Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (28 page)

Simon scooped up the sword, catching his breath, reeling now with the unaccustomed exertion. Blood pounded at his temples. He listened. Slapping footfalls from an indeterminate distance—

Remembering the baby, he reached down and quickly drew up the basket. The child had fallen silent, probably exhausted and starved. He peered in at it an instant, his heart plummeting to see the incongruity of its sweet innocence in this stronghold of evil. Shushing it needlessly, he bounded up the stairway to the next level.

The iron-clad door was locked, the keys likely on one of the dead men below. And now footsteps and voices approached rapidly from a corridor that crossed the one he could see.

He set the child down on the landing, out of weapon reach. The energumen began to laugh mockingly inside him, assuring him that it was useless to try to escape. He cursed and gritted his teeth. Brigands appeared down the corridor, brandishing pikes and broadswords. They were bellowing and pointing. The baby began to cry softly again.

Simon’s soul cried out for divine aid.

Then he recalled the lesson in shape-shifting he’d suffered at the hands of that old desert holy man. The mufti in Africa, whom he’d regarded as a lunatic, though Gonji had urged him to listen to the strange man. And, in truth, some unfathomable nexus of mystical principles had vindicated the old mufti’s wisdom: Simon had found that in moments of great emotional duress and pressing need, he could achieve at least a partial transformation into the Beast even by day.

He watched the sweating faces and flourished weapons coming on beyond the grating. Heedless of their threat, he began to batter the heavy door with a shoulder. Again and again he pounded the portal, catching flashes of his own erupting fur and protruding black nails, feeling his jaws distend into a snout, his voice becoming increasingly bestial as he growled out challenges to the mercenaries, who watched with dawning horror, uncertain of their next move.

A pistol ball grazed his neck, galvanizing him. With a mighty howl of wrath he grabbed the bars and wrenched the door free of one squealing hinge. A second pull broke it from its mooring. Simon charged the retreating warriors with the formidable makeshift shield.

He ran them down, crushing two screaming men in his first charge. Ripping into a knot of soldiers trying vainly to gain the exit corridor, he savaged them in seconds with their own weapons, the ancient stonework strewn with bodies, splashed and dripping with blood and gore. Simon kept the largest broadsword he could find amid the carnage and went back for the baby.

Gaining an inner ward without further incident, Simon stopped sharply and gurgled low in his wolfish throat to see the ashen squad of men who massed at the next gatehouse, duty-bound to prevent his escape. Two arbalest bolts shattered on the wall and floor around him. He doubled back inside the central keep, frustration inflaming his back-swept eyes of molten silver.

He set the child down in a safe place, knowing its ultimate safety depended on the outcome of the fray. Chattering out a favorite prayer in a rattling, guttural voice, he spotted and retrieved the huge double-bladed battle-axe of antique vintage that decorated a wall niche above the stair to the armorer’s tower.

Then he went out to engage the spreading mercenary detachment that moved to outflank him, as sweat glistened the brows of every man, betraying their fear. With a look to the crossbowmen sparsely arrayed on the walls above the ward, he roared in animal fury and surged out into the blinding sun-glare.

Old ghosts stirred in the fastness of the long-abandoned prison fortification, their battle-fervor gleefully aroused at the prospect of clashing steel where none had been heard in centuries.

Minute by minute, the unfolding spectacle swelled their ghastly, spectral numbers.

* * * *

Yvonne Dusseault hurried along the avenue, watching the evening shadows merge and deepen over Lamorisse.

She stopped at a crossing lane as a riderless horse bolted past, wild-eyed and snorting, splashed with blood. Staring after it for a few anxious seconds, Yvonne abruptly found her attention drawn to the sound of an infant’s weak cries.

Swallowing, she lipped a silent prayer and turned into the dim, narrow lane, taking cold comfort in the weapons under her cloak.

She spotted the basket before she heard the strange voice.

“Take it,” the voice rasped, “and care for it.”

Yvonne halted, licked her dry lips, and ambled nearer, pulling out and fisting a wheel-lock pistol in bold warning.

“Stop there!”

“Who are you?” she asked. “Come out from behind there.”

The nearly naked figure of a man slowly crawled from behind a clump of rain barrels. He’d been savaged and left for dead. He bled from a score of wounds. Incredibly, the stubs of crossbow quarrels studded his flesh in at least three spots, yet he lived.

But then she saw his eyes and knew he could only be a Farouche, her bitter enemy. She raised her pistol and leveled it at his head in both hands. “What have you done to this infant, you God-
damned
—”

She unclenched her teeth and raised the pistol barrel out of line. For now she saw the white cross emblazoned in his upraised palm and knew who this wretched man must be.

* * * *

“Don’t watch me,” Simon pleaded from the bed. “Don’t watch when it happens…” He felt the first tremor that preceded the werewolf transformation, saw the pale disk of the Satyr’s Moon, reveling in her third night of life.

“Easy, Simon,” Wyatt Ault told him as the surgeon tended his myriad wounds. “You must return to health. We need your help.”

“Faith,” Simon rambled, feverish and near delirium. “You’ve got to have faith—power to resist their black magic—your greatest strength—faith—”

“Lie
still,
man,” the surgeon ordered, grimacing, uncertain of where to treat him next. While he worked, a blacksmith strove to remove the iron bands still locked about Simon’s wrists and ankles.

“It will—it will heal soon. But you’ve got to get away from me. It will make you ill to watch—”

“Non,
Simon,” Jacques Moreau assured him, “it will not. You are a most welcome sight—”

“How did you get away from them?” Wyatt asked.

Simon’s head turned. He seemed to ponder the question, bleary-eyed and shuddering. “I couldn’t get them all,” he replied, seemingly in apology. “Not enough stamina. When I lost the power of the Beast, I had to flee.”

“There’s no shame in that,” Yvonne told him, looking on with grave concern. She came up close and brushed his coarse hair back from his forehead. “That’s wisdom. You get well. Then you fight again another day.”

“The baby—?” Simon began to shake with increasing agitation.

“I’ve done what I can for him,” Yvonne said quietly. “I don’t know…”

Moreau raked his fingers through his hair. “You best—you best take the child to Mme. Denoyer. She’s still nursing, I think. She’ll care for him.”

“But I—” Yvonne began to demur, saw the look Moreau gave her, and sighed as she moved to comply. “You’re the commander.” She picked up the basket with the reluctance of one who feels vaguely threatened by the prospect of caring for so fragile a life. Casting Jacques a disapproving glance, she rushed out the rear door of the surgeon’s house.

“You must go from town to town!” Simon blared all of a sudden, delirious and lurching into a seated position as the men tried to ease him back down. Bristling tufts of hair began to appear in spots on his body as they watched, horrified. “You must rally the people for battle! The Wunderknechten!”

“Oui-oui,
Simon,” Jacques reassured him. “At once—we’ll do so at once. But you must rest easy—
Simon
—” Moreau suddenly remembered. “Simon, she’s
here.
Claire Dejordy—”

“Claire
—where?” Simon’s red-veined silvery eyes beamed at him wildly but with returning lucidity.

“Not here, exactly. She’s with a young warrior whom you know, they tell us. A Wilfred Gundersen, from Austria. He and some other fighters have come to aid us. He has Claire safely hidden.”

“Nowhere
is safe until the Farouche are destroyed!” Simon grabbed a handful of the surgeon’s shirt as his lower jaw began to erupt, elongating with a grisly crackling sound.

“Jesus!” The surgeon pulled free and staggered backward, eyes straining at their sockets.

“Wilfred!” Simon shouted. “Wilfred is here? That’s good—good! Then Gonji must also be about—I knew it! I knew it!” He fell back onto the bed, the rhythmic pulsing of his flesh momentarily abating. “Deep inside…I knew it…Claire—”

Simon stiffened, his back arching sharply as if in the grip of a monstrous unseen hand. Then he emitted a piercing shriek as his wounds burst open to bleed anew.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The blistering heat of day began to abate with the first evening shadows. Wilf and his band ate a sparse meal in the concealment of a gully that offered them a vantage on the trap they’d set in the limbs of a dead tree. They sweated over their portions in the sweltering humidity, redundant carping heard now and then from men who griped at how tenaciously the passing summer held on.

The pine forest swathed the hills about them in unbroken blue-green splendor. Darkness crept hungrily over the floor of the timber fastness. A steamy carpet of mist collected over the treetops that ascended the mountains to the east.

But their eyes rarely strayed from the bait. A freshly butchered calf hung from a sagging tree branch inside a canvas sack. At its bottom, a thick droplet of blood bulged and fell, bulged and fell…

Their ploy was a simple one and innocent enough in appearance: It looked as though slumbering woodsmen had suspended their freshly killed game out of the reach of predators. And the trap was rife with deadly possibilities, for the troop lay in wait of the evil flying creatures—
la gargouilles
—that had riddled the flocks of the herdsmen in Burgundy.

They were not long in waiting. About the time they espied the unnaturally bloated disk of the moon climbing the horizon, the men began to hiss one another to silence.

The eerie sound of monstrous undulating wings reached their ears.

Twenty pairs of eyes bulged in shock and instinctive revulsion. A few men stifled gasps when the flying creatures circled into view, approaching the offering with suspicion.

“Now,
Wilfred?” someone whispered.

“Nein
—not yet.”

Three gargoyles pirouetted about the tree, glancing around the area. Each one sported a razor-spiked cudgel. They nattered at one another in sibilant voices awhile. Then one of them knifed in at the sack and sliced it open with a short stroke of its weapon. Calf’s blood gushed out of the slashed fabric.

They began to cluck, heads bobbing rapidly as if in laughter. The one who’d cut open the sack now reached inside and worked at the carcass with a four-fingered, taloned hand. It tore loose a slickly dripping chunk of calf flesh and stuffed it into its mouth. Each of the other two followed in turn while its fellows scoured the environs below for any sign of danger.

“Christ—what hideous creatures,” Monetto whispered beside Wilf. “How about it—now?”

Wilf licked his lips, then nodded curtly.
“All-recht
—”

Prearranged hand signals flashed. Bows and arbalests drew their beads through arrow-loops, from under cover of burrows and brush and camouflaging boughs.

A
whickering
volley of steel-tipped shafts and bolts laced the air.

One gargoyle’s hovering position had made it the favored target. It emitted a single icy cry as a half-dozen sleek missiles spindled its form. It crashed to earth like a snapped limb. A second creature took a single pistol shot in its rear thigh and lost its cudgel in screaming, anguished reaction. It took amok flight for high refuge, ungainly and erratic. The third had been missed altogether; its sharp eyes fixed on the massed firing position below. It pointed, shrilled a furious note at the hidden warriors, and followed its wounded fellow creature on a rush of soughing wingbeats.

“Let’s go!” Wilf shouted.

Two small squads on the flanks of the main body broke from cover, already taking to their concealed horses and giving chase to the airborne horrors. Wilf and the others were slower to recover their more distant mounts, but they soon pounded after the leading edge of the pursuit.

The warriors fired at will now as they clumped over the pine-matted paths, cursing when the tree cover permitted no view of their quarry. Nocking and launching from the saddle, many of them employed mounted archery techniques taught them long ago by Gonji himself.

Pistol and arquebus fire exploded from various points in the forest, as pairs of men in scattered listening posts began to catch sight of the gargoyles.

The wounded creature’s weakening power of flight caused it to swing low over the treetops. It lost altitude, swooped down into a delve, and was torn from its ungainly flight path by a crossfire of long-barreled wheel-locks.

The sharpshooters who’d done the deed whooped and howled in glee, falling on the downed nightmare beast with a vengeance. The gargoyle shrieked and beat its wings uselessly, clawing upward in short bounds only to flutter back to earth. Its left wing was in ruin, and it was summarily dispatched by sword and polearm.

The uninjured gargoyle was soon lost to them, but the night’s engagement abruptly took on a more sinister character.

The last man in Wilf’s party—Kurt Frohm—lagged behind to ascertain for himself that the bowshot gargoyle was indeed dead. The Austrian archer dismounted and studied the crumpled form. He nodded with satisfaction and pumped his fist when he recognized the fletching of the armor-piercer shaft from his own quiver, lodged between the monster’s torn leathery wings.

Kurt failed to hear the soft padding of hooves behind him. A short throwing dagger thudded into his back, ripping through his jack and shirt, embedding itself high in his spine. Kurt Frohm bellowed in shock and pain and fell on his face in the damp forest earth. Before he had ceased clawing behind him in his death throes, Belial Farouche, in his night-haunting satyr persona, retrieved his lethal knife and stood above the Wunderknecht in triumph. Belial cackled coldly before leaping into the air and stomping Frohm’s head like an overripe melon.

The evil shape-shifter swiftly bounded off in the Austrian party’s wake. Belial put up the dagger and brought into play the small crossbow with which he’d become quite proficient in the course of his favored sport—slaughtering many a beloved pet left outside during placid village nights.

On the rugged terrain of the gloom-shrouded forest, Belial was equal in speed and superior in maneuverability to most horses. His agile motion was astonishing to view. He soon caught up with the pursuit and dropped two more of Wilf’s men with short, poisoned bolts, leaving them writhing in agony as he ran off, laughing maniacally. Belial cranked the crossbow’s miniature gaffle as he ran, reloading and seeking fresh “game.”

“What the hell is that?” Monetto called over to Wilf, halting him and straining to hear behind them. He overrode Wilf’s quizzical grunt with an impatient wave, bade him listen with a hand cupped to his ear.

About fifty feet separated them from the main body of the company. They held their steeds steady and flashed each other questing glances when they heard the grinding ratchet sound in the rear distance. They held their breaths in check. Waited…And heard a piercing shriek toward their left rear—

“Shit,” Wilf breathed. “Those batmen doubling back, you think?”

“Nein.
Only one left, that we could see,” Aldo reminded him. “They looked none too valiant—”

“Shh!”

The rapid cranking of Belial’s crossbow again. Another scream, closer this time. One of their party was crying out piteously in untold pain, his cries muffled by the thick bower.

“Nagy!” Monetto called out. No response. He tried again. “Cling low to your horse’s withers,” he told Wilf.

“Why?”

“That was a gaffle-type crossbow. Someone’s after our asses—
Nagy!”

Hoofbeats pounded toward them, now from a forward position. Nick Nagy’s helmed form burst through the brush astride his destrier, from where he had circled ahead of them.

“What the hell do you want, Monetto? God damn it, I’m chasin’—”

“Shut up and listen—”

“Aldo—Nick—” Wilf rasped harshly, thinking fast as he reloaded a pistol. “Speak Hungarian. Split up, ride ahead, and gather a few men each, as quick as you can. Spread your squad on either side. Stay in sight of each other as best you can and angle the flanks in to sweep back through the forest about a hundred yards. Remember the old maneuver—the wings of the hawk, enfolding.”

“Igen
—yeah,” Monetto replied, “but who’s the beak? The point man?”

“I am.”

They nodded briskly and rode off, conceding to Wilf the more dangerous duty. Wilf wheeled his bay stallion twice and took up a spiraling path calculated to both buy time and gradually angle him back the way they’d come. He rode close to the steed’s neck to offer a small target and held his pistol at the ready.

He’d made a circuit-and-a-half when he heard stamping hooves nearby. Then a familiar voice. He raised his head a bit to enhance his view. Heard the clack of a crossbow, the short
s-s-si-izz
of a bolt’s streaking flight—

There was a blood-curdling shriek. Wilf saw a stricken body and a whinnying horse crash into the brush several yards to his right. He grimaced and brought the pistol up over his mount’s crest, panned the muzzle over a wide firing radius. He saw nothing.

He heard a distant thudding of muted hoofbeats on the spongy floor of the forest, momentarily encouraging him, then—the quick, staccato chatter of the crossbow being re-cranked again.

Wilf exhaled a hot breath and yanked the reins, feeling sudden panic. His steed neighed and tossed with the abrupt direction changes, then plunged through the rustling underbrush in a mad charge toward the ratcheting noise. Wilf aimed the pistol as he jounced atop the horse, having no idea how long the gaffling-time might be on such a weapon.

The sound ceased. Wilf pulled to a halt and sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. He ducked on instinct and threw up an arm at the same instant that he heard a shout up ahead and the
clack
of the satyr’s weapon.

Wilf felt the impact of the bolt against his upper arm as it deflected off his scale-plated vambrace and sang off the side of his Zischagge helmet. His reaction nearly threw him off the horse, but he righted himself. Saw a flash of evil eyes—a limber, darting movement in the trees at his right—

Wilf squeezed off an explosive shot, the report startling his mount and evoking shouts from his closing comrades.

Belial cackled shrilly, just ahead, and bounded off into the deep, foreboding woods.

“Sonofabitch!”

Wilf snarled and kicked his mount into a reckless gallop through the low-hanging pine boughs, taking cuts and abrasions from the sharp slap of the branches, cursing his repeated loss of view of the track ahead.

The stallion lurched hard, swerving to avoid a young tree in its path as the forest thickened, the trail almost pitch-dark now. Wilf saw two gleaming helms, angled for them but restrained himself from shouting.

Then he drew in his reins, spanking his thigh in anger. He’d lost the devious assassin.

Wilf hadn’t even noticed that he’d reflexively belted the spent wheel-lock pistol and drawn Spine-cleaver from its back harness until he heard Aldo Monetto’s warning shout from somewhere to the right.

Wilf squeezed the cold comfort of that familiar hilt and brought up the
katana
defensively, seeing Aldo’s steed lurch awkwardly through the low branches and brush, then tumble sidewise. Monetto flew over his horse’s plunging head as his pistol cracked off an errant shot, the muzzle flash briefly flaring the scene alight—

Belial had been lying in wait behind a tree, and as Monetto had passed, the satyr had plunged a dagger into the warrior’s steed. The horse shrieked and fell, throwing Monetto, to thrash and kick in its mortal pain. Aldo scrabbled away, growling in bewilderment, dragging his battle-axe. He abruptly knelt on one knee and raised the weapon protectively.

“Here!” Wilf shouted, attracting the attention of their closing fellows, pointing and roaring at Belial.

Belial panicked, bounding to and fro, trapped now by the ringing Wunderknechten, who cried out in wonder-turning-to-fury, to espy their evil, goat-legged quarry.

They leveled their weapons, seething, to a man, in their purpose now.

The first warrior to reach Belial missed the evasive satyr with the downswing of his sword, and Belial’s horns gored his horse’s belly, sending mount and rider bucking away in shrilling frenzy.

Wilf wildly leapt down from his mount and came on at the run, Spine-cleaver cocked for a killing blow. Belial blared a warning note at him as they locked glares. The shape-shifting satyr stamped the ground, preparatory to leaping high over the racing Wilf’s anticipated arcing slash. But Wilf held fast and skidded sideways, leery of the cloven hooves that bounded high and now plummeted toward his face. And from overhead, Belial cocked his arm to hurl a dagger.

For an instant, Wilf was targeted for knifing death.

A pistol barked behind him, and Wilf flinched as Belial’s upper chest burst with the ball’s impact. The satyr hooted in animal pain and spun half around. Wilf recovered control of his thews and lunged forward to slash the monster down and in, then sidewise with the returning arc—a crosshatch of spurting wounds scored the wailing satyr’s body as Wilf continued to strike.

Wilf’s final twisting underhand blow split Belial’s lower jaw in two. Teeth and bone and part of a bloody tongue lashed the air. And Nick Nagy pushed past the smith to skewer the shape-shifter with his
ranseur’
s
lethal-edged head. Nick twisted and pushed as Belial clawed his last at the polearm’s haft.

“Goddamn filthy sonofa—!”

“Calm down, Nick,” Wilf said between gulping breaths. “I believe…your point was well taken—
let’s have a roll call.”

Bitterly, they tallied their losses at the expense of the mythic man-beast. Five men dead. Three from the Vedunian refugee settlement in Austria, two more from among the French villagers who’d directed them on the foray.

They stared at Belial’s corpse for a long time, rapt by the creature’s strangeness. Yet his eerie facial similarity to Simon Sardonis was not lost on them.

“A Farouche,” the village spokesman said, conversing in High German. “I’m sure of it. We’ve seen
this
monster before.”

“That should start something,” Monetto declared as he caught up the traces of a stray mount.

Wilf shook his head.
“They
started something. We’re only here to make them sorry they did. For Simon’s sake. God knows what they’ve done with him, if what we’ve heard is true. You people fought well, Albert—” He was addressing the village spokesman now, a sturdy hunter with an air of quiet confidence about him.

“Danke,
Sir Knight,” Albert replied. “But it isn’t arms that have made us strong against this Farouche pestilence. It is our faith. The people of my village stay firm in their faith, and the good Lord sees us through. Here’s the proof—this vile thing, the dead gargoyles back there…The Evil One only shows such horrors when he is at his wit’s end,
nicht wahr?”

“You may be right,” Wilf agreed. “I only wonder what they’ll do next. What we’ll do. I wish we had more troop strength. A better plan…that’s my fault, I guess.”