by Victor Milán
Feeling as if his skin were trying to crawl off his body and creep away, Rob confronted the tale-teller.
“Where did you hear that bloody twaddle, you old rogue?” he demanded.
The oldster shrugged. “Here and there. In the wind.”
Rob frowned. It was the sort of answer a Traveler might give. Then again, the man was clearly a caravaneer. That breed had much the same lives as the Irlandés-gitano Travelers, rootless and wandering, hence had much the same attitudes. And superstitions.
He also knew he’d get no more specific answer. “You’re just confusing his tale with the old song ‘Tam Lin,’” he said.
He sang a few bars: “I forbid ye maidens all, who wear gold in your hair/To travel to Carter Hall, for young Tam Lin is there.”
To his annoyance the old man laughed. He was missing teeth. Rob felt tempted to loosen a few more.
“Aye. And the Queen of Faeries caught him as from his horse he fell. My eyes are old and weak, and my mind wanders further afield than my aching feet can. But I know the difference between a horse and a three-hundred meter cliff. Voyvod Karyl had his sword hand bit off by a horror, he did; and fell toward the surface of the Tyrant’s Eye. How did he come to live, then, I wonder? If the fall didn’t kill him, blood loss would’ve, sure.
“Yet there he lies not fifty paces from us, alive as you or me. And with a sword hand as good as any man’s. And better, on the evidence!”
“That’s nothing to do with the Fae!” Rob said hotly. Then shut up. That Karyl had lost a hand—and more to the point, regained it—wasn’t a story he wanted noised around any more than Karyl himself did. He wasn’t sure why. He just knew it would be no good thing.
“And what’s a man named Korrigan think he’s about, anyway, doubting Faerie deeds?” the old man asked.
That took Rob aback. “‘Touched by the Fae,’ the name means,” the old caravaneer said. “Does it not?”
“How’d you know that?”
The old man cackled. “You think my travels haven’t taken me across Anglaterra, and even Irlanda? A caravaneer goes where wind and whim drive him. Just like a Traveler, lad.”
“Then I’ll tell you why I don’t like hearing talk of the Faerie Folk bandied about,” Rob said in hot Anglés, reading in the other’s eyes that he understood full well—as hardly anyone else in camp would. “It’s no healthy thing to speak of them, for body or soul. And whatever do you think you’re about, to go on so with a Grey Angel abroad in the world working his great mischief?”
But the old rogue was nothing daunted. “What better time to invoke the Fae” he said softly—and blessedly, still in Anglysh—“than when the Creators’ retribution stalks us all? Who better to give us hope against the Seven, than enemies sworn of the Eight?”
Rob stared at him. His bearded jaws worked futilely. That enraged him more than anything: this daft old bugger had robbed him, Rob Korrigan, of words. He thought of striking the caravaneer down for his truly terrifying blasphemy—and even more terrifying knowledge.
But while Rob Korrigan did not imagine himself a good man, he knew he wasn’t that man.
Instead he made the cross-and-circle sign of the Lady’s Mirror, the evil-averting gesture he hoped was most remote from Grey Angel malice. Then he turned and stalked away.
He crawled back into his tent and bedroll, and pulled his vexer-down pillow over his ears.
Chapter 34
Tiranes Escarlatos, Scarlet Tyrants (singular Tirán Escarlato)—The Imperial bodyguard. They are easily recognized by their gilded armor—their breastplates usually figured to resemble muscular human torsos—and their barbute helmets with red or gold crests of feathers or horsehair. They are handpicked, mainly from among the minority peoples of the Torre Menor or Lesser Tower, for loyalty to the Fangèd Throne regardless of who occupies it.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
As Duke Falk von Hornberg entered his gold-and-scarlet silk pavilion pitched next to the Emperor’s similarly colored but much grander one, he tore his barbute helmet from his sweat-curled hair and threw it across the room without regard to its fancy, imported Ridiculous-reaper plumes.
“Fae eat that fool of a priest! His madness gels my blood. And he only makes that infernal caterwauling worse.”
“What do you expect, your Grace?” said Bergdahl, who sat astride a stool examining the armor the Duke had brought from the North for chips in its royal-blue enamel, or signs of rust. On court occasions, such as tonight’s, Falk wore the armor of the commander of the Imperial bodyguard, not his personal harness. “Off they’ve marched to war to prevent a Grey Angel Crusade. And here they’ve just learned it’s all in vain: a Grey Angel has raised a horde anyway, and marches now to meet them. Their worst childhood nightmares have been realized.”
He cocked a sly brow at his master. “Haven’t yours?”
Falk made a clotted sound and dropped onto a sturdy camp chair. Up here on Nuevaropa’s central massif the night was neither especially hot nor humid, any more than winter chill reached here from the mountains. Yet his body stewed beneath his gambeson, and his thighs, bare between figured gilt greaves and the red metal-studded strips of boiled duckbill-leather that made up his kilt, ran with perspiration.
The fact was, he hadn’t himself yet truly absorbed the news that arrived that afternoon with a messenger whose eyes rolled as madly as her near-foundered horse’s. He held himself devout, at least in relation to these slack Southerners. Perhaps precisely for that reason, he’d never even in his nightmares anticipated that he might someday find himself facing the Creators’ fearful justice, in the form of a Grey Angel horde.
There was that within him that understood too well the almost-animal fear and grief of the mob that howled outside his silken walls. It wanted to cast the shackles of mind aside and join the ululation.
There’s the virtue of the discipline you’ve devoted your life to, he reminded himself sternly. Sacred Order begins within one’s own head. And heart.
Outside in torch-lit night his recently minted Eminence, Cardinal Tavares, preached in a voice thin and cutting as a whip. He praised the Creators and their servants the Grey Angels, thanking the latter for their mercy in purging Paradise, or at least this part of it, of sin. He urged the mob to confess, repent, and beg forgiveness.
He certainly wasn’t soothing them.
“A wonder Jaume doesn’t cut the imbecile down himself, after the grief he’s given him,” Falk said, pouring a goblet full of wine from an ewer and draining it at a tilt.
“Highly profitable grief to us, though, wasn’t it, your Grace?” Bergdahl said.
“He was useful undermining Jaume when his only game was bringing naughty lordlings to heel. Now everything’s at stake, and if Tavares hasn’t become an active liability, he’s at least a thrice-damned pest. Why does Felipe stomach that noise, anyway? It walks perilously near sedition.”
“Yet Tavares may serve us.”
“Will he? His cant’s weakening the army, not strengthening it. How will that help us fight this horde?”
Bergdahl pretended busyness and said nothing.
With lowered head and lower brows, the young Duke regarded his shadow, his servant and master.
“Is this part of my mother’s plan? A Grey Angel Crusade? She sent me to return order to a decadent Empire, and bring glory to it and ourselves. What glory is there in this? What honor? Is it an honor, to survive what the Church teaches is the Creators’ righteous punishment?”
“If you know a man who sincerely apologizes for surviving,” Bergdahl said, “send him my way by all means, your Grace. I’d like to study such a sport of nature.
“As for glory and honor—those’re just made-up, anyway. Whoever survives this shitstorm will make up plenty to go around after the fact, because of his doubts and sins.”
With a growl Falk turned away. The most damnable thing about this creature was that his very worst impertinences often contained kernels o
f truth Falk knew, in mind and belly, he could never refute.
“Come now, your Grace,” Bergdahl said, putting down one darkly gleaming vambrace blue and picking up the other. “Weren’t you even the least bit pleased to see the look on Jaume’s pretty face when Tavares commenced his yowling? Calling on lords and lowborn alike to show this Angel they know how to punish, so that His wrath will pass us by?”
Falk made a rumbling in the top of his wide chest that maybe only he could hear. It was true. He did feel a certain satisfaction.
Which stabbed him through with guilt. What knight is truer, nobler, or more capable than the Constable? Don’t we all need his skill and heroism now more than ever before?
He had felt just such a roil of love and hate for the Princess Melodía before—he pushed that thought away like a plateful of offal.
“I wonder, now,” Bergdahl said, filing smooth a nicked edge, “what look Don Jaume will have on his face when you tell him how you took his woman in the ass by force?”
Falk felt as if an iron mask had been forge-heated red and clamped on his face. He had to fight to draw in a breath.
“Never mention that again,” he managed to say at last. “Not to me. Not to anybody.”
Bergdahl gave a one-shouldered shrug and a single chuckle of amusement. “As you wish, your Grace. As you know, I exist only to serve your true will.”
Outside a man screamed. For a moment Falk dared hope somebody, perhaps even Jaume himself, had stuck a sword through the unwashed middle of Cardinal Tavares. But then he heard the voice he had come to hate hissing right along. Apparently His Eminence’s bloody eloquence had momentarily overwhelmed some particularly susceptible listener.
“Don’t you see what he’s doing?” Falk asked. Whether of the air or Bergdahl hardly mattered; his servant heard everything in any event. “He’s tearing the army apart! I believe in the firm hand. The iron hand, when called for. And I believe in the absolute right of blood; how could I not? We have to keep the common ruck in their place, for their good as well as ours.
“But this goblin Tavares preaches cruelty for its own sake. The things some of the magnates and their knights do turn my stomach. And it’ll all turn ’round to bite us like a stepped-on adder, if the people between us and the horde come to fear us more than them.”
“Some have tried to bite the Imperial ankle already,” Bergdahl observed dryly. “Their bodies form peculiarly baroque roadside decorations, do they not?”
“Bad as it’s been, Tavares is making it worse. And that’s not the only thing. It’s hard enough to control the nobles at the best of times. Their knights—they’re scarcely better than horrors. They need a harder hand to keep them in line than any serfs. But torture, rape, and murder can’t be controlled. They’re chaotic by nature.”
“The knights and nobles did the same to Jaume in the Army of Correction,” Bergdahl said. “With Tavares egging them on. And didn’t we encourage him to do so, if only by sly suggestions that the Emperor pay more heed to his mad friend the Pope than his kinsman and champion?”
Falk sighed heavily. “And I’m beginning to repent it now. Especially since that damned red-wrapped priest is beginning to really get on my nerves. He’s got a voice like fingernails on a slate-board.”
“Yet who, after His Majesty himself and the Constable, might be the Imperial Army’s third most powerful man, if not the head of the Scarlet Tyrants in their pretty feathers and red skirts and all? Pity you’re so helpless to do anything about Tavares’s noise. What with the Empire crying out for strong men and all.”
Falk glared at him a moment. As always Bergdahl ignored his heated look. His certain knowledge that Bergdahl was quite aware of it—as he was of every detail around him—only made Falk the angrier. Though not as mad as the realization that the bastard was right. Again.
He slapped hands on his thighs and stood.
“Time for a last turn around the camp,” he said. “And while I’m at it, I believe I’ll detail some squads to beat the more enthusiastic whiners and screechers unconscious if they won’t shut up. I may not be able to put a rag in Tavares’s reeking gob. But nobody from Duke to dung-shoveler’s got the right to defy the Tyrants.”
“Hmm,” Bergdahl said. “Decisive. Your mother would be so proud.”
Falk had collected his helmet, straightened the golden plumes—now he was glad they were merely disarrayed, not broken—and started for the door. He halted turned back frowning.
“How does this insanity advance my mother’s plan?”
Bergdahl shrugged. “Who can say? Who can say? Kiloliters of blood will spill before this game plays out. Rivers of red stuff. Who knows what doors will be left open to a strong man when the last drop is sucked down by the thirsty soil of this shithole called Paradise?”
“But what if I fall? Gods, what will be left?”
Bergdahl shook his head and smiled a brown-toothed smile. “As to that, not even the Creators can say. But if you’re the man you ought to be, the man to bring the Empire to new heights and order to the world, won’t you survive? If you don’t, what kind of world-bestriding hero are you?”
“One thinking more about what kind of world might be left for me to bestride,” Falk said.
“Faugh.” Bergdahl made a gesture like scraping an evil taste from his grey-pink tongue on his upper teeth, which thoroughly revolted Falk. “Some men would whine if they were hung with a golden rope.”
* * *
“What’s the meaning of this?”
Sitting in the box of the lead wagon of the baggage train, whose drivers had fled when her jinete troop appeared out of the woods to both sides of the road, Melodía took a meditative bite from an apple before answering. The fruit was late-harvest, gold, and piled high in the bed. The nosehorns who had pulled the wagon stood in the ditch, nipping off mouthfuls of hock-high green weeds in their beaks and grinding them happily in their teeth. Her exotic upland sword lay in its scabbard by her right hand, her pointed steel cap on her left.
The challenge had emitted from a broad, florid face with iron-grey side-whiskers sweeping out to the sides like wings. The face perched without a neck’s apparent intervention atop a black breastplate painted with a fisted black gauntlet on a golden shield. Its owner bestrode a night-black sackbut with a yellow throat and underbelly.
“It means,” Melodía said, “you should have accepted our offer to parley for safe-passage through your county. It means now my light-horse has ridden all the way around your army.”
With a broad smile she gestured at the two score lightly armored riders who sat horses and striders in the grass on both sides of the right-of-way, and the woods-runners who stood among them with bows held casually ready.
“It means, in fine, you’re fucking surrounded.”
Alerted by panicked messengers—Melodía extrapolated; they’d certainly been panicked when she let them go—that raiders had materialized behind them to capture a wagon train, County Fleur’s three leading nobles had ridden post-haste back through the army they’d thrown across the road to block the fugitives’ progress. A dozen men-at-arms supported them.
These latter looked nervously toward the brushy woods to either side, clearly suspecting more enemies lurked there than stood in plain sight. Melodía was amused. Someone on their side is thinking straight, at least.
“This is an intolerable provocation!” the stout black-armored man shouted.
From intelligence gathered by Rob’s spies, Melodía knew him for Vicomte Eudes. He was in the process of giving up the power he’d held as regent to his late sister’s son, Morgain, who had just attained majority at twenty-seven and ascended to full Countship. He wasn’t best pleased, as her friend Fanny would say.
Hoping to take itself out of the Grey Angel Crusade’s path, the fugitive army had veered off the High Road down a tributary, west into Métairie Brulée’s neighboring province. The Shield Mountains stood far enough away now that winter held little sway here, felt mainly as a perce
ptible drop in air temperature by night. Flies in their usual cohorts buzzed around the beasts and their droppings. Birds and fliers squabbled in the brush and trees. The hardwoods here had adapted to a yearlong cycle, leaves browning and falling off and being replaced constantly, instead of dumping them in fall as their higher-up cousins in Providence did.
“If we wanted to fight with you,” Melodía said cheerfully, “your baggage would be charcoal now. Voyvod Karyl’s crossbows would be turning your breastplates into colanders. And let’s not even talk about what his three-horns would do to those pretty duckbills of yours.”
Speaking of not talking, Melodía didn’t even want to think about Karyl. On the march from Belle Perspective he had retreated completely into himself. Rob Korrigan, who’d been with him the best part of a year, said he’d seen these black fits before. But nothing like this. Always before Karyl, managed to function. Not now.
At least the Colonel had chosen his captains well. His army worked fine without his active participation. His mere presence, riding each day at their head on his surly little grey bruja of a mare, seemed sufficient to inspire his troops, and keep them acting as one. For the moment.
The red-haired boy in the middle of the noble trio blanched at the vividness of Melodía’s description. He clearly didn’t care to envision his gorgeous, long-crested green and yellow duckbill eviscerated by brow horns tipped with filed iron. Count Morgain looked gangly even in his gilded plate armor with three green Fleur-de-Lys on the breast. He had high cheekbones, straight nose, and a prominent jaw. His green eyes resembled those of a horse confronting an open-jawed matador.
I kind of like producing that effect, Melodía thought. She took another bite of apple. Although it was hardly sporting of her; he was two whole years younger than she.
“What can we do?” Morgain stammered, looking nervously around. He had noticed how close the trees grew to the road here. Perhaps at last it occurred to him Melodía might not be showing all her hand.