The Dinosaur Princess

by Victor Milán

  “Any sign of the Princess?” Jaume asked anxiously. He feared this would be a Treb ruse—a feint to draw off the rescuers while Montse’s real abductors smuggled her out some other way.

  The Marine spy shook her head. Her short hair wasn’t anything unusual down here by the docks, Jaume had observed. “No. But—there are two women in uncomfortable-looking black priestly robes and those funny high hats important Trebs all wear. One of them’s doing most of the arguing for their side, or at least screeching. They have a much shorter acolyte with them who’s even more swaddled up. She looks like she’s holding a little animal of some kind.”

  Relief almost turned the ligaments of his knees to boiled noodles. “That’s her!” he exclaimed.

  He turned to wave acknowledgment at his waiting men while Herrera bellowed at his own: “Light ’em up, boys and girls!”

  Exchanging messages with the Naval base’s comandante by galloper as he pushed his men down the road toward the city at a faster pace than was good for duckbills to sustain, he had managed to make sure certain preparations were made in time. Fortunately, Felipe had not seen fit to revoke Jaume’s status as Condestable—supreme commander of all the Empire’s war forces. Even more helpful, perhaps, was the fact that the Laventura Sea Dragons’ Channel Squadron brothers and sisters had passed glowing reports of the balls and fighting prowess of Jaume and his Order across the grapevine.

  Fully armored Marines tossed torches into the three cargo carts jammed axle to axle in the side street. Aided by some dry tinder beneath, the damp rags and scrap lumber, well doused in pine oil, instantly took flickering blue flame. And a beat of Jaume’s racing heart later began to puke great aromatic gouts of dirty-white smoke toward the storm clouds quickly gathering low above the harbor. While a Dragon chanted a rowing cadence, they began to push each forward around the corner, a dozen Marines each pushing on the box and the two beams a nosehorn would normally be hitched between to pull it.

  Bartomeu brought Camellia to her knees. Jaume almost vaulted aboard her. As she rose with a grunt to her big three-toed feet, he yanked free the loose knot that held his shield to his saddle, threaded his left arm through the band of his shield, and seized the grip. Drawing the Mirror from across his back, he twisted in the saddle and brandished the longsword.

  “For Beauty and the Lady!” he cried.

  “For Empire and the Infanta!” his Companions roared back.

  Slamming his visor shut, he urged Camellia to follow the smoke-belching dinosaur carts toward the docks.

  * * *

  Just when Montse wasn’t sure whether she’d first suffocate inside the cowl of the heavy black hemp acolyte robe her abductors had swaddled her up in to mask her distinctive dark-blond dreadlocks or expire from boredom at the sudden last-minute haggling about their passage, Paraskeve broke off shrieking Griego imprecations at the captain of the cog Karagiorgos and screamed, even louder, “They’re coming!”

  The priestess never eased her raptor-claw grip on Montse’s left arm, though.

  A nosehorn began to bray in panic from somewhere on the wharf nearby. Montse smelled smoke. She wondered if a street vendor’s brazier had spilled and ignited some of the goods piled high on the dockside, causing the dinosaur’s alarm.

  Because there was only one “they” whose coming Montse could imagine the Trebs reacting so strongly to, her heart almost burst with joy. She wheeled around, fumbling at the hood with the hand that wasn’t holding a quiescent Mistral in order to clear her vision as well as her airway. And immediately wondered how the awful woman could tell.

  The smoke wasn’t coming from a burning kiosk or a crate of fine Spañol fabrics bound for far ports. Instead, it boiled up from the beds of three carts that had appeared down the street that led to the docks. She could just see them moving closer, over the black-leather-capped heads of a brute squad of the Guardia Civil’s Shore Patrol and between the great war-hadrosaurs of the Flower Knights arrayed in a protective semicircle in front of them.

  As if he read her mind, Dragos murmured, “Who else could it be?”

  She cried out in fear as the Flower Knights loosed their bows. Smoke swallowed the arrows.

  “They’re shooting blind,” Dragos said, slightly tightening his reassuring grip on her shoulder. “Also high, or I miss my estimation.”

  The ship captain turned and scuttled up the ramp, bawling instructions. Montse had spent enough time hanging around the La Merced docks to realize from the way the sailors on board began untying lines that he meant to cast off as quickly as possible. He gobbled something down his beard at the others that Montse couldn’t understand.

  Is he going to abandon us here? she wondered. I hope!

  His come-forward hand waving broke that hope. Akakios shouted out, “We’re boarding!” in his booming bass voice. Evidently whatever point they’d been haggling about was pretty moot now.

  Paraskeve was now yelling at Anastasia to do something. The wild-haired junior priestess turned and dashed straight up the ramp, tearing off her swaddling clothes. Since she’d seen that the Trebs were, if anything, more averse to nudity around others than a bunch of stuffy Alemanes, her behavior baffled Montse even more than usual.

  Tasoula’s madness seemed purposeful somehow, and that worried Montse. But at least Paraskeve let her go.

  She and Akakios hustled up the ramp as Tasoula vanished from Montse’s view. Their Spañol minions and Treb servants followed. So did the small, scary Vlasis, at a more deliberate pace. Chubby Charalampos stayed on the flagstones by the base of the ramp, shifting nervously from foot to sandaled foot. His eyes rolled left and right like a frightened horse’s.

  “Aren’t you going to drag me aboard?” Montse asked the debonair Count Balaur, who still held her by the shoulder.

  “Wait a moment,” he told her. “And be ready.”

  Two of the carts swerved left and right to the sides of the wide, abruptly deserted avenue. Through the smoke around the one that stalled in the middle appeared the colossal, lurching forms of hadrosaurs with armored knights on their backs. Their harness was enameled white, and a red Lady’s Mirror shone on the left side of every one.

  The Companions! They really are here! Montse’s heart almost burst from a passion more violent than joy. She jumped up and down, cheering and waving poor Mistral around in her hand.

  It barely registered when two of the Treb knights, still meters away from the charging Nuevaropans, fell off their duckbills with a clatter of their armor scales.

  The two lines collided like a wave and a rock of flesh and steel.

  * * *

  “They’re drawing!” Will Oakheart of Oakheart heard Owain de Galés call in Anglysh.

  The two Anglaterranos crouched between chimney pots on the steeply peaked roof of a tall building of yellow brick. The treacherous Trebizon emissaries were clumped at the foot of a ramp running up to a fat three-master carrack a hair over a hundred meters away, already riding low in the water with a full hold of cargo and supplies. They seemed to be embroiled in a heated dispute with the ship’s master.

  Will was aware of them, but his whole attention was focused on the eleven cataphracts who sat on war-duckbills arranged in a semicircle on the wharf to deny access to the ramp and the ship beyond. They had initially reacted with apparent confusion over the appearance of three carts smoking like self-ignited dung heaps that had suddenly rounded the corner and were bearing down on them along the broad thoroughfare, looking at each other and shouting words the pair likely wouldn’t have been able to understand had they been able to hear them. But their leader came to a sudden decision. At his command, thumb-rings drew nocked arrows smoothly back to ears as the deceptively heavy-looking recurved bows of laminated Triceratops horn came up.

  Shooting blind, Will thought. And why wouldn’t they? Their arrows would do them no good in their quivers.

  He and his partner were already drawing their longbows of stout Anglysh yew and sighting along their arrows, each fletched with t
wo white feathers and one red, in the Companions’ colors. Like the Ovdan war bows their enemies were preparing to loose, each required enormous strength and skill to use properly, and thus a lifetime’s training. And like the hornbows, they were within easy range for archers as masterful as Will reckoned his enemies to be—and for him and Owain as well.

  Will the chisel tip pierce those overlapping scales? he wondered as he drew a deep breath, let half go, and held the rest. We’re about to find out.

  He shot. A finger-snap later he heard the plangent note of Owain’s more powerful bow. Though shorter by a hand than Will, the Welshmuhn was stronger.

  His shot struck a clean-shaven blond knight on a red-marbled blue morion through the gorget. He loosed his bow into one of the flaming wagons, clutched the shaft with one hand, which was quickly sprayed with blood, and fell. He saw a dark-bearded Flower Knight go down as well.

  The rest loosed their bows. Even at this distance, Will heard the deep music of the chord they produced and savored its curious Beauty. The Lady and the Eight keep my Brothers, he thought, and reached for another arrow in the quiver slung by his side.

  * * *

  A flight of arrows flashed through the astringent smoke and whuffled no more than a meter over Jaume’s head.

  “Go low!” he shouted. “They’re shooting blind.”

  If they were going to do that, there was no more point in choking on dense smoke. They had eaten up almost half of the distance to the dock and cost the enemy a wasted volley. It’ll have to do. He opened his visor with his sword hand just long enough to cry, “Sea Dragons, clear the way!”

  Still cheering lustily, the Marines on the left and right shoved their cars to the side of the narrow street, upsetting kiosks of fresh fish and fried hornface-flesh strips abandoned by their proprietors when trouble broke. Even for the Laventura waterfront, a notoriously violent place, this was an extreme level of combat.

  By oversight the third cart got left in the middle of the street. Jaume and his nine Companions, on their duckbills at a rolling four-footed lope, flowed about it like a stream around a stone. He rode bent down along Camellia’s neck with his shield rim held up to his visor slot to present as small a target as possible to the expert Trebizon archers. He had to trust in Camellia’s steel chamfron to protect his beloved mount’s face and eyes.

  The Flower Knights stood to receive their charge in a half-circular formation a mere thirty meters ahead. Behind them stood a phalanx of burly bravos in black-enameled boiled nosehorn-leather breasts and backs and leather caps, armed with shields, crude but deadly lead-head maces, and a few spears and halberds. Jaume recognized the Laventura Guardia Civil’s Shore Patrol, even more notorious for their wanton brutality than their corruption, which Herrera had warned they might find opposing them.

  As the Flower Knights began drawing their bows for a second volley aimed at their now clearly visible foes, more urgent was the fact that Roshan hadn’t told him the entire truth. He and his men weren’t doing everything possible to thwart Montserrat’s rescue after all. By standing to receive a charge by enemy dinosaur knights, they were putting themselves at a terrific disadvantage—one their priestly masters would be unlikely to deign to recognize. They had set themselves up to die—and lose—with honor intact.

  They loosed their arrows.

  Jaume felt an impact slam, first to the left side of his shield, then his visor, and then the cheekbone behind. His eyes watered at the jolt and sudden sting. He blinked to clear them. He saw young Ramón, the Brother-Aspirant, slump from the saddle of his brown-and-white sackbut bull with an arrow jutting from just in front of the crown of his horror-skull basinet helmet.

  With his sword hand he reached for the arrow’s red shaft. A squeal that threatened to shatter his eardrums through his helmet made him turn his head to the right. He saw Ayaks’s morion Bogdan falling onto his golden side with an arrow sticking out of the left eye hole of his chamfron. The giant blond Ruso timed his beloved mount’s fall expertly, leaping clear at the last heartbeat so that he landed on his feet and running with his greatsword held over his head with both hands.

  With the first two fingers of his gauntleted right hand, Jaume gripped the arrow against the Mirror’s hilt, snapping the arrow off with a decisive twist of his arm. The visor held the remaining section of shaft firmly enough that it didn’t torque the head badly and expand the wound. But the action still sent a blinding-white sheet of agony smashing back through the left side of Jaume’s skull like a heated axe blade.

  His eyes streaming tears of intense agony as much as grief for young Ramón and the brave and beautiful Bogdan, Jaume let go the broken arrow and firmed his grip on his longsword. He thrust it out straight before him.

  A beautiful green Lambeosaurus with white mottling reared up in front of Camellia, panicked at her charge. Even the best-trained war-dinosaur might break at any unexpected threat, as Camellia and all the rest had done in the face of the phantom fire in La Bajada. Jaume let Camellia knock the halberd right on its ass, expertly putting her shoulder in to deliver maximum force while suffering the least ill effect from it. Barely slowed beyond being forced to raise up slightly herself and tuck in her hoof-like forefeet, she kept running forward on her hind legs.

  Before she had finished a fresh pace, the Lady’s Mirror took a Flower Knight with an imposing plaited black beard right through his yelling mouth as the man, his bow abandoned, struggled to draw a talwar in time. The sword-tip smashed right out the back of his skull to tear his helmet from his head by the mail aventail behind.

  As he delivered the killing blow, Jaume saw Ayaks, running with great bounding strides reminiscent of the duckbills and seemingly not much slower, deliver a screaming overhand cut of his dosmanos to a Flower Knight on an orange-and-yellow sackbut. The long blade hacked through the plate cuisse that protected the front of the Treb’s thigh and chopped it to bone. The answering sheet of red that sprayed out told Jaume, as he ripped his own weapon free of the sagging corpse it had made of a lovely and valiant young knight, that the Companion would have no need of a follow-up blow. He had severed the great artery of his enemy’s leg. The man would bleed to death in a few beats of his battle-accelerated heart.

  Jaume started to twist back counterclockwise—and, letting go of the grip, threw the shield right at Roshan’s unprotected face.

  The Flower Knights were already overmanned—thanks in part to the rooftop sniping of the Angloterranos. But the street was now clogged by a seething scrum of war-dinosaurs, ridden and riderless. Jaume urged Camellia straight ahead.

  “Make us a path, baby,” he told her.

  Almost at once a great pale shape barred their way: Gulrukh, his rose-faced white Corythosaurus. “Now you must fight me, my lord!” cried Roshan from her back.

  But through the riot of dinosaurs and their-all-but-inconsequential human excrescences, beyond an increasingly uneasy wall of black-leathered Guardias, Jaume could see that the Trebs had concluded their disagreement with their getaway-ship captain, or at least wisely chosen to take it aboard, and were hustling up the ramp.

  The small one hung back and swept her cowl from her head with a hand still holding a rather nonchalant-looking silver-and-black ferret. The hood fell back to reveal a familiar mass of dark-golden dreadlocks.

  Montserrat! Jaume’s heart soared at mere sight of her.

  “No time!” he shouted at Roshan as a priestess in a tall silver-chased black hat yanked the Princess rudely up the ramp.

  As they came knee to knee, the Flower Knight aimed an overhand cut at Jaume’s head. Jaume leaned into it, bringing his shield up over his head from the left. The long curved blade glanced off with a scraping sound.

  The Flower Knight swung his sword and managed to send the shield flipping end over end past him with a clang. And Jaume caught him with a forehand cut right under his left armpit.

  The scales’ overlap and inertia absorbed most of the blow’s force. Jaume doubted he’d so much as cracked a rib. Bu
t the stroke was powerful enough to unbalance Roshan ever so slightly in his saddle.

  Twisting his body right, Jaume withdrew the sword, then plunged it in a thrust to the left side of Roshan’s chest. Delivered mostly with Jaume’s upper body and arms, the longsword’s point didn’t come any closer to penetrating Roshan’s coat of steel scales than the edge had. But it delivered enough of a shock to knock Roshan over his mount’s left side.

  Jaume yanked his left leg free of the stirrup and, pushing up from the saddle with his right, braced the sole of his left sabaton on the saddle pommel. Then he used his leg to launch himself right across Roshan’s just-vacated saddle.

  He landed in a graceless sprawl, facedown across the saddle. Bracing with his left hand on the pommel, he got his feet beneath him and threw himself from Gulrukh’s high back toward her master, who had just landed on his back on the dockside pavement with a splash of latent muck.

  As Jaume plummeted, he reversed his grasp on the Mirror’s long hilt with his right hand, and seized it with his left as well. Using the full weight and momentum of his armored body, he drove the longsword straight through the center of Roshan’s chest.

  The Flower Knight’s body arched as if to receive the blade as it punched through his scales, ribs, and heart.

  Jaume let go the hilt and landed hard atop the fallen Flower Knight. This time, he’d been prepared for the drop and hadn’t had the breath knocked out of him. Which wasn’t to say the battle bruises wouldn’t hurt more than usual tomorrow.

  If he lived that long.

  Roshan’s smile was somehow sweet and horrific for being full of blood that was bright even in the near-storm light.

  “They have more magic, and worse,” he said. “Kiss me, my love.”