Paul Kearney: Corvus

Two more of Sertorius’s men seized Kassia, and ripped the clothes from her back. One held her from behind while the other stripped her, laughing as she kicked and screamed at him.

Philemos stood still with Rian at his side, and behind them the fountain. He held out his sword and waved it back and forth as Sertorius and his men closed in on him.

Sertorius seemed in a high good humour. He stood looking at Philemos with a kind of amused tolerance. “I always knew you had spirit in you, boy – the way you fought for that little morsel behind you, up in the hills. The thing is, you got to learn when to walk away from a fight. Your father should have taught you that before he died.

“You got no more time for learning, now.”

Philemos was not looking at him. He was peering over Sertorius’s shoulder, at the broken doors behind, and his face was a picture of astonishment. Sertorius frowned, and turned himself.

Two men stood in the tall doorway of the house. They wore chitons and cloaks of scarlet, and one was armoured in the Curse of God. Naked drepanas glittered in their hands and their armour was covered in blood.

“What the fuck?” Sertorius said. His men all turned with him. The two manhandling Kassia released her and she ran to Rian, naked and weeping.

Rian stood with her eyes shining, full of tears.

“Father,” she said.

Rictus and Valerian advanced into the courtyard. There was a light in Rictus’s eyes that made the seven men in front of him back away.

“Rian?”

She stared brokenly at him. The breath sawed in and out of her as though she had suddenly come out of deep water.

Rictus looked over the men in front of him, saw Philemos.

“Where is my wife?”

Sertorius jerked his head at Adurnos, and the big man began sidling around Rictus with the two Arkadians.

“He raped her!” Rian screamed. “They raped her and she killed herself!” She broke down, sobs tearing out of her throat. “Daddy, they killed her, they killed her. She’s dead, she’s dead.” She sank to her knees.

Rictus’s eyes narrowed to slots of pale murder.

“Go left,” he said to Valerian, an animal’s sound, barely words at all.

“There’s better ways to end this, friend,” Sertorius said. “What’s done is done -”

Rictus leapt forward, his red cloak whirling up around him like a bloody cloud. The drepana leapt in his hand, a flash as swift as a hawk’s strike.

One of the Arkadians fell sideways with his throat slashed open. The other swung madly and missed as Rictus side-stepped, catching him off balance. He brought up his knee and slammed it into the man’s face, breaking bone. The Arkadian went down.

Big Adurnos charged like a bearded bull, punching Rictus in the mouth and stabbing with his own sword in the same moment.

The blade clicked off the Curse of God. Rictus soaked the blows up, backed away a step with blood running down his chin, and stepped in again. One, two, three flashes of cold iron, the clang as his drepana clashed with Adurnos’s sword, and the big man’s blade was knocked down. Rictus flicked up the point of the drepana and it ran smoothly into Adurnos’s groin.

He stopped, stock still, his mouth open and a look of sheer disbelief on his face.

Rictus twisted the blade and pulled it out and up, and Adurnos’s body opened up like a sack full of steaming meat. His insides fell down onto the flagstones of the courtyard with a wet slap. He looked down at them, scrabbling at the great rent in his body as the sight left his eyes, and he toppled.

Valerian had downed one of the Avennans, but the other one, along with Bosca and Sertorius, was pressing him back to the entrance, hacking at him. The remaining Avennan suddenly went down with a bitter cry of pain; Philemos had come up and stabbed him from behind.

Sertorius shouted with fury and turned on the boy.

Rictus shouldered Philemos out of the way, charging into the fight like a scarlet avatar of wrath. Sertorius’s sword slid off the black cuirass and Rictus swept his own blade down with a grunt, chopping through Sertorius’s arm close to the wrist. He cried out, raised the spurting stump and gripped it with his free hand. “No, no!” he screamed.

The sound distracted Bosca and Valerian stabbed him through the ribs, and as the man folded in on himself he raised his sword and brought it down two-handed, stabbing Bosca at the base of his neck. The drepana sliced through meat and bone. The head fell slack, attached to the body only by strings of sinew and skin and Bosca slumped to the ground, twitching. For a few seconds his eyes rolled in his head, and then he was still.

Sertorius had sunk to his knees, still clutching the stump of his arm. His face was chalk-white.

“The great Rictus!” he said, and managed something like a laugh. “Well, it’s something to have met a legend.”

Rictus stood panting in front of him, and wiped the blood from his chin. He looked over at Rian. Philemos was holding her in his arms, and she was staring at him with wide, bloodshot eyes. Beside her, Kassia was kneeling, naked, numb and silent.

Valerian was staring at Rian also. He saw how Philemos was looking at her, and closed his eyes a second.

Rictus wanted to ask Sertorius what he had done to Aise – for some reason he had to know. The great searing pain in his chest had to hear something, know something of Aise’s fate, no matter how bad it might have been.

“What did you do to my wife?” he asked Sertorius, and his voice cracked with strain, a grief he had not known he was about to feel. Agony, more raw than anything he had felt since he had been a boy.

Sertorius sneered. “Phaestus was right – Rictus the family man. Well, my friend, we used your wife like a little whore. We -”

The blade of the drepana silenced him, sliding easily into his mouth, chopping through his tongue and opening his cheeks, a last, wide smile. Sertorius gargled, choking on his own blood.

Rictus stood there, holding the blade, keeping the thief upright while he drowned and flailed in front of him. Finally it ended. Rictus tilted the sword, and Sertorius slid off it like meat off a skewer.

He turned around, unutterably tired, unwilling to contemplate the desolation that was being unveiled before him.

One of Sertorius’s men was still alive, the one with the broken face. Rictus nodded at Valerian, and the younger man killed him, a single clean thrust. Then he stared at Rian, but no longer with any hope in his eyes.

Rictus knelt in front of his daughter. “Where is Ona?”

“Hiding.”

“Rian,” Rictus said. His voice broke.

His daughter moved into his arms and he held her close to him, burying his face in her hair, crushing her against the black unyielding breast of Antimone’s Gift.

“I’m here,” he said, “I’m here. It’s all right. Everything will be all right now.”

The halls echoed with his footsteps, the nails in his sandals clicking on the marble. In alcoves set every few paces, the great leaders of Machran stood hewn in more marble. Dead faces, empty eyes, white stone.

All meaningless now. Whatever Machran had been to these men, it was something different today. Tonight. This quiet night near the tail end of a long and bloody winter.

Fornyx met him at the junction of the corridors and the two appraised each other for a moment.

“What do you think he wants?” Rictus asked.

“Why ask me?” Fornyx demanded. “You’re the father-figure here.”

They stood looking at one another, a tall, fair man with a haggard face, and a short, wiry black-bearded fellow some ten years younger. Both wore black cuirasses and scarlet cloaks. Both bore the marks of old wounds on every limb.