A hit.
The tiny thorn of the thirteen-fist arrow, studding the monster’s skull, gave Gonji perspective on its size as its shrill rasp of outrage rippled the sheath of webbing.
He calculated, emitted a gasp of hot breath, and abandoned the bow. It was too impossibly large for the arrows to inflict much damage.
He seized the halberd, felt the reassuring heft, hoping it would avail him. Then he backed between the twin blazes and took up a defensive stance. In the stable, Tora’s hooves pounded the brittle boards.
All at once, like something extruded from an unseen fissure, the monster hovered above him, filling the sky with snapping, hissing horror. The ground shook when it leapt down into the snow. It seemed relentless, unstoppable, as it came straight for the tiny fire-framed sentinel.
Gonji held his stance before the oncoming monster. It stopped short of the flames, its battle cries like a cathedral full of shrikes. It lashed over the licking flames with an extended pincer, Gonji parrying that hinged vise with his halberd. Its forelegs were lined with stiletto bristles like those of a mantis.
The samurai feinted at its face, again and again, maddening it. A second sweeping claw sparked in the fire, and the Moonspinner cried out in shock, reeling back on its hind members. Gonji lunged forward two sharp steps, nearly engaging a mandible with his halberd’s spear-point. The creature’s claws scissored together over his head as he dove beneath them and rolled almost into the flames. Grabbing a firebrand, he chucked it at the looming monstrosity and scrabbled behind the bonfires.
It flinched, then its ponderous bulk rose up to seize him over the top of the flames. But Gonji used them as a fiery rampart, moving in as close as he could stand to the fierce heat. He whirled his halberd in a pattern that nearly unhinged one of the searching pincers. It jerked aside, and the samurai’s sudden bold foray around one bonfire’s edge opened a line to its thorax.
Gonji lunged forward to full extension, but the halberd’s spear-point caught only air as the monster leaned away. Its snapping mandibles nearly snared the pole-arm’s shaft as it riposted viciously. Gonji fell back behind the bonfires again, cursing his poor thrust.
The Moonspinner ripped a hitching rail from its cradle and cast it toward him with unsettling intelligent intent. The post crashed down amid the flames, sending sparks coruscating over the snows. Then it bent forward and, with a further eerie display of sentience, began shoveling snow forward with both claws. In seconds one bonfire was hissing out in steaming ruin.
The hollow-eyed death’s-head, its ragged-edged mouth working all the while, kept Gonji at bay as it worked with waxing frenzy upon seeing its success. The samurai made two useless attacking gestures, intending to arouse it into resuming the chase. He picked up a flambeau from the second fire, shook it at the monster’s face in a gesture of defiance.
It started to move toward him again as it saw him draw away from the second fire and back toward the windmill.
And then Tora kicked free of the stable and pounded up to the killing ground.
“Not now, stupid beast!”
A mixture of primitive fear, Gonji’s peril, and his own enjoyment of battle had driven Tora to join with his master. The steed circled in front of the bonfire, bolting, rearing, flailing.
The Moonspinner eyed the new, larger quarry and lumbered after it.
Gonji swore and took after the enormous creature with a vengeance, seeing his plan in collapse, his only hope of conveyance about to become an appetizer.
Tora slowed eerily as he entered the webwork, moving through ever-darkening clouds of fever-mist, from Gonji’s point of view. Curtain after curtain of inky silk coated the struggling horse until finally, twisting in a supernaturally slow ballet, Tora hung nearly upside down in the night air. Kicking and shrieking, he sank gradually groundward, as if suspended in quicksand.
The monster stopped and reared over him. Something licked out of its mouth and seized an end of the webbing. With a strange reverse motion, it pulled the strands of web toward it, Tora compelled to draw ever nearer the dripping mandibles, his binding sac swaying like the subject of a snake charmer.
Gonji’s full-circle halberd slash parted one of the creature’s legs at the bottom joint.
The Moonspinner emitted an unearthly cry and stopped reeling in Tora. It made a motion as if to climb the air itself, lost its balance, and nearly fell back upon the samurai.
Gonji slipped and fell, gathered himself and sprinted back toward the bonfire, where he scooped up another firebrand without pausing. The pain-maddened monster, maimed now, barreled after him with a now-ungainly stride.
Gonji kicked open the door at the base of the windmill. Laughing with insane glee, he bounded across the straw- and chaff-strewn floor in three strides. Rounding the millwheel, he started up the spiral staircase that clung to the wall all the way to the windmill’s cap.
Six steps up, he was knocked to one knee by the impact of the Moonspinner’s leap onto the side of the ancient structure. Wood cracked and masonry spilled. The shaft and gearing that rose from wheel to cap began to creak as the monster’s progress nudged the great vanes into a half turn. Gonji almost dropped the flambeau, his heart skipping a beat.
Not yet.
He scrabbled up the stairs, saw the great bulk through a window on the next turn. He mounted the stair to where the abdomen of the beast moved by, exposed. He set down the torch and lanced the creature with a thrust that sent it clawing sideways for a new purchase, screaming in pain.
Gonji grimaced to see the green ooze that coated the halberd’s point. But then he was swinging wildly at an out-of-reach pincer that extended through another aperture to grasp the great wheel’s shaft, scoring it horizontally. The monster’s savage instinct was simply to destroy him now by any means. The torchlight seemed to guide its thrashings.
Gonji wedged the torch into the iron railing. He bounded upward again as the structure of the windmill shook from the Moonspinner’s pummeling without.
He was so intent on watching for glimpses of the beast through the windows that he nearly tripped over the crouched figure of Luna Invierno.
“Moon!” Gonji gasped, heart hammering. “What the—”
“I presume you have a plan here,” Moon said matter-of-factly.
Gonji bobbed his head. The monster began gnawing at a window framework, gouging it into broad roundness in seconds.
“Torch the windmill, what else?” the samurai responded.
“As I thought.”
“I have to get it higher.” He started up the steps.
“Did it never occur to you that all it has to do is leap down from the wall?”
“I’ve got straw piled all around the base. It should go up pretty fast,” Gonji shot back.
“Bah—a fool’s wish,” Moon said. He produced a coiled rope. Tearing free a rusted section of iron railing, he went on: “Anger it—get it to reach in again.”
Gonji scratched his itching beard a moment, then nodded and scampered up to where the Moonspinner had turned the window into an archway.
Silently gliding up the last few steps with his back against the wall, he timed his movement, whirling the halberd around and down. His blow cracked the end off a mandible as it lay on the sill. The creature hissed, its evil proboscis licking in reactively. Gonji lashed at it but missed.
The monster adjusted its position again, the outer shell of the windmill crackling under the stress as if assaulted by a hailstorm. Gonji climbed past the window. Just overhead now was the boardwalk around the great gear assembly in the cap.
A powerful pincer reached through the enlarged window, snapping about randomly. On the stair below, Moon whirled the iron bar at the end of his rope and tossed it up.