Corvus (43 page)

The doors sprang
open, the iron bolt that held them together flying off. The heavy couches
grated backwards on the flagstones, their legs splintering. They saw what
looked like the bed of a handcart. It was hauled, grating, backwards out of the
newly made entrance. Men’s voices in the street outside.

They came in, a
group of lean, hungry-looking vagabonds, filthy and bright-eyed. Sertorius led
them, and as he entered the fountain courtyard Rian shrank backwards in horror
and Philemos seemed to stagger. He saw them standing there, and his face
stretched in a wide grin.

“What’s this, a
welcoming committee? People, I am touched! Look at this, lads - don’t it make a
picture?”

Six other men
entered the courtyard in his wake, dusting off their hands and wiping sweat
from their faces.

“There’s my little
black-haired sweetheart. Girl, I have something for you - we all have. I’ve
been saving it since we turned you over to Karnos.”

“The other one’s
not bad either,” Bosca said, running his fingers over his mouth.

“I told you there’d
be nice pickings in this place, didn’t I?”

The men spread out
in a crescent. The four people in front of them backed away until their heels
were against the lip of the fountain pool.

“Get behind me,”
Philemos said to Rian.

“There is money in
this house,” Polio said loudly. “I can take you to it, save you some time. This
is the house of Karnos, remember. He’s a powerful man. If you harm us,
gentlemen, he will find a way to make you pay for it.”

“Karnos is dead,
you old fuck,” Bosca snarled. “It’s all over the city. This Corvus is in charge
now. He’d probably thank us for doing his work for him.”

“Dead?” Kassia
repeated. “Karnos is dead?”

“What’s this - are
you pining for him, my lovely?” Sertorius smiled. “That’s tragic, that is. Let
us comfort you in your time of sorrow.”

“Enough,” Adurnos
snapped. “Fucking do it, and leave out the talk, chief.”

They moved in like
wolves. Polio advanced to meet them, lashing out with his knife. Adurnos caught
his wrist; one of the Arkadians grabbed his other arrn. They stretched him like
that between them, struggling, until Sertorius stabbed him in the heart. The
old man went down without a sound, his beard white as sheep’s wool on the
stone, his eyes still open.

Two more of
Sertorius’s men seized Kassia, and ripped the clothes from her back. One held
her from behind while the other stripped her, laughing as she kicked and
screamed at him.

Philemos stood
still with Rian at his side, and behind them the fountain. He held out his
sword and waved it back and forth as Sertorius and his men closed in on him.

Sertorius seemed
in a high good humour. He stood looking at Philemos with a kind of amused
tolerance. “I always knew you had spirit in you, boy - the way you fought for
that little morsel behind you, up in the hills. The thing is, you got to learn
when to walk away from a fight. Your father should have taught you that before
he died.

“You got no more
time for learning, now.”

Philemos was not
looking at him. He was peering over Sertorius’s shoulder, at the broken doors
behind, and his face was a picture of astonishment. Sertorius frowned, and
turned himself.

Two men stood in
the tall doorway of the house. They wore chitons and cloaks of scarlet, and one
was armoured in the Curse of God. Naked drepanas glittered in their hands and
their armour was covered in blood.

“What the fuck?”
Sertorius said. His men all turned with him. The two manhandling Kassia
released her and she ran to Rian, naked and weeping.

Rian stood with
her eyes shining, full of tears.

“Father,” she
said.

Rictus and
Valerian advanced into the courtyard. There was a light in Rictus’s eyes that
made the seven men in front of him back away.

“Rian?”

She stared
brokenly at him. The breath sawed in and out of her as though she had suddenly
come out of deep water.

Rictus looked over
the men in front of him, saw Philemos.

“Where is my wife?”

Sertorius jerked
his head at Adurnos, and the big man began sidling around Rictus with the two
Arkadians.

“He raped her!”
Rian screamed. “They raped her and she killed herself!” She broke down, sobs
tearing out of her throat. “Daddy, they killed her, they killed her. She’s
dead, she’s dead.” She sank to her knees.

Rictus’s eyes
narrowed to slots of pale murder.

“Go left,” he said
to Valerian, an animal’s sound, barely words at all.

“There’s better
ways to end this, friend,” Sertorius said. “What’s done is done -”

Rictus leapt
forward, his red cloak whirling up around him like a bloody cloud. The drepana
leapt in his hand, a flash as swift as a hawk’s strike.

One of the
Arkadians fell sideways with his throat slashed open. The other swung madly and
missed as Rictus side-stepped, catching him off balance. He brought up his knee
and slammed it into the man’s face, breaking bone. The Arkadian went down.

Big Adurnos
charged like a bearded bull, punching Rictus in the mouth and stabbing with his
own sword in the same moment.

The blade clicked
off the Curse of God. Rictus soaked the blows up, backed away a step with blood
running down his chin, and stepped in again. One, two, three flashes of cold
iron, the clang as his drepana clashed with Adurnos’s sword, and the big man’s
blade was knocked down. Rictus flicked up the point of the drepana and it ran
smoothly into Adurnos’s groin.

He stopped, stock
still, his mouth open and a look of sheer disbelief on his face.

Rictus twisted the
blade and pulled it out and up, and Adurnos’s body opened up like a sack full
of steaming meat. His insides fell down onto the flagstones of the courtyard
with a wet slap. He looked down at them, scrabbling at the great rent in his
body as the sight left his eyes, and he toppled.

Valerian had
downed one of the Avennans, but the other one, along with Bosca and Sertorius,
was pressing him back to the entrance, hacking at him. The remaining Avennan
suddenly went down with a bitter cry of pain; Philemos had come up and stabbed
him from behind.

Sertorius shouted
with fury and turned on the boy.

Rictus shouldered
Philemos out of the way, charging into the fight like a scarlet avatar of
wrath. Sertorius’s sword slid off the black cuirass and Rictus swept his own
blade down with a grunt, chopping through Sertorius’s arm close to the wrist.
He cried out, raised the spurting stump and gripped it with his free hand. “No,
no!” he screamed.

The sound
distracted Bosca and Valerian stabbed him through the ribs, and as the man
folded in on himself he raised his sword and brought it down two-handed,
stabbing Bosca at the base of his neck. The drepana sliced through meat and
bone. The head fell slack, attached to the body only by strings of sinew and
skin and Bosca slumped to the ground, twitching. For a few seconds his eyes
rolled in his head, and then he was still.

Sertorius had sunk
to his knees, still clutching the stump of his arm. His face was chalk-white.

“The great Rictus!”
he said, and managed something like a laugh. “Well, it’s something to have met
a legend.”

Rictus stood
panting in front of him, and wiped the blood from his chin. He looked over at
Rian. Philemos was holding her in his arms, and she was staring at him with
wide, bloodshot eyes. Beside her, Kassia was kneeling, naked, numb and silent.

Valerian was
staring at Rian also. He saw how Philemos was looking at her, and closed his
eyes a second.

Rictus wanted to
ask Sertorius what he had done to Aise - for some reason he had to know. The
great searing pain in his chest had to hear something, know something of Aise’s
fate, no matter how bad it might have been.

“What did you do
to my wife?” he asked Sertorius, and his voice cracked with strain, a grief he
had not known he was about to feel. Agony, more raw than anything he had felt
since he had been a boy.

Sertorius sneered.
“Phaestus was right - Rictus the family man. Well, my friend, we used your wife
like a little whore. We -”

The blade of the
drepana silenced him, sliding easily into his mouth, chopping through his
tongue and opening his cheeks, a last, wide smile. Sertorius gargled, choking
on his own blood.

Rictus stood
there, holding the blade, keeping the thief upright while he drowned and
flailed in front of him. Finally it ended. Rictus tilted the sword, and
Sertorius slid off it like meat off a skewer.

He turned around,
unutterably tired, unwilling to contemplate the desolation that was being
unveiled before him.

One of Sertorius’s
men was still alive, the one with the broken face. Rictus nodded at Valerian,
and the younger man killed him, a single clean thrust. Then he stared at Rian,
but no longer with any hope in his eyes.

Rictus knelt in
front of his daughter. “Where is Ona?”

“Hiding.”

“Rian,” Rictus
said. His voice broke.

His daughter moved
into his arms and he held her close to him, burying his face in her hair,
crushing her against the black unyielding breast of Antimone’s Gift.

“I’m here,” he
said, “I’m here. It’s all right. Everything will be all right now.”

THE
TURNING OF THE ROAD

The halls echoed
with his
footsteps, the nails in his sandals clicking on the marble. In alcoves set
every few paces, the great leaders of Machran stood hewn in more marble. Dead
faces, empty eyes, white stone.

All meaningless
now. Whatever Machran had been to these men, it was something different today.
Tonight. This quiet night near the tail end of a long and bloody winter.

Fornyx met him at
the junction of the corridors and the two appraised each other for a moment.

“What do you think
he wants?” Rictus asked.

“Why ask me?”
Fornyx demanded. “You’re the father-figure here.”

They stood looking
at one another, a tall, fair man with a haggard face, and a short, wiry
black-bearded fellow some ten years younger. Both wore black cuirasses and
scarlet cloaks. Both bore the marks of old wounds on every limb.

“Spring is almost
here,” Rictus said. “Planting season.”

“The snows will be
melting,” Fornyx told him. “Another few days and the hills will be clear enough
to walk.”

Rictus nodded as
though they had both just agreed on something. Then they turned as one and
continued walking down the cavernous corridor.

A pair of sentries
stood holding spears before a deeply recessed wooden door. They, too, wore
scarlet cloaks.

“Athys,” Rictus
said to one of them. “How’s the leg?”

“Barely a scar,
chief. I can run as fast as ever.”

“It’s all right.
He’s expecting us.” Rictus opened the small door. He had to stoop to enter.

There was a fire
burning in a round hearth, lamps hanging from the ceiling, and papers scattered
over every available surface: chairs, tables, in cascades upon the floor.

“Corvus?” Rictus
said.

Something stirred.
There was an anteroom off to one side, a simple bed in the corner, an armour
stand with a black cuirass perched upon it, and Corvus, dressed in a red
chiton.

“You wanted to see
us?” Rictus asked.

Corvus nodded. He
was looking at the Curse of God with his arms folded. He had lately had his
hair cropped short, and the thick black shock of it stood up like a brush. He
looked more like a Macht than he had; flesh had been added to his slender
bones.

Since the end of
the campaign, the hard riding and marching had become a memory, and he slept
now in the echoing maze of the Empirion, his tent packed away with the rest of
the army’s baggage.

In this room as in
the next, papers and maps covered everything. Parmenios had offices here in the
Empirion, but kept them stacked and ordered like the ranks of a well-trained
phalanx. This disorder was Corvus’s own.

Rictus saw a map
of the Empire lying on the floor. He picked it up, old vellum that sagged in
his hand. For a second he ran his finger across names and mountains and rivers
that had seen the blood of his youth spilt across them, five thousand pasangs
and twenty years away.

“It’s a big day
tomorrow, chief,” Fornyx said breezily. “A bit like getting married. You ask
me, you should either be drunk, or asleep.”

Corvus smiled. “You’re
right, Fornyx; I suppose it is a kind of marriage.” He reached down and lifted
something from beside the cuirass, something that glittered in the light of the
lamps.

“Look at this.
Silver from a mine on the slopes of Mount Panjaeos itself. Tomorrow Kassander
of Machran will place it on my head, and I shall be a king.”

He tossed the
circlet up into the air, caught it as though it were a gleaming child’s toy,
and then set it down again.

“What do you think
of the chiton?” he asked Rictus.

“I like the
colour,” Rictus said with a raised eyebrow.

“From now on, all
the army will wear scarlet.

It will be as much
a symbol for us as the raven sigil. We’ll train up every spearman to match your
Dogsheads, and we’ll teach Macht to ride horses and use bows like Ardashir and
the Companions. We’ll have a siege train, designed by Parmenios. We will make
an instrument of war, brothers, such as this world has never seen before.”

Rictus and Fornyx
looked at one another.

“You’re to be
crowned king of the Macht in the morning, Corvus,” Rictus said. “Who else is
there left to fight?”

Corvus turned and
smiled. “The world we live in is a big place, Rictus. You look hard enough, and
you will always find someone willing to fight.”