Paul Kearney - Corvus

He had talked to Rictus of it, back in the days when he had been an honoured guest at Andunnon and the two had sat by the fire after a few days’ hunting in the hills. Together, they had speculated idly that they might one day make an expedition into the lost interior of the Deep Mountains, to look for that lost city with walls of iron. Something to occupy their retirement.

Antimone, Lady of Night, Phaestus thought, how did it come to this?

They kept to the high ridges to steer clear of the drifts, and found, themselves in a blue and white world, where the wind took their breath away and set the snow clouding in a blizzard off the rocks and stones at their feet. The sky was empty except for the pale red disc that was Haukos, always reluctant to quit the sky in winter, but to the north the great peaks of the Harukush – legendary even among the Kufr – barred the horizon like a white wall. Down from them the wind swooped, and the bite of it was as bitter as a plunge into a midwinter sea.

There were six of them: Phaestus, Philemos, and four others who had come out of Hal Goshen with them. One of these, Sertorius, had been at various times in his life a mercenary, a hunter, a slave-dealer, and a pimp. It was in this latter guise that he had come to the attention of Phaestus, in his duties as chief magistrate of the city.

The two had known each other for many years, and from their confrontations there had arisen a grudging mutual respect. In his own way, Sertorius was as proud and stiff-necked as Phaestus, and as disgusted by the tame surrender of his city. It was he, and his silent little band of henchmen, who had smuggled the Speaker of Hal Goshen, his family and some of his household out of the city – and with a surprising degree of discretion.

Ostrakr, the sentence had been, but Phaestus had no doubt that he was not intended to survive. His rival, Sarmenian, had ached for the chief magistracy for too long to be magnanimous in victory.

Sertorius had been well paid for his troubles, but this current exploit he was doing for free. Like Phaestus, he was a man without a city now, and were he to walk through the gates of Machran, he wanted to do so with something to show for his trouble, something which would ease the transition.

He was a lowlander, a black-haired, brown-skinned man with eyes the colour of a thrush’s back and a convict’s gall-marks on his wrists. His face was seamed and scarred with knife-fights and wickedness and he had a wide gap between his front teeth. He was not the company Phaestus would have chosen for a trip into the highlands in winter -still less the three hulking street-thugs that were his companions – but the choice had not been wide, and Sertorius had at least a brassy, hail-fellow-well-met way of getting along with others which had come in useful with the goatherder folk the night before.

What Sertorius and his men lacked, however, was a knowledge of the mountains, and they stumbled in the wake of Phaestus and his son, holding onto the tails of the mules and complaining endlessly about the cold.

“Two good day’s travel,” Phaestus told them, reining in his contempt with the practice of a politician. “That’s all. Two days, and then we shall have a roof over our heads, for a day or two at least.”

“If the weather holds,” Sertorius said, the words hissing through his gapped teeth. “I hope the prize we seek is worth it, Phaestus.”

“Believe me, my friend, it will be well worth the trip. But we must make it to Machran as quickly as we can. The last I heard, Corvus was banking on a swift winter campaign. The fighting is going on even as we speak.”

“Then we’re well out of it,” Adurnos, one of Sertorius’s henchmen muttered.

“If it hurts the little fucker who took our city, then I’m all for it,” Sertorius said. “But remember, Phaestus, I was paid only to get you out of Hal Goshen. This here trip is my own charity.”

“And your own self-interest,” Phaestus told him. “This way you turn up at Machran with something that Karnos wants. You arrive there empty-handed, and you’ll be starting at the bottom again.”

“The bottom’s where I feel comfortable,” Sertorius said with a laugh.

Struggling along the knife-ridge later in the day, with the sun setting at their left shoulders and the wind masking all conversation, Philemos drew his father close.

“I don’t trust them.”

“Nor do I. But so long as their interests and ours coincide, they will serve us faithfully. Sertorius is a rogue, but he has a keen sense of what’s good for him.”

“They’re animals, father; scum from the sewers. What’s to stop them turning on us?”

“Philemos,” Phaestus said, smiling, “I am their introduction to Karnos, to the fleshpots of Machran. And more than that, look at them. They’re lowland city criminals – if you and I walked away from them now they would perish up here. They need us as we need them. They are outside their own world.”

“So are we,” his son said. “Father, I would sooner we had gone to Machran and joined the League army – to fight in open battle. What we’re doing here -”

“What we do here is worth a thousand men on the battlefield,” Phaestus snapped. “Not everything comes down to standing in a spearline, boy. And you’ll get your chance at that before we’re done.” His face softened at the look on his son’s.

“Philemos, you were born to be more than phalanx-fodder, as was I. If you are to be a man, you must learn from me. A man cannot always follow the dictates of what he perceives to be his honour -sometimes that will lead him to his ruin.”

“Father, you could have been ruler of Hal Goshen under Corvus – it was your honour that has brought you here.”

Phaestus smiled. “Well said. I shall make a rhetorician of you yet.” He turned away, and the smile curdled on his face.

It was not honour. It was ambition, and outrage, and bloody-minded hatred. To be offered something like that, like a coin dropped on a beggar’s plate -and by Rictus, who despite everything was nothing more than a brute mercenary.

It could not be borne. It was the manner in which the offer had been made, as much as the offer itself.

I am a better man than Rictus, he thought. And I will prove it.

There was something in Aise which responded to winter. She respected it, with the good sense of a woman who had lived her life in the blue and white world of the high hills. But there was more to it than that.

It was not that she enjoyed the sensations of the season – although she did – it was more that the vast labour of the year was done, at long last, affording a chance to stand and look around, and to lean back from the earth upon which she threw all the life she had within her, year upon year.

She did not like winter – no fool could – but there was a certain satisfaction about it, seeing all which had been set in train throughout the year lead up to the moment of truth. That was winter in the highlands; the test of life itself.

The barley had been scythed, threshed and winnowed, and the grain stored in the three-legged wooden bin at one end of the yard. When Aise felt cold, or out of sorts, she would open the bin and scoop out a bucketful, then pound it to flour in the great hollow stone that Rictus and Fornyx had dragged out of the river years in the past. They had been two days getting it from the water to where it now sat, and every time she thumped the iron-hard log into it she thought of them that summer, sitting grinning at one another with the muck of the riverbank all over them and that great stone between them. Now it sat in the yard as though it had been there since time immemorial, a totem of their permanence here.