The Dinosaur Lords

by Victor Milán

  Since then she’d been left alone. Downcast servants, always accompanied by Scarlet Tyrants equally disinclined to meet Melodía’s gaze, brought her ample food. Despite her usual harrier appetite she ate little. Nobody responded to her demands to know why she was being held, how long she would be held, and to be allowed to send a message to her father.

  She had a comfortable bed and a water closet fed by a rain cistern on the tower roof. She even had books of Nuevaropan history brought with her morning meal, stacked on a sturdy table near the window. A comfortable cage. But a cage withal.

  It was when the Tyrants had first slammed the door behind her that Melodía cracked. First she went into fist-hammering rage. That only skinned the heels of her hands on the bare, buff-plastered walls. Then she slumped against the door in a paroxysm of tears.

  Now, recovered, she had returned into detachment. She was resilient. Indeed, she felt something like relief. She had convinced herself that this was all nonsense. There was simply some misunderstanding. Everything would be cleared up soon.

  So I finally get my father to notice me.… She shook her head ruefully.

  The door opened.

  She looked that way, expecting to see servants bringing her supper, with their armed and red-cloaked shadows behind. Instead she had a single visitor, dressed in a loincloth, buskins, and royal-blue cloak. Although he was certainly big enough for two.

  “Duke Falk,” she said. She frowned. “Did my father send you to let me go?”

  Then she caught the strange gleam in his Northern sapphire eyes, and the smile, triumphant yet somehow sickly, that twisted his full lips. Something’s very wrong, she thought.

  Then it was as if her reality were a window shattering in reverse: the pieces all flew together at once, and she saw the whole with sudden clarity.

  “You’re behind this outrage?” she said. “How could you dare?”

  He laughed. “I’m the man of the hour, Melodía. I’m your father’s chief bodyguard.”

  With a small internal jolt of alarm, Melodía realized that his speech was somewhat slurred. By drink, her nose already told her. But by emotion as well. None of which boded well.

  “And I’ve already proven my value,” Falk said, “by breaking a heinous plot against the Emperor.”

  “What?”

  He nodded. “Arrested his very Chief Minister and seen him condemned. And cut down those three archconspirators, your kinsmen.”

  “My kinsmen?” She frowned in utter incomprehension.

  “Gonzalo Delgao, his brother Benedicto, their brother-in-law Barón Alarcón.”

  “Them?” She shook her head rapidly, like a dog clearing water from its eyes. “They, they—they’re obnoxious loudmouths and total fools. But they’re harmless. Poor Benedicto’s dim, and Gonzalo’s so clever he only outwits himself.”

  She ran down. It struck her belated that Gonzalo had manifestly done exactly that. For the last time, if this appalling former rebel told the truth.

  And from the way Falk carried himself, managing to strut while standing still, she knew he did.

  “It’s all written down and attested to, you see,” Falk said. “Manorquín told all.”

  “Manorquín? Don Augusto? And you believed him? Out of everybody at court, he was the most likely to mean my father harm. He’s been in love forever with the notion that a full-blood Ramírez should sit the Fangèd Throne instead of a member of Torre Delgao!”

  Falk smiled. “Precisely. Who better to confess the whole nasty scheme? And your own role in it, my lady.”

  “My role? Are you crazy? If I were conspiring against my father, which is completely and utterly absurd, those four buffoons were the very last creatures on Paradise I’d choose to do so with. Including the ridiculous reapers of Ruybrasil!”

  Falk’s smirk became outright fatuous in its self-congratulation. Somehow the near-imbecility of such an expression on the face of what she knew to be a most intelligent man made him far more frightening.

  “That’s not what Manorquín’s confession says.”

  “But it’s a lie!”

  Falk laughed. “The truth’s what people believe, isn’t it? More to the point, your father believes it. Who’d be so disloyal as to contradict him?”

  He frowned and cocked a theatrical brow. “Except his own daughter, perhaps? You’ve been most intemperate criticizing his policies, Princess. People have heard. And wondered.”

  “How could anybody possibly believe I’d plot to overthrow my own father? To what purpose? M-much less to, to—”

  She couldn’t say kill him. The thought of anyone wanting to harm her father horrified her to the pit of her stomach. That anyone could think she might was literally unspeakable.

  “These are perilous times, Highness,” the young Duke said. “The news from Providence has terrified not just the La Merced rabble but the entire court as well. Who knows what might have caused one of the Creators’ Avenging Angels to Emerge, after so many centuries of sabsence? It can only be the blackest evil. Perhaps Fae-worship. Perhaps—”

  He had gotten close without her being aware of anything but that sinister smile and those scary eyes. Now she smelled not just sweat and wine but something else, as if his passion itself exuded a reek. His huge bare chest was almost touching her equally bare breasts. Her buttocks pressed against the edge of the stout table that stood by the outer wall. She could retreat no farther.

  “Perhaps even a princess plotting her father’s demise,” he breathed. “And in such uncertain times, who could doubt even a princess can fall into evil, dabbling in questionable doctrines?”

  “Questionable doctrines? You mean Jaume’s teachings? They’re as orthodox as can be! The Creators themselves tell us to take pleasure in the world they made us—it’s right there in The Books of the Law. That’s not questionable at all. It’s—”

  Her words ran down. It’s that damned Life-to-Come cult, with its upside-down theology. And among its adherents, rumor has it, the Pope himself. Good job defending your novio, there.

  She looked at the sweat that streamed down Falk’s face in spite of the cool Channel air through the window, and wondered if it might be too late already.

  He smiled. His pale skin was flushed. His lips, pink ever so lightly touched with blue, looked unpleasantly fleshy inside his night-black beard.

  “Your father’s allowed you to run wild,” he said in a husky whisper. “Now it’s time you learned some discipline.”

  He reached for her. She flinched away. Then she snapped upright and flashed her eyes.

  “You don’t dare touch me,” she said. “My father—”

  “Won’t believe a word of it. I’m a man of proven loyalty. Whereas you are a spoiled princess caught in folly, possibly a trafficker with demons, making mad accusations out of spite.” He caught her arm. “You women think nothing of men.”

  She shot a knee toward his groin. He turned his hips and took it on the thigh.

  “You think we’re nothing more than dirt beneath your pretty little feet,” he said. She tried to grab his lip and twist. With bull-tyrant strength and startling speed he spun her to face the table. Bending her arm cruelly up behind her back, he forced her down until her breasts were squashed painfully against the unyielding wood.

  “You think you can do what you like with no consequences,” he rasped. “Well, I’ll show you consequences, bitch.”

  She screamed. She hated herself for doing it. Being slammed with the knowledge of helplessness had broken her vaunted self-control.

  No matter how clever she liked to think she was, she couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  And worse … she knew screams wouldn’t help. The walls and doors were thick enough to muffle sound. And if the sentries on the wall heard, she knew they wouldn’t intervene.

  Creators’ Law forbade torture. But sometimes even divine law got stretched. Especially when the terrible Grey Angels stalked the surface of Paradise once again. The guards, human, feared th
e Angels as much as any.

  Melodía felt her loincloth wrenched away, heard it flung to the wall. A great sweaty hand clamped on her right buttock. A broad powerful thumb probed between her cheeks. She gasped as it pushed inside her.

  “Jaume’s a boy-lover,” Falk grunted. Sweat dripped from his lank hair to scald her back. “He’s used you this way. I know he has.”

  Like most girls her age—and in spite of Doña Carlota’s best efforts—Melodía wasn’t virgin in any sense. But what she’d done, she’d done willingly. No one had ever dared try to force her. It had never entered her head that anyone might. She was the Emperor’s daughter. As a hidalga she’d been trained to the use of arms. As was the custom she always carried at least a dagger.

  Except it had been stripped from her by rough hands, along with her dignity and freedom. Lacking a weapon, she was defeated by mere strength.

  This. Can’t. Be. Happening.

  She screamed again in fury, frustration, and pain as he rammed himself into her.

  Chapter 47

  Gordito, Fatty—Protoceratops andrewsi. A small ceratopsian dinosaur with a powerful toothed beak, a frilled, plant-eating quadruped: 2.5 meters long, 400 kilograms, 1 meter high. The only “hornface” to lack horns. A ubiquitous domestic herd beast, not found wild in Nuevaropa. Timid by nature.

  —THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

  These flagstones are hard on my knees, thought Pablo Mondragón. I’m too old for this.

  A man who seldom smiled, he smiled thinly now. It was his age, in ways, that had brought him here.

  He wouldn’t be growing older. A consolation, of sorts.

  The sun through high overcast stung the back of his bowed neck and beat up at his bowed face from the yellow limestone flags. He was aware of the crowd gathering around the fringes of Creation Plaza by their murmuring, like the sound of surf in the Channel nearby. The onlookers were subdued. As Mercedes, they had small taste for public cruelty, except where pirates were concerned. But being Mercedes, they couldn’t resist a spectacle.

  The execution of a disgraced Chief Minister to the Emperor was, by definition, spectacular.

  Don Pablo had a mind attuned to irony. He recognized it in the fact that, even in the last hours of his life, locked in a small cell in the Palace of the Fireflies, he still attracted information. He knew that Heriberto, Prince of the Tyrant’s Jaw and landlord, disapproved of the sudden spin of the Wheel in his Imperial tenant’s affairs. He had refused use of the great central square, el Mercado, for the morning’s proceedings.

  But his Holiness had no such reservations. So it came to pass that Mondragón knelt alone in the center of Creation Plaza, nearly as vast as the Mercado, awaiting his executioner. Whoever and whatever it might be: certainly not the venerable Tyrannosaurus Don Rodrigo, fat, tame, and without a tooth in his head. El Verdugo Imperial could do no more than gum a convict’s neck and drool down his back.

  Mondragón felt oddly content. While it was axiomatic that the Emperor possessed too little overt power to conspire against, the Fangèd Throne’s prestige and influence still drew abundant intrigue. The Chief Minister’s job was to serve as lightning rod for the occupant of the Fangèd Throne. Mondragón had never expected to die peacefully in bed. Few of his predecessors had.

  I wish my successor luck, whoever he may be. He was distressingly aware of the ease with which that recent rebel and upstart child Falk had outmaneuvered him. Clearly, I lost my edge. Perhaps this turn of Maris’s Wheel was overdue, for the good of the Empire.

  He was afraid that the wildest of the rumors flying in the wake of the terrible news from Providence would prove true: that Felipe’s confessor might succeed him. He didn’t trust the Father Sky sectary. Fray Jerónimo was unaccountable-for, thus unaccountable.

  Mondragón believed that was his only fear. Then he heard the crowd gasp, looked up, and knew that fear had been a total stranger before.

  Seeing a pure-white Tyrannosaurus bull waddling toward him, thick tail swinging, ruby eyes fixed upon him, and Duke Falk astride his back in his glittering Scarlet Tyrant armor, introduced Don Pablo to the genuine article.

  An alguacil read loudly from a scroll of condemnations. Mondragón couldn’t hear him for the pulse roaring in his ears.

  There was no need for him to hear the traditional call to lift his head to ease the Executioner’s task. As the great white head filled his sky like Eris falling, he could look at nothing else.

  Saw-toothed jaws almost as long as Mondragón’s whole body opened wide. The beast’s breath washed hot and wet over him. It smelled incongruously of the spearmint-imbued grit with which Falk’s hapless arming-squire had to clean the monster’s teeth after every meal. Saliva ropes fell across Mondragón’s upturned face.

  He screamed as the tyrant’s jaws enveloped his head, blotting out the light. The last thing he felt was the touch of terrible teeth on his neck.

  * * *

  The clack of a lock opening roused Melodía from a restless drowse of fatigue compounded by despair. As the door opened she raised her face from a pillow still sodden with her tears. She was too drained even to fear that Falk had come to use her again.

  But it was neither the Duke nor hooded interrogators she saw by the grey dawn light seeping from her narrow window. A crone in a stained cloak and cowl hobbled in, stooped over a cane. A loosely woven hemp mask covered her face.

  The woman coughed. Melodía recoiled in fear. Her captors’ new torment shocked her right out of her sump of despair. Disease was rare—so rare that its onset was considered a curse. Legend claimed the Grey Angels favored plague as an instrument of divine retribution. Paradisiacals feared few things more than sickness.

  “What’s this?” she demanded. She aimed for hauteur, managed to avoid a terrified squeak. The words stung her raw throat.

  She glimpsed a flash of red cloak in the corridor. The door slammed behind the newcomer with unusual emphasis.

  Melodía’s unwelcome visitor straightened. The hood slipped back from her head. She stripped the contagion-mask from her face with a relieved exhalation and stuffed it in a sleeve.

  Through eyes gummy and swollen from crying Melodía saw a handsome middle-aged woman shaking out long black hair streaked with white. She had a long straight nose and a thin-lipped mouth, perhaps a touch over-wide. She looked somehow familiar. But Melodía didn’t know her name.

  “My name is Claudia, Princess,” the woman said. “I’m here to get you out.”

  * * *

  Heart pounding, Melodía hobbled into the corridor outside her cell. The pair of Scarlet Tyrants who had opened the door to the insistent tapping of her cane stood well clear to let her pass. One stuck a helmeted head around the doorjamb. On seeing a slim feminine form lying beneath a blanket, he yanked the door quickly shut and practically skipped back away from the stooped and masked figure.

  Melodía coughed as convincingly as she could. Her savior Claudia had thoughtfully cleaned her mouth with lavender pastilles before donning the contagion-mask. But that just meant it inevitably smelled of lavender-scented spit.

  It was a hardship Melodía was willing to bear.

  The Tyrants didn’t even tell her to be on her way. It was as if they feared just talking to her could infect them. Melodía had no idea what Claudia had told them to get them to admit her to the cell. It didn’t really matter.

  Terror of immediate discovery threatened to override even the relief flooding through her. Melodía found it almost impossible to focus on the details of the plan—short and simple as it was—that Claudia had recited as she cleaned the Princess with water from the tap in the closet.

  The skin between Melodía’s shoulders crawled in anticipation of the fatal shout. But when she reached the stairs, all she heard was gusty sighs of relief. She only just remembered to hobble on her cane as she began to pick her way down the winding steps.

  At the bottom another tall female figure awaited. Melodía stopped and almost fled. They found me!

&nb
sp; Then: “Pilar!” It was half sob, half prayer of thanksgiving.

  She tensed to sprint down the last few steps and grab her maidservant in the tightest hug of their lives. But in the lightest, most conversational tone possible, Pilar said, “Stay in character.”

  Melodía froze. Emotions too many and too intense for body and mind to process filled her up. There was sodden-foolish gratitude, relief, lost-dog love. And also: Who does she think she is, this servant daring to speak that way to a Princesa Imperial?

  That brought back Melodía’s self-control. You are a princess, perra, she told herself. So act like one.

  Pilar gave her hand a quick squeeze as she reached bottom.

  “Follow me,” she said, still as if she were simply sharing the latest gossip. “Don’t hurry, but ¡muévete! Understand?”

  “Yes,” Melodía said, in what she hoped was a suitable disease-victim croak. That didn’t take much acting thanks to the dryness in her throat.

  Covering Melodía’s head with a black mantilla, Pilar led the way through the yard, around the corner of the great residency complex toward the fortress’s west wall, farthest from La Merced. Around them the great living organism that was the Firefly Palace buzzed with coming dawn, everything so everyday it almost hurt. Melodía smelled onions and garlic frying for breakfast. Sturdy, red-faced women called cheerful banter as they carried great steaming tubs of freshly boiled laundry. Horses neighed and nosehorns bleated, expectant of their breakfast oats. A cool dawn breeze blowing up La Canal caressed her cheek—bringing with it an unfortunate brimstone tang from the sewage-bloom west of Adelina’s Frown.

  Tamely Melodía followed her servant under clouds consolidating into a grey ceiling as pallor reached the western sky. Her mind and spirit had become numb. She seemed to drift through mists, through phantoms, her surroundings at once familiar and bizarre. She could have believed the last few days an evil dream but for the pain that stabbed up her backside at every step.