tried to shush him, but to no avail. “Look what he’s done—he doesn’t fool around, does he?”
And then the samurai saw. His lips curled at the sight. The windmill was flanked by huge barren oaks. And both the naked branches and the gently tilting vanes of the windmill were festooned with the bodies of Spanish troops.
Better that they had been dead than in their present state. For they hung like silkworms, paralyzed and suspended in dark, translucent cocoons; murmuring like the mindless possessed, seemingly no longer human.
CHAPTER SIX
“Looks like the table is set for something,” Moon prattled in a singsong voice.
He cavorted about the area, unconcerned with the forms suspended in living death. Now and then he would glance into the sky, cackling nervously. Bounding through the snow with amazing energy, Moon suddenly cartwheeled up to a hitching rail before the abandoned farmhouse, which stood beside the nearer tree. Never stopping, he made an acrobatic leap over the rail, a tumble through the snow, and then a springing double somersault that landed him feet first onto a blood-stained skeleton in the snow that had been picked nearly clean.
Brittle bones exploded in all directions.
“Hee-heeeee!”
Gonji gritted his teeth but said nothing, as he looked again at the hanging forms, mortified. Their eyes had been gouged out. They seemed paralyzed, their exposed heads lolling in slow motion, slack mouths emitting idiot sounds.
He dismounted and began to cut the wretched victims out of the cottony black cocoons, one by one. “Help me here,” he commanded.
“Are you loco?” Moon replied. “Forget them. Their cause is lost.”
“That’s no way for a warrior to die. Honor demands that—”
“What rubbish!” Moon scoffed. “Name me a good way to die! They’re just hanging meat now.”
“They’re soldiers. A warrior deserves a better death.”
“You’re loco, as I thought,” Moon said. “What land do you come from that rates one death as better than any other? Come on, there’s a warlock’s treasure to loot. And if you let this bother you so much, you’ll never make it that far. There are worse things waiting up the road.”
“I’m not here to loot anything,” Gonji said coldly as he went about his grim business.
Moon bobbed his head scornfully. “As I thought—you’re on the side of the soldiers. The warlock will make you regret that, methinks.” He crowed a laugh and bounded away toward the farmhouse’s rear.
The samurai gathered the wretched troopers—fifteen in all—and ritually beheaded them. He piled them before the windmill, wrapping their heads in their jacks. The mystical cocoon material was strange, dissipating when shredded gently, like heavenly dust. But opposed by resistance such as dead weight, it had been strong enough to suspend full-grown men. Gonji labored over an hour at the grisly task, feeling a mixture of fatigue, wrath, and emptiness of soul.
Ambling grimly to the farmhouse to find dry wood, Gonji found the door bolted from within. In no mood to trifle with resistance, he removed his swords from his obi, drew back, and skipped toward the door. A hard side snap-kick slammed it open with a thunderous report.
“Not bad,” Moon said from a short distance away. He wiped his lightly bearded lips with the long tassel of his cowl. “Your feet are almost as limber as mine.” He sat among the soldiers’ effects, sipping from a wine jug. They had been using the farmhouse as a station or command post.
“The back door was open, though. Still—not bad.”
Gonji cast him a scowl and set to gathering the wood. Outside again, he constructed a blazing bonfire that became the funeral pyre of the soldiers. The cocoons went up like dry chaff. Moon pranced up to him.
“Something’s not going to be happy about that,” Moon warned. “You’ll probably be taking their place for dinner, senor warrior. Look up there.”
Gonji followed his gesture. The sky had indeed become still filmier, gauzelike; webbing over with ethereal patterns that seemed to radiate from the moon, now reaching almost to the ground in spiraling tracks. Tora, too, had begun to sense the waxing peril, tossing and curvetting from his tether.
“Who are you?” Gonji demanded of the other.
Moon snorted. “I told you—I’m a thief. I would steal the warlock’s treasure that some would preserve and others would destroy. Those are the choices for any who would course this valley. Neutrality is impossible.” He looked up to the sky again, chuckling. “And now I see that escape for you is also impossible; so you’ll no longer be needing your horse.”
He grabbed up his staff and ran toward Tora. Seeing Gonji draw his katana and race after him, he let out a whoop and pole-vaulted over the anxious steed.
“Hah-hah! I don’t need a horse—stupid, noisy, nervous animals! I just wanted to show you how altogether impotent you are.”
Gonji stamped toward him, sword clenched vertically for a two-handed strike. His mind reeled, trying to make sense of the madman’s mania, and thought cost him reflex. Moon somersaulted over him and struck him a passing blow, high on the back, with his staff.
Moon alighted, squared up, and they faced each other, came to engagement. The thief executed a series of feints, then a rapid high-low-high spearing attack. Gonji slapped the staff aside easily each time. He timed the next strike and parried, slashing the staff aside with a vicious counterattack, then whirled into a figure eight of glinting steel that drove Moon backward.
With a derisive titter, the thief somersaulted backward, using the staff for leverage, then sprang into a low lunge that Gonji leapt over. The samurai moved to attack an inside line as the long staff arced around. His foot slipped in the snow, but he managed to deflect the circling blow aimed at his midsection. They clashed and clacked, neither gaining advantage.
“You fence pretty well for a man who insists on keeping both hands on his sword,” Moon taunted.
Two circling parries chipped wood from the staff. Then a sudden underhand snap of the Sagami chopped six inches from the staff’s end, leaving a sharpened point.
Moon brayed a laugh and blew him a kiss. “So be it, then—you die by your own device.”
But when Moon lunged, Gonji snicked out his ko-dachi with an eye-blurring movement, catching and turning the now deadly staff in a twisting X-block with both swords. He drove its point into the snow, and his one-handed swipe with the Sagami forced Moon to release his grip or lose his head. The samurai bore down on the now unarmed, backstepping thief with crossed blades.
“Too late,” Moon gasped. “You’ve lost anyway—look.”
Horsemen ringed them in, descending from the hills. They bore no recognizable colors or uniform. Even in the dark it was clear that this was some mercenary bunch. They must have been forty in number, but they were still quite distant and spaced too far apart to close the trap.
What sort of cavalry technique is that? Gonji found himself wondering.
“I’ll let you ride with me,” the samurai
