The Ten Thousand Read Free

into
the top of his spine. A childish punching, fuelled by rage more than the
knowledge of where a fist does damage. He rode it out, forehead on the sand,
blinking furiously and trying to make his thoughts come in some kind of order.
    “The bastard begs!”
    I didn’t beg, he
thought. At least, not for me. For my father, I will beg. For my father.
    He twisted his
head, still pounded, and caught Remion’s eye.
    “Please.”
    Remion understood
perfectly. Rictus knew that. In these few, bloody minutes he had come to know
the older man well.
    No, Remion
mouthed. His face was grey. In that instant, Rictus knew that he had seen all
this before. Every permutation of this stupid little dance had already printed
its steps in the older man’s memory. The dance was as old as Hell itself.
    Something else his
father had said: Do not believe that men reveal themselves only in defeat.
Victory tugs the veil aside also.
    Goddess of the
Veil; bitter, black Antimone, whose real name must never be spoken. Now she
smiles. Now she hovers here about these dunes, dark wings flickering.
    The black side to
life. Pride, hate, fear. Not evil— that is something else. Antimone merely
watches what we do to ourselves and each other. Her tears, it is said, water
every battlefield, every sundered marriage-bed. She is un-luck, the ruin of
life. But only because she is there when it happens.
    The deeds, the
atrocities—those we do to ourselves.
     

TWO
    A
LONG DAY’S TROUBLE
    “We are late to
the party, my friends,” Remion said.
    Dusk was coming
on, and a bitter wind was beating around the pines on the hillsides. Rictus’s
arms were numb from the elbow down, and when he looked at his hands he saw they
were swollen and blue. He sank to his knees, unable to look at the valley
below.
    Broken-nose yanked
his head up by the hair. “Watch this, boy. See what happens when you go about
starting wars. This is how it ends.”
    There was a city
in the valley, a long, low cluster of stone-built houses with clay-tiled roofs.
Rictus had made tiles like that on his father’s farm. One shaped the mud upon
the top of one’s thigh.
    For perhaps two
pasangs, the streets ran in clumps and ribbons, with a scattering of
pine-shadowed lots among them. Here and there the marble of a shrine blinked
white. The theatre where Rictus had seen Sarenias performed rose inviolate,
head and shoulders above the swallow’s-nest alleyways. And surrounding all, the
very symbol of the city’s integrity, was an undulating stone wall two
spear-lengths high. There were three gates visible from this direction alone,
and into each ran the brown mud of a road. A hill rose up at one end of this
sprawling metropolis, one flank a sheer crag. Upon this a citadel had been
built with a pair of tall towers within. There was a gatehouse, black with age,
and the gleam of bronze on the ramparts.
    And people, people
everywhere.
    The sound of the
city’s agony carried up into the hills. A dull roar, a swallowing up of all
individual voice, so that it seemed the sound was not made by men and women and
children, but was the torment of the city itself. It rose with the smoke, which
now began to smart Rictus’s eyes. Plumes of black rose in ribands and banners
within the circuit of the walls. Crowds clogged the streets, and in the midst
of the roar one could now make out the clangour of metal on metal. At every
gate, mobs of men were pressing inwards with spears held aloft, bearing the
hollow-bowled shields of the Macht warrior class. There were devices on those
shields, a city badge.
    Rictus looked to
his side in the gathering darkness, at Remion. His captors had retrieved their
cached panoplies on the way here. White on scarlet, there was painted upon
Remion’s shield the sigil gabios, first letter of his city’s name.
Almost all the shields below had such devices.
    “Isca dies at
last,” Remion said. “Well, it has been a long time coming, and you folk have
been a long time asking for