Gonji’s militia makes a successful practice foray against an occupied village in the marches, Klann comes to Vedun in an eleventh-hour appeal for peaceful coexistence. The king is secretly poisoned by Mord, who accuses Tralayn of the crime. And true to the legend, the next Klann personage immediately arises, phoenix-like, from the corpse of the murdered one. This Klann is a harsh, vindictive man who will brook no resistance. Tralayn is summarily tried and executed by a kangaroo court at the castle, after first prophesying that a Deliverer will come to the aid of the city, one who will shake the invaders’ courage by his very sight. Flavio is hanged in the city square. An abortive rebellion ensues, fomented by the guild leader Phlegor. Many citizens are slaughtered, and the city’s rebellious spirit is dampened.
As word of the mistimed and costly revolt spreads, fearful city leaders urge that the rebellion be abandoned. Out of frustration, Gonji and some of his militant friends become embarrassingly drunk. Gonji’s double-dealing on behalf of the city has become known to Julian, and the unconscious samurai must be spirited away by the militia.
Awakening to the news of his disgraceful failure as Flavio’s bodyguard, Gonji attempts ritual suicide but is prevented by his friends, who find the practice horrifying. Angered by his inability to find satisfaction for his loss of face in the midst of this cultural conflict, he decides to leave them to make what they will of their situation.
In the catacombs Gonji and his accompanying band discover that Baron Rorka and the last of his knights have been savaged by a colossal carnivorous worm from the bowels of the earth. They destroy the monster in a ferocious battle that costs several more lives, then begin to piece together the evidence that a traitor in their midst works for Mord—and that quite possibly Mord is playing both sides against each other, toward a mutual destruction for his own insidious ends.
Outraged at being manipulated and having all their laborious plans compromised, Gonji tells the militia that Klann must be approached with their suspicions and that, failing to convince him, they must now prepare for the worst—the dreaded clash that Mord is orchestrating. Taking with him a quiver of arrows impregnated with the potent venom of the worm-thing, Gonji rides to the lair of Simon Sardonis, where he will confront the legendary figure who so cynically rejects the hero’s mantle.
So ends THE SOUL WITHIN THE STEEL.
PART ONE
LUPUS IN FABULA
CHAPTER ONE
At the Hour of the Monkey, Mord determined that Gonji must die.
The sorcerer had gained a grudging respect for the samurai. By his sword skill, cleverness, and steely nerve, and now with the proof of his training of the militia—witnessed in the extermination of the worm—he was turning the game to his favor. His continued presence might confound Mord’s purpose, might compromise the plotting of the Grand Scheme. What might his next devious move be?
The militiamen had destroyed the worm as had been expected, but not at the anticipated blood-cost; not out of desperation but out of determined fury and confident might-of-arms. They had learned well. And they had not followed the worm’s destruction with a precipitate rebellion stemming from their fear of the catacombs’ discovery. Instead they had fired the castle tunnel.
What did they suspect? What would they do now?
The traitor’s word might come too late. Mord had to know what the wily samurai was doing and he must eliminate the oriental’s threat, even as he had done with Baron Rorka and his potential for enlisting Church forces.
The sorcerer stood in the dungeon chamber before his articles of magick and arcane gramarye and performed the ritual. At its culmination he ingested the scrapings of Gonji’s blood he had obtained after the samurai’s duel with Julian. Then he reclined on the stone altar so that he might depart his body, stretch out with his astral being at the end of the long mystical silver cord, find the unwitting fool wherever his barbarian blood pulsed.
As always, the blood-search rewarded him: The oriental rode through the valley on a southerly course.
But something else could be felt—the pulsing of the great key, that mystery object that had baffled Mord, troubled him with its conflicting emanations for weeks. As the oriental rode on, the supernatural radiations grew stronger. Could he be riding toward a meeting with the elusive Being that exerted its enigmatic presence in the territory?
Mord’s unsavory mind smiled. For the longer he followed, the more certain he became.
Abruptly the wyvern was awakened from its demon sleep atop Mord’s tower high above Castle Lenska. Screeching in response to its master’s call, it flapped from its perch on thirty-foot wings and careened about the castle twice, eagerly accepting the controlling mind of Mord. Mord’s eyes of baleful ebon supplanted the flying beast’s red orbs as it pushed off with a tremendous gush of wind toward the south.
Toward the lone rider who thundered through the sylvan valley.
* * * *
Flavio swings from a gibbet, and Tralayn’s been dragged off in shackles—how does that sit with your self-pitying—Iye. No, that was no good....
You ignore the plight of these people who are dying for you—
Gonji cursed and shook his head as the gray roncin mare clumped through the enshrouding forest. His jaw set with grim determination, swords jiggling in his sash with the bouncing motion of his ride, the samurai pondered glumly: Exactly how did one shame a legend that walked hand-in-hand with death?
Gonji had long since left the southern valley’s main trail, angling off along the path he had ridden scant days before with Tralayn, the path which led to that sinister cave concealed at the base of the northern foothills of the Carpathians’ lower curve. The steed snorted as it stumbled over snaring vine and eruptions of scrub and bramble.
The samurai felt uncertain of his mount; she failed to respond to his subtle pressures on bridle and flanks as the goodly Tora would have. But Tora had not been found in the catacombs after the battle with the venomous slithering beast, and the thought that his prize stallion might have become a meal for the loathsome monster inflamed him with a shapeless, futile anger. He would have to bring such disruptive emotion under control for the meeting to come, if come it must.
And his roiling feelings were not his only enemies this night: the long day had exacted a toll; his whole body ached and sagged. The drinking bout and purging emetic had left his insides twisted. His belly churned with nausea. The brief, feverish sleep during the night of abortive rebellion in Vedun had done little to replenish his strength, and the day’s battle with the worm-thing from the underworld returned its impressions with fresh pains of half-remembered bruises and abrasions, cuts and lumps.
Yet nothing so disturbed his harmony as the poignant memory of his failed duty on behalf of Flavio and the Elder’s city.
Cursing the despairing voice within that bade him surrender in the name of graceful failure, he rode on.
Clenching his jaw, Gonji warded off the pine boughs that sought his face along the path, brushing and scraping at him and his mount, now and then twining about his mighty longbow so that he would be forced to halt and disentangle it. The forest seemed to grasp at him, hold him back from his purpose. But at whose behest?
The roncin picked her footing in the cloying darkness. The path twisted through the lush, rich-smelling blackness of the forest, the horse’s hooves thudding over the spongy pad of pine needles and fecund earth, the verdant scents intoxicating.
The night lay deep, heavy clouds mantling the treetops. Animals and insects ceased their trilling and chirruping as the man-beast clump crashed through their sanctum, only to take it up again, beratingly, at their backs as they rode on. Goatsuckers warbled their plaintive cry, and a judgmental owl hooted from the high limbs of a great oak that demarked a fork in the path. The air was cool but damp as sea spray.
Or was it his own fear-sweat that chilled Gonji’s skin wherever his half-kimono brushed it?
He growled low in his throat and spat out a gnat. The forest shroud thinned