by Victor Milán
Then she saw what loomed above the writhing throng. “Oh, sweet mother Maia!” she exclaimed. “That’s a Grey Angel! They’re real! They’re really real!”
“Yes, they are,” Melodía said. She grabbed Jeannette’s wrist.
“Run,” she suggested.
They ran.
Part Four
Crusade
Chapter 30
Nariz Cornuda, Nosehorn, One-horn—Centrosaurus apertus. Quadrupedal herbivore with a toothed beak and a single large nasal horn. 6 meters long, 1.8 meters tall, 3 tonnes. Nuevaropa’s most common Ceratopsian (hornface) dinosaur; predominant dray and meat-beast. Wild herds can be destructive and aggressive; popular (if extremely dangerous) to hunt.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
With a dinosaurian grunt and a squeal of tortured wood and metal, the harnessed three-horn pulled the wagon off the dirt track that ran through the army camp. Watching by lights of torches and campfires that gilded the great brow-horns and gleamed in its yellow eyes, Rob nodded his satisfaction.
The supply wagon had been badly overloaded; Gaétan’s hatchet of a cousin Élodie, who had taken over from Rob as chief quartermaster for the Providential army, would have the hide off someone tonight with her tongue like a dinosaur-drover’s whip. No sooner had the wagon’s brace of nosehorns hauled it onto the springer-path that led through forests and fields to Chestnut Street than the near front wheel snapped right off the axle.
Because it blocked the way for other wagons there was no time to jack it up and replace the wheel. Especially since clouds were thickening, Rob could feel the imminence of rain on his cheeks. Karyl ordered the wreck hauled to the side, to be repaired if possible, and otherwise abandoned.
The three-horn bull weighed more than the two nosehorns it replaced and their load combined. The professional Ovdan mahouts who had come with the trikes were a surly lot; this one had played no-speak-any-civilized-bloody-language when Rob tried to order him to chain his monster to the wagon and drag it clear. He tried in his rude but fluent Francés, Spañol, his native tongue, and Alemán. His Slavo was limited to a spatter of obscenities. The mahout hadn’t responded to those either.
Overhearing Rob’s increasingly vociferous efforts, Karyl had brought all the Ovdans together and, in their own language, delivered unto them what Rob reckoned was a truly magisterial ass-chewing. It hadn’t made the skinny little man who bestraddled the neck of this particular monster any less sour. But he was more cooperative.
And here out of the night a wild-eyed woman came flying on a lathered horse, with sword in hand and wine-red highlights where firelight touched her short thick hair, screaming, “They’re coming!” as if the world was ending.
As she reined up Karyl materialized, hair tied back, stripped to the waist, wearing loose dark trousers and carrying his sword-staff. Light-rider commander Melodía Delgao slipped from the saddle, then turned to help down a second young woman who rode behind her. To his astonishment Rob recognized Jeannette, Gaétan’s sister, who had briefly been his lover soon after he and Karyl arrived in Providence. She was naked.
He trotted to help on short, bowed legs. When he put his arm around Jeannette she collapsed against him. He smoothed back sweat-matted hair that had pulled randomly free of her braid and plastered itself to her face like kelp. He felt something stickier than perspiration. When he took his palm away he realized it was coated in half-dried blood.
“By the Eight, girl, who did this to you?” he asked.
“I did,” Melodía said.
He stared at her.
“Well, she was about to hurl herself into the flames. So I clipped her with my talwar hilt. I meant to stun her so I could throw her over my horse’s rump and escape.”
She looked uneasily from one man to the other. “Well, it works in the romances. And slapping her worked the first time.”
Rob winced. “How’d it actually work?” He had an excellent idea already, having had more than a few fast-moving bottles and beer-mugs intersect his sconce in his time.
Melodía shrugged. “She doubled over crying and clutching her head instead. But it distracted her, anyway.”
“Wait,” Rob said, “she meant to throw herself into flames?” He stared at Jeannette. “Where? What flames?”
“At my family’s house,” she said weakly.
“You have our undivided attention,” Karyl told Melodía. “Take a deep breath. Then tell the whole story from the start.”
She did. And she did. Karyl’s eyes narrowed when she backed up a month to certain events in Bogardus’s bedchamber. Then widened at what she had seen and experienced there.
That started whispers scurrying like rats among the crowd assembling about them: Grey Angel. Grey Angel.
Rob began to trace out the S-within-a-circle sign of Equilibrium in air before his chest. Then he stopped. Not the best invocation, he reminded himself. That’s their symbol. The whole reason they exist, if they do.
And to his horrid dismay he had a feeling he was about to have the Grey Angels’ existence confirmed. In exactly the worst way possible.
“So you’re saying this creature squelched your memory of your first encounter with him somehow?” Karyl asked.
Melodía actually faltered. Then she held her head up almost haughtily and said, “Yes,” as if daring him to contradict her.
Instead he said, “Go on.”
Economically and straightforwardly, she described the unbelievably nightmarish events in the Garden Hall—Rob would have to commend her on her professionalism, from a scouting standpoint. She kept glancing at Karyl as if to see whether he took what she was saying seriously or not. The very fact he failed to bark the listeners back to their tasks told Rob he did.
“Why Jeannette?” Rob asked when she got to the part about the pair fleeing the château.
“She seemed more—savable than the others,” Melodía said. “And I knew the Council’s harbored an increasing hatred for her family. I didn’t like all the talk of pruning.”
“So then what?” Karyl asked.
“She snapped out of it.”
“It was like waking from a dream,” Jeannette said. She looked as wan as she sounded. Rob could tell she hadn’t been eating well. Possibly for weeks. But she seemed shrunken in more dimensions than the flesh. “A dream of drowning.”
“The Grey Angels’ fabled mind control,” Karyl said. “You and our horse-captain confirm that it’s apparently no more fabulous than they themselves are.”
Himself is taking this all quite well, Rob thought. Karyl had spent his whole eventful life firmly disbelieving in the Creators and their mythology, and magic of any sort. The fact that the self-styled witch Aphrodite had regrown his bitten-off hand for him by magic had gone a way to spoiling that part of it for him. But now his entire worldview was getting kicked to pieces.
If it was all true, of course. If it was a lie, these two women were cheating the world of great performances onstage.
Karyl seemed to believe their stories no more than Rob himself. Rob had to credit the man for the steel in his character. Although he was also beginning to suspect with a sinking feeling that Karyl was handling the situation so well because he had already sussed out that he was facing the professional challenge of his life.
And if what I very much dread is coming next, Rob thought, that means just surviving this night. If we do that things really get bad.
Jeannette felt gingerly at her head. “I wish you’d found some other way of getting through to me than to keep hitting me, Día,” she said mildly.
“Sorry,” Melodía said. “She followed me right out of the villa and got on the gelding behind me. We rode into town, to her family’s house to warn them.”
“What family’s house?” a familiar voice demanded. Rob’s innards cringed. Such goings-on, he thought glumly, make far better songs than they do livings-through.
Gaétan swam through the crowd as though breasting surf. “My family? Our family? Jeannette? Baby,
what’s happened to you?”
She turned to her brother, then clung to him like a handful of mud and wept like a lost child.
“Yours,” Melodía said, facing him. To her credit she didn’t flinch. She may have been spoiled, the most privileged little girl in all Nuevaropa. But she had stood up to face-to-face combat.
And a Grey Angel, of course. Though Rob’s intuition told him that telling the next was worse.
“There was a huge bonfire in the Old Market Square,” Melodía said. “A lot of people were there. A man I didn’t know was preaching; the listeners showed the strangest mixture of crazy fervor and listlessness. I couldn’t understand.”
“Grey Angel’s spell,” someone moaned from the crowd. “It’s a Crusade.”
“I didn’t want to think that,” the crop-haired woman said. “I still don’t want to.… We rode past a procession of blank-faced children carrying candles, flanked by adults with arms and torches. I didn’t stay around to watch them. By then we could see the flames.
“A mob was attacking Commerce House. Fire was already streaming out every window and door, and smoke curling up around the roof-beams. Évrard himself stood in front of his house, laying about with a great sword and trying to carve a way to safety for his family and servants.”
Gaétan uttered a strangled cry. Jeannette wept in juddering breaths, as if all her ribs were broken.
“Your father gave a good account of himself,” Melodía said. “He cut down half a dozen rioters as we approached. But the mob … wouldn’t stop. Despite their losses, despite the danger, they swarmed him like horrors over a duckbill calf. He did all that a man could. But they brought him down.
“And then—then—” Her voice, steady until now, faltered. “They picked up your youngest sister and threw her into the flames.”
“Alive?” blurted Rob.
She nodded. A line of moisture that glowed like molten copper ran down one smooth cheek.
Gaétan’s heart-ripped cry reminded Rob of nothing so much as the last great scream Karyl’s legendary matadora Shiraa had vented at the Hassling when, her shoulder torn open by Duke Falk’s albino tyrant, Snowflake, she had been forced to abandon the being she had bonded to as her mother at the moment when she hatched. That cry had been so full of sorrow and rage it seemed too great for even such a giant beast to emit.
Rob was almost surprised that when this shriek of grief and rage ended, the young man didn’t collapse like an empty bladder.
He threw his long arms around Gaétan from behind. Despite the many duties that kept him from playing his beloved lute over the past weeks and even months, Rob Korrigan remained a dinosaur master. He still swung axes and mallets to build paddock fences, hauled cables, tossed fodder bales about. Such a life had made him strong, and kept him that way. His build suggested a beer keg on short legs more than a hero from the ballads. It did not suggest a weakling.
Gaétan struggled. Rob locked hand on wrist, pinning the younger man’s arms to his sides. Bending his knees and straightening with a grunt, Rob lifted Gaétan’s sandaled feet right off the hard-trampled yard.
“That was when I hit Jeannette with my sword hilt,” Melodía said. She couldn’t look at the futilely struggling young trader. Rob couldn’t blame her. “She tried to hurl herself after her sister.”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “I wonder if what I did was right. My—that is, Count Jaume always taught that all true virtue begins with personal choice. And when did the Garden lose sight of that? Did they ever even see it? I’m afraid I wronged Jeannette by not honoring her choice to die with her family.”
“She can always die,” Karyl said. “Nothing easier than that.”
Then he spat a harsh laugh. “For most.”
“Let me go, you misshapen Irlandés ape!” Gaétan bellowed, kicking and trying to slam the back of his head into Rob’s nose. Having had his nose broken by just that trick at least once that he remembered, Rob held his own head back with face averted. “I’ve got to go back! I have to avenge my family!”
“Will your throwing your life away bring them back, then?” Rob asked. “What kind of trade is that?”
Jeannette reached to stroke her brother’s cheek. He turned his face away. He spat curses: at her, at Melodía, at Rob, at Karyl, at the world called Paradise. At the Creators.
At this blasphemy some of the crowd around them began to mutter apprehensively. Rob ignored them, continuing to hold the strapping Gaétan off the ground as though he were a child. Karyl swept the crowd with a gaze like a scythe and the muttering died down.
Jeannette grabbed Gaétan’s face with both hands and smothered his outcries with a kiss. “Please, no, brother, no,” she said. “I don’t want to lose you too. I won’t! Curse me if you will. You’ll have to knock me down and walk over my body to go into town!!”
He glared at her. Rob felt him tense, and feared for a moment he might try to head-butt her. Then the young man relaxed.
Indeed, not just fight but heart went out of him. His suddenly dead weight forced Rob to let him back onto the ground. He barely managed to keep a hold.
“Very well, Master Korrigan,” Gaétan said, his voice almost steady. “You can let me go. Later on you can give me the drubbing I doubtless deserve for the things I said about you. Or Colonel Karyl can have me whipped from the army for disrespect. I won’t resist.”
Rob let him go and stepped back. “You said something, boy?” he asked, shaking his arms to restore circulation. “I couldn’t hear a thing, for your great empty sweaty-haired pumpkin of a head pressed into my face, so.”
Gaétan looked at Karyl. Karyl made a brusque dismissive gesture. In a world of touchy nobles who’d call out a peer for the least perceived slight—and ride a whole peasant family into the road for less—Karyl had a hide like an old nosehorn bull. If you could insult him, Rob had seen no evidence of the fact; he had no more amour propre than a corpse.
“What else can you tell us?” Karyl asked the two women.
“There must be a thousand strangers in town,” Jeannette said.
“Where did they all come from?” her brother asked.
Rob snapped his fingers. “The north! That’s why Karyl’s cousin reported it seemed so deserted—and why my woods-runners saw bale-fires, and wouldn’t go there.” He cut off, frowning. “But the north’s sparsely populated. Where’d Raguel go and get a thousand Crusaders?”
“I’m no betting man,” Karyl said, “but I’ll wager there’s not a living soul between Providence town and the passes.”
“So they’re all dead,” Rob said. “Or signed on with this bloody Angel.”
“So the evidence suggests,” said Karyl. He shook his head and sighed.
“I see no doubt,” he announced to the crowd at large. “A Grey Angel Crusade has broken out in our very own dooryard.”
“Then let’s march on the town and clear them out!” someone yelled. Others shouted aye! Still others muttered nervously of sorcery and blasphemy.
“The townspeople are joining Raguel too,” Melodía said. “Those who don’t they kill. Horribly.”
“So what?” the militant voice cried. Rob craned to see who spoke. But the man stayed lost in numbers and darkness. “Even if they recruit a thousand out of Providence town, we still outnumber them.”
Then it came to Rob. “And we’ve got dinosaurs,” he said. To his mind that settled it.
For Gaétan too, apparently. He whipped out his sword and brandished it high. Its blade seemed to catch fire.
“That’s enough for me!” he cried. “I’m for going back and recapturing the town! Who’s with me?”
Before anyone could offer, Karyl said, “And they’ve got a Grey Angel.” Not loudly; but his words carried.
Gaétan froze.
“How do you fight a Grey Angel?” Karyl asked, his voice still quiet and penetrant as an arrow. “With any chance of winning, I mean? If you think you know how, Gaétan, I surrender command of the army to yo
u on the instant, and shall follow and eagerly learn.”
The tip of Gaétan’s sword crunched in the dirt. He hung his head. “I’m sorry, Colonel. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Then gather your wits and start,” Karyl said, not unkindly. “We need you, and we need you sharp. We need everybody.”
He turned to the onlookers. “If we weren’t halfway ready to take the road we’d be doomed,” he said. “Take this lesson to heart: sometimes it truly is better to be lucky than good. We march on the hour. Anybody or anything not ready to move then will be left to the horde.”
“The horde?” someone asked.
“Did you not hear this woman then, when she rode into camp all in a fuss?” Rob said. “She called out, ‘They’re coming!’ Who do you think she meant, you great git?”
But he looked to Karyl in concern. “We’ve wounded in the infirmary,” he said. Practice, drill, and simple camp routine caused their share of injuries. Anytime you mixed people with big, strong, volatile animals like horses—to say nothing of dinosaurs—they got hurt.
“Load them in wagons,” Karyl replied. “Dump food if you have to. There’ll be plenty of game and forage along the route, anyway.”
“Our route where?” Rob asked.
“South.”
“Toward Métairie Brulée?” Rob exclaimed.
“Toward the Imperial Army?” Melodía yelped.
“There’s at least a chance we can pass through Métairie Brulée without fighting,” Karyl said. “And if we have to fight, I like our chances with Célestine’s army better than Raúl’s. As for the Imperials, the facts remain the same: they’re far. The Angel and his horde are near. And if the Impies are marching to forestall a Grey Angel Crusade—well, they’re too late now. Perhaps they’ll turn back.”
“You don’t know my father,” Melodía said.
“Better than you might think,” Karyl said.
“But what about Count Raúl?” asked Eamonn Copper. Rob hadn’t seen him come up. Drink blurred the edges of his words but his eyes were clear. He’ll not let a little thing like having a load aboard impair him, thought Rob, good Ayrishmuhn that he is.
