mud and slamming down next to him to kick and flail in its agony. Jiri scrabbled away on hands and knees in the mire, panting but unhurt, as hooves splattered all around him.
Tadeusz intercepted the mercenary in his flight, engaging him with sparking steel. As he drew alongside, the young bushi missed parrying a desperate lunge that sprang out of the gloom. His mouth gaped upward at the sky like the jaws of a moon-baying wolf, blood gouting in his throat and strangling him as the soldier’s sword-point snapped off clean in his breastbone.
By now Nagy and Berenyi had run the mercenary down. Old Nikolai roared to hear Tadeusz’s mortal cry. The swing of his powerful sword arm sliced open the brigand’s capote and jerkin, cutting into his spine. The man fell into the muck, stunned and gasping, paralyzed.
Nagy rode a few paces off and dismounted. His younger partner, Berenyi, bounded down from the saddle, wild-eyed and vengeful, hurling imprecations at the downed enemy. He darted forward, feinting unnecessarily once with his broadsword before lunging deeply and stabbing the groaning, fallen man through the chest, withdrawing his sword with some difficulty.
Wilf’s gelding jolted and kicked under him through it all, biting at other horses stamping near, its natural enjoyment of a fray aroused. The young smith tossed the reins from side to side, assessing the fight.
“Damn you, Hawk!” he swore. Vlad Dobroczy stared down with eyes like an owl’s above his great nose, pistol still smoking from the tattered hole in his cloak. He seemed dazed by the shattered face that glared up in grisly ruin.
But now Wilf saw that the lone survivor aboard the wagon had wheeled his team and was lashing them back west. If he could recognize any of them and reach the outposted sentries at the southern valley road....
“Hyah!”
Wilf stormed after the jouncing wagon, traces held in his left hand, the gleaming steel of his katana trailing behind him in his extended right arm. He reached out with his will to restrain the fleeing dray, mentally cleaving the distance even as the gelding’s hooves pounded onward through the rain and the puddling ruts in the ancient road. The heavens opened wider and shed their anger in slanting waves that obscured his vision.
The dray disappeared around a black bend like a skittering groundhog. Wilf’s nape hairs prickled, a chill coursing his spine. Beyond that bend a whole company of mercenaries might lie in wait. Or a replacement column of Llorm regulars. He was one man with one sword that had been his for a mere handful of days. The knowledge of its use had been burned into him during the life of the waxing moon. And the teacher of those nascent skills—Gonji—was not with him now. Yet his spirit was his own, and its yearnings were his master.
He rode on harder and gained the bend in a minute that aged him by days.
Half the distance had dissolved between Wilf and the surging wagon when something remarkable happened. Wilf saw a tall figure leap from the brush at the side of the road and out before the wagon team. The figure raised his staff before him, and the draft horses neighed and swerved, slipping off the wet stones to tumble into the ditch at the right.
The dray overturned with a crash and the driver’s high-pitched scream.
Wilf pulled to a halt, the gelding stumbling but righting itself quickly. He steadied the tossing steed and peered over its snorting muzzle. His unknown ally had descended on the fallen driver. There was a sudden movement behind the spinning wheel of the upset wagon. One horse broke from its harness and galloped off; its partner’s legs could be seen, twitching spasmodically on the ground.
Who in hell could that be?
Wiping his eyes on a sleeve, Wilf pushed his mount toward the wreck, Spine-cleaver cocked warily along his right side.
Another figure joined the first, giving him pause. This one was smaller and hooded by a mantelet. Carrying a longbow. But even through the haze, Wilf recognized him almost at once.
“Gonji,” he breathed, breaking into a trot.
The young Gundersen reached them quickly. Gonji ignored his relieved greeting, but Wilf was of no mind to take offense, for his astonishment at the sight of the samurai’s companion caused him to gape like a speared fish.
This was Wilf’s first glimpse of Simon Sardonis, who looked like no man born to walk the paths of auspicious men. Wilf gazed with ambivalence at the eyes, the ears, the long pale hands—curling now, and alive with sinew; the spiky bristling of the doglike hair, even in the matting rain.
Wilf tore his eyes away, gulping down the hot constriction in his throat. He returned Spine-cleaver to its scabbard. Rubbed at the nervous tic in his right eye. There was a tension in the air that undid Wilf’s sense of relief at Gonji’s return.
Simon poked at something in the wreckage with his staff. Within the hood of the mantelet, Gonji’s eyes narrowed. He stood with folded arms and stared.
In the wreckage, something moaned like a tortured calf with nothing left of life but the final agony.
Gonji shot Wilf a look and beckoned to him. Wilf could see the driver, dead, several feet off in the scrub. The unearthly moaning sound came again, and the smith dismounted, his breathing tight, gooseflesh flaring his skin.
He reached the end of the overturned wagon and peered down. The dray’s ribs were caved in on the side that faced the sky, the burlap torn and askew. And when Wilf’s eyes focused on what moved inside the wreckage, his hand shot to his mouth in shock, muffling his unseemly outcry.
“Jesu—Maria—”
It crawled out of the blanket that had shrouded it with an ungainly dragging motion of one arm, its groans now reduced to a strange liquid trilling that fluttered from its partial mouth.
The half-man—Mord’s wretched victim. Severed and sealed vertically along his entire horribly sectioned human fragment. One-armed, one-legged, half-headed—the body-length wound coated with a pallid substance resembling tallow, leaking now in spots; oozing dark, nearly black, blood.
Its life-source unknowable, the pathetic creature was all that remained of the combative craft-guild leader, Phlegor.
A flash of steel, as Gonji yanked the Sagami free and raised it high overhead.
Wincing at the sight, Wilf turned his head and stifled a spate of gagging to hear the sounds it evoked, upon its descent.
* * * *
Jiri Szabo wiped himself as best he could, rubbing his mud-streaked face on a soaked shirt sleeve. He retrieved his downed blade and gathered his horse’s reins, all the while watching Wilfred’s mad ride of pursuit.
“God, I hope he catches it,” the young athlete said. “Maybe we should go after him, to help.”
His words dispelled Vlad’s fascination with the corpse of the man he had shot. The eagle-beaked farmer looked toward his departing rival.
“Forget it. He’ll never catch them,” he replied grimly. He belted his spent pistol and swiveled his mount to view their situation. “Better help me collect the horses, Jiri. There’ll be more trouble than we can handle here soon.”
Szabo turned to remount, stopped when he saw the twisted body of Tadeusz.
“Shouldn’t we...pick him up?”
“Igen,” Hawk agreed curtly in Hungarian, “you do it.” He moved off after the scattered horses.
Grimacing at the twisted, mud-splashed remains of his dead friend, Jiri cast about for assistance. There seemed to be none forthcoming. He swallowed back his grief and brought up Tadeusz’s mare, began to roll the militiaman’s body in a blanket.
“All he ever worried about,” he mumbled to himself, “was whether he could go through with killing a man in battle.” Jiri Szabo shook his head sadly, knowing all the while that the ironic eulogy had drifted up from the well of self-doubt in his own soul.
* * * *
Rubbing the back of his neck for a restless