Gonji.

Fortress of Lost Worlds.

T. C. Rypel.

DEDICATION.

For JOSEPH STEFANO,.

whose limitless insights pioneered dramas 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 knights 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 spa.r.s.e copses. Rolling winter wasteland. The starlit bowl of heaven. His own horses 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 soldiers 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 hadnt 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 Alcalas sweat-sodden undergarments clung like a clammy shroud.

But he was alive. More than those other poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 surpa.s.sed 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 dont shiver, neither are you touched by the snows wetness. Is it the Devils fire that protects you?"

Her moist dark eyes moved from the pistol barrel to the soldiers face. She was sloe-eyed and raven-haired, yet her complexion was pale for the region. French, not Spanish, Alcala decided.

"Im 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 knights chin jutted, his jaw working to hear her words.

"So its an ambush then? Your cohorts will find me no unwary victim."

The maiden turned her head and gazed into the distance. "Thats 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 a thigh as she shifted from his harsh look. "Ride on, then. Use the pistol, if you be a man of mercy, but ride on while you still wear your skin."

The tremor in her voice gave him pause. He peered around them warily, expecting instantaneous attack from unseen h.e.l.lions lurching from his nightmares. Only the bitter wind snaked about him. Nonetheless, the clouding of his breath quickened when next he formed words.

"Tell me," he said uncertainly, "tell me of this...devil whos imprisoned you."

"A warlock," the woman explained over her shoulder. "A powerful warlock who holds this territory in thrall."

Alcalas eyebrows rose thoughtfully. "The one opposed by troops garrisoned at Barbaso? The one who calls himself Domingo Negro-Black Sunday"?

"The same. But what matter to you?"

"I have a certain interest in this business. Tell me more. All that you know."

She shrugged weakly. "Hes a wily one, that one. Wily and wicked. I know only that he rules my people with an evil hand. Takes what he wishes. And hes imprisoned me here for so long...so long. And do you know the jest of it? The faery ring hides me from the eyes of all who pa.s.s, save for those who possess neither the courage nor the cleverness to free me. Youre the seventh since I last stopped counting."

A seething anger in the knights breast swept the chill before it. He swung down off his mount, his boots crunching into the snow. Licking dried and cracked lips, he stepped awkwardly through the snow, dimly aware of making more of the slow progress than was necessary. Nearing the ring, seeing the womans surprise and dawning hope, he considered his pistols heft a moment before belting it.

"Can it be," she began in disbelief, rising, her breath coming in rapid gasps that punctuated her words, "that the ring has misjudged one at last? After so long? So very long? The ring, it-it-keeps me warm-keeps me from hunger-preserves me in this living death. But Im so bored. So desperately lonely."

Alcala watched the swift tracery of rolling tears that coursed the womans cheeks. He rubbed his sweating palms together. "What prevents you from leaving it?" he asked.

"The warlock said-" She paused to wipe her eyes. "He said Id be burned to a cinder if ever I tried to pa.s.s over the blooms. Id be blackened like a morning ember. Arent you afraid?" Her breast heaved with anxious excitement.

He cleared his throat. "Not very. Have you ever tested it? Say, with a piece of your clothing?"

Her eyes widened with innocent wonder, as if at a revelation. She tossed off her hood. Her l.u.s.trous, tousled hair tumbled over one shoulder. A wild expectancy flooded over Alcala: He thought she would next throw off her cloak, and he had decided that there would be nothing beneath but a lovely expanse of eurythmic whiteness, swaying to sensuous music.

Instead she reached out her hand.

"No-no!" the soldier warned. "Stand well back."

His sword sc.r.a.ped free. Clutching it with both hands, he dug its point into the snow beneath an orange firebloom. A wolf howled across the snowy plain. Alcala glanced behind him to where his steed snorted and pawed.

"Do you know its secret?" The woman fretted, her hands moving to her throat.

"Im not sure. Stay back-"

Sucking in a harsh breath, Alcala pitched the glowing ball out of the ring. It lofted like a will-o-the-wisp and descended in a slow arc that seemed to carry it back toward the faery ring. The knight raised his blade defensively as the woman gasped. But the bloom of incendiary sorcery at last dropped into the snow, where it was received with a bubbling hiss and dismissed with a brief column of steam.

Heartened by the natural reaction, the knight flicked another, and then another ball of eldritch incandescence into the dousing drifts. When he had thus cleared about a third of the faery rings circ.u.mference, he stood at its edge and smiled thinly at the maiden.

"I dont even know your name."

"Time for names, words, endearments later," she replied in a rushed whisper. "Can you get me out of this?"

He reached his hand across the broken faery ring, felt the warmth within, beckoned to her. Slowly, hesitantly she approached, touched his fingers, clasped his hand gently, her eyes pressing back the tears, her mouth forming words soundlessly.

Finally she found voice.

"I can...I can think of only one way to thank you," she whispered deeply. "But you must appreciate my disadvantage. Its been so very long since..."

Her lips brushed his, their breaths mingling hotly. She kissed him again more urgently, her arms clinging about his neck, her tongue seeking his.

At last the corporal of pistoleros drew back from her, caressed her shoulders, regarded the yielding in her moist eyes, the heaving of her bosom.

"Its still warm inside," she whispered. "Warm and soft. The night is long, and dangerous for travel. Nothing will enter here." She drew him by the gloved hands toward the center of the ring.

Humility, had the knight. Yes, and temperance, too, in roughly the same measure. It had been many weeks since hed seen his wife. And hed been with no other woman.

The enchanted ring he shared with the grateful maiden was approximately ten feet in diameter, warm as the sea breeze in May and fragrant as the gardens of Granada. Its floor was laced with angels breath, and to lie upon it after so many nights of frozen ground and saddle-slumping-with so delicious a maiden-was a prospect pardonable in the most onerous of confessionals.

So Alcala removed his gloves and cast off his morion, doffed his sword belt and pistol. Indifferent to the alarms in his soul. Heedless to the reappearance of the magic firebulbs that again completed the faery ring. Hearing nothing of the wilderness cries of the predators whose ululations carried the news from pack to pack.

Alcala pulled the ring maiden against him, eager to hold her again. Her slender arms twined about his neck, her fingers ruffling his hair as she pulled him downward, their mouths becoming one.

Downward, slowly downward slithered those inhumanly grasping arms, joining at his back now, squeezing. Squeezing the breath from his lungs such that he couldnt draw enough air through his nostrils. But when he tried to disengage his lips from the seamless suction of her own, he found his mouth engulfed by a nauseating sticky wetness.

His eyes bulged in shock and pain when his backplate collapsed in her lethal embrace. He caught a fleeting glimpse of milky flat gray spreading through her erstwhile sultry eyes, and then blinding white-hot streaks filled his vision as his breath hissed from his lungs, the vacuum crushing them.

The last sound he heard in his smothering torment was the caving in of his rib cage. Blackness overwhelmed him, sparing him the sight and sensation of the wetly lashing appendage that blasted through steel plate, and then again and again-through the flesh and bone of his back, battering and gouging-until it reached and removed his stilled heart.

The riderless mount whinnied and stamped, curvetting and bolting wildly among the winter-shocked poplars. But it could find no escape through the ring of dark shapes that closed about it at h.e.l.ls own mocking pace.

PART ONE.

Softly Rides the Reaper.

CHAPTER ONE.

Panic...

Panic is what tumbles under stress from the clutter of an undisciplined mind.

Iye-no. Thats not quite right. Work at it. Keep thinking. Keep staving off...panic.

The vicious wind lashed the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, implacably buffeting the white-bundled horse and rider as they pressed onward. Negotiating the precipitous switchbacks at night in a blinding snowstorm was sheer madness.

The madness of the hunted and the hungry.

Sabatake Gonji-no-Sadowara had long since become accustomed to such madness.

He let his philosophic musings drift off with the echoed howl of the wind. For a s.p.a.ce, he thought of nothing. Then he considered the grim possibilities of frostbite, which produced a cheerless frame of mind that evoked bitter memory. He saw visions of Vedun, a place he had learned to love and had helped destroy; and of the bizarre Simon Sardonis, the lycanthrope, perverse answer to Gonjis ten-year quest after half-understood prophecy; of unfinished business and compromised principles; self-imposed duty and failed charge; of wondrous knowledge that brought no gain; of his own changing priorities and eclectic beliefs. There came the fleeting warmth of familiar faces-good companions and staunch sword-brothers-abruptly twisted by lines of pain and set in the blankness of death.

Who are they?

His thoughts plunged and shifted with the broken rhythm of Toras plowing hooves. It had been hours, he fancied, since hed last looked back over his shoulder, back down the mountainside to see what followed. When last he had looked hed been plodding through the forested lower slopes, unable to do anything but press on. Upward, ever upward toward the peaks that would dominate the Spanish countryside, that would lift him out of the bitter winter of loathsome France. There was, in the present circ.u.mstance, nowhere else to go: The Pyrenees yawned forever to the west; to the east beckoned an icy Mediterranean grave. And behind, the pursuers relentlessly tracked him.

Who in h.e.l.l are they?

They had come in the night, a long-ago night following the Moon of Consummate Horror-when a town had been systematically destroyed, purged of its unspeakable foulness. They had approached almost casually, dark and silent, as if conveyed by the enshrouding h.e.l.l-mist that preceded them. Their number seemed small; perhaps no more than a dozen. Their armament was unknown but for the deadly bowshot-from arbalest and longbow alike-that struck down half of Gonjis party in the first volley with the random callousness of the plague. Half the remainder fell in the next, and broken, weary, and wounded as they were, the unsavory prospect of flight seemed their only alternative.

Gnawed to the point of shame by the f.e.c.kless trail they had left in their wake, they would now and again wheel and charge their distant pursuers. Another adventurer would fall screaming, and still another, torn from the saddle by the impact of a bolt. In impotent rage they would count their losses, come to terms with the inevitable, and grimly resume their flight.