The Dinosaur Lords (56 page)

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

The morning was still bright and cheerful as a traitor beneath thin, high clouds. It was warm by upland standards, enough for sweat to beset Rob’s eyes from beneath his helmet’s bill and tickle his ribs inside the thick nodosaur-hide cuirass in spite of leafy shade. A light breeze stirred the bell-shaped blue flowers that cloaked the hill to its crest a couple hundred meters north. It blew out of the east and smelled of the flowers’ faint perfume and green growth. The fragrance was as soothing and pretty as the scene.

“That’ll change, soon enough,” Rob Korrigan muttered to himself.

Beside him Little Nell shifted from foot to foot. He wasn’t sure whether that was because she was picking up the tension among the hundred or so men and women Karyl had spread out under cover of the shoulder-high growth at the edge of the forest between them and the derelict village, or from the fact that her archnemesis Asal stood browsing for tasty shoots just a few meters away.

Karyl and Rob stood between their saddled mounts, just inside the screen of brush. Without glancing Rob’s way, Karyl nodded. He knew what Rob meant. And he knew even better than Rob how ghastly true that was.

He held his hornbow in both hands before him, and stood gazing straight ahead as if he could see what was happening.

And like enough he can,
Rob thought.
He knows this song as well as I. Better.

The Providence army’s cheering had been met with first scattered cries and then a hoarse distant shout as soon as they hit the hillcrest. The Providentials’ voices had merged with those of the lead Cr
è
ve Coeur element into an inchoate chorus. Now the clamor rose an octave. Trumpets blared.

A muscle at the edge of Karyl’s jaw twitched. Screams shot up like startled fliers.

Well away to the left, a mounted quartet appeared. They rode their three horses and tan-ruffed russet strider not at a panic run, but at an easy lope. They were some of Rob’s scouts, not fleeing but doing their jobs.

He looked at Karyl. Karyl nodded.

“It won’t make any difference if the Brokenhearts realize we’re here,” he said.

Rob put fingers in his mouth and emitted a shrill whistle. The horses’ ears perked up. The four turned their mounts and clucked them into a gallop toward where the forest met the road.

On the road a single beast crossed the summit, heading their way. It was Yannic’s green strider, riderless, its golden ruff distended, running as fast as its long legs could pump. Its toothless beak was open in a cry unheard for the greater tumult of pain and fear rising behind it. Rob was interested to note it still hadn’t shat itself out.

The scouts drew rein near Rob and Karyl’s hiding place.

“It went like the captain said,” said Gilles, a rare townsman among the light riders, whose black hair clung lankly to his skull at all times, not just in the heat. “The whole army started to falter the moment they saw the first Brokenhearts crest the next hill.”

“Rangers,” said the strider rider, a woodcutter’s daughter named Fran
ç
oise who hailed from this very region. “Guilli let them trot ahead to find the game for the lords.”

“Who showed up to hunt quick enough,” Gilles said. “Our own noble masters rode straight ahead, never even looking around to see they’d left the foot behind. We only saw five Brokenheart war-duckbills, and maybe twenty-five horse. But they were enough to swamp the town and country lords. Baron Isma
ë
l was unseated promptly by a pair of knights riding morions. A sackbut rode Stalk-Neck Percil down straightaway and squashed him.”

“It crushed his great black charger too,” said Marie, a farm girl who was sturdily built for a light rider. She had black hair done up in ringed pigtails to either side of her head and a gap in her top teeth. “That was terrible.”

“We reckoned we’d seen enough then,” Gilles said, “and came back to report.”

“Any sign of Longeau?” asked Karyl, to Rob’s bafflement. The scouts shook their heads.

It struck Rob that he clearly recalled seeing Councilor Cuget riding off all full of vainglory with the three town lords, and the pair of barons following on their monstrous mounts. But he could not recall seeing so much as a feather from Longeau’s downy tail after he finished his spew of rousing piffle.

Ah well,
he thought
, that’s not a one I care to remember. Even compared to that treacherous toad Melchor.…

“You’ve done your jobs,” Rob told his riders. “Fade back into the woods and rest your mounts.”

The scouts laughed. “They’re just knights,” said Marie. “Their beasts are fat and slow. Can’t we give them a hard time?”

For emphasis she brandished a feathered twist-dart with its thong of strider hide wound around its meter-long shaft, to give it spin when cast from a spear-thrower.

“Go ahead,” Rob said. Then he let his eyes slide sideways to Karyl. Karyl’s neatly bearded chin dipped once, which made Rob feel warm inside like a gulp of brandy.

The scouts rode away to the right, so they could sting the pursuers’ eastern flanks. The terrified strider ran right up the road past the defenders, still squalling cacophonously.

To the right—east—of the road, a lone man topped the blue-flowered hill. He ran in great ground-eating bounds the way the strider had, despite the tails of his mail hauberk slapping like lead weights at his legs. A household soldier, Yannic’s man by the arms on his tunic, he had thrown away shield and weapons alike in his frenzy to escape.

Next came a few clots of men. And then the army of Providence, in one great wave of fear.

“Steady,” Karyl called to his small, concealed force. They were woods-runners, dismounted scouts, volunteers who had chosen to defy their hereditary overlords. Most had bows, though some carried spears, axes, or swords and bucklers from the town armory. To Rob’s surprise, even a handful of armored house-archers and house-shields had opted to remain with Karyl. Rob honestly didn’t know whether cowardice or courage motivated them.

Karyl had spaced them far enough apart to allow their fleeing comrades to pass freely between them, although he expected the bulk of the routed to choose the road’s quicker path.

“Stay out of sight until I give the word. All our lives depend on you.”

Rob vented a long sigh. “You were right all along,” he said to Karyl. “Courage
is
overvalued. It betrayed them all. They let it drag them off to die for the unworthy. Just as you said it would.”

“But at least they won’t let it lead them astray so easily, next time.”

Rob had to bite down hard on the obvious rejoinder that
next time
appeared to be in no good prospect.

Ah, but isn’t that what we’re all about here, with even Ma Korrigan’s son getting ready to face off with mounted and armored knights, contrary to all good sense and prior practice? To make a next time?

As the broken army swept down the slope toward the woods, a horseman appeared, already among them. He speared a running man through the back as casually as he might a fallen leaf off the forest floor. The mountainous forms of war-hadrosaurs rose over the crest. They rolled down like a living avalanche, crushing men like flowers.

The Brokenheart nobles’ arrogance made Rob’s blood burn in his veins like lye. Most riders wore helmets without visors; those who had them didn’t deign to close them. They were prepared not for battle but for slaughter: for an encounter that would involve at most a short, sharp shock, and then panicked flight. They anticipated that Providence’s defenders would have their hearts and taste for glory crushed in their torsos at the first sight of armored men on horses, let alone three-tonne dinosaurs, and would run before their enemies got within shortbow shot of them.

Which had happened.

As Karyl surely knew it would, if the army he had so carefully grown and nurtured with the care of an actual master gardener tried to fight the battle the town lords wanted to lead it into. Even though those who had fought with him in the ambush at Whispering Woods knew something most commoners did not—that even a high-and-mighty dinosaur knight could be pulled off his high-and-mighty dinosaur and done to brutal death by the meanest hands—they were in no way prepared for the emotional shock of facing such knights in the middle of open ground, with nothing but air and flowers to keep their powerful mounts from grinding them to screaming paste.

Still, Rob couldn’t help but feel almost as much disgust as fear as the mobile massacre rolled toward him.
This is nothing more than Count Guilli’s advance guard,
he thought.
Were any of us—even the great captain, Karyl—any less daft than Longeau and that lot to think we stood any chance against them?

“We have to help them!” Ga
é
tan cried. Rob could clearly see him sitting astride Zhubin, behind the screen of bushes on the other side of the road.

“Stand where you are and use your bow, and you will,” Karyl said.

“But they’re being slaughtered!’

Rob laughed harshly. “So why add your futile blood to theirs? Some bleed, all run; now’s when all the murder’s done. When men flee like bouncers but less expertly, and more easily ridden down from behind.”

“Poetic,” Karyl said. “But accurate, withal.”

He swung aboard Asal and held up his hornbow. “So we’ll cover our friends’ flight with flights of our own.”

Ga
é
tan’s eyes blazed. Tears gleamed on his cheeks. But he nodded, as if slamming his forehead into a wall.

It’s a shocking bad idea,
Rob thought,
but except for abandoning all and getting out while we can, it’s the best of a bad lot. Or so I suppose, not being the great captain here.

The first refugees reached the woods. Some crowded together onto the road, seeking the swiftest possible escape from the death that pursued them. Most just ran straight ahead, taking the most direct route away from their pursuit.

The distinctive towhead of Lucas the painter turned sword prodigy appeared over the rise to the left of the road, followed quickly by the rest of him. Though he ran with the rest, having little choice if he didn’t want to be summarily ridden down, he still carried his longsword. Most of the routed men had jettisoned their arms and such armor as they could easily detach on the run, to speed them on their way.

Maybe he saw Karyl mount his mare. Maybe he simply knew the master he’d turned his back on would be just inside those woods, watching and waiting. Because just a few meters down the slope he stopped and turned to face his pursuers.

He reversed his longsword, gripping it with both hands near the tip. Rob knew the meter and a half blade wasn’t honed to shaving sharpness, and that this was why: so it could be safely grasped. Though Rob wouldn’t have wanted to do so barehanded as Lucas did. Any more than he’d care to stop and stand in the open with a blood-bent knight sure to bear down on him at any moment.

One did. Rob could see his bearded face laughing in his open helmet. He carried no shield, and held his spear with its bloody point to the clouds, clearly expecting to have to ride farther before he made another kill.

Lucas swung the sword like an axe and caught the knight full in the face with the cross-shaped hilt. Of all the heinous things a body could do with a longsword, that was the one that men called the “murder-stroke.”

The Brokenheart’s face exploded in red. He flopped backward over his courser’s croup. Lucas turned around to Karyl, whom he knew waited in the woods, and brandished his sword triumphantly over his head.

“You fool!” Karyl shouted. “Guard yourself!”

The head of a spear stood suddenly out from the young man’s chest as another horseman loomed up behind.

Lucas stretched an agonized hand toward Rob and Karyl. He opened his mouth. All that came out was a torrent of blood, shining in the cloud-filtered sun. He fell forward among the blue flowers he’d never get the chance to paint.

The horseman let go the spear and drew an arming-sword as he rode over Lucas’s prostrate form. Rob glanced at Karyl. Behind his beard Karyl’s face was hard and white as bone as he drew an arrow back with his left thumb. The recurved bow of Triceratops horn droned deep as he let go.

Rob whipped his head left to see it avenge Karyl’s wayward sword-apprentice. Instead it struck through both scarlet and blue cheeks of a magnificently brindled sackbut. The nearest of the Cr
è
ve Coeur war-duckbills, it had turned its head to the side for some reason at just that instant.

Rob’s astonishment that Karyl had shot something other than Lucas’s killer was almost overridden by amazement that he had missed the monster’s eye. Of course, it would have taken a master Anglysh longbowman to make such a shot, and never mounted; but Rob trusted Karyl, Ovda-trained, to do it.
Has grief gotten the better of his aim?
he wondered.

Across the now-crowded roadway Ga
é
tan’s bow boomed as if to echo Karyl’s. The Brokenheart who had speared Lucas was raising his sword over his shoulder to strike down another fleeing Providential. It was as if the motion carried him on backward out of his saddle—but for the fact that Rob’s eye had just registered the young merchant’s arrow smashing through the center of his forehead, just below his helmet-rim.

Blatting shrill distress, the Parasaurolophus Karyl had shot turned and bolted back the way it had come. Two more Cr
è
ve Coeur monsters followed closely behind to either side. The wounded sackbut slammed keel-to-keel into the halberd-crest following to its right. Both dinosaurs went down in a thrashing, musically discordant chaos of limbs, vast bodies, and massive tails. Their cries could not drown out the agonized bellow of the Lambeosaurus’s rider as their combined mass crushed him like a cherry.

Rob’s eyes widened. Karyl’s aim had been as true as his mind was clear. That shot had been neither accident nor mistake.

Off to his left Melchor rode into the woods. Though his marchador’s ears were pinned and fear-foam trailed from its mouth, it kept up the steady fast-walking pace it was trained to that gave it its name. The beast must be sturdy indeed to keep up its amble despite carrying an ashen-faced Yannic as well as its stout owner.