The Dinosaur Lords (26 page)

Chapter
20

Tit
á
n espinoso,
Spine-Backed Titan
—
Diplodocus longus.
Quadrupedal herbivore, Nuevaropa’s longest titan; grows to 30 meters and 20 tonnes. Exceedingly long neck tipped with a small head; whiplike tail. Distinguished by a row of dorsal spines.

—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

“Am I talking to myself here?” Rob asked, puffing slightly as he approached the hilltop. All he saw before him was white sky and his companion’s cloaked back.

Having grown tired of trying to elicit details about Karyl’s past, he’d been imparting his own autobiography. Or trying to. Karyl vanished over the rise.

Nothing. Just the wind whistling among the thorny weeds of the ditch. Rob scowled and grunted and tugged on Nell’s lead to make the hook-horn step it up.

“My mother told me never to ask questions I wouldn’t like the answer to,” Rob muttered. Then, louder: “Is your heart made of stone, then, man? Don’t the sad tales of my youth at least make it twinge?”

On the far slope Karyl stood by the track with the air of a man who had waited patiently for many minutes.

“If the details didn’t change quite so randomly,” he said, “my heart might twinge a little, perhaps.”

“I’m a poet, not a historian,” Rob said. “Everything I tell you is true, considered metaphorically.”

“Consider my sympathy metaphorical too, then.”

Karyl set off into a broad valley of tilled fields. Through it ran the river that formed the border of the province they were crossing, M
é
tairie Brul
é
e—Burned Farm—and Providence. Beyond stood the mixed conifer and hardwood forest known as Telar’s Wood, which ran across the Tyrant’s Head from Slavia to Spa
ñ
a. The map said it covered much of the western, narrow end of wedge-shaped County Providence. They had already passed through a kilometer-wide spur of it.

Far beyond the forest, the mighty Shield Mountains climbed the sky. The breeze that blew from them felt cool. To Rob’s admittedly fanciful perceptions it seemed to smell of never-melting snow as well as pine, cedar, and oak.

In the course of three weeks on the road, Rob had often enough found Karyl a trying companion. Along with the nightmares that frequently jolted Rob from sleep, Karyl suffered sporadic blinding headaches. When those struck, he was prone to becoming querulous, and sometimes had to ride atop Little Nell with a wet rag tied around his eyes.

But Rob found himself strangely drawn to the man. The rare story that escaped his bearded lips was a rich reward to a man of Rob’s temperament. Not to mention what such reminiscences might be worth to a professional minstrel, cast into song.

And … there were the bandits. Just the occasional singleton or pair, seemingly driven by greed or meanness to prey on their fellow men, since this seemed no hard land to live on. Fortunately Rob and Karyl had encountered no substantial bands. Or the larger groups hadn’t thought the pair worth bothering with.

Rob knew already that, for a man who professed himself reluctant to use his sword, Karyl was alarmingly efficient with it. Accordingly they found themselves in possession of a few extra coins, for when they felt an urge to slake their thirst with something other than water, or pass a night at a country inn, out of the sometimes-chilly upland weather. Which at least got drier the closer they came to the jagged blue mountains.

Thanks to their earlier brush with bandits, they now possessed a shortbow and quiver of arrows. Rob’s skill with these proving greater than he let on to, if only just, they brought a steadier and readier supply of fresh meat to the pot than his snares alone could.

Today both men walked. Little Nell ambled amiably behind, her gizzard stones rumbling as she digested a purple-leaf thornbush she had uprooted in passing. As usual, Rob let his companion keep a slight lead. Not out of deference—or so he told himself—but to keep an eye on him. The nearer they came to their destination, the more focused Karyl became. But along with the dreams and headaches, he was given to brooding, to such an extent that he appeared to lose the outside world entirely. Rob was far from certain Karyl wouldn’t simply wander off and be seen no more.

Without warning, Karyl stopped and stood looking to his left.

“What is it?” Rob asked, running a thumb for reassurance beneath the springer-hide strap that held his axe across his back. The Empire’s roads were dangerous places—if mostly to the bandits unlucky enough to brace Karyl and Rob. Their whole point in coming here was that Providence was beset by predatory neighbors. And M
é
tairie Brul
é
e was one of them.

Karyl pointed with his sword-staff. Around a ridge half a kilometer to the north lumbered a herd of a dozen spine-backed titans. Long, narrow creatures, green with pink undersides, the largest adults reached thirty meters and perhaps twenty tonnes. Calves a mere ten meters long frolicked between their columnar legs. The giants proceeded at their customary slow, oblivious pace, stripping leaves from the scrub with peg-shaped teeth.

They had no voices: they couldn’t force cries down the tremendous length of their necks. From the books of ancient lore, allegedly passed down by the Creators themselves, Rob knew they needed a system of air-tubes along their neck-bones even to move the dog-sized heads at the ends of them. But when they whuffed and chuffed and farted, it carried as far as a shout. You could hear them coming.

Karyl took off his woven-straw hat and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. His
left
hand, its fingers mostly grown out but still weak, wrapped in a bandage to protect the soft, pink skin from sunburn. Rob let Nell’s lead drop so she could munch the roadside foliage, and joined Karyl to watch the monsters.

Rob knew dinosaurs. Better in some ways than he knew men—and far better, sadly, than he knew women, to go by his record. He’d spent his life around them. Still, the size and majesty of these animals struck Rob Korrigan speechless. He felt as if his flesh and the blood in his veins had chilled beneath his sun-warmed skin.

A sound like a whipcrack magnified a thousandfold split the air. That was what it
was
. A calf had strayed too close to the woods, which might hide a matador or a horror pack. The herd bull had snapped his fifteen-meter-long tail like Paradise’s biggest whip. The sound, which stung Rob’s ears even at this distance, brought the young one hustling back, obediently bobbing its head.

“They may not have voices,” Rob said, “but they can still talk to each other.”

“Indeed,” Karyl said. His eyes shone.

“You feel it too?” Rob asked.

“How could I not?”

“Ask that of most of the world, my friend.”

The majority of folk viewed dinosaurs as nothing more than tools, toys, or terrors, depending on circumstance. They regarded the beasts as simply
there
, like rocks and trees, and paid them no particular mind unless they were about to be trampled or ripped to pieces by them. But no man or woman became a dinosaur master who ever saw a dinosaur, no matter how small, without a sense of affection that was almost proprietary.

And none could behold one of the titans without a sense of awe verging on religious.

Rob unstopped a water bottle, drank, wiped its mouth with a palm, passed it to Karyl. Karyl held it without looking at it, as if he didn’t know what to do with it. Sometimes he needed reminding to perform basic self-maintenance; Rob cleared his throat. Karyl drank.

“Let’s move on,” Rob said. “They’ll always be here. Whether we humans are or not, the dinosaurs endure.”

Karyl nodded. He put his hat back on. Clucking to his hook-horn, Rob picked up her tether, and together the three of them made their way onward into Providence.

*   *   *

It was the kind of morning that made it seem as if the Creators themselves smiled on the great enterprise about to begin. The sky for once was clear over Montserrat’s head, a canopy of brilliant blue. In the naked light of the sun rising in the west, the Imperial colors and Heriberto’s blue, gold, and green almost glowed from the flags on the palace walls. The air was fresh and clean and redolent of the smells of the forest, thanks to the rains that had fallen overnight and then considerately stopped.

All but bursting inside her skin with anticipation, Montse stood by the road leading north from the Firefly Palace’s Imperial Gate. Beside her, her father stood barefoot in the simple brown hemp robes of a mendicant of the Sect of All Creators. Montse vaguely understood that was his way of displaying humility and gratitude to those marching out to fight. Not just for him, but for the greater cause of the majesty and authority of the Fang
è
d Throne, and blah, blah, blah.

She wondered just how humble he thought he could look with her right there beside him in her horribly uncomfortable red-and-gold princess suit, and Chief Minister Mondrag
ó
n looking important and grave. To say nothing of a whole century of Scarlet Tyrants, red-dyed horsehair crests waving in the breeze, arrayed behind and to both sides of the Imperial party.

Near the Emperor in his ceremonial sackcloth stood the other grandes. Courtiers not bound to go on the expedition tried visibly not to look too relieved. Falk glowered in his beard with his arm in a showy sling. Montse’s cousins Lupe and Llurdis blinked out of deep, dark puffy sockets at the sunlight, as if unsure what it was. Josefina Serena wept; nothing unusual there.

Fanny of Anglaterra caught Montse’s eye and winked. Montse gave her back a big grin, which she shifted to Abigail Th
é
l
è
me. Abi gave her a quick thin smile. Montse liked them both. Fanny treated her like a little sister. The skinny girl from Sansamour talked to her like an adult. Montse didn’t at all understand why everybody thought she was so sinister.

It was a Day of Two Swords: Swordsday, the first D
í
a de Lanza of the month likewise named for the Creator most identified with war. It was the most propitious possible date for a campaign to begin.

Despite the loss of productivity yesterday’s tourney caused, multitudes of Mercedes had roused themselves from sleep to trudge through the murk before dawn up the promontory west of the city. Some had never gone to bed at all but roistered the night away in anticipation of this final extravaganza. Efficiency, the Mercedes would call that.

Trumpets blared from the battlements above the immense bronze-bound gates. The crowd cheered wildly. With a seismic groan, the gates swung open.

Out rode the newly minted Constable on his beautiful dinosaur Camellia. The crowd went mad. The other Companions followed Jaume, no less resplendent than their Captain-General in their white-enameled armor with the Lady’s Mirror blazing red from their breastplates.

Jumping up and down, Montse screamed, “Cousin Jaume! Camellia! I love you!”

Turning his bare head ever so slightly, the Constable caught Montse’s eye. He winked. Camellia bobbed her round-crested head and snorted greeting.

The Ej
é
rcito Corregir had spent the night noisily mustering in the palace grounds. Behind the Companions came the Conde Monta
ñ
azul, his face like thunder above his breastplate, leading his own knights. After them rode the other nobles and knights who had sworn to carry the Imperial banner against the obdurate Count Terraroja. Then came the Companion auxiliaries, the Brothers-Ordinary: five hundred mercenaries and aspirants to Companion with white tabards over their armor, led by the veteran Coronel Alma. In a clearing half a kilometer into the woods, Montse knew, they’d swap their heavy coursers for simple, durable marchadors, as the dinosaur knights would do with their war-duckbills.

Last out the gate tramped the Ninth Legion of the Imperial Nodosaurs. First came the skirmishers and arbalesters in nosehorn-leather jerkins and steel caps, followed by artillerists with heavy gauntlets and shovels. Bringing up the rear of the whole great procession marched the main body of pikemen and women, at once stern and almost defiant in their browned sallet helmets and breastplates, their pikes trailed over their shoulders. Consigned to the rear as lowly foot soldiers, they treated that position as a place of honor, reflecting their status as the last to leave the battlefield.

Montse loved a good show like the Merced she was at heart. She hopped and waved and yelled herself hoarse. But exhilarated as she was by the spectacle, she couldn’t quite forget the one figure who was missing from the great event.

*   *   *

Falk’s arm ached like lost hopes.

He ignored it. He was accustomed to ignoring pain. He had a lifetime’s practice at it.

But he couldn’t ignore the emotions warring inside him: frustration, anger, disappointment. Fear that his trick might be found out.

Not that he’d heard a breath of that happening. Instead, his so-called servant Bergdahl had told him, when he came to wake his master with his usual unconcealed glee, that La Merced buzzed with the rumor that Jaume’s victory was soiled: that he had performed a foul deed, striking and injuring a foe who had yielded.

Bergdahl, of course, had spent the night assiduously spreading the rumor himself.

Falk caught sight of the man now, a gallows figure looming above the mob of Mercedes on the far side of the road. Instead of watching the gorgeous cavalcade, he was watching Falk with a goblin grin.

Bastard,
thought Falk. For a moment resentment of the man—and, yes, of Falk’s mother, who pulled Bergdahl’s strings—threatened to overwhelm him.

As if reading his master’s thoughts, Bergdahl grinned wider. Once more Falk could hear the words he had spoken as Albrecht helped prepare the Duke for his appearance.

Don’t be a fool,
Bergdahl had told him
. Enjoy it. You’ve got free rein, just as we intended. With the Emperor—and his cock-teasing daughter.

Despite himself, Falk felt his lips extending in a smile.
Yes
, he thought
, I should enjoy those things. I’ve sacrificed so much for them.