by Victor Milán
“Let’s remember that this is all possibility, not certainty. It’s a possible lie to the future. Our task is to steer events in some different direction before they reach that land.”
“You’ve the soul of a poet, despite yourself.”
“No need to insult me.”
But he smiled, slightly, once again. His face’ll ache for days from such unfamiliar exercise. But Rob had to admire his self-control at being able to make even the mildest of jokes while pondering such matters. Or the complete cold-bloodedness. But Rob had spent enough time with the man to have his measure in some degree. Karyl’s blood ran as hot as any beneath that calm and pallid surface.
“It still seems a mighty task,” Rob said, “even for those who’ve done what some might call mighty deeds enough for a lifetime already.”
“It is. And—I am beginning to wonder if we’re up to it.”
Rob felt cold. “Oh, no. Don’t go saying that.”
“The first time, Raguel’s arrogance made Him overconfident. Not surprising, inasmuch as his technique had always worked before, in slaughtering human beings by the million. He didn’t expect such a setback, any more than, frankly, I ever expected we could deal it to him.”
“Yet you faced him. Alone. When no one else would.”
Karyl sighed. “I was dead anyway—a state I’d be resigned to, if I could just achieve it and stay put. But I could not let myself simply die without fighting. It’s what I do. The only thing I saw to fear was not to face Raguel in battle, since I’d nothing more to lose.”
“So the fierce pride of a master craftsman saved the Empire.”
“And the jaws of my sweet, loyal, loving Shiraa.” This time Karyl’s smile was wide and prolonged.
How could I, a dinosaur master, not love a man who so loves a dinosaur? And such a fine girl she is, at that.
“But now,” Karyl said, and the smile evaporated, “the Angels will come against us with greater force. They exist, in defiance of my lifetime of resolutely not believing in them, and they’ve demonstrated exactly the sort of vast magical powers the legends attribute to them. I—I don’t really know how to respond to that.”
“By fighting, of course,” Rob said. “It’s what you do.”
“Indeed. But I am having a hard time seeing how we can defeat them without bringing some kind of force beyond the physical to bear.”
“What about the witch who calls herself Aphrodite after the continent, then? Who hired us first to go and turn a sect of pacifists into an army? Which we did.”
“She gave me back my hand. Raguel filled the minds and hearts of a hundred thousand with all-consuming rage. That’s quite a disparity of power.”
“Granted. And not even I know how to find her again. ’Twas her who sought me out. But at least we could try.”
“Believe me,” Karyl said, “she cannot help us. No. We are in a desperate strait, and against my own judgment—against my own terrors, against the nightmares that have tortured me for months—I begin to fear we have to contemplate allying ourselves with a different power. One which has no love of Angels.”
And Rob knew.
First he went cold. Bergdahl was right, all these weeks! Despite the man’s hail-fellow companionship, Rob somehow hated being forced to admit it. But he hated it even more because it meant—
His mind vanished in a roaring white flame of terror.
His heart broke. He fled—from Karyl’s presence, from Séverin Farm, pausing only to reclaim and fumblingly saddle Little Nell before fleeing to the dubious sanctuary of his traitor’s castle.
* * *
Karyl stood staring at the sudden vacancy of his study.
“I wonder what possessed Rob to take off like that,” he said softly to himself. He had gone quite white behind his red-bronze beard.
He shook his head. He had other matters to concern himself with. Matters he desperately wanted not to have to confront, but he had no choice.
“I hope he hasn’t suddenly taken sick,” he said. “I’ll send a healer in the morning to check on him. He’s never been one to think about his own health.”
He had hoped to get Rob’s reassurance that an alliance with the Fae was, at least, a possible strategic option.
Or, to be honest with myself, that Rob would talk me out of the whole notion, somehow.
That easy escape now being closed to him, the foremost task he feared was getting sleep. The dreams were actually somewhat better, now that he knew what lay behind them.
And sometimes immeasurably worse, now that he knew. He put his friend’s curious reaction from his mind, steeled himself, and marched off to his nightly battles against nightmare.
Chapter 36
Gordito, Fatty.…—Protoceratops andrewsi. A small Ceratopsian dinosaur: a frilled, plant-eating quadruped, 2.5 meters long, 400 kilograms, 1 meter high, with a powerful toothed beak. The only hornface to lack horns. A ubiquitous domestic herd beast, not found wild in Nuevaropa. Timid by nature.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
“Have you ever been offered a proposition which horrified you too much to even think about taking it?”
Rob Korrigan slouched in a chair in the dining hall of his manor as if he’d melted onto it. Dawn light oozed from the window like pus from a wound. His beard scratched the skin above his collarbone, where his substantial rust-colored chest thatch failed to reach. A wine goblet stood on the table within ready reach. It was empty.
He wasn’t sure which number it was.
“No, my lord,” Bergdahl called from the kitchen, where he was chopping onions for Rob’s breakfast omelets of scratcher eggs on a sturdy wooden table. A pan of fatty bacon sizzled and filled the air with a delicious aroma as it roasted in the fireplace. For such a strange-looking chap, Bergdahl was a startlingly good cook. “I can’t say that I have.”
“Ah. A downy scratcher chick you are, Bergdahl. Pray you stay that way.”
“As you say, my lord.”
After riding straight back from Séverin Farm to Tertre Herbeux as fast as Little Nell was willing to go, which wasn’t very, Rob had thought his only interest was in getting drunk. Also as rapidly as possible. But the smells of his seneschal’s cooking proved him wrong.
Now he wanted to eat and get drunk, both as fast as possible. He heaved himself up and, taking the empty goblet, padded into the kitchen with the blue-painted white tiles cool beneath his bare feet.
He spied the wine bottle on a side table. It was empty. Setting the goblet down beside it with a decisive plonk! of silver on knife-scarred hardwood, he went to the door to the underground pantry and opened it.
Just inside, down a ramp of hard-stamped dirt by a set of wooden shelves, he saw a heavy clay ale jug. If memory served, it was mostly full. He fetched it, came back to the short hallway that led to the kitchen, and pulled the cork out with his teeth. Then he set about seeing how fast he could make it go from full to empty.
He heard a loud knocking from the manor’s front door. “If you can spare a moment from your cooking, Bergdahl,” he called, annoyed, “go tell whoever the fuck that is to piss off promptly, there’s a good fellow.”
“At once, my lord.”
After an indeterminate interval that Rob had spent, if not in bliss, at least blessedly oblivious in his single-minded focus on guzzling, he heard Bergdahl clear his throat from close at hand.
“What is it?” he grumbled, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He resented having his drinking interrupted, given that his seneschal didn’t have the tone of a man announcing breakfast is served, and anyway Rob couldn’t recollect hearing the promised omelets being cooked.
“It was a messenger from El Duque de La Marca, my lord.”
“From Karyl?” asked Rob, who had completely forgotten the errand he sent Bergdahl on, and now felt even more befuddled.
“That Duke of the Borderlands, yes,” Bergdahl said, with what Rob acknowledged to himself as laudably restrained sarcasm.
“What
did he want?”
“She,” Bergdahl said. “It seems that His Grace is worried about your health.”
“What? Why?” He shook his head. The motion made his brain feel as if it were sloshing about in his skull. Good, he thought. That means I’m getting properly drunk.
He waved a hand. “Never mind. I trust you told her to piss off promptly?”
“As you commanded, lord.”
“Well. Good. Carry on, then. I find myself craving that omelet. And a touch more to drink.”
He upended the jug and let the amber liquid cascade, more into his mouth than down his beard to drip on his chest hairs, left bare by his open vest. The vessel’s growing lightness weighted down his heart.
“So, my lord,” called Bergdahl, back at the stove working his own arcane magic on his omelets. Or so Rob judged by the distance he sounded to be; he couldn’t be arsed to look away from the all-important jug. Rob had no idea how he did the thing; his master Morrison had claimed Rob could burn water trying to boil it. But at least it meant he’d not had to add cooking to his endless list of ’prentice chores.
“Are you ready to face the truth?”
The words tolled like a great bronze temple bell in Rob’s mind, suggesting it was still not sufficiently fogged. It’s all true, he thought. What I thought I saw in his library that night. What I heard. All true.
“It may be sedition to say so,” Bergdahl said, “but His Grace has clearly betrayed humanity and the Creators to the evil ones.”
At that Rob wagged his head like a yearling three-horn brought to bay by a pack of juvenile tyrants.
“No,” he said. “That I won’t believe. I don’t give a shit about him being a great lord again. It isn’t that. Karyl’s my friend. He wouldn’t turn against his own kind. He fought for us.”
“He also fought a Grey Angel—a servant of the Creators.”
“When none other would. And your erstwhile master, the Duke of Hornberg, took the field against Raguel right along with the rest of us. No, I tell you. He’s no renegade.”
Not knowingly, he’s not. But the Fae were notorious for their trickery. To Rob, that was more than myth or mere reputation.
“But why does he try to seduce you into dealing with the Fae, if he hasn’t already turned?”
“Because he thinks it’s right! He’s obsessed with fear of another Grey Angel Crusade. Not that there’s anything daft about that; I don’t expect them to turn into docile little darlings now that one of them’s been defeated for the first time in history.”
Splendid job, Rob, m’lad, he thought. You’ve reminded yourself of one more thing to be petrified of. He drained the somewhat bitter dregs, tossed the heavy jug aside—sadly, it was stout enough to bounce on the flagstone of the hallway, not break satisfyingly—and went rooting for another.
“How can he possibly think dealing with the Fae’s a good idea?” Bergdahl asked, scooping the omelets onto a silver platter. “Leave aside that it’s a death sentence to do so under Creators’ Law. The stories all suggest the Fae themselves will do worse to anyone who trusts them.”
Don’t I know it? Rob thought. He descended into the larder and found an unopened jug behind a sack of turnips. He hauled it out and took it back into the kitchen, where he began prying greedily at the green wax seal with a knife.
“Ah, there you go, you nosehorn’s catamite! Got you.”
He pried the cork out, upended the jug, and drank.
“I can’t say what motivates the man. Unless he’s that desperate. Or—”
He frowned and actually lowered the jug.
Wrapping a damp rag around his hand, Bergdahl pulled the bacon pan from the open cooking hearth by the wooden handle on its long metal tang. “The Fae are known for more than their tricks,” he told Rob as he carried it spitting and hissing like a wet vexer to the main table. “They use magic too. It’s said to be hard for them, but they have their ways as well as wiles.”
“That’s it!” Rob snapped his fingers. “The devils have ensorceled him!”
He waved the mostly full jug at Bergdahl. “Only one thing to do now,” he said. “I see it plain as day.”
“And what is that, my lord?” asked Bergdahl, back in the kitchen.
“I’ve got to”—he woke to the smells of dinosaur bacon and eggs cooking as to a lovely, naked mistress—“eat breakfast, then get drunk. Priorities, my man.
“And after I’ve slept that off, it’s away to La Majestad I go to save my dear friend Karyl from his own enchanted self. And the world as well, I wouldn’t doubt.”
Chapter 37
La Vida se Viene, Life-to-Come—A radical sect of the Church of Nuevaropa which preached self-denial, holding that the Creators’ mandates in The Books of the Law were metaphorical, and sometimes even meant the opposite of what they said. Despite its heterodoxy, which crossed the line into heresy when some sectaries claimed that sin could lead to eternal damnation, the Life-to-Come enjoyed a substantial following in the early eighth century.
—LA GRAN HISTORIA DEL IMPERIO DEL TRONO COLMILLADO
When Melodía entered the crowded throne room pretending to support La Madrota’s elbow—the ancient got along as spryly as she herself did, for all that she could tell, and better than Melodía currently could with her body bruised and aching from an early morning’s training in the scrubland—she almost stumbled when she saw who stood before her Fangèd Throne.
Jaume was dressed in a red feather cape and white trunks, leaving his heroic torso and long muscular legs bare. He looked at Melodía. Her breath stumbled as her feet almost had. She nodded once, slightly.
Yes, I forgive you. Yes, I was wrong to blame you. Again. Forgive me, my love.
She looked at Rosamaría critically, though, as they took their waiting places on the front row of the stands placed left and right of the doorway. “He’s our secret weapon? But you can see—people are still snickering at him!”
“No. He’s bringing our secret weapon.”
The throne room was on the verge of stifling, more from the heat of the scores of bodies packed inside than from the heat of the day outside the Heart’s thick stone skin. While Melodía wore little more than bangled loincloth and tiara, La Madrota was, as usual, swaddled like an infant, neck to soles in black robes.
As if to compensate, the matriarch held a lacy black fan before her lower face. “Subtle,” Melodía said in disgust.
“Sometimes the direct means work best, child. Subtlety’s just another tool on the bench. That’s the lesson of Martina la Negra’s whole life; you should study it again, and this time pay attention.”
“Your Majesty, ladies and lords and Deputies of the Diet,” Jaume declared, “please allow me to present the hero of the Battle of Canterville, Duque Imperial Karyl de la Marca.”
It was an unusually warm day up here on the heights. Melodía, her father, and most of the Court had dressed lightly. Others, especially the Dieta Deputies and other officials, tended to affect the heavy black velvet currently fashionable for their breed, which Melodía gathered they thought enhanced their gravity and appearance of importance.
By contrast, Karyl strode in wearing the loose white shirt and black trousers tucked into the rolled-down tops of cavalry boots that she had grown used to seeing him wear during the Providence army’s flight from Raguel’s Horde. He had only added a nosehorn-leather jack to face the Grey Angel Himself—and everybody knew it.
Whether on his own—and Melodía had decided he was a far shrewder motivator than he believed himself to be—or coached, he was clearly reminding the Emperor and all his court that he was first and foremost a peerless fighter. He strode in to thunderous applause, stopped at a respectful distance before the Fangèd Throne, and knelt.
“I thought he hated Jaume,” Melodía said to Rosamaría as the tumult died.
“They seem to have come to terms.”
“Rise, Duke Karyl,” Felipe said. “Please. You honor us with your presence.”
“Your
Majesty is too kind.” He stood up and took a step back.
“Your Majesty, Your Highness, Doña Rosamaría, ladies and gentlemen of the Court. I thank you for hearing me. What I have to say is urgent, and will be brief.”
“Blasphemer!” a woman shouted.
“Bishop Charlotte,” Rosamaría murmured to Melodía. “Deputy for Cardinal Beate to the College of Princes. She’s a solid von Hornberg ally.”
“He dared to cross swords with a Grey Angel!”
“Large crowd this evening,” Melodía said.
“Having some idea what was going to happen, I made sure to rally our supporters. Margrethe in response rallied hers. So it goes.”
The Duque de Mandar rose to his full enormous height, his gaunt, normally blue face red with fury. “Religion to the side, you’re an idiot. You’re impugning to his face a man who dared cross swords with a Grey Angel!”
Gasps greeted that observation—followed quickly by general laughter. “La Señora Obispa has also impugned me and whoever else fought against the Crusade, including His Majesty himself,” Mandar added sternly.
Rolling her eyes like a frightened horse at Margrethe, who sat beside the Emperor with a curdled expression on her own square face, Charlotte melted back into the crowd with the look of one who wishes she could retract the past minute.
“Grandes y grandezas,” Jaume said in a commanding voice that did not sound raised, “please. His Holiness, Leo Victor, has issued an Encyclical confirming the Emperor’s proposition that in the Grey Angel Crusade, we faced not the punishment of the Creators, but a test imposed by Their servants for Their own reasons. A trial by combat, if you will.”
“Excellent,” La Madrota said. “Do you see what he did there?”
“No,” Melodía admitted. “He seems to be prolonging irrelevant debate.”
“No. He’s ending it. Watch.”
