The Dinosaur Lords (5 page)

No sound came out—that any human could hear. Rob rocked back with eyes slamming shut as the terremoto’s side blast struck him like an unseen fist.

When he opened them again, he refused at first to believe them.

It wasn’t the approaching dinosaur knights reeling and clutching heads streaming blood from ruptured orifices. It was Karyl’s fighting-castle crews.

Armored from the front against the hadrosaurs’ silent war cry by bony frills and faces, almost all the three-horns had their backs to the Companions. They too suffered the terremoto’s full effects: fear, burst eardrums, even lesions in the lungs. A Triceratops bull reared high, pawing the air and bleating like a gut-speared springer. Its howdah broke loose, spilling men and women flailing into the river.

The Companions charged straight over them.

Rob boiled to his feet. “What’s this?” he screamed. “Treachery?” He hardly knew what else to call it.

The surprise attack caught the already-disordered mercenaries utterly helpless. Even though by now the mace-tails had bulled their way clear to scramble up the north bank and make for the woods, the Legion stood no chance. Formidable as Triceratops’ horns were, they were effective only against an enemy in front of them. Even the Companions’ Ordinaries worked wicked execution, their horses looking like toys as they hamstrung horned colossi with sword and axe.

Karyl rode Shiraa at a spraddling, splashing run, trying desperately to herd his surviving three-horns west. That way offered their sole hope of escape.

His matadora came flank to flank with a Companion halberd. The white-and-green brindled hadrosaur was bigger; Shiraa had teeth. Though his eyes rolled in fear beneath a crest with rounded blade to the front and a spike angled to the rear, the Lambeosaurus bull didn’t give way. The Companions trained their mounts to overcome even their marrow terror of big meat-eaters. Indeed, the halberd could easily knock the war-galley-slim Shiraa down.

But Karyl’s blade slid unerringly through the eye-slit of the Companion’s close helmet. The white knight fell. His mount fled, trumpeting despair.

Falk and Snowflake fell on the mercenary lord from his blind spot. For Rob it was a surfeit of wonder: since carnivorous war-mounts were so rare, they almost never faced each other in battle.

Somehow sensing danger, Karyl wheeled Shiraa clockwise. Snowflake struck first. His huge jaws tore a strip of flesh from Shiraa’s right shoulder.

The matadora screamed. Her raw wound steamed in the rain, which had begun to come down heavily again.

Falk’s battle-axe swung down to smash in the crested crown of Karyl’s helmet. Rag-limp, Karyl Bogomirskiy fell into the rising, frothing torrent and vanished.

For a moment Rob thought Shiraa would stand above her master. She and Snowflake darted fanged mouths at each other, roaring rage.

Dinosaur knights, Princely and Imperial alike, closed in. Reluctantly Shiraa backed away. With a sorrowing wail she turned and fled downstream.

The rain closed in, obscuring Rob’s sight. Or was it tears?

Rob Korrigan rocked on his knees in the unforgiving river. He mourned beautiful and mighty beasts, and greatness’s fall. And cursed himself for the part he’d played in all.

“What have I done?” he sobbed. “What have I sold?

He raised fists to a leaden Heaven.
“And what has it
bought
me?”

Chapter
3

Horror, Chaser
—
Deinonychus antirrhopus.
Nuevaropa’s largest pack-hunting raptor; 3 meters, 70 kilograms. Plumage distinguishes different breeds: scarlet, blue, green, and similar horrors. Smart and wicked, as favored as domestic beasts for hunting and war as wild ones are feared. Some say a Deinonychus pack is deadlier than a full-grown Allosaurus
.

—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

The first thing he knew was pain.

Agony beat from his left hand like the pounding of a drum. Blind, he pulled. A cold, rubbery grip resisted.

He became aware of a chill enveloping his whole being, which leached away whatever strength remained within him. A stench, vast as a slow sea surge, of decay. A more concentrated stink, like wind-driven chop, of filth and feces and stale grease.

Cadenced grunting, as of effort. The pain resolved to the root of his finger.

Last came light on sealed lids, red through. He tried to open his eyes. They refused. The pain in his hand came rhythmic, insistent. His head hurt.

Still without knowing who did so, he willed his eyes to open. Hard. Eyelids parted with a tearing like a wound reopened. He realized dried blood had stuck them together. A crumb caught in the lower lid rasped his left eyeball.

The clouds hung darker and lower than usual. He lay among reeds, half-submerged in cool water. Indistinct against slate sky, a haggard, filthy figure squatted in the river, sawing at his ring finger with a knife. Its blade was apparently none too keen.

He tried to pull his hand away. Squalling like a vexer, the looter yanked back. Dark eyes widened in fury and alarm behind kelp-streamer hair. The knife flashed toward his face.

He fell onto his back in the water, still joined to the looter by his wrist. He put his right hand down to brace. His fingers encountered something hard, cruciform. Before he consciously knew it was a sword hilt, he had it grasped and was lashing back.

Impact shivered up his arm. Blood slashed his face in a hot, hard spray. The looter screeched again and fell back, thrashing and splashing green water that gradually turned the color of rust.

Absently the man wiped at nose and cheeks, discovering in the process a stubble of beard. It felt unfamiliar.

The looter’s sloshing subsided. The man glanced down at the sword in his hand and grunted. The blade was snapped off half a meter from its ornate hilt. It had sufficed.

Now still, the looter’s body floated on its back with arms extended and forehead tipped back in the water, surrounded by hair like a water-weed halo. From the long skinny breasts tied across its belly with a rawhide thong the man realized he had killed an old woman.

The knowledge evoked little response, beyond detestation for those who preyed on the helpless. Nuevaropa abounded so fantastically in plant and animal life that starving took effort. To be sure, foraging had its risks—like everything else. But no hunger of the belly had driven this creature to attempt to mutilate him. Or kill him when he had the temerity to wake.

That she looked old struck him strange. He did not know why.

He examined his wounded hand. His third finger bore a heavy gold ring that showed a three-horn’s head in bold relief. A line of blood encircled its base. Looking closer he realized the wound was shallow but ragged. As he’d suspected, the looter’s knife was blunt.

Likely she had a bag of small stolen treasures, now sunk with her in shallow water. That brought complete indifference. He was beyond any desire for gold now.

Survival
was another matter. Maybe. He felt vague stirrings of alarm.

The ache throbbing in his head was even more persistent and powerful than that in his hand. He reached up gingerly.

Fingertips found close-cropped hair. The right side of his skull felt moist, mushy; he wondered if it might actually be dented. The pain that shot behind his eyes clear down to his stomach didn’t encourage him to probe further.

He felt his first stab of true emotion: dread that he might feel the exposed surface of his brain.

He knew where he was, in general. He remembered facts about his surroundings, the natural world, the structure and functions of his body. And how to wield a sword, clearly, natural as breathing; he transferred it to his left hand without conscious thought. But what he was
doing
here, naked in the shallows of a broad river beneath storm-threatening skies, was a mystery to him.

So was just exactly who he might be.

Urgency began to churn his belly. Life wasn’t exactly proving attractive, now he’d been restored to it. But the animal within, once wakened, desired desperately to cling to it.

He rose from the water. Unsteady on quivering blue-white legs, he looked around. The world resolved about him as though summoned into being by the act of observation: a riverbank fenced with a green riot of weeds. The mud beyond, churned by the feet of many men and monstrous beasts. A slope covered in low vegetation climbing to a forest. The air lay cool on his skin.

The stench of rotting flesh was profound.

A tearing noise made him turn, splashing, sword-stub ready. Fifteen meters out in the river and a bit downstream lay a dead duckbill. In the wet warmth the gases of decomposition were already ballooning its vast body. A once-glorious hide of scarlet, orange, and gold had faded to greyish pink, ochre, and mud. A small tailless flier with drab brown fur perched atop it, ripping up a strip of skin with its beak.

Everywhere sprawled or floated the rotting corpses of men, horses, and dinosaurs. Not twenty meters from him a Triceratops lay on its side in mud, its eyes picked empty. Beside it lay a fighting-castle, wickerwork sides and wooden frame broken by the monster’s fall. Inexplicably, the sight of the great dead dinosaur twisted his heart and stung moisture from his eyes.

Who am I,
he wondered,
to wear a ring worth finishing me off for, and to grieve so for a dinosaur?

It scarcely mattered now. Now he was no one, mother-naked and stinking with a dent in his skull, lost.

It was morning, he observed from the feel and color of the sun’s diffuse light and the way the faint shadows leaned east. Neck muscles creaking and bones crackling protest as if they’d expected never to be used again, he turned to look upstream.

Carnage lay thicker there. Indistinct with distance and mist wisping from the river, men moved about the banks, singly or in small groups. Most were afoot; a few rode horses or striders. He saw no living war-hadrosaurs. Nor any big meat-eaters drawn to the feast.

Oddly, that saddened rather than relieved him.

Fear stabbed him through:
I mustn’t be found!
he thought.

Whoever he was, he felt a sick certainty that those men would do him harm if they learned he still lived. Painfully he climbed onto land and began to stagger downstream through tatters of mist.

Returning circulation first pricked his legs like needles, then stuck like knives. As he forced himself to a jarring trot, his pulse kept stride. The hammers beating at his temples did likewise.

From thicker fog before him a figure appeared, dark, compact, hooded. He stumbled to a halt, though limbs and body cried out together that once he lost momentum he might never get it back. For three heavy heartbeats, each of which threatened to burst his skull, he stood watching, head tipped to one side, breath wheezing through open mouth.

The figure stood unmoving. Waiting.

What have I left to lose?
the man asked himself bitterly. He approached. He couldn’t really walk, but only engage in a more-or-less controlled forward fall.

He knew he wasn’t a large man. The waiting figure was smaller still. Despite the looseness of its coarse brown robe, its carriage told him it was female.

The apparition’s voice confirmed it: “A moment, Voyvod Karyl,” it said, feminine and low.

“Voyvod Karyl,” he repeated slowly. The words seemed to echo through the clangor in his skull.

He touched his head. “He’s dead, I think.”

The cowl nodded. “I know. It’s why I speak to you. I speak only to the dead.”

“You’re … the Witness?” he asked. Childhood stories, half-remembered and less believed, clamored in his memory, like faint contending voices overheard down a long corridor.

“I am. I try to watch all of this world’s great events.”

“And never intervene,” the man said.

He felt no sense of identification with the name she had given him, had scarcely any sense of that man or his past. His memories were too troublesome, too painful, to try to bring into focus.

“Just so,” she said.

“Not possible. The Witness can’t be real. I’ve known of people living as much as three centuries. No longer.”

“The Creators made me different,” she said.

He uttered a corpse-tearer croak. It was as close to a laugh as he could come.

“The Creators don’t exist either. My wounds are making me delirious. Well then, myth. What do you want from me?”

“Knowledge,” she said.

“You must have a surfeit of that. If you’re the Witness, you’re as old as the world.”

He spoke bluntly, for dead men have small need of tact. He recalled that the man he had been spoke little and to the point as well.

“Older,” she said. “Seven centuries isn’t long, for the subject I study. Barely a beginning.”

“What can I teach you?”

“I want to know what it means to be human.”

“Compared to what?”

“Dead or not,” she said, “that I cannot tell you.”

“I am cold and naked,” he said. “My mouth is as parched as the rest of me is soaked. I’d drink, and no doubt I’d be famished, if my stomach weren’t in total rebellion. My head feels ready to split apart. Someone hunts me, I don’t know who. I doubt I’ve time to tell you much.”