by David Drake
So the close-shouldering apartment blocks hid the direct sun from the streets except at noon on certain days. It also meant that a fire in one building involved potential disaster for the region or the city as a whole—as had already happened twice since a blaze had given Nero room enough for a sprawling palace and grounds in Rome's center. So far as Lycon was concerned at the moment, the interlocking balconies and eaves might prevent him from directing his men by sight, but this amounted to no more of a handicap than the scrub or high grass in which he normally worked. The narrow interstices made it possible to reach the roof of their objective without going through the top floor that Mephibaal leased.
Had leased until recently, at any rate. Lycon wiped his palms on his tunic, not for the first time.
A three-note call drifted down from above. It was from no certain direction by the time it bounced through the maze of walls and projections.
"That's Hippias," said Vonones, gripping the stock of his whip with his hands and firmly enough to flex it into a bow. "They're all in position."
N'Sumu waited with the placid arrogance of one of the huge stone dolphins at the horseraces, ready to tip and signal completion of a lap but utterly disdainful of all other matters of human endeavor. Lycon noticed that when the Egyptian turned his gaze upward toward darkness, his eyeballs frosted into dull opacity. The beastcatcher thought that it might be a trick of the light, until the same thing happened when N'Sumu looked directly down the street past him, and his eyeballs gleamed, dulled, and gleamed normally again without any change in external circumstances. N'Sumu grinned starkly when he noticed Lycon's attention, but he made no comment about what the Greek thought he had seen.
Lady Fortune, Lycon thought, we need you now and always. But especially now. "Right," he said aloud. "Time we made our move." His fingertips checked the net slung over his left shoulder, then the dense ivory baton he had slipped through the sash of his tunic in preference to a weapon with an edge. "Let's go."
There were seven in the party that Lycon led up the only staircase of the apartment block. Two of the men were Vonones' slaves, recent arrivals from Ethiopia who did not even speak Greek. They would be a deadly liability on the roof, where coordination was crucial and only shouted orders were possible in the darkness. They could, however, accompany Lycon on the direct assault, carrying large lanterns. One of the slaves was directly behind Lycon on the stairs, holding his light aloft and so close that the back of the hunter's neck quivered with the heat of the triple lampwicks flaming within their cage of lead and horn. The other Ethiopian brought up the rear.
Most of the Watch unit, with their Centurion, were on the roofs with the bulk of Vonones' crew and the additional specialists Lycon had hired from the Amphitheater for such need as this. Two patrolmen accompanied the beastcatcher up the stairs. Except for spears, they wore the full military equipment that was normally a matter for parades and riots only. Lycon was not certain how much use the men's laminated-linen body armor and shields of spruce plywood would be, since protection had to be offset against weight and the lizard-ape's awesome quickness. Still, it was worth trying tonight, since only N'Sumu professed to have any knowledge of the beast they stalked.
N'Sumu himself followed the first lantern-bearer. The Egyptian carried no weapon at all, and he walked with both hands outthrust before him as if in benediction. His palms were of the same richly tanned, almost bronze shade as the rest of his skin, and Lycon again shivered at the unbidden thought of some huge bronze serpent looping its way along the branches of a jungle forest. Lycon had heard of certain warriors who were skilled in some sort of open-hand combat technique, but he thought such men were said to live beyond the Empire's easternmost frontiers, not in the lands south of the Nile's first cataract. If N'Sumu chose to wrestle with the lizard-ape barehanded, that was fine by Lycon.
Vonones was directly behind N'Sumu. The Armenian merchant was so nervous that Lycon could hear his sandals catch and skip as he repeatedly missed his footing. Vonones need not have come at all, and certainly there was no reason for him to be one of the group that entered the loft. He had insisted, however. With so much at stake, Vonones was determined to see it through personally, whatever the risks. Lycon hoped he wouldn't get in the way.
They had not attempted to evacuate the lower floors of the building. The noise and confusion would have been colossal—and in the event their supposition about the creature's lair was incorrect, the probable riot caused by the affair might have led Domitian to indulge one of his whims. There were ragged men and women sleeping at each landing. Lycon and the boots of the patrolmen prodded them into the hallways where others of the very poorest already huddled. The presence of those folk was mildly troublesome—they would almost certainly drift back to block the stairs down which the assault party might need to retreat abruptly. Still, they proved that the creature had not made its escape in this direction when it heard the boots and murmured orders of the men taking up positions on the surrounding roofs. If the lizard-ape indeed had made its lair here, Lycon assumed it would normally reach its lair from the adjacent rooftops. By night it could easily leap across from roof to roof—silently, unseen . . .
The top flight of stairs was closer to being a ladder of rough poles than a proper staircase. There was no railing, but the wall was worn and slimed by the hands of a decade of beggars. The lantern-bearer following Lycon cursed and stumbled and cursed again: some of his obscenities, at any rate, were Greek. The remainder of the group, especially Vonones and the heavily-armed patrolmen, were also having difficulties. N'Sumu, though graceless, mounted the stairs without actually touching the wall over which his open hand glided in readiness to brace him.
Lycon moved up the steps on his tip-toes, only the faint creak of the wood beneath his hobnails betraying his ascent. The beastcatcher held his net in both hands, swinging it waist-high and ready for an underarm cast in an emergency. It wouldn't stop the lizard-ape for long, but anything that would slow the beast down was worth trying.
The door beyond the topmost landing was a solid one, out of keeping with the upper levels of this or any other apartment block. If the sauropithecus had chosen this particular place for its lair, the choice was either a very lucky one for it—or else luck had nothing to do with it.
It's nearly as human as you are, N'Sumu had said.
"We may have to cut this down," Lycon whispered toward the men behind him. "Didn't expect anything this sturdy, or I'd have brought axes."
There was scant room for three on the landing proper. Lycon had half expected N'Sumu to squeeze aside and let pass the Watch members with their swords. Instead the Egyptian himself stepped to the door and ran his palms over its framework. The gesture was not casual, but rather a precise survey of the edges of the panel where they butted against the jamb and where, presumably, the bar or bolts were engaged. So far as Lycon could tell, N'Sumu did not actually touch the heavy wood.
The slave with the lantern cowered aside with a look of rigid fear—directed at N'Sumu rather than what might be beyond the door. Neither of the Ethiopians had a good grasp of what was going on—they were present to carry lights, and nobody had bothered to explain the business further. It was reasonable enough that the slave would not regard their quarry with the taut anxiety of those who knew what they were seeking—but why the fear of N'Sumu? It was almost as if the slave, who might well know the Egyptian peoples of the Nile south of Elephantine Island as familiarly as Lycon did Thracians, nonetheless found N'Sumu both unique and unpleasant.
"It's wedged in place," N'Sumu decided. "Not firmly at all. If you want, I think that I can . . ."
Lycon shook his head in negation. A drop of sweat from the climb stung his eye and made him blink. Vonones panted two steps down from the landing. Behind and below him on the stairs, the backlighted bronze helmets of the Watch patrolmen gleamed like halos. One of the men had drawn his sword and was trying to brace himself upright against the wall with his elbow.
"You," said Lycon
, pointing over the rolled and ready net at the lantern-bearer. He spoke a sort of bush dialect that worked well enough in the field and which the Ethiopian understood as much through Lycon's tone as his words. "Jump in and put your back to the wall to the left side of the doorway, while I go to the right. Any delay, any foul-up, and I'll feed you to a hyena. Believe me. One bite at a time."
The slave nodded with his lower lip sucked between his teeth. It would be worth any unknown danger to get away from N'Sumu.
"All right, then," said Lycon. He kicked in the door and it fell with a crash like that of a catapult firing.
The lantern-bearer followed orders with an alacrity that impressed Lycon himself. N'Sumu was inside as abruptly, his eyes blank as marble, and his palms again outstretched.
Lycon spun within to the right, because he was right-handed and his direction of movement would aid a cross-body cast of his net. The shadows cast by the lantern slid across walls and beams in a counterfeit of activity, but for a moment only the newcomers themselves moved in the low-ceilinged attic.
The man who was already sprawled just inside the doorway certainly did not move. He had worn the usual two tunics, the inner one of a fine close weave of linen, before it was stripped away in threads and tendrils. Now he lay in a semicircle of fluff. His face was upturned and frozen in a startled expression. His arms and torso were naked and from his hips on down all that remained were bare bones that gleamed yellow beneath the dried blood and thin patches of adherent flesh. Blood still oozed from the exposed tangle of guts and organs laid bare above his pelvis.
Most of the other corpses humped against the floor of the loft had not been stripped with anything like the same playful enthusiasm. In general, the clothing—rags to begin with mostly—had been slashed apart crudely, and the flesh beneath treated in a similar fashion. Lycon could not guess how many corpses—most of them no more than picked and scattered bones—were strewn about the loft. The number itself, a hundred or so perhaps, would not be particularly startling to one who had seen a thousand bodies dragged from the Amphitheater on a long afternoon. Those had been fresh, though—and most of these . . . such flesh that remained had heated to dripping liquescence under the roof tiles.
Always before, Lycon would have said that a smell was something you got used to. He did not want to believe that now. Not even the accustomed stench of Rome's slums could have continued to mask the presence of this charnel house much longer.
Vonones and the two patrolmen burst into the loft behind N'Sumu. The second lantern-bearer stopped in the doorway, his nerve failing. Vonones snarled a command, and the slave entered—increasing the amount of light available without in the least improving the scene it displayed.
"They're," said Vonones, "they're all . . ." He slashed out with his whip, not aiming at anything in particular.
"Is it here?" one patrolman demanded as he twisted—fearful that the sideguards of his helmet were keeping him from seeing the taloned demon that approached him.
Recovering from the sight, Lycon jerked his own head to the side. Nothing seemed to move—only N'Sumu, who was walking cautiously toward the man who hung from a roof truss, held there by a swath of something that seemed more like spun metal than any fabric, even silk, N'Sumu's hands were raised and his eyes, when Lycon stepped alongside, were dull.
"By Isis, that's Smiler," muttered the other patrolman. "Ox's partner, and—why that's Carretius!" He pointed toward the half-consumed body whose torso lay before the entrance—only now was the man's memory grasping some sort of awareness out of this nightmarish scene.
"What . . . ?" Lycon said to N'Sumu, and something leaped at them from the hollowed ribcage of one of the corpses.
The shadow thrown by the lanterns distorted and exaggerated both the creature and the motion. It was that exaggeration that called Lycon's attention to the movement while it was within the capacity of his reflexes to respond to it. The creature that launched itself toward his eyes was not the lizard-ape he feared, nor yet was it anything that he had ever seen before.
It was cat-sized and perhaps quicker than a cat, but its leap was a long one—long enough for Lycon to react. Lycon's net, cast by reflex, opened like a spider's web catching the sun. The bronze weights, as delicate as the silken cords themselves, held the net in a momentary orb that collapsed around the leaping thing in midair. The motion with which the beastcatcher had cast his net, still gripped by the cord that pursed shut the outer edge against the weight it held, carried the furious creature safely past Lycon's left shoulder.
The net had been intended to tangle the lizard-ape for the minimal instant Lycon might need to press his attack or to escape. This creature—whatever it was—was well within the size of the prey for which the net had been designed. His unexpected success gave Lycon a momentary thrill of triumph—one that stuck in his throat as he saw the floor and walls of the loft seethe with sudden movement like bubbles rising in a cesspool.
Something the size of the first creature twisted in the air toward N'Sumu. An instant before touching him, its blue-scaled body exploded in a burst of light as green as spring hay. In the fluff that remained of Carretius' linen garment crawled a dozen bright blue things no larger than baby rabbits and fully as blind, but with the bloody determination of so many gadflies. One of them clamped to the ankle of the leading lantern-bearer, and his shriek was louder than that of the two patrolmen—who knew from experience what the hurtling lantern meant in a place like this.
Smiler hung with his mouth and muscles slack. Lycon had assumed the man was as dead as those he had accompanied here, Ox and the halved corpse facing the doorway. Now Smiler's eyelids opened and his head rocked back, trying to tear loose from the shimmering band of stuff that clamped and supported him. One of the dangling arms lifted and pointed toward the beastcatcher. There was a touch on Lycon's sandal, something crawling, and his hobnails ground it against the flooring as he started for the hanging man.
Smiler's throat convulsed. Then his lips moved and spewed not words but blue-shimmering larvae the size of men's fingers—dozens of them, gouting up to flop onto the wood and writhe on vestigial legs toward the man who had just approached. Blood sprayed from Smiler's lips and throat together as the entire substance of his body seemed to convulse and give way to pass more of the things that had just hatched within his living flesh.
There was a second green flash—something incomprehensible that N'Sumu seemed to conjure forth. Lycon had no time to think about it, as Vonones' whip popped close enough to draw blood from the hunter's ear—ripping a cat-sized horror that had just dropped down from a roof tile and onto Lycon's head. The thing in Lycon's net was squirming; he swung it against a pillar to quiet it, as he jumped back toward the door and safety.
The clot of men blocking the opening was to be expected, but the effect two men carrying shields would have on the tight doorway was a shock even to Lycon, as he caromed off the back of one of the patrolmen.
"The mother isn't here!" shouted N'Sumu. His right hand moved as if to fend something away. Although there was no visible motion beyond that, things curled off a truss ten feet away like spiders swung through a flame. A nimbus the color of copper burning danced over the timber and nearby tiles, but it was pale in comparison to the yellow flame of the olive oil that spread from the shattered lantern. Oblivious of the crackling flames, N'Sumu was raging: "Wait! She must have left by the roof! She'll be back! We've got to wait here for the mother to return! I order you to wait!"
The wicker screens closing the outer walls shuddered as the fire began to suck in its breath. The panel directly across the loft from the doorway had been smashed out and replaced by a tunic—neatly opened and hung to conceal the interior of the large room from eyes in adjacent buildings. The cloth flapped inward, drawn by the breeze, and drew with it the edge of the boar net that had been hung around the entire top floor of the building. Men on the roof shouted at what they thought was success—the sauropithecus slashing its way through a wall panel to
escape the powerful party by now blocking the stairwell exit.
Of course, it had also been possible that the lizard-ape would burst through the roof instead. For that, there was no help but to trust to the expertise of men with hand nets like the one Lycon himself carried. The operation might or might not have succeeded if the sauropithecus—if the mother—had been in its lair. Lycon had not, at any rate, sprung his trap on empty air.
Only now it was they who were trapped—or soon would be—in this rapidly spreading conflagration. N'Sumu seemed to ignore the danger. Either the man was possessed—or else the danger of being trapped inside a blazing building was something beyond the Egyptian's experience. Assuming N'Sumu was an Egyptian.
Assuming—there was another green flash, a very brilliant one; an arm that might have been a small child's, only blue-scaled and with claws already longer than a leopard's, was blown past N'Sumu from where its owner had crouched twenty feet away—assuming that N'Sumu was even human.
The two patrolmen and their shields were crossed like X-shaped barricades in the doorway. Both men were screaming unintelligibly. Because their oval shields were strapped on, it would have taken greater coordination than either man was showing to drop them. Even so, they could have got out easily had they simply backed up and tried the opening again, with their shields and bodies parallel—the way they had entered the loft. Panic, whether from the fire or the charnel house itself, did not permit that.