by Victor Milán
Melodía looked down at the sparse grass and yellow dirt. Which she knew she’d be visiting again shortly, and at speed. “No.”
“Well, then! Now on with your plate, girl. It’s time to practice longsword play. And to make you repent more fully the laxity of your former ways!”
* * *
“I do not know why you are willing to work with me,” the Grey Angel who pretended to be Fray Jerónimo said in his darkened cubby off the Emperor’s bedchamber. Margrethe still wondered what use it might conceivably ever have been intended for.
“We’re both looking to work through the Emperor, aren’t we? Perhaps we have similar aims. We both want him to go to war with Trebizon over his daughter’s kidnapping, don’t we?”
“True. But what if our aim is the destruction of your species?”
She laughed. “If that were easy, even for your kind, you’d have done it already. For whatever reasons, you need to work through humans. Well, I’m a human, willing to work with you. And as for the ‘destruction’ aspect—well, I suspect terms can be reached and accommodations made for those who prove sufficiently useful.”
“That is not … irrational.”
Not that I trust you, you great grey beast. But you’re not the only power who thinks I’m its tool.
“I know Felipe’s been a very good little boy indeed about doing what you tell him to,” she said. “It must be frustrating, being unable to shift his mind on this.”
“It has proven unexpectedly difficult.”
“I can help you with that.”
“You think he will listen to you in a matter where he no longer even heeds me, his confessor?”
“I find it funny that he thinks you speak for the Gods—and would be scared into shitting himself if he knew how literally true that was.”
“Grey Angels do not speak for the Creators, but only act on their behalf.”
“Certainly, certainly. As for why he’ll listen to me—well, give me time, and see.”
“If you can do anything, be quick about it.”
Just impatient, are you? That seems unlikely for someone who spends all his time sitting alone in a tiny dark compartment. So what could make a Grey Angel feel hurried?
“I shall do what I can. Say, don’t you get bored always sitting here in the dark like this? Do you sleep all the time?”
“I do not get bored. Nor do I sleep.”
“Different people have different pleasures. I suppose it’s the same for supernatural beings.”
“Despite your flippant tone, I do perceive possible uses for you, Dowager Duchess. So I will warn about the greatest threat to your plans.”
“The doddering old husk they call the Great Mother? She’s old and losing her touch. She’s formidable. But I can still overcome her.”
“No. Your greatest threat at this moment is the man called Karyl, Duke of the Borderlands.”
“Him? That annoying little handroach? I know he’s all the rage in Nuevaropa at the moment, having spoiled the party for your brother Raguel. Are you simply being vindictive?”
“Do not assume I am displeased at the failure of my brother’s plan. He poses danger to you.”
“He knows war, not intrigue. He lost his county to intrigue as a boy—and wandered the entire continent studying war instead. I don’t propose to meet him on the battlefield. But I’m sure I can win if he faces me on mine.”
“Others have underestimated him. Raguel, for instance.”
“A hit! A palpable hit. Well, as it happens, I already have plans under way to neutralize him, just in case.”
“Why that, if you believe he poses no threat to you?”
“Shall we say—loose ends?”
Chapter 34
Bicho-cazador, Bichador, Bug-chaser.…—Anurognathus ammoni. A nocturnal Volador Chato, Flat-nosed or Snub-nosed flier: a small pterosaur with a short muzzle instead of a beak, 50 centimeter wingspan, dark fur, needle teeth to catch insects.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
“Now, what matter could bring such a fine and famous gentleman as yourself to visit the humble likes of me?” called Rob Korrigan as Jaume rode up to his manor on a sorrel courser mare.
The bard, dinosaur master, and now Baron stood before his front door, wearing loose brown trousers, a loose unbleached linen blouse, and no shoes. He smoked a clay pipe with a long, thin stem. Beside him stood a pair of young women with long braids and strung shortbows over their shoulders, obviously the so-called woods-runners who had served Rob and his master, Karyl, so well in the recently ended wars. They gazed at Jaume with curious eyes but neutral expressions.
A gaggle of peasant children stood in the road at a respectful distance behind his horse’s swishing red tail as he reined her to a halt.
“I wish you good day, Baron Korrigan.”
A look of what appeared to be genuine pain crossed Rob’s face. “Please don’t call me that,” he said. “It’s a thing I like even less than deserve. Especially coming from such a great lord and hero.”
“I’m less of those things now than I was,” Jaume said, as lightly as he could. “At least the latter, since His Majesty’s seen fit to let me keep my ranks.”
“Never less to those who know you and your deeds. Nor, if I may flatter myself, those who’ve heard the songs sung that I myself have written about you. Which are mostly even true, so far as I can ascertain.”
Jaume laughed. “I’ve heard some of them,” he said. “You do me great honor. You’ve a gift for words.”
“You can’t mean that—the Empire’s greatest poet, praising my barroom doggerel?”
“Since you know so much about me, do you think I’d lie about such a thing?”
“No, never, Count Jaume! I most humbly beg your pardon.” And the man began to kneel.
“No, no, what are you doing that for? It’s me who’s visiting your land—I hope by your leave.”
“Always! And here’s you not just a Count on your own account but here a Cardinal and Prince of the Church and all, hence of a dignity equal to a duke.”
“True enough. Still no need to kneel. I fancy we’re comrades of sorts, since we both faced the Horde at Canterville. And in any event, may I dismount?”
“Of course! And make yourself welcome at my humble house. Please come in, take a load off, and let me offer you aught to wash the trail dust from your throat.”
“Thank you.” Jaume dismounted. “And if someone might see to my mount, get her watered and into some shade, if you please?”
Rob cocked a finger at the peasant children. Jaume saw that they had edged closer.
“You, Livie. Take the Champion’s horse round to the stable and let the grooms take care of her, there’s a good lass.”
He tossed a copper coin to the small girl who had trotted eagerly forward. Her short hair, face, eyes, and hemp smock were all exceedingly similar shades of brown. She caught it deftly as a snub-nosed flier, Anurognathus, capturing a moth at sunset.
“Are you really the Imperial Champion, Count Jaume dels Flors, monsieur?” she asked.
“Guilty as charged. Here you are.” He handed off the reins. “Treat her gently and she’ll be gentle with you. She’s a good mount, for a horse.”
“What’s her name?”
“I’ve no idea.” She wasn’t a dinosaur, after all. Jaume was kind to all animals, as a matter of personal inclination and because of his religious obligation to act in accordance with Beauty. But in the end a horse was a mount, no more. Not a person like Camellia, or his men’s lovely hadrosaurs.
“Off with you, girl,” Rob said. She led the animal around the grey fieldstone hip of the manor. “She’ll remember this day all her life. To what do I owe the honor, Mor Jaume?”
“Well, I knew—given what I heard from Melodía and others after Raguel went down—that I’d little hope of crossing into Providence without attracting your eye. As indeed I appear to’ve done. Good day, ladies.”
He nodded to the woods-runner pair. T
he shorter, dark one grinned and nodded shyly. The taller, red-haired one just glared at him from her sun-brown, freckled face as if daring him to start something.
“I hope you take no offense, Count Jaume,” Rob said. “The runners have little love for authority or noble birth, and less respect.”
“I’m not thin-skinned in that regard.”
Walking up to Rob, he bowed deeply to the woods-runners, then held out his hand to the Baron of the place. Rob gazed at it a moment as if uncertain what it was, then gripped him forearm to forearm in greeting.
“So I thought I’d make a virtue of necessity,” Jaume said, “and turn a courtesy call upon the lord of this land into a plea for help, knight to knight.”
“Help?” Rob stared at him with green-hazel eyes. He had a curiously handsome face behind his red-bronze beard. It went oddly with his long-armed, short-legged, powerfully bodied build. “What help could I ever give you, of all the people beneath the clouds?”
“I need to beg Duke Karyl for help in a vital mission,” Jaume said. “I’d like you to keep him from killing me before I can state my case, if you would be so kind, Mor Korrigan.”
* * *
“Where is that body servant you had, Doña Rosamaría?” Melodía asked when she arrived for her evening lesson. As usual, her body ached with the day’s exertions. Even more than the bruises Auriana’s play with grappling, wooden daggers, and longsword blunts—and, of course, falling off Tormento, deliberately and otherwise—would account for. Her muscles were protesting.
But less and less each day. She knew that meant progress.
“The one who was fluttering around you like a moth for a few days. Parsifal, I think his name was.”
The dark figure on the simple bed nodded. “His employment was cut short. He met with an accident.”
Melodía frowned. She’d heard nothing of that. Then again, she had made no personal connections with the servants who waited on her within the Corazón Imperial. With smooth, courteous indifference, they had initially simply ignored her efforts to get to know them. Then, later, La Madrota had advised her to be wary of any kind of intimacy with the staff, because Duchess Margrethe had certainly suborned some.
Speaking of which—
“He was a spy,” she said. It was not a question, but a realization. “For Margrethe.”
“Just so.”
“You killed him.”
“Not in person. But yes.”
Melodía felt her face fold up in a frown. She hated puzzles.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “From the lessons you’ve taught me, wouldn’t it be better to leave a known spy in place? Rather than risk a more efficient, or at least subtler one, being set on you?”
“In general. I had my reasons for acting so precipitously in this case. In part, I confess, because I was offended that the Dowager Duchess would try such a transparent trick on me. In my house. And in any event she certainly has a great many more spies on the staff. Even more than the ones my own spies have identified.”
Melodía pondered that. “But didn’t you also tell me it was useful to have your opponents underestimate you?”
“Indeed. There are limits to how much Margrethe will accept that I’ve fallen into my dotage and final decline. I decided it would be useful to show her that I had achieved neither my longevity nor my position—to say nothing of having maintained the family’s position as Imperial Tower—by falling short of needful ruthlessness. Also, he annoyed me; I’m only human, after all.”
“Why would she try something so obvious?”
Rosamaría’s wizened face wrinkled deeper into frown. “I wish I knew. We all make mistakes; no one is perfectly cunning.”
“Even Raguel made mistakes, it seems,” said Melodía with a smile. The fact that they had beat Him, and she had played a role in that defeat, was sometimes all that kept her going through the uncertainty and despair, and constant worry for her baby sister.
“Even Him.”
“Did you believe in the Grey Angels? Ah—before, I mean?”
“No,” La Madrota said. “Any more than I ‘believe’ in air. I knew they were real, and not because of Church doctrine or our family’s official histories. Which are as packed with self-serving fabrications as I believe you’ve always suspected them to be; it’s just that not everything they claim is a fable. Even some of the more outrageous elements. I’ve never seen one, thank the Eight. But I’ve … seen their workings before.”
That made Melodía regret bringing the subject up. Raguel had violated her mind, as Hornberg had violated her body. The Angels terrified her.
“And yet,” Doña Rosamaría said, “this move of Margrethe’s does seem painfully clumsy. Of course, it’s a truism that it’s dangerous to presume an enemy’s actions are a mistake. But in the kind of war we’re waging, it can be as fatal to judge a mistake as a cunning stratagem as vice versa. That’s why no one wins forever. Not even me.”
“I’m confused,” Melodía said, shaking her head. “It seems she’s outmaneuvered you on several occasions.”
Even though by now she knew her ancestor better, part of her still quailed to utter such a criticism. But La Madrota nodded.
“She has. I find her … curious. She still holds the upper hand in our campaign, now that she has your father’s ear on the same pillow with her, though he stills holds out against going to war with Trebizon, bless his stubbornness.”
She actually laughed. Though small and soft, the sound jarred Melodía.
“Mother Maia knows I never expected to say that. Still, despite her getting the better of me, I sometimes wonder if—like the Trebs—she’s as clever as she thinks she is. Perhaps it’s just my old woman’s vanity, but I have to wonder if she’s getting help of some kind.”
“From where?”
“Where, indeed?” La Madrota asked, her black eyes particularly sharp in the low lamp light.
A thought struck Melodía that made her insides quiver.
“You don’t mean the Grey Angels!”
“I do. Or others.”
“But it can’t be! We just finished standing off Raguel’s Crusade!’
“You have firsthand experience with those who have bargained with Them for power and glory, I believe.”
“Oh, yes,” Melodía said. Quietly, as if she feared to hear the words. “And it ended in horror for them.”
It came to her, briefly, to wonder what had driven Lady Violette to her compact with Raguel. She knew that Bogardus had allowed himself to be gulled by his belief that the Grey Angel he secretly served shared his beautiful vision of making all of not just Nuevaropa but Paradise into a garden of love and peace and calm, reflective beauty. His idealism betrayed him. But what pain moved his co-conspirator Violette to betray humankind, and ultimately herself?
Melodía wondered if the decisive snap of Shiraa’s jaws had granted her merciful release. As her own javelin cast through the eye had given Bogardus.
Then she thought, Fuck her. I don’t care. Karyl’s pet matadora gave her better than she deserved.
“And for hundreds of thousands of others,” Rosamaría said with some asperity. “The reports I received indicate that the Grey Angel Horde slaughtered scarcely imaginable numbers in the areas they overran. If it’s true that Margrethe is being aided by one or more of the Seven, then I’m far less concerned with the possible dangers to her than I am the danger she poses to us, the Empire, and all of Paradise.”
“But we can’t know.”
“No. Nor will it be easy to find out.”
She sat a moment with her head sunk to her clavicle, swaddled as always in her plain black robes.
“It troubles me that after centuries of inactivity, the Grey Angels have taken action against us humans again,” La Madrota said. “Why now? What’s their end?”
“We’re taught they act to correct imbalances in the Equilibrium of Paradise.”
“But how did the Empire threaten to throw Equilibrium out of true? Or
was that it at all?” Rosamaría shook her head. “Whatever They are, the Grey Angels are not human. Their motivations are not ours. Which makes it futile to speculate on them, as vital as it may be to learn what they are. And it makes it so much the harder to learn whether the Duchess Margrethe has made her own arrangement with more-than-human powers.”
“How can we find out?”
“Be alert. I will delve, but quietly. We have to remember that neither you nor our new Duke Karyl, nor anyone else suspected Raguel’s presence and influence in the Garden villa. Except for the plotters Bogardus, Violette, and that other Council member, the one Karyl caught in treason and killed.”
“Longeau.”
“And yet presuming supernatural influence exists where it does not can be as dangerous to us as refusing to accept the possibility that it does. The dance is intricate and difficult.”
They sat awhile in silence.
“And my lesson for tonight?” Melodía asked at last. She was starting to nod off, in truth. She was sleeping better now, since her training with Auriana was at least giving her a passable counterfeit of the sensation of action and purpose. But her daily exertions also wore her out. And her mental training with Rosamaría drained her energies to a surprising extent.
“You have had it, my dear. Leave me. And … take care. More even than you’ve been. Matters approach some kind of head.”
I didn’t know you cared, Melodía thought.
“I told you before, child,” La Madrota said. “I love and care for you, and all my descendants. It’s just that I must sometimes act as if I do not care.”
“You can read minds?”
Again, the smile—surprisingly warm and gentle, for one so harsh.
“No. I can read faces. They can be good guides to what’s going on behind. Now go. And know that I do love you, Melodía Estrella.”
* * *
A half dozen of Karyl’s war-Triceratops lumbered about the broad bare yard of Séverin Farm when Rob rode jouncing up on Little Nell’s back onto the grounds alongside Jaume on his red horse. The sun was falling to its early grave behind the Shield range, still many kilometers to the east and blue but showing silvery glints of the eternal snowcap topping the higher peaks.