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aid in scaling, after the fashion taught by the old ninja master who had secretly befriended an artless young samurai against his father’s wishes. Then, emptying his mind and allowing the karumi-jutsu climbing technique full sway, he began to ascend the slick wall of the cuesta.
    Digging and scraping, Gonji utilized the nooks in the almost sheer cliff face. The nekode gouged chinks where there had been none. He used his fingers and toes for purchase, clinging like a spider, teeth gritting with the effort. He fought off the numbing chill, flexing and relaxing muscle groups in turn, shifting his weight, feeling out the easiest advance upward, testing and probing, lightening his body as the time-honored, almost mystical method had taught.
    The first three yards came easy. Five. But how high to the nest? Fifteen—eighteen yards?
    Wygyll.
    All at once, as the monster bird took note of him with a quizzical shriek of disbelief, Gonji remembered its name. Not the name it would be called here in Spain. That one he could not recollect. It was the English name he remembered. The English, he had heard, had their names for everything. Things they knew well; things they would not admit to believing in.
    This creature was a member of an old race, older than man. Scavengers who roosted on cliffs and ledges.
    Wygyll. The wygyll’s aerie. Forty feet above.
    Something stinking and moist landed on his shoulder. Some part of the boar’s viscera. He shrugged it off. Soft crumbling sounds descended past his position. Then a rock cracked him on the skull, scintillas of starlight lacing the momentary blackness of his vision.
    “Cholera!” he swore, his favorite European imprecation having the venting effect it sometimes manifested. He shook his head to clear it, sure that he had been cut. His skull throbbed at the point where it swelled.
    Above—the soughing of wingbeats as the wygyll lofted from its perch. Gonji steeled himself, wary but relaxed.
    Must maintain the hold, he told himself. What was their favorite technique? Ah—four claws extended; clamp with the hind, rake with the fore. A simple attack pattern that could leave an ox in shredded ruin.
    In his peripheral vision he could see the fifteen-foot wingspread looping lazily about the area, tipping gently at the extremities of its flight path to sail into a graceful figure eight knotted behind the clinging samurai’s unprotected back.
    Without warning the air ballet ended. With a war cry more penetrating than the teeth of the wind, the wygyll dove. Wings trimmed, talons tensed for a strike.
    Gonji willed his thews to relax. He inched up another span. Felt the rush of the approaching marauder. Sensed the closing distance between them. He drew a pistol smoothly, cocked it, turned outward from the wall, maintaining a three-point grip—
    But it was coming on at too indirect a tangent. He knew he was firing from so oblique an angle that he threatened his own precarious hold with the recoil.
    The wygyll did not recognize the menace the firearm posed. It swooped in with searching talons eager to rake and tear.
    Gonji fired— splfszzzz.
    “Sonofabitch— cholera!”
    He gathered his senses at once, even as the wygyll cried out in terror of the misfired pistol’s spluttering powder. His right hand flung off the useless piece and went to the hilt of the Sagami at his shoulder. But the wygyll’s fear of the harmless pyrotechnic caused it to swerve into an ungainly tumble. Feathers fluttered off its wings from the violent directional change.
    The flying predator soared from side to side of the broad cirque valley, whether gathering speed or wrath, Gonji could not tell. It strafed Tora once, twice, the valiant steed’s hooves lashing up to ward it off.
    Gonji used the opportunity to gain another yard. He was working on the second before he caught sight of the cunning beast’s next intention. Farther along the base of the cliff lay a large chunk of sodden log. This the wygyll descended upon