by Victor Milán
That got another general laugh.
“I thought we were insanely lucky the Trebs weren’t going balls-out for the southern coast,” Manuel said. “Now thanks to the girl we know they’re taking a circuitous route from sanctuary to secret sanctuary, to avoid detection with the whole country roused against them.”
“We are lucky none of their spies’ve told them about the girl’s little billets-doux.”
“It amazes me they haven’t caught on to what she’s doing,” Machtigern said. “She managed to scratch a message on a table in a common room at the last inn they stopped at. On a table. How the Trebs missed it is beyond me.”
Jaume thought of the latest communication they’d received. That very morning, almost as soon as they took the road, they’d run into a woman farmer mounted on a yearling nosehorn riding the other way. She’d been excited almost beyond coherent speech when she realized she had stumbled right into the presence of the Imperial Constable and his handpicked band of champions. Though once Jaume read the note, the five Tronos he’d given her from their rapidly dwindling supply had shocked her into silence.
“The Trebs are a peculiarly virulent strain of buckethead, it seems,” Florian said. “Despite their reputation for mastery of intrigue, they seem like the sorts who don’t deign to glance at tabletops. Nor commoners. Nor little girls, beyond making sure they don’t slip away.”
Jaume marveled at his cousin’s keen intelligence as well as her resourcefulness. She’d even been learning Griego on the side from the least offensive among her abductors, a sardonic count called Dragos from the Rumano, one of whatever the Basileia called its Lesser Towers—minority groups. She’d overheard that because of problems with their carriages—real this time—they needed to risk stopping at a sympathizer’s house in the substantial settlement of La Bajada for repairs.
“I am amazed by how many spies the Trebs have among us,” Grzegorz said.
“I don’t think any of us suspected it,” Manuel said. “But I should have. We’ve been at peace with Gran Turán right over the mountains longer than any of us have been alive, leave aside the usual bandit raids. Even though Trebizon isn’t our neighbor, we’re their real maritime commercial rivals in western Terra Aphrodite. It’s why they’ve been trying so hard to get the Emperor to marry Melodía off to their Crown Prince Mikael.”
“Who weighs two hundred kilos and never bathes,” said Ramón. “Or so I’ve heard.” Younger than his Slavo fellow Aspirant, he was naturally far less serious in demeanor. But he mostly kept silent now, apparently afraid of embarrassing himself and ruining his chance at acclamation to full Brotherhood.
“The key thing is, they’ve money and motive aplenty to build a spy network inside the Empire, or at least Spaña. And a perfect entrepôt through Laventura.”
“Trebizon’s westernmost stronghold, as they say,” Florian said.
“All the more reason to make this work now,” Jaume said. “If they get into the city, they’re better than halfway home. You all know the plan. The Lady’s strength to us all.”
* * *
“Found us!” screeched the wild-haired noblewoman the other Trebs usually called Tasoula. “The heretics are right outside the village!”
Montserrat’s first reaction to the outburst was to jump halfway off the chair in the sala on the emporium’s second floor, almost spilling a sleeping Mistral to the rich parquetry floor.
The second was elation. If she’s right, I’m as good as free!
Their host, a cadaverous middle-aged Taliano émigré at least two meters tall despite a stoop, who had a great wing of grey hair sticking out like the fin on a cazador jorobado from either cheek, did stand bolt upright from his chair and stare wildly about in alarm with sunken eyes.
“Calm yourself, Señor Alessandro,” said Dragos, sitting on the banco beneath the front windows with his legs crossed, sipping tea from a green glass cup. “I doubt Count Jaume and his pretty bullyboys are about to burst in on us this moment. Although it’d be quite diverting if they did.
Paraskeve shot him a hot-eyed look of hatred, which, Montse reflected, was nothing out of the ordinary for her.
“He is!” Montse took the opportunity to pipe. “He’s coming to kill you all, you murderous loonies!”
“Calm yourself, child,” Akakios said. He stood by a side table looking on with an air of authority that, as usual, did nothing to command the proceedings. It was a constant source of exasperated wonder to Montse how these Trebs got anything done.
Dragos doing most of it, I think is how.
Akakios swept what he clearly hoped was a calming gaze around the richly appointed room. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“Yes I do! Jaume’s going to pull your guts out through your nostrils and I’m going to watch—”
“What do your cards tell you, Tasoula?” asked the priest Charalampos, his thin, bearded face even more twisted with tension than usual.
“The voices in her crazy head, you mean?” Paraskeve said.
Anastasia jumped up from the small table where she sat and flipped it over, sending the Creator’s Cards spread out on it flying everywhere. They could be used either to cast the yijing or, as she’d apparently been using them now, to tell Tarot.
“They’re not my voices!” she shrieked. “I don’t want them in my head! But the cards tell me the Companions are right outside town.”
“Surely, now, they must be wrong,” Akakios said, making patting-down motions with his hands.
“We must fly! Fly!”
“Do people actually say that where you come from?” asked Montse, intrigued despite herself.
“No,” Charalampos said. “She’s just crazy. She read too many romances before the voices started talking in her head.”
“I don’t like it any better than you do,” Dragos said, setting his cup down on the bare whitewashed stone and standing up from the red, black, and grey imported Tejano feather-work blanket spread on the bench for a cushion. “But she’s been right more often than she’s been wrong. We can’t afford to ignore this warning.”
“She is undoubtedly correct,” said the tall man who stood quietly by the back wall. He was very pretty, in a round-faced way, with clean-shaven pink cheeks and big liquid-brown eyes. He was the leader of the Order Military of dinosaur knights who had ridden out from Laventura to meet Montse’s kidnappers in the southern Meseta. Montse knew they spent a lot of time painting and singing and other arty things, and in general they struck her as nothing but a cheap imitation of her cousin’s Companions. “It was inevitable that they’d catch us, sooner or later.”
“Which they wouldn’t do if you’d done your job before and destroyed them in the ambush we set up for you,” said the other male Treb, the small, thin priest called Vlasis. Though he never spoke loudly or directly seemed to threaten, he scared Montse more than any of the others. Even more than the murderous Paraskeve or the raving Tasoula.
“If the Companions were so easy to destroy, Raguel would have finished the job,” Dragos said. “Instead of getting seen off by a disgraced nobleman’s pet.”
“Blasphemy!” shouted Paraskeve.
“Fact,” Dragos countered, calm as always. “Meanwhile, if you want my advice, and I know you don’t, you’ll send out the Mirza and his knights and be quick about it. They probably won’t destroy Jaume this time, either, but they’re your only hope of forestalling him carrying out his young cousin’s quite entertaining prophecy.”
Roshan nodded. “We will prevent them from overtaking you, Arch-Priest,” he said to Akakios. “But you have to follow the seeress’s advice and run.”
“But the carriages aren’t fully fixed,” protested Akakios. For once his smooth, deep voice spiked in alarm.
“No help for it,” Dragos said. “Better to risk a wheel falling off on the road than the Companions getting to you here.”
“But what do we do if one does?” asked Charalampos.
“Run,” Dragos said.
/> Everyone was standing and looking agitated. Alessandro, their traitorous host, was wringing his hands as if anticipating the feel of the headsman’s axe on the back of his neck once his role was discovered. But no one seemed to be doing anything.
Except Roshan, who strode forward with long legs, bare beneath the simple red-dyed linen smock of his Order. The sword hanging from his belt had a curved blade. Montse wondered if it was a talwar.
“How can you help them?” she asked him. “I’m a child. They’re kidnapping me! How is that chivalrous?”
“It isn’t,” the knight said, his face troubled. “But duty overrides all.”
As he passed Montse, he reached down to grip her shoulder. “Be strong, Princess. Your people have not forgotten you.”
She slapped his hand away. “Don’t you dare touch me, you—you dung beetle!”
The hurt in his eyes seemed genuine, to Montse’s surprise.
He left. “Come, everyone,” Akakios said. “We need to be moving as well. Take charge of her, Count Dragos.”
“You slapped the wrong person,” Dragos said to her sidelong as he came up to herd her after the others.
“I’ll slap you too, if you’d like,” she said.
Chapter 14
Sacabuche, sackbut.…—Parasaurolophus walkeri. One of the most popular war-hadrosaurs. Bipedal herbivore: 9.5 meters, 2.5 meters tall at shoulder, 3 tonnes. So named because its long, tubular head-crest produces a range of sounds like the sackbut, a trumpetlike musical instrument with a movable slide.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
Despite a saddle especially constructed to cushion the impacts, and Jaume’s decades of training and practice in maintaining a proper seat, each footfall of Camellia’s fast trot through the streets of La Bajada threatened to jar his every sinew right off his skeleton. He could ignore the rain pelting his face beneath his sallet’s open visor. But though his morion’s powerful three-toed hind feet gave her excellent purchase on most surfaces, the water running over the cobblestones made them slick as fine glass.
He led Bernat, Ayaks, Will, and Grzegorz down the left-hand, or easterly, path through the town toward the large mercantile house. Florian led the rest—Owain, Manuel, Machtigern, and Ramón—right of the main road. He kept his neck turning. He was worried not only about surprise charges or, worse, arrow volleys from a side street or alley but also about the winding way, whose already claustrophobic narrowness was accentuated by the way the tall, narrow buildings on either side had been built out toward each other. They’d be ideal for snipers with crossbows to shoot from, or simply to toss heavy clay roofing tiles down on their heads from. Jaume doubted that ease of ambush was enough to make the Trebs comfortable entering a town this large, no matter how urgent their emergency. The most likely reason they’d gone to ground so close to the potential safety of the coast and crowded sprawl of Laventura was that Treb money had bought an alliance, or at least compliance.
Either way, a quarrel through the neck will make me just as dead, he thought.
From his dealings with Karyl Bogomirskiy, then Voyvod of the Misty March, during the war against the Princes’ Party in the North, Jaume knew true Ovdan war-bow strings wouldn’t lose tension in the rain. The Companions’ main hope for overcoming the advantage the cataphracts’ bows gave them was that the twisty streets provided only short sightlines—and in a pinch Jaume and his dinosaur knights would have a chance to dodge down a byway if they encountered archers.
The buildings showed drab, colorless façades in the rain. Having looked from the ridge before the rain began, Jaume knew most really were that drab, covered in yellow-brown stucco. But close up he saw that each structure was different in height or frontage—this one closer to its cross-street neighbors, that one farther—in what seemed like a defiant attempt at individual distinction. He found the aesthetic oddly satisfying, even if not to his eye beautiful.
Twenty meters ahead of him, a dark sackbut skidded into view around the corner of a three-story brothel, identifiable by two red lamps burning in the gloom. Three more war-duckbills appeared in quick succession.
“Bowl them over and pass them by!” Jaume shouted to his men. He didn’t feel the need to add, “if you can.” It skirted the edge of insult to tell his Companions that much, even the candidate Ramón—he and Grzegorz had been tutored intensively by the full Brothers on the chase.
Jaume slammed the visor of his sallet shut over the bevor that protected his throat and lower face, leaving only a narrow slit to see and breathe through. He raised his escutcheon-style shield. He carried the Lady’s Mirror in his right hand. He and his men had decided there was little point in bringing unwieldy long lances into the confined streets of La Bajada. He was minorly disappointed to see the Trebs—these Trebs, at least—had made the same decision.
It didn’t matter terribly much. A dinosaur knight’s real weapon was his three-ton duckbill. He was mostly there to steer, and do what he could as a secondary thing.
The lead enemy rider showed an extravagant sweeping moustache as he rode bent far over his Parasaurolophus’s neck. He and his comrades wore the same open-face spired helmets they had when the Companions first encountered them in the curious ambush Pablo the traitor had steered them into. He held a talwar up behind him, the point of its curved blade to the sky. The cataphracts eschewed shields, as Ayaks had assured them they probably would.
With the pressure of his knee, Jaume veered Camellia slightly to his right. Well trained and a thoroughly experienced warrior, the morion raised her head high half a long step before impact to clear it from the path of the two big dinosaurs’ collision.
She deflected right. The sackbut staggered, tossing its head, rolling its eyes, and opening its beak in distress. The Treb knight struggled to keep his saddle against his mount’s flailing. Jaume’s cross-saddle overhand cut sent the Lady’s Mirror slamming against the vambrace protecting the left arm the Flower Knight threw up to shield himself. Steel plate flexed. Jaume didn’t know whether he’d broken the bone beneath, but the blow was enough to knock the off-balance man over the hadrosaur’s side.
Twisting in his saddle, Jaume swung his longsword back clockwise at a bearded knight mounted on a morion. He deflected the blow high with his talwar, then tried a countercut. Jaume dropped his elbow and took it at the juncture of blade and cross-guard.
Then Ayaks, riding past the Flower Knight on the other side, rose high in the stirrups of his gold-and-cream morion, Bogdan, and, swinging his 180-centimeter dosmanos with both hands, hacked through the man’s helmet and into the skull beneath.
Camellia, slowed by her glancing impact with the sackbut, ran breastbone to breastbone up against a morion that was a bright enough blue to show through the rain and gloom, with some dark marbling. Jaume guided her past to the left. The rider, who was fair and clean-shaven, took a vicious overhand swing with a long-hafted rider’s axe. Jaume opened with his shield as the blow landed, causing the axe head to glance off. At the same time, he turned Camellia into the blue morion, thrusting overhand for the man’s exposed face. The knight had presence of mind and was skilled; he hadn’t overextended with the axe blow. Instead, he leaned fast back and to his own right. The powerfully driven longsword tip didn’t hit his face, or even his steel gorget; it took him just under his left clavicle. The heavy steel scales of his hauberk didn’t let the Lady’s Mirror penetrate, but, backed by Camellia’s three tons, turning the stroke was still enough to send him sprawling out of the saddle.
Never one to admire the effect of a sword stroke, Jaume was already twisting his body and his mount clockwise. As he did he caught motion from the corner of his eye. It was Roshan, on his pink-faced white Corythosaurus, turned shades of grey by downpour and light.
The Mirror caught Roshan’s overhand-swung talwar flat to flat and carried it down past Jaume to his right, glancing off Camellia’s sodden caparison of heavy cloth. Too overextended to counterstrike effectively with the longsword, Jaume used his clockwise moment
um to drive the upper edge of his shield toward the Flower Knight’s face.
But Roshan was already steering the morion to his own left. He was able to escape the blow by ducking low over the dinosaur’s strong white neck.
Jaume recovered. He kept Camellia turning right while holding his shield up cross-body and his sword with tip above left shoulder—a precarious pose for anyone but a master dinosaur knight and swordsman. Fortunately for Jaume, he was both.
Less fortunately, Roshan clearly knew it. He wheeled his mount quickly, trying to catch Camellia in the throat with his own morion’s massive tail. Jaume gave off trying to set up a cut and instead caused Camellia to pirouette in place, using her own tail as counterbalance. At the same time, he took his left foot from the stirrup and swung his leg up. The enemy tail-sweep took Camellia flat along her left flank—a hit that jarred Jaume’s eyeballs in their sockets but did her no substantial damage. And did not break his leg, thanks to his quick action.
But the blow staggered Camellia all the same. She had to step to her right to keep from going down. While Jaume, brilliant rider though he was, had to focus on staying in his saddle with his left leg in the air.
Before Camellia could recover, Roshan wheeled his duckbill around in front of her again. Jaume got his left leg back down and readied to receive the Treb’s next sword cut.
It didn’t come. Instead, all of Roshan did, flying at him from his saddle as they came nearly knee to knee.
He had dropped his long, curved sword to swing from a lanyard. Jaume tried to smash his sword pommel into Roshan’s head, but its spired shape made the blow glance off Roshan’s left pauldron. Roshan got inside Jaume’s shield and tackled him right off Camellia’s back.
Like any dinosaur knight who wanted to live, Jaume spent frequent painful hours practicing falling off his high-backed steed without taking damage—or, at least, while taking minimal damage. But not even his and his fellow Companions’ cunning and resourceful minds had foreseen this particular course of events. Jaume himself had managed to scramble aboard the notoriously wicked robber baron Sándoval’s sackbut and break the Baron’s neck from behind, but that was only possible because the Baron, a buckethead among bucketheads, arrogantly assumed that his opponent’s lack of armor and lowly horse meant that he could do nothing to harm a fully armored knight riding a war-dinosaur.