by David Drake
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’s 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’s 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’s 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’s 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 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’s 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.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The water began to sizzle and hiss almost as soon as the cloak hit it. Perennius levered the stone sewer grating back with a grunt.
The tall civilian touched him with the arm that did not support Sestius. “I think we’d better step back,” he said calmly. He suited his own action to the words.
The agent moved aside at once, though the request had surprised him. He had chosen to ditch the alien paraphernalia in a street grate a few hundred feet from the barracks. Steam-blurred light was flooding through the cuts in the stone trough. The hissing built into a roar, then a scream. “Let’s move on,” Perennius shouted, afraid that the noise would attract the official attention that he thought they had avoided when they left the brothel unchallenged.
The roar dropped abruptly to the echo of itself reverberating down the sewer pipe. Simultaneously, the grating crackled and several chunks of it fell in. Unperturbed, Calvus resumed walking Sestius toward the barracks.
Perennius swore as he followed the other men. “Do you have weapons like that?” he asked.
“Not here,” Calvus said. “We could not send any … object. Besides, I was not raised to fight.”
“Blazes,” the agent said. He had thought the tall man was a coward when he froze during the ambush. Nothing Perennius had seen since supported that assessment, however. He did not understand Calvus any better than he did the other aspects of this situation in which monstrous insects flashed thunderbolts in the darkness.
“This one will die of shock if he isn’t kept warm,” Calvus said. Unexpectedly, he spoke in Illyrian. The stranger’s intonations were as me
chanically perfect as those of his Latin had been. “Do you want that?”
“What?” the agent blurted. He was sure at first that he was being chided for not showing more concern for the injured centurion. It struck him then like a death sentence that the question had been asked in all seriousness: would he prefer that Sestius die? “Blazes, no, I don’t want him to die!” Perennius said angrily. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
Calvus shrugged. “You wanted secrecy,” he said simply.
The transient barracks stood on a middle slope of the Caelian Hill. Externally they were built like a four-story apartment block with a central courtyard. Inside, each wing and floor was divided like a pair of ordinary barracks blocks. There were ten squad-rooms along each face, inner and outer, backed by an equipment storage space attached to each squad-room. In each corner were larger units designed as officers’ quarters.
The assignment desk was served by a swarthy civilian, probably the slave or hireling of the watch stander properly assigned to the task. The clerk seemed bright and willing, but he was not fluent enough in either Latin or Greek to understand what Perennius was asking. He kept trying to assign the three of them to a room instead of directing them to the room Gaius would already have taken. Soldiers tramped through the lobby at one stage or another of their search for an evening’s entertainment. Their babble made more difficult a task which already seemed impossible.
Perennius was unpleasantly aware of Sestius’s state. He had seen men die of shock before. Its insidious peace frightened him more than blood or a sucking hole in the chest. Wounds you could at least see to treat. In Aramaic, the agent began, “I am not Gaius Docleus, I want the room Gaius Docleus is—”