The Dinosaur Knights (33 page)

“The modern world is corrupt,” Violette said. “It's too poisonous to nurture the tender shoots of idealism. So we must prepare the soil. Until that's done, we must put aside ideals like pacifism, the pure pursuit of beauty and pleasure, the liberty of actions and desires. Even the indulgence of thoughts at variance with the common good.

“When we have purified our Garden, those ideals can bloom forth once more in all their glorious profusion. Until then, we've got to bind and weed and prune.”

Melodía frowned slightly at that.
Bind and prune. Why does that sound sinister? Especially since she smiles so happily as she says it
.

Violette turned to Bogardus. “I think she's ready.”

He frowned slightly. “Are you sure, Sister? It's a grave step.”

“Don't I know it?” Violette acted chipper, almost giddy. Her lavender eyes were fever-bright. “But you see how receptive the child is. And she'll be going away for who knows how long? Why deny her access to inner Beauty for so long?”

Bogardus sighed. “If you feel so strongly.…”

It was Melodía's turn to frown at him. His subdued manner was starting to worry her. His face had a grey cast, and the skin hung slightly loose on his strong bones. He seemed to have declined somehow since her last visit.

This afternoon he had been as thoughtful and proficient a lover as always. Yet Melodía sensed his heart wasn't in it. He seemed vague. Maybe even not as clean as he might be; she had thought to catch just the faintest whiff of decay when Bogardus and Violette squired her into the room. She'd been horny enough to overlook it, after her recent vigorous activity and prolonged abstinence. When he embraced her he smelled fine—faintly of his usual lilac soap, in fact.

But his skin had a curious texture to her touch, partly gritty, partly greasy.
Is he unwell?
she wondered. The thought didn't comfort.

Violette sprang up, sprightly as a child. The candlelight splashed her narrow bare back and backside in yellow shading to burnt orange as she walked for the blue curtain across the doorway at the back of the room.

“We've been discussing this,” Violette said excitedly. “We both agree your spiritual development has reached the point where you're ready to ascend.”

“‘Ascend'?” Melodía said faintly. Her earlier excitement—and later afterglow—had faded. Now she noticed once again that, like Bogardus himself, his bedchamber had changed.

And like Bogardus himself, not for the better. Gone was the brilliant decoration that had enlivened it the first time he brought her here. The cunningly executed paintings were missing from the walls, the sculptures from their stands and niches. The bedclothes were still rich and soft, but their colors were drab.

Most of all she missed the flowers that once filled the room with colors and perfume. There remained nothing living or which had ever been alive between bare whitewashed walls, save for food, furnishings, and themselves. It was as if the Garden's guiding aesthetic was no longer Beauty, but austerity.

The deep blue of silk curtain screening the doorway was the sole touch of color that remained. Violette reached for it. Posing dramatically she looked over her shoulder at Melodía.

“You've heard us speak of Inner Mysteries,” the silver-haired woman said, paused with her hand on the curtain. “Now behold the sweetest mystery. Meet our guiding Angel!”

She whipped the curtain open. In the small room beyond Melodía saw what she took for a statue of a seated man. By the candles' faint glow Melodía could make out hints of detail: features and limbs beyond exquisite, curly golden hair. Its face was lowered so that shadows hid the eyes. Even seated, the idol's head rose higher than Bogardus's.

The sculpted beauty seared her soul with its perfection. It exalted and disturbed.
Is this what they've been hiding?
Melodía thought, as her heart hammered at her ribs.
The most perfect work of art ever wrought by human hands?

The figure raised its head.

It looked at Melodía with pools of blackness for eyes. Slowly it reached a hand toward her. The flesh on the fingers was mottled with discoloration.

The stench of corruption, faint before, now struck her like a breath from a freshly opened grave.

The greatest terror Melodía had ever known seized her. Panic blazed sunlike inside her. She turned and fled, heedless and naked, down echoing corridors and out into the cool autumn night.

*   *   *

“What in the name of the Old Hell is this?” Mor Florian exclaimed, reining in his cream and yellow sackbut atop a stony ridge in the Meseta uplands of western Spaña.

Comte Jaume dels Flors drew Camellia to a halt beside his Companion. He led his fifteen surviving and present Companions to the rendezvous Felipe had ordered them to make. Close behind them followed their squires and their Brothers-Ordinary men-at-arms. Next, strung out behind them, marched and rode the rest of the Ejército Corregidor, the lesser nobles and knights and their retinues, still grumbling about the plunder and rape and slaughter they'd been denied at Ojonegro. Then came the baggage train, and last tramped the Nodosaurs. They were probably no less disgruntled at missing the fruits of an intaking, but so great had their contempt for the bucketheads become that they wouldn't deign to show it as their supposed betters did, but made sure to keep it among their browned-iron ranks.

The late morning was hot; the year's round of four two-month seasons brought only subtle differences to Spaña, except in the very shade of the lofty Shield Range. Two kilometers west the Grand Imperial Army of Crusade—El Gran Ejército Imperial Cruzador—lay camped by the High Road to rest. Jaume's expedition had just mounted the pass called Gate of the Winds, through the Copper Mountains that screened out most of the rainstorms blowing from the Channel and made La Meseta one of Nuevaropa's driest regions.

Like a great blanket woven of men, monsters, and engines, the Empire of the Fangèd Throne's army lay spread across a dusty dun plain. Skeins of reinforcement, from militant orders and vassal lords summoned from Spaña and nearby Francia to serve their Imperial liege, had expanded it to over twenty thousand strong.

Who now stood in ranks to either side of the gleaming white High Road to await their comrades' arrival: knights on warhorses and hadrosaurs, glittering House troops, peasant levies slouching listlessly, the grim brown block of the Twelfth Tercio of Imperial Nodosaurs. Beyond them a field full of tents and pavilions sprouted like so many gaudy mushrooms. Even at this distance Jaume could see the open red and gold pavilion where Felipe sat between his army and his camp, flanked by his Scarlet Tyrants in their gorgeous figured breastplates and wind-nodding plumes.

That surprised none of the Companions; the riders who had shuttled back and forth between the two armies the last two days had apprised them of the Imperial cantonment's location, as they had the Emperor of their approach. A hill or two back, Jaume and his men had stopped to don armor and swap ambler horses for war-duckbills in order to make a properly grand entrance to their Emperor's camp.

What stopped Jaume and his men with jaws hanging open—and made Jaume's stomach writhe like a spear-spitted bouncer—was the forest that had sprung up along the Camino Alto Imperial.

No natural trees comprised it. And—as the white-blond Brabanter Mor Wouter de Jong had once remarked, in a different setting—these trees bore strange fruit.

They were gibbets. Some bore crossbars from which blackened bodies hung by the necks. Some were simple poles, with strangely nude-looking bodies tied to them, with their flayed skins flapping like flags above them. Some held wagon-wheels, their victims' broken limbs woven among the spokes to increase their final agony. Some were no more than pikes, with heads on top. Others, stouter poles impaled men and women. Or parts of them.

“There must be hundreds of them,” murmured Wil Oakheart of Oakheart. “What does this mean?”

“Nothing good,” Florian said.

“I fear I am compelled to agree,” said Manfredo. The Taliano knight managed to speak normally despite the fact his mouth and entire face were no more mobile than a stone statue's.

Feeling as if his armor had turned to lead around him, Jaume led them down onto the road of horror. Perched atop a tau cross from whose arms two bodies hung by withered necks, a grey-backed flier with a white belly and fanciful yellow and white swirls on its unwieldy-looking crest opened a toothless beak to utter a croak of annoyance at their approach. Spreading wings seven meters wide it flapped slowly away across the scrub-dotted plain.

We were blessed at first
, Jaume realized.
The wind's blowing crosswise
. But soon enough and too soon, the Companions were riding between the lines of foul trees.

The stink seemed compounded of more than mere rotting flesh. As if misery and terror and degradation each had a reek of its own.

“Some of them are still alive!” Dieter exclaimed. “They're moving! Oh, Sweet Middle Sister Li, Lady of Beauty, have mercy!”

Tears streamed down his pink cheeks as he looked beseechingly around at his comrades. “Can't we help them?”

“I think they're beyond help,” Florian said, without his usual snap.

“But they're not! Some of them are still moving. Look!”

Though he wished he could not do so—though he wished he could do almost anything else, including die—Jaume did look. And he had to admit to himself the young Alemán knight was right. Some of the bodies showed definite movement.

“Look yourself,” rumbled Ayaks, his face fisted in a mountainside scowl. “Look close and learn.”

He rode Bogdan, his golden morion bull with the cream-colored belly, past Dieter's sackbut into the ditch beneath a breaking-wheel. Drawing his greatsword from its sheath slung over his right shoulder, he gripped the hilt near the butt. Making sure he and his mount stayed well out from beneath he reached up to prod the swollen body hanging there. With a scream that echoed its occupant's agony, the wheel turned. The corpse, which was that of a woman, rotated head-down. Her head swung back, opening her mouth.

A cloud of flies with black furry bodies and opalescent green bodies exploded from her with a buzz like an arrow-volley. The maggots and ants that writhed on every square centimeter of her brown, greasy, naked skin fell like grey living rain.

“See where the dead juices dripped, and killed the grass below?” the weeping blond giant demanded. “See that? But someday flowers will grow here. Tell yourself that, boy: someday, flowers will grow!”

Dieter let his helmet drop from the crook of his arm to cover his face with both hands and cry like a lost child.

The arming-squires had ridden up behind, no doubt closer than protocol would normally allow in their eagerness to see what was happening. Jaume half turned his head toward them and without even looking, said, “If you please.”

A brown-haired boy scuttled forward to retrieve the armet. It was Jacques's squire David, not Dieter's Wolfram. Presumably the Alemán was one of those now puking noisily onto the crushed pumice pavement of the High Road.

“The world is an abode of ugliness,” the usually taciturn Machtigern said in a voice like an iron wagon tire clattering down a cobbled street. “It's why we seek Beauty, to find and foster it when we can. To fight for it, even. To restore the holy Equilibrium of the World against the likes of this.”

“O dear, my lord,” someone cried out, “please don't make us do this thing!”

Chapter 26

Alabarda
, Halberd,
Halberd-crest
—
Lambeosaurus magnicristatus
. Bipedal herbivore, 9 meters, 3.5 tonnes. Prized in Nuevaropa as a war-hadrosaur for the showy, bladelike crest that gives it its name. Easily bred for striking coloration, like the more-common Corythosaurus and Parasaurolophus; bulkier than either.

—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

“Tour
,” a voice hissed from the darkness as Melodía picked her barefoot way through the trees and brush toward the light of a campfire belonging, if her somewhat fuddled brain recalled rightly, to one of her jinete contingents.
Tower
, in Francés.

“
Atout
,” she answered, the day's challenge-and-reply somehow, fortuitously springing to her mind without conscious effort. It meant, “trump card” in the same language.

“Come ahead on,
jefa
.” That last was a Spañol word for “boss,” which her light-riders affectionately called her in a nod to her heritage/birthplace.

“Why are you Maia-naked?” asked one of the quartet sitting or squatting around the fire, drinking wine from bouncer-skins and gnawing chunks pulled off the scratcher they had roasted over the fire. This one's name was Magda, Melodía recalled. She was short, barrel-shaped, rode a brown and puce strider, and spoke with an unusual brand of Slava accent.