Paul Kearney - Corvus

But the real shock was the leader of Corvus’s own Companion Cavalry. This fellow’s name was Ardashir, and he was a head taller than anyone else in the room, with violent green eyes and skin a pale gold. His face was so long as to be almost equine, and he had dragged his long black hair into a topknot.

Ardashir was not Macht. He was Kufr.

It had been a long time since Rictus had laid eyes on a Kufr. From his own experience he knew that the other peoples of the world came in many shapes and sizes. He had encountered most of them in his travels, and while the Macht might lump them all under the same derogatory label, he knew better.

There were many castes in the Empire, but the highest were formed by those who came from the heartland of Asuria, who spoke the language of the Great King’s court, provided his bodyguards and administrators. By his appearance Ardashir was one of these, a high-caste Kefren of the Imperial nobility. And he sat here at a Macht table, commanding troops in a Macht army.

Rictus found the tall Kefren studying him almost as intently as he was being studied. Ardashir smiled. “It is not often one finds oneself breaking bread with a legend. Rictus of Isca, I have heard your name in stories all my life, as have we all here. It lifts my heart to think that we shall be fighting shoulder to shoulder from this day on.” His voice was deep, melodious, his Machtic almost perfect.

“Come, drink with me.”

Rictus found his throat seizing up on him. The Kefren’s face had jolted his memories. He remembered faces like that raging down at him in a line thousands strong, crashing in close enough that their spittle sprayed his face, their blood soaked his skin. He had trampled faces like that into the muck and mire of Kunaksa. He had not believed the memories could be brought back so bright and vivid while he sat eyes open and wide awake, and had to fight a momentary, overwhelming urge to spring to his feet. He bowed his head and choked down a cup of yellow wine.

The whole table was watching him; Rictus, leader of the Ten Thousand, thrown into panic by the sight of a single Kufr. He beat it down, grinding his teeth on the wine. When he raised his head again his face was as blank as a flint.

“You are a long way from home,” he managed.

Ardashir bowed his head in acknowledgement. “A friend came this way, and I followed him.”

“Ardashir’s people make up most of the Companion Cavalry,” the one-eyed man, Demetrius, said. “They were among the first to fight for Corvus, and have come all this way -”

“They are my friends, all of them,” Corvus said, his high, clear voice cutting the older man short. “They have fought by my side on a dozen battlefields. The Macht have never been a people to appreciate the potential of cavalry, and a man does not become a horse-soldier overnight. To create a mounted arm, I had to look over the sea. Rictus, in your youth you battled your way across half the Empire. You of all men should be able to appreciate the valour of the people within it.”

Corvus was taut-faced, staring at him. Here was a test, Rictus realised. He spoke to Ardashir again.

“I fought the Great King’s Honai at Kunaksa, and the Asurian cavalry at Irunshahr. I do not have to be convinced of your people’s prowess.”

Druze leaned close to Ardashir and reached up to shake the Kefren by the shoulder. “Prowess or not, he still beat you, you big yellow streak of shit.”

The table erupted in laughter, Ardashir laughing as loud as the rest. He clinked cups with Druze, the two of them as familiar with each other as any two fighting comrades can be. Rictus wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. He found Corvus still watching him, smiling without humour. Then the pale-faced youth raised his own cup to Rictus and drained it. It would seem the test had been passed.

“Rictus has drilled his Dogsheads to a level not equalled by any other troops I have seen,” Corvus said, raising his voice. The long table fell silent instantly.

“They are only a half-mora of spearmen, but I intend that their example shall be followed throughout the army. Here and now, I name Rictus of Isca as one of my marshals, equal to all of you here. Demetrius, Teresian, you will consult with Rictus on the drilling of your own men. If we can field a phalanx that fights as well as did the Ten Thousand, then there is nothing in all of the Harukush that can stand against us.”

There was a general buzz of consent, and Fornyx slapped Rictus on the back, leaning in close to speak in his ear.

“Congratulations, marshal. Before you let me kiss your elevated arse, look at your colleagues. I think you just pissed in their wine.”

One-eyed Demetrius, and rawboned Teresian. They drank silently, looking over the rim of their cups at Rictus, and he realised that he had just made his first enemies in Corvus’s army.

The green branch got Rictus up to the city walls. It was snowing, a wet, dark snow that was the child of the decaying season. Impenetrable though the Curse of God might be, it held no warmth, and Rictus was shivering under his scarlet cloak as he stood with the olive branch held up in one hand, the blank pocked stone of the ramparts looming over him. There was activity up there on the walkway; he could see the conical gleam of helms moving, but as yet the massive city gates remained closed.

It had been a year and a half since last he had stood here, the tail end of the summer, just before he left for the Nemasis contract.

The gates had been open then, the sun warm and the land as rich and ripe as a plucked pomegranate.

The roads had been thick with people and handcarts and animals making their way to the Summersend market. For most of the country folk around about it was a once-a-year trip, to sell what they had grown and reared and woven, and in return to buy what they could not make for themselves on their farms. They would go home with the redware pottery that was unique to the city, or perhaps a new axehead, or a slave, or perhaps even a scroll of poetry to read aloud in the dark hours of the winter.

Hal Goshen was the hub of men’s lives for sixty pasangs around, as much a part of the landscape as the mountains that reached white and remote on the northern horizon. It did not seem possible that a thing of such permanence could be taken away, erased from the world because of the will of one man.

But that might well happen now, if Rictus could not raise an answer out of these walls.

He tried again. “I am Rictus of Isca, and I am known to you and to your Kerusia. I am here to speak for the eastern general, Corvus, whose army is behind me.” Nothing. His temper flared.

“Open the fucking gate, will you? I’m one man, and it’s fucking freezing out here.”

A snap of laughter from above. Finally there was the crack of a reluctant bolt, and a postern in the gate swung open, admitting a heavily cloaked figure. The postern slammed shut behind him.

“I hope Aise has the goats down from the high pastures,” the figure said. “There will be drifts up there by now that would bury an ox.” The man was lean as a whip, with long lank grey hair, and a gold stud in one nostril. When he smiled he had the white teeth of a much younger man – he had always been proud of them, Rictus remembered, and the effect his smile had on women.

“Phaestus,” he said. “Thank the goddess. I was thinking it was about time I got an arrow in my neck.”

“I have bows trained on you,” Phaestus said, “not that they’d be much use against a Cursebearer. So it’s true then; you and the Dogsheads have thrown in with the conqueror of the east.”

“It’s true, though we didn’t have much choice in the matter.”