Twenty pasangs, half at a run, the other half at a brisk walk. The day wheeled its way through morning and afternoon and into dusk. They arrived before full-dark, as Rictus had intended. In the last light of the sunset they saw the post-house ahead of them, the land around as flat as the bread the Kufr ate, then rising up as steeply as rocks out of a calm sea towards the white-topped mountains in the east, now blushed pink with Araian’s last light. The Imperial Road arrowed up into the Magron foothills, too straight to be quite real, and off it smaller roads of red dirt were carved out which led to villages and towns of mud-brick, none important enough to warrant a tell to perch on. In these, lamps had already begun to be lit. Not many—poor folk went to bed with the sun—but enough to mark them out upon the darkening face of the land.
Rictus raised his hand, and all about him his men came to a halt, blowing and panting, spears upright in their right fists, their left arms hung with the leather and wicker peltas, and in the left hand of each a bundle of slim javelins. Rictus nodded at an older man, a bald-headed, gap-toothed veteran of the skirmishers. “Whistler, take four fists and hang back left. You’re the reserve. Keep a taenon or two between us. We meet something big, and we’ll pull back through you.” The man nodded, grinning. His name was Hanno, but he was known as Whistler because when he breathed though liis mouth, as he did now, the air shrilled through the gap in his front teeth.
A younger man, a mere boy with eyes dark as blackberries and the beauty of a girl, spoke up. “What of me, Rictus?”
“Go out on the right with two fists and keep a lookout on that flank, Morian. Get up on the higher ground there. When the thing is done, we reassemble here.” They nodded at him, impatient to be off. “Very well. Now we go. Arrowhead, all of us.”
Half the men spread out in formation, Rictus at the point. They loped forward, eyes darting left and right, staring ahead. There was no Paean sung, no feet marched in time. This was warfare on the fly, as much a hunt as anything else.
The post-house was in fact a complex of several buildings with a corral beside them that had half a dozen swift horses nosing at the earth within.
Rictus’s men sped through the buildings and out the other side. A single Juthan slave who walked out of a doorway was spitted through the neck and dropped without a sound. On the eastern edge of the post-house Rictus raised his hand again. “Move in.” He waved at Morian; the boy nodded and spread his own tiny command in a line off to the right. As he took to the rising ground there, they became silhouetted against the stars.
Rictus stood fast as his men went through the buildings. There were shouts now, a scream cut off. He stood watching in the dark, noting in his head the position of every fragment of his little command. Moments like this, he loved—when one directed the men like the elements of some dance and saw the efficiency of it at one remove. Phobos’s Dance, mercenaries called it, making light of war as they did of most things.
This kind of killing, though, Rictus had seen enough of. He did not count it valour to slaughter men struggling out of their beds.
Morian came pelting back down to him. The boy’s eyes were so wide they almost had a shine about them in the gathering starlight.
“Off to the south and east, maybe three pasangs, there’s a camp, a big one. Scattered fires spread out wider than the walls of Machran. Rictus, it is huge.”
Rictus paused a second. Morian was young, but as clear-headed as they came.
“All right. Bring in your men. Finish the work here and then join up with Whistler. Quickly now.” Unable to help himself, he grabbed the boy’s arm. “Morian, are you sure?”
“Antimone’s tits, it’s bigger than our own, Rictus.”
“You’re sure it’s not a town?”
“It’s campfires, not lamps, enough of them for a city. Rictus—”
“Enough. Off you go.” Rictus released him. His heart had begun to hammer. When he opened his mouth he could hear the rush of it beating in his throat. He looked around him, gauging the situation. No more cries from the houses; the work there was done. Now the men were ransacking the place for food and drink and trinkets. If he was quick... He hesitated a split second more, then took off at a run.
The ground rose under his feet. Not a steep slope, but enough to hide what lay beyond the rise. He sprinted, slinging the pelta on his back by its leather strap. In one hand he held his spear at the trail; his javelins he clenched together in the other. His feet barely felt the earth beneath him. He topped the rise and found fragments of brick under the soles of his sandals. Another tell, vast as a long hill out of nature, but so ancient that it had worn down to a low slope in the ground, no more. And on the other side—