The Dinosaur Knights (37 page)

He turned the verdigrised bronze latch and opened the door. A slender figure in a leather jack, brown canvas trousers, and jackboots turned with a book open in her hands.

“Ah,” Karyl said. “The Short-Haired Horse Captain, then.”

*   *   *

“So that's what they call you now?” Rob Korrigan asked, entering the office behind his deceptively slight master.

A thrill went through Melodía, chased by immediate self-anger for being thrilled. Then she decided she should feel good.

It's the first title I've actually earned
, she thought.
The first
anything
I've actually earned. Why not get excited that my commander acknowledges it?

“Yes,” she said, successfully fighting back an urge to add a coy, “I guess they do.”

She set the book down on a reading-stand. It was an early fifth-century treatise on the Corsair Wars, then still in progress, from the Anglaterrano point of view. It was written in Anglysh, which she read tolerably well.

The room was bare but for a modest writing desk and a few chairs, stained and obviously scavenged. From the mostly empty shelves and the lingering smell of moldy paper, she guessed this had been the landowner's library. What books the Séverin clan had left had surely rotted and been thrown out. The lonely handful of scrolls and bound volumes on the shelves—all military in nature, except one curious, slim book dealing with the Fae, of all things—were in too good a shape to be anything but recent acquisitions. Presumably by the room's present proprietor, Karyl himself.

“You've heard the news?” Karyl said.

“News?” She looked at Rob in confusion. “You mean confirmation Don Raúl is about to invade?” Which news she herself had only just brought back, gleaned from prisoners and confirmed by woods-runners scouting across the river she, a Spañola, thought of as Los Aguasrisueños—the Laughing Water—into Castaña.

“As to that,” Karyl said. “I want your troop to scout ahead of the army when we march for the Castaña frontier.”

“Really? I mean, it's an honor, sir.”

You've dined with the greatest grandes of Nuevaropa
, Melodía thought in disgust,
and you sound like a schoolgirl about getting a simple task
.

Then it struck her: “What news, then, please?”

“The Imperial Army is on the march,” he said, watching her closely. His eyes, so dark as to be almost black, burned like that of a horror on the hunt. “Here. Against us.”

“Here?” Her heart slammed up into her throat and turned the word to a squeak.
They'll take me!
her mind shrilled in terror.
They'll take me and give me back to Falk!

“It appears they believe they can forestall a Grey Angel Crusade by stamping out the heterodoxy of the Garden of Beauty and Truth,” Karyl said, not without irony in his voice.

Her knees went loose. To keep from keeling over she put a steadying hand on the table atop the book she'd been reading.

It wasn't the thought of an Angel Crusade that made her stomach want to leap out of her mouth in fear. She didn't believe in any such thing—no more than she believed in the Creators themselves. To be sure, she had read histories of the Demon War, before the Empire of Nuevaropa was even founded, when the eight Creators and Their Grey Angels had fought alongside faithful men and women against the evil Fae and their worshipers.

She dismissed them, as she did accounts of subsequent Grey Angel Crusades, when the Angels roused uncanny armies to purge the land of sin and error. Just as she dismissed the tales of how Manuel the Great had slain an imperial tyrant—a beast not known before or since—which was ravaging the land, and somehow by virtue of that did established the Empire, with himself and his family to rule it in perpetuity. He had even had the monster's skull cleaned and gilded to serve as his, and his heirs', Fangèd Throne.

Melodía bought none of that. Those stories were all mere propaganda: made up to impress the impressionable.

But Falk, now. Falk was a devil she knew too well.

I can't—won't—believe my father has the slightest inkling what the commander of his bodyguard did to me
. But with the Vida se Viene fanatics ascendant in his court, and fear of the legendary horror of a Grey Angel Crusade blazing at inferno heat, what chance had mercy for any of them?

“Melodía?” Rob asked with that strangely musical Irlandés lilt. “Are you ill, then, child?”

She could smell ale sour on his breath. But he acted dead-sober. Unusually so, in fact.

She held up a hand for time. She closed her eyes and pulled in a deep breath. She emptied her mind. Then, slowly, let the breath go, and as it exhausted allowed her mind to speak the single, secret syllable she had been given as a child by a Priest of All Creators.

It was a ritual familiar to anyone born in Nuevaropa. Indeed, everywhere on Paradise Melodía had heard or read of, from Tejas to far Zipangu, folk followed a similar practice. The men waited while she drew two more calming breaths.

When she opened her eyes she felt calm. For the moment, at least. And for the moment, that sufficed.

“What are we going to do about this Crusade?” she asked. Her voice still sounded like a gate hinge wanting oil. But at least it didn't quiver.

“Try to survive long enough to worry about it,” Karyl said. “Which entails whipping Conde Raúl back across Les Eaux de Rire in convincing fashion as quickly as possible. Especially since word of this new Imperial adventure may embolden Comtesse Célestine to try to curry the Emperor's favor by smiting the infidel before he can.”

Not once had he said, “your father.” She appreciated it. She thought.

Then again, there was no reading this strange, and strangely compelling, man.

“We march at dawn, day after tomorrow,” Karyl said. “You and your troop get the best rest you can tonight. Be ready to ride out along the Chausée Chastaigne by tomorrow's sunset.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

She knew that was the proper response. Still she made no move to go. And not because he hadn't dismissed her; she had already learned that when the fabled Karyl Bogomirskiy gave you an order, you didn't need his permission to carry it out.

But the gaze he held on her was probing, not peremptory. “We will deal with the Imperial Crusade in due turn,” he said gently. “Till then, don't let it worry you.”

She couldn't help her skepticism from creasing her brow. Instead of reacting with anger, he said, “You're a student of the military arts.”

He gestured at the book she'd been reading. “If you learn nothing else about them, learn this: nothing ever happens as expected. Especially in war.”

He crooked a smile at Rob. “As your master taught me well, when he stampeded a herd of wild mace-tails under the legs of my three-horns at the Hassling.”

“That was you?” she said to Rob.

He shrugged. “A good idea it seemed, at the time.”

“A brilliant tactic,” Karyl said, “for all it got you sacked.”

Questions bubbled to the surface of Melodía's mind. Not least was,
why does Karyl hate my Jaumet then, and not Rob Korrigan?
She decided to ask none of them.

“Strange are the ways of fates and Fae,” Rob said lightly. Then he winced. Melodía saw Karyl's brow tense and wondered why.

A hard rap rang from the frame of the open door behind them. Melodía turned to see a stocky, middle-aged woman in a battered drover's hat.

“There's a messenger just down from P-town, Colonel,” she said to Karyl. “Says the high-and-mighty Council has their feathers all in a fuss over this news about the Impies. They're demanding you run back to pat their hands and soothe their plumage back in place.”

Karyl made a face as if he smelled something worse than mildew in the walls. “Thank you.”

“Will you go, then?” Rob asked.

“Not likely. I don't have time for that now.”

He frowned and tapped knuckles contemplatively on his desk. Someone had taken it upon him or herself to refinish it with sandpaper and oil. Melodía already knew Karyl well enough to feel sure he'd never ordered such a frivolity for himself.

It's an odd little army I've found myself in
, Melodía thought. Karyl didn't demand his underlings truckle to him constantly, like so many nobles she'd known. They treated him almost casually. Yet his least desire was crisply carried out. She'd even seen her near-anarchic jinetes roundly thump a mercenary for speaking ill of their Colonel.

She noticed without marked happiness that he was looking at her.

“You're inward with the Council,” he said. “And they can't fault me for sending someone of low rank if it's you.”

“For a fact, our employers are uncommon sensitive to social rank, for a passel of egalitarians,” Rob said.

“Yes sir,” she said. “But—Lord Karyl?”

He raised a brow.

“What do I tell them?”

Karyl smiled. “I leave that to our initiative, Captain. You know our situation. Put all that diplomatic education you got at the Imperial Court to use.”

Chapter 29

Raguel,
El Amigo de Dios
,
Friend of God
—One of the Grey Angels, the fearful Seven who serve as the dispensers of our Creators' ultimate justice. Associated with Maris, the Youngest Daughter, and hence the least of the Angels (as well as reputedly capricious), yet said to help enforce order even among the Seven themselves. A spirit of ice and snow, he is often linked to female Angel and divine messenger Gabriel, as well as the stern Zerachiel.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

Melodía rode a sorrel gelding of dubious antecedents north at a brisk amble along the Rue Impériale. The horse came from the army's general herd. Meravellosa remained behind, resting up from their recent adventures. She'd done most of the actual work, after all.

Full night had descended. The day's continuous cloud cover had broken, but now clotted masses seemed to swoop and collide across the starry sky, as if building to a storm. She smelled the promise of rain, soil still giving the day's warmth back to the night, and early winter crops sprouting in the fields. Off to her left the River Bonté gurgled beyond the trees. Bits of frozen volcanic foam crunched beneath the sorrel's unshod hooves. Moths as big as Melodía's head flapped around her in the middle-twilight, while toothy, tailless fliers squeaked in pursuit. Night insects sawed and trilled in the brush that grew beside the ditch. They gave her a pang of homesickness, specifically for the fireflies with half-meter bodies and meter-long wings that gave La Merced's great coastal fortress its name. They didn't live up here in the cooler piedmont.

She turned off on the unpaved lane to the Garden château east of town. She was surprised to see few lights agleam in Providence; the citizens tended to let go only reluctantly of the day's activities. But a single yellow glow outlined tall, narrow shops and houses as if a huge bonfire blazed in the central plaza. It gave her an eerie feeling.

She shook it off. It was nothing to do with her.

The villa likewise showed few lights. Even in the fitful starlight Melodía could see that the leaves on the trees and the vines drooping over the courtyard walls were curled from neglect and dehydration. She frowned. When she arrived here, scant months before, that garden had seemed a pocket paradise, a microcosm of what the world could be: green, fragrant, vibrant, abundant and inviting. Now it struck her as foreboding.

At least they don't have town guards standing watch outside tonight
, she thought. The city soldiery had grown unpleasantly assertive in recent days.

She went inside. The corridors were deserted, dark except for orange light from the dining hall. She made her way toward the bubble of voices by memory, and the feel of fingertips on cool whitewashed walls.

Garden communicants packed the hall to the walls. Bare walls, she saw with a shock: the mural painted by the lost genius of young Lucas, which had once made the room into the semblance of a beautiful garden, had been whitewashed over, and the rafters repainted brown. It was as if the ruling Council of the Garden of Beauty and Truth had determined to purge itself, at least, of every trace of Beauty.

As for Truth, she couldn't yet say.

Torches flickered in black-iron sconces on the denuded walls, red flames giving off more thready, resinous smoke than light. A scatter of oil lamps burned low. Candles glowed everywhere in hundreds: on tables, the bancos, the niches where they emphasized the hollowness where works of beauty, statues and vases of surpassing skill, had recently stood.

Melodía took a seat on a bench built from the wall at the rear. No one paid her any mind. Every other occupant of the hall, even those murmuring to one another, leaned toward the dais where Bogardus presided over the Council of Master Gardeners. She felt as if she occupied her own personal bubble of isolation.
Which suits me fine
, she thought.