Paul Kearney - Corvus

Karnos went everywhere in a nondescript box chair now, borne by four of his most trusted slaves. When he walked on the streets openly he would not get a hundred paces before some woman would be holding her sick baby up to him and shrieking. So he went through the streets of Machran – his city -looking out from behind a twitching curtain while the slaves negotiated a way through the febrile crowds, aided by a file of spearmen who were unafraid to use their shields to bowl the stubborn or bloody-minded out of the way.

He watched as day by day the great capital of the Macht, with its towering marble buildings and soaring domes, became a cesspool of the desperate and the wicked. Little could be done about public order, because the spearmen were needed on the walls – even so, they had put out two major fires in the last week.

He climbed out of the box-chair in front of his house, and Polio was waiting for him, slamming the heavy doors behind him, and shutting out the close-packed chaos of the streets outside. Like water, the people seemed to gather in the hollows of the city in preference to the hilltops, and the Kerusiad Hill was quieter than the districts around the Empirion and the Amphion.

As for the Mithannon, it had become a law unto itself, and gangs were operating there with relative impunity. Not the old, well-established street-tribes of Machran, but new, disorderly, vicious bodies of desperate men who would not pick up a weapon to defend the walls, but would fight to maintain control over the few wretched alleyways they considered theirs to rule.

No doubt that was where Sertorius and his henchmen were now.

The three had broken out of the villa the day after they had arrived and had disappeared into the vastness of Machran. There was no point in trying to find them again; they would fit well into the anarchy prevailing in the Mithannon. Karnos was glad they were gone, in a way that made him feel ashamed. He had wanted the three of them dead, for the brute animals that they were, but his own part in the death of Rictus’s wife left him with dirty hands. He did not feel he had the right to sit in judgement over anyone anymore, no matter what Kassia said.

He was not the only one, either. Phaestus had joined his family in a rented villa further down the hill, and Karnos had not spoken to him since the day after his arrival in the city. He was failing fast, at any rate, coughing his lungs out of his mouth piece by piece. Antimone’s wings beat over him now, and from what Philemos had told Karnos, the old man did not seem to mind. He had led a blameless life, but had ended it with one brutal act, and seemed to feel that his painful death was punishment for it.

We all think more and more in terms of death and the gods these days, Karnos thought. We flick out our libations and make light of it when we have wine inside us and the wolf is far from the door, but break down our world a little, let us glimpse the eyes watching us from beyond the firelight, and we call on the gods like children wailing for a parent.

“Any trouble?” he asked Polio automatically.

“No, master. The guard’s day shift was just relieved. There is nothing to report.”

Twice in the last fortnight, prowling mobs had sallied up the hill looking for the house of Karnos, to let him know just how much they resented his mishandling of the city’s administration. Twice, Machran spearmen had beaten them back, and killed several of their own citizens in the process.

Law and order, Karnos thought. In the end it all comes down to who has the biggest stick.

“Have we visitors?”

“Master Philemos is here, and the lady Kassia is waiting for you. Polemarch Kassander sent word by runner that he will be here for dinner.”

“Dinner!” Karnos laughed. “Very well. Thank you, Polio.”

He looked in on Rictus’s children. They had a suite of rooms at their disposal, and he had hired a quiet, middle-aged Arkadian woman to look after the youngest.

She was kneeling on the floor now with the little russet-haired girl, Ona, and the two of them were assembling wooden blocks in front of a meagre fire.

For weeks now, the child had withdrawn from the world. She cried silently night and day, and would speak to no-one except her sister, but would become absorbed at the sight of a trinket or crude toy, crooning over it for hours.

The room was warm, at least, and there were a couple of lamps burning. He met the eyes of the nurse and shook his head when she made to lift the little girl for him to look at, then walked past the doorway without a sound, feeling like a thief in his own home.

Rian, Rictus’s beautiful eldest daughter, was in the inner courtyard, sat on a bench with a blanket round her shoulders. Philemos stood in front of her, chattering away. He was quite a talker when he got going, Philemos. Karnos liked the lad; he had courage, though he would never be physically formidable, and he was clearly besotted with Rian.

Karnos stood silently behind a pillar and watched the pair of them. Rian’s skin was pale as a hawthorn bloom, and her ordeal had brought out the exquisite bones of her face. Sadness made her features even finer. Philemos had told Karnos of their journey to Machran, and he knew there was a strength in Rian that matched that of her dead mother.

You had a fine family, Rictus, Karnos thought. You should have kept out of all this, stayed in the hills and left your spear by the door. How could a man not be happy with what you had?

Rian looked up and saw him there. Philemos paused in mid flow, and gave her his hand. They came towards him side by side, and Karnos suddenly realised that the affection was not all one way.

It was Kassia who had drawn their eyes. He could smell her perfume as she came up behind him and slid her arm through his.

“The master of the house returns. How went the day, Karnos?”

He set his hand on hers, smiled at Philemos and Rian.

“It goes much better now than it did. What say you we all take a seat by the fire, and I’ll tell you about it?”

The foraging party was two hundred strong, strung out along two pasangs of track, its column broken up by lumbering waggons and the braying stubbornness of a mule train. At its head a knot of horsemen rode with their cloaks pulled up over their heads, and the tall Niseians plodded below them in gaunt doggedness, their coats staring and as muddy as the harness of their masters.

“Old Urush here is near the end of his rope,” one of them said in Kefren, patting the corded neck of his mount. “It’s been nothing but yellow grass and parched oats for him these three weeks past.”

“The Macht eat horses,” another said. “They think nothing of it. How can a race pretend to civilization when they will eat a horse?”

“You might be glad of a taste of it ere we’re done,” a third said, a grin splitting the golden skin of his long face. “Ardashir, what say you?”

Their leader reined in and held up one long-fingered hand. “Shoron, you have good eyes – look south to where the track goes round the spur of the hill, maybe seven pasangs.”

“I can’t see a thing. The rain is like a cloud in this country.”

“Wait a moment, it will shift – there. You see?”

The Kefren called Shoron dug his knees into the withers of his horse and raised himself up off the saddle. He shaded his eyes as though it were a summer day.

“Mot’s blight, that’s infantry, a column marching this way. I count… blast the rain. Maybe five thousand – the column’s at least a pasang long. Could be more.”

“Bless your sight, Shoron,” Ardashir said. He looked back at the long train of horsemen and waggons and mules behind him. His mount picked up his mood and began to lumber impatiently. He hissed at it. “Easy, Moros, you great fool.” He shook his head.