The Dinosaur Knights (40 page)

“Where did they all come from?” her brother asked.

Rob snapped his fingers. “The north! That's why Karyl's cousin reported it seemed so deserted—and why my woods-runners saw bale-fires, and wouldn't go there.” He cut off, frowning. “But the north's sparsely populated. Where'd Raguel go and get a thousand Crusaders?”

“I'm no betting man,” Karyl said, “but I'll wager there's not a living soul between Providence town and the passes.”

“So they're all dead,” Rob said. “Or signed on with this bloody Angel.”

“So the evidence suggests,” said Karyl. He shook his head and sighed.

“I see no doubt,” he announced to the crowd at large. “A Grey Angel Crusade has broken out in our very own dooryard.”

“Then let's march on the town and clear them out!” someone yelled. Others shouted aye! Still others muttered nervously of sorcery and blasphemy.

“The townspeople are joining Raguel too,” Melodía said. “Those who don't they kill. Horribly.”

“So what?” the militant voice cried. Rob craned to see who spoke. But the man stayed lost in numbers and darkness. “Even if they recruit a thousand out of Providence town, we still outnumber them.”

Then it came to Rob. “And we've got dinosaurs,” he said. To his mind that settled it.

For Gaétan too, apparently. He whipped out his sword and brandished it high. Its blade seemed to catch fire.

“That's enough for me!” he cried. “I'm for going back and recapturing the town! Who's with me?”

Before anyone could offer, Karyl said, “And they've got a Grey Angel.” Not loudly; but his words carried.

Gaétan froze.

“How do you fight a Grey Angel?” Karyl asked, his voice still quiet and penetrant as an arrow. “With any chance of winning, I mean? If you think you know how, Gaétan, I surrender command of the army to you on the instant, and shall follow and eagerly learn.”

The tip of Gaétan's sword crunched in the dirt. He hung his head. “I'm sorry, Colonel. I wasn't thinking.”

“Then gather your wits and start,” Karyl said, not unkindly. “We need you, and we need you sharp. We need everybody.”

He turned to the onlookers. “If we weren't halfway ready to take the road we'd be doomed,” he said. “Take this lesson to heart: sometimes it truly is better to be lucky than good. We march on the hour. Anybody or anything not ready to move then will be left to the horde.”

“The horde?” someone asked.

“Did you not hear this woman then, when she rode into camp all in a fuss?” Rob said. “She called out, ‘They're coming!' Who do you think she meant, you great git?”

But he looked to Karyl in concern. “We've wounded in the infirmary,” he said. Practice, drill, and simple camp routine caused their share of injuries. Anytime you mixed people with big, strong, volatile animals like horses—to say nothing of dinosaurs—they got hurt.

“Load them in wagons,” Karyl replied. “Dump food if you have to. There'll be plenty of game and forage along the route, anyway.”

“Our route where?” Rob asked.

“South.”

“Toward Métairie Brulée?” Rob exclaimed.

“Toward the Imperial Army?” Melodía yelped.

“There's at least a chance we can pass through Métairie Brulée without fighting,” Karyl said. “And if we have to fight, I like our chances with Célestine's army better than Raúl's. As for the Imperials, the facts remain the same: they're far. The Angel and his horde are near. And if the Impies are marching to forestall a Grey Angel Crusade—well, they're too late now. Perhaps they'll turn back.”

“You don't know my father,” Melodía said.

“Better than you might think,” Karyl said.

“But what about Count Raúl?” asked Eamonn Copper. Rob hadn't seen him come up. Drink blurred the edges of his words but his eyes were clear. He'll not let a little thing like having a load aboard impair him, thought Rob, good Ayrishmuhn that he is.

“Castaña?” Karyl barked a laugh. “He's Raguel's problem now. May they find great pleasure in getting to know each other.”

Then turning at a fresh commotion, he said, “What's this?”

It was a party of jinetes. Rob recognized the picket he'd set to watch in the woods west across the Imperial High Road. They surrounded a rider who wasn't of their troop, who had a flag-bright burn across his face. To Rob's amazement a woods-runner rode beside him. The woods-runners were willing enough to ride pillion with the light-horse, but most insisted they couldn't learn to manage the “great ungainly beasts” themselves.

“They crossed the Lisette last night,” the wounded horseman reported, swinging down from the saddle to dump a proffered duckbill-leather bucket of water over his head.

“Who?” Rob demanded. “Not the Crève Coeur army, surely?”

“No army,” the rider said. “Not like any I've seen.”

“Mad things,” said the woods-runner, who had dismounted with evident relief and moved smartly away from the horse as if unwilling to acknowledge the association. “Evil. Like dead men walking. And women, and children. With no more fear to them than logs.”

“You couldn't stop them with your bows?” Rob asked.

“There were more of them than we had arrows,” the woods-runner said. “More than there are arrows, maybe. They seemed more numerous than the wood's very trees. And the way they treat those who fall into their hands alive makes Count Guilli's Rangers seem like Maia's Mothers of Mercy.”

“So that's what the Council's missionaries have really been up to in Crève Coeur,” Karyl said in disgust. “Assembling their own Grey Angel horde.”

“But how could they …
compel
the Brokenhearts, without an Angel's powers?” Rob asked.

“Maybe Raguel visited them himself,” Melodía said.

“But it took these men a day's hard ride to get here on horseback!”

“And that awful thing had legs almost as long as I am tall! Who knows how fast it can walk? Or run?”

“Who knows if he needs to run?” someone else shouted. “He's a Grey Angel!”

“I don't care how he did it,” Karyl said. “Or how the horde was raised. The fact is: it's raised. It's about to be here. Our only choice now is flight.”

“But isn't it our duty to submit to the Grey Angel's will?” a man's voice sobbed from the dark. “They are the Creators' own avengers!”

Karyl gestured in the direction of the town. “Be my guest,” he said. “I'm not ready either to become a mindless thing, or a corpse.”

The silence that answered was eloquent.

Karyl turned to Melodía. “Are you up to leading your light-horse in a rear-guard action? It will be dangerous. It will also be key to our army's survival.”

*   *   *

Melodía's throat seized up. Her pulse hammered.
Face Raguel? Again? I can't!

She wanted to fall to her knees and beg Karyl to spare her. Even kill her on the spot. Anything but face that horror a third time.

Instead she caught herself on the verge of toppling over.
I'm hyperventilating
, she thought. She forced herself to draw a deep if ragged breath from her diaphragm.

It gave her a little of her mind back.
I wanted to have
consequence, she reminded herself.
I wanted to make a difference in the world. How can I do that, if I give into my fears? Even fear this great?

“I—” She swallowed. “I'm willing.”

“Very well.” Karyl nodded. “Get your troop together and ride north as soon as you can to screen our retreat. With your permission, Master Rob.”

*   *   *

“But that means fighting our employer!” Rob exclaimed.

All around them men and women rushed this way and that, carrying out assignments barked by their superiors. In the torchlight Karyl's smile could have looked no more ghastly had his mouth been filled with blood.

“I'm surprised a dinosaur master as seasoned as you forgets the Mercenary's Second Rule.”

“And what might that be?”

“When your employer turns on you, the contract's canceled. Of course.”

He turned away. Feeling a jongleur's professional awareness of playing the straight man, Rob called after him, “But what's the Mercenary's First Rule?”

Karyl looked back. It looked as if every nightmare that had wakened him screaming on the road and in the first months in Providence, the night-terrors that went away once campaigning began in earnest, had all come back on him at once like a cloud of corpse-ripping fliers.

“They always turn on you,” he said. “As I was taught at Gunters Moll.”

Chapter 31

Jinete
, Light-rider
—Skirmishers and scouts, often women, who ride horses and striders. They wear no armor, or at most a light nosehorn-leather jerkin, with sometimes a leather or metal cap. They use javelins or feathered twist-darts, and a sword. Some also carry a light lance and a buckler. A few shoot shortbows or light crossbows, but mounted archery is very difficult, and not much practiced in Nuevaropa.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

“Don't get your weapons stuck in an enemy,” Melodía told her jinetes in the cool and pregnant dark. “Edge over point. If you have to thrust with sword or lance, don't be afraid to let it go. You can replace a weapon easier than you can replace you.”

They were mustered in the Séverin farmhouse foreyard beside the elevated Imperial Road. Volunteers had swelled her troop to nearly fifty. But they were all she had to stall whatever awfulness was coming, and give the army time to get underway.

“Use your darts and javelins when you can. That's why you have them; that's why the Colonel sent a whole wagonload more along with us. Questions?”

“None,” called out Valérie, her lieutenant and now best friend. Slender, deceptively delicate-looking, Valérie was a town girl of some means who joined up after the first successful ambush looking for adventure and had distinguished herself in action. She was popular, and could easily have been elected troop-commander. But she preferred to play second-in-command.

Melodía drew sword and signaled the advance. The jinetes followed her across the ditch, whose weedy bottom already ran in a trickle from the rain that had begun to spit down intermittently, then up the berm onto the roadway. Turning right to tunk across a plank bridge over the stream that angled through camp they set out north at the trot.

Providence town burned. In places orange flames shot higher than the peaked roofs. Smoke rolled up to meld with forge-hued clouds. Melodía imagined she heard screaming.

I hope it's my imagination
, she thought.

Half a kilometer up the Chausée Imperial, they met a hundred refugees streaming south. Grey-faced in diffuse light of stars and Eris and reflected fire-glow, gasping in their terror and fatigue, most carried nothing but the clothes on their backs. Without need for orders the troop split to either side of the road, flowing back together when they passed the dispirited gaggle.

Halfway to town the road climbed a long, slow hill. Hellish yellow glow silhouetted a wagon piled high with household goods, drawn by a single plodding nosehorn. Melodía signaled her riders to go slow. Karyl had ordered that refugees be allowed to join the army if they agreed to follow instructions—and showed no signs of Raguel's madness. She wasn't sure that was wise. But it wasn't her problem; she put it from her mind.

Then she saw that shadow figures swarmed over the wagon to grapple with people perched atop the cargo-mound. A woman ran toward them, eyes wild, smock ripped to bare a swinging breast, pleading for help. Her cries rose to wordless shrieking as she was tackled to the pumice from behind.

“They're here!” Melodía shouted, thankful that tedious years of singing-lessons by a fussy, overly perfumed Taliano had taught her to project her voice like a brass trumpet. “Troop, skirmish forward!”

She charged on Meravellosa, lashing out with her talwar. She used the curved blade's flat to beat back the people piling onto the fallen woman. But although in her excitement, and with her height advantage, she struck so hard it hurt her whole arm and shoulder, her blows did no more than momentarily distract the attackers.

Even as she'd ridden out of Providence town with a bloody-faced and moaning Jeannette behind—was it really just an hour before?—Melodía wondered if she could bring herself to kill members of the Grey Angel horde. The man she had fought in the valley of the Laughing Water was a professional warrior, and a raider to boot—no more than a violent criminal, really. Although once she would have thought him nothing worse than a member of her own class who exercised his privileges to excess; maybe she would've nodded with appropriately furrowed brow as Josefina Serena wept for his cruelty.