Flavio would have—”
Wilf peered back over his shoulder, knowing the pain of the memory he had evoked. “Sorry, Gonji.”
The samurai stared down at the racing, rain-stippled track, making no reply.
“But anyway,” Wilf continued, “there were so many dead after the craftsmen’s rebellion. The chapel—the city—filled with coffins until the funerals. A lot of those coffins...don’t contain bodies....”
Gonji’s face brightened. He chuckled dryly. “And whose ghoulish idea was that?”
Wilf snorted. “Your braying chum Paille’s.”
“Hah! I might’ve known.”
“Gonji—” Wilf grew deadly serious. “Have you given any more thought to the traitor? To whom it might be?”
Gonji was slow to respond. “Hai.”
“You don’t think it’s my father, do you?”
The odd frankness of Wilf’s question surprised him. “Iye—why do you ask?”
“Oh, nothing. I’ve just...overheard talk. Well, not talk, exactly, but...you know, the way people look at someone they don’t trust. And Papa sure hasn’t done much to inspire trust lately, what with all these secrets of his. He hasn’t made a move to appeal to Klann for peace or to tell him about Mord’s treachery—what we suspect, you know? He wants to take my head off when I bring it up. He’s become unapproachable.”
Gonji thought awhile before answering. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Wilf,” he said, scratching an itch beside his sore belly. “Words of caution against Mord are going to be hard to form without tipping the militia’s hand. And I certainly don’t suspect your father of being traitorous. No spy would behave as mysteriously as he has.
“Nein....” His gaze lofted to a distant vision. “I don’t think it’s anyone in the council. Only the council members knew that there was no hope of Rorka raising outside assistance. So eliminating him was a futile action. It must be someone in the rank and file, I suppose, who reports to Mord. But who?” His fists balled up on his thighs.
“Do you have a plan now?” Wilf asked. “Do you know what we’ll be doing next?”
“Hai, sort of a plan,” Gonji allowed, exhaling wearily. “I doubt that it will be very popular among your countrymen.”
They reached the area where the fight had transpired. Quiet now, but for the falling rain. Dark blood-streaks whirled and eddied in puddles under soft moonglow. Drag marks and myriad hoof prints filled in rapidly with water.
“Who did you leave in charge?”
Wilf blinked, embarrassed. “I—Nagy, I guess.”
“Come on,” Gonji said. “If they were smart, they took the horses back down into the valley.”
They cut a virgin path through tangled congeries of shedding larches that left them soaking by the time they reached the valley floor. Turning eastward for about a hundred yards, they found the party of four with the shuddering horses in tow, awaiting Wilf’s return with short-tempered uncertainty.
“Gonji!” several voices whispered in relief. Happy wet faces glowed aboard prancing steeds. Only Vlad seemed sullen and unimpressed.
“I see they’re delighted to see me back,” Wilf said sarcastically.
Gonji snickered. “So how do you like the mantle of leadership?” They could make out the swathed body lashed to Tadeusz’s saddle. “Who’s that?” Gonji asked. Wilf told him who it must be, and he nodded grimly, but then the others were shushing them and waving them closer.
“Helmets,” Nick Nagy grated harshly when they had closed the distance. “Across the ravine to the south. Jiri saw them.”
“Klann’s troops?” Gonji inquired.
“I don’t think so. The helms were sort of...spired.” Jiri described a pointed effect in the air above his sallet.
Gonji mounted a dead mercenary’s horse and, waving off accompaniment, trotted to the ravine some small distance to the south, swords at the ready.
The trees parted at the northern end, and the samurai immediately espied the mounted party at the farther end.
Turks. Three of them. An armed military scouting party. This was the northernmost incursion by Turks Gonji had seen in his considerable time in the territory. They were growing bolder, their fears of the haunted Carpathians melting in the heat of acquisitive passion. With the instinct of vultures, they had sniffed out Vedun’s harrowing situation and now lay back in wait.
The locals would call this a bad omen at the very least, and Gonji decided to minimize the import of the sighting.
The Turks saw him and halted at once in their low chatter. Eyes and armament gleaming, they held their steeds steady. Gonji made no effort at concealment, his posture as stony and imposing as the mountains behind him. He had left his longbow with Wilf, but he had not come to fight. Looking back over his shoulder and hissing as if in command, he swept his long sword out of its sheath and pointed it at the Turks. Instantly, they wheeled their mounts and clumped off into the forest.
Rapacious bastards. Scouting, no doubt, and ordered to avoid any fight. Could Vedun be any more oppressed?
A peculiar feeling seized Gonji. He suddenly found himself wishing for one last swoop by the dead wyvern. One strafe at the Turks’ departing backsides.
He shook his head to reclaim his senses. Turning and trotting back toward his comrades, he acknowledged to himself the awesome scale of the dark powers now arrayed against the ancient city on the Carpathian plateau. Experienced a fatalistic portent of doom. Cursed the karma that had befallen Vedun, his loyalty to the city aroused anew.
When he returned he found Wilf and Vlad embroiled in an argument over the farmer’s having brought a forbidden pistol along, instigating the deadly incident.
“They recognized his horse,” Dobroczy kept repeating, indicating Tora, who had now turned his head and was pawing in docile approval of Gonji’s returning presence.
“And we might have convinced them otherwise,” Wilf argued. “Now we can’t get these horses up tonight whether—”
“I like staying alive,” Vlad snarled.
“Shut up, idiots!” Gonji railed. They all snapped to attention. He seemed different now. Sterner.
“You’re in more trouble than you realize, and there’s no time for your petty quarreling.” The samurai fairly strutted before them astride the borrowed horse, his eyes like marbled lava.
“Now I’ll give you your orders, and there’ll be no more...squabbling.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The vestibule chamber, a massive cavern that led to the catacombs, smelled of huddled bodies, pungent moss and earth. Dirty yellow light lapped the stifling air from torches ignited in wall cressets. Hats were removed and jerkins pulled open among the men. Sweat glistened on foreheads, and eyes glittered with anxiety.
Coughs erupted in the thick smoky air. Voices muttered like the gurgling cross-currents of intersecting brooks. In several languages it was rumored that the mighty man of valor had returned. The tall man with the super-normal powers. He who had battered the huge Field Commander Ben-Draba, broken the warrior’s neck before whole companies of his men, in broad daylight; then had leapt the fifteen-foot curtain wall that girdled Vedun, despite the arrow that had found its mark in his flesh.
Simon, they said his name was. Simon, the Beast-Man.
The by-now well-known, accented voice came in German, speaking words that muffled their chatter, mesmerizing them:
“So it’s come to this—fight or die.”
The samurai stood on