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.”
TWENTY- SEVEN
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.
“Spring is almost here,” Rictus said. “Planting season.”
“The snows will be melting,” Fornyx told him. “Another few days and the hills will be clear enough to walk.”
Rictus nodded as though they had both just agreed on something. Then they turned as one and continued walking down the cavernous corridor.
A pair of sentries stood holding spears before a deeply recessed wooden door. They, too, wore scarlet cloaks.
“Athys,” Rictus said to one of them. “How’s the leg?”
“Barely a scar, chief. I can run as fast as ever.”
“It’s all right. He’s expecting us.” Rictus opened the small door. He had to stoop to enter.
There was a fire burning in a round hearth, lamps hanging from the ceiling, and papers scattered over every available surface: chairs, tables, in cascades upon the floor.
“Corvus?” Rictus said.
Something stirred. There was an anteroom off to one side, a simple bed in the corner, an armour stand with a black cuirass perched upon it, and Corvus, dressed in a red chiton.
“You wanted to see us?” Rictus asked.
Corvus nodded. He was looking at the Curse of God with his arms folded. He had lately had his hair cropped short, and the thick black shock of it stood up like a brush. He looked more like a Macht than he had; flesh had been added to his slender bones.
Since the end of the campaign, the hard riding and marching had become a memory, and he slept now in the echoing maze of the Empirion, his tent packed away with the rest of the army’s baggage.
In this room as in the next, papers and maps covered everything. Parmenios had offices here in the Empirion, but kept them stacked and ordered like the ranks of a well-trained phalanx. This disorder was Corvus’s own.
Rictus saw a map of the Empire lying on the floor. He picked it up, old vellum that sagged in his hand. For a second he ran his finger across names and mountains and rivers that had seen the blood of his youth spilt across them, five thousand pasangs and twenty years away.
“It’s a big day tomorrow, chief,” Fornyx said breezily. “A bit like getting married. You ask me, you should either be drunk, or asleep.”
Corvus smiled. “You’re right, Fornyx; I suppose it is a kind of marriage.” He reached down and lifted something from beside the cuirass, something that glittered in the light of the lamps.
“Look at this. Silver from a mine on the slopes of Mount Panjaeos itself. Tomorrow Kassander of Machran will place it on my head, and I shall be a king.”
He tossed the circlet up into the air, caught it as though it were a gleaming child’s toy, and then set it down again.
“What do you think of the chiton?” he asked Rictus.
“I like the colour,” Rictus said with a raised eyebrow.
“From now on, all the army will wear scarlet.
It will be as much a symbol for us as the raven sigil. We’ll train up every spearman to match your Dogsheads, and we’ll teach Macht to ride horses and use bows like Ardashir and the Companions. We’ll have a siege train, designed by Parmenios. We will make an instrument of war, brothers, such as this world has never seen before.”
Rictus and Fornyx looked at one another.
“You’re to be crowned king of the Macht in the morning, Corvus,” Rictus said. “Who else is there left to fight?”
Corvus turned and smiled. “The world we live in is a big place, Rictus. You look hard enough, and you will always find someone willing to fight.”
He stepped forward and ran a hand down the lightless surface of the armour in front of him.
“But I didn’t ask you here to listen to me rant about the future. I wanted to ask you a favour, Rictus.”
“Just ask.”
Suddenly Corvus looked as wide-eyed and young as a boy confronting his father with a confession.
“Help me put it on,” he said.
He touched the armour again gently, as a man might stroke the arm of a woman too beautiful to notice him.
“I must do it now, tonight. I intend to be crowned wearing it tomorrow, and I must know – I have to know that I can wear it. Do you understand?”