Gonji: Fortress of Lost Worlds. T.C. Rypel
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evoked a primal terror and dread he’d not felt since last he tilted with the warlock’s forces.
There was a knock at the front door. The captain opened it to admit a somber Sgt. Carlos Orozco. Salguero’s friend since childhood entered with a terse greeting. He declined Anita’s offer of refreshment, nor would he lock eyes with the woman, for whom his disdain was well known. Only when she had left the two men alone would the sergeant speak his business. His voice was thick with irony and resignation. The way a man speaks when he no longer believes in what he does but can do nothing about it.
“I’ve made the rounds, checked the outposts, for what it’s worth.” Orozco extracted a bandanna from a pocket of his cloak. He dabbed at the frost-melt in his drooping mustache as he spoke. “No blood in the streets. No night fiends about, so far as I can tell. Maybe we were lucky, eh? Of course, only half the posts were attended. Maybe the others are dead, or dragged off to be eaten by—but the only way I can tell is with a roll call. Do you want me to have them fall out from the inns and their adopted beds or whatever—?”
Salguero shook his head morosely. The sergeant turned away, directing his voice at the wall as he went on.
“This business with Montoya—the slovenly bastard. He’s a troublemaker, Hernando. You know what I’d do with him, if I were in command.”
“No. Place him under guard. Suspend all pay and privileges.”
Orozco grunted. “A leave of absence for him, then.”
A tense silence passed between them. The sergeant selected two pistols from Salguero’s small arsenal and began loading them.
“Time to mount another patrol, I think,” Orozco said airily.
“Don’t do it, Carlos. Don’t bother.”
“Someone must.”
“I need you here. You’re my only…link to sanity.” There was faint pleading in the captain’s tone.
“Don’t come apart on us. You’re too good a soldier, too fine an officer, to succumb to this place. What you need right now is what I need—a good fight.” Orozco triggered the wheel of a pistol, sparking the empty priming pan. “I can’t stand it here any longer, Hernando. I won’t waste another day in this living hell. I take the last few good lancers and mount a party. We fill the column at gunpoint, if need be. I load one pistol for the first pig who runs with loaded breeches. One for the enemy—whatever shape it takes this time. And a third…a third for myself. In case I need it.”
They eyed each other tellingly.
Salguero’s lips parted twice before he found words.
“I can order you to stay.”
“You can,” Orozco allowed hollowly.
Anita hovered at the doorway. Without another word, Sergeant Orozco gathered up the pistols and strode from the chamber to depart into the snow. The captain listened to the receding drum of his hoofbeats.
“Brave hombre,” Anita sneered.
“What is it that you want of me?” Salguero demanded, turning on her sharply. “This town has destroyed my company as surely as any of the warlock’s foul magic.”
“Just be nice to me,” she replied, sidling up to him.
Salguero felt the heat in his loins, but there was no true passion in it. Just melancholy surrender. The admission of weakness before a superior force.
He bent to kiss her, but she snatched his rapier from its scabbard and placed the needle point against his chest. She laughed, cold and derisive, to see his shock. Her voice was full of jeering accusation.
“Go out and catch me a warlock. I’ll keep the bed warm for you here.”
“Capitan!”
The cries sprang from several throats near the house. The beating on the portico door came simultaneously with the keening wind and the sudden darkening of day that they’d come to know so well.
The hideous harridan. The ghostly hag. The banshee.
The door burst open and terrified faces confronted the captain. Among them was Orozco’s. Captain Salguero ran out onto the front steps to stare pop-eyed down the road to the west. The gray-green filmy apparition, her ethereal gowns flowing down over the housetops, swept toward them.
The harbinger of death, whose charnel stench sometimes brought violent illness, whose burning touch inflicted on her victims’ flesh gray-mottled patches of infection that produced pustules and trembling paralysis, followed by rigidity and death.
Salguero heard screams and the slamming of doors and shutters from all points in the town, though he could not tear his eyes from the strangely hypnotic death-shade who turned the west end of Barbaso sickly translucent.
“Get inside, capitan—now!”
Orozco and another lancer dragged Salguero into the house and bolted the door. They crouched with backs to the walls until the ghastly apparition passed, their eyes shut and lips trembling in silent prayer, as they had done many times before.
It was long after the wailing wind had ceased, and the gloom that penetrated even the very walls had passed from the sky, that they tentatively went out to the silent street.
In the wake of the banshee rode the corpse.
It wore the uniform of the pistoleros, and its decapitated head was fixed in the crook of one rigidly tied-down arm. Its sightless eyes stared in empty, eternal horror. The other death-stiffened arm was twined about a slashed regimental pennon, its shreds flapping listlessly in the breeze.
Salguero himself halted the lathered, wild-eyed steed. Steadying it, he gazed with lip-twitching disgust at the blood-drained, bearded head; the black, swollen lips and sickly-white boiled-egg eyes. A military pouch dangled from the corpse’s chest in grisly fashion, pinned there by the long thin blade of a misericord.
“Oh, Jesus—” The lancer behind Salguero began to vomit.
The captain tugged out the blade and gingerly grasped the pouch. Beneath it there was no heart, just a grisly hole in the corpse’s chest. His heart would turn up later, they knew, in some sick-joke revelation, after the fashion of their tormentor’s morbid sense of humor.
The pouch identified the knight as a Corporal Alcala. The message he bore from Madrid was simple. Alcala had been part of a detachment of handpicked pistoleros who were to aid Salguero in ending this tedious campaign against the warlock who called himself Domingo Negro. High Command, it seemed, had grown impatient. Salguero was ordered to press an all-out attack on Castle Malaguer. But that was not what concerned the captain and his aides. It was, rather, the fresh, chicken-scrawled postscript, appended in blood below the king’s own seal:
“You have your orders.”
CHAPTER FIVE
As soon as Gonji crossed the bridge over the Segre River, he experienced something of a second—if secondary—homecoming. The windswept snowy plains of Aragon were a sight that stirred familiar memories. He knew this place, knew its people, its lore and legendry, its monsters and magics.
He felt control and wariness in equal measure. Weakness here would surely usher one to madness or death or grim fates unsuitable to such rational description. But neither would it serve one to proceed with fatuous overconfidence.
Thus, when he happened upon the body of a slain Spanish lancer, the samurai bowed somberly in deference to whatever valor the man had expended in his duty, and then appropriated the lancer’s razor-edged halberd, to supplant the one he had lost in the harsh mountain passes.
Gonji left behind lands of Reformation strife, where it best availed him to remain neutral in his commitment, for a country ruled by the Roman Church. Here, faith in Iasu was sometimes strong, sometimes corrupted by fervent perversity of design, and always countered by faith in the formless Dark Power, here personified in Satan.
Christian