The noise rose – men were fighting, it was clear now. They heard the clash of iron, and. someone shrieked, a death-scream.
“Phobos!” Kassander cursed, and he began to run.
Rictus felt the man’s blood spatter warm across his face as the drepana took the fellow’s arm off above the elbow. He was unused to the heavy lowland weapon; it felt like a butcher’s cleaver in his grasp, made for chopping and slashing.
He had the end of his cloak wrapped round his left arm, and threw it up in the next man’s face, making him flinch long enough for the drepana to arc round again and open his belly. A stink of shit and hot meat as his entrails flopped down his legs into the mud, entangling his feet. The man tripped up and gave a high-pitched scream, rolling in the ropes of his own insides.
“Now,” Corvus snapped, “back to us.”
Rictus turned in the space he had made and darted between Corvus and Druze. The Igranian’s pelta had been chopped in two and hung bloody from his arm. In the other his sword described a vertical circle as neat as a juggler’s flourish, and another one of the enemy went to his knees, wide-mouthed in disbelief, and then fell flat, cleaved open from collar to breastbone.
Corvus leapt in with a flash and took down a third. “Machran!” he shouted. “Machran to me!”
A gap opened up in the ring that surrounded them and they were through it in a moment, slashing to left and right, out of the firelight and into the rainswept dark. Rictus tripped on a guy-rope and went on his elbows, only to be seized upright by the scruff of his neck and shoved onwards. Even in that instant, he found himself startled by the brute strength in Corvus’s thin frame.
More men running at them, weapons in their hands. They were in the midst of a massive, congealing mob of bewildered figures, all shouting at once. The wounded were squealing behind them, and torches were being lit from the campfires. The rain hammered down on their faces and their legs were drained of energy, nothing more than mindless sinew hauling on the bone.
Rictus thought his chest was about to burst. He could not speak. Corvus and Druze both grabbed him and half-dragged his burly form through the tent-lines. An animal growl rose out of his throat; anger went white hot through his limbs and restored some sense to his head.
“Get the fuck off me.” He shook away their helping hands.
Men shouted enquiries at the trio, unsure. Druze tossed aside his split shield and tucked his maimed arm in his cloak, bundling up the fabric around a slash which had laid him open to the bone.
“Knucklebones,” Corvus said loudly, panting. “Cheating bastards tried to rob us. They’re still at it back there.”
“Halt and identify yourselves,” some officious prick yelled at them.
“Kiss my arse. We have a hurt man here – go stop that fight back there,” Rictus shot back.
“Hold your ground!”
There were too many around them, crowding as men will about bad news or a quarrel. Rictus reversed his drepana and punched the officious prick low down in the groin with the wooden bulb of the weapon’s pommel, then shouldered him aside. When the man next to him protested in snarling outrage, Corvus laid the flat of his sword against his temple, and he went down like a dropped sack of sand.
“Out of our bloody way.”
They were through again, into the darkness, a tight, determined knot moving with a purpose, like an arrowhead plunging through the bowels of an ox.
Kassander bent and held the lamp up as he entered the tent. Karnos followed, mastering the impulse to retch at the stench within.
“What in the world happened here?”
The bloodied man in the torn chiton was holding the flesh of his forearm onto the bone, gore dripping in black strings from between his clenched fingers.
“He came in here like something sent by Phobos. He had a white face, and eyes, eyes like -”
“What happened to these men?” Kassander asked patiently. The inside of the tent was a charnel house, chopped-up corpses steaming as the heat left them. The back of the tent had a rent slashed in it from top to bottom.
“We had a girl, a slave girl the mess had gotten from the wagon-park. We were taking turns on her and he came in out of nowhere – General, his eyes -they were not those of a man. He came in here like a storm, killing right and left. There were others with him. They grabbed him as he was about to finish me off, cut open the back of the tent, and then they all went out that way. They cut us up like we were rabbits on a block, general. They were not men at all.”
The man was in white bloodless shock, his lips blue. “Go to the carnifex,” Kassander told him. “I’ll talk to you later. What’s your name?”
“Lomos of Afteni, your honour.”
“All right Lomos, get out.”
“Wait – where’s the girl?” Karnos demanded.
“She ran. She’s all right. It was just some fun, General, I swear.”
“Go – go on – get that looked at.”
Karnos and Kassander squatted on their haunches amid the carnage, the lamp’s light lending a flicker of mocking movement to the bodies. Karnos counted five men there. It was as close as he had ever come to violent death in his life thus far, and while his stomach was still heaving, his mind studied the scene with a revolted fascination.
“Drepana wounds,” Kassander said, moving the lamp this way and that. “The strawheads use stabbing swords. We must find that girl – perhaps she was not a slave at all, and had relations in camp – it has been known. Come, Karnos.”
The camp was bristling like a kicked anthill now. The two men emerged into the rain to find that something was still going on, out near the eastern lines. A fully armed centurion with a transverse crest halted in front of Kassander.
“General, we think the enemy is behind this -there are infiltrators in the camp, and they’ve been raising hell. We have men hurt and killed all over the eastern end.”
“Phobos!” Kassander hissed. He scraped a hand through his hair and turned to Karnos. “This makes no sense.”
“Is it the precursor to an attack, you think?” Karnos asked. His heart lurched in his chest. Only a few days before, the notion of battle – real warfare, with himself in the thick of it – had seemed like the stuff of distant and slightly absurd conjecture. Here, in the chaos of rain and firelight, with other men’s blood soaked into his feet, it was real and terrifying.
“We must turn out the army, just in case,” Kassander decided. He turned to the centurion, noticing the alfos sigil on his shield. “Are you from Afteni?”
“Yes, general – these are my men butchered here.”
“Pass it along the lines – the men are to arm and stand-to. I want them formed up on the eastern side, by centon.” He turned to Karnos, his big, good natured face something entirely different now.
“We must gather the Kerusia, and rouse out all the contingents at once. There’s no telling what this presages.”
Karnos nodded. “You’re the soldier, Kassander.”
“You’re the man who got us all here, brother. It’s your job to talk to the other city leaders. We must assemble the army at once.”
Rictus, Corvus and Druze collapsed in the sucking mere some half pasang from the enemy camp, and lay in the freezing water, utterly spent.
“It must be near daylight,” Rictus said. “We have to get on, or we’ll be stuck out here like cockroaches on a tabletop when the sun comes up.”
Corvus was wiping blood from his face with the corner of his sodden cloak. “Agreed. Look at them, Rictus; you see what we have done?”
There were torches lit all over the enemy camp now, travelling up and down it like fireflies. Even out here they could hear the surf of noise on the hill, men’s voices raised in an angry clamour.
“Reminds me of stoning a hornet’s nest when I was a boy,” Druze said.
“It was madness,” Rictus said, turning to Corvus. “By rights, we three should be dead in there, or captive.”
“I saw your face when you looked in that tent,” Corvus said, unabashed. “There was a time when you would have done the same thing. You wanted to, tonight.” “I have learned to think of the consequences of my actions.”