the earth-staked Sister took up a cracked refrain that fulsomely twisted their siren song of earlier: “Come, little mite, let me suck thy bowels....” Gonji gathered brush and twigs to revive the fire. Curiously, he found himself moving slowly, deliberately. Behind him Tora neighed anxiously, as if to spur him to complete the job.
He took from a satchel the small earthen bottle given him by a priest. Uncorking it, he sampled the blessed water with his tongue. Warm and tasteless. He laved his fresh wounds, gritting back the purgative sting without an outcry as an exercise to help restore his harmony of body and soul.
The impaled vampire’s blackening tongue chattered on all the while.
“Why do you dally, man of the East? Do you want me still? You may yet have me, even as I am! Hee-heeeee—!”
Gonji strolled up calmly and looked down at the slender form now framed in black blood. He grimaced. A few moments ago this tiny creature might have rent him like some monstrous beast of lore. Her neck was bridged unnaturally, eyes rolled back to avoid the sight of the glinting cruciform.
“Further on,” she purred, “you will meet our brothers. Perhaps you would prefer their ministrations, ahhhh—?” Her taunting trill pitched ever higher as Gonji’s lips arched back in a snarl of disgust. He realized that he had been listening to her for a long time. Could he be so forlorn that even in such a voice he found comfort?
“Cholera,” he said with edged softness, resorting again to the popular epithet of the territory, descriptive of a rather vile, intestinal disorder, that had become his favorite.
He sloshed holy water on the vampire. She shrieked and lurched, red welts blossoming on her alabaster flesh.
Gonji strode to the fire, rekindled the torch. Without another thought he set the screaming creature ablaze, turning the night incandescent. It burned like dry wheat, flaring so swiftly that Gonji was singed as he pulled free the lashed swords.
He turned to the headless vampire corpse, ignited it likewise. Then he regarded the head that reposed sidelong on the ground. The bulging orbs and clacking fangs still were set in the face of Reiko, though the features were gradually resolving into something else. Settling, elongating into...someone familiar.
He hesitated with the torch. He had to know.
The teeth stilled, the eyes receded. A thin smile creased softening lips, the smile that had pledged the love of its wearer countless times before when doubts and fears had threatened the nurture of a young half-breed samurai. They threatened now.
Then the voice came, though the lips didn’t move. It was a deep, resonant, masculine voice; cold and malevolent. It issued so unexpectedly, so incongruously from the beloved face that Gonji’s heart hammered in his breast. It said:
“You—will—die—in—this—land.”
Gonji swallowed back a surge of bile and spoke a single word:
”Karma.”
He thrust down the flickering torch, and the vampire’s own voice returned, howling shrilly a long anguished note that died in the hills.
Then, once again, his mother’s face was laid to rest in sacred memory.
* * * *
The fire’s red glow pulsed steadily, warm and reassuring. Somewhere in the domain of eagles a tufted cloud obscured the moon. The samurai lay back on his bed of pine needles and contemplated the wax and wane of the stars, his eyes lazily sweeping from one to another, assigning brightness values.
Sleep pressed close. A nighthawk squalled in triumph and dove through the tree line at some unfortunate prey.
Gonji let his mind drift, sensing a bit of respite from unholy assault. No night fiend’s eyes glittered in the brush, no hunter of souls hissed or gibbered or slithered at his back. The charred remains of the Weeping Sisters lent a perverse air of special comfort. Even Tora snorted in satisfaction like some fiery equine god who had been appeased.
The moon reappeared from behind the cloud cover, and Gonji reached up a hand and cupped it for a time. He thought of his mother, that storm-tossed Nordic woman whose birthing had both blessed and cursed him. He thought of his repudiated—and by now surely lost!—heritage in Japan. The lands, the wealth, the samurai who would die for him. He must be a man of destiny. Who had lived such a life? Who had braved a thousand kinds of death and emerged the victor? Yet he was in self-imposed exile on the continent of his maternal roots. A landless nomad, a warrior duty-bound to himself; a man of vast accomplishments in warfare, of fleeting glories and countless kills and (of this he was sure) the toast of balladeers in far-flung lands!
He laughed mirthlessly.
Nothing matches this Europe for horrors, he mused. But if the evil is great, then so must be the good...somewhere. The needs, always the needs. Companionship. Brothers of the sword. Love that doesn’t die. Friends—true friends. And duty, sacred duty—the only worthwhile duty here is to oneself. It seems nothing can be shared as inviolate for very long. All is shattered. But that is karma, neh? So here I am, a poor victim of self-mockery, pursuing my silly quest, a quest in name only by now—if indeed it was ever anything more. Where are all those priests, Buddhist, Christian, some I never even heard of before, who have put me on my way, eh? And what next on my tortuous trail? Vedun. Ah, Vedun. The storied city nestled on a cliff in the mountains. Wonderful. More sullen faces, more distrust, more cold steel raised in threat—hai, and mine is colder still, neh?
“And what say you, spirits of my fathers?” he asked of the indifferent night. I go on, as always I go on. I seek what is not, glory in the moment, and damned be tomorrow! Twice cursed past and thrice ahead! When my time comes, then that is karma, but I’ll strive to end it on my terms. Hai, that is good.
And as sleep overtook him, Gonji’s mind succumbed to the futile urge to try to divine those things that lay ahead on his course, for this was surely preferable to dwelling on his present state of stoical misery.
His last waking thought was of the name. The name of that evasive thing whose trail he dogged, the name that had captivated his fancy and enticed him with its very perversity:
Deathwind.
CHAPTER TWO
It was the spectacle of a lifetime.
A thousand knights under the wind-snapped banners of Hapsburg Austria thundered across the floor of the valley, pounding over littered corpses as they pursued a broken enemy. The stench of blood and death lofted on the rising heat waves. Gonji leaned forward with keen interest, an anxious hand massaging the Sagami’s hilt. Tora shuffled nervously on the brink of the escarpment as his master edged him closer for a better look.
The samurai’s pulse raced. He wiped the sweat from his brow with an impatient motion, flicking his tongue across a beaded lip. His neck wounds ached, but he paid them no heed. Howls of bloodlust and the clanging din of naked steel issued from the battlefield. The silver glint of arrows and arbalest bolts raked the air. Sporadic gunfire cracked in Gonji’s ears, puffs of ignited powder belching in advance of the echoing bursts.
Eyes like living coals, salt-burned neck craning for a better view, Gonji assessed the clash. The battle must have raged since almost dawn. The mercenary army had taken a beating. Already at the far end of the valley, the priests who directed the knights had erected a great command tent, a huge flag bearing the Christian cross rippling overhead.
At the extreme opposite end of the valley, to the east, the retreating mercenaries scurried up the myriad trails that led back into the hills. Charging knights lanced the stragglers, dropped them with bow and musket fire, or beheaded them as they ran them down. Hemmed-in pockets of mercenaries fought fiercely against the outnumbering Austrian troops at various points on the field. The leading edge of the fleeing mercenaries was already lost among the grassy knolls and thick forests to the east, and far ahead of them—perhaps miles away—Gonji could mark through the shimmering haze a massed party that poured into the forest like a sinuous spotted serpent.
Curious—such a division in a retreating