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BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY T. C. RYPEL
The Deathwind Trilogy
Gonji: Red Blade from the East
Gonji: The Soul Within the Steel
Gonji: Deathwind of Vedun
Other Gonji Adventures
Gonji: Fortress of Lost Worlds
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1985, 2014 by T. C. Rypel
FIRST BORGO PRESS EDITION
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For
JOSEPH STEFANO,
whose limitless insights pioneered drama’s Outer Limits,
whose lessons I may yet learn
INTRODUCTORY QUOTE
Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.
—Francis Bacon
PROLOGUE
A whispered breath of evil rushed past the knight from behind, seeking the chilled gaps in his armor and cloak that no blade, no bullet or fang had found.
A tight cloud of icy crystals formed before his face as he tugged the reins. It took two hard yanks before the nickering steed would swerve again in the direction of the horrors they had left. The knight’s sword raked stridently from its scabbard in the wintry air. He cursed his benumbed hands for having failed him in his effort to reload his pistol after the last skirmish.
But, then, neither had there been time. No time at all for him who would remain among the living.
Scanning the snow-blanketed trail behind him with stinging eyes, he saw no enemy. He tossed his hood off his morion helmet to enhance peripheral vision. Shivering from the lick of the icy wind, he found his senses quickened. Gladdened withal, he peered into the snowy night land more closely, lip curling in defiance.
Poplar trees in sparse copses. Rolling winter wasteland. The starlit bowl of heaven. His own horse’s staggering path—this last troubled him most of all. He resolved to keep himself wide awake this night.
Too near now, his destination. Too much struggle, too many deaths to surrender to fatigue or hunger or the bitter cold of the unfamiliar mountain region.
Ahead rose the gray-blue moonlit stutter of the Pyrenees’ eastern extremity, which, from the soldier’s viewpoint, herded the flat white horizon toward the unseen silent depths of the Mediterranean. The barren trees thickened in the nearer distance but afforded no chance of concealment for any crouching enemy his imagination might conjure. It hadn’t snowed for two days now, and the deep velvet whiteness lay undisturbed for as far as the eye could see.
Alcala put up his blade and spanked his mount onward at a faltering gait. Frigid puffs of breath pointed their way. The renewed motion stirred the icy fastness about them, and Alcala’s sweat-sodden undergarments clung like a clammy shroud.
But he was alive. More than those other poor bastards could say. And why not? His matchless skill with pistol and sword had seen him through again. There was no denying it. And false humility was surely as costly a fault as unbridled conceit. Si, that was the truth of it.
The Castillian knight reached down and patted the pouch containing the sealed orders from the High Office. Intact. They should have been entrusted to him in the first place. But then his humility had prevented his volunteering to bear them on his person. Yet now Divine selection had seen them into his hands. Had he carried them all along, he would not have had to pry them from Gutierrez’ stiffened fingers after…
No—no good to think about that.
His belly churned, and he spat the bad taste into the snow.
It was then that he first saw the fiery ring fifty paces to the right. Then the figure within, slumped and mournful. Then the fire again—softly incandescent—the crouched figure—and then—
No, not fire. Glow. A muted fire-like glow, as if bulbs of blue and orange and pale yellow luminescence had bloomed upon the snow.
Santa Maria.
A young woman sat in the center of it all, knees drawn up to her chin, her countenance doleful. She wore a simple traveling cloak, its pastel color indeterminate in the magic firelight, the hood drawn over her head like a mantilla.
For an instant the knight fancied that he had been visited by an incarnation of the Madonna. As a child he had dreamed of such privileged encounter. And was he not on a mission sanctioned by the High Office of Inquisition itself?
But then military instinct moved him to a more suspicious turn of mind. Glancing about cautiously, he extracted his wheel-lock pistol, spannered the mainspring until it clicked, and then loaded and primed the firearm with deadly calm, forcing obedience into his numb fingers by sheer will.
The haunting apparition regarded him wanly, her expression unchanging.
When he was satisfied that his piece was in firing order, Alcala urged his mount toward the illumined maiden. The steed, heedless of any danger, plodded dutifully through the soughing drifts.
When the glowing ring was ten paces off, the knight halted and leveled the pistol casually across his thigh. His unshaven face forced into a stern set, Alcala studied the woman. Her melancholy, it seemed, was surpassed only by her loveliness.
With eyes only for the pistol, she spoke: “Do it. Do it—por favor.”
Alcala swallowed hard, and his head tilted quizzically. “Who are you? What are you, that you sit so complacently upon the cold ground? You don’t shiver, neither are you touched by the snow’s wetness. Is it the Devil’s fire that protects you?”
Her moist dark eyes moved from the pistol barrel to the soldier’s face. She was sloe-eyed and raven-haired, yet her complexion was pale for the region. French, not Spanish, Alcala decided.
“I’m a victim,” she said matter-of-factly, “as you will be. And he who imprisoned me in the faery ring might as well be the Devil.”
The knight’s chin jutted, his jaw working to hear her words.
“So it’s an ambush then? Your cohorts will find me no unwary victim.”
The maiden turned her head and gazed into the distance. “That’s what I said. What battle do you run from?”
“Run?” Alcala echoed sharply, eyes crinkling peevishly. “I run from nothing. I am Corporal Ramon Alcala of the Third Castillian Pistoleros, and you, senorita—you bait a trap very poorly indeed.”
The eerie flicker of the fireblooms limned the flesh of
