The Dinosaur Knights (41 page)

Instead she'd killed him. And, after her purely physical reflex, felt nothing but justified. She'd dreamed of the confrontation since, to be sure. And in those nightmares seen, not herself killing him, but what he would have done to her and her friends if she hadn't.

But could she kill mere … people? Innocents caught up by an irresistible force?

Then a woman raised a face whose bottom half was masked in blood from her still-screaming victim's back to snarl at Melodía. And suddenly all Melodía could see were the red-dripping muzzles of Count Guillaume's horrors as they ripped her best friend to death.

She slashed the face apart with her backhand, screaming louder than the woman she cut down.

Belatedly remembering her own instructions, Melodía darted Meravellosa ten meters back down the hill. Slamming her Ovdan sword into the pebbled duckbill-leather scabbard hanging from her pommel, she snatched a javelin from a pannier behind her right leg.

The refugee woman's struggles subsided to twitches, and her shrieks to moans. A pool of darkness grew around her quicker than the porous tufa and well-drained roadbed could suck it down. A man stood up from his victim with an air of satisfaction. Melodía flung the javelin into his capacious belly.

Jinetes rode up beside her. A strider, worse-tempered than a horse, squalled rage. A horde member howled as a lightning peck burst his eye in its socket.

Quickly slaughtering the blood-soaked pack, the riders showered darts at the figures who still clung to the wagon like baby sea-scorpions to their three-meter-long mother's back. Melodía hung back to pant for breath. Her body ran with unpleasantly slick sweat inside her fatty-leather jack.

A farm boy named Marc rode up on a bay gelding, carrying a hunting spear. He looked down at the fallen fugitive, then at Melodía. She nodded. Face wrenched by emotion, he drove the spear down hard between the prone woman's shoulder blades. Her limbs and head starfished backward up off the gravel. Then she went limp.

The jinetes regrouped. To Melodía's relief they hadn't lost anybody, and suffered no hurts worse than scratches and bruises. She wished it would last, knew it couldn't.

“The road ahead's clear almost to the outskirts,” Valérie reported. She shook her head, making her braids swing beneath her steel cap. “They—the—the hordelings, they won't run. All we can do is kill them.”

Her voice held a leaden quality to it, not the usual light and bright of a naturally high spirit exalted by the fierce pleasure of fighting deadly danger and winning. Melodía understood.

Melodía's troopers trotted back to the supply wagon to replenish their missiles. Some who had experience with wagon-handling beseeched and bullied the thoroughly terrified nosehorn into dragging the refugee wagon athwart the road, then released it from its harness. With its long tongue the vehicle more than served to block the thoroughfare. It wouldn't stop the horde, especially not afoot—as all the hordelings Melodía had so far seen had been. But her job wasn't to defeat Raguel's host, nor even turn it back. It was to buy time for Providence's army to get away as cleanly as possible. Any slight delay helped.

A couple of riders Melodía detailed to drive the liberated nosehorn back to Séverin farm. Karyl could use every dray beast he could get. She led the rest, panniers filled with fresh darts, north along the High Road toward the glow of a burning town.

*   *   *

A few hundred meters to the east a farmhouse blazed. West by the river flames shot from the top of the old stone water-mill. Melodía hoped all the occupants were safely away.

I wish I could believe it
.

The jinetes were spread out across open country to either side of the Chausée Imperial. The horde had spread out even farther to advance cross-country, over fields and through woods.

A flurry of brief, bloody skirmishes had confirmed what she never doubted: Valérie reported truly. The hordelings, as they had fallen to calling them—wouldn't flee. They showed an almost complete lack of sense of self-preservation or will—except to kill. Most walked at a slow and mindless shamble. Until they spotted prey: then they pounced with the swift savagery of dromaeosaurs.

They might not rout, Melodía and her riders had learned, but they could be discouraged, even stopped. When jinetes stood off from a mob of them and pelted it with darts, it would come apart like a dirt clod in a hard rain. But they soon discovered that not all the Angel's followers lacked volition. They regrouped quickly, and sought ways to bypass her pitifully small blocking force. Some intelligence guided their actions.

That Raguel himself might be near hit Melodía like a gulp of cold sewage: it sickened and chilled her at once. But she kept the panic that yammered and fought like a penned beast to escape and devour her mind under control, by focusing on keeping her people alive.

As many as I can. As long as I can
.

*   *   *

“
Bluhdi Hel!
” Rob Korrigan roared in Anglysh, waving his dinosaur master's axe Wanda for emphasis. Then in the Francés his listeners might actually comprehend: “They're your brothers and sisters, not clotting sacks of grain!”

Soldiers carried wounded from Séverin farm's main house and loaded them aboard a wagon. Its drover had tied bandannas around the eyes of its two yoked nosehorns to keep them from stampeding; as it was they tossed their great-horned snouts in panic and added their bawling to the general pandemonium. Rob knew the need for speed, but the crew was getting a little enthusiastic about slinging the injured into the bed.

Screams rising behind made him turn. A man ran at him across the yard. He wore a leather apron of some sort. Rob's first, mad thought was,
An awfully incautious dyer he must be: not only are his arms stained halfway past the elbows, he's splashed his fool face as well
.

Then he saw the way the man's eyes rolled in his face and his mouth gaped unnaturally wide. He reached hands that were wet with something that definitely wasn't dye for Rob.

His head burst like an overripe melon when Rob slammed his axe both-handed into the side of it.

“Shit,” Rob said. All around him he saw people grappling.

I hope I haven't lost the Short-Haired Horse Captain and her whole troop.
Karyl expected they'd never hold the horde, just delay it as long as they could. Which was exactly this long, it seemed.

He even found himself hoping the Imperial chit had survived. Aye, she had cost him dear; yet she showed promise. And he was no man to take lightly the loss of such a beautiful girl.

He spun and waved his bloody axe in the air. “To arms!” he shouted. “The bastards are upon us.”

To their credit the burly pair handing up a sheet-wrapped woman didn't simply drop her. They did however sling her right past the pair of attendants standing in the wagon-bed—like, yes, a grain sack. Rob hadn't the heart to yell at them.

Nor the breath. He set off at a lumbering run toward the nearest knot of combat.

As if waiting for this moment the rain burst down in torrents. It chilled Rob to the core.
No matter
, he thought.
The work'll warm me, quick enough
. He was more concerned that he'd be fighting in treacherous footing.

Most invaders fought unarmed. The rest sported a bizarre assortment of weapons, from hoes and kitchen knives and crafters' hammers, to swords and halberds likely looted from the arsenal. All attacked amateurishly, but with as much straight-ahead ferocity as any house-shield armored cap-a-pie.

As he came up on the rear of a mob assailing a cart stacked high with casks, Rob saw Karyl. The Colonel stood alone in the midst of a circle of hordelings. Rain streaming down bearded face and bare chest, his single-edged staff-sword in his left hand, staff-sheath in his right, he faced a dozen attackers with his customary battle calm.

Right, then, he's got the blighters just where he wants them
, Rob thought, and began to chop flesh and bone like cordwood.

*   *   *

They fought in driving rain, amidst a black confusion of brush and trees. Chance had set Valérie at Melodía's side. She had lost her helmet. By the scattered, shifting light of a wood-cutter's cot burning off to the right Melodía could see her lieutenant's blond hair was a seaweed mat of blood and sweat. Her features, so pertly pretty Melodía felt pangs of jealousy at times, were smeared with dark muck whose composition Melodía didn't care to guess.

It was all either woman could do to keep her legs clamped around the heaving, rain and sweat-slick barrel of her horse. Melodía's arms felt as if their skin was filled with embers, and every slight motion drove spikes into elbows and shoulders.

Unfortunately, staying alive required constant movement that was anything but slight.

She heard her friend call, “
Sacrée Maia Mère
, it's a little girl! Come here, child.”

As she drew her talwar once more, having exhausted her supply of darts, once more—how many trips she'd made to the steadily retreating wagon, she couldn't count—Melodía saw Valérie urge her chestnut mare several splashing paces forward. Leaning from her saddle, she reached down to a child with long dark hair falling in her face and over the shoulders of a grubby sleeping-shift. She couldn't have been twelve.

The girl grabbed Valérie's wrist with both hands and bit hard on her forearm. She clung single-mindedly as the horsewoman cried out more in surprise than pain.

After the night's exertions the scout lacked strength to pull away. From the brush a swarm of hordelings boiled like flat-nose fliers from a barn loft at sunset, shrilling with blood-hunger. Before Melodía could do more than blink, they engulfed her friend.

Melodía charged Meravellosa into them, slashing with renewed energy. Blood flew at her like reverse black rain. But there were already too many to cut through. More crazed people swarmed to surround Melodía. Dozens of them, faces blood-smeared and contorted, eyes standing out as if grown too big for the sockets.

Even as Valérie's mare sent one flying with a kick that audibly broke his pelvis, the hordelings pulled her down. Somehow she managed to land on her feet, striking out with a fist and the hilt of her arming-sword.

Her blue eyes met Melodía's. She flung out her free hand. “Go!” she shouted. “Get away!”

Melodía faced a choice: die, or do as her doomed friend said. Wheeling Meravellosa about, she hacked her way free. At least there was this: fresh hot tears as well as raindrops cleansed her eyes of spattered blood.

All around her she could hear brush crackling and shouts and screams as her jinetes battled the fresh onslaught. Marc appeared at her side, clutching his spear. Blood ran from its head, over its crossbar, up its haft and halfway up his bare arm. He looked as if he'd seen ghosts.

“Give me your spear!” Melodía shrieked. He didn't so much obey as gape blankly at her. She grabbed the weapon from his hand.

Somehow Valérie still kept her feet. But the hordelings had her hair, had her arms, pulling in either direction as if to rip them off her body. They screeched like feeding fliers.

The spear was heavy, balanced for thrusting, not throwing. But her one-eyed arms-mistress had taught Melodía well. She reversed it, hefted it once to get the feel, and threw.

It struck Valérie in the sternum, and punched through thin bouncer leather, bone, and heart. Despite the hands yanking at her braids that heartbreakingly pretty face turned toward Melodía. She smiled a last red smile.

Then she was gone, down and hidden by a seethe of madness.

“Fall back!” Melodía screamed. Marc at least followed her as she crashed blind into the undergrowth. She had no aim in mind but to increase distance between herself and the inexorable monster tide. Then rally her riders—such as remained—and go at them again.

Another one!
the voice of the child within her wailed.
I lost another friend! I got her killed too!

With an act of coldest will, Melodía sealed memory and heart behind an iron door. She had a duty—to her troop, to Rob Korrigan, to Karyl and the people of his army. To all the people of Nuevaropa, perhaps—since who knew how many lives Raguel intended to reap? She couldn't let anything hinder her carrying out that obligation.

It might not be my duty to survive
, she thought.
But it is my duty to sell my life as dearly as possible
.

In a small clearing she stopped and turned.
I'll pay in pain for you later, Valérie
, she told her friend's memory.
I credit Pilar for teaching me to choke down emotion with survival on the line
.

With a raw hunting-dragon cry, she raised her sword to rally her riders to her for yet another attack.

*   *   *

The prone man's legs kicked when Rob split his close-cropped skull with his axe.

The attack was over. All the hordelings who'd entered the cantonment were down. The dawn blushed red in the west as though in shame at the butchery that greeted it.

The army hadn't lost many to the unskilled yet ferocious assault. Bone-tired and cold from the rain that only lifted when the battle ended, some had complained aggrievedly when Karyl ordered that each and every fallen horde member's head be crushed, stabbed through, or severed. Until a man whose guts hopelessly entwined his own legs, and had already been trampled into the muck all around him besides, tripped a mailed soldier—and a woman showing bone from a dozen deep cuts tore out the house-shield's throat with a single bite.

Seeing no other prospects awaiting his axe nearby, Rob thrust her spiked head into the mud and leaned against the butt, almost too tired to think.

Something made him look around. Riders filed around the farmhouse's field-stone flank from the west. Melodía Delgao rode in the lead, slumping in the saddle as if barely conscious. A mere dozen jinetes followed her into the bloody mud of the yard. All of them showed hastily bandaged wounds.