CHAPTER SIX
Perennius swore as his iron-cleated boots skidded on a greasy stone. “Slow up, damn you,” he snarled to the linkman. “I hired you to light our way, not run a damned race with us!”
It embarrassed the agent that Calvus seemed to walk the dark streets with less trouble than he did. Anyone lodging in the palace should have done all his night rambling on the legs of litter bearers.
Tall buildings made Rome a hard place for Perennius to find his way around in the dark. He supposed that he used the stars more or less without thinking about it in cities where the apartment blocks did not rear sixty feet over narrow streets as they did in the capital. Even though the barracks were nearby, he had hired a man with a horn-lensed lantern to guide them. The fellow was a surly brute, but he had been the only one in the stand at the whorehouse who was not already attending someone inside.
The raised lantern added a dimension to the linkman’s scowl. “Through here,” he muttered in a Greek that owed little to Homer. “Me go first.” As he spoke, he scrambled into a passage less than three feet wide. The narrow slit of sky was webbed with beams cross-connecting the upper floors of the apartment buildings to either side. Poles draped with laundry slanted from windows, though it was doubtful there was ever a breeze there to be caught.
“Hold the damned light where it does some good!” Perennius said. He turned to his companion. “Here, sir, you go first. It won’t hurt this—” he gave his travelling cloak a flick—“to get dropped in the slops again.”
“This is safe, then?” Calvus asked as he stepped past the agent. There was curiosity but no apparent concern in his voice.
“Slow down!” Perennius shouted. In normal tones he continued, “Safe for us. I wouldn’t advise you to wander around here without your own attendants, but—we’re sober, and even a boyo like the one ahead of us knows the payout wouldn’t be worth the trouble of trying to bounce the pair of us.”
“I wondered,” said the tall man, “because this—” he rapped the right-hand wall. He had been tracing his fingers along it as if he needed support—“is the back of the building where we hired this guide. The brothel.”
“Well, that doesn’t—” Perennius started to say. Metal rang behind them, at or near the entrance to the passage. Darkness and the curve of the walls hid the cause. The agent’s sword whined against the mouth of its scabbard as he cleared the blade hastily. “Come on, quick,” he hissed to Calvus. His arm gestured the tall man forward, around a blind angle after the linkman.
The right-hand wall angled back abruptly, widening the passage into a court ten feet broad at the far end. There, another wall sharply closed the reentrant. The court was large enough for a second-floor balcony above the brothel’s rear entrance. There were figures on the balcony, and there were at least half a dozen men in the court beneath.
“Take the dagger!” Perennius said. He thrust the ball pommel against his companion’s hand. Calvus was as still as a birch tree. His fingers did not close on the knife. The agent saw sweat glittering on the tall man’s face and scalp as the guide lifted his lantern higher.
“Yes,” rasped one of the figures on the balcony. The voice was indescribably harsh. Only the word itself was human. “Kill them.”
“Aulus!” cried the other figure, a woman, but twenty years smothered Perennius’ recognition of the speaker.
As the agent lunged forward, he pivoted his sword arm to slash rather than to stab. His blade was Basque steel, forged in the Bilbao Armory before it slipped away with Postumus. It had a sharp edge and held it while Perennius sliced through the lantern, the hand holding the lantern, and into the pelvis of the guide who had betrayed them. The bravos waiting in the court surged forward in the darkness.
Perennius was on the stones and rolling, now. He would have called to Calvus, but there was nothing useful to say. Their retreat was surely blocked. It would be a miracle if even confusion allowed either victim to escape through the other end of the court. Besides, the tall man had funked too badly to move, much less to fight or run.
The guide spun off screaming. The sword that was killing him had bitten so deeply in the bone that Perennius had let it go. There was a crash and double screams as the wounded man collided with his friends and another blade. Someone stumbled on Perennius’ torso. The agent thrust upward with the dagger Calvus had refused, ripping one of the ambushers from thigh to sternum.
“Gaius, go back!” the woman was crying in Allobrogian. The passage the agent had followed to this killing ground was alive with voices and the ring of blades too long for the surrounding walls. A club or a boot numbed Perennius’ right arm. His legs were tangled with the thrashing body of the man he had just disemboweled. The agent slashed his dagger in a brutal arc a hand’s breadth above the pavement. Boot-webbing and tendons parted. Someone screamed like a hog being gelded. A club swished toward the sound. The weapon must have been a section of water pipe, because it crunched against a skull with none of the sharpness of wood on something solid.
“Hold up! Hold up!” a male voice bawled from the passage.
The door serving the balcony from within opened.
To the men who had been fighting below in total darkness, the rectangle of light was dazzling. The two figures on the balcony were struggling with one another. Calvus stood as white and frozen as an unpainted statue. He had not moved since the lantern shattered. Now one of the bravos hit him in the face with the lead-studded glove of a professional boxer.
“Hey!” cried someone from the open doorway. Perennius was raising his dagger for a left-handed throw at the man who had just struck Calvus. He thought he recognized the speaker—Maximus, the guard from Headquarters—just as the first of the lightning bolts struck.
One of the figures locked together on the balcony fell in on itself in a blue glare. There was a hissing roar like that of a wave on the rocks. The flash was momentary, but the roar echoed hellishly in the angled court.
The two thugs still on their feet ran for the door in the other building. The men who had followed Perennius down the passage did not exit into the court. Their accoutrements clattered as they ran back the way they had come. Calvus’ knees had buckled. The tall man had slid down. His back and sagging head were supported by the wall behind him while his legs splayed out on the stones. All this Perennius could see clearly in the strobe of the second world-shattering flash.
The balcony had a wicker guard-wall. The figure pressed back against it was short and dressed in cape and cowl. Those details were clear because the actinic glare flooded through every interstice as its fury exploded in the balcony doorway. The roar and the screams merged in a sound that could have come from fiery Phlegethon.
Options were clicking through Perennius’ mind, overprinted with the retinal memory of the flash. Better to act and bear the consequences than to freeze and become the pawn of others’ actions. He gave his dagger a half-flip, caught it by the blade, and threw it with all his strength toward the figure which had been silhouetted above him.
The balcony door was still open, and a lamp burned beyond. The doorway was only a yellow dimness, however. It was no longer able to illuminate the court to eyes which the lightning had blinded. The air stank with burning wool and burning flesh, with wastes voided in terror and wastes spilled from disemboweled victims.
The bravo who had died across Perennius’ legs held a meat cleaver. It was an awkward, foolish weapon, but it was the closest one now to hand. The agent appropriated it as he slid from beneath the corpse. His own right shoulder felt swollen to twice its normal size, but he had the use of that hand again, after a fashion. He stepped carefully to where Calvus had fallen. There were moans and even movements from the ambushers who had not run, but none of them was likely to be a threat. They were all fools. In the darkness, they had been worse enemies to each other than Perennius had been to them.
A white form lifted jerkily against the wall. “Did you kill it?” asked Calvus. His voice was weak but unmistakable for its near lack of emotion. The tall man touched the agent’s forehead. That minute contact seemed to give Calvus the strength to pull himself fully erect.
“We’ve got to get the hell out of here before the clean-up squad comes in,” Perennius whispered. “I’ll go first and we’ll try the door to the left there.” He gestured with the cleaver. His sight was returning, though he still saw dancing purple flashes every time he closed his eyes.
“No,” said Calvus, “we’ll go up. None of the fighters were on the balcony. And we have to see that it is dead.”
Anger at being contradicted rolled almost at once into an awareness that this time the panicky civilian was right. But though the floor of the balcony was only some eight feet above the pavement, Perennius’ own injury—
“Here,” said Calvus, lacing his fingers into a stirrup. “If it still moves, kill it. But draw me up quickly if it is dead.”
The agent started to protest, but the bald man appeared to know what he was about. He was in a half-squat, with his buttocks braced against the wall as a fulcrum. Lean as Calvus looked, there had been nothing of softness in his lines; and anyone who could shrug off a blow like Calvus had received had to be in good physical condition.
Besides, the first one over the wicker railing might need an aptitude for slaughter. There was no doubt as to which of the pair of them that called for.
Perennius measured the distance, measured the chances. He shifted the cleaver to his right hand, hoping his fingers could grip the weapon while he jerked himself up with the other arm. He socketed his foot in the stirrup, touched the balcony with his free hand, and said, “Go!”
The tall man shot Perennius upward as abruptly as a catapult. Instead of having to catch himself on the railing and pull his body over, Perennius soared. He scarcely brushed the wicker. The agent tried to swing his legs under him, but he hit the floor in an awkward sprawl anyway. Something crunched beneath him like underfired terra cotta. Remembering the violence that was always his companion, Perennius switched the cleaver to his better hand even as he twisted to see who shared the balcony with him.
The agent had landed on a body that powdered under his weight. The second figure lay face down with half the length of Perennius’ dagger pinning its cape to its shoulders. The doorway into the building proper was shattered. The door itself was in splinters, and the stucco over the stone and brick core of the wall was crazed away in a six-foot circle. On the floor of the room within lay two men. One of them was shrunken to scarcely the bulk of a child. A triple ceiling lamp, suspended from bronze phalluses, lighted the room. Other faces peered around the jamb of the door on the other side, where the room opened into a hallway. “Imperial Affairs!” the agent croaked to the frightened onlookers. “Get the Watch here fast!”
One of the sprawled men groaned and lifted to one elbow. It was Sestius, the centurion, and that meant the shrunken thing beside him must be Maximus. What in blazes had hap—
“Perennius!” Calvus called from the alley. “Get me up!”
“Stand clear,” the agent ordered. He glanced down to make sure that Calvus was not gripping the balcony floor. Then he split the woven guard-wall with a single blow of the heavy knife he had appropriated. Perennius left the blade an inch deep in the balcony framework. He reached through the slit to give the other man the lift he requested. Calvus’ legs flexed as Perennius jerked upward. The tall man thumped to the floor, then squirmed upright.
“Herakles!” the injured centurion muttered. “What was that?”
There were more questions than that to be answered, Perennius thought as he tugged his dagger clear. A hand’s breadth of the blade was greasily discolored in the lampglow. A lighter blade might have disconcerted the man it struck, but not even the power of the agent’s arm could have guaranteed it would sink deep enough to be fatal.
“Yes, turn it over,” Calvus said as Perennius reached toward the cowl that still shrouded his victim. The cloth was cheap homespun. It slipped back from the head it had covered.
“Unconquered Sun,” Perennius whispered. Sestius, who had crawled forward, gave a shout compounded of fear and loathing when he saw what the agent had uncovered.
The head was not featureless, as shock had insisted in the first instant; but the features resembled those of an elbow joint more than they did a human face. Death had relaxed an iris of bone around what had to be a mouth, though it was at the point of the skull. A thin fluid, not blood and not necessarily the equivalent of blood, drooled between the bony plates of the iris. There were no eyes, no nose . . . no skin, even, as the agent learned by prodding the head gingerly. The surface was chitinous and slick as waxed bone. There appeared to be smudges of pigment shadowing the generally pale surface. Perennius ran a fingertip over them: Sestius watched in horror, Calvus with the detached calm of a woman carding wool. The large blotch where a human’s mouth or nose might have been was made up of pores pitting the surface of the chitin in whorls. Higher on the conical head was a circumferential ring like a diadem. The tissue there was brown and flaccid, unlike the surface that supported it. It felt like fresh liver or the eye of a week-dead corpse.
Perennius swore. He jerked the cape completely away from the thing he had killed. His other hand kept the dagger pointed so that if the corpse reared up, it would impale itself. The pose was unconscious and an indication of how great was the fear that the agent controlled when he touched the creature. Sestius continued to stare with the fascination of someone watching a tapeworm thrashing from a friend’s anus. None of those peering from the hallway could have seen past the centurion’s torso. Perennius had cleared most of the gawkers by naming the Bureau. The madam might possibly summon the Watch; but no one cared to display too much interest in the secrets of the Bureau of Imperial Affairs.
“We thought somebody was being mugged,” Sestius said in a low voice. “We’d stopped in for a drink when we got relieved. Maximus was shook, you know, you . . . We knocked the door open and then . . . sir, what is this?”
The creature’s torso was segmented like one fashion of body armor. Its surface was of the same glaucous chitin as that of the head. There was a collar of tiny tentacles, only inches long, where a human’s shoulders would have been. At approximately the midpoint of the body was a girdle of three larger arms spaced evenly around the circumference. Two of them held objects in the triple fingers with which they terminated. The limbs were hardened, like the body itself, but the thin hoops of chitin with which they were covered made them as flexible as a cat’s tail.
The body beneath the trio of arms was a pliable sac on three stumpy legs. The creature vaguely reminded Perennius of a lobster or a spider; but those familiar animals were oriented on a horizontal axis, while this one was as upright as a man.
“Yeah, Calvus,” the agent whispered. “That’s a good question. What is it?”
“An adult,” said the bald man, “a Guardian. There should be five more of them. They are your opponents.”
“A religious cult, you said,” Perennius snarled. His control was crumbling in reaction to what he had just done and seen. “Six cultists!” he said even louder. The point of his dagger wove intricate patterns in the air as the agent’s right arm trembled.
“I said you could think of them that way,” the tall man said. As the agent rose, Calvus straightened also to tower over the shorter Illyrian. Greatly to the agent’s surprise, Calvus’ eyes and the icy will behind them remained steady despite the volcanic fury they faced. Perennius had met those who could match his rage with rage, but he had never before known a man who could meet his savage bloodlust and remain calm. “And I said I would find some way to explain it to you,” Calvus continued. “I did not expect to be attacked here in Rome, but it seems to have done a better job of explaining what you face than any method I had considered using.” His eyes jerked down. “No, don’t touch that,” he said to Sestius.
Perennius looked down as the centurion snatched back his hand. Sestius had reached out toward not the dead creature itself but rather toward one of the metallic objects in its hands. Now he stared up in surprise at the two men standing above him. “The, the whatever it was that hit me.” Sestius explained. “I thought it came from . . .” He gestured at an object that looked like a bell-mouthed perfume flask.
Calvus dipped his head in agreement. “Very likely it did,” he said. “But if anyone but one of them—” again the disgust loaded one word of an otherwise neutral sentence—“handles the weapon, all its energy will be liberated against the person holding it.” The tall man turned up his palm. “And those nearby,” he added.
The Watch was not coming, that was clear. Someone burly enough to be the bouncer looked through the doorway to the hall, then leaped back as if struck when his eyes met Perennius’ angry glare. “Probably just as well,” the agent said aloud. “Marcus has the clout to get us clear, whatever the City Prefect thinks about it . . . but I guess we’re going to have enough problems without a story like this one chasing us to Cilicia.” He shook his head. “It would, too, sure as sunrise.”
“Do we just leave it, then?” Calvus asked. He was curious rather than concerned, much the way he had been when he allowed Perennius to send him down the passage toward waiting murder.
“Quintus, can you stand?” the agent asked. He offered a hand as the centurion struggled to obey. Sestius’ limbs seemed whole, but they were not entirely willing to accept his mind’s direction. “We’ll dump it down there with the other meat,” Perennius said with a nod to the court below. “I don’t care what the folks who come to strip them think, I just don’t want our names on it. If the gear’s that dangerous, we’ll wrap it in the cloak and deep-six it in the Tiber. Quintus, I hope for your sake you know how to keep your mouth shut, because if you start blabbing, I swear I’ll strangle you with your own—hey, what in blazes happened here?” Perennius touched the soldier’s vest of iron rings.
“Their weapons are two-stage,” Calvus said. He did not coin new words, but his use of familiar ones was disconcerting. It was rather like hearing a priest using his sacerdotal vocabulary to describe hog farming. “An ionizing beam, polarized in three dimensions, that provides the carrier in any liquid or gas. Then—”
Sestius’ armor had been of wire links, bent to interlock each with four other rings. It was not an expensive vest. The individual links had not been riveted into shape. Now the front of the vest was no longer a flexible mesh but something as stiff as a sintered plate. There was a hard weld at every point where metal touched metal. Close up, Perennius could separate the odor of burned leather from the avalanche of stenches with which the varied butchery had filled the night. The mail vest was backed with leather to spread the weight of the links and of blows upon them. As the metal flowed and fused, the leather had charred beneath it.
“—the secondary beam, a high-current discharge, travels down the carrier precisely like a thunderbolt,” Calvus was saying. “It destroys the controls of sophisticated equipment. And, of course, it destroys life forms . . . but their own body casing, though natural, appears to be totally proof to current, at least at the frequencies their weapons discharge it.”
“Blazes,” the agent muttered. He understood nothing of the tall man’s explanation. The reality was clear enough, though, the flash and bodies seared to powder in the instant. He did not think Sestius had been alert enough when he awakened to really look at his companion. Maximus had nothing recognizable as a chest or face. His linen tunic was yellowed below the waist, completely missing above it. A chain and gold medallion shimmered on the blackened husk. It had been so hot that the minted features had lost definition.
Calvus had already acted on the agent’s plan. He was prodding the creature’s instruments onto the cloak of the figure incinerated on the balcony with it. The second body was human, probably female from the breadth of pelvis exposed when a point-blank discharge fried away flesh. The torso pulverized when Perennius leaped onto it. The bare skull was shrunken to the size of his two fists clenched together. The agent wondered vaguely what they had been struggling about, the woman and the creature, the Guardian. Blazes, though, there were more important questions than that to answer.
Perennius sheathed his dagger and gripped one of the creature’s limbs. It was hard-surfaced but pliant, like a length of chain. The agent’s back crawled. He kept his face impassive as he reached under the slick, conical head with his other hand. He heaved the carcass over the railing. “Somebody’s going to get a good sword in the morning,” he muttered, “but they’re going to get a surprise along with it. Let’s get out of here.”
The three men stepped out of the room by the hall door Maximus had forced to intervene. Calvus was supporting the centurion with an arm around his shoulders. A fold of the tall man’s toga shielded Sestius’ face from the remains of his companion.
Under his breath, Perennius muttered, “Told the bastard to wear his armor.” But nothing could erase his awareness that the young guard had saved the life of Aulus Perennius in a situation the agent’s boastful assurance had gotten him into.