by Victor Milán
The hideous glare flicked out, leaving him blinking away great orange balls of light that seemed the only illumination in utter blackness.
* * *
“What was that?” Selena asked.
“In candor, your guess is as good as mine,” said Karyl.
“But it was—it was a Faerie?”
“Yes. They’re real. It seems everything is real, and nothing may be true. As to it being their Queen, I didn’t think they were the sort to suffer such. But I could be wrong about that too.”
“To traffic with the Fae is death.”
He shrugged. “I’ve been under death sentence before.”
I’ve died before, he thought. But for some reason feared to say as much, though he’d made light of it in the past. That was to Rob, with whom he felt more easy speaking his mind. But he doubted he’d make the same joke now, even to the closest thing he had to a best friend.
“You get used to it. But this”—he gestured at the spot where the thing had stood—“I’m not so sure about.”
“Your Grace.” The voice from behind quavered so much that he barely recognized it.
“Yes.” He turned.
Laurent had his feet on the dais, at least, though his face was still whiter than Karyl could readily credit it getting, and his eyes remained saucers.
“I … I resign my Countship. My cowardice there proved that I’m unworthy of my spurs, much less rule of a province. If you choose to take my life, I won’t resist.”
A corner of his moustache quirked up to a brief lopsided almost smile. His color was coming back, and it brought with it at least a shard of his usual insouciance.
“Not that it would do me any good.”
Karyl shook his head once, briskly. “Impossible. Denied. I need you here.”
“But my cowardice just now! I’ve shown I’m not fit to rule.”
“As to whether anyone’s fit for that, I have my doubts. In any event, you rule here, and I rule over you, and what I rule is that here you stay.”
“But—”
Karyl raised his left hand slightly. “Enough. There’s work here I need you to do, and fighting the Fae isn’t any part of it.”
Laurent bowed his head. “Why did you even appoint me, Your Grace? The first you saw of me, I was your enemy, and if your damned woods-runners and light riders hadn’t caught me by surprise, I’d have helped to serve you so much dirt it might have choked you.”
“You struck me as a capable man, and honorable for a man of your station. When it came time to pick someone to run Crève Coeur, Rob found no one who could offer eyewitness testimony that you had committed rape or murder, even under Guillaume. And by then I had the evidence of your ability and character from your service with my army.”
Laurent raised his face enough to show Karyl an upraised brow. “You recognized me the first time you saw me, didn’t you?”
“Of course. Blacking your hair, beard, and brow didn’t do anything to change your scar, nor your eyes.” Rob had caught it too, within a day or so of Laurent’s joining the Fugitive Legion in Métairie Brulée, right before their one-sided battle with the ill-advised—and ill-fated—Countess Célestine. Or rather Stéphanie the woods-runner had. She had been the one to bring the captive enemy knight before the Garden Council, as they sat in judgment on charges Rob and Karyl had betrayed the army to its defeat at Guillaume’s hand at the Blueflowers battle. Her eye was at least as keen as Karyl’s.
“You know everyone under your command, don’t you?”
“Given time, and a sufficiently modest army. I still don’t know everyone who had joined us by Canterville. Nowhere close. At the end that force was at least twice as great as any I’ve commanded.”
“But I violated my parole,” Laurent said. “I swore on my life and honor that if I ever returned to Providence, they both would be forfeit.”
Laurent, Karyl had learned from him after Raguel’s fall, had stayed out of Guillaume’s fight at the Marais Caché, in accordance with the terms of his parole to Karyl. He had been in Crève Coeur town when Raguel’s Crusade erupted and had barely escaped with his life. After several days of dodging the divinely crazed marauders, he had crossed the Lisette back into Providence, reasoning that if he was arrested for violating his parole, Karyl would kill him far more quickly and cleanly than the Horde was going to. Hard a man as he was, he had seen things to leave him soul sick and shaken.
A caballero, a horse-mounted knight rather than a dinosaur rider, Laurent had enlisted anonymously with Karyl’s now Fugitive Legion hours after it had crossed into Métairie Brulée. On the brink of battle with Countess Célestine’s army, no one had been in a mood to question a prospective recruit with his own harness and war-horse and the build and well-scarred visage of a man who knew how to use them. Horse chivalry was reckoned of far less worth than dinosaur knights, anyway, although they played important parts in battle.
“I judged all such vows and warrants were voided by the Grey Angel Crusade,” Karyl said. “Circumstances had changed. The world had changed.”
He turned to Selena, who had put away her sword and was leaning against the wall as if she needed its help to stay standing.
“I’ve seen worse.”
“The presence of the … uncanny unmans me,” Laurent said. He heaved himself off the throne and tottered from the dais and across the marble floor to pour himself wine. If any servants had been around to witness the advent of Uma, they had fled. “Seeing Raguel in the flesh, or whatever he was made of, almost turned me to a eunuch then and there, and I never saw him closer than a thousand meters off.”
“Fighting against the Fae is no part of your job,” Karyl said.
Laurent held a goblet up to Karyl, who shook his head. Wine and herbs had long since proved false friends in dealing with the recurring pain of the dent in his skull Falk had given him at the Hassling or with the nightmares that periodically woke him screaming. Whose terrors seemed to cluster nearer to him now than ever before in waking life. Intoxicants did little to dull the edge of torments of body or mind but did erode the steel self-control he needed to keep himself from doing things not even he could live with.
Laurent proffered the cup to Selena. After a moment she caught Karyl’s eye. He nodded. With an air of almost puppyish gratitude she walked briskly to Laurent, accepted the goblet, and drank.
“How did you face it so bloody calmly?” Laurent asked Karyl. “First, Raguel, now that—that thing?”
“With Raguel I saw little choice. He threatened my army—he threatened everybody. Someone had to act. So I did. But here—”
He shook his head.
“I have no idea.”
* * *
“I knew you’d come,” said Karyl, as soon as the door shut on the servants who had ushered him into his bedchamber for the night.
“And here I am,” said Aphrodite, the sorceress and ageless Witness. And if he believed what she told him when she visited him after Raguel’s fall, Paradise itself. Or at least its spirit.
“I’m tired,” he said. “I know that the instant I close my eyes, the worst of the nightmares—the laughing inhuman faces, the ecstasy and pain, alike intolerable—will find me again. But still I need what sleep I can get after that. So please tell me what you can tell me, or will, and go.”
She shook her head. She wore her usual cowl, but with the hood hanging behind her short hair.
“I wish you would stop treating me like an enemy, Karyl,” she said. “I really am on your side.
“I accept that,” he said, grudgingly. “But I don’t know what you are. So I don’t know why you’re on my side. Nor what you want from me.”
“It is simple: I need a champion. You, of all men and women here and now, have proven yourself best qualified.”
“Really?” She was right that he didn’t like asking questions for anything other than information. But the word was practically forced from his mouth by the pressure of his skepticism.
She waved a
pale hand at him.
He sighed. “Point taken. I’m here. Very well: what was that creature?”
“What she said, amazingly enough. She is Uma, the Faerie Queen.”
“But legend has it the Fae are hardly the sort to accept another’s dominion. Or, really, even their own.”
“That is true. But their behavior is truly unpredictable. She is one of the strongest among them. She also has the gift, almost unique for a Faerie, of possessing the capacity to form and follow a fixed purpose. She plans. That itself augments her power greatly.”
“So those she can’t overpower directly, she outplots.”
“Precisely. Or at least that is the closest we can come to understanding their nature and their doings. They are truly and profoundly alien, no less to myself and the Grey Angels than to you.”
“I thought you knew everything. And understood everything.”
She laughed. It was so unexpected it came close to shocking Karyl. Even after everything he’d experienced in the past weeks and the past few minutes.
“I know much,” she said, “and I understand much. But I am not omniscient by any means. And most of what I truly understand is involved with the business of keeping the world and those upon it, plants as well as animals, alive. That is why I spent so long observing human affairs, especially human conflict: to gain a measure of understanding of you. And in doing so, I have come to achieve a marked degree of affection for you.”
“So what does she want from me?”
“I cannot say for certain. Or even make a good guess, given that ‘certainty’ and the Fae are incompatible. She no doubt is keenly aware that you and she share a common foe.”
“The Grey Angels.”
“Yes. For both them and the Fae, the Demon War never really ended. They just left—mostly—the physical plane of existence, and now battles are waged in the World Below.”
“I take it that’s a metaphor.”
“In a way. In a way it is literal. Please do not ask me to expand.”
“I won’t. I have rather more urgent questions to ask. What do the Grey Angels plan to do to us?”
“For some, who call themselves the Purifications, to destroy you utterly. Raguel is one of them; and His attempt having been defeated by you and Shiraa—and do not deny your own part in the victory—it becomes the Preservationists’ turn to try. They believe that it is only necessary to prune humanity back drastically to save what they conceive of as the Equilibrium of Paradise, rather than eradicate it of you.”
“That’s humane of them.”
“Not in the slightest. You surely gathered from that that they still want to kill almost all of you?”
“I spoke sarcastically.”
“Forgive me. I have little experience in dealing with humans, face-to-face.”
“Except for doomed men and women, to whom you feel safe in revealing yourself as the Witness, since they’ll never tell anybody.” That was how they’d met, when Aphrodite had confronted Karyl as he fled naked and wounded from the aftermath of the Battle of Gunters Moll.
“Yes. The Grey Angels’ nature might surprise you in its similarity to your own.”
“That doesn’t do much to comfort me.”
“You are wise. But their interests are simply in no way congruent to your own. Concepts such as ‘humane’ or even ‘inhuman’ are as inapplicable to them as they are to the Fae.”
“So you’re thinking Uma wants me as an ally?”
“It seems likely.”
“What good can I or any human do, much less for the likes of her? You tell me the Grey Angels will continue to try to wipe us out and cannot be killed.”
“I did not say that.”
“No. But you said the Fae had fought them for centuries. Have they succeeded in killing a Grey Angel.”
She hesitated. “No.”
“Then what can I or any of us do?”
“You have already thwarted a Grey Angel Crusade. That has never happened before. Not I, nor they, can truly predict what you might be able to do them. You as a species—and you, Karyl, as an individual.”
“Why didn’t Raguel just wave his hand and make an end of all of us there on the battlefield? Or make an end of all of us, everywhere, if that was his intention?”
“Did Raguel display that kind of power on the field of Canterville?”
“No. And I’ve no idea why. He controlled the thoughts of tens of thousands of people.”
“Over a hundred thousand. But he influenced their emotions, rather than controlled what they thought.”
“Still, I cannot truly conceive of such power; I can only know that I witnessed it. Church canon tells us they are the Creators’ own mystical avengers. What limits their power?”
“The same thing that limits mine. They, too, are subject to a geas. Even though they have warped the Creators’ clear mandate to preserve the Equilibrium of Paradise to mean they must eliminate you, there are distinct limits which they dare not pass as to what actions they can take directly against you.”
“I take it you mean ‘dare not,’ rather than ‘cannot.’”
“You take my meaning correctly. There is a line for me. There is another line for them. For either of us to cross that line would mean our instant death. Our permanent extinction, not an inconvenience like the destruction of Raguel’s avatar.”
She stepped back and raised her hood to hide her features in shadow. “And now I have said all I dare for the moment. I cannot control your dreams, dear Karyl, but I can offer my true wish that they treat you kindly tonight.”
She stepped back into shadow and was gone.
“They won’t,” he said, with a hand wave at the air. “But thanks for the thought.”
Chapter 25
Titán trueno, Thunder-titan—Apatosaurus louisae. Giant quadrupedal plant-eating dinosaur, 23 meters long, 23 tonnes. Nuevaropan native. Placid and oblivious like all titans, Apatosaurus’ sheer size renders it a danger to life and property, especially in herds.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
“If you poke those bloody great beasts with those sticks,” Rob shouted from Nell’s back to the score of peasants of various ages who stood in the road holding long, pointy poles and gazing apprehensively at the Thunder-titan herd browsing on their crops half a kilometer away, “and they find out about it, you’ve thrown yourselves headfirst into a cesspit of trouble.” A somewhat larger group of locals stood a safe distance back from the makeshift militia, watching from the sides of the road and irrigation ditches.
Tertre Herbeux was mostly flat, dotted with low round hillocks like the one the manor perched on, a little over a kilometer to the northeast, which gave the place its name. It was greener here than most of Providence, all of which in turn was greener than most of La Meseta. A trio of fliers flapped by to the west, big looking but not big enough to be called dragons, and hence a bother.
“Who’s this lout?” demanded a stout, red-faced farm woman in a hemp smock, with a red rag tied about her head and some kind of long crimson feather sticking up out of it. “And on such an ungainly, ugly beast.”
“My Lord,” said Bergdahl, who rode alongside Rob on a great strider more villainous-looking than he, with blue body feathers, a yellow rough, and a tuft of oddly pink feathers sprouting from the top of its head. Its eyes seemed never to look in the same direction. “It is customary for a nobleman to have his House-soldiers whip any peasants who address him in such a disrespectful way. Before or after tearing their tongue out.”
“But I don’t have House-shields, or House-archers, either. Nor do I need any mailed mercenary bully-boys or girls to do my lout-thumping for me, should thumping be required.”
The woman’s hazel eyes narrowed, then widened considerably. “You’re the new baron.”
“Guilty,” Rob said. “The very one you sent to have pulled out of his nice warm bed on a fine summer morning to save your homes and livelihoods, so. Those two there, in fact—they were the ones who fetched me.
” And he pointed to an adolescent boy and girl, familiar-looking despite the conical straw hats pulled low in front of their eyes. They were sidling off into the fields as if hoping to blend into the bean sprouts.
Though I don’t look any too baronial, and that’s a natural fact. He wore a springer-leather vest laced up the front, not so tightly as to hide the rusty fur on his chest, short breeches, and buskins, topping off the whole ensemble with a battered brown slouch hat to keep the sun from his eyes. The sun up here in the shadow of the Shields, clearly visible on the eastern horizon even here at the far end of Providence, seemed to sting more than it did in the lowlands, even though it was cooler here as a general rule. He wondered if the clouds, being closer, filtered less of the sun.
I’d regret not throwing a feather yoke over my shoulders before saddling up Nell, he thought, but my head still throbs so hard from last night’s merriment I’m ecstatic I can keep my saddle. I can hardly believe even I put away that much beer and Laventura sack. Bergdahl knew an astonishing number of limericks in Anglés and Spañol, of equally astonishing obscenity. More surprising, he knew bawdy songs Rob had never heard, which he claimed came from Alemania and the isles of the Northmen beyond across the sea. Perhaps greatest wonder of all, he sang with a marvelous fine basso that Rob himself might envy.
“I see no need for thumpings, though,” he said as he rode up to the farmers, who now seemed unsure which they should be alarmed of more, the mammoth dinosaurs lumbering toward their homes and livelihood or this outlandish new lord of the manor. “Anyone can make a mistake. I will even own that I’ve spoken in less than obsequious tones to gentle folk in my own time. But anyone who dares imply that Little Nell is a whit less noble than a sackbut fit for the Emperor Felipe himself—we’re on speaking terms, you know—to ride to war shall answer to the fists of Rob Korrigan. Uh, Baron of Tertre Herbeux. Me.”
And, reining Little Nell, he also scratched her neck in a way he knew would make her snort and toss her head, with its great odd, forward-hooking horn. That made the hayseeds jump back.
He swung a bare leg over his saddle and dropped to the road. The crushed pumice surface seemed threadbare, for a fact. Small surprise that verminous tub Melchor let his fief go to wrack and ruin, even before he scuttled off to Providence Town to join the very Grey Angel Horde that would soon lay it waste.
