Gonji: Red Blade from the East (29 page)

“I am...bewildered, Tralayn,” the Elder admitted. “If earlier outposts of the faithful were obliterated here before, then what are we to do now? How can we succeed against evil where they failed?”

“A disturbing question, my friend.” The prophetess grew pensive. “Perhaps...perhaps their faith was weak, or their human courage failed them. Or perhaps the agencies of righteousness were unable to concentrate their might, as we may yet succeed.”

She raised a hand to the staircase and the shuffling steps which had begun to descend. As the brooding councilmen turned at her gesture, they viewed a sight that made their hearts leap in their breasts. The familiar bearded face seemed older, troubled. A heavy, ragged dressing on one shoulder displayed a crimson stain from a wound beneath. But there was no mistaking the charge of hope that galvanized the catacomb as they watched their benefactor ease downward, steadied by a battle-scarred retainer. His name burst from a score of throats:

“Baron Rorka!”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Panther-quick and silent as poison, Gonji loped through the mazelike canyons of high-walled alleys in Vedun’s southern quarter.

One fist clutched the bow and quiver, the other gripped the sword hilt above his shoulder as he ran, encountering no one. Now and then a stray dog would bark at his swift passing or a cat would scurry from its forage. The city had grown quieter now, save for the wyvern’s rushing flight and the distant lowing of cattle. The alleys smelled of damp rot and trench offal; he was near a sewage culvert.

Gonji’s feet skidded to a halt on the cobblestones at an egress to the broad lane abutting the southern quarter of the city wall. His breath came in short gasps, and his heart raced. He listened intently, panned the wall for soldiers: one burgonet glinting in moonlight, strolling this way in opposition to his partner, now far to the east.

The wyvern soared over Gonji, shrieking once sharply. Gonji felt a chill as he turned at the unearthly sound. He ground his teeth and fixed the beast in his vision with rays of loathing. It flapped twice hard, accelerating with alarming speed. Then it spat, blasting something from the sky—a hawk or an owl. The Llorm bowman, disciplined, ignored it and pursued his duty. At the top of the stairs he did an about-face and marched back eastward.

Footsteps approached along the lane. A soldier, Llorm, heading toward the stone stair to the allure, perhaps fifty paces away.

Changing of the guard? Gonji cursed. This wasn’t getting any simpler.

The Llorm clumped over a narrow wooden culvert-span, stopped and spat into the trench. He started up the stair to the crenellated battlements, then paused to adjust a tasset strap. He heard the soft scrape behind him, felt the warm draught of body heat at his back. A snaring arm locked about his throat, choking off his breath. Gonji yanked off the burgonet and knocked the soldier senseless with his own helm. He dragged the unconscious Llorm into the shadows, then looked up: it had gone undetected.

A moment’s indecision: to kill or not? No, no killing. No sense stirring up reprisals. These people had enough trouble already. He’d just have to be swift and silent. Not to mention cautious: he glanced at the downed soldier. He’d be asleep for some time, Gonji told himself confidently, then dismissed all thought of it as he vaulted up the steep stairway to crouch atop the allure.

He scampered up into an embrasure and peered over the brink into the valley below. Far, far below. The valley floor shimmered softly a long way down. In the distance Gonji could make out the seeth of a river; to the east, the hissing rumble of an unseen cataract that fed it. The cold wind tore at his clothing. He wished he’d worn another layer. But comfort was soon forgotten.

The air overhead parted, cloven by the rushing bulk of the wyvern. Gonji hunkered down in the cover of a battlement. He closed his eyes and held his breath, and his imagination served up the momentary vision of flesh seared pulpy and crackling by foul fire. He was angered by the atavistic fear’s power over him, and he drew strength from the clean solid feel of the wooden bow in his right hand.

“You’ll get yours, slime-spawned bastard!” he whispered, watching the monster’s soaring course.

Furtively he peered around the stone blocks of the merlon. Sweat stung his eyes; his face and hair were by now soaking under the dark wrap. The Llorm guards could both be seen now, nearing each other just beyond the roof of the slaughterhouse. Soon they would turn, and the bowman on Gonji’s side would be facing in his direction.

Gonji traced the wyvern’s arcing flight. Already it was approaching diametric opposition to him above the northern rampart. Its improbably aerodynamic bulk swam almost lazily on the air currents, supported by some awful magick he cared not to ponder. It would zoom overhead again while the Llorm sentry was far off....

Sure, damn it, why not?

Gonji sat back in the cradling crenellation, legs braced against the battlement. Craning his neck to follow the flight path—a wild unreasoning glee shouting down the alarm bells in his mind—he nocked an arrow and half-drew the bow along his side above the abyss. An action shot. Difficult. A fine challenge—

The beast glided up from behind. The great wind surged in time with Gonji’s adrenalin rush. Predatory hind claws raked, scant yards overhead.

He pulled hard, tracked, and fired.

The arrow whistled skyward—tore through a wing—

“Skreeeeee!”

A gurgled laugh of triumph, and the samurai pounded granite with his fist. “How’d that feel—good, eh? Hee-heeee!” he whispered shrilly through clenched teeth.

The wyvern flapped jerkily with the shocking pain, reared its head and flailed its barbed tail.

Down the allure a stone’s throw, the sentry stopped and regarded the beast’s frenzy, automatically readying his arbalest.

Uh-oh
, Gonji thought. He rubbed his stinging eyes and looked from the guard to the angry monster, which had skewed into an ungainly, lopsided flight pattern. Its great gaping jaws probed and snapped at the embedded shaft, its supple neck coiling in hideous contortions.

With a snapping of wood and a cry of renewed agony, it wrenched the arrow loose. It had drifted low over the rooftops in its struggles. But now it launched upward, regaining altitude, testing the injured wing.

All at once the sentry broke into a run along the allure, hefting the crossbow before him. Gonji crouched in the embrasure, abruptly indecisive.

Had he been seen? Was the sentry obeying some predetermined order?
What?
Nothing for it now but to test it—

He eased the quiver of arrows out over the allure as a target. Its filigreed designs shone in moonlight a scintillating instant. There came a
clack!
and a crossbow quarrel zipped past the quiver to shatter against stone several yards away.

Hell’s bells and dung for karma.
...

Immediacy and instinct took over. Gonji slung the bow and quiver across his back atop the swords, leapt out of hiding and launched himself at the Llorm bowman. Thirty or forty paces separated the two men when the samurai began his sprint. The sentry gaped for an instant at the masked figure, gleaming eyes locking in the star-shot night. Then he began to reload.

The crossbow was of the gaffle type: Seated on the stock was a ratchet-and-crank affair for levering back the powerful bow. Upon sighting the heavily armed masked man charging toward him, the Llorm archer began cranking the crossbow for fair. The short race was on. Gonji, grimly aware that at this distance a steel-tipped quarrel could tear through three men with hauberks—he being one with none—ran like a man possessed, calling on every reserve of speed in his strong legs. Somewhere in the distance: the frightened trumpeting of a herd of cattle and the wyvern’s bellowed rage.

Twenty paces....

Don’t raise an alarm
, Gonji mentally commanded as he ran.
Don’t cry out.

Ten paces....

The crossbow was set; a bolt was slapped into place, fumbled once, aligned. The sentry drew hissing breath. The distance between them melted.

And Gonji made his move, a body length from the lethal bolt.

* * * *

Captain Julian Kel’Tekeli reined in viciously before the cattle pens in the eastern quarter of Vedun. His open shirt flapped in the wind. He wore neither armor nor helm—haste being this night’s master—but held his naked blade at the ready. He blinked back the sleep that pinched his eyes and gauged the meaning of the savage vision suspended above the terrified cattle.

The wyvern hovered on great undulating flaps of its wings, rending flesh and bone from the slickly wet carcass of a calf. The other animals jostled and cried in their pens, panicked by the monstrous predator’s rage.

Julian squeezed the reins as his mount curvetted and snorted. Mercenaries began to arrive astride horse and on foot, some only half dressed. They whispered and kept their distance. Blood and entrails sprinkled the area.

At last the wyvern flung the carcass to earth. With a shriek of recognition at the mercenary captain, it tossed its antlered head once and reared back on furled batwings. Its angry red eyes flashed, and with a snapping of scythe-like jaws it blatted a clump of acid excrement into a pen filled with bleating sheep. Then it launched toward the southern rampart.

The wind of its acceleration tore unfastened helms from the heads of onlookers.

Julian yanked his mount around. “To the south, you lazy dogs—let’s go!”

* * * *

Gonji deked left-right, smooth as a cobra. The sentry became lost in the motion and, fearing to miss, stumbled back a pace. His front hand slipped its grip, and the bolt cracked harmlessly into the night.

A swift snap-kick knocked the weapon from the Llorm’s grasp. Gonji sprang forward, his throat clutch stopping just short of costing him a hand as the soldier drew steel wildly and etched an arc in the air between them.

Gonji leapt back, pulled the Sagami, engaged him with a two-handed front guard. The Llorm slashed. The Sagami’s point dropped two inches and the blow sailed past silently. Feinting a lunge, Gonji drew another slash. With a quick circular parry he pushed the sentry’s blade toward the wall briskly, pulling the man off balance. Then Gonji whirled, his spinning heel kick slamming into the Llorm’s neck....

Too hard. The soldier hit the low wall of an embrasure. Gonji sucked air, reached out—too late.

The guard tumbled through a crenellation and hurtled down the cliff face. Gonji leaned over the embrasure, elbows braced against the merlons, eyes bulging in disbelief, watching his opponent bounce down the slope to his death in the valley.

The Llorm’s long, anguished scream could be heard for miles.

Gonji stared for long seconds after the vanished body, disjointed thoughts coming in overlapping waves.
Sonofabi
—
now what?
—
how’d that happen?—he fell, that’s it, he tripped and—Fool!

He turned at the sound of shouts and hoofbeats in the streets below. Already the garrison was turning out. But it seemed so fast, too fast, for them to be responding to the guard’s screams. Torches flared alight in various points of the city, streaking the darkness with lurid color. Some were approaching swiftly, borne on horseback. He had to move.

He dropped onto the allure, disentangled the strangling bow and quiver from around his neck. Arrows spilled to the wooden walkway. He scooped up a handful and jammed them back into place. An uncertain step right—the second Llorm sentry was coming on the run, arbalest loaded and held at port arms. Then left—

“Aveya! Aveya!”

It was the Llorm relief guard he had knocked out, now recovered and poised at the base of the stairs, sword in hand. Wisely, the soldier held his ground and called out for assistance.

“Cholera,”
Gonji swore, pounding a fist in the empty air. Sweating freely now in the chill, cursing his rotten planning, he turned to the right again and faced the second wall sentry, who abruptly stopped, a short bowshot off. The crossbowman drew a bead.

Gonji plucked out an arrow and dropped the quiver, hopping into a crenellation. The Llorm held and followed his movement. The samurai notched his arrow and bobbed up and down once, twice. The archer didn’t bite.

Gonji leapt onto the allure, feinted pulling his bow, jumped back up almost immediately into the merlon’s cover—
thok!
The quarrel ripped through empty space still warmed by Gonji’s body heat. Gonji gritted his teeth, stood and yanked back on the bow. But now it was the sentry’s turn to jump up into a crenellation.

“Swine-karma!” Gonji had time to exclaim, and then he saw it. Huge and black and undulating against the star-field.

The great beast soared straight at him on his left, hind talons drawn back against its bulk, fiery orbs fixing on him with blazing hate. Jaws agape and serpentine neck cocked—ready to spit. It closed the distance to Gonji surreally fast, almost in strobing leaps, to Gonji’s quickened senses. And in that instant of heart-freezing immediacy, he fleetingly felt his control of motion seize up; an inner voice of revulsion and despair at the prospect of ugly burning death beckoned him to plunge backward into the abyss to share the now peaceful fate of the sentry.