The Dinosaur Knights (58 page)

And Raguel's war-duckbills were magnificent. The strange, will-less hordelings made only the scantest effort to care for themselves. They often dropped dead on the march from hunger and dehydration. Not because food—if of often terrible nature—and water weren't available, but merely because, in whatever fearful ecstasy gripped their minds and souls (if they still happened to have them; a point unclear), they simply forgot to drink or eat.

But no one, not even a Grey Angel, could treat war-beasts that way, equine or dinosaurian. Not and get use out of them. Somebody had been found to care for them. And their riders' armor, by appearances.

Which confirms these bucketheads have voluntarily joined in this great evil
, thought Rob.
More's the pity our trikes can't get at the bastards directly, and spare their lovely dinosaurs
.

In a shockingly short time it was over. None of the three-horns were seriously hurt. They spread out slightly to avoid the kicking bodies of those they'd felled. The duckbills, anyway; they didn't deign to notice when grounded riders got in their way.

Led by their dinosaur knights, the Legion wings had already plunged among the Crusader foot. The coursers in the three-horns' path took one look at the ten-tonne monsters and bolted. Most stampeded straight into the horde themselves, disregarding their riders' efforts to control them.

Gaétan rode past Rob on Zhubin, waving his sword and whooping. Behind them marched the Legion pikes—no hapless conscripts but volunteers, well-trained and respected, and leavened with veterans. With what Rob thought more courage than sense Gaétan's spear-and-shield men ran forward with mail jingling to form a buffer between the horde and the vulnerable trike legs and bellies. Archers launched arrows over their comrades' heads and even fighting castles rising two stories in the air; they could flight-shoot at absurdly high angles and be sure of finding plenty of targets when their arrows stormed down. Rob heard their feathers hissing over even the demon-chorus of screaming and bugling and banging.

Rob reined his hook-horn to a stop.
By your leave, Karyl dear
, he thought,
Nell and I'll just stay back here and wait for the goblins to come to me. Not as if I've long to wait.

Not long enough.…

He slipped his arm into the leather sleeve on the back of his round shield. As he picked it up and wiggled it down his arm to where he could grasp the leather-wrapped wood handle, the hordelings turned to attack their new tormentors.

“The Eight make us fucking grateful,” he croaked through a throat dry as High Ovdan desert, “for what we are about to fucking receive.”

Chapter 43

Montador
,
Montadora
—To honor knights we give them the title of
Montador
or
Montadora
, meaning a man or woman who rides in battle, on horse or dinosaur. Usually we call them
Mor
or
Mora
for short.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

Shock ran up Melodía's arm as she slashed her talwar across the back of a hordeling's neck. As the middle-aged woman pitched soundlessly onto her face, Melodía tried not to think how she resembled her long-dead mother, Marisol. Or what the pink scrap was that she'd been masticating as mindlessly as a duckbill with a mouthful of weeds when Melodía cut her down.…

She wheeled Meravellosa away from the mob. Karyl's three-horns and montadores had already vanished into the horde's main stream. She and her jinetes were now slashing at the rear of the colossal mob trying to overpower the Legion's peasant pikes.

The temptation was simply to wade into them, laying about with her curved blade. But she'd watched two hadrosaurs and a Triceratops brought down by nothing more than human swarms already. The horde was itself a monster, knowing nothing of pity or remorse. Only rage. And hunger. It would swallow her and all her riders at a single gulp, and not slow down.…

So she had to lead her jinetes in doing what they usually did: hit. Run. Ride back in to hit again. She knew she'd lost some of her laughing boys and girls already.

If we weren't all lost the instant the sun rose on this horrible day
.

She turned in the saddle to check her panniers. Just a single meter-long dart remained, a three-meter leather thong wound down it to impart a stabilizing spin when hurled. Time to head back to restock. There were no signs the supply wagons running dry of missiles, in any event. Melodía could only marvel at where Karyl had laid hands on them all.

She looked back around. And reined Meravellosa to a sudden stop.

She found herself facing a black cliff of sackbut. The hornface-leather barding that guarded chest and flanks, the steel chamfron on its face and segmented gorget down its throat, all gleamed the same black as its hide. The armor and shield of the rider who stared down at her past its shoulder were likewise all of black, as was the plume that nodded at the nape of the crested armet.

“Fuck,” she said.

She might have darted clear. Instead some impulse made her lean forward to pat her mare's neck soothingly. It ran with sweat that was hot to her palm.

Leaving his lance upright in its socket by his right leg, the knight reached a black gauntlet up to open a black visor. From all that blackness gazed the sad, lost eyes of Bogardus, sunken in purplish-brown pits of flesh.

What she saw there was the darkest black of all.

“Melodía, my love,” he said.

“Don't call me that!” she screamed. “You lost the right to call me that when you stabbed us in the back!”

He shook his head. “But you were there. Didn't you see? Yes, I betrayed you. I betrayed everyone. Most of all myself. But at the end I fought him. You saw.”

She sucked in a shuddering breath. “Yes. I did. You failed. But you did try.”

“And only when it was much, much too late. I can hear it in your eyes. Melodía—Día, will you believe me when I say I'm sorry?”

“If you were to turn now and join us, I might.”

Nervously she looked around. Nobody paid them any mind. The hordelings were preoccupied throwing themselves at the Imperial pikemen and -women, who had managed to form themselves into a circle. The other light-riders continued to pick at the Crusaders. Most kept flowing on south as mindlessly as a river.

“I would,” Bogardus said, “if only I could. I cannot. Raguel controls my actions.”

“He's making you say that?”

“He allows me to. I can control my speech. Only that—I think it amuses Him.”

“Why is He doing this to you? Why is He doing this to us—all this cruelty and horror?”

“To punish me. To punish us.”

“Couldn't He do it—I don't know—more cleanly?”

“He hates us,” Bogardus said. “They all hate us, His kind—the Seven who remain. He belongs to a faction who thinks the Angels need only wipe out
most
of us humans for the sake of Paradise.

“They're the merciful ones. Their rivals want to erase us all and start from a clean slate.”

That rocked her back in her saddle. “But why?”

“I don't know. They feel it's the Creators' will.”

“They
feel
it? They don't know? The Creators didn't tell Raguel to unleash a Crusade?”

“No. That much I know. Apparently the Grey Angels are allowed substantial … latitude in how They discharge Their duties.”

“Wiping out the people the Creators went to so much trouble to put here—I'd call that too much latitude!”

There was a dispassionate-observer part of her, which often drew closer to the fore at times of intolerable stress, like this. Now it was amused at the way a lifelong agnostic was talking about the Creators as established facts.

Well, if Grey Angels exist
 … her usual self admitted.

“Now what?” she asked the sad thing that had been her lover. “What do you want of me?”

He grimaced as if in hideous pain. Apparently he had to fight to get the next words out.

“Kill me.”

He slammed the visor down.

*   *   *

Rob slammed his axe deep between the shoulder blades of a pallid woman trying to pull herself up Big Sally's barding. The fighting-castle crew was preoccupied battling hordelings attacking from the far side with half-pikes and axes.

The woman screeched. Rob wrenched the axe-head free. Something fluttered and stank at him from her shoulders as she fell.

“Sweet Maia, Mother of Mercy,” he moaned, “please tell me what she was wearing for cape and cowl was not a flayed human skin!”

*   *   *

Ducked low along Meravellosa's outstretched neck, Melodía thought,
That was much too close
, as she raced beneath the sackbut's fast-moving tail as it swept at a rising angle. It had come within a scale's thickness of breaking her and her mare like a bundle of dry sticks. She was so focused on dodging Bogardus's lance that the monster's sudden spin almost caught her.

She rode fifteen meters straight to get well clear of the black sackbut.
I never appreciated how agile a big two-legged dinosaur could be before
.

Gazing up at the blank black visor she wondered how much of the man she once adored still lived behind it. And what Paradisiacal good he could possibly do her.

Bogardus's mount pirouetted to face Melodía. From her training she knew nothing drained a human like combat. Horses too, to judge from the way Meravellosa stood panting, with legs braced wide and head hung low. She marveled that she could stay in the saddle. How the poor souls in the Imperial lines still fought on after hours of combat was more than she could fathom, though she supposed necessity had something to do with it. She struggled to keep breathing slowly and deeply, despite the way her lungs burned.

The battle raged without her. That didn't matter. She faced the black dinosaur and its black rider alone; her jinetes were doing their duty, trying to keep their foot-bound fellows from getting swamped … as long as possible, anyway.

And that was fine. This was her fight. She'd prefer a quick death under the sackbut's feet—or if she were truly blessed, a clean stroke of her former lover's longsword—to the fates of the scores she'd seen beaten or mauled or bitten to death. Or disjointed like a scratcher for the pot, but still alive.

She did feel a stab of apprehension about Karyl.
Is he still alive?
Then wondered why she felt such concern.

Probably he did. Because as long as he lived, so did his army. So did hope … somehow.

The thought stoked that always-anger to a rising a rage blaze.

“How?” she screamed at Bogardus. “How can I kill you? I can't cut through your armor with my sword, even if I could reach you! Help me, damn it—if there's really anything still human in there, and it isn't just that goat-fucker Raguel playing with me!”

He gazed at her, eyes invisible through the narrow gap in his visor.

Slamming her talwar into its sheath, Melodía grabbed the final dart from her pack. Slipping the end-loop over her right wrist she tested the feathered missile's weight and balance.

Can I hit that eye-slit?
she asked herself. She knew: she couldn't. Her arm trembled just holding the dart. Besides, even if she hit the mark precisely, its iron tip was too wide to fit through the slit. She couldn't throw it fast enough to punch its way inside.

“Or are you just playing with me? Using me again the way you and Violette did?”

Bogardus dropped his lance. He unstrapped his black shield and let it fall. Moving as if underwater he raised gauntleted hands. They grappled with his midnight helmet as if it were a living thing.

Somehow unwilling fingers fumbled the catches open. He tossed the armet away.

His hair hung damp and lifeless around his slack-skinned face. It had all gone a leaden grey, like the clouds that threatened overhead.

His features clenched in a look of agony. “He's punishing me for my defiance,” he forced through locked jaws.

His longsword sang free of its black-enameled scabbard. A black gauntlet flourished it high.

“Defend yourself, my love!” Bogardus screamed. “I can't do any more—”

Melodía nudged Meravellosa to gallop left at an angle that would bring her hard along the sackbut's glistening black flank. And within easy range of its rider's meter-long blade.

As she came level with the dinosaur's blunt beak, Melodía threw her dart. The longsword whistled down. Then she ducked down beside Meravellosa's neck. It rang off the peak of her cap and sliced away the horse-tail.

She hauled left hard on the reins and pressed with her heels. Meravellosa spun as if she had her own giant counter-balance tail, gathered herself like a bouncer, and shot away.