Generations of his ancestors, each holding the Bogomirskiy family treasure: a huge hunting spear, their favored weapon of war, but crafted specifically to kill giant predatory dinosaurs like the monster which now terrorized the nearby barony of Zelenyye Polya. The very gilded-steel and age-darkened wood spear which now hung above young Karyl’s head like the weight of the world called Paradise.
If only it would fall off its brackets and impale me right now, he thought. Which is the only way my father will let me touch it.
“But the good Voyvod ordered the boy to show a Bogomirskiy on the throne, but take no action,” the Archbishop said. “And wisely left the two of us to watch over him to make sure he didn’t defy his father’s wishes and make a mess of things. As he so often does.”
And how I wish he hadn’t, Karyl thought. Even more fervently he wished he couldn’t smell the Archbishop. That worthy belonged to a sect called Life-to-Come, which defied the Creators’ own laws on the subject of cleanliness, maintaining that they were allegorical and spoke only of the spiritual kind.
And to think, when the peasants had appeared from a barony half a day’s ride northeast to beg an audience in their ragged, grimy smocks, Karyl had welcomed the break from the tedium of sitting on the uncomfortable chair for hours a day, until he was dismissed for his afternoon studies. And chores, of course.
He tried to rally his routed wits. “But won’t your own baron take care of the… the beast?” he stammered.
“Lord,” the man said, “he won’t hear us. He says he’s too busy for such trifles.”
“The Slayer took my daughter’s head clean off with a single snap,” the woman said in a hollow tone, as if telling a tale from long ago and far away that she didn’t really believe. “It spat it right out again before eating her. I saw it happen. Praise the Creators, at least we got that back intact, so I could kiss her sweet forehead once more before we buried what it left of her.”
With every scrap of will Karyl could muster, he prevented himself from throwing up all over his father’s throne. Just.
“A pretty predicament,” the Baroness said with poisoned sweetness. Her blonde languor and full breasts as fully displayed as allowed by Northern Nuevaropan standards – far stricter than in the scandalous south – caused his just-pubescent loins to stir.
The rest of her terrified him.
“His people cry out for help,” she went on. “Yet he must do nothing or be disinherited, having finally proven his unworthiness as heir.”
“But if he were worthy,” the Archbishop said, “despite the Voyvod’s orders, he’d still take up the Spear – ”
“His father’s Spear, his monster-hunting spear with which he usurped the throne on which the child sits!”
“And sally forth to end this threat to the Misty March.”
The Baroness uttered a little laugh and gave Karyl a look of triumphant spite. The directness of her gaze still gave him an erection beneath his acting-Voyvod robes.
“But of course, we already know he won’t.”
The Archbishop nodded sage agreement. “This one’s courage died along with his brother.”
“But never fear,” the Baroness said to the petitioners. “The Voyvod will return in a handful of days and see things right. Even the hungriest Slayer can only eat so many of you serfs in that amount of time.”
“Creators be praised,” the Archbishop said.
* * *
Late afternoon light streamed in through the open windows set up under the dinosaur barn’s eaves, catching motes in flight like swarms of gnats.
“It just strikes me as singularly poor judgement,” said Smrdltska.
“Who’s a good girl? You’re a good girl!” Karyl tried to say, but the first words were garbled by the carrot he held in his mouth, and the latter were drowned in the crunching of the batteries of small teeth packed into his beloved duckbill Lyuba’s jaws.
“For them to ride you like that? Not wise. You’ll inherit the Misty March someday.”
“Not if my father has his way,” Karyl said glumly, scratching the dinosaur’s high-arched, blue and gray-mottled snout as she moved her jaws contentedly from side to side to pulp the carrot. The youths were taking a shade break from their hot and humid labors. “He can disinherit me and adopt an heir of his choosing if I don’t measure up. The law’s as plain as day on that.”
Smrdltska laid a finger alongside his nose. Karyl never saw anybody else do that. He knew Smrdltska only did it because he’d read it in a book somewhere. His best friend was almost as bookish as Karyl was.
Given his father’s overt disapproval of his surviving offspring, Karyl had few friends or even neutrals in his father’s castle above the namesake mists of Mirkgrad. Ardashir, the Voyvod’s Ovdan weapons master, and Vlad’s dinosaur master, Danilo, came close; both treated Karyl harshly, but only because both deemed him a prize pupil and demanded much of him. Though they were commoners, their invaluable skills shielded them from the Voyvod’s displeasure.
Whereas, as the son of a knight with barely a minor manor to his name, and esquire of a mercenary knight with even less, Smrdltska was beneath notice. He and Lyuba were the only true friends Karyl had.
“Ah, but dispossessing you won’t please your grandfather, Turhan Pasha, who’s known to take a stern view of affronts,” Smrdltska said. “As I understand it, your father only holds this fief from the Grand Duke on condition he keeps the peace with the Grand Turanian Empire over the mountains. It is a march, after all; that’s why he’s called Voyvod and not Count.”
“Great,” Karyl said. Lyuba whuffled appreciatively and licked his hand with her enormous tongue. “All I have to do is somehow not give my father cause to disown me. Which I’m not sure how to do right now, as the Archbishop and the Baroness so kindly pointed out.”
“Ugh. The Archbishop smells like an open cesspit, and a mama pteranodon could raise her brood in that great beard-bush of his, if it were only cleaner. I don’t envy you having to sit right next to him for hours on end. But Baroness Stechkina, now – ”
Karyl gave him a glare. Smrdltska shrugged.
“I know. Your father would make your life worse than he does already if he caught you so much as glancing at her. Fortunately for the two of them, Baron Stechkin is easily intimidated.”
“Feeling intimidated by my father doesn’t exactly make you easy,” Karyl said. “Can we talk about something else, please? Like what in the name of King Chián I’m supposed to do now?”
“The prudent thing to do would be to follow your father’s express command and do nothing. That would give him less cause to dump you than any other course. Regardless of what the corpse-tearers he set to perch on both your shoulders say.”
“But those poor peasants!” Karyl said. Even as he did, the thought of a Slayer on the rampage almost made him throw up. He had put the overwrought pair off as best he could, promising a decision on the morrow. And as they were hustled away by House-shields, he added the looks on their faces to the long and growing list of things he hoped he wouldn’t dream about.
“Well, you know me,” Smrdltska said. “I only do the prudent thing by accident, anyway, so I’m a poor choice of counselor.” He shook his head. “Really, it’s too bad you’re so scared of Slayers, Karyl. They must make smashing war mounts! Although only the wild-caught ones are worth much. And of course you can only ever tame them if you’re the first thing they see on hatching. Or so my grandmother told me. Still, just think—”
“Smrdltska!”
His friend gave him a stricken look. “Right,” he said. “Right, right. Where’s my head? I forgot, Karyl. Really.”
“Sometimes I wish the monster had killed me too,” Karyl said. “Just like my father does.”
Smrdltska clapped him on the shoulder. Taller and huskier as well as fairer, he almost knocked slight Karyl into the sturdy gate of Lyuba’s stall.
“Don’t talk that way! Someday you’ll show him the error of his ways.”
&nbs
p; Karyl let a raised brow answer for him as he recaptured his balance.
“Ah, well.” Smrdltska sighed theatrically. “Back to the paddocks. Those triceratops turds won’t rake themselves!”
* * *
With a start and a gasp, Karyl woke. He sat up straight in bed. He was sucking hard for breath and slimy with sweat, though the breeze off the White River blowing through his open window was cool. The sky beyond was clear and black, dotted with stars that offered no warmth.
It wasn’t the first time he’d awakened from the nightmare. Not even that night…
* * *
A roar and a loud ripping noise awakened twelve-year-old Karyl.
They had camped for the night just inside the Misty March’s eastern border. The western tag-end of the vast continent of Aphrodite, the Tyrant’s Head was named for a not at all fanciful resemblance to Aphrodite’s worst-feared predator. The much-dreaded Tyrannosaurus rex was not native to Nuevaropa, which occupied the Tyrant’s Head, but scarcely less dangerous or frightful was the meat-eater called the Slayer, which was. The small procession of horses and pack-nosehorns were following the road that wound along the narrow strip of coast where the high Shield Mountains which separated Nuevaropa from the Ovdan Plateau reached the Océano Niobe.
Karyl, his mother, his brother, and his baby sister all slept together on silken cushions inside a felted horse-hair tent. His mother the Voyvoda Shadi was a princess born and raised, but a princess of a people who still cherished horse-nomad roots. She felt most comfortable in such a shelter.
Dawnlight poured in as Karyl sat up frightened and confused, accompanied by a blast of heat as from a volcanic vent, and stench as from a reopened grave.
He saw only spearhead teeth in jaws longer than he was tall, in a vast pink and yellow gape. And then, pushing naked between his family and fanged death, his adored older brother Stanislav, two years younger than Karyl was now. Stani the big, Stani the strong, Stani the agile. Stani, who always lit the lantern of their dour father’s smile. Stani who, if not as quick of wit as his younger brother, wasn't lacking for it. Ever laughing and outgoing.
And brave.
Like a passing thought he vanished in a clash of yellow teeth and splash of red. Something hot hit Karyl in the face.
He cringed back. His mother thrust him behind her as clawed forearms tore the tent wide to a sky already filled with clouds. She clutched baby Danika in her swaddling to her breast.
A savage lunge of the great green head with its hornlike brows, mottled with darker bands, and screams. Then Karyl was alone.
He heard shouts from outside. The monster’s squeal was as world-splitting as its roar had been as arrows struck its shoulder. It turned away and vanished.
When the cavalry patrol whose arrival had routed the Slayer found Karyl, he was weeping uncontrollably and trying to stuff his mother’s intestines back inside, where he had dragged the upper and the lower halves of her together.
* * *
Even now, no one knew how the monster had reached the tent without raising an alarm. Allosaurus fragilis’ stealth was legendary, but the princess’s party had camped in a grassy clearing where no amount of trickery could hide a ten-meter, ton-and-a-half dinosaur. The Voyvod and his torturers didn’t think it could, anyway – torture being forbidden by both Imperial and Creators’ Law – but Vlad Mstislavovich Bogomirskiy had little brief for rules not his own. But while their illicit work elicited any number of confessions from the guards who’d survived the Slayer attack, none held water.
Hopelessly awake and streaming sweat, Karyl knew Smrdltska was right. It was absurd for his father to blame his son – and heir, until and unless the Voyvod carried out his oft-repeated threat and adopted a replacement – for causing the deaths of his family. Or for cowardice.
But so his father did.
Karyl squeezed his eyes shut experimentally. The tooth-filled jaws were waiting.
The dreams had been bad before. Now he knew they’d never let him rest again. The peasants from Zelenyye Polya had given horrid substance to his nightmare.
He pulled in a deep, shuddering breath. “I can’t live this way,” he said to the bare walls of his small room.
He got up and hastily dressed. Descending to the larder, he packed a sausage, a smoked cheese, and a hard round loaf of yesterday’s bread into panniers. Optimistic, he realized. I won’t be able to eat a scrap before this is settled. Nor keep it down. He also drew a couple of galley-bird skins of water. He could drink, at least.
He crept into his father’s throne room and looked carefully around. His father’s castellan, Sasha the Sly, was a special enemy of Karyl’s, and as sneaky as her nickname implied. No one lurked in the darkness.
“My father will kill me if I do this,” he said softly. The sound of his own voice heartened him, though less than he hoped.
“Then again – ” He stretched up on tiptoe. “ – to look on the bright side, the monster will likely kill me before he has the chance to.”
The touch of the haft of his father’s spear seemed to spark him like static. He lifted it cautiously from the bronze brackets that held it to the wall.
It’s so light! He knew it shouldn’t be a surprise. Though razor sharp and stout, the steel head was hollow. Its tip was cut at a sharp bias; vents ran clear to the crossbar, to allow its victims’ blood to spew out freely.
And yet it always seemed to weigh the world when it hung above me.
He turned and crept out, trying not to bang the spear against a stone doorway and raise a traitorous clang. He made his way back to the scullery and out a back door beneath a starry sky unblemished by the clouds, whose return would herald the day.
My last day, more likely than not. But at least I’ll have an end.
* * *
The monster wasn’t hard to find.
Where the pine trees that surrounded Mist City gave way to tall palms, with mangroves along the river and denser scrub alive with orange and purple flowers, a party of peasants pointed the way. They knew it well: they carried the freshly torn and bloodied body of one of their friends on a two-wheeled cart drawn by a mud-green fatty down the well-corduroyed road.
As Karyl rode past, he saw it was the middle-aged woman who had begged his help yesterday.
My fault. The words tolled in his mind like a funeral bell. When I didn’t give her an answer…
Sick to his stomach as well as his soul – sicker – he turned down the wagon track that led off east through bushy cycads. Down by the broad, slow White River, toothed shorebirds squabbled over scraps. Grasshoppers weighted down the pale green fronds, a potential scourge for farms and truck gardens who had recently appeared in accordance with some cycle of their own, obscured by the everlasting Equatorial late summer. Despite a cooling breeze blowing up the river from the coast, Karyl’s ride north along the good corduroyed road that followed it into Zelenyye Polya already seemed as if it had lasted a lifetime.
He tried not to think how likely it was it had. This close to the Slayer’s waiting jaws, it would be easy to act the coward his father claimed he was.
Much as it grieved Karyl’s horse-nomad soul, he rode a chestnut mare whose antecedents, appearance, and spirit alike were nondescript. She was the best he thought he’d be able to sneak off with without the theft being quickly noticed. As for Lyuba, he and Danilo were the only ones who ever paid her any mind; doubtless his father bore the expense of keeping the beast because Karyl’s very fondness for such an unsuitable mount disgraced him further with Vlad’s hangers-on.
The dinosaur plodded placidly behind, tethered to his saddle. She was about eight meters long – small for her kind, as her war-duckbill cousins were for theirs. Since its True Name was Maiasaura – as in Maia, Queen of Paradise’s Eight Creators and Consort of King Chián – her breed rejoiced in the vulgar name “Queen Duckbill.” But except for a little nub in front of her eyes she had no crest. Which made her unfit to carry a Nuevaropan dinosaur knight into battle.
In other words, ideal for the despised heir to Misty March’s throne, who was decidedly not a knight and constantly assured by his father he’d never be one. But propriety demanded that Karyl be taught to ride a hadrosaur as if the accolade lay in his future. Doubtless that contributed to his father’s allowing him to keep Lyuba, too, since it meant he didn’t have to borrow or buy the boy a true war mount like his own Parasaurolophus, Otmshcheniye.
Karyl didn’t care that Lyuba lacked an extravagant head ornament. He loved her, and she him.
All too soon, she stopped dead behind him and whuffled gently. Or as gently as her chest, in which Karyl might comfortably have ridden, would allow. He instantly reined the chestnut in.
A few accelerating heartbeats later, the mare tossed her head, flared her nostrils, and whickered in alarm.
Karyl sighed. “Let’s get it over with, then.”
He dismounted. He took a single skin of water from the saddle panniers, with a last regretful glance at the food he’d risked exposure to pack. As anticipated, he’d had no appetite for it on his morning’s journey. And now …
Karyl took his father’s spear from the holder by the saddle’s pommel and hefted it in his left hand – his sword hand. As he had when he first raised it in the small, dark morning hours, he marveled at its lightness.
Will this finally get my father to approve of me, in spite of my defying his sternest commands? he wondered. Or at least win his respect?
Odds are I’ll never know. He was sure enough of the answers that the thought comforted him.
He untied and coiled the Ovdan horsehair rope that secured Lyuba’s bridle to his saddle. The mare stood still, too uneasy at what she smelled even to drop her head and graze at the low weeds. He scratched her nose and hugged her briefly around the neck. She wasn’t much of a horse, but he felt a kinship for all living creatures. Especially the disregarded ones. And they seemed to like him.
The Jurassic Chronicles (Future Chronicles Book 15) Page 25
