The Dinosaur Knights (36 page)

The anger that constantly smoldered inside Melodía roared suddenly to flame, brighter and hotter than the conflagration that was eating some poor peasant's home.

“You fucker!” she shrieked. “
Die!
” Melodía flung herself forward along Meravellosa's neck, and using the last of the mare's momentum and the strength of her own fury, stabbed her sword-tip into the marauder's left armpit. Linked steel rings resisted briefly, parted with a strangely musical tinkle. She felt her blade drive deep.

The man uttered a gargling scream. Feeling the flames bite his mount darted right out from under him. He fell, pulling Melodía's trapped blade with him.

His weight dragged her half out of the saddle. With both hands she yanked the talwar furiously to free it. Fierce heat though not flames stung her cheek and arm. Some still-detached part of her mind thought,
I'm glad I cut my hair short
. Meravellosa snorted, bobbed her head and danced.

A rush of movement brought Melodía's head up. An enemy horseman bore down on her with sword upraised.
I'm dead
, she knew.
Fuck
.

Something blurred in from her left. She heard a wet, peculiar crunch. The swordsman's sudden scream was muffled by the iron shank of the feathered twist-dart that skewered his face from side to side.

As he thrashed backward over his horse's crupper, loudly gargling his own blood, Melodía finally pulled her weapon free of the man on the ground. Meravellosa promptly dashed free of the fire. She almost collided with the chestnut mount of a young blond woman in a leather jack and simple steel cap, who was whipping the thong that had been wrapped around the twist-dart about her right forearm with practiced ease.

“Valérie,” Melodía said. Or croaked. “You're getting in the habit of saving me with those darts of yours.”

The blond woman grinned. “My pleasure, Día.”

Melodía looked around for more foes. None remained in sight. At least none still upright. Survivors of the farm household whose ravaging Melodía's mixed troop of jinetes and woods-runner had interrupted were noisily finishing off a couple of fallen raiders with farm implements in the yard. Melodía glanced toward them, then hastily away.

When her head stopped turning her brain didn't seem to want to. The whole world whirled around her. She started to topple.

A strong grip on her left arm caught her. She found herself looking at the black beard and gap-toothed grin of the woods-runner 'Tit Jean—short for Petit Jean, or Little John. Naturally he was the biggest person in her scout troop.

The anger that had been tamped by her desperation to free her talwar flared again. Jean's smile faltered as he saw the flash in her eyes.

His look turned to outright worry when she laughed.

“Sorry,” she told him, straightening in her saddle. The dizziness had passed. 'Tit Jean let her go and stepped back with manifest relief. “It's just that, when that first man set about me, all I could think at first was, ‘How dare he? I'm the Princess of the Empire!'”

At once she regretted the admission, fearing it would make the others think she was giving herself airs. She'd tried so hard to gain the trust, first and foremost, of people who had themselves taken part in rescuing her from a terrible situation none of them would have been foolish to wander within a dozen kilometers of. She measured her success in large part by the fact that Valérie had not only volunteered to join her troop but quickly become her closest friend.

Did I just throw that all away, with a bit of buckethead arrogance?
she wondered.

Then 'Tit Jean put his big round catapult-shot head back and bellowed laughter. The other troopers in earshot joined in. Melodía smiled in relief.

Then she swayed again. At once the woods-runner grabbed her once more.

“Best get down while you can,” he said. “Better than falling on your snout.”

Feebly she nodded. She let him help her, which actually consisted of him taking her about the waist in both hands, lifting her up and pulling her off Meravellosa before setting her daintily on her feet on the hard-stamped ground. She leaned forward, bracing hands on thighs. Melodia fought hard to keep from throwing up, because she didn't want to show that kind of weakness in front of her troop. But mostly because she really, really hated throwing up.

“I never killed anybody before,” she said in a small voice.

“It can be hard, Día,”'Tit Jean said. “My first time, I cried for half a week. Of course, I was fifteen.”

She didn't glance up to see if he was joking. Mainly because she was fairly sure he wasn't. She'd never encountered woods-runners before joining the militia—scarcely knew they existed. She'd learned they led a hard life.

Her woods-runners were all from the country west of Providence town, or even from Crève Coeur and points father west and north. Although she gathered that they ranged so freely such distinctions mattered little to them, when they were even aware of them. She had a couple who currently lived near Castaña for guides.

Though Raúl's reavers showed the foresters nowhere near the extravagant sadism Count Guillaume's Rangers had—and the farmers and others whom woods-runner called “the sitting folk” bore the brunt of their depredations—a number had rallied to the cause, once their brethren from the west brought word of how Karyl served their great and hated foe Crève Coeur.

“It's the first time anybody ever tried to kill me,” she added. “Will I ever get used to it?”

“For some, that is harder to get used to than the other thing,” Valérie said.

Melodía found herself laughing again. Even she thought it was crazy, and controlled it quickly. Nonetheless she still shook from its aftereffects when she stood up to say. “I should have said that to him: how dare you try to lay hands on me? It might've shocked the bastard so much I could've finished him right then!”

That sent everyone roaring. 'Tit Jean patted her shoulder.

“You'll do,” he said. “You
are
crazy. But it's crazy like the rest of us vagabonds!”

Chapter 28

Guerra Altasanta
, High Holy War,
Guerra de Demonios
,
Demon War
—177 to 210 AP. A global war waged between the Creators, their servitors the Grey Angels, and their human faithful against their archenemies, the hada—or Fae—and their allies. It culminated in Nuevaropa's last Grey Angel Crusade to extirpate Fae-worship. Now widely considered to be a mythic account of the Years of Trouble, from the dawn of human civilization on Paradise in Year Zero to 210 AP, which led to the formation of the Nuevaropan Empire.

—LA GRAN HISTORIA DEL IMPERIO DEL TRONO COLMILLADO

“D'you wonder I drink so much these days? Look at me: I've my hands on nigh thirty of the mightiest war-dinosaurs in all the Tyrant's Head. And Himself without question the Empire's leading expert on the use of three-horns in war—and not just because he's the only one. But do I get to play with my marvelous toys? Do I get to learn how to handle them at the feet of the Master? I do not! All I do is instruct the grooms and order in the feed for the great bloody brutes.

“You think I drink too much, then? Fie on that! Not enough by half! I'm still sober enough to do this bloody job, and that's too sober.

“And a job it's become, this game of spies. A great game it seemed at first. A lark for Master Korrigan, who knows a secret and you do not, by your leave, or not. But it never fucking lets up. Unremitting, it is. Day and night it's roused out of bed or drawn away from my dinosaurs to hear the latest reports I am.

“The bastard Count Raúl is ready to invade. He's trying to get that hunchbacked clown Countess Célestine to attack us too. Will she, won't she, will she, won't she, will she join the dance? Who knows? I don't think the great hornface cow herself does, from this moment to the next!

“So: Himself must know the latest glad tidings from my op'ratives, whatever they may be. At once. If not before. And where do we go now, Master Rob? Whither do we ride? Where do we spy?

“And the Creators will love us more than we deserve what if the Council fools don't buy us fresh trouble in Crève Coeur. We hear naught but unceasing complaints from their shiny new Countess and her lackeys. The Garden's got its missionaries on their tits the whole clock round, nagging them to do this, and refrain from that—worse than they're even after doings in Providence town, to hear 'em go on. And that's bad enough. We're lucky the Councilors fear Karyl well, and rightly so, or it's crawling all over us they'd be like lice, telling us when to go to bed and which side to tuck our tallywhackers away in our scanties.

“And what to do, what to do about the North of Providence? Is it that the no news we get from there is good news? Or is that news itself, and bad, somehow, that we never hear a bloody peep? The merchant caravans are starting to dry up, with the Council at them all the time, telling them what they can sell or carry through Providence—even pestering them as to what they bloody believe. But such as still brave the Council and the snow building in the Shield passes say they see neither teeth nor toenails of a single human between the mountains and the farms just north of Providence town. Nor do we get a bloody useful syllable from our precious woods-runners. Not that there's much woods there to draw them; but they're afraid to venture there as well. Faugh! Beggars could teach us Travelers a thing or two on the subject of superstition, and that's saying a mighty mouthful.…

“What's that? Snort? Aye, snort indeed. It's a hard row I hoe. And now nothing'll do but Karyl the Great decrees we must be ready to march east day after tomorrow; and only by the good grace of our Mother Maia is poor Rob Korrigan able to snatch these few fleeting moments to unburden his soul. But it's a fine listener you are, and that's a fact.”

A gusting exhalation, redolent of fennel and new-mown hay engulfed Rob's head in humid warmth. A vast pink and yellow tongue licked him lovingly from beard to brows.

“It's never a bit of back-chat you give me, Little Nell,” he said, scratching the hook-horn's sensitive nostrils from where he lay on his back in fresh straw. “Aye, it's the best you are indeed.”

“Knock, knock,” a sardonic voice came from somewhere over Rob's head.

He rolled an eye back to see a familiar face hanging like a sun-browned moon in the lantern-shine above the gate to Nell's stall, in Séverin farm's restored barn.

“What's that, Gaétan, me lad? Do you know no better than to trouble me in my office, so?”

“What, the bottom of an ale-jug? Up and at 'em, Master Korrigan. Trouble's just exactly what we have.”

Rob gave him a one-eyed squint. “Define ‘trouble.'”

“A courier just came up the High Road. The Church and the Empire have declared a Crusade against us. They're on the march. Thus: trouble.”

“Against—what?” Rob sat up. “Who's ‘us,' then?”

“The Garden. Providence. The Emperor Felipe himself leads the Crusading Army hence, bringing fire and sword and all the usual trimmings. Karyl wants to see you five minutes ago.”

Rob lay back at full length on straw-covered stone. “Fuck me,” he moaned.

“It shall be done,” Gaétan said. And laying hard hands upon Rob's ankles he dragged him forthwith into the yard.

*   *   *

“But it's the Empire,” Rob Korrigan said.

“So what?” Karyl asked. He kept on walking down the hall of the largely rebuilt villa which now served him as headquarters.

Rob's feet faltered in surprise.

“Perhaps it is the world's end, after all,” he said, “when the man who never asks a rhetorical question asks a rhetorical question.”

“No such thing. The Crusading Army is far away. Count Raúl is a two-days march down Chestnut Street from this very spot. And that's if he and his toadies weigh themselves down dragging the customary cartloads of whores and other geegaws. I don't see how the news affects our situation, and asked to be enlightened.”

Outside in the chill winter evening men bawled and dinosaurs squalled. Wagon-springs groaned as heavy cargoes were loaded and shifted. The Providential army made ready to return to war.

Trotting to catch up with his commander, and feeling like a vexer chick bonded to a farm woman, Rob said, “The proclamations they're sending forth before them say they intend no mercy on the heterodox. Whatever in the name of the Mother Creator and her Three Blessed Daughters
that
might mean. But it's our extermination they plainly speak of, and nothing less.”

At the heavy age-darkened oak door to his office, Karyl paused to show Rob a sardonic brow.

“They can't exterminate us if we die before they arrive. Lesson the first: deal with the enemy you have at hand. Let's see off Count Raúl and then see what the Imperials bring us.”