subjugated your people! We offer you the blood of these unbelievers in the hope of your favour!’
He turned swiftly and raised the sword, briefly holding the position before driving the blade down into his first victim’s body at the point where neck and chest met, hacking the man’s body in half with a diagonal cut that exited his body at the opposite hip. The two halves of the ruined corpse dropped to the ground, and Obduro spun across to his next victim, using the sword’s momentum to swing the blade up into the helpless gang member’s crotch, again cleaving the body cleanly in two. The third captive stared in terror at the blood-flecked mask as Obduro stopped in front of him with the sword’s point touching his chest. He paused momentarily before pushing the blade through the man’s ribs and stopping the heart behind them, pulling the sword free and raising its blood-soaked length to the men on the walls.
‘Soldiers of Rome, your choice is made! There will be no quarter asked of you, and none given. Your blood will be offered to the goddess, and in her name we will kill you all! Prepare to meet your doom!’
He turned away and vanished into the press of his men, and Sergius tapped his chosen man’s shoulder.
‘They’ll be a moment or two working out how best to attack us. Call me when they show any sign of getting serious about wanting to be inside these walls.’ He climbed wearily down the steps and walked across to where Julius lay, shaking his head at the apparent depth of the bandit leader’s penetration of the defenders’ organisation and actions. ‘He even knows my bloody name, that’s how well informed he is. So, we have a choice. We can either surrender, and be butchered outside the city walls, or fight it out and be butchered inside these walls. It’s not much of a choice though.’
Julius, still recumbent on the gravel, grimaced back up at him.
‘And I’m not going to be much use to you, am I?’
He lifted the wounded leg, and both men shook their heads.
‘No, you’re not. If that wound’s as deep as it’s long you’re not going to be…’
As Felicia walked towards them across the store’s wide expanse from her impromptu medical post in the administrative building, she called out, staring forebodingly at Julius.
‘Stop waving that leg about and keep it straight!’
Sergius laughed wryly at the doctor’s imperious command, leaning closer to speak quietly into his colleague’s ear.
‘Obduro was shouting the odds about some fugitive by the name of Marcus Valerius Aquila. Would that be the same Marcus who had the balls to marry that woman?’
Julius looked back up at him, his response pitched just as low.
‘There are some things you’re better not knowing, First Spear. The man in question is innocent, but his past won’t leave him alone, it seems.’
Felicia reached the centurions and bent over Julius, casting a critical eye at the gash in his thigh.
‘You men, pick up this wounded officer and carry him to somewhere a little less likely to be showered with spears at any second. And then, Centurion, we can have a look at that leg and see how much damage you’ve taken this time.’
Julius caught her sleeve as she straightened up.
‘Madam, my woman…?’
Felicia shook her head swiftly.
‘She’s been raped, watched you brutally slaughter her attackers without any thought for her sensitivities, then had to run for her life and be reduced to a quite bestial act of murder, to judge from the blood she’s covered with, although she’s not saying much about it. I think she’s going to need a good deal of delicate handling for quite a while, and that will include your having no expectations that she’s “your woman”. Just because she’s a prostitute doesn’t make her any less vulnerable than any other woman under those circumstances. Come on, pick him up.’
Obduro leaned close to the former centurion who now commanded the former Treveri auxiliaries that were the main part of his band, looking about him at the dimming landscape before speaking quietly, moving closer to ensure he could be heard above his men’s noise.
‘I want to be inside that store in less than a single hourglass, you understand?’
The hard-faced soldier-turned-brigand nodded his understanding, intimidated by the expressionless mask only inches from his face.
‘It’ll be dark in less than half that time. I’ll have a century keep the men on the walls busy, and send two more round either side to dig our way in through the granary walls. The men inside can’t be everywhere, and once we’re through the bricks and into the store it’ll only take a minute or so to roll them all up.’
Obduro nodded.
‘Good enough. Just make sure you succeed, if you want the share I’ve promised you. We need to be away from here before dawn.’
He turned away, gesturing to a man waiting quietly at a respectful distance with a military trumpet in one hand.
‘It’s time for my triumphant return to the city. Give the signal.’
On the city walls above Tungrorum’s west gate Tornach stared out into a landscape stained red by the setting sun, while the remaining member of the city guard detailed to ensure that the entry stayed firmly closed lounged on the defence’s thick stone parapet. They had watched in silence as the bandit army marched up the main road to the city and its vulnerable grain store. The guard shook his head and spat over the wall.
‘That lot will have the legion boys out of the granary in no time. It’s just as well we’ve got twenty-foot-high walls between them and us, or we’d be going the same way.’
Tornach grunted his agreement and pulled a blue sharpening stone from his pack, unsheathing his sword and eyeing the edge critically. The other man looked over at him incuriously, then back out across the darkening fields beyond the walls.
‘You won’t need that. There’s no way they’ll be able to get into the city without ladders.’
The bandit hunter spat on the whetstone and rasped it down the blade’s length, leaving a thin blue coating of the stone’s grit along the sword’s cutting edge.
‘Maybe not. But the one thing I’ve learned from Obduro over the last year is that the worst things tend to happen just when you’re least expecting them.’ He spat on the stone again and turned the sword over to sharpen the other side of the blade. ‘Take us. Here we are, safe on top of a twenty-foot-high wall, with the gates below us made from oak so thick and so well secured that it would take four strong men just to lift out the bars that hold them closed. And yet…’
The other man eyed him dubiously.
‘And yet what?’
A trumpet sounded from the south, a long wailing note followed swiftly by another, and then a third. The guard shifted from his lounging position, leaning out over the parapet and craning his neck in an attempt to see what was happening around the wall’s curve. ‘Sounds like some sort of signal.’
He shuddered as Tornach’s sword slid up into the sleeve of his mail coat, the point stabbing deep into his left armpit with expert precision. Leaping back from the wall he put a hand to the hilt of his own weapon, his eyes wide with shock as he swayed on his feet for a moment with blood pouring down his left side, then crumpled helplessly to the wall’s stone walkway. Tornach stared dispassionately down at him, nodding as the truth dawned in the dying man eyes.
‘And yet one man inside these walls might change all that in an instant.’ He wiped the sword’s blade on the dying man’s tunic, a mixture of crimson blood and the whetstone’s blue residue staining the cloth a dark purple, then sheathed the weapon, spreading his arms as if taking the salute of a baying arena crowd. ‘All I have to do now is open the gate and my task is complete.’
The guard shook his head weakly.
‘Needs… four… men…’
Tornach smiled again, reaching into his pack and pulling out a coil of rope.
‘So it does. And here they are.’
Several miles to the west, the reunited Tungrian cohorts were storming up the road towards the city with Scaurus at their head and the legion’s cohort struggling in their wake. No longer heedful of the effects of such a long march on his men he was setting a murderous pace at the front of the long column of soldiers, while behind him the three cohorts’ centurions encouraged, cajoled and simply threatened their men to keep them moving at the required
