Corvus (33 page)

The news had run
through the ranks of the spearmen in the gateway. Their voices were a low buzz
of wonder.

“Quiet!” Murchos
shouted.

“This could be a
trick,” Karnos said, more for form’s sake than anything else; he could read a
man’s face, and he knew that Fornyx was telling the truth.

“I will enter the
city alone, if you like. I’m not a spy - I know Machran well in any case. I
wish only to do the decent thing by my friend.”

Karnos nodded. He
saw something else in Fornyx’s eyes, an anger smouldering alongside the grief.
That was interesting. He turned and looked at Murchos. The big Arkadian seemed
torn between astonishment and glee. He made a show of considering the matter a
moment.

“Very well, then.
You can enter - you alone. Your companions can wait here. The gate will be
shut, and I will escort you myself.”

Fornyx bowed
slightly. He nodded to the other two mercenaries who accompanied him, handing
the olive branch to a young man with a scar that tugged his face askew, and
then stepped into the shadow of the South Prime Gate.

The spearmen made
a lane for Karnos and Fornyx, while Murchos ordered the gates shut in a voice
of brass. They clunked shut with a boom, and Fornyx stopped and looked at them
in wonder.

“First time I ever
saw them shut, close to,” he said. “You must have had a hell of a time
loosening those old hinges.”

“It took enough
oil to drown an ox,” Karnos said. “But then, we’ve plenty to spare. Perhaps you’d
care for some wine before we begin your sad task? I’m sure I can lay hands on a
skin.”

Fornyx’s mouth
twisted in a half-smile. “You are a shifty bastard, Karnos. But I make a point
of never refusing wine, especially on a morning like this.”

“I’ll have some
sent to the wall. We can pour a libation for the dead.”

The dead still
lay in heaps. Many
hundreds of men had died on the walls of the Goshen Quarter and the clean-up process
had only begun. The bodies of the enemy were first looted, stripped of arms,
armour and any trinkets of value, and then the defenders tossed their stiff,
stripped carcasses over the parapet to lie like gutted fish in the street
below. Waggons waited there, and municipal slaves with the
machios
sigil
painted on their tunics were loading the corpses upon them like cords of wood.

Fornyx drained his
wine-cup while standing beside Karnos on the battlements he had fought atop the
night before. They were treacherous with frozen blood. It was splashed about
the stone of the merlons as liberally as paint. Karnos raised his voice and
called a halt to the grisly work.

“What will you do
with them?” Fornyx asked him.

“Our own dead will
be burned on a pyre outside the Mithannon with all the proper rites, if Corvus
will allow us to do so without harassment.”

“He will. He has
authorised me to promise that.”

Karnos inclined
his head. “Your people are your own affair. They will be hauled north
separately, and left on the banks of the Mithos.”

“You would leave
them there like carrion?”

“You are our
enemy, Fornyx. I will not use up the city’s resources to make you a pyre.”

“Fair enough. Give
me some more, will you?” He held out his cup.

Karnos filled it
himself from a wineskin. Soldier’s wine, as raw as vinegar. Fornyx downed the
cup in a single throat-searing swallow.

“It was a good
enough way to die. At least he did not fall in some poxed little skirmish
somewhere. The walls of Machran are a grand enough stage even for Rictus.”

“He could have
been defending these walls. I asked him - you know that,” Karnos said.

“I know. In the
end, it was his curiosity that killed him.”

“How so?”

Fornyx smiled. “Come,
Karnos - you must have felt it yourself. This phenomenon, Corvus. Tell me you
would not like to meet him.” “I would,” Karnos conceded. “But the price of his
fame has been too high.”

“Yes it has,”
Fornyx said. And then: “More wine.”

The cup was
refilled and emptied again. Fornyx’s eyes were bloodshot and watering with the
potent stuff, but his face remained as hard as ever. Karnos merely sipped at
his own cup, watching the mercenary closely.

“Your men died
well,” he said, “but there cannot be many of the Dogsheads left now. They are a
dying breed.”

“They are dead.
They died here with Rictus. I am done with this war, Karnos. I am going home.
Rictus’s wife is a woman -” he halted, looked into his cup, frowning.

“Yes?” Karnos
looked as prick-eared as a cat.

“Nothing. All I
want now is to walk away from this.” A twisted smile flitted across his face.

“The fun has gone
out of it, you might say. I care not a damn now whether Machran stands or
falls.”

“You are lucky to
be able to do so. For us within these walls, there is no such choice.”

“That is war. A
man cannot always have what he wants.” Fornyx let the last of his wine trickle
over the bloodstained stone of the walls. “For Phobos, who has the last word on
us all.”

Karnos did the
same. “For Antimone, who watches over us in pity.”

Fornyx tossed his
cup away. “I must get started,” he said.

The short winter’s
day ran its
course, and as night came on the corpses lay contorted and hardening at the
foot of Machran’s walls amid a wreckage of broken timber and iron, the ghastly
flotsam of war. The bodies on the battlements were slowly cleared away, the
waggons trundling into the night with their grisly loads, but no-one as yet had
gone near the mounded charnel house piled up outside the city. Those who had
died going up and down the ladders lay where they had fallen.

Rictus opened his eyes.

All day he had
lain as still as the corpses surrounding him, drifting in and out of the world.
His wounds had stopped bleeding, and he was almost beyond feeling the cold. He
knew there were things broken in him, but he could not quite make out what they
were. His black armour was so slathered with blood and gobbets of flesh that it
had lost its unearthly darkness and was a dull red, the colour of a clay tile.

He smiled. He was
still a Cursebearer.

There were other
things moving in the mound of bodies, and small mewling sounds from men who
were still alive deep in that hill of decaying flesh. One of the last to fall,
Rictus was near its crest. He had tumbled from the walls and landed on a
mattress of dead and dying men, and Antimone’s Gift had stopped the impact from
killing him. When he breathed, he could feel the broken ends of bones grating
in his chest, but he was breathing.

Alive, but not
quite of this world, not yet. The cold had numbed him, and the reopened wound
in his arm had bled him almost white.

Better the cold
than the putrefying heat of the summer.

There was a
snuffling and yapping at the base of the corpse-mound, animals growling and
snapping. The vorine had come out in the night to feast upon the dead.

That galvanised
him. He bit down on his own agony as he struggled over the wood-hard limbs and
snarling faces that surrounded him. There was torchlight on the battlements
high above, and periodically a sentry would lean over an embrasure and study
the sights below. Once, one threw a stone at the feeding vorine. Each time,
Rictus went limp, staring up with the open eyes of the dead at the men above.

He was not the
only survivor with the strength to move. As he slithered downwards over the
bodies here and there a hand clutched feebly at him, a desperate stare met his
own. He ignored them, intent on his own salvation, on beating down the pain and
keeping the languor of the cold from carrying him out of the world.

Someone was
coming. It was not yet moonrise, but even so, Rictus could make out a crouched
shadow working its way about the foot of the mound. He fell still, but the
mound shifted under him, and he slid helplessly across the face of a bronze
shield, and was jabbed in the thigh by the blade of a broken drepana. He
emitted a sharp hiss of new pain.

The shadow paused,
then approached. The vorine turned to meet this new threat, snarling, unwilling
to leave the hill of bounty they had found. There was a swift, sharp sound, and
one of the beasts yelped.

Torchlight over
the battlements again. All went still. The yellow eyes of the vorine reflected
back the light as they drifted off in the darkness, angry and afraid. The light
left, the sentry walking on.

The shadow came
closer. Rictus lay paralyzed with sudden terror, as keen a fear as he had felt on
any battlefield. Something was climbing up the serried limbs of the dead,
standing on their joints and fingers, ascending a ladder of meat.

Rictus could hear
it breathing right beside him, see the warm air it exhaled in a white cloud.
Then it set a hand upon his face.

He lurched, the
pain in his chest screaming. The hand forced him down easily.

“Be quiet, you
bloody fool. Lie still.”

A strange voice,
but familiar.

An eye came into
view, a glow about it similar to that which lit the eyes of the vorine.

“Bel be praised.
Rictus!” the voice whispered. “How are you hurt?”

“Who are you?”

“It’s Ardashir.”
The face came closer, and Rictus could see it was that of the tall Kefren. One
of his eyes was swollen closed, and all that side of his head was black with blood.

“Ardashir…”
Rictus fell back.

“Can you walk? Are
you much hurt?”

“I don’t know,
Ardashir. What happened to you?”

“I got hit on the
head by a stone, right at the start - I never even made it to the ladders.”

“You were lucky,”
Rictus said. He closed his eyes. The world was moving under him, as though he were
too drunk to stand. He grunted as the pain bit into him again, and realised
that the Kefren was pulling him down over the dead, grasping him by the wings
of his cuirass.

“If your legs
still work, time to start using them,” Ardashir whispered. “It’s a long way
back to camp.”

“My head is
stuffed with wool. No, keep going. For the love of God, get me out of this.”

His legs worked,
albeit sluggishly, as though they had gone unused for days. Finally Ardashir
and Rictus lay on the cold ground beyond the mounded bodies. Rictus struggled
and swayed to his feet, while Ardashir set another arrow to his bow and shot it
at the vorine pack which hovered scant yards away.

“Get yourself a
spear, or something to swing at those fellows,” Ardashir said. “They seem
rather intent on us.”

Rictus found a
bloodied drepana, but it was too heavy for him. His right arm was a bloodless
lump of meat. He found the sauroter-end of a broken spear, and stood with it in
his left fist, swaying.

“I could do with a
drink,” he said.

“You and me both -
here, lean on me, and wave that thing at our hungry friends. We’ve a way to go
before moonrise.”

The mismatched
pair began limping and stumbling away from the walls of Machran, the tall Kefren
half-carrying the dazed Macht. The vorine watched them from a safe distance,
and then left off the pursuit for easier pickings among the dead of Corvus’s
army.

THE
SHADOWS ON THE PLAIN

“Look at it
,” Philemos said in
wonder. “It’s like a city. Father, do you see?”

Phaestus lifted
his head, as weary and lean as a dying vulture. “It’s his army. His curse upon
the world.”

Sertorius looked
out across the darkened landscape at the vast crescent of campfires which
extended for pasangs to the south and east of Machran. He whistled softly. “Phaestus
my friend, were I a believing man I would echo you. Never seen anything like
it.”

Bosca spat upon
the sleet-thickened pelt of the earth. “Machran still stands, and from what I
see this fellow has no campfires to the north of the city, up at the river.
Looks like a way in, boss.”

“Agreed. We’ll
follow the riverbank and try for the Mithannon Gate. Come, people; we’re nearly
there.”

He turned to the
three huddled figures behind him, scarecrows with hair as wild as brambles and
eyes sunken into their heads. He bent and grasped one face in his filthy hand,
turning it this way and that.

“Bosca, you are a
slap-happy prick, you know that? Can’t you fuck a woman without using your
fists?”

“She needed a
little encouragement,” Bosca said with a shrug. “Wasn’t putting her heart into
it.”

“It makes us look
bad, like thugs from the gutter.”

“That is what you
are,” Philemos said evenly.

Sertorius drew
close to the dark-haired boy, smiling. “Careful, lad - we’re not in Machran
yet. I’ve indulged you, because I like your spirit. Even gave you the girl to
moon over all you want. But don’t you press me too hard - I get cantankerous,
this close to the end of a job.”

“The boy means
nothing by it,” Phaestus croaked.

“Well make sure
you speak up for us in Machran, Phaestus - make me look good. I’ve not come all
this way for a pat on the head and a bronze obol set in my hand. Me and mine
have earned something substantial, getting these bitches this far.”

“Get us into the
city and you shall have your just deserts, Sertorius, I promise you,” Phaestus
said.

“Very well, then.
Up, ladies! The last leg lies before us.”

He bent Over Aise
again. “Soon that sweet cunny of yours will get a rest, wife of Rictus. You can
spend what’s left of your days looking back on the fond memories we ploughed
you with.”

Then he turned and
set his face close to Rian’s. “I only wish I had tasted you, my little
honey-pot. I would have given you dreams to remember me by.”

He straightened. “Let’s
go. Adurnos, carry the brat, and keep it quiet.”