by Victor Milán
But he too had been driven near exhaustion from fighting his way through the horde to his appointment with embodied Death. He was slow to rise. His hair had come undone during his fall, and now hung in his face and to just above his shoulders in lank strands.
“Are you injured, man?” Rob asked the air.
Though he’d lost the bow, Karyl still gripped his sword hilt. Holding it two-handed, down and to his left, he began to pace. He spiraled closer to Raguel.
As before, Raguel stood rigid and let him come. Rob thought with a shiver of a cat and a mouse. By all reports, in this the Grey Angel’s true form, his face could show no more expression than the hideous and none-too-expertly carven idol he so resembled. Yet his attitude spoke fluent cruel triumph.
No more slowly than the Angel had, Karyl attacked. Steel rang off—whatever undoubtedly invulnerable mystic metal the soul-reaper was made of. Karyl and his foe passed each other by.
Ten meters apart they turned about to face off again. Raguel’s posture changed; now Rob thought to see puzzlement that this impertinent human wasn’t holding a metal stub. Karyl’s sword was intact.
Rob laughed out loud. Gaétan stared at him as if he were mad. I am, and what of that?
“Don’t you see?” he told his comrade. “Our voyvod didn’t let that monster’s edge catch his blade. It’s that skillful he is: he caught that evil thing on its flat and guided it safely past.”
Gaétan shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve even heard of anyone surviving a single passage of arms with a Grey Angel.”
“Don’t fret yourself, lad,” Rob said. “I doubt Raguel has either.”
Raguel waited for his human foe to come to him. And come Karyl did. Time and again metal sang its sliding song. Yet Raguel could score no solid cut against either sword or wielder.
But neither was Karyl able to strike the Angel’s rotted-rock-looking flesh. And one of them was mortal. However fierce the will that drove it, Rob reckoned, Karyl’s body must have reached its limits long since. Karyl could not keep fighting long.
Visibly he began to slow. Still the Grey Angel was able to sever neither his steel nor the silver cord his life. But each time He came closer.
Rob had to keep reminding himself to breathe.
At last the duelists stopped facing each other from five meters away. Karyl sagged as if only strings hooked to his shoulder blades from the clouds held him up. Sweat dripped from the ends of his hair. His sword tip dragged in the dust.
Raguel awaited, all supreme assurance once more. His foe had put up a fight that was literally unparalleled. But now he was done.
Voicing a wheezing cry that by dint of Angel magic Rob clearly heard, Karyl raised his sword and staggered forward. His dark eyes glared madly between sodden kelp-streamers of hair.
Rob’s lips twisted behind a beard caked with mud made of what he daren’t think about; behind them gullet and gut twisted too. A shame to see such a gorgeous battle end on such a desperate unskillful note, he thought. Though thinking so seemed to betray the fight Karyl had fought.
It ought to form the greatest legend of a man who had lived many of them. But alas none would live to sing it.
Almost casually Raguel flicked the soul-reaper horizontally at his opponent.
With a burst of vexer speed, Karyl plunged into a forward roll. The scythe-blade hissed harmlessly over him. He came up slicing at the long grey arm that held it.
Raguel’s forearm parted. The hand whirled away, claws still clutching the soul-reaper, to fall in the dust fifteen meters off.
Raguel threw back his head, opened his jaws, and vomited a cry of cosmic rage. Rob clapped hands to ears. He saw hordelings fall to the ground by the hundreds, stunned or killed by the Grey Angel’s wrath.
Karyl wheeled and flung himself at Raguel’s back. His arming-sword cut an arc of brightness in the face of the gloom.
Raguel spun widdershins. His intact left arm backhanded Karyl into a backward flip. The man’s peaked helmet tumbled away. He landed heavily on his back.
He didn’t move.
Rob moaned. The hordelings hissed in triumph.
* * *
“No,” screamed Melodía. “Not possible!’
But of course it was. What wasn’t possible was the fight this lone man had put up against the Creators’ own Avenging Angel.
And what wasn’t possible was saving Karyl now.
She swayed in Meravellosa’s saddle. When she killed Bogardus a desolation had fallen upon her, as if she had killed the last other soul in her world. And then when Karyl rode to challenge the Angel, it was as if a shaft of bright light pierced the black abyss within her.
Now she was about to lose Karyl too. And with him she, and the world, would lose even the hope of hope.
Summoning everything she had and more, she hauled Meravellosa’s head up from where the mare scrabbled for bits of trampled vegetation to nourish her exhausted body. “Please, girl,” she whispered hoarsely, leaning forward to pat her friend’s neck. “Do this for me now.”
Meravellosa snorted and tossed her pale mane. She began to run as if she’d just sprung up from the sweetest rest of her life.
We can’t reach him in time. The words rang like a dirge in Melodía’s brain. And even if we could, what can I do?
But she had to try. If nothing else, I’d rather die at the gallop than standing still. Even if that meant galloping toward one of her two greatest nightmares, the Grey Angel Raguel.
As if from the very soil of Paradise a huge and sinuous shape arose, a javelin-cast to Melodía’s left. Ten meters long, vertically striped from near-black back to tawny underside, it was unmistakably an Allosaurus. It had lain in cover Melodía would have sworn would scarcely hide a housecat.
Lifting its head it uttered a ferocious, pealing cry: shiraa!
No one but Melodía seemed to hear. The great meat-eater’s sudden apparition almost at her side would have scared her mindless, if she wasn’t already as scared as she could be.
With vast springing strides the monster ran toward the unequal combat. Though Meravellosa was running as fast as Melodía had ever known her to, the meat-eater effortlessly outdistanced her, lancing straight through the middle of the horde.
* * *
To Shiraa, the tailless two-legs made a ridiculous amount of fuss killing one another. Given that they hardly ever seemed to eat each other.
Climbing a ridge through a hardwood forest she had spied the two-legs with the weird head standing at its edge. Pulse quickening she ran toward it.
Before she even reached the brushy verge the wonderful smell reached her nostrils: Mommy!
But Shiraa was a good Allosaurus. And her mother had taught her well. She smelled a lot of other tailless two-legs, and a whole lot of blood. It made her tummy rumble.
Remembering both her natural guile and her lessons she had looked for cover. She crawled down a little crack of gulley right into the heart of the slaughter-field. Of course, it did help that everyone else was paying attention to everything else than the possibility a tonne-and-a-half predatory dinosaur was sneaking into the middle of their war.
Driven by a growing sense of urgency, Shiraa had not fed in days. Now her stomach seemed to be eating itself, driven mad by the succulent smells of torn flesh.
But more compelling than the pains of hunger was that smell. The smell of her mother. Who loved her, who took care of her, and who had been stolen from her by bad things.
Mommy! Shiraa comes! Shiraa good girl!
As she crept forward she saw her mother fighting. She fought well, as the mother of a matadora naturally would. She killed a terrible, grey Great Hunger that must have been twice the size of its albino cousin who had blindsided Shiraa that awful day, hurt Shiraa, and taken away her mother.
She smelled that one too. The coward. But vengeance would wait. Only Mommy mattered now.
But now her mother faced a great big tailless two-legs. She showed no fear. Yet something about that tall,
grey two-legs caused fear to trickle from Shiraa’s spine down into her belly.
Her mother kept fighting. She bit one hand clean off the tall, scary two-legs.
The bad grey thing struck her. Struck her mother.
That shit was not happening. Roaring her own name, Shiraa rose from covert and charged in loving, white-hot rage.
* * *
He’s taking his sweet time about, is Raguel, Bringer of Divine Justice, Scourge of the Impure, thought Rob in a fever of despair. Clearly he wanted everyone, followers and enemies alike, to see the futility of human resistance to the will of a Grey Angel played out in terrible detail.
The Angel held up his remaining hand. It seemed to take fire with black flame.
“The Hand of Death!” Rob yelled excitedly to Gaétan. “No one’s seen it used before and lived to tell of it.”
A heartbeat and he shrugged. “Nor is that likely to change today.”
Then something like a tawny, black-striped, ten-meter stinger-bolt on legs flashed into the circle of death.
“Shiraa!” Rob Korrigan shouted in astonishment. In unison the running monster voiced the same cry, magnified a hundredfold.
Raguel began to turn. Without breaking stride, the matadora darted her head and snatched up the Grey Angel in her teeth. She held him up against the cloudy sky. Long, bony arms and legs waved uselessly.
Shiraa bit down with all her strength. With a sky-split crack, the Grey Angel’s body fell in two halves.
It reached the soil of Paradise as a rain of glittering grey dust.
At one side of the circle, Sister Violette sat astride a white sackbut, mother-stark naked but for a white feather cape. No sooner had the ash that had been Raguel vanished into the hard-stamped ground than her own three-tonne dinosaur disintegrated.
From the resultant cloud of white powder she ran, shrieking like a woman on fire. She brandished a longsword over her head.
“Blasphemer!” she screamed. “I’ll send you back to Hell!”
She made straight for the still-unmoving Karyl. Somehow she managed to overlook so trifling a detail as three thousand scarlet-eyed kilos of Nuevaropa’s best-feared killer, bending solicitously over Karyl with the tip of her snout a handspan from his face.
“A wonderful thing, fanaticism,” Rob said, as Karyl reached weakly up to touch the nose of his long-lost friend.
* * *
Her mother’s breath blowing into her distended nostrils was the sweetest thing Shiraa had ever smelled. Her fleeting touch made her quiver with joy. Mommy back! Mommy!
A strange cry reached her ears. She turned her head.
She saw a tailless two-legs, pale as a cloud. Running right at her. It waved a hurt-stick in the air.
Abruptly Shiraa remembered how fearfully hungry she was.
Mommy safe, she told herself above the rising rumble of her belly. Shiraa can eat now. Shiraa good Allosaurus.
And looky-look! Food comes to good Shiraa.
Part Six
Just Deserts
Epilogue
Uriel, El Fuego de Dios, Fire of God—One of the Grey Angels, the Creators’ Own Seven servitors and vindicators of Their divine justice. A fire spirit, linked to the Oldest Daughter, Telar, and imbued especially with Her Attributes of both creation and impermanence. He is said to be allied with Raphael the Healing-spirit, and Remiel the Merciful, hence among the more approachable of the Seven. It is wise to remember that such things are relative, since the Angels’ ministrations are seldom gentle.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
“Father,” Melodía said. She made herself smile as he swept her into his arms. His embrace was stronger than she remembered.
All she could think was, He looks so small. But maybe it was because that was all she could permit herself to think.
He held her out to arm’s length. “It’s so wonderful to see you again, my daughter. I’ve missed you terribly.”
“I missed you too, Father.” She wondered if that were a lie. She thought she could trust the fatigue that weighed down her words to keep anyone from sensing any falsity to them.
Felipe stepped back and beamed around at the small group gathered on the hill before the Imperial tent. Sun stung Melodía’s cheeks. The overcast had begun to thin when Raguel fell.
The horde’s will to fight had vanished with him.
The buzzing of flies on thousands of bodies heaped nearby was almost lulling in the noonday heat. The smell of the ocean of blood they’d spilled was far less so. Melodía wondered if she’d ever stop smelling it.
“So these are your friends.” The Imperial head nodded at them in turn: Gaétan. Garamond. Côme. Rob Korrigan. All sweaty and bloody and swaying in their armor. And Karyl who, despite cracked ribs and other injuries, insisted on facing the Emperor of the Fangèd Throne on his own feet, unassisted. They all looked as if they’d bathed in blood, which was now caking and beginning to go bad.
As Melodía knew she herself did. She could hear her absent dueña’s clucking outrage at her getting the nasty mess all over her father. It might in fact have bothered her—if his breastplate didn’t already look as if a butcher’s-bucket had been splashed across it. Red traces lingered in the crannies of his round smiling face, at the roots of his short ginger hair and Imperial beard. The Emperor of Nuevaropa had not stood or sat idly by while others defended him. Not at the end, anyway.
Maybe she’d feel proud, someday.
She felt the absences too, like missing teeth. The turbulent Eamonn Copper. Baron Ismaël. And so many of her own laughing wild children: Marc, Arianne, ’Tit Jean. Henri the woods-runner. There’d be no honors for them save the memories of friends and comrades.
Melodía would not let herself look past her father toward one who stood right behind him, though she felt his presence like sunlight. The need to see that beautiful face, to meet those long green-turquoise eyes with her own, burned inside her like a white-hot iron.
Yet she couldn’t bring herself to risk seeing the man who stood beside the one she longed for, as though her dream lover and her greatest remaining nightmare had become close comrades. As indeed, apparently, they were.
Karyl raised his head and shook back his long dark-brown and silver hair. “Don’t you remember, Majesty? You outlawed us. Although in view of current circumstances I’ll ask you please to overlook that fact in the matter of my comrades. It’s me you want, and I’ll gladly stand for them.”
“Tush, son,” Felipe said, “don’t talk nonsense. It’s unfitting in a Duque Imperial.”
“A what?”
Karyl hadn’t just faced a Grey Angel riding a supernatural outsized Tyrannosaurus rex without flinching, he’d charged them. Now he looked nonplussed.
“I think it’s a rank suitable to the service you performed today,” Felipe said, “inasmuch as without your intervention we’d all be dead now. For the moment it’s purely titular; no lands or income come with it. But they will.”
He stepped back and swept the group with weary yet calculating pale-green eyes.
“As of this moment all of you are nobles of the Empire. Every man and woman who fought beside us this day is a knight at least. Chián, but I’d make that matadora of yours a duchess if I thought she’d comprehend it, Duke Karyl. If only to see the faces on those mealy worms in the Diet when I went before them in the People’s Hall to have them confirm it.”
He smiled thinly. “I don’t doubt I’ll find fiefs for you and all your officers and more. Some seem to have fallen vacant of late.”
He looked to his right. “As for you: Falk von Hornberg, you are created Imperial Duke as well. And you, nephew—congratulations: you’re now an Imperial Prince. If anything, that honor’s overdue. But then nothing can recompense you two for what you’ve done, and suffered, today. The same for all of you.”
With a clack of poleyn on hard dirt, Jaume dropped to a knee. “Majesty, Uncle, I can’t accept—”
“Nonsense again. You�
�ll do your duty. Just as you always do.”
“Majesty, wait—if you please!”
Felipe frowned at the interruption, timid though it was. Melodía’s heart sank. Rob was a strange man, to be sure, but he’d treated her well. And he’d really loved Pilar, it seemed. He deserved a better fate than to be shortened by a head now for lèse-majesté.
“Begging your pardon, please, Majesty, but you don’t mean to include me among such a glittering crew, surely? I’m no noble, Majesty, but plain Rob Korrigan, dinosaur master, minstrel, Traveler, and rogue thoroughgoing, if I don’t repeat myself. By very definition and grace of the Creators the lowest of the low. Your Majesty. Sir.”
Felipe raised a brow. “So? Well, you’re Baron Korrigan now, lad, so stand up straight. There’re eyes upon you. And if you’re near the greatest rogue among my vassals I’ll eat a dung-wagon, cargo, tongue, and tires.”
Rob stared at him with what resembled scratcher eggs with green-hazel eyes painted on the narrow ends. He stood up straighter.
“Understand, my friends, that your accomplishments this day have earned you any reward it’s within my and the Empire’s power to bestow,” Felipe said. “Please also understand that it is necessity as well as justice that impels my largesse. For as things stand I have to reward you all—or hang every one of you for the blackest blasphemy imaginable. And myself right alongside.
“So go. Clean yourselves up. Drink something, for Maia’s sake. And tonight at the great feast of thanksgiving for our deliverance I’ll proclaim your elevations. And we’ll all celebrate until we’re too drunk to stand. What say you?”
A hefty clatter told Melodía that Falk had gone to his knees. Beside Jaume. She hunched her head down between shoulders drawn unbearably tight against her body.
Don’t let them see it, she ordered herself.
He had violated her in a terrible and secret way. Had destroyed her life and falsely accused her of treason, although those seemed petty things next to his great crime. She had longed for months for the moment when she’d face him again.
Preferably looking into those deep-blue eyes as she drove her talwar slowly into his belly.
