Paul Kearney - Corvus

“We had a girl, a slave girl the mess had gotten from the wagon-park. We were taking turns on her and he came in out of nowhere – General, his eyes -they were not those of a man. He came in here like a storm, killing right and left. There were others with him. They grabbed him as he was about to finish me off, cut open the back of the tent, and then they all went out that way. They cut us up like we were rabbits on a block, general. They were not men at all.”

The man was in white bloodless shock, his lips blue. “Go to the carnifex,” Kassander told him. “I’ll talk to you later. What’s your name?”

“Lomos of Afteni, your honour.”

“All right Lomos, get out.”

“Wait – where’s the girl?” Karnos demanded.

“She ran. She’s all right. It was just some fun, General, I swear.”

“Go – go on – get that looked at.”

Karnos and Kassander squatted on their haunches amid the carnage, the lamp’s light lending a flicker of mocking movement to the bodies. Karnos counted five men there. It was as close as he had ever come to violent death in his life thus far, and while his stomach was still heaving, his mind studied the scene with a revolted fascination.

“Drepana wounds,” Kassander said, moving the lamp this way and that. “The strawheads use stabbing swords. We must find that girl – perhaps she was not a slave at all, and had relations in camp – it has been known. Come, Karnos.”

The camp was bristling like a kicked anthill now. The two men emerged into the rain to find that something was still going on, out near the eastern lines. A fully armed centurion with a transverse crest halted in front of Kassander.

“General, we think the enemy is behind this -there are infiltrators in the camp, and they’ve been raising hell. We have men hurt and killed all over the eastern end.”

“Phobos!” Kassander hissed. He scraped a hand through his hair and turned to Karnos. “This makes no sense.”

“Is it the precursor to an attack, you think?” Karnos asked. His heart lurched in his chest. Only a few days before, the notion of battle – real warfare, with himself in the thick of it – had seemed like the stuff of distant and slightly absurd conjecture. Here, in the chaos of rain and firelight, with other men’s blood soaked into his feet, it was real and terrifying.

“We must turn out the army, just in case,” Kassander decided. He turned to the centurion, noticing the alfos sigil on his shield. “Are you from Afteni?”

“Yes, general – these are my men butchered here.”

“Pass it along the lines – the men are to arm and stand-to. I want them formed up on the eastern side, by centon.” He turned to Karnos, his big, good natured face something entirely different now.

“We must gather the Kerusia, and rouse out all the contingents at once. There’s no telling what this presages.”

Karnos nodded. “You’re the soldier, Kassander.”

“You’re the man who got us all here, brother. It’s your job to talk to the other city leaders. We must assemble the army at once.”

Rictus, Corvus and Druze collapsed in the sucking mere some half pasang from the enemy camp, and lay in the freezing water, utterly spent.

“It must be near daylight,” Rictus said. “We have to get on, or we’ll be stuck out here like cockroaches on a tabletop when the sun comes up.”

Corvus was wiping blood from his face with the corner of his sodden cloak. “Agreed. Look at them, Rictus; you see what we have done?”

There were torches lit all over the enemy camp now, travelling up and down it like fireflies. Even out here they could hear the surf of noise on the hill, men’s voices raised in an angry clamour.

“Reminds me of stoning a hornet’s nest when I was a boy,” Druze said.

“It was madness,” Rictus said, turning to Corvus. “By rights, we three should be dead in there, or captive.”

“I saw your face when you looked in that tent,” Corvus said, unabashed. “There was a time when you would have done the same thing. You wanted to, tonight.” “I have learned to think of the consequences of my actions.”

“I have learned to trust to my luck sometimes, Rictus. And it has held. Phobos watches over me. He brought us out of there.”

“It was insane,” Rictus persisted.

“If a sane and sensible life includes walking past rape without blinking, then I would rather be dead,” Corvus said, and there was a cold menace to his words that made Rictus and Druze look at one another.

He wiped his eyes with his cloak hem. “Sneer if you will, Rictus.”

“I am not sneering.” Rictus thought of the sack of Isca, of Ab Mirza in the Empire, the excesses of the Ten Thousand.

Once, I was the same, he thought.

“It may be expedient to tolerate what revolts you,” Corvus said, “but where does that leave you, in the end? Better to die fighting for what you know is right and wrong.”

“Black and white,” Rictus said.

Corvus smiled. “Indeed. Druze, my brother, how is that arm?”

“It stings a little.” Druze’s face was pinched with pain.

“Then let’s get you back home.” Corvus put his arm about Druze’s shoulders and pulled him close, then kissed him on his forehead.

“You took that blade for me,” he said.

They staggered through the marshland with the adrenaline of the fight still singing in their nerves. It brought them another pasang or so, before draining away, leaving them wrung-out and thick-headed. At least that was how Rictus felt. Corvus began to talk again, as easily as a man lingering over his wine.

“Twenty sigils; that’s the hinterland cities plus a few more. I saw the alfos and hammer of Arienus there, and Gast and Ferai – even Decanth. But they are not sending their full levies, or Karnos’s army would be twice as big. Druze, give me your arm – that’s it.

“It means they’re holding back. Even now, they are not fully combined. Perhaps they do not rate their own danger as high as they should. I want them all in front of me, the men of every great city of the Macht. If we are to help our friend Karnos gather them all in his ranks, we will have to twist his tail a little more – more than we have done tonight.”

“Boss, I think you went over there looking for a fight,” Druze said.

“Perhaps I did. Did you see their lines? Amateurs, ankle-deep in their own shit, half-drunk most of them, their sentries gathered around fires and blind to the dark. At least we got them out of their blankets for a night.”

He looked back. A grey light was growing in the air, Araian making her slow way up the back of the clouds to the east.

“Dawn is coming, and they’re forming up on the brink of the hill – look, Rictus – they’ll be all morning at it.”

A black line was growing across the land, thickening and lengthening with every minute. Spearmen, moving into battle array.

“It would be rude not to respond,” Corvus said, his pale grin back on his face. “When we get back, I think I’ll have to turn out our lot to say hello.”

Rictus looked at him sharply.

“You mean to bring on a battle?”

“Why not? Warfare is half blood and half bluff, Rictus. Karnos does not know what we’re about, so he’s taking the sensible route; he’ll stand his men there in the rain for as long as he thinks we’re about to come at him. Last night, the curtain went up. Now I intend to amuse the audience further.”

With the rising of the sun, the clouds that had blanketed the sky for so many days finally began to part and shift, as though Araian had become impatient and was peeling them back to see what had become of the world. The rain petered out, and as the light broke broad and yellow across the flooded plain between the two camps it was caught by the pools of standing water and set alight in dazzling flashes of rippled reflection.