by Victor Milán
“Castaña?” Karyl barked a laugh. “He’s Raguel’s problem now. May they find great pleasure in getting to know each other.”
Then turning at a fresh commotion, he said, “What’s this?”
It was a party of jinetes. Rob recognized the picket he’d set to watch in the woods west across the Imperial High Road. They surrounded a rider who wasn’t of their troop, who had a flag-bright burn across his face. To Rob’s amazement a woods-runner rode beside him. The woods-runners were willing enough to ride pillion with the light-horse, but most insisted they couldn’t learn to manage the “great ungainly beasts” themselves.
“They crossed the Lisette last night,” the wounded horseman reported, swinging down from the saddle to dump a proffered duckbill-leather bucket of water over his head.
“Who?” Rob demanded. “Not the Crève Coeur army, surely?”
“No army,” the rider said. “Not like any I’ve seen.”
“Mad things,” said the woods-runner, who had dismounted with evident relief and moved smartly away from the horse as if unwilling to acknowledge the association. “Evil. Like dead men walking. And women, and children. With no more fear to them than logs.”
“You couldn’t stop them with your bows?” Rob asked.
“There were more of them than we had arrows,” the woods-runner said. “More than there are arrows, maybe. They seemed more numerous than the wood’s very trees. And the way they treat those who fall into their hands alive makes Count Guilli’s Rangers seem like Maia’s Mothers of Mercy.”
“So that’s what the Council’s missionaries have really been up to in Crève Coeur,” Karyl said in disgust. “Assembling their own Grey Angel horde.”
“But how could they … compel the Brokenhearts, without an Angel’s powers?” Rob asked.
“Maybe Raguel visited them himself,” Melodía said.
“But it took these men a day’s hard ride to get here on horseback!”
“And that awful thing had legs almost as long as I am tall! Who knows how fast it can walk? Or run?”
“Who knows if he needs to run?” someone else shouted. “He’s a Grey Angel!”
“I don’t care how he did it,” Karyl said. “Or how the horde was raised. The fact is: it’s raised. It’s about to be here. Our only choice now is flight.”
“But isn’t it our duty to submit to the Grey Angel’s will?” a man’s voice sobbed from the dark. “They are the Creators’ own avengers!”
Karyl gestured in the direction of the town. “Be my guest,” he said. “I’m not ready either to become a mindless thing, or a corpse.”
The silence that answered was eloquent.
Karyl turned to Melodía. “Are you up to leading your light-horse in a rear-guard action? It will be dangerous. It will also be key to our army’s survival.”
* * *
Melodía’s throat seized up. Her pulse hammered. Face Raguel? Again? I can’t!
She wanted to fall to her knees and beg Karyl to spare her. Even kill her on the spot. Anything but face that horror a third time.
Instead she caught herself on the verge of toppling over. I’m hyperventilating, she thought. She forced herself to draw a deep if ragged breath from her diaphragm.
It gave her a little of her mind back. I wanted to have consequence, she reminded herself. I wanted to make a difference in the world. How can I do that, if I give into my fears? Even fear this great?
“I—” She swallowed. “I’m willing.”
“Very well.” Karyl nodded. “Get your troop together and ride north as soon as you can to screen our retreat. With your permission, Master Rob.”
* * *
“But that means fighting our employer!” Rob exclaimed.
All around them men and women rushed this way and that, carrying out assignments barked by their superiors. In the torchlight Karyl’s smile could have looked no more ghastly had his mouth been filled with blood.
“I’m surprised a dinosaur master as seasoned as you forgets the Mercenary’s Second Rule.”
“And what might that be?”
“When your employer turns on you, the contract’s canceled. Of course.”
He turned away. Feeling a jongleur’s professional awareness of playing the straight man, Rob called after him, “But what’s the Mercenary’s First Rule?”
Karyl looked back. It looked as if every nightmare that had wakened him screaming on the road and in the first months in Providence, the night-terrors that went away once campaigning began in earnest, had all come back on him at once like a cloud of corpse-ripping fliers.
“They always turn on you,” he said. “As I was taught at Gunters Moll.”
Chapter 31
Jinete, Light-rider—Skirmishers and scouts, often women, who ride horses and striders. They wear no armor, or at most a light nosehorn-leather jerkin, with sometimes a leather or metal cap. They use javelins or feathered twist-darts, and a sword. Some also carry a light lance and a buckler. A few shoot shortbows or light crossbows, but mounted archery is very difficult, and not much practiced in Nuevaropa.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
“Don’t get your weapons stuck in an enemy,” Melodía told her jinetes in the cool and pregnant dark. “Edge over point. If you have to thrust with sword or lance, don’t be afraid to let it go. You can replace a weapon easier than you can replace you.”
They were mustered in the Séverin farmhouse foreyard beside the elevated Imperial Road. Volunteers had swelled her troop to nearly fifty. But they were all she had to stall whatever awfulness was coming, and give the army time to get underway.
“Use your darts and javelins when you can. That’s why you have them; that’s why the Colonel sent a whole wagonload more along with us. Questions?”
“None,” called out Valérie, her lieutenant and now best friend. Slender, deceptively delicate-looking, Valérie was a town girl of some means who joined up after the first successful ambush looking for adventure and had distinguished herself in action. She was popular, and could easily have been elected troop-commander. But she preferred to play second-in-command.
Melodía drew sword and signaled the advance. The jinetes followed her across the ditch, whose weedy bottom already ran in a trickle from the rain that had begun to spit down intermittently, then up the berm onto the roadway. Turning right to tunk across a plank bridge over the stream that angled through camp they set out north at the trot.
Providence town burned. In places orange flames shot higher than the peaked roofs. Smoke rolled up to meld with forge-hued clouds. Melodía imagined she heard screaming.
I hope it’s my imagination, she thought.
Half a kilometer up the Chausée Imperial, they met a hundred refugees streaming south. Grey-faced in diffuse light of stars and Eris and reflected fire-glow, gasping in their terror and fatigue, most carried nothing but the clothes on their backs. Without need for orders the troop split to either side of the road, flowing back together when they passed the dispirited gaggle.
Halfway to town the road climbed a long, slow hill. Hellish yellow glow silhouetted a wagon piled high with household goods, drawn by a single plodding nosehorn. Melodía signaled her riders to go slow. Karyl had ordered that refugees be allowed to join the army if they agreed to follow instructions—and showed no signs of Raguel’s madness. She wasn’t sure that was wise. But it wasn’t her problem; she put it from her mind.
Then she saw that shadow figures swarmed over the wagon to grapple with people perched atop the cargo-mound. A woman ran toward them, eyes wild, smock ripped to bare a swinging breast, pleading for help. Her cries rose to wordless shrieking as she was tackled to the pumice from behind.
“They’re here!” Melodía shouted, thankful that tedious years of singing-lessons by a fussy, overly perfumed Taliano had taught her to project her voice like a brass trumpet. “Troop, skirmish forward!”
She charged on Meravellosa, lashing out with her talwar. She
used the curved blade’s flat to beat back the people piling onto the fallen woman. But although in her excitement, and with her height advantage, she struck so hard it hurt her whole arm and shoulder, her blows did no more than momentarily distract the attackers.
Even as she’d ridden out of Providence town with a bloody-faced and moaning Jeannette behind—was it really just an hour before?—Melodía wondered if she could bring herself to kill members of the Grey Angel horde. The man she had fought in the valley of the Laughing Water was a professional warrior, and a raider to boot—no more than a violent criminal, really. Although once she would have thought him nothing worse than a member of her own class who exercised his privileges to excess; maybe she would’ve nodded with appropriately furrowed brow as Josefina Serena wept for his cruelty.
Instead she’d killed him. And, after her purely physical reflex, felt nothing but justified. She’d dreamed of the confrontation since, to be sure. And in those nightmares seen, not herself killing him, but what he would have done to her and her friends if she hadn’t.
But could she kill mere … people? Innocents caught up by an irresistible force?
Then a woman raised a face whose bottom half was masked in blood from her still-screaming victim’s back to snarl at Melodía. And suddenly all Melodía could see were the red-dripping muzzles of Count Guillaume’s horrors as they ripped her best friend to death.
She slashed the face apart with her backhand, screaming louder than the woman she cut down.
Belatedly remembering her own instructions, Melodía darted Meravellosa ten meters back down the hill. Slamming her Ovdan sword into the pebbled duckbill-leather scabbard hanging from her pommel, she snatched a javelin from a pannier behind her right leg.
The refugee woman’s struggles subsided to twitches, and her shrieks to moans. A pool of darkness grew around her quicker than the porous tufa and well-drained roadbed could suck it down. A man stood up from his victim with an air of satisfaction. Melodía flung the javelin into his capacious belly.
Jinetes rode up beside her. A strider, worse-tempered than a horse, squalled rage. A horde member howled as a lightning peck burst his eye in its socket.
Quickly slaughtering the blood-soaked pack, the riders showered darts at the figures who still clung to the wagon like baby sea-scorpions to their three-meter-long mother’s back. Melodía hung back to pant for breath. Her body ran with unpleasantly slick sweat inside her fatty-leather jack.
A farm boy named Marc rode up on a bay gelding, carrying a hunting spear. He looked down at the fallen fugitive, then at Melodía. She nodded. Face wrenched by emotion, he drove the spear down hard between the prone woman’s shoulder blades. Her limbs and head starfished backward up off the gravel. Then she went limp.
The jinetes regrouped. To Melodía’s relief they hadn’t lost anybody, and suffered no hurts worse than scratches and bruises. She wished it would last, knew it couldn’t.
“The road ahead’s clear almost to the outskirts,” Valérie reported. She shook her head, making her braids swing beneath her steel cap. “They—the—the hordelings, they won’t run. All we can do is kill them.”
Her voice held a leaden quality to it, not the usual light and bright of a naturally high spirit exalted by the fierce pleasure of fighting deadly danger and winning. Melodía understood.
Melodía’s troopers trotted back to the supply wagon to replenish their missiles. Some who had experience with wagon-handling beseeched and bullied the thoroughly terrified nosehorn into dragging the refugee wagon athwart the road, then released it from its harness. With its long tongue the vehicle more than served to block the thoroughfare. It wouldn’t stop the horde, especially not afoot—as all the hordelings Melodía had so far seen had been. But her job wasn’t to defeat Raguel’s host, nor even turn it back. It was to buy time for Providence’s army to get away as cleanly as possible. Any slight delay helped.
A couple of riders Melodía detailed to drive the liberated nosehorn back to Séverin farm. Karyl could use every dray beast he could get. She led the rest, panniers filled with fresh darts, north along the High Road toward the glow of a burning town.
* * *
A few hundred meters to the east a farmhouse blazed. West by the river flames shot from the top of the old stone water-mill. Melodía hoped all the occupants were safely away.
I wish I could believe it.
The jinetes were spread out across open country to either side of the Chausée Imperial. The horde had spread out even farther to advance cross-country, over fields and through woods.
A flurry of brief, bloody skirmishes had confirmed what she never doubted: Valérie reported truly. The hordelings, as they had fallen to calling them—wouldn’t flee. They showed an almost complete lack of sense of self-preservation or will—except to kill. Most walked at a slow and mindless shamble. Until they spotted prey: then they pounced with the swift savagery of dromaeosaurs.
They might not rout, Melodía and her riders had learned, but they could be discouraged, even stopped. When jinetes stood off from a mob of them and pelted it with darts, it would come apart like a dirt clod in a hard rain. But they soon discovered that not all the Angel’s followers lacked volition. They regrouped quickly, and sought ways to bypass her pitifully small blocking force. Some intelligence guided their actions.
That Raguel himself might be near hit Melodía like a gulp of cold sewage: it sickened and chilled her at once. But she kept the panic that yammered and fought like a penned beast to escape and devour her mind under control, by focusing on keeping her people alive.
As many as I can. As long as I can.
* * *
“Bluhdi Hel!” Rob Korrigan roared in Anglysh, waving his dinosaur master’s axe Wanda for emphasis. Then in the Francés his listeners might actually comprehend: “They’re your brothers and sisters, not clotting sacks of grain!”
Soldiers carried wounded from Séverin farm’s main house and loaded them aboard a wagon. Its drover had tied bandannas around the eyes of its two yoked nosehorns to keep them from stampeding; as it was they tossed their great-horned snouts in panic and added their bawling to the general pandemonium. Rob knew the need for speed, but the crew was getting a little enthusiastic about slinging the injured into the bed.
Screams rising behind made him turn. A man ran at him across the yard. He wore a leather apron of some sort. Rob’s first, mad thought was, An awfully incautious dyer he must be: not only are his arms stained halfway past the elbows, he’s splashed his fool face as well.
Then he saw the way the man’s eyes rolled in his face and his mouth gaped unnaturally wide. He reached hands that were wet with something that definitely wasn’t dye for Rob.
His head burst like an overripe melon when Rob slammed his axe both-handed into the side of it.
“Shit,” Rob said. All around him he saw people grappling.
I hope I haven’t lost the Short-Haired Horse Captain and her whole troop. Karyl expected they’d never hold the horde, just delay it as long as they could. Which was exactly this long, it seemed.
He even found himself hoping the Imperial chit had survived. Aye, she had cost him dear; yet she showed promise. And he was no man to take lightly the loss of such a beautiful girl.
He spun and waved his bloody axe in the air. “To arms!” he shouted. “The bastards are upon us.”
To their credit the burly pair handing up a sheet-wrapped woman didn’t simply drop her. They did however sling her right past the pair of attendants standing in the wagon-bed—like, yes, a grain sack. Rob hadn’t the heart to yell at them.
Nor the breath. He set off at a lumbering run toward the nearest knot of combat.
As if waiting for this moment the rain burst down in torrents. It chilled Rob to the core. No matter, he thought. The work’ll warm me, quick enough. He was more concerned that he’d be fighting in treacherous footing.
Most invaders fought unarmed. The rest sported a bizarre assortment of weapons, from hoes and kitchen
knives and crafters’ hammers, to swords and halberds likely looted from the arsenal. All attacked amateurishly, but with as much straight-ahead ferocity as any house-shield armored cap-a-pie.
As he came up on the rear of a mob assailing a cart stacked high with casks, Rob saw Karyl. The Colonel stood alone in the midst of a circle of hordelings. Rain streaming down bearded face and bare chest, his single-edged staff-sword in his left hand, staff-sheath in his right, he faced a dozen attackers with his customary battle calm.
Right, then, he’s got the blighters just where he wants them, Rob thought, and began to chop flesh and bone like cordwood.
* * *
They fought in driving rain, amidst a black confusion of brush and trees. Chance had set Valérie at Melodía’s side. She had lost her helmet. By the scattered, shifting light of a wood-cutter’s cot burning off to the right Melodía could see her lieutenant’s blond hair was a seaweed mat of blood and sweat. Her features, so pertly pretty Melodía felt pangs of jealousy at times, were smeared with dark muck whose composition Melodía didn’t care to guess.
It was all either woman could do to keep her legs clamped around the heaving, rain and sweat-slick barrel of her horse. Melodía’s arms felt as if their skin was filled with embers, and every slight motion drove spikes into elbows and shoulders.
Unfortunately, staying alive required constant movement that was anything but slight.
She heard her friend call, “Sacrée Maia Mère, it’s a little girl! Come here, child.”
As she drew her talwar once more, having exhausted her supply of darts, once more—how many trips she’d made to the steadily retreating wagon, she couldn’t count—Melodía saw Valérie urge her chestnut mare several splashing paces forward. Leaning from her saddle, she reached down to a child with long dark hair falling in her face and over the shoulders of a grubby sleeping-shift. She couldn’t have been twelve.
The girl grabbed Valérie’s wrist with both hands and bit hard on her forearm. She clung single-mindedly as the horsewoman cried out more in surprise than pain.
