Gonji: The Soul Within the Steel: The Deathwind Trilogy, Book Two (39 page)

But she did. She spent her days assiduously learning what she could of the difficult tongue, mainly from the chief steward. She gleaned great satisfaction from her ability to manipulate even that venomous old soul in the furthering of her purpose. And she knew enough now to learn from the conversation that Klann lived in fear of some predatory thing in the province that lusted after his blood. Mord seemed convinced that there was in fact such a creature hovering near but that it was something he
should
be able to enlist in their support. He seemed obsessed with the large key he carried at all times, which he insisted had something to do with the presence.

The idea of the spectral presence was new to Genya and terrifying in a way she couldn’t describe. She had never known such fear in Vedun, and she couldn’t understand Mord’s assertion that it was in some way connected with the captive city.

And there were other things that gnawed at her. Things that troubled sleep: the scary murmurs among the servants, talk of mysterious crop failure in Vedun; of soldiers slaughtered by invisible things; of rebellious action by the citizens; and worst of all, the disappearances of the two servant girls who bore on their foreheads the red mark placed there by Mord, the mark they could not remove despite all tearful, frantic efforts.

“My men are killed in the forests at night,” King Klann had told her when she brought him his mutton and wine. “Why do they do these things?”

But her winsome way had calmed him, and for once none of the ladies of the court had intruded. Soon she had allayed his suspicions of the people of Vedun with her stories of their happiness and brotherhood. She was feeling clever and sure of herself. Sure that she was on her way back to Vedun, whether by lubricious guile or outright deceit, the way paved by the controlled seductiveness that had never failed her. For if the king’s paternal favor was withheld much longer, she would find another way to escape. Perhaps through the miller’s gate, whose steward she had already dangerously approached about that very subject, though she was not desperate enough to pay the price he demanded....

“I’m tired now, and I have much to ponder,” Klann told her at last. “Leave me now.” He patted her face in the kindly manner he reserved for Genya alone, then turned his back on her and began to pace.

She left via the chamber’s double doors, out the vestibule’s heavier paneled door and past the sentries. The corridors were cold and dank, empty but for an occasional passing Llorm guard or scurrying dog or cat. The cresset lamps had burned low, some extinguished altogether. In the gleam of every licking flame she saw the burning eyes of Mord, remembered the way he had looked at her now and again, thought of the missing servant girls.

They say he does the unspeakable with ’em
, Yola the chambermaid had said....

Genya pulled her collar close about her throat and hurried around the second turn on her course to the scullions’ chambers. She stopped when she heard the muted clanking sound behind her. She couldn’t tell how far behind or in what direction. Her hands were clamped over both her mouth and nose as she leaned against the chilly stone wall, listening. She tried not to breathe, fought off a spate of shivers.

Nothing. Silence. No...
breathlessness.
The sound that followed her stopped just after she had.

Emitting a single hot breath, she steeled herself, annoyed by her fear of the familiar fortress surroundings. She moved off again, hoping to pass someone, glad for the rustle of her skirts that filled the too-complete stillness of the corridor maze.

There—a soldier. Good....

She smiled more sweetly than usual when the Llorm dragoon passed and touched the brim of his helm. Grinned to herself and whispered a few scolding words over having behaved like a child, hearing the comforting boot-slaps diminish behind her—

And vanish altogether with a single scrape, as if the soldier had been swept off his feet by something above him.

Genya gasped and trembled, pausing again to listen. Again the sounds abated just when she strained to hear. She lipped a fervent prayer and hurried on, her brows knitting as she clutched the front of her bodice, the fear within gripping her heart still tighter.

She turned right into the corridor that led past storage pantries to the servants’ quarters. She gaped, open-mouthed: all the lamps had expired. But there was nowhere else to go. Now she heard the soft, loping footpads echoing in the halls...where? behind her? before? She couldn’t tell.

Forward. She must run for the chambers—run! She hurtled onward into the darkness, her slapping footfalls and rustling skirts masking all other sound. The
thing
might be behind her, grasping, reaching out to touch her at any second. She had to look back—no! Mother of God,
no!

Then she stumbled over a bucket in the darkness and sprawled on the floor. She barely felt the ache in her shin as she scrabbled into a seated position and...heard the laughter. She peered back flinchingly into the darkened corridor she had run through and saw the dim light from the intersecting hall. Then heard the comforting voices of soldiers.

“Uh—heeelp!” she cried out tentatively in a soft whining voice that made her feel foolish. She laughed when she saw them turn into the corridor and jog toward her, calling out. Two Llorm sentries, their sword hilts and burgonets glinting until they were enveloped by shadow....

By the huge, hulking shadow that loomed over them and laid them both low. They fell to the stone floor almost as one.

The clatter of a helmet, bouncing against the wall. And the shadow approaching her, reaching out, piercing her soul with its inhuman eyes.

She tried to scream, but the sound caught in her throat. She lay across from the linen pantry. All she could think to do was run for the door, bolt herself within, and then scream and scream until she woke the dead, if need be. And if the pantry were locked—?

But it wasn’t. It yielded at once to her frantic jiggling of the handle. She pushed inside and slammed the door, reached for the—
There was no bolt!
She dropped down like dead weight with her back to that slender portal and began to sob even as she pushed against it, digging her feet into the floor with the superhuman strength of the doomed.

“Hsssst!”
the voice grated harshly under the crack. “Silence. Don’t fear me, girl. I haven’t come for you. Raise no alarm.” It spoke in Hungarian. A voice she had never heard before but found strangely comforting.

She lay shaking in the pantry for what seemed a long time, but almost immediately the sense of oppression had lifted, for the presence was gone.

* * * *

Mord stiffened in the dungeon chamber, as if a bolt had skewered him. He seized up the psychically endowed key, a look of triumph firing his crow-black eyes: “So you’ve come to me....”

He surged from the chamber, past the cells of puling, mindless half-human wretches, and up two flights of crumbling stairs, pushing through an iron-grated door that shrieked on arthritic hinges—

“Guards! Turn out the garrison!
We have an intruder!
”

The castle exploded with the tumult of shouted orders and stamping feet, jangling steel and the confused questions of the newly awakened.

“Look—this man is dead!”

Gasps and outcries. The corpse of a Llorm footman—the one who had passed Genya in her panicked flight.

“The king! See to the king’s welfare!”

Soldiers and civilians alike poured through the corridors toward Klann’s private chambers, lighting lamps and torches as they went. Others searched Castle Lenska from top to bottom, through every corridor and drum tower, through kitchens and larders and every cellar and dungeon and rat-infested subterranean cell, save for those only Mord knew of.

Outside, the dreaded wyvern roused itself from sleep and shrilled at the storm as it banked around the castle spires and walls, gradually widening its radius of search. Two hundred mercenaries camped in the outer ward and beyond the moat on the piney slopes grumbled and cursed as they, too, joined the search in the heavy downpour.

“What the hell we lookin’ for?”

“This is crazy!”

Tumo bellowed and kept pointing into the forest to the west. Retrieving his great spiked truncheon from under the canopy, he leaned it on an elephantine shoulder and pointed again, canine sounds and braying groans emanating from between his flaccid lips. He looked up to his master Mord, who stood atop the ramparts, gazing with a strange fixation into the forest. Beside him there was a frenzy of activity, one soldier babbling about the apparition he had seen but couldn’t stop, his dead partner being examined by an anxious group. A dagger still jutted from the dead man’s breast.

“No, Tumo,” Mord ground in his murky voice. “Not now.” The sorcerer seemed deeply puzzled. He hefted the key in a gloved hand.

At the king’s chambers: madness. The two sentries who guarded their king had been stabbed to death. No one had seen the assailant. King Klann leaned against the wall, unable to arrest the trembling that had begun when he had come out to see why his guards failed to respond to a command.

“I saw him...,” Klann kept saying, distant and unsettling to those who listened. “I
think
I saw him. He’s—he’s showing me that he can destroy me whenever he wishes. He might have done so, if—if—”

“Calm yourself, milord,” Lady Thorvald pleaded. “Let me help you into—”

He pushed her hand away roughly. “What must I do to have security here?” he shouted in a cracked voice. “Sleep with a regiment at my bedside?!”

He still displayed the effects of his horripilation; his face was pallid, his hair bristling.

“Another dead sentry on the south middle curtain, but
this
man says he struck the intruder, sire!” came an officer’s voice.

The babbling Llorm guard was pushed forward, his drenched face an almost comic fright mask. He was helmless and quaking.

“Well—
speak.
”

“I—I—I struck him, sire, slashed him as he went by.... He—he—Kirka, he stabbed Kirka, and then I sliced open his arm but...but then he was
gone.
”

“You missed him, then, idiot.”

“No, sire, I did hit him. See here—his
blood.
”

Half-clad soldiers and civilians in nightshirts pressed forward to see the valiant sentry’s bloody sword, sighing and muttering in impressed tones.

“I don’t want his blood, I want his
corpse
,” Klann railed.

“Here, let me have that.” Mord pushed through the crowd and took the weapon. “Draw another from the armorer.”

“You—Mord,” Klann cried in an accusing voice, pointing. “Where were you during all this? You’re supposed to be one step ahead of such unnatural attacks against me.”

“It was I who raised the alarm, milord, having sensed the presence—”

“A fat lot of good it did.” Klann still shook.

“On the contrary, I succeeded in contacting the thing.” Gasps from the onlookers. “I was right in thinking it ought to be something which might aid us. I called to it, and it tried to come, but...somehow it was restrained. I don’t understand all about this being yet—”

“Well,
do
something! Subjugate it, drive it away, destroy it, but
do your job!
We’ll not be threatened by the supernatural while you dare to call yourself a sorcerer in our employ.” Klann’s pallor had by now been replaced by a lurid flush. Mord bowed to him and departed with the sword.

“Gorkin,” Klann said to his castellan, “get me a scribe.”

“Milord?”

“A scribe and a courier. I must see these people, go to them. First thing in the morning I want the message sent to Vedun. This has got to stop. We can’t live with this oppression, and they know—oh, yes, Gorkin, they know what it’s about!”

A peal of thunder rumbled in the mountains like the drums of an advancing army, and Klann grabbed his head as the angry counsel of the Brethren rose until it filled his ears and clouded his vision. Lady Thorvald and General Gorkin and two or three retainers caught him as he swooned, guided him back into his chambers.

“Garth...,” he muttered in his delirium. “We must speak with Garth....”

* * * *

Under the lambent glow of the lapping torch, Mord examined the sentry’s sword with eager eyes. The blood that dozens of people had marveled at moments before...was gone. And suddenly the simple weapon felt unsalutary, radiating a threat the likes of which he hadn’t known in centuries.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The training had been long and hard during the night, the militia grim. There were several incidents of lost temper and a general lack of harmony. Gonji knew the reason.

Radetzky the foster had been caught trying to smuggle a pistol to the militia. Rushing through the streets toward the chapel with his concealed prize, he had had a chance encounter with a band of sharp-eyed mercenaries, who had been tipped off either by the over-cautious way he walked that morning or his instant flush of guilt upon being espied. No one was sure, and it didn’t matter. Radetzky had been beaten near the rostrum, kicked and battered, until his teeth lay loose all around him and he coughed up blood from a mouth that no longer resembled a mouth. And at the last they had loaded the gun and taunted him with its deadly promise. Then, just before Captain Sianno had arrived with intentions of stopping their brutality, one of them had blown a large hole through Radetzky’s forehead.