half-remembered bruises and abrasions, cuts and lumps.
Yet nothing so disturbed his harmony as the poignant memory of his failed duty on behalf of Flavio and the Elder’s city.
Cursing the despairing voice within that bade him surrender in the name of graceful failure, he rode on.
Clenching his jaw, Gonji warded off the pine boughs that sought his face along the path, brushing and scraping at him and his mount, now and then twining about his mighty longbow so that he would be forced to halt and disentangle it. The forest seemed to grasp at him, hold him back from his purpose. But at whose behest?
The roncin picked her footing in the cloying darkness. The path twisted through the lush, rich-smelling blackness of the forest, the horse’s hooves thudding over the spongy pad of pine needles and fecund earth, the verdant scents intoxicating.
The night lay deep, heavy clouds mantling the treetops. Animals and insects ceased their trilling and chirruping as the man-beast clump crashed through their sanctum, only to take it up again, beratingly, at their backs as they rode on. Goatsuckers warbled their plaintive cry, and a judgmental owl hooted from the high limbs of a great oak that demarked a fork in the path. The air was cool but damp as sea spray.
Or was it his own fear-sweat that chilled Gonji’s skin wherever his half-kimono brushed it?
He growled low in his throat and spat out a gnat. The forest shroud thinned a bit, pilfering a few lonely rays of gray moonlight. Ahead the trees grew more sparse, disdaining to negotiate a knoll in the immediate distance, overgrown with dwarf pine and furze, creeping vines and wild berry bushes.
Gonji paused to see the dance of silver light at the head of a knoll. And what might lie over the rise? Elven carousal in a private midnight amphitheater? Or was it a grim drama the creatures of the wood awaited, lacking only the arrival of the human participant?
(further on you will meet our brothers)
Gonji licked his dry lips and bared his teeth at the fanciful notion born of his wrath, almost wishing it were true, as he spurred the roncin into a canter and clumped up the knoll, his left hand resting on the Sagami’s hilt.
Why does Mord let you live?
Cresting the slope, he peered down into a moonlit delve, a gurgling brook meandering along its nadir. An open wound in the forest. For an instant as he sat aboard the steed, squaring his shoulders against an unbidden feeling of aloneness and vulnerability, he imagined that his faulty sense of direction had betrayed him: He could not recall having passed this way with Tralayn.
But it abated at once when he caught sight of the ominous rise of the foothills before him. The sleek-faced escarpment he sought was scarcely a kilometer distant.
And now—a new awareness: The forest whispers had receded; he had penetrated into a sphere of paralysis, for although he could sense the shapes of staring things all about him, not a living thing moved save for the trees, nor did any sound come to him but the murmur of the brook and the slow, heavy soughing of the wind at his face, ruffling his clothes and hair. A deep note of warning, as of a watchdog’s growl.
A misshapen frustration, topped by a many-headed anger, rose up in snarling defiance within him. He set his jaw against the press of the wind, his face an inscrutable Eastern mask; but the Western half—the tameless, emotional Western child part of him—jabbed the roncin’s flanks, harder than necessary, directing her down into the delve.
Gonji eased down off the shuddering horse, allowed her to drink from the brook as he paced the bank from side to side like a predator spoiling for a fight. Weary and eager to drink though it was, the animal repeatedly paused in its slaking to cast about with rolling eyes, nostrils quivering in the wind, ears flicking to snatch at sounds beyond Gonji’s range. The samurai watched her closely, keeping near lest she flee to leave him alone on foot.
Then the moon tore a hole in the scudding cloud sea and emerged in silvery glare. Gonji peered up to see the soft white ring that dimmed its edge. A portent of more rain. Leaden wisps skimmed over the moon’s surface, obscuring it again, making its shape indistinct. It was bloated, bulbous. Almost full....
Full?
A sudden screaming chill along the ramparts of sanity.
Iye. No. Not full. Not for two—three days yet. The last full moon had nearly seen him dead. This one must find him very much alive. Oh, very yes. There was much that must be done before he could pass with honor into the land of the dead.
The roncin nickered, trembling and stamping. Gonji spoke to her reassuringly and caught up the reins, calming her as she stamped back against his gentle pressure. He brought her under control and leapt astride, riding out a brief spate of anxious bucking.
The wind gusted through them again, swirling about, buffeting them as if shaking a fist against their continuing. Gonji experienced a momentary unbidden vision of the monstrous beasts of the nether world he had encountered in his time, few so terrifying as those he had seen in Transylvania; of the strangling white clutch of the Weeping Sisters, those foul blood-lusting things which had tried to feast on his unwilling person; and of their prophecy that he would die in this land. Hollow threat of the evil Deceiver, or oracle of certain doom?
But then came the fortifying thought of the fulfillment of his destiny, so close at hand, if deadly in promise; and of his hatred for the fulsome Enchanter, who had toyed with him, had so casually regarded his prowess and his courage. And lastly he thought of the lamented dead, and of the fighting hearts of the men and women of Vedun....
Karma....
With a grunt he kicked the steed across the brook and up the delve’s far side.
The trees soon parted. Before him lay the broad glade that fronted the concealed cave. The Cave of Chains. Frosted lances of moonlight slanted through the treetops to dance over the tall, still grass. Cool and quiet it was, the pines and larches that rimmed it as implacable as a court of inquisition. The forest at Gonji’s back seemed to his heightened sensibilities to recede of its own accord, abandoning him, having offered its fair warning.
The roncin’s snorting was the only sound, the wind having died away now. The animal’s pounding hooves clumped forward three strides into the glade and came to a confused halt. She tossed and whinnied fretfully, such that Gonji drew on the reins to steady her. But the more he tried, the more recalcitrant the horse became, tossing her head and curvetting, then clattering a full circle before he yanked her, shivering, to the fore once again.
(Deathwind) Stop it. That means nothing now.
(He is here) He’s a man, that’s all. And by all the spirits of my ancestors, I aim to learn what he’s about....
The samurai whispered in calming tones to the steed and dismounted, lashing her tightly to a stump at the eastern end of the glade. On an impulse, he removed the longbow and quiver of poisoned arrows, looking about him circumspectly all the while. These he brought with him as he strode lightly across the grassy clearing.
Halfway to the boulder-strewn base of the hill and the cave entrance covered by tangled overgrowth, Gonji was seized by a sudden conviction of the alienness of his presence in that place. The same skin-prickling sensation he had experienced on the day he and Tralayn had entered the secret cave. At the center of the glade he lay down the bow and quiver and began pacing laterally before the cave entrance, adjusting his swords and striving to control his breathing and pulse.
He would have
