Free The Dinosaur Knights by Victor Milan

visible most of the time as a blue wall. Despite altitude and the breeze off the perpetually snow-clad peaks the morning was hot, the overcast seeming no thicker than a vast linen sheet. Unusual numbers of birds and big fliers circled overhead; Melodía kept a wary eye on these, although none seemed large enough to be true dragons, hence dangerous to full-grown humans.
    Aside from wrinkling their noses the young women paid the smell no further thought. Death was commonplace, after all.
    â€œTell me one thing, Pilar,” Melodía said.
    â€œAnything, Melodía.”
    Melodía insisted that Pilar refrain from calling her Highness, and was trying to break her from using honorifics of any kind. They were both outcasts, now. Outlaws together. And friends—a fact Melodía found herself clinging to with a certain desperation, the more so for having recently recovered it after losing it so long ago.
    â€œWhere’d you learn to speak Francés so well?”
    That skill had served them well on that chance encounter with the bandit-hunters in Licorne Rouge, and several times since, when Pilar had used the same ruse to talk their way past other wayfarers. She had also used them to buy some feathered twist-darts.
    Melodía had put the bow to good use shooting small game for the pot, and it could help defend their camp. But Melodía couldn’t shoot at all well from horseback—horse archery was an incredibly abstruse skill, and Melodía gathered you practically had to be raised to it to be much use, like the wild steppe-nomads of Ovda. She was fairly proficient throwing darts from the saddle, though, enough to discourage bandits or other minor predators.
    She now rode with a quiver of half a dozen darts by her right knee. Like the smallsword they wouldn’t raise eyebrows among those the women encountered. It was common for servants to go armed to protect their masters against the bandits that infested the roads.
    Melodía and Pilar hadn’t run into any actual bandits yet. For which Melodía thanked her luck. After her traumatic experiences in La Merced she was even less inclined than before to believe in the Creators.
    â€œWhere’d I learn Francés? Why, the same places you did, naturally. Didn’t I sit in on all your lessons from girlhood on? And your conversations with the Lady Abigail Thélème? I got to practice, sometimes, with lesser folk I met in the course of my Palace duties. Which gave me a firmer grip on the tongue, if not exactly its courtlier aspects.”
    Melodía laughed. Quickly she sobered. How did I come to take her so much for granted, this childhood friend of mine? For ten years at least I’ve been no more aware of her than of my own shadow. The thought made her feel sticky and cloddish.
    Pilar’s face rumpled. “Ay, that smell—” she said.
    The stink seemed to have suddenly redoubled. Overt before, now it battered Melodía’s head and shoulders like an inflated bladder at some riotous Mercedes street carnival.
    â€œMother Maia, what died?” she exclaimed. “A titan?”
    They came around a rock-island like a white mushroom, swinging wide to clear a big clump of debris, limbs and brush and the like, which the last flood had left stacked against its upstream side, and saw what caused the smell.
    â€œGood call,” Pilar said. “That’s certainly a titan. And it’s most definitely dead.”
    It lay like a ridgeline athwart their path and the stream itself. Sunlight glinted on the temporary pond it had made by damming the flow. It had been a big one, a true matriarch, a good thirty meters long. What kind it had been was unclear: its body was blackened and grotesquely swollen. All Melodía could tell was that it was some fur-legged monster, such as a spine-back or thunderbeast, though not a treetopper. She could see no sign of the rest of what had probably been a goodly herd of enormous