4
——— IV ———
“Leopard-man.” The Black Count’s voice made a hollow, rustling noise, like a winter wind blowing through the skeletal branches of a withered tree. “You did well to get past the Sem and come all the way here, bringing the twins of Parros without a scratch! For this, in particular, I must thank you.”
Guin did not answer. Shielding the twins with his body, he glared at the count. His eyes flamed, the fangs in his rigid jaw gleamed with a sudden white brilliance, and he held his sword poised to strike.
“I was worried, you see,” rasped the count. “I sent my black knights to fetch the twins from the white tower, but those filthy monkeys had already taken the keep proper and were in the tower by the time my knights arrived. You—all three of you—are too valuable to risk losing to those barbarians: a warrior worth his weight in gold in the arena, and the Pearls of Parros, keepers of its secrets—no?”
Rinda shouted. “Let Suni go! The Sem will be here any moment! She can parley with them for peace!” The figure looming before her was too frightful for words, yet seeing Suni tied up behind him on some horrible device, struggling and crying when she saw them come into the room, filled Rinda’s heart with an indignant wrath so strong it overcame her fear.
“My young princess of Parros, do you know what this device is for?” asked the count with a rasping, derisive laugh. “There is only one drug that eases the symptoms of my disease, the black plague I carry—I must squeeze it from the living, down to the last drop.”
Rinda railed at him, calling him a vampire and worse, yet he continued on as though she did not even exist. “It is my daily nourishment—yet only the freshest blood suffices. Then I slice off slivers of flesh from the drained body and press them to my skin—it slows the plague’s advance..
Rinda was furious. “How many innocent Sem have you killed? It was Janos himself who cast the flames on Stafolos Keep! This is your punishment, monster!”
“If this keep must fall, then so be it,” the count replied coldly. “It is all set in Jarn’s weave, is it not? If that divine bastard had even a drop of pity in him, would he have let me live thus? Jarn has set our fate, and Janos has nodded his approval, so who am I, who curse at them rather than pray to them, to say what should happen to Stafolos? In fact, why not accept that my existence is a curse, and spread my disease all over my homeland of Mongaul—yes, throw my plague right in the very face of its master Janos, and the dotard Jarn and his damned loom! I’ll smear my filth all over their world.”
“Count Vanon!” thundered Guin, whose eyes, flaming yellow, had been silently watching the lord of Stafolos Keep rant against the gods. “Your curses would make Doal proud, I’m sure, but there is one thing you forget.”
“And what is that, beast-man?” said the count, stiffly raising his hand. “Whatever you say, keep in mind that I could peel off my armor at any time and change you and the twins of Parros to rotting lumps of flesh.”
“Go ahead,” said Guin, calmly stepping forward.
Rinda screamed. “Guin! Stay away from that thing!”
Guin stepped forward again, and again, moving closer.
“I’ll spread my plague! I’ll do it!” the Black Count screeched. “Don’t come any closer, half-man! I’ll rip the mask off my face and visit a destruction upon this keep so total that the Sem and the flames will seem a child’s prank in comparison!” His hand slid up to the fastenings on his chest plate. The children screamed for Guin to stop, yet he strode forward still, holding up his longsword.
“You… You do not fear the black plague, leopard?!”
“I do fear it,” replied Guin, “but I said you were forgetting something: you are not the Black Count of Mongaul!”
Suddenly, Guin swung his longsword down through the helm and armor that wrapped around the count’s body, cutting him in two halves from head to toe!
Rinda and Remus screamed in unison, but the sound of their voices was drowned out by an even louder death wail that sliced through the air around them. The twins screamed again, and drew back, looking with unbelieving eyes at what was left of the count.
No sloughing, melting flesh, no fallen wreck of a man, no spreading plague of pestilence and death.
“Guin! There… there’s nothing there!”
“This is the true form of the evil that lurks in Stafolos Keep—this is your ‘Black Count’!“ shouted Guin, leaping over the split suit of armor to pull the little Sem girl from the evil looking contraption on the wall. “It is nothing but a haunt, an evil spirit. No count—and no black plague!”
But it was untrue to say that there was nothing in the suit of armor at all, for now a black, swirling something was coalescing on the floor in front of the twins as they held hands trembling. It was like a darkness born of greater darkness, a living, black mist slowly gathering itself into a writhing, monstrous presence. It was an animate emptiness, a moving void—yet clearly it had a will, it was very much alive, and it possessed the intelligence that had enabled it to impersonate the count for a very long time. Rinda felt the bile rise in her throat. Her trembling, white fingers hurriedly made the sign of Janos to ward off curses and spirits. But she stopped halfway through, her hands frozen in place.
“Guin! It’s coming this way!”
Guin whirled around. The darkness that rose from the broken armor shell was growing physically palpable, the wisps joining together to form a vaguely human shape. The sight was nauseating.
Through the translucent mass, Guin could see the twins huddling together. Grabbing Suni by her hairy arm, he charged towards the thing, slashing through it three times with his sword.
“No, Guin, stop!” Rinda screamed.
The entity wobbled, seeming to split apart with the blows, but then it slid back together, its shape even more clearly defined now, and its hellish desire even more plain. It advanced on the twins, sensing warm, living blood.
“Run!” Guin shouted to the twins. “It’s a wraith—akin to the ghouls in the Roodwood! This is what left those bones we found! Run, quickly!”
The twin Pearls of Parros had already started back up the corridor, fleeing toward the stairs. Guin brought up the rear, slashing at the spirit whenever it drew close and retreating when he could. His sword was but a poor weapon against the thing-all he could do was slow the creature down—but at least he was buying them time. As he furiously swung his sword, trying to keep the thing from reforming, he shouted back to the children: “Don’t go up, or we’ll be trapped! We leave through the corridor below!”
“Guin!” Remus was just about to step onto the stairs when he called back. “We can’t go this way, Guin! The Sem are in the tower!”
“The Sem are breaking through the door below! I can hear them!” shouted Rinda.
“Wildlings from below, and a wraith from behind!” roared Guin. “It seems Jarn in his kindness has seen fit to give us a taste of every predicament there is! Fine—we go up!”
The twins shouted their agreement, but instead of heading up the stairs, they waited for him to catch up. The sound of a ram hitting the door far below rang louder, accompanied by the high-pitched victory cries of the Sem. Now and then, the companions heard a human voice—one of the few remaining knights shouting desperate orders to protect the tower, or the keep-lord—but they never heard a reply other than the sound of swords clanging on stone.
“They give their lives to protect this fiend?” spat Guin.
Then, hearing the door below give way at last, he abandoned his futile battle and ran to the children, urging them up the stairs. “We can outrun the wraith at least,” he shouted, nearly out of breath, “and if those Sem come up as quickly as I think, they will-”
A great commotion broke out below them on the stair. The wraith had found a source of living flesh more immediate than Guin and the children—it was like a ravenous bear wandering into a pack of feral dogs. The wildlings gave a tremendous battle cry and charged, not even giving the wraith time to choose which it would feast on first.
“Now’s our chance! Run!” Guin barked. Yet they had only climbed four floors higher when they came to a dead end: a heavy stone door stood between them and the single small room, like that in the white tower, at which the long stair terminated.
“Not again!” the leopard-man growled furiously.
“What was that thing?” Remus asked.“If it was only pretending to be the Black Count Vanon, then what happened to the real count?”
“If I’m not mistaken, the real count was the first one it ate,” Guin replied. “Perhaps he was searching in the Marches for answers to his own disease, and brought back someone the wraith had possessed. Once the thing consumed the count, it could order victims brought to it and eat them at its leisure. I assume the fiend also took on some of the count’s knowledge, so it had no problem impersonating the keep-lord, especially as Vanon was so reclusive. A surprising show of intelligence for a mere Roodwood spirit…”
“So then, the real Count Vanon…”
Before Guin had finished saying “turned into a pile of white bones some time ago,” Rinda cried, pointing ahead of them. Guin turned to look, and froze.
Somehow, without a sound, an apparition had appeared beyond them in the dead end of the gloomy stone corridor. It looked even wispier than the wraith; its silhouette was vague, little more than a faint shadow on the wall, nor had it the presence of the living darkness they could hear fighting the Sem below.
Yet it did have a form, just enough to distinguish the tall stature of a nobleman, covered in hastily wrapped bandages and shadowed in a deep-hooded cloak. The skin that was visible through the wrappings on its face and body was black and sagging, a grim gruel of rotting flesh split open in places to show the white gleam of bone beneath.
But what was far more terrible than the sagging flesh of its body, and far more piteous, were the eyes that shone with a wet gleam from a break in the bandages that covered its mostly hairless head. They were white and clouded, and almost certainly could no longer see, yet they were unmistakably human, clinging to some almost-forgotten memory of the intellect and consciousness they had once possessed.
Rinda shivered. Surely this was the same accursed apparition that had visited her in the white tower.
“Count Vanon…”
“Yes,” whispered Guin, averting his gaze, “the real count was eaten long ago, but his death was cursed and he was not allowed to enter the underworld, so he roams the keep in the form he had during life… watching that imposter destroy whatever vestiges of pride he had left.”
“Poor Vanon…” Rinda murmured, genuine pity welling in her heart. “What a horrid fate… to have your body eaten by a Roodwood ghoul, yet still to be cursed with the same miserable form in death as you had in life.”
“At least, this way, he was able to spare his homeland from the ravages of the disease he carried,” said Guin, extending his left hand toward the apparition and making a strange sign, like a ward, in the air.
“Black Count!”
“The Sem have taken Stafolos Keep, or soon will, and the blaze will have it if they do not. The Roodwood wraith will have to abandon its charade, and the fires will purge it in the end.”
“Fire will purify all. Your disease, the wraith’s foul work—all will be purged in the fire that takes Stafolos Keep.”
’“Now, go to your rest in the underworld! Your master Doal awaits you, apparition!”
Guin’s voice rang clear in the stone corridor.
The ghost slowly raised its hands, seeming to make a gesture—with its indeterminate form, it was impossible to divine just what. Still, Rinda thought she could see something that looked like peace in those clouded eyes.
It was then that Rinda realized. When this same apparition had appeared before her and Suni in the tower room, it had reached out to them, she had thought, to attack. But that strange pathos, the longing in its eyes, was a plea for salvation. It had been trying to tell them of the fate that had befallen the keep; it had been in pain. Tears welled in her eyes.
“What could he have possibly done that Janos would punish him so?” said the girl, shaking her head. “I cannot think of anything that would warrant it.”
“It is because your soul still sleeps in the cradle of youth, little princess. I can think of a few things he might have done,“ said Guin, but the bleak jest in his voice faded as he listened at the stairway. “Wait, they are coming!” he shouted. “The Sem are coming up the stairs!”
The constant sounds of battle below them were suddenly much closer. The wraith had claimed many of the wildlings, but even that had not slowed them. Meanwhile, the monster had grown with each kill, until their axes and arrows could do little to harm it—and what real harm could stone blade and poisoned shaft do to something made of nothing but the darkness itself?
Guin readied his longsword. Dried blood turning black caked his blade and the arms that held it, made brighter by more blood that had sprayed on top of that. He could keep fighting, yes, but soon a stone axe or a swift Sem arrow was bound to break through his guard and catch one of his legs, already weak with exhaustion, and then surely he would die there in that dead-end corridor at the tower’s top. There was only one way out, and that was down. All he could do here was wait for death to come, whether it was from the great army of the Sem, the voracious wraith, or the smoke and flames of the fire that crackled and grew among the buildings of the keep.
Guin howled and raised his sword, taking a few swings to limber up his stiffened arms.
But Rinda grabbed on to his elbow to get his attention.
“Look!”
Guin turned around. The apparition was moving away from them, slowly fading. As it moved, it was making exaggerated gestures with its arm, pointing up at the stone ceiling above them. Again and again, it pointed at a particular spot on the ceiling. A light that seemed to come from the very depths of space shone in its eyes… until the ghost of the diseased lord reached the far wall and vanished into it—the Black Count Vanon, gone at last.
“The ceiling! There must be something there!”
“Let’s hope it’s a way out,“ Guin growled, reaching out toward the ceiling where the count’s apparition had pointed.
For a while it seemed like another section of featureless stone, but then the leopard warrior’s sword caught on some sort of hidden lever, and a trap door popped open in the ceiling, letting in a fresh evening breeze and light from the faded sky of the lingering day.
The twins and Suni cheered.
“Climb!” said Guin, lifting Rinda up toward the small square hole. When she had adroitly scrambled through, he lifted the other two up after her. Just then the Sem broke past the wraith, arriving at the top floor of the tower in strength. Brandishing their weapons, they filled the narrow space with their piercing war cries.
Guin snarled and swung his blade, cutting down the first wildlings as they swarmed toward him.
“Guin! Quickly! Are you okay?” came the nervous shouts of the twins from above.
“Get away from the opening, now!” Guin shouted back, his sword flying furiously as he single-handedly took on the full brunt of the wildling attack. There seemed to be no end to them—and from the ever-nearing cacophony behind them, it sounded like the wraith was also coming up the stairs, slaughtering Sem as it came. Guin laid low the two nearest of his foes, sending up a crimson spray, and then turned his back on the rest and leapt for the hole in the ceiling.
His powerful hands grabbed on to the edge of the opening and he lifted himself up with a fluidity of motion uncanny for his size, kicking off the Sem that clung to his legs and waist. His wide shoulders caught on the sides of the hole for a moment, but he twisted and slid through on the diagonal. He was free! Guin stood and breathed a deep sigh of relief.
They were on top of the black tower. The day that had begun in battle was trying to end before the battle was over. Looking down on the buildings of the keep below, they saw the courtyards and parapets buried in bodies. Inky black smoke rose on all sides, signaling the fall of the keep to the world.
They could also see the dark, deep flow of the Kes below, the slanting dusk light glinting off its surface. And there was the Roodwood, the Taloswood, the mystic dusky-violet mountains in the distance… and the wildlands of Nospherus stretching beyond the black river.
The sun was starting to set, a giant, dusky orange halfsphere throwing its last reddish rays on the ruined fortress. Guin stood with the sun at his back, his sword in his hand.
Rinda, Remus, and the little girl Suni held their breath as they looked at the warrior with the body of a hero and the head of a leopard, standing tall with the giant corona of the sun’s red disk behind him, a bloodied sword in his hand. He could have been a statue to the half-beast god Cirenos, or even the war god Ruah—horrible, yet at the same time a thing of beauty. The ruddy light spread over his smooth, rippling muscles like a baptism of blood. He was poised with one foot upon the flag stand that marked the very top of the tower, holding on to the flagpole with his free hand.
“Guin!”
He reacted in a flash to Rinda’s warning, leaping down to where the first of the wildlings was climbing up through the opening in the roof. With a flick of his sword, he sent its head flying off the tower to land in the courtyard far below. He kicked the next attacker back down into the corridor, and shouted, “There is no end to this if we stay here! Children! I am going, will you follow?”
“Wh-Where, Guin? We’re on the top of the tower! Where is there to go from here?”
“There!” howled Guin, pointing down to one side.
The children gasped. Down where he pointed was only the deep, silent flow of the Kes.
“If we jump, we may die. The sun is about to set; we will face the Marches night in those dark waters. We may be knocked out and slip under. But know this—staying here is certain death.”
“I understand,” said Rinda. “I will go.”
“Me… Me too,” said Remus, suppressing his fear.
“Good,” Guin replied. Moving quickly, he loosened his belt and used it to fasten the three children onto his back. The wildlings trying to stream up through the opening were already too many for him to handle alone.
“Close your eyes, keep your heads down, and hold on!” shouted the leopard warrior, and like a bird, he leapt off into space.
Towards freedom—and destiny.
End of Book One
The Guin Saga, Volume 1
was published on September 29, 1979 by
Hayakawa Publishing
and written by
Kaoru Kurimoto (栗本 薫)
with illustrations by
Naoyuki Kato (加藤 直之)
This volume was published on June 1, 2003 by
Vertical, Inc.
and formatted into an epub by
Elemhunter, from scans by xPearse.
This release is revision 2.0 (January 24th, 2022).
For formatting corrections, etc., contact
HabaneroScans@Gmail.com
Table of Contents
- Chapter One - The Spirit Wood
- Chapter Two - The Keep on the Marches
- Chapter Three - The Day of the Sem
- Chapter Four - Beyond the Black River
- Colophon