Gonji: The Soul Within the Steel: The Deathwind Trilogy, Book Two (59 page)

Gonji rubbed the back of his neck in wonder at the portent of the carnage. What could have done such a—? Then he descried the drag marks in the dust, the long trails that all led to...the shallow flat outgrowth of rock on which many training lectures had been held, near the center of the cavern. And about the same time, as the others took note, rasping in breath sharply, they heard the slithering sounds in the ground beneath their feet.

“Stay clear of the rocks and tunnels,” Gonji commanded. They all froze, looking about cautiously, wide-eyed. The men who had gone after weapons slowed, listening, hushing one another as the sound moved toward the pounding of their massed feet—

A resounding cracking of earth and stone—

And the horror erupted in their midst, spewing rocks and shale and screaming men in every direction as it burst up from the bowels of the earth, mewling with a shrill echo like a thousand cats in a cathedral. Beyond its sound, it bore no resemblance to anything natural.

In seconds the monstrous creature had snared a shrieking man and dragged him under the earth, slithering backward, down into the depths through the new hole in the cavern floor. The stunned survivors of the eruption crawled away, some moaning in pain with injuries sustained in their fall.

“
Cholera
—what in all the hells
is
that?” Gonji breathed. Then, shouting: “Get to the damned weapons! Fan out. Head for the sides of the cavern. Hurry—we need bows and guns—”

“It’s a serpent,” someone behind said in awe.

“
Nyet
, it had
claws
.”

“We’ve got to get to the tunnels, Gonji,” Wilf cried. “We can’t fight that thing!”

“Get hold of yourself,” the samurai shouted.

“There’s no one left alive here to rescue!” a man screamed. “Let’s get out before we’re next!”

A rumbling eruption came again from the direction of the tunnel that exited into the hills. Then the subterranean scraping came again under the cavern floor. Swift and ominous. The creature slithered under their feet impossibly fast, imparting a primal fear that one could not count on the solidity of the very earth beneath his feet.

“Then let’s get out of here now,” Gonji agreed, swallowing back the lump in his throat. “You men with the armament—grab what you can and get back to—”

“Gonji!” Paille was yelling, sprinting out of the southern valley tunnel, three men trailing behind him. “Gonji, that thing’s burrowed up into the tunnels, blocked them off with tons of earth! We can’t get out this way!”

“Back to the city tunnels,” Gerhard yelled, waving them all toward the way they had come. But a fresh explosion of rock before the door through which they’d pried their way in stopped them in their tracks, some men pummeled by the hurtling stones. The beast emerged, triumphantly clacking its clawed tentacles, and its segmented, wormlike body—forty or fifty feet of flexing and extending rings—bowed and stretched eerily in place, churning up rocks behind it with its tail, such that the portal to the city tunnels was effectively blocked in seconds.

It reared up on its tail and wove its beaked, eyeless head, birdlike, as if listening. The men in the cavern all stood and stared in abject terror, their claustrophobic shock paralyzing them. Every man now understood what was happening. The training cavern had become a larder, a livestock pantry for the worm-thing’s casual feeding.

Its pair of grasping appendages sprouted from its body for nearly a third of its length. These were similarly segmented and ended in the vicious talons that now rubbed its beak, as if cleansing lazily while it sat, coiled with detached unconcern.

“Stand still, everyone,” Gonji shouted. His voice echoed, and the monster’s head twisted again. It tensed and extended the awful tentacles, sliding forward slightly. “Move only on my commands.” It slid forward half a length, its motion, when above ground, like that of an inchworm.

“Karl,” Gonji whispered. “Try one.”

Gerhard drew back on his mighty bow, launched—the shaft embedded in its soft gray underside with an almost pulpy sound. The beast emitted a high-pitched whine like a startled cat and raked the air before gliding forward. A knot of men panicked and bolted at the center of the training ground, and the monster immediately undulated after them.

“Stop, you fools—it can’t see you,” Gonji cried. “It has to feel your footfalls!”

The worm was terrifyingly fast for its size. One man stumbled, and the creature was led unerringly to the sound of his falling body. It descended on him as he screamed insanely, seizing him with the talons, immobilizing him with the venom from the spurs that projected from the base of those chitinous talons, like extruded stings. Then it gouged his belly open with its hooked beak, and the ghastly sucking sounds began.

Suddenly the cavern was alive with panic-stricken militiamen, who scrambled for cover anywhere it might be found. The worm fed casually on the freshly killed prey.

“Come on, you men,” Gonji yelled to the staring bowmen and pistoliers, and they rushed forward. “Follow me,” he said to the bunch within earshot.

“Where?”

“To get more weapons and mounts.” He began to run.

“But that thing will follow our footsteps!” Wilf shouted after, trotting hesitantly, with eyes fixed on the worm.

“Just follow me!”

Several men ran with him in answer, Gerhard launching a parting shot that pierced its hide, disturbing its feeding. It lashed about blindly a second, then followed after the running footfalls, even as Wilf had feared.

“Fire!” Gonji ordered over his shoulder, to the gawking militiamen, who seemed reluctant to use their weapons for fear of drawing the monster’s notice. That snapped them from their collective trance.

A fusillade of gunfire and bowshot exploded and whistled into the monster’s soft flesh. It rocked with the impact, a banshee wail spewing from its maw. There were shouts of released tension when its mesmerizing hold was broken, but now the pistol-men had to retreat to reload, and the beast bore down on the shouting band of archers, who fell into disarray and broke into flight rather than resuming their attack.

The maddened creature coiled and sprang off after Gonji’s sprinting party again, slithering into a course that would intersect theirs before they could cross the cavern. But Gonji yelled for men to grab mounts and bring pole-arms, then led his small band into the training facilities that sprouted in the middle of the cavern. They reached the quintains and jousting posts, just as the worm caught up to them and reared for a strike. Now the men were darting behind the practice mechanisms for cover.

Gonji leapt out and slashed right and left with his
katana
, drawing the creature’s attention. Then he darted and twisted through the practice field, setting the man-forms spinning and squeaking, the others following his lead. The worm hesitated in its confusion over the cacophony. All at once, it sprang downward, catching a quintain and tearing it to shreds. It moved forward into the practice devices and was slowed, becoming entangled in the wood and burlap and rope of the twisting training aids.

By now Dobroczy and Nagy arrived aboard two harnessed but barebacked horses, another pair in tow. Gonji and Gerhard bolted under the
karumi-jutsu
scaffold and leapt astride the skittish mounts. Gonji grabbing a bow and quiver tossed to him by a man on foot. Monetto ascended the scaffold with a lance, balancing lightly and awaiting the creature’s approach.

The archers reformed and sent another volley into the worm’s slimy rings. It clawed at the irritants ineffectually. The pistoliers charged forward again and blasted a torrent of lead balls through it broadside, so that it spun unnaturally, screaming and crashing down onto the quintains.

Gonji and Gerhard galloped in circles about it, firing war arrows into it. The creature bled darkly now from a hundred wounds.

“Pour it on!” Gonji roared, riding ever nearer the beast in his battle-frenzy.

Now pikemen appeared on the grounds, spears tearing into the bewildered worm-thing as it snaked its rending talons about in futility, the sounds of its tormentors coming from all directions at once. Defensive posturing was something new to the predator from far below the earth’s crust, its natural prey placid and inoffensive.

Sklarz and Foristek began to work in on foot with halberds, slicing through the gelatinous rings with razored steel. But they moved too close—Sklarz became ensnared on a tattered quintain, and the monster heard his scream beneath it. Half Sklarz’s head was torn off by the twisting slash of the beaked head. Foristek went mad at the sight, screaming his friend’s name and burying his halberd a foot deep, penetrating to the worm’s vital organs. It lurched high into the air over their heads, men scrambling to avoid its descent. Elongating into a blood-freezing strike like the spurting of a severed artery, it launched itself full length in the direction the wound had come from, landing atop the big farmer and knocking him senseless. Then it lifted him into the air with some difficulty in its mortal agonies, its beak shredding Foristek’s torso, before the anguished gazes of his screaming sword-brothers.

“Sado-war-a-aaaa!”
Gonji’s war cry rent the cavern, echoing as he leaped off the horse and bounded atop the monster’s back, screaming with berserker frenzy. He had both his swords out now, slashing repeatedly at the worm’s back and neck. It lurched, but he stabbed both blades into its soft flesh and held on as it dropped Pete’s lifeless corpse in its maddened efforts to dislodge Gonji. Its catlike mewling shrilled as it rolled and at last threw the samurai off, nearby steeds neighing and tossing their riders in fear of its violent movement.

Then it loomed above Gonji, leaking its vital fluids, unsure of his position as he froze beneath it, only the Sagami in his grasp now, the
seppuku
sword lost in its flesh. It leaned near the agility scaffold, and Monetto’s lance gored its ear slit, its most sensitive organ. It slashed sidewise, but the lithe biller had already dived off the scaffold.

Its other tentacle raked under its belly, and the keen flash of the Sagami’s arc sliced off its taloned end, fluid spouting at once.

“Mind his venom!” someone cried, but Gonji had dashed off with the momentum of his sword cut.

When he looked up, it was to see a fresh blast of pistol fire from close range send ragged chunks of gray-green flesh tearing toward the cavern ceiling. Then the monster worm emitted a final piercing whine and fell like a downed tree, skewered on a splintered jousting post.

They pulled themselves up slowly, mouths gaping and panting. Horsemen dismounted. It was a long time before they would stop circling the thing, staring at their hard-won prize. Longer still before their last war whoops had died and they had stopped embracing and pounding one another’s backs in the pressure-release of victory.

But at that point some of them could only collapse in tearful exhaustion. And the bodies of the dead lay all about them, reminding them of the price they had had to pay.

Gonji withdrew the
seppuku
sword from the dead thing, cleansing his blades on a dead man’s cloak, his eyes still red and glazed over. He peered closely at an armor-piercing arrow that had driven through its lower jaw and continued on, straight up through the upper, splitting the base of its beak. He couldn’t recall having seen the shot.

Gerhard and Wilf came up beside him. “My parting shot,” Karl related, “just before it almost fell on me. Not bad, eh?” Gerhard grinned shakily, his chest heaving. It was the first time Gonji had ever heard him express pride in a bowshot. “Do you know what this means?” the archer said, his tone suddenly changing.

Gonji began to shake his head, his mind a maelstrom of his own thoughts, motives, suspicions.

“That the prophetess was right about Mord wanting to see us all in our graves,” Nick Nagy snarled, removing his soaked tunic and scowling.

“Worse,” Gerhard corrected. “It means that there’s a traitor among us.”

They were stunned by the assertion. Gonji’s eyes narrowed, focusing on something that twisted his lips.

“
Why
, Karl?” Monetto asked.

Gerhard shrugged. “The catacombs, eh? I don’t believe he stumbled on them, whatever his powers. And that...
thing
didn’t simply blunder up here. Even Tralayn never spoke of any such creature ever appearing before.” He unstrung his bow with assistance from another man.

They mulled it over, others commenting or offering opinions, while Gonji continued to stare off toward the castle tunnel.

“Well, that’s just my hunch,” Gerhard concluded at last to those who disagreed.

“Sit down, all of you,” Gonji said gravely. “Let’s rest and...reason this out.” They complied, food and beverages being passed around from their stores, accepted wearily.

“It can’t be,” Wilf said, wagging his head as he sipped his wine. “Klann would’ve sent a whole army through here to wipe us out,
neh?
”

“Unless your father is right,” Gonji countered, “
and
Tralayn is right.... Suppose Klann is being straightforward with us, as your father insists, but that Mord is working at cross-purposes to him, as we all heard Tralayn say a thousand times. So Mord employs a
traitor
—” He spat the word, revulsion for its connotation bringing a bitter taste to his tongue. “—as Karl suggests. Someone hateful enough—
insane
enough—well-paid enough?—to brook murder and savagery and the decimation of his neighbors—”