by Victor Milán
Down the road the white Parasaurolophus trotted on its hind legs, holding its pawlike fore-hooves daintily to its chest. It was a huge animal, Jaume saw, bigger than any sackbut bred for war. Midway between the armies its rider reined it to a stop.
“I am the Herald of the Grey Angel Raguel of the Ice, Bringer of Divine Justice, Scourge of the Impure,” she called, brandishing a metallic staff that bore a circular emblem like a grey mirror at its top.
Her words carried clearly to La Miche despite the distance. “She has a loud voice even for a woman,” Timaeos muttered. Though the Griego was a confirmed misogynist, no Companion was more devoted to the Lady’s service. Not even Jaume.
“No doubt her patron gives her help with some Angel trick,” said Florian.
Several Companions made the sign of the Lady’s Mirror at their comrade’s flippancy. Even Jaume felt a thrill of dismay.
“You have offended the Creators,” the nude woman cried. “You must submit now to the will of great Raguel, or else expiate your sins in blood.”
Jaume looked to Le Boule. Felipe signaled. The Imperial Herald mounted his white marchador and rode past the nodding Scarlet Tyrants’ plumes to the road. Spearmen rolled aside the wagons that blocked it. He set forth at an amble with bare head held high.
“He’s got stone,” Machtigern said, rubbing his chin. Like most Companions he shaved clean.
“Heralds are protected by convention,” said Dieter.
“And do Grey Angels feel bound by our conventions, I wonder,” murmured Florian, “any more than we do by compacts made by ants?”
“Oh,” said the youngest Companion.
The Imperial Herald stopped twenty meters from his opposite number. All Jaume could hear was the fact of his voice, no words. “It seems you’re right about Raguel helping the woman,” he told Florian.
“That brings me little enough pleasure. As usual.”
“Then look and see your fate!” Raguel’s Herald cried in response to the Imperial envoy.
She turned and gestured dramatically at the heights behind her.
“Behold the Angel Raguel. Behold your doom!”
“Trite,” grumbled Bernat, who was scribbling furiously on a piece of paper he held pinned to a slate with his thumb. “But you can’t expect any better from fanatics, I suppose.”
Through the trees on the far heights emerged a colossal silvery-grey shape. Even the Companions gaped: it was a Tirán Rey, a bull Tyrannosaurus rex, most feared of all Aphrodite Terra’s dinosaurs. Even at this range Jaume could see the monster dwarfed Falk’s albino adolescent Snowflake.
“Beautiful,” murmured Rupp. “He must weigh seven tonnes!”
Jaume found a smile inside himself. “You shame us, my friend, finding Beauty where even we find only terror.”
The slight Alemán shrugged. “I’m a dinosaur master,” he said simply, as if that explained it. Which it did.
“And only a dinosaur master,” muttered Wil, “would notice the bloody beast first.”
A thing that looked like little more than a grey skeleton straddled the tyrant’s back. By proportion to its monstrous mount Jaume guessed it would stand nearly three meters tall. It held a curious weapon, a meter of haft with a meter-and-a-half scythe-blade the same length fixed in line with it, like the head of a glaive.
“So that’s a Grey Angel,” Florian said. “Why did the Creators choose such an ugly brute for a servant?”
“Perhaps they have other canons of beauty than we do,” said Bernat. He barely glanced up.
“Why make ours different, then?” Florian asked.
A commotion from the hill across the road interrupted the discussion.
“Tavares,” Florian muttered as if cursing. He wasn’t the only one.
The Imperial chaplain’s red robes fluttered about him in a rising breeze. He had thrown his hat away. His heavy, unwashed hair stood up in a skewed shock from a narrow, passion-twisted face.
“Sinners!” he screeched, a cry as penetrant and chilling as that of a long-flying dragon on the hunt. The Boule was close enough for Jaume to hear every hateful syllable. “You have all sinned in the eyes of our holy Creators! And you all must atone.”
Felipe sat rigid. Jaume saw that his round face was strained and color-drained. Falk stood at his side, hefting his axe in blue steel hands.
“The Creators’ Avenger stands before you. Submit to him! Submit to judgement. A heartbeat, and it will be too late. You must serve, or perish.”
Felipe said something low enough that Jaume couldn’t hear. The Emperor shook his head.
Tavares flung fists in the air. “You dare defy the will of the Creators? Blasphemer! Sinner!”
Falk started forward. Felipe thrust himself up out of his chair and stalked forward, all but brushing the huge armored man aside.
“You have abused my tolerance for the last time, priest,” he said, gesturing with his sword. These words were clearly audible on La Miche. “Go now, and never return. Or I’ll send your head, limbs, and torso to your Angel on six different fatties!”
The prelate’s eyes shot wide. His dark face paled. For a moment he stood as if expecting the undistinguished-looking man with the steel-clad paunch to soften. But not even Falk showed less yield than the Emperor.
Tavares turned and walked down the slope. Stiffly he mounted his own waiting ambler and trotted around the Scarlet Tyrant ranks to the road.
Dieter stared openmouthed, his cheeks a brighter pink than usual. “But he’s just a middle-aged fat man!” he blurted. “How could he stand up to the Cardinal under Raguel’s eye?”
Florian laid a hand his armored arm. “The Emperor is a middle-aged fat man who has a gift of making everyone underestimate him.”
The guards on the High Road let the Cardinal pass. Without a backward glance, Tavares rode out of the Imperial Army. A knight on a blue and yellow sackbut rode to join him from the left wing. A dinosaur knight and several men-at-arms followed him.
“Look at that,” Florian said. “Our dear friend Montañazul, with vassals.”
“They increase our strength by subtracting themselves from it,” Machtigern said.
Others broke from the Imperial ranks, peasant pikemen, House soldiers, gendarmes, even two more dinosaur knights. Jaume saw briefly violence flurry as some were discouraged by their comrades, mostly among the lowborn conscripts.
Owain and Will Oakheart of Oakheart, the Companions’ expert longbowmen, looked expectantly at Jaume. Both had arrows nocked. He saw leaders among the shortbows and even the Nodosaur crossbows turned toward him for instruction.
Jaume looked in turn to the Emperor: this was policy, not tactics. Felipe shook his head. Then he turned, went back to his humble chair, and sat down as if already overcome by weariness. Jaume signaled for the missile troops to hold their shots.
As Tavares and fifty or sixty followers approached the horde, the Imperial Herald backed his mount off the road. Herald or not, he was unwilling to contest passage with that many heavily armed knights. To say nothing of dinosaurs.
The white-haired woman turned to Raguel, who sat immobile on his strange grey tyrant as it squatted on the hillside, switching its long tail. The Angel made no sign that Jaume could see. But the Angel’s Herald backed her white sackbut off the road as well.
Tavares’s party approached the horde’s silent ranks. “I don’t like waiting like this,” Dieter said. “I want something to happen.”
“Patience, boy,” said Pedro the Lesser.
Dieter turned in surprise. The diminutive weapons-master seldom spoke. Not with words, anyway. He preferred to let his arts, whether the intricate engravings and miniature paintings he created, or arms, talk for him.
“They’ll come to us soon enough,” he said, digging at an ear with his thumbnail. “Then we’ll fight rested, and they’ll tire.”
“They are the Grey Angel’s slaves,” Timaeos said in a hollow voice. “They don’t tire, any more than they fear.”
The distant Angel waved a grey claw. His Crusaders opened ranks. Without hesitation Tavares rode into the avenue they cleared. His followers trooped after.
When the last of the defectors was at least fifty yards up that corridor of living bodies, Raguel slowly raised his arm. He clenched his claw into a fist.
The corridor closed.
The Crusaders rolled over the defectors like a returning tide. Tavares turned in his saddle. Jaume thought he could see the outrage and anger on his face.
He also thought he saw the Cardinal’s expression turn to fear as a score of hands reached for him. A woman scaled Tavares’s right leg and sank her teeth into his neck. Dark spray flew from her jaws.
“Well, his robes won’t show the blood much,” Wil Oakheart said.
Screams floated up as from a distant rookery of sea-fliers as the others were submerged. Montañazul, taken by surprise, was toppled from his saddle immediately. The other three dinosaur knights bolted in different directions, trampling Crusaders by the score, laying about madly with their swords. The Crusaders didn’t flinch from the basso-bugling monsters. They attacked.
“They’re swarming them like ants on a grasshopper,” said Bernat. “Fascinating.” He wrote furiously.
Retching, Dieter turned away. He covered his face with his hands. “No one deserves that!”
“I disagree,” said Florian, shaking back golden locks. “I think Tavares and his filthy friends have earned precisely what they’re getting. The Angel has a sense of justice, at least. And more than a touch of humor.”
“I wouldn’t rely too much on either quality to help us today,” said Machtigern.
Florian leaned against the taller man and rested his head on a pauldron. “I’m not, friend; believe it. But then, we’ve always known there was little justice in this world, save what we make for ourselves.”
Dieter turned a red and tear-streaked face toward Jaume. “How can our Lady sanction such horror?”
“The Creators are different from us,” Jaume said. “And yes: I know that’s no answer. All I can do is say what my heart tells me: whatever lies behind this Raguel’s Crusade, Our Lady Bella has no part in it.”
The shrieking died away. Hamstrung, the war-hadrosaurs fell thrashing, crushing dozens, smashing dozens more with their tails. The flesh-waves closed over them as well. In a matter of moments they were quiescent, no more than prominences on which the Crusaders stood, eerily silent, waiting.
As for Tavares and his companions, it was as if they had never been.
“You couldn’t want a better tonic for the troops,” Wil Oakheart said. “Nobody who saw that’s about to shirk.”
Raguel’s Herald urged her white duckbill back up onto the High Road to face the Imperial ranks.
“Your submission does not suffice,” she declaimed. Again her words rang in Jaume’s ears as if from mere meters away. “You continue to defy the will of the Angel Raguel. So be it. You all are judged. Now you will suffer.”
The wind veered to blow toward the Imperials from the hordeling. It brought with it the stench of a vast open sewer and ten thousand open graves combined. Men long grown inured to the reek of their own unwashed bodies and those of thousands around them recoiled, gagging and retching at the smell. The Companions, prepared, brought forth handkerchiefs doused in essence to mask mouths and noses. Jaume’s smelled of lilacs.
On Le Boule, Snowflake looked up. His red eyes glared. He rose and shook himself, wagging his big white head. Apparently what the fortune of the wind had brought him was scent of the grey Tyrannosaurus. He thrust his face forward, opened jaws armed with teeth like daggers, and uttered a roar of fury that made even the red and gold ranks of the Imperial bodyguard flinch away.
Raguel’s mount heard. Leaning far forward he opened jaws armed with teeth like shortswords. His bellow of answer rang like a thousand trumpets. The ground vibrated beneath Jaume’s feet. Everywhere among the Imperial ranks men pressed hands to ears against that awful sound.
The horde charged. But not even a hundred thousand throats howling at once could drown the final peals of the grey monster’s challenge.
Chapter 40
Terremoto, Earthquake—A call too low for humans to hear, employed as a weapon by crested hadrosaurs such as halberds, morions, and sackbuts. Can panic or stun; a mass terremoto, properly focused, can deal lethal damage to the largest meat-eater, and instantly kill a human. Effective to 30 meters, 40 en masse. Favored ranged weapon of Nuevaropan dinosaur knights, whose armor and training help them resist its effects. As it takes a hadrosaur several minutes to recover from giving a terremoto, it can normally be used only once per battle, to disrupt an enemy formation during a charge.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
With a groan like a constipated thunder-titan a trebuchet swung its long arm up into the sky. A hundred-kilo stone, knocked roughly ’round by artillerist chisels, soared off against the dark grey clouds.
Falk watched its flight intently. A trebuchet was a true siege engine, fixed in place and slow to reload, even with nosehorns harnessed to draw back its arm against a massive counterweight. It served best against a big, stationary target, like a castle. The projectiles moved with a slow majesty, and were large enough to easily track by eye—and clear the way for. Though they could be wicked accurate, they usually required one or more shots to find the range. Even massed troop formations could usually find a way to get out of the beaten zone before taking too much punishment.
But the Grey Angel horde was by far the largest army Falk had ever seen. It was the largest army anyone had ever seen, so far as he knew. At least on the Tyrant’s Head, only the colossal forces employed in the Demon War of half a millennium ago approached it. And until now, he’d taken for granted that the accounts exaggerated the numbers involved.
And the Grey Angel’s soldiers didn’t bother to dodge. They cared nothing for their own deaths. Only others’.
The stone struck well back in the advancing wave of bodies. It bounced high in amidst dark spray. When it fell again Falk saw bodies tumbled like duckbill-pins. It struck at least three times more before he lost sight of it, smashing bones and mangling flesh.
The horde flowed instantly to fill the gapes it left. Like water.
The lesser engines raked the enemy. Stinger-shafts impaled rank after rank of Crusaders armored lightly if at all. Tar-balls bounced, leaving pools of black-smoking fire that gyrated, screamed, and spread.
Undeterred the horde came on. Falk expected nothing else. These were mere preliminaries, albeit hard enough on the impaled and ignited. History judged causes’ greatness proportionally by how many individuals, themselves powerless to affect any outcomes of consequence, suffered and died in their service.
Human history was known to stretch back for millennia before Creation, although its details were lost in clouds of myth. Duke Falk wondered if things had always been so. He suspected they had.
Trumpets blew discordant signals from the Imperial lines. The engine crews were hard at it. Hands cranked stinger windlasses. Grunting nosehorn teams hauled back catapult and trebuchet arms. Iron darts were dropped in slots. Heavy round stones were placed lovingly in slings, and tar-balls in cups. Falk heard a whump as one was lit in front of his position.
Nodosaur crossbows launched a withering volley as the Crusader wave rolled within range. Archers swarmed forward to loose their shortbows. The infantry waited, the peasant levies restless and uncertain, the House troops almost eager, the Nodosaurs silent and grim.
Without awaiting orders, Archiduc Antoine led the Imperial left wing forward at the trot. They promptly masked the aim of the Nodosaur engineers who had just turned their stingers to engage the oncoming enemy dinosaur knights. Falk imagined the artillerists cursing savagely as they swung their ballistas back to bear on the horde infantry.
On the right the Third Tercio stingers loosed a volley into the war-dinosaurs bearing down on them. No armor could stop the black darts. Two war-duckbills tumbled into avalanc
hes of flailing tails and giant bodies. A second pair stumbled over them, fluting in pain and dismay. A dart shot transfixed a dinosaur knight on a mostly orange sackbut, pinning shield to chest.
Seeing his left move prematurely, Jaume ordered the Imperial right wing forward. Pennons fluttering from upraised lances, the dinosaur knights sent their duckbills jogging after the Duque de Mandar, followed by the men-at-arms on their coursers.
As the west wings of the two armies closed, each let go a terremoto that raised the hair on the Duke’s nape. He could see no effects from the inaudible hadrosaur killing-cries before Antoine’s dinosaur knights and their enemies spurred to the charge.
They met with a terrific crash. Squealing morions slammed breastbone to breastbone against sackbuts. Lances splintered. Knights hurtled from high-cantled saddles. Breast-and-backs crumpled beneath monstrous feet with weird musical warbles.
Masses of war-dinosaurs interpenetrated with a sliding clangor of sword on shield and plate. Screams skirled to Falk down the stinking wind. The heavy-horse swung wide of the monster scrum to replicate their battle in miniature.
To Falk’s right, the Crusader dinosaur knights struck the Duque de Mandar’s duckbills between the High Road and the Fortunate River cut in a sustained thunderclap.
A cloud of feathered shafts rose hissing from the Imperial shortbows. They fell like steel rain among the scarcely protected Crusaders. They ignored the arrows as they did the quarrels and bounding boulders and fireballs. Those who fell or even faltered were crushed without qualm. The wounded screamed no more loudly than the unharmed.
A cheer rose up from the Imperial foot ranks as the whole of the horde’s first several ranks fell. And died away as the horde swept forward, heedless as surf.
Seemingly as little concerned with their own survival as Raguel’s slaves, the Imperial artillery crews and missileers shot, reloaded calmly, and shot again as the horde rolled down on them. But though hundreds were killed, the Grey Angel Crusaders showed that reports of their fanatical ferocity were if anything understatements.