by Paul Kearney
TWENTY-SIX
THE HOUSE ON THE HILL
THE FIRST CRASHING impact on the door had startled them more than the roar of the city’s fall. It was immediate, personal, and on a human scale. Their fear, which had been an ill-defined dread before, now lurched into something closer to terror.
No sound outside, no shouting, nor clamour of a mob. Just the crash on the stout doors of Karnos’s house, as though a giant ram were charging it with blind malevolence.
Philemos’s mother became hysterical. She and her two young daughters were locked away in a far corner of the house. As Philemos shut the door on them, he heard the sound of furniture being dragged and piled up against it on the inside.
The wide front doors of the house were solid, oak and bronze. Kassia, Rian, Ona, Philemos and Polio began hauling furniture in their turn, dragging the beautiful couches made by Framnos, Karnos’s pride and joy, across the fountain courtyard and wedging them tight against the gate. Now they heard the grunt of men outside, the rattle of wheels on the cobbled street before every crash.
“There are armed men in here!” Philemos shouted. “Come through those doors and we’ll cut your throats!”
The only response was a burst of laughter, and then the gates were charged again. The heavy doors moved inwards, and white cracks opened and closed in the black wood.
“Perhaps we should go shut ourselves-in different rooms,” Kassia said, her face white and bloodless with fear. She was thinking of Aise the night she had arrived, that look in her eye. She could not imagine what had been done to her to make her look like that, but now it was going to happen. To all of them.
Rian stood calmly, a kitchen cleaver in her hand. She hugged Ona close to her.
“You have to try and hide,” she told her sister. “Ona, can you find some little space where no-one will find you?”
A timber was smashed free of the doors and skittered across the flagstones of the courtyard.
“Can you do that? I’ll come and find you later, I promise.”
The child looked at her dumbly, great dark eyes under a mass of red-brown hair.
“I promise,” Rian repeated, and her voice quavered on the word.
Ona put her arms around her sister’s neck, solemn, but eerily untroubled. Then she turned and ran away. They could hear her feet pattering through the house. Then there was a moment’s silence. Philemos set a hand on Rian’s arm. She wiped the tears from her face.
“I wish I had died at Andunnon, with Eunion. We should all have died there together.”
“I will not let them touch you,” Philemos said fiercely. “I protected you once before, and I will do it again.”
The door crashed inwards, the bolt tearing free of the wood.
They stood side by side, four people brought together by some whim of Phobos. A sister, a daughter, a slave and a son.
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 wit
h 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.”
TWENTY- SEVEN
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.”
He stepped forward and ran a hand down the lightless surface of the armour in front of him.
“But I didn’t ask you here to listen to me rant about the future. I wanted to ask you a favour, Rictus.”
“Just ask.”
Suddenly Corvus looked as wide-eyed and young as a boy confronting his father with a confession.
“Help me put it on,” he said.
He touched the armour again gently, as a man might stroke the arm of a woman too beautiful to notice him.
“I must do it now, tonight. I intend to be crowned wearing it tomorrow, and I must know - I have to know that I can wear it. Do you understand?”
Fornyx looked mystified, but Rictus understood perfectly.
“Let me see, then.”
The armour came up off its stand, light as leather, harder than any stone. Rictus opened the two halves of it and Corvus slid his arm into the gap. He was sweating.
The clasps snapped shut, and then the wings came down and clicked into place. Corvus stood tugging at the neck of the cuirass. “It’s too big,” he rasped.
“Wait a second,” Rictus said, remembering the first time he had donned his own cuirass, on the Kunaksa hills. This boy’s father had told him to put it on.
Corvus’s face changed. “It’s shifting. I can feel it.”
“It will mould to your body. It only takes a second.”
Something lit up in Corvus’s strange eyes. “It’s done, Rictus. It fits as though it was made for me.”
Fornyx clapped the shoulder of the youth’s black armour. “There you go; a Cursebearer at last. What a vision we are, three men in black and scarlet.”