The knight was stung by the implied insult. His eyes narrowed and his head tilted in amazement. From his look, he might have just been told that his mother and father were sister and brother.
“Strike, then,” he rasped in a tremulous voice.
Gonji hesitated, then shockingly rotated his blade over his head in a broad, torso-twisting slash that ended against the knight’s right pauldron. He froze at the end of the motion for a long moment, the Sagami’s gleaming edge jammed to the knight’s shoulder. Their eyes never broke contact.
Slowly, the samurai drew his blade away, and the young knight’s defiant smile faded. A thin line of blood traced the Sagami from mid-blade to point, although no mark could be seen on the knight’s armored shoulder.
Gonji replaced his katana without cleansing it. He spoke just above a whisper: “I do not wish to shame you. I know this sorcery born of faith, and my faith is no weaker than your own. I stayed my blow short of killing you.”
The knight’s look of horrified disbelief was fleeting. He replaced his burgonet and wheeled his steed.
“He chooses to face the Moonspinner,” he shouted to his charges. Laughter and catcalls came Gonji’s way. “Hurry now, before we become entangled in her web.”
They spread out and rumbled off the way they had come, scattering uphill, still in their widely spaced ring, receding from Gonji with that same bizarre spatial distortion that had marked their approach. But they stopped and turned on the surrounding hilltops, and he could see the intent in their poised pistols and crossbows.
He would be coerced into dealing with the “Moonspinner”—whatever that entity might be, whose darker-than-night webs now gently spun down to touch the snow itself.
* * * *
Two bonfires seethed and roiled in stark relief against the backdrop of the tattered windmill. A breathless midnight stillness crept into the valley, as if the brightening orb of the moon were a greedy eye that would claim any creature that dared exercise the fullness of life beneath it.
Gonji sat in the lotus position between the blazes, stern of countenance. His bow and quiver lay at one hand, his daisho lashed to his back. The angry edge of the stropped halberd loomed over his head, the shaft leaning against his shoulder, his arms crossed over it. He was helmetless and stripped to his short kimono, riding breeches, and boots. His pauldrons and vambraces were his only armor. He glared back, unblinking, at the ominous moon’s sickly glow.
When the dark shadow stirred on the surface of the moon, the samurai rose slowly. He jammed the halberd’s butt end into a snow mound and took up his bow and sheaf of war arrows.
The shadow deepened, assuming a solid shape that was unidentifiable. But it moved. First, it traced a path across the moon, then seemed to leap off the glowing surface to begin a spiraling descent, like a sky coach on an invisible road.
The gossamer black webs fell more heavily now, vibrating, heralding the Moonspinner’s deadly advent. But the windmill area remained clear of them: When they settled near Gonji’s fires, they were rent by the heat, sent billowing into the sky like ignited silk.
Gonji watched the apparition become a dark finger wriggling along the webbing, then a hideous grasping arm that even from its vast distance searched him out unerringly. It was approaching with that same mystical speed, that same spatial disruption evinced in the entrapment by the warlock’s army. The latter had built their own fires on the surrounding hillocks, where they sat dismounted, anxiously watching the developing spectacle.
On an impulse Gonji bounded toward the farmhouse as far as he dared venture without becoming entangled in the snaring, ladderlike black web. He could not move very far, he found, and quickly returned for a torch. The flambeau seared through the web eagerly, and he returned his attention to the monster’s descent.
Moving to his left through the incendiary whumping of the web, he observed a spine-chilling sight. Changing his perspective caused the monster’s form to elongate conically, from the pinpoint of its rearmost portion to the outsized projection of its horrible head—from this vantage the only part that seemed a living thing.
Gonji was not fond of spiders.
But there was no comfort in the surprising discovery that, although he had expected one, this was not a spider. Rather, it was something worse. Something that filled him with an atavistic revulsion.
He began to hear a distant sound from far off in the sky. At first it was like the wind pouring through a gorge. Then it seemed like a million goatsuckers trapped in a mile-deep cavern. And, as he ran back toward the bonfires, it took on the blood-lusting murmur of an onrushing Saracen charge.
Back before the fires, he could make out the growing definition of the head: triangular, half the size of the moon now, mandibles snapping in anticipation.
It was hungry, and the samurai had destroyed its feast.
He scurried past the fires, beyond the truncated, inverted cone of the windmill’s housing. He could see the shuddering of the webbing by his torch, the thickening of its translucent film; the mercenaries’ fires now ebbed in his vision, through the bowl of the creature’s snare. He could barely make out the figures of horses and men.
But the Moonspinner became still more distinct, and in spite of his effort to maintain control, Gonji found his mouth gaping. From the gambrel-roofed stable, Tora began to whinny and kick.
The conical shape grew with increasing acceleration. It was an armored nightmare, a vicious bug with a long segmented body and an indeterminate number of legs. Clearly it had been conjured from some nether world rather than sired by any natural forces.
He resisted a wild urge to flee, the firebrand shearing a panic-propelled course to safety. But there was, he knew, no safety from this thing. And it was not the way of the warrior. This creature was an obscenity; a perversion of the wonder of nature. It offered death most foul, the dishonorable death of a trapped animal. If he fled it now, the way he had once fled the wyvern’s first attack, he would have no peace until he returned to face it.
Ever concentrating on the creature’s rapid approach, he made a touch count of his clothyard shafts: six left. He nocked one lightly in his powerful longbow and eased to his right, where he planted a torch in the snow. The Moonspinner stopped and peered down at him; black, horned eye wedges fixing on him from its bony death’s-head. It reared up at a ninety-degree angle to its long hind segment, fierce mandibles dripping something like venom; clacking sharply, like staffs crossing on a plain below a battlement.
When it came on again, it was about the size of a whip scorpion at arm’s length.
Gonji could only guess at the precision of his depth perception in this space-distorting arena.
Breathe and pull. Rotate. Launch—
His war arrow hissed away through the cold air. Arced toward the alien horror. There was a chilling foreshortening effect; he felt an instant’s nausea and disorientation. The spatial distortion made him feel like the participant in a dream. The arrow winked out of sight—
A miss.
It seemed he had aimed too high, but he couldn’t be sure. The creature came on, weaving through its ethereal support like a wave-tossed galleon. Above his head, the wondrous bracework of black webbing began to vibrate heavily at the center. Gonji strove to regulate his tight breathing, fixing on the web’s vibration as a reference point. The hideous head bore down eagerly, large as a cat’s now—but how far off? It ran on the four legs attached to the rear segment. The front pair, pincered and lined with needlelike filaments, poised to clutch and rend.
How in hell far?
Teeth clenched, Gonji loaded his three-man bow and pulled again, sweat coursing his jawbones. When the Moonspinner’s head was so large that only the corona of the moon could be seen behind it, he launched.