The Dinosaur Knights (42 page)

Rob moaned aloud in mingled relief and grief.

Twenty minutes later, mounted on Little Nell, he followed the last of the Providential army onto the High Road. South, marching toward the Laughing Water's juncture with the River Bountiful, and on to where the Lisette marked the border with Métairie Brulée.

Chapter 32

Dragón Grancrestado
, Great-Crested Dragon
—
Quetzalcoatlus northropi
. The largest of all the
Azhdarchids
, which are in turn the greatest of the furred, flying reptiles called
fliers
or
pterosaurs
. Wingspan 11 meters, stands 6 meters tall, weighs as much as 250 kilograms. Known for flying vast distances; feared as a major threat to both livestock and humans, whom it lands to stalk and kill with its swordlike beak.

—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

Despite a lack of signs of pursuit, Karyl drove his refugee army for two days without respite, though torrential rains that turned even the exquisitely engineered and scrupulously maintained Rue Imperial into a white-mud river. Those who had exhausted themselves in the fighting—like Melodía Delgao and her sad scrap of survivors—were simply stacked in wagons like the wounded to sleep. So was anyone who faltered on the road. Animals that broke down were slaughtered, efficiently butchered by the roadside, and continued the journey as meat.

While they weren't yet followed by what the army had generally started calling hordelings or hordelings, they were continually overtaken. Refugees caught them up singly or in haggard clumps. And not just from the Lisette Valley and Providence town.

The second evening after the flight from Séverin farm a party of eastern woods-runners arrived. Castaña had invaded, they said, looking to take advantage of Providence's upheaval. Raguel himself, mounted on a big black stallion, had led his Horde to meet them. He cut the round-crested head off Count Raúl's glorious scarlet Corythosaurus with a single sweep of his strange weapon: a sort of scythe attached like a spearhead to a halberd haft that legends called a soul-reaper.

When the Conde fell the Grey Angel's followers swarmed him, shucked him out of his armor like a crayfish, and stripped the living flesh from his bones with their teeth.

Tales of Raguel's reign continued to reach the army from Providence town. They were no more pleasant than Count Raúl's end.

The rain broke the night before the army reached the great granite bridge across the Lisette into Métairie Brulée—a blessing too small for Rob, for one, to appreciate too hugely. His scouts told him that Comtesse Célestine had nervously withdrawn her assembled army to her seat of Belle Perspective about twenty kilometers southwest along the High Road from the frontier.

A barricade made of a giant tree trunk blocked the Métairie Brulée end of the bridge. Two weather-beaten stone towers flanked it. Not just the two formerly listless guards manning the barrier but the entire detachment of a score or so house-shields and bows who occupied the towers fled promptly south at first sight of Karyl leading his ragged-assed cavalcade out of the woods two hundred meters from the river.

Rob sent light-riders galloping in pursuit. As the army began trudging across the bridge they brought back a pair of House troops who had skinned out of their hauberks and fled in their linens. After Karyl expended considerable patient effort convincing them he didn't mean to have them, or indeed anybody, roasted over slow fires, they calmed down enough to listen to the message he wanted them to take to their Countess:
We mean you no harm. We have no choice. We're fleeing a great and terrible danger. Join us if you will, but please let us pass through your lands unmolested.
Then he gave them horses and sent them on their way.

Though it was only noon Karyl had the army camp on the Métairie Brulée side of the river to rest. The Lisette would serve as a moat should the horde be chasing them after all.

The next morning they hit the road early. Also armed, armored, and ready to deploy from the march into battle. Never expecting the Countess to accept his reassurance, and simply stand aside to let his army pass through her domain, Karyl had told Rob to set scouts watching her army around the clock.

As usual, he was right.

*   *   *

“You did well,” Karyl said to Melodía. On her return he had assembled his chief lieutenants at a campfire council of war in the middle of the camp.

She felt like purring.

Belle Perspective's curtain walls were imposing—but in a picture-pretty way, more than serious defensive works. Even Melodía, who'd never had near her baby sister's fascination with siegecraft, could see how easily they'd be brought down by a little judicious application of dinosaur muscle. Or even some brisk pick-work.

And the walls did little to reassure Comtesse Célestine and her surviving lords when they huddled in her throne room to receive Karyl's appointed delegate. Not after the hiding his army had dealt her blocking force that day on the road north of her keep.

Melodía didn't even know if the portly Countess recognized her as the Princesa Imperial. She suspected not. If it miffed Célestine to be sent a mere captain of light-horse—which would seem by definition to mean
lowborn
—to negotiate her surrender, she didn't show it. The remorseless efficiency of the Providential army, its otherworldly monsters, and most of all its legendary commander, left those who had experienced it (or even watched from safety, as the Countess had) shaking with terror hours later.

Light-horse captain or not, Melodía had shown the Countess her finest Corte Imperial hauteur. Not rudeness—Melodía hadn't enjoyed her etiquette lessons any more than Montserrat did, but both were good students, and learned. Instead she showed the simple, invincible assumption that anything she asked for would without question be granted.

It was. Before Melodía could so much as ask, Célestine offered a tribute in silver that forced even the Emperor's elder daughter to exert great will to keep her eyes from popping.

Boggled or not, Melodía had wit to ask for twice the sum. The Countess folded like a badly set up tent, causing Melodía to curse herself silently for not asking three times as much.

Still, Karyl expressed himself well pleased at what she got.

“That and the ransom of the knights we took will go a long way toward keeping us in supplies,” he told his captains.

“Supplies?” asked Luc Garamond, with the huskiness of vocal cords as scarred as his broad sword-slashed face. “We won't just take what we need?”

“But why pay?” asked Élodie, the merchant Gaétan's cousin who had signed on as Quartermaster-General. A slip of a woman, she kept sharp features crowded onto the front of her unusually large head, whose size was emphasized by the severe ponytail into which she drew her blond hair. She was competent, unusually honest, and even personable—for a quartermaster. Or so she struck Melodía, who'd seen the breed before at her father's courts, in La Merced, La Majestad, and back home in Los Almendros.

“Normally I'm in favor of paying for what one takes,” Élodie said. “But in this case, what can it matter? Soon or late, the horde will come after us. Then the inhabitants of this land we've passed will lose everything, lives included. They'd do better to pitch everything portable in the pot and join us.”

Karyl scratched at a corner of his eye. “Perhaps. But for that very reason we've got to keep moving. We'll find our road much smoother if we don't have to fight guerrillas for every step. Or worse, find our way blocked by refugees, who've left all the land burnt bare and the wells poisoned.”

Even Garamond, murky green eyes glowering beneath his square-cut black hair, nodded at that.

“Even so,” Élodie said, “with all the expenses we face”—she flicked blue eyes at Garamond—“can we afford the outlay?”

“I intend to pay as much as I can, as long as I can,” Karyl said. “After that—”

He shrugged. “People will have to decide whether they'd rather take their chances with us or the horde.”

“Or the Imperials,” Côme said.

That evoked a general growl of resentment. Melodía frowned.
They blame the Empire for their problems
, she thought.
It isn't fair
.

The truth, it had sickened her to see, was that those at the Corte Imperial who'd feared a Grey Angel Crusade had been right. And it sprang indeed from the soil of the Garden of Beauty and Truth—if not from any seeds obtained from her lover Jaume. Although having held the Grey Angel in her own eyes, and felt his awful power in her mind and soul, she couldn't doubt he'd played Bogardus and Violette like puppets all along. He had come to them, for reasons of his own.

She didn't say any of that. Of course. Recent experiences had taught her better respect for the concept of futility.

“Seems to me,” Côme drawled, “the real question right now is, where are we going?”

That caused a nervous look to pass around the bonfire like a yawn. “That's in the Creators' hands now,” said Gaétan.

He spoke in a heavier voice than he ever had since Melodía joined the army. Events had baked ebullient youth into maturity. And somberness, at least for now.

He now commanded all the foot-archers, erstwhile House troops as well as peasants. Under Karyl's keen but calm black eyes the highborn took orders from the low when called upon to do so.

That tickled the underbelly of Melodía's own class-consciousness in a most uncomfortable way. Too well she recalled how Imperial Court gossip held out the egalitarianism of Voyvod Karyl's own March as proof of his deadly perfidy when her father employed him as mercenary captain. And she herself had spouted her share of fashionable leveling rot to her ladies-in-waiting. Yet here and now she plainly saw it worked—at least for Karyl Bogomirskiy. And she had also learned a hearty respect for that.

Birth-blind the army may have been, but it acted with one will. Melodía now fully believed what her beloved Jaume told her in despair: Karyl never intended treachery against her father. Any compact he made he would honor to the death. But as for the potential of Karyl's ability and personal force—the advisors who had prevailed upon Felipe to order Jaume to strike down his own ally had been right to fear him.

“Or at least in Raguel's hands,” said Karyl. “We go where he drives us.”

“To what purpose?” Garamond asked gloomily.

“One thing we know: Grey Angel Crusades come to an end. Or there'd be no one left on Paradise.”

“The last Crusade in Nuevaropa ended five hundred years ago, at the end of the Demon War,” Melodía said.

That brought her some hard looks. Raguel was the blade hanging over everybody's necks, but the Empire and Torre Delgao were far from popular. There was still that
other
Crusade to fear.

Besides, as mere troop-leader she was much the junior here. But though she'd accepted her humble rank—she'd signed on as a simple trooper, after all—if she knew something relevant, she was going to speak right up.
What can they do
, she thought,
bust me back to the ranks?

“That's history,” Garamond said, “and that's just dust.”

“I want to hear her,” said Côme, taking a pull from a bouncer-skin of Métairie Brulée's famous wine and wiping his mouth with his hand. “All I know about these cursed Grey Angels are the stories my mother told me when I was small, to frighten me out of misbehaving.”

He laughed. “Of course, I heard those stories a lot.”

Karyl looked to Melodía. “Tell us more.”

“The Crusade that ended the Demon War lasted over a year,” she said, “but that was a unique circumstance. The Empire's had reports of Crusades in other lands. They seem to last anywhere from a few days to several months. But no credible accounts of any have come in the lifetime of anyone living, except my grandmother, Doña Rosamaría.”

And
she
was head of Torre Delgao, and over half as old as the Imperio itself. “Most people now just think they're legends. Or at any rate, things that only happened in the past.”

“Well, the past has bloody risen up to haunt us now,” said Rob.

“I don't really even know why the news of what had to be Raguel's Emergence in Providence caused such immediate panic in La Merced,” Melodía said. “Why would so many people believe it? There must have been forces at work there I still don't comprehend. For that matter—why didn't anyone hear about Raguel Emerging here? Or—in Providence, anyway. Where it happened?”

Everyone looked at everyone else, but no one brought forth an answer.

“That much makes no difference to us now,” Karyl said. “What does is knowing that our task is simply to keep clear of the Grey Angel Crusade until it's over. Which I've no doubt we'll find an easier thing to say than do.”