in High German, now facing the eastern end of the clearing. “Declare yourself, if you be a man, and let us speak of Vedun.”
The heraldic dash of wind at his back turned his blood to searing frost, matting his clothes to his sweating back, raking his hair and topknot. He shouldered about, grasping the belted katana’s hilt with both hands, to face the terrible sight of Simon Sardonis. The man of mystery. Cold-blooded killer of the giant commander Ben-Draba, and of untold others in Klann’s employ. He, of whom Tralayn had spoken her awful tale.
The tethered steed whinnied and stamped as the tall figure began to circle languidly in her direction, scowling at her instinctive panic.
Approaching Gonji at a lazy pace, the man spoke.
“Calm yourself.” His voice came soft but commanding, the language a recognizable French dialect, a coarse rasp in its undertone. “What do you want here? Who told you of this place?”
Calm yourself. The cavalier accusation failed to penetrate at once, for Gonji’s mind had exploded in flaming pinwheels of disjointed thought. In his anxious state, no coherent words would come, so he merely kept his silence and permitted instinct to move him. The glade seemed transformed, timeless. Overlays of impression unfolded to the samurai’s wary consciousness. First, the soldier’s assessment: Sardonis wore a short sword thrust through his wide belt, much in the manner of Gonji’s own swords. No other armament was apparent. The man was alone. He strode with an air of confidence and command. His face, though, bore the occasional twitch of barely contained curiosity or unease. And when he began to move laterally again once he had approached to within about forty feet of Gonji, his movement betrayed a definite limp; he was favoring his right side. The bowshot he had taken in the buttock had left its agonizing reminder.
Next Gonji took in the man’s overall appearance. Under the broad belt he wore a light-colored tunic, slashed and blood-stained on the left sleeve, a thick wrap bulging beneath the ragged tear. His narrow-cut breeches and well-worn walking boots were of so similar a dark hue in moon-bathed night as to look of a piece. He was hatless, his coarse golden hair lying back stiffly, darker now than Gonji remembered, its blackened ends stirring like the ruff on a dog’s back.
Finally came the insistent impression he had experienced upon entering the concealed cave with Tralayn: Gonji was an alien here, an intruder. Unwanted. Out of place. And his foreignness bore less of a cultural association than a metaphysical.
Gonji eased his hands off the Sagami’s hilt and stood regally straight, turning slowly to keep Sardonis in the center of his vision. The longbow and quiver of envenomed arrows lay a rod away. Small comfort against the chilling memory of the speed of this man of legend: Fleeting glimpses of the event at the city’s square returned to Gonji. The killing of Ben-Draba...the lightning escape on foot...the scramble up a sheer fifteen-foot wall...the Night of Chains...the full moon....
He is a man. Still a man. He—
“Well, monsieur?” came the grating voice again. “Has your bold blustering been so easily retired by—”
“Speak German,” Gonji shot, “or Spanish—anything but French. I care as little for your native language as I do for your hermit’s self-pity.” Gonji felt the momentary singe of the harsh words, and then it passed. He was beyond regret now. Beyond diplomacy. Beyond fear.
Sardonis’ hair began to bristle like a hedgehog’s. The strange man’s swept-back eyes became a gleaming silver line, curving angrily. To Gonji’s mind, so similar to his own. Yet different; the difference being less one of race than of...species.
“You’ve already crossed over a boundary from which few men have ever returned,” Simon asserted coldly. “Once again—who sent you here? And what were you told?”
Sardonis had spoken in German now, and Gonji would continue in kind.
“Tralayn,” he replied softly.
“So,” Simon said smugly, relaxing somewhat, “the holy woman betrays her oath. The sanctimonious—”
“She’s dead,” Gonji shouted, “or likely so by now. Dragged off in shackles to Castle Lenska. Or is this old news to you? Were you there watching from your godlike vantage, the way you’ve watched all our puny mortal struggling from the beginning?”
Simon grew rigid again, a slight coloration creeping into the paleness of his cheeks. Caution, Gonji-san....
But when Simon spoke in reply, it was in a tentative voice, his eyes for the first time falling from the samurai. “No, I—I didn’t know,” he acknowledged, his voice dwindling to a verbal introspection. “So that’s why it wouldn’t let me....”
Gonji was emboldened by the turn, the icy barrier of apprehension melting, his anger and frustration and sense of futility surfacing: “Hai, Tralayn—dead, Mark Benedetto—dead, Flavio—dead—” At this disclosure Simon’s angular, predatory eyes became a silver line of menace, snapping up to lock onto Gonji’s own again. “Dead,” Gonji repeated. “Swinging in the square from his beloved cross, that holy symbol under which you’d call yourself his brother. And it needn’t have happened,” he accused, pointing a finger at Simon for a second but almost at once lowering both his hand and his voice, for with the words had come a fresh flooding of guilt-ridden recrimination. And he continued in a near whisper:
“The priest, Father Dobret...dead.... But I suppose you already know that.”
Simon quaked with an inner fury at the words. “Ja,” he replied with a tremulous breath, “I’ve been there.”
Gonji experienced a rash of gooseflesh. Could the strange man have learned of Gonji’s own participation in the outrage at Holy Word Monastery?
Simon’s trembling subsided, and he glared at Gonji.
“What did Tralayn tell you...of me?”
“Enough,” Gonji replied evenly, gauging the reaction. Then: “Everything. Enough to know that you shirk your responsibility, your duty. You resist your destiny, Monsieur Thing-of-Legend—Herr Grejkill—shi-kaze...Deathwind!”
Gonji’s pulse raced, and he began to pace as he spoke, circling about Simon imperiously, their roles subtly reversed now, as the man of folklore and legend cast his eyes groundward again and flushed with a look that resembled shame. Or guilt. Or self-loathing.
Simon swallowed with noticeable difficulty. “She broke her vow.”
“What is a vow,” Gonji proposed, ambling with hands behind his back, “when measured against the lives of men?” A poignant stab: You speak in tarnished, hypocritical assertions, Gonji-san. Does not bushido itself demand—Iye, I must maintain the upper hand. He must be made to see. These people—they matter. “She broke a vow for the higher value of saving the city and the people she loved. She knew that your great power might be—”
Simon hissed him to silence with a flash of gleaming white teeth, abruptly hostile once again. “Leave this place,” he shouted. “Go away from here. All I ever asked of men was that they leave me alone. Alone with this accursed burden I bear like some scourge out of Hell. My every crossing with men has brought death and destruction. Now you come to me, an infidel, blaring like a herald of Death that all those I could call friend are dead. Leave me now!”
Simon turned his back to him, shoulders bunching with tension. But Gonji continued pacing around him, sweating palms rubbing over the fabric of his half-kimono as he picked over his words, like a man traversing a thicket of deadly thorns.
“Ah, so desu ka? Is that the truth?” Gonji probed. “You care for people only after they’re dead, so that you can play godling with your aroused sense of vengeance? Why don’t you try doing something for the living now and again?”
Simon whirled and transfixed him with the silver darts of his eyes as the pale moon burst through the cloud cover. A searching wind whirled into the glade.
“Infidel,” Simon intoned venomously, “you have no idea what you’re saying. If you’ve been told what you