The Dinosaur Lords (50 page)

The horse veered to avoid collision, spoiling its master’s attack by putting its body between spear and target. A mature hornface weighed more than all but the hugest draft horses; Little Nell, who truth to tell was on the chubby side, weighed two tonnes, and could simply bull down a courser like this one.

Ditching the spear to draw his sword as he passed, the rider aimed a desperate cross-body cut at Rob. Rob took it on his shield, then returned a whistling overhand stroke with his axe. The other arm’s shield protected torso and head. Rob wasn’t aiming for them. The bearded axe-head hit the horseman’s thigh instead, sheering through mail legging, linen trousers, and flesh to jar against bone.

The man bellowed in pain as Rob wrenched the axe free. Rob thanked Maris, Lady of Chance and the Sea, it hadn’t bit into the femur. He’d have been lucky not to be dragged from the saddle himself.

The Brokenheart fell off his horse. His left boot caught in the stirrup. The courser, now thoroughly terrified, put its head down, crashed back down onto the road, then set out at a wheezing, clattering, foam-blowing run, dragging its erstwhile rider bellowing behind.

Axe high, Rob looked for other threats. No enemies were near him. Karyl went sword to sword with a man on a chestnut. A second man-at-arms rode in from Karyl’s blind side, swinging a spiked-ball flail over his head.

Rob shouted warning. As he did, Lucas rose up from the scrub right next to the flail-man. Holding his longsword hilt in both hands and yelling like a madman with pale hair flying, the painting prodigy rammed the tip into the man’s side under the short ribs. Welded links popped. The horseman groaned, blood flooding down his chin. Lucas, blue eyes rolling in red face, rammed the blade all the way through him until mail hauberk and surcoat tented on the other side.

The Brokenheart fell that way. There was no way Lucas could keep hold of the blood-slick cross guard. He had to let go of the longsword.

He didn’t seem to mind. Instead his success so astonished and exalted him that he whooped, threw his hands in the air, and began to dance around in triumph.

“Behind you!” Karyl yelled at him. He had finished off his first opponent and twisted in his saddle to deal with the second, only to find that Lucas had killed him. And to see another Cr
è
ve Coeur rider looming behind the youth, eyes glaring wildly past the nasal of his peaked cap and spear cocked to impale him. Agile and quick as Asal was, she had no chance of carrying Karyl close enough in time to intervene.

“Fuck,” Rob said. He headed Nell that way, though she was farther than the mare, and slower. He doubted Karyl would leave much avenging of the painter for Rob to do, but the Brokenheart might be bringing friends to the party.

He heard a
clink
and a
crunch
. Just before he drove his spear home in Lucas’s oblivious back, the Brokenheart stiffened and grabbed for his throat.

A chisel-tipped arrowhead stuck out of the horseman’s gullet, painted bright red in the morning sun.

As the rider collapsed, Rob looked up and beyond him. At the far end of the trapped raiding party, Ga
é
tan stood on a rocky jut above where the second tree had fallen. He was still holding his hornbow in perfect follow-through.

A good hundred meters,
thought Rob.
Lad’s a fair shot, for true.

Karyl swept his sword up in a salute. Ga
é
tan grinned and bobbed his head in acknowledgment. He was busy nocking another arrow and looking around.
He
didn’t intend to get caught celebrating by a sudden enemy.

Then again, he’d likely done this before. Rob was certain Lucas hadn’t. As was brought home when the boy looked from the man who’d almost spitted him, to the man he’d spitted himself to such lethal effect, and puked his guts into a berry-bush.

Rob risked a look toward the road. As a child he’d been particularly struck on a walk when he’d seen perhaps a dozen centimeter-long black and red ants near the entry to a hill of much tinier black ants. Whether the big ants had tried a raid, or merely tried the lesser ants’ patience, the defenders, each perhaps a tenth the size of a single intruder, had swarmed them by the hundreds, immobilizing and slowly destroying them without regard to their own losses.

That was about the sight that greeted his eyes now. The Providentials had thrown themselves on the marauders, overmatching superior arms and training with numbers and fury. They flailed their enemies with farm implements, pounded them with rocks, and pummeled them with fists. In the midst of the mayhem, the dinosaur knight surged his long-crested mount this way and that with its tail knocking combatants of both sides sprawling, and swinging his longsword with little more discrimination.

“
Someone
fight me, Fae eat your souls!” he screamed. “There must be some man of birth to face me!”

Rob was glad to see there were few feathered darts and arrows jutting from the duckbill’s green-streaked orange hide. The shortbows could only hurt the thing by hitting an eye, and Karyl had impressed upon the woods-runners how badly he
didn’t
want the thing hurt. Or at least impressed St
é
phanie, who harbored a savage grievance against the Brokenhearts. Which was enough: no one with his wits wanted to get crosswise of her. Meanwhile Ga
é
tan and his arbalesters had justified Karyl’s faith in them by not shooting the sackbut with weapons that could harm it.

The duckbill was a fortune walking on two big legs. If they captured it alive, Karyl could sell it and share out a handsome prize with all. But Rob knew he had a greater gain in mind. The Empire was full of dinosaur knights who had lost their mounts and couldn’t afford a replacement. They’d coming flocking for a chance to obtain a new war-hadrosaur in exchange for a year’s service. Having shown he could take the beasts from Count Guillaume’s vassals, Karyl could probably get some to sign on to fight as cavalry or even armored infantry in hopes of winning a new mount in battle.

Karyl rode back along the trail, keeping above the scrum. Rob followed. The knight kept thrashing about and yelling shrill challenges. The stink of blood and ripped guts beat up from the road like heat from a forge.

“Why don’t you just shoot the bugger off his sackbut and be done with it?” Rob asked. “Or let Ga
é
tan be about it. Surely you don’t mean to go sword to sword with a man on dinosaur-back?”

Seeing a mounted, thus putatively noble, foeman come into view, the Cr
è
ve Coeur knight pointed his sword at Karyl.

“I challenge you to meet me blade to blade as a man of honor,” he cried.

“Whether I’m a man of honor or not is immaterial,” Karyl replied. “You’re just a bandit.”

To the volunteers he called, “Get him off the monster. Use nooses or poles. Don’t get hurt, and for Maris’s sake don’t hurt the duckbill.”

“What do we do with him then?” shouted Guat, whose face was a carnival horror mask of blood. Whose, Rob didn’t know.

“Whatever you wish.”

The knight stared at Karyl, slack-jawed as if the Voyvod had lapsed into his native Slavo. The militiamen cheered and jeered. Someone threw a loop of rope at the knight’s face. He batted it away. Others incautiously ran forward to try to pull him down by hand. He sworded one in the face and his sackbut trod another into the roadway, squeezing a last scream from bursting lungs that momentarily overrode the dinosaur’s fanfares of alarm. The mob jumped back.

They started throwing sticks and head-sized rocks at the knight. These bounced harmlessly from armor or shield, or were swatted down with his sword. Emeric and his sister, who was as tall as he was, ran up behind the duckbill carrying a burly four-meter branch with a forked end. They hooked the knight smartly under his right armpit and levered him sideways out of his saddle.

He landed with a ringing
thud
that made Rob wince. The peasant army fell on him with a single feral howl of glee.

“How can you let this
happen
?” Rob demanded of Karyl as green-enameled plate armor rang to the blows of clubs and the
chink
of spear-tips. “He’s a nobleman!”

“He’s a criminal. He’s the guiltiest of all. Whatever crimes the others committed or contemplated, they did by his command. Besides, I thought you hated blue bloods.”

Rob opened his mouth. For once he could find no words to shape with it. He did hate blue bloods. He held a vengeance of his own against them. And yet, and yet—it felt wrong to stand by and let one be lynched by his lessers like this.

Face burning, feeling a strange and nameless disgust surging within, he turned Nell right about and rode her away at a trot, down to the road, and back toward the village they had saved.

But he couldn’t outride the knight’s screams.

Chapter
41

Telar, Laventosa,
Windy,
La Tejedora de Sue
ñ
os,
Dreamweaver
—Duchess of the Creators:
Xun
☴
(Wind)—The Oldest Daughter. Represents Fabrication and destruction, artisans, sleep and dreams, forests, and Wind. Also birds and fliers. Known for her vigor. Aspect: a woman with long, kinky gold hair in a green-trimmed white gown, working a loom as a long-crested dragon soars above her. Sacred Animal: long-crested dragon. Color: green. Symbol: a golden loom.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

“Feeling better?” Karyl asked Rob sardonically as a beautiful, strongly curved blond woman looped a flower wreath around the dinosaur master’s neck from his right. They marched side by side past the fountain in the central plaza, leading the survivors of what everyone now called the Battle of Whispering Woods on a triumphal procession through Providence town.

The woman beamed up at Rob. He could barely help noticing she had on nothing but a colorful strand or two of blossoms, none too carefully arranged. Public nudity was less common up here by the Shields, where cold winds occasionally blew down from perpetually snow-sheathed peaks even in high summer.

“It’ll do for getting along with,” Rob said as a stout peasant woman, fortunately wearing more normal country garb, held her grandson up to plant a kiss on his bearded cheek. Then in Anglysh: “Faugh, the little blighter’s been at the taffy! He’s got it all in my beard, the little shi—yes, madame, a lovely child. May he bear you many equally lovely great-grandchildren.”

Happy holidaymakers lined the Brokenheart Highway, the north road from Cr
è
ve Coeur to Providence town, to welcome the returning heroes home. They cheered, banged tin drums, and blew lustily on whistles and paper horns. The noise would certainly have hurt the cultured ears of the Garden Councilors, had any of them been anywhere to be seen.

*   *   *

Two days after the battle, the bad taste lingered in Rob Korrigan’s mouth. His dreams had not been pleasant. The Brokenheart knight, he’d learned, had died as badly as Rob’s fears foretold, crushed by degrees as his steel carapace was slowly beaten in.

Rob’s
mind
knew the man deserved as much, and probably worse. He’d led his merry crew toward pillage, house burning, torture, mutilation, and rape, enslavement and murder: all the filthy pleasures the rulers of this world loved to wallow in when they felt they had license. Rob’s belly didn’t buy it, though.

A handful of foot soldiers and two horsemen had broken through and fled toward Cr
è
ve Coeur. Given how much of the way ran through Telar’s Wood, and how many and vindictive were Emeric’s folk, Rob was none too sure they’d gotten
away
.

The militia took six shield men prisoner, all injured. Karyl had them stripped of all but loincloths and the improvised crutches that two men needed to walk. He ordered them set free, and told them to take themselves back across the Lisette by fastest route, or die.

One made the mistake of protesting that the woods were full of raptor-packs.

“
Wild
raptors, you mean?” St
é
phanie the woods-runner had asked with lye-and-honey sweetness. “Not like the tame packs you set on us, to rip us apart for sport?”

The captives cringed away in unconcealed terror. She was a good 180 centimeters tall and built like her brother, leanly muscular. She was also formidably armed, with bow and quiver slung over bare brown shoulder, a single-edged knife as long as a short sword at her hip, and a spear with a wickedly sharp leaf-shaped head, that could be used for slashing as well as thrusting. She had an alarming tendency to gesticulate with it.

The prisoners, Rob thought, feared none of those things as much as her
rage
. She seethed with elemental fury, so intense and pure that Rob felt if she sprayed it on you, it might melt your face off.

She had been a notable beauty once, he reckoned. Then Cr
è
ve Coeur Rangers hunting woods-runners, whose pinprick ambushes had till now been the closest thing to effective resistance the raiders met, caught her. They raped her, carved her face up with a hunting knife, and would have tortured her to death had not Emeric led a small group of forest folk to her rescue.