He stopped and dismounted, relieved his bladder in the snow. Feeling hungry, he tarried awhile on the broad plain that must mark the center of the valley floor. Hills rose humpbacked with snow on either immediate horizon, but he could still easily make out the cloud-crowned Pyrenees to the north.
As he munched a piece of dried beef and fed Tora a few handfuls of meal, the samurai pondered again the epoch-making mystical revival in Europe, trying to make sense of it, some discernible cosmic pattern. Something was happening on this continent. The world seemed burdened by a heavy karmic legacy from times past. Multifarious forces struggled for supremacy, and Gonji had run afoul of more than his share. They seemed to take a keen interest in him. And now, it seemed he would be facing them alone…again.
And how fared Simon Sardonis these days? he wondered as he remounted.
“Cholera,” he swore under his breath, implementing a favorite Polish expletive of an old comrade, descriptive of a disease that produced unsavory effects.
His mood lightened as he patted his steed’s shoulder. “Do you know, Tora, what that giant had in mind for you?” Tora seemed unconcerned as they broke into a canter across the crisp plain.
It could not be far to Barbaso, and there was no losing the way, even given Gonji’s sometimes poor sense of direction. Barbaso—and perhaps some answers to a few questions before he proceeded to Zaragoza.
* * * *
Twilight gloom descended with the fierce north wind, and still Gonji had not seen the rooftops of Barbaso. The trees began to gather into pairs, the pairs begetting copses, and soon Gonji pulled up before yet another misplaced wood. Here he felt a dawning fear, a sense of isolation and vulnerability. A presence of things wholly unknown. Certain of the trees and scrubs were of varieties he had never seen before, and the wind seemed to swirl and howl from out of the wood, daring the adventurer with its dangerous allure.
He would find a suitable spot, he decided, gather what kindling he could, and make camp for the night. Progressing farther seemed foolish, although Barbaso might lie a scant three hundred yards beyond the wood. He was weary and in no mood to run any gauntlet fixed by haunters of the night.
He had not advanced far in his quest of a campsite when he became certain that he was being followed. The nape of his neck prickled time and again as he scoured the periphery from the corners of his eyes. Once, on impulse, he wheeled and nocked an arrow in one swift movement, only to find nothing lurking with gaping jaws; no track in the failing light but his own.
But he fancied that he heard a muffled chatter of mocking laughter. Anger roiled in his breast as he continued on his way, waxing resolved now to find Barbaso by the glimmer of its lamplights.
So intent was he on furtive side glances that he nearly made a fatal error. Mounting a rise in the trail bordered by thick brush and evergreen, he caught the hint of lightning movement just ahead of Tora’s warning snort—too late to veer.
Snake, was his first thought, but almost at once he knew differently. The snaring vine creepers coiled about Tora’s forelegs, more following from the brush—thick, elastic brown tentacles—as the halberd came up and slashed down to the right—up, over Tora’s crest—down hard on the left— Once again to either side as the horse whinnied and fought its way backward.
Green splotches now discolored the pole-arm’s vicious edge.
Gonji listened to the clacking of reeds in the deadly plant’s base. Whether they communicated pain or anger he could not tell.
He calmed Tora and steered him wide under the trees to examine the predatory plant from safe vantage, a grimace frozen on his face.
It was the luna carnivora, a popular sorcerer’s snare. It grew in mated pairs, one on either side of the path, waiting in ambush behind concealing trees. Its endlessly elongating tendrils could squeeze the life from a bull, and once immobilized, the prey was slowly flayed and eaten via adhesive tongues that tore flesh in thin strips. A hideous death. The death of an insect.
Gonji hawked and spat bile from his throat. He viewed the reposing creatures with an ambivalent fixation. The hidden sides of the tree trunks were decorated with skulls, human and animal; the waving plants themselves, adorned with tinkling bones. It was said that in the base of the bole of each luna carnivora were set two pairs of eyes so chilling to the soul that meeting their gaze would cause one to feel revulsion in being looked upon ’til the end of his days. Eyes that made one curse his own power of sight.
Gonji resisted the urge and pushed on. But he was certain that he had heard that restrained laughter again.
The wood was an eerie place. The moon seemed huge and leering above the trees, and a fine gossamer mist seemed to trail in pinwheels from its dully glowing rim. But the samurai rode with confidence: He had yet to encounter any magic he could not fathom, nor any fabulous beast he dared not confront. But he did begin to wonder in what state of siege—or worse—he might find Barbaso.
The woods thinned again, and the trail conjoined with a broader road. The surrounding area looked as though it must have been under cultivation, a curving ladle of land ridged with furrows of snow. The farms of Barbaso. Farther down the road, bordered by tangled shrubs and a short, broken picket fence, was a country cemetery.
Gonji stopped here and strained up and outward from the saddle, his piercing dark eyes penetrating the moonglow. Several distant graves showed evidence of having been disturbed. Frozen earth had been churned up and strewn amidst the snow. An ill omen in any land.
Craning his neck to scan the road ahead, he proceeded through the pale golden glow of the moon’s silent scrutiny. Something drew is gradual, wary attention, as he approached it in curiosity.
The glimmer of colored lights bloomed on the snow, once on either hand, before the fire-blossom ring of blue and orange suddenly appeared in fullness, garish in its iridescence. A lovely, doleful young woman sat upon the snow within the imprisoning ring. Her eyes reflected resignation, then a disinterested acknowledgment of the passing warrior.
Gonji’s own stoic countenance matched hers in its disinterest, and as he was about to pass, her head tilted in curiosity.
“What battle do you flee from?” she asked in a melodic voice.
“Many,” Gonji answered curtly.
“I’m so cold and so lonely,” she said mournfully. “Will you not end my imprisonment?”
The samurai reached into his sewn-in kimono pocket but found no silver, so he swept an arrow from his saddle-bound quiver, loaded his bow, and casually fired a passing shot that skewered her porcelain breast. The arrowhead protruded bloodlessly from between the faery-maiden’s shoulder blades. She snarled and tore it from her ensorceled flesh, then easily snapped it in two.
“Good karma to you,” Gonji said lightly, his eyes back on the road ahead.
“Bastard!” she shouted. “So you know of me? Only a coward may see us, do you know that?”
“I don’t know about that,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “But only a coward would be attracted to your so carefully affected innocence.”
She hissed at his back, but he offered not so much as another glance, riding on almost apathetically, bored with what the Dark Powers had made of their local grave-robbing. If this common faery-ring maiden were the worst the ruptured graves offered, he need not concern himself with them.
But again—black sorcery in this territory. The Archmage of Malaguer he’d heard of was not given to dabbling in the dread art of necromancy.
He halted Tora and turned when he heard the high-pitched cackling approaching fast behind him. A small figure raced on foot over the snows, bearing a staff and swinging