These became discrete, separating into ten twisting cyclones of thickening murk that hovered just above the bank.
The eyes appeared first, sultry red eye-slits with tiny, iridescent black pupils. Then sinewy limbs appeared out of the mist—animal limbs; four of them, sprouting shiny, hooked claws and settling, at last, to earth. They seemed barely to touch the ground, though the heads and torsos that molded and solidified seemed heavily muscular. Litheness, grace, and savagery vied for supremacy as the creatures began to move as one in the soft sheathing of black mist that seemed ever to accompany them, to conceal the fullness of their shadow life.
To know their meaning, men would call them demons, for indeed they were: huge, vicious, sentient
temple cats
. Witches’ familiars from another world, a hungry world. Guardians and assistants to necromancers in their nefarious work.
They circled Balaerik once, flashing dark razored teeth, as they stretched and breathed and fixed themselves in their new environment, on this new sphere of existence. Cunning and adaptive, they knew the work they’d be about beyond any need for spoken communication.
The bodies of the Dark Company silently floated toward them against the river’s current. Fishlike, bloated, rotating slowly in a grisly ballet, the deathless ones drifted toward the banks, where Balaerik awaited them, arms folded patiently.
The temple cats spoiled to get at them, not liking the water’s cold touch. When the corpses’ progress brought them into waters ankle deep to a man, the cats began to pad out gingerly, snarling in their soft, distant fashion.
Each cat seized a corpse by the neck in a soft but firm bite, dragging it ashore. Then they began licking the corpses, cleansing them, turning them over as needed, such that an amazing transformation occurred: The decaying, bloated gray bodies and tattered bits of garb were slowly, laboriously made over, renewed. Clothing and body armor were dried and repaired; slung weapons were purged of rust and rot; the swollen, mottled flesh of each cadaver shrank, becoming uniformly pallid, firmly set in the stiffness of the freshly dead.
The eyelids were licked open to reveal dead, milky-white orbs, and now each cat sat atop one body and pressed its gaping jaws over its subject’s entire face, exhaling into the lungs, the nostrils, and the eyes at once.
Movement began in the corpses’ chest cavities. The cats sucked in the ejected river water and regurgitated it onto the bank.
When they had completed their ghastly work, layers of time had lifted from the once moldering corpses, though they were yet among the dead.
Now each sentient cat took a languid position at the head of each supine form. They seated themselves sphinx-like, to stare down fixedly at the dead warriors. Balaerik came up to them and stood over each silent form in turn:
“Hilmar—Ullrich—Wiemer…” he pronounced over the first slain man.
“Death be undone.”
There was an impact to the body. A rupture tore through its cuirass and shirt and upper chest. Blood gouted from the angry wound. Then there was an abrupt reversal, an aberration in time—a pistol ball jerked free of the man’s chest and rolled onto the muddy bank. The wound remained, like the cone of an erupting volcano, but the body began to stir, the warrior’s eyes rolling wildly as the darkness of the unbinding grave was once again cast off.
“Jurgen—Kleinhenz…Death be undone.”
The hulking murderer’s twisted, broken neck snapped back into place with a hollow crack that mocked the hand of justice.
* * * *
The Spanish sergeant stayed his troop’s whispering with a spank of his thigh. Balaerik’s Brotherhood of Holy Arms looked like nothing any of them had ventured, though they’d spent the better part of an hour speculating.
“They’ll need horses, won’t they?” the sergeant asked. He swallowed hard to see Balaerik’s complacent smile as he led the bizarre procession of squelching forms along the river bank.
“That will be no problem,” the
donado
replied, evoking an unabashed whimper from one of the younger lancers.
“What the hell?—God in Heaven!”
The lancers saw the cats gather at the mouth of the nearby gully just as the Dark Company opened fire on them with bow and arbalest. The sergeant was one of the first to fall, amid screaming men and rearing steeds. Two Lancers made it almost to their attackers before the temple cats fell on them with raking claws and fangs like steel boning knives.
One stalwart Lancer, nearly relieved of an arm by the cats, found the desperate strength to aim and fire his pistol into the face of one of the reanimated fiends. His dying vision was of that shattered, swarthy face repairing itself by some fiendish magic as the arrogant would-be victim stood over him with hands on hips.
The temple cats swiftly herded the maddened horses into the gully’s cul-de-sac. Balaerik caught up a lance and, drawing near to a bucking steed, sliced open its throat. As it lay kicking in its death throes, he captured its flickering life in his necromantic sphere. It gave no resistance, for animals were even easier to command than twisted souls.
“So be it,” he whispered. “The end of useless lives—and a new dark beginning.” He stole the horses’ dying breaths, each in turn, aided by the Dark Company, to whom he spoke.
“Do you cherish this life?”
Affirmations hissed in a half dozen languages from throats still learning again the power of speech.
“Would you remain alive for all time—immortal?”
An eager response ensued, fraught with the terror of those who had learned what the grave held for them.
“I shall be leaving you now, with this hope: Complete the task I set, and live forever. There can be no failure for you, you know that. You know your quarry, and this time there is no restraint on you. Last time I instructed you to torment him at long distance, to make him know the pain of loneliness and loss, to force him to reunite with that other being that troubles us. Now he has done so. Now you may hurt them both any way you wish before destroying them. That is my command. Destroy the samurai, and the man who imprisons the Beast, and you shall live forever.”
A soft sibilant hiss of wonder as the undead killers entertained the tantalizing possibility.
“Death be undone.”
A black gelding thrust upward onto its feet, unsteady at first to be so rudely recalled to life. Then, eyes and nostrils flaring, it walked up to Balaerik and bowed to him reverently.
PART THREE
Orphans of Arcadia
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The escapees and renegades fleeing with Gonji from Toledo set their barges and boats adrift when they had disembarked near Aranjuez. There they linked up with a wagon caravan bearing textiles purchased by Jacob Neriah.
The crafty old merchant had set them up well: Plenty of wagon space had been provided for noncombatants, supplies for their mad rush to the sea were trundled out of concealment by Salguero’s new command of adventurers, and horses were brought from the stables of three villages for the militant members of the motley entourage.
“Just like Vedun again,” Neriah had jested nostalgically, though Gonji had failed to share his enthusiasm.
The samurai spent the beginning of the journey riding with the wagons, resting his ravaged body until the plan called for separation into smaller caravans and he felt sufficiently trailworthy to take up the reins of a black mare.
He found himself reunited with several old battle-mates, including the surly Corsini, and it was gratifying to know that he still commanded enough respect that old debtors sought him out to repay favors.
But the more Gonji saw of the Inquisition refugees, the less he liked it. There were many families along, young folk and aged. It seemed they believed themselves on some sort of holy pilgrimage to the
Wunderknechten
sanctuary in Austria, and the samurai was uneasy about his selection as spiritual and military leader of this dangerous retreat.
And though he said little of it, he knew he would pursue a different course from theirs once they reached the sea.
They fled eastward for a few days, gradually angling southeast as they made for Valencia. Neriah’s money had found the right hands, and the caravan was alerted in advance to the action the Spanish army planned against them. Messengers had been sent ahead to order blockades by the military outposts along the Mediterranean, and Gonji sensed doom hovering over their trail.
Added to that grim intuition was another concern: In the two days since the escape from Toledo, Simon Sardonis, the dour lycanthrope, had not rejoined the ever-growing party.
* * * *
Buey’s small band of rebels linked up with the main body of the caravan late the second night. Gonji was seated beside the wounded Sergeant Orozco when they rode in. The sergeant had been burning with fever since the ball had been removed from his leg. A Gypsy woman, golden earrings tinkling and glittering in the firelight, attended Orozco, laving his wound with an evil-smelling potion. The fever seemed to be breaking.
The Ox called out a greeting, then dragged a bound-and-gagged, hooded figure down from a horse and pushed the prisoner toward Gonji. The hood was raked off: It was Pablo Cardenas, the solicitor from Barbaso.
“Oriental
devil
!”
Cardenas shouted when the gag had been removed. “You’re responsible for my family’s peril! But you haven’t escaped them yet. The army will fill you with holes, and
then
they’ll stake you—”
“Wait a moment, wait a moment, Cardenas,” Gonji blustered. “I don’t know what you’re holding against me, but I’ll tell you, I’ve had enough of Spanish accusation. Cut him loose.”
A soldier complied, and the two stood eyeing each other with hostility.
“He blames
this
on you,” Buey said, extracting and tossing to Gonji…the duplicate of the lost wygyll emblem.
“
Cholera
,” the samurai swore, catching it and holding it close. “Not the same, but very much like it. Where did you get this?”
Before Cardenas could answer, Orozco pushed up on an elbow, grunting. “You mean he had that thing all the time? I
knew
you only wanted to get me killed so you wouldn’t have to pay me back the silver you owe me.”
Cardenas looked from Orozco’s sweaty grin to Gonji’s curious facial set. “I—it was found in my children’s bedchamber. You claim you had nothing to do with it?”
“How do you suppose it got there,
Kyooshi
?” Captain Salguero inquired, setting a foot on a stool and leaning forward.
“The witch, probably,” Gonji said softly.
“Domingo Negro?” Cardenas asked, wide-eyed.
The samurai nodded pensively. “She brought the one I carried to the dungeons. It was lost when Valentina’s cell was burned out. She seemed to invest it with a great deal of import. Perhaps that’s why she sent us two of them.”
“But why
me
?
Why my children?” the solicitor demanded. “Why involve us in this lunacy? I have no desire to follow you to your deaths. As soon as you see fit to release me, I’m going to rejoin my family. Do you know that we had to run from the colonel’s troops ourselves because of this? Damn that witch to the deepest pit of Hell!”
“Or,” Gonji continued bemusedly, “perhaps it was to force you to join us that she sent this emblem with you. There may be some reason you’re to go along with me.”
“To Austria?” Cardenas shouted. “You must be mad. I’m not going anywhere with you!”
Gonji looked askance at him but didn’t reply.
“Is your family safe, then?” Salguero asked the man.
“
Si
,
I think so.”
“Where did you hide them?” Buey pressed.
Cardenas started to answer but held himself. “Let’s just say we’re heading in the same direction for now.”
“So sorry,
senor
,”
Gonji said gently, “but I think it will be necessary for us to keep you along until we reach the sea. For our own security.”
“You can’t keep me here.
I’m not your prisoner
!”
“We trust you,” Captain Salguero cut in. “It’s just that we can’t be certain who you might encounter on the road. We’re responsible for many lives here. There are a lot of families who might be imperiled by our pursuers.”
Cardenas’ brow knit, and he licked his dry lips, drawing his collar close about his neck in the cold night wind that briskly swept the savannah. “I can’t believe you’ve betrayed your country and your Church like this, captain. And you, samurai—I tried to help you when they led you away from Barbaso. I urged them to treat you decently. I was very nearly imprisoned for it myself.”
“
Hai, arigato.
I do remember,” Gonji told him. “It’s
because
of matters like that that these men have betrayed their leaders. I can never repay any of you, I’m afraid, for all you’ve done for me. I can only try…”
He let his voice dwindle into the whistling wind, and his eyes dropped groundward as he moved off into the darkness.
A moment later Valentina rose from the wagon where she had sat, listening in silence, to take a blanket out to him.
* * * *
Whether out of shock, pain, or unexpected dignity, Gonji could not tell, but Valentina had not embarrassed him with an overt display of affection on that first night, when they had consummated, in a sense, their longing to be in each other’s presence without the restraint of walls or bars. By the simple eloquent clasping of their hands, by the commingling of the feelings their eyes projected, they communicated the depth of interdependency they had developed over the long months in the dungeons. The onlookers had fallen to respectful silence, for clearly these two ill-treated prisoners shared a bond of love.
For Gonji, though, freedom unveiled a bittersweet discovery. While they had been imprisoned together, Valentina had been an unattainable object of desire. Now that they were free, harsh reality intruded on their relationship: In view of her unfortunate disease, Gonji would not take her, though they longed for each other. And Valentina understood, all too well, if tacitly.
“I can understand the appeal of a trollop to a lonely man,” Salguero had joked in reply to Gonji’s gratitude for the captain’s rescuing her. But the samurai had gleaned no humor from it. His longing soon turned to frustration and gloom as they shared each other’s warmth during the cold wayfaring nights.
Valentina, for her part, never voiced the subject, understanding and accepting their situation in a manner that added to Gonji’s guilt. Her entire mien had changed. Her vulgar outbursts were rarer and more restrained now that she had been welcomed into the community of refugees. She no longer posed as a whore. But neither was she viewed by the others as Gonji’s devoted, long-suffering slave. She instead displayed a marvelous depth of character and dignity, giving the samurai space but aligning herself as his partner during moments of communal gathering.
Her love was clear; and her respect, perversely vexing to him. It would have been far easier on him had she chosen a more selfish tack.
He lay prone in the bed of a canopied dray the second night, Valentina redressing a wound on his back.
“You have more permanent scars on your tired old back now, thanks to the Inquisition,” she said.
“We both have,
neh
?”
“
Si
,” she said, thoughtfully. “We both bear a lot of scars. Gonji-
chan
,
none of this is easy for you, is it?”
He took a long time to reply. “For any of us. We’ve got a long, hard road ahead.”
“That’s not what I mean. Would it be better for you if I left?”
He craned his neck to look back at her. “What do you mean? Where would you go, if not to Austria? Do you have family left anywhere in Spain?”
She smiled. “Lie still.” She pushed him back down with a firm pressure on his shoulders. “Where did you get this ugly scar?” She ran a finger along the cicatrix of the sword wound he had reflected on a thousand times in lonely moonlit silence.
Gonji grunted noncommittally, changing the subject. “I never told you this before. There was never a chance. A sorceress came to me in the dungeons—through you. She came to advise me concerning the dark powers that bedevil us. She was able to enter you because of—don’t be alarmed. She was a kind witch, keen of mind. That’s just the way she entered the spirits of others. Through…injuries they possess…do you know what I mean? She could not help you, though I asked. I am sorry, Tina
-chan
.”
After a breathy moment, she said quietly, “I love you, Gonji. I think you know that. Don’t say anything. I only needed to hear myself say it. It sounds so…wholesome.” She laughed in her bawdy fashion of old, and for an instant Gonji was again transported to the dungeons. A fleeting impression of uplift from wretched misery, as only she had been able to provide. Then Valentina grew serious again. “You have no obligation to me. Freedom is too precious a thing for those such as you and me.”
She drew back and sighed wearily. Gonji turned over to face her. She winced a bit when her still-raw back touched the side of the dray.
“Why don’t we get drunk,” she said, “and then you can see what you can do about
my
back? And then my front—” She laughed again, and Gonji was caught up by her mirth.
He could not be cruel to her. He owed her much. Thus was he burdened with yet another duty, for obligation was not so easily dismissed for one who espoused the
bushido
code. He had no idea how he would ultimately deal with it. But the time was drawing near.
* * * *
Just after dawn the next morning, there was a commotion in the encampment. Gonji was roused by Valentina to find the lupine presence of Simon Sardonis ambling toward the whispering refugees. He strode into camp with the sinewy grace Gonji knew so well. The samurai’s breath quickened as he ransacked his thoughts for the right words to address to this strangely accursed ally he had not seen in so long.
“
Lobis homem—
the werewolf!”
The whispering ceased among the tightly knotted groups of oglers wherever the eerie silver eyes of this towering figure chose to rest. They scanned him as they would a captive wild animal, focusing now on the pointed ridge of blond hair on his brow, the sinew in his arms, or the blood under his dark nails. He wore torn and bloody breeches, a ragged shirt, and a cuirass of Spanish cavalry issue. They were ill fitting, and by the legend of this being who was called Grejkill, the Beast with the Soul of a Man, there could be little doubt as to how he had obtained them, and why.
Only hours earlier he had needed no clothing. He had prowled the plains in the form of the great golden werewolf. And soldiers had been unfortunate enough to cross his path. The people had been prepared for his eventual appearance among them; it had been much spoken of. Yet they still gaped, and crossed themselves, and anxiously fingered weapons as they herded their children behind them for protection.
Gonji watched it all in silence, knowing Simon’s discomfiture but admiring him greatly for the courage to appear among them. He had been shunned of men for so long, due to his ghastly curse, that he had understandably become deeply misanthropic. Gonji recalled at what traumatic cost Simon had joined with the defenders of tragic Vedun.
He thought to say something of it, discarding the notion when he realized that it might embarrass Simon and cause him to withdraw again. In the same instant, Captain Salguero was moving forward, and reaching up to grasp Simon’s shoulders, then shaking the man’s reluctant hand, and finally holding up that legendary lycanthrope’s hand to show the onlookers the white cross emblazoned in the palm.
“This man is the one you’ve heard so much of,” the captain was blaring momentously. “He is a follower of the Christ, but he embraces the universal tolerance of the
Wunderknechten
that we all hold dear. And he is the Wrath of God to all powers of evil—”
Gonji folded his arms and cocked an eyebrow as he listened, smiling inside. He could see Simon begin to sweat, those silver eyes flicking about for safe harbor though there was none to be found, the company of others being so discomfiting to him. Salguero had certainly overstated Simon’s tolerance of beliefs outside the dogma of Holy Mother Church, unless Simon had changed radically since Gonji had last ridden with him.
And what of this sudden camaraderie between Simon and the captain? Salguero had not mentioned that he and Simon were now fast friends. These Spaniards certainly had a way of developing bonds of affinity over every chance meeting. Gonji was not sure that he and Simon could call each other ‘friends,’ though it was the samurai who first had shamed the reclusive werewolf into helping other people, in the Vedun campaign.