The Dinosaur Lords (44 page)

He swung the lance down toward the enemy. “Couch lances!”

“
For the Lady!
” his Companions echoed.

A courser in a blue-and-white caparison lay thrashing on its side in Camellia’s path. Its rider struggled frantically to free the leg trapped beneath it. Jaume did not close his ears to the squelching and shrieking as he rode the morion right over them, but he didn’t look down.

He dared a fast glance to his sides. On his right rode Manfredo. To the left Florian’s red-and-yellow sackbut he called Here Comes Trouble slammed his breastbone against the rump of a racing bay courser and spun the half-tonne horse counterclockwise without breaking stride.

Tears flooded Jaume’s eyes. He blinked them clear as they ran hot down his cheeks. He always cried in battle. Whether from sorrow at the ugliness and suffering he was causing, or from mere physical reaction, or both, he wasn’t wise enough to know.

The Redlands knights rode their hadrosaurs south at a rolling four-legged gallop. Their quarry were already exhausting themselves in their desperate sprints, and dropping back to all fours. Their hunters knew they’d catch them, soon enough.

Their vision, their entire beings, had narrowed to a sort of tube focused solely on those they pursued. It was an overwhelming human impulse, Jaume knew; he and his own knights had learned to control it through training and experience.

Few other grandes saw the need. The pursuit was the
matanza
, the time of slaughter, and it was what they most enjoyed of war.

The Redlanders literally could not see the destruction racing toward them like a stinger bolt. Until it hit them.

Now it was time to charge. Jaume signaled his Companions to draw their mounts’ pawlike forelimbs off the ground, even as he did so with Camellia. A full-on sprint of those colossal hindlegs made the duckbills’ power terrible.

Jaume steered Camellia in front of another morion streaked blue over green, whose rider had tastelessly caparisoned it in purple and silver. The other monster shied away from the collision, turning its head and trying to stop. It didn’t hit Camellia, but Jaume cut it close enough that his lance went through its neck behind the flexible gorget that guarded its throat, just below the jaw.

The duckbill fell over to its right, spraying blood in a fan. Jaume had already let go of his lance and was reaching to draw the Lady’s Mirror. A lance was as expendable as an arrow in duckbill combat. A dinosaur knight’s main weapon was his mount.

He crashed Camellia’s full weight into the side of a second hadrosaur, a yellow-speckled brown sackbut. His body whipped forward as Camellia stopped dead. Her breastbone knocked the other dinosaur down, trumpeting and kicking.

Jaume glanced right and turned Camellia left. She pirouetted as gracefully as a ballerina on the Lumi
è
re stage, ducking head and forequarters low and elevating her massive counterbalancing tail.

Which she swung like a log into a morion’s face. The dinosaur’s neck broke with a noise like rock shattering beneath a hammer. It turned into a white, grey, and black avalanche.

Using the momentum from slamming into the duckbill, Camellia spun back clockwise. The dead dinosaur and doomed rider hurtled past.

Humid and foully rich, the stench of spilled blood and vast voided herbivore intestines surrounded Jaume like swamp air. All around him men and monsters fought, with a tumult that sounded like a smithy accompanied by an orchestra of bagpipes and bugles.

He saw Machtigern’s hammer dent the side-crown of a green, white, and red helmet. His victim’s armor slumped as if emptied, and flopped loosely from the saddle. Roaring, Timaeos struck a black-and-white shield with his maul so hard it knocked the Redlander clean off his mount.

Amidst a wave of pink dust, its rider howling as his pinned leg was ground beneath, a downed sackbut skidded on its side into Fern
ã
o’s sackbut, Lusitano. Jaume yelled as the green-and-yellow Lusitano tumbled, plunging Fern
ã
o down and out of sight.

Jaume had no chance to aid his downed Companion. A knight in a countercharged black-and-gold helmet charged him on his morion, swinging a flange-headed mace. From the way his armored body moved, Jaume could tell he was putting everything into the blow, in hopes of breaking Jaume’s shield and the arm beneath.

So instead of squaring the shield to the blow, as reflex screamed for him to do, Jaume swung the shield outward from his body. The mace glanced along its face with a steel-on-steel hiss.

To strike that hard the Redland knight had to open with his own shield as well, to clear his stroke and add momentum. He also had to lean far into it.

When Jaume deflected his shot it left his enemy wide open. Jaume thrust hard with the Lady’s Mirror. Its star-steel tip broke through the gorget with a squeal.

Blood spurted in dainty scarlet streams through the fine piercings where the enemy’s visor covered his mouth. The Mirror pulled free of the Redlander’s throat and armor as he fell.

Momentarily, Jaume found himself alone amid a swirl of vast bodies. He couldn’t see Fern
ã
o or Lusitano anymore. He glimpsed a terrific roil of smaller armored bodies to the north as the Companions-Ordinary fought the Terrarojano heavy cavalry. Like the dinosaur knights, the Companion hombres armaos had caught their opponents strung out, and had taken them in the flank. Now skill, courage, and hard blows would tell if those advantages could make up for their lack of numbers.

Snare drums snarled. Trumpets screamed. Flags wounded the sky with color. Great drums beat like the heart of a frightened titan.

Death reigned.

A knight with the lower half of his unfashionably antique great helm painted red with a series of semicircles for an upper border and the top enameled white attacked Jaume at the sprint with his lance couched. A banner with the same colors flapped from a standard affixed to the cantle of his saddle. His sackbut was strikingly colored: pure white, with its limbs, tail, and beak shocking crimson, as though the giant beast had just forded a river of blood.

Conde Terraroja had found out his chief tormentor.

Jaume turned Camellia to face the charging sackbut. His knees nudged her into one more bipedal sprint. Her huge chest heaved like the bellows of Torrey’s own forge. Saliva streamed from her beak in long white ropes. She had little left to give. But she was a fighter, and she gave it now.

“Bella and the Emperor!” Jaume shouted. He leaned forward as Terraroja’s lance struck his shield with an impact that would have sent most knights sprawling backward over the cantle. But he kept his seat as if his legs were welded to Camellia’s sides.

The white hadrosaurs crashed together. For a moment they strained breastbone to breastbone. The sackbut rolled its eyes wildly. Terraroja dropped his stub of broken lance and drew his arming-sword.

His Parasaurolophus wasn’t as high-backed as Jaume’s Corythosaurus. But the duckbills were well matched in size and strength. Rupp von Teuzen had trained the Companions’ mounts in what amounted to the art of
dinosaur wrestling
. Unfortunately, the technique was no secret; Terraroja’s mount held its own.

The instant Jaume realized Camellia couldn’t gain him any advantage, he gave her the command to turn counterclockwise. Her opponent’s own pushing helped her whip right around in place. It put Jaume and Count Redland knee to knee, Jaume’s right side to his enemy’s left.

Behind the slits of his great helm, Terraroja’s eyes widened in triumph. Jaume had left himself wide open by giving his opponent his unshielded side.

As Camellia turned, Jaume had started his longsword stabbing for those eye-slits. Like everybody, Don Leopoldo had a powerful reflex to protect his eyes. His shield, flat at the top and tapering at the bottom, snapped up fast.

Too fast. Too high. Which increased the amount of time it blinded him.

Twisting right in his saddle, pivoting Camellia back clockwise to give him the proper angle, Jaume reached his shield toward the sackbut’s rump. He caught the left rim of Terraroja’s shield with the right edge of his own.

He wheeled Camellia back the other way. Her mass yanked Leopoldo half out of his saddle toward her. He roared as the two monsters slammed together, causing the steel cuisse that guarded his left thigh to flex inward with a hollow sound, putting cruel pressure on the thigh within.

Leaning into him, Jaume smashed the heavy round pommel of the Lady’s Mirror into his great helm. He had Camellia sidle a fast step left. The stunned Terraroja fell right between the monsters.

Normally a war-hadrosaur would drop its torso the instant it felt its rider losing balance, to keep him in the saddle or, failing that, reduce how far he had to fall. But Camellia’s sideswipe body-slam had disconcerted Redland’s sackbut. It reacted too late.

Jaume directed Camellia to swat it with her tail. It vented baritone despair and fled south.

Don Leopoldo de la Terraroja lay on his back like an overturned handroach, arms and legs waving feebly. Jaume reared Camellia as close to upright as her hips and big tail would permit. Walking forward on her, he stopped just short of the step that would bring a three-toed foot and half the combined weight of dinosaur, rider, tack, and armor down on Terraroja’s breastplate.

For a moment he locked eyes with Terraroja. If the Count of the Redlands harbored any notion the Count of the Flowers was bluffing about crushing him, it fled.

“Wait!” Terraroja cried. “I yield!”

“Order your men to stop fighting.”

“Stop fighting!” Leopoldo called out. Still breathless from his fall, he couldn’t put much volume in it. But he tried.

“Don Leopoldo yields!” Jaume shouted.
He
had plenty of breath. “Terrarojanos, your master orders you to surrender! Throw down your arms!”

Most of the action had gone elsewhere, leaving Jaume largely isolated with his vanquished enemy amidst a scatter of fallen dinosaurs and men, some moving and groaning, some not. Fortunately Timaeos was nearby. The Trebiz
ó
nico added his colossus bellow, repeating the words.

The cry was echoed across the battlefield. Anyone who thought it a ruse had only to glace over and see Terraroja’s distinctive sackbut running enthusiastically south, on all fours with its tail high.

Like grass swept by a sudden wind, weapons fell to the ground as the Redland army surrendered.

*   *   *

“There were three of them,” the child said excitedly. “Two men and a montadora, their armor all bright and everything, each on a monster as big as a house.”

Karyl and Rob stood listening in a shady thicket east of the S
é
verin farm practice field. The afternoon air was thick, and tangy from some herb unknown to Rob. Feathered gliders furiously scolded them and the child for their intrusion.

Newly minted spymaster Rob had struck gold. The luck of the Korrigans had brought him this vest-pocket virtuoso spy, a street urchin in a hemp-sack smock, who seemed to know everyone in Providence town and everything they got up to. He had a gift for getting other children—and not just the guttersnipes—to talk to him.

Or
her
. Rob couldn’t make up his mind. Beneath random black hair and a coating of urban grime, his informant had a very kidlike face, and spoke in a piping voice like everybody else that age, sixteen or so. The urchin went by the name Petit Pigeon, Little Pigeon, which gave Rob no clues either way.

“They just charged right into town down the Brokenheart Highway with their Cr
è
ve Coeur badges painted on their chests, bold as you please,” Little Pigeon said. “Kicked carts and kiosks to splinters, knocked ladders all flying. Dumped old Quentin Wen-Nose the housepainter on his ass so hard he cramped right up and had to scuttle for the gutter on all fours, like a bug. Everybody had to step lively to get out of the way.”

Between sentences the child stuffed more of the handful of dried figs Rob had given … it … into its mouth. Rob sympathized. When your cheeks were that hollow, beneath wide cheekbones suggesting a naturally full face, eating took priority over even the most thrilling news.

Or the most horrific.

“This one kid, he’s maybe five, he didn’t move fast enough. The Brokenheart leader, this big guy with a shaved head and black beard, knocked him ass over elbows with his sackbut. Achille, kid’s name is. Snot-nosed little bugger, but he didn’t deserve nothin’ like that.

“His mom, Mathilde, she’s this journeyman potter in Fat Vincent’s studio by the river, she was haggling with Crook-Backed Ad
è
ly the feather-monger. She’s married to Igon, this Basque leatherworker from up in the mountains. She saw her child go flying and ran to help him, screaming like her hair was afire.

“So the woman knight on the green morion, she had short yellow hair and a green cross on a white shield painted on her breastplate, she runs Mathilde right through with her lance. Then the third guy, had on a cape that looked like scarlet horror feathers, his red sackbut steps on both of them and just grinds ’em into paste on the cobbles.”

“Buckethead assholes,” Rob said. “Pardon my Anglysh.”

In went more figs. Hardened though he thought he was, Rob felt his stomach turn over at that.
You’ve been there yourself. Remember how real hunger feels.

“What happened next?” Karyl asked gently. His arms were folded over his deceptively skinny bare chest. He held his staff in one hand.

“They rode right up to Town Hall,” Petit Pigeon said, dribbling bits of fruit from his mouth—Rob was tired of trying to think of a child as
it
. “Black Beard hollered for the mayor. Old Ludovic came out. He’s a dick; anybody
official
is gonna be one, it’s just natural. But he showed some big ones, I got to tell you. He looks like this brown rat, scarcely bigger than that kid who got squashed, with hardly a hair to his head, a big old nose, and these droopy moustaches. He’s quivering all over. But he faces them, up there on those giant monsters of theirs. Demands to know why they’re violating his town and everything and stuff.