The Dinosaur Knights (44 page)

Little Pigeon shook his head. “It was like it was trying to own me. Nobody owns me but me. So I made it stop. Which it did when I ran away from the parade. I was ready to fight like a cornered alley cat if anybody tried to stop me. But nobody noticed I was gone.”

“So the horde's begun moving south in force?” Karyl asked.

“Oh, yes.” The child nodded emphatically. “They can move wicked fast when they want to. You don't want to hang out around here too long. Believe me, you don't.”

“You're right.” Karyl leaned back. He looked troubled. The child picked up on it right away.

“Did I say something wrong, Lord?”

“What? No. Not at all. You've done very well indeed. What can we do for you?”

“Well, feed me, for a start.” He stuffed the last of his meat pie in his mouth and brushed crumbs from his hands. “Well, more. I'm starving. My friends are too. And—and if you could let us stay with you, please? We won't make no trouble. Won't steal or nothin'.”

“I doubt that,” Rob said. The child gave him a stricken look. He chuckled.

“I'm counting on you to keep the theft petty and the mischief minimal, my boy.”

Little Pigeon drew himself up indignantly. “I'm a girl,” he said.

“Oh. Well. Of course you are, lass. Any rate, take your friends 'round to the kitchen tents and tell them I told them to feed you all you can hold. We'll find something useful for you and your friends to do.”

Little Pigeon jumped up and hugged him. To Rob's surprise his—her—cheeks were wet. “Thank you, Master Rob! And you, Lord Karyl! Thank you!”

She set off at a brisk scuttle across the green and lavender ground cover. Garamond glared after her. He clacked his pewter mug down on the table and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

“Are we an army or a rolling charity?” he demanded. “Do you mean to take in every rag-tag starveling that wanders in, Colonel?”

“If they swear to follow my rules and serve as we tell them to,” Karyl said, “yes. I do.”

“Sentiment?” Melodía asked. Rob thought her more surprised at the fearful king tyrant Karyl showing compassion, than objecting herself.
Or maybe I'm just a sucker for a pretty face
, he thought.
Well, I am that that, surely
.

“By no means. We can't run forever. We'll have to fight—certainly the horde, all too likely the Empire. We'll need every pair of hands we can muster then.”

“But—children and untrained peasants?” Côme said. “I'm all for saving those we can. But they're not going to be of much use in battle, surely?”

Karyl smiled. “I can use them.”

Côme raised his brows, pulled his chin up and the corners of his mouth down, in an almost-comical look of surprise.
Another noble
, Rob reflected,
might've taken immediate and violent exception to Karyl's flat contradiction.

Of course any grande who responded that way would be doing very well indeed to live long enough to feel his own steel clear its sheath. Côme was a formidable fighter even for one of his class. Karyl was … unique.

But there was a reason Karyl had set the displaced Baron to command his dinosaur knights. His often deliberate clowning notwithstanding, Côme was no fool. Scarcely a buckethead at all, really.

He rubbed his chin and nodded thoughtfully. “I'll happily learn the trick of using them, then.”

Karyl stood up sharply.

“Very well. The horde's following us now. We've got to move with a purpose. Ladies, gentlemen: you know your tasks. Do them.”

*   *   *

Screams grabbed Rob by the scruff and yanked him up from the depths of sleep.

Dressed only in a soft linen loincloth, he tumbled from his tent. He had his axe Wanda in hand. At once he felt self-conscious about it.

I'll not be needing you after all, love
, he thought.
I know that sound
.

As he expected the cries issued from the humble tent next to Rob's and no larger than it.

He grabbed a passing arm. “Steady,” he said to the wide-eyed look its owner, a woman dressed like him and carrying a dirk, gave him. “Himself is having his bad dreams. It's that and nothing more. Pass the word, there's a love: there's no threat to the camp. Only nightmares.”

“Nightmares? But it sounds like a man being eaten by a matador!” she said.

She must be a newcomer
, Rob thought.
We've plenty of those, and more every day
.

He tipped his head and listened. “Close, aye. But not altogether. Now—away with you!”

They had marched a few hours southwest along La Rue Imperial, then halted to laager in for the night. Now the whole camp was roused. Men and women jumped up from beside fires or poured from tents, ready to make their final stand against the whole of the Grey Angel horde.

But Rob heard older hands, veterans who'd joined in early days, already spreading the message had given the mostly naked woman: “Relax. It's just the voyvod's nightmares.” Behind Karyl's back they called him by his outlandish noble title, Slavo, for a warlord who ruled a March.

They remembered such dreams from before the first time they ambushed a Crève Coeur raiding party, back even before the Blueflowers. Once action began, the nightmares stopped.

What worried Rob, who'd endured Karyl's screaming dreams and night-fears and bouts of black depression far longer than any soul in the refugee army, was the question of why they'd commenced again.

As he walked through the camp helping pouring oil on troubled water he heard a greybeard who'd joined the army in Métairie Brulée addressing a rapt circle of listeners.

“The Fae caught our lord when he fell from the cliff with a mortal wound,” he said, “and bore him to the Land Below. There they saved his life and healed his hurts.”

He shook his hoary head. “But it's a terrible price they exact. One he ain't done payin', yet. But he pays in pieces, each night in dreams.”

That went right down Rob's spine, hitting every vertebra.

“I thought nobody remembered what happened to them in the Venusberg,” a young Castañera said.

“Why d'you think it haunts him when he sleeps? That's when the bodies buried deep in your mind and soul get up and walk around.”

Feeling as if his skin were trying to crawl off his body and creep away, Rob confronted the tale-teller.

“Where did you hear that bloody twaddle, you old rogue?” he demanded.

The oldster shrugged. “Here and there. In the wind.”

Rob frowned. It was the sort of answer a Traveler might give. Then again, the man was clearly a caravaneer. That breed had much the same lives as the Irlandés-gitano Travelers, rootless and wandering, hence had much the same attitudes. And superstitions.

He also knew he'd get no more specific answer. “You're just confusing his tale with the old song ‘Tam Lin,'” he said.

He sang a few bars: “I forbid ye maidens all, who wear gold in your hair/To travel to Carter Hall, for young Tam Lin is there.”

To his annoyance the old man laughed. He was missing teeth. Rob felt tempted to loosen a few more.

“Aye. And the Queen of Faeries caught him as from his horse he fell. My eyes are old and weak, and my mind wanders further afield than my aching feet can. But I know the difference between a horse and a three-hundred meter cliff. Voyvod Karyl had his sword hand bit off by a horror, he did; and fell toward the surface of the Tyrant's Eye. How did he come to live, then, I wonder? If the fall didn't kill him, blood loss would've, sure.

“Yet there he lies not fifty paces from us, alive as you or me. And with a sword hand as good as any man's. And better, on the evidence!”

“That's nothing to do with the Fae!” Rob said hotly. Then shut up. That Karyl had lost a hand—and more to the point, regained it—wasn't a story he wanted noised around any more than Karyl himself did. He wasn't sure why. He just knew it would be no good thing.

“And what's a man named Korrigan think he's about, anyway, doubting Faerie deeds?” the old man asked.

That took Rob aback. “‘Touched by the Fae,' the name means,” the old caravaneer said. “Does it not?”

“How'd you know that?”

The old man cackled. “You think my travels haven't taken me across Anglaterra, and even Irlanda? A caravaneer goes where wind and whim drive him. Just like a Traveler, lad.”

“Then I'll tell you why I don't like hearing talk of the Faerie Folk bandied about,” Rob said in hot Anglés, reading in the other's eyes that he understood full well—as hardly anyone else in camp would. “It's no healthy thing to speak of them, for body or soul. And whatever do you think you're about, to go on so with a Grey Angel abroad in the world working his great mischief?”

But the old rogue was nothing daunted. “What better time to invoke the Fae” he said softly—and blessedly, still in Anglysh—“than when the Creators' retribution stalks us all? Who better to give us hope against the Seven, than enemies sworn of the Eight?”

Rob stared at him. His bearded jaws worked futilely. That enraged him more than anything: this daft old bugger had robbed him, Rob Korrigan, of words. He thought of striking the caravaneer down for his truly terrifying blasphemy—and even more terrifying knowledge.

But while Rob Korrigan did not imagine himself a good man, he knew he wasn't that man.

Instead he made the cross-and-circle sign of the Lady's Mirror, the evil-averting gesture he hoped was most remote from Grey Angel malice. Then he turned and stalked away.

He crawled back into his tent and bedroll, and pulled his vexer-down pillow over his ears.

Chapter 34

Tiranes Escarlatos
, Scarlet Tyrants
(singular
Tirán Escarlato
)
—The Imperial bodyguard. They are easily recognized by their gilded armor—their breastplates usually figured to resemble muscular human torsos—and their barbute helmets with red or gold crests of feathers or horsehair. They are handpicked, mainly from among the minority peoples of the Torre Menor or Lesser Tower, for loyalty to the Fangèd Throne regardless of who occupies it.

 —A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

As Duke Falk von Hornberg entered his gold-and-scarlet silk pavilion pitched next to the Emperor's similarly colored but much grander one, he tore his barbute helmet from his sweat-curled hair and threw it across the room without regard to its fancy, imported Ridiculous-reaper plumes.

“Fae eat that fool of a priest! His madness gels my blood. And he only makes that infernal caterwauling worse.”

“What do you expect, your Grace?” said Bergdahl, who sat astride a stool examining the armor the Duke had brought from the North for chips in its royal-blue enamel, or signs of rust. On court occasions, such as tonight's, Falk wore the armor of the commander of the Imperial bodyguard, not his personal harness. “Off they've marched to war to prevent a Grey Angel Crusade. And here they've just learned it's all in vain: a Grey Angel has raised a horde anyway, and marches now to meet them. Their worst childhood nightmares have been realized.”

He cocked a sly brow at his master. “Haven't yours?”

Falk made a clotted sound and dropped onto a sturdy camp chair. Up here on Nuevaropa's central massif the night was neither especially hot nor humid, any more than winter chill reached here from the mountains. Yet his body stewed beneath his gambeson, and his thighs, bare between figured gilt greaves and the red metal-studded strips of boiled duckbill-leather that made up his kilt, ran with perspiration.

The fact was, he hadn't himself yet truly absorbed the news that arrived that afternoon with a messenger whose eyes rolled as madly as her near-foundered horse's. He held himself devout, at least in relation to these slack Southerners. Perhaps precisely for that reason, he'd never even in his nightmares anticipated that he might someday find himself facing the Creators' fearful justice, in the form of a Grey Angel horde.

There was that within him that understood too well the almost-animal fear and grief of the mob that howled outside his silken walls. It wanted to cast the shackles of
mind
aside and join the ululation.

There's the virtue of the discipline you've devoted your life to
, he reminded himself sternly.
Sacred Order begins within one's own head. And heart
.

Outside in torch-lit night his recently minted Eminence, Cardinal Tavares, preached in a voice thin and cutting as a whip. He praised the Creators and their servants the Grey Angels, thanking the latter for their mercy in purging Paradise, or at least this part of it, of sin. He urged the mob to confess, repent, and beg forgiveness.

He certainly wasn't soothing them.