Fortress of Lost Worlds (44 page)

Circles, round and round,
he was thinking in scattershot flashes.
We sail straight and make circles…

He heard Gonji above him, shouting something, tried to establish contact, and failed. Saw the evil duellist Polidori atop a turret, posing like a pompous conqueror, some distance away.

Vaguely, Sergeant Orozco was aware that he was drifting nearer the center of this bewildering chess game, his piece soon to be wiped from the board.

Die like a man, like a soldier—for your God and your king—well—for your God, anyway…

He swallowed dryly and brought up his pistol when he saw the kitchens descending within range.
Perhaps a shot at the goddamn cat. Perhaps not…

The wall containing Buey, Ahmed, and Luigi Leone would pass the killer’s airborne fragment first. Maybe they would draw Kleinhenz’s attention. Or his temple cat’s. Orozco’s eyebrows arched to see how near those two shifting bodies came, nearly colliding on this pass.

He saw Buey leap out of concealment, coiled rope in hand, to land on the kitchen fragment as someone lent him cover fire from a barking, fuming pistol.

He could hear the struggle, the growling of the monster cat. His nerve ends flared as he strained up to see, the larders plunging near.

The creature was on Buey’s back, clawing and tearing, talons slashing out of dark swirling mist, as the big man roared and twisted mightily, pulling at the rope that was taut about Kleinhenz’s neck.

Buey’s face was shredded at the left cheek, his thick forearm jammed between the temple cat’s now very solidified jaws, when he fell between the larders on Orozco’s side.

“
Carlos
,”
Buey cried raggedly, throwing the end of the rope toward the sergeant. For an instant, Orozco saw the rope slipping away. Then he lurched out over the nothingness of the air-bound arena and caught the hemp a scant foot from its end.

He threw himself backward. Kleinhenz yanked back stronger, determined not to return to the grave he’d earned by his sadistic barbarity. Orozco lost his footing, skidded toward the brink of the graveyard. His shot-weakened leg caught the facing of a headstone, hooked it as he swore and strained and pulled until his hands bled. He felt the slack as Kleinhenz tripped, coiled it frantically about his arm. Scrambling to his knees, he looped the rope about the headstone as the assassin gave a powerful tug that trapped the sergeant’s arm against it. Orozco cried out in pain but held, face pressed against the slab as he felt the sudden heavy tug and crushing pressure.

Kleinhenz was dragged off his wedge of rock and wood to dangle out over the ether. Orozco wriggled his arm free and hurriedly tied off the rope. He inched to the parapet. Kleinhenz was pulling himself up, hand over hand, slowly, inexorably. The dead would not die easily.

He looked down, saw Kleinhenz’s familiar cat leaning out from the larders, pawing out uselessly. Saw Buey’s downed form. The creature would kill him in its vengeful rage, if indeed it hadn’t already.

Locating his pistol, the sergeant rushed to the brink, leaned over, hissed a prayer. Aimed and fired. He cursed the cloud of black smoke that obscured his vision.

A moment later he laughed aloud, his curse brushed aside by an outcry of thanksgiving. The cat lay splayed on a larder lid, softly shimmering, as if with escaping steam.

Kleinhenz’s neck snapped like kindling, the rope singing with the sudden rigid vibration.

But Orozco could not judge Buey’s state. Then he saw Gonji’s leap—and Simon’s—and the surging cat—the assassin’s back up on that turret—

And then it was all lost to view.

* * * *

“Don’t kill it, Simon!” Gonji grated, seeing the transformed lycanthrope, fangs bared, confront the blackly fulminating temple cat, the two circling each other warily. “Don’t kill it…yet.”

He glared at Polidori, who snuck glances at the two beasts, Simon and his lava-eyed temple cat. His swagger had fled before concern for his familiar.

“Wait,” Polidori hissed harshly. Gonji betrayed his surprise, for none of them had heard any of the undead tormentors speak before. “You are a man of honor, are you not?”

“You’re afraid,” Gonji said evenly, flooded now with confidence. He hopped down from the embrasure,
katana
held in middle guard. Polidori set his blade point down in cavalier fashion.

“So what if I am?” the duellist grated, watching as Simon and the temple cat spoiled for combat, in their standoff. Both backed away cautiously to await the outcome of this exchange. “You would shun the grave, too, if you knew what lay beyond it.”

“The karma of some is worse than that of others,” Gonji replied.

“Let this be you and me,” Polidori proposed. “I, too, am curious as to which of us would triumph in a match, whose fencing is superior. Let us cross swords, and let the victor live.”

Gonji cocked his head to indicate the nearness of the arena’s implacable, crushing center. “We all die soon.”

“Then why fight at all, if that’s your belief?”

Gonji spat on the stone floor of the turret. “If you can’t answer that, then there’s no use in further discussion.”

He crept forward, smooth as a stalking tiger, mayhem barely contained in the flash of his dark eyes.

But Polidori’s delay had been a ploy. A bolt
whickered
down from above to shatter at Simon’s springing feet. He had glimpsed the attacker—Fernandez, and his instincts galvanized his thews to evade the shot. Simon snarled up as the second familiar cat launched down to join Polidori’s against Simon.

Now all three raging beasts tore into one another in frenzied animal fury, as Fernandez, too, landed in their midst from his looming ruin.

Gonji circled Polidori and Fernandez, feeling out their attack with silver-lick parries, stringing them out to avoid landing between them in the confined space. He knew the renegade Spanish trooper’s schooling, had seen his style countless times before. But Polidori’s storied technique was a legitimate threat and would require scrutiny.

Gonji drew his
ko-dachi
and lashed out in a sudden burst of twin-fanged fury, feeling them out, turning away their relentless alternating lunges, inflicting several futile wounds. Neither feared death, though Polidori guarded his back carefully, where his death-blow had been delivered. And Fernandez’s mode of death was still unknown.

Polidori seemed to lay back, to allow Gonji to wear himself out, as the clash wore on, fatalistically.

Angered by their confidence, knowing that Simon might succumb at any time in his battle with those phantasmagoric cats, he beat aside Polidori’s blade, backed him against the merlons with a whirling, scissoring assault, and then abandoned him suddenly to tear into the weaker fencer, Fernandez. In a split instant, Gonji disarmed the Spaniard with a twisting double-bladed snare. His fanning return hacked off one hand and sliced deeply into the corpse’s knee.

He spun to catch Polidori’s deep lunge at his back, driving the blade up over his head and slashing the assassin across the belly to no avail. Gonji could hear the snarling and raging howls of animal fury behind him, along with Fernandez’s cold laughter, as the revivified, severed hand slid back to the killer in its necromantic magic, the ruined knee reconstructing itself.

But Polidori suddenly contorted in pain and jammed an elbow into his ribs. Simon had stabbed his familiar, wounding it deeply. Gonji leapt forward, swept the duellist’s blade wide to the left with his
seppuku
sword, and sliced horizontally with the Sagami, bursting both of the dead man’s eyes.

An instant’s hesitation—Gonji looked back to Fernandez, who reacted like a jolted puppet as Simon caught up enough smoky substance to slam the killer’s temple cat against a crenellation—and then the samurai’s series of lightning circular slashes brought the blinded Polidori low, with a furious series of dismembering chops. Dead body parts landed about him, and Gonji cursed the futility of it all.

He stood back, teeth gritted in hatred, sucking in a whistling breath filled with impotent fury, unsure how to apply that rage against these undying fiends. But then he remembered—

Before Polidori’s parts could reassemble themselves, Gonji kicked him over prone and drove a foot into his back. Poising the
katana
high overhead, the samurai
poured his loathing of this abominable assassin into a parting thought.

“Take this to Hell with you,
dead man:
You’re the poorest excuse for a legend I’ve ever encountered.
Good fencing—
” With both hands, he plunged the razor point of the
katana
through the killer’s back, feeling the life driven from the reanimated body by the clean edge of forthright steel.

But then he regretted his momentary indulgence of vainglory.

Fernandez and his familiar had leapt down to a safe haven on the chunk of ruin that passed below. Gonji pounded the merlon in frustration, then went to Simon’s aid. The lycanthrope had reverted to humanity again, and he seemed in a bad way. He tried to rise, blood seeping from dozens of wounds. For an instant Gonji grimaced, believing one of Simon’s eyes had been gouged out. But only the eyelid had been sliced, for the eye was intact, though it fluttered in irritation at the blood that filled it.

The samurai steadied his breathing, forced Simon to lie back, for the first time wondering whence had come the sorcery that allowed the partial transformation into the werewolf, which should have been denied him. He decided that Simon’s noble spirit had somehow found the way under the pressure of their dire need.

He was watching the revolting dissipation of Polidori’s dead temple cat when Orozco shouted above him, jabbering what he knew, asking their condition. On the next pass the sergeant was low enough to drop down with them.

“Buey’s gone,” Orozco was saying, his voice unsteady, full of emotional and physical anguish.

“We all will be soon,” Gonji noted. “You—you’ve been a fine friend, Carlo-
san
. A great
bushi
.”

They eyed each other with shared respect. Orozco nodded. “A helluva fine friend,” he said, chortling, finding inside himself a last spark of humor. “Good for a loan of silver anytime. You got away with it, you Jappo devil.
Look
—”

Gonji peered down. He could see Fernandez, huddled with his cat under the roof of an airborne redoubt.

“
Cholera—
have you any powder left? My bow is—somewhere. No shafts anyway.”

Then they saw the figure suddenly appear on the carven stonework of the redoubt’s floor.

Soiled caftan. A woman…

“Valentina!”

She heard Gonji’s shout, looked up languidly and seemed to smile. But she gave no reply. The undead killer and his temple cat went into motion. Gonji slid along the embrasures to see, losing composure, his mind racing with concern, making no sense of it. Then they were out of view.

Gonji saw that his turret’s next pass would take them into the center of the sorcerous battleground, to be enveloped by its mystery.

“Valentina!” He couldn’t see her, as the redoubt sailed past the floating walls of a fragmented dungeon.

Gonji turned, whirled about helplessly, leaning back against a wall, an agonized sound escaping his throat. Then:

“Carlos!”

It took him a moment to realize that he was alone.

* * * *

She remembered him now, the memory seething with hatred. He had been one of the first to take her after she’d become aware of her curse. She abided her disgust and threw back her caftan to reveal her nakedness. She forced a smile that melted into a sneer as he came toward her, his eyes briefly reflecting the revived memories of lust.

The temple cat recognized her first, for it could sense the secret it guarded slipping from its time-suspending sorcery, eroding like sludge before a driving rain. The ghostly animal backed away, head lowered, for it could not perform its protective duty in the presence of the
executioner
.

Fernandez looked to his guardian cat, and realization dawned agonizingly. He began to tremble as she approached him. Her very proximity had triggered the onset of the process. He stumbled backward a pace, then another. The affliction that had laid him low overwhelmed him once again, this time at an amazingly accelerated pace. In moments he had lost control of his faculties, his entire left side falling prey to paralysis. In panic over the imminent loss of the life he’d killed so many to keep, the escape from the glimpsed fate that had filled him with horror, he raised his blade to strike her.

But something prevented him. He could not strike at his executioner. He dropped the sword and staggered back, ever back, with failing control over his undead nerves and muscles.

When he reached the brink he teetered an instant, reached out to her, fending,
imploring
. Valentina’s eyes were like icy spikes when she reached out and took his hand, caressing it with the other. And he recoiled from her touch as if struck by a battering ram.

The evil renegade lancer fell over the brink with a choked outcry, floating in death, passing through the sphere’s outer barrier and swiftly reappearing on the farther side, to take his place amidst the debris that gradually drifted toward the dreadful, crushing center of the space distortion. He was rigid in death, as he’d been at the moment Balaerik had given him back his foul shadow-life.

Valentina watched the temple cat curl into a ball of shadow, shrinking, flitting off on the air currents, its charge and its existence summarily canceled.

She shuddered and fell to her knees, gathered the caftan about her and hugging herself. She began to sob, then to vomit convulsively. When the terrible moment passed, her lips spouted a torrent of prayers, in thanks. Unutterable gratitude that her touch alone was enough to negate the necromancy that had revived the evil Fernandez.

For Valentina knew she could not have survived, had her unspeakable fear come true.

Her fear that, in order to save her friends, she might be required to submit to the lust of an evil, putrid corpse.