Fortress of Lost Worlds (36 page)

She turned on her heel and stalked off, the venom in her tone still hanging in the somber air. No one spoke for a time, her candor taking them by surprise.

“Well, someone did him in,” Del Gaudio finally added.

“Eh?”

“Polidori—that’s why it couldn’t have been him. He was murdered finally, so I heard.”

Gonji’s eyes narrowed. He squeezed the hilt of his
katana
as he looked out to sea. “Sometimes the dead—won’t stay dead.”

Simon Sardonis brayed a canine laugh from the topmast. They all eyed the monstrous werewolf uneasily to hear the uncharacteristic sound.

“You need to take a firm hand with the dead,” he rasped down eerily, his laughter fracturing the morbid quiet on the deck as his snout angled at the moon.

“Don’t
you
go mad on me now,” Gonji fired up at him, pointing a finger. The irony of his own statement didn’t register on him until he’d had time to decipher the meaning of Simon’s renewed outpouring of barking laughter.

Tomorrow night would bring the full of the moon.

* * * *

The Night of Chains, Simon was wont to call it. For during the full-moon nights of his youth, when the orphaned wolf-child was raised in a French monastery, he was habitually shackled to the wall of a locked and barred cellar.

The galley provided no such sure deterrent to his madness on this night, and it had been this more than anything else that Simon had dreaded. For on the night of the first transformation under a new full moon, the
demon
within him held sway. Simon’s spirit was consigned to some dim recess of their sphere of cohabitation, and there was no end to the savagery the primitive Beast might wreak. If it killed on this night, the agonizing transformations that ostracized him from normal humans would occur each night until the next full moon; albeit, Simon would then assume control of the Beast. If he was prevented from killing, he would be a normal man for the duration of that moon, freed of the horror with which he regarded the sun’s decaying light.

It was Gonji who had shamed him out of his self-pity, a few years earlier, proving to him that he possessed the strength and courage to take control of the raging Beast even on the Night of Chains, once the Beast had slaked its blood-thirst. The struggle for control was a terrible thing to behold. It was an ordeal that Simon resisted, much preferring the horrible madness to play itself out while he thrashed about while helplessly chained, unable to kill. And it seemed necessary on this full-moon night, when he must be prevented at all cost from allowing the Beast to kill, in these circumstances.

Gonji, for his part, dreaded the loss of the werewolf’s power during this increasingly deadly journey. It boded ill to eschew the werewolf’s raging fury. But what was there to be done about it? He had avoided voicing the gruesome thought he had very briefly entertained—that one of them should be chosen as a
sacrifice
that night, such that others might live. He knew how Simon—not to mention the others—would react to the unthinkable idea, for he hated the Beast’s savagery and wished earnestly to be like other men.

So as night drew on, a grim-visaged Simon, who once again refrained from meeting the eyes of the others, was bound into the dinghy with heavy rope and rigging, lashed to the boards and cleats in an effort to hold the Beast at bay. The dinghy was lowered into the sea, and the mooring rope that connected it to the ship was paid out to its full length. Pistols and bows brandished in sweating fists, the tense squad led by Gonji took up its dual vigil in the stern: They would at once watch for the reappearance of the Dark Company’s felucca and guard against the uncontrolled Beast’s breaking free and trying to climb the rope to the ship. He would not be able to swim to them, for a stiff breeze carried them on their course now, and the oars had been shipped.

As anxiety gave vent to sporadic outbreaks of temper, the violent struggle on the dinghy came to their attention. They saw the shredding of the canvas, the lateral tossing of the small boat as it skimmed the waves. There came to their ears a crunching and snapping din. A cleat broke loose on the dinghy and sprang into the air. Then they heard the terrible bellowing of the ensnared werewolf, the sounds of internal conflict that manifested themselves in cursing and shouting in two different voices.

There was a moment’s respite. Then, suddenly, coils of rope burst upward, savaged by fang and claw, and the monster that was not Simon Sardonis loomed up over the dinghy’s bow and regarded them all with bloodthirsty red eyes.

An epidemic gasping broke across the deck of the galley, the confidence they’d learned to feel in the werewolf s powerful presence utterly dashed.

“Sharp eye,” Gonji cautioned without taking his eyes from the baleful monster. “Keep watch for that ship.”

The werewolf seized the mooring rope and began to climb.

“Simon,” Gonji shouted, “take command. You know you can.”

“
Ja—
come and help me, little slope-head.” The voice that issued in reply from the Beast, speaking in High German, was not Simon’s but
another’s
. Chilling in its foul appetite; in its eagerness to kill, to devour with sadistic savagery. Simon had long ago told Gonji of its desire to destroy the samurai, how it sometimes whispered without voice that Simon should rend him. How, in a dreadful, unguarded moment of lost control, Simon had very nearly tried once.

“Should we shoot it?” Orozco said, his pistol shaking in a nervous grip. “Or
what
?”

Gonji deliberated, thoughts galloping in several directions, shaking his head vigorously at last. “Got to wound him, that’s all.”

“What? In
this
sea? How you going to sight straight enough?”

“Just let me
try
,”
Gonji shot back. “He’s
my compadre. My
responsibility. You just hold your fire unless it becomes necessary.”

The Beast’s back skimmed the water’s surface as he climbed upside down along the heavy rope. Then its form disappeared altogether, plunging beneath a wave. It washed back up, roaring at the elements, its fur matted and glistening in the full moon’s harsh reflection.

Gonji launched an arrow, missing low, the shaft darting into the cold gray waters. He nocked another razor-tipped shaft, rotated his bow downward, and trained it on target. Fired—

The Beast howled and spun in shock and pain. It nearly lost its grip on the lanyard. It ripped the war arrow from its shoulder, twining its furred legs about the rope for uneasy purchase. Its savage roaring was repeatedly drowned by the creature’s helpless dips below the rolling waves.

“That won’t stop him,” Buey cried.

“It might slow him, make him think,” Gonji reminded. “If he’s capable of thinking.”

Then bedlam broke loose near the bow.

All eyes had been trained on the outre drama at the stern. No one noticed when or how the soaking intruder in caftan and burnoose had boarded. But they soon learned for what purpose.

A Morisco woman turned at the sound of splattering seawater and screamed. She extracted a poniard from her belt and raised it to defend herself, but the evilly grinning stranger’s scimitar licked out and plunged into her belly, a vicious curved wedge of Damascus steel yanking out slick and red through her grasping fingers as she fell.

Screams of shock and bellows of rage. Two pistols barked, one on either side of the crumpled form, lead balls tearing into the swarthy killer from point-blank range. He peered down at the black holes in his caftan and snaked out with his blade, relieving one startled mercenary of his arm, up to the elbow, and tearing through the windpipe of the other. The deathless assassin came on, rotating his scimitar in invitation.

The warriors circled him warily, lunging in with bared steel. The Moriscos among them shouted at him in their language, calling out threats and demands that he surrender. The intruder took a dozen sword cuts that had no effect as he swept on through them, felling three more men with his deadly slashes. Unhurried, a relentless, indestructible juggernaut.

By now Gonji recognized that the ship had been invaded by the Dark Company. He looked back and forth from the slaughter on the deck to the oncoming werewolf, who still dangled from the mooring rope.

“What do we do?” his men were crying.

“I’ll tell you what we do,” Orozco replied, his pistol booming in the night, the ball tearing into the howling Beast that had been Simon Sardonis. “We fight for our lives!” he roared.

Gonji swore at the sergeant but loaded his bow and sighted on the Beast again. He stayed his breathing, fighting the rolling of the sea to find a non-vital spot on the werewolf. He fired. His shaft struck the creature in the thigh. It bellowed and lost its leg-hold, one raking paw of a foot striving to catch the rope again.

Then the samurai turned from it and bounded down onto the deck, shouting for the others to make way. His
daisho
came out as one as he rushed the sneering Arab, whose undying body now bore the tattering marks of a score of sword and pistol wounds.

Gonji stopped sharply, then stamped forward, catching the deadly scimitar’s beheading arc on the
ko-dachi
and turning it overhead. He dropped to one knee and whirled the
katana
low, severing the assassin’s leg at the knee joint. The monster registered no pain but only surprise as it toppled to the boards. It lost its scimitar, and the samurai descended on its downed form in fury, his next stroke severing its head, wrenching outcries of revulsion as the head rolled against the rail, its eyes open, the mouth still working.

A rasping hiss issued from that mouth, which formed words that seemed to come to their ears out of the air itself. Gonji stalked the head as though it were some loathsome cornered vermin that might spring.

The shadow-cat’s claw raked at him through the scupper where it had been clinging to the hull, unseen, as silent and deadly as nightshade. The claw scored his boot, scratching his ankle. He bounded back two paces, then bolted at it with both blades lashing in twin-fanged wrath, striking only wood as the cat withdrew with unearthly speed.

The dismembered parts of the assassin began to move, to slither along the deck like ungainly vipers.

“Destroy it!” Gonji shouted. “Cut it to bits!”

But the others were slow to respond, and even the samurai hesitated, uncertain how to approach the wetly creeping sections; where to strike effectively. Fear of the dark sorcery that animated the undead killer froze their thews.

The body was drawn over the rail, the head and leg section slipping eerily through the scuppers, and the tripartite assassin disappeared under the waves. The cat leapt off the hull, bows being rushed to engagement at the rail. But the creature dissolved into a dark spot atop the water and casually drifted off, an inky form, dotted by hellish red eyes, whose stain moved off upon the waves.

Gonji cursed and slammed a fist on the rail, sprinting for the stern again, when he heard Buey shout his name.

The werewolf was pulling itself inexorably up the rope, growling furiously at the ashen squad.

“Can we kill him?” Orozco blared.

“It’s harder than you think,” Gonji responded. “I’ve seen him take more wounds in a single night than that thing we just dispatched back there.”

They opened fire with the pistols, one shot at a time, gauging the effect on the lycanthrope, trying to avoid hitting him in any vital area. With each shot the creature’s progress was slowed, until finally it released its grip and fell into the churning water.

“
Cholera
,”
Gonji growled, hoping they would not lose Simon to the sea. “
Simon
!”
he cried down into the ship’s wash.

For a heart-clutching space, the bipedal wolf was lost from view. Then a golden-tufted arm grasped the dinghy’s oarlock, thirty yards aft. Another… The werewolf painfully pulled itself aboard, began slashing and tearing at the small boat’s mast, leveling it in its rage and pain, bashing at the boards until it began to take water. Still the savage Beast vented its primitive fury, crashing out sections of hull to reveal the skeletal futtocks. And when it had spent itself, it collapsed and clung to the shattered fragment of boat still towed by the shredded, unwinding mooring rope.

As the moon’s unrelenting eye was gradually obliterated by dawn’s gray haze, only Gonji remained to watch the accursed man’s return to humankind. He was fearfully pulled from the water by shaking hands, his wounds attended to by two women and a man with fretful faces. The others discovered the phenomenon Gonji recalled from the campaign at Vedun: The pistol balls and arrowheads had been ejected from the body during reversion. His many wounds, cauterized by sea water and bound carefully now with a Moorish unguent and bandages, already had begun to heal. Exhausted and near delirium, Simon managed a weak gesture of gratitude for what they’d done, heartened as he was by the prospect of freedom from the Beast for the space of a month.

* * * *

The dead were buried at sea while Gonji slept. Anxiety and atavistic terror over the portentous events of the previous night, coupled with the effects of exhaustion, caused violence and mutiny among the refugees.

An Austrian mercenary imagined that a Morisco who approached behind him was the assailant from the night before. He shot him through the head. A fight ensued, broken up by Buey and the other lancers before any other serious harm was incurred.

Gonji was roused from slumber to find the ship’s complement hotly disputing the completion of the quest. Many favored abandoning the accursed voyage and trying to rejoin their fellows in Austria. Those who had had enough of evil sorcery were now supported by certain detractors of Gonji and his methods of leadership, fueled by the belief that Simon’s aid was lost to them. Delivered from the shadow of the Beast, they poured out their secret misgivings.

Gonji held an impromptu vote, those choosing to go on aligning themselves with him at the bow. The Spanish lancers and Italian rogues joined him, along with Valentina and two women whose men had been killed, the Moriscos, and several individuals splintered from the dissenting factions. But the samurai was surprised to find that his side was outvoted.

Drawing the Sagami, Gonji summarily brought an end to the proceedings by reminding them that they operated under the military structure of a free company, not a democracy. He dispersed them with a blunt warning against failed resolve.