The Dinosaur Lords (33 page)

Florian laughed.

“By the sound I thought we were about to be charged by a matador bull,” he said. “Dieter, my boy, you’ve much to learn about stealth.”

As usual, Dieter wore his emotions on his face as clearly as if portrait-master Pedro the Greater had painted them there.

“What’s the bad news?” Jaume asked lightly.

“You—you have a visitor, Captain,” Dieter said.

*   *   *

“So it’s, ‘when Rob and I assemble the troops,’ now, is it?” Rob said on the villa’s doorstep. “What’s the role Rob Korrigan plays in assembling troops, then? I’d hardly know which part goes where.”

“I need you to help me teach them,” Karyl said.

“Teach? Teach what?”

“Everything. You taught them during weapons drills this afternoon.”

“That was more by way of supervising: keeping the lads from busting each other’s heads and arms. But I had to dump a few on their asses to do it. I’m not sure how fine a lesson that may be. Though I suppose they did learn Rob Korrigan was not a man to be fucked-about with.”

“That sounds like teaching to me,” Karyl said, without a tint of irony.

“Does it, now? You who never so much as raises his voice, much less a hand?”

“I’ve had more practice,” Karyl said. “It’s a skill, like any other: you’ll learn by practice. Anyway, everyone has his own approach.”

“Which might be my salvation, I suppose,” Rob grumbled. He was thinking,
How do I learn your skill of looking at a body fit to freeze flames solid?

The fact was he had felt as if he were floundering in waist-deep muck all afternoon. All he knew about teaching came from his own experience of being taught by his old master, Morrison. Which, boiled down, was:
sooner or later it all comes down to a sound thrashing.

He caught himself asking just who he might be, to question the great Voyvod Karyl? And shook his head in self-disgust at that.

Especially since he knew he was hooked already.
Not the first time my weakness for hero-worship has sprung up to bite me on the ass, and doubtless not be the last.

“So why’d you try so hard to dissuade the boy from dedicating himself to the sword, then?” Rob asked, mostly to change the subject. “I thought you were anti-art.”

“I’m dead to it now,” Karyl said, “although I wouldn’t try to ban it any longer.”

“Why, then?”

“I hate waste. That’s all.”

“Right,” Rob said. “Well, I’m hungry and thirsty. So let’s go in and make our report.”

“Wait.”

The quiet word stopped Rob with his foot raised to the step. He turned back.

“You’ve received the payment promised for delivering me?” Karyl asked.

A moment of silence passed, during which Rob’s mouth tasted of copper and a bell seemed to ring in his head.

“Yes,” he said at last, unwilling to risk trying to slip a lie past those dark raptor eyes. “Last night Bogardus took me aside privately and gave me the money Aphrodite had left.”

“So will you stay?”

Frogs croaked down the darkness. Insects chirped and sang back from the trees. Terror-moths blundered about around the two men’s heads, occasionally brushing cheek or brow with butter-soft wings whose backs were patterned like screaming wide-eyed faces. Tiny snub-nosed fliers flitted in pursuit, snapping at the moths with needle teeth. Detached wings and body parts fell like soft carnage rain.

Heat crept up Rob’s cheeks. He didn’t know what Karyl meant by that question. Instinctively he feared it.

“I suppose,” Rob said with a carelessness he didn’t feel. It rang false to his own ears.

Yet for a fact, where’ve I got to go? It’s not as if anyone’s clamoring for the service of a dinosaur master sacked for showing up his blue blood masters.

“Do you mean it?” Karyl asked.

“Do you want me to? And how did you know about the money, anyway?”

Karyl chuckled softly. It shocked Rob in a way, as if it came from a full-grown tyrant bull.

“It was the only way it could be. All men must eat. All women too. You performed a service in expectation of pay.”

“Well—yes. Yes I did.”

“I’m a mercenary. I don’t share the disdain of
commerce
my class so cherishes. I was raised to look down on it, but I got that nonsense bashed from me soon enough on the exile’s road. High Ovda isn’t like Nuevaropa. It’s drier. Living’s harder. And I always had to make sure I was more valuable alive than shopped to Baroness Stechkina’s assassins. So I sold my services as a caravan guard and made my way east.”

Rob flinched and blinked violently as a half-eaten abdomen arced in to hit him in the eye. It dropped away at once, but he wiped furiously with his thumb at the residue he could feel wetting his cheek like an entrail tear.

Karyl cocked a brow. “Carry on,” Rob said, waving his free hand at him. “I’m fine.”

“Or rather, I sold
Shiraa’s
services,” Karyl said. “I was a kind of appurtenance, like a saddlebag, albeit admittedly useful for keeping her from eating the wrong people. I was a boy, skinny as a willow branch and not terribly skilled at arms.”

Rob was rapt. It was as much as he’d ever heard Karyl say about his own past—details the legends and ballads had never covered.

If I survive this … whatever-it-is I find myself embroiled in,
he thought,
I’ll dine richly for the rest of my days spinning whole new songs into the Saga of Karyl Bogomirskiy.

“So—you don’t resent it that I took gold to deliver you like a parcel?”

“How could I? I took money for wringing labor from my own people by force. I took money for
killing
. You betrayed no confidence; you did me no harm. And to tell you the truth, you’ve brought me something I thought I’d never know again.”

“What’s that?”

“A spark of joy in my life. It’s a
challenge,
preparing Providence to defeat dinosaur knights. I may not be up to it. I certainly can’t do it alone. That’s why I asked if you meant to stay.”

Rob’s breath caught in his throat.
The great captain wants me to help him?

That other part of him, the cynical observer—or was it the realist?—observed that, despite his disinterest in and professed dislike of
passions
, Karyl knew quite well how to stir them in others.

“What do you want me to do, my lord?” he asked.

“Help me as you did today. And also, I need you to be my quartermaster.”

“I’m honored beyond—wait. Quartermaster, did you say?”

“I did.”

“But I know nothing about it!”

“You’re a dinosaur master. You know how to get your monsters provisions and proper housing.”

“Well … yes.”

“Soldiers need those things too. The local men can live with their families for now, but the rest will need to be quartered. At that, even the locals will start to gripe if the outsiders get meal stipends and they don’t.”

“Sure and that’s Creators’ Gospel. But here, now, what about this Lucas—”

“An eager lad. But he’s an artist, a Gardener in full bloom, and as practical as a paper shield. I wouldn’t want to rely on him to keep me fed.”

“Since you put it that way—”

“We’ll also need sanitation seen to, in a hurry.” Rare as disease was, in Nuevaropa at least, a lack of proper disposal of bodily wastes inevitably caused an outbreak that cut down men and beasts like an arrow storm. Even as
The Books of the Law
promised.

“Providence is rich,” Karyl went on, “with its commerce and its silver mines. How long that will remain true, with so many hands turned to fighting and to … whatever it is the Gardeners do … is an open question. For now, they can afford to pay. And they’re going to have to.”

“You want me to tell the Council that?” Rob asked in wide-eyed terror.

“I’ll tell them,” Karyl said. “They dislike me already; I might as well start giving them reason. But I still need someone to do this work. I don’t see Emeric in the job. And no one else has given me the least reason to trust him to pour piss from his own boot if the instructions were engraved on the heel.”

“It’s not the future I’d exactly envisioned for myself.”

“Then hurry and train up a successor so you can move on to something else. Will you do it?”

Rob swallowed. “Yes.”

Karyl clapped him on the shoulder. “Good man. Come on, then. We’ve lots to discuss with our employers before we can eat. If they let us.”

Chapter
27

Lagarto-pescado,
fish-lizard
—
Ichthyosaur
. A common type of sea dragon, a swimming reptile resembling a fish, with long, tooth-filled jaws (or, some fancy, the fabulous
dolphins
depicted in
The Bestiary of Old Home
); 2–4 meters long; 950 kilograms. Eats fish, shellfish, cephalopods, and occasionally each other. Sailors’ tales notwithstanding, rarely known to attack humans.

—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

The smell met Jaume like a barrier when he entered the tent. It felt like emerging from a cool cloister into a hot and humid night. If the night blossoms outside the ruined temple down the valley had smelled like a corpse rotting in a perfume lake, the man waiting for him smelled like a corpse thrown into a cesspit, with a wheel of lamentably far-gone cheese thrown in to add body.

“My lord Bishop,” he made himself say politely. He went to the end of the table opposite his guest and sat in a folding wooden chair, on a satin cushion colored cream and butterscotch. Leaning back jauntily, he cocked a leg over one arm.

It’ll take days of airing-out and half a liter of rose attar to make the place livable again
, he thought with bitter amusement.
Ah, Uncle, the things I do for you.

“I will not sit,” his visitor said, as if Jaume had invited him to.

“Suit yourself. May I offer you food? Drink?” Jaume gestured toward a covered plate and silver water pitcher on the table.

“Your men offered me refreshments of the flesh,” the Papal Legate said. “I have no need of them.”

Ever?
Jaume was tempted to ask as he took a peach from a basket beside the covered dish. He was glad Florian wasn’t here. He would have said what Jaume was content merely to think. Which would not, in the long run, have made matters easier on the march.

By the time Jaume and Florian got back to the Companions’ camp, the night had expanded to fill every corner not occupied by separate light: of bonfires, of torches pungent with resin smoke, black and thready. Mor Jacques had intercepted him, worrying up with the latest reports of aristocratic waste and folly: three knights and some number of servants no one bothered to tally, dead in a tent fire caused by drunken roistering idiocy; a peasant’s hayrick deliberately burned, for what passed among the bucketheads as fun. Jaume gave what orders he thought might do some good. For the most part all he could do was listen and commiserate.

At his pavilion waited Manfredo, looking even graver than usual. Jaume had commanded his three knights to stay outside. He’d had to be brisk about it.

“How may I serve you?” Jaume asked his guest. He bit into the peach, savoring its flowery sweetness. He refused to give in to ugliness. And anyway, a campaigner who let bad smells spoil his appetite got awfully hungry.

“You committed what some would judge a grave offense today against Count Ironstar, my lord.”

“Surely not as grave as those committed by the ones I punished,” Jaume said. “I will not tolerate rape and murder. If Ironstar can’t control his knights, and they won’t control themselves, it falls to me to do so. As Constable I hold the High Justice. I dispensed it.”

Bishop Tavares stiffened. The Legate was a deceptively slight man, younger than Jaume, with wild black hair, a stinking robe, and grime-black sandaled feet. He wore a necklace of wooden balls, each as big around as a trono, from which hung a green wooden pendant shaped like a wreath. It showed three gold lines: two broken stacked above a solid. It was the glyph of Ad
á
n, the Oldest Son, god of manhood, and of mammals, of agriculture, commerce, and wealth. As well as ruination, destruction, and impoverishment.

“When the Eight created this world, they saw fit to raise certain folk above others, as more suited to rule,” Tavares said.

“So much is generally accepted.”

“Those chosen to rule enjoy rights and privileges over those they rule.”

“And the ruled enjoy rights in turn,” said Jaume. “By Imperial law. As well as the Creators’ word.”

Tavares smiled thinly through a beard that consisted mostly of neglect. Jaume sized him up as extremely dangerous, in the way of one who never drew steel himself but inspired others to wield it for him.

“You refer to the words’ obvious import,” Tavares said. “The profane. But isn’t it clear to any truly spiritual man that anything so obvious cannot really manifest divine intent? The pure truth, the holy truth of the spirit—that lies
behind
the words.”

“I disagree. I trust my Creators to say what they mean.”