Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (32 page)

“Weapons of old temper and substance…” he said.
“Now
we are ready.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

South of Burgundy, the French band led by Armand Perigor and Sgt. Carlos Orozco began to encounter resistance as their journey outdistanced Perigor’s influence.

They’d already had one firefight with a small detachment of the French king’s cavalry, who took a dim view of the free company that
ruddled
over the roads of their territory with Corbeau’s heavy ordnance in tow.

Now the king of France, blind to the horrors supposedly inflicted on superstitious peasants by some fanciful enemies from another world, would also be seeking to stamp out these “revolutionary” brigands, Gonji’s Knights of Wonder.

“Shit, Armand,” Brett Jarret complained, “have you given thought to how we’re going to get
out
of Burgundy with this stuff? Or even with our worthless skins?”

“We’ll have to abandon the cannon, obviously, eh, Corbeau?”

The Crow shrugged resignedly.

Normand Gareau chuckled dryly and looked at Orozco. “I suppose you gentlemen have considered that it might all be academic once…we’ve seen things through.”

Grim silence accompanied the observation.

“I just wish we’d get a chance to try these crazy guns of yours,” Orozco said at length. “I could use a good explosion or two. I’ve got this itch…”

“Perhaps you should have stayed back with Jenny Giguere,” Corbeau replied. “You seem to be itching ever since you met her.”

Orozco scowled at him, and one or two men fell to gibing the sergeant.

But now the Saone River was in view, and each warrior drifted into private reverie, wondering whether this placid clime could indeed mark the same place where they’d faced the demonic foes who’d hit them during that freakish snowstorm of the previous winter.

* * * *

Gonji executed a dreamlike, balletic turn, the Sagami held in horizontal high guard.

Seven men lay dead about him. But he knew one more was somewhere about the grounds of the springhouse, for the blow had not killed him. The lowing of the wandering cattle made it impossible to detect the foe’s location by sound. So Gonji took to cover and stalked his foe on foot. He was not long in finding him.

The brigand in pikeman’s pot and cavalry jack lurched out from behind a dray and leveled his pistol at Gonji from twenty paces. Gonji tilted his
katana
downward across the front of his body.

The wounded Farouche adventurer sneered painfully and pressed at his riven side. His pistol wavered in a blood-dripping grip.

“Looks like a standoff,” Gonji said evenly, slowly lowering his blade to his side.

The man’s eyes widened. He gazed at Gonji as if the samurai had sprouted horns.

“You—you’re
crazy,
you slant-eyed bastard!”

His quaking arm pushed forward preparatory to the pistol’s barking shot.

But Gonji reacted to the labored movement. He darted laterally out of the line of fire and in the same motion drew a poisoned
ninja
dart from his boot. The dart hissed through the space between them and pierced the man’s trousered thigh as the lead ball split wood on the springhouse wall beside Gonji.

Gonji sprang forward—unnecessary…the brigand trembled with the paralysis that preceded death. The samurai exhaled a sharp breath, snapping his sword to clear the blood grooves, then relaxing and cleansing the blade on a horse blanket. He replaced the
katana
with a sharp two-step motion, cupping his lacquered scabbard with his left hand and drawing the dull forte of the storied blade through thumb and forefinger, gliding the blade point, edge heavenward, down into its place of readiness.

He went to the springhouse and slaked his thirst with the crisp, cool water. Then, grimly ascertaining that the farm family were all beyond assistance, Gonji tended to his horse. He watered the black mare and spoke calmingly to her—she was uneasy, still snorting and champing with battle tension. At length he climbed aboard Nichi, patted her affectionately, and took up the chase again.

Unlimbering his longbow and laying it across the saddle, Gonji left behind the spoor of the brigands he’d surprised and killed. They’d been a poor fighting lot, incompetent. It had been but a brief interlude in his pursuit of the crossbow-wielding flight of gargoyles.

They were his primary targets, for the nonce. He’d seen first-hand the abominations committed by those winged vermin who filled him with loathing and vengeful fury.

* * * *

Jacques Moreau was sweating heavily and his hands were numb and clammy as he knelt on one knee beside his son.

“Guy…listen, I—” He swallowed back the lump in his throat. “I want to explain to you something that…something that’s bothered your
pere
for a long time. You see, I am not the great hero you seem to think. I never was. I ran away from a great battle once, when I was in the service of the king. A mighty exchange of bowshot. Arrows like a rain of death from the sky. Something happened, inside me. I became afraid, you see, all at once…So I ran…No one ever found out, so I thought I got away with it. But I didn’t really. Do you know what I mean?”

The boy’s gaze was filled with wonder, and he nodded slowly. Moreau wasn’t sure whether the moistness brimming Guy’s eyes evinced fear or resentment or simple disappointment.

His voice cracked as he went on. “I was afraid then. And I’ve been afraid since. Do you remember when you fell down that hole, when we were out falconing with the Richards? You were little then. Not the big brave fellow you are now. You cried—remember? You slid down and couldn’t get out. And you were calling for your
pere
to come save you—”

“You pulled me out,” Guy said softly.

“Non.
I did not. I was afraid again. I’ve always feared tight, small spaces. I couldn’t find in me the courage to go down after you. The hands that pulled you out were not mine. They were Monsieur Lavelle’s. Oh, I was there to hold you when you were drawn up. And you were too small and too…confused to know that it wasn’t I who had rescued you. But I knew. And it has always troubled me. You see…I always wanted to tell you. And now seems a good time. Because now I’m afraid in that same way again. I’m afraid that you’ll see your father a coward. And I’m going to do everything I can so that doesn’t happen. Do you understand?”

Guy nodded, very deliberately. “Will you stay with me?”

Moreau felt the stinging tears welling up in his own eyes now. “I will stay with you forever, my son. Nothing will ever take me from your side.”

They hugged each other tightly.

There followed a few moments of peaceful sharing. And then two stained-glass windows exploded inward at nearly the same instant, lethal crossbow missiles
thunking
into wood and masonry inside the chapel.

Guy screamed to see the satanic face of a gargoyle leering in through a shattered, wind-blown portal.

“You may not enter this holy place!”

The old priest surged at the ghastly visage, broadsword held high in both hands. When he reached the window and slashed with all his might, the creature launched upward and soared away. Edged steel splintered the lacquered frame in its wake.

Moreau left Guy’s side. He shouted in warning. Another gargoyle had descended from the sky to aim its arbalest at the window. The priest cringed out of the way of the bolt that whizzed by and lodged in a splintered confessional door.

There was some comfort in seeing how the gargoyles hissed and spat when they caught sight of the hanging and propped crucifixes. They were indeed thus far denied entrance, perhaps by dint of the arrayed sacramentals and blessed objects, or by their innate superstitious fears. But their deadly missiles were not barred from the chapel’s sanctuary, and they were growing bolder, as if empowered anew by the waning faith of the refugees.

“Faith,”
Moreau said to himself on a deep note of resolve.

He slunk along the wall to a broken window, turned suddenly along the frame to face the outer darkness and blasted his pistol at the nearest gargoyle.

Fiery pain accompanied the lead ball’s rocking impact as the creature fell from its low hover. Its fellows nattered in surprise and wrath. They brought their weapons into bead. A fusillade of bolts tattered the pews where Moreau had stood a second earlier.

“Faith,
Father,” Moreau cried out as he frantically reloaded. “Faith and courage and the sting of righteous weapons—”

The
cure
summoned a weak smile from where he hunkered in the pews, squeezing the crucifix about his neck with one hand and the hilt of the sword in the other.

As Moreau spannered his wheel-lock, laughing with the rush of adrenaline that drove his fear before it, the great fanged head of the monster serpent appeared at the window nearest him.

Ophidian eyes of black pearl fixed on him with cold animal lust. It opened its gaping maw in hungry promise, the cavernous expanse consuming the entire view from the window.

The sharp report of a pistol sounded at Moreau’s right. The ball struck the back of the serpent’s throat. It hissed and clamped its fanged jaws tightly shut, snapping its huge head back from the window.

Guy stood beside his father, the gun still smoking in his two-handed grasp.

“Go away from
mon pere,
you bad snake,” Guy shouted, his voice high-pitched and tremulous.
“Heart of evil / Hie away / Choirs of angels / Thy power stay—!”

“Get down, Guy,” Moreau shouted. “Under the pews—”

The fanged head loomed in at the window again, this time squeezing its bulk through the ruptured aperture to search out the offending humans.

Moreau gritted his teeth and took up the priest’s pike. He lanced the polearm at the oncoming triangular head, his vision focused on the terrible curved fangs. The pike-point skewered the serpent’s lower jaw. It hissed in pain and tugged free with a shuddersome twisting motion. The sinuous beast raked itself bloody as it fled the jagged glass fragments in the frame to squirm and hiss in pain on the grounds outside.

More crossbow bolts whistled through the windows.

“Come ahead, servants of Satan!” Moreau blared. “You would deny my son the fullness of life? This is God’s own fortress!”

He saw the priest take up a position at a window, raising the broadsword for a strike as the gargoyles grew bolder again. His soul now fired with both fervent righteousness and cold inevitability, Moreau clambered to another wind-blown shattered orifice and drew a bead with the reloaded pistol. His shot bowled over an alighting gargoyle.

His bellow of triumph was cut short when he saw the strange figure pounding over the grounds astride a dark horse. Eyes narrowing to slits, he felt his heart sag in anticipation of hellish reinforcements.

But then Moreau’s vision penetrated the murky shadows without, and he knew who this rider must be.

* * * *

Gonji’s back stiffened with the powerful
kyu-jutsu
draw of his bow.

The first gargoyle to take an armor-piercer shaft was slammed into the chapel’s wall so hard that its wing snapped at an upper brace, tearing it open.

A second winged monster hovered above the steeple, shrieking at Gonji in futile menace. The fourteen-fist arrow sliced through its abdomen and protruded several inches beyond its spine with a gout of dark blood.

A third lofted upward, drawing and reloading its crossbow by means of both fore- and hind-claws. As it eerily pushed the bow with its feet and yanked the steel string back with its gnarled claws, the creature danced tantalizingly in a flight path designed to confound the samurai’s aim.

Gonji’s powerful shot tore its head from its shoulders.

The last living gargoyle sought safety in the skies. It beat its vaned wings for the star-shot patch of aerial harbor above the clearing.

Moments later—two mighty bowshots later—the gargoyle’s squalling, primitive cries and spiraling plunge into the treetops lent testimony to its failed endeavor.

But now the writhing monster snake speared over the flattening grasses, arching its neck from side to side as it bore down to strike at the back-stamping Nichiyoobi.

Gonji held the mare’s panic in check with knee pressure. Nichi snorted in defiance of the oncoming horror, lurching up to kick defensively.

The samurai tossed away his bobbing sallet to glare into the merciless black eyes that sought to wither his soul. He drew both his pistols and fired them at once. The bucking horse caused both shots to miss their targets, the serpent’s opaque orbs, though one lead ball erupted the flesh on its snout.

Gonji quit the saddle, taking his bow and quiver, and spanked away the whinnying mare. She circled the slithering mass and began to stamp at its prodigious uncoiling length until forced to retreat by the serpent’s reactive thrashings.

Gonji sprinted for the chapel, hearing voices within shouting unclear words. The monster angled for him but could not match his speed and deceptive veering. He turned a corner and drew it close to the walls, where it slithered close behind. But at the second corner, he heard the warning shout that it had cannily anticipated his circuit of the chapel and doubled back along its own body to intercept him.

“Cholera.”

Gonji jump-stopped and tore back the way he’d come. He caught up with, and then passed, the giant serpent’s doubled mass. Saw the fanged head rising to surprise him at the front of the chapel.

Again he took up his great longbow.

Two shafts pinned the monstrous snake’s lower jaw before it flinched back and returned to the original direction of the chase, now maddened with pain. This time he had to swing wide of its undulating coils and lost time. The great maw nearly cut him off at the second corner. But he beat its fanged strike with a scalp-prickling gasp, plunging on in a crouch along the next wall, nape hairs bristling and gooseflesh running rampant.

He passed the shouting human voices again, heard a shot, felt the snake’s barreling form shudder. He turned another corner, and another—twice he was slammed by lurches of the undulating, scaly bulk.

Now the serpent’s tail was beside him. Gonji paused a moment. The white fangs presaged the appearance of the ominous head, behind him. It had nearly lapped its tail and was rearing in triumph—

“Now, stupid monster—surprise-surprise!”

Gonji sprang forward and angled away from the snake. From beside the scale-crusted hindmost portion he fired two rapid shots into the serpent’s tail, pinioning it to the wall of the chapel. A third—

With the first deeply embedded war arrow, the great reptile’s head had jerked back from the whiplash effect. The second and third caused it to writhe in blind fury. Its tail skewered to the wall, it was unable to move forward.

The serpent bent back, undulating in a frustrated effort to retrace its path again. And now the samurai pursued. Gonji emptied his quiver of armor-piercing arrows into the creature’s head and neck. Dark, greenish fluid leaked from a dozen wounds.