The Dinosaur Knights (9 page)

They stayed far enough apart to ignore one another with honor, reserving their bellowing wrath for younger kinfolk who got too grabby, or the occasional incautious flier or raptor. As Melodía and Pilar watched with horrified fascination a matador bull brought its big head up to clash its jaws on a corpse-tearer with a short powerful beak and nasty flesh-tone-and-purple crest that winged too near. The monster's agility apparently surprised the flier even more than it did the women.

Growling like a volcano about to blow the matador shook the black-furred flier until its long wings flopped limp as water weeds. Then it tossed the corpse away into the grass and resumed tearing at the titan.

Ignoring the giants, countless lines of even less enumerable black ants wound out of the mountain of decay. Mammalian scavengers, emboldened by hunger and mostly the fact they were too small to bother with in the face of this giant feast, rummaged in the narrow nooks and crannies of the vast cathedral of decomposition.

“Whew,” Melodía said. She hadn't even known she was holding that breath. “This is a pretty dilemma, isn't it?”

“It'll take us hours to backtrack to anyplace where we can get the horses up the cliffs,” Pilar said. Sheer four-to-seven-meter limestone walls half a kilometer apart defined the valley. “And the longer we spend around that thing the more likely we are to run into latecomers to the banquet. It's a miracle we didn't get snapped up as we rode here all unsuspecting.”

She made a quick, clearly ritual gesture, which Melodía, a thoroughgoing agnostic even though she had been schooled in Church ritual, failed to recognize. It clearly wasn't one of the eight simple sigils of three lines, whole or broken, stacked upon each other that signified each Creator. Nor was it the more complex ideograph from the Holy Tongue, which textbooks said and traders confirmed was the everyday language of far Chiánguo. It gave Melodía a curious feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“There's a whole barony's worth of meat-eaters all crowded together here,” Melodía said. “A county's perhaps. More than a human hunter might see in a long lifetime. But they're the real problem.”

“No.”

Like the small furred predators who provided humanity's companions and helpers, dogs and cats and ferrets—like humans themselves—meat-eating dinosaurs sometimes chased prey for sport. Raptors, in particular the big, clever horrors, were notorious for their cruel games. It was one reason they were called horrors.

But no carnivore would abandon the boundless bounty of a dead titan while meat remained. From twelve-meter matadors to hopping raptors no longer than Melodía's arm, all were fixated on the fragrant corpse. When finally gorged—it took a lot to satiate a meat-eating dinosaur—they waddled off to find shelter and slept for a day or two to digest. Then, if flesh still clung to the bones, they'd feed again. Until the last scrap was consumed they would either eat or wait to eat more, distracted only by suspicion that their neighbors would try to cheat them of their stinking mouthfuls. Which of course they would.

“The feasters aren't the ones we have to worry about,” Melodía said. “It's the ones who aren't strong enough to force their way to the trough.”

She saw some of them now, a couple of hundred meters off to the left: a trio of bachelor male matadors, gleaming black and red in the sunlight, stamping in frustration in weeds that came to their knees and occasionally snapping at one another.

“They do look mightily pissed off,” Pilar said. “And they're just the ones we can see.”

“You aren't going to like this,” Melodía said, “but let's ride in as close to the dead monster as we can get our mounts to go. The diners will barely notice us.”

“You're right,” Pilar agreed. Her complexion was less dark an olive than normal. “Let's go. But we'll still have to run the gauntlet of the unhappy excluded. We'll look to them like consolation prizes.”

For some insane reason Melodía laughed. “Then we'll have to trust to our wits and our horses!”

“Let's pray our wits are sharp. A matador can outrun a horse on a short field. Or an ambler.”

Melodía grinned at her. “Good thing we're well mounted, then, isn't it? Yah! ¡Vámonos, queridas mias!
Let's ride!
”

The sturdy mare shot forward as if launched from a ballista. Pilar's white marchadora followed a beat later, the gitana bent low over her neck, her long black hair streaming behind. Whatever she thought of the wisdom of Melodía's chosen course she wasn't going to let the Princess ride into danger's literal dripping jaws alone.

And the plan was insanely dangerous in fact. But Melodía was young, and vigorous, and found that she thrilled to the hunt even when she was the prey. Her heart sang with more than exhilaration's song:
What did I do to earn such devotion from Pilar?

Wishing she dared whoop with exhilaration, Melodía swept behind the feasting monsters' tails, Pilar beside her, so close their horses' hooves raised glittering fans of spray from the impromptu pool, which had gathered around the hulk. Winged beasts perched higher up the mountain of softening, oozing flesh than land-borne predators could climb beat wings and screamed as if in outrage. Melodía wondered if they might actually be clever enough to try to divert some of their rivals into pursuing the strange horse-human hybrids, clearing the way for them to eat in peace.

If so, it didn't work. A couple of blue horrors flicked quick yellow gazes at the women as their mounts and pack-marchador splashed past. But they didn't so much as twitch their feathery tails.

Glancing at Pilar, Melodía saw her companion rode with mouth wide open.
She doesn't dare breathe through her nose either
, Melodía thought. The stench was almost visible here—and not just the shimmering cloud of flies, the buzzing of whose myriad rainbow wings almost drowned out the sounds of tearing and crunching.

They passed the corpse's far end. Whether tail or neck they couldn't tell; whatever tipped it lay hidden among grass and boggy pools. Melodía couldn't hold back a skirling cry of triumph.

Pilar gave her a wild-eyed look. Then her laughter joined Melodía's.

Ten meters their beasts' hooves drummed on more-or-less solid white soil. Twenty meters on they rode, then fifty.

“We made it!” Melodía sang out.

And naturally that was when the matador lunged from hiding in the shade of a concave-sided stone island, roaring like an avalanche.

Chapter 6

Matador
, Slayer
—
Allosaurus fragilis
. Large, bipedal, carnivorous dinosaur. Grows to 10 meters long, 1.8 meters at shoulder, 2.3 tonnes. Nuevaropa's largest and most-feared native predator. Famed for its often-incredible stealth.

—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

Baron Salvateur was a big man in black armor on a big black horse. Or at least they looked black in the pissing-down rain. His shield was blazoned with a winged golden figure armed with a sword on black. Or anyway dark.

Perhaps mindful of the arrows his men had met at Blueflowers, which had prevented them from turning their victory into a total massacre of the Providence militia, he wore full plate and an armet. The visor was up, revealing a face that at this distance was an olive blur with a black smear of moustache. Rob thought he saw stubble darkening the jaw.

He stood with Karyl and Bogardus behind a barricade of a couple of wagons, one loaded with wine casks, one with stones, which had been pushed together end to end to block the Chausée de l'Ouest. Bogardus had tricked himself out in steel cap and leather jack from the arsenal, whose ancient caretaker had handed out spears, halberds, and crossbows to the numerous citizens now manning the barricades. Karyl, like Rob, wore the clothes he'd come to the trial in that morning.

A hundred meters west riders, mounted on coursers and dinosaurs, appeared from the brush at the edge of the woods. Among them came armored foot, shields, and archers. The distance was too great for Rob to read their expressions. Their attitudes suggested trepidation and frustration.

The Providentials hooted. The riders looked at their commander. He looked at the bristling defenses, the steep roofs and narrow streets. Clearly he had expected to fall upon a city virtually undefended, by way of either demoralization or simple surprise.

He proved his reputation for astuteness by showing that he recognized what he was really looking at: a trap. If his marauders continued, they would find themselves outnumbered, surrounded, in terrain that took away their every advantage and gave them to their enemies.

Without further word or signal the baron turned his stallion and high-stepped the beast back into the woods.

Most of his men, riders and infantry, turned to follow, some sullenly, some—the brighter—with attitudes of relief. One horse-mounted knight, a young buck with long braids and his helmet still attached to his saddle behind him, wheeled his white courser. As the beast sidestepped and whickered he stood up in his stirrups, pulled up the skirt of his mail coat and pulled down his breeches to bare his ass.

A bow thrummed from the barricade. Even without the rain to stretch and weaken the string it was a heroic shot for a shortbow. Yet an arrow sprouted instantly from the knight's pale left buttock.

He howled. His horse bolted into the brush. Emeric stood on the board of a wagon brandishing his bow.

“Missed, a handspan right!” he shouted after the knight, whose own comrades Rob could hear laughing at him most unchivalrously as his horse crashed through the undergrowth. “Come back, Mor Knight! My sister will plant her spear right between those pink cheeks of yours!”

The defenders cheered uproariously. They hadn't really believed they could stand off a powerful raiding party, especially after the debacle at Blueflowers. And now they had.

They tried to put Emeric on their shoulders. Instead he waved them off shouting, “It's Karyl who saved us! Praise him!”

Somebody began to chant the name: Karyl. Karyl. Rob turned to his companion in a combination of delight and astonishment.
Truly, the Fae must smile on you, my friend
, he thought.

Bogardus strode toward Karyl, his practiced presence commanding every eye. Two meters from the smaller man he stopped, doffed his steel cap, and knelt.

“Captain Karyl,” he said, his face streaming rain—and tears as well, or at least his voice suggested them. “I pledge to follow your commands in war. Will you lead us?”

“Lead us!” the crowd yelled. “Lead us.”

Rob had thrown his fist in the air and was shouting the chant as well. It may have been that he started it.

Karyl's brow knit. Uncharacteristically he paused before saying, loudly and clearly, “I shall.”

Bogardus grabbed his left hand—his sword hand—and kissed it. As he bent his head Rob saw a stark look come over Karyl's face. And though Rob had never known a touch of the mind-reading gift, it came clear as a shout to him that his friend was remembering the captive knight's parting words.

*   *   *

Like a vast pink Paradise flytrap lined with yellow daggers, the monster's mouth spread open scarcely ten meters to Melodía's right. The way her heart practically exploded in her chest, it might have been the same in centimeters. She felt the hot gush of its bellow.

They had outridden the dead titan's stink, carried away downstream on the wind. The reek of decaying meat-bits caught between those serrated slashing-teeth struck Melodía like a fist.

“Shit!” she yelped. Meravellosa who, like all her short and somewhat chunky kind, was no racehorse, had been running at what Melodía had always known as her best speed. Now muscles bunched and exploded between the rider's trim muscled thighs. The mare accelerated.

Melodía dared a fast glance back. Their pursuer was skinny, and not just from hunger: little more than a snake with two huge pumping hind-limbs. Teal on the back, shading to greenish-yellow on chest and belly, he would in time darken and acquire the stripes that are characteristic of his kind. But his eyes were already that terrible matador blood-color.

Clearly the Allosaurus was an adolescent male, aggressive and obnoxious enough to be driven from his own family by the prime, not yet strong and seasoned enough to win entrance to another pack. Misjudging his quarry's speed, he had charged at ninety degrees to their course rather than leading them like a marksman shooting fliers on the wing. That lack of skill was doubtless part of the reason he hadn't found a new pack.

Trying to correct its aim, the dinosaur skidded sideways into a shallow outlier of the main watercourse. Slipping in the mud, it fell onto its side in a colossal splash, with hind-feet and smaller forelimbs clawing comically at the air.

Youth-agile, it jumped back onto its feet in an eyeblink and hurled itself forward again. It roared as if Melodía's witnessing its humiliation had made this personal.