The Dinosaur Lords (53 page)

It caved in Duval’s shield. The arm beneath broke with a loud crack.

The Angl
é
s ambassador, Sir Hugo Hugomont, broad as a castle gate and jovial, started to step forward to thrust his staff between the men and end the fight. He was acting as knight-marshal. With Duval’s obvious injury, honor was now satisfied. The Scarlet Tyrant commander could concede without disgrace.

But Duval did not yield. He stabbed at Falk’s belly so hard his sword-tip broke through the Herzog’s breastplate. Falk raised his axe overhead again.

It hacked through the crown of Duval’s helmet. Blood squirted from his eyeholes. A scarlet plume, severed, floated gently to the ground.

He landed before it did.

Using only his alarming strength, so as not to dishonor his fallen enemy by stepping on him, Falk wrenched his axe free. Melod
í
a heard someone vomit behind her. Maybe more than one. She held her breath; if she smelled puke, she’d throw up too.

She had not been able to watch when Jaume fought Falk. She’d made herself watch this fight to the end. Now she wondered why.

Stumbling-eager, Falk’s arming-squire Albrecht brought his master a cloth to clean his blade. The Duke did a rough, quick job of it. Then, as nimble as a dancer despite heat, exertion, and twenty kilos of plate, he walked up to kneel beneath where Felipe sat, and lay his weapon symbolically at his Emperor’s feet.

Melod
í
a narrowed her eyes. Her father’s face had frozen when Duval fell. The two had never been friends; the gruff Riquezo often said that if his principal felt friendly toward him, he wasn’t doing his job. He served the Fang
è
d Throne, not its current occupant. But he had served both throne and occupants devotedly for seventy years.

Felipe was no man to ignore that fact. But he was a sucker for a gesture such as Falk’s.

“It saddens me that things had to come to this,” he said. “But I am pleased to welcome the new commander of my bodyguard. You’ve proved yourself worthy, Falk von Hornberg.”

Melod
í
a rose and turned to go. She felt as if her whole body was clenched like a fist. She didn’t care if her ladies followed. She just wanted to get
away
—somewhere dark, cool, and alone.

She wasn’t trying to flee the carnage so much as her reaction to it. Disgust filled her, and sadness for a good man who had never done her harm. Yet she also felt strangely stimulated. Almost aroused.

That was harder for her to confront than the reek of vomit or the sight of a bright red pool with green-bellied flies crawling on dough-colored clumps of brain. Or even the way servants hovered at the courtyard’s edge with their buckets of sawdust and water, their scoops and brushes, waiting to clean the yellow flags.

“What’s that noise?” asked Fina, dropping her hands and looking around.

“It sounds like some disturbance in the city,” Abi said. “Must be big, if we hear it here.”

Down the loggia a commotion broke out as a pair of Scarlet Tyrants tried to bar the approach of what was unmistakably a postrider, whose springer-leather jackboots and jerkin were spattered with dried road mud.

“Your Majesty!” she cried. “An urgent dispatch from Comte Guillaume de Cr
è
ve Coeur!”

“Let her through,” Felipe said. The Tyrants lowered their halberds and stepped back.

The messenger knelt three meters before the Emperor.

“Terrible news, your Majesty,” she said, proffering a scroll bound in a scarlet ribbon and sealed with a broken-heart signet in blue wax.

Mondrag
ó
n took the dispatch and handed it on to Felipe. “Tell me, please,” the Emperor said.

“Count Guillaume of Cr
è
ve Coeur reports that a Grey Angel has been seen Emerging in County Providence!”

*   *   *

“
They’re coming!
”

Both scout and bay mare ran with sweat in the morning heat. They’d appeared at a dead run over the rise ahead of Karyl and Rob. The light, porous tufa gravel that covered the road squeaked loudly beneath flying unshod hooves.

She reined up before the two men, at the head of the marching column.

“They’re only a few kilometers up the road,” she reported, leaning forward to pat the shoulder of her dancing, eye-rolling mount to calm her. “A dozen dinosaur knights, thirty heavy horse, a hundred house-shields. There’re forty, fifty house-bows and peasant archers, and a couple hundred levies.”

“Any idea who leads them?” asked Karyl.

“They’re following a gold cup on green banner.”

“Baron Salvateur,” said Rob. The name didn’t taste good. Guillaume’s top henchman, Salvateur was a scar-faced, hot-tempered man, and by all accounts a canny field captain. “I was hoping a fool commanded; they’re in such rich supply. Well, no need to tell me that this is war, and we get what we get, not what we want.”

Karyl had already turned away. The Providence army had begun to emerge from a dense wood of evergreen broadleaves peppered with pines. Karyl was issuing orders to deploy them at the forest’s edge.

The day was beautiful. It had briefly rained the night before. Providence had kept its roads well paved and drained even after Count
É
tienne abdicated, so they didn’t have to slog through a ribbon sea of mud. But the air was almost unbreathably thick with the smell of damp leaves and undergrowth.

Before them undulated gentle hills covered with wildflowers, blue as a lake on a thin-cloud day. These resembled tiny bells, gleaming as if jeweled with water droplets. Rob’s poetic nature rebelled at the notion that through this beauty a small but powerful army approached, bent on destroying him and his friends.

Remember,
he told himself
, no day’s too fair to die on, nor too foul either.

Ga
é
tan, mounted on Zhubin, was helping Karyl’s other lieutenants chivvy the militia’s leading elements into the undergrowth to either side of the road. Karyl wore the same helmet and leather coat he had in the Whispering Woods. Ga
é
tan was similarly kitted-out.

Anticipating hotter and closer action, Rob had opted for heavier: a breast-and-back of bony-scaled armad
ó
n hide; a light linen blouse beneath, with just enough sleeve to keep the arm-holes from chafing; cuisses of nosehorn hide boiled in wax strapped over the thighs of yellow silk trousers. An open-faced steel burgonet, with a crest and a bit of bill to protect his face, topped the ensemble. His round shield hung from one side of his saddle, his axe, Wanda, from the other.

“What’s this nonsense?”

Rob turned in his saddle, scowling. Longeau drummed up at a brisk trot on his white gelding rouncy. His fellow town lords followed close behind, forcing foot soldiers to dive off the right-of-way into the ditch or be trampled.

“Why are we stopping?” Percil demanded in a voice as pinched and querulous as his face. “We hear the enemy’s been seen. We must attack without delay!”

“We’re taking up positions in the woods,” Karyl said. “They’re our best defenses. Neither their foot nor their mounted forces can attack us en bloc there. And they can’t easily pursue us if we have to withdraw.”

“What’s this?” Longeau almost screamed. “Defend?
Withdraw?
”

“We must attack!” Percil said.

“That’s suicide,” Karyl said.

“Enough of this defeatist scratcher-shit,” Yannic said to Longeau. “What says the Council?”

Longeau drew an arming-sword and brandished it in a glittering circle over his head. “Forward, men and women of Providence!” he bellowed. “Forward to victory.”

“Stop that,” Karyl said. “I command here.”

“Not anymore,” Percil said.

Melchor puffed his fat bearded cheeks. “Enough of this make-believe. A member of the Council leads us now.”

“And the serfs will obey us, as they’re accustomed to,” Yannic said.

“The townsmen too, if they know what’s good for them,” added Percil.

“In the name of the Master Gardeners of Beauty and Truth,” Longeau trumpeted at the bewildered volunteers, “I command you: forward!”

To Rob’s horror they obeyed. Raising a wild cheer at the urging of house-soldiers wearing the colors of Percil, Yannic, and that fat fraud Melchor, the army surged forward. They split around Nell and Asal like water around rocks, and went streaming up the road at an eager trot.

Few so much as glanced at Karyl.

“Spare no one!” Yannic cried, waving his sword. He spurred his strider to a two-legged run to take the lead. It clacked its beak anxiously, and its ruff stood out stiffly to the sides. Cuget of the Council rode after him, waving an arming-sword and hollering. Melchor on his pony, and Percil on his big black stallion, hung back to continue shouting encouragement to the militia, as if afraid
sense
might suddenly break out.

Travise and Isma
ë
l rode by, aloof and distant atop their mountainous hadrosaurs. They steered courteously to either side of Rob and Karyl. The infantry in their path had to step lively or get trodden into the tufa, of course.

Ga
é
tan had turned his spike-frill to face the road, and sat staring aghast as the army of Providence fled almost gaily to meet the unseen enemy.

“What’s the matter with you?” Rob shouted at Karyl in sudden anger. “You’re the most famous field captain in Nuevaropa! Why don’t you order them to stop?”

“Never give an order you know won’t be obeyed.”

The human torrent began to thin. Most of the militia had already vanished over the blue-covered hill. Suddenly Lucas was by Karyl’s stirrup. The painter was almost hopping from foot to sandaled foot in indecision as his comrades flowed past. He wore a light leather tunic and his new longsword with its hilt sticking up above one shoulder. His face was red and wracked beneath the pale bangs sticking out beneath the brim of his plain steel cap.

Karyl’s own face was as tormented as if one of his killing headaches had struck full force. “Don’t, boy,” he said. “Please, don’t go.”

“But you don’t
understand,
” Lucas said. “You came; you’ll go. We’ve always had the town lords, and we always will. We’ve always obeyed them. And they’ll find ways to punish us if we don’t now.”

“We can change that,” Karyl said. “Together. You know we can.”

Lucas stilled. “Well—”

Guat the farmer ran past, his belly bouncing over his grimy leather loincloth. He had a spear in his hand and a leather helmet askew on his head.

“Come on, lad,” he called. “Glory’s this way! All you’ll find here is a coward’s shame.”

Lucas gave Karyl a last agonized look. “I’m sorry,” he said, and ran along with the rest.

Karyl lowered his head and squeezed shut his eyes.

“I failed you, boy,” he said, so softly Rob could barely hear him from the cheers and the thumping of heedless feet. “I should have trained you better.”

He opened his eyes and shook his head once quickly, as if clearing water from his hair.

“Right. Now let’s get busy saving what we can.”

Chapter
43

Eris, La Luna Visible,
the Moon Visible
—The moon we see at night when the clouds usually clear. As distinct from La Luna Invisible, the Moon Invisible, where pious girls and boys know the Creators lived when they made Paradise out of Old Hell. It of course cannot be seen, but nevertheless, it is there.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

Filled with dark joy and darker purpose, his new scarlet cape of office flapping from his shoulders, Falk von Hornberg strode the corridors of the Firefly Palace. A fist of five Scarlet Tyrants trotted behind.

The Empire was overdue for revolution. He was bringing it. Not to overthrow the Emperor, but to give him all the power an Emperor should wield.

Falk had worked hard and fast to consolidate his own power once Felipe confirmed him as the new chief of his Imperial bodyguard. Now was the time to take the last and boldest steps.

They came to a door. Gently, Falk tried the latch. It was locked.

“What if we brought the Angel,” a voice like an overgrown child’s half sobbed from the door’s far side, “for our sin of plotting against the Emperor? Our own kinsman!”

“If the Grey Angels went on crusade every time there was a little plotting,” said a second, supercilious voice, “they’d never stop.”

“How many times must I tell you, Benedicto?” came a third voice, crisply precise but touched with weariness, “Nobody’s plotting against Felipe. We only want to get his attention. You’re overreacting to this imaginary apparition.”

“La-la-la-la! I can’t hear you! It scares me when you call the Grey Angels imaginary, Gonzalo! Please don’t.”

Falk smiled. Then, rearranging his face in a suitable scowl, he looked to his squad.

“Break it down,” he said.

Doors in the Palace of the Fireflies were well built and sturdy. They’d laugh at a mere boot. A heavy bronze ram wielded by four husky Scarlet Tyrants proved less humorous.

With a squealing groan the door blew inward.