Read Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 for Free Online Page A

ever begins on time, no one is ever where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there. War is an overloaded wagon with a creaking axle, mud-stuck, pulled forward by a beat-up mule. Except every so often when it is not – when it is transformed into a charging stallion, or a downward-streaking hawk. Bas sometimes supposed, amidst the endless drudgery of his day-to-day tasks, turning boys into killers and killers into corpses, that he continued on as the Caracal simply because there was no other alternative; and then one of these single sterling seconds would arrive, and Bas would again recall his purpose.
    Up and past the Aelerian defences so swiftly that none had thought to stop him, past an arrow-shot hoplitai, the first of the day’s casualties but not the last, and thoughtless he reached down and grabbed the dying man’s shield, bellowing as he went, a bronzed battle horn loud enough to be heard above the tumult. His blade whistled from its sheath, Roost-forged steel red as the last moment before sunset, lighter than a switch of willow and stronger than a hand’s breadth of cast iron – the stories called it the Caracal’s Claw, or sometimes Red Wind, though Bas had never been known to call it anything, or at least not that anyone had ever heard. He pushed past the loose back rank of soldiers, a sudden shower of arrows doing nothing to slow his passage, though one struck the man next to him just above his hauberk, a death swift and sure, and another would have struck Bas’s shoulder had he not batted it aside with a movement of his shield, reflexively, without noticing, something that would have been impossible except for one man in a thousand, and for that man would be the most extraordinary deed he might perform in a long lifetime of war. As a pebble dropped in still water or a rumour whispered in a schoolroom Bas’s arrival spread its way through the hoplitai, who surged forward in answer to the Caracal’s example.
    The west gate was broken, the bottom of the portcullis shattered, the top hanging impotent, but behind that the Salucians were staging an admirable last stand behind a line of barricades, though not for long, no, by the gods, not if Bas had anything to say on the matter. He found himself suddenly among the packed front ranks of hoplitai and then past them, to the very lip of the fortifications. A spearhead caught itself in Bas’s shield and he roared and pulled his arm backward and ripped the lance out of the hands of its wielder, cast both to the ground, and then he was atop the wall and down it, and his men were coming furiously behind him.
    The Salucians preferred their swords single-edged and slightly curved, and carried half-moon shields, and generally were not any good with either of them. But the soldier in front of Bas then proved an exception to the rule, and he didn’t seem frightened of Bas either, and this was rather a surprising thing because everyone was afraid of Bas, not just the enemy either, anyone with a set of eyes and two grains of sense and even a fair number of men who could not claim even these meagre distinctions. But this Salucian was not – beneath his conical cap of boiled leather his eyes were dark and grim and unflinching. The Salucian was brave and the Salucian was fast, and the Salucian knew enough of combat to realise he needed to move swiftly against Bas, to swell in tight and negate Bas’s superior reach. What the Salucian did not know was that Bas, for all his more than forty-five years, was still as strong as any man alive, and when they locked their blades against each other Bas planted his legs and tensed with his shoulders and he sent the Salucian hurtling back towards the men swarming to reinforce him, sending three of them tumbling and then falling upon them, once on the attack Bas never relented, not for a single instant. It is a fact that no man is invincible or even particularly difficult to kill, that four men or at the very most five,