by Victor Milán
She saw Falk raise a hand gauntleted in blue-enameled steel to acknowledge the cheers that pealed out from the courtiers, soldiers, and servants gathered inside the Palace to welcome home the Emperor, and a new feeling—at least, new in this present, deadened reality—suddenly blazed up with searing heat.
Rage. It enraged her that her rapist should be cheered by those sworn to the service of her own family. Of her own father. Yes, he had done amazing feats protecting her father’s life and that hill and Canterville. She’d heard too many accounts from those she trusted—not least Jaume, who did not and could not and must not know anything of her violation by Falk—to doubt his heroism of that day.
But it doesn’t make him not a monster, she thought. It makes him a brave monster. Nobody should cheer a monster.
Thoughts of leaping to her death evaporated like water drops on embers. I will not let him win!
Roused, at least for now, from whatever swamp she’d been submerged in, Melodía held her own head high as she crossed into a place she’d lived in but would never call home, while the feet of a dozen war-hadrosaurs slapped the bridge’s planks at her back.
The Heart’s entryway looked vast enough to admit a dinosaur knight on her dinosaur. Great age-greened bronze valves seven meters high and five wide stood open to either side. Ranks of Defensores del Corazón, men and women in blue and silver livery, with badges of gold and red, stood with their round shields and three-meter thrusting-spears grounded beside their thick-soled buskins, flanking the broad steps to La Entrada. Its clever design of pointed arches progressively stepped inward made less apparent the fact that the real entry narrowed to where it could be closed by more reasonable doors, hidden well back in shade, to keep the weather out.
As she and her father rode side by side down the avenue to the carven steps, Melodía wrinkled her nose at the smell and tried not to wince at the fearful blare of the trumpeters who lined both sides. Behind them a whole town’s or at least a respectable village’s worth of buildings stood between the Palace and the curtain wall. Though the Palace was dug far back into Mount Glory, and its cellars extended deep below the Plateau level, there was a limit to the space it offered for storage and habitation. Especially for draft horses and dinosaurs and war-duckbills. Outbuildings from shacks to dormitories of a degree of elegance, with shops and warehouses in between, all of a variety of styles—some pitch-roofed, many flat—had sprung up over the centuries. Even at that, large open spaces remained for mustering yards and the like; the ledge was larger than it looked from outside.
Melodía’s enemy—she hated to even think his name—turned his white tyrant just in front of the great door and led his Imperial bodyguards to take up position in the yard outside it. Felipe continued right up to the base of the steps. Melodía rode with him, trying not to show her relief at not having to look at that man anymore.
Having preceded the Imperial cavalcade to cry their progress—the party was limited to marching speed by the contingents on foot—the Palace’s own Herald, a middle-aged woman with short iron-colored hair and a build like a nosehorn, took up position atop the short stairway. Raising her conical speaking-trumpet, she bellowed the arrival of His Imperial Majesty, Felipe the First, Emperor of Nuevaropa, Protector of the Faith, and so on and so forth. Palace grooms, young men and women dressed in feathery headdresses and red-trimmed yellow skirts, ran down to take the reins as Felipe, his older daughter, and his retinue dismounted.
They led the mounts offstage to the left, to where a lane ran to a less grand-appearing gate set into the cliff, which really was large enough to admit a dinosaur rider. Horses, hadrosaurs, and the handful of lesser riding-dinosaurs would go down a ramp to underground stables. Mostly, Melodía knew, the entrance was used for the constant stream of supply wagons necessary to keep the Heart beating. Which was presumably already in motion behind them and would start rolling through the gate the moment her father and company went inside.
Stewards materialized to remove the Emperor’s dusty trail-cape and replace it with a giant cloak bristling with long reaper plumes, all yellow and red, of course, and to plant the ruby-inset gold Imperial crown upon the close-cropped ginger Imperial dome. Felipe smiled hugely. He was as amused by Imperial ostentation and ritual, which he found completely ridiculous, as he was enamored of it. Fortunately, Melodía was spared: she had never enjoyed that sort of thing, and had far less patience than her father—still less patience for it now, she was realizing, after having found purpose and validation as the Short-Haired Horse Captain, leading the mounted scouts for Karyl’s army.
And Montse has a lot less patience for folderol than I, she thought. It went like a javelin to her heart.
As Felipe Delgao Ramírez, Emperor of Nuevaropa, swept into his Palace for the first time in years—looking for all of Paradise like one of the fully feathered adult Tyrants rumored to stalk the planet’s cold northern climes—Melodía followed a dutiful step behind. The entrance hall was imposingly large, large enough to accommodate a mounted war-duckbill, even if the actual door was not. Walls of living rock, polished smooth and washed a pale gold color to enhance the light that poured in from windows and cunningly constructed light shafts, soared high overhead before joining in groined vaults. The floor beneath their feet was yellow marble.
The space was dominated by a gilt bas-relief of Manuel Delgao astride a sackbut bull, delivering a golpe de gracia with a lance thrust downward between the colossal gaping jaws of a Tyrannosaurus imperator.
Pages led Felipe through the hall and on toward the throne room. The corridor walls were scattered with statue niches, gold-framed paintings, and feather tapestries, all showing scenes from the illustrious career of the founder of Torre Delgao and the Empire he had ruled—with special emphasis on his most notorious feats of derring-do, which were now widely, albeit tacitly, accepted, in-family at least, as being wildly exaggerated if not outright made up. Even in her sunken-in state, it struck Melodía after years of absence that, while far from tasteful, the leitmotif—which continued throughout the Palace—was undeniably effective in producing an impression of mythic might and indeed inevitability concerning the man, his family, and his Imperio. That too was intentional. Martina Delgao, sister to Juana I and architect of both El Corazón and the modern-day Empire, had known the value of inspiring awe.
At the entrance to the throne room, her father stopped flat.
Melodía stepped up beside him—the corridor was easily wide enough to allow her to do that without jostling him. Which would be unseemly, even for his elder daughter and heir. That Melodía felt impatient at best with Imperial courtly norms didn’t mean she flouted them.
Usually.
She saw at once what had halted him.
At the far end of another tall, wide chamber stood the Fangèd Throne. It was what the name suggested: made apparently from the skull of a Tyrannosaurus, jaws agape, with a thick cushion on the lower jaw in lieu of a tongue and covered in gold paint. Except it was enormously larger than that of any King Tyrant. It belonged, so legend—and even the official histories—said, to an Imperial Tyrant, an oversize Tyrannosaur that had terrorized this part of Spaña before Manuel Delgao, a dinosaur knight returning home after heroic service in the Demon War, killed it single-handedly. Then rode the wave of renown that deed brought him to reuniting the shattered lands of the Tyrant’s head into the Empire of Nuevaropa, and himself to a throne made out of its head.
Since then nobody had ever seen an Imperial Tyrant. Not just in the Empire Melodía’s illustrious forebear had founded. Nowhere. In any part of Paradise. Rumors of sightings cropped up every now and then, but never any official confirmation, from the enormous rest of Aphrodite Terra or elsewhere. Melodía thought the Demon War—the supposed Last Battle in which the Creators, their Grey Angels, and their hosts of pious human devotees had finally defeated the attempt of la Hada, the Fae, to reconquer what they claimed as their home world—to be a myth: some kind of altogether human civil war, glossed into glowing propaganda aft
er the fact to legitimize both the Empire and her family’s rule of it. Similarly, she considered the Throne itself to be a gilded plaster fake.
Of course, her doubt of the ancient legends had been shaken, at the least, by her three encounters with an actual Grey Angel, first in the decaying guise of human flesh and then in whatever Raguel was really made out of. But they couldn’t all be true, all those absurd old myths and legends. Could they?
But, real or not, what the Fangèd Throne was not was empty.
A woman sat at ease on the crimson velvet cushion-tongue.
“Ah, Your Highness,” she said in Spañol thickly flavored with Alemán, “please forgive me. I arrived this morning and could not resist the temptation to warm the Throne for you.”
She rose. Melodía stared at her in astonishment not unmarked by alarm. She was a startling apparition in a white silk gown, accented in black and midnight blue, whose hem swept the floor. She seemed fully as broad as the Palace Herald but, unlike her, tall enough to appear … well, less squat. Above an imposing bosom-bulwark rose a great square pink face, framed by astonishing braids, white as the everlasting snow that crowned La Guardiana, queen of the Shield peaks. Her eyes were the bright and merciless blue of a glimpse of daytime sky through a rare tear in the clouds.
Felipe blinked at her from beneath lowered brows.
“And who might you be, Señora?” he asked mildly. Melodía admired his restraint, though she personally suspected it was misplaced. Your huge Alemana ass doesn’t belong on the Fangèd Throne! she thought, with a degree of outrage that surprised her. Only Delgao asses should be planted in it.
Falk came clanking up on Felipe’s left in the full midnight-blue personal harness he wore, instead of the Scarlet Tyrant’s red and gold. He stopped. Melodía refused to look at him directly. But from the corner of her eye she saw his face had gone even whiter than usual behind his midnight beard.
“Mother?”
Chapter 11
Morión, Morion.…—Corythosaurus casuarius. A high-backed hadrosaur, 9 meters long, 3 meters high at shoulder, 3 tonnes. A favored Nuevaropan war-mount, named for the resemblance between its round crest and that of a morion helmet.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
“So, amigo,” said Manuel. “What’ve you got for us today?”
The yard smelled of dust and the dung of large herbivores—horses and nosehorns, penned in the stables behind the three-story fieldstone posada where they’d stopped to refresh themselves and, hopefully, find information about their quarry. The latter was not unpleasant to Jaume’s nostrils, since he’d grown up with it. Small green- and blue-feathered scratchers lived up to their name among the furrows of the inn’s truck garden. The oviraptors chuckled to one another as they picked caterpillars and big grubs from the small still-green tomatoes and the bean plants. Dusty hills peeked over the shoulder-high adobe wall that enclosed the inn-yard, crowned with grey-green scrub juniper and yellow limestone outcrops. The sky was bright through the clouds, now thin and almost eye-hurtingly white, that perpetually covered it by day.
A cat lay atop the wall with its forepaws tucked to its chest, watching with knowing yet disinterested yellow eyes. Its cream-and-ginger fur reminded Jaume of the coloration of his beloved Corythosaurus war-mount. Like all the Companions’ war-hadrosaurs—and even their full plate armor—she had been left behind for her squire to bring her to, and hopefully catch up with, her master.
Ah, Camellia, Jaume thought. How I miss you. He missed her almost as keenly as he did his novia Melodía.
His heart quickened at the hope he might soon be reunited with both.
“They’re in Tres Veces, my lord,” Pablo said. “A village of some substance, with many stone buildings, in a river valley not ten kilometers away.”
Manuel grinned. Like Florian, he was a commoner who had risen through the ranks of the Brothers-Ordinary, the Companions’ mercenary heavy-cavalry auxiliaries, to knighthood and full Brother status. Born and raised poor on La Meseta himself, he even somewhat resembled the informant, though taller and wirier. He was the obvious choice to do most of the talking, since he spoke the same dialect and knew the words and mannerisms that would put a fellow campesino most at ease.
“‘Three Times,’ eh?” Manuel said. “Perhaps you can tell me the story behind that name someday. For now, though, I’m wondering how you found out about them?”
“I saw them with my own eyes, lord. They were entering the village in two carriages with blacked-out windows. The second had a wheel loose on its axle. A half dozen horsemen rode behind.”
Manuel cocked a brow at Jaume. “Matches the reports we’ve had till now well enough,” Jaume acknowledged.
Manuel knew that as well as any. He had carried some of those reports, from La Merced and its environs, when he met them riding hard the other way on the Imperial High Road. Recently returned from a solo mission for his Order, he had missed the latest campaign and its climax, the desperate fight against Raguel and his Horde, which had gutted the Companions’ already depleted ranks.
The keenest strategic mind of the group, as well as a master of portraiture, the vihuela del arco family of stringed instruments, and the longsword, Manuel had advised them to head south in hopes of intercepting Montse’s abductors en route to Laventura. So Jaume had done, leading his men around the isolated Sierra del Poder and its lesser offshoot, La Sierra de La Gloria, in the midst of La Meseta, which housed the Spañol and Imperial capitals, respectively.
“Well,” said Will Oakheart of Oakheart, “there’s one thing that’s helping us: the Trebs aren’t near as subtle as they think they are.”
“At least they’re not traveling with half a dozen baggage wagons,” Florian said. “Consider the sacrifice they must be making for this.”
“Consider the sacrifice we will exact from them,” Machtigern said. The Alemán knight smiled readily. But seldom with such a raptor edge.
“How long ago?” asked Jaume.
Pablo shrugged. “The sun was already well up, lord.”
Jaume dug in his purse and produced a gold Trono. He tossed it to the informant.
Pablo snagged it deftly from the air. “¡Muchas gracias, señores! May the Creators bless you.” The coin was worth several months’ income for a peasant like Pablo, enough to buy him a trained riding horse or arming-sword, either of good quality.
“Bless you, Don Pablo. If you’ve helped us rescue the little princess, it’ll be the least of your rewards.”
He looked around at his Companions. White teeth grinned in all their faces, dark and fair, bearded or shaved clean.
“¡Montemos! Let’s ride.”
* * *
“Mother,” Falk said as soon as the door to her apartments, on the floor below the Imperial level, had shut behind him. “What are you doing here?”
“Isn’t it obvious, Falki, mein Schatz?” she asked, shedding her gown so that it shimmered to the floor. Beneath, she wore short silken trunks and a tight band to support her breasts—which by itself would be common full dress here in scandalous Spaña—instead of mere undergarments. The skin of her back was very pale. A wispy servant, shorter than she was but still tall for one of these Southerners, with curly dark brown hair and a thin fussy line of moustache, scooped it up and put it away in the wardrobe. “Or are you just being too lazy to think, again? I’m here to look after my boy.”
He hardly registered the verbal slap. Instead, he was staring around in disbelief at his surroundings. They were opulent, a riot of fat silk cushions and brightly colored screens, most depicting a startling variety of erotic scenes. The indirect afternoon sunlight through the window did little to mute the garishness.
He gestured around. “What’s—all this?”
“A few trifles. Mere scraps of comfort. Why would I want to be surrounded by Delgao braggadocio in the form of tasteless art? Oh, I’ve heard all about their conceit in this absurd cave-dweller Palace of theirs. I came prepared.”
She smiled. �
��You know your mother is always prepared.”
She accepted a cup of wine from the servant, who wore a natural-colored linen tunic over a loincloth and was obviously a Palace appurtenance rather than one of her usual gaggle of body servants, and drank deeply. She was never the sort of person to sip.
“What on Paradise made you think sitting in the Fangèd Throne was a good idea?”
She laughed and held the gilt goblet out to be refilled. “I was curious how it felt, to occupy the literal seat of the Empire’s power,” she said. “And I thought it was time an ass other than a skinny Delgao one sat on that cushion.”
She turned her back on Falk again and then set her cup down on a sideboard carven with extremely unlikely images of naked nymphs with wreaths in their hair coupling with nosehorn bulls. In real life, such a juxtaposition, if it could be achieved, would prove immediately fatal to the nymphs. The Dowager Duchess Margrethe’s own tastes were themselves conspicuous in Alemania, where the very sort of dignified austerity the Imperial Heart went in for was the norm.
Raising her arms, she said, “Parsifal, help me get these off. Then you may retire.”
The servant stepped up and began unfastening the breast-band. “Besides,” his mother said airily, “His Majesty took no offense. He seemed quite charmed by me, I think.”
“The rest of the court was pretty thoroughly scandalized, though, Mother,” he said.
She shifted her feet to part her pale thighs slightly to allow Parsifal to skin the drawers off her ample hips and down. Her bare buttocks, large but well muscled, rippled to the motion.
“They don’t matter,” she said. “Only the Emperor matters.”
“But you said our mission was to win influence at court!”
“As a means of gaining influence over His Majesty. Who’s not a bad-looking man, really—probably the Alemán part of him.”
She stepped out of the garment, which the servant picked up and put away.
“You yourself have gotten influence with His Nibs, in your own way—after your battlefield antics, you hardly need worry what all the sycophants and mendicant knights and terribly tedious Diet members who flutter around the Throne whisper about you. And I plan to gain direct influence myself, in my own indirect ways. Parsifal, you may leave us for now.”