Opposite them were some of the low-caste hufsan, Royal attendants in the livery of the King, and in the darker corners of the tent a trio of towering Honai, unarmed save for stabbing short-swords—this being the only form of weapon permitted at a parley, and more a ceremonial badge than a useful adjunct to a fight.
“So where is the renegade?” old Argus asked.
“And the King,” Mynon added.
Jason stood, head cocked to one side in that way of his, listening. He was about to speak when a flap in the far side of the tent was lifted and Vorus entered. He was wearing his black armour and his helm sat in the crook of one arm.
“There’s more behind him,” Jason hissed, and started to draw his sword.
“Peace, brothers,” Vorus said, holding up one hand. But the Macht generals were all drawing their weapons now, except for Phiron, who stepped forward with both hands up and empty, palm out.
“Listen to him,” he said loudly. “Sheathe your swords, damn it all. Think of the men on the hill, for Phobos’s sake. Stand down.”
The men behind him paused, and one after another the twelve blades were slid back in their scabbards. Vorus nodded. He stepped forward. “Phiron of Idrios,” he said. “You have led your men well, and they have acquitted themselves honourably. I salute you, one man to another, one general to another.” He held out his free hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, Phiron took it in the warrior grip. The tension in the tent sank swiftly. Pasion, just behind Phiron, shook his head and began to smile.
Vorus brought up his helm, that bowl of iron, and smashed it into Phiron’s face, breaking bone.
Phiron staggered, and Vorus struck again, still gripping the other man’s hand in a white-knuckled fist. As Phiron crumpled, Vorus shouted out in the Kufr language. All around the walls of the tent, hitherto unseen flaps were lifted, and pouring into the space around the Macht there filed fully-armed Honai of the Great King’s bodyguard.
Vorus released Phiron’s hand, and the Macht general crumpled to the planked floor, his face a broken mire of blood. Vorus stepped back, donning the gore-flecked helm, and shouted in Kufr once again. The Honai moved in.
Pasion had leapt forward, sword in hand. He bounded across Phiron’s body with a full-throated roar and stabbed out at Vorus. The blade struck the renegade’s black cuirass and scored harmlessly off to the side. Vorus’s own blade came up from his waist and transfixed Pasion through the ribs, hilt-deep.
Rictus did not see much more. He and Jason were at the rear of the Macht. As Rictus started instinctively to advance, Jason thumped him backwards to the wall of the tent. “Cut it open!” And then he turned to clash aside the thrust spear of a Honai guardsman.
Rictus scored his blade down the tent-leather, admitting a bloom of cold air from the night outside. He turned once, to look back at the one-sided melee that was now raging in the tent. The Macht had come together in a tight knot of blades and were beating down the spears of the Honai. Vorus had disappeared. Phiron and Pasion lay dead, and as Rictus watched, Teremon followed them, his one eye not quick enough to catch the spearhead that look him on his blind side. Orsus’s bull-roar tilled the air as the shaven-headed general hinged forward, stabbing the Honai below the corselet and opening his bowels. This Kufr’s fall entangled the legs of two more, and the Macht blades licked out at once, opening their throats and groins. The air was full of blood; the tall Honai with their raging eyes seemed like some smith-made automatons set whirring into clockwork life, jabbing down with their spears and butting into the Macht with the bowls of their shields.
Then Rictus was through the opening he had made. The night was dazzlingly dark about him, full of feet running, plashing through the mud, Kufr voices calling to one another, screams echoing out of the tent. He stood one moment, and then turned back and was about to push his way back inside when Jason burst through the rent, dragging Mynon with him. “Get his other arm. Up the hill, now. Move!”
Mynon had taken a blow to the head. He was supporting his weight with all the craft of someone very drunk. They dragged and carried him away from the tents, the breath sawing in their lungs, their brains white with the enormity of it all. Rictus felt as though his mind had been locked down in some box, and his body carried on its necessary work without it.
“Down,” Jason said. And all three of them lay flat in the mud. Kufr with torches ran back and forth across the plain and clustered around the tents like fireflies. The three Macht lay not thirty paces from the nearest, but so slathered were they with mud that only their eyes gleamed clean of it. These they shut when the Kufr torchbearers looked their way.