Fortress of Lost Worlds (41 page)

Valentina fought to control her quavering hand, strove to take charge of her nerve, as the hand smoothed the fabric of the caftan at her thigh. She felt the hard barrel of the wheel-lock pistol beneath, certain that she could never get to it without tipping her intent, its cold steel feeling as unattainable as the sparkling waters of a mirage.

Years of dealing with the expectations of men set her body in motion without the need for awkward calculation. She lowered her eyes demurely and peered up at him from under a sheepish brow. Her breast heaved with soft sobs, her bosom jutting upward toward her chin as she leaned back on her arms in a posture that implored mercy and promised capitulation. A single conjured tear traced her cheek.

But she had never dealt with a dead man before.

The assassin sneered, and an unearthly wind-howl emanated from his throat that chilled Valentina’s soul. He extended the crossbow closer to her face in one corded hand.

Lola screamed madly, shaking her head from side to side. The killer’s rheumy eyes snapped toward her, his weapon arm angling at Lola, now, instead.

In that instant Valentina brought the pistol up from under her caftan and blew the distracted temple cat’s brains back through the grating. Back into the distorted space from which it had come, in an eruption of dark, foul matter.

The reaction was instantaneous. The assassin snapped rigid as if seized by some invisible horror. There was a savage sound of crushing bones and rending flesh, blood and viscera squirting and flinging from the reanimated cadaver, as the grave exacted final justice. His limbs were torn asunder, and his innards began to spew about the room.

“
Dios mio—Dios mio—
!”
Valentina kept shouting over Lola’s lunatic screams, more to swallow back her impulse to vomit than out of any fear. For she was beyond fear now, as she wiped at the dark blood that had splattered her. She could only wonder what to do next, half expecting to discover that she and the hysterical woman with her were the only ones left alive.

For now Kiri, too, was dead. Her second offspring, a male, was stillborn.

Valentina reloaded her pistol and looped the sling of the assassin’s crossbow around her neck. She gazed with twisted features at the grisly ruin of the undead killer’s wretchedly sundered corpse, wondering what manner of death had once claimed this monster.

Then she ran over to the squealing, puling Lola and hit her in the jaw with a roundhouse right that jarred the woman into gaping sensibility.

“That’s right—look at it!” she commanded, seeing Lola’s revulsion at the sight of the ravaged assassin, whose moment of death had surely been mastication by some monstrous beast. She grabbed Lola’s face and turned it toward the temple cat, which lay on its back, half in view, jaws jacked wide, its skull scooped open to reveal bits of some quivering mass. “You did your part.
We
did it. Now pick up that child, and let’s get out of here before any more of these—
things
come scuttling in here.”

“Gonji said we wait here,” Lola whined.

“To
hell
with that swaggering bastard!” Valentina roared. “I go my own way. Now bring that infant, or I leave you here with the dead souls.
Puha—
bitch! Move your ass!”

* * * *

Orozco and Herrmann twirled their blades anxiously, spreading to outflank the confident Polidori. As they engaged him, they were ever wary of the appearance of the temple cat, which could not be far away, bearing the killer’s suspended death within its shadowy substance.

“Sonofabitch,” Orozco fumed. “Dirty sonofa-Milanese-bitch! We know how you died. And now you die
again
!”

The sergeant launched at the assassin’s half-armored back, but his blade was deflected with a whipping parry. The force knocked Orozco off to the side, his limp rendering him clumsy and slow, further weakening his merely average fencing ability. His only hope was that he might annoy Polidori enough to enable Herrmann to deliver the killing blow—the blade-point in the back which the Italian brigands had proclaimed as his method of dispatch.

If they were right…

But Polidori lived up to his legend: Even the two of them together could not find an opening against this skillful fencer. And his plate-armored back could not be penetrated by anything less than a powerful direct lunge.

Orozco heard the growl of the cat behind him. He whirled down painfully on one knee, barely stopped himself from squeezing off what would have been a wasted pistol shot, as the demon sharply withdrew through the archway into unknown space with a glimmer of volcanic red eyes.

Herrmann roared with shock and pain. Polidori had plunged his blade into the man’s belly. Orozco bellowed with rage and stamped in at Polidori’s uncovered back. The valiant Herrmann, knowing his wound to be fatal, still found the courage to grab at the assassin’s blade with both hands, holding it fast in his own guts to buy Orozco time, though he shuddered and fell to his knees, screaming a long, mortal cry. Polidori could not withdraw his saber.

The undead killer lurched sidewise to evade Orozco’s lunge. His saber cut through the dead man’s arm, withdrawing bloodlessly. Polidori grinned evilly.

Orozco heard the scrape behind him, turned and leveled his pistol. Another assassin—Wiemer—stood in the archway, two cats’ heads appearing at either side of him, then withdrawing at once, as he did, to see the pistol in Orozco’s hand.

Outnumbered and terrified, Sergeant Orozco knew he could not win this encounter. The wisdom of retreat sang its life-affirming refrain.

He leapt to a barred window, felt the illusion of cold iron disperse as his arm passed through. Polidori retrieved his blade from the body of Herrmann as the sergeant pushed himself through.

Orozco blared in anger and frustration. Then in pain—

After falling for what seemed a long time, he struck a dank and clammy stairwell, cracking open his chin, bruising and scraping his arms and face as he tumbled downward in pitch darkness. He hit the bottom of the sub-cellar headfirst, scintillas showering his vision as he slipped into unconsciousness.

Thinking ugly thoughts of cowardice. And of the face of the assassin who had
retreated
to see Orozco’s flourished gun.

* * * *

“Most entries through right and left doorways—at least when you’re moving generally
upward—
seem to lead you diagonally to a lower level.” Cardenas was scribbling with charcoal on a tattered piece of cloth as he spoke. The crude taper’s light glowed in the tower’s darkness like a lonely vespers candle.

“You’re learning how this works?” Simon asked him with uncharacteristic interest.

“I think so. Something. I’m not sure.”

“My little infidel friend will be pleased,” the lycanthrope noted. “You can be sure he’ll find some foolish reason for optimism in all this.”

“You don’t like Gonji very much, do you.” Cardenas framed it more as a statement than a question.

“Well, it—” Simon broke off and pondered the solicitor’s pointed words. “We have our disagreements. He has his heathen notions and wild ideas.”

“He’s not an easy person to like, at first. With his arrogance and overbearing and such. Yet…” Cardenas looked up from his calculations. “I think he possesses a depth of goodness, of compassion, that he finds difficult to express openly. Something in his Far Eastern heritage, I suppose.”

“
Oui.
Do you know where we are now?”

“I think we’re in one of the fore-towers, near the barbican. The turret should be just above our heads.” He peered through a high, barred window. “Nothing but that awful mist on this side.”

The assassin dropped down from the ceiling and clacked off a quick arbalest shot. The quarrel tore shallowly through Simon’s ribs, cleaving the spaces between them to split on the wall in a spatter of bloodlets and shards of elm wood. The killer drew his blade and descended on the wounded giant.

Cardenas could only stare in horror a moment before setting his taper on the sill and firing an ineffectual gunshot into the assassin’s back.

Simon’s broadsword rasped out and engaged the opponent’s blade with furious spark-showering blows, backing him away, though his sword arm was on the pain-wracked side. Then Simon seemed to shrink away from the combat, clutching at himself, gurgling low in his throat as though convulsing.

Cardenas was galvanized, fearing Simon would die and leave him at the mercy of the dreaded assassin and its lurking shadow-cat. He leapt onto the back of the undead, pinioning its arms, grimacing against the feel of the clammy, stiffened flesh like one wrestling an enormous beached fish. Cardenas clenched for his life, sprained arm flaring with pain, only half-seeing the eerie transformation Simon was even now undergoing, in his own furious struggle.

Simon emitted a savage snarl and flung away his blade. He saw the temple cat, hanging upside down from the ceiling beam in the murky shadows overhead. It gaped its jaws and dropped. Amazingly, Simon sprang from the floor and caught it in midair, twisting to slam atop it on the mildewed floor.

Cardenas groaned as he struggled to maintain his bear hug about the muscular assassin’s chest, knowing that the moment he released his grip would be followed by the moment of death. He saw the flailing of talons and heard a cracking sound but could not discern its source. The taper-lit darkness roiled with violent shadows and the sounds of deadly struggle.

The undead nemesis lurched Cardenas onto his back. His breath whooshed out, and his tenacious hold was broken.

The murderer rose and clutched at Cardenas’ throat. The solicitor fought the clamping hand uselessly. Then—

A keening yowl. Something monstrous was rising in the darkness. Furred and fanged.
Simon.
The dead cat’s broken jaws dangled from one
taloned
hand. The assassin went blank-faced above Cardenas, then turned a ghastly
red
and began to swell… Something reeking poured out of his mouth to splatter onto Cardenas. He rolled out from under the killer, spitting and wiping himself as he began to heave dryly.

The corpse slammed down onto the stone floor, still swelling, reddening, vibrating. Its flesh began to peel back, and it streamed oily filth from every orifice. Then it suddenly lay prone, death triumphing over the assassin a second time, for
all
time.

“We would’ve—” Cardenas gasped, suddenly realizing what they had witnessed. “We would’ve—had a hard time—
boiling
him alive in the desert—no?” He emitted a short, mad laugh.

The killer lay still, his bright pink flesh having burst and gone pulpy, eyes now milky white globules.

Cardenas sucked in a breath to espy his companion, standing erect now, in the candle light. “
Jesus
,
Simon, are you all right? I thought—the transformations—they—?”

“
Si
.”
Simon clutched at his torn, bleeding side and laughed a guttural laugh, marveling at the revelation. “It seems…it seems the old desert madman was right. The mufti… If I want to badly enough—if I have a great enough need—But don’t be quick to tell the samurai. Smug heathen. He’ll take credit for my learning something else I didn’t know about myself.”

Cardenas winced to look at his state in the cool glow of the taper. “We should find the others. Tell them what we’ve done. And learned. Can I do anything for you…the wounds?”

Simon looked at him sidelong and smiled coldly, shaking his head.

Cardenas felt the rising gooseflesh to see a man’s smile curve the lips of the now slowly
receding
snout of a golden wolf.

* * * *

“I’ll do this one, Klank.”

Luigi Leone stretched his small figure up tall, squaring his shoulders. With a nonchalant sniff, pistol angled to fire, he jumped at the grated window.

There was shocking impact and a noisy clangor as Leone bounced off the rusted iron grillwork and fell back on his behind.

Klank LoPresti brayed a harsh laugh. “Idiot! Well, now we know where one of those barred windows really
is
. Good work, Leone.” He checked over his array of weapons again, lurching his shoulders in his habitual fashion, telling from the din and the touch whether every piece of his noisy armor was strapped in its assigned place. Fully bedecked, LoPresti resembled an armored gorilla, with his bulky upper body mounted on stocky bowed legs. Luigi sometimes called him “Sir Ape.”

“At least I don’t make as much noise when I fall as you do every time you hiccup,” Leone retorted. “You sound like a wagonload of wind-chimes tip—”

“Look out!”

The grating stopped passage only
one
way.
The Spanish killer known in life as Fernandez, a renegade from the army, bounded through and aimed his arbalest at Klank. The burly brigand slid out a pistol, cocked and fired as he turned sharply to avoid the quarrel. The pistol ball knocked Fernandez back with its impact, but he came on, uninjured.

Leone cried out to see the exploded view of Klank’s bloody shoulder as he twisted by. His heavy jack had partially deflected the bolt, saving his arm. LoPresti’s sword sang out of its scabbard.

“The cat,” he whispered in a breath tight with pain. “Watch for the cat.”

Klank came to en garde, spanking the confident Fernandez’s blade aside and lunging in to find the dead Spaniard offering no resistance: LoPresti’s blade-point ripped into his belly without effect.

Fernandez laughed coldly as they clashed and clashed again. Leone watched in abject horror for the temple cat to come into sight, pistols clenched in sweating palms, his good eye bulging. Klank LoPresti drew the Spaniard toward the doorway by which the pair had entered the chamber, drove the assassin’s blade upward with a twisting high parry, pushed in close to the corpse’s fetid breath, then butted it in the face with his helm and kicked one of its feet out from under it. Fernandez stumbled forward and Klank pounded a sharp elbow to the back of his head that pushed him toward the portal. When Fernandez righted himself and turned to reengage him, LoPresti instead jumped into the air and drop-kicked him magically out of sight, through the archway and into the three-foot drop to the banquet hall the distorted space could not reveal.