by Victor Milán
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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To my friends whose astonishing generosity and sacrifice made possible not just this book but my continued survival.
I can’t name you all—I don’t even know who all of you are—so I’ll name none. You know who you are.
Neither words nor riches can ever repay what I owe you. My awe, humility, and gratitude will live so long as I. As will my love.
Thank you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest thanks to my fellow writers of Critical Mass, whose kind wisdom taught me how to write this novel: Daniel Abraham, Yvonne Coats, Terry England, Ty Franck, Sally Gwylan, Ed Khmara, George R. R. Martin, John J. Miller, Matt Reiten, Melinda Snodgrass, Jan Stirling, Steve “S. M.” Stirling, Emily Mah “E. M.” Tippetts, Lauren Teffeau, Ian Tregillis, Sage Walker, and Walter Jon Williams.
I believe there is no other resource like you in the world. (And please forgive me if I overlooked you!)
Special thanks to my old friend Mike Weaver, who told me how Grey Angels Emerged.
To my Dinosaur Army, who helped me spread the word.
And to Wanda Day, who crocheted me a Triceratops head. And for whom Rob’s axe is decidedly not named.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
One thing you should know.
This world—Paradise—isn’t Earth.
It wasn’t Earth. It won’t ever be Earth.
It is no alternate Earth.
All else is possible.…
Wars begin when you will,
but they do not end when you please.
—NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, FLORENTINE HISTORIES, BOOK III, CHAPTER 2
Prologue
Pastoral/Aparecimiento
(Pastorale/Emergence)
Dragón, Dragon—Azhdarchid. The family to which the largest of the furred, flying reptiles called fliers or pterosaurs belong; wingspan 11 meters, stands over 5 meters high. Lands to prey on smaller dinosaurs and occasionally humans.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
THE EMPIRE OF NUEVAROPA, FRANCIA, DUCHY OF HAUT-PAYS, COUNTY PROVIDENCE
Toothed beaks sunk in low green and purple vegetation, the herd of plump, brown, four-legged dinosaurs grazed placidly, oblivious to the death that kited beside sheer white cliffs high above.
Though he lay on a limestone slab with hands laced behind his head, their herd-boy was less complacent. He had put aside his broad straw hat and green feather sun-yoke, intending to doze away the morning. His small Blue Herder dog, lying in the grass beside him, would alert him if danger from the ground threatened the three dozen fatties in his charge. But then he spotted the dark form wheeling hopefully against the perpetual daytime overcast, and all hope of relaxation fled.
He didn’t believe stories about monstrous flying reptiles like this great-crested dragon swooping down on short-furred ten-meter wings to carry off beasts or men. Nobody he knew had seen any such thing. What dragons could do was land and, tall as houses, stalk prey on wing-knuckles and short hind legs.
I’m not scared, the boy told himself. It was mostly even true. Like land-bound predators from little vexers to Nuevaropa’s greatest predator, the matador, a dragon preferred easy meat. It wouldn’t like stones cast from the boy’s sling, nor the yapping and nipping of a dog far too clever and nimble for it to stab with its sword beak.
The dog hopped up and began to bark excitedly. The boy sat up, feeling bouncer-bumps rise on his bare arms. That meant danger closer to hand.
He sat up to look for it. It wasn’t lurking in the meadow splashed with blue and white wildflowers. That didn’t offer enough cover even for a notoriously stealthy matador.
To his right rose the white cliffs, and beyond them the Shield Mountains, distance-blued, a few higher peaks silver-capped in snow despite the advent of spring. Away to the southwest the land shrugged brush-dotted foothills, then sloped and smoothed away into the fertile green plains of his home county of Providence, interrupted by the darker greens of forested ridges and stream-courses.
Several fatties, still munching, raised frilled heads to peer in the same direction the dog did. Though members of the mighty hornface tribe of dinosaurs, they lacked horns, and might. Meek, dumpy beasts, they grew to the length of a tall man and the height of a tall dog.
They were staring at a dozen or so plate-back dinosaurs that swayed into view in the meadow not forty meters downslope. The beasts’ bodies looked like capital Ds lying down. The herd bull was especially impressive, four meters tall to the tips of the double row of yellow spade-shaped plates that topped his high-arched back, his scaled hide shading from russet sides to yellow belly.
His tail spikes, nearly as long as the herd-boy was tall, could tear the guts out of a king tyrant. The fatties began switching their thick tails, spilling half-ground greenery from their beaks to bleat distress. Plate-backs were placid, but also nearsighted. They tended to lash out with their tails at anything that startled them. Which meant almost anything that got close to them.
The herd-boy was on his feet, dancing from foot to foot, sandals flapping against his soles. His best course was to stay put and hope the intruders went away on their own. If they didn’t, he’d have to chuck rocks at them with his sling. If that didn’t work, he’d be forced to run at them hollering and waving his arms. He really didn’t want to do that.
He looked urgently around for some alternative. And so he saw something far worse than a herd of lumbering Stegosaurus. His dog began to growl.
It strode from the cliff fully formed, Emerging from white stone in one great stride. Two and a half meters tall it loomed, gaunt past the point of emaciation, grey. It lacked skin; its flesh appeared to have dried, cracked, and eroded like the High Ovdan badlands the caravanners described.
He knew it, though he had never seen one. No one had seen one in living memory. Or so far as anyone knew—because most of those who laid eyes on a Grey Angel, one of the Creators’ seven personal servants and avengers, didn’t live to talk about it.
The Angel stopped. It turned its terrible wasted face directly toward the herd-boy. Eyes like iron marbles nestled deep in the sockets. Their gaze struck him like hammers.
I’m dead, he thought. He fell facedown into pungent weeds at the base of his rock and lay trying to weep without making noise.
Through a drumroll of heartbeats he heard his dog barking furiously by his head, where, both prudent and courageous, she had withdrawn while still shielding her master from the intruder. The acid sound of fatties whining their fear penetrated his whiteout terror and kicked awake the boy’s duty-reflex: My flock! In danger!
Realizing he was somehow not dead—yet—he raised his head. His fatties were loping away down the valley, tail
s high. Then fear struck through him like an iron stinger dart.
The Angel was looking at him.
“Forget,” the creature said in a dry and whistling voice. “Remember when you are called to do so.”
White light burst behind the boy’s eyes. When it went out, so did he.
* * *
He woke to his dog licking his face. Bees buzzed gently amidst the smell of wildflowers. A fern tickled his ear.
What am I doing dozing on the job? he wondered. I’ll get a licking for sure.
Sitting up, he saw with sinking heart that his flock was strewn out downhill across low brush-flecked foothills for a good half kilometer.
For a just a moment his soul and body rang, somehow, as if he stood too close to the great bronze bell in All Creators’ Temple in Providence town when it tolled. He tasted fear like copper on his tongue.
The feeling passed. I must have had a bad dream, he thought.
He stood. Cursing himself for a lazybones, he began trotting down toward his vagrant flock.
He prayed to Mother Maia he could get them rounded up again before anyone noticed. It was his greatest concern in life right now.
Part One
La Batalla Última
(The Last Battle)
Chapter 1
Tricornio, Three-horn, Trike—Triceratops horridus. Largest of the widespread hornface (ceratopsian) family of herbivorous, four-legged dinosaurs with horns, bony neck-frills, and toothed beaks; 10 tonnes, 10 meters long, 3 meters at the shoulder. Non-native to Nuevaropa. Feared for the lethality of their long brow-horns as well as their belligerent eagerness to use them.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
THE EMPIRE OF NUEVAROPA, ALEMANIA, COUNTY AUGENFELSEN
They appeared across the river like a range of shadow mountains, resolving to terrible solidity through a gauze of early-morning mist and rain. Great horned heads swung side to side. Strapped to their backs behind shieldlike neck-frills swayed wicker fighting-castles filled with archers.
“That tears it!” Rob Korrigan had to shout to be heard, though his companion stood at arm’s length on high ground behind the Hassling’s south bank. Battle raged east along the river for a full kilometer. “Voyvod Karyl’s brought his pet Triceratops to dance with our master the Count.”
Despite the chill rain that streamed down his face and tickled in his short beard, his heart soared. No dinosaur master could help being stirred by sight of these beasts, unique in the Empire of Nuevaropa: the fifty living fortresses of Karyl Bogomirskiy’s notorious White River Legion.
Even if they fought for the enemy.
“Impressive,” the Princes’ Party axeman who stood beside Rob yelled back. Like Rob he worked for the local Count Augenfelsen—“Eye Cliffs” in a decent tongue—who commanded the army’s right wing. “And so what? Our dinosaur knights will put paid to ’em quick enough.”
“Are you out of your tiny mind?” Rob said.
He knew his Alemán was beastly, worse even than his Spañol, the Empire’s common speech. As if he cared. He’d had this job but a handful of months, and suspected it wouldn’t last much longer.
“The Princes’ Party had the war all its own way until the Emperor hired in these Slavos and their trikes,” he said. “Three times the Princes have fought Karyl. Three times they’ve lost. Nobody’s defeated the White River Legion. Ever.”
The air was as thick with the screams of men and monsters, and a clangor like the biggest smithy on the world called Paradise, as it was with rain and the stench of spilled blood and bowels. Rob’s own guts still roiled and his nape prickled from the side effects of a distant terremoto: the war-hadrosaurs’ terrible, inaudible battle cry, pitched too low for the human ear to hear, but potentially as damaging as a body blow from a battering ram.
An Alemán Elector, one of eleven who voted to confirm each new Emperor on the Fangèd Throne, had inconsiderately died without issue or named heir. Against precedent the current Emperor, Felipe, had named a close relative as new Elector, which gave the Fangèd Throne and the Imperial family, the Delgao, unprecedented power. The Princes’ Party, a stew of Alemán magnates with a few Francés ones thrown in for spice, took up arms in opposition.
The upshot of this little squabble was war, currently raging on both banks and hip-deep in a river turning slowly from runoff-brown to red. As usual, masses of infantry strove and swore in the center, while knights riding dinosaurs and armored horses fought on either side. Missile troops and sundry engines were strung along the front, exchanging distant grief.
Rob Korrigan worked for the Princes’ side. That was as much as he knew about the matter, and more than he cared.
“You forget,” the house-soldier shouted. “We outnumber the Impies.”
“Gone are the days, my friend, when all King Johann could throw at us was a gaggle of bickering grandes and a mob of unhappy serfs,” Rob said. “The Empire’s best have come to the party now, not just Karyl’s money-troopers.”
The axeman sneered through his moustache. “Pike-pushers are pike-pushers, no matter how you tart ’em up in browned-iron hats and shirts. Or are you talking about that pack of spoiled pretty boys across the river from us, and their Captain-General, the Emperor’s pet nephew?”
“The Companions are legend,” Rob said. “All Nuevaropa sings of their exploits. And most of all, of their Count Jaume!”
As I should know, he thought, since I’ve made up as many ballads of the Conde dels Flors’ deeds as Karyl’s.
The Augenfelsener ran a thumb inside the springer-leather strap of his helmet where it chafed his chin. “I hear tell they spend their camp time doing art, music, and each other.”
“True enough,” Rob said. “But immaterial.”
“Anyway, there’s just a dozen or two of them, dinosaur knights or not.”
“That’s leaving aside the small matter of five hundred heavy-horse gendarmes who back them up.”
The house-shield waved that away with a scarred and crack-nailed hand.
Standing in formation across the river, the three-horns sent up a peevish, nervous squalling. A rain squall opened to reveal what now stalked out in front of their ranks: terror, long and lean, body held level, whiplike tail swaying to the strides of powerful hind legs. In Rob’s home isles of Anglaterra they called the monster “slayer”; in Spañol, “matador,” which meant the same. In The Book of True Names, they were Allosaurus fragilis. By whatever name, they were terrifying meat-eaters, and delighted in preying on men.
A man rode a saddle strapped to the predator’s shoulders, two and a half meters up. He looked barely larger than a child, and not just in contrast to his mount’s sinuous dark brown and yellow-striped length. For armor he wore only an open-faced morion helmet, a dinosaur-leather jerkin, and thigh-high boots.
Thrusting its head forward, his matador—matadora—roared a challenge at the dinosaur knights and men-at-arms waiting on the southern bank: “Shiraa!”
The axeman cringed and made a sign holy to the Queen Creator. “Mother Maia preserve us!”
Rob mirrored the other’s gesture. Maia wasn’t his patroness. But a man could never be too sure.
“Never doubt the true threat’s not the monster, but the man,” he said. He scratched the back of his own head, where drizzle had inevitably filtered beneath the brim of his slouch hat and begun to trickle down his neck. “Though Shiraa’s no trifle either.”
“Shiraa?”
“The Allosaurus. His mount. It’s her name. Karyl gave it to her when she hatched and saw him first of living creatures in the world, and him a beardless stripling not even twenty and lying broken against the tree where her mother’s tail had knocked him in her dying agony. It’s the only thing she says, still.”
No potential prey could remain indifferent to the nearness of such a monster. That was why even the mighty three-horns muttered nervously, and they were used to her. But the house-shield did rally enough to turn Rob a look of disbelief.
“You
know that abomination’s name?” he demanded. “How do you know these things?”
“I’m a dinosaur master,” Rob said smugly. Part of that was false front, to cover instinctive dread of a creature that could bite even his beer-keg body in half with a snap, and part excitement at seeing the fabled creature in the flesh. And not just because meat-eating dinosaurs used as war-mounts were as rare as honest priests. “It’s my business to know. Don’t you? Don’t you ever go to taverns, man? ‘The Ballad of Karyl and Shiraa’ is beloved the length and breadth of Nuevaropa. Not to mention that I wrote it.”
The axeman tossed Shiraa a nervous glance, then glared back at Rob. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“Why, money’s,” answered Rob. “The same as you. And Count Eye Cliffs, who pays the both of us.”
The axeman grabbed the short sleeve of the linen blouse Rob wore beneath his jerkin of nosehorn-back hide. Rob scowled at the familiarity and made ready to bat the offending hand away. Then he saw the soldier was goggling and pointing across the river.
“They’re coming!”
Shiraa’s eponymous scream had signaled the advance. The trikes waded into the river like a slow-motion avalanche with horns. Before them sloshed the matadora and Karyl.
From the river’s edge to Rob’s right came a multiple twang and thump. A company of Brabantés crossbowmen, the brave orange and blue of their brigandine armor turned sad and drab by rain, had loosed a volley of quarrels.
Rob shook his head and clucked as the bolts kicked up small spouts a hundred meters short of the White River dinosaurs.
“It’s going to be a long day,” he said. “The kind of day that Mother warned me I’d see Maris’s own plenty of.”
The axeman shook himself. Water flew from his steel cap and leather aventail.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, all bravado. “Even riding those horned freaks, those Slavo peasant scum can’t withstand real knights. Young Duke Falk’s already chased the Impy knights back up the north bank on our left flank. Soon enough our rabble will overrun their pikes. And there’s our victory, clean across.”