The excited townsfolk had turned out en masse in the cold blue dawn to see them off. They swarmed along both sides of the main street, hushing one another to hear the samurai’s words, whispering anxiously, speculating as to why the Oriental rode at the head of the troop alongside Captain Salguero. Military protocol seemed to have been swept aside before this arrogant heathen who went by many infamous names.
Gonji had arranged the display with Salguero’s sanction. Though the captain was still in command, it was Gonji who was fortified with the only useful experience of Domingo’s wiles. He was their scout, their guide—and, by his own choice, their point man, chief target of whatever menaces they would encounter. He spoke long and loud before the gathered throng, laying out their plans in a manner anyone of military experience would find foolhardy, confounding of all security measures.
But that was his intention. The past had taught him to be suspicious, and he acted under the assumption that the warlock would have operatives in Barbaso. If he could convince Domingo of their peaceful intent, it could save many lives.
Any advantage would be welcome.
They rode out of town to cheers and well wishes. Soon their thundering hoofbeats and clanking armament drove the sounds of Barbaso from their ears.
They proceeded north through the valley, the plains rising gradually toward the hillocks where nestled the dread Castle Malaguer. Pennons snapped in the crisp air as they rode, their colors proclaiming King Philip’s Royal Lancers. Gonji and Sergeant Orozco rode to the right of the column, wary of the track ahead. Captain Salguero headed the lancers, looking both proud and battle-weary in his gleaming cavalry armor. Now and then he would cast Gonji questioning glances, as if he were an unseasoned officer appealing to a superior for direction. Gonji was a bit unsettled by this nascent indecisiveness in a once forceful commander. It made him mindful of the nervous young lieutenant named Valdez, to whom Salguero had entrusted the fortifying of Barbaso. Well into the previous night, Valdez had persisted in asking Salguero to advise him of what to do in the face of sundry imponderables. Cluttering his thinking with the shapes of nameless fears.
That was how Salguero looked now, and it boded ill.
They rode without incident till the noonday sun glared off the hard crusted snow. Stopping to eat and rest the horses, the men exchanged pointless banter while looking to the hills apprehensively. In days to come, Gonji would often recall the shortness of that morning’s ride, compressed in memory by the enormity and number of the wonders that followed during that eventful day.
As they rumbled over the snowbound savannah in early afternoon, the terrain began to alter. Subtly at first, copses of trees and outcroppings of rock where none should have been. But then the horizon line began to shift, to grow, to sprout new features seemingly with every stride of their mounts. Mesas could be seen now in the distance, stuttering across the lower edge of the hazy sky. The soldiers muttered in disbelief and rubbed their eyes as the cliffs grew unnaturally before them. There could be only one explanation: The troop was riding through another spatial distortion like the one Gonji had experienced at the windmill.
The samurai had warned them of this phenomenon, had cited it as one example of a situation wherein their guns would not avail them, for they could not follow the trajectory of a bullet to gauge target distance. But even so forewarned, Salguero slowed his column, his courage failing at the eerie sight, until at last he stopped them.
He clumped across to Gonji and Orozco, his face ashen as he spoke in a tremulous voice.
“This—this is not Spain.”
Gonji nodded curtly. “It seems that way. But by the sun we see that we still travel northward. I say we go on.”
The captain seemed about to expostulate, but he bobbed his head and wheeled back to the column.
They advanced at a slower gait, the mesas nonetheless creeping upward strangely against the hem of the sky, minute by minute.
The trees thickened. Gonji halted them and steered them off the trail to swing wide through deeply packed snow. The lancers ceased their grumbling over this inconvenience when Gonji pointed out to them the coiling tendrils of a dormant
luna carnivora
plant. His graphic explication of its habits silenced their carping and instilled more confidence in the samurai’s guidance. Many troopers now watched him to catch his reactions to the trail ahead.
The column was thrown into whinnying, curvetting disarray when the first of the faery-ring maidens appeared under the naked poplars at their left, to be followed shortly by two more. The ring-stones glowed garishly on the powdered snow, sparkling with rainbow hues like hypnotic diamonds.
Gonji raised a hand, and Salguero shouted orders that the men should reassemble without a look to the seductive apparitions.
Gonji rode toward the ring that held the first seated, pouting maiden. Mournful blue eyes regarded him from under a languid sweep of long golden hair.
“Ride on,” she said in a mellifluous voice. “You have not the courage to free me from my bondage.”
Orozco shuffled up beside Gonji, eyeing the woman suspiciously. “Is this—”
“
Hai
,”
Gonji answered, and then to the woman: “But it’s not courage that will free you, is it? Orozco, do you have silver for me?”
The faery-ring maiden’s eyes widened, and her lips parted to bare her teeth. A look of inhuman madness etched her face.
The sergeant reached into a pocket and extracted a silver coin. He held it out to Gonji, one eyebrow cocked in curiosity. “What do you want it for?”
Gonji didn’t respond but pried the coin from Orozco’s tight grasp. “I’ll owe it to you.”
The maiden began to hiss like a viper to see the glint of the coin. Gonji tossed it into the snow about three feet outside the twinkling ring. The woman executed an inhuman leap, as if launched by a concealed spring in the snow where she sat, landing outside the ring to claw in the snow after the charm-like piece of pure silver.
At once the glow faded from the stones. They winked out of sight. An alarming transformation occurred, the horses bucking in primal terror such that Orozco was thrown back into the snow with a jangle of armament.
The thing that writhed before them, unprotected now that it had left the magical ring, was not a woman. The dead young woman’s body had returned to an erupted grave to resume its eternal sleep. The slug-like monstrosity that had stolen her form now rolled and quivered in the snow, corrupting as the troopers watched, aghast.
Outcries of unabashed horror—gasps of revulsion—as the vicious appendages lashed and twined in impotent rage like willow branches in a cyclone. Never again would they plunge into an unwary traveler’s body to devour him from the inside out as he died an agonizing death, living tentacles boring in and sucking at his still warm vitals.
“Silver, you see,” Gonji explained. “They can’t resist it. Whether that’s due to its glitter or its purity, no one can say. But it’s the purity that ends their foul enchantment.”
The monster vented its wrath in a last gurgling cry, putrefied matter spewing at once from a ghastly aperture in its domelike head, to steam in the snow. Some lancers covered their noses. Others crossed themselves as they slowly clumped away from the awful sight.
Gonji helped Orozco gather himself, then cleaned out the sergeant’s purse and dealt similarly with the other faery-ring dwellers. Sullen and fearful, speculating as to the unknown terrors that might lie ahead, the column thundered off without a look back.
Orozco joined them, lagging behind, in no hurry to resume his position at the point. He was caked with snow, one numb hand thrust into his un-clinking pocket. The narrow-eyed squint of the freshly victimized took a long time to thaw from the sergeant’s face as he rode, quietly cursing Gonji.
* * * *
They moved on in tense silence for a time, the mesas looming ever nearer, burgeoning eerily as though they were a painted landscape pushed toward the troop by an unseen hand. The lancers watched Gonji closely, still more impressed, after his facile handling of the faery-ring illusion and its dreadful secret.
Gonji saw the tightness in Salguero’s face, the creeping petulance in the captain’s slowly dawning realization of his command’s shifting allegiance. The samurai had no wish to erode the bond between him and his old friend, but when he shuffled near Salguero to have a word with him, the captain fended him off with curt responses and quickly broke contact.
Gonji dropped the matter, moving back to the point as his attention was drawn to the strange familiarity of the cliffs ahead. But then this, too, was abruptly forgotten when the first arbalest bolts arced down on them from the sky.
A lancer screamed and was bowled backward over his steed’s haunches. Salguero shouted orders. Bows were unlimbered and aimed at the flying death merchants—two wygylls, the strange birdmen, firing crossbows with deadly accuracy.
Another soldier fell, a quarrel ripping through his breastplate in a gout of dark blood.
Gonji reined in and raised a steadying hand to them. His thoughts raced. He stamped toward the column and called out over their shouts:
“Hold your fire! Dismount—use your horses for cover—”
Salguero’s teeth ground as he looked from the descending birdmen to Gonji and back again, his pistol flourished uncertainly.
“Are you mad? What are you going to do, samurai,
bargain
with them?”
“Just have your men dismount,
senchoo
—
por favor—
let me try something.”
The captain licked his dry lips. A bolt crashed into the snow before his horse’s hooves. The animal stutter-stepped backward. “I hope you know what you’re doing.” He swung down from his mount and aimed his wheel-lock over the saddle.
“
Hai
,
so do I,” Gonji said, low enough so that only Orozco, dismounting at his side, heard him.
Gonji extracted the artifact the cliff-wygyll had given him and, propping it atop the spike-point of his halberd, lifted it high overhead. He swung it slowly from side to side as the flapping attackers swooped down at him.
A hissing bolt skimmed his thigh. He caught his breath and held it, steadying the halberd, his heart thudding in his breast. The creature’s companion hovered near, shrilling with bloodlust. Its beak was jammed against the arbalest’s stock as it drew a bead on the single boldly mounted human.
But then its fellow warbled a string of near human syllables, seized its attention, and pointed. The larger of the two lowered the weapon and peered with bright, intelligent eyes. It uttered a chattering disputation and raised the crossbow again as it hovered near the samurai. But its mate shrieked a single note, lofting down lower, to hover beside it. The angry creature clucked once at Gonji, then spiraled off into a surly holding pattern, squawking down at the men hunkered beneath their horses.
Gonji heard whispers behind him as the smaller wygyll descended with easy grace.
“Pollo—pecho—seno—”
A chicken with the breasts of a woman,
the troopers had concluded in their befuddlement. And this one was indeed the female of the pair, her nearly human breasts jutting from the sparse down that tufted her body. It had a softness and sheen that differed from her mate’s; differed, in fact, from her own heavier wing feathers. And her breastbone was not in evidence, her contour much more human than the male’s, whose forefront was dominated by the great arch of his cantilevered breastbone. The reversion to avian life seemed less pronounced in the females.
She picked the wygyll artifact gently off the razor tip of the halberd as her mate keened his warning. Fingering it with taloned hands that seemed nonetheless deft, she lowered her head and closed her eyes as she touched it to her beak. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes, tiny rivulets coursing the slope of her beak. There was warmth in her eyes when she again looked at the samurai.
Gonji smiled thinly and bowed to her, feeling somehow honored, touched by an empathetic sharing. It was a sensation he had known vaguely before, on occasion, when moved by the earnest communication in a poem, in a passage of music.
She laid the wygyll’s mourning emblem on the halberd point again and, furling her twelve-foot wings with an undulating rhythm, rose to rejoin her mate. The sputtering male drew close to her. They grasped taloned feet, beating out an unsteady path in the frigid air as they seemed to hold counsel, the male nattering and clacking his beak all the while. But his mate slung her shouldered crossbow’s strap around her neck and lay the weapon atop the quiver on her back in a gesture of ceased hostility.
After demurring awhile, the male did likewise. He disengaged from her and strafed the dismounted column twice, swooping low and shrieking at them in a bravura display of frustrated fury and breathtaking speed.
The horses reacted with rearing terror and could not be calmed until the creatures had turned and flapped nearly out of sight to the north.
Only Tora held his position, to Gonji’s pride. The samurai sighed with relief that his instinct had been borne out again. Braced by the company’s increased confidence and deepening respect for him, he nonetheless found his spirits plummeting to see Salguero grow more sullen as they resumed their track.
* * * *
The deja vu Gonji had experienced earlier now turned to grim reflection: The mesas ahead were the same ones he had passed to the
south
of Barbaso.
He swore under his breath, uncertain whether to apprise the captain of his fears or leave the dispirited man to his somber introspections. For, as if by default, Gonji had indeed assumed command: Captain Salguero spoke nothing now and only led the troop where Gonji directed.
The samurai said nothing of the phenomenon as the low mesa sprouted unaccountably from the plain at their right. Were they now on an endless loop of land, doomed to pass over the same ground forever? Would nightfall find them riding back to Barbaso like a troop of misguided idiots? Or, perhaps, had the Archmage somehow cast the entire valley into some lost world of untold horrors? Did he sit now in his stronghold on the real world, laughing into his cups?