The Dinosaur Knights (59 page)

At twenty meters Melodía slowed the mare. Her poor, faithful girl was stumbling on the stumps of trampled weeds now.

Melodía looked back. Bogardus sat motionless in the black sackbut's saddle. His arms hung by his sides.

His dark eyes met hers. Somehow they seemed less black.

“Thank you,” he mouthed.

But no sound came from his mouth. Just blood gushing from the dart through his throat.

He fell to the ground. So did a princess's tears.

*   *   *

As the three-horn went over with a crash, hot tears blurred Rob Korrigan's eyes. It was Broke-Horn, ever ill-fated: one of their original six, brought low by nothing more than the hands and malice of a mob of creatures with scarcely more claim on humanity than the Triceratops himself.

The great beast, the four men and women of its crew, and its mahout were all Rob's friends. To see them swarmed by these unclean things made him clench his fists on axe-haft and shield-grip in impotent fury.

Gaétan, who was closer than Rob, led a dozen house-shields to try to rescue the fallen monster's crew. Zhubin was limping. He had a javelin-shaft broken-off in his left haunch. A true hornface, the spike-frill didn't hold back from a fight, even hurt.

It was futile. The flesh-torrent forced the rescuers back. Not even Karyl's transcendent genius could transcend the sheer overwhelming numbers of the Grey Angel Crusade.

We've worked a frightful execution today
, Rob thought. Wanda's head, his shield, and even his face dripped with blood. It itched most abominably, drying on his skin and in his beard.
Much good it's done us
.

For the moment he was left alone with his weariness and sickness of heart. Behind him the Legion pikes were stalled into bristling circles. The rest of the infantry and the surviving cavalry all moved together in a clump with the trikes. They were still mostly alive; they killed so effectively that the horde now tended to steer clear of them. Raguel, it seemed, had some desire to preserve his awful engine—at least until He was done with it.

Had the horde been any natural army it would have run screaming back up the Imperial High Road … probably hours ago, from the hurting the Impies had laid on it. Rob could see occasional hints of a great commotion away off to the southeast, where he could see a handful of war-duckbills and a substantial body of cavalry carving their way through the horde toward Karyl's band.
Jaume Orange-Hair and his pretty pals, or I miss my guess
, Rob thought.
And what would I give to see
that
reunion?

He laughed aloud, causing several house-shields nearby to stare at him as if he'd bid sense farewell. Which no doubt he had—since after all, to see a reunion between Karyl and the man who had literally lanced his White River Legion in the back would require them all to live that long. Which Rob counted slightly less likely than the sun setting in the west this evening.

Vast as it was, the horde had taken vast casualties. But of course it didn't have scores of thousands of merely human wills. It only had one single and thoroughly inhuman Will directing it. And that Will, it seemed, was still fixed on bringing down that gold and scarlet Tyrant's-Head flag, flapping from the top of a distant hill.

Rob sighed. Little Nell reeled beneath him. Wanda felt as if she weighed as much as the dead Triceratops. His shield might have been an anvil. His muscles ached so badly he couldn't feel what had to be a score of minor wounds—not all the blood spread so liberally across his and Nell's persons originated in other bodies. Not that it mattered.

“Once more into the breach,” he muttered, forcing the axe to rise again by sheer force of will. Or cussedness, more like. Will's
never been me strong suit
, he thought.
Perversity, now
.…

An eerie stillness dropped over the entire battlefield like a blanket. The Crusaders all stopped where they were and turned their heads to stare back toward the center of the horde. Rob saw a gangly man turn away heedless of Gaétan's arming-sword swinging down at his head. It split his skull from behind.

Rob felt his own limbs go limp. It was as if something had reached inside him to drain the last of what little strength they had. His own head swiveled the same way as the Crusaders' had. His comrades' heads did too.

“Raguel!” he croaked, awed and terrified by the creature's power.

Then he saw what it was the Grey Angel wanted all to witness. And gave a wordless raptor-scream of denial and fear.

Raguel of the Ice rode his king tyrant in the midst of a clear space a good fifty meters across. It traveled with him: some force compelled his servants to stay well away from their dreadful master. Not that anyone with even the slightest spark of sanity, even the most skilled and seasoned dinosaur master, would care to approach any nearer to the seven tonnes of rage and terror the Grey Angel rode.

Yet someone did.

Hornbow in hand, arrow nocked, Karyl Bogomirskiy galloped straight toward the looming horror, and the greater horror on its back.

Chapter 44

Tirán Imperial
, Imperial Tyrant
—
Tyrannosaurus imperator
.
Tyrannosaurus rex
's big brother: 20 meters long, 10 tonnes. According to the histories, Manuel the Great, founder of the Empire of Nuevaropa and its ruling Torre Delgao, killed an imperial tyrant that was ravaging Nuevaropa in the wake of the
High Holy War
, and had its colossal skull made into the Emperor's Fangèd Throne. Curiously for such a large and terrible creature, none have been seen anywhere on Paradise since.

—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

“Oh, no, my lord,” Rob moaned. “This is too mad even for you. Are you that eager to die, then? You did not have a prayer against that behemoth on your poor lost Shiraa, and it's three times her size. How can you hope to win on that bloody-minded nag?”

The unseen grip on his volition went away. But now even Raguel would have been hard-pressed to force Rob
not
to watch.

The giant grey tyrant noticed that some pitiful creature had the impertinence to approach. It turned smartly about, thrust forward its face, opened an abyss, and roared through swords.

Karyl's reply was pointed, and to the point. An arrow's black fletching stood suddenly from the tyrant's right eye.

Its left looked quite surprised.

The monster shuddered. Rob half fancied he could feel it quiver, through the ground and up Nell's thick legs.

The silver-grey Tyrannosaurus reared as high as its none-too-flexible tail would let it. The colossal head lolled to one side. The monster collapsed.

Into dust. Grey dust that sparkled as it swirled away down the wind.

Raguel landed standing.

“Holy shit,” Rob said reverently to Gaétan, who had ridden his spike-frill up by Rob's side. “There's something you'll not see every day.”

“Maia,” Gaétan croaked. “The Angel looks pissed!”

A moan arose from the horde. The free humans around Rob cheered lustily. A similar sound rose from the distant doomed ranks of the Imperials.

Rob slumped. “And then, a man on horseback can't face a Grey Angel afoot either,” he said.

“No one's ever fought one alone and lived,” said Gaétan. He sounded as if he were about to cry.

“Ahh, well, then,” Rob said, “if we credit the songs and fancy-stories—and what better source might there be on mythical creatures?—nobody's fought an Angel and lived at all.”

Gaétan shot him a nasty look. “Quit being encouraging.”

Fearlessly, Asal raced toward the Grey Angel. Raguel raised his soul reaper. Karyl drew and shot again.

The Angel lowered its long grey badlands of a face down to stare at the shaft through its stomach. Then it raised its head and looked at Karyl with empty-looking sockets. It didn't even bother plucking the arrow out.

Twenty meters from the Grey Angel, Karyl halted his mare. She snorted and tossed her mane defiantly. “Show heart like that, and I might forgive you, you evil little witch,” Rob said. “Not Nell; but she could never see that far, withal.”

For a moment that stretched into agony the two antagonists faced each other. Karyl slung his bow. Then, drawing his arming-sword, he set Asal in a slow counterclockwise walk around his two and a half meter tall opponent. Raguel stood unmoving. He didn't stir even when Karyl rode clear behind him.

Himself must know it's a trap
, Rob thought. But seizing as near a thing to an advantage as he was liable to get, Karyl wheeled his mare and charged the Grey Angel back.

Snake-fast Raguel spun, his soul-reaper slashing a high arc. Karyl swung his sword. In a flash Rob knew his aim: to deflect the blow, then cut backhand.

But the Angel didn't strike at Karyl. His blade swept through Asal's neck as if though it were made of mist. Her head flew away end for end.

The mare tumbled hooves-over-spurting stump. Karyl threw himself clear. Putting a shoulder down, he rolled through the dust with all the aplomb of his horse-barbarian kinsfolk.

But he too had been driven near exhaustion from fighting his way through the horde to his appointment with embodied Death. He was slow to rise. His hair had come undone during his fall, and now hung in his face and to just above his shoulders in lank strands.

“Are you injured, man?” Rob asked the air.

Though he'd lost the bow, Karyl still gripped his sword hilt. Holding it two-handed, down and to his left, he began to pace. He spiraled closer to Raguel.

As before, Raguel stood rigid and let him come. Rob thought with a shiver of a cat and a mouse. By all reports, in this the Grey Angel's true form, his face could show no more expression than the hideous and none-too-expertly carven idol he so resembled. Yet his attitude spoke fluent cruel triumph.

No more slowly than the Angel had, Karyl attacked. Steel rang off—whatever undoubtedly invulnerable mystic metal the soul-reaper was made of. Karyl and his foe passed each other by.

Ten meters apart they turned about to face off again. Raguel's posture changed; now Rob thought to see puzzlement that this impertinent human wasn't holding a metal stub. Karyl's sword was intact.

Rob laughed out loud. Gaétan stared at him as if he were mad.
I am, and what of that?

“Don't you see?” he told his comrade. “Our voyvod didn't let that monster's edge catch his blade. It's that skillful he is: he caught that evil thing on its flat and guided it safely past.”

Gaétan shook his head. “I don't think I've even heard of anyone surviving a single passage of arms with a Grey Angel.”

“Don't fret yourself, lad,” Rob said. “I doubt Raguel has either.”

Raguel waited for his human foe to come to him. And come Karyl did. Time and again metal sang its sliding song. Yet Raguel could score no solid cut against either sword or wielder.

But neither was Karyl able to strike the Angel's rotted-rock-looking flesh. And one of them was mortal. However fierce the will that drove it, Rob reckoned, Karyl's body must have reached its limits long since. Karyl could not keep fighting long.

Visibly he began to slow. Still the Grey Angel was able to sever neither his steel nor the silver cord his life. But each time He came closer.

Rob had to keep reminding himself to breathe.

At last the duelists stopped facing each other from five meters away. Karyl sagged as if only strings hooked to his shoulder blades from the clouds held him up. Sweat dripped from the ends of his hair. His sword tip dragged in the dust.

Raguel awaited, all supreme assurance once more. His foe had put up a fight that was literally unparalleled. But now he was done.

Voicing a wheezing cry that by dint of Angel magic Rob clearly heard, Karyl raised his sword and staggered forward. His dark eyes glared madly between sodden kelp-streamers of hair.

Rob's lips twisted behind a beard caked with mud made of what he daren't think about; behind them gullet and gut twisted too.
A shame to see such a gorgeous battle end on such a desperate unskillful note
, he thought. Though thinking so seemed to betray the fight Karyl had fought.

It ought to form the greatest legend of a man who had lived many of them. But alas none would live to sing it.

Almost casually Raguel flicked the soul-reaper horizontally at his opponent.

With a burst of vexer speed, Karyl plunged into a forward roll. The scythe-blade hissed harmlessly over him. He came up slicing at the long grey arm that held it.

Raguel's forearm parted. The hand whirled away, claws still clutching the soul-reaper, to fall in the dust fifteen meters off.

Raguel threw back his head, opened his jaws, and vomited a cry of cosmic rage. Rob clapped hands to ears. He saw hordelings fall to the ground by the hundreds, stunned or killed by the Grey Angel's wrath.