by Victor Milán
Now still, the looter’s body floated on its back with arms extended and forehead tipped back in the water, surrounded by hair like a water-weed halo. From the long skinny breasts tied across its belly with a rawhide thong the man realized he had killed an old woman.
The knowledge evoked little response, beyond detestation for those who preyed on the helpless. Nuevaropa abounded so fantastically in plant and animal life that starving took effort. To be sure, foraging had its risks—like everything else. But no hunger of the belly had driven this creature to attempt to mutilate him. Or kill him when he had the temerity to wake.
That she looked old struck him strange. He did not know why.
He examined his wounded hand. His third finger bore a heavy gold ring that showed a three-horn’s head in bold relief. A line of blood encircled its base. Looking closer he realized the wound was shallow but ragged. As he’d suspected, the looter’s knife was blunt.
Likely she had a bag of small stolen treasures, now sunk with her in shallow water. That brought complete indifference. He was beyond any desire for gold now.
Survival was another matter. Maybe. He felt vague stirrings of alarm.
The ache throbbing in his head was even more persistent and powerful than that in his hand. He reached up gingerly.
Fingertips found close-cropped hair. The right side of his skull felt moist, mushy; he wondered if it might actually be dented. The pain that shot behind his eyes clear down to his stomach didn’t encourage him to probe further.
He felt his first stab of true emotion: dread that he might feel the exposed surface of his brain.
He knew where he was, in general. He remembered facts about his surroundings, the natural world, the structure and functions of his body. And how to wield a sword, clearly, natural as breathing; he transferred it to his left hand without conscious thought. But what he was doing here, naked in the shallows of a broad river beneath storm-threatening skies, was a mystery to him.
So was just exactly who he might be.
Urgency began to churn his belly. Life wasn’t exactly proving attractive, now he’d been restored to it. But the animal within, once wakened, desired desperately to cling to it.
He rose from the water. Unsteady on quivering blue-white legs, he looked around. The world resolved about him as though summoned into being by the act of observation: a riverbank fenced with a green riot of weeds. The mud beyond, churned by the feet of many men and monstrous beasts. A slope covered in low vegetation climbing to a forest. The air lay cool on his skin.
The stench of rotting flesh was profound.
A tearing noise made him turn, splashing, sword-stub ready. Fifteen meters out in the river and a bit downstream lay a dead duckbill. In the wet warmth the gases of decomposition were already ballooning its vast body. A once-glorious hide of scarlet, orange, and gold had faded to greyish pink, ochre, and mud. A small tailless flier with drab brown fur perched atop it, ripping up a strip of skin with its beak.
Everywhere sprawled or floated the rotting corpses of men, horses, and dinosaurs. Not twenty meters from him a Triceratops lay on its side in mud, its eyes picked empty. Beside it lay a fighting-castle, wickerwork sides and wooden frame broken by the monster’s fall. Inexplicably, the sight of the great dead dinosaur twisted his heart and stung moisture from his eyes.
Who am I, he wondered, to wear a ring worth finishing me off for, and to grieve so for a dinosaur?
It scarcely mattered now. Now he was no one, mother-naked and stinking with a dent in his skull, lost.
It was morning, he observed from the feel and color of the sun’s diffuse light and the way the faint shadows leaned east. Neck muscles creaking and bones crackling protest as if they’d expected never to be used again, he turned to look upstream.
Carnage lay thicker there. Indistinct with distance and mist wisping from the river, men moved about the banks, singly or in small groups. Most were afoot; a few rode horses or striders. He saw no living war-hadrosaurs. Nor any big meat-eaters drawn to the feast.
Oddly, that saddened rather than relieved him.
Fear stabbed him through: I mustn’t be found! he thought.
Whoever he was, he felt a sick certainty that those men would do him harm if they learned he still lived. Painfully he climbed onto land and began to stagger downstream through tatters of mist.
Returning circulation first pricked his legs like needles, then stuck like knives. As he forced himself to a jarring trot, his pulse kept stride. The hammers beating at his temples did likewise.
From thicker fog before him a figure appeared, dark, compact, hooded. He stumbled to a halt, though limbs and body cried out together that once he lost momentum he might never get it back. For three heavy heartbeats, each of which threatened to burst his skull, he stood watching, head tipped to one side, breath wheezing through open mouth.
The figure stood unmoving. Waiting.
What have I left to lose? the man asked himself bitterly. He approached. He couldn’t really walk, but only engage in a more-or-less controlled forward fall.
He knew he wasn’t a large man. The waiting figure was smaller still. Despite the looseness of its coarse brown robe, its carriage told him it was female.
The apparition’s voice confirmed it: “A moment, Voyvod Karyl,” it said, feminine and low.
“Voyvod Karyl,” he repeated slowly. The words seemed to echo through the clangor in his skull.
He touched his head. “He’s dead, I think.”
The cowl nodded. “I know. It’s why I speak to you. I speak only to the dead.”
“You’re … the Witness?” he asked. Childhood stories, half-remembered and less believed, clamored in his memory, like faint contending voices overheard down a long corridor.
“I am. I try to watch all of this world’s great events.”
“And never intervene,” the man said.
He felt no sense of identification with the name she had given him, had scarcely any sense of that man or his past. His memories were too troublesome, too painful, to try to bring into focus.
“Just so,” she said.
“Not possible. The Witness can’t be real. I’ve known of people living as much as three centuries. No longer.”
“The Creators made me different,” she said.
He uttered a corpse-tearer croak. It was as close to a laugh as he could come.
“The Creators don’t exist either. My wounds are making me delirious. Well then, myth. What do you want from me?”
“Knowledge,” she said.
“You must have a surfeit of that. If you’re the Witness, you’re as old as the world.”
He spoke bluntly, for dead men have small need of tact. He recalled that the man he had been spoke little and to the point as well.
“Older,” she said. “Seven centuries isn’t long, for the subject I study. Barely a beginning.”
“What can I teach you?”
“I want to know what it means to be human.”
“Compared to what?”
“Dead or not,” she said, “that I cannot tell you.”
“I am cold and naked,” he said. “My mouth is as parched as the rest of me is soaked. I’d drink, and no doubt I’d be famished, if my stomach weren’t in total rebellion. My head feels ready to split apart. Someone hunts me, I don’t know who. I doubt I’ve time to tell you much.”
“You’ve no time at all, Lord Karyl,” she said. “But each conversation with the doomed, however brief, expands my knowledge.”
“We’re born in pain and trepidation. It seems we die the same way, although for some unfathomable reason I’ve yet to learn for sure. We like to imagine we can live in some different state. Whether that’s illusion, I know no more than you.”
“You’re eloquent for a man in your condition. The tales told of you seem true.”
He waved dismissal with the broken sword. “Whatever they say, they’re all lies now.”
She floated toward him, her legs not stirring
the hem of her robe. A white blanket of mist hid her feet. The cowl tilted up toward his face.
Inside he could see nothing but blackness.
“Ah, Karyl Vladevich,” she said. “You have done deeds that shook the Tyrant’s Head, and may yet reverberate across Aphrodite Terra and all the wide world. I had such hopes for you.”
“No doubt I’ve disappointed many people,” he said. “I fear I’ve gotten many killed. I don’t think I want my memories back. Even if you offered me something for sharing them.”
“I can give you nothing. It would disturb Equilibrium.”
“The sacred Order of the World,” he recited like a catechism. It was, he realized. His lips twisted in a savage smile. “We can’t have that.”
She raised sleeve-shrouded arms as if to touch his face. Irrationally he recoiled.
“There’s something about you—” She stopped, shook her head: an oddly peevish gesture for a mythical being. “No. It can’t be. You will soon be dead to stay, and so will end the saga of Karyl of the Misty March.”
It was only then he realized she’d spoken his Slavo all along, not Spañol, his native tongue, though her accent was that of a Rus, rather than his Češi people.
From the thickening mists came a chilling sound: a drawn-out ululation.
“They come with dogs to smell you out, Lord Karyl,” she said. He thought he heard a note of sadness in her voice. Or maybe wistfulness. “And horrors to take you.”
“Who?”
“Your murderers.”
He looked over his shoulder. Panic boiled up inside him as a second hound gave tongue. Beneath it he detected the chirps and snarling of the real killers, the raptor-pack who followed the dogs.
“Now I find that, though I thought my life already forfeit,” he said bitterly, “my body still doesn’t want to let it go. Am I to be spared nothing?”
She said nothing, just slowly backed away.
“Help me.”
She spread sleeves that still hid her hands. “I cannot.”
Left and right he whipped his head, seeking some road to safety. His heart fluttered like a netted bug-chaser. He vibrated with the need to flee. He hated the fear. Yet he couldn’t still it.
He glared at her. “Cannot or will not?”
“They are the same. Good-bye, Lord Karyl. May your death be swift and painless.”
“Doubtful,” he said through peeled-back lips. “Can’t you see the future?”
“If I could, would I have troubled you? Now run, my lord. Or die here. Whatever will ease your final moments, do.”
She turned and glided up the slope to the broadleaf trees thronging the ridgeline that paralleled the river. He knew their tantalizing shelter was a lie: his pursuers would be on him before he could hide among them.
Driven as hard now by defiance as dread, he fled east. He ran without hope, and only pain for a companion. His brain bubbled with images: of childhood, lost friends, long travel in exotic lands.
And war. Always war.
* * *
They caught him as he ran out of world.
Two kilometers east of the battlefield the ground simply dropped away. Three hundred sheer meters below, the inland sea called the Tyrant’s Eye lay hidden beneath a rumpled grey-white plain of clouds that seemed to extend from the Cliffs of the Eye.
He mastered the temptation to keep running.
Panting from his flight, sword-stub upraised in his left hand, he turned at bay beside a clump of scrub oak. A whistle caused the pair of grey-brown dogs with wrinkled faces and great dangling dewlaps streaming froth that loped in close pursuit to veer aside. Dark eyes rimmed with scarlet veins burned with resentment at being denied the kill.
But they did as they were trained. The brightly feathered death that ran behind would rend them as eagerly as their prey. When their hunters’ blood blazed with the hot joy of the chase, the raptors could only just be restrained from turning on one another.
Eight green horrors trotted into view on strong hind legs, the big killing-claws on their feet daintily upraised. Deinonychus: the biggest and worst of Nuevaropa’s pack-predators. Thus beloved of the nobility, who kept them to hunt men as well as beasts.
Pampered in some lord’s kennel, the three-meter-long killers had gotten their spring plumage early. Their upper feathers were a brilliant green with yellow highlights, their breasts buff streaked with brown. The crests on their narrow skulls were shiny black, as were brow-stripes above staring yellow eyes. Their muzzles were likewise yellow.
A pair of riders followed the pack. A brown-bearded man whose blue, silver, and black tabard, well freighted with belly, proclaimed him a knight straddled a russet great strider with a dainty white feather ruff and silly yellow plume on its small head. It high-stepped in obvious terror of the hunting-pack.
The other man rode a white mule. Taller and leaner than the knight, he wore a ratty cloth yoke to shade his shoulders, greasy loincloth, and beggar’s buskins. His bare legs and wasteland torso were smeared with grime. Beneath greased-back blond hair his face was round yet sparely fleshed, with a brutal beak of a nose.
As they closed in on their quarry, the horrors slowed and began to hiss and sidle. They were as notorious for their cunning as for their cruelty. The sheer cliff at the man’s back helped him: the monsters couldn’t get behind him.
A horror stepped forward and reared to almost the man’s own height, erecting its crest and spreading feathered forelegs wide. Their undersides were shocking scarlet, loud as the challenge the raptor screamed. Its breath stank of death.
A second horror, circling to the man’s right, sprang for him with talons forward and jaws agape. Undistracted by the first one’s display, he sidestepped and hacked off black-clawed toes with a forehand cut. The return stroke gashed open the shrieking green face as the horror flew past. The blade-stump missed the glaring yellow eye, but flooded it in blood.
The creature put its maimed foot down and collapsed. Squalling, it lashed its long tail so violently that the man had to dodge to avoid being knocked off his feet, and possibly the cliff.
The other raptor pounced. The man flowed to meet the attack. Slipping right he sliced the horror’s throat. With a blood-strangled squawk, it stumbled forward over the edge.
The pack chittered furiously. Two had turned to savage their maimed fellow. Behind them, not ten meters from the hunted man, the beak-nosed man sat applauding sardonically on his mule.
“Well done, Lord Karyl,” he said in Alemán. “You bring your legend to its appropriate end. Too bad no one’ll ever hear the tale of your valiant last stand.”
The four horrors not engaged in murdering their injured pack mate hung back, dancing nervously from foot to yellow foot.
“Karyl’s dead,” the man said. The language came readily enough to his tongue. Its gutturals less so to his raw throat.
“That signet ring on your sword hand suggests otherwise. And like the allegedly late voyvod, you’re left-handed, I see.”
The knight’s livery struck forth sudden memory: a midnight-blue helmet, nodding plumes of black, azure, and white. Beside them a curved axe-blade, fast descending.
Then a flash of light, and nothing.
“So the young Duke of Hornberg wants a trophy?” the fugitive rasped.
“No,” the peasant said. “His mother. Or rather, a token that you’re safely dead. It seems she fears you pose a threat to her ambitions for her baby boy. And perhaps she’s right. She was surely wise to send us to make sure of you; you’re as Creator-lost hard to kill as a handroach.”
“Oh, dear,” the fat knight said, as teeth through feathered throat bit off the injured horror’s cries. “His Grace will be most displeased at losing such prime animals, Bergdahl.”
“His Grace will have to buck up,” the commoner said. “Does he think there’ll be no cost if he wants a man like this dead? Or the Dowager Duchess does. And don’t think she gives a malformed hatchling what finishing off the Voyvod of the Misty March c
osts her dear son in playmates.”
“I hate to kill a man’s pets,” the man said. “Call them off and come face me yourself, Mor Lard Tub.”
“We have explicit instructions—” the knight gobbled.
“Not even this hedge knight’s that big a fool,” the commoner said. “Kill all you can. More will hatch.”
More pain came, in the form of remembering.
“I’ve died once,” the man said. “I can do it again. If your horrors take me my one regret is not avenging Count Jaume’s treachery.”
“Life’s full of disappointments, my lord,” the peasant said.
Lagging behind his swift-footed pack and mounted betters, a stout, balding huntsman with Duke Falk’s black toothed-falcon insignia painted on his hornface-hide tunic came puffing up. He whipped the two horrors still squabbling over their comrade’s corpse back to duty.
Joined by a third they rushed their prey. Two more swung wide to his left to catch him like a soldier-ant’s pincers.
He charged them. His blade split one’s skull. It grated free to chop almost through the forelimb the second reached with to grab him.
Midleap the horror twisted to snap at him. He dodged. The raptor fell among the three lunging from the right and bowled them into a spitting, tail-whipping tangle.
The man ran right at the two riders. Instead of going for the sword hanging from his baldric, the fat knight froze, bearded chins trembling. The commoner merely laughed as if this were the world’s finest joke, and would only be made sweeter were he cut down by a naked man with a broken sword.
But one pack-hunter had hung back. It leapt. Raptor hit man, chest to chest. Lightly built though it was, the horror was as heavy as he. Its momentum drove him back. He punched at it with both fists, trying to fend off the killing-claws slashing at his exposed belly and genitals.
The creature struck like an adder. Sharp teeth snapped shut on the man’s sword arm just above the wrist, crunching through muscle and bone to meet with a clack. Pain shot through him like lightning.
Still gripping the broken sword, the man’s hand flew as if propelled by a blood-jet to land on bare white soil half a meter from the edge. The voyvod’s signet glinted mockery on a twitching finger.