Paul Kearney - Corvus

“Perhaps you would like us to turn back,” he said, setting a hand on Druze’s shoulder. The nails had been painted scarlet some time ago, but the paint had worn and flecked. He looked as though he had been scrabbling in blood.

“If you do, then I cannot see us arguing with two men such as yourselves. Even the five of us are no match for two Cursebearers. So consider yourselves the victors.” A smile under the hood. “There is no need for blood to be splashed on such a bright morning.”

“Agreed. Turn back out of this valley, and we will part in amity,” Rictus said. He lowered his spear but kept his left shoulder towards the strangers, the shield covering him.

“So be it,” the small man said. “Though, if I could, I would like to know the names of those who turn us back on our tracks.”

“You think me a fool?” Rictus asked lightly. They were all young, these five men, and the speaker perhaps the youngest of them all, yet their gear had seen much service, and they stood with the easy, yet alert poise of trained soldiers. These were no mere citizens. Something about all this was wrong.

“I hear tell that Rictus of Isca lives in this glen,” the hooded youth said. “He’s a much storied man, and a Cursebearer to boot. If I were to encounter him, I’d like to know I had, just for the telling of the tale later.”

“Cursebearers do not just spring up out of the ground, especially so high and far from civilized life,” Druze added, spreading his hands like a reasonable man. “You cannot blame us for being curious.”

“Perhaps Rictus prefers to keep himself to himself,” Fornyx said.

“He has every right to do so,” the hooded man replied. “Believe us when I say we wish him no ill. I have been reading stories of the Ten Thousand since I was a boy. It would be a banner-day in my life, were I to meet their leader face to face.”

He raised his head, and for the first time looked Rictus eye to eye. “You have my word on that.”

His face was pale, and there was something odd about his eyes. But before Rictus could quite grasp it, the youth had lowered his gaze again.

“Phobos,” Fornyx cursed.

“Go left,” Rictus murmured out of the corner of his mouth. These young men were not going to back down. The morning was going to end in blood after all.

Louder, Rictus said; “Leave now. No more questions, no more talk. Leave, or die here.” Both he and Fornyx raised their spearheads to throat height and assumed attack stances.

Not one of the men moved. The hooded youth sighed, reached into his sleeve and brought forth a cheap wooden flute, the kind soldiers whittle for themselves in their encampments.

“I will not fight you, Rictus,” he said calmly – he was too calm. Even as Rictus and Fornyx advanced, neither he nor any of his men stirred, but the youth put the flute to his lips – they were as red as a girl’s- and played a shrill melody, a fragment of a marching tune Rictus had heard half a hundred times before.

And instantly, the forest came to life all around them.

Men rose up out of the snow, from behind trees, out of the brush. They had been lying under white cloaks, hiding in the thickets. Their appearance set the woods alive with frightened birds.

In a moment, Rictus and Fornyx were surrounded by dozens, scores of armed soldiers, blue-faced with cold. Some had bows, others javelins, and yet more unsheathed their drepanas so that cold iron glittered in the snow-brightness.

They stood silent and watching, like legendary warriors brought to magic life out of the very soil of the earth.

“Damn,” Fornyx said. “The little bastard.”

There was the white, draining shock of it, the knowledge it was all over, his whole life finished at last.

So this is how it ends, Rictus thought. For me, for Fornyx, for all of us. He thought of Aise and the girls, and what would happen to them now, and he fought down the automatic impulse to charge, to skewer this flute-playing boy and drown him in his own blood. He had to buy time.

“Stack arms,” he said to Fornyx.

“My arse,” his friend snapped, wide-eyed with fury behind his helm.

“Do it, Fornyx.”

The two men stabbed their spears butt-first into the ground so that the sauroters buried themselves. His right hand free, Rictus took off his helm, and the cold air bit his face.

“You have us at a disadvantage,” he said to the flute-player. “And you have my name right. I am Rictus, and this here is my second, Fornyx.” He looked about himself, heart thundering, face stiff with the effort to keep it impassive. But he managed a little flourish of contempt.

“You think you brought enough men?”

The youth reached up and threw back his hood. He was smiling. He walked down the slope as though descending the steps of a palace, until he stood so close that Rictus could have reached out and set both hands about his throat.

His eyes were weirdly pale, a shade of violet that did not seem quite natural. He had black hair past his shoulders, as gleaming black as a raven’s wing, and his white skin had a sheen of gold about it.

He was as beautiful as a maiden, but had the scar of an old sword-stroke at the corner of his left eye.

“I have wanted to meet you for a long time, Rictus of Isca,” he said.

“I am called Corvus.”

It is a fine line, sometimes, Rictus thought, between guest and hostage. The key to it is left unspoken, buried in courtesies. The fist inside the glove.

They were escorted back down into the glen of Andunnon as though the men about them were for their own protection, and the strange youth who called himself Corvus walked beside them, as though he were a friend of theirs. Some of his companions relieved Rictus and Fornyx of the weight of their shields, helms and spears, but they were allowed to keep their swords. Courtesy.

“This is a beautiful place,” Corvus said, as the woods thinned and the column came out into the open sunlight of the valley bottom. “A man could be happy here. I do not wonder that you wanted to keep your home a secret, Rictus.”

“I am curious as to how I failed in that regard,”

Rictus said tartly.

The youth nodded. “There’s a lot to be said between us. I hope you will perhaps count me a guest here and not an intruder. It is no part of my intent to harm you or your family.”

“If talk were commerce, all men would be rich,” Fornyx said, and spat into the snow. “A guest does not bring a full centon of warriors to test his host’s hospitality.”

“If I had brought any fewer, you would both have fought me,” Corvus said, holding up one long-fingered hand as though to catch something. “I had to take away hope of winning to make you listen to what I have to say.”

“They’re a patient bunch,” Rictus said, gesturing to the ranks of soldiers who marched on all sides. “How long were they buried in the woods?”

“They are my Igranians,” Corvus said. “From Igranon in the high eastern Harukush. It’s so cold up there they think this is a mild spring in comparison. They are my light troops, my foot cavalry. Druze is their chieftain, and one of my marshals.”

“I hope they brought their own bread,” Fornyx drawled. His tone was mocking, insolent, but his face was white and drawn as a fever-victim, and his fist was knotted on the hilt of his sword.

“In this valley, my hounds stay on the leash,” Corvus said gravely.

They made good time. As the column approached the farm, they saw that Aise and Eunion had not yet left, Garin and Styra were in the front yard packing up bedrolls. The two shrank together as the long line of armed men came into view and began splashing across the shallows of the river. Then they bolted like hares, sprinting for the north. Corvus swept an arm forward and at once the dark smiling fellow Druze led off some two dozen of his men at a run. They skeined out into two lines that flanked the farmhouse and surrounded it. The two fleeing slaves were tripped up, pinioned, and prodded back down the valley towards the house. Rictus and Fornyx looked at one another. These Igranians’ discipline was almost as good as that of the Dogsheads. High mountain tribesmen they might be, but they had been well-drilled.