by Victor Milán
Despite the gore, Jaume pressed his lips quickly to Roshan’s. The Flower Knight sighed his final breath into Jaume’s nostril. It smelled of rose pastille and fresh blood.
Jaume sprang to his feet. Most of the Flower Knights were down. He slapped up his visor and whistled. From where she stood a few paces away, Camellia, warily watchful, trotted toward him.
Taking a page from Roshan’s book, Jaume sheathed the Mirror, then grabbed his stirrup and used it and the rigging straps to haul himself and his twenty-plus kilos of armor right up her flank onto her high back. He took a moment to feel pleasure at the accomplishment—he’d practiced plenty of acrobatic maneuvers in full harness, but never that one—and then once more urged Camellia through the melee as the Companions powered down a last trio of Flower Knights.
He heard a scream: a keening, ear-stabbing warble of syllables in an unknown tongue. He had time to look up and see a naked woman with wild dark hair perched on the caravel’s rail, gesticulating frantically with dirty-looking arms.
Then, like an ocean wave, cobblestones and the reeking soil of the dock itself rose up to wash over the combatants and him.
Chapter 19
Raptor irritante, Irritante, vexer.…—Velociraptor mongoliensis. Nuevaropan raptor, 2 meters long, 50 centimeters high, 15 kilograms. Commonly kept as a pet, though prone to be quarrelsome. Wild vexer-packs are often pests but pose little threat to humans.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
“The woman,” Will said to Owain. “Shoot her.”
He was out of sorts because his most recent shot, at a small Flower Knight riding a dun halberd, had missed. He was reaching for another arrow, but the few remaining enemies were too intermingled with the Companions for even him to risk a shot.
“I don’t like to. She’s crazy.”
The capering woman raised her eyes and her hands and gestured at the building closest to that particular dock, which showed the three round lanterns of a pawnshop. A dull orange tile arrowed off its steeply pitched roof and struck Bernat in the back. He toppled right off the back of his cream-and-brown sackbut, Jordi, as if it had killed him. Which, given that it might weigh thirty kilos, it well might have.
Without another word, Owain pulled back his already nocked arrow and loosed.
* * *
“But, Mother,” Falk said urgently. “I have to talk to you.”
“You are talking, my son. And I am listening. I don’t have anything better to do right now, since you’ve interrupted my massage.”
He frowned and swallowed. The operation was in fact continuing quite smoothly as two short men dressed in immaculate white cotton loincloths, their squatly muscled tan torsos twined with elaborate tattoos of giant serpents, fliers, and flowers, pummeled her bare back and buttocks with the blades of their stiffened hands as she lay with her face turned from him and resting on a plush, folded towel. They paid him no mind. Blind master masseurs of legendary skill from Zipangu, off the far end of Aphrodite Terra, they were said to find their services in demand all over the world. And to be accordingly well compensated. In this case, Falk’s and his mother’s hosts were footing the bill for his mother’s indulgence. Rather than, as usual, the long-suffering peasants of Hornberg back home.
A pair of pet vexers, bred for plumage in the Imperial colors, dozed on the far side of a small pool beyond the marble table on which the Dowager Duchess lay. They were quite tame. Felipe, a great lover of the hunt, kept a pack of them for chasing small game in the scrublands around Glory Plateau. Savage though they were to prey, they were quite gentle and attached to humans, like cats. They had the run of the Palace, also like cats.
Falk felt an odd sensation in the pit of his stomach as the foreign pair, their hair glossy black and wrapped into tight topknots, each began to knead one of the Dowager Duchess’s thighs, their fingers digging deeply into white skin. She made a soft growl low in her throat and fidgeted her butt. He moistened his lips with his tongue.
I wish I were more fully dressed, he thought, even though it’s hot and humid as a Black River swamp down here.
“As you no doubt know”—because of course his mother still had spies watching her son’s every move, even though his longtime servant and nemesis, Bergdahl, was temporarily dispatched to different duty in Karyl’s new Duchy of the Borderlands—“I’ve followed your instructions quite scrupulously to diminish and disparage the Imperial Princess’s reputation. Both to weaken the force of her inexplicable opposition to waging war on Trebizon to avenge the kidnapping of her own sister and, in case she’s inclined to make use of her position as the Emperor’s only remaining daughter, to level … certain potentially damaging allegations.”
“Not yourself, though? I mean, I’ve been trusting you, but I know you sometimes fall short of justifying that.”
If by trusting you meant having that wretched asshole Bergdahl ride my neck like a giant leech the whole time I’ve been in the South, he thought.
“Of course not.” He caught himself, thank the Eight, before asking if she thought he was stupid. He knew too well what that answer was. Even if she’d be quick, as she always was, to assure him he wasn’t really stupid, she knew, and that was why she was so disappointed. “I’ve spoke nothing but praise for Her Highness’s service in fighting for the throne. I pay others to spread the rumor that she was merely slumming with useless peasant residue, along with a surcharge for appropriate snickering.”
“And you have quite frustrated her efforts to build a base of her own from which to undermine your reputation,” she said. He didn’t bother asking how she knew that. He wasn’t stupid. “You’ve done quite well in that regard, left to your own devices. For once.”
He uttered a small, soft grunt, as if she had punched him in the stomach with her powerful right fist. She had seldom struck him as he was growing up—his father had more than made up that deficit, until Falk pushed him down the stairs one late night when the man was shitting-himself drunk—but Falk knew she could hit like a Griego pankratist.
“But that’s all changing,” he said, “despite the best efforts of my bribed courtiers. And I don’t dare push them harder. Veterans of Karyl’s campaigns have begun arriving at Court and telling far different tales of our pretty Princess’s contributions in battle. Knights and grandes of immaculate birth and reputation.”
She turned to give him a cool blue gaze. “Aside from having recently been placed under the Emperor’s own ban and declared outlaws, you mean?”
“And personally pardoned by His Majesty immediately following the battle. He said, approximately, that he either had to pardon and ennoble everybody who’d fought on his side or hang them all for impiousness, himself included. And he started by making erstwhile arch-outlaw Karyl Bogomirskiy a Duke and giving him half of Duke Eric’s lands for a fief.”
She sighed gustily as the masseurs applied themselves to her feet. “One of Bergdahl’s few total failures. It doesn’t surprise me that you failed to kill him, even given a clean shot at his back. But it’s unlike Bergdahl to leave his mark alive. Ah, well. Proceed with your complaint, dear boy.”
“Some who originally marched with the Empire on Crusade against Providence also have arrived bearing witness to her actions. Specifically, she apparently faced the arch-heresiarch Bogardus himself, who founded the Garden and served as lieutenant to—to the Grey Angel Himself. He had been a dinosaur knight, before he became a priest, it seems. He rode a war-hadrosaur and wore full armor, while the Princess fought him from the back of that pampered pony of hers, in only light leather and armed with javelins. And won.”
“Impressive,” Margrethe murmured.
“You see my problem.”
She laughed. “Enough, boys,” she told the blind men. They bowed and withdrew. She rose and stretched.
“Ah, they are good at that. And you have nothing to worry about.”
“But our efforts—”
“Served their purpose.”
She padded naked up to him. She w
as not much shorter than he was. He could smell the musk of light, clean sweat on her skin. Her nipples almost brushed his own bare chest.
“And now our dear Princesa is about to find her own efforts dashed,” she said, smiling at her son. “Along with more than a measure of her hopes.”
“How do you know that?”
She laughed. “Come now. You know I have my ways. I always have my ways.”
She reached up and stroked his bearded cheek.
“So set your mind at ease. Nothing she says will matter soon. Against you or our lovely war.”
She withdrew her hand slightly and gave him a slap across the cheek that rocked his head around on his nosehorn neck.
“Ow!” he said, rubbing his face. “What did you do that for?”
“For being a fool and running your fool tongue in front of servants. Did you learn nothing from your time with Bergdahl? Even when he was employed as a servant in the Firefly Palace?”
“But—they’re outlanders. And they’re blind.”
“They aren’t deaf, boy. Not mute, either. Luckily, I tip them handily, even measured against their usual expectations. They’ll stay discreet.”
That was another not-exactly-Alemana trait of Falk’s mother’s: she was always open-handed. Where her own pleasures were concerned, at least. And also her intrigues.
“And if not—” she shrugged a powerful shoulder. “I’ll have them garroted and cast down the Moat for the rag-pickers to find. That’s an expense service around here, too. But also well worth it, when it’s called for.”
“But they’re the Emperor’s own servants! Hired directly from their island kingdom at truly Brontosaurian expense, or so it’s said.”
“And he can afford to hire more. They’re outlanders, and you know they aren’t in good color here at court.”
“Zipangu is a good deal farther from the Basileia than Trebizon is from here.”
“And who knows or cares, when the Emperor’s own baby daughter has been stolen away from her home by wicked foreigners? In any event, such an act is vanishingly likely to become necessary. And even less so to be connected with me. As you should know more than anybody.”
He stood rubbing his beard lightly with his fingertips. As always under such circumstances, he felt an inextricable tangle of emotions, of which frustration, resentment, and adoration were large parts.
“You know I only do what I do out of love for you, Falki,” she said. “Now run along, and stop endangering your mother’s dearly bought relaxation with your groundless worrying.”
She turned, walked to the pool, and dove in. The velociraptors jumped up when the ensuing wave washed over them, shook and ruffled suddenly soaked feathers whose gorgeous red-and-yellow colors had temporarily turned brown, and ran off with mincing steps of their hind legs, killing claws discreetly held above the smooth marble floor, chittering their outrage at each other.
* * *
From behind his right shoulder, Will Oakheart heard a squelching sound, a soft, sad gurgle of a sigh, and knew Owain was lost.
He continued his smooth draw without a hitch, sighting down the pale wooden shaft at the scrum developing by the ramp to the Treb cog. He noted that the wild-haired, capering nude woman had disappeared, and so had the wave of uprooted soil and paving stones. The nearby roof tiles now remained calmly in place.
But he found no targets. He trusted his aim—as did Jaume and the Brothers-Companion clearly overwhelming the last Flower Knights below. He saw Machtigern crush the skull of the small cataphract who had clearly just shot the shaft that had struck Owain. But what he did not trust was the random surge and weave of human and dinosaurian bodies in battle. The ultrahard chisel-shaped arrowheads he and Owain were shooting were the finest quality available on the Tyrant’s head, made specially and at great price by the wandering smiths and tinkers of La Familia Herrera—or the Smyth Famuhly, as he’d say in his own tongue. If they’d punch through Trebizon scale, they’d punch through the backs of Companion cuirasses at least as readily.
Reluctantly, he relaxed his draw. Removing the arrow and returning it to his quiver, he glanced aside.
Owain lay on his back, his pretty lips slightly parted, his eyes mostly closed. There was no sign of the arrow that had struck him. Almost certainly chisel-tipped as well, it had passed through his torso side to side, on an upward course from lower left rib cage almost to the right armpit. A pool of blood had spread wide around him already on the burnt-umber-colored tiles, running in rivulets down toward the alley below. The sky, its clouds suddenly as thick and black as boiling blood pudding above, robbed his blood of its lustrous red hue.
It seems so unfair, he thought, as he laid his longbow carefully aside and knelt to cradle Owain’s head. Owain opened his green eyes, so pure and bright, and with obvious effort turned his head aside to kiss the hand that caressed his beardless cheek.
“Don’t stir,” Will told him. He didn’t mutter reassurances. They were both Companions, and of all of them Owain—and Will himself—would know best that the small, spurting holes on either side of his torso were plain signs of a mortal wound.
Owain smiled at him. His teeth were ghastly with blood.
“That was a … true shot,” he croaked, and his head lolled to the side as the light left his eyes.
Will sat there for a time, feeling the dead weight of his friend and sometime lover’s head on his bare thigh. He heard without registering the sounds and trumpeting and clangor of combat from the waterfront below. He wasn’t sure how he felt. He had lost dear friends before—he had been one of Jaume’s select Order for years, and that was part of their service as Companions of the Lady. But never had someone he had been lovers with die in his arms before.
Empty, he decided. It’s all I can let myself feel now.
He disentangled himself from Owain’s now-lifeless body. Gently, as if it mattered. He settled Owain’s blond head on the tiles. Then he picked up his bow and rose.
A wall of fire roared alight between the Companions on their dinosaurs and the cog. From the savage heat Will felt even on his perch and the shrieks of the human-like shapes visible inside the inferno, he knew this was no illusion.
I’ve done what I can here, he thought. Farewell, my friend, my love. We’ll be back for you.
He turned away and began looking for the fastest way down to street level.
Chapter 20
Dragones de la Mar, Sea Dragons (singular Dragón de la Mar, Sea Dragon)—Nuevaropa’s Imperial Navy, named after the common name for large—and well-feared—carnivorous marine reptiles. Colors are blue, green, and silver. Their dromons, rowed war-galleys, patrol La Canal for pirates; larger sailing ships cruise the high seas and wage naval warfare. Every Sea Dragon serves as both sailor or rower and fighter. They also fight in boarding and shore actions as marines.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
I don’t believe it, Montse thought, seeing the flagstones of the wharf and the very ground below it rise up to pelt the victorious Companions, in apparent response to Lady Anastasia’s naked capering on the rail.
Montse made sure to stand well on the other side of the ramp from her—the breeze was blowing from the shore, picking up strength, which struck the girl since there were so many tall buildings to block it. But it meant she could barely smell Tasoula. The priestess’s bodily hygiene left visibly more to be desired nude than clothed.
More than scared, Montse felt angry. I don’t like things that don’t make sense!
The only answer as to how the stone and soil fountain was taking place that made near sense was magic. And even after all that had happened, that she had seen, Montse hated to admit it was real.
Despite the unnatural interference, the Sea Dragons continued to battle with the Shore Patrol ruffians who backed the now mostly fallen Flower Knights. The mad priestess raised her attention to the pitched roofs beyond the docks, made gestures of pulling. Massive clay tiles began to detach and hurl them
selves at the Companions. To her horror, she saw one fall. His visor was down; she only knew it was not Jaume, because Camellia was her old friend, too.
Tasoula’s ululations ended in a strangled squawk. She collapsed on the deck. Montse had no idea why until she noticed the arrow sticking up at an angle from the planks. Gore dripped from its whole visible length, especially the feathers.
“No!” shrieked Charalampos, his pitch higher than the sorceress’s had been. “Even Fae magic won’t stop them!”
That word—hada, for he had screamed in Spañol—chilled Montse as none of the terrible things she had experienced or seen so far had. She was agnostic about the Creators. She was still reluctant to believe in magic, although she was grudgingly coming to accept that, rationally, it did exist. But she most powerfully did not want to believe in the Creators’ ancient enemies, against whom they had supposedly fought the Demon War that gave birth to the Empire. A conflict that everybody she knew, including Jaume, who was so devout he was technically a cardinal, had always assumed was a normal human one around which a fantasy castle of legends had been built, largely by her own Torre Delgao as propaganda. Even here, trembling so close to freedom’s brink, she hardly dared to breathe for fear of upsetting the outcome. Montse knew the ramifications of the Fae’s existence would be terrifying indeed.
The plump priest hiked up his skirts and dashed down the ramp even as crew folk struggled to raise it. Jumping to the stone dock he turned right, and bolted along the waterfront, behind the ranks of men battling on foot.
Vlasis stepped up, raising his arms. “You must not speak the name!” he shouted.
At his gesture, a wall of flame blazed up, right at the water’s edge. Montse smelled roasting meat, and, seeing the thrashing forms inside the mast-high fire and hearing the inhuman screams issuing from it, realized it was the smell of people burning. Among the doomed and desperately struggling shapes was that of Charalampos.
Dragos’s grip tightened on her shoulder, then relaxed. “So,” he said. “We don’t dare risk it. I’m truly sorry, Princess.”