by Victor Milán
“She’s safe, at least?” he asked.
The Emperor nodded. Tears dripped from the end of his goatee.
“The last anyone has heard. But Maxence also says that his Grace the Duke of Haut-Pays has heard claims from refugees that she serves him, riding with his scout cavalry.”
Which, given that Voyvod Karyl was engaged to fight for our declared enemies in Providence …
He stood.
“What will you do?” Felipe asked him, almost beseechingly.
“What my Emperor directs,” Jaume replied. “As always. Majesty?”
He could not trust his self-control anymore. Barely waiting for Felipe’s answering nod he spun to the door-flap.
To find himself looking into Duke Falk’s sapphire eyes. Being who he was, Jaume could not help but feel a flash of admiration for the masculine beauty of the powerfully built young man.
But it was more elusive beauty than usual. Because the taut alabaster skin of Falk’s face had gone an unhealthy grey and sagged most alarmingly, and those long-lashed, lovely eyes were wide as a startled matador’s.
He’s as stricken by the cruelty of His Majesty’s dilemma as I am! Jaume thought.
“Your Grace,” he managed not to mumble, and fled back to his encampment and his private grief with as much dignity as he could.
* * *
As the silken flap swished shut behind the departed Condestable Imperial, Falk turned to follow. His face and chest burned with shame at having witnessed the spectacle of two men—important men, leaders—weeping openly. He already felt ambivalent about Jaume. But he could afford no such confusion with regard to his liege the Emperor. Could he?
“Your Grace,” Felipe said from behind. His voice still trembled unmanfully. Falk gritted his jaw, then composed himself and turned.
He bowed, both to show respect—I must respect the Emperor!—and to hide the last of scrubbing his face of emotion.
“How may I serve your Majesty?” he asked.
He meant it. All my life, he thought, I’ve been groomed to serve Chian, and his principle of power. I admit I’ve wondered whether Felipe truly was the strong man the Empire needs. He shown my doubts were pointless.
“I thought I—I thought we’d saved Melodía by getting her away from La Merced,” Felipe said haltingly. “Now she seems likely to be crushed like a grain of millet between the millstones of our armies and Raguel’s Crusade. Events both vast and unforeseeable.”
Not altogether unforeseeable, Falk allowed himself to think sardonically. Not to me.
But I must admit I never foresaw an actual Grey Angel Crusade. He was a believer in the True Faith of the Creators, as mandated for all human inhabitants of Paradise. But he had not expected the tenets of his religion to manifest in quite such concrete ways. To say nothing of such appalling ones.
The Emperor hung and shook his head. “I don’t see what better I could have done. Yet I feel that I’ve failed her.”
For an agonizing moment Falk sat frozen. Does he know? Is this a test? Some subtle torture, before he summons my own men to hale me off to the more overt kind?
But Felipe simply sat, head down, shoulders slumped, looking prematurely aged by care. He didn’t have much guile in him in any event. Witness the ease with which Falk had persuaded him that allowing Melodía’s escape was the Emperor’s own idea, weeks before.
“I cannot call her back,” Felipe said in a way that showed how he fought to keep the tears from surging back. “Not after all … all that’s happened. Nor can I treat this unexpected revenant Karyl or his host as anything but enemies. Since, ultimately, they’re the enemy we marched out on Crusade against.”
“I see your Majesty’s dilemma.”
“What am I to do, boy?” Felipe blinked rapidly at Falk. “What am I to do for my poor baby girl?”
Inspiration came. “Wouldn’t Fray Jerónimo tell you to bide? Wouldn’t he say that all things happen for a purpose? Be patient, he’d say. And rest easy about your daughter’s fate.”
The clever devil’s managed to keep his true identity and even his face secret from me, the chief of the Scarlet Tyrants. And more than that, from Bergdahl’s best efforts, at the Palace of the Fireflies and on the march. I might as well at least have use of him.
Felipe’s head snapped up. His eyes glittered so sharply Falk feared he’d overplayed his hand.
But the Emperor just sighed and subsided back in his chair. “Melodía’s fate rests in the Creators’ hands,” he said. “As do all our fates. You’re right.”
He reached out to take Falk’s huge hand, white scarred with lighter white, with his own. It was soft as a baby’s. The pikeman’s calluses he’d earned in youth had long since worn away.
“You have my gratitude,” Felipe said. “Go now, boy. Tend to your duties and then get what rest you can. You’ll need it.
“You’ve put my mind at ease. Now leave a tired old man to his prayers.”
* * *
But instead of rest, when Falk entered his own tent after nightfall, he found Bergdahl, sitting and sharpening his big peasant’s knife on a stone.
“See to my armor,” said the Duke, naked and dripping from his bath outside. “It got somewhat blood-splashed.”
“So some of the nobles resisted his Majesty’s edicts about cleanliness being next to holiness, did they?”
“Briefly.”
“Isn’t cleanup your arming-squire Albrecht’s job?”
“I’m telling you to do it.”
“Well, I’m pleased to say I’ve long since given up all pretense to holiness,” the servant said, tucking away stone and knife and rising.
“One thing,” said Falk as Bergdahl headed out to fetch the armor from its rack outside the tent.
He turned back with a brown-toothed smile. “Your Grace commands me.”
“As a matter of fact, I do. As I traveled the camp, delivering the Emperor’s edicts—and enforcing them on those who weren’t quick enough on the uptake—I encountered rumors flying everywhere. Remarkable rumors. Rumors concerning the Voyvod Karyl Bogomirskiy. The ostensibly late Karyl Bogomirskiy.”
“Ahh.” Bergdahl shrugged. For once he actually looked abashed. “Well. Like your Grace, I’m used to those I kill staying that way. Gave me quite a turn, it did, to hear he’s turned up alive and well—and with a brand-new army. But I swear on my life—which I’ll be damned lucky of your lady mother leaves me—I saw him go over the cliff, clutching that horror and bleeding out from the stump of his sword-arm, with nothing beneath him but three hundred meters of air and the surface of the Eye.”
Falk waved that away. “What troubles me are these rumors I’m hearing that Karyl never intended any treachery—that Count Jaume stabbed an innocent man in the back.”
“Why, those are surely true—as who knows better than your Grace? After all, didn’t I deliver the Princes’ peace terms, requiring Karyl’s destruction, to his Highness Marshal von Rundstedt with my own hand? Which he viewed with manifest distaste, I’ll add. And unhesitatingly carried out, as Jaume himself did, loyal little lapdogs that they are.
“Not that Felipe found putting the wood to Karyl any great hardship. That bastard Slavo’s unbroken chain of victories scared his own masters as badly as they did us in the Princes’ Party.”
“All that aside, such rumors now serve only to discredit our Constable.”
Bergdahl snapped dirty-nailed fingers.
“Ah! Why, I believe—yes, they were calculated to do that very thing. By me, as it happens. And spread by the selfsame party.” He showed awful brown teeth in his goblin grin.
“What on Paradise for?”
“Have you forgotten? The stress of being in charge of the Scarlet Tyrants is weakening your mind. He’s your rival, of course. He stands between you and the Fangèd Throne.”
“He’s also a military genius,” Falk said, “whose skill might be the only thing standing between us and annihilation.”
“You discount your own gi
fts. I never thought I’d live to see it.”
With one hand Falk grabbed the front of Bergdahl’s soiled tunic. Although his servant was no small man, and fully as tall as the young Duke’s one hundred ninety centimeters, he hoisted him straight off the ground so far his sandals dangled.
“Don’t you understand, you damned fool?” Falk roared. “We don’t dare weaken the army now, staring a Grey Angel in the face! If Jaume loses any more control of this army, we lose everything.”
Despite the huge fist knotted beneath his chin Bergdahl sneered down his long, bent nose. “You truly don’t understand the game you play here, do you, young master? Good thing your mother had sense to set me to provide sense for you.”
“It stops now. The rumors. The scheming. You will obey me, or I’ll wring your head off like a scratcher for the pot.”
He dropped his manservant. Bergdahl caught himself from falling and stood as tall as he ever did.
“What would your dowager mother say?” he asked, massaging his throat.
“If we don’t stop this,” Falk said, “not a blessed thing. She’ll die. You will die, and I will die. Everyone will die. We’re fighting for our lives as much as for Empire. If you hamper that fight in any way, you’re my enemy. And I will treat you as such.”
That made Bergdahl blink. Falk felt grim satisfaction. It was the closest he’d come to getting the better of the villein.
“Don’t say anything,” he said. “Just nod your head and walk away. Or run very far and very fast.”
Bergdahl nodded his head. And walked away.
If we survive, the goblin will make me suffer, the young Duke thought. But first—we must survive.
Chapter 37
Troodón, Tröodon—Troodon formosus. Pack-predator raptor, 2.5 meters long, 50 kilograms. Sometimes imported to Nuevaropa as pets or hunting beasts. Like ferrets, tröodons are clever, loyal, and given to mischief. Vengeful if abused.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
“Ho, there, Horse Captain!”
Melodía led her troop into the village of Florimel off a sweep to make sure the army’s rear was clear of the Grey Angel horde. She found the fugitive army already halfway through the little settlement snuggled deep in Telar’s Wood. She trotted Meravellosa down a line of three-horns rumbling along nosehorn to tail, grumbling softly in their throats, following their own shadows cast well before the by the setting sun. They were hungry and cranky; even horse-aficionada Melodía, who knew little and cared less about dinosaurs, could tell that much.
She had to trust her mare’s cleverness and sure-footedness to thread a path between marching monsters and gaping locals. Apparently unaware of Triceratops’s belligerent nature, the good inhabitants of Florimel, adults as slack-jawed rapt as children, lined the main lane to watch the fantastic enormous three-horned dinosaurs go by. Nor was that the only danger they seemed oblivious to.
Why are you just standing around? Melodía wanted to scream at them. The Grey Angel is coming. You should be running for your souls!
At the cheerful, boozy call Melodía looked right. An inn, its façade whitewashed and half-timbered, fronted right on the road. A shingle hung by the door featured the legend, The Purple Horror, and an appropriately colored painting of a deinonychus rampant. Feeling less than charitable, Melodía suspected that was a truthful portrayal of the effects of taking on too much of their home brew.
On a half-log bench beside the sign, Rob Korrigan leaned back against the narrow building with bandy legs crossed. He had his long, thin-stemmed clay pipe in one hand, a blue and white ceramic liter mug in the other. Little Nell, hitched to a stone post nearby, had her beak in a bucket hung from the two long horns that topped her frill, happily ignoring the world and munching grain.
Melodía envied the hook-horn her obliviousness.
“Master Korrigan?” she called.
He hoisted his mug in salute. “The same it is, my charming captain.”
“You’re drunk!”
He waved the pipe. “And getting stoned too, I’ll add.”
She turned Meravellosa off the road and reined to a stop before him. “How can you do that, at a time like this?”
“Can ye name me a better time?”
She frowned. She knew he’d been finding shelter in bottle and herb more and more of late. Most frequently after another screaming fight in Karyl’s tent.
Rob did all the screaming. If Karyl had uttered a word in days, Melodía didn’t know the person who’d heard it.
“I can’t imagine you unfitting yourself for duty with your precious dinosaurs to be tended to,” she said sternly.
He shrugged and swilled. Wiping his beard with the back of his pipe-hand, he said, “Little enough you know of dinosaur masters, then. It’s more often drunk we work than sober. Easier to face the horns and fangs and tonnes that way, don’t you see? Anyway, I’ve a staff of grooms well trained and hopping. When I inspect these beauties in their paddock southwest of town in an hour or two, they’ll be spotless, with every little nick and scrape anointed.”
“What about your job as chief of intelligence?”
He sighed, put down the mug, dropped his boots to the yellow soil, and leaned forward.
“And there we get to chasing our own tails, lass, as to whether it’s the news that drives me to drink, or I need to drink to digest what you and the rest of our fine scouts tell me.”
Melodía blinked. Then again, formal logic was never the Irlandés’s strong suit in the soberest times.
“Or haven’t you heard?” he said. “Duke Eric of Haut-Pays has raised his vassals on the northwest side of the Petits Voleurs. Even if he doesn’t know his business—and the talk is all that he does, distressing well—he could hold the ridges against our lot forever, with a few handfuls of peasants with sticks, commanded by pages with cook-pots on their heads. It’s caught between the matador and the horror-pack we find ourselves. And, giving all respect to your Imperial daddy, I’m hard-pressed to decide which is which.”
He turned his mug upside-down and shook the last drops onto the sparse and battered green and purple ferns by his boots.
“Then I know something you don’t know.” Melodía could have stopped herself from saying it. She chose not to. “We might not be caught at all. The horde’s turned off our trail. That’s what I’m here to report. And there’s room between the Little Flier ridges and the Imperial Army for even a force as big as ours to slip between, especially with the horde occupying the army’s attention. Given sufficient skill, that is. And luck.”
He blinked at her, then narrowed hazel eyes that currently showed mainly green with a shrewdness that belied his self-professed state. “You’re lucky,” he said. “And surprising skillful, for one so young, raised so soft.”
“I learned on the job,” she said, with an equanimity that surprised her. He was right. As was she: this minstrel-turned-spymaster, deliberately loutish and deliberately fey as he liked to play, had taught her surpassing well.
“The question then being, are you lucky and skillful enough?”
“No. But I know someone who is.”
“Himself?” Rob sat back, gusting laughter like a volcano rousing itself to a real full-bore eruption. “It’s all your luck and more you’ll need for that! Me, I doubt the Creators themselves could rouse him from his sulks. The Fae, now—”
“Superstition.”
“Ha! You say that, who twice clapped eyes on Raguel His own fearful self? Ah, the certainty of youth. Deliver me from same.”
What hair she’d left herself, she tossed. “I’m off.”
She turned Meravellosa back to the road and nudged with her heels.
“And that, lass,” he called after, “is why Ma Korrigan’s son was always wise, when wise enough he was to evade responsibility.
“It’s not just that it’s wicked heavy. In the end it always turns to sand, and runs out through your fingers.”
* * *
Two male woods-runners guarded Karyl
’s tent. It was a largish affair, although nothing to compare with the complex and palatial pavilions most grandes affected. Melodía knew he’d have settled for a one-man shelter, but for the need to hold occasional council under cover. Especially with winter rains come to the highland forests.
Melodía was in no mood to brook interference, and ready to pluck every string to get in to see the moody master of this traveling circus. Even the Daughter of the Emperor string: her need, and theirs, was that great.
But the woods-runners, who worshipped Karyl no matter what, also held her in high esteem. Ironically, given their disdain for authority and class distinctions, the more so because of her birth. That the Emperor’s own heir treated them as equals and even friends made them think she must have a proper heart in her, unlike most of her kind.
Besides, she’d earned enough rank in this ragtag yet efficient army to justify the guards admitting her. As they promptly did. Let no one in surely couldn’t apply to the Short-Haired Horse Captain herself, now, could it?
With only such sun as filtered through cloud and canvas, the tent’s interior looked big as a cave and only marginally better lit. The only objects were Karyl’s bedroll and cloak, rolled against one wall with his walking-stick propped against them, and the mat on which the man himself sat cross-legged, eyes shut, and dressed only in a loincloth.
He showed no sign of noticing her. She sat down facing him.
“You can play dead, like a tröodon waiting for an unwary eye-harvester to hop in range of an easy chomp, as long as you wish, my lord,” she said. “I’m quite prepared to wait you out.”
He opened one eye. “If you weren’t determined and resourceful I never would’ve given you the light-horse,” he said with a theatric sigh. “I shouldn’t have expected to keep you out.”
“No.”
He face looked ghastly: cheeks hollow, eyes sunk deeply into dark grey pits. The bone looked ready to split the skin of his broad forehead at any second.
“What made you so determined to override my wish to be left alone?” he asked. “It’s not the fact your father’s outlawed me, is it?”
