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must go.” He nodded at them both, then turned
and resumed his way through the crowd, the people parting before him as though
he were contagious.
    “We have luck with
us,” Gasca said. “That’s a meeting the goddess had a hand in if ever anyone
did. And I have seen the Curse of God at last.”
    “I didn’t come all
this way to be a camp servant,” Rictus said.
    “Let us go to that
merchant’s inn. We’ll set ourselves up there and see about joining a company
tomorrow. We shall eat and drink and wash and find ourselves a bed.”
    Rictus smiled. He
looked tired, older than his years, pinched with hunger and bad memories. “Lead
on then. And take this shield for a while— fair’s fair.”
    * *
*
    The Mithannon
faced north towards the Mithos River, a grey flash of cold mountain-water that
ran parallel to the walls of the city for five or six pasangs. The open plain
there had long ago been flattened out and beaten into a dirt bowl around which
there clustered irregular lines of wooden shacks and stalls, hide tents made
semipermanent with the addition of sod walls, and hundreds of low-roofed
ramshackle shelters brought into being with the connivance of a bewildering
variety of materials. The place seemed a mockery of the stone and marble
majesty of Machran itself, but if one looked closer there was an order to the
encampments. They ran in distinct lines, and some were cordoned off with rawhide
and hemp ropes mounted on posts. Flags and banners snapped everywhere, a kind
of ragged heraldry splashed across them, painted on signposts, daubed on the
skewed planks of shacks and cabins. And everywhere in the midst of these crude
streets there walked knots and files of men dressed in scarlet of some shade or
other. These were the Hiring Grounds, and the Marshalling Yards, and the
Spear-Market, and half a dozen other names besides. Here, men might join the
free companies, those soldiers who sold their spears to the highest bidder and
who owed allegiance to nothing except their comrades and themselves.
    In the quarter of
the city closest to the Mithannon there was the greatest concentration of
wine-shops and brothels in all Machran. Here, the gracious architecture
degenerated into a hiving labyrinth of lesser buildings, built of fired brick
and undressed stone, roofed with reed-thatch from the riverbanks rather than
red tile, and lacking windows, often doors. Men had built upwards here, for
lack of space in the teeming alleyways about them. It seemed, looking up from
the splash and mire of the noisome streets, that the buildings leaned in on
each other for support, and a mason with a plumb-line might look around himself
in despair.
    Up in the swallow’s
eyrie of one of these there was an upstairs room. A man might spit through the
gapped planks of the floor there onto the heads of the drinkers below, but
somehow the place stood, stubborn and askew and seething with all manner of
babel that wine could conjure out of men’s mouths. It was a place where
conversations could be had in shouts, and still no one an armspan away would
make sense of them.
    “When is Phiron to
return?” one of the men asked. This was Orsos of Gast, whose face had writ
across it the dregs of every crime known to man. He was known as the Bull to
friends and enemies alike. Now his deep-set eyes glinted with suspicion. “I
have a firm offer from Akanos, me and my centon. Time is money, Pasion.
Promises never fattened a purse.”
    The cursebearer
named Pasion cast his gaze down the long, wine-stained table. Twenty centurions
sat there in the faded red chitons of mercenaries. Any one of them alone would
have made a formidable foe; gathered together they were a fearsome assemblage
indeed. A jug of water sat untouched on the tabletop. Pasion knew better than
to buy them wine before the talking was done.
    “He is in Sinon,”
Pasion said casually, “Putting the final touches to our arrangements. With fair
winds and good weather, he’ll be here in a week