The Dinosaur Lords (6 page)
“You’ve no time at all, Lord Karyl,” she said. “But each conversation with the doomed, however brief, expands my knowledge.”
“We’re born in pain and trepidation. It seems we die the same way, although for some unfathomable reason I’ve yet to learn for sure. We like to imagine we can live in some different state. Whether that’s illusion, I know no more than you.”
“You’re eloquent for a man in your condition. The tales told of you seem true.”
He waved dismissal with the broken sword. “Whatever they say, they’re all lies now.”
She floated toward him, her legs not stirring the hem of her robe. A white blanket of mist hid her feet. The cowl tilted up toward his face.
Inside he could see nothing but blackness.
“Ah, Karyl Vladevich,” she said. “You have done deeds that shook the Tyrant’s Head, and may yet reverberate across Aphrodite Terra and all the wide world. I had such hopes for you.”
“No doubt I’ve disappointed many people,” he said. “I fear I’ve gotten many killed. I don’t think I want my memories back. Even if you offered me something for sharing them.”
“I can give you nothing. It would disturb Equilibrium.”
“The sacred Order of the World,” he recited like a catechism. It
was
, he realized. His lips twisted in a savage smile. “We can’t have that.”
She raised sleeve-shrouded arms as if to touch his face. Irrationally he recoiled.
“There’s something about you—” She stopped, shook her head: an oddly peevish gesture for a mythical being. “No. It can’t be. You will soon be dead to stay, and so will end the saga of Karyl of the Misty March.”
It was only then he realized she’d spoken his Slavo all along, not Spa
ñ
ol, his native tongue, though her accent was that of a Rus, rather than his
Č
e
š
i people.
From the thickening mists came a chilling sound: a drawn-out ululation.
“They come with dogs to smell you out, Lord Karyl,” she said. He thought he heard a note of sadness in her voice. Or maybe wistfulness. “And horrors to take you.”
“Who?”
“Your murderers.”
He looked over his shoulder. Panic boiled up inside him as a second hound gave tongue. Beneath it he detected the chirps and snarling of the real killers, the raptor-pack who followed the dogs.
“Now I find that, though I thought my life already forfeit,” he said bitterly, “my body still doesn’t want to let it go. Am I to be spared nothing?”
She said nothing, just slowly backed away.
“Help me.”
She spread sleeves that still hid her hands. “I cannot.”
Left and right he whipped his head, seeking some road to safety. His heart fluttered like a netted bug-chaser. He vibrated with the need to flee. He hated the fear. Yet he couldn’t still it.
He glared at her. “Cannot or will not?”
“They are the same. Good-bye, Lord Karyl. May your death be swift and painless.”
“Doubtful,” he said through peeled-back lips. “Can’t you see the future?”
“If I could, would I have troubled you? Now run, my lord. Or die here. Whatever will ease your final moments, do.”
She turned and glided up the slope to the broadleaf trees thronging the ridgeline that paralleled the river. He knew their tantalizing shelter was a lie: his pursuers would be on him before he could hide among them.
Driven as hard now by defiance as dread, he fled east. He ran without hope, and only pain for a companion. His brain bubbled with images: of childhood, lost friends, long travel in exotic lands.
And
war
. Always war.
* * *
They caught him as he ran out of world.
Two kilometers east of the battlefield the ground simply dropped away. Three hundred sheer meters below, the inland sea called the Tyrant’s Eye lay hidden beneath a rumpled grey-white plain of clouds that seemed to extend from the Cliffs of the Eye.
He mastered the temptation to keep running.
Panting from his flight, sword-stub upraised in his left hand, he turned at bay beside a clump of scrub oak. A whistle caused the pair of grey-brown dogs with wrinkled faces and great dangling dewlaps streaming froth that loped in close pursuit to veer aside. Dark eyes rimmed with scarlet veins burned with resentment at being denied the kill.
But they did as they were trained. The brightly feathered death that ran behind would rend them as eagerly as their prey. When their hunters’ blood blazed with the hot joy of the chase, the raptors could only just be restrained from turning on one another.
Eight green horrors trotted into view on strong hind legs, the big killing-claws on their feet daintily upraised. Deinonychus: the biggest and worst of Nuevaropa’s pack-predators. Thus beloved of the nobility, who kept them to hunt men as well as beasts.
Pampered in some lord’s kennel, the three-meter-long killers had gotten their spring plumage early. Their upper feathers were a brilliant green with yellow highlights, their breasts buff streaked with brown. The crests on their narrow skulls were shiny black, as were brow-stripes above staring yellow eyes. Their muzzles were likewise yellow.
A pair of riders followed the pack. A brown-bearded man whose blue, silver, and black tabard, well freighted with belly, proclaimed him a knight straddled a russet great strider with a dainty white feather ruff and silly yellow plume on its small head. It high-stepped in obvious terror of the hunting-pack.
The other man rode a white mule. Taller and leaner than the knight, he wore a ratty cloth yoke to shade his shoulders, greasy loincloth, and beggar’s buskins. His bare legs and wasteland torso were smeared with grime. Beneath greased-back blond hair his face was round yet sparely fleshed, with a brutal beak of a nose.
As they closed in on their quarry, the horrors slowed and began to hiss and sidle. They were as notorious for their cunning as for their cruelty. The sheer cliff at the man’s back helped him: the monsters couldn’t get behind him.
A horror stepped forward and reared to almost the man’s own height, erecting its crest and spreading feathered forelegs wide. Their undersides were shocking scarlet, loud as the challenge the raptor screamed. Its breath stank of death.
A second horror, circling to the man’s right, sprang for him with talons forward and jaws agape. Undistracted by the first one’s display, he sidestepped and hacked off black-clawed toes with a forehand cut. The return stroke gashed open the shrieking green face as the horror flew past. The blade-stump missed the glaring yellow eye, but flooded it in blood.
The creature put its maimed foot down and collapsed. Squalling, it lashed its long tail so violently that the man had to dodge to avoid being knocked off his feet, and possibly the cliff.
The other raptor pounced. The man flowed to meet the attack. Slipping right he sliced the horror’s throat. With a blood-strangled squawk, it stumbled forward over the edge.
The pack chittered furiously. Two had turned to savage their maimed fellow. Behind them, not ten meters from the hunted man, the beak-nosed man sat applauding sardonically on his mule.
“Well done, Lord Karyl,” he said in Alem
á
n. “You bring your legend to its appropriate end. Too bad no one’ll ever hear the tale of your valiant last stand.”
The four horrors not engaged in murdering their injured pack mate hung back, dancing nervously from foot to yellow foot.
“Karyl’s dead,” the man said. The language came readily enough to his tongue. Its gutturals less so to his raw throat.
“That signet ring on your sword hand suggests otherwise. And like the allegedly late voyvod, you’re left-handed, I see.”
The knight’s livery struck forth sudden memory: a midnight-blue helmet, nodding plumes of black, azure, and white. Beside them a curved axe-blade, fast descending.
Then a flash of light, and nothing.
“So the young Duke of Hornberg wants a trophy?” the fugitive rasped.
“No,” the peasant said. “His mother. Or rather, a token that you’re safely dead. It seems she fears you pose a threat to her ambitions for her baby boy. And perhaps she’s right. She was surely wise to send us to make sure of you; you’re as Creator-lost hard to kill as a handroach.”
“Oh, dear,” the fat knight said, as teeth through feathered throat bit off the injured horror’s cries. “His Grace will be most displeased at losing such prime animals, Bergdahl.”
“His Grace will have to buck up,” the commoner said. “Does he think there’ll be no cost if he wants a man like this dead? Or the Dowager Duchess does. And don’t think
she
gives a malformed hatchling what finishing off the Voyvod of the Misty March costs her dear son in playmates.”
“I hate to kill a man’s pets,” the man said. “Call them off and come face me yourself, Mor Lard Tub.”
“We have
explicit
instructions—” the knight gobbled.
“Not even this hedge knight’s that big a fool,” the commoner said. “Kill all you can. More will hatch.”
More pain came, in the form of remembering.
“I’ve died once,” the man said. “I can do it again. If your horrors take me my one regret is not avenging Count Jaume’s treachery.”
“Life’s full of disappointments, my lord,” the peasant said.
Lagging behind his swift-footed pack and mounted betters, a stout, balding huntsman with Duke Falk’s black toothed-falcon insignia painted on his hornface-hide tunic came puffing up. He whipped the two horrors still squabbling over their comrade’s corpse back to duty.
Joined by a third they rushed their prey. Two more swung wide to his left to catch him like a soldier-ant’s pincers.
He charged them. His blade split one’s skull. It grated free to chop almost through the forelimb the second reached with to grab him.
Midleap the horror twisted to snap at him. He dodged. The raptor fell among the three lunging from the right and bowled them into a spitting, tail-whipping tangle.
The man ran right at the two riders. Instead of going for the sword hanging from his baldric, the fat knight froze, bearded chins trembling. The commoner merely laughed as if this were the world’s finest joke, and would only be made sweeter were he cut down by a naked man with a broken sword.
But one pack-hunter had hung back. It leapt. Raptor hit man, chest to chest. Lightly built though it was, the horror was as heavy as he. Its momentum drove him back. He punched at it with both fists, trying to fend off the killing-claws slashing at his exposed belly and genitals.
The creature struck like an adder. Sharp teeth snapped shut on the man’s sword arm just above the wrist, crunching through muscle and bone to meet with a clack. Pain shot through him like lightning.
Still gripping the broken sword, the man’s hand flew as if propelled by a blood-jet to land on bare white soil half a meter from the edge. The voyvod’s signet glinted mockery on a twitching finger.
“Well, that’s more luck than we deserve,” the commoner said.
Clutching his feathered assassin to him with his last hand, the man toppled backward into the void.
Trood
ó
n, Tr
ö
odon
—
Troodon formosus.
Pack-predator raptor; 2.5 meters long, 50 kilograms. Sometimes imported to Nuevaropa as pets or hunting beasts. Like ferrets, tröodons are clever, loyal, and given to mischief. Vengeful if abused.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
THE EMPIRE OF NUEVAROPA, SPAÑA, PRINCIPALITY OF THE TYRANT’S JAW, LA MERCED, PALACE OF THE FIREFLIES
“—
y con alma tuya, hermano
,” the hooded man replied to a hushed greeting from an acolyte he encountered in the gallery that ran along the north wing of the Palacio de las Luci
é
rnagas.
They went their opposite ways. Morning sunlight shone through piercings in fanciful floral shapes carved in the outer wall. On the practice-ground a story below, the Scarlet Tyrants—Imperial bodyguards—contended with a clatter of wooden swords and shields.
The man in the cowl had no name that mattered. He was consecrated to life as a
what
, not a
who
. He wasn’t tall. He wasn’t short. He was neither wide nor narrow. The skin on his hands and within his hood’s recesses was sun-browned olive. His eyebrows were black laced with grey, his eyes dark. He looked like many men in Spa
ñ
a, the southernmost realm of the Tyrant’s Head.
He wore the brown robe of the Kindred of Torrey, with that Creator’s trigram embroidered in yellow on the breast: a solid line with two broken lines beneath it. The current Emperor was well known for piety far beyond what his office required. Men and women of all sects’ cloth were common here.
Altogether, the hooded friar was as unremarkable as craft could make him.
Leaving the loggia, he passed into cool interior and turned into a stairwell. To his right was a nook on whose back wall was painted a fading, peeling scene of black Lanza, the Creator most identified with war, defeating a swarm of misshapen hada during the High Holy War. It concealed a door that opened only in response to a knowing touch.