by Victor Milán
Melodía’s eyes narrowed. “That’s quite uncalled-for, Princesa,” she said. “She’s just a little girl. She’s fourteen.”
And a half, she narrowly stopped herself from adding—as Montserrat inevitably did, even though it wasn’t even true yet.
A knock forestalled further sniping. Doña Carlota’s imposing brows bunched, and her eyes flicked suspiciously to the door.
“Enter,” Melodía called.
The door opened. An under-chamberlain in red and yellow Imperial livery stood there jittering.
He drew in a breath that seemed to double the size of his narrow young chest. “His-Imperial-Majesty-the-Emperor-Felipe-respectfully-requests-the-presence-of-his-daughter-Her-Highness-the-Princess-Melodía-at-an-audience-in-the-Great-Hall-in-half-an-hour’s-time!” he declaimed in a rush.
Melodía’s eyes widened. She waved Pilar away and stood. Fanny played a quick triumphant coda and set aside her bow, smiling.
“Tell my father I’ll be there,” Melodía said. The under-chamberlain nodded and fled.
“Guess who’s finally home?” Lupe singsonged as the door closed.
“Hoo!” said Llurdis, fanning herself. “Did it suddenly get humid in here?”
Chapter 5
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.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
Shiraa opened her eyes.
She peered through a screen of fronds into the heart of a forest. Down here it was still dark, but dawn light glancing off the tops of trees across the little valley struck them alight with green fire. Around her the forest breathed with the sounds of a thousand small creatures, all fervently hoping she wouldn’t notice them, and the rustle of ferns and flowering bushes in the morning breeze. She could almost see the prey-smell strands in the cool air.
Swinging her long balancing tail and powerful hips, Shiraa strode into the open. Fronds thrashed. Branches clashed. A flock of small tailless fliers exploded from the trees, azure and gold, raising raucous cries.
For a time Shiraa had known nothing but pain and the blackness of loss. She hid. She was good at that.
Eventually hunger overcame the agony of the wound the white monster had given her. When she set out painfully from her hiding place, she found meat lying all around in dizzying abundance. Between gorgings, the smell of rotting flesh lulled her to sleep with its song of plenty.
The great feast ended as the meat turned to slime sucked down by the soil. Shiraa could easily eat the tailless two-legs who continued to roam the killing-grounds, small and slow and weak as they were. But she had been taught to respect them since she hatched and first laid eyes on her mother, who was herself a two-legs. Unless they attacked her, she must not harm them—not without her mother’s permission.
So she limped away from the battlefield to forage, and heal, and await the strength to search for her lost mother.
Now she had recovered. It still hurt to move in certain ways. She endured.
Deep longing drove her now. She needed her mother’s love to feel fullness. To belong.
Her mother had gone away. But she knew her mother would never abandon her.
Shiraa hungered. She would eat. Then, following some knowing it would never occur to her to question, she continued her journey south.
Somewhere that way, she knew, she would find her mother again.
* * *
Racing each other into the market square, a pair of laughing children jostled Rob Korrigan. They seemed too intent on the entertainment that had already attracted a sizable crowd to the middle of this central Francés town called Pot de Feu to notice.
Rob put a quick hand to his pouch. A bump like that was a common trick to cover a purse-slitting; he’d done it himself, as a tad. The strider-hide bag was still flat as a titan-trodden vexer, of course. It was the principle of the thing.
“Barbarous continentals,” he muttered.
Folding his arms he leaned against the side of a victualer’s covered wagon to watch the show. He kept his axe, its head cased in stout nosehorn leather, propped close at hand. He didn’t think he had any enemies here. But he hadn’t kept his head attached to his shoulders—almost literally, since he could boast but little by way of a neck—by taking things for granted.
The busker was good, Rob had to admit. No taller than Rob himself, built like twine-tied sticks bundled in a tatty brown cloak, he sat before a patch of wall where the whitewash had peeled away from grey mud brick. Dark hair, silver-shot, hung to his thrown-back hood. His eyes were dark in a face from which it seemed all nonessentials had been crushed. Their raptor intensity struck Rob to the spine when their gaze brushed his.
Though he laughed often, he didn’t speak. He didn’t need to; his antics were eloquent. He pulled a handkerchief from the nose of a stout market lady in a red head-rag, and discovered copper coins in delighted children’s ears.
As merchants folded up their kiosks and crated their wares for the night, his audience grew. Sparrows and tiny tailed fliers hopped among sandaled feet foraging for scraps. A toothed raven and a similarly sized green-crested flier squabbled over a melon rind. A tame vexer perched on an onion cart cursed both in screeches.
Sunset came quickly, throwing light like fire-glow across the western faces of white stone towers and tall narrow buildings huddled close, and the slates of steep-pitched roofs. A rising breeze brought the rich damp smell of crops awaiting harvest, and the thicker scent of the woods that lurked beyond the constraints of axe and plow. In Nuevaropa the wild was never far away, and never more than held at bay.
The wind also brought an eye-watering whiff of sulfur from Vieux Charlot, the nearby volcano. They didn’t call this dump Firepot for nothing.
The busker finished his sleights and began to juggle. And now I’m impressed, thought Rob. The man lacked a left hand.
And therein lay Rob’s problem.
Splendid. The silly sod has gone and lost his bloody sword hand.
If a wound didn’t kill you, it healed quickly and well. That was common to all the creatures of Paradise. But once a part was gone, it was lost for good.
I wonder if my principal will dock my pay for delivering damaged goods. If it really is him.
First the busker tossed fired-clay bowls borrowed from a merchant at a nearby booth with his right hand, to catch them upside down on his stump and flip them back in the air. Next, he juggled ninepins plundered by giggling urchins from the village green a few streets over.
Sadly, he also blew enthusiastically on a fatty-herder’s reed pipes he’d stuffed in his mouth. Once again I question whether my perfect pitch is a gift from the Creators, or a spite of the Fae, thought Rob.
The busker’s next trick almost made Rob forgive his noise: he juggled daggers. His stump flipped them by their blade-flats as they descended, back to his right hand. He worked up to five at a time. Then he pretended to let one slip. Catching it by the tip he tossed it high to twinkle like a yellow spark in the last slanting light, to a rush of delighted applause. He sent the others after in fast succession.
He looks like him, Rob thought, studying his target under the guise of watching, fascinated at his tricks. Though he was that too. At least, he looks like the portraits I’ve seen, and the descriptions I’ve heard.
Rob had never seen the man he’d been sent to retrieve from closer than sixty yards. And the bugger hadn’t exactly been holding still at the time.…
The daggers fell to plant themselves in a line like daisies in the hard-packed soil before him. As the onlookers clapped and hooted, he took from his sack a shallow brass bowl and a stick about half a meter long. Laying the stick down before him, he placed the bowl on its tip. Then he sat back on skinny haunches, smiling beatifically through his beard.
Around Rob the villagers and passers-through speculated eagerly as to what the busker would do now. Some did s
o in Francés, which Rob understood passably well and spoke with a deliberately outlandish accent. Others used Spañol, which everyone in Nuevaropa theoretically knew. By order of the Creators, it was said, though Rob begged leave to doubt it.
Actually, Rob never begged leave to doubt. He seldom begged leave to do anything at all. Doubting was the very last thing on Paradise he’d ask permission for, except perhaps singing and playing his lute, laughing, drinking, wenching, and nursing sullen resentment against those who did him down.
A silver coin rang in the busker’s bowl. It made a nice musical sound. More musical than his playing, in any event, Rob thought sourly.
Another followed quickly, then a very cascade of copper centimes and Imperial centavos, plus a silver peso or two, as onlookers took the hint to encourage the performer. Rob couldn’t see which urchin had tossed in the first coin. He took for granted it was a shill, provided with two pesos and allowed to keep one. With perhaps the threat of a beating with the meter-and-a-half-long blackwood staff that lay beside the busker to keep him or her committed.
Once primed, the audience responded readily. The busker had a winning way about him, always smiling and laughing and getting others to join in. His deformity, and the ingenious use he made of it, aroused both sympathy and admiration.
To his left Rob noted three men who had appeared in an alley mouth. They stood watching the performance with folded arms and scowls. To his eye they looked like professional toughs. He’d encountered more than a few such in his travels.
What interest might they have in a poor street performer, and him kitten-harmless, so?
The busker’s bowl was duly filled. He emptied it into his purse. Then with the tip of his stick he hoisted the bowl into the air. Still puffing furiously on his pipes he stood up, holding the stick upright and setting the bowl to twirl. He finished with stick balanced on chin, and the bowl spinning atop it. The crowd erupted in applause as urchins ran among them with more bowls.
“He seems to have quite the going concern here,” Rob said as he straightened, to none but himself. He was always his best audience, after all. “Maybe he won’t be interested in my proposition at all. And wouldn’t that be my luck all over?”
The three hard men were no longer to be seen.
* * *
He caught up with the busker in a narrow, noisome alley toward the village outskirts nearest the volcano, whose eponymous crater stained red the sky above the rooftops, and whose bone-deep demon mutter never paused for breath. The street performer had a slouch hat, his sack shouldered, and carried his stick in his lone hand. Though not after the manner of a man who needed its help to walk.
“How are the mighty fallen,” Rob Korrigan murmured to himself.
And maybe, of himself. His life had been no path of blossoms since he’d been sacked.
He followed his quarry across a street little wider than the alley, then stopped and looked around. He saw nothing but shuttered windows and a rat or two to overhear him calling the busker by a dead man’s name.
“Ho, there, Voyvod Karyl,” he called softly.
The man broke stride momentarily. Then he continued. He didn’t look back.
Rob scowled at the cloaked back dissolving into the gloom.
“Wait, may the Fae curse you,” he said more loudly.
Instantly repenting letting anger take the reins of his tongue—as it did so often—he hastily added, “I’ve a proposition which might bring profit to the voyvod.”
On the brink of disappearing the busker halted.
“Voyvod Karyl is dead,” he said without turning. Like Rob he spoke Francés. His accent was unmistakably Slavo.
“You can speak?” Rob said.
The man walked on.
For a moment Rob stood scowling, with his big scarred hands folded over Wanda’s head. “Ah,” he said, “that I, a dinosaur master, should be reduced to chasing down alleys after madmen.”
For gold, the ever-present voice at the back of his head reminded him. With your purse as empty as your stomach soon will be.
And it was a princely sum he was promised for such a petty errand: a gold trono, sufficient to buy a sword or suit of clothes, either worthy of a gentleman. Which Rob knew well he’d never be.
“Then again,” he said, “as a minstrel, an Ayrishmuhn, and a Traveler, what’s more natural to me than skulking down alleys?”
Tipping the oak axe haft back over his shoulder, he trudged after the man he called Karyl. He was still puzzling over how he might nail down the busker’s attention long enough to make his pitch when three men stepped from the shadows in front of him.
Chapter 6
Chián, El Rey, The King, Padre Cielo, Father Sky—King of the Creators: Qian ☰ (Heaven)—The Father. Represents Fatherhood, rule (and misrule), power, and the Sun. Also dinosaurs. Known for his majesty. Aspect: a sturdy, white-bearded man with gold-trimmed scarlet robe and golden scepter, sitting on a throne. Sacred Animal: Tyrannosaurus rex. Color: gold. Symbol: a golden crown.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
Uncomfortable as always in her elaborate Imperial regalia of red ridiculous reaper plumes and heavy gold baubles, Melodía stood by the left arm of the Emperor’s chair. She was bored, as she always was when called upon to wear that outfit.
She shut her ears to the drone of the stout priestess, who wore the grey robes with the eight-sided symbol on the front that signified dedication to all eight Creators without patron or favor. The Princess had long practice at that.
If she squinted through the gloom, Melodía could just see her father’s Chief Minister, Mondragón, standing like a scarecrow on the other side of the Emperador’s throne-away-from-home. The Great Hall of Firefly Palace devoured light. She knew that the alternating courses of sand and amber stone that vaulted upward over the Imperial heads constituted an architectural wonder. At the moment she had to take it on faith. It wasn’t as if you could actually see it. Especially now, with no sunlight streaming in the courses of narrow arched windows to alleviate the darkness. A myriad of oil lamps and candles burning their little hearts out could barely scratch it.
She let her eyes slide over the gaggle of courtiers and local grandes standing about pretending to listen raptly to the convocation. There were times she almost envied the more prudish North, with its predisposition to more body covering despite its warmer clime. Parchment-skinned pots and sagging breasts were not complemented by loincloths and feather yokes, however resplendent.
Though she could, to her regret, put names to almost all the hangers-on, she had far less notion of what most of them did.
The priestess finished. Felipe smiled and nodded approvingly. She withdrew amidst a gaggle of acolytes¸ who waved censers enthusiastically about, surrounding her with dense aromatic clouds as if warding off mosquitoes.
Melodía’s father had an infinite capacity for pious boredom. So, apparently, did the Creators themselves, who forbore to strike down even the longest-winded of Their servitors. It was another reason Melodía secretly doubted their existence. She would have slagged the marble beside the priestess’ sandals with a lightning bolt, just to see her dance.
The Imperial Herald stepped forth and in tenor-trumpet tones began to introduce Felipe by his titles, real and fanciful: “Behold his Imperial Majesty, Terror of the Evildoer—”
Luckily Melodía also had experience keeping her face expressionless. Not even she thought of her father as prepossessing. Felipe Delgao was a man of middle age, middle height, and slightly more than middling paunchiness, wrapped in a gold-trimmed cloak of scarlet feathers. A simple crown with a single red reaper plume sat on short hair just on the red side of sandy. His slightly protuberant eyes were pale green this evening.
He looked, even to his daughter, who really did love him, like the personification of mediocrity. Which fact had much to do with his Election. All factions had agreed the stout Duque de los Almendros was far too inconsequential to upset any dung-carts.<
br />
And here he was, kicking them over right and left like a child pitching a tantrum among his toys. Melodía wished she could enjoy the dismay her father caused Nuevaropa’s magnates. Unfortunately she deplored his methods as much as his sternest critic did.
“—Defender of the Faith, Shield and Sword of the Holy Church, Upholder of Creators’ Law—”
Felipe looked amused by the hyperbole, knowing it accreted to the office, not the man. Sometimes in private he liked to remark they’d spout the same encomiums to Don Rodrigo, the fat, half-blind, and toothless old Tyrannosaurus rex that served as Imperial Executioner, should he somehow get elected. And the courtiers would suck up to him as eagerly.
Still, Felipe looked for all of Paradise as if he were enjoying this immensely.
“—el Emperador del Imperio de Nuevaropa, Felipe!” the Herald finished ecstatically. The mob of hangers-on erupted in applause, as if Felipe had just slain a legendary monster like his progenitor and predecessor, Manuel Delgao.
Melodía glanced down at her sister, fidgeting by her side. As Infanta, Montserrat got away with just a modest silver circlet confining her unruly dark-blond dreadlocks. She wore a simple white child’s gown, which for a wonder was spotless. Its state meant some harried attendants had shrewdly waylaid the girl and wrestled her into it as she was on the utter threshold of the Great Hall. Her Imperial inveterate tomboy Highness Montserrat could notoriously get dirty walking across five meters of freshly scrubbed tile.
With nobody else paying attention, Montse stuck her tongue out at her sister. Melodía winked back. She felt a warm rush of closeness and love.
In some ways the siblings were as different as fur and feathers. Yet they loved each other with a fierce and almost conspiratorial devotion: allies against an indifferent, uncomprehending court and world. And, too often, father.
The guards flanking the entrance stamped their nosehorn-hide sandals ceremonially. Trumpets flourished. Conversation died as the tall ironwood doors groaned open. A herald entered between the stone-faced Scarlet Tyrants with their figured and gilded cuirasses, scarlet capes, golden red-crested barbute helmets, and altogether businesslike halberds. Felipe grinned.