by Victor Milán
He jerked his hand away. It was sticky-red with Longeau’s blood.
With eyes like boiled onions Longeau stared at his gushing stump, and at the rest of his arm, which jerked like a landed fish on the maroon floor tiles. Pallid fingers still clutched the knife.
“Strike me dead,” he said, almost wonderingly.
“I have,” Karyl said, turning away and bending over to retrieve the scabbard. “You’ve perhaps two minutes left with that artery severed.”
Longeau gaped at him. His eyes rolled up and he slumped to the floor. The crowd watched, shocked to silence.
“Shouldn’t we help him?” Absolon asked after a moment.
Slowly Bogardus came around the table and stepped down from the dais to stand looking down at his friend. The pulses of blood from his wound grew visibly weaker with each repetition.
“Why?” Bogardus asked sadly. “To preserve him for the noose? This is a kinder death, as well as a far more aesthetic one. He’d choose it himself if he could.”
“What about those things he was saying, then?” Rob said. “All that about terrible beauty, and what was to come being worse than a marauding army?”
Violette pulled free. “A madman’s ravings,” she said. “His desire to justify his actions drove him insane. To think I trusted him!”
She ran to Bogardus and threw herself against him. He embraced her with one arm, disregarding the blood that soaked her hair and gown.
“Who but a madman would trust Crève Coeur enough to bargain with them?” he said. “A sad case, my friends.”
He reached up, took a spray of fresh forest flowers from a vase on the Council table, and tossed them on the body.
Rob frowned. That doesn’t sound right, he thought. But then, nothing here does. He felt questions pressing outward on his skin, but for the moment even he couldn’t quite fit words to them.
At a sign from Bogardus husky townsmen came and picked up Longeau’s now-lifeless body. Cradling Violette against his chest, Bogardus watched them carry him out the door to the kitchen.
“Ah, my friend,” he said sadly. “That it had to come to this.”
He gave a final hug to the shaken Councilwoman and helped her sit on the edge of the dais. Then he turned to the address the hall at large.
“Now, my brothers and sisters, hasn’t the time come to apologize to these gentlemen, and confirm them in the roles we have given them? Which, we’ve now seen, they’ve carried out with exceptional skill and courage.”
But the Councilors, standing off by the left end of the dais, tossed nervous looks around among themselves, like hot embers.
“Things are complicated, Bogardus,” said Iliane, who had shown no active hostility to the outlanders—if no overfriendship either. “We’ve seen and heard some horrible things tonight. Things I never imagined I’d witness have disturbed our hall’s serene beauty. You can’t ask us just to wave our hands and pretend nothing’s happened.”
“No, Sister,” Bogardus said, smiling sadly. “What I ask is the opposite: take note of the frightening things we’ve experienced, and act accordingly.”
But the surviving Councilors wouldn’t meet his eye.
Rob sidled close to Karyl. “It’s a brave show we’ve put on, any must admit,” he murmured. “But now we might think of edging toward the door and exiting stage left.”
“Salvateur!”
The woman’s voice rang off the rafters. Everybody jumped and turned to stare at the rear of the hall.
Stéphanie stood there, still naked and spear in hand. Her magnificent body and scarred face streamed rain. Her eyes were wild and fierce as a hunting horror’s.
“Salvateur!” she shouted. “His riders are fast approaching down the west road! While you loll around here on your fat butts listening to fools and liars, your enemy comes to burn your towers around your swollen heads!”
* * *
Melodía raised her face to the morning sun shining through the perpetual daytime overcast. She inhaled deeply.
“It smells as if something died,” she said,
They rode up a river valley, wide, flat, and shallow, in the county of Métairie Brulée near the border of Providence. The river itself, currently more a stream, wound through marshes and stands of thin, pale-green weeds. The valley’s most remarkable feature was the limestone islands, each about five meters tall, which dotted it. These had flat tablelike tops and white sides scooped and smoothed into shiny concave waves by water.
And, perhaps, the wind that quested ceaselessly down from the mountains. The Shields were close enough now to be visible most of the time as a blue wall. Despite altitude and the breeze off the perpetually snow-clad peaks the morning was hot, the overcast seeming no thicker than a vast linen sheet. Unusual numbers of birds and big fliers circled overhead; Melodía kept a wary eye on these, although none seemed large enough to be true dragons, hence dangerous to full-grown humans.
Aside from wrinkling their noses the young women paid the smell no further thought. Death was commonplace, after all.
“Tell me one thing, Pilar,” Melodía said.
“Anything, Melodía.”
Melodía insisted that Pilar refrain from calling her Highness, and was trying to break her from using honorifics of any kind. They were both outcasts, now. Outlaws together. And friends—a fact Melodía found herself clinging to with a certain desperation, the more so for having recently recovered it after losing it so long ago.
“Where’d you learn to speak Francés so well?”
That skill had served them well on that chance encounter with the bandit-hunters in Licorne Rouge, and several times since, when Pilar had used the same ruse to talk their way past other wayfarers. She had also used them to buy some feathered twist-darts.
Melodía had put the bow to good use shooting small game for the pot, and it could help defend their camp. But Melodía couldn’t shoot at all well from horseback—horse archery was an incredibly abstruse skill, and Melodía gathered you practically had to be raised to it to be much use, like the wild steppe-nomads of Ovda. She was fairly proficient throwing darts from the saddle, though, enough to discourage bandits or other minor predators.
She now rode with a quiver of half a dozen darts by her right knee. Like the smallsword they wouldn’t raise eyebrows among those the women encountered. It was common for servants to go armed to protect their masters against the bandits that infested the roads.
Melodía and Pilar hadn’t run into any actual bandits yet. For which Melodía thanked her luck. After her traumatic experiences in La Merced she was even less inclined than before to believe in the Creators.
“Where’d I learn Francés? Why, the same places you did, naturally. Didn’t I sit in on all your lessons from girlhood on? And your conversations with the Lady Abigail Thélème? I got to practice, sometimes, with lesser folk I met in the course of my Palace duties. Which gave me a firmer grip on the tongue, if not exactly its courtlier aspects.”
Melodía laughed. Quickly she sobered. How did I come to take her so much for granted, this childhood friend of mine? For ten years at least I’ve been no more aware of her than of my own shadow. The thought made her feel sticky and cloddish.
Pilar’s face rumpled. “Ay, that smell—” she said.
The stink seemed to have suddenly redoubled. Overt before, now it battered Melodía’s head and shoulders like an inflated bladder at some riotous Mercedes street carnival.
“Mother Maia, what died?” she exclaimed. “A titan?”
They came around a rock-island like a white mushroom, swinging wide to clear a big clump of debris, limbs and brush and the like, which the last flood had left stacked against its upstream side, and saw what caused the smell.
“Good call,” Pilar said. “That’s certainly a titan. And it’s most definitely dead.”
It lay like a ridgeline athwart their path and the stream itself. Sunlight glinted on the temporary pond it had made by damming the flow. It had been a big one, a true mat
riarch, a good thirty meters long. What kind it had been was unclear: its body was blackened and grotesquely swollen. All Melodía could tell was that it was some fur-legged monster, such as a spine-back or thunderbeast, though not a treetopper. She could see no sign of the rest of what had probably been a goodly herd of enormous dinosaurs. The sandy, weedy soil, frequently washed by rain and river-rises, wouldn’t hold tracks for any length of time.
“We have a problem,” Pilar said, reining in her ambler.
Melodía stopped Meravellosa beside her. The mare kept an ear cocked back toward the gelding-marchador, which followed Pilar’s mount on a lead, lest it try to sneak a nip at her fanny.
“So we do,” Melodía said.
Vast as it was the titan would take no more than a minute or two to ride around. In life the plant-eater had been too huge for any predator to bring down, except perhaps tyrants operating in a pack. Dead, by accident or starvation or festering wound, it provided a bounteous feast that drew every predator of every size from kilometers around.
Hordes of meat-eating dinosaurs crowded around like trenchermen at table. Multiple generations of horrors jostled each other and perched on the high-arching ribs to snap in fury at scavenging fliers impertinent enough to try to land and rip off a beakful. Blues snarled and shrieked and flourished arm-feathers at reds that got too close to their territory, while greens nipped in to take advantage of their distraction, for all the planet like street gangs in La Merced’s nastier slums.
Behind the horrors orbited packs of smaller harriers and little vexers, dashing in under their big cousins’ terrible claws to snatch a bite and whip away again.
Even they stayed well clear of two matador packs that worked the hulk. Out of practical necessity the big horn-browed hunters had staked out either end: long neck and tail, and the body immediately adjacent. One clan was blue-green and yellow, the other a more unsettling blackish-red shading to tawny gold on their bellies. Both groups displayed the distinctive sharp striping, dark over light.
They stayed far enough apart to ignore one another with honor, reserving their bellowing wrath for younger kinfolk who got too grabby, or the occasional incautious flier or raptor. As Melodía and Pilar watched with horrified fascination a matador bull brought its big head up to clash its jaws on a corpse-tearer with a short powerful beak and nasty flesh-tone-and-purple crest that winged too near. The monster’s agility apparently surprised the flier even more than it did the women.
Growling like a volcano about to blow the matador shook the black-furred flier until its long wings flopped limp as water weeds. Then it tossed the corpse away into the grass and resumed tearing at the titan.
Ignoring the giants, countless lines of even less enumerable black ants wound out of the mountain of decay. Mammalian scavengers, emboldened by hunger and mostly the fact they were too small to bother with in the face of this giant feast, rummaged in the narrow nooks and crannies of the vast cathedral of decomposition.
“Whew,” Melodía said. She hadn’t even known she was holding that breath. “This is a pretty dilemma, isn’t it?”
“It’ll take us hours to backtrack to anyplace where we can get the horses up the cliffs,” Pilar said. Sheer four-to-seven-meter limestone walls half a kilometer apart defined the valley. “And the longer we spend around that thing the more likely we are to run into latecomers to the banquet. It’s a miracle we didn’t get snapped up as we rode here all unsuspecting.”
She made a quick, clearly ritual gesture, which Melodía, a thoroughgoing agnostic even though she had been schooled in Church ritual, failed to recognize. It clearly wasn’t one of the eight simple sigils of three lines, whole or broken, stacked upon each other that signified each Creator. Nor was it the more complex ideograph from the Holy Tongue, which textbooks said and traders confirmed was the everyday language of far Chiánguo. It gave Melodía a curious feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“There’s a whole barony’s worth of meat-eaters all crowded together here,” Melodía said. “A county’s perhaps. More than a human hunter might see in a long lifetime. But they’re the real problem.”
“No.”
Like the small furred predators who provided humanity’s companions and helpers, dogs and cats and ferrets—like humans themselves—meat-eating dinosaurs sometimes chased prey for sport. Raptors, in particular the big, clever horrors, were notorious for their cruel games. It was one reason they were called horrors.
But no carnivore would abandon the boundless bounty of a dead titan while meat remained. From twelve-meter matadors to hopping raptors no longer than Melodía’s arm, all were fixated on the fragrant corpse. When finally gorged—it took a lot to satiate a meat-eating dinosaur—they waddled off to find shelter and slept for a day or two to digest. Then, if flesh still clung to the bones, they’d feed again. Until the last scrap was consumed they would either eat or wait to eat more, distracted only by suspicion that their neighbors would try to cheat them of their stinking mouthfuls. Which of course they would.
“The feasters aren’t the ones we have to worry about,” Melodía said. “It’s the ones who aren’t strong enough to force their way to the trough.”
She saw some of them now, a couple of hundred meters off to the left: a trio of bachelor male matadors, gleaming black and red in the sunlight, stamping in frustration in weeds that came to their knees and occasionally snapping at one another.
“They do look mightily pissed off,” Pilar said. “And they’re just the ones we can see.”
“You aren’t going to like this,” Melodía said, “but let’s ride in as close to the dead monster as we can get our mounts to go. The diners will barely notice us.”
“You’re right,” Pilar agreed. Her complexion was less dark an olive than normal. “Let’s go. But we’ll still have to run the gauntlet of the unhappy excluded. We’ll look to them like consolation prizes.”
For some insane reason Melodía laughed. “Then we’ll have to trust to our wits and our horses!”
“Let’s pray our wits are sharp. A matador can outrun a horse on a short field. Or an ambler.”
Melodía grinned at her. “Good thing we’re well mounted, then, isn’t it? Yah! ¡Vámonos, queridas mias! Let’s ride!”
The sturdy mare shot forward as if launched from a ballista. Pilar’s white marchadora followed a beat later, the gitana bent low over her neck, her long black hair streaming behind. Whatever she thought of the wisdom of Melodía’s chosen course she wasn’t going to let the Princess ride into danger’s literal dripping jaws alone.
And the plan was insanely dangerous in fact. But Melodía was young, and vigorous, and found that she thrilled to the hunt even when she was the prey. Her heart sang with more than exhilaration’s song: What did I do to earn such devotion from Pilar?
Wishing she dared whoop with exhilaration, Melodía swept behind the feasting monsters’ tails, Pilar beside her, so close their horses’ hooves raised glittering fans of spray from the impromptu pool, which had gathered around the hulk. Winged beasts perched higher up the mountain of softening, oozing flesh than land-borne predators could climb beat wings and screamed as if in outrage. Melodía wondered if they might actually be clever enough to try to divert some of their rivals into pursuing the strange horse-human hybrids, clearing the way for them to eat in peace.
If so, it didn’t work. A couple of blue horrors flicked quick yellow gazes at the women as their mounts and pack-marchador splashed past. But they didn’t so much as twitch their feathery tails.
Glancing at Pilar, Melodía saw her companion rode with mouth wide open. She doesn’t dare breathe through her nose either, Melodía thought. The stench was almost visible here—and not just the shimmering cloud of flies, the buzzing of whose myriad rainbow wings almost drowned out the sounds of tearing and crunching.
They passed the corpse’s far end. Whether tail or neck they couldn’t tell; whatever tipped it lay hidden among grass and boggy pools. Melodía couldn’t hold back a skirling c
ry of triumph.
Pilar gave her a wild-eyed look. Then her laughter joined Melodía’s.
Ten meters their beasts’ hooves drummed on more-or-less solid white soil. Twenty meters on they rode, then fifty.
“We made it!” Melodía sang out.
And naturally that was when the matador lunged from hiding in the shade of a concave-sided stone island, roaring like an avalanche.
Chapter 6
Matador, Slayer—Allosaurus fragilis. Large, bipedal, carnivorous dinosaur. Grows to 10 meters long, 1.8 meters at shoulder, 2.3 tonnes. Nuevaropa’s largest and most-feared native predator. Famed for its often-incredible stealth.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
Baron Salvateur was a big man in black armor on a big black horse. Or at least they looked black in the pissing-down rain. His shield was blazoned with a winged golden figure armed with a sword on black. Or anyway dark.
Perhaps mindful of the arrows his men had met at Blueflowers, which had prevented them from turning their victory into a total massacre of the Providence militia, he wore full plate and an armet. The visor was up, revealing a face that at this distance was an olive blur with a black smear of moustache. Rob thought he saw stubble darkening the jaw.
He stood with Karyl and Bogardus behind a barricade of a couple of wagons, one loaded with wine casks, one with stones, which had been pushed together end to end to block the Chausée de l’Ouest. Bogardus had tricked himself out in steel cap and leather jack from the arsenal, whose ancient caretaker had handed out spears, halberds, and crossbows to the numerous citizens now manning the barricades. Karyl, like Rob, wore the clothes he’d come to the trial in that morning.
A hundred meters west riders, mounted on coursers and dinosaurs, appeared from the brush at the edge of the woods. Among them came armored foot, shields, and archers. The distance was too great for Rob to read their expressions. Their attitudes suggested trepidation and frustration.
The Providentials hooted. The riders looked at their commander. He looked at the bristling defenses, the steep roofs and narrow streets. Clearly he had expected to fall upon a city virtually undefended, by way of either demoralization or simple surprise.