Corvus

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?”

Fornyx looked mystified, but Rictus understood perfectly.

“Let me see, then.”

The armour came up off its stand, light as leather, harder than any stone. Rictus opened the two halves of it and Corvus slid his arm into the gap. He was sweating.

The clasps snapped shut, and then the wings came down and clicked into place. Corvus stood tugging at the neck of the cuirass. “It’s too big,” he rasped.

“Wait a second,” Rictus said, remembering the first time he had donned his own cuirass, on the Kunaksa hills. This boy’s father had told him to put it on.

Corvus’s face changed. “It’s shifting. I can feel it.”

“It will mould to your body. It only takes a second.”

Something lit up in Corvus’s strange eyes. “It’s done, Rictus. It fits as though it was made for me.”

Fornyx clapped the shoulder of the youth’s black armour. “There you go; a Cursebearer at last. What a vision we are, three men in black and scarlet.”

Corvus wiped his eyes. “Thank you, Rictus. I have been travelling a long time, to feel I have the right to this. I was never sure -”

“You are Macht. It was made for you to wear,” Rictus said. “After tomorrow you will be our king. Be worthy of the armour and the crown.”

Corvus looked up at him. “These last weeks, since we took Machran, I have been receiving delegations from every city worthy of the name. Men that reviled me now put their signatures to edicts congratulating me.”

“They’ve had enough of war for a season,” Fornyx said. “They’re ready for something new, anything so long as the fighting ends.”

“I trust men like Kassander more – men who fought me openly, who kept trying until the very end. Men like that are worth something.”

Rictus thought of Phaestus, of Karnos. If they were alive right now he would kill them himself. And yet he had a daughter who loved Phaestus’s son.

“I’ve heard it said that only Antimone truly knows the hearts of men,” Rictus said, “and that is why she weeps.”

“When I turned up at your farm that morning, Rictus, I never thought that it would lead to where it did,” Corvus said. “I wish it could have been different.”

“It’s been a long road,” Rictus said. “None of us know what’s around the next bend in it.”

He thought of Jason, this boy’s father. Eunion, that good and gentle man. And Aise, whose life had ended in torment. All because of him.

Their lives, their deaths; they would be with him always in a blackened corner of his soul.

“We just keep marching,” Rictus said softly. “That is what we do. We carry the Curse of God on our backs and go into the dark together.”

“There are times when I am not sure what it means, to be one of the Macht,” Corvus said. “And I know I do not yet know what it means to be a king.

“Tomorrow the leaders of the Macht will all be there to see the circlet put on my head, men from fifty cities, a crowd of thousands. But what that means, for me and them, I am not yet sure.”

Rictus looked down at him, this terrible, earnest young man with the strange eyes.

“It will come to you,” he said. “In time.”