Paul Kearney - Corvus

Then the sun was on their faces again. They were through the gates, into the open square beyond, and Rictus’s men were opening out into line, centon by centon. Centurions stood only paces apart, so worn down had their commands become. But there were enough red cloaks to hold one side of the square.

Rictus looked up and saw to his left the white dome of the Empirion rise up out of the maze of streets before him, untouched and inviolate, whilst to his right was the bulk of Kerusiad Hill in the distance, whitewashed villas clinging to it like tiers of swallow’s nests. The gates were taken, and behind the Dogsheads fresh morai of spearmen were moving in support.

But the men of Machran were not yet beaten. They reformed on the far side of the square, and began to advance again. They were led by a Cursebearer, whose black armour was like a hole in the sunlight. He raised his spear and shouted for them to advance, and hundreds followed him, roaring.

“We need that bastard dead,” Fornyx said. “They see a Cursebearer go down, and I think we’ll have them.”

The Dogsheads lowered their spears, those who still had them, and charged. They kept their lines intact as they moved, where the enemy hurtling towards them had lost formation, becoming a mob of crazed men in bronze.

But they had momentum. As the two sides crashed into one another the Dogsheads were halted in their tracks by the savagery of the Machran assault, and all up and down the square the thing restarted in earnest.

The struggle in the gatehouse had been bitter; this one verged on insane. As men went down dying they clutched at the legs of their enemies, reached up under the short chitons to tear at their genitals. Rictus had a sandal pulled off his foot and brought his heel down on a snarling face, then stabbed the sauroter into an eye-socket.

The enemy Cursebearer was almost opposite now, and he left his own line and hurled his spear-butt in the man’s face. It clanged off his helm, making him look round. Rictus swung his shield and smashed it into the torso of a soldier opposite, kicked him in the knee-joint and drew his drepana. He stabbed downwards as though it were an oversized knife, not looking to see the damage it did. He hauled it free of quivering meat, trusted Fornyx to finish the job, and lunged into the enemy line, utterly unaware of the animal snarling from out of his own mouth, intent on coming to grips with the man in the black cuirass.

Their shields clashed. The other man stabbed down with his spear-butt and the sauroter point struck the rim of Rictus’s shield, clinked off the bronze, and skittered from the surface of his armour. The press had tightened again, and Rictus could not raise his sword. He let go of it, reached up and caught the Cursebearer’s spear. The sauroter sliced open his palm, but he was able to wrest it out of the other man’s grip. The man was tired. His neck was corded and gaunt under the helm, a big vein pulsing blue in the shadow of the cheek-guard.

Rictus flipped the spear-butt round, the two of them swaying breast to breast in the packed mass of the melee. He looked into the other man’s eyes through the helm-slot, felt a strange flash of recognition, and then stabbed downwards, into the man’s neck. The sauroter went so deep as to bury the bronze, and the Cursebearer slid bonelessly to the ground.

Something like a wail went up from the Machran men all around. “Karnos is dead, Karnos is dead!” they shouted.

It was the breaking point. The line fell apart, and into the gaps the Dogsheads lunged with methodical professionalism. Men were speared as they turned to flee, tripped up and stabbed before they could get past the reach of the spears, hemmed in by the mass of men boiling behind them. The battle in the square disintegrated; in moments, heartbeats, it transformed, became a slaughter.

“Fornyx,” Rictus said, panting. “Keep the push on – don’t let them reform.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Go on. I’ll catch up.”

Fornyx led the Dogsheads up the square with a roar that belied his wiry frame. The Machran defenders were in rout, and the Dogsheads broke formation to take up the pursuit. Behind them came hundreds more of Teresian’s and Demetrius’s centons, and looking back Rictus saw horsemen in the gateway now as well, the lead elements of Corvus’s cavalry.

He bent over and vomited onto the bloodsoaked stones, dropped his shield, and dragged off his helm, gasping for air.

Then he staggered over to the dying Cursebearer lying amid a mound of his own men, the spearshaft protruding obscenely from above his collarbone and his blood running down the black armour in a steady stream.

He knelt down and pulled off the man’s helm.

Karnos looked up at him with wide, white eyes, and after a moment, he smiled, blood oozing from his lips.

“Rictus of Isca? Am I dead already?”

“Karnos.” The round face was gone. Karnos had become a different man, familiar and changed all the same. A gaunt warrior who wore Antimone’s Gift as though he had been born for it.

“You will be soon,” Rictus said. He took the dying man’s hand, feeling an indefinable sadness. He had not thought much of the silver-tongued slave dealer who had once tried to employ him, but the man who lay before him now was someone else. “You fought well. I did not think you had it in you.”

“Rictus?” Karnos’s white face twisted into a picture of astonishment. The blood gurgled in his throat. He gripped Rictus’s hand until the bones creaked. “But you died, weeks ago. On the wall.” “Almost. I made it off the wall the quickest way I could.”

Karnos shut his eyes a moment. “Oh, Phobos, you filthy swine.”

“What is it, Karnos?”

“Listen to me.” Karnos coughed up a gout of blood, choking on it, and Rictus wiped it from his mouth, leaned close to catch the man’s failing breath.

“I have your children in my house. Your children, you understand? I am sorry, Rictus. I sought to use them against you. They are on the Kerusiad Hill.”

“My children?”

“Forgive me. Phaestus and I, we thought -”

Rictus’s face was a white, bloodstained mask of shock and fury. “My family?”

“You know the house – the big villa with earth-coloured walls. They are there, safe.”

“My wife!” Rictus said, his voice rising. “What about my wife? What have you done, Karnos?”

But Karnos was already dead.

The panic spread across the city in waves. Broken remnants of the Arkadians and Avennans were already streaming off. the walls, heading for the Mithannon, whist the men of Machran fought on hopelessly.

Their polemarch, Kassander, rallied a dozen centons below the towering dome of the Empirion itself, and led them back into the fray, but Corvus’s forces were already in command of most of the Avennan Quarter, and the siege towers had broken the defence to the east, in the Goshen.

Fully half the circuit of the walls had been taken by the enemy or abandoned by the defenders, and more of the besiegers were pouring through the gates by the minute, a tide “that seemed unstoppable. The citizens of Machran began flooding north and west, away from the fighting. Tens of thousands of people were on the move in the streets, in places packed as tight as the ranks of a fighting phalanx.

“The city has fallen,” Sertorius said. “That’s it, lads, I’m telling you: The whole thing is about to come crashing around our ears. Bosca, for Phobos’s sake, clear a way there – Adurnos, help him.”

They were going against the flow, a small determined fistful of men battling against the current of the panicked crowds, clearing a path for themselves with the threat of their drawn swords, and sometimes with the flat of them slapped into someone’s face. The streets leading into the Goshen Quarter were a madhouse of screaming women and shrieking children, bloodied men fleeing the lost battle of the walls.