by T. C. Rypel
Genya ran forward, stopped in horror, Mord’s laughter filling the hall behind her all the while.
A Llorm trooper crashed through the portal on the landing above them, dropping hard to the clammy stones at the monster’s broad feet. Gonji staggered into the archway above and stared down at the sixth Klann personage—
The Tainted One. A hideous amphibian mutation. A mindless primitive introduced into Klann’s lineage by unholy human-inhuman couplings in the dim ancestral past, when men dared to intermix with those things that called themselves gods.
Gonji saw Mord behind Genya and was momentarily indecisive. The sorcerer was shocked to see the samurai still alive, to catch the glint of hatred in his eyes. He caught Genya’s shoulder, but she twisted out of his grasp and scrambled along the wall toward Gonji. Mord cursed and turned, running into the bleak corridor, past the cells of puling mutilated subjects.
The Tainted One rushed Genya. Gonji leapt down the stair and sliced open its gray-green belly. A swipe of its misshapen arm, fortified by a raging bellow, knocked the samurai flat, breath whoofing out of him. Genya ran for Wilf, now, who was dazed and moaning; his left arm swelling, broken.
The monster closed a snaking amphibian appendage around Gonji’s leg and began to drag him along the stone floor. He slashed and cut at the malformed tentacle with the Sagami, slicing it through. The monster fell back, maddened and leaking a thick, dark fluid.
A flashing explosion above and the crumbling of masonry as a tower wall collapsed—smoke billowed into the dungeon—Wolverangue had circled through the castle, leveling wall after wall, still seeking Simon. It had stalked near to the tower in its wave of destruction—
“Get Wilf—get out of here—free those people!” Gonji shouted at Genya as the Pit-spawned monster came at him again.
Genya whimpered and dragged a moaning Wilf onto his feet, picking up his downed sword. They staggered into the corridor again. On a sudden compassionate impulse, she fumbled with the cell locks, doors creaking open to unleash the wretched half-humans whom Mord had mutilated.
“We can’t get out!” Genya shrieked back at Gonji.
The samurai tore through the monster’s broad lower jaw with a one-handed uppercut, grunting at the splash of its unholy life’s-blood. “Mord must have, somehow—go!” he roared with disgust. Then he took to the corridor after them, the Tainted One in raging pursuit.
The suffering half-human fragments crawled and staggered mindlessly from their cells, as the three survivors stumbled about in the darkness. Then Gonji saw a flashing bar of moonlight, and watched it shuttered at once by the slamming of the iron hatch, high above.
“This way!” he yelled. The Tainted One half-loped, half-hopped after them, bellowing in pain, its frog-like bulk scraping the walls of the narrow corridor. It became entangled with the pawing, lowing victims of Mord’s spells, batting them out of its way, crushing them against walls.
Wilf moaned behind him as Gonji gained the portal, kicked it ajar—it led into the outer ward below the prison tower—
And Simon Sardonis was there, the savagely wounded werewolf, amidst a whirling vortex of wind, snowed under by a grim squad of wildly screaming Llorm troopers. Simon was weaponless, save for his rending fangs and talons, and the Llorm laid into him with pike and sword, charged to intrepid fury to see his weakness. He fought them on all fours now, like a dying beast.
Gonji roared in fury, cutting a swath through the determined men as Genya supported Wilf across the ward toward the wrecked gatehouse. The Llorm fell back, disheartened at the terrible sight of the samurai, though his every kiyai was charged with the knifing pains from his wounds and his eye was swelling shut from a blow he scarcely remembered.
The Llorm drew away, some of them discarding their weapons and dropping in an emotional heap. For now they, too, realized the thing that their noble royalty had become, their whispered lore proving true.
The mutant-monstrosity reeled into the ward. Simon mounted his last howling attack, charging the Tainted One in a challenge to mutual extinction, slamming into its pliant flesh and digging in with great, wet slashes that evoked unearthly shrills of pain.
Amid the eerie thrashing and whipping wind, and the pulings of panicked stray animals, the raging heat wave preceded the molten hissing of stone, a hundred feet away along the middle bailey wall.
The Hell-Hound pulverized the final barrier to its prey, a mountain of ashlar and masonry bursting into the ward.
Genya and Wilf were lost to Gonji’s view. His heart sank as he cried out in surfeit to the kami of war.
Simon and the mutated Klann separated and instinctively took flight, dragging themselves away from the searing approach of the Hell-Hound. The tormented souls that whirled about the stalking demon became animated to frenzy, knowing their time of viewing the world of the living to be at an end. The Tainted One hobbled off, savagely wounded; Simon crawled away in a spiraling path, maddened to howling, in his pain. Yet over the din he called out to Gonji, over and over, a single name: Mord.
Wolverangue glowed redly in anticipation.
Gonji fell back, gasping and throwing an arm over his face to stave the heat waves. He cast about in desperate helplessness. When his eyes scanned the rubble-strewn ward a second time, he caught sight of the foul enchanter. As the fragmented human experiments pitifully struggled out through the cellar door, Mord slunk away behind the supply drays and private coaches assembled under the outer curtain wall. Horses and domestic animals bolted and shrieked, trapped in the ward, lurching across Gonji’s path as he ran toward the scattered drays.
Mord spotted him, screaming and yammering in warning, motioning with conjurer’s gesticulations that produced no effect. The samurai raised his katana high, a long growl burning his throat as he bore down fast.
But the blood-soaked golden werewolf lurched up to intercept him.
“No!” Simon cried, giving Gonji pause, a taloned arm staying his blow.
Gonji looked from the sorcerer to the werewolf, failing to understand. Mord took the opportunity to turn and run. Gonji cursed and put up the Sagami, sprinted after Mord and bore him down from behind with a flying tackle. They tumbled over the paving stones, rolling and grasping. Mord’s sword arm came up, and Gonji caught it at the wrist, staving its edge from his uncovered skull. He struck the enchanter a hard but ineffectual punch in the midsection. Mord laughed in his face, his breath the breath of a carrion-eater.
They regained their feet, breaking their hold. Mord swung a low arcing blow that Gonji sprang over, drawing the Sagami again with a gurgle of pain.
“You can’t destroy me, fool,” Mord boasted. “I’m an immortal servant of the Dark Lord—”
“Your Dark Lord has lied,” Gonji replied.
Simon bellowed behind them, having collapsed again, dragging a ruined leg, yelling for Gonji not to kill him. The samurai battled defensively. Their blades whanged off each other repeatedly, Gonji’s fury stoked anew with every crossing.
Mord cut his leg with a deflected pass, a superficial blow, but it enraged Gonji. He surged at the sorcerer, pressing the attack now, oblivious to everything save his loathing for Mord.
Mord blared a cavernous laugh and lunged deeply. Gonji sidestepped the thrust and snapped his blade upward—
The sorcerer’s sword arm was severed almost to the shoulder. Mord shrieked in an intensity of pain he hadn’t known in centuries. Gonji’s following sequence of slashes cut open his breast and belly, then another ground-to-sky cut that knocked loose his ominous golden mask—
Gonji retreated a pace and grimaced. The sorcerer was hideously deformed, his face a shriveled thing; the eyes, solid black marble chips; his skin, wrinkled and sere, mottled bluish-green like a serpent’s. And where he bled from Gonji’s sword cuts—even at the stump of his right arm—there emerged only a trickle of pale blood. An ancient, withered, evil being who had no place outside the Pit....
Mord hissed at Gonji through a lipless mouth filled with tiny, pointe
d teeth. A long, dry tongue, like living bark, darted at the samurai in threat, as the now mutilated sorcerer backed away. But Simon circled around the drays as Gonji turned at the awesome heat at his back, which increased in intensity. The shambling chaos, Wolverangue, burned its footprints into the stonework, but fifty feet behind.
Simon seized the sorcerer and dragged him down, enfolded him in his long arms and dug his talons into the monstrous adept.
“The dray—tie him in the dray—”
And Gonji understood at last. He grabbed a harness and helped the man-wolf wrestle the struggling sorcerer into the dray bed. They lashed him tightly to the small wagon and together wheeled it around by the hitch to face the oncoming horror. With a grunting push, they rumbled the wagon toward the gaping maw that lowered groundward and spread wide to receive the offering. At the last moment they were forced to fall back from the terrible heat. But the dray rolled on, as if drawn by suction, into that shimmering mouth of Hell—
Mord’s long wail of despair and appeal to his Dark Master was engulfed, as if drowned in an endless fiery tunnel. There came a shocking concussion of dimensions disentangled from each other, a snapping withdrawal that slapped the pair of them onto their backs. And in a red flash of impure flame, whose heat flared and subsided in a second, both the Hell-Spawn and its invoker were gone from the world. Hell had reclaimed its own.
The Hell-Hound had found the offering satisfactory.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The end of their struggle a foregone conclusion, the remains of the invading army, crouching at the walls or under cover, put up their weapons. The few mercenaries gathered themselves, hollow-eyed, and began to pick their way through the smoldering rubble toward the sanity of the surrounding forest slopes, their survival its own precious victory.
Gonji peered over at the weakly pawing werewolf, a great sympathy overwhelming him. He had no idea what to do for his terribly wounded ally, who had secured the lives of so many.
His own wounds began to take their toll; he sat back, grunting with every movement, still clutching his sword, but his fighting spirit smothered.
Gonji spotted the Tainted One, ravaged and moaning, trying vainly to scale the outer bailey wall. Some of the Llorm sat with their backs to it, as if in shame, weeping in their defeat and disorientation.
A shaft, fired by an unknown assassin, whistled from a low-slung dungeon hatch to pierce the mutant’s back. The creature finally went down, for the last time, in a heap in the fuming dust and clouding black smoke, its dying bleats unattended.
The fires raged on through the castle, as refugees streamed through the now cooling main gatehouse, only to find the rubble impassable. So they made their way through the miller’s gate and postern, or over the walls by ropes.
The evacuation of Castle Lenska had begun.
Gonji blinked and wiped his eyes to get a clear look at the apparition that stepped through the smoke, bearing two longbows. A Llorm officer. It was Aldo Monetto.
“Follow the Devil, and you find a samurai,” Monetto said, his begrimed face breaking into a smile. His teeth were the only recognizable part of him.
Gonji began to laugh, tossing his head back wearily, a sound of forlorn relief. “Still here? You don’t follow orders very well, do you? Oh, Aldo-san...it’s all over....”
“I retrieved your bow, and Karl’s,” the biller said. “For a time there, I thought I’d never find any of you alive.”
Gonji remembered. “Wilfred and Genya—they’re over there somewhere. At least I think they’re still alive. See if they need help. Wilf’s hurt pretty badly.”
Monetto saluted carelessly and, with a sympathetic frown aimed at Simon, ambled away.
Then Gonji saw the small figure of the naked woman, seated near the wall, smoke obscuring her, then parting to reveal her again. He pushed up with a mighty effort and strode toward her, scowling, but strangely fascinated. He reached her as a single Llorm trooper draped his surcoat about her nakedness and knelt at her feet, weeping. Another Llorm grimly held a spear at port arms, as if to bar Gonji from further retribution, though it cost him his life. And Gonji bowed to the doughty bodyguard.
For here was the seventh and final Klann personage—a frail blonde queen, wistful in defeat. And Gonji found his heart going out to her, though he could not fathom why, at the moment. He fell to one knee before her. “Your...your Highness...,” he found himself saying.
She was somehow an intriguing woman, looking less vanquished than serenely daunted. And her small, angular face, not unattractive, appeared to still be settling into its final cast, save for the piercing eyes of pale blue that shone toward unseen horizons. She rose and spoke to no one in particular.
“I’m sorry for the horror of it all,” she said haltingly, in Kunan. “But I cannot help being most sorry for myself....” She looked down at Gonji and continued in Italian. “I’m alone now, you see. So very alone. I once wondered what others meant when they spoke of...loneliness. Wondered whether it was not something to be desired, to have the peace of one’s own quiet, distinct thoughts. But it’s not so good a thing, this loneliness. It’s so...cold and empty inside now....”
She wrapped her arms about her and shivered. Gonji’s mouth twisted to see the discarded skin and moldering substance of the mutated Klann sibling. At length, Queen Klann the Last went on.
“Tell these people, please, won’t you, that I’m very sorry for what’s happened to them. To their city. Tell them—tell them my ill-omened royal line has suffered for it, far more than they can ever understand. I alone have known the death of each child of the House of Bel. There is but one more scion left to die....”
She took a dirk from the belt of a personal retainer. Her remaining soldiers gathered around her, muttering to her, enfolding her from view. Gonji stood a moment before backing away respectfully, at last believing, in part understanding; sympathizing with the concept of an endless quest after a lost legacy that ended in repeated catastrophe.
Gonji turned and moved away toward his fellows, a strange sense of the capricious turning of destiny pulsing with the beats of his heart....
* * * *
Monetto found Wilf and Genya alive and overcome with emotion to be at last together, locked in an awkward embrace. Wilf was in obvious pain. Aldo helped her fashion a splint for the young smith’s broken left arm, and a Llorm trooper came up on his way out of the demolished stronghold and offered them water and mead. They accepted it gratefully, and before the soldier departed, Aldo made a point of offering his hand in friendship, telling the man to spread the word to his fellows and their families that they would be welcome if they sought sanctuary with the Vedunian party in Austria.
“Oh God, Wilf, is it really over?” Genya asked as she bound his wounds and tried to relieve his discomfort.
“Done, Genya,” he replied. “We’ll never be apart again.”
She began to cry softly. “I was so afraid. Will you...take me as I am?” she queried curiously.
“What the hell does that mean?”
She touched her forehead. But the oily red mark was gone. She began to laugh exultantly when the perplexed Wilf assured her that there was nothing on her face that a good scrubbing wouldn’t remove.
And not long after, among the castle refugees, they saw Tomas emerge, battered and begrimed, from the burning keep. When he saw Genya’s fiery glare—and Wilf with his katana still clutched in a bloody fist, Aldo Monetto standing by, his axe over his shoulder—the Keeper of the miller’s gate halted and gaped. His face drained of color. Genya rose and took one meaningful step toward him.
Tomas emitted a short, choked cry and stumbled backward. He returned the way he had come, back into the smoking ruins. Genya steeled herself, fists squeezing her palms white. But she stopped. And in a concession to the return of peace and civility that she was hard pressed to explain to herself, she eschewed vengeance, at least for the moment.
“Genya?” Wilf questioned. She turned to respond.
The night sky shrank before the darkest hour, the Hour of the Tiger, but the flames of Castle Lenska blazed the environs alight.
The samurai soon fell to dry heaving, and they gave him water and a little bread, brought by assembling servants who were lost for guidance. Aldo tightly bound Gonji’s staved-in ribs and laved his many cuts. The samurai’s left eye had swollen completely shut, giving rise to a series of jibes by the again light-hearted biller.
When Genya unbound Wilf’s leg wound to display the awful rent in his thigh, the flesh laid open raggedly to bleed anew, Genya hissed and Wilf gasped—and promptly passed out.
Genya, with much fretting, began to treat the leg wound, shushing Monetto’s chuckling.
“That’s a good sign, milady,” Aldo assured. “It means you’re both still very alive, after all this.”
“I’m glad he waited until now to go faint-hearted on me,” Gonji jested from where he leaned on one elbow.
More servants and soldiers emerged from the smoking inner wards and halls, choking and wounded. They streamed from the burning keep, the drum towers, from every level of Castle Lenska the Unassailable, which had twice been assailed in scarcely more than a moon. Soldiers and servants aided one another, all weapons now abandoned.
Monetto nudged Gonji to see Richard the baker stagger out with a fresh band of escapees. Genya hurried over to them.
“Richard! You’re alive!” She ushered him over to Wilf to share in her joy over her love’s survival.
“Shouldn’t we tell him that Lottie’s well?” Monetto asked softly, when Gonji grabbed his arm to restrain him.
“Iye. If it’s their karma to find each other again, then it will be as it will be. Let them live with their loss for now. Perhaps they’ll have gained the courage they needed to fortify their love by then.”