by David Drake
However, there was no potential for danger on the sixth floor here. The whole area, a loft whose ceiling was the tiled roof and the laths on which the tiles were laid, had been rented for over a decade by a white-bearded patriarch named Mephibaal. He and a woman who was either his wife or mother housed a troop of beggars, whom they directed with a rigid discipline of a sort from which the Jewish revolutionaries of twenty-five years earlier could have benefited.
Carretius dealt with no one but Mephibaal himself or sometimes the woman of whose name he was as innocent as he had been when the couple first rented the loft. The type and numbers of the subtenants would normally have been a matter of concern, even on the top floor. Rogues too poor to own a brazier had been known to cook over sand spilled on the bare floor boards, and the chance of saving a building if a fire took hold was no better than Carretius' personal chance of deification. Mephibaal would not permit any such nonsense, let alone allowing one of his charges to get out of hand to the point of trying to rob the rent-taker. In fact, a detail of the beggars on the sixth floor carried the chamber pots every morning to the shop of a nearby wool-finisher. The urine was used in the fulling process, and Mephibaal collected a modest commission for what would otherwise have been refuse. Carretius both admired and envied Mephibaal's industry.
The door at the stairhead was a solid one, set there by the tenant himself—more to restrain his charges than out of fear of burglars. Smiler knocked on it with his left hand. It was late in the evening. Even here at the top, very little light ever came through the slats of the cupola that covered and ventilated the staircase. They would have to light a torch on the way back.
"They don't answer," said Smiler puzzledly. He rubbed his knuckles against his cheek instead of the opposite palm. "I hear them inside, but they don't answer." He openly displayed the razor which was normally covered, with his hand, beneath a fold of his tunic.
"Do you suppose something happened to Mephibaal?" Carretius wondered aloud. He was too tired at the moment to respond with real enthusiasm to any unexpected difficulty, but he saw the dim crescent of the blade in Smiler's hand. "Pollux! He always seemed like he was older than Numa, but I never thought he'd die in bed. Do you suppose that lot have murdered him?"
Ox looked up stolidly at the two smaller men. "Should I?" he asked in a voice thick with his German accent. His short hair was so pale that it seemed to disappear in bright sun, but here on the stairs he seemed to be wearing a casque of fine gold. When he hunched, the points of his shoulders lifted but he still had no neck—only a triangle of muscle where lesser men had necks.
"Wait a minute," the rent-taker said. His mind had aroused itself from dull fatigue to a state of general concern. He took a tinder pump and a wax candle from his wallet. "Knock again," he ordered, as he rotated the thumb-sized pump to unlock it.
As Smiler, his face gone blank, obeyed, Carretius gave the bronze piston two quick strokes, then withdrew it. The shaved bay twigs in the chamber, heated by the sudden compression of the air, flared into open flame. The rent-taker ignited the wick of his candle—a poor light, but more practical to carry against the need than was a lamp with oil sloshing in the bowl. His fingers were trembling, and when he had a proper candleflame he dropped the pump onto the landing. The tube and piston were hot from use as well as the resulting tiny fire, and at the moment Carretius did not have the patience to put the pump carefully back in his wallet.
"All right," he said to Ox, glancing to see that the tinder was only a dying glow on the boards.
Both of the smaller men flattened against the lath and plaster partitions as the grinning German advanced. Smiler held his razor vertical beside his right ear. Its edge and its wielder's eyes were equally chill in the candlelight.
Ox tested the panel with his fingertips. It was meant to open inward. Smiler fretted impatiently, as uncomfortable with the big man's plodding deliberation as was Carretius himself. The door creaked beneath Ox's touch, and there was an expression of childish delight on Ox's innocent face.
"Open it, damn you!" Carretius demanded.
Ox slammed his palm against the point on the door at which he had felt the resistance of a bar. The staples that held the bar in place within ripped free at the impact. Ox shouldered the sagging panel inside, ahead of his rush. Carretius and Smiler lunged in at either heel—half expecting the onslaught of up to a score of beggars, desperate from the murder of their master.
The smell was not expected.
The loft was crisscrossed by the studs that supported the tile roof above, but it had no interior walls. The stench permeated the loft's entire expanse—a miasma that choked them despite their acquaintance with the filth commonplace in such dwellings.
The candle's circumscribed illumination hid the outstretched interior. There were windows—in fact, the outer walls were comprised of removable wicker screens in order to reduce the weight upon the exterior walls beneath—but none of them was open. There were rat-scuttling sounds, but not the anticipated assault by beggars. What it looked like, huddled on the floor and even hanging from the rafters, could not possibly be. . . .
"Get some more light in here!" Carretius shouted to his henchmen. The dagger he always carried, but had never had to draw, was free in his left hand as he held the candle high in his right.
Ox threw down the door panel and started across the creaking floor toward the screens. He shouted and snatched at the back of his neck. Wood splintered as Ox's berserk rush carried him through a roof stud.
Smiler spun about, searching for an unseen threat. His razor flicked through something in midair that was neither a bat nor a pigeon. Something else that had clung to the tiles overhead dropped silently onto Smiler's face.
Carretius screamed in terror—an instant before he felt the pains that lanced through both ankles. He bent and hacked with the point of his dagger at the agony, oblivious of the fact that the blade was cutting his own flesh as well.
A new rush of pain seemed to dip Carretius' right hand into molten lead. He flung away the candle, killing the light. The rent-taker's throat was already locked in a cry for which his lungs no longer held breath, but he straightened and slashed his weapon toward the unseen bulk that was savaging his right hand. The blow brought relief, even though the steel gouged along his wrist and the back of his hand—ripping something loose from his flesh.
For an instant, the only light in the loft was the dim rectangle of the doorway through which the men had entered. Then there was an explosion of laths and wicker as Ox plunged blindly through fragments of screen, out into the twilight and a fifty-foot drop to the street below. Carretius could not possibly have scrambled across the stretch of timbers and horror between him and that new opening, even if it held hopes of anything but a fatal drop. The doorway was only a few yards behind him, but as he turned both the rent-taker's ankles gave way. It was more than mere pain—the Achilles tendons were severed. Carretius crashed to the floor—still trying to crawl toward the door.
A figure appeared in silhouette against the open doorway. It was small and hunched—a woman with the tail of her mantle flipped over her head for propriety's sake, or a short man in a hooded Gallic cloak. The figure paused, just inside the loft and not quite close enough for Carretius' desperate hands to touch.
"Help me!" the rent-taker shouted, knowing the other could not see him in the darkness. His calves prickled as tiny needles advanced, tearing into his flesh. The pain cut through the anesthesia of his fear. Dimly he was aware of other tiny assailants, dropping unseen onto his writhing body.
"Pull me out of here, and you'll never want for anything!"
The figure stepped past the rent-taker and disappeared as it moved out of the light. Carretius clutched toward the whisper of legs on heavy cloth—the only sound the figure made—but his bloody right hand touched nothing, or felt nothing it touched.
The figure reappeared. It was carrying the door panel that Ox had flung away as the three men had burst into the loft. The open do
orway, the last hope in the blackness of Hades, disappeared as the figure carefully fitted the door back into place. There was a gentle tapping, as a scrap of timber was wedged between jamb and panel to hold the door in place until permanent repairs could be made. Carretius felt, rather than saw, the figure as it turned back to him.
The jagged touch of unseen climbing things had already shredded the rent-taker's garments across his back. His ragged breath was the only sound in the foetid loft—that and a scrambling, tearing sound, as of many crabs in a wooden trap.
He still had time to wonder what had become of Smiler, and in another moment he knew.
Chapter Thirteen
"He's going fast," said the Watch Centurion, as if Lycon needed help in judging serious wounds. "Maybe it's not what you're after, but I thought maybe—you know—that thousand sesterces reward you're offering for evidence of killings that don't look like your usual brawls and muggings and the like."
"You may have just earned it, Silvius," said Lycon, uncinching his belt so that his tunic could flap and cool him as he bent toward the victim. They had been held to the pace of Vonones' chairmen and the pair of lantern-carrying guides leading them all. In daylight and by a route with which he was familiar, Lycon would have run on ahead of them.
The big man was obviously near death—should be dead already from the injuries suffered in his fall. Perhaps with a body that huge it took time for the brain to know it was useless. Lycon remembered the giant German warriors he had seen in his youth—pierced by a dozen fatal wounds and still shambling forward to slay, froth on their lips and death frozen in their eyes.
The Watch station was converted from what had been a bakery on the corner of an apartment block—two rooms on the ground floor, and a connected upper room in which on-duty personnel could sleep until needed. Although public order was a concern, the fourteen battalions of the Watch were intended primarily for fire-fighting duties, despite their military organization and helmets. The front room in which the dying man now lay was steamy and odorous from the sausages that a few of the men on duty were grilling for supper. They watched and munched, more curious about Lycon than they were about what was, after all, just another corpse—or soon would be.
"All over me," the dying giant whispered. His eyes were open but unfocused, so he probably did not see Lycon bending over him. "They just kept coming. I hit them and it was like knives, like knives . . ."
"His name is Ox, and he and another bad one work with a rent-taker named Carretius," Silvius explained. "Don't know where they are, but it seems Ox fell off a roof or out of a window or something. Broke his fall somehow, and we found him crawling along the street out of his head from pain. Couldn't have happened too far from here—can't get too far with your arms and legs all busted up, no matter how strong a man you are. But it's these wounds he's got all over his back that puzzled me, so I thought maybe you'd want to see."
"Wine!" Lycon called. "We've got to get him to talk!"
N'Sumu's long-fingered hand reached past Lycon and raised the dying man's right arm. The flayed palm and the obvious break in both bones of the forearm could have been results of the fall. The cuts on the upper side of the arm had been made by dozens of piercing claws that had sunk an inch or more into the powerful arm before they were dragged free. They were sharp enough to cut rather than simply tear. Lycon thought of a net tied with fishhooks—fishhooks with their inside curve sharpened to a razor edge. The wounds covered his arms and shoulders.
Silvius handed Lycon a scrap of wine-soaked cloth. It was a rag that had been used to polish brass, but at this point that mattered as little to the victim as it did to Lycon. The hunter swabbed at the dying man's mouth. The astringent wine rinsed blood momentarily from broken lips. Lycon wrung the cloth, trying to get the man to swallow a little wine.
"Mephibaal was never no trouble," the dying man whispered. "Why'd he want to do this? Like knives . . ."
The three of them—Vonones, Lycon, and N'Sumu—had been dining together to discuss a week's accumulation of useless rumors and wasted searches, when the messenger from the Watch station had appeared at Vonones' ground-floor suite. The merchant had thrown a cloak over his tunic of pastel blue silk—Lycon would have permitted him no time to change, even had Vonones wanted to.
Now Vonones grasped the Centurion's shoulder—his grip firm with excitement. "Mephibaal," Vonones whispered urgently. "Find out who he is—and where he lives!"
"We went in when he didn't open the door," Ox mumbled. A heavy leather strap was sewn over the shoulders of his tunic and down the front, and the rent purse nestled upon his chest like a well-fed tick.
Lycon indicated the purse. "Well, we know he wasn't mugged and robbed."
"Ox?" laughed one of the Watch members as he strolled closer. "Nobody'd go for Ox. Not Hercules. Even without Smiler there to change their faces with his razor."
"We're close," said N'Sumu, trying to examine the back of the dying man's neck. Ox resisted his efforts. "He must have discovered the lizard-ape's lair."
"Couldn't see," whispered Ox. "Couldn't see . . ." The big shattered man lunged upward from the bare couch as N'Sumu tried to lift him. Lycon tried instinctively to hold him back. Ox swept him aside unnoticed, flinging the beastcatcher across the room.
"Got to get out!" the dying man shouted, in a spray of blood and spittle. His eyes were open, but they saw nothing in this world or the next. Ox took two steps, and the sound of the bone ends grating in his right thigh was audible even over the cries of the startled men around him. He struck a wall, rebounded, and struck it again—as if the bright splash of pulmonary blood he had coughed onto the stucco at his first impact was a target for the second. The back of the big man's tunic had been shredded by sharp claws, and bright bone showed yellow beneath the bloody tatters.
When his knees buckled, Ox sagged like a half-filled wine skin. His head fell forward onto his chest, and he might have been praying for the first and last time in his life. A circular hole the size of a pigeon's egg gaped from the back of his neck. Blood oozed but did not spurt from reopened wounds.
Lycon swore as he got to his feet from where Ox had sent him sprawling. He was not so much concerned that the man had died without saying much, as he was that Ox apparently had had very little to say. The attack had been unseen and unexpected. Perhaps it had been the work of the lizard-ape—N'Sumu thought so—but the question remained: where had it taken place?
The Centurion had stepped to the inner door of the station. "Basileus!" he shouted. "Check the codices for someone named Mephibaal in this district. Hurry!"
The patrolman who had been standing near tapped Silvius on the shoulder. "Mithras, sir," he said. "Don't worry about that. Everybody knows where old Mephi lives: the whole top floor of the building Hieronymos the tax-farmer owns, across from the Baths of Pulcher."
Silvius' eyes narrowed. "Where the dice game meets?" he asked.
"Other direction," said another Watch member. "But Castor—that's where they brought Ox from. Could've jumped from the seventh floor as well as from a roof, like we figured."
"Sixth floor," said a short man with Hamitic features, who trotted from the inner room with a volume of square-cut papyrus sheets open in his hands. "Mephibaal, son of Jeroboam, freedman of . . ."
"Basileus," said Lycon, pointing a finger toward the clerk though his eyes were on the Centurion. "Shut up for a minute. Silvius—can you locate the room we want?"
The Centurion nodded. "Yes, yes. But there were to be one thousand sesterces . . . ?"
"N'Sumu," said the beastcatcher, turning his gaze. "You're in charge. Tonight, or do we wait for daylight?"
"You'll get your money," Vonones murmured to Silvius. "Maybe a lot more—if you help us and be quick about it."
N'Sumu shrugged. "Daylight would be better," he said, "but if we wait—who knows? The sauropithecus might shift its lair. Certainly it will shift it if it thinks this one could have led others to it." He waved toward the huge, half-flayed cor
pse.
"I think it may have difficulty moving just now, but . . ." During the pause, the bronzed face was as still and false as a statue's profile. "Yes. Best we go after it at once."
Lycon rubbed his face with his hands. "Right," he said without looking up, his palms covering his eyes and mouth. He brushed his hands down sharply. "Vonones," he said in a crisp, emotionless voice. "We'll use your litter bearers for messengers. I've got people waiting at your compound with gear. We'll need nets with the men too.
"Yes, and we'll need your troop," he added in an aside to the Centurion of the Watch. "Don't worry. You'll be paid for it—and our lord and god will have your guts out if there's a moment's delay."
"I said, we'll go at once," said N'Sumu. "Ourselves." His expression was unreadable, but there was a clear note of command in the words.
"We'll go when I say we're ready," snapped Lycon. "I've seen this beast work, and you haven't. And I don't mean to be gutted like a perch—or end up like this one." He toed Ox's corpse without looking down at it.
"You have been at close quarters with these lizard-apes before, of course—haven't you, N'Sumu?"
N'Sumu seemed about to assert his authority, then backed down. "Make your plans, beastcatcher," he said. "Then I will deal with the situation in the way best suited."
He continued to stare at Lycon as the hunter scribbled orders onto pieces of papyrus supplied by the Watch Centurion. Vonones felt his dinner roil uneasily in his belly, but his fear was not only of the lizard-ape.
Chapter Fourteen
From the street where Lycon waited with the others, the preparations on the rooftops around them were invisible. An occasional wedge of broken tile pattered between outthrust balconies to smash on the pavement, and the fitful glow of lanterns overhead provided uncertain evidence of the men who moved into position above the streets.
There were laws regulating set-back from the street against building height—intended to guarantee sunlight for every stretch of pavement in order to burn away the noxious effluvia that would otherwise, according to the best medical opinion, propagate themselves in shadows. Save for a handful of major boulevards, however, the laws were an excuse for Watch commanders to extort bribes instead of being genuine subjects for enforcement. There had been nothing about this portion of the north slope of the Aventine Hill that precluded the builders from developing it as they pleased—and at a price.