The Dinosaur Knights

by Victor Milán

  Chapter 16

  Horror, Chaser—Deinonychus antirrhopus. Nuevaropa’s largest pack-hunting raptor: 3 meters, 70 kilograms. Plumage distinguishes different breeds: scarlet, blue, green, and similar horrors. Smart and wicked, as favored as domestic beasts for hunting and war as wild ones are feared. Some say a deinonychus pack is deadlier than a full-grown Allosaurus.

  —THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES

  Melodía’s righteous anger, mostly at herself, evaporated in a mouse-terror squeak. Soldiers! They’ve decided to disregard Guillaume’s orders, sneak in and—use me.…

  A dark-olive face thrust in through the cut. Green eyes looked at her in concern.

  “Highness?”

  “Pilar,” she breathed.

  Pilar’s face withdrew. A shaft of white lanced into the tent. Although the sun had passed the zenith and the cloud-filtered light was indirect, it dazzled Melodía’s eyes, accustomed to the gloom. She screwed her eyes shut on big pulsing purple balls of afterimage.

  She heard the sizzle of silk being cut. Then Pilar was kneeling beside her, sawing through the scarf that tied her wrists.

  “Where on Paradise did you hide that knife?” was all she could think to say.

  “Somewhere they didn’t find it,” Pilar said. “That’s a good lesson for you, Princesa dear: a woman always needs a final friend.”

  “How’d you get clear of your guards?”

  “Pointed out to them that it would hardly do for an Imperial Princess, even a hostage one, not to be properly attended by a serving-maid. That, and promised them blow jobs.”

  “Ew,” Melodía said. “Did you deliver?”

  “We need to move rapidly now, Alteza, and leave particulars for later, yes?”

  She helped Melodía out the hole in the back of the tent. A stand of green bamboo screened it. Melodía blinked, swayed as the blood prickled back into her limbs.

  Pilar reached to steady her. She shook her head.

  “I’m fine.”

  Pilar knew that was a lie, of course. But she didn’t call Melodía on it. Instead she took her hand and led her into dark-green brush, away from the clearing where the tent stood among a number of others.

  When they had gone a few meters Melodía stopped. “Take me to the others,” she said.

  Pilar shook her head impatiently. “I can’t.”

  “I’ve got to help them!”

  “I’m sorry, Melodía. They—”

  “I command you to help me rescue them.”

  Green eyes flashed. “Am I your servant, or your friend?”

  Melodía’s lips pressed to a line. She nodded. “You’re right. You are my friend. Now, please take me to the others!”

  “But I can’t,” Pilar repeated. “It’s too late.”

  She pointed east. Through gaps in the lance-leaved vegetation Melodía saw a field of ripened wheat, abandoned to rot by farmers who had fled the Crève Coeur advance. It was already being choked by weeds which had sprung to half its height. A pallid figure ran through the wheat with gangling high-kneed strides and flapping elbows. Behind it the dying stalks wavered as if from a wind. Among them Melodía caught cobalt flickers, as of blooming wildflowers.

  It took her a moment before she realized the fleeing man was Councilor Absolon. Blood that shone bright red in the sunlight streaked his naked body. It occurred to Melodía that the breeze seemed awfully localized. Could it be a wind-hada, as they called a miniature whirlwind back home?

  Then something blue and lean blurred from the vegetation to land on Absolon’s shoulders. That’s no wind. Realization chilled Melodía. Those aren’t flowers. They’re feathers.

  Three meters long, the horror as likely weighed as much as the gaunt, gawky Councilor himself did. Its impact sent the running man pitching forward onto his face. Even before he vanished from view, the outsized killing-claws on its hind feet were gouging into his back as it clung to his face with winglike arms.

  Absolon left a trail of blood spray in the air behind him when he fell, and screams like a girl-child’s. They were shockingly high and ululating, pleading without words for mercy from a creature that thirsted for cruelty as it did for the hot blood of prey.

  Pilar’s grip on Melodía’s arm had no more give than black iron.

  “You—can’t—help—him,” she hissed.

  More plumed monsters sprang on the shrieking man. They had blue and white crests, white bellies, black masks at their eyes. A yellow snout whipped skyward, flapping a long red strip of something it held in its teeth like a rag. A rag that shed red drops.…

  And you did this to him, an accusing voice said in Melodía’s skull.

  Out into the field loped a party on horseback. Guilli rode in the lead on a white hunter mare. Four or five of his noble favorites followed, dressed as he was for the hunt in jaunty caps, tunics, loincloths, and sword-belts. Melodía heard the hateful music of their laughter even over Absolon’s screams.

  With dagger-twisting-in-the-entrails certainty, Melodía knew how foolish she had been. But she wasn’t stupid. Neither was she slow.

  He’s gone, but— “The others—”

  “The only ones better off than he are dead already,” Pilar said. “Let’s go.”

  “I can’t just abandon them.”

  “You’re still heiress to Los Almendros,” Pilar said. “You’re a Delgao. You have a duty. You have a destiny.”

  “But how can I live with their blood on my hands?”

  “Learn,” Pilar said. “You can always die later. It’s easy. Now, stop being a fool. Come on.”

  She led the unresisting Princess south along the field’s verge, keeping them screened by brush and trees. Melodía’s every fiber longed to simply dart straight away from the camp of her enemies. But she fought the panicky urge. That would mean fleeing into more open, derelict cropland. Into the sight of the terrible yellow eyes of the horrors.

  She and Pilar didn’t run, but they did move fast. The undergrowth crackled around them. As Melodía got control over thoughts and fears chasing each other in a mad vortex she began to wince at every rustle of branch or crackle of fallen twigs underfoot. Then she realized the noise they made hardly mattered, between the steady rumble of the army camp, and the terrible cries, and even more terrible laughter, of the hunt.

  They jumped a narrow stream running through the woods. Beyond the undergrowth it flowed into a straight ditch with a windbreak of plane trees with white boles planted alongside it. High weeds marked the ditch’s course as clearly as they obscured actual sight of it.

  “Why are we so close to the camp’s edge?” Melodía asked. “Instead of right in the middle of it?”

  “Prevailing winds blow from the east,” Pilar said. “The Count pitched his tents on this side of camp to avoid his army’s smell.”

  Evidently he had no fear the Providence would fall on him suddenly. And why should he? Melodía thought bitterly. They’re crazy if they think they can face him at all. Was I really so wrong—

  From somewhere to the right, not far, rose a chilling sound: the deep baying of a hound. Other dog-voices quickly joined.

  Yes. The word slammed into her skull like a mace. Yes, I was so wrong.

  “The dogs are on us,” Pilar said. “We have to run for it now.”

  “Maybe Guillaume just wants us brought back.”

  “I doubt it. Does it matter now?”

  Melodía was a seasoned enough hunter to know the answer. Horrors of whatever color were sight hunters. Killing had their blood-lust up: they’d chase and bring down prey now for sheer love of the hunt. And they were trained to follow the baying of hounds—

  “Across the open fields?” she said. “We don’t have a chance!”

  “Until those things have our guts in their teeth,” Pilar said, “there’s always a chance.”

  Even in her extremity that reasoning sounded questionable to Melodía. Her reflex panic did her a favor then. It overrode her mind’s inclination to think-through and debate, and made
her body run.

  She bounded after Pilar into the field. This one had clearly been harvested. Dry stalks nodded among the weeds, and broke at their passing. The tilling of the rows and relatively soft soil made running hard. Melodía quickly found herself panting.

  From the sound, the dogs had broken through the trees behind them. They were halfway across the field now. Another copse rose less than two hundred meters ahead of them. If they made it they might at least make a stand.

  A trumpet’s skirl smashed that hope. Melodía stumbled over a furrow. As Pilar grabbed her arm and helped her recover she looked back over her shoulder.

  Count Guillaume himself was just riding through the weeds on this side of the ditch. He lowered a hunting-horn from his red face. His laughing courtiers flanked him.

  From the tall weeds came wiry brown men and women in peaked green caps and tunics: Rangers, Crève Coeur’s scouts—and huntsfolk.

  And with them came blue horrors, ten or more, their jaws red and snapping.

  Melodía ran so hard it felt as if her heart would explode. Pilar raced at her side. The traitor dirt crumbled beneath them, slowing their steps.

  The pursuing dromaeosaurs seemed to skip lightly across the tops of the rows. Laughing, the hunters followed.

  Ahead of Melodía the trees and brush grew larger, tantalizing. It felt as if safety waited there. Though Melodía knew better, she still drove herself as fast as her long flashing legs could carry her. Reaching the woods would at least be a final triumph to carry with her to her next spin of the Wheel.

  The snarling cries grew louder. Pilar pressed something into Melodía’s hand.

  “Take this!” she shouted. “Use it—on yourself if you have to.”

  Melodía lost the stride, slowed, stumbled. She saw she grasped the smooth black wood hilt of Pilar’s long-bladed knife.

  “The Fae set me to watch over you, Princess,” Pilar told her. “I’ve failed. May they protect you now.”

  Pilar stopped running. Turning, she walked back toward the pursuing raptors. She spread her arms out to her sides.

  “Here I am!” she shouted. “Come take me!”

  “Pilar, no!” Melodía screamed.

  Behind the horrors, Guilli and his party had slowed to a trot. The Count leaned forward in the saddle. A grin stretched his big face wide. He seemed as avid as the raptors.

  Seeing their prey stop and turn back toward them clearly confused the horrors. They slowed, began to chirp to one another, as if in wonder or in warning. They no longer had running prey to chase down. So they began that horrible, characteristic sidle they used when a quarry faced them down. The eerily cunning tactics that did as much to make them feared as claws or cruelty ever did.

  Pilar glanced back. “Princess, run!” she shouted.

  But Melodía could not. Desperately she looked around for a rock to hurl. But the field had been tended well. Any rocks large enough to make useful missiles had painstakingly been removed by hand from the plow’s path generations before.

  She hefted the dagger to throw. Then she realized how stupid-futile that would be. I’ll probably miss, she thought. Even if she cast and killed one, against all odds, that would leave eight or nine more—and her completely unarmed. The one-eyed weapons mistress at the Palace of the Fireflies had taught her better than that.

  Pilar kept walking forward. It clearly befuddled the deinonychus. They could be scary-clever, these small, feathered killers. But this was something even they had trouble comprehending: a prey that neither tried to fight nor run, but rather walked straight toward them.

  Evidently they decided their customary pincers trick would still serve. The dinosaurs split. One crouched directly in Pilar’s path, snarling menace. The others circled left and right.

  Pilar never even turned her head to watch as they closed in behind her.

  I have to do something, Melodía thought, jittering from foot to foot. But her mind gave her only blankness.

  She couldn’t bring herself to run. That had nothing to do with the exhaustion that tore her lungs and made her legs feel like boiled noodles. Yet her friend was sacrificing herself so Melodía could do just that.

  She thought of throwing herself on one of the horrors that circled Pilar from behind. But what good would that do? If she stabbed one to death, the others would still take down her friend even as she did so.

  The raptor on Pilar’s right flung wide its arms. It fanned the feathers to show their cream and white undersides. Thrusting forward its big head it opened its jaws wide to shriek. Reflex made Pilar turn toward it.

  The horror on her left jumped on her back. She staggered but kept her feet as it sank its teeth in her shoulder. Its killing-claws raked great bloody rips in her loose white blouse. Shouting anger, Pilar smashed its face with her fist.

  Light bones crumpled. Blood squirted from flared nostrils. The monster let go and fell back squalling.

  But it had done its job. The others charged. One jumped seized her throat in its jaws and hung on as its rear talons tore her belly. The rest darted in snapping.

  Pilar fought furiously. But along with outweighing her, the monsters were strong and fast—and sharp. They quickly brought her down. She was screaming now, in what seemed more rage more than pain.

  Blood flew like a red fountain in the sun. Pilar stopped struggling. Melodía moaned and swayed.

  Then one horror raised its head. It was the one that had spread its arms to draw Pilar’s attention: the biggest, the pack-leader. Something hung from its featherless, blood-smeared snout. Something like a softly laden pouch, which dripped red.

  The skin crept on the backs of Melodía’s hands and neck. Her cheeks tingled. The monster was holding her friend’s severed breast in its mouth.

  Yellow saucer eyes fixed Melodía. A brilliant blue crest rose in interest.

  The prey that wouldn’t run away was dead. It wasn’t fun anymore. And the raptor pack-leader still wanted to play.

  It whipped its face skyward, tossing Pilar’s breast in the air. Catching it in its teeth, it chewed twice and swallowed it. Then it uttered a warbling cry.

  The other horrors raised their heads. In uncanny unison they turned to stare at Melodía.

  The lead horror hopped off Pilar’s torn corpse. It minced toward Melodía, head held tipped to the side, as if driven by curiosity, not evil intent.

  Melodía wasn’t fooled.

  Not twenty meters behind her the trees beckoned. She didn’t dream of dashing for them. Once she turned her back, the monster would be on her in three strides.

  Instead the anger that had smoldered within her for weeks exploded into full flame.

  “Come on, you bastard,” she yelled, brandishing the knife both-handed in front of her. “I’ll teach you what it feels like to be strangled in your own fucking guts!”

  The creature reared up in surprise. Its crest rose again. Then it thrust its head forward and screeched again.

  It meant to shock her into momentary immobility—then strike. Instead she shrieked back, wordless and raging. It might be futile defiance, but it was born of a fury as terrible as anything that made the horror’s heart race.

  The pack-leader sprang. Its jaws opened wide to snap off Melodía’s face.

  Part Three

  Redemption

  Chapter 17

  Corredor de Bosque, Woods-runner, Coureur de Bois—A nomadic people who range freely in Telar’s Wood in the eastern part of the Empire of Nuevaropa, professing no allegiance to kingdom or county. Skilled trackers, hunters, and archers, the woods-runners tend to be at odds with townsfolk and farmers, whom they disdain as “sitting-folk.” Woods-runners regard the “sitting-folk” as arbitrary and mean, and the “sitting-folk” despise the woods-runners as thieves, each with some justice.

  —A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS

  The horror pack leader’s open mouth looked huge as castle gates rimmed with swords. Inside it glared bright red and yellow.


  Something buzzed past Melodía’s left ear like an angry wasp as big as a firefly. She heard impact.

  The raptor twisted in midleap. Feathers stood out from its arms and body. It dropped, shrieking, two meters away, and rolled almost to her feet.

  She stared down at it, not comprehending what had just happened, and why those long, narrow jaws were snapping at a black shaft sticking from its throat instead of on her face.

  Something grabbed her arm and yanked her backward so violently she almost fell over. As she did the horror’s leg slashed out. The black killing claw scythed air scant centimeters from her belly.

  “Don’t just stand there!” someone shouted in her ear. “Did you want that thing to gut you?”

  Melodía turned her head. A young woman dressed in leather held her. She had an oval face and yellow braids hanging from a browned-iron cap.

  “Maybe,” she said. She had lost the feeling of reality.

  Then more flying things hummed past to either side of the two young women, and reality returned abruptly, snapped back in place by the shrieking and kicking and blood-arcs as more arrows hit the horrors feeding on Pilar’s corpse. And not just horrors: a green clad Ranger huntsman fell howling and clutching at his bare belly.

  The Crève Coeur hunting party had halted thirty meters back to get a good view of the sport as the pack took Pilar. Guilli stared at the horror now lying dead in front of Melodía with a face mottled and swelling in grief and rage.

  “Léonide!” he cried. “My old, my brave!”

  The young knight at his right started to draw his sword. “Brigands!” he shouted. “To ar—”

  Another black shaft struck his right eye, beneath a square-cut brown bang. His shout cut off and he slumped from the saddle like a bag half-full of laundry.

  The hunting party’s horses reared and screamed alarm. Another bold young buckethead got his longsword free and charged forward at the archers, male and female, who had suddenly materialized to either side of Melodía as if out of the plowed ground.

  A chestnut horse dashed as if to meet him. Instead its rider, a young woman armored like Melodía’s rescuer in a light nosehorn leather jack, wheeled the mare broadside to the knight. A twist-dart flew from her hand, spinning as the thong wrapped around its feathered shaft unwound. It struck him in the center of his unarmed chest. He went backward over his grey’s cruppers.