The Dinosaur Princess

by Victor Milán

  The second hit the roof’s flagstones kneeling, with the buckler in his left hand dropped to them for support. He swung his sword in a vicious forehand cut for Karyl’s advanced right.

  Karyl stabbed the sheath-staff down against a limestone flag. The arming-sword clacked against it. Karyl thrust his own sword through the assassin’s throat.

  He pulled it free as he stepped back. He turned left at a right angle—southwest—and raced through the fragrant garden, then vaulted for the next roof, which lay at the same level and was also flat.

  He jumped short. His boots missed the parapet. But he managed to fling his sword arm over it, catch himself, and clamber up and over to safety.

  Relative safety. And temporary. He heard a whistle from his right. It was echoed at once by one from in front, from behind a higher peaked roof. Then a third came from behind and to his left. They came clearly audible over the rising clamor, especially from the open Great Courtyard right in front of the Entrada. Yet they’d remain meaningless to anyone who heard them who wasn’t caught up in the deadly chase.

  Neat trick, he thought. I’ll have to remember it. He didn’t bother adding any mental caveat about if I live. He never took the next second for granted, much less surviving an immediate threat. Of course, they were alerting him that at least three different groups were closing in on him. Clearly they preferred coordination over stealth. He presumed it a sound decision; he wasn’t about to second-guess another artisan’s craft.

  That didn’t mean he didn’t intend to, in the vernacular of his long-ago youthful friendship with Smrdltska, back in Castle Mist, fuck it right up.

  He was getting close, tantalizingly close, to the wall and the ten-meter-wide gate where the Via Imperial passed through. He raced toward it, to the far side of the new roof, another seeming dwelling place with more modest foliage, and jumped to the steep side of a roof with fired-clay tiles, scrambling up. The overlapped tiles gave decent purchase to his feet and even his hands, which were holding a sword-hilt and the sheath part of his staff. He quickly reached the top.

  Two assassins were just cresting the ridge of the next roof ahead. From his right he glimpsed a second pair racing across the garden of a three-story structure, right before they passed out of sight below the roof he was standing on. Both sets were sprinting flat-out as they closed on their kill.

  Peripheral motion snapped his eyes left. A third pair were just clambering over the end of the roof he was standing on, not eight meters away. They were close enough he could see the triumph on their unmasked upper faces as each stood up and drew an arming-sword.

  Without hesitation, Karyl rushed them. His habit, so deeply ingrained by training and experience as to be reflex, was to charge into an ambush. And no mistake: this was an ambush, albeit a rolling one.

  The nearer one came right for him, swinging his sword overhand. The farther slid a couple of paces down the roof slope to Karyl’s right—prudently flanking him away from his own sword hand. As expected, the man ran almost as fast on the steep pitch as he would on level ground, especially with the tiles’ help.

  With the flat of his single-edged blade, Karyl slapped the descending sword from the left, turning his hips to steer it past his body to the right. He dropped his right arm over the sicario’s, sticking the sheath—still held upward from his fist like a sword—against his right rib cage beneath the armpit. Pressing his left forearm against the killer’s biceps, he locked his sword arm out.

  Karyl now faced down the roof’s side. The second assassin attacked from Karyl’s right, arming-sword cocked over his left shoulder. Even by stars and backscatter lamplight, Karyl could see his pupils widen at the certainty of his kill.

  The certainty was misplaced. Using unbearably painful pressure on his captive’s elbow, Karyl swung the sicario into the path of his partner’s powerful downward cut. The man howled and convulsed in Karyl’s joint lock as the blade bit deep into his right shoulder and chest, almost at the base of his neck.

  Karyl felt a strange looseness in the trapped arm. It told him the second swordsman had chopped the right side of his clavicle clean through—meaning the whole arm had just lost a major anchor point. Karyl might have lost the leverage needed to control him.

  He didn’t care. He raised his right arm as high as he could and gave the stricken sicario a hearty shove with his left, putting a clockwise hip rotation behind it.

  The man’s scream got louder as he plunged down the roof slope into the face of his companion, who was trying to yank his blade free of the man’s body. The second attacker toppled over backward, and both rolled in an uncontrollable tumble of flailing limbs, down the pitched roof off to the street three stories below.

  But now the other four had Karyl surrounded. They circled him with the deliberation of pure self-assurance. They held all the Creator cards now. As Karyl had reminded Rob, a lethally disadvantaged foe was the kind they were best equipped to fight.

  Karyl circled and reversed, scanning his head left to right as he did so, as if trying to keep track of all four at once. He knew that was impossible. What he was really doing was swiveling his eyes to watch the faces of whichever two happened to be in front of him at a given instant.

  He was reasonably confident they, whichever they were, wouldn’t launch the final attack.

  A bald man and a man with short red hair and unusually fair skin for the sicarios Karyl had seen tensed visibly. The bald one’s dark eyes widened slightly.

  Karyl spun counterclockwise, lashing out with his sword. The two assassins who’d been closing on him from behind leapt back.

  His left boot slipped out from under him. He fell forward to his left.

  Chapter 45

  Uriel, El Fuego de Dios, Fire of God—One of the Grey Angels, the Creators’ Own Seven servitors and vindicators of Their divine justice. A fire spirit, linked to the Oldest Daughter, Telar, and imbued especially with Her Attributes of both creation and impermanence. He is said to be allied with Raphael the Healing-spirit, and Remiel the Merciful, hence among the more approachable of the Seven. It is wise to remember that such things are relative, since the Angels’ ministrations are seldom gentle.

  —A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

  The assassin’s arming-sword clanged against Rob’s silver pitcher, his parrying weapon of choice. He stabbed furiously back with his own sword. More by blind luck than anything else the sicario didn’t manage to bring his main-gauche dagger up in time to stop four fingers of its tip from sliding neatly into his gullet, just above the notch of his collarbone.

  Well, now I’m only doubly fucked, Rob thought as he averted his face to keep the answering blood jet from catching him in the right eye. That’s what I get for trying to escape through a maze of a Palace whose innards I only clapped eyes on two hours ago. Having promptly gotten lost after fleeing the kitchen.

  Well, and for trusting that blond Tyrannosaurus, Margrethe.

  Until the last year or thereabouts, Rob Korrigan’s experience at face-up fighting had entailed taverns and the consumption of copious amounts of booze. Though he was sadly about to die stone-sober, such brawls served him reasonably well in a fight like this, doomed as it was. By reflex he yanked his own arming-sword free of the assassin’s neck and then flicked blood from it squarely into the eyes of the one rushing in with sword and buckler from his right. The man jumped back, blinking and dabbing at his eyes with the back of his sword hand.

  Rob continued his spin in a rapid of not unduly graceful pirouettes. Only to see the third of the masked killers who’d surprised him by popping from a side corridor one floor up from the Palace kitchen. He had his right arm drawn back by his ribs and his arming-sword poised to deliver a thrust to an off-balance Rob, who had no Paradisiacal hope of preventing him from running him through.

  The dark eyes went wide in bare surprise. The sicario went as rigid as if turned to stone by wild Faerie magic.

  * * *

  It was no accident. Karyl had
faked a fall in order to roll at the feet of one of the pair of contract killers who’d attacked him from behind. The man jumped lithely up and let Karyl pass right under him.

  Karyl let himself keep rolling. He heard his assailants cry out as they came mincing down the tiles with sideways feet, trying not to slip and join him.

  When he neared the roof’s lower edge, he flung out his right arm and leg, sprawling. Between that and the corrugations caused by the overlapping tiles themselves, he stopped himself short.

  A sicario had changed course to come down almost on top of him, either to kill him if he caught himself or help him over the edge if he needed it. Instead, he trotted right into a forehand slash of Karyl’s sword across the shins.

  The man screeched and tripped over Karyl’s prone body, showering the back of his shirt with hot blood. Using his staff to steady himself, Karyl rolled right and kicked the man off him. His yells got shriller as he rolled off the roof.

  Karyl sat up. Before he could get a leg under him, he caught a blur in the corner of his right eye. He swung the staff-sheath over and back. By chance the blackwood deflected a sword-cut. He cracked the assassin with it smartly across the masked mouth in riposte and came up on his right knee. Another charged in from the left with his arming-sword pulled back two-handed for a thrust. Instead, he ran himself onto Karyl’s blade.

  Karyl pushed off with his right foot, driving his sword through the bald sicario’s stomach to the hilt. His sword-point was already past Karyl’s left shoulder. He pushed himself past the assassin to his own left, spinning him by the sword that impaled him as if it were a handle.

  He turned him clear around, put his right boot to the point between navel and balls and shoved him off the sword and at the sicario he’d hit in the face with his staff. The killer dodged and his stricken companion skidded, moaning, into space.

  Karyl swung a blind stroke left with his sword, causing the opponent trying to close from that side to dance back. He got both feet beneath him. He was almost at the bottom edge of the roof now, the gutter mere centimeters below his left boot.

  They charged him together. He spun clockwise, deflecting a sword slash from the man who had been behind him with the staff. He ran past, readying to hack him across the back.

  Instead, his foot slipped for real. He slid down. His feet flew over the gutter and into air.

  * * *

  Melodía’s friends and nominal subordinates the woods-runners had taught her a lot about backstabbing. Not in intrigue. The literal thing.

  Although the first thing she’d learned on joining Rob Korrigan’s Providence Militia scouts as a simple jinete, or light rider, had been that the woods-runners accepted no one’s dominion. But they would pay attention to those they respected. Even their own “chieftains,” like Emeric and his scarred and vengeful sister Stéphanie, exerted no control. Only influence. Which she was proud of having won in her own right.

  During the fights against border raiders, and then the long fighting retreat culminating in the desperate battle with Raguel’s Crusaders, she’d had no opportunity to use that knowledge. The skirmishes with the mostly Castañero marauders had all taken place on the back of her mare, Meravellosa. And the Horde tended to mindlessly attack anyone not part of it whom they laid eyes on; they seldom presented their backs, especially to a dagger thrust.

  But she used that knowledge now with both calm determination and a savage glee. The pain of that first kidney thrust momentarily paralyzed the sicario. But she had also learned from her wandering teachers that you could never count on a single body stab to incapacitate your foe, much less kill him.

  So as fast as she could she withdrew the dirk and plunged it into the black-clad back again, half a dozen times in rapid succession. Blood splashed her belly and thighs.

  His knees buckled, and he dropped to his side. He instantly curled up into a ball of mewling agony. Overcoming a reflex stab of compassion at her heart, she leaned down, stuck the tip of her dagger into his neck just before the spine, and cut forward and up with a decisive twist.

  She had even remembered to step back, so that the sudden fan of blood from the severed artery beneath his ear missed her completely. It showered Rob, though. He was already pretty much drenched in gore anyway.

  “Behind you!” she shouted.

  Rob dropped to his left knee, pivoting and bringing up the heavy pitcher he improbably held in his left fist. Even more improbably, yellowish goat-milk cream slopped out the top to join that already running down its sides.

  The arming-sword the last remaining black-masked man had swung at the back of Rob’s head glanced safely away from him. Rob hacked the man above his left knee. It gave way beneath him. He went down and struck it hard on the unforgiving stone floor.

  Rob snapped up and kicked him under the chin. The killer’s head snapped back, black hair flying. Melodía wondered if the kick had broken his neck as he folded backward with his right leg sprawling out at a clumsy angle.

  Rob was taking nothing for granted. He tossed his pitcher aside, ringing it off the bare stone wall of the servants’ passageway and decorating it with a hearty splash of cream. Reversing his sword in his right hand and folding his left over the plain steel pommel, he strode to the supine man and glared down at him.

  The man was alive and conscious. Melodía saw his eyes standing out from his head and his mask. He opened his mouth.

  “Fuck you,” Rob said, and plunged the blade down through mask and open mouth so hard it punched out the back of the man’s skull to screech against the stone. The assassin spasmed wildly, back arching, limbs failing. Then he went limp and empty of life.

  Rob let go of the sword, which fell over, turning the man’s head to one side. His open eyes gave the impression of staring in shock at the horrid mockery of his tongue.

  Melodía was looking up and down the corridor. The dagger she’d drawn from her gem-bangled belt of gold-painted leather had rubies and topazes glittering in its hilt, but the blade was sturdy, keen, and true. As the blood dripping from it proved.

  “Baron Korrigan,” she said, “what are you doing here? I didn’t even know you were in the Palace.”

  Her former boss stood bent over with his hands on his thighs, panting.

  “Smuggled in … discreetly … this evening, Your Highness,” he puffed.

  “Melodía. Why were you smuggled in?” she asked.

  “It’s Karyl … He’s … caught in a wicked web.”

  “That’s histrionic.”

  “Muh trade … lass. The Duchess … lured me here, got me inside. I did … a terrible thing. And now her sicarios are hunting both me and Karyl!”

  “What?”

  He looked up and grinned through the blood, fresh and half-dried, which turned his face into a frightful demon mask.

  “Is this how you go to battle, then, now you’re a princess again?” he asked.

  She looked down at herself. She had forgotten that aside from her slim belt she was dressed only in sandals, a jeweled loincloth, and a tiara. The green silk was stained beyond repair by gore.

  “I was at dinner.”

  She’d been taking a shortcut to her apartments to grab more suitable clothes for what she had in mind. Armor was out of the question, given her need for haste, but she doubted it would matter for what she had in mind. The builders of the Imperial Heart had neglected to build a secret passageway from dining hall to penthouse. Or at least no one had ever revealed one’s existence to her.

  “Now, what the Old Hell’s this shit about you and Karyl? I thought I was willing to believe anything evil of Margrethe, but this? I know she hates Karyl, but why would she set professional murderers on you? And how did all this happen?”

  “She played on my fears,” he said, painfully pushing himself upward and then straightening his barrel-shaped body as if by means of a crank and ratchet. “She and that hada-spawn Bergdahl, whose goblin looks don’t lie as to his black nature.”

  Bergdahl. She remembered
her apprehension when her father had announced that the man—her rapist’s creature—would serve Rob as seneschal to teach him how to be a Baron. But the world-shattering news of Montse’s abduction had driven the matter entirely out of her head. As it had so many things.

  She frowned as the import of what he was saying hit home. “You didn’t—”

  “Ah, but I did, lass. I feared for his soul—that he’d be captured by the magic of the Fae. So I agreed to lead him where he might be taken into … protective custody. There to be exorcised of their evil influence.”

  He shook his head forlornly. “’Twas for his own good. So I told myself. And so the witch Margrethe assured me. And see where it led?”

  “He was your best friend! How could you betray him?”

  “How could you lead Pilar to her death?” he flared back.

  She felt her eyes widen, felt cold fury fill her stomach. It was a terrible thing to say.

  Because it was true. He had loved her childhood friend turned servant and then friend again. Melodía had watched her die, trying to help her escape from Count Guillaume of Crève Coeur’s pet hunting horrors—where Melodía had led her and a number of Garden dignitaries on a misbegotten errand of peace. And Rob had seen what the Deinonychus pack had left of her, moments after Karyl and the light riders had appeared to kill the monsters and save her life.

  Rob sighed and dropped his hazel eyes, now green with fury, from hers. He flapped both hands in a gesture of conciliation.

  “Peace,” he said. “I beg you—for Karyl’s sake, and maybe your father’s, if not for mine. I spoke out of turn. We both did what we thought was right and were fucking idiots to do it. I can’t make it right, what I did or what I said, since two wrongs just make twice the wrongs. But can I hope that since we’ve both drawn heart’s blood, honor’s satisfied for both of us, at least?”

  She had to smile. “It’s hard to stay mad at you, Baron Rob.”

  “Ah, well. Get to know me better, it’ll come more easily. But now we’ve places to be.”