by Victor Milán
When her head stopped turning her brain didn’t seem to want to. The whole world whirled around her. She started to topple.
A strong grip on her left arm caught her. She found herself looking at the black beard and gap-toothed grin of the woods-runner ’Tit Jean—short for Petit Jean, or Little John. Naturally he was the biggest person in her scout troop.
The anger that had been tamped by her desperation to free her talwar flared again. Jean’s smile faltered as he saw the flash in her eyes.
His look turned to outright worry when she laughed.
“Sorry,” she told him, straightening in her saddle. The dizziness had passed. ’Tit Jean let her go and stepped back with manifest relief. “It’s just that, when that first man set about me, all I could think at first was, ‘How dare he? I’m the Princess of the Empire!’”
At once she regretted the admission, fearing it would make the others think she was giving herself airs. She’d tried so hard to gain the trust, first and foremost, of people who had themselves taken part in rescuing her from a terrible situation none of them would have been foolish to wander within a dozen kilometers of. She measured her success in large part by the fact that Valérie had not only volunteered to join her troop but quickly become her closest friend.
Did I just throw that all away, with a bit of buckethead arrogance? she wondered.
Then ’Tit Jean put his big round catapult-shot head back and bellowed laughter. The other troopers in earshot joined in. Melodía smiled in relief.
Then she swayed again. At once the woods-runner grabbed her once more.
“Best get down while you can,” he said. “Better than falling on your snout.”
Feebly she nodded. She let him help her, which actually consisted of him taking her about the waist in both hands, lifting her up and pulling her off Meravellosa before setting her daintily on her feet on the hard-stamped ground. She leaned forward, bracing hands on thighs. Melodia fought hard to keep from throwing up, because she didn’t want to show that kind of weakness in front of her troop. But mostly because she really, really hated throwing up.
“I never killed anybody before,” she said in a small voice.
“It can be hard, Día,”’Tit Jean said. “My first time, I cried for half a week. Of course, I was fifteen.”
She didn’t glance up to see if he was joking. Mainly because she was fairly sure he wasn’t. She’d never encountered woods-runners before joining the militia—scarcely knew they existed. She’d learned they led a hard life.
Her woods-runners were all from the country west of Providence town, or even from Crève Coeur and points father west and north. Although she gathered that they ranged so freely such distinctions mattered little to them, when they were even aware of them. She had a couple who currently lived near Castaña for guides.
Though Raúl’s reavers showed the foresters nowhere near the extravagant sadism Count Guillaume’s Rangers had—and the farmers and others whom woods-runner called “the sitting folk” bore the brunt of their depredations—a number had rallied to the cause, once their brethren from the west brought word of how Karyl served their great and hated foe Crève Coeur.
“It’s the first time anybody ever tried to kill me,” she added. “Will I ever get used to it?”
“For some, that is harder to get used to than the other thing,” Valérie said.
Melodía found herself laughing again. Even she thought it was crazy, and controlled it quickly. Nonetheless she still shook from its aftereffects when she stood up to say. “I should have said that to him: how dare you try to lay hands on me? It might’ve shocked the bastard so much I could’ve finished him right then!”
That sent everyone roaring. ’Tit Jean patted her shoulder.
“You’ll do,” he said. “You are crazy. But it’s crazy like the rest of us vagabonds!”
Chapter 28
Guerra Altasanta, High Holy War, Guerra de Demonios, Demon War—177 to 210 AP. A global war waged between the Creators, their servitors the Grey Angels, and their human faithful against their archenemies, the hada—or Fae—and their allies. It culminated in Nuevaropa’s last Grey Angel Crusade to extirpate Fae-worship. Now widely considered to be a mythic account of the Years of Trouble, from the dawn of human civilization on Paradise in Year Zero to 210 AP, which led to the formation of the Nuevaropan Empire.
—LA GRAN HISTORIA DEL IMPERIO DEL TRONO COLMILLADO
“D’you wonder I drink so much these days? Look at me: I’ve my hands on nigh thirty of the mightiest war-dinosaurs in all the Tyrant’s Head. And Himself without question the Empire’s leading expert on the use of three-horns in war—and not just because he’s the only one. But do I get to play with my marvelous toys? Do I get to learn how to handle them at the feet of the Master? I do not! All I do is instruct the grooms and order in the feed for the great bloody brutes.
“You think I drink too much, then? Fie on that! Not enough by half! I’m still sober enough to do this bloody job, and that’s too sober.
“And a job it’s become, this game of spies. A great game it seemed at first. A lark for Master Korrigan, who knows a secret and you do not, by your leave, or not. But it never fucking lets up. Unremitting, it is. Day and night it’s roused out of bed or drawn away from my dinosaurs to hear the latest reports I am.
“The bastard Count Raúl is ready to invade. He’s trying to get that hunchbacked clown Countess Célestine to attack us too. Will she, won’t she, will she, won’t she, will she join the dance? Who knows? I don’t think the great hornface cow herself does, from this moment to the next!
“So: Himself must know the latest glad tidings from my op’ratives, whatever they may be. At once. If not before. And where do we go now, Master Rob? Whither do we ride? Where do we spy?
“And the Creators will love us more than we deserve what if the Council fools don’t buy us fresh trouble in Crève Coeur. We hear naught but unceasing complaints from their shiny new Countess and her lackeys. The Garden’s got its missionaries on their tits the whole clock round, nagging them to do this, and refrain from that—worse than they’re even after doings in Providence town, to hear ’em go on. And that’s bad enough. We’re lucky the Councilors fear Karyl well, and rightly so, or it’s crawling all over us they’d be like lice, telling us when to go to bed and which side to tuck our tallywhackers away in our scanties.
“And what to do, what to do about the North of Providence? Is it that the no news we get from there is good news? Or is that news itself, and bad, somehow, that we never hear a bloody peep? The merchant caravans are starting to dry up, with the Council at them all the time, telling them what they can sell or carry through Providence—even pestering them as to what they bloody believe. But such as still brave the Council and the snow building in the Shield passes say they see neither teeth nor toenails of a single human between the mountains and the farms just north of Providence town. Nor do we get a bloody useful syllable from our precious woods-runners. Not that there’s much woods there to draw them; but they’re afraid to venture there as well. Faugh! Beggars could teach us Travelers a thing or two on the subject of superstition, and that’s saying a mighty mouthful.…
“What’s that? Snort? Aye, snort indeed. It’s a hard row I hoe. And now nothing’ll do but Karyl the Great decrees we must be ready to march east day after tomorrow; and only by the good grace of our Mother Maia is poor Rob Korrigan able to snatch these few fleeting moments to unburden his soul. But it’s a fine listener you are, and that’s a fact.”
A gusting exhalation, redolent of fennel and new-mown hay engulfed Rob’s head in humid warmth. A vast pink and yellow tongue licked him lovingly from beard to brows.
“It’s never a bit of back-chat you give me, Little Nell,” he said, scratching the hook-horn’s sensitive nostrils from where he lay on his back in fresh straw. “Aye, it’s the best you are indeed.”
“Knock, knock,” a sardonic voice came from somewhere over Rob’s head.
He roll
ed an eye back to see a familiar face hanging like a sun-browned moon in the lantern-shine above the gate to Nell’s stall, in Séverin farm’s restored barn.
“What’s that, Gaétan, me lad? Do you know no better than to trouble me in my office, so?”
“What, the bottom of an ale-jug? Up and at ’em, Master Korrigan. Trouble’s just exactly what we have.”
Rob gave him a one-eyed squint. “Define ‘trouble.’”
“A courier just came up the High Road. The Church and the Empire have declared a Crusade against us. They’re on the march. Thus: trouble.”
“Against—what?” Rob sat up. “Who’s ‘us,’ then?”
“The Garden. Providence. The Emperor Felipe himself leads the Crusading Army hence, bringing fire and sword and all the usual trimmings. Karyl wants to see you five minutes ago.”
Rob lay back at full length on straw-covered stone. “Fuck me,” he moaned.
“It shall be done,” Gaétan said. And laying hard hands upon Rob’s ankles he dragged him forthwith into the yard.
* * *
“But it’s the Empire,” Rob Korrigan said.
“So what?” Karyl asked. He kept on walking down the hall of the largely rebuilt villa which now served him as headquarters.
Rob’s feet faltered in surprise.
“Perhaps it is the world’s end, after all,” he said, “when the man who never asks a rhetorical question asks a rhetorical question.”
“No such thing. The Crusading Army is far away. Count Raúl is a two-days march down Chestnut Street from this very spot. And that’s if he and his toadies weigh themselves down dragging the customary cartloads of whores and other geegaws. I don’t see how the news affects our situation, and asked to be enlightened.”
Outside in the chill winter evening men bawled and dinosaurs squalled. Wagon-springs groaned as heavy cargoes were loaded and shifted. The Providential army made ready to return to war.
Trotting to catch up with his commander, and feeling like a vexer chick bonded to a farm woman, Rob said, “The proclamations they’re sending forth before them say they intend no mercy on the heterodox. Whatever in the name of the Mother Creator and her Three Blessed Daughters that might mean. But it’s our extermination they plainly speak of, and nothing less.”
At the heavy age-darkened oak door to his office, Karyl paused to show Rob a sardonic brow.
“They can’t exterminate us if we die before they arrive. Lesson the first: deal with the enemy you have at hand. Let’s see off Count Raúl and then see what the Imperials bring us.”
He turned the verdigrised bronze latch and opened the door. A slender figure in a leather jack, brown canvas trousers, and jackboots turned with a book open in her hands.
“Ah,” Karyl said. “The Short-Haired Horse Captain, then.”
* * *
“So that’s what they call you now?” Rob Korrigan asked, entering the office behind his deceptively slight master.
A thrill went through Melodía, chased by immediate self-anger for being thrilled. Then she decided she should feel good.
It’s the first title I’ve actually earned, she thought. The first anything I’ve actually earned. Why not get excited that my commander acknowledges it?
“Yes,” she said, successfully fighting back an urge to add a coy, “I guess they do.”
She set the book down on a reading-stand. It was an early fifth-century treatise on the Corsair Wars, then still in progress, from the Anglaterrano point of view. It was written in Anglysh, which she read tolerably well.
The room was bare but for a modest writing desk and a few chairs, stained and obviously scavenged. From the mostly empty shelves and the lingering smell of moldy paper, she guessed this had been the landowner’s library. What books the Séverin clan had left had surely rotted and been thrown out. The lonely handful of scrolls and bound volumes on the shelves—all military in nature, except one curious, slim book dealing with the Fae, of all things—were in too good a shape to be anything but recent acquisitions. Presumably by the room’s present proprietor, Karyl himself.
“You’ve heard the news?” Karyl said.
“News?” She looked at Rob in confusion. “You mean confirmation Don Raúl is about to invade?” Which news she herself had only just brought back, gleaned from prisoners and confirmed by woods-runners scouting across the river she, a Spañola, thought of as Los Aguasrisueños—the Laughing Water—into Castaña.
“As to that,” Karyl said. “I want your troop to scout ahead of the army when we march for the Castaña frontier.”
“Really? I mean, it’s an honor, sir.”
You’ve dined with the greatest grandes of Nuevaropa, Melodía thought in disgust, and you sound like a schoolgirl about getting a simple task.
Then it struck her: “What news, then, please?”
“The Imperial Army is on the march,” he said, watching her closely. His eyes, so dark as to be almost black, burned like that of a horror on the hunt. “Here. Against us.”
“Here?” Her heart slammed up into her throat and turned the word to a squeak. They’ll take me! her mind shrilled in terror. They’ll take me and give me back to Falk!
“It appears they believe they can forestall a Grey Angel Crusade by stamping out the heterodoxy of the Garden of Beauty and Truth,” Karyl said, not without irony in his voice.
Her knees went loose. To keep from keeling over she put a steadying hand on the table atop the book she’d been reading.
It wasn’t the thought of an Angel Crusade that made her stomach want to leap out of her mouth in fear. She didn’t believe in any such thing—no more than she believed in the Creators themselves. To be sure, she had read histories of the Demon War, before the Empire of Nuevaropa was even founded, when the eight Creators and Their Grey Angels had fought alongside faithful men and women against the evil Fae and their worshipers.
She dismissed them, as she did accounts of subsequent Grey Angel Crusades, when the Angels roused uncanny armies to purge the land of sin and error. Just as she dismissed the tales of how Manuel the Great had slain an imperial tyrant—a beast not known before or since—which was ravaging the land, and somehow by virtue of that did established the Empire, with himself and his family to rule it in perpetuity. He had even had the monster’s skull cleaned and gilded to serve as his, and his heirs’, Fangèd Throne.
Melodía bought none of that. Those stories were all mere propaganda: made up to impress the impressionable.
But Falk, now. Falk was a devil she knew too well.
I can’t—won’t—believe my father has the slightest inkling what the commander of his bodyguard did to me. But with the Vida se Viene fanatics ascendant in his court, and fear of the legendary horror of a Grey Angel Crusade blazing at inferno heat, what chance had mercy for any of them?
“Melodía?” Rob asked with that strangely musical Irlandés lilt. “Are you ill, then, child?”
She could smell ale sour on his breath. But he acted dead-sober. Unusually so, in fact.
She held up a hand for time. She closed her eyes and pulled in a deep breath. She emptied her mind. Then, slowly, let the breath go, and as it exhausted allowed her mind to speak the single, secret syllable she had been given as a child by a Priest of All Creators.
It was a ritual familiar to anyone born in Nuevaropa. Indeed, everywhere on Paradise Melodía had heard or read of, from Tejas to far Zipangu, folk followed a similar practice. The men waited while she drew two more calming breaths.
When she opened her eyes she felt calm. For the moment, at least. And for the moment, that sufficed.
“What are we going to do about this Crusade?” she asked. Her voice still sounded like a gate hinge wanting oil. But at least it didn’t quiver.
“Try to survive long enough to worry about it,” Karyl said. “Which entails whipping Conde Raúl back across Les Eaux de Rire in convincing fashion as quickly as possible. Especially since word of this new Imperial adventure may embolden Comtesse Cél
estine to try to curry the Emperor’s favor by smiting the infidel before he can.”
Not once had he said, “your father.” She appreciated it. She thought.
Then again, there was no reading this strange, and strangely compelling, man.
“We march at dawn, day after tomorrow,” Karyl said. “You and your troop get the best rest you can tonight. Be ready to ride out along the Chausée Chastaigne by tomorrow’s sunset.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
She knew that was the proper response. Still she made no move to go. And not because he hadn’t dismissed her; she had already learned that when the fabled Karyl Bogomirskiy gave you an order, you didn’t need his permission to carry it out.
But the gaze he held on her was probing, not peremptory. “We will deal with the Imperial Crusade in due turn,” he said gently. “Till then, don’t let it worry you.”
She couldn’t help her skepticism from creasing her brow. Instead of reacting with anger, he said, “You’re a student of the military arts.”
He gestured at the book she’d been reading. “If you learn nothing else about them, learn this: nothing ever happens as expected. Especially in war.”
He crooked a smile at Rob. “As your master taught me well, when he stampeded a herd of wild mace-tails under the legs of my three-horns at the Hassling.”
“That was you?” she said to Rob.
He shrugged. “A good idea it seemed, at the time.”
“A brilliant tactic,” Karyl said, “for all it got you sacked.”
Questions bubbled to the surface of Melodía’s mind. Not least was, why does Karyl hate my Jaumet then, and not Rob Korrigan? She decided to ask none of them.
“Strange are the ways of fates and Fae,” Rob said lightly. Then he winced. Melodía saw Karyl’s brow tense and wondered why.
