Part 36 (2/2)
”Were all dead,” Lola said in a trembling voice, stifling a sob.
The winged form of the gravid wygyll was carefully lowered from above. She fluttered and cried out as Buey slowly paid out the rope, several hands cradling her gently.
Gonji looked them over, gauging their worth in the survival struggle to come. Some of them moved to the embrasures. s.h.i.+fting the skeletons more reverently than had Simon, they wedged in to look back and forth from Buey, far below, recovering the rope, to the invisible doorway ten feet over their heads, where the hempen strand snaked up like some fakirs illusion, to whisk back into the s.p.a.ce the Ox occupied on the black soil fifty feet beneath them.
It was a while before every aspect of the magic phenomenon stopped eliciting breathy gasps and bulging eyes.
Gonji caught Simons smug ”What now?” look and averted his gaze, looking down to where Valentina tried to make the wygyll Kiri comfortable. Lolas face registered terror and revulsion as she scanned their bizarre surroundings. Orozco and Cardenas stood at one embrasure; Klank LoPresti and Luigi Leone-checking over their weapons-at another. Herrmann knelt on one knee and gazed about him with dim hostility, rubbing his chin with the back of a pistol-clenching hand. Jaime Gonzaga, a lancer who had been with Salgueros company in Barbaso, stood nearby, looking expectant, awaiting Gonjis next order. The three Moriscos left alive-Ahmed and his friends Na.s.sim Patel and Abdulla el Kerim, whose names Gonji had learned only yesterday-whispered anxiously near a turret archway.
Ahmed saw Gonji looking and pulled away from the others to speak with him. ”They fear that these dead soldiers will also come back to life at any moment. Have you any such-expectation?”
”We have more pressing worries,” he replied, turning his attention to the others. ”Gather the supplies here. Lets eat quickly and make a plan. Im eager for your suggestions. Lets divide the remaining water among us in case were-separated.”
Buey came into view, hanging over their heads, his body appearing by jerky stages. He slid partway down the rope headfirst, dropped right-side up as the ”new” gravitation took over. Then he reached back through the mystical portal to cut the rope free of where hed tied it and fell with a thud into their midst.
”I set the horses free,” he told Gonji quietly, to which the samurai nodded glumly in agreement.
”So theres to be no escape?” Cardenas asked, his face twitching.
”This was our destination,” Gonji reminded him. ”And our pursuers would only kill them, anyway. Perhaps later we can...catch them...”
”And so now what do we do?” Orozco asked.
The samurai saw the question mirrored in the eyes of all of them. He looked up to the high towers that loomed out of sight in the mist, and considered.
”See that fog?” Luigi was saying. ”Is it foul to breathe?”
”At least we know the Turks wont come here,” Klank noted, clicking the hammer of a wheel-lock. ”Scared of the dead, they are.”
”Not like us, eh?” Simon interjected in a rare moment of social partic.i.p.ation. The Italian brigand snickered at the grim reminder.
”Gatekeeper,” Gonji shouted at the turrets above, stilling the others.
After several seconds of breathless silence, Herrmann engaged their attention. ”Listen,” he gasped. ”Movement-the earth-”
”Sounds more like the sea,” Cardenas corrected.
The sound they heard was more a vibration they apprehended through their teeth, their inner organs. A s.h.i.+fting of great ma.s.ses.
”This fortress itself might be moving,” Gonji said. He called out again: ”Who is it that rules this domain?”
Simon chuckled. ”Well challenged, friend samurai. But dont you understand yet? This is the domain of the dead, hence its name. Our stubborn hunters may well have led us here, one way or another. Have you given thought to that?”
”Youre not helping, Simon,” Gonji said.
On an impulse, Klank LoPresti pushed open the door to the turret. It gave with a grinding of long-dormant hinges. He licked his lips and stepped through with weapon raised, as if expecting to encounter an unseen obstacle.
”Klank?” Leone called out, taking an uneasy half-stride forward, sword drawn, as his friend vanished from sight.
They heard wild laughter over their heads. Klank peered down from an embrasure sixty or seventy feet still farther up. ”I am LoPresti the Magician!” he shouted down.
”No doorway can be trusted to lead into what it serves up to the eyes,” Cardenas said in wonder. His gaze licked about, an expression of rapt fascination working its way through the solicitors unease over these strange events. ”I suggest-I suggest, Gonji, that we explore-cautiously-every aspect of this castle.”
Gonji exhaled sonorously. ”Its certain that we cant stay here. Weve got to prepare to defend ourselves.”
He spotted the rusting hulk of an old multiple-arrow catapult once used in the defense of the walls against some unguessable enemy. This they pushed under the invisible air-bound portal by which theyd entered, propping it such that the verdigris-encrusted arrowheads set into the perpendicular bank now pointed upward, rather than horizontally. Any intruder dropping in would find the fall rather more perilous than had Cardenas.
They began to explore this magically gifted fortification, their immediate need being to learn its properties apropos of their defense, their eventual escape, any lurking menaces, and a haven for Kiri, for the gallant bird-womans time was near at hand.
The questing band crept circ.u.mspectly into the enveloping s.p.a.ce distortion of the immense and ageless castle. Wary of every fresh mystical phenomenon, weapons ever at the ready, they gradually overcame their wide-eyed wonder over each new manifestation of its grotesque, sense-defying architecture.
The fortress was composed of ma.s.sive stone and ashlar blocks, whose towers and turrets seemed to rise forever, from certain perspectives. Surely, in a normal spatial frame, they agreed, this hold would have proven impregnable. And it was with a good degree of consternation that they noted the size of the doors and archways, whose height and breadth might have been adequate to admit the pa.s.sage of minor giants.
The place was cold and dank, unwarmed by the radiance of life for so long that the band feared what unearthly stirrings they might inspire by their pa.s.sage. The walls crawled with fungus and lichen, and in certain odd corners of the inner wards, miasmic vapors were agitated into chilling motion upon their entrance. These they studiously avoided, as they did the heavy portals whose closure against certain outer wards did not completely seal out the pungent odors that clogged their nostrils as they edged by.
Their explorations seemed to bear out Cardenas a.s.sumption: No doorway, once crossed, served up the actual scene viewed from without. Forward pa.s.sage usually advanced one deeper into the fortress, though the progress was more often vertical-to higher or lower recesses-than straight ahead. But sometimes, they discovered with alarm, such pa.s.sage regressed one to a chamber or rampart or bailey he had been in before. Left, right, or oblique turnings through the maze of pa.s.sageways were still less to be trusted. These could resolve-in a sudden breathless overlay of new s.p.a.ce-almost anywhere, sometimes turning one in an opposite angle from the one hed been proceeding on.
And these were the most treacherous. Once Jaime Gonzaga, leaning through a gunloop with reasonable caution, found himself sucked out through a prison tower window grating on a sheer wall far across the middle bailey! He was forced to cling by his knees, upside down and bawling for deliverance, until Buey found the magical access to the top of the tower above him, nearly a half-hour later. The Ox pulled him up by rope.
They were thus reminded of two things: the directional disorientations sometimes experienced in pa.s.sage; and the drawing action the new s.p.a.ce exerted once one had committed more than half his ma.s.s to pa.s.sing through.
The brush with death gave them pause. They stopped where they were, widely spread now in the environs of the vast middle bailey-the length of three cavalry practice grounds placed end to end-and gathered their unreliable wits. A profound despair accompanied this loss of trust in the senses. It seemed to sap their will to even move.
Luigi Leones amusing discovery that he could spank the wall with his blade and hear the sound echoed in various disa.s.sociated parts of the castle caused smiles that soon faded. One at a time, they realized gloomily what this could mean should one of them fall prey to danger as had Gonzaga, while out of sight of the others.
”This middle bailey will make an effective killing ground,” Gonji said, ”should we encounter-opposition.”
”How can we be sure of our shots?” Orozco asked, gazing down into the ward.
”We cant. But as with any other castle defense, we rely on the advantage of high ground. Seek what cover is to be found up here. Gauge the action of our shots. It would be difficult for an enemy below to locate us up here with any speed or reliability.”
The military men shrugged in unconvinced concession of the point. Gonji ordered them into pairs and set them to exploring further and committing every detail of their pa.s.sage to memory or mapping. He watched them move off to try to find the positions from which the teams were to proceed as one. Ahmed, Gonjis partner, waited beside him. Simon Sardonis and Pablo Cardenas were to remain as a rear guard. The solicitor had retrieved a torch from a wall sconce and fired it alight.
”Its always night here,” Lola observed aloud as she stared into the unfriendly star-shot sky, drawing her cloak close about her. Valentina cast her a critical glance from where she knelt beside the softly groaning Kiri.
Cardenas began to draw a layout of the fortress on a wall, using a charred stick. Gonji took note and drew near.
”You understand something of this place?”
Cardenas clucked impatiently. ”Certainly not. What can anyone know? Just entertaining a notion.”
Valentina patted the wygyll comfortingly and came up to Gonji.
”This is the place the witch spoke of, through me?” she inquired. And when Gonji nodded, she went on: ”Then perhaps I should be the one to lead the exploration? I mean...she might have left some...spell upon me, or-”
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