Birds of Prey

by David Drake

  The young man pivoted. His shield rose to deflect the rain of pebbles that had warned him, then jolted up another inch to slam aside Sabellia with similar ease. The woman’s knife sprang into the gorge. Sabellia took the initial shock on her chest and the arm outstretched to snatch at the youth’s neck. Then her impetus brought her head and the pivoting shield-rim into contact. Her body spilled limply to the side of the trail. Dust and pebbles she had dislodged continued to fall as Sacrovir swung toward the agent in a loping rush.

  The younger man covered the twenty feet between them in four strides. Perennius had a moment to wonder if the Guardians could somehow affect minds the way Calvus did. Though that was needless. Humans had been leaping to absurd conclusions for ages without needing outside influences.

  Perennius blocked with his sword, not his dagger, the youth’s first overarm slash. The agent wanted to try his opponent’s strength before he trusted the lighter weapon in the place of the shield he lacked. The shock of the swords meeting made the agent stumble. His right side burned the way his whole torso had when the Guardian’s bolt sizzled on his armor. Because Perennius was off balance, his dagger-stroke at the Gaul’s knee would probably have missed even if the long shield had not buffeted the agent like a ram as he jabbed. Sacrovir knew how to use that shield.

  The agent staggered backward. His opponent—younger, taller, fresher—cut at him sideways, holding his spatha waist high. Perennius stepped inside the blow. Perennius chopped at the Gaul’s instep as the other man’s wrist struck the agent’s side. Perennius’ sword gouged the shield when the other dropped it to interpose.

  The sword-cut was a feint. Perennius’ left hand and the dagger swung over the Gaul’s outstretched sword arm. Sacrovir looked a good deal like Gaius, the agent thought, as his armed fist slammed against the base of the other’s right ear.

  It was not until the instant of jarring contact and the brown eyes rolling upward that Perennius realized that he had not killed the man who toppled away from him. Perennius had struck with the knobbed pommel of his dagger, not the point that would have grated lethally through brain and blood vessels across the younger man’s skull.

  It had happened very quickly, as it had to happen when both opponents were so skilled and so determined. It had happened too fast for conscious decisions. Perennius had not killed, though it would have been as easy to do so.

  The agent knelt at the feet of his sprawling opponent. Sacrovir’s left arm hung off the trail. The weight of his shield was threatening to tug the supine body with it further into the chasm. Perennius laid down his sword to lift the iron-and-plywood shield. He laid it across the torso of the youth it had been unable to protect.

  A slab of stone that must have weighed six talents hurtled to the valley floor. It was safely outward of the trail and of the agent. Perennius looked up. Calvus, her hands freed of the missile she had not thrown at the Gaul, was descending the wall with ease. The woman’s awkwardness did not matter when each handhold locked her as firmly as an iron piton to the limestone. Calvus stepped down beside the agent while he was bending over Sabellia. At full stretch, Calvus’ limbs gave her the look of a gibbon from one of the islands beyond Taprobane.

  While Perennius struggled with his gauntlets, Calvus ran a slim finger from the point of Sabellia’s jaw, up the reddening bruise, to the bloody patch on the Gallic woman’s cheekbone. “Nothing broken,” the traveller said softly. “Minor concussion, perhaps. Nothing too serious.” Then she said, “You did recognize him then? I didn’t think you would. Could. He’ll be all right, too.”

  Perennius back-trailed her eyes from his own face to that of the supine Gaul at whom she had glanced before speaking. Sacrovir was snoring. There was a smear of mucus with no sign of blood in it over the Gaul’s moustache. “Him?” the agent said. He was puzzled, but the matter was not important enough to spend time on now.

  Perennius began to stand up. He was angry that the motion required him to put down his left hand for support. “From Rome, you mean? No, I didn’t see any of them. He must be the Sacrovir that Ursinus talked about. When he died.” In the same flat voice, the agent said, “I’m going to see Gaius now. The Sun has received the soul of a brave man.”

  “It’ll be faster,” said Calvus as the agent began to stumble down the trail, “if I lower you.” She extended an arm and nodded downwards.

  Perennius swallowed, then angrily stripped off his gauntlets. He flung them to the ground. The remainder of his padded armor was hellishly hot and confining, but it would take longer than the agent cared to spend to remove it. He looked at his protégé fifty feet below. Gaius moved only when the wind blew the trees against which he rested. “Calvus,” he said. He extended his hand, stubby and tendon-roped and strong. “Swear to me that what we’re doing is going to save the Empire if we succeed. Swear that.”

  Calvus took the agent’s hand in her own, slim and stronger yet than that of the agent. She knelt and found a hold in the roots of an olive tree. Perennius swung out, dangling over the slope in her grasp. “That isn’t true, Aulus Perennius,” she said. “I can’t—”

  “Easy, I’ve got a foothold,” Perennius said.

  Calvus released the agent’s hand with the same care with which she chose her words. “The Empire is doomed, gone,” she said. “We have a chance to save humanity from these—others. But not in your day, Aulus Perennius. Not for fifteen thousand years.”

  Perennius made a sound in his throat. His face was deep in the tilted crevice which now supported him. Calvus could not see his expression. When Perennius looked back up at the woman, it was only to say, “All right, I can hold your foot till you’ve got a hold. Come down.”

  Calvus scrambled to obey. The agent said, “That isn’t good enough, you know? I can’t care about hum—there, sure, put your weight on it. I can’t care about humanity. That’s the pirates who raped Bella, that’s a kid from Gaul who fights for gray things with arms like worms. That’s not worth dying for, Calvus. That’s not worth me bringing Gaius to be killed.”

  “Do you need my hand here?” Calvus asked. The lower end of the crevice was ten feet above the next switchback.

  “No, I—” Perennius said. His hand gripped a spike-leafed shrub. The stem crackled when he put his weight on it. The agent felt Calvus’ fingers link around his ankle, ready to support him if he started to slide. “That’s all right,” he said. Stiffly but under control, Perennius descended half the distance. When his hobnails missed their bite, he skidded the remainder of the way. Calvus was with him in a series of quick, spider-like clutchings.

  “You weren’t supposed to follow me,” the agent said. He was breathing hard as he eyed the last stage down to the trail. They would be a hundred feet west of Gaius, where he lay in the track the allosaurus had flailed in the vegetation. “You could’ve gotten killed.” The agent looked at Calvus. His face was still but not calm. “Could’ve gotten Bella killed.”

  The tall woman nodded. “The allosaurus crossed the ford and picked up your track an hour after you had ridden out. Sabellia said we could either draw it away from you … or if it ignored us, we were safe anyway. She rode, I walked.” Calvus attempted a smile. “The last distance, I ran, Aulus Perennius. And then I couldn’t find any way to help you.”

  “I need a hand,” the agent said. As he crawled vertically down the rock face, he added, “Do you expect to be able to get people to die for nothing, Lucius Calvus? Is that what you expect?”

  “Not for nothing,” the woman said. She extended herself so that her right hand alone supported her weight and the agent’s. “Aulus, this is the most important thing on Earth since life appeared.”

  Perennius twisted his face upward. He shouted, “Not to me! Not to Gaius and Sestius and the people we’ve killed!” He looked down at the trail over which he dangled. In a neutral voice he directed, “All right, let me go.”

  The agent hit with a clang of ironmongery. He staggered. The armored shirt and apron were even more awkward than us
ual. The lacework of rings had been welded into streaky patterns. They gave the garments the effect of a stiff girdle in addition to their weight.

  “Aulus,” Calvus said. She touched Perennius’ shoulder as he would have stamped down the short interval seperating him from Gaius’ remains. The agent turned, not quite willingly, to face her. Calvus’ touch was no more than that; but when Perennius had shifted his weight to stride forward, his shoulder did not move nor the fingers from it. Calvus said, “Even if I were to intervene, nothing goes on forever. Not your Empire, not humanity as you know it … or even as I know it.”

  “We shouldn’t intervene, then? We should let things go?” Perennius demanded harshly. “Where’s the bigger joke in that, Calvus? You saying it or me listening?”

  Her calm voice, her ivory face, could not express troubled emotions. Perennius felt them as surely as the hand on his shoulder as Calvus said, “Aulus, if your Empire should survive another two centuries, as it might, the cost—” She broke off to wipe sweat or a tear from the corner of one brown eye. “In my day, nothing, no difference. Events open and close, according to their magnitude. Even what I was sent to do will mean nothing when the sun swells to swallow this world.”

  “Praise the Sun for the life he offers,” whispered the agent, an undertone and not an interpolation.

  “In my day,” the traveller repeated with emphasis. “In between, the Christian religion would become a theocracy that would last a thousand years beyond this rump of an Empire. I can’t offer more than a few centuries, Aulus. It’s time is over. Please understand that.”

  “Well then, give me the rump!” Perennius shouted. “And don’t be too sure that there won’t be a way out then, my friend. Or—” and his angry voice dropped into a tone of cold ruthlessness—“do you think you can force me to help finish the job? Finish your job. Is that what you think?”

  “I think,” said the woman, “that we have grown too good of friends since we met for me ever to try to force you to act. And I think we know each other too well for me ever to think I had to force you to do your duty.”

  “Shit,” the agent said dismally. He reached out to clasp the hand still tighter against his armored shoulder. Perennius was looking away, toward the crags across the gorge.

  Still clasping his taller companion, the agent began to walk to where Gaius lay. “I don’t want a thousand years of Father Ramphions, no. But I’d take that if I could give my world a time, a stability like that of the past. And if…” Perennius’ voice trailed off. He took his hand from his shoulder to place his arm around the woman’s waist. The play of muscles as she walked was as finely tuned as that of a dog—or a tigress. “I’d give the whole game to those fucking gray monsters if I thought it’d bring Gaius back. I almost would.”

  “Aulus, that won’t be necessary,” the traveller said.

  The catch in the tall woman’s voice turned the attempt at lightness into something very close to open emotion. “Gaius will live.” Calvus knelt beside the fallen youth. The laces closing his helmet had not burned through the way Perennius’ had. They popped audibly at a tug. Gaius’ face was sallow, bloodless beneath the weathered tan of shipboard and the road. “And so will your Empire, Legate,” the woman added softly. She stripped away the gorget and began breaking the tack-welded hooks and eyes that closed the mail shirt.

  Gaius breathed. There was even a flutter from his eyelids each time the woman’s fingers brushed his flesh. Perennius drew off the younger man’s gauntlets. He said, “So that I’ll go in the cave with you?”

  “No, my friend,” the traveller said, concentrating on the injured man before her. “Because you’d do that anyway. We thought—they thought—” and she looked at Perennius while her hands continued their gentle work of massaging Gaius’ temples—“that they were sending a machine back to root out those others.… And perhaps they were right, perhaps it was a machine they sent back. But I’m not a machine now, Aulus. I’ll do the job, because it is my job and my pleasure. But I’ll do it my way. Now, I’m going to leave you for a moment.”

  Perennius nodded. He expected the woman to stand up. After a moment’s surprise, he realized his mistake. Calvus was gone from him, all right, but she had retreated not into physical distance but rather into her trance state. The agent felt a twinge of fear, as if he were walking in front of a cocked and loaded catapult. He stood up. Whatever was happening was not directed at him.

  Soon enough, though, they would—he would—have to deal with the remaining Guardian and whatever lay beyond. Perennius gave a harsh laugh. He spat away the ball of phlegm that choked him. No water now to drink when his mouth was clear, and no rest for the weary. No rest for the wicked. The agent bent down to examine Gaius’ prostrate form. Calvus crouched over Gaius like a mantis awaiting a victim … but Perennius could not save the youth, and he could not despite his habits bring himself to doubt the traveller’s good faith. You did have to trust somebody else, or you would fail and everything would fail.

  Aulus Perennius had no use for failure.

  Calvus straightened slightly. Beneath her hand, the injured courier sighed like a child relaxing in his sleep. Gaius was still unconscious, but his normal color had returned.

  “I’ll need to get his armor off,” Perennius said. His voice broke. Looking away, he blinked repeatedly to clear his eyes of the tears. “I’ve got an idea for the shirt, and I need his helmet, and greave besides.”

  “Take my hands, Aulus Perennius,” said the tall woman. She extended them. Her fingertips were cool on the agent’s palms. Even as Perennius opened his mouth to note the need for haste, the pictures began to form in his mind.

  At the first, Perennius was not aware of what was happening, because the spires lit by richly-colored discharges were unlike any buildings he had seen. The agent’s mind accepted the images as signs of shock or madness. He felt the same horrified detachment that would have accompanied knowledge that the ground had fallen away beneath him and he was dropping toward certain death. Then details of awesome clarity penetrated. Perennius realized that he was seeing—or being shown—something by Calvus in a medium at which the traveller had never hinted.

  Gray, segmented creatures used huge machines to bathe the spires in light. In form the creatures were the Guardians that Perennius had seen and slain, but now there were myriads of them covering the ground like shrubs on wasteland and directing machinery of a scale that dwarfed them. Ripples of livid flame dissolved swathes of the creatures, but still more of them crawled out of the cracking, heaving soil. One of the spires settled like a waterfall descending. The structure’s walls crumbled in sheets, spilling the figures within as bloody froth in the crystalline shards. The figures were tall, mostly quite hairless; they were as human and as inhuman as Calvus herself. The alien creatures swarmed and died and swarmed in greater numbers. Another spire began to collapse as the scene segued into—

  something else in its way as alien. Men and women of proportions which the agent found normal sat one per small, eight-sided room. Perennius saw—visualized—simultaneously the individual units and the ranks and files and stacks of units comprising a whole larger than any construct he had seen, the Pyramids included. The humans had body hair and wore clothing, as did only the hirsute minority of those dying in the crystal spires of the previous scene. But though every detail of this folk’s activities was evident to Perennius, he comprehended none of it. The square shafts filling the interstices between alternate facets of the octagons were in some cases filled with conduits. Many shafts provided instead vertical passage for capsules which sailed up and down without visible mechanisms. None of the humans moved more than to reach or glance toward one of the eight shimmering walls of the units which held them. Suddenly, called by an unseen signal, everyone in the structure stood and fed themselves into upward-streaming shafts. They moved with the ordered precision of cogs engaging in a watermill. And the scene blurred, shifting by increments too minute for separate comprehension to—

&
nbsp; figures in a great barn, framed by metal webbing. Down the long bay were hauled spidery constructs. They bulked out by accreting parts attached by the lines of humans to either side of the growing machines. Everything was glare and motion. Overhead pulleys spun belts which in turn drove tools at the direction of the workmen. The noise was unheard but obvious from the way everything trembled, from motes of dust in the air to the greasy windows in the roof. It all danced in the abnormal clarity of the agent’s vision. The crudity and raw-edged power was at contrast to the slickness of the scene immediately previous—and even more at contrast to the sterile perfection underlying the chaos of the initial set of images. It was evident to Perennius that he was seeing a regression, despite the unfamiliarity of the concept to a mind attuned to stasis rather than to change. The regression was evident, even before the workmen—all men—downed tools together and the vision shimmered to—

  a kaleidoscope, a montage of discrete images. Imperial troops advanced across a field while their opponents fled. The wrack the defeated left behind included the standards of units the agent knew to be stationed in Britain; the paraphernalia of the barbarian mercenaries fighting at their side; and their dying leader. The sullen rain washed blood from the usurper’s gaping belly and the sword onto which he had fallen.

  Elsewhere—perhaps a thousand elsewheres—identical proclamations were tacked to the notice-boards of municipal buildings. Perennius recognized a few of the cities. He could have identified other settings at least by province. As many more scenes and the races of those who read the proclamation were beyond the experience of even the agent’s broad travels.

  And at the center, at the core, though it was no more a physical center than the melange of images was actually viewed by the agent’s eyes—there, connected to all the rest by cords of documents and bureaucracy, sat a man enthroned in a vaulted hall. He ruled in state, wearing the splendid trappings which no Roman leader had been permitted save during a military procession, the diadem and gold-shot purple robes.