Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (23 page)

Gonji trusted him not a whit. Worse, he found himself deeply distrusting Michael, husband of the woman who occupied so much of his thinking.

“I’ve taken to heart Brother Xeno’s practices of self-denial, you know,” Michael was saying as he walked Gonji back to his horse. “They’ve done wonders for me…”

Gonji grew sullen and noncommittal, making replies only when absolutely necessary. He was profoundly disturbed by the changes in Michael Benedetto. And as he said his farewell and rejoined his waiting companions, he began to think of the shapes of evil. Shape-shifters—the chameleon who had befouled his life years earlier—the dreadful thing Grimmolech had supposedly done to Simon Sardonis in the womb…

He wondered now whether the man that strange mystic held in his thrall was really the man Lydia had married. Gonji felt a distinct premonition of dark fortune. For Lydia. For the colony here in Austria.

But there seemed to be no help for it.

* * * *

“Does it bother you to know that he desires your wife?”

Michael stiffened. His dark eyes flashed as in days of old. He felt a resurgence of what people once called his “Neapolitan temperament.”

“Yes, but I cannot let that occupy my mind. What is…simply is. There is no help for it.”

Brother Xeno smiled paternally. “You have learned well, my son. Yet your aura belies your words. What is it?”

“The old leg wound,” Michael replied, only a half-truth. “It aches again.”

“Because you have allowed yourself to lose control of your center. Your harmony of spirit is disturbed, and you have lost the power over the flesh. Is it not so?”

“I’ll be all right. And these people will respect me again, as they once did.”

“If you desire that, then you must conquer the spirits that bedevil you.” Xeno placed his hands inside the ample sleeves of his robe, crossing his arms over his chest. “Tell me…could you deal with your feelings if you discovered that this man had had his way with your wife?”

Michael’s head tossed as if he’d been slapped. His lips parted twice before he found words. “Yes…I can deal with anything I
must
deal with.”

“That is good. Every man must find a way to remove the obstacles to his harmony of spirit, if he is to be in control of his center.”

Brother Xeno ambled off quietly toward his austere shelter, leaving Michael to stare down the road, after the samurai and his departing band.

* * * *

“Be strong, Anton,” Gonji had said. “Strong and vigilant.
Sayonara
…”

He’d said his good-byes that evening to Anton alone, cautioning him to tell no one of their quiet departure. And as they slipped away from the settlement, Gonji felt a tremor of guilt again, as if he were abandoning them to fate. Yet there was nothing that could be done about it. Soon it would be clear that Wilf and the others had not gone to Vienna. Questions would be asked, and the evil conspirators who were surely about would learn Wilf’s purpose, if they were not onto it already.

“So what now?” Orozco asked. “Back to Italy and then by ship to France?”

“Funny you should ask,” Gonji replied. “That’s what
you
are
going to do.”

“Me? What about the rest of you?” the former sergeant of lancers snapped.

“They
will be split into squads,” the samurai said, casting a thumb over his shoulder toward the thirty-odd warriors who rode behind. “They’ll ride like the devil through the Empire and gain the Alpine passes. Some will enter Burgundy from the northeast, some from the southeast.”

“And you?”

“I go alone…the way my tormentors seem to like it least. Straight into the heart of that damned place.”

“That’s madness!” Father Sebastio fretted at their side, his horse tossing and snorting as it picked up the priest’s tension. “What—?”

“So sorry, Kuma-san, but this time we do it right. We infiltrate, arrive in small groups, without a fanfare. And I go alone because our opponents seem to enjoy killing off my companions,
neh?
We need to try a different tack anyway,” he said over their scoffing sounds. “Listen to me. They’ve had everything their own way thus far. They control the powers on this continent even as
ju-jutsu
turns force against itself. These evil connivers who cross worlds in search of ready conquest—
they
are the ones. Domingo Negro spoke truly of the complex powers who yearn for this world’s riches. She also spoke of their being entrenched in France, among other places. I didn’t listen, then. That’s why I planned things so poorly. I failed to understand the vast outreach of the enemy, and I was insufficiently committed. That is different this time.” He removed his sallet and bound his
hachi-maki
around his forehead, the samurai
headband of resolution
. “They make a game of opposing me. A game of torment which they fancy they’ve fixed in their favor. They set themselves up as clever puppeteers. I shall let them believe they hold my strings awhile longer, then deal with them in my own way. But I need your help, to the last sword-brother. This time we do
not
match them, strength for strength—our army of sacrificial victims against their powers of Hell. And I shall bear the guilt for that fool’s campaign until those poor men we left in France are avenged. This time we do it like the
ninja, neh?
As quickly and silently as venomous lightning. And if the Great
Kami
smiles upon our way, perhaps we have allies in Burgundy already. That is our first order of business—find out what’s become of Wilfred’s band, and of Simon.”

“So why am
I
going to
sail
to France?” Orozco grumbled, gesturing in perplexity.

“Did not Armand Perigor pledge to go along should we ever try to win back our lost face in Burgundy?” Gonji asked slyly.

“Ah, true,” Orozco agreed. “But…where is he?”

“Collioure,” Father Sebastio recalled, brightening. “He said, if ever we wished to find him, mention Corbeau in Collioure.”

“Hai.”

“That’s on the southern coast—and mighty close to Spanish power,” Orozco reminded, cocking an eyebrow in irritation. He affected his familiar victimized posturing. “I am still considered a renegade in my country.”

“Hai,
that’s why I chose you,” Gonji said. “I need someone Perigor knows and trusts, and it’s easier for a Spaniard in Spain to pretend to be something he isn’t than for anyone else.”

“How’s that again?” Orozco queried, leaning from the saddle in bewilderment. He eyed Sebastio and Leone, who were chuckling, and by his look Orozco appeared to be wondering whether Gonji’s double-talk hadn’t somehow made a fool of him.

“Never mind,” Gonji said. “You’re elected.”

“The Ox goes along?” the sergeant asked hopefully, meaning, of course Buey, who rode close behind them.

The samurai looked back to Buey, the massive ex-lancer, who was now more taciturn than ever, his dream of retiring in Austria gone sour. “That’s up to him. But I was hoping he’d take command of the company when I move on.”

Buey locked eyes with Gonji. “I don’t know. I ride along because I have no other choice. I think God must want me along on this. Maybe we’re repeating a mistake and He wants me there when He lets us get crushed.”

Gonji hissed in disagreement. “Or maybe He wants to see you vindicated,
neh?”

The Ox thought about it a moment before nodding gloomily.

“Yoi,”
Gonji said. “Good. And Kuma-san?”

Sebastio hefted his sword, the big Italian
schiavona. “
I don’t know that I can use this against men. But if what you’ve all said about this province is even partly true, then—” The priest shrugged and slammed the blade back into its scabbard.

“Domo arigato.
All of you. You are true and noble friends.”

“Si,”
Orozco said dismally, “and I want fresh flowers on my grave daily—and that damned silver you’ve owed me for two years already—”

Orozco’s caustic humor cheered them along the road, camaraderie spreading through the company. And when it came time for them to take their separate ways, Gonji briefed them, thanked them all with unaccustomed warmth, and had a brief, private word with each of the nearly forty men.

Father Sebastio conferred his blessing, and the fellowship was fragmented in the hope that it would one day be reunited in triumph.

* * * *

Anton the Gray Knight crouched with his back against the wall of the sleeping chamber. He was sweating profusely as he listened, clutching the wheel-lock pistol vertically before his eyes, using both hands to steady the piece in his moist grasp.

The cobwebs of sleep were quickly supplanted by fear of whatever it was that had crept upon the house in darkness and burst in through the wooden shutters, leaving them splintered kindling in the next room—the room Gonji had slept in.

The samurai had been right. There
was
a conspiracy of evil that held them all in its arrogant thrall, contemptuous of their ability to combat it.

The noises ceased. Anton waited a moment longer, then kicked open the door that separated him from the unseemly shapes his imagination had conjured. The room swirled with a cold breath of evil. But nothing slithered there now. It lay dark and still but for the soft creaking of a cockeyed shutter that swung on one hinge.

Anton rotated the pistol toward the cot. It looked unstable, and there was a huddled form atop it—the bundled blankets the samurai had told Anton to arrange there during the night or two before his departure had become common knowledge. The Gray Knight moved closer to examine the oddly remade shape.

There was a hole the diameter of a hitching post ripped through the blankets, the mattress, and the ruined frame of the cot. Whether it had been drilled or eaten through, Anton did not care to ponder.

PART THREE

Actions at the Gate of Hell

Infernal thunder shook both sea and land

In all the planets, and hell’s batteries

Let off the artillery, which Milton mentions

As one of Satan’s most sublime inventions.

—Byron

CHAPTER TEN

“Your wife,” Claire said to Wilfred Gundersen, smiling sweetly as she rode beside him through the dell. “She was very
enceinte
when we left, it seemed. Do you think by now—?”

“I’m probably a father,
ja,”
Wilf replied curtly, at once regretting his sharp tone. He still seethed over the oppression they’d witnessed in Lamorisse. “Seems strange, to think about it,” he added.

“A papa,” she said. “What were you hoping for?”

“A boy, I suppose,” Wilf answered wistfully.

“She didn’t seem to care for me much, I thought.”

Wilf felt a twinge of embarrassment, hoping it didn’t show. “She’s just been acting oddly. Moody—you know.” Now he was sure his face had flushed. “Well…I guess you don’t,
nicht wahr?”

“Nein,
I’ve had no children yet.” She laughed breathily. “Was she…uneasy about you riding off to help another woman?”

The warrior was increasingly uncomfortable with the tenor of the conversation. They’d spoken little of a personal nature during their weeks on the road. He suddenly realized that he
had,
in fact, found Claire quite attractive in a distant, unconscious way. It surfaced now, causing him to seek shelter in thoughts of discipline. He wondered what Gonji might say under similar circumstances.

“Nein,”
he lied, “this was too important for her to be thinking anything…like that.” He cursed deep inside.

“That’s good,” Claire said. “You’ve been both chivalrous and valiant, and men like that usually prove faithful, too.” Her smile faded, and her brow creased. “What do you think of what Moreau said—”

“Hsst.”

Two mercenaries suddenly pincered them from either side of the road, breaking out of the pines at a point where the track ascended out of the dingle.

“Follow my lead,” Wilf whispered to her, smiling anxiously. He heard Claire’s short note of assent. There was no way but through these men. Wilf and Gonji had dealt with surly brigands like this before, and in greater numbers. But Gonji wasn’t here now, to Wilf’s chagrin. He hadn’t tasted action for a long time. Cold sweat broke out in his palms, and his throat went dry.

What would Gonji do?
No one could say; he never did the same thing twice.
Mushin no mushin.
Empty the mind. Let training take over. That was as good a start as any…

“Where’re you bound?” one of the mercenaries asked Wilf, grinning broadly. They wore the familiar, unsettling wolf crest on their jacks.

“St. Pierre,” Wilf replied. “My wife and I are visiting.”

“That so? And who might you be visiting?”

Wilf gulped. In truth, he and his party had slipped into the small town by twos and threes, inconspicuously. And Wilf had made no acquaintances before he and Claire had departed for Lamorisse. So he recalled the name of the Frenchman he had once known best.

“Paille. Alain Paille. A poet.”

“Poet? The name sounds familiar, but let’s see if we can put a face on it. We’ll escort you there so that you encounter no trouble, eh?” They were eyeing Claire portentously.

Wilf carried but one pistol. Loaded, primed, and spannered, it provided some comfort. But cold steel would have to win the day, if it came to a fight, for both brigands also sported pistols.

“That’s kind of you,” Wilf replied quietly.

They rode toward St. Pierre at a canter, the Farouche hirelings in the rear, as the road drifted upward out of the Saone Gap. All the while Wilf anticipated a pistol ball in his back. He tussled with the desperate urge to turn on them suddenly and take his chances. But before he ever formed a resolve, they reached St. Pierre.

Wilf knew he would have to make a move. He could feel Claire’s tension and tried to project confidence. He kept riding for the center of town. In the distance he could see some sort of turmoil. Then he caught sight of one of his comrades, dressed in peasant garb and nodding furtively to Wilf as he stood beneath a Farouche banner. Wilf rode on, braced a bit.

He assessed the fisticuffs at the fountain near the town hall. Brigands with drawn swords were prodding men into fighting one another. They’d roughly formed a ring. Downed bodies of the beaten lay about the fountain. Others reluctantly went at each other in response to blade points jabbed into their behinds. Wilf began to rankle; he’d seen such spectacles perpetrated by bullies before. In Vedun such a sadistic display had been interrupted by Gonji. It had left a deep impression—the first time he’d seen the samurai in action.

“This fellow’s a visitor,” one of the mercenaries called out behind Wilf.

“Well, we’ll have to make him welcome,” replied the commander, a balding, thick-chested man standing outside the fighting ring. “Him
and
his lady.” Gruff laughter. The bloodied and gasping men in the ring halted a moment and were prodded on again.

“We’ll go look for your friend,” the second escorting mercenary told Wilf, riding up close. “But until then, you can get to know some of the townies better, eh? Maybe your friend is among them.” The soldier’s tone grew coy. “Tell us, be you Huguenot or Catholic?”

Wilf anxiously glanced around the faces of the sparse, milling crowd. Saw more of his men interspersed among them, waiting expectantly: Aldo Monetto—dressed in an ostler’s jerkin, a sack slung over his shoulder; Nick Nagy—

Wilf averted his eyes, almost doing a double-take when he saw how Nagy was garbed.

“I am a Christian,” Wilf said evenly.

“A
Christian?”
the pot-helmeted mercenary echoed, cocking an eyebrow. “But that’s so vague…You’re not one of these rabble-rousing Wonder Knights we hear about, are you? Your accent marks you as Germanic. Aren’t those
Wunderknechten
Germanic? And we know how to deal with
Teutschen
troublemakers. That’s not what you are, is it?” And when Wilf shook his head curtly, the soldier went on, pointing at the battered men who were being forced to fight one another: “But…I think the Catholics here are a little short-handed. So you’ll fight on their side while we…learn your lady’s preferences, eh?”

When he leaned back to leer at a wide-eyed Claire, Wilfred Gundersen calmly drew his pistol and fired it at close range. The brigand’s face exploded in a scattering of blood and bone.

Screams and galvanic motion ensued. The horses shrilled and bucked. The shocked mercenaries on foot drew weapons in surprise, not having expected the hemmed-in Wilf to act. Wilf brought his stallion under control before the other mounted escort could steady his own mount. Bolting close by the warrior’s flank, Wilf pulled Spine-cleaver and slashed the man viciously through right arm and breastplate.

“Ride!” he shouted at Claire, who kicked her horse in compliance. Then the young warrior bore down on the back-stepping footmen who clawed out pistols and raised blades against his charge.

Shots rang out all about them, Wilf’s band surging into combat or drawing a bead on the pistoleers as soon as he had initiated action. Three men fell nearly as one. The brutalized townsmen, seizing their freedom, grabbed weapons from the slain brigands and joined in on the side of the interceding party from Austria—

* * * *

Aldo Monetto crashed his heavy sack against a mercenary’s skull. The man’s partner turned, snarling, and brought out his saber. The acrobatic biller from Vedun bounded into the air and front-kicked him in the jaw, sending his helmet sailing. Tumbling out of the way of another brigand who charged up from behind, Aldo snatched the pistol dropped by the man whose skull he’d split and blasted a smoke-belching shot into the attacker’s belly. Then he brought out an axe and dirk from the sack and tore into two broadsword-wielders who bore down on him, blades angled for the kill.

Monetto’s dirk whistled through the air, one man gurgling a short outcry, blood erupting from his riven throat. The second mercenary, armored in burgonet and cuirass, slowed to see his partner dispatched so skillfully. He circled Monetto warily, gauging the double-bladed battle-axe’s potential. Then he stamped forward and lunged low. Monetto snapped a knee up, and the blade slid by, deflected by his light leg harness. A whirling swing of the axe drove the mercenary sword’s point high overhead, and as the blade was bound up, Monetto sprang forward and landed a pummeling front kick to the man’s ribs. He staggered backward. Monetto’s axe described two devastating arcs. The first sang off the broadsword’s forte, clanging it out of lethal range; the second, whizzing over Monetto’s head and then suddenly downward, severed the brigand’s leg above the knee.

* * * *

Hernando Salguero, former captain of the First Catalonian Lancers in Spain, quietly strode through the curtain that separated the inn’s back room from the serving tables. At the sound of gunfire from outside, the Farouche hirelings in the inn pushed to their feet and unlimbered their weapons.

Salguero aimed his pistols at the backs of the two nearest brigands. Smoke fumed from the roaring double discharge. As the pair fell, Salguero overturned their table and snapped up one of their fallen pistols. An errant shot from another mercenary splintered wood from the table, causing Salguero to wince. He peered out cautiously, saw two men from his company engage the remaining three. But another of the Austrian band hesitated, his courage failing him. He held up fending hands to no avail—a skewering blade drove him against the wall as he wailed in mortal agony.

Salguero gritted his teeth and brought up the pistol. It wasn’t spannered.

“
Mierda
—shit!”

The bladesman came at him now, and the captain drew his saber. They clashed in a hard, sparking engagement, the foe’s strength clearly superior, the vitality of youth also in his favor. Salguero battled him gamely as he was backed against the shelving, his escape blocked by ale casks. Bottles exploded in shards from a swipe of the Farouche minion’s heavy blade.

An arm extended through the doorway. The bark of a pistol—

The captain’s assailant tumbled into him, eyes glazing in death. Salguero pushed him off, saw the triumphant head toss of the warrior who’d saved him, the heaving chests of the other two allies in the inn as they withdrew from their successful clashes.

Then,
whuffing
out a breath of relief, Salguero retrieved his pistols and began clearing and reloading them.

“Wilfred—my God!” one of the men said as he cautiously viewed the scene out in the street.

Salguero’s eyes narrowed in alarm as he ran for the door.

* * * *

The stooped old woman emitted a single falsetto “ooh” through her face-wrapping shawl as the shooting began. She bumped into two startled wolf-crest wearers. One of them mouthed a fierce oath, cast her an angry scowl, and swung a heavy forearm blow at her.

Surprisingly, the old woman ducked the blow with a nimble head-slip and kicked him in the groin with the point of her wooden
sabot.
The brigand expelled a chestful of stale breath and crumpled in agony. Before the second man could react, strong, gnarled fingers had seized his throat and squeezed it in a powerful grip.

They tumbled onto the ground amid pounding feet and hooves, the clangor of steel and the harsh report of gunshots. The mercenary’s face turned from red to purple as he fought insanely, clawing at the shawled face, shredding fabric to reveal the whiskered visage of…old Nikolai Nagy. Years of hard work had imparted Nagy the tenacious grip of an ape, and the mercenary’s surprise to see the old woman revealed as an old man proved his undoing. Nagy’s dirk finished the job.

* * * *

The mercenaries at the fountain scattered for cover as sporadic gunfire dropped their fellows. They could ascertain neither the strength nor the positions of their attackers.

Wilf clung low on his mount, then bellied down off the saddle and into a sprint. Spine-cleaver gleamed vertically in his grasp as he ran down two men like an aroused scorpion. He slashed left, then right—their rib cages parted under glistening oriental steel.

A pistol ball hissed through the air from an indeterminate point, Wilf dropping to one knee reflexively, flinching. He had not been hit. He gathered his breath and bulled into a knot of three back-skipping enemies. Momentarily disheartened by Wilf’s fierce charge, they nonetheless angled blades at his face, bellowing at him in threat. He felt a rush of adrenaline to see their panic, the old battle-fervor of Vedun chasing his fear of wound before it.

A shaft from an unseen accomplice dropped the soldier to Wilf’s left. The centermost brigand, a bearded lout in a wolf-crest tunic, hurled a French obscenity at Wilf and clashed blades with him. Wilf beat back the blade with a sharp parry and in the same motion surprised the third man by catching his downward arcing blade with a fast overhead maneuver.

Wilf’s complete balletic turn into a low slash relieved the Frenchman of his lower leg, the man’s blade point narrowly missing Wilf’s unprotected head. Shrieking to see his booted foot thump softly on the street beneath him, the brigand balanced in ashen shock an instant before falling to writhe in mortal agony in his own spurting blood.

The last man gaped to see the damage Wilf had done, casting about for help against this deadly opponent. He was slow to respond as the smith sprang at him in a dynamic charge. Wilf roared a hair-raising
kiyai
and
whanged
the mercenary’s blade aside, then drove the
katana’s
point in a lethal horizontal thrust that began beside his right ear and ended six inches deep in the man’s chest. Losing his balance in his charge as the blade bound up in the dying man’s spine, Wilf plunged forward, falling with the collapsing brigand, taking the blaring force of the man’s death scream full in the face before scrabbling to his feet and pulling his crimson blade free with a splattering effort.

He brought Spine-cleaver into high rear guard—

It all was over.

“Who’s in charge here?” Wilf shouted in a commanding voice.

A middle-aged woman standing nearby panned her vision about the square. She carried a pitchfork with blood-stained tangs. This she lowered to lean on as she answered for all in the collectively gasping town of St. Pierre.

“I think
you
are, sir.”

Aldo Monetto strutted up to him, laughing, his axe leaning on a shoulder as he tore at a bloodied shirtsleeve with his teeth. “You know,” he said, spitting out the sleeve tatter, “I think the woman’s got a point.”

Wilf walked the area, his face contorted with tension, bringing his breathing and pulse down to normal. He moved like a proud young lion now, prowling, displaying the ready menace in its claws and fangs.

Salguero moved up to join them as the townsfolk tended to their injured and slain. “We lost two,” the ex-captain apprised Wilf grimly. “Sixteen left to do whatever it is you have in mind to do.” He studied the young warrior with eyes of experience. “Your first victory,
senchoo—
captain!
I remember the feeling. I’d wager Gonji does, too. It’s never the same again, I’m afraid. The dead come back to haunt you in increasing numbers. Make you think too much.”