Corvus Read Online Free PDF Page B

that happens, Machran can
field an allied army of maybe forty thousand, a force the like of which the
Harukush has never seen before. This would-be conqueror cannot match that. He
will see sense, and pull in his horns.” He wanted Eunion to agree with him, to
treat the thing as Rian had. But the old man would not oblige.
    “Is it true what
they say about him, that he is little more than a boy?” Rian asked, with a wide
grin.
    “He’s young, by
all accounts, but it would take more than a boy to do what he has done these
last three years. He has a dozen cities under him now, and rules them as King
in all but name.”
    Eunion nodded
thoughtfully. “Corvus, he calls himself. That’s an old word indeed. I
wonder how he dug it up. It denotes a black carrion bird, a raven or suchlike.”
    “It’s what he’s
called. His true name, no-one knows, or he has not seen fit to tell it, at any
rate. But whatever his name is, he has an army of twenty thousand in the field
this year, and it swells with each fresh conquest. When he takes a city, his
terms are so lenient that its citizens are almost glad to fight for him
afterwards. He enslaves no-one; he confiscates no land or property. All he
wants are men to hoist spear in his ranks, and coin to finance his campaigns.
He makes war feed upon itself.”
    “I hear tell he
reads like a scholar,” Eunion said with a curiously wistful smile.
    “I don’t know
about that. Folk say all manner of nonsense about him.” Rictus stared at
Eunion, From his daughter, he might have expected it, but it disappointed him
to see the old man caught up in the stories, the weave of myth that was
thickening about this Corvus. He had experienced something like it in his own
life, and knew how baseness could squat behind a legend. “I’ve also heard that
he grows wings by moonlight, that he is the son of Phobos himself, that he’s
not even one of the Macht, but some kind of demigod. You of all people, Eunion,
should not believe all you hear.”
    The old man smiled
again.
    “I know, master.
But sometimes men need the stories.” He set a hand on Rian’s head. “We all do.
It is what set us apart from the beasts.”
    They felt his
anger. Rian shrank from him towards Eunion, which made him angrier still. In
silence, the three stared across the foothills to where the dark forests ended
at the hem of the mountains in the north and west. Last night’s snow lay on the
peaks; they were white as a dream of winter.
    “I’ve always
scoffed at signs and portents, not thinking them worth a rational man’s time,”
Eunion said, “but were I a peasant from the hills -”
    “A strawhead?”
Rictus asked, mocking, bitter even.
    Eunion inclined
his own bald pate. “That is a word I’ve not heard for a long time, living up
here. But, if you like. If I were an uneducated highlander, I might read
something into old Grenj’s defeat of the eagle.”
    “And what would
that be?” Rictus asked, frowning again.
    “The upset of
normal things. Something new in the wind - a change for us. For all of us. For
all the Macht.”
    “You read a lot into
a goat’s good luck,” Rictus said coldly. He did not like to hear Eunion talk
like this.
    “Forgive me,
master. This boy conqueror, this… phenomenon. I don’t think he is going to
leave the world without making a mark on it much larger than the one he has
henceforth. And if I read you rightly, you believe the same. Fornyx let slip
you are thinking of hanging up the scarlet. Is it true?”
    Rian’s face
upraised to him, open and delighted. “Father! Is it?”
    “Eunion, you leap
like one of these damn goats from one subject to another.”
    “I think not. I
think there is a connection there.”
    Rictus said
nothing for a long time. He bit into his onion, the crisp sting of it flooding
his mouth, and then chased it down with a lump of creamy goat’s cheese.
    “This Corvus is making
war on us,” he said. “And it is a war like we haven’t seen before; he