were green as grass and the only men in the army who had not yet been blooded in a great fight. But Corvus was strolling alongside them now, as earnest in talk as if they were his oldest veterans. He told them one of Fornyx’s dirty stories, which set up a roar for yards up and down the files. He did not tell it as well as Fornyx, and Rictus was not even sure he found it amusing himself, but he told it well, with the skill of a natural mimic.
The boy could have been an actor, if all else had failed, Rictus thought.
Corvus looked up at the snowbitten red cloak on the horse, raised a hand. ‘It’s my old warhorse,’ he cried, ‘on his old warhorse. Phobos, Rictus, can’t you let us find you something better to ride than that nag?’
‘She suits me well enough. Corvus, a word, if I might.’
Corvus mounted, raised a hand to the farewells of the grinning spearmen who a half hour before had been glum as owls, and he and Rictus trotted upslope, into the falling snow.
‘I may have seen something. We’re well into the mountains now, and this is the place for them.’
‘Qaf?’
Rictus nodded. Corvus brightened. ‘What a wonder that would be — like seeing a myth made flesh.’
‘I’d rather we saw none of them,’ Rictus said. ‘Besides, they may not attempt anything against so great a host.’
‘The officers are forewarned, which is more than you were,’ Corvus said, gripping the older man’s arm a moment. ‘Rictus, don’t worry!’
‘A hazard of advancing years; one begins to worry about everything.’
They went into camp that night as usual, the men in concentric rings with their feet to the flames of the campfires — campfires which were appreciably smaller than they had been at the outset of the march, for the only wood they could burn now was that which they had brought with them in the waggons.
The horselines were heavily guarded, and on the King’s orders the sentries were doubled. Such precautions would normally have elicited some groaning from the veterans, but they, too had glimpsed unsettling sights in the quietly falling snow throughout the day, and they turned to with a will.
Corvus himself did not seem to sleep these days at all, and he did not spend the night in his tent, but walked the camp ceaselessly all through the dark hours, checking with the guards, running the orderly officers ragged.
Finally, he joined Rictus and Fornyx at the Dogheads’ lines, and the three of them walked out beyond the camp and its firelight, driven by some impulse they could not define. They stood in the dark, listening.
But the night was silent. Even what wind could be heard was far off, up in the peaks above their heads, keening like a new widow. The snow fell steadily in the darkness, the flakes fattening, blanking out the world and hiding the stars utterly.
‘A night like this,’ Corvus said in a low voice, ‘feels like a moment before the making of the world. Not a light, not a sound. Nothing but the cold dark and the stone. It is as though we were at the beginning of all things.’
‘Or the end,’ Fornyx said, with a gravity quite unlike him. ‘Antimone is close tonight, brothers — can you not feel it? I swear I can hear the beat of her black wings when I close my eyes.’
Something moved, out in the dark, a rattle of stone. They went very still, save that Rictus and Fornyx lowered their spears in slow, graceful arcs until the aichmes pointed outward. Corvus did not twitch a muscle. He was rapt, as if listening to a song.
And then they saw it. Taller than a man, with two lights blue as sapphire for eyes. It was paler than the mottled stones behind it, and were it not for the eyes it might have been nothing more than a squared-off crag itself. It was watching them, not five spear-lengths away. Rictus found his own heart high in his throat, thumping hard and fast; with his mouth open he could hear the blood going through it, a sound like the panting of a dog.
And then it was gone. The lights went out as it turned and unhurriedly picked its way upslope, not dislodging so much as a pebble now, in its passing. Fornyx advanced as though in a trance, spear still levelled, but Corvus held him back.
‘Let it be. It did not come to fight. Not this time.’
In the morning it seemed more than half like a dream to Rictus. He woke to find Valerian trying to blow life into the grey coals of last night’s fire, his scarred lips pursed like the neck of a drawstring bag as he blew red life into the ash. When a flame had licked up, Rictus threw aside his cloak and the fine covering of snow which had stiffened it, and sat hunkered and shivering, aching, feeling as old as he ever had in his life.
‘What’s the matter with your tent?’ Valerian asked, passing him the wineskin. ‘Was there a mouse?’ He grinned, the lopsided ruin of his face making the gesture singularly sweet.
‘The old need less sleep than you think,’ Rictus said, tossing the skin back to him.
‘There were things in the dark last night. Men all along the column saw them. It’s the talk of the camp.’
‘The camp always has something to yap about,’ Rictus said, stifling a groan as he rose to his feet and his limbs straightened.
But he felt better, for some reason. The sense of dread that had been with him ever since the army had entered the mountains was gone. It was as though an old nightmare had been explained away.
There were no more sightings in the night. The army continued on its way unmolested for several more days, until one morning there was a shout up at the van of the column, and word was sent down that Rictus was to go forward at once.
He pushed the patient mare hard, her unshod hoofs crunching in the frostbitten ground, and one of Druze’s Igranians met him near the head of the army, panting, his drepana resting on one shoulder. He pointed eastwards, to where a knot of horsemen and infantry were gathered together over a mound of scree.
‘Corvus wants you, chief. Seems they’ve found something.’
The King was standing peering at something he held in his hands. Druze was beside him, and tall Ardashir, who felt the cold more than most, being a Kufr, and was almost unrecognisable in his layered furs.
‘What is it?’ Rictus asked, dismounting stiffly.
Corvus did not speak, but handed him a rusted shard of iron, heavy to the touch, half as long as a man’s forearm.
It was an aichme, an iron spearhead of Macht design.
And looking at the oval-shaped mound of rubble and stone, Rictus suddenly realised.
This was a burial mound.
His fists tightened a moment on the spearhead. So powerful was the memory that he saw other men standing there with him: young Phinero, and bald Whistler, who had been members of Phiron’s Hounds, the light infantry of the Ten Thousand. Other faces jockeyed for position also. So little had the surroundings changed in thirty years that for an insane second Rictus thought he was about to see Jason himself come striding up the slope to join them.
He dropped the aichme as though it burned.
‘What happened here?’ Druze asked, dark face puzzled. ‘Who did you fight?’
‘The things in the night,’ Corvus answered him. ‘Didn’t you ever read the story, Druze? The Qaf attacked them here, after the Ten Thousand split up. Rictus was voted warleader, but a fool called Aristos took a disaffected few hundred and split off from the main body. The Qaf slaughtered them, but they made it to the coast too.’
Rictus caught the King’s eye. Aristos had survived, long enough to kill Corvus’s father, on the very shores of the sea they had marched so far to reach, almost within sight of home.
‘We’re wasting daylight, my king,’ he said, as harsh as an old crow. ‘We must get moving.’
He mounted his horse, wincing at the click of pain in his knees. Corvus continued to watch him.
‘Wherever we travel, Rictus, death walks before us. We all go into the dark together.’
‘With the Curse of God on our backs,’ Rictus whispered. Then he tugged hard on the reins and turned the long-suffering mare away, setting her face towards the east. Towards yet more memories.
Eighteen days after entering the Korash Mountains, runners from Druze came sprinting back down the
