Gonji: The Soul Within the Steel: The Deathwind Trilogy, Book Two (24 page)

“Your place first. Is Strom there now?”

“He was.”

“I want to talk with him. Then out to the fields and orchards to check on this withered crop business.”

“Wha-a-at?”

“Never mind now. Let’s go.” He spurred Tora toward the southwest sector, and Wilf fell in behind. They cantered toward the Gundersens’, taking notice of the anxious mutterings passing in relay among the citizenry.

Gonji’s expression clouded, and he halted them when he saw the fiercely appointed band approaching them head-on down the Street of Charity.

They yielded right-of-way at their end of the timbered culvert crossing. The scowling party of ten, weapons bristling from saddles, backs, and belts like whiskered outgrowths, arranged themselves in a double column to negotiate the narrow passage. The timbers creaked and groaned under their clanking, clumping mass: Austrian brigands, by the look of them, and new to Vedun.

They slowed when they passed Gonji and Wilf, eyeing them cautiously and barking gruff greetings. Then, taking them for mercenaries of Klann, their leader inquired after the headquarters. Gonji pointed the way, and they rumbled off, surly laughter and banter left in their wake.

Then Wilf sucked in a breath. One of the last pair cradled on his shoulder what had appeared at first to be a pole-arm. It was now clearly revealed as an enormous claymore. The Scottish highlander sat stiffly in the saddle, supporting the heft of his great six-foot broadsword, whose point lay deep in a stirrup-like cup that took most of the weight.

“I’d hate to get smashed by that thing,” Wilf judged.

“Mmmm.” Gonji followed their departure for a moment and then moved off across the culvert.

There seemed a great deal more mercenary activity in the smith shop’s sector when they arrived. Gonji observed the bandits’ purposeful comings and goings with a calculating eye while Wilf went inside the shop. Garth struggled in the corral with a skittish gray gelding that needed a shoeing. The animals were unaccountably nervous, their temper affecting even Tora when Gonji brought him near.

“Strom’s gone,” Wilf noted, returning to the corral. “What is it you were saying about the crops?”

“Later. Garth—” Gonji called. “Why all the mercenary activity hereabouts?”

Garth calmed the anxious steed and bridled him. “A new garrison,” he shouted. “They’ve converted the granary back there to a second garrison for free companions.”

Gonji looked back toward the southern portion of the bailey wall, where the silo’s sloped peak towered.

“Wonderful,” he breathed.

He turned back toward the corral just as Wilf grabbed his arm. An electric numbness paralyzed them both. Out of the lead-lined sky swooped the wyvern, long neck undulating as it shrieked its threat, great leathery wings rowing through the air currents.

“Cholera!”

They stared, unmoving, as it swept over the quadrant and tilted sharply eastward. The horses kicked and bolted, Garth launching himself for the corral rail, rolling over in an ungainly, muscular leap to avert the lashing hooves.

“Are you all right?”

“Ja, ja,”
the big smith assured, dusting himself off. He glanced at the sky and then returned to the corral with affected nonchalance. “Funny how quickly one gets accustomed,” he added with a shrug as he slowly climbed back into the pen, where the horses still surged and bumped haunches and necks, eyes crazed and nostrils flaring. He collected the gelding and hurried him out the gate.

“You’ll forgive me, my friend,” Gonji said as he led the animal past, “but I think it’s unhealthy to become too comfortable with wyverns in one’s skies.”

They followed Garth to the forge.

“Where’s Strom?” Wilf queried.

“Gone to the pasture. Where else?” Garth replied.

Gonji thanked Garth for the restoration of his mother’s gift sword, all the while preoccupied with the wyvern’s arcing flight, one eye peeled skyward, his breath coming in short gasps. He felt a frustrated need to lash out, a tightening sensation in his chest and throat.

“What the hell to do?” he said aloud. He could feel Wilf absorbing his tension beside him, clenching his fists.

The flying dragon soared overhead again, and Garth leapt back from the bucking gelding, talking to it soothingly, ignoring the beast above.

“Gonji’s staying to fight,” Wilf observed, antagonism in his tone.

“Indeed?” came Garth’s calm reply. He resumed his work, his file scraping at the gelding’s hoof.

Wilf’s mention of him snapped Gonji’s bonds of indecisiveness.

“What did Strom say about these murdered men he found?”

“Nothing much,” Garth said. “He found them and then did the right thing—told someone in authority. They questioned him and let him go.”

“What about this crop destruction? Have you heard?”

“Only something about a crop failure—that’s all.”

Three mercenaries clattered past, heading for the new garrison. Now there were people rushing by on foot and horseback, relaying news in whispers along the street.

“Something’s afoot,” Gonji said, lips pursed.

“Yuschak,” Wilf called out, walking out to engage an excited rider. “What’s going on?”

The rider bounded up. “The farmers—they’re questioning the farmers. They’ve hanged Gornick!”

“Hanged—?”

“The Ministry—Flavio!” Gonji whispered. He fixed the wyvern’s position; it hovered somewhere over the square now.

“Dammit, I’ve got to do something, but I hope it doesn’t start now—Wilf! Get me those new pieces of armor.”

Wilf ran into the house. Garth knelt beside the forge, something on his mind.

“What will you do, smith? The devils
will
force your hand,” Gonji probed gravely.

“I don’t know. I only know that I cannot raise a sword against Klann.”

But his voice lacked conviction, and it contained something else, a wistful sadness that made him seem like a man helplessly imprisoned.

Wilf bounded up to them from the house with Gonji’s equipment over a shoulder as he struggled with the couplings of his own sword belt and baldric. Garth’s eyes narrowed to see the broadsword that dangled from his son’s belt, a short blade with a hand-carved hilt—the sword Garth had presented him on his twelfth birthday.

“Wilfred—?” Garth questioned warily.

“I’m going with Gonji, Papa,” Wilf said with a determination that defied challenge.

“Think, Wilf,” Gonji urged in a measured tone, donning his armament. “We can’t know what might happen this day.”

“I’m going, and that’s that. I want to be part of this, whatever happens.”

“Go then, Wilfred,” Garth said icily. “Follow your wayward spirit to your grave, but...expect no tears from me.”

But he had turned and lumbered off with the last few words, and it seemed to Gonji that his voice had trembled with the very tears he had forsworn, and in that brief instant the samurai recalled similar words spoken by a mighty
daimyo
to his recalcitrant half-breed son.

The wyvern shrilled in the distance and completed its spiraling descent, alighting on a rooftop out of sight of their vantage.

Gonji drew a long breath. “You do what I say today. Nothing more, nothing less.
Wakarimasu
—understand?”

“Ja,”
Wilf agreed in a breathy whisper.

“Let’s go, then.”

They mounted and spurred off toward the Ministry, toward the area where the fulsome flying monster had appeared to land.

* * * *

“
Jesu Christi
, Hawk—
look
.”

But Peter Foristek’s shout was drowned by the screaming of the crowd before the Ministry, and Vlad Dobroczy didn’t need to see his friend’s pointing arm. All heads were upturned as the wyvern spiraled down lazily to settle atop the Ministry building’s peak. It squalled at the restive throng, its long black tongue protruding from the razor-sharp beak. Its cavernous mouth was slick and moist, blackened by a tarry substance.

Many people now bolted from the square. Some who sat in windows of nearby buildings to witness the questioning of the farmers scrambled inside for cover. A squad of renegade German Landsknechts, now mounted although still bedecked in the Almain rivet armor of light infantry, pressed the farmers into a tight knot lest any break for the alleys.

“
Ja
, our dragon friend is hungry!” shouted Ivar, Julian’s lieutenant, from his perch aboard a gray mare. He spanked his horse’s haunches with the flat of his blade and lurched away from the cavalry line, at the center of which sat the proud Captain Kel’Tekeli. Two mercenaries with drawn pistols followed in his wake. Ivar looked confidently armored in a waistcoat cuirass and tassets. He yanked in the reins before the huddled farmers, jangling to a halt. The open buffe of his Flemish burgonet helm squeaked as it swung on its hinges. “Who would like to be fodder for the dragon, eh?”

Mutters and grumblings. The crowd across the street pushed in closer, led by the craft guildsmen.

“Why don’t you leave those farmers alone!” Phlegor yelled from their center. Several axes, an adz, a staff here and there shifted on twitching shoulders in their midst.

“Now who’s looking for trouble?” Ivar growled. “Who wants to take that tough peasant’s place?” He indicated the swinging man across the square.

The farmer named Gornick, while not precisely hanged as the hysterical Yuschak had told Wilf Gundersen, had indeed been hoisted on high. He swung from a cucking stool lashed to the gibbet where late had been displayed the corpses of the two bandits shot by Klann’s troops. Gornick had flung one of the ruined fruit samples at an interrogating soldier and had been tied to the cucking stool and beaten with staffs by guffawing troops. Bleeding from many superficial wounds, his eye puffed shut, Gornick dangled limply now, as the soldiers had tired of taking whacks at their impromptu practice dummy. Beside Gornick, muzzled and hanged by its neck, twitched a Great Dane, which had bitten a Landsknecht who had cuffed its master. The dog had ceased to emit the
kuh-kuh-kuh
sound from its dead throat now. Its legs kicked reflexively, spastically in death as Gornick’s stool glanced off its carcass.

Curses and insults sprang up in the heat and dust. The soldiers glanced about them circumspectly, swords in moist fists. They were greatly outnumbered.

“Farmers! You needn’t submit to this unlawful interrogation! Resist them!”

It was Paille, calling from somewhere on high. The bell tower! The madman leaned from the arch where hung the massive bells. Vlad Dobroczy felt a crazy laugh rise up from his chest to see the artist’s acrobatic raillery.

“Get that idiot down from there,” Julian commanded from the cavalry line, still maintaining his distance from the scuffling throng.

“You—Paille!” a soldier cried. “Get down here!”

“Come for me, knave!” Paille roared, pulling his dagger from his belt. There was laughter in the ranks. Julian pursed his lips and shook his head. And gestured to his archers.

Two shafts twanged forth and hissed toward the snarling poet, only to crash uselessly against the granite facade of the tower. A second later Paille emerged from behind the arch to thumb his nose and stick out his tongue.

Julian sighed petulantly. “Get him. Go up and get him,” he said in a low voice. “And try not to make a farce of this. Lunatic’s making you look like....” His voice trailed off as he watched two soldiers enter the tower at the ground floor doorway. They emerged a moment later.

“He’s locked himself into the belfry,” a soldier called. Shouts and catcalls wafted over from the gathered citizenry. The Landsknecht squad corraled the farmers against the steps of the Ministry of Government and Finance.

“Ring the bells,” Julian said simply.

The two mercenaries looked at each other with bright faces, the thought appealing to them. They dashed into the tower again. A moment later the great alarm tocsin clanged with pendulous fury as if all the legions of Hades had descended on the city.

Seconds later Paille emerged into the arch high above the Street of Hope, miming, with an eye-popping facial set, the tintinnabulous action of the bells. Then his forefingers came up to his ears and he indicated, with a jerky, mechanical motion, the waxed cotton strips he had stuffed into them beforehand.

Jeering laughter and bravado now seized the crowd, and Vlad could sense the turn. For the moment all the soldiers’ weaponry and the monstrous winged dragon were all but forgotten. Then the wyvern lofted up from its perch with a bawling cry and flapped across to the bell tower, and Paille dove out of sight.

“What do we do, Hawk?” Foristek asked Vlad, shifting his scythe to the other shoulder.

Dobroczy regarded the huge man, saw the other farmers also awaiting his answer, and he realized in that moment that, despite his youth, his strength and aggressiveness had made him their leader.

He squeezed the long shaft of the pruning hook he carried. Gritted his teeth and called out to Ivar: “We don’t know anything about this God-cursed crop plague. Why don’t you leave us alone before you make one too many mistakes?”