The gates were wide open now, and Karnos walked through them, close-wrapped in a wool cloak of his own. Murchos followed him, a bear of a man made more feral by the rough goatskin. And behind the pair the centon of spearmen advanced, some ninety armoured men in close ranks.
Three men in red cloaks stood awaiting them in the shadow of the walls, one holding aloft a branch of. olive wood with a few thin leaves clinging to it. Around them, scores of corpses still lay contorted on the cold ground, the residue of Corvus’s diversionary attack of the night before. The three looked like the sole survivors of some disaster as they stood there amid the tumbled bodies of the dead.
None of them were Rictus, Karnos noted at once, disappointed. He slid his good arm out of his cloak and raised his hand.
“Close enough, friend – what is it you’ve come to say?”
The branch-bearer was a lean, wiry man with a black beard. He walked forward a few steps, his feet cracking the ice which had gathered in the frozen rutted mud of the roadway. Blood, too, had frozen in puddles hard as gemstones, but he avoided stepping on it. He let his cloak fall back and Karnos saw that he was a Cursebearer; he studied the man’s face more intently.
“Fornyx?”
The man smiled. “You have a good memory for faces, Karnos. We only met the once, I think.”
“You’re Rictus’s second, aren’t you?”
“I was.” A spasm of pain crossed the lean man’s features. “I come here to ask you a favour, one soldier to another.”
Karnos’s eyebrows shot up his forehead. “After last night, I find this a strange time to -”
“Rictus of Isca died on your walls last night. I have come to ask you for his body.”
Karnos’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. He looked like a landed fish. Murchos sprang forward. “What’s that you say?”
Fornyx’s face was a study in sinew and bone. His eyes flashed. “You heard me. I ask your permission to search through the bodies on your walls.” His jaw worked as though he wanted to bite back the words as he spoke them. “I lay no claim to his armour. I want only to be able to burn him decently, for his wife’s sake.”
The news had run through the ranks of the spearmen in the gateway. Their voices were a low buzz of wonder.
“Quiet!” Murchos shouted.
“This could be a trick,” Karnos said, more for form’s sake than anything else; he could read a man’s face, and he knew that Fornyx was telling the truth.
“I will enter the city alone, if you like. I’m not a spy – I know Machran well in any case. I wish only to do the decent thing by my friend.”
Karnos nodded. He saw something else in Fornyx’s eyes, an anger smouldering alongside the grief. That was interesting. He turned and looked at Murchos. The big Arkadian seemed torn between astonishment and glee. He made a show of considering the matter a moment.
“Very well, then. You can enter – you alone. Your companions can wait here. The gate will be shut, and I will escort you myself.”
Fornyx bowed slightly. He nodded to the other two mercenaries who accompanied him, handing the olive branch to a young man with a scar that tugged his face askew, and then stepped into the shadow of the South Prime Gate.
The spearmen made a lane for Karnos and Fornyx, while Murchos ordered the gates shut in a voice of brass. They clunked shut with a boom, and Fornyx stopped and looked at them in wonder.
“First time I ever saw them shut, close to,” he said. “You must have had a hell of a time loosening those old hinges.”
“It took enough oil to drown an ox,” Karnos said. “But then, we’ve plenty to spare. Perhaps you’d care for some wine before we begin your sad task? I’m sure I can lay hands on a skin.”
Fornyx’s mouth twisted in a half-smile. “You are a shifty bastard, Karnos. But I make a point of never refusing wine, especially on a morning like this.”
“I’ll have some sent to the wall. We can pour a libation for the dead.”
The dead still lay in heaps. Many hundreds of men had died on the walls of the Goshen Quarter and the clean-up process had only begun. The bodies of the enemy were first looted, stripped of arms, armour and any trinkets of value, and then the defenders tossed their stiff, stripped carcasses over the parapet to lie like gutted fish in the street below. Waggons waited there, and municipal slaves with the machios sigil painted on their tunics were loading the corpses upon them like cords of wood.
Fornyx drained his wine-cup while standing beside Karnos on the battlements he had fought atop the night before. They were treacherous with frozen blood. It was splashed about the stone of the merlons as liberally as paint. Karnos raised his voice and called a halt to the grisly work.
“What will you do with them?” Fornyx asked him.
“Our own dead will be burned on a pyre outside the Mithannon with all the proper rites, if Corvus will allow us to do so without harassment.”
“He will. He has authorised me to promise that.”
Karnos inclined his head. “Your people are your own affair. They will be hauled north separately, and left on the banks of the Mithos.”
“You would leave them there like carrion?”
“You are our enemy, Fornyx. I will not use up the city’s resources to make you a pyre.”
“Fair enough. Give me some more, will you?” He held out his cup.
Karnos filled it himself from a wineskin. Soldier’s wine, as raw as vinegar. Fornyx downed the cup in a single throat-searing swallow.
“It was a good enough way to die. At least he did not fall in some poxed little skirmish somewhere. The walls of Machran are a grand enough stage even for Rictus.”
“He could have been defending these walls. I asked him – you know that,” Karnos said.
“I know. In the end, it was his curiosity that killed him.”
“How so?”
Fornyx smiled. “Come, Karnos – you must have felt it yourself. This phenomenon, Corvus. Tell me you would not like to meet him.” “I would,” Karnos conceded. “But the price of his fame has been too high.”
“Yes it has,” Fornyx said. And then: “More wine.”
The cup was refilled and emptied again. Fornyx’s eyes were bloodshot and watering with the potent stuff, but his face remained as hard as ever. Karnos merely sipped at his own cup, watching the mercenary closely.
“Your men died well,” he said, “but there cannot be many of the Dogsheads left now. They are a dying breed.”
“They are dead. They died here with Rictus. I am done with this war, Karnos. I am going home. Rictus’s wife is a woman -” he halted, looked into his cup, frowning.
“Yes?” Karnos looked as prick-eared as a cat.
“Nothing. All I want now is to walk away from this.” A twisted smile flitted across his face.
“The fun has gone out of it, you might say. I care not a damn now whether Machran stands or falls.”
“You are lucky to be able to do so. For us within these walls, there is no such choice.”
“That is war. A man cannot always have what he wants.” Fornyx let the last of his wine trickle over the bloodstained stone of the walls. “For Phobos, who has the last word on us all.”
Karnos did the same. “For Antimone, who watches over us in pity.”
Fornyx tossed his cup away. “I must get started,” he said.
The short winter’s day ran its course, and as night came on the corpses lay contorted and hardening at the foot of Machran’s walls amid a wreckage of broken timber and iron, the ghastly flotsam of war. The bodies on the battlements were slowly cleared away, the waggons trundling into the night with their grisly loads, but no-one as yet had gone near the mounded charnel house piled up outside the city. Those who had died going up and down the ladders lay where they had fallen.
Rictus opened his eyes.
All day he had lain as still as the corpses surrounding him, drifting in and out of the world. His wounds had stopped bleeding, and he was almost beyond feeling the cold. He knew there were things broken in him, but he could not quite make out what they were. His black armour was so slathered with blood and gobbets of flesh that it had lost its unearthly darkness and was a dull red, the colour of a clay tile.