Part 40 (1/2)

And then Valentina began to quiver, for thoughts of her syphilitic affliction had now jarred something loose among her guilt-bound memories.

She had at last remembered the face-the touch-the sweating grasp like so many others shed known. The same boorishness, braggadocio. Another virile specimen who would ply her the way he just knew she was born to be plied. She remembered all but the name of Fernandez. And she knew what she must do.

”Shem-” she said, fighting for control. ”Shem, you must send me back to my friends. I have an-an unfinished quest.”

”No,” he protested. ”Did you not listen? I told you they were doomed. Something is happening in that tortured nexus of worlds. You cannot go back there!”

”But why?” Valentinas eyes went wide with apprehension.

”Because the gateways are closing in this place. That fortress is enfolding back into its center. All inside it will share the fate of the meddlers who fas.h.i.+oned it so perversely.”

”What do you mean?”

”Theyll be compressed-crushed within it.”

”Shem-you must do something!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

They were naked sacrifices for the entertainment of a leering cosmos.

To the perspective of the inhabitants of the Fortress of the Dead, Wunderknecht and a.s.sa.s.sin alike, it seemed as though theyd been jolted by the whim of some capricious G.o.d, their tilting grounds wrenched apart, such that they stood in awe aboard chunks of flying debris in an immense ether-bound arena.

Just as things had appeared to revert to normality, there had been a jarring impact, knocking them all off their feet. When they had gathered their senses, they found themselves floating in a s.h.i.+mmering, murky void on fifty-foot sections of the exploded castle. The jagged segments drifted slowly on straight lines-vertical, horizontal, and skewed-pa.s.sing one another until each reached the edges of their mist-bordered sphere of containment. Moving through the barrier, they would find themselves momentarily disoriented, realizing finally that they had resumed their inexorable course at the extreme opposite end of the line from which theyd begun.

But the next pa.s.s brought each piece of castle ground or wall or turret nearer to the others than the last. And nearer to the trembling center of that sphere. It was a shrinking, spherical arena, with a dreadful core that looked like a living void. A hungering darkness.

For a brief interval all thought of combat was forgotten.

Gonji stood with his swords lashed to his back, his retrieved bow hanging limply in one hand, peering outward from a chunk of middle bailey ground bordered on one side by a sheared-off section of the main gatehouses tall inner towers. He scanned the incredible phenomenon with less sense of doom than of wonder. He could make out figures on the truncated air vessels, but none seemed near enough to engage, whether friend or foe. His ma.s.s of debris was on an outer plane, cutting a short arc from the enveloping sphere, but growing larger with each pa.s.s as he moved toward the center.

But Gonji and his band all soon noticed what occurred when a fragment reached the exact center of the sphere: It dissolved into nothingness, as if fed from front to rear into an invisible devouring maw.

Gonji could make out two figures on a horizontal path near the center, racing about in frenzy on the bakehouse roof. He recognized Simon first, then saw that it was Cardenas with him. They had perceived their peril and were frantically searching for a means to survival. Gonji could only watch helplessly, from perhaps hundreds of yards away.

He saw Simons leap down onto a section of marble floor that pa.s.sed below. Cardenas lost his nerve, waiting until the next agonizing pa.s.s to drop down through twenty feet of air, nearly missing the banquet hall section, shrilling with terror as Simon grabbed him, near an edge, and pulled him to safety.

And then a crossbow quarrel shattered on the wall behind the samurai. Gonji searched below him-the undead murderer Jurgen Kleinhenz was reloading from a fractured piece of the kitchens and larders.

”No steadier hand than a dead one,” Gonji taunted, nocking, aiming and planting a shaft in Kleinhenzs chest-with no effect save moral victory.

There would be no truce with the undead, even in these mutually destructive circ.u.mstances.

Kleinhenz pa.s.sed through the barrier, his perch reappearing far above, the killer well covered. No opportunity to try anything else.

Gonji looked back to where Simon and Cardenas crouched near Klank LoPrestis dead body, and the samurai gnashed his teeth in anger. The ground theyd occupied before had now diminished weirdly in perspective as it neared the arenas deadly center. Another chambers broken wall descended past Gonjis viewpoint on an oblique angle. On the floor was the corpse of Na.s.sim Patel, his head in grisly ruin.

Luigi Leone had come face-to-face with the savage Ottef Abu-Nissar just before the ma.s.sive shock that heralded the unfolding of the castle. When he recovered his senses, he flicked horrified one-eyed glances from his amazing circ.u.mstances to his strangely inert opponent. Abu-Nissars cat had strayed too far from him and now occupied a different purchase: the crenellated disc of a turret below them.

Abu-Nissar lay still, and the trembling Leone drew his sword and began to slash at the unmoving form, hoping desperately that hacking it to pieces would prove lastingly effective.

Buey drifted by, still sorting himself out, quaking with disorientation. He was on the overturned ceiling of a bedchamber, shards of gla.s.s from a chandelier all about him.

”Hang him, Leone!” Buey was shouting, recognizing who it was. ”Strangle him.”

Ahmed Il-Mohar descended on a bizarre perch-the steps of the central keep, about eighty feet above and to the right of the right-angled wall of the ward on which Leone hacked frantically.

”No, he must be hanged!” the Moris...o...b..llowed across the ether, concurring with Buey.

Ahmed eased toward the jaggedly crumbled edge of the stairs, then scrambled back again when he saw the ghastly, fathomless s.p.a.ce beneath him. He hugged an ashlar block to forestall his vertigo. His staircases course drew him nearer to Leone, but as he pa.s.sed he forgot the scene rising past him now and could think only of the proximity of his own death.

Sergeant Orozco believed himself trapped in a nightmare. He recovered consciousness, his head caked with blood, every joint aching from his fall. He was in a now-exposed dungeon chamber, tipped slightly such that the drop into an abyss, below, yawned up at him. Fighting back a seizure of nervous tremors, he took stock of his situation. He saw the flatter, broader crag of stone-jutted land looming up below him like a rising leviathan. He would have to jump outward to make it. Quickly, before the moment pa.s.sed- He leaped, slamming down among the headstones of the graveyard that had occupied the grounds beyond the barbican.

Breathing heavily, heart thumping, he saw Wiemer clutching Lola around the neck on a strangely listing portion of the banquet hall gallery. It was wobbling slightly, like a spun platter. Rubbing his eyes, still refusing to believe the physical evidence of his bizarre environment, Orozco took aim with a pistol.

It had to be risked. The woman was likely lost anyway. And why not try it? None of this was real. He steadied his hand on top of an ancient gravestone. Clack. The pistol was empty. Orozco swore, as he vaguely recalled discharging it earlier.

This was not a dream. His mind screamed in rejection of it. But it was all too real.

He saw Cardenas on the banquet floor. Saw the leaping form of the now lupine Simon Sardonis, bounding atop a floating piece of the outer bailey wall to try to give chase to a temple cat and its a.s.sa.s.sin, several fragments away.

Orozco shook his head and licked his parched lips.

”Cardenas!” he blared, seeing the man hefting a pistol. ”This one, Cardenas! Shoot this one!”

And then he lost his view of Wiemer and Lola, who screamed as she was wrenched back by her hair again.

Cardenas looked up to the chunk of gallery that drifted by in a pattern that would cross the crumbled banquet halls, where he clung. He dimly heard Orozcos shouts, wis.h.i.+ng he could be left alone to die, caring nothing now for these people who had led him away as a captive, torn him from his family.

But in his bitterness he wished pa.s.sionately to lash out at something, someone in this grotesque nightmare. It might as well be one of the undead a.s.sa.s.sins. His wheel-lock pistol clutched in a sweating fist, he drew a bead.

But then he saw that Wiemer used Lola for a s.h.i.+eld, and he was moved by concern for the woman. Shaking as he was, he knew he couldnt chance the shot. They pa.s.sed by, Wiemer holding a grimacing Lola tighter and hissing his unholy laughter, as Cardenas withheld fire.

The solicitor cursed, then saw two deadly visions: Abu-Nissars scrabbling temple cat traversed a course toward its lifeless charge-chopped to pieces by Leone-that would soon bring it into Cardenas range. Secondly, the banquet hall chunk he occupied would soon pa.s.s through the spheres devouring center, taking him and Klank LoPrestis corpse with it.

Cardenas raced about the rough-edged floor, saw the rising roof of the granary, thirty feet below. Shrieking a prayer for deliverance, he threw himself atop the thatched roof, cras.h.i.+ng partway through, knocking the wind out of him. But he was safe from the center for now.

He pa.s.sed through the misty barrier at the spheres edge, found himself moving upward through utter blackness for a long time, babbling in terror. He gasped with relief to pa.s.s back into the arena again but almost at once caught sight of the walking corpse Fernandez, who exchanged crossbow fire with an unseen archer. Then the gallery was descending toward Cardenas, though farther away now. He heard shouting-a shot behind him somewhere.

Sergeant Orozco was pa.s.sing him on the far side of the gallery portion. He saw the sergeant aim and fire a pistol, cursing. He had missed his shot.