The Dinosaur Lords

by Victor Milán

  Despite the way his vision kept trying to tighten into a tunnel, Rob caught motion in his right eye’s corner. Karyl was out of the trees and riding toward him with sword drawn.

  A Brokenheart veered to charge him. The flat of Karyl’s blade guided his overhand sword cut safely by. As the horses passed each other, Karyl took a flawless forehand draw–stroke across the knight’s throat, cutting to bone and sliding slickly out without getting bound in meat or cartilage.

  As before, Karyl didn’t seem to fight. He killed, with the efficient inevitability of watermill’s grinding, and yet with a horror’s unsettling liquid grace as well.

  The marauder who’d speared Rob circled left, seeking an opening. A shadow dropped onto him. Above the mailed shoulder, Rob saw the cruel beauty of Stéphanie’s dagger-sculpted face turned crueler by a snarl as she wrenched the knight’s head sideways. His neck broke with a thick crack.

  The other two Brokenhearts turned their horses smartly ’round and spurred back the way they had come.

  “The lard butts have fled and left our balls to roast in the sacks!” one shouted to his comrades, speaking of the Crève Coeur dinosaur knights.

  “Let’s go,” the second called. “There’s no honor and less loot, scrapping with these savages.”

  Some of the approaching horsemen turned back. Others faltered, slowing their mounts to a trot.

  To Rob’s unalloyed horror, a dinosaur rose up from behind the hill beyond them. It was black, its chest and belly crimson shading to gold. As it stopped at the crest and dropped to all fours, Rob saw its rider wore clear-enameled armor. His shield was also black, painted with a yellow figure Rob couldn’t make out at this range. A black-and-gold pennon streamed from the tip of the lance he carried upright with its butt in its leather cup by his stirrup.

  “Salvateur,” said Françoise, emerging from the undergrowth to Rob’s right on her strider.

  “And that’s us right fucked, then,” Rob said as trumpets blared and mailed infantry with spears and round shields spread out to either side of the enemy commander.

  But instead of charging at the fanfare, the Brokenhearts who were still riding toward the forest turned back.

  “That’s the recall!” somebody cried from the brush. A cheer went up.

  Salvateur’s voice boomed out like the challenge of a rutting nosehorn bull. Rob couldn’t make out the words, but he got the distinct impression the Baron was roundly ranking out his knights for riding themselves into a trap to no good end.

  The basso thrum of Karyl’s hornbow from Rob’s right startled him. He resisted the urge to glance aside, and kept eyes fixed on Salvateur.

  The Baron raised his shield. Rob could see the quiver of motion as the arrow stuck in the middle of it.

  The spearmen started downslope at a careful walk, shields high.

  “Nice warning shot,” Rob said.

  But Karyl frowned. Rob recognized that barely visible brow-furrow signified what in a normal human being would be scowling, shouting, beard-tearing rage—that last being a thing Rob had often heard of, but never actually witnessed and would pay good gold to do so. Or at least silver.

  “I shot to kill,” Karyl said. “A competent captain who has Guilli’s ear is as deadly to us as a hundred dinosaur knights.”

  Karyl’s scratch defensive force was still shouting triumphantly, and even hurling catcalls at the advancing but still-distant house-shields.

  Surging relief flashed over into anger inside Rob. “What are you cheering about, you gits?” he shouted. “We still lost the battle! And barely touched Guilli’s army, which will be on our necks while you’re still applauding your fool selves!”

  “You did well,” Karyl called to those who’d stood with him. “And Master Korrigan’s right: we’ve still got a fleeing army to protect. Fall back, keep to cover, and get ready to ambush the enemy if the pursuit picks up again.”

  Emeric stepped out on the road. From the commotion coming from the underbrush, Rob gathered that a few Brokenheart knights were still in the process of dying, and not as expeditiously as they’d like. He didn’t much care. The woods-runners were especially vindictive toward their tormentors; Emeric himself showed little appetite for that sort of thing, preferring to leave the more protracted forms of vengeance-taking to his sister. But few in Providence had much love for Count Guillaume’s armored reavers.

  “What about the wounded?” the woods-runner asked.

  “Help those who can walk,” Karyl said. “Leave the rest.”

  Emeric nodded and faded into the woods.

  “What?” Rob demanded in disbelief. “There must be fifty of our people still out there! And Lanza alone knows how many more over that hill.”

  “We can’t retrieve them,” Karyl said. “And we can’t carry them. They’d slow us down too much. Salvateur may pursue us at a more deliberate pace than his vanguard knights did. But he will pursue.”

  “But the Brokenhearts will butcher them!”

  “They’re lost to us already. We can’t afford to lose still more in a futile attempt to recover them.”

  “What kind of heartless bastard are you?” Rob screamed the words.

  “A commander,” Karyl said. “It’s not my first time to it.”

  He looked out across a hillside strewn with writhing bodies, crying out for the help he’d just denied them. A few crawled toward the hopeful shelter of the woods, leaving trails of beautiful blue flowers crushed and stained with gore.

  “And in spite of all my efforts, it seems I’ve yet to see my last.”

  Chapter 49

  Maia, La Madre, the Mother, Madre Terra, Mother Land—Queen of the Creators: Kun ☷ (Land)—The Mother. Represents Motherhood, soft power, birth (and death), healing, and Paradise. Also mammals. Known for her compassion. Aspect: beautiful grey-haired matron in brown-and-gold gown, holding a sheaf of wheat in one hand and a sickle in the other. Sacred Animal: horse. Color: brown. Symbol: a wheat sheaf.

  —A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

  Hunger like a baby horror swallowed live, kicking at the insides of her belly with its tiny killing-claws, roused Shiraa from sleep.

  She knew at once what had wakened her. The sweet, sweet scent of the flesh of prey beasts roasting filled her head with intoxication at every breath she took. It was an acquired taste, taught her as a hatchling by her mother. She listened hard and sniffed, ignoring as best she could the delicious odor. She detected no danger nearby—no creature even as big as a half-grown tailless two-leg.

  She rose, taking care to make as little noise as possible, and poked her snout cautiously out of the canebrake where she’d sheltered for her nap. The sun was setting to her left. The hills cast lengthy shadows out into the farmlands to the west.

  A trickle of smoke, slaty in the twilight, rose above the next hill south. Somewhere unseen, fatties bleated as a herder drove them to their nighttime pens. A stream wound behind the hill, and now above the blandness of upland plants, Shiraa smelled dressed wood and metal and strangely altered animal hides, and the commingled odors of a throng of the tailless ones: all the signs of a settlement.

  Training and experience alike taught Shiraa never to seek out contact with the tailless ones without her mother telling her to do so. But in the slowly thickening gloom she could just see, this side of a stand of trees atop the hill, a familiar hooded figure.

  She caught, again, the faintest teasing wisp of her mother’s scent.

  The Hooded One was not her mother, she somehow knew. Yet it was guiding her, slowly, to where her mother awaited her. She knew that too.

  She slipped out of the thicket and down toward the valley. Eat? she thought hopefully.

  And, Shiraa lonely.

  * * *

  “All right, contraband!” Abi’s indecently cheerful call was muffled by the cloth and hundreds of kilos of animal dung that covered Melodía and Pilar. “Enough lazing about. Time to be up and doing.”

  The two women lay pr
essed together tightly. Their bamboo tubes, angled up past the canvas to protrude a couple of millimeters from the excrement, had let in enough air to keep them alive. They hadn’t kept crumbled dried dung, and some not so dry, from filtering in with them.

  While it was true that herbivore crap didn’t intrinsically smell all that bad, Melodía had forgotten some of it had been scooped up moist from the underground ramp. On the drive through La Merced and up into the hills to the south it had begun to ferment.

  Melodía heard a crunching noise. A sudden flood of light made her blink.

  “We’ll have you out in no time, Día,” Fina said brightly.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Digging you out,” Fina said, puffing with effort. “Help is on the way.”

  “Help?”

  A corner of the canvas was lifted. Melodía found herself looking up at a small head haloed with morning light that glowed through dark-gold dreadlocks.

  “Montse?”

  “You could make yourself useful too, Melodía,” her sister said, “instead of lying there like a truffle waiting to be rooted out by a fatty.”

  “Don’t mind her, Día,” another female voice said. Melodía’s heart jumped again at its sound. She felt dizzy, and not only from the fumes she’d been breathing. “Just sit tight and we’ll have you out in half a mo’.”

  Melodía began to squirm free. Pilar helped, mostly by trying to keep dung from falling in their hair and faces. She wasn’t terribly successful.

  Lying on the hard wagon bed trying to move and even breathe as little as possible had knotted Melodía’s muscles. Her joints felt solidified. Even though the ride had lasted no more than three-quarters of an hour, most of it across well-maintained city streets and corduroy roads, it had been abundantly bumpy.

  Montse peeled back the canvas as weight was shifted off it. Hands pulled Melodía to her feet. Without thinking about it, she turned and bent to help Pilar up as well.

  The dray stood parked in a clearing among tall hardwood trees. The nosehorn’s feed bucket had been removed. It grazed on low, feathery ferns with lavender underparts, which gave off a scent of mint when crushed.

  Early sunlight slanted down to the clearing through fine clouds. Plate-sized blossoms—bright yellow and streaked from the centers with crimson, orange, or pale violet—decked the undergrowth surrounding the glade. Speckle-faced bouncers peeked from among them. Forest-gliders soared between lower branches, and fliers chirped from the higher ones.

  Montserrat hit Melodía and almost toppled her into the heaped shit. She clung to her elder sister with startling strength, weeping wildly. Melodía found herself sobbing almost uncontrollably as well.

  “Perhaps you’d like to climb out of the crap, Día?” Abi said. “I mean, if you’re happy up there…”

  Gently Melodía disentangled her sister. Josefina Serena and Princess Frances of Anglaterra helped the two down to the turf. Pilar scrambled lithely after.

  Melodía looked down at herself. “Fanny, I—” she began, ineffectually batting at clumps of mostly dried dung that clung to her coarse robe.

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” Fanny embraced her.

  “I was afraid—”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “I know.”

  Something nudged Melodía from behind. She heard a whicker, felt a soft exhalation of warm breath on the back of her head. She turned to find herself staring up the flared nostrils of her mare, Meravellosa.

  “Maia!” she cried, hugging the horse around the neck. Looking past her she saw a pretty white mare and a strapping bay gelding with a homely bent-nosed face and its back piled high with baggage tethered nearby.

  “I love you all,” she told her friends with tears streaming down her cheeks. “Thank you so much for saving me. But you shouldn’t have done it. What were you all thinking?”

  Montse shook back her ropes of hair. “I ordered everybody to do it! It’s all my fault. They can punish me if they want to.”

  “This one’s a fighter, Día,” Abigail Thélème said. “It isn’t true, of course. We all did it because we wanted to.”

  “Who thought this up? Was it you, Abigail?”

  “I admit I helped flesh out the plot. But I can’t claim much credit. Your sister and that servant wench of yours cooked it all up between them. Amateurish, but worthy of Sansamour withal.”

  Melodía turned to the guilty pair in amazement. Pilar calmly met her gaze.

  “Your sister’s much beloved among the servants,” she said. “For her they’d do almost anything.”

  Not for me, I notice, Melodía thought. “And you?”

  Pilar smiled and reached up to pluck a twig from the hair over Melodía’s forehead. “We grew up together, Princess. Remember?”

  Melodía felt her lips compress. Maybe I didn’t, she thought.

  “We didn’t have any trouble on the way,” Abi Thélème said. She sounded almost disappointed. “But we’ve got no way of knowing when your disappearance will be detected. Maybe it already has been. You two need to get away from here in a hurry.”

  Fear for her friends, and Pilar, and Claudia, and the other servants who must have aided her escape, hit Melodía hard enough to make her sway.

  “Really, Día,” Fanny said encouragingly, “the fact that we’re working together with your sister should give us all immunity. It’ll all be written off as a lark by foolish girls who’ve heard too many ballads of Companions’ derring-do.”

  “Your father better not try to punish us,” Fina said, frowning fiercely. “Nor my daddy’s servants either. He’d find himself out on the street right quick!”

  Melodía’s stomach clenched. “Don’t be too sure,” she said.

  Do I have to go back, to save my brave foolish sister and my brave, foolish friends? Lady Bella, please spare me that!

  “Día,” Fanny said, “we’ll be fine.”

  “Keep a special eye on Falk. He’s dangerous. He—I believe he’s behind all this.”

  “We figured that out on our own,” Abi said dryly. “Too late to help. I—let’s just say I let everybody down.”

  Even in her seethe of fear and hope, Melodía couldn’t help wondering if this was the first time she’d ever heard Abi sound uncertain.

  Another thought almost drove her to her knees. “Papá,” she whispered.

  How much did he know? How much does he know? Does he know what that bastard did to me last night?

  She didn’t dare think about that now. Maybe ever. If she had an “ever.”

  Someone took her hands. “Melodía, your father loves you,” Fanny said. “We don’t know everything that’s going on.”

  She drew in a deep breath and opened her eyes.

  “Very well. I need to get away, if I’m going to.” She frowned as the obvious question slapped her in the face. “But—where?”

  “Providence,” Fanny said. “Where else?

  Fina gasped theatrically. “But that’s where the Grey Angel Emerged!”

  “It’s still best,” Fanny said. “They follow Jaume’s philosophies there, after all. If anyone’s going to welcome her, it’ll be the Garden of Beauty and Truth.”

  Mention of Jaume stuck another dagger in Melodía’s soul. What this news would do to him she couldn’t imagine. After I was too proud to say good-bye, or even return his letters.…

  “Fanny’s right,” Abi said, sounding just the slightest bit surprised. Melodía judged the cool Sansamour scion too canny to be taken in by Fanny’s fluff-head act, but she doubtless considered the Anglesa a hopeless amateur at intrigue. Which most intriguers this side of Trebizon were, next to Abi. “If the Providentials don’t actively oppose Church and Throne, they’re certainly not in awe of either. They might well be willing to defy the Empire by sheltering a fugitive.”

  She paused, scowled, and exhaled through bared teeth.

  “Or maybe they’ll see you as the perfect coin to buy their way back into your father’s good graces. I’m afraid
the only choices we have to offer you range from bad to worse, Melodía.”

  No, Melodía thought. Not worst.

  “Providence it is,” she said. “I’ll just have to take my least-bad choice. And do the … the best I can to get by.” Her voice faltered.

  Montse hugged her again fiercely. “Don’t sell yourself short, Día!” she cried. “And stop taking Pilar for granted!”

  Melodía looked down at her sister in surprise. She smiled.

  “I have,” she said. Pilar stood nearby. Melodía reached out to take her hand. Lifting it to her lips she kissed it, then let it go.

  “Be well, Pilar. I’ll miss you.”

  “How?” her servant asked. “Inasmuch as I’m coming with you.”

  “You can’t!”

  “Try and stop me.” Pilar smiled. But her tone didn’t joke.

  “But—”

  “Be realistic, Día,” Fanny said. “You can’t go all the way to Providence by yourself. It’ll be hard enough for the two of you.”

  “But—I can hire guards.”

  “You don’t dare,” Abi said. “Too much risk they’ll recognize you. Your father can pay them more to drag you back than you can pay them not to. Anyway, if you don’t take the girl, I’ll be happy to hire her. She shows a lot of promise. I can use someone with that kind of enterprise and courage.”

  “No! I’ll go with Melodía if I have to follow her like a lost dog.”

  Given Abigail Thélème’s customary aristocratic chill, Melodía expected her to take offense at such summary refusal from a mere maidservant. She showed no sign of doing so. Melodía’s friend—and whatever else she was, Abi had proven truly that—was a deeper pool than she’d ever realized.

  Like all my little circle, she realized with a shock. Everyone but me. Evidently I’m the shallow one.

  Still, she teetered on the edge of ordering Pilar to stay behind. And found she couldn’t. To do so would be to cut herself off from everything she’d known.

  “I don’t have the words,” she said. “I’ve got more and truer friends than I ever imagined—and the best sister in the world.”

  She tousled Montse’s hair. “And now, when I finally understand that, I have to leave you all.”