He shook her off. "She seemed to be wrong about Cardenas place here. So sorry, but I believe she must only have used you to convey her message."

"Well, Im tired of doing nothing."

"Youve got to keep Lola from...losing her composure. And the wygyll will need you soon, neh?"

"Im not a G.o.dd.a.m.n midwife," she stormed, lowering her voice when she saw the heads turning. "Listen to me-I dont even know what to expect."

"Have you helped birth any children before?"

"Si-human children. But what in h.e.l.l will I be dealing with here? Do they have infants or an egg or what?"

"Its-" Gonji folded his arms and pondered his memories before answering. "A child. With wings. Rather like the cherubs you place in your churches. And I believe they normally give birth to two."

"Mierda," she swore, glowering at him. "Ill never forgive you for this. Do you know what madness this is? Where is your 'gatekeeper? Where are the answers to all these great secrets you mumble about? Youve proven one h.e.l.luva lousy leader." She fumed off.

Gonji returned his attention to the scouting parties with a heavy sigh.

Klank and Luigi shouted triumphantly from a tower on Gonjis side of the keep. Theyd discovered a guard post whose entrance arch reliably led back out to the middle-bailey wall. They returned and helped the women move Kiri there. Despite their care, they caused the wygyll a sudden pain, and an involuntary reaction of her great wing knocked Leone off his feet and almost off the rampart.

Orozco and Herrmann found their way to the far ramparts allure, and Buey and Patel joined Jaime Gonzaga and Abdulla el Kerim in the ward below. Luigi and Klank continued with their battlement mapping as the other four teams proceeded with the cautious scouring of the castle from the great gatehouse at the front to the unimaginable regions in the unseen rear.

As they crossed the middle ward, they discovered it operated via the same foreshortening phenomenon theyd witnessed at Castle Malaguer. The teams that glided along the ramparts moved sideways, backs to the merlons, and found that they made sorcerously rapid progress, leaving those down in the ward to dwindle in seconds to distant flecks. In addition, one team atop a rampart would view the other-and the walls surrounding them-as compressing and lengthening, distorting into spiky illusions as tall as firs.

The castle was a mirror-maze whose phantasmagoria were all too real.

The seven remaining undead a.s.sa.s.sins circled the gatehouse block that was the solitary evidence of the ageless Fortress of the Dead. Like some unmarked cenotaph to the glory of lost eons, the stone withheld its secrets even from these evil confounders of the grave.

Hilmar Ullrich Wiemer, whose cutthroat band had slaughtered and pillaged a Bavarian town until a pistol fired by the hand of a priest had ended his reign of carnage, separated from the others. His temple cat familiar sniffing and pawing the blackened soil at his side, he bent and pa.s.sed the dead flesh of one arm through the ethereal portcullis. Grinning at the others, he pushed himself through, the altered gravitational effect of the new s.p.a.ce pulling him down atop the multiple-arrow catapult.

Eight huge arrowheads tore through his body, pinning him to the device.

His temple-cat familiar, seeing the danger as it pa.s.sed through the portal, twisted itself in midair and landed on its feet a short distance away. It sat grooming itself as the other killers dropped through. Two of them pulled the viciously ensnared Wiemer away from the midair portals drop, catapult and all. There was a hiss of ghoulish laughter that might have wilted a monastery garden.

They pried Wiemer from the device amid the sounds of wrenching flesh and bone and the snappings of arrow stoles. Wiemers wounds healed as they watched, his windpipes burst pa.s.sage ceasing to screak with the air it devoured for his blasphemous half-life. His leaking eye socket refilled, as the soft, milky tissue oozed back up his cheek.

When Wiemer was whole again, the seven deathless a.s.sa.s.sins-oozing a putrid corruption that kept reversing itself-moved without hurry into the keeps fastness. Their temple cats prowled ahead of them with deadly cunning and their heightened animal senses. They split up as they began to comb the weird s.p.a.ce of the castle, knowing their trap was closing; the prey, near at hand, and bedazzled by the places spatial anomaly.

The antic.i.p.ation of the slow torment would now be supplanted by the ecstasy of the slaughter and the rapture of immortality. Where the power of death would be theirs to command.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

Jaime Gonzaga and Abdulla el Kerim had entered the central keep on the far end of the portico from where Buey and Patel had disappeared from sight.

Gonzaga, an eighteen-year veteran lancer who had survived numerous campaigns under Salguero, took to the lead, trusting to a pair of brandished pistols to give him an advantage over anything that might lunge out at them from the darkness. Abdulla, a dour and laconic Moor, had fashioned them a flambeau. This, he seemed reticent to shine into the murky corners of the keep. So Abdulla stayed conspicuously centered in the corridors they traversed, permitting Gonzaga to play the point man without any pang of guilt. Abdulla kept his saber dangled loosely in one hand, the thought of using the unfamiliar weapon in close combat never entering his mind.

To Abdulla, all that mattered now was escape from this satanic stronghold. Escape at any price.

Entering the keep, they found the first archway projecting them into the warmer air of a second-story corridor, containing quarters for the ancient contingent of nameless defenders.

"Remember," Gonzaga whispered back, "leftmost arch leads to second level. I can see the ward from out this window."

Abdulla nodded absently, caring nothing for this pointless mapping procedure-little more, he thought, than a tour of h.e.l.ls eager reception hall.

Jaime Gonzaga had begun to lose track of their bewitched meanderings-trusting in Abdulla to fill in his own memory gaps, for the later enlightenment of the others-when he peered into what looked like a block of once well-stocked larders.

This led to the heavily fortified bulwark of the millers gate, whose exit over a normal castles moat rendered it a popular target of traitorous activity during sieges. More than a few mighty fortresses had fallen through raiding action at such postern pa.s.sages, the gates thrown open by hands lined with lucre or moistened by cowardice.

"Here-mark this," Gonzaga ordered. "This gate might lead out."

"What?" Abdullas eyes shone with a nascent interest. "Then we must use it-I mean-we must-we must be able to tell Gonji where it leads to, for certain."

Gonzaga eyed him distrustfully. "Not now. Well retrace our path back to here later."

"Are we not supposed to explore? Im sure he will ask why so potentially important a portal was left unopened."

"I just said well-get away from there!"

Gonzaga stormed after Abdulla, who was already at the gates defensive housing, unbarring the door and pulling it open with a squeal of corroded hinges.

"Whats the matter, lancer?" Abdulla accused. "Lost your nerve? Afraid to find what might lie without? What will you do, shoot me in the back?"

What followed might have been averted had the Moor been able to read Gonzagas mind. The lancer did briefly consider shooting the man for panicking, then modified his decision to a mere clunk on the head. But now Abdulla moved into the gatehouse, and both men were startled to find that this archway had led into exactly what their eyes had declared.

Abdullas eyes flared in the torchlight as he caught up the firebrand and drew it inside the housing. "Behold-at long last a touch of normality. Let us open the gate." He pointed at the small portcullis and iron-bound gate beyond it.

With rasping breath, Gonzaga nodded and put up his pistols. Together they muscled open the grate and double door. A short drawbridge was all that separated them from the outside. Gonzaga stayed the Moors eager hand at the capstan wheel and looked through the arrow loops into the darkness without. Cool air soughed past the opening, but nothing could be seen without, save infinite blackness.

"Listen," Gonzaga whispered. "What does that sound like to you?"

"Water. At any rate, something that isnt inside this Keep of Dead Souls."

With a shared look of desperation, they strained as one at the capstan, the drawbridge lowering to now reveal a fulminating mist which was shot through with patches of luminescence with no source they could discern. Abdulla thrust the torch through, his arm disappearing from view. He began to say something, a look of triumph crossing his face. Then the triumph was replaced by shock. He clutched at Gonzagas jack with his free hand, tearing the front of it as he was powerfully wrenched from view.

The lancer cried out and grabbed at the voussoirs of the arch for purchase as he leaned out to see, holding his breath, expecting to be plunged into a wall of impossibly suspended sea. He saw Abdulla clutching for life at the chains of the drawbridge as cyclonic winds strove to tear him away.

And Gonzaga witnessed an awesome vision that made him feel as insignificant as a bead of moisture on the Sahara.

The drawbridge lapped out over empty air in a fathomless void full of gargantuan shifting land ma.s.ses. Tongues of land and wedges of sea and fire and smoke held their contained shapes as they drifted by, moving both up and down in the immense womb of black mist, propelled or levered by unknown forces. Gonzaga watched the pleading Abdulla el Kerim swept at last from the chains, his hands and face streaked with blood, his chest horribly collapsing as if from a monstrous vacuum. Abdulla was sucked off into the ether-mist, to bounce like a lifeless doll from one far-off land ma.s.s to another, at last a tiny dark speck consumed by a fiery sea.

With a grunting, terrified effort, Gonzaga pulled himself back into the gatehouse to fall hard onto the welcome feel of adamantine stonework. He fought his way back through the darkness, losing his nerve even as he lost his way back along his mystically tortuous path.

When he lurched into a bin-lined granary and confronted the foppishly plumed a.s.sa.s.sin, all hope fled. Gonzaga drew a pistol and fired it into Polidoris chest, flung it away. The renegade lancer now raked out his sword. Polidori cast him a fell grin and smartly drew his own saber.

As they circled each other and came into engagement, Gonzaga maintained his composure, knowing that he must divide his attention between the dead a.s.sa.s.sin and the familiar that must lurk somewhere near. The second pistol was reserved for that demonic cat.

But Polidoris reputation as a bloodthirsty and s.a.d.i.s.tic duellist had been well founded. In life he had killed a hundred sixty-one men, claiming that he could recall and savor the death-stroke inflicted on every opponent. Now, in suspended death, fate had served up Gonzaga as his first victim. Polidori treated it as a special event.

By the time the familiar-cat appeared, preening itself atop a grain bin, Gonzagas left arm was in ruin. He could not draw his remaining pistol, much less employ it. Polidori continued torturing the overmatched swordsman, bleeding him slowly, until Gonzaga fell among the dusty larders at the far end of the granary, near the bakehouse.

The a.s.sa.s.sin seemed to hold a whispered discourse with the temple cat for a moment, as Gonzaga slipped from consciousness.

"How shall we skewer so fine a pig?" the revenant killer hissed.

An instants mute pause- The sabers point lanced out in the musty darkness. The death-stroke was an old favorite of Polidoris-through the eye and into the brain.

The temple cat undulated where it stood, purring like a complacent tiger.

Buey leaned back with his torch and smiled puckishly at Na.s.sim Patel. He calmly took Patels pistol from his quaking hand and stuffed it into his own belt.

"Now, boy," the big man told him, "wait un minuto, and then do as I do, comprende?"

"Si, senor." Patel swallowed hard.

Buey tossed him a stern glance and bade him watch. He sat on the floor before the doorway with his legs vanishing beyond the portal. Then he lay back and pulled at the jamb till he and his torch fell out of sight.

Patel emitted a strained cry in the darkness, then waited, knees knocking, until the minute had elapsed. The tiny Morisco deliberated another moment before sitting and easing his legs through, as had Buey. His heart began hammering in his breast to see the phenomenon that filled him with fear. Suppose when he came through he no longer had legs?

But then he was abruptly sucked through, for he hadnt realized hed been inching forward in compliance with the intimidating soldiers order. He howled as he fell. The world suddenly dissolved beneath him, his loins filling with an electric charge, and he bit his tongue when he bounced on the cushions and tumbled over to strike his head on the floor of the dais.

Buey rushed forward amidst the explosion of feathers where a cushion had burst under Patels fall.

"Ahhh, dummy-I told you to lay back so youd fall feet first! Now look-you bit your tongue, and it bleeds. If youd stop walking around with your mouth open like a fly catcher-"

Buey had taken a liking to the ingenuous Morisco. Patel was young and eager to please, and he was obviously impressed with Bueys great size and might. Buey, on the other hand, had long been a champion of the little man, a hater of bullies, a curious mantle hed somehow acquired as an adjunct to his own fascination with size and strength. Gonji had been the smallest man Buey had fought in many a year, and his loss to the samurai had proportionately raised his esteem for the mans fighting skills.

"Youve got to be tough, Patel, if you want to be a Knight of Wonder," he was saying now.

"Si, senor, I do wish to be such a knight."

"Here-" Buey returned Patels pistol. "Spannered? Loaded? Si. Now dont keep it hammered until you need it, lest you shoot me in the back, eh? You see one of the big cats, what do you do?"

"I do not shoot until I am sure of my aim. And I squeeze, not yank."

"And?"

Patel swallowed, though his throat was dry. "And that might not be until the creature is sitting upon me."

"Esta bien-all right. You want to live to be as big as I am someday, no?"

As they shared a nervous laugh, something huge fell through the mystical portal of the dining salles ceiling-not where the two renegades had descended but a dozen feet nearer the archway that led into the corridor.

Jurgen Kleinhenz, thief and murderer, hanged after an ironic twist of fate had seen his ident.i.ty confused with that of one of his own victims-a man almost as nefarious as he-came toward them, his lethal axe arcing for a kill.

Buey shouted at Patel and brought up his blade, whose forte sang off the gleaming axe-head, sparking the dim light. Buey drew a belted pistol in his left hand and fired it into the a.s.sa.s.sins face. The ball burst through the cheekbone and out the back of Kleinhenzs head.

Patel made a queasy sound as Kleinhenzs ruined face tilted a grin at them atop his twisted neck. But then the axe murderer was looking down at Bueys belt, where The Oxs coiled rope still depended. And he was abruptly backing away toward the arch, no longer grinning. The memory of hanging still frosted the killers black soul.

Kleinhenz drew a poniard from his boot and stiffly hurled it at the ducking Buey. It clattered in some dim corner of the salle. Patel emitted a ragged laugh to chase his trembling fear. He pointed to where Kleinhenz was vanishing through the portal.

Then Buey turned and saw the cat. He bellowed for Patel to move. But the little Morisco could only stare in horror, frozen in place, as the vicious fangs and talons launched toward him across the short s.p.a.ce. The cat-creatures surging form struck Patel hard and bore him down onto the cold stone, where it rent and tore and worried his face and neck with savage speed.

Bueys thunderous, bellowing charge saw him kick the cat hard in the ribs. It felt like kicking something bloated, through watery resistance, but the creature hissed and scrambled off its ravaged victim.

Buey caught up Patels downed firearm. He rotated his aim after the scuttling creature, his arm trembling with fury. His shot split the air with a fire-lick and belching smoke, but the ball only buried itself in the churning masonry of a wall. It was gone.

And then Buey was bent over Patel, trying vainly to stanch the blood lapping from the little Moriscos severed artery, bubbling from his shredded mouth and throat.

A moment later both were bathed in spent blood and Bueys hot tears, and Na.s.sim Patel lay still.

Valentinas face was set in a grimace. Amidst her gasping, the infant cherub cried out. A female. Valentina held it before her in awe, pa.s.sed it to Lola, who kept sobbing and shaking, fearing to touch the tiny creature at its face or high on its back-the two places which alone betrayed it for something other than a human baby.

Valentina snapped commands, and Lola surrendered to the work, though her words were an incessant torrent of demurral. She finally refused to help when Valentina ordered her to sever the umbilicus. The condemned seductress blurted a stream of invective and performed the task herself.

Through it all, Kiri kept wailing, and Valentina did what little she could to soothe her.

"Simon!" she shouted, laying the infant at its mothers breast. "Simon, see if you can find a little more water!"

But there was no response. It had been a long time, it seemed, since the lycanthrope had last poked his head up from the invisible portal near the center of the floor.

"Ive got to get out of here," the other woman was gabbling.

"Lola! G.o.d d.a.m.n it, Lola, you stay right here! Shes not finished!"

Indeed, the second wygyll nestlings head was already crowning.

And then Lola was screaming and clawing backward across the floor until she struck her head against a stone gatehouse piling, dazing her. Valentina looked across the austere sentry post and froze, Kiris wailing m.u.f.fled by her own shrieking soul.

A steely-eyed, undead Aryan killer strode toward her slowly, crossbow aimed at her face. In the floor grating from which hed impossibly materialized, a devil-eyed temple cat now half-appeared, poised for a spring, propped on its forelegs alone.

Valentina fought to control her quavering hand, strove to take charge of her nerve, as the hand smoothed the fabric of the caftan at her thigh. She felt the hard barrel of the wheel-lock pistol beneath, certain that she could never get to it without tipping her intent, its cold steel feeling as unattainable as the sparkling waters of a mirage.

Years of dealing with the expectations of men set her body in motion without the need for awkward calculation. She lowered her eyes demurely and peered up at him from under a sheepish brow. Her breast heaved with soft sobs, her bosom jutting upward toward her chin as she leaned back on her arms in a posture that implored mercy and promised capitulation. A single conjured tear traced her cheek.

But she had never dealt with a dead man before.

The a.s.sa.s.sin sneered, and an unearthly wind-howl emanated from his throat that chilled Valentinas soul. He extended the crossbow closer to her face in one corded hand.