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bites in the snow evinced the clearing efforts of the night hunters— ogros canibalis— and their vicious cudgels.
    The samurai could hear them bellowing behind, but the sounds receded, and he somehow knew the nocturnal hunters would not change their time-honored ways out of vengeance. Few creatures but man tempted the Fates thusly.
    He who defies nature courts the unnatural. Who had said that? A fellow adventurer of days gone by. Which one? He could not recall.
    Nor did he look back. The same saddle-blistered philosopher had also told him the proverb concerning the faces of yesterday’s dead.
    He rode on for a time, counting his pains—the shoulder wound was not deep, but his lower leg was throbbing, as was his skull—and, not surprisingly, yearning again for shelter from the cold, the sun’s glare. The storm had ended, and as they passed across to the Spanish slopes, the passes became both less treacherous and less snowbound.
    The glowstones, he discovered, were bereft of their sorcerous properties once removed from their environment. He wondered in amusement what an onlooker might think to see him reach inside his greatcoat and toss out chunks of useless stone. And only two of the sweet red mountain fruits survived intact; red pulp stained the entire front of his tunic and kimono.
    He fed the solid fruits to Tora and settled comfortably into the saddle. Before long, the day being his normal time for slumber, he nodded off, his salleted head bobbing with the horse’s slow gait. His last thought was of this single similarity between himself and the cannibal ogres.
    The only difference being that their slumbering berth never brought them to the icy brink of a parapet, as his did several times that day.

CHAPTER TWO
    He’d tracked the wild boar two days and a night now, at last locating and blockading its lair, though it had led him on a merry chase.
    Red-eyed and bone-weary, he had found his days and nights at last becoming reordered, though he had slept little for either since descending the barren Spanish slopes of the Pyrenees. He had spent half a night lying in wait of his pursuers, but the Dark Company either had perished in the avalanche or ceased to find the game amusing. A third possibility was dismissed with a curse and a grim resignation: Perhaps their new tactic was to lull him into false security only to fall upon him in their cold fury two nights, three nights, ten nights down the trail.
    If it came to that, then so be it.
    Karma.
    Upon entering Spain, he’d discovered the winter of another world. Milder, evenly snow-crusted, less enervating in its frigid bite. He’d doffed some of his heavy wraps, riding now in tunic and breeches, short kimono, and traveling cloak. His thick tabi and Austrian cavalry boots were sufficient enough to protect his feet.
    The northern Spanish winter was an icy natural wonderland. The great waterfalls of the shallow foothill terraces had diminished in force, their torrents abating to sparkle in a clear crystal sheen. The U-shaped cirque valleys shimmered below, their symmetrical beauty and perfection broken only by the brilliance of ice-diamond pools and furrows. By day, a multihued aurora borrowed from the smiling kami of the sky; by night a silent, eerie land of stark shadow, the moon’s face reflecting off the polished earth.
    The dull pain of hunger had begun to paralyze Gonji’s keen appreciation of nature’s art. The poet’s soul was shouted down by the warrior’s belly.
    Winter forage was proving no easier in Spain than in France. The frozen land yielded little. He had encountered one heavily guarded caravan from the silver mines which, upon espying his half-breed Oriental strangeness, had taken him for an unsavory character and warded him off with brandished weapons, refusing even to allow him near enough to speak. The single tiny village he’d happened on had been inhabited by the sort of superstitious peasantry that had long been a bane to him. Doors and