The Dinosaur Lords (57 page)

The farmer Guat ran toward the undergrowth to Karyl’s right, weeping as he tried to cradle his spilled guts in his filthy blood-soaked arms and doing a bad job of it, trampling and tripping on their shredded loops that had fallen free. As Rob watched, some woods-runner gave him the only mercy available: an arrow through the temple.

More arrows arced from the trees as strung-out Cr
è
ve Coeur horsemen came in range of short continental bows. Most stuck in mail coats or colorfully painted nosehorn-hide breastplates. One rider fell. A stricken horse reared screaming, and its knight scarcely managed to throw himself clear before it crashed to the ground.

Karyl loosed again. The Brokenheart who had steered his sackbut wide of the fallen duckbills went down with the shaft through his gullet. The remaining two dinosaur knights turned about and headed back the way they’d come. They were in this chase for the joy of slaughter, not to suffer pain or death themselves.

The field was theirs in any event. Nothing Karyl could do would change that, for all his genius.

Which was why his genius meant he wouldn’t bother to try.

The horsemen were too hot for the chase to notice their dinosaur-riding comrades retiring. They converged on the road. Why thrash about in the underbrush when the easy meat lay that way, packed in ahead of them?

Rob reckoned the woods-runners, scouts, and volunteers of Karyl’s scratch covering force could show them plenty of reasons, and pointed ones. But Ga
é
tan suddenly rode his spike-frill out to block the Brokenhearts’ path.

He hadn’t had time to set his own recurved bow aside and take up shield and sword. He loosed a final shot. Links sprang open with a chiming sound as the arrow stormed into the hauberk of the lead rider, not four meters distant, and cut his heart in two. As the knight pitched off to his right, Rob saw the arrow tenting out back of his mail for a handspan.

The next rider speared Ga
é
tan through his chest.

Chapter
46

Gran Canal,
Grand Channel
—The body of water separating mainland Nuevaropa from Anglaterra. The top leg, running southeast, is called La Raya (the Stripe) of the Tyrant’s Head for its resemblance to an eye-stripe. At the gulf called El Bocado (the Gullet or Gulp), it turns southwest into La Fauces
,
the Maw. Also called La Canal Corsaria
,
the Corsair Channel.

—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

At least they put me in a north-facing cell,
Melod
í
a thought,
so I have the breeze off the Gran Canal to comfort me.

She withdrew the hand she had reached between the black iron bars that were the only visible manifestations of
cage
to push open her window. Outside, the thirty-centimeter insects that gave the palace its name performed their intricate three-dimension dance, their green-yellow glow leaving bloodred streaks to linger briefly in her eyes. Eight or ten meters below, Prince Harry’s house-shields trudged the ramparts between torches whose light flickered orange on their peaked helmets, and on engines pointing out to sea, ready on the instant to defend against an attack only insanity would launch.

Away far off on the white cliffs of Anglaterra, hidden by the night, a single blue light shone. The daytime clouds had unraveled, leaving the sky to black and stars. Out on the Channel, the minute orange gleams of a ship’s lanterns at prow and stern crawled from east to west. From within the palace walls came the sounds of someone strumming a
guitarra,
the hot-iron smells of the unsleeping palace forges, the kitchens’ steamy scents. The commonplace nature of it all almost reassured her.

And then it all turned like a knife in her belly as she remembered why she was here.

She sighed and turned back to her small, spare room, high up the northwestern tower of the Firefly Palace. They’d brought her clothes. She only bothered to wear a green silk loincloth. She’d been locked up a night and a day. Some robed men she didn’t recognize had shouted questions, accusations, and threats at her. She answered the first as best she could and ignored the rest, all with simmering dignity.

Since then she’d been left alone. Downcast servants, always accompanied by Scarlet Tyrants equally disinclined to meet Melod
í
a’s gaze, brought her ample food. Despite her usual harrier appetite she ate little. Nobody responded to her demands to know why she was being held, how long she would be held, and to be allowed to send a message to her father.

She had a comfortable bed and a water closet fed by a rain cistern on the tower roof. She even had books of Nuevaropan history brought with her morning meal, stacked on a sturdy table near the window. A comfortable cage. But a cage withal.

It was when the Tyrants had first slammed the door behind her that Melod
í
a cracked. First she went into fist-hammering rage. That only skinned the heels of her hands on the bare, buff-plastered walls. Then she slumped against the door in a paroxysm of tears.

Now, recovered, she had returned into detachment. She was resilient. Indeed, she felt something like
relief
. She had convinced herself that this was all nonsense. There was simply some misunderstanding. Everything would be cleared up soon.

So I finally get my father to notice me
.… She shook her head ruefully.

The door opened.

She looked that way, expecting to see servants bringing her supper, with their armed and red-cloaked shadows behind. Instead she had a single visitor, dressed in a loincloth, buskins, and royal-blue cloak. Although he was certainly big enough for two.

“Duke Falk,” she said. She frowned. “Did my father send you to let me go?”

Then she caught the strange gleam in his Northern sapphire eyes, and the smile, triumphant yet somehow sickly, that twisted his full lips.
Something’s very wrong,
she thought.

Then it was as if her reality were a window shattering in reverse: the pieces all flew together at once, and she saw the whole with sudden clarity.

“
You’re
behind this outrage?” she said. “How could you dare?”

He laughed. “I’m the man of the hour, Melod
í
a. I’m your father’s chief bodyguard.”

With a small internal jolt of alarm, Melod
í
a realized that his speech was somewhat slurred. By drink, her nose already told her. But by emotion as well. None of which boded well.

“And I’ve already proven my value,” Falk said, “by breaking a heinous plot against the Emperor.”

“What?”

He nodded. “Arrested his very Chief Minister and seen him condemned. And cut down those three archconspirators, your kinsmen.”

“My kinsmen?” She frowned in utter incomprehension.

“Gonzalo Delgao, his brother Benedicto, their brother-in-law Bar
ó
n Alarc
ó
n.”

“Them?” She shook her head rapidly, like a dog clearing water from its eyes. “They, they—they’re obnoxious loudmouths and total fools. But they’re harmless. Poor Benedicto’s dim, and Gonzalo’s so clever he only outwits himself.”

She ran down. It struck her belated that Gonzalo had manifestly done exactly that. For the last time, if this appalling former rebel told the truth.

And from the way Falk carried himself, managing to strut while standing still, she knew he did.

“It’s all written down and attested to, you see,” Falk said. “Manorqu
í
n told all.”

“Manorqu
í
n? Don Augusto? And you
believed
him? Out of everybody at court, he was the most likely to mean my father harm. He’s been in love forever with the notion that a full-blood Ram
í
rez should sit the Fang
è
d Throne instead of a member of Torre Delgao!”

Falk smiled. “Precisely. Who better to confess the whole nasty scheme? And your own role in it, my lady.”

“
My
role? Are you crazy? If I
were
conspiring against my father, which is completely and utterly absurd, those four buffoons were the very last creatures on Paradise I’d choose to do so with. Including the ridiculous reapers of Ruybrasil!”

Falk’s smirk became outright fatuous in its self-congratulation. Somehow the near-imbecility of such an expression on the face of what she knew to be a most intelligent man made him far more frightening.

“That’s not what Manorqu
í
n’s confession says.”

“But it’s a lie!”

Falk laughed. “The truth’s what people believe, isn’t it? More to the point, your father believes it. Who’d be so disloyal as to contradict
him
?”

He frowned and cocked a theatrical brow. “Except his own daughter, perhaps? You’ve been most intemperate criticizing his policies, Princess. People have heard. And wondered.”

“How could anybody possibly believe I’d plot to overthrow my own father? To what purpose? M-much less to, to—”

She couldn’t say
kill him
. The thought of
anyone
wanting to harm her father horrified her to the pit of her stomach. That anyone could think
she
might was literally unspeakable.

“These are perilous times, Highness,” the young Duke said. “The news from Providence has terrified not just the La Merced rabble but the entire court as well. Who knows what might have caused one of the Creators’ Avenging Angels to Emerge, after so many centuries of sabsence? It can only be the blackest evil. Perhaps Fae-worship. Perhaps—”

He had gotten close without her being aware of anything but that sinister smile and those scary eyes. Now she smelled not just sweat and wine but something else, as if his passion itself exuded a reek. His huge bare chest was almost touching her equally bare breasts. Her buttocks pressed against the edge of the stout table that stood by the outer wall. She could retreat no farther.

“Perhaps even a princess plotting her father’s demise,” he breathed. “And in such uncertain times, who could doubt even a princess can fall into evil, dabbling in questionable doctrines?”

“Questionable doctrines? You mean Jaume’s teachings? They’re as orthodox as can be! The Creators themselves tell us to take pleasure in the world they made us—it’s right there in
The Books of the Law
. That’s not
questionable
at all. It’s—”

Her words ran down.
It’s that damned Life-to-Come cult, with its upside-down theology. And among its adherents, rumor has it, the Pope himself. Good job defending your
novio
, there.

She looked at the sweat that streamed down Falk’s face in spite of the cool Channel air through the window, and wondered if it might be too late already.

He smiled. His pale skin was flushed. His lips, pink ever so lightly touched with blue, looked unpleasantly fleshy inside his night-black beard.

“Your father’s allowed you to run wild,” he said in a husky whisper. “Now it’s time you learned some discipline.”

He reached for her. She flinched away. Then she snapped upright and flashed her eyes.

“You don’t dare touch me,” she said. “My father—”

“Won’t believe a word of it. I’m a man of proven loyalty. Whereas
you
are a spoiled princess caught in folly, possibly a trafficker with demons, making mad accusations out of spite.” He caught her arm. “You women think nothing of men.”

She shot a knee toward his groin. He turned his hips and took it on the thigh.

“You think we’re nothing more than dirt beneath your pretty little feet,” he said. She tried to grab his lip and twist. With bull-tyrant strength and startling speed he spun her to face the table. Bending her arm cruelly up behind her back, he forced her down until her breasts were squashed painfully against the unyielding wood.

“You think you can do what you like with no consequences,” he rasped. “Well, I’ll
show
you consequences, bitch.”

She screamed. She hated herself for doing it. Being slammed with the knowledge of helplessness had broken her vaunted self-control.

No matter how clever she liked to think she was, she couldn’t think of anything else to do.

And worse … she knew screams wouldn’t help. The walls and doors were thick enough to muffle sound. And if the sentries on the wall heard, she knew they wouldn’t intervene.

Creators’ Law forbade torture. But sometimes even divine law got stretched. Especially when the terrible Grey Angels stalked the surface of Paradise once again. The guards, human, feared the Angels as much as any.

Melod
í
a felt her loincloth wrenched away, heard it flung to the wall. A great sweaty hand clamped on her right buttock. A broad powerful thumb probed between her cheeks. She gasped as it pushed inside her.

“Jaume’s a boy-lover,” Falk grunted. Sweat dripped from his lank hair to scald her back. “He’s used you this way. I know he has.”

Like most girls her age—and in spite of Do
ñ
a Carlota’s best efforts—Melod
í
a wasn’t virgin in any sense. But what she’d done, she’d done
willingly
. No one had ever dared try to force her. It had never entered her head that anyone
might
. She was the Emperor’s daughter. As a hidalga she’d been trained to the use of arms. As was the custom she always carried at least a dagger.