Paul Kearney - Corvus

Karnos did the same. “For Antimone, who watches over us in pity.”

Fornyx tossed his cup away. “I must get started,” he said.

The short winter’s day ran its course, and as night came on the corpses lay contorted and hardening at the foot of Machran’s walls amid a wreckage of broken timber and iron, the ghastly flotsam of war. The bodies on the battlements were slowly cleared away, the waggons trundling into the night with their grisly loads, but no-one as yet had gone near the mounded charnel house piled up outside the city. Those who had died going up and down the ladders lay where they had fallen.

Rictus opened his eyes.

All day he had lain as still as the corpses surrounding him, drifting in and out of the world. His wounds had stopped bleeding, and he was almost beyond feeling the cold. He knew there were things broken in him, but he could not quite make out what they were. His black armour was so slathered with blood and gobbets of flesh that it had lost its unearthly darkness and was a dull red, the colour of a clay tile.

He smiled. He was still a Cursebearer.

There were other things moving in the mound of bodies, and small mewling sounds from men who were still alive deep in that hill of decaying flesh. One of the last to fall, Rictus was near its crest. He had tumbled from the walls and landed on a mattress of dead and dying men, and Antimone’s Gift had stopped the impact from killing him. When he breathed, he could feel the broken ends of bones grating in his chest, but he was breathing.

Alive, but not quite of this world, not yet. The cold had numbed him, and the reopened wound in his arm had bled him almost white.

Better the cold than the putrefying heat of the summer.

There was a snuffling and yapping at the base of the corpse-mound, animals growling and snapping. The vorine had come out in the night to feast upon the dead.

That galvanised him. He bit down on his own agony as he struggled over the wood-hard limbs and snarling faces that surrounded him. There was torchlight on the battlements high above, and periodically a sentry would lean over an embrasure and study the sights below. Once, one threw a stone at the feeding vorine. Each time, Rictus went limp, staring up with the open eyes of the dead at the men above.

He was not the only survivor with the strength to move. As he slithered downwards over the bodies here and there a hand clutched feebly at him, a desperate stare met his own. He ignored them, intent on his own salvation, on beating down the pain and keeping the languor of the cold from carrying him out of the world.

Someone was coming. It was not yet moonrise, but even so, Rictus could make out a crouched shadow working its way about the foot of the mound. He fell still, but the mound shifted under him, and he slid helplessly across the face of a bronze shield, and was jabbed in the thigh by the blade of a broken drepana. He emitted a sharp hiss of new pain.

The shadow paused, then approached. The vorine turned to meet this new threat, snarling, unwilling to leave the hill of bounty they had found. There was a swift, sharp sound, and one of the beasts yelped.

Torchlight over the battlements again. All went still. The yellow eyes of the vorine reflected back the light as they drifted off in the darkness, angry and afraid. The light left, the sentry walking on.

The shadow came closer. Rictus lay paralyzed with sudden terror, as keen a fear as he had felt on any battlefield. Something was climbing up the serried limbs of the dead, standing on their joints and fingers, ascending a ladder of meat.

Rictus could hear it breathing right beside him, see the warm air it exhaled in a white cloud. Then it set a hand upon his face.

He lurched, the pain in his chest screaming. The hand forced him down easily.

“Be quiet, you bloody fool. Lie still.”

A strange voice, but familiar.

An eye came into view, a glow about it similar to that which lit the eyes of the vorine.

“Bel be praised. Rictus!” the voice whispered. “How are you hurt?”

“Who are you?”

“It’s Ardashir.” The face came closer, and Rictus could see it was that of the tall Kefren. One of his eyes was swollen closed, and all that side of his head was black with blood.

“Ardashir…” Rictus fell back.

“Can you walk? Are you much hurt?”

“I don’t know, Ardashir. What happened to you?”

“I got hit on the head by a stone, right at the start – I never even made it to the ladders.”

“You were lucky,” Rictus said. He closed his eyes. The world was moving under him, as though he were too drunk to stand. He grunted as the pain bit into him again, and realised that the Kefren was pulling him down over the dead, grasping him by the wings of his cuirass.

“If your legs still work, time to start using them,” Ardashir whispered. “It’s a long way back to camp.”

“My head is stuffed with wool. No, keep going. For the love of God, get me out of this.”

His legs worked, albeit sluggishly, as though they had gone unused for days. Finally Ardashir and Rictus lay on the cold ground beyond the mounded bodies. Rictus struggled and swayed to his feet, while Ardashir set another arrow to his bow and shot it at the vorine pack which hovered scant yards away.

“Get yourself a spear, or something to swing at those fellows,” Ardashir said. “They seem rather intent on us.”

Rictus found a bloodied drepana, but it was too heavy for him. His right arm was a bloodless lump of meat. He found the sauroter-end of a broken spear, and stood with it in his left fist, swaying.

“I could do with a drink,” he said.

“You and me both – here, lean on me, and wave that thing at our hungry friends. We’ve a way to go before moonrise.”

The mismatched pair began limping and stumbling away from the walls of Machran, the tall Kefren half-carrying the dazed Macht. The vorine watched them from a safe distance, and then left off the pursuit for easier pickings among the dead of Corvus’s army.

“Look at it,” Philemos said in wonder. “It’s like a city. Father, do you see?”

Phaestus lifted his head, as weary and lean as a dying vulture. “It’s his army. His curse upon the world.”

Sertorius looked out across the darkened landscape at the vast crescent of campfires which extended for pasangs to the south and east of Machran. He whistled softly. “Phaestus my friend, were I a believing man I would echo you. Never seen anything like it.”

Bosca spat upon the sleet-thickened pelt of the earth. “Machran still stands, and from what I see this fellow has no campfires to the north of the city, up at the river. Looks like a way in, boss.”

“Agreed. We’ll follow the riverbank and try for the Mithannon Gate. Come, people; we’re nearly there.”

He turned to the three huddled figures behind him, scarecrows with hair as wild as brambles and eyes sunken into their heads. He bent and grasped one face in his filthy hand, turning it this way and that.

“Bosca, you are a slap-happy prick, you know that? Can’t you fuck a woman without using your fists?”

“She needed a little encouragement,” Bosca said with a shrug. “Wasn’t putting her heart into it.”

“It makes us look bad, like thugs from the gutter.”

“That is what you are,” Philemos said evenly.

Sertorius drew close to the dark-haired boy, smiling. “Careful, lad – we’re not in Machran yet. I’ve indulged you, because I like your spirit. Even gave you the girl to moon over all you want. But don’t you press me too hard – I get cantankerous, this close to the end of a job.”

“The boy means nothing by it,” Phaestus croaked.