Corvus by Paul Kearney Read Free Book Online Page B

eyes as the sun caught them in
passing.
    “Perhaps you would
like us to turn back,” he said, setting a hand on Druze’s shoulder. The nails
had been painted scarlet some time ago, but the paint had worn and flecked. He
looked as though he had been scrabbling in blood.
    “If you do, then I
cannot see us arguing with two men such as yourselves. Even the five of us are
no match for two Cursebearers. So consider yourselves the victors.” A smile
under the hood. “There is no need for blood to be splashed on such a bright
morning.”
    “Agreed. Turn back
out of this valley, and we will part in amity,” Rictus said. He lowered his
spear but kept his left shoulder towards the strangers, the shield covering
him.
    “So be it,” the
small man said. “Though, if I could, I would like to know the names of those
who turn us back on our tracks.”
    “You think me a
fool?” Rictus asked lightly. They were all young, these five men, and the
speaker perhaps the youngest of them all, yet their gear had seen much service,
and they stood with the easy, yet alert poise of trained soldiers. These were
no mere citizens. Something about all this was wrong.
    “I hear tell that
Rictus of Isca lives in this glen,” the hooded youth said. “He’s a much storied
man, and a Cursebearer to boot. If I were to encounter him, I’d like to know I
had, just for the telling of the tale later.”
    “Cursebearers do
not just spring up out of the ground, especially so high and far from civilized
life,” Druze added, spreading his hands like a reasonable man. “You cannot
blame us for being curious.”
    “Perhaps Rictus
prefers to keep himself to himself,” Fornyx said.
    “He has every
right to do so,” the hooded man replied. “Believe us when I say we wish him no
ill. I have been reading stories of the Ten Thousand since I was a boy. It
would be a banner-day in my life, were I to meet their leader face to face.”
    He raised his
head, and for the first time looked Rictus eye to eye. “You have my word on that.”
    His face was pale,
and there was something odd about his eyes. But before Rictus could quite grasp
it, the youth had lowered his gaze again.
    “Phobos,” Fornyx
cursed.
    “Go left,” Rictus
murmured out of the corner of his mouth. These young men were not going to back
down. The morning was going to end in blood after all.
    Louder, Rictus
said; “Leave now. No more questions, no more talk. Leave, or die here.” Both he
and Fornyx raised their spearheads to throat height and assumed attack stances.
    Not one of the men
moved. The hooded youth sighed, reached into his sleeve and brought forth a
cheap wooden flute, the kind soldiers whittle for themselves in their
encampments.
    “I will not fight
you, Rictus,” he said calmly - he was too calm. Even as Rictus and Fornyx
advanced, neither he nor any of his men stirred, but the youth put the flute to
his lips - they were as red as a girl’s- and played a shrill melody, a fragment
of a marching tune Rictus had heard half a hundred times before.
    And instantly, the
forest came to life all around them.
    Men rose up out of
the snow, from behind trees, out of the brush. They had been lying under white
cloaks, hiding in the thickets. Their appearance set the woods alive with
frightened birds.
    In a moment,
Rictus and Fornyx were surrounded by dozens, scores of armed soldiers,
blue-faced with cold. Some had bows, others javelins, and yet more unsheathed
their drepanas so that cold iron glittered in the snow-brightness.
    They stood silent
and watching, like legendary warriors brought to magic life out of the very
soil of the earth.
    “Damn,” Fornyx
said. “The little bastard.”
    There was the
white, draining shock of it, the knowledge it was all over, his whole life
finished at last.
    So this is how it
ends, Rictus thought. For me, for Fornyx, for all of us. He thought of Aise and
the girls, and what would happen to them now, and he fought down the automatic
impulse to charge,