Killer

by David Drake

  The real skin was dark though not black, indeterminate in the moonlight but seemingly closer to purple than brown. The blood that welled from the gashes in it was very dark indeed.

  "What under heaven?" Lycon murmured as he knelt beside N'Sumu and began, with his swordpoint, to extend a tear in the bronze overskin down the length of N'Sumu's right arm. Beneath that false skin was a pattern of interconnected nodes, a large one on the inner angle of the elbow and another which covered the palm of the right hand.

  The sword had been blunted by use and the pavement. Vonones touched his friend's arm to restrain him and finished undressing N'Sumu's hand with the pen-sharpening knife he carried in his wallet. The false skin was resistant to direct pressure, but it parted like a maidenhead once the cut was started. One of N'Sumu's fingers was actually a part of the integument.

  What remained when the small knife had picked away the counterfeit was something slimmer than human, with three fingers and an opposable thumb. Lycon stared at it and stared at the whole sprawling body in the light of present revelation. He could not imagine that N'Sumu had ever seemed human. A praying mantis the height of a man would have seemed less strange.

  Vonones lifted the node away from N'Sumu's palm. Interconnecting it with the similar flat bulb at the elbow and a score of lesser nodes were a series of tendrils, thin enough to have an orange sheen in the moonlight where the thicker lumps of the same material were dull and colorless. The node had the wet flaccidity of a spleen with barely enough structural integrity to keep from tearing apart under its own weight. It had not been attached to N'Sumu's body or to the bronze overskin by any evident means beyond friction and the slight tackiness of its surface.

  Lycon nodded and touched the skein of tendrils with his sword. The roughness of its edge gave it purchase on the material which stretched briefly, then fell away like gossamer. "If that's why he could—do with his hands," said the beastcatcher, "then we don't want . . ."

  The severed ends of the material steamed. For an instant there was a spicy odor, as if cassia had been flung on a hot stove. "There's more," said the Armenian, and the two men huddled together to flay the moaning figure of N'Sumu. The head was the worst part. Even with the portion the sauropithecus had ripped from the mask, the full reality was more disturbing than either of them had imagined.

  "We should finish him," Lycon said in a low voice. He had not felt queasy in the present way since the afternoon on a mud bar he had cleaned a crocodile which had grown to three tons weight by devouring villagers who fished and washed in that stretch of the Nile. "He's . . . he's as like the other, the lizard-ape, as he is to us."

  The animal dealer lifted his jaw in agreement. There was a particularly dense pattern of nodes ringing N'Sumu's head and neck. If the blob on his palm had been the charm which permitted the "Egyptian" to stun and kill, then these might well have something to do with the skill with which a mouth so inhuman mimed human speech. The little knife clipped each nodule out of the pattern of tendrils, then lifted it separately to the pile of offal on the stone.

  Aloud, Vonones said, "Do you want to live, my friend?"

  "What?" Lycon asked. "I. . . . Yes, I do."

  "So do I," Vonones said, flopping N'Sumu's left arm aside to make the task of stripping it easier. "And Master N'Sumu here is going to make that possible. He's going to capture the lizard-ape alive just as he told the Emperor he would."

  The Armenian smiled brightly, but it was not for some minutes that Lycon understood what his friend meant.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The veils were drawn back above the hollow of the Flavian Amphitheater so that the sun could flood in on the mid-afternoon main turn in the arena. The sand had been raked smooth over the area, as large as a freeman's farm in the dim, grim days of myth and Romulus. Blood did not show, not even from the ivory chairs of the imperial entourage on the lowest of the viewing levels. Domitian, shaded himself by a panel of gold-shot scarlet silk held by a pair of slaves, leaned forward in anticipation. His tongue touched his thick, cruel lips, and his fingers twitched as if they had a throat between them to squeeze. Crispinus, unshaded and smelling a little of sweat through his heavy perfume, watched the Emperor sidelong with a false smile and the inner awareness that imperial whim could cause any of the fifty thousand spectators to be thrust down into the arena.

  The section of German guards carried spears and shields whose blazoning cost more than a sharecropper's annual profit. The plywood cores of the shields were perfectly functional, however, and would provide the necessary protection should a beast somehow get through the spiked iron grill within the arena proper and up the eighteen-foot wall above which the tiers of seats were ranged.

  There was just a possibility that the shields would be needed this afternoon.

  "Lord and god," said the tribune Lacerta, who had seen—or seen flashes of—the lizard-ape on the loose, "I really think the danger of this creature's speed is such that—"

  There was a bellow from the expectant crowd, though there was nothing unfamiliar about the beast that snapped and snarled its way onto the sand through a short covered passage from the cells below. It was a tiger, young and powerful, with a sheen on its coat indicating the good condition of the muscles beneath. The tiger's belly sucked in sharply behind the rib cage: the beast had been fed only lightly for the past day and a half, leaving it hungry without breaking its spirit the way a week of starvation would have done. The beast whirled, clawing at the goads of the men advancing behind the movable grate in the passage. Then it sprang fully out into the arena and roared at the surrounding spectators.

  "That fellow Vonones did a splendid job with the cat, didn't he?" observed the Emperor as he considered the tiger with the eye of a connoisseur of blood sports. "Philon!"

  "Lord and god?" replied the secretary who sprang to attention with his stylus poised over a wax tablet.

  "A diploma for the animal dealer, Claudius Vonones," Domitian said, "freeing him for port duties throughout the Empire for a period of five years. That will let him bring us more entertainment as good . . . if he's wise."

  "But lord and god," pressed Lacerta, "this creature, this sauropithecus, is amazingly fast and can leap—truly, I saw it—at least thirty feet. I fear it may be dangerous for even you to watch it in the open like this."

  "You'd put me in a cage, Lacerta?" the Emperor asked, turning to the Guard officer with a look of chilling speculation on his face. "Or do you think I should hide in my palace while a unique animal kills a tiger in front of—" he gestured toward the packed stands, the fifty thousand men, women and children who had managed to acquire tickets for this most special of occasions "—half of Rome?"

  "My master and god," Lacerta lied, straightening with a taut face and freshly-beaded sweat on his forehead, "you know that I did not mean such a thing."

  The Italian officer remained braced to attention, his eyes turned toward the arena and his mind focused on images of his own death. He did not relax, even minusculely, until he heard Domitian say, "Jump thirty feet? I wonder if it will leap onto the tiger as soon as the arena door—"

  Another door in the high arena wall swung down, and the crowd thundered over anything further the Emperor would have said—even as the event embarrassed his hopes.

  The sauropithecus did not leap into the arena. Indeed, it could be seen clutching at the movable grating until a slave with a torch thrust it out onto the sand in stumbling despair.

  "It doesn't look like a lizard at all," said Domitian loudly, and in obvious displeasure. "Or an ape, so far as that goes."

  "I thought you said it was blue, Lacerta?" Crispinus called, shark enough to be a part of any offered kill. "That thing's really a purple in good light."

  "Head like a fish, not a lizard," put in another courtier.

  The guard tribune was shaking. He had parlayed his brief glimpse of the sauropithecus in action into sole credit for the beast's capture, aided by the seeming unconcern of Vonones and Lycon to tell Domi
tian himself a story that meant riches and power for its heroes—or hero: the Egyptian mangled unrecognizably, another of the capture party torn to collops, and—in the tribune's version—Lacerta himself pinioning the beast while its claws cut deep grooves (artistically rendered by a tinker with mallet and chisel the next day) in his armor.

  "It's exceptionally cunning," Lacerta said, repeating what he had been told, "and I have no doubt that it's luring the cat closer." He had a great deal of doubt—the creature looked very much as if it were running around the iron palings in a blind panic—but surely the gods would recognize a prayer, whatever its form? To the hope expressed as a certainty, the tribune added the lie, "That's what it did when it killed the first tiger."

  This tiger was certainly fooled. It did not like the crowd noise or the direct blaze of sun on sand, but unlike some of its kin it did not react by cowering against the bars until barbs and torches drove it back toward the center. It hunched, midsection first rising, then falling, as the paws wriggled for purchase in the sand and the tail twitched. The orange of its fur overwhelmed the black of the stripes overlaying it in the dazzling sunlight. The great head shifted to follow the scrambling so-called lizard-ape. The whole body shifted; and the tiger sprang for its prey.

  Almost a hundred feet separated the cat from the bipedal monster with which it shared the arena. The tiger covered the distance in three magnificent bounds which drew gasps of delight from even the jaded familiarity of the onlookers.

  The prey leaped up onto the grating. The creature had been RyRelee, emissary from a Class 5 planet of the Federation—and more recently, before it lost its false skin and the battery of biomechanical devices which permitted it to kill and stun and process information in hundreds of human languages, had been N'Sumu the Egyptian wizard. Now, in the last moments of its life, it was the lizard-ape. It caught a cross-bar scarcely eight feet above the ground, and the tiger smashed it back to the sand with both hind paws firmly planted.

  The purple-skinned corpse did not even twitch as the tiger used it as an outlet for its rage.

  "I am not pleased," said the Emperor. His voice was emotionless, but his normally florid face was a mask of white fury when he turned to look at the tribune. Domitian's private amusement was to be shut up in a room with flies whose wings had been clipped; and to kill them, one at a time. "Marcus Lacerta, I think you lied to me."

  "I—" the tribune gasped. His cognomen, Lacerta, meant Newt; in this moment he looked very like a newt stranded on a hot rock with no hope of escape. "My lord and god, I—"

  The Emperor waved him to silence. "Philon," he said. "Marcus Cloelius Lacerta here. To the arena this afternoon . . . with another tiger, I think."

  The tribune whirled around with a scream frozen on his face. Two of the Germans whom he had until that moment commanded gripped him expertly, effortlessly. Their spears fell ringing to the travertine paving, unnecessary now that the threat from the arena had failed so markedly to materialize.

  "It's a pity, you know," said the Emperor. He extended his thick lips in a pout. "I was looking forward to seeing a real killer."

  THE END

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