The Dinosaur Lords (58 page)
Except it had been stripped from her by rough hands, along with her dignity and freedom. Lacking a weapon, she was defeated by mere strength.
This. Can’t. Be. Happening.
She screamed again in fury, frustration, and pain as he rammed himself into her.
Gordito,
Fatty
—
Protoceratops andrewsi
. A small ceratopsian dinosaur with a powerful toothed beak, a frilled, plant-eating quadruped: 2.5 meters long, 400 kilograms, 1 meter high. The only “hornface” to lack horns. A ubiquitous domestic herd beast, not found wild in Nuevaropa. Timid by nature.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
These flagstones are hard on my knees,
thought Pablo Mondrag
ó
n.
I’m too old for this.
A man who seldom smiled, he smiled thinly now. It was his age, in ways, that had brought him here.
He wouldn’t be growing older. A consolation, of sorts.
The sun through high overcast stung the back of his bowed neck and beat up at his bowed face from the yellow limestone flags. He was aware of the crowd gathering around the fringes of Creation Plaza by their murmuring, like the sound of surf in the Channel nearby. The onlookers were subdued. As Mercedes, they had small taste for public cruelty, except where pirates were concerned. But being Mercedes, they couldn’t resist a spectacle.
The execution of a disgraced Chief Minister to the Emperor was, by definition, spectacular.
Don Pablo had a mind attuned to irony. He recognized it in the fact that, even in the last hours of his life, locked in a small cell in the Palace of the Fireflies, he still attracted
information
. He knew that Heriberto, Prince of the Tyrant’s Jaw and landlord, disapproved of the sudden spin of the Wheel in his Imperial tenant’s affairs. He had refused use of the great central square, el Mercado, for the morning’s proceedings.
But his Holiness had no such reservations. So it came to pass that Mondrag
ó
n knelt alone in the center of Creation Plaza, nearly as vast as the Mercado, awaiting his executioner. Whoever and whatever it might be: certainly not the venerable Tyrannosaurus Don Rodrigo, fat, tame, and without a tooth in his head. El Verdugo Imperial could do no more than gum a convict’s neck and drool down his back.
Mondrag
ó
n felt oddly content. While it was axiomatic that the Emperor possessed too little overt power to conspire against, the Fang
è
d Throne’s prestige and influence still drew abundant intrigue. The Chief Minister’s job was to serve as lightning rod for the occupant of the Fang
è
d Throne. Mondrag
ó
n had never expected to die peacefully in bed. Few of his predecessors had.
I wish my successor luck, whoever he may be
. He was distressingly aware of the ease with which that recent rebel and upstart child Falk had outmaneuvered him.
Clearly, I lost my edge. Perhaps this turn of Maris’s Wheel was overdue, for the good of the Empire.
He was afraid that the wildest of the rumors flying in the wake of the terrible news from Providence would prove true: that Felipe’s confessor might succeed him. He didn’t trust the Father Sky sectary. Fray Jer
ó
nimo was unaccountable-for, thus unaccountable.
Mondrag
ó
n believed that was his only fear. Then he heard the crowd gasp, looked up, and knew that
fear
had been a total stranger before.
Seeing a pure-white Tyrannosaurus bull waddling toward him, thick tail swinging, ruby eyes fixed upon him, and Duke Falk astride his back in his glittering Scarlet Tyrant armor, introduced Don Pablo to the genuine article.
An
alguacil
read loudly from a scroll of condemnations. Mondrag
ó
n couldn’t hear him for the pulse roaring in his ears.
There was no need for him to hear the traditional call to lift his head to ease the Executioner’s task. As the great white head filled his sky like Eris falling, he could look at nothing else.
Saw-toothed jaws almost as long as Mondrag
ó
n’s whole body opened wide. The beast’s breath washed hot and wet over him. It smelled incongruously of the spearmint-imbued grit with which Falk’s hapless arming-squire had to clean the monster’s teeth after every meal. Saliva ropes fell across Mondrag
ó
n’s upturned face.
He screamed as the tyrant’s jaws enveloped his head, blotting out the light. The last thing he felt was the touch of terrible teeth on his neck.
* * *
The clack of a lock opening roused Melod
í
a from a restless drowse of fatigue compounded by despair. As the door opened she raised her face from a pillow still sodden with her tears. She was too drained even to fear that Falk had come to use her again.
But it was neither the Duke nor hooded interrogators she saw by the grey dawn light seeping from her narrow window. A crone in a stained cloak and cowl hobbled in, stooped over a cane. A loosely woven hemp mask covered her face.
The woman coughed. Melod
í
a recoiled in fear. Her captors’ new torment shocked her right out of her sump of despair. Disease was rare—so rare that its onset was considered a curse. Legend claimed the Grey Angels favored plague as an instrument of divine retribution. Paradisiacals feared few things more than
sickness
.
“What’s this?” she demanded. She aimed for hauteur, managed to avoid a terrified squeak. The words stung her raw throat.
She glimpsed a flash of red cloak in the corridor. The door slammed behind the newcomer with unusual emphasis.
Melod
í
a’s unwelcome visitor straightened. The hood slipped back from her head. She stripped the contagion-mask from her face with a relieved exhalation and stuffed it in a sleeve.
Through eyes gummy and swollen from crying Melod
í
a saw a handsome middle-aged woman shaking out long black hair streaked with white. She had a long straight nose and a thin-lipped mouth, perhaps a touch over-wide. She looked somehow familiar. But Melod
í
a didn’t know her name.
“My name is Claudia, Princess,” the woman said. “I’m here to get you out.”
* * *
Heart pounding, Melod
í
a hobbled into the corridor outside her cell. The pair of Scarlet Tyrants who had opened the door to the insistent tapping of her cane stood well clear to let her pass. One stuck a helmeted head around the doorjamb. On seeing a slim feminine form lying beneath a blanket, he yanked the door quickly shut and practically skipped back away from the stooped and masked figure.
Melod
í
a coughed as convincingly as she could. Her savior Claudia had thoughtfully cleaned her mouth with lavender pastilles before donning the contagion-mask. But that just meant it inevitably smelled of lavender-scented spit.
It was a hardship Melod
í
a was willing to bear.
The Tyrants didn’t even tell her to be on her way. It was as if they feared just
talking
to her could infect them. Melod
í
a had no idea what Claudia had told them to get them to admit her to the cell. It didn’t really matter.
Terror of immediate discovery threatened to override even the relief flooding through her. Melod
í
a found it almost impossible to focus on the details of the plan—short and simple as it was—that Claudia had recited as she cleaned the Princess with water from the tap in the closet.
The skin between Melod
í
a’s shoulders crawled in anticipation of the fatal shout. But when she reached the stairs, all she heard was gusty sighs of relief. She only just remembered to hobble on her cane as she began to pick her way down the winding steps.
At the bottom another tall female figure awaited. Melod
í
a stopped and almost fled.
They found me!
Then: “
Pilar!
” It was half sob, half prayer of thanksgiving.
She tensed to sprint down the last few steps and grab her maidservant in the tightest hug of their lives. But in the lightest, most conversational tone possible, Pilar said, “Stay in character.”
Melod
í
a froze. Emotions too many and too intense for body and mind to process filled her up. There was sodden-foolish gratitude, relief, lost-dog love. And also:
Who does she think she is, this servant daring to speak that way to a Princesa Imperial?
That brought back Melod
í
a’s self-control.
You
are
a
princess,
perra
,
she told herself.
So act like one.
Pilar gave her hand a quick squeeze as she reached bottom.
“Follow me,” she said, still as if she were simply sharing the latest gossip. “Don’t hurry, but
¡mu
é
vete!
Understand?”
“Yes,” Melod
í
a said, in what she hoped was a suitable disease-victim croak. That didn’t take much acting thanks to the dryness in her throat.
Covering Melod
í
a’s head with a black mantilla, Pilar led the way through the yard, around the corner of the great residency complex toward the fortress’s west wall, farthest from La Merced. Around them the great living organism that was the Firefly Palace buzzed with coming dawn, everything so
everyday
it almost hurt. Melod
í
a smelled onions and garlic frying for breakfast. Sturdy, red-faced women called cheerful banter as they carried great steaming tubs of freshly boiled laundry. Horses neighed and nosehorns bleated, expectant of their breakfast oats. A cool dawn breeze blowing up La Canal caressed her cheek—bringing with it an unfortunate brimstone tang from the sewage-bloom west of Adelina’s Frown.
Tamely Melod
í
a followed her servant under clouds consolidating into a grey ceiling as pallor reached the western sky. Her mind and spirit had become numb. She seemed to drift through mists, through phantoms, her surroundings at once familiar and bizarre. She could have believed the last few days an evil dream but for the pain that stabbed up her backside at every step.
Great yellow-brick warehouses and draft-animal stables dominated the compound’s western end. Here a certain note of worry permeated the talk among stable hands, warehouse workers, and drovers. Fear of the Grey Angel’s Emergence was alive and thriving. But business as usual predominated, with the usual rough humor as prevalent as dread.
Pilar led Melod
í
a into a great, round-arched opening in a sod-covered mound. Melod
í
a followed, even more hesitantly than her stoop and cane commanded as her eyes adjusted to relative darkness. A walkway ran above a broad ramp down a tunnel that sloped beneath the palace proper and on to the city. Its barrel-vaulted ceiling rang with the bawling of nosehorns and fatties, horse snorts and whinnies, and profanity-laced shouts from drivers and loaders. Lanterns hung along the reinforced limestone walls created everlasting amber twilight. Immense fans powered by dinosaur-driven capstans aboveground kept fresh air moving up the tunnel, but on first entry the stink of piss and shit made Melod
í
a’s eyes water.
She quickly grew accustomed to it. It reminded her to cough conspicuously, which at least was useful. Their fellow pedestrians gave them a wide and fearful berth on the footpath.
Ramp traffic, loaded wagons going up and empty ones going down, was already heavy. The rather steep grade took its toll on beasts climbing and brakes descending. But it was far quicker than going south overland and circling down from the promontory.
Pilar turned into one of the numerous wide bays cut into the walls. Still conscientiously leaning on her cane, Melod
í
a followed. Inside a pair of women dressed in wide straw hats and what appeared to be hemp sacks tended to a brown-dappled cream Centrosaurus hitched to a dray. As one looped the strap of a wooden feed bucket over its long nasal horn, the other dumped handfuls of oats from an open bag into a second pail. Nosehorn beaks couldn’t scrape all the tasty oats from the bottom; they’d occupy themselves happily for hours trying to get at every last flake with their tongues.
When the strap passed before the nosehorn’s eyes, it tossed its frilled head and bleated alarm. The laborer hauled off and booted the beast in its near front shoulder with a skinny, brown-skinned leg.
“Creators light a fire in your belly, you scratcher-beaked sack of shit!” she yelled in a familiar voice.
“Lupe?” Melod
í
a asked.
The woman wheeled around. “Who the fuck wants to know?”
Filth smeared her thin cheeks. Her eyebrows formed a solid line, which, Melod
í
a realized, had been augmented with charcoal. As viciously sensitive as Lupe was about her tendency toward a unibrow, Melod
í
a could think of only one person in all the walled town that was the palace brave or rash enough to do such a thing—
