by Victor Milán
“Where’s Karyl?”
“Away free and clear, that’s my devout hope.”
“Where are you bound?”
“The same general destination, if not specific. Himself is through with me, I fear, and no blame to him. If he did anything wrong it was likely refraining from killing me for what I did.”
He was an expert performer, she knew. But if his grief and regret were anything but real, he was the greatest actor in the history of the world.
“How did you wind up here?”
“I led three of the devils through the kitchen, where Lady Maris herself must’ve inspired me to raise the alarm they were really here to kill the Emperor. Which, mind you, I don’t know is even false. They dispatched the rogues and raised the alarm while I made off at speed. And got lost.”
He gestured at the floor, and the huddles of black and crimson.
“Till they found me.”
“You’ve got to get out of here.” She gave him quick instructions on the fastest way to the Entrada.
“I’d be a poor fish if I didn’t suspect that Margrethe was spreading word that Karyl and I are behind all these murderers and all this murdering, in an imagined plot against your father. If the Tyrants of heart’s Defenders come upon me, the kindest thing they’re like to do is kill me out of hand.”
She hesitated a moment. Time pressed like the whole weight of the thousands of tons of mountain stone above their heads. Then she untied her loincloth from about her waist.
“Please forgive the blood,” she said as she tied it around his right biceps.
Rob raised an eyebrow. “That seems mighty informal dress, even for Spaña,” he said. “Tiara notwithstanding.”
“I’m the Princess. I could run around naked all the time if I chose.”
“Fair enough. And while I don’t mind the stains, given how you put them there, what’s this for, actually?”
“My favor. The red and yellow jewels sewed in mean it belongs to a member of the Imperial family. Which means me, basically.”
“But might they not think I killed you for it myself, what with the blood and all?”
She laughed. “I believe you used to like the phrase ‘He’d gripe if you hanged him with a golden rope.’ It’s the best I can do. Now go!”
“What’re you going to do?”
“Save both you poor fools,” she said. “If I can.”
Chapter 46
Volador, Flier, Volado Peludo, Furred Flier.…—Pterosaur: a flying reptile, covered in fine fur. Some have tails, some have crests, some have beaks, toothed or not. Not dinosaurian. Rivals to birds for the skies of Paradise and the offal of its streets. They range in size from tiny bug-chasers to the vast, majestic, and fearful Dragons.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
Letting go of his sheath, Karyl just managed to drop his right forearm in the bronze half-pipe of the gutter and clamp the lip between thumb and fingertips. His shoulder groaned as his falling weight hit it, and pain shot from his brutally torqued elbow. But he held on and didn’t fall.
Yet.
The nearer assassin hacked down at him. He blocked the blade with the flat, at the cost of more agony to his shoulder and elbow. It was power against power, a thing he hated to get caught up in in a fight. But in spite of his superior position, the man had launched the attack hastily, in hopes of speeding Karyl to join the sicarios he’d sent tumbling to death or broken bones on the hard rock below, rather than from a set, strong position.
The man raised his arming-sword for another blow. Karyl sliced him across the right thigh. It was too high to cut the quadriceps tendon and too shallow to damage the big muscle, much less sever the femoral artery. But the man grunted and sat down hard, apparently to keep his knee from buckling and his possibly falling off the roof.
His blade dropped. Karyl’s flashed in to lick across his face, left to right. Then back across his throat.
The blood geyser hit Karyl full in the left eye, temporarily blinding it as it covered his face in wet heat. His right eye saw the last assassin descending for it in a cut not even his viper reflexes could block.
He swung his legs and hips forward and let go.
He did not plummet to shatter his back and hips on the bare, unforgiving stone of the Porch. He did scrape his tailbone painfully on the inner edge of the planter on the railing of the balcony below. The pitched-roof buildings of the miniature city within the Palace wall were mostly or all dwellings. Most such had balconies, and every one that had a peaked roof had held growing containers. Karyl landed on his feet and took up a two-handed grip on his sword’s blackwood hilt, blade aimed at the roof edge right above.
This sicario was cagey enough not to try dropping directly onto his prey. Instead, he swung down to land at the far end of the balcony from where Karyl had lighted.
They faced each other. Karyl kept his sword above his head but angled the tip down to the level of his opponent’s face. Karyl’s opponent was the red-haired man whose skin was a paler olive than most the assassins’. His dark eyes grinned.
The sicario advanced by half steps. He was armed with a single sword, which he tossed from hand to hand without glancing at it, as if to try to intimidate Karyl with his confidence and prowess—and hinted ambidexterity.
Karyl was unimpressed. He lowered the staff-sword to a conventional guard position, with the butt of the hilt a hand span above his advanced left knee. He kept his eyes at soft focus, directed toward the man’s pelvis—he had long ago learned that, in combat, eyes and hands might lie but hips told the truth. If he keeps up this juggling act, he thought as his enemy drew within two meters, he’ll give me the opening I—
The redhead darted his right hand into the planter and flung dirt into Karyl’s eyes.
He managed to twitch his head to his left and shut his eyes. But he couldn’t stop some dirt from getting in. As he blinked furiously to clear it, the sicario launched into a beautiful left-handed lunge.
Into air. Leaving his right hand gripping his sword-hilt by the end, Karyl put his left on the planter and vaulted himself to the balcony below. He inadvertently dislodged it. It banged off the planter on the level Karyl landed on and crashed into the street.
Though perhaps not consciously, Karyl had been half expecting such a move. Carrying various forms of powder, from ground pepper to lye, to throw in an opponent’s eyes and blind him, temporarily or not, was a popular trick among the Vagabonds of Tianchao-guo, and their shinobi cousins from the island kingdom of Zipangu farther east. Karyl had gotten the impression early on that this gang was a pale imitation of the latter, also called ninjas, whose attributes and exploits were well, if not always accurately, known as in the romances so beloved in Nuevaropa. They might have picked up the ploy from reading adventure novels.
He’s good, Karyl thought, moving back to the wall and taking up a two-handed guard stance again, facing outward. He almost got me with it. He managed to blink his eyes clear—clear enough.
But instead of jumping down to the second-floor balcony to attack Karyl once more, the assassin swung his legs down, dropped, caught himself on the planter without knocking it over, gave Karyl the finger of the hand holding his sword—still the left—and dropped to the street below.
He has style, Karyl acknowledged to himself. His insouciance reminded him of Rob, whom he hoped had at least managed to get away clear.
“So,” a male voice called up from below. “Are you just going to cower up there and wait for my brothers to come help me get you?”
The sicario’s Spañol had a marked Catalan accent. Given that his hair was a lighter red than Melodía’s—whose skin was darker—and darker than Jaume’s—who was paler—his apparent origin didn’t surprise Karyl.
“Such as you’ve left of us—you’ve hurt our fraternity badly, but we’ll kill you quickly, once they’re here. Or will you come down and play?”
“Neither,” said Karyl, and pushed this balcony’s plant container down on him.
He shifted left and followed it. He heard a crack from below, followed by a second, heavier crash. It sounded to him as if his opponent had tried to fend off the heavy trough, this one carven stone, and suffered a broken forearm for his trouble.
Karyl landed well enough, flexing his knees deeply into a crouch to take the impact. By chance he’d landed within reach of his fallen staff-sheath. He grabbed it as the assassin, his right hand flopping grotesquely from a new joint mid-forearm like a broken flier wing, rushed him with upraised sword.
He swung the staff up and cracked its tip underneath the Catalan’s jaw. Dropping it again, he took a two-handed grip once more, raised his sword over his left shoulder, and chopped the sicario’s left hand off at the wrist as his opponent swung his arming-sword forehand and down.
Turning his hips, he let go with his right hand, rotated his pelvis the other way, and slashed his disarmed killer across the black-clad belly.
Doubling over his ruptured gut, pressing his spurting stump and extra-jointed arm against himself in a vain attempt to hold back the greasy dark-grey-looking loops of intestine, the assassin staggered back. He raised his face to Karyl.
“I suppose—mercy—would be too much—to ask?” he said, and for a wonder, kept the banter in his tone despite what had to be frightful pain.
Karyl answered with a thrust through his right eye.
“A quick death,” he said quietly, as the assassin collapsed onto a pile of his own blood and guts, “is mercy of a sort.”
He flipped the miraculously never-dulling blade to clear blood and sundry stray tissue from it. Scrupulously wiping it clean on the dead man’s back, he recovered his sheath and returned the sword to it.
He heard what sounded like at least two sets of groans from the shadows. He ignored the wounded sicarios. They were no longer in his way. He’d given the red-haired man misericordia—the final blessing—as much because it was convenient to do so as for the fact he despised cruelty. But he felt no obligation to the rest of those who’d just failed in killing him.
And if they want to make a try at my back, despite their undoubtedly serious injuries, here on level ground, he thought, well, let them.
He walked on, no more watchful than usual, and no less.
* * *
As Karyl expected, the courtyard was filled with confusion. Ignoring the knights who sat their backs in states of dress from mostly full armor to mostly full nudity, nine or ten war-hadrosaurs were jostling in a courtyard their numbers and bulk managed to crowd despite its expansive size, then furiously blaring and pawing at one another. Retainers and servants darted about on foot trying not to get trampled or smashed to jelly by a tail swung in heedless anger. The humans all seemed to be bawling at the tops of their voices, too, though their efforts were feeble beside dinosaurian squealing and trumpeting.
He simply found the least well-lit stretch of the main thoroughfare from the courtyard and the Palace entrance to the curtain wall, where stout stone buildings choked it down to ten meters’ width by design to funnel intruders who had made it this far and make it handier to murder them from above, and walked across with his usual purposeful, seemingly unhurried stride.
No one paid him any mind.
But once he was down the nearest alley on the far side, he ran toward the northwestern juncture of cliff and wall, leaving the gates and their promise of safety beckoning and open behind him. He had a greater goal than mere escape.
* * *
Melodía pressed her palms against her breasts even more firmly as she bounded up the stairs to the Imperial apartments. She’d been cupping them to keep them from bouncing as she ran. She knew that would be undignified, even if she were still dressed in anything but a belt and that ludicrous tiara. But they’d swung around enough to be uncomfortable when she was backstabbing the assassin as it was.
She almost ran facefirst into Jaume, striding down the hallway to the stairs from his own chambers next to hers. He still wore nothing but the sandals and loincloth he’d also worn to dinner. At least he was spared the tiara.
But he did hold the Lady’s Mirror in one hand, and the longsword’s sheath in the other.
“Princess,” he said. His brow furrowed in puzzlement. “You wore more than that to dinner, I think.”
A little breathlessly despite the endless hours of drilling with Auriana, Melodía filled him in on her encounter with Rob and the murderers—and a version of why edited to include only that Rob knew the Dowager Duchess von Hornberg had set the sicarios on both men.
He took it all in without raising a brow. “Where are you going?” he asked when she’d finished.
“To help them get away. Margrethe’s no doubt told as many people as she could find that they’re behind an attempt on my father’s life. There’ll be hanger-on knights turning out on their war-dinosaurs to stop them.”
She hesitated. “I need to go out in the Courtyard. I need to be ready to fight if I have to. I’ll need clothes for that. We can’t let them get arrested.”
Falsely, she thought. As I was. She burned with the need to tell him the story of her false accusation and imprisonment. And what happened next. But this wasn’t the time.
It’s never the time! She stilled the voice of the lost child within. Maybe the time would come—but this clearly wasn’t.
Jaume shook his head.
“I’ll go set things straight. Order the knights and the guards to stand down if I have to.”
“No! You can’t. You mustn’t. Your position’s still too precarious, and we can’t throw away everything we’ve worked for.” That’s part of the reason. “I’ll handle it.”
“But if there’s fighting—”
“I can handle it! You’ve got to trust me, my love.”
“I do. But I don’t want to send you into danger.”
“I’m the Princesa Imperial,” she said. “There won’t be any danger.” Not deliberate, anyway. Accidental is another thing. “Now, go. Take care of my father. We can’t assume he’s safe!”
He nodded and kissed her quickly.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
She smiled. “Your Princess is about to surprise a lot of people.”
Including you, my love.
* * *
Here by the end of the Bulwark, El Salto’s noise was substantial, at the point of transition from splashing to roar. Karyl heard Shiraa trill a happy greeting even before he entered her temporary dinosaur barn, with his sword drawn and its sheath held in his right hand, ready to parry or strike. It was a warehouse built of fired-clay brick, long enough to allow all ten meters of the Allosaurus to stretch out, with room left over for dinosaur grooms to move safely around outside her makeshift stall; and she could curl up to sleep, as she sometimes did, without taking up even half its width.
When he and Jaume had arrived at the Imperial Heart, Karyl had been surprised to find the building emptied of whatever had been stored there in order to house his friend, given what he presumed was the relative premium on space on El Porche. Then again, the Imperial Champion and Condestable wasn’t exactly without influence here himself. Also, Jaume appeared to be allied with Torre Delgao’s ageless matriarch, Doña Rosamaría.
Now, by the light of lamps hung from the uprights, he saw that the spacious interior had been transformed again, from one pen to two. And that he and Shiraa were not alone.
“Rob,” he said.
Shiraa’s barn was cavernous enough to have an echo. It smelled of mice, and shorter-term occupancy by dinosaurs, and of fresh hay. From his daily daytime visits here, Karyl knew that scores of Anurognathus—small, furry, needle-toothed fliers called chato because of their short muzzles—had nests built among the stone-and-wood rafters. They’d be untenanted now; the snub-noses emerged at sunset to eat the insects that swarmed by night, even here in the dry uplands.
“You look like you had a rough night of it, Your Grace,” Rob Korrigan said.
“You should see the other men.”
/> Rob chuckled. “I’ve seen enough of what you leave of sicarios impudent enough to try to ply their trade on you tonight to last me. Oh, and I took the liberty of preparing your mount. As well as my own.”
He slapped Shiraa on her smooth-scaled shoulder in a comradely way, just ahead of the foremost of the two girths holding Karyl’s saddle on her back. She was gazing intently at Karyl with her two great scarlet eyes peering up past the twin bony flanges on her lowered snout. She stood half out of her opened enclosure. Behind her, he saw her toy still hanging from a stout rafter by a stout length of chain. It was a simple cycad log, fibrous, still green, and replaced as soon as it dried out by the Palace’s nervous but dutiful dinosaur grooms. She could chew on it, worry it, tug on it, or amuse herself for hours by bumping it with her nose and watching it swing this way for that. Karyl’s girl had simple tastes.
Thrusting his staff-sheath through his belt, Karyl went to her. He held his palm to her nostrils. She sniffed, then blew against it. Her breath was warm and moist.
He scratched the arched bridge of her nose and between the small horns. She bobbed her head and made slight chuckling sounds of pleasure.
The lower, dumpier dinosaur beside her blew emphatically through the nostrils of her own prodigiously horned nose. She had her saddle on as well, with a large pack behind and Rob’s axe, Wanda, hung by the bow.
“Little Nell,” Karyl said. “I should have expected to find you at the Palace, since your master’s here. But why are you both here?”
“This was the only place they had to put her,” Rob said, shifting to scratch her neck behind her frill, which had two long horns sticking up from its top. “And she got used to Shiraa’s presence when we rode back to Providence together, you’ll recall.”
“I do,” Karyl said. He had his right hand on his sheath, and while he held his sword in a relaxed position by his left leg, he still had it out. He kept his eyes scanning the shadows of the makeshift.
“As for me,” Rob said, “I knew you’d not leave this good girl behind, any more than I’d leave Nell. So I thought it best to expedite our departure by making both ready. Sorry I don’t have your own baggage. I was a bit discommoded to try fetching it from your chambers, what with bloody-handed murderers chasing me.”
