Stop this now.”
Simon snarled. “Not so easily done as you think, infidel.” He charged again. A deep lunge that Gonji turned aside, flicking his blade arrogantly at the other’s chin.
“Again!” the samurai stormed. “Stop this madness and we’ll—”
A rapid feint and vicious cutover that Gonji barely evaded—
He could taste the tang of steel as it sizzled past his eyes. His stomach rolled and leapt to his throat. Now thought fled and impulse reigned.
They were at last united in purpose: One of them would die.
A bone-rattling clash of arcing swords, followed by another. Gonji caught Simon’s next hard sally on his shrieking blade and turned it, but the powerful blow defeated his parry and slapped him solidly on the left arm with the broadsword’s flat forte.
The sharp sting galvanized him. The samurai shot forward and twisted his katana with a whiplike snap, cutting open his opponent’s shoulder.
Simon growled and contorted with shock and pain, Gonji drawing back a step and holding his blade steady before him. The beast-man looked slowly from the wound to Gonji, and on his face there dawned the sudden terrible resolve of the wounded animal. His lower jaw thrust forward in a display of primitive anger and glinting teeth. A devil’s-breath wind lapped the clearing again, then—
What followed came in fragmented sensory impressions to Gonji: Simon—the wind—silver-gray eyes looking past him, washing over with a new focus—bristling hair and lobeless ears flattening like a cowed dog’s....
Simon abruptly dropped the sword and launched into Gonji like a bighorn ram. The samurai saw a fleeting glimpse of the frenzied gray mare, stayed his descending katana. Then Simon’s head butted his midsection, and he went down hard on his back, losing the Sagami’s grip, breath whoofing out of him, knees jerking up reflexively, coruscating lights filling the black sky above him.
And he felt, more than saw, the great dark shape that soared overhead, skreeing in premature triumph. The treetops bent stiffly into the sucking draw of the wind, and the wyvern flapped upward on supernatural wing-strength, looped across the face of the waxing moon for the return dive.
“Get out of here, idiot! Get into the trees!” Simon was howling in French. But Gonji couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Simon’s life-saving tackle had knocked the wind from his diaphragm. He could only lie, paralyzed, listening to the screams of the roncin in its death throes, the sizzle of burning horse flesh. The skirring of thirty-foot batwings....
“Come on—crawl—do something!”
Gonji sucked hard for breath, but little came. He saw Simon dart across his limited field-of-view and heard him begin calling out to the flying dragon, words of challenge and insult. Then the memory of the creature’s ruinous saliva and excrement pushed him through his paralysis and into a desperate scramble over the pine-scented earth. He found the Sagami and dragged it with him toward the tree line.
Behind him, Simon dared the wyvern’s strafe. The monstrous familiar of Mord took up the challenge, knifed down at the poised mystery man, flaming saliva roiling in its throat glands.
Simon held his ground, cursing the beast. Then when he could wait no longer, he began to dart from side to side into the center of the glade, against the creature’s flight path, closing the ground between them rapidly. He snatched up his downed sword. The wyvern’s head coiled back; unused to dealing with a prey that chose to advance against it, it jetted two quick darts of crackling saliva that splashed the glade, searing the grasses but missing the bold adventurer.
In one motion Simon cocked and threw his short sword like a dagger, just as the creature passed above him, not a rod above the ground.
It squalled and twisted its sinuous neck as the blade glanced off a taloned hind leg. Serpent eyes of solid black—Mord’s eyes—riveted Simon with spears of demon-hate. Blatting a clump of corrosive excrement that landed twenty yards from the scrambling Gonji, the monster undulated its leathery wings, twisted into a tight arc for a return engagement with its new tormentor.
Gonji reached the trees, panting, on his knees, rubbing his aching abdomen. He drew breath in hungry gulps, grimacing at the reeking stench of the beast’s waste that burned the grasses in a spreading circle nearby. He saw Simon race toward the center of the glade after his fallen sword.
The wyvern bore down on him.
“Iye,” he whispered helplessly. “Run, you fool! Run like the wind!”
Feeling desperate and helpless, he watched Simon slide on the ground, retrieve the useless steel, then launch into a mad zigzag sprint toward the nearer, eastern side of the glade, as the wyvern arched its long neck and began to spit rapid darts of lethal yellow fluid.
The samurai’s heart froze when it seemed the man had been struck. But the jet had passed him by, and with that amazing sprinting speed Gonji had seen from him once before, Simon gained the trees.
But the forest was sparse to the east. And the wyvern’s night vision was keen.
Gonji remembered the bow and quiver, ran after them, his breath regulating now. Grabbing up the weapons, he lashed the quiver to his back and ran toward the sound of the monster’s flight. In the trees: the chilling hiss of its fulsome armament.
Gonji paused to listen an instant, staring overhead, cautious both for the beast itself and the crackle of its foul excreta. With startling suddenness the wyvern barrel-rolled over his concealed position. Gooseflesh flared over his body as he broke from the trees and into a smaller clearing; anything to avoid its direct flight path.
He nocked one of the shafts impregnated with worm’s venom. “Simon,” he called. “Are you hurt?”
No response.
The wyvern cried out keeningly and in a flash was nearly over him again, blotting out the gibbous moon with its tenebrous bulk.
It spotted him. Too late. It was already past when its bowels erupted in an errant dropping that melted the upper branches of a shielding pine, running down its trunk in unnatural putrefaction.
Gonji scowled. Sighting and pulling with desperate speed, he launched the poison-tipped shaft. He missed, the creature’s ponderous bulk already covered by the eastern pine-peaks.
“Cholera,” he swore, slapping his thigh in frustration. He rubbed his sore abdomen, fought back a mild nausea. Drew another arrow and began to run deeper into the intermittent bower, his sashed swords scraping through the brush.
“Simon,” he spat in a growling whisper. Still no answer. He could hear the wyvern’s wind-rush low over the treetops, but its position was lost to him.
A brook trickled through a delve on his left, the trees thinning more now. Thoughts whirling, heart racing, Gonji sprinted along the bank where a stand of oaks lent partial cover, though the farther bank lay bare to the raining death from the skies. At the eastern end of the brook the enormous trunk of a fallen oak, split by lightning, bridged the delve at head height.
“Skreeee!”
Gonji leapt about, saw Mord’s shining black eyes in the antlered head that careened down with a vengeance. The jaws gaped as it sailed in, slowing to aim, neck poised. It hawked a hissing stream of saliva.
