Corvus (41 page)

It echoed across
the earth. Druze heard it in the midst of the great slaughter at the east gate.
It carried clear across the city, so that Sertorius and his men lifted their
heads and paused a second to listen as they stood at the foot of the Kerusiad
Hill. Kassia and Rian heard it as they stood upon the balcony from which Aise
had leaped to her death, and peered out across the teeming bulk of Machran to
the battling formations on the plain beyond the walls, wondering what it
signified. It did not seem like a sound made by the agency of man. It sounded
like the muttered anger of the gods.

The Companions
broke into full, tearing gallop, and their lances came down, the wicked points
held out at breast-height. Too late, the morai of the League realised what was
thundering towards them from the south. Some managed to turn and present their
spears; others simply stood and stared at that rolling mass of murder
approaching, that black line of death.

The Companions
smashed into the Macht battle-line with the impact of a flash-flood. The
Niseians had been trained not to flinch from men, but to use their bulk, their
iron-shod hooves, their teeth. They were warriors as much as the Kefren who
rode them, and their sheer weight and momentum was irresistible.

The charge broke
upon the rear of the League army like an apocalypse and broke clear through it,
chopping the fighting centons of Avensis and Pontis to pieces.

Hundreds of men
were bowled off their feet, and the big horses trampled them into the bare muck
of the earth while their riders stabbed out with the long lances, a flickering
hedge of darting iron.

Parnon died there,
still struggling to make himself heard. The flower of the fighting men of two
cities were annihilated in a few minutes. The League army, which had been on
the cusp of routing the foes to their front, simply ceased to exist.

Men threw down
their shields and tried to squirm out of the press any way they could. Some
died fighting, clustered together in stubborn knots and clots, battling back to
back. More died without the opportunity to strike a blow, crushed in the deadly
space between Corvus’s anvil and the hammer he had sent galloping upon it.

The men on the
walls of Machran who were able to lift their heads and look south saw a long
vast rash of men and horses embroiled in a formless mob, pasangs long: the sun
glittering across it, catching spearpoints, the flash and gleam of helms and
shields tilted to the sky. And then the teeming crowd opened, and across the
plain men were running for their lives, hundreds, thousands of them, heading
south away from the walls.

But the horsemen
reformed their line and, before them, so did a long battered formation of
spearmen. They dressed their ranks, and began to advance north towards Machran
to join their comrades fighting and dying in the shadow of the walls, and they
were singing as they came.

MACHRAN

Something had changed
. Some kind of
current had gone through the men fighting and dying in the gatehouse of the
South Prime, like the hide of a horse twitching at the bite of a fly. Rictus
felt it -he had known it before on other battlefields, but so tight and
entangled and brutal was the fighting here that it almost went unnoticed.

The packed mass in
front of him seemed somehow to ease a little. He heard men shouting - not the
wordless baying of the othismos, but some kind of news that travelled through
the ranks of the enemy like fire on a summer hillside.

Fornyx was at his
side now, brought close by the murderous attrition of the battle. At the
beginning of the morning they had been separated by a full centon of men, but
those were all gone now.

“The League is in
flight, Rictus,” he yelled. There was blood on his mouth and all down his neck,
though they were all slathered in it. Impossible to tell until the thing was
done whether it was one’s own or other men’s gore.

“You hear them?
Corvus has done it - he’s beaten off the relief army.”

The pressure
slackened. Men were backing away now, the desperation still in them, but with
these tidings they knew the beginning of despair. They were fighting
automatically now, and hope was leaving their eyes - it was a thing impossible
to explain to any man who had not been in the belly of a hard fought battle,
but Rictus felt it too.

“Dogsheads!” His
voice was a gravel-hard croak. He reversed his broken spear at last to use the
sauroter. There were weapons aplenty lying at his feet, but they were all
broken. Men were fighting with swords now, but there was little room to swing,
and the slashing drepanas were hard to manipulate in the crowded phalanx.

“Dogsheads, on me
- advance!”

Fornyx was on his
left, Kesero on his right. The Dogshead banner was five feet above their heads,
but splashed with blood all the same. Rictus saw Valerian off to one side - he
had lost his helm and his mutilated face was streaming blood. All the old
veterans of the Dogsheads seemed to have moved up through the ranks and were in
the forefront. The newly trained men were good - better than any other spearmen
on the field - but they were still not the hardened veterans of Rictus’s old
command, and they were not bound to him in the way that these men were.

“Same old faces,”
Fornyx said with a grin. “You just can’t get rid of us, Rictus.”

“Same old game,
brother. One more push, and we’re over the hump. Can you feel it?”

The Dogsheads
surged forward. Before, it had been like setting their shoulder against a stone
wall. Now it was as though they were pushing on a rusted gate. There was
movement. The fight shifted, the men of Machran backing away foot by foot,
dying with every step. The fearsome crush in the gatehouse lessened.

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.