Paul Kearney - Corvus

Kassia joined her, lifting a winecup off the table that sat like an island in the middle of the room.

“It’s quite something, to see it all from here,” she said, smiling. “We are high up on Kerusiad Hill, and you’re looking west. There’s the Empirion, and Round Hill rising behind it. All of Machran at your feet. I never tire of looking at it.”

“I’ve never seen it like this, like a view through the eye of a bird.”

“The Kerusiad is a tall hill. At the top of it is the citadel of Machran, an old fortress where the Kerusia meet in session. They’re repairing it now, just in case we…”

“In case Corvus and my husband breach your walls,” Aise said. She turned around. “Lady, you seem a kindly woman. Of this Karnos I know nothing except that he has a reputation as a womaniser and an orator. Tell me, what does he intend to do with my girls and I?” Aise stared at Kassia unblinking. The white of one eye had half-filled with blood, and its socket was a purple hollow.

“Karnos is a good man, whatever you’ve heard of him,” Kassia said earnestly. “He detests what was done to you. He has told me that you and your children are welcome to make his home your own for as long as you wish.”

“He sounds like a man with a guilty conscience,” Aise said. “I know we are not here on a whim. He seeks to use me against my husband.”

Kassia set down her wine carefully on the tabletop.

“Aise.” She glided forward and took the older woman’s hands in her own, looking her full in that beautiful, broken face.

“Rictus died yesterday in an assault upon the walls.”

Aise stood very still for perhaps three heartbeats. Then she jerked her hands out of the younger woman’s grasp and backed away.

“That is a lie.”

“I am so sorry.”

“I do not believe you.”

“I would not lie about such a thing. Aise, yesterday morning Rictus’s second, Fornyx, came to the city under a green branch and asked to retrieve his body.”

“Fornyx?” Aise backed away further. One hand came up and covered her mouth.

Kassia followed her, opening her arms. “Believe me when I say Karnos has no hidden plans for you. With Rictus gone -”

“With Rictus gone I am without worth,” Aise said. And spoke his name again, so softly it could barely be heard.

Tears burned bright in her bruised and blood-filled eyes. She drew a breath that was part sob, part snarl.

All this time the knowledge that he was there in the world, a black-armoured invincible pillar of her life – it had kept her on her feet. The fact of his very existence had made her take one step after another when she wanted nothing more than to give up, to lie down and shut herself away from the memories poisoning her heart. Rictus would find her. Rictus would set things right, if he had to tear Machran stone from stone to do it.

A childish belief, but it was the last hope she had possessed.

And now he was dead.

“Aise -” Kassia began, her face twisted with pity.

“Stay away from me.” The look in Aise’s eyes halted Kassia in her tracks.

She walked to the balcony and stood there with her hands on the reassuring wood of the balustrade. All Machran loomed out below her, a surf of noise and activity that filled the world. Men shouting, dogs barking, mules braying, the rattle of cartwheels, and unending, ceaseless chatter. Tens of thousands talking, talking.

She set her hands on her ears, the tears trickling down her face, thinking of Andunnon, the quiet world of the hills, making bread that last morning before it was all destroyed. She would never know peace again, now. She knew that.

Even in the most silent hour of the night, she would hear them laughing as they violated her, and see their faces. Rictus would have killed them. He would have made things right.

Rictus was dead. Her world was destroyed.

“Aise,” Kassia said. “In time…”

She had made a bargain with the gods, and they had kept it. Let it all be on me, she had prayed, and her prayer had been answered. Her daughters were alive and whole.

“You say you will look after my children.”

“Yes – of course.”

She had done enough. All her life she had been doing things for others. Now she would do one last thing for herself.

“Aise!” Kassia screamed, and lunged forward.

Too late. Rictus’s wife leaned out over the balcony and let herself fall. A flash of turning pictures galloped past her mind, bright leaves from a forest of memories; and then there was a shattering blankness. And she knew true peace at last.

Like a sluggish beast, the army of Corvus came awake in its camps. As the first snows came and went in the dilatory way of the lowland winter, so the morai of the conqueror began marching again.

The baggage train was up at last, and gangs of labourers were set to improving the washed-out sections of the Imperial road that led east, thousands of the inhabitants of the hinterland rounded up and put to work felling trees and quarrying stone. The main camp astride the road took on a more permanent look as the brown army tents went up in neat rows with corduroyed roads laid between them. And the army spread out to north and south, an octopus with arms of barbed spearmen.

Teresian led two morai west, marching the whole length of the city walls, and set up camp opposite the West Prime Gate. Demetrius and three thousand spears ensconced themselves to the south, cutting the Avennon road. Druze led two overstrength morai of spearmen and Igranians north, and began constructing a stockaded fort outside the Mithannon, on the banks of the Mithos River. One of the first things he did was to retrieve the mouldering dead of the army’s last assault and gather them into a pyre, to burn alongside the ashes of the defenders.

Corvus remained facing the East Prime Gate with the main body, the cavalry and the baggage-park.

Stockades of sharpened logs went up in great skeins around the walls, dotted with watchtowers, and beacons were stacked up at key locations, ready to be lit should the defenders decide to sally forth and challenge the tightening grip on the city.

Machran was wholly surrounded, every road blocked, every means of egress from the city overlooked by men in arms. It was cut off from the outside world.

“What is it this morning? More of that damned barley broth? Get it away from me,” Rictus snapped.

Fornyx blew on the steaming bowl. “At least it’s hot. Most of the army breakfasts on stale bread and goat meat so high it bleats as you put it in your mouth.”

“I could do with some of that.”

“Severan says nothing with a taint in it – you’re still too weak. Now be a good boy and eat your fucking broth.”

Rictus grunted in pain as he sat up in the bed and took the bowl from Fornyx. “How’s a man supposed to heal without a bit of meat or a splash of wine?”

“You have me there.” Fornyx leaned back in the leather-strapped chair and closed his eyes a second. The brazier to one side gave off a shimmer of heat, and the air in the tent was close.

“Open the flap, will you? I can’t breathe in here. That smoke-vent hardly lets any air in at all.”

Fornyx opened his eyes again. “You want to take the lung fever? Last week you were flat on your back coughing up green slime and talking to people who weren’t there. Another fever will carry you off, Severan says. You’re not the young buck you used to be, made out of rawhide and horse’s piss. None of us are.”

“Then talk to me, Fornyx. Tell me the news.”

Fornyx looked at his friend closely. Rictus had been pared back to the essentials of life; sinew, bone and corded muscle. His skull seemed too large for his body now, despite the broadness of his shoulders, and he had lost the outdoor ruddiness of wind and sun and snow. His face had the pallor of an invalid, and there were blue rings beneath his eyes that had not been there before.