The Dinosaur Lords (54 page)

The little man with the outsized head sprang from his chair facing the door. A rapier in a ruby-set scabbard hung from a twisted bronze lampstand. As the cabo in charge of the Tyrant squad preceded Falk inside, he yanked out the long, slim blade with a sliding ring.

“Gonzalo Delgao, you are hereby placed under arrest—”

The Tyrant corporal saw steel pointed his way, glinting yellow in the lamplight. The Emperor’s bodyguards were trained to respond with bowstring speed. The cabo interrupted himself in mid-oration to ram his arming-sword through the sternum of the armed but unresisting Gonzalo.

The little man gasped and went to his knees.

“You hurt my brother!” roared Benedicto. His neck and the veins in his face engorging in fury, he picked up a heavy table of blueheart wood and slammed it down on the sidewise crest of the Tyrant’s helmet.

“Benedicto, stop!” shouted Falk von Hornberg, sidestepping the cabo, who lay head-to-head with Gonzalo. His outflung fingers twitched as their blood mingled on a formerly splendid Ovdan carpet.

Fists knotted so tightly the knuckles cracked, Benedicto rushed the Duke. As he cocked his right arm for a blow, Falk stepped to meet him, grabbing his left forearm and right biceps. Benedicto was even bigger than Falk, and weeping mad with grief and rage. For a moment each pushed against the other, so wound around the effort they couldn’t speak. Then Falk shoved the bigger man stumbling back, to fall on his broad rump on the tiled floor.

“Benedicto—” Falk said. Agile as a schoolboy, the big man scrambled up and rushed him again. He didn’t charge head-lowered like a nosehorn bull, but upright, looking to smash the interloper with his fists. Tears streamed down a face the color of sun-bleached bone.

Falk’s left hand whipped a broad-bladed cinquedea, a five-finger dagger, from his belt. He planted his right palm against Benedicto’s breastbone, trying to ward him off with a stiff-arm. Benedicto drove him back toward the door, one pace, two.

The dagger bit like a viper: once, twice, so many times in blinding succession Falk himself lost count. Benedicto squealed like an enraged Tyrannosaurus. Blood flew from his mouth, to splash hot across Falk’s bearded face and down his gilded breastplate. He kept pushing hard against Falk’s outstretched arm until he suddenly stiffened and his eyes rolled up in his head. He went limp and fell down dead.

The other four Tyrants had laid aside their ram and come into the room to help their new commander, spears at the ready. They saw their fallen cabo.

Ren
é
Alarc
ó
n had been caught standing by a wall hanging that portrayed the Rape of La Merced, pouring wine from a decanter. He set it down on a cabinet beside his cup and arched a disdainful brow at Falk.

“You’ve a brisk way with the bereaved,” said Alarc
ó
n. “If your Grace’s wits were as sharp as your steel, perhaps—”

A Tyrant stuck his spear into the nobleman’s open mouth. Its tip poked out the back of his skull with a crunch. Alarc
ó
n’s eyes snapped wide with final surprise.

“That should hold your tongue, traitor,” the guard snarled as Alarc
ó
n collapsed.

Falk frowned around at the bloody shambles the room had become in a matter of heartbeats. He hated to think what his mother would have said of this state of affairs.

I see I’m going to have to do something about the Tyrants being quite so quick to stab first and ask questions later.

Still, thinking about it, perhaps things had worked out for the best. The three dead men’s silence was more useful than anything they could say. Traitors had resisted justice and died; inconvenient details could be concealed readily enough by the leader of the Emperor’s bodyguards.

Public examples were needed. They would be made. That was all accounted for.

Now Falk needed something else. Still frowning, now deliberately, he swung his gaze to the surviving member of the quartet. He still held the dripping dagger in his hand.

Augusto Manorqu
í
n, as sleek as a house cat, had never so much as uncrossed his legs where he sat in a velvet chair whose green matched his doublet.

Correctly reading the question on Falk’s face, Manorqu
í
n raised much-beringed hands, spread wide with pale palms forward.

“Whatever suits the needs of the State,” he said, “I will happily confess to.”

Falk smiled through drying blood. “Wise man,” he said.

*   *   *

Barely pausing to wipe the blood from face and armor with a rag a Tyrant handed him, Falk handed over his prisoner and set off on his next errand. A fresh
pu
ñ
o
of guardsmen followed. Their corporal, rather older and more weathered than the last, kept them alert and eager as vexers on the leash. They’d
heard
what happened to the previous squad-leader.

Falk took a shortcut outside through soft sunset air, between a guest wing of the sprawling main residence and the tower that housed the Imperial apartments. The clouds were breaking apart into bands of slate underlit with orange-and-yellow forge light along the eastern sky above La Merced. The first stars glittered in indigo overhead. Fireflies danced below them like living lanterns. The wind was fresh from the Channel, smelling of salt and the greenery of Anglaterra on the far side.

Instead of the cheerful music and laughter that usually greeted day’s end in the Palace of the Fireflies, Falk heard hushed conversation on every side. Somewhere someone sobbed heartbrokenly.

He smiled.

Panic had spread rapidly through the palace and the city below. News of the Angel’s Emergence had taken even Falk aback. Not because he thought it was true, but rather because its timing and import so perfectly capped off Bergdahl’s machinations, building suspicion against Providence and the Garden over the weeks since the army departed.

Falk knew Bergdahl and his mother communicated regularly, in a code the best cryptographers he could find in La Merced—something of a hotbed of the trade—had so far proven unable to break. Could they somehow have had advance knowledge of the Grey Angel’s Emergence?

He immediately dismissed that as absurd. If the Dowager Duchess knew all this was going to happen, corroborating that the fabled Angels existed would be among its least unsettling ramifications.

Entering the tower, he led his squad up the spiraling staircase to the Imperial apartments. Precisely on schedule: a pair of Tyrants stood flanking a door that was swinging open even as Falk led his men into the corridor.

Mondrag
ó
n, dressed in his usual loose robes of brown and black, halted a step outside the door. The expression on his gaunt raptor-beaked face never changed. But Falk read the knowledge in the slightest flicker in those obsidian-flake eyes.

“So this is how it goes,” the tall old man said, with the slightest of aristocratic lifts of his brow. “I admit I am surprised. Well played, young man. Well played.”

“This way, Se
ñ
or Ministro, if you will,” the cabo said, stepping to the fore as his men surrounded Mondrag
ó
n. The corporal’s voice was gruffer even than usual. A Scarlet Tyrant had to be no respecter of persons other than those of the Emperor and his immediate family. But it wasn’t every day they were called upon to arrest the Emperor’s Chief Minister and best friend for treason.

As expected Mondrag
ó
n fell into step behind as the cabo led off along the corridor. Out of courtesy Falk didn’t order him bound. In turn the minister made no undignified and ultimately futile resistance or attempts to escape. They were both professionals, after all.

One more arrest,
thought Falk with a thrill of dread as well as anticipation.
The most important and risky of all.

But he’d take no direct part in that. As Bergdahl had advised him not to.

Instead he followed the
pu
ñ
o
and their prisoner at a brisk pace through the Imperial apartments. It was appropriate that the Tyrants’ commander oversee the interrogation of such an important prisoner. Even though whatever Mondrag
ó
n said or did not had as little bearing on what was going to happen as it did on whether or not Eris would rise in the West tonight.

*   *   *

Melod
í
a sat naked on the edge of the bathing pool in her quarters. Serving girls daubed her with sponges soaked in infusions of flower petals. She had opted not to take another full bath before retiring. The day’s cataclysmic turn of events had drained her. She just wanted to sleep as soon as possible.

From outside came a crash, and an angry shout from Pilar. “You can’t come in! These are the Princess’s rooms!”

Melod
í
a stood up, scowling as her servants shrank back. Five Imperial guardsmen burst in. As always they were gorgeous in their scarlet cloaks and golden armor. Their brash masculine presence was still a profanation.

Armed and armored, trained and strong, the five men still quailed before the Princess’s wrath. Invading a hidalga’s private bath was a serious matter. And when that hidalga was the Emperor’s favorite daughter and heir.…

“What in the name of the Old Hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

One of them, she saw, was trying to fend off Pilar, who was kicking and punching at him like a furious horror.

“Pilar,” she said, putting s snap to her voice. “Stop.”

Her maidservant dropped her arms and stood back. Her black hair was a crazy tangle. Pink spots shone high on olive cheekbones. They almost matched one coming into being beneath the right eye of the guard who’d battled with her. She’d caught him a smart one with her fist.

“You can’t help me,
querida
,” Melod
í
a said. “Thank you.”

Pilar slumped. She sighed, hung her head, and stepped back. Her erstwhile opponent rearranged himself, looking like a man trying to hide relief.

“Your Highness,” the cabo said, “we have come to arrest you on suspicion of conspiring against the Emperor.”

“Against my
father
? Are you insane?”

“Those are our orders. Which we follow to the death.”

“How melodramatic.”

A Tyrant approached holding a robe of white silk. She raised a hand to halt him. “If I’m fit to be arrested in this state,” she said with a haughty chin lift, “I’m fit to walk to my fate in it.”

The cabo’s brow furrowed. He rubbed his thick jaw, causing a furtive sound like mouse claws in the wainscoting, from what she guessed was permanent stubble.

Public nudity could be used to show sincerity, and as a protest. Melod
í
a meant both. Though he didn’t seem an unduly subtle man, the Tyrant under-officer clearly understood it.

His four men could have forcibly robed the naked Princess.
Eventually
. He glanced at his man who’d grappled with Pilar, who was developing a prize black eye.

The cabo waved the robe away. “Alteza,” he said, gesturing toward the door.

Melod
í
a drew in a deep breath, well aware her captors couldn’t keep their eyes off her still-moist breasts riding up her ribs. “When my father hears of this—”

She faltered. Stopped. For the first time she felt the needle of fear through her chest.

If my father didn’t know,
she thought in horror,
how would they dare arrest me?

Her knees threatened to give way. Feelings of anger and betrayal and confusion—and lost, lost sorrow—engulfed her as though a star-strike in the Channel had caused a vast wave to inundate the palace.

By a wrench of will she made her face a mask. Squaring her shoulders, drawing her head up high, she swept past the men and out of the bath chamber without another word.

Chapter
44

Hada,
the Fae
—also
Demonio,
Demon. An individual is called a Faerie. A race of wicked supernatural creatures who defy the Creators’ will and seek to tempt humanity into ruin. Fighting together, humankind, the Grey Angels, and the Creators Themselves defeated their attempt to conquer all Paradise during the dreadful Demon War. Notorious for their pranks, which can be cruel, and their fondness for driving bargains with mortal men and women. Which they keep, but seldom as expected.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

“What have I
done
?”

His despairing words chased each other through the low, torchlit passageway, part of a labyrinth of retreats and storage rooms below the Firefly Palace, like Fae voices mocking. He slammed a fist into niter-crusted stone. White powder drifted down and made him blink and sneeze.

Arms crossed over his chest, Bergdahl leaned coolly against a wall. “Why, I think your Grace has pulled off a remarkable coup, progressing from rebel scum to master of the Imperial bodyguard in a matter of months. That, and gotten dripping drunk.”