Fortress of Lost Worlds (35 page)

Orozco sneered. “I just might do that.” He pumped a fist for emphasis and departed.

Gonji’s insides churned with his conflicting emotions. He was not cheered to find Cardenas joining him moments later.

“Sorry to disturb your private space,” the solicitor said.

“Well, you’ve done it, so say what’s on your mind,” Gonji replied.

“Once again you’ve involved me with sorcery. That hurricane wind—”

“And this time it saved your life,
senor
,
did you give no thought to that?” Gonji rubbed his tense face petulantly.

“
Si
,
you didn’t let me finish,” Cardenas replied. “The irony of that did not escape me.”

Gonji met his eyes, seeing warmth in them for the first time. Then, shadow-smooth and nearly without a sound, the tall form of Simon Sardonis glided up next to them.

“Have them clear the stern hold for tonight, and then lock me in there,” he told Gonji enigmatically. “When the—the commotion has ceased, release me, and I’ll help with the rowing.”

The lycanthrope’s meaning ultimately would become the talk of the boat.

* * * *

An eerie scene transpired just past midnight, as the newly erupted, gigantic form of the werewolf took up a post at the oars, his broad, sinewy back bending effortlessly to the task.

The rest of the refugees stared in wonder, strangely encouraged to see this terrible golden apparition—whose European legend haunted the dark recesses of their thoughts—now openly enlisted in their cause.

Wild courage swept through them an hour later, then, when they saw the pursuing, ghostly felucca appear again.

Gonji pondered a long moment, then issued the breathless order to swing the ship about and engage their bold attackers head on. Peering out from between the shields, the samurai and his trusted leaders watched apprehensively as the galley’s five heavy bow guns were brought to bear on the tiny craft.

The first volley carried too far. The second booming discharge fell short, their adjustments compensating too much. The third sequential explosions from the cannon began to pepper the sea all about the felucca, which still sailed on through the dark waters, suicidally unconcerned.

Men could be seen standing in the felucca now, gathering unhurriedly at the rails to stare at them across the briny waters. The mercenaries whispered and nudged one another—what warriors could be so heedless of death? And now there was something else: other forms—sleek, shadow-like, gliding over the ship like dragon’s breath.

Gray-black mists with eyes like fiery red pits. Windows onto Hell.

A cannonball crashed into the felucca with a furious explosion of sea foam and smoke, splintering wood and cries of victory from among the refugees. They began clapping one another on their backs. Only Gonji withheld any sign of triumph.

His breath stayed, he beheld the listing of the broken vessel with desperate expectancy. Its hull bursting below its shallow draw, the felucca took water and sank in scant minutes. All the while, her eerie crew stood amass on her single deck, issuing no outcry, making no effort at saving themselves.

The felucca was swallowed by the sea. Twisting shadows, like oil spills, were the only sign of her passage.

* * * *

The following night the galley was taken aback when a sudden cross-current gust of wind flattened her sails. The wind dissipated completely almost at once, and Gonji’s party found themselves becalmed, motionless, somewhere to the south of Sicily.

The crew had become restive, small fights breaking out among them. There was a renewal of various superstitious practices, much mumbling of private prayer. Their strange journey had begun to gnaw at each person’s secret fears, to evoke nightmares.

So there was no great surprise in the discovery that the sunken felucca had diabolically resurrected itself to give chase again.

The rowers strained at the oars to press them ahead, their only means of propulsion now. Simon, in his bestial guise once again, took up a place among the benches.

“What in the name of all demonic agents
are
they?” Gonji demanded of an unresponsive cosmos. “What fires their evil magic?”

“Maybe they work like the faery-ring maidens,” Buey proposed.

Orozco grunted. “You won’t get any more of
my
silver to try on them.”

Gonji’s hand worked at the hilt of the belted Sagami. The rhythmic sluicing of water by the oars and the groaning of the spars were the only sounds for a long space. “I doubt it,” he answered at last. “This is something much worse. Some—godless black sorcery we’ve never encountered.”

“Is her crew the same?”

“Hard to tell.”

“Maybe they steal the lives of those they slay,” Corsini interjected. “Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to throw our dead into the sea.”

“What else can we do with them?” Klank LoPresti asked. “Can’t be stinking up the place with corpses gone ripe. Jesus—”

“She’s drifting closer,” Orozco said.

“Son-of-an-Ingelese-bitch—they’re not even
rowing
!”

“Get my longbow,” Gonji ordered to no one in particular, his voice firm with a sudden resolve. “They’re getting within our range, I’d say, Corsini-
san
.”

The battle-scarred Neapolitan grinned broadly and went after his own bow.

Gonji moved to the canted rowing benches and engaged Simon. “Have any intuition about our insistent enemies out there?”

“No,” he replied simply in the guttural growl that was the voice of the Beast.

“Care to try another swim to see what you can learn about them?”

“Forget it. I’m still sodden from last time. I don’t like getting water in my ears.
You
go this time.”

Gonji’s eyes flicked to the stiff, pointed ears the werewolf mentioned, unsure whether Simon was serious or merely indulging in a sarcastic jest. Nearby rowers snickered nervously, having evidently decided on the latter.

Gonji and Corsini, the best archers among the warrior party, took up positions on either side of a shield above the tiller. The felucca was almost directly behind them now, having closed the distance between them to no more than three-hundred yards.

“I know no demons of Hell that can resist a thirteen-fist war arrow fired by a righteous hand,” Corsini said, making a wry face as he tested his archer’s ring.

“That makes
your
bow useless, Corsini,” Del Gaudio called from behind.

A spate of laughter, Gonji hissing them to stillness. He and Corsini nodded to each other and began launching alternating shots. Their shafts whistled off into the cloud-mounted night air, and they gradually found the range. Corsini was the first to strike the felucca’s deck, as Gonji’s wounded shoulder made the powerful pull difficult. “Looks like your contest,” he conceded, watching the unhurried shuffling on the small craft that came in response to the implanted shaft.

“What the hell are those things running around the deck?” someone asked.

“Dogs?”

“Too fast for dogs.”

“They’ve got their own werewolves, maybe,” Luigi Leone whispered, looking over his shoulder at the huge straining back covered by golden fur.

“Shut up,” Gonji warned.

They resumed their volleying, as the felucca magically picked up speed and tacked eastward to flank them on the port side.

Thwack!
The first crossbow bolt slammed into the galley’s hull.

“They sure as hell have the range in
their
pockets,” Corsini noted.

Gonji and his old battle-mate ran down to take up a new position at a portside shield. As they began firing again, the felucca now judged at about two-hundred-fifty yards off, a steel-tipped quarrel skimmed through a scupper and shattered a screaming mercenary’s ankle.

“Block those scuppers with barrels or chests,” Orozco ordered. Several women and a few men off the oars scrambled after blocking objects.

Corsini’s next shot caught one of the eerie boatmen in the side, ripping through his arm and biting into the rib cage, pinning the arm.

“Yo-ho!” Corsini shouted, his mates pounding him on the back. Their excitement abated as they watched the event that followed aboard the felucca.

The stricken man’s cohorts gathered round him. One of them tore the arrow from his body and flung it overboard. The man who’d been hit moved to the starboard rail and nonchalantly set one foot upon it, leering out toward the galley. The magnificent bowshot had apparently caused him not the slightest discomfort.

Terrified looks passed from one observer to another. Gonji felt their failing courage, knew it for the enervating foe it was. He breathed in short gasps, trying to steady his reeling mind, to concentrate on some useful plan that would at least forestall panic.

“Here—look here,” he commanded. “Those things that walk the deck. Let’s try one of them.”

“What for?” Corsini asked disconsolately. “Target practice?”

Two bolts bit into the hull just below Corsini, startling him. A third sizzled by overhead to splash into the sea, starboard.

“Target practice, then,” Corsini said resignedly as Gonji cast him a censuring glance.

They drew a bead on one of the slithering creatures as it coursed a rail with quicksilver litheness. Both shots missed short, the creature paying them no heed. Gonji’s next release slammed into the hull directly beneath the apparition, which now resembled a tarred lynx as the felucca drifted nearer. They watched with fascination as it looked out languidly toward them. Then they crouched with sudden shock as two bolts chillingly struck their shield, almost simultaneously.

“You think their quarrels are as harmless as our shafts?” Corsini asked jestingly.

“They’re closer now,” Gonji noted. “The rest of you archers grab your bows and get over here. Let’s try some concerted fire.”

While the men scurried to comply, the pair tried another volley. Startling results—

Gonji’s shaft sped just over a creature’s head as it reclined, preening itself atop the prow. It tipped its shadowy head sharply to allow the arrow to fly by, nearly striking a crossbowman behind it. Corsini’s shaft arced downward, the shadow-cat following its course until, at the last instant, it withdrew a paw with a lithe recoil that barely evaded the
thunk
ing arrow. Unconcernedly, the creature stood and stretched itself, then resumed its slinking walk around the rail.

“Fast,” Corsini rasped. “Damn, they’re fast!”

The archers assembled, now ten in all, and Gonji thought a moment before fanning them out for maximum crossfire effect.

“Now, everyone—concentrate your aim on that prowling beast,” he directed. “Forget the men for now.”

They demurred a moment, then came to agreement. They waited behind their shields, out of sight, until the murky creature lithely padded around to their side of the felucca’s rail again. On Gonji’s signal, they all swung into the arrow loops between the shielding.

The Dark Company had been waiting for them. A half-dozen arbalests clacked just as the refugee archers drew and fired.

“
Polidori
!”
Corsini shouted beside Gonji, his eyes jacking open with abrupt recognition. Then several things happened in rapid succession.

The shadow-cat skipped backward to avoid two shafts, but another, from an oblique angle, skewered it through the shoulder, belting it off the rail. Shouts of triumph, smothered at once, altering into cries of alarm—

Corsini turned his back to the shield and clutched at the bolt embedded in his chest, his hands clawing slick and red at the front of his shirt. His gurgled moan of distress was choked with blood. Gonji lowered him to the deck, ran a hand through his hair helplessly, breathing his friend’s name.

“Poli—dori,” the Italian brigand choked out at him, grabbing Gonji’s jerkin with a bloody hand as his eyes glazed over in death.

The samurai removed the stiffening fingers and pushed up to the rail, climbing defiantly between two shields. Lances of hate beamed from his dark eyes, burning into the relentless pursuers.

“Bastards!” he roared. “Come and face meeeeee!”

Orozco tried to pry him away for his own safety, but Gonji pushed him off. Buey wrapped him up in a mighty bear hug, and the two began to struggle, stopping when they heard Del Gaudio’s shout.

“Hey-hey, she’s pulling away. Something happening.”

They all pushed in between the shields to see, even the rowers leaving their posts. Simon leapt from the deck and powerfully scrambled up onto the topmast, clinging by taloned hands and feet.

It was true. The felucca was drifting off now, the dwindling figures on the deck huddled together curiously.

“It worked—Jesus-Maria, it
worked—
”

“Kill the cats, then, no?”

Gonji ignored the celebration, skeptical of the hard-won victory’s ultimate meaning. “Luigi—Del Gaudio—what did he mean?
Polidori
?”

Del Gaudio growled and shook his head, as if banishing some delusion. “
Si
,
I saw it, too. The plumed hat, his trademark. For a
minuto
I thought it was Polidori, also. But it cannot be.”

“Who is this Polidori?”

“You never heard of him?
Cattivo uomo—
a very bad fellow. A Milanese duellist. Some say the greatest of all. Killed—what, Leone?—a hundred fifty men, or more? Men…some women…” He went on bemusedly as one-eyed Luigi tearfully shrugged him off, bending over the fallen Corsini. “His specialty was killing over the ladies—other men’s ladies. He liked killing much more than loving, but I guess he liked the two together best of all because he would seduce or otherwise dishonor married ladies to force their husbands into dueling with him. The widow-maker, his
amici
used to call him. Then he killed more than a few widows who tried to avenge the husbands they’d cuckolded with him!”

“I know his type,” Valentina said disgustedly, “and you’re right, Del Gaudio, they do like the cuckolding and the killing more than the bedding. What that sort needs is to encounter the right kind of woman. One with a sense of honor
and
the means to extract vengeance. Those pampered Milanese
ladies
you speak of ought to be
hung
, every one. Some people aren’t happy unless they’re wallowing in the gutter.”