The samurai’s hand gripped the Sagami’s hilt as the lunatic ran up to him, laugh crinkles radiating from his black eyes. He was about thirty, too lightly dressed, and sported a ridiculously long cowl that made him look like a jester.
“I like that!” he was shouting, his words punctuated with breathless laughter. “I like your spunk. I may be able to use that. Come on, come see what’s up ahead. Let’s see how you’ll deal with that—”
And with that he ran on up the road, chattering incoherently.
“Hold it,” Gonji commanded, but he was forced to trot up alongside the strange fellow before he could engage him again.
“Who are you?”
The little man laughed sharply and gasped for breath as he ran, speaking in gulps. “Who am I? Oh no, senor, I don’t fall for that. You can…you can call me Luna Invierno—Winter Moon, eh? Hee-hee! I never give…my real name…you may be…a sorcerer, no?”
And he was right, of course. Some sorcerers gained power over a man merely by the use of his true name.
“All right, Moon,” he said. “What’s your business?”
“My business? Hee-hee! I’m a scavenger. A thief. Living off what the land will yield. Taking what it won’t.”
“And how is it that you manage to survive—with no horse, no sword—?”
“I’ll match my staff against your sword anytime,” he replied petulantly, “and my sling against your bow.”
“Is that so?”
“And I know my share of magical protections.”
Gonji shook his head. “The Archmage of this valley offers little challenge, it seems. The faery-ring maidens hardly require much—”
“Bah, they’re not his! This Domingo Negro—he’s a mean one. Doesn’t bother with minor spells and snares.”
“Then there are other powers present here?”
Moon fluttered his lips with a finger, issuing a sound intended as ominous portent. “Many powers vie here. I thought you knew what you were doing.”
Gonji bridled. “Never mind. What’s your business? What do you want with me?”
“I aim to rob Black Sunday’s Garden of Miracles. And you’re going to help—if you’ve got the cojones for it. But come—see—what—lies—next!” His stamping footfalls underscored each word as he sprinted ahead toward a right bend in the road.
“I’m not—” Gonji reined in, face contorted with aggravation at the little ferret’s insolence. He kicked Tora into a canter and came abreast of the strange little man, about to remonstrate, when he spotted the tower of the windmill around the bend.
The sky had grown darker, a filmy vapor streaking it with ephemeral tendrils, delicate patterns now discernible where the mist passed near the moon’s disc.
“See here!” Moon shouted, gesturing toward the windmill as it came fully into view in a small clearing, near a farmhouse. Gonji tried to shush him, but to no avail. “Look what he’s done—he doesn’t fool around, does he?”
And then the samurai saw. His lips curled at the sight. The windmill was flanked by huge barren oaks. And both the naked branches and the gently tilting vanes of the windmill were festooned with the bodies of Spanish troops.
Better that they had been dead than in their present state. For they hung like silkworms, paralyzed and suspended in dark, translucent cocoons; murmuring like the mindless possessed, seemingly no longer human.
CHAPTER SIX
“Looks like the table is set for something,” Moon prattled in a singsong voice.
He cavorted about the area, unconcerned with the forms suspended in living death. Now and then he would glance into the sky, cackling nervously. Bounding through the snow with amazing energy, Moon suddenly cartwheeled up to a hitching rail before the abandoned farmhouse, which stood beside the nearer tree. Never stopping, he made an acrobatic leap over the rail, a tumble through the snow, and then a springing double somersault that landed him feet first onto a blood-stained skeleton in the snow that had been picked nearly clean.
Brittle bones exploded in all directions.
“Hee-heeeee!”
Gonji gritted his teeth but said nothing, as he looked again at the hanging forms, mortified. Their eyes had been gouged out. They seemed paralyzed, their exposed heads lolling in slow motion, slack mouths emitting idiot sounds.
He dismounted and began to cut the wretched victims out of the cottony black cocoons, one by one. “Help me here,” he commanded.
“Are you loco?” Moon replied. “Forget them. Their cause is lost.”
“That’s no way for a warrior to die. Honor demands that—”
“What rubbish!” Moon scoffed. “Name me a good way to die! They’re just hanging meat now.”
“They’re soldiers. A warrior deserves a better death.”
“You’re loco, as I thought,” Moon said. “What land do you come from that rates one death as better than any other? Come on, there’s a warlock’s treasure to loot. And if you let this bother you so much, you’ll never make it that far. There are worse things waiting up the road.”
“I’m not here to loot anything,” Gonji said coldly as he went about his grim business.
Moon bobbed his head scornfully. “As I thought—you’re on the side of the soldiers. The warlock will make you regret that, methinks.” He crowed a laugh and bounded away toward the farmhouse’s rear.
The samurai gathered the wretched troopers—fifteen in all—and ritually beheaded them. He piled them before the windmill, wrapping their heads in their jacks. The mystical cocoon material was strange, dissipating when shredded gently, like heavenly dust. But opposed by resistance such as dead weight, it had been strong enough to suspend full-grown men. Gonji labored over an hour at the grisly task, feeling a mixture of fatigue, wrath, and emptiness of soul.
Ambling grimly to the farmhouse to find dry wood, Gonji found the door bolted from within. In no mood to trifle with resistance, he removed his swords from his obi, drew back, and skipped toward the door. A hard side snap-kick slammed it open with a thunderous report.
“Not bad,” Moon said from a short distance away. He wiped his lightly bearded lips with the long tassel of his cowl. “Your feet are almost as limber as mine.” He sat among the soldiers’ effects, sipping from a wine jug. They had been using the farmhouse as a station or command post.
“The back door was open, though. Still—not bad.”
Gonji cast him a scowl and set to gathering the wood. Outside again, he constructed a blazing bonfire that became the funeral pyre of the soldiers. The cocoons went up like dry chaff. Moon pranced up to him.
“Something’s not going to be happy about that,” Moon warned. “You’ll probably be taking their place for dinner, senor warrior. Look up there.”
Gonji followed his gesture. The sky had indeed become still filmier, gauzelike; webbing over with ethereal patterns that seemed to radiate from the moon, now reaching almost to the ground in spiraling tracks. Tora, too, had begun to sense the waxing peril, tossing and curvetting from his tether.
“Who are you?” Gonji demanded of the other.
Moon snorted.