He had to shake his mind into the moment; the scenes before him were so familiar that the sense of danger was dulled.
He stopped short when he caught sight of the namis sigil on some shields, painted in blue. These were men of Nemasis, with whom he had fought only the summer before. The gap-toothed man with the shaven head was Isaeos, the idiot whose bumbling had cost lives and lost months in Rictus’s last contract. He bent his head into his hood as he passed by.
The mismatched trio of filthy strangers wandered through the camp without challenge, three more nameless Macht in a sea of them. Rictus stopped counting sigils after he reached twenty. Every city of the hinterland was here, and yet the camp was not big enough to accommodate their full levies. Some must have been sending token contingents, no more. Even among the members of the Avennan League, there were hostilities and rivalries. Karnos had done well to come so far with so many.
No-one challenged them. Rictus was not surprised. He had known citizen armies all his life. They would fight like lions when the time came, but the idea of camp discipline was beyond them; one might as well try to herd cats.
After only a few weeks with Corvus, he had begun to take for granted the efficiency of the army on the far side of the plain, to view it with even a trace of indulgence. He had all but forgotten that his Dogsheads were the exception, not the rule, and that Corvus had made something surprisingly different out of his own host.
Once again, he found himself looking at this Kufr half-breed from a revelatory new angle.
Kufr. Now that was something to factor into things.
The three interlopers grew in confidence, emboldened by the black night, the rain and the muck-stains which made them almost indistinguishable from every other man in the camp. Rictus accepted a squirt of wine from a good-natured drunken fellow with the machios sigil tattooed on his arm, and went so far as to ask him where Karnos’s tent might be found.
“That fat bastard?” the man cried. “He’s still in Machran with his cock up some slave-girl’s arse. It’s Kassander you want, friend – he commands here. What are you, some kind of messenger? Fucking rain – ain’t it a bitch, eh?” He staggered off, plashing through the muck with the bullish determination of the drunk who knows where he wants to go.
“The more I hear of this Karnos fellow, the more I like him,” Druze said with his thick black brows beetling up his forehead. “Had I the choice -”
A woman’s scream cut across him, shrill and terrified.
“I said,” Druze went on, “Had I the choice I’d much prefer -”
“Shut up,” Corvus snapped. “Rictus, where was that?”
Rictus pointed down the haphazard line of tents. “It’s not our concern, Corvus. There’s nothing more to be seen here.”
He was ignored. Corvus strode off on his own in the direction of the scream.
“Oh, shit,” Druze muttered, and grasped Rictus by the arm, taking off in his leader’s wake. “Rictus, for Phobos’s sake, get a hold of him.”
Corvus moved like a black, silent raptor through the tent lines, with Rictus and Druze trailing him.
He had thrown back his hood, and his eyes caught the light of the campfires and reflected it back a violent green.
He pulled back a tent flap, and out of the interior blew a blare of lamplight, the stink of men’s sweat, and something else, something high and keen and bitter in the night. Fear.
TEN
Karnos woke with a start. He had barely been asleep anyway. Some gaudy dream of standing talking to a crowd, and the men he spoke to were all cheering him, shouting his name, and sharpening knives.
Subtle, he thought with a mental grunt. Phobos, how is a man to live like this, for weeks at a time? I am Speaker of Machran. I made this army – I created it out of nothing. It is here by my will.
He turned in the straw, snarling and tugging his cloak about with him. They could at least have made me some kind of bed… there are ticks in this straw.
He scratched his crotch violently, and cursed aloud. Awake now.
In all seriousness – how does a man live like this? He thought of his well-stuffed mattress in Machran, and little Grania in it with her white skin and soft mouth. Or that new girl – the one with the lovely arse.
Here he was, one cloak to his name, lying on tick-infested straw with the damp of the ground creeping through it.
He opened his eyes wide.
The lamp was almost out of oil; a blue, guttering blossom pulsing round the wick. It was almost wholly dark in the tent.
What in hell was that?
He heard it again; a distant uproar, men shouting. He was used by now to the sound of the interminable quarrels, the fights that flared up out of nowhere; these were the background noises of the camp. But this was different; more urgent.
He sat up, adjusted the lamp so the end of the wick had a last drop of oil to suck into, and as the light strengthened, he scrabbled through the straw which lined the tent floor, fumbling for sandals, sword; anything which might orientate him to this strange and new place the night had found him in.
The tent flap was flung open and he saw a black silhouette with fire behind it.
“Some trouble over at the eastern end – might be nothing, but it sounds ugly. Want to come along?”
Kassander’s voice.
“Fuck it, yes. I’m awake now anyway. What time of the night is it?”
“The bad time, when men are tired but not quite asleep. This may only be a brawl.”
“I said I’m coming,” Karnos snapped, hopping into his sandals with his sword slung over one shoulder. “Help me with my cloak, will you? Phobos, what a life.”
In a camp this large, Karnos felt like a tick on the hide of some great unknown beast. He had never truly tried to imagine what a host of some twenty thousand men might look like; he had merely totted up the numbers as they came in. If they stood eight men deep in battle array their line would stretch around three pasangs.
It was as though a new and noisome city of leather and shit and woodsmoke had been planted on the world, and here he was in the middle of it, one more face in a teeming sea of them.
This was not like holding forth on the floor of the Empirion – the rules were different here. Walking through the camp, he was accorded a certain amount of -affectionate regard from the Machran host, a level of curiosity from the men of the other cities, but should a Cursebearer chance by, their eyes would be drawn to the black armour instantly, with a degree of awe that was almost religious.
I must get one of those one day, Karnos thought. It would perfect the image. Or redeem it, maybe.
He was a wealthy man; in the past he had tried to buy Antimone’s Gift from Cursebearers down on their luck, but his offers had been rebuffed with such contempt that he had given up on the exercise. Once a man had one of those things on his back, it seemed it took up some space in his soul. Death was all that would make him part with it. It was one of the gauges of a city’s greatness; how many Cursebearers it had as citizens.
There will be a few on the ground before all this is over, Karnos thought. I will talk to Kassander about it.
The two of them picked their way through the camp lines. The men had been sheltering in their tents, grumbling their way into sleep, or sharing a skin of wine, or rattling a game of knucklebones. Now the place was stirring again, and the paths between the bivouac lines were filling up with yawning, bad-tempered crowds, wondering what was causing the racket.
“I bet it’s the Aftenai again,” Kassander muttered. “A more bloody-minded set of fractious bastards I’ve never seen.”