raised his voice, a sarcastic quality seeping in. “I know that the chains in the cave are broken, and the full moon is scant nights off. Yet you stay. What are you planning to do on the Night of Chains?”
Simon halted, his shoulders bunching with tension, the hair at his neck bristling eerily in the moonlight. “What I plan,” he said haltingly, “is no concern of yours, infidel.” He stepped toward the cave again, more deliberately now, the limp marring the smoothness of his gait.
Gonji’s wrath seethed within him like a riptide, to be so dismissed. “So?” he cried. “Then you’ll continue to skulk around like some kind of a night-fiend, kill whom you please, and slink back to your cave, neh? That’s very gallant of you. Meanwhile, others will be put to the sword for your crimes. My, what a hero! And then on that night—on the full moon—you’ll give the beast his head—” His voice rose in irate pitch, crashing through the bleak space between them until Simon turned, an ugly grimace on his countenance. “—and there’ll be kills a-plenty, you dung-eating bastard!”
Might as well finish it....
Gonji’s eyes narrowed as Simon stalked him now with teeth grinding. “These people don’t need monsters to help them. They need men.”
The air filled with ozone as a terrible arc of lightning shattered the sky above the hills, and a hot blast of wind buffeted Gonji’s face just ahead of the man’s charge.
“I’m not a monster, you yellow devil!”
And suddenly the samurai was falling back, sword drawn, against the other’s vicious attack. Simon’s short blade lashed at him with propeller fury, a crude, emotion-charged power behind the broad, wild strokes.
Despairing, uncertain, Gonji gave ground, slipping and deflecting the mighty blows with deft two-handed parries. Simon’s rudimentary berserker style, all cursing and animal strength, repeatedly offered openings by which Gonji might leave him unlimbed; or so it seemed—the return speed of his sword arm was remarkable.
Yet Gonji found his head filled with conflicting thoughts, the enemies of the ken-jutsu fencer. He could not empty his mind, relax, and allow instinct free rein. He had lost. Failed, in his intent in coming here. And the mocking thought that he had forged no alternative to failure recurred, staying his thews. For he had not come here to kill this mysterious being, the possible object of his time-honored quest.
But neither had he come to this place to die....
Wicked blue sparks showered the battleground as the blades sang off each other, and Gonji pressed an attack of his own aimed at breaking the tall man’s frenzied resolve. Somehow he had to bring this senseless engagement to an un-fatal end. He must disarm Simon, wound him if necessary.
But first and foremost he must remain alive himself. A sensation of bone-deep weariness responded to his need for renewed strength and second wind.
Gonji leapt back a pace, whirling the Sagami in a flashing figure-eight of deadly steel, flicking the katana from one hand to the other with an effortless grace intended to distract, to divert, to intimidate his opponent with the masterful skill the motions bespoke.
Still Simon advanced. Slashing, growling, his unschooled but effective technique losing nothing of its surging, predatory energy. His eyes of chipped silver bored into Gonji’s.
The samurai tried a new tack: He stood his ground, the Sagami at middle guard before him, and attempted to address Simon’s whirling blows with small efficient parries alone. But the passive stance failed him; Simon’s brutish power tore through each parry in such a way that Gonji was quickly forced to fall back bodily or be struck by the barely deflected strokes. He could hear the fierce whinnying of the roncin at his back now. Made out the pounding thumps of her hoof-falls and knew his danger of being trampled—
With a spinning high parry, he twisted Simon’s broadsword over his head and spun around the tall man, passing his opened ribs without riposting. Now Simon’s back was to the mare as he half-turned to reengage. She cried out in fear of his demonic presence.
“There!” Gonji shouted, dropping the Sagami into earth-pointed rear guard. “I could have spilled your bowels. Stop this now.”
Simon snarled. “Not so easily done as you think, infidel.” He charged again. A deep lunge that Gonji turned aside, flicking his blade arrogantly at the other’s chin.
“Again!” the samurai stormed. “Stop this madness and we’ll—”
A rapid feint and vicious cutover that Gonji barely evaded—
He could taste the tang of steel as it sizzled past his eyes. His stomach rolled and leapt to his throat. Now thought fled and impulse reigned.
They were at last united in purpose: One of them would die.
A bone-rattling clash of arcing swords, followed by another. Gonji caught Simon’s next hard sally on his shrieking blade and turned it, but the powerful blow defeated his parry and slapped him solidly on the left arm with the broadsword’s flat forte.
The sharp sting galvanized him. The samurai shot forward and twisted his katana with a whiplike snap, cutting open his opponent’s shoulder.
Simon growled and contorted with shock and pain, Gonji drawing back a step and holding his blade steady before him. The beast-man looked slowly from the wound to Gonji, and on his face there dawned the sudden terrible resolve of the wounded animal. His lower jaw thrust forward in a display of primitive anger and glinting teeth. A devil’s-breath wind lapped the clearing again, then—
What followed came in fragmented sensory impressions to Gonji: Simon—the wind—silver-gray eyes looking past him, washing over with a new focus—bristling hair and lobeless ears flattening like a cowed dog’s....
Simon abruptly dropped the sword and launched into Gonji like a bighorn ram. The samurai saw a fleeting glimpse of the frenzied gray mare, stayed his descending katana. Then Simon’s head butted his midsection, and he went down hard on his back, losing the Sagami’s grip, breath whoofing out of him, knees jerking up reflexively, coruscating lights filling the black sky above him.
And he felt, more than saw, the great dark shape that soared overhead, skreeing in premature triumph. The treetops bent stiffly into the sucking draw of the wind, and the wyvern flapped upward on supernatural wing-strength, looped across the face of the waxing moon for the return dive.
“Get out of here, idiot! Get into the trees!” Simon was howling in French. But Gonji couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Simon’s life-saving tackle had knocked the wind from his diaphragm. He could only lie, paralyzed, listening to the screams of the roncin in its death throes, the sizzle of burning horse flesh. The skirring of thirty-foot batwings....
“Come on—crawl—do something!”
Gonji sucked hard for breath, but little came. He saw Simon dart across his limited field-of-view and heard him begin calling out to the flying dragon, words of challenge and insult. Then the memory of the creature’s ruinous saliva and excrement pushed him through his paralysis and into a desperate scramble over the pine-scented earth. He found the Sagami and dragged it with him toward the tree line.
Behind him, Simon dared the wyvern’s strafe. The monstrous familiar of Mord took up the challenge, knifed down at the poised mystery man, flaming saliva roiling in its throat glands.
Simon held his ground, cursing the beast. Then when he could wait no longer, he began to dart from side to side into the center of the glade, against the creature’s flight path, closing the ground between them rapidly. He snatched up his downed sword. The wyvern’s head coiled back; unused to dealing with a prey that chose to advance against it, it jetted two quick darts of crackling saliva that splashed the glade, searing the grasses but missing the bold adventurer.
In one motion Simon cocked and threw his short sword like a dagger, just as the creature passed above him, not a rod above the ground.
It squalled and twisted its sinuous neck as the blade glanced off a taloned hind leg. Serpent