klann. The elite guard split their number, half of them poising to take on the samurai, their eyes filled with apprehension. He slapped off his bobbing sallet and crossed his blades in deadly invitation, black eyes panning their sweating faces. Their leader cursed and lunged—
A twisting parry-slash—a turning undercut and a balletic turn to deflect a downward crashing blow—one-two-three silver-taloned gleaming edges raking through mortal screams—
Only debris and the dead lay between Gonji and the back of the enchanted king. But Klann had moved farther off, bearing down on Garth, who had been backed into a corner.
A door swung open off the hall.
Lady Olga Thorvald appeared, calling out to Klann in desperate fear. Garth and Olga locked eyes for an instant. The smith lost his concentration. A plunging spear ripped through his shoulder, slamming and pinning him against the wall in a gout of blood.
“Garth!” Gonji blared, surging to his aid.
Klann hesitated a long moment as Olga continued to appeal to him to flee. His remaining personal guards took the initiative and pushed their reluctant liege toward that portal, though his face, angled back at his skewered ex-comrade, Garth, had suddenly gone ashen, as if out of concern.
Wilf saw them rush the king toward safety and seized his last few shafts, sticking them in a wooden bench. He notched and launched. His steel-headed arrow spindled a retainer, tearing through his back up to the stabilizing feathers. Another—
A Llorm gained the bannister at his feet, dangling with one arm and thrusting with the other.
—Wilf’s shaft tore through the neck of the king as he passed the doorway—the door slammed shut in the faces of the guards—
“I got him!”
Wilf’s roar of triumph was cut short by the fierce, stabbing pain in his inner thigh. The Llorm pulled back for another strike. Wilf cried out, long and loud, and drew Spine-cleaver, leaning over the balustrade to strike off the man’s gripping arm, sending him plummeting in a dark-red spray. The young smith fell back against the wall and examined his leg. It bled freely and burned with a maddening intensity, but it would not debilitate him. The muscles seemed intact. Wincing, gritting his teeth, he groaningly bound the gash with a dead man’s shredded tunic sleeve. As he did so, he spotted his brother.
“Lorenz—you bloody bastard,” he cried in a long wail, scrabbling up in his pain to nock and launch his final arrow at the sneering man on the far side of the gallery.
Lorenz bowed like a courtier and casually pulled a gallery door closed before him, as the war arrow struck the lintel. Wilf slapped the balustrade and threw his bow down into the shambles, taking the stairs over downed bodies to rejoin Gonji, who bent over his fallen father.
Wilf’s mouth funneled and he forgot his own pain when he saw Garth being helped aloft beneath the blood-smeared wall.
The remaining soldiers, seeing now the raiders’ number and condition, regrouped and came on, swords and pole-arms extended for the kill. Wilf and Gonji set themselves, casting each other a doomed expression of farewell....
The doors squealed on their hinges and flattened inward thunderously, battered by the werewolf’s massive shoulder. The Beast tumbled in and rolled, then skimmed his huge axe along the floor, men leaping and falling to avoid its screeching slide.
The werewolf seized an overturned table and slammed it into a backpedaling party of six soldiers. The disheartened Llorm began to disperse in terror, injury, and despair. Doors flew open in every wall.
“Let them go, Simon,” Gonji ordered. “Garth’s hurt—and we still haven’t found Mord—Wilf, where the hell are you off to now?”
The young smith had begun to move up the gallery stair. “Lorenz,” he shouted back. “He’s up here somewhere.”
Garth was waving at him weakly.
Gonji railed at his tormented friend. “Get back here! Forget him. Who did you come here for? We get Mord, and you get your Genya. There isn’t time for anything else.”
Wilf bitterly abandoned his vengeance, with a last look up to the walkway, and returned. They helped the badly injured Garth to his feet.
“Oh, Papa,” Wilf fretted to see his father’s grievous wounds.
“Never mind that,” Garth gasped. “You go on...all of you...I must seek Olga. I’ll—I’ll join you later, ja?”
“It’s worse than any of you think,” Simon rasped, his enormous, feral wolvish form hulking over them protectively. “There’s something tracking me—a demon out of Hell—”
“What?”
“Mord’s work, I think,” Simon clarified, pawing blood from his slashed muzzle. He squatted down low, shuddering, issuing a painful sound that was chilling to hear. There were hideous rents in his blood-matted golden fur. “We must find Mord,” he growled with pained determination. “I must find him—get out of here, all of you—!”
He pushed off from the floor and loped through the smashed doors with a terrifying howl, his axe forgotten.
“Simon!”
Garth struggled out of their grasp, letting his axe fall weakly. Hefting his broadsword, he staggered off. “You must go,” he said with effort. “Each of you has his quest. Fulfill it...and go from this place.”
“Papa—!” Wilf caught him in a swoon and embraced him. It lasted but briefly, and they parted, Wilf and Gonji watching the valiant smith shuffle off through a north corridor before turning right toward an area of living quarters.
The pair moved in the opposite direction, thinking to make their way back across the middle ward to the central keep, and from there through the inner maze of halls to the prison tower, where Mord’s wyvern once roosted.
The halls were filled with screams and blood, panicked soldiers and civilians everywhere, fighting one another in their frenzied efforts at escape. Localized fires had broken out from torches flung at the werewolf and the raging of the ignited magazines. Only small pockets of troops now acted in defense of the castle. Most passers-by took little notice of the invaders. Gonji and Wilf had begun to wonder whether there wasn’t more at work than the actions of the raiding party, when they caught sight of the soul-chilling apparition without.
The unearthly thing that Simon had spoken of....
It moved through the ward in gathering chaos, something that belonged nowhere in the natural order. It looked like a gaping hole in the space above the ward, yet shaped like something reptilian. And its eyes—that horrible yellowish glare that suggested eyes—seemed to see everywhere at once, to burn into the soul of the watcher with ghastly promise of lost eternity. In its wake it carried...dancing things, whirling and lashing about in tormented rhythm. Lost souls, grasping for a new purchase in the world of men that always seemed close, yet ever out of their reach. The apparition stepped lightly in the ward, though seemingly possessed of a ponderous dark mass, the whimpering and wailing of the trailing spirits ever more piercing. Each step burned the paving stones of the courtyard, until they were molten, dully glowing.
A nightmarish suggestion of teeth and claws. The fathomless maw spreading....
Wilf and Gonji retreated from the vestibule hall, for the hellish thing was coming straight for them. The ward being out of the question now, the pair wished each other good fortune and split up, to increase their odds of at least partial success.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Wilfred Gundersen was the first of them to find an object of his quest, though it was not the desire of his heart that was fulfilled but the passion of his angry spirit.
He made his way through a corridor past the banquet hall, out beyond the flaming ruin of the armorer’s tower, reentering the corridor maze below the battlements of the mighty central keep.
He climbed to the second level, filled with desperate Akryllonian nationals—women and children, for the most part—who sought an exit to freedom. The gates were impassable, seared to molten rock and iron by the passing of the demon Wolverangue.
Wilf avoided crossing paths with any Llorm troops who tried to evacuate their families in the din and confusion. A servant from Vedun had told Wilf that Genya had been seen in the keep earlier that day. All he could do was follow up the frightened girl’s word.
That was when he found Lorenz.
His treacherous half-brother leaned casually against the door jamb of a bedchamber, smiling coyly. Wilf sucked in a hot breath and strove to dash the red lights that obscured his vision. He squeezed the katana in a cold, sweating fist and walked toward Lorenz slowly, scanning him. No pistol; rapier still in the sheath.
Screaming people surged through the hall, crossing between them as they locked gazes. Wilf stopped, ten feet from the traitor, mouth working at forming wor
ds.
“Well, Wilfred—late as usual.” Lorenz consulted a Nuremberg egg watch, replaced it in the pocket of his waistcoat. He laughed complacently. “You wanted to get inside the castle all this time—all you had to do was ask! All this...violence wasn’t necessary.”
Wilf found his voice. “Why did you kill poor Strom? The little fellow idolized you.”
“I had to get to the castle with intelligence,” he replied, shrugging. “So I gave him a choice. He refused, provincial little thinker that he was. I was forced to eliminate him, use him for a smokescreen, with the aid of Mord’s black ram, of course. Perhaps I asked the wrong brother, eh? You’re the one who wanted to breach the castle walls.”
“Why, Lorenz? Why do all this...outrage? Why did our mother do this insanely evil thing? What could Mord have offered you both?”
“She despised you and Strom, you know. For being sired by the brutish blacksmith. He forced himself on her, did you know that? Unthinkable treatment, for such a lady. That’s why she loved only me all these years. Does that make you jealous, Wilfred?”
Wilf shook his head slowly, Lorenz’s madness becoming clear. “Could such a mother truly love any child?”
Lorenz’s gaze lofted skyward as he went on rhapsodically, almost as if he’d forgotten Wilf’s presence.
“I used to dream of a life in the great courts of Europe, those places I saw as an errand boy of a glorified Carpathian peasant village. Imagine my joy to discover these Akryllonian nomads during my last business venture abroad. To learn, quite by accident, that my mother was among them. We recognized each other at once. It was...almost magick, of the sort the peasants shiver at before their fires. I remembered her—you were too young, but I remembered. She looks grand, Wilf. She’s scarcely aged at all. And Wilf—she’s told me who my father is. My true father....”
“The raving lunatic—so I’ve heard.”
Lorenz snorted. “You dare to speak that way? Considering that you are the seed of that cuckolded bull who—”