Gonji: Fortress of Lost Worlds. T.C. Rypel
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dragon; the weeping vampire sisters; Wolverangue, the Hellspawn…
Gonji smiled thinly and replaced the splendid blade. He laid it along his left side—the place of easy draw—and set about heating water for a ritual cleansing that was long overdue. This he pursued with many a thought, many a reworking of unfinished poetry, given to marking the events of an itinerant life of mystery and wonder. He laved each major body scar as though it were a shrine, pausing long at the cicatrix along his shoulder blade to recall a paean to lost love.
Dressed again, he ate more of the mushrooms as he pored over an unfurled map.
Hai. He nodded as he formed his resolution, there lies the next station of unfinished business.
Without consciously acknowledging it, he had been drifting toward Spain—toward Aragon again—for a long time. Ever since, in fact, the lycanthrope had begun to take such pains to obliterate his spoor. In Aragon, Gonji would confront Duke Alonzo Cervera, explain at last, whatever the cost, the complete details of their wretched crossing three—was it four now?—years before. The full tale of Theresa’s horrible fate in Hungary during the Szekely clan war.
Theresa’s—and that of Gonji’s unborn child.
He nodded grimly to see the course he would have to follow if he were to be direct: To reach Zaragoza without delay, he must cross the Segre River. Must pass Barbaso and the dreaded Castle Malaguer. Must, perhaps, dare the hand of the Inquisition itself.
Karma.
* * * *
The panic of disorientation.
Gonji rolled away from the glowing mound and drew the Sagami with a sharp whine.
He was sweat-drenched. His eyes cast about wildly before fixing on Tora’s snorting muzzle. The chestnut stallion’s face looked slick, his eyes frenzied.
The warmth had lulled Gonji into slumber. He had no way of knowing how long, what time of day it might be in the world beyond the mountain sanctuary. But what had awakened him?
Ogros.
The samurai licked at cracked lips. Ogros—what? The legend—now he remembered, at least partially. An old woman, smiling old woman, telling her Gypsy lies to a captive campfire audience.
Beware Ogros. Ogros what?
Something. The Hunters of the Night. Children of the ancient mountain. Older than man, and still more ravening.
For endless minutes before he began gathering his belongings, Gonji listened to the chanting that rumbled up to his ears from somewhere—everywhere—in the cave system. Rhythmic, heavily accented, undeniably primitive.
He was the invader. The interloper. He had used their mountain uninvited. The hunters—the Hunters of Night—he had arrived at night—invaded their home while they hunted—who?
Ogros.
It mattered not in these things whether fact followed supposition. Sanity demanded that the lurking shapeless terrors be named and objectified.
They moved from the cave as warily and noiselessly as possible, Tora being little help there in his eagerness to find open air. The darkness seemed to part less readily before the quickening of the glowstones. Gonji fought back the gooseflesh that accompanied his sudden realization that the enchanted caves’ operation rendered him a conspicuous target.
The chanting rolled through the tunnels, vibrant and vigorous.
And Gonji realized with sagging heart that, even as they made their escape, he had no idea where escape lay: His poor sense of direction had done him in again. Cursing, he moved them in a different direction. They crossed the mountain stream twice before he thought he recognized a cavern they’d been in. Gritting his teeth, he dragged a recalcitrant Tora through the archway.
He stepped on something that gave under his foot, emitting brittle snapping sounds as it seized him by the boot.
The samurai gasped aloud and drew his katana, the keen blade flashing downward but striking empty air. Gonji kicked viciously twice before shattering the maddening thing against the wall. The illumination of the glowstones at last caught up with his slashing vision: a rib cage.
The chamber was filled with bones. A charnel cell filled with discarded skeletons of men, animals, and things that were part of both but altogether neither. There were paintings on the walls, their subjects unpleasant enough that Gonji turned from them quickly and, setting his jaw and concentrating on calming his fears, turned back again. Certain now that no escape lay in that direction.
The savage chanting echoed in the depths of the mountain as they searched for the exit. Gonji kept the Sagami fisted at his side as he peered into one chamber after another, awaiting the framing of each slowly dawning vision in the indifferent light of the magic stones. Blade clenched in two-handed middle guard, he anticipated in each murky glow the attack of some coil-sprung horror. Now and again Tora would stamp back so fretfully from a cavern entrance that the samurai would back away from that haunted cell, sword at the ready, until another would threaten with its imminent adit.
He at last happened on a chamber whose contoured arch seemed familiar. Furthermore, a wash of frigid air pulsed from the cave—by now a welcome sensation; the bite of the merciless winter wind was much preferred to this nefarious place. But when he stepped into the archway, there issued no nascent sparkle, no hint of magic from the ensorceled stones. Only a peculiar odor coming in wisps that the cold air sought to deaden.
Gonji selected a stone about a span in diameter that glowed magenta in his gloved hands. He beat one side of it against a wall until it blazed like the August sun, and he could no longer hold even its farther side. This he tossed into the freezing antechamber.
Even in the bounding, strobing light, the shock of what he saw set his hair to bristling. Carcasses hung in the deathly air of the cave. Animals and men. Streaked with the reflected colors of frost and blood. Suspended upside down to swing gently in the air currents. Some whole, some sectioned. Preserved or curing for obvious future use.
The samurai grimaced, his fingers working over the hilt of the Sagami. A naked man hung nearest him, arms reaching limply for the floor, face set in a rigid distortion by gravity and dishonorable death.
Gonji’s breath came in gasps of frustrated anger as he yanked Tora around and hurried back the way they had come. He moved too swiftly for the rock glow to keep pace, relying now on faulty memory of their steps, pausing scant seconds when he became too disoriented, the chanting welling up through the foreboding mountain tunnels.
He found the stream again and used its splash to set his course, eschewing caution for speed. He felt certain that he must turn off to the left at some point. But where?
After a tortured few moments of plunging through the threatening darkness, he paused and cast about helplessly, straddling the stream gully, allowing the stones to ignite, illuminating the tunnel and drying his wet boots. He regulated his breathing while he calmed Tora with a reassuring hand. Was it his imagination or was the chanting growing louder? Nearer. It was insistent in its pulsating rhythm. Now Gonji fancied that he could discern syllables: huk-huk—huk-huk—Throaty and militant. A chant suitable for the breaking of backs and skulls.
There issued from a cavern farther ahead a soft, shadow-dappled archway flicker. The telltale sign of habitation. It waxed and waned tauntingly, sunset red to burning rust.
Gonji gritted his teeth and let go the reins. He could not resist a look at the enemy, for surely it must lie in wait beyond that arch.
Huk-huk—huk-huk—
He scampered in a crouch toward the cave, blade at the ready. Negotiated the head-high slope to peer warily within.
Nothing moved inside. The outre glow emanated from piled glowstones heaped into four mounds. A branching of the stream—or perhaps another stream altogether—formed a serene raised pool near the cavern’s center. The gnarled branches of a tree—a larger version of the one he’d partaken of—veined the air above the pool. On it the berries grew to palm-sized