The solicitor Pablo Cardenas was an enigmatic figure. He said little and betrayed less by his actions, but he seemed ever present during the training, and Gonji fancied that he could always feel the mans critical stare at his back. And in that respect Cardenas was much like the general citizenry.

They were an indolent lot, it occurred to Gonji. They grumbled endlessly about dwindling winter stores, the long absence from Barbaso of chapmen and merchant caravans, and the terrifying oppression of the warlock who called himself Black Sunday. But they seemed curiously content, he had decided, if apprehensive.

Something troubled Gonji. These people were quite possibly not telling all they knew of the warlocks works and intent. It made no sense for the warlock to attack them, for it seemed he had nothing to gain. And their vituperative rebuff of Gonjis curiosity-their dismissal of his question as meaningless on the grounds that evil never needed a rationale for its slitherings-satisfied him not at all.

They distrusted him, as he did them. But as far as he could tell, they hadnt yet sold their humanity or their souls. Or those of their children. Not like that town near Avignon, where he had waited too long to act upon his suspicions.

And as for the Archmage Domingo Malaga y Colicos, he remained a mysterious presence, hovering over the territory and inspiring nightmares. Yet during the two weeks of tactical and weapons training, there were but two supernatural incidents.

Once, after a morning hunting party had come running back, shaken and empty-handed, the midday sky turned as dark as the oceans unplumbed depths. A hollow, mocking laughter rang out in the sky, diminishing gradually as the sun burned away the darkness.

The second occurrence was more deadly.

During a practice cavalry skirmish on the plains to the west of the town, Gonji saw his first glimpse of the hideous wailing banshee who brought the trembling death. Upon seeing the unfurling of the banshees ghostly cloak, which spread across the width of the valley, the troop ignored Gonjis shouted order to stand their ground and broke for town in ma.s.s panic. Gonji remembered something of this apparitions meaning, but when he saw the cold fury in the banshees fathomless, hungry eyes, when he smelled her graveyard stench and felt the sudden nakedness of his companions abandonment, his confidence was shattered.

He, too, fled her icy gray clutch and her blood-freezing wail, cursing all the while.

When they were huddled in the stables, breathless and sweating, Gonji berated them for having run, angrier with himself than with the troopers. He roared at them to overwhelm the nagging voice of his own guilt. He recounted the banshees lore, asking why they had panicked and why they now felt safe; further, explaining what they must do when, surely, they must meet her gaze again.

And he knew that he must prove by example the truth of what he claimed, if truth it was.

Two men and their mounts were overtaken by the banshee that day. Her hand had touched them, tainted them with her curse, knelling their premature doom. Their quivering agony had seemed interminable, abated later by paralysis. And at long last, death.

A woman looked into the eyes of one of the dead men, and what she saw there drove her to hysterics.

It was the imprint of the banshees face.

"Remember," Gonji shouted to the marshaled column of thirty lancers, their horses shuddering and snorting in the chill morning air, "this is a military expedition, si, but not a siege force. If attacked, we defend ourselves, but we do not initiate attack. If possible, I want to talk with this warlock, reason with him, if hes a reasonable man."

The excited townsfolk had turned out en ma.s.se in the cold blue dawn to see them off. They swarmed along both sides of the main street, hushing one another to hear the samurais words, whispering anxiously, speculating as to why the Oriental rode at the head of the troop alongside Captain Salguero. Military protocol seemed to have been swept aside before this arrogant heathen who went by many infamous names.

Gonji had arranged the display with Salgueros sanction. Though the captain was still in command, it was Gonji who was fortified with the only useful experience of Domingos wiles. He was their scout, their guide-and, by his own choice, their point man, chief target of whatever menaces they would encounter. He spoke long and loud before the gathered throng, laying out their plans in a manner anyone of military experience would find foolhardy, confounding of all security measures.

But that was his intention. The past had taught him to be suspicious, and he acted under the a.s.sumption that the warlock would have operatives in Barbaso. If he could convince Domingo of their peaceful intent, it could save many lives.

Any advantage would be welcome.

They rode out of town to cheers and well wishes. Soon their thundering hoofbeats and clanking armament drove the sounds of Barbaso from their ears.

They proceeded north through the valley, the plains rising gradually toward the hillocks where nestled the dread Castle Malaguer. Pennons snapped in the crisp air as they rode, their colors proclaiming King Philips Royal Lancers. Gonji and Sergeant Orozco rode to the right of the column, wary of the track ahead. Captain Salguero headed the lancers, looking both proud and battle-weary in his gleaming cavalry armor. Now and then he would cast Gonji questioning glances, as if he were an unseasoned officer appealing to a superior for direction. Gonji was a bit unsettled by this nascent indecisiveness in a once forceful commander. It made him mindful of the nervous young lieutenant named Valdez, to whom Salguero had entrusted the fortifying of Barbaso. Well into the previous night, Valdez had persisted in asking Salguero to advise him of what to do in the face of sundry imponderables. Cluttering his thinking with the shapes of nameless fears.

That was how Salguero looked now, and it boded ill.

They rode without incident till the noonday sun glared off the hard crusted snow. Stopping to eat and rest the horses, the men exchanged pointless banter while looking to the hills apprehensively. In days to come, Gonji would often recall the shortness of that mornings ride, compressed in memory by the enormity and number of the wonders that followed during that eventful day.

As they rumbled over the s...o...b..und savannah in early afternoon, the terrain began to alter. Subtly at first, copses of trees and outcroppings of rock where none should have been. But then the horizon line began to shift, to grow, to sprout new features seemingly with every stride of their mounts. Mesas could be seen now in the distance, stuttering across the lower edge of the hazy sky. The soldiers muttered in disbelief and rubbed their eyes as the cliffs grew unnaturally before them. There could be only one explanation: The troop was riding through another spatial distortion like the one Gonji had experienced at the windmill.

The samurai had warned them of this phenomenon, had cited it as one example of a situation wherein their guns would not avail them, for they could not follow the trajectory of a bullet to gauge target distance. But even so forewarned, Salguero slowed his column, his courage failing at the eerie sight, until at last he stopped them.

He clumped across to Gonji and Orozco, his face ashen as he spoke in a tremulous voice.

"This-this is not Spain."

Gonji nodded curtly. "It seems that way. But by the sun we see that we still travel northward. I say we go on."

The captain seemed about to expostulate, but he bobbed his head and wheeled back to the column.

They advanced at a slower gait, the mesas nonetheless creeping upward strangely against the hem of the sky, minute by minute.

The trees thickened. Gonji halted them and steered them off the trail to swing wide through deeply packed snow. The lancers ceased their grumbling over this inconvenience when Gonji pointed out to them the coiling tendrils of a dormant luna carnivora plant. His graphic explication of its habits silenced their carping and instilled more confidence in the samurais guidance. Many troopers now watched him to catch his reactions to the trail ahead.

The column was thrown into whinnying, curvetting disarray when the first of the faery-ring maidens appeared under the naked poplars at their left, to be followed shortly by two more. The ring-stones glowed garishly on the powdered snow, sparkling with rainbow hues like hypnotic diamonds.

Gonji raised a hand, and Salguero shouted orders that the men should rea.s.semble without a look to the seductive apparitions.

Gonji rode toward the ring that held the first seated, pouting maiden. Mournful blue eyes regarded him from under a languid sweep of long golden hair.

"Ride on," she said in a mellifluous voice. "You have not the courage to free me from my bondage."

Orozco shuffled up beside Gonji, eyeing the woman suspiciously. "Is this-"

"Hai," Gonji answered, and then to the woman: "But its not courage that will free you, is it? Orozco, do you have silver for me?"

The faery-ring maidens eyes widened, and her lips parted to bare her teeth. A look of inhuman madness etched her face.

The sergeant reached into a pocket and extracted a silver coin. He held it out to Gonji, one eyebrow c.o.c.ked in curiosity. "What do you want it for?"

Gonji didnt respond but pried the coin from Orozcos tight grasp. "Ill owe it to you."

The maiden began to hiss like a viper to see the glint of the coin. Gonji tossed it into the snow about three feet outside the twinkling ring. The woman executed an inhuman leap, as if launched by a concealed spring in the snow where she sat, landing outside the ring to claw in the snow after the charm-like piece of pure silver.

At once the glow faded from the stones. They winked out of sight. An alarming transformation occurred, the horses bucking in primal terror such that Orozco was thrown back into the snow with a jangle of armament.

The thing that writhed before them, unprotected now that it had left the magical ring, was not a woman. The dead young womans body had returned to an erupted grave to resume its eternal sleep. The slug-like monstrosity that had stolen her form now rolled and quivered in the snow, corrupting as the troopers watched, aghast.

Outcries of unabashed horror-gasps of revulsion-as the vicious appendages lashed and twined in impotent rage like willow branches in a cyclone. Never again would they plunge into an unwary travelers body to devour him from the inside out as he died an agonizing death, living tentacles boring in and sucking at his still warm vitals.

"Silver, you see," Gonji explained. "They cant resist it. Whether thats due to its glitter or its purity, no one can say. But its the purity that ends their foul enchantment."

The monster vented its wrath in a last gurgling cry, putrefied matter spewing at once from a ghastly aperture in its domelike head, to steam in the snow. Some lancers covered their noses. Others crossed themselves as they slowly clumped away from the awful sight.

Gonji helped Orozco gather himself, then cleaned out the sergeants purse and dealt similarly with the other faery-ring dwellers. Sullen and fearful, speculating as to the unknown terrors that might lie ahead, the column thundered off without a look back.

Orozco joined them, lagging behind, in no hurry to resume his position at the point. He was caked with snow, one numb hand thrust into his un-clinking pocket. The narrow-eyed squint of the freshly victimized took a long time to thaw from the sergeants face as he rode, quietly cursing Gonji.

They moved on in tense silence for a time, the mesas looming ever nearer, burgeoning eerily as though they were a painted landscape pushed toward the troop by an unseen hand. The lancers watched Gonji closely, still more impressed, after his facile handling of the faery-ring illusion and its dreadful secret.

Gonji saw the tightness in Salgueros face, the creeping petulance in the captains slowly dawning realization of his commands shifting allegiance. The samurai had no wish to erode the bond between him and his old friend, but when he shuffled near Salguero to have a word with him, the captain fended him off with curt responses and quickly broke contact.

Gonji dropped the matter, moving back to the point as his attention was drawn to the strange familiarity of the cliffs ahead. But then this, too, was abruptly forgotten when the first arbalest bolts arced down on them from the sky.

A lancer screamed and was bowled backward over his steeds haunches. Salguero shouted orders. Bows were unlimbered and aimed at the flying death merchants-two wygylls, the strange birdmen, firing crossbows with deadly accuracy.

Another soldier fell, a quarrel ripping through his breastplate in a gout of dark blood.

Gonji reined in and raised a steadying hand to them. His thoughts raced. He stamped toward the column and called out over their shouts: "Hold your fire! Dismount-use your horses for cover-"

Salgueros teeth ground as he looked from the descending birdmen to Gonji and back again, his pistol flourished uncertainly.

"Are you mad? What are you going to do, samurai, bargain with them?"

"Just have your men dismount, senchoo-por favor-let me try something."

The captain licked his dry lips. A bolt crashed into the snow before his horses hooves. The animal stutter-stepped backward. "I hope you know what youre doing." He swung down from his mount and aimed his wheel-lock over the saddle.

"Hai, so do I," Gonji said, low enough so that only Orozco, dismounting at his side, heard him.

Gonji extracted the artifact the cliff-wygyll had given him and, propping it atop the spike-point of his halberd, lifted it high overhead. He swung it slowly from side to side as the flapping attackers swooped down at him.

A hissing bolt skimmed his thigh. He caught his breath and held it, steadying the halberd, his heart thudding in his breast. The creatures companion hovered near, shrilling with bloodl.u.s.t. Its beak was jammed against the arbalests stock as it drew a bead on the single boldly mounted human.

But then its fellow warbled a string of near human syllables, seized its attention, and pointed. The larger of the two lowered the weapon and peered with bright, intelligent eyes. It uttered a chattering disputation and raised the crossbow again as it hovered near the samurai. But its mate shrieked a single note, lofting down lower, to hover beside it. The angry creature clucked once at Gonji, then spiraled off into a surly holding pattern, squawking down at the men hunkered beneath their horses.

Gonji heard whispers behind him as the smaller wygyll descended with easy grace.

"Pollo-pecho-seno-"

A chicken with the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a woman, the troopers had concluded in their befuddlement. And this one was indeed the female of the pair, her nearly human b.r.e.a.s.t.s jutting from the spa.r.s.e down that tufted her body. It had a softness and sheen that differed from her mates; differed, in fact, from her own heavier wing feathers. And her breastbone was not in evidence, her contour much more human than the males, whose forefront was dominated by the great arch of his cantilevered breastbone. The reversion to avian life seemed less p.r.o.nounced in the females.

She picked the wygyll artifact gently off the razor tip of the halberd as her mate keened his warning. Fingering it with taloned hands that seemed nonetheless deft, she lowered her head and closed her eyes as she touched it to her beak. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes, tiny rivulets coursing the slope of her beak. There was warmth in her eyes when she again looked at the samurai.

Gonji smiled thinly and bowed to her, feeling somehow honored, touched by an empathetic sharing. It was a sensation he had known vaguely before, on occasion, when moved by the earnest communication in a poem, in a pa.s.sage of music.

She laid the wygylls mourning emblem on the halberd point again and, furling her twelve-foot wings with an undulating rhythm, rose to rejoin her mate. The sputtering male drew close to her. They grasped taloned feet, beating out an unsteady path in the frigid air as they seemed to hold counsel, the male nattering and clacking his beak all the while. But his mate slung her shouldered crossbows strap around her neck and lay the weapon atop the quiver on her back in a gesture of ceased hostility.

After demurring awhile, the male did likewise. He disengaged from her and strafed the dismounted column twice, swooping low and shrieking at them in a bravura display of frustrated fury and breathtaking speed.

The horses reacted with rearing terror and could not be calmed until the creatures had turned and flapped nearly out of sight to the north.

Only Tora held his position, to Gonjis pride. The samurai sighed with relief that his instinct had been borne out again. Braced by the companys increased confidence and deepening respect for him, he nonetheless found his spirits plummeting to see Salguero grow more sullen as they resumed their track.

The deja vu Gonji had experienced earlier now turned to grim reflection: The mesas ahead were the same ones he had pa.s.sed to the south of Barbaso.

He swore under his breath, uncertain whether to apprise the captain of his fears or leave the dispirited man to his somber introspections. For, as if by default, Gonji had indeed a.s.sumed command: Captain Salguero spoke nothing now and only led the troop where Gonji directed.

The samurai said nothing of the phenomenon as the low mesa sprouted unaccountably from the plain at their right. Were they now on an endless loop of land, doomed to pa.s.s over the same ground forever? Would nightfall find them riding back to Barbaso like a troop of misguided idiots? Or, perhaps, had the Archmage somehow cast the entire valley into some lost world of untold horrors? Did he sit now in his stronghold on the real world, laughing into his cups?

But no-on the hills that topped the horizon, an unguessable distance off in the present spatial circ.u.mstance, loomed the dark turrets of Castle Malaguer.

Gonji had time for one brief speculative thought. Then he heard the rushing sound of water from the cataract around the next bend in the cliff wall.

When they neared the grotto the samurai quickly remembered, he swung the troop wide around it-which was fortunate for them. For an enormous boulder arced over the shallow ledges and crashed in their former path with an earth-shaking impact.

The column was thrown into chaos, troopers breaking for short distances in all directions, fighting their panicked steeds, as the giant emerged from the grotto to lean casually against the cliff face. He raised his oaken staff, which might have been a beam liberated from a mangonel, and used it to scratch behind his ear.

"Buenos dias," the giant bellowed archly. "On a quest, are we, conquistadores? Did your quest allow for the possibility of failure due to crushed bones and little bodies beaten into the snow?"

Salguero gestured, and the column fanned out and loaded their bows. Gonji cut across the broad stretch between the men and the giant, shouting that they should hold their fire. But two overzealous troopers launched their shafts, antic.i.p.ating the order. One glanced harmlessly off the giants patchwork armor, but the second found a c.h.i.n.k and embedded in his upper arm.

Bedlam.

The giant howled and tore the arrow free, which pained him still more. He caught up another huge rock and, fixing on the pair who had injured him, bowled the rock over the snow with tremendous force.

"Cuidado! Look out!"

One horseman evaded the bounding juggernaut, but the others mount stumbled. Both horse and rider were crushed by the enormous weight. The lancer was killed instantly, his back and neck broken, and the animal lay on its side, kicking and screaming.

Salguero roared, and the company fired a fusillade of whickering shafts. The giant turned away and covered his head. Most of the volley deflected off, or stuck in, the behemoths plate-and-hide armor; some shafts, however, found a home in his flesh.

Gonji pounded to and fro between the combatants, shouting hoa.r.s.ely and waving with his bow.

"Alto! Alto! Halt! Its all a mistake-alto!"

The captain held the next volley in check, though the giant advanced on Gonji, swinging his mighty oaken staff round and round his head for a strike.

"Stay your hand, there, Sir Giant. At least let me have a word with you."

The giant stopped and peered down closely at him. Yanking another arrow from his hide, he arched his head back in recognition. "I know you. Youre the little scuttler who seeks wonders but only finds giants, eh?" He began to laugh, a growling deep in his throat at first, then a blaring full-bodied mirth as he tipped his face toward the sky. "Have I seen any wonders, indeed! I have a sense of humor, you know, and I like a little wriggler whod rather make talk than hurt me with stings."

He scowled at the troopers, who looked about uneasily at one another but held steady.

Gonji fought the reins to move Tora closer. "Si, I would make talk, if you would allow me. Just spare them-they were frightened of your imposing appearance-and Ill stay their fire. Before you could kill them all, they might cost you an eye, or an ear, and Id hate to see so mighty a warrior as you walking around a mere fragment because of man-stings."

Having thus played on the giant races celebrated fear of human toxicity, Gonji succeeded in arranging a dinner encounter that none of the lancers would ever forget.

Most of them sat near the entrance to the grotto, eating from their cold provisions and muttering in wonder at the colossal form of the giant, but always staying close to their horses in case he should become suddenly hostile or perhaps suffer from indigestion.

Buey, accompanied by two of his sycophants, sat facing the giant on the far side of his cooking blaze-on which was spitted the carca.s.s of the bowled-over horse. The Ox seemed eager to display his boldness around Gonji since his defeat in their fight. And as a giant among men, he had long since been fascinated by things huge and mighty. To sit down to sup within a pole-arms length of a giants crushing power was the stuff of tales and ballads.

Gonji, Captain Salguero, and Sergeant Orozco all sat to the giants left, the Spaniards occasionally wincing to see the giants rolling red sack of a tongue licking his wet lips in antic.i.p.ation of the crackling, spitted horsemeat. The samurai tried to show no reaction to the giants various inevitable vulgarities, since the t.i.tan seemed touchy about them, his acrid breath by far being the worst.

"Call me...Urso," the giant said when they were settled, drinks in hand. "Thats not my real name, of course. Oh no. Im not that naive. I didnt give it to the warlock, and neither do you get it."