Paul Kearney - Corvus

The darkness drew in over the floodplain, a lightless black without stars or moons. The three men lurched from one footfall to the next, the muck seizing them calf-deep. Once, Druze went on his face and the others had to halt and lever him free, haul him upright again. Corvus was seized by a fit of laughter, and after a contemplation of their absurd condition it flapped through them all so that they stood for a few minutes holding their mouths, leaning on one another like drunks.

“I’ll lead,” Corvus said at last. “I’m lighter than either of you clodhoppers, and I see better in the dark. Grab a hold of my cloak and try not to pull me on my arse.”

They went on, their only frame of reference in that starless murk the subdued glow of the enemy campfires. Only a few were burning, fighting a losing battle with the endless rain. Usually a host like Karnos’s would light up the night sky with its fires like a city at festival time.

Corvus halted, and Rictus felt the young man’s iron grip on his arm.

“Sentries,” he murmured, his breath warm in Rictus’s ear. “We go right, cast around them.”

The three made a laborious dog-leg about the sentries which only Corvus had seen. They were glad of the rain, for the sluicing hiss of it covered their lumpen progress. Rictus found his joints aching as they had not since the winter before, in the siege-camp outside Nemasis, and he felt again the ache of the arrow-wound in his thigh. The cold and the wet were always ready to recall his old scars, as though in league with his ageing body to remind him of his mortality.

They waded as quietly as they could through knee-deep freezing water, clenching their chattering teeth shut, and began to hear other sounds than the rain ahead. Men’s voices, a low hum of talk, and the chink and gleam of lights glancing through the gaps in leather-canopied tents. The ground rose under their feet, became marginally drier in that the mud was only ankle-deep.

“Here we are,” Corvus said, as unconcerned as if he had led them into his own back yard. “From here on in we straighten up and look like citizens. Perhaps we should go under different names. Druze, you look like a Timus to me.”

“Boss,” Druze said, “I would follow you to the far side of the Veil if you asked me, but don’t try to make me laugh. It’s not one of your gifts.”

“I fall short in that respect,” Corvus admitted, and they saw him grin under his hood. He seemed as light of heart as a boy who has found a peephole in a bathhouse wall.

“I wonder if Karnos’s tent is as big as mine. What think you. Rictus? You know him better than I.”

“I think Druze’s accent and your face will give us away in a moment. Let me lead, for Phobos’s sake, and both of you keep your mouths shut.”

Corvus nodded, and in an entirely different, clinical voice said, “Count the sigils you see. I want to know which cities have brought up their levies.”

They walked through the camp as brazenly as though they belonged there, Druze wiping the muck off his pelta so the Machran sigil shone out white in the firelit gaps in the dark. The camp of Karnos’s army stank worse than their own, and Rictus put out of his mind thoughts of what his bare feet must be treading through.

Men were crowded in their tents, huddled around guttering clay lamps and foul-smelling tallow candles. Some resolute souls were keeping campfires going, atop each the familiar villainous black shape of a centos, the great iron pot fighting men had eaten from since time out of mind. There was a toothsome smell on the air amid the baser stinks; Karnos’s men were eating stewed goat, ladling in mounds of lentils and onions to eke out the meat. Lowland food; the smell of it brought back memories of a dozen old campaigns to Rictus.

He had to shake his mind into the moment; the scenes before him were so familiar that the sense of danger was dulled.

He stopped short when he caught sight of the namis sigil on some shields, painted in blue. These were men of Nemasis, with whom he had fought only the summer before. The gap-toothed man with the shaven head was Isaeos, the idiot whose bumbling had cost lives and lost months in Rictus’s last contract. He bent his head into his hood as he passed by.

The mismatched trio of filthy strangers wandered through the camp without challenge, three more nameless Macht in a sea of them. Rictus stopped counting sigils after he reached twenty. Every city of the hinterland was here, and yet the camp was not big enough to accommodate their full levies. Some must have been sending token contingents, no more. Even among the members of the Avennan League, there were hostilities and rivalries. Karnos had done well to come so far with so many.

No-one challenged them. Rictus was not surprised. He had known citizen armies all his life. They would fight like lions when the time came, but the idea of camp discipline was beyond them; one might as well try to herd cats.

After only a few weeks with Corvus, he had begun to take for granted the efficiency of the army on the far side of the plain, to view it with even a trace of indulgence. He had all but forgotten that his Dogsheads were the exception, not the rule, and that Corvus had made something surprisingly different out of his own host.

Once again, he found himself looking at this Kufr half-breed from a revelatory new angle.

Kufr. Now that was something to factor into things.

The three interlopers grew in confidence, emboldened by the black night, the rain and the muck-stains which made them almost indistinguishable from every other man in the camp. Rictus accepted a squirt of wine from a good-natured drunken fellow with the machios sigil tattooed on his arm, and went so far as to ask him where Karnos’s tent might be found.

“That fat bastard?” the man cried. “He’s still in Machran with his cock up some slave-girl’s arse. It’s Kassander you want, friend – he commands here. What are you, some kind of messenger? Fucking rain – ain’t it a bitch, eh?” He staggered off, plashing through the muck with the bullish determination of the drunk who knows where he wants to go.

“The more I hear of this Karnos fellow, the more I like him,” Druze said with his thick black brows beetling up his forehead. “Had I the choice -”

A woman’s scream cut across him, shrill and terrified.

“I said,” Druze went on, “Had I the choice I’d much prefer -”

“Shut up,” Corvus snapped. “Rictus, where was that?”

Rictus pointed down the haphazard line of tents. “It’s not our concern, Corvus. There’s nothing more to be seen here.”

He was ignored. Corvus strode off on his own in the direction of the scream.

“Oh, shit,” Druze muttered, and grasped Rictus by the arm, taking off in his leader’s wake. “Rictus, for Phobos’s sake, get a hold of him.”

Corvus moved like a black, silent raptor through the tent lines, with Rictus and Druze trailing him.

He had thrown back his hood, and his eyes caught the light of the campfires and reflected it back a violent green.

He pulled back a tent flap, and out of the interior blew a blare of lamplight, the stink of men’s sweat, and something else, something high and keen and bitter in the night. Fear.

Karnos woke with a start. He had barely been asleep anyway. Some gaudy dream of standing talking to a crowd, and the men he spoke to were all cheering him, shouting his name, and sharpening knives.

Subtle, he thought with a mental grunt. Phobos, how is a man to live like this, for weeks at a time? I am Speaker of Machran. I made this army – I created it out of nothing. It is here by my will.

He turned in the straw, snarling and tugging his cloak about with him. They could at least have made me some kind of bed… there are ticks in this straw.