The Dinosaur Lords (60 page)

But Rob’s retaliation was already humming down in furious overhand. Wanda hit the helmet just to Rob’s left of its low crest, split steel and skull clear to an astonished green eye.

A shock almost as great as the physical one that traveled up his arm punched Rob from inside to out.
I killed a knight!
he realized. Exultation and revulsion alike surged in him. He felt a sense of soaring triumph—and of having committed a profanation.

But he let none of that stick him immobile. That would kill him just as dead, and just as fast. This wasn’t the first man he’d slain. Just the first noble. Though he would surely see that wide eye staring at him in his dreams as blood flooded it, he knew. If he lived, of course.

But to do that he must first free his axe, which was stuck tight in the young fool’s head.

Hollering wordlessly, with outright panic rumbling like lava from his belly both ways, Rob drove Nell against the horse’s shoulder. Raising a boot from his stirrup, he put it against the rider’s mailed chest to brace the flaccid corpse and yanked the axe free with a spasm of effort.

Another spear hit him in the back. This one actually went through the tough, pebbled nodosaur hide to sting his left shoulder blade.

Nell’s turn widdershins was perceptibly slower. The spearman opted to pull out his spear as he danced his horse back away from the big swinging head and brutal down-hooked horn. But another Brokenheart closed in from Rob’s right. His arming-sword had already begun the stroke that might or might not sweep Rob’s head from his short, thick neck, but would most certainly kill him.

Giving his last, best, futile effort to bring his axe around in time to knock the sword astray, Rob saw something flicker down over the rider’s wide, dark eyes and sadistic grin. Then the knight whipped right backward over his saddle’s high cantle. Beyond his horse’s speckled white rump, Rob caught a glimpse of the Providential farm youth who had noosed the Brokenheart ’round the neck with a catchpole. He grinned even wider than the knight had as he hauled his catch thrashing down into the brush and out of sight.

No enemies remained in view to Rob’s left, down the forest road. All he saw that way was the backs of the last of the routed army. He turned a now-wheezing Nell clockwise once more.

A spear darted for his face. He knocked it half a meter past his right cheek with his shield rim. Then he lowered the round shield, just enough to see over the top.

He faced a trio of horsemen, right where the trees began to close in over the road. His heart dipped momentarily as beyond them he saw still more riding strung out down the blue-clad slope toward the woods. They ignored the darts and javelins flung at them by the handful of mounted scouts who buzzed around their flanks to the left and right as thoroughly as they did their taunts.

Despite the way his vision kept trying to tighten into a tunnel, Rob caught motion in his right eye’s corner. Karyl was out of the trees and riding toward him with sword drawn.

A Brokenheart veered to charge him. The flat of Karyl’s blade guided his overhand sword cut safely by. As the horses passed each other, Karyl took a flawless forehand draw–stroke across the knight’s throat, cutting to bone and sliding slickly out without getting bound in meat or cartilage.

As before, Karyl didn’t seem to fight. He
killed
, with the efficient inevitability of watermill’s grinding, and yet with a horror’s unsettling liquid grace as well.

The marauder who’d speared Rob circled left, seeking an opening. A shadow dropped onto him. Above the mailed shoulder, Rob saw the cruel beauty of St
é
phanie’s dagger-sculpted face turned crueler by a snarl as she wrenched the knight’s head sideways. His neck broke with a thick crack.

The other two Brokenhearts turned their horses smartly ’round and spurred back the way they had come.

“The lard butts have fled and left our balls to roast in the sacks!” one shouted to his comrades, speaking of the Cr
è
ve Coeur dinosaur knights.

“Let’s go,” the second called. “There’s no honor and less loot, scrapping with these savages.”

Some of the approaching horsemen turned back. Others faltered, slowing their mounts to a trot.

To Rob’s unalloyed horror, a dinosaur rose up from behind the hill beyond them. It was black, its chest and belly crimson shading to gold. As it stopped at the crest and dropped to all fours, Rob saw its rider wore clear-enameled armor. His shield was also black, painted with a yellow figure Rob couldn’t make out at this range. A black-and-gold pennon streamed from the tip of the lance he carried upright with its butt in its leather cup by his stirrup.

“Salvateur,” said Fran
ç
oise, emerging from the undergrowth to Rob’s right on her strider.

“And that’s us right fucked, then,” Rob said as trumpets blared and mailed infantry with spears and round shields spread out to either side of the enemy commander.

But instead of charging at the fanfare, the Brokenhearts who were still riding toward the forest turned back.

“That’s the recall!” somebody cried from the brush. A cheer went up.

Salvateur’s voice boomed out like the challenge of a rutting nosehorn bull. Rob couldn’t make out the words, but he got the distinct impression the Baron was roundly ranking out his knights for riding themselves into a trap to no good end.

The basso thrum of Karyl’s hornbow from Rob’s right startled him. He resisted the urge to glance aside, and kept eyes fixed on Salvateur.

The Baron raised his shield. Rob could see the quiver of motion as the arrow stuck in the middle of it.

The spearmen started downslope at a careful walk, shields high.

“Nice warning shot,” Rob said.

But Karyl frowned. Rob recognized that barely visible brow-furrow signified what in a normal human being would be scowling, shouting, beard-tearing rage—that last being a thing Rob had often heard of, but never actually witnessed and would pay good gold to do so. Or at least silver.

“I shot to kill,” Karyl said. “A competent captain who has Guilli’s ear is as deadly to us as a hundred dinosaur knights.”

Karyl’s scratch defensive force was still shouting triumphantly, and even hurling catcalls at the advancing but still-distant house-shields.

Surging relief flashed over into anger inside Rob. “What are you cheering about, you gits?” he shouted. “We still lost the battle! And barely touched Guilli’s army, which will be on our necks while you’re still applauding your fool selves!”

“You did well,” Karyl called to those who’d stood with him. “And Master Korrigan’s right: we’ve still got a fleeing army to protect. Fall back, keep to cover, and get ready to ambush the enemy if the pursuit picks up again.”

Emeric stepped out on the road. From the commotion coming from the underbrush, Rob gathered that a few Brokenheart knights were still in the process of dying, and not as expeditiously as they’d like. He didn’t much care. The woods-runners were especially vindictive toward their tormentors; Emeric himself showed little appetite for that sort of thing, preferring to leave the more protracted forms of vengeance-taking to his sister. But few in Providence had much love for Count Guillaume’s armored reavers.

“What about the wounded?” the woods-runner asked.

“Help those who can walk,” Karyl said. “Leave the rest.”

Emeric nodded and faded into the woods.

“What?” Rob demanded in disbelief. “There must be fifty of our people still out there! And Lanza alone knows how many more over that hill.”

“We can’t retrieve them,” Karyl said. “And we can’t carry them. They’d slow us down too much. Salvateur may pursue us at a more deliberate pace than his vanguard knights did. But he will pursue.”

“But the Brokenhearts will butcher them!”

“They’re lost to us already. We can’t afford to lose still more in a futile attempt to recover them.”

“
What kind of heartless bastard are you?
” Rob screamed the words.

“A commander,” Karyl said. “It’s not my first time to it.”

He looked out across a hillside strewn with writhing bodies, crying out for the help he’d just denied them. A few crawled toward the hopeful shelter of the woods, leaving trails of beautiful blue flowers crushed and stained with gore.

“And in spite of all my efforts, it seems I’ve yet to see my last.”

Chapter
49

Maia, La Madre,
the Mother,
Madre Terra
, Mother Land
—Queen of the Creators:
Kun
☷
(Land)—The Mother. Represents Motherhood, soft power, birth (and death), healing, and Paradise. Also mammals. Known for her compassion. Aspect: beautiful grey-haired matron in brown-and-gold gown, holding a sheaf of wheat in one hand and a sickle in the other. Sacred Animal: horse. Color: brown. Symbol: a wheat sheaf.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

Hunger like a baby horror swallowed live, kicking at the insides of her belly with its tiny killing-claws, roused Shiraa from sleep.

She knew at once what had wakened her. The sweet, sweet scent of the flesh of prey beasts roasting filled her head with intoxication at every breath she took. It was an acquired taste, taught her as a hatchling by her mother. She listened hard and sniffed, ignoring as best she could the delicious odor. She detected no danger nearby—no creature even as big as a half-grown tailless two-leg.

She rose, taking care to make as little noise as possible, and poked her snout cautiously out of the canebrake where she’d sheltered for her nap. The sun was setting to her left. The hills cast lengthy shadows out into the farmlands to the west.

A trickle of smoke, slaty in the twilight, rose above the next hill south. Somewhere unseen, fatties bleated as a herder drove them to their nighttime pens. A stream wound behind the hill, and now above the blandness of upland plants, Shiraa smelled dressed wood and metal and strangely altered animal hides, and the commingled odors of a throng of the tailless ones: all the signs of a settlement.

Training and experience alike taught Shiraa never to seek out contact with the tailless ones without her mother telling her to do so. But in the slowly thickening gloom she could just see, this side of a stand of trees atop the hill, a familiar hooded figure.

She caught, again, the faintest teasing wisp of her mother’s scent.

The Hooded One was not her mother, she somehow knew. Yet it was guiding her, slowly, to where her mother awaited her. She knew that too.

She slipped out of the thicket and down toward the valley.
Eat?
she thought hopefully.

And,
Shiraa lonely.

*   *   *

“All right, contraband!” Abi’s indecently cheerful call was muffled by the cloth and hundreds of kilos of animal dung that covered Melod
í
a and Pilar. “Enough lazing about. Time to be up and doing.”

The two women lay pressed together tightly. Their bamboo tubes, angled up past the canvas to protrude a couple of millimeters from the excrement, had let in enough air to keep them alive. They hadn’t kept crumbled dried dung, and some not so dry, from filtering in with them.

While it was true that herbivore crap didn’t intrinsically smell all that bad, Melod
í
a had forgotten some of it had been scooped up moist from the underground ramp. On the drive through La Merced and up into the hills to the south it had begun to ferment.

Melod
í
a heard a crunching noise. A sudden flood of light made her blink.

“We’ll have you out in no time, D
í
a,” Fina said brightly.

“What are you doing?”

“Digging you out,” Fina said, puffing with effort. “Help is on the way.”

“Help?”

A corner of the canvas was lifted. Melod
í
a found herself looking up at a small head haloed with morning light that glowed through dark-gold dreadlocks.

“Montse?”

“You could make yourself useful too, Melod
í
a,” her sister said, “instead of lying there like a truffle waiting to be rooted out by a fatty.”

“Don’t mind her, D
í
a,” another female voice said. Melod
í
a’s heart jumped again at its sound. She felt dizzy, and not only from the fumes she’d been breathing. “Just sit tight and we’ll have you out in half a mo’.”

Melod
í
a began to squirm free. Pilar helped, mostly by trying to keep dung from falling in their hair and faces. She wasn’t terribly successful.

Lying on the hard wagon bed trying to move and even breathe as little as possible had knotted Melod
í
a’s muscles. Her joints felt solidified. Even though the ride had lasted no more than three-quarters of an hour, most of it across well-maintained city streets and corduroy roads, it had been abundantly bumpy.

Montse peeled back the canvas as weight was shifted off it. Hands pulled Melod
í
a to her feet. Without thinking about it, she turned and bent to help Pilar up as well.