He dropped the fruit he’d been eating and rushed back to Tora. They hurried along the stream. Into an empty cave, and through another. The chanting increased in pitch, the reverberating echo turning Gonji to and fro in search of safe exit. His lips wove a tapestry of favorite imprecations.
(something to kill and the power to kill it)
Another blast of cold air from a passed cavern entrance. This one clean and sharp with the tang of ice. The nerve-racking languid glow filled the entrance at last. He recognized it, knew their location. Through this one into the next—
Blinding silver sunlight—tongues of sifting snow—he’d found it!
Dragging Tora inside, he halted and considered: the stones. Very useful when building a fire was impossible. Nodding curtly, he turned back.
“Hai. Wait here, dumb beast.”
In the adjacent cavern most of the rocks were too large. He selected a few small ones, looked them over as they began to glow, mind racing to fashion an efficient plan. Put them inside his wraps? In Tora’s saddle pouches? What?
He dropped these inside the coat, where they gathered at his belt. He began to feel foolish. He moved into the main tunnel, heedless of the chanting now. With the Sagami in the crook of an arm, he picked up more glowstones of useful size. He was about to turn back when his eye caught the wash of yellow glare spilling from one—two—nearby caverns.
The stones fell from his arms.
The chanting was mixed with satisfied grunting now, and clearly the latter issued from the brightly glowing caverns ahead. More chants split from the main chorus, becoming localized, nearing his position.
He watched the garish light with dawning fear. Remembered the soft magenta tones that had burned in response to his own body’s needs.
Tora shrilled and bucked in the exit cavern, bellows of savage mirth mingling with the sound of animal panic.
The samurai surged back toward his frenzied steed, skin prickling. Stumbling once and then again, he gained the entrance cave’s glaring white hole in time to forestall the monsters from destroying the wildly bucking horse. His roar of fury froze them an instant that would remain locked in his hall of nightmares.
The hunters had returned. Ogros.
Ogros—canibalis.
Two of them. Huge and hairy, whether pelted or sporting their own fur, he could not be sure. They were humanoid, but Gonji’s blood froze to see the slightly elongated snouts that flourished canine fangs and long, red tongues.
Cholera—they might be ten-, twelve-feet tall, judging by their stoop.
The nearer one raised the cudgel with which it had been threatening Tora. With a blare of triumph, it stalked Gonji with the shouldered weapon. The samurai’s thews responded with a high-guard stance that might have been comical in other circumstances, so disparate were their sizes.
He eyed the growling ogre steadily, his peripheral vision sketching out the hefted cudgel’s deadly head. One side featured a sort of razor-edged scoop, partially filled with snow. The other side—just razor edges.
The monster heralded its strike with a bellow, and Gonji dove beneath its arc and tumbled into the cavern. The wall where he’d stood exploded in sparks of white-hot glowstones. Some of them landed in the creature’s fur, and it beat at the scorched spots in primitive fury.
Gonji rolled to his feet with a grimace, burdened by his winter garb. These beasts were faster than they looked. He raised his katana overhead defensively and eyed the second beast, which came on with a vengeance, dropping its slack burden—an all too predictable, human shape.
Tora reared and kicked madly at the second ogre. It hefted its cudgel too swiftly and bashed the cave ceiling, throwing itself off balance. The samurai charged it, stamping left and right, the Sagami gleaming as it whirled through a double feint. The beast swung its weapon awkwardly down on him in a black-taloned simian grip. He spun to avert its descent and slashed the monster halfway through the knee with a wicked rotating blow.
Dark blood spouted from the wound as its terrible shriek blocked Gonji’s left ear. It fell toward him, grabbing at the ruined knee, and when its great form tumbled past, the samurai’s returning one-handed slash shattered its lower jaw, blood and bits of stained tooth peppering the snowy entrance hollow.
Its screams were quickly forgotten in the rush of wind from the first monster’s sweeping bludgeon. Gonji ducked too late. One viciously honed glaive point shredded the fabric of his garb, gouging the flesh of a shoulder. The force of the blow twisted him off his feet. He rolled twice before the creature’s furious onslaught, then ran out of cave floor as he struck rock.
He was trapped in a corner of the cave.
The ogre snarled to intimidate him but eyed the Sagami with respect. It was unused to such speed and skill in the unwary travelers that were its kind’s usual prey.
The monster growled and scraped its weapon menacingly on the ground before the samurai’s niche, like a man trying to dislodge some dangerous vermin.
Suddenly it realized its advantage and sprang like a guard dog, leveling the cudgel for a battering-ram blow. In the same instant Gonji caught up a dirk from his boot, launching it with an overhand snap as he dodged the plunging metal blades.
The monster howled in pain and rage amid splintering rock. It stepped on Gonji’s legs with a clawed foot as he scrabbled away. The cudgel was forgotten. The flesh-eating snow beast tore at the invading knife in its chest.
Gonji cried out with the agonizing effort as he twisted under the monster’s huge padded foot. His scythelike rake of the Sagami hamstrung the flailing creature.
Behind, the other downed monster continued to pule in agony, and other sounds approached from within the cavern system.
Gonji heard none of it. He pushed to his feet, his left leg aching badly. His footwork was imprecise and ungainly but the katana struck repeatedly with awful accuracy as it sang in the icy cavern. He leapt in and out, relieving the creature of half a matted paw, opening deep wounds in both legs. He raised his blade for another strike, but a wild backhand blow batted him against the wall, his breath gushing out of him.
His vision swam, and for a moment he was unsure of where his sword lay. He saw Tora in a blurry haze. And the body of a man—Spanish cavalry jack—caved-in face—
The great hairy fist caught him up by the waist and pulled him close to those blazing eyes. He felt the creature’s hot, rank breath in his face. The crushing grip born of vengeful mortal agony. And he knew its intent. It would crush his head in its canine jaws.
The ogre gurgled something at him in a moist, guttural voice, perhaps a final taunt in its own language. In that instant Gonji drew the seppuku sword in his left hand. His right palmed the short blade’s forte in a circular pushing motion, crisp and wetly arcing through both the monster’s eyes, the bridge of its nose. The foreshortened return plunged the ko-dachi’s fierce point into the screaming predator’s throat, choking off its cries.
Gonji dropped to the ground with a groan. A momentary reflection passed: Again the seppuku blade, which might someday bring him ritual death, had spilled the blood of another.
Then he was snatching up the Sagami and belting both blades as he led the snorting Tora from the cave, out into an angry silver morning. The packed snow of the mountain trail made a welcome crunch under Tora’s hooves as he mounted and kicked the animal past the cave, up the cleared trail that continued the climb through the Pyrenees’ passes. Ridged bites in the snow evinced the clearing efforts of the night hunters—ogros canibalis—and their vicious cudgels.
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