Birds Of Prey

Birds of Prey

by David Drake

CHAPTER ONE

The leader of the mob carried the head of a lion with six-inch fangs. It was on a stake just long enough for him to wave it as a standard while he bawled a slogan back to his followers.

Aulus Perennius, a block and a half down the street, could not make out the words. It was only reflex, anyway, that made him want to jot down the slogan in his mind, to freeze the faces of the mob's first rank for a later report. Beside Perennius, Gaius reached under his cloak. "Rome isn't our assignment," Perennius said to the younger man. "What we do now is get out of the way. It'd peeve Navigatus no end if I got trampled to death a couple blocks from Headquarters after he went to all this effort to call me back to Rome."

Perennius had spoken lightly, but he was muttering a curse that was more general than the immediate situation as he stepped into an alcove. A barred door there served one of the larger units of the apartment block. The common stairways to the third through sixth floors were open, but they were already disgorging a rabble which would join the mob for entertainment. Gaius, Perennius' protege from his home village of Doklea, slid into the doorway beside him.

Aulus Perennius was five feet nine inches tall, a touch above the median. He was a blocky, powerful man with hands hard enough to be a stone mason's and a face as weathered as a field slave's. His tunic and dark blue cloak were both of better quality than a laborer could have afforded, however. It did not require the angular shape of a short sword beneath his cloak to give him a military appearance. Perennius looked to be a forty-year-old soldier of Illyrian descent. That was what he would in fact have been, had he not become an agent of the Bureau of Imperial Affairs ten years before.

Gaius was half the agent's age; taller, slimmer - a cheerful-looking youth, and that not only by contrast to his dour companion. He too wore a sword, a cavalry spatha long enough to project beneath the hem of his cloak.

Perennius stared at the mob. He knew that it was not the cause of the collapse of everything he had spent his life trying to preserve. It was no more than a symptom of that collapse. The agent's expression was nonetheless that of a man who had lived so closely with anger and death that they might now be his only friends.

The bow shock of the mob was clearing the street ahead of it. Rain earlier that afternoon had left a slick shimmer of mud and filth on the paving stones, since the sewer beneath was blocked. A sedan chair came to grief as it tried to turn around. One of the bearers lost his footing and the whole rig came down on him with a crash and a scream. The woman inside tumbled through the curtains and fouled her silk tunics in the muck. "Dressed like a whore!" Perennius whispered savagely, but she was too old to owe her success to that. No doubt she was an official's wife, tarted up just as his mistresses were.

Gaius started to go to her aid. The agent's hand stopped him. The woman stood on her own hefty legs and screamed at her chairmen. An onlooker scooped up a handful of mud from the gutter and flung it at her with a taunt in Aramaic. The woman cursed back in the same language, but there were more hands dipping toward the gutter and the mob itself was closing fast. The woman gathered her skirts and darted for the relatively dry surface of the covered sidewalk to make her escape.

Her servants followed her. Three of them snatched up their poles and strutted off with the chair. They were in trouble enough for falling. Loss of the vehicle besides would invite a level of punishment worse than anything they could expect at the hands of the mob. The fourth bearer limped along behind his fellows. He squeezed his right thigh with both hands as if to force out the pain of the bruise it had received between a brace and the stone pavement.

Shops were closing abruptly. Like the upper-class woman, they were obvious targets for the mob that would at other times comprise their clientele. The manager of the wineshop in the alcove next to Perennius slammed down his shutter without even delaying long enough to tug in the cups chained to the counter. His three patrons kept an eye on the approaching tumult as they slurped their mixtures of water and powerful African wine. In a bread shop on the ground floor of the building across the street, a lounger tried to snitch a roll. He squawked as the counterman caught his wrist and pinned his forearm to the limestone counter with the iron-edged shutter. The hasp of the padlock within must have had enough reach to close despite the impediment, because the loafer continued to scream even as the mob boiled past him.

The counterman was almost certainly a slave, perhaps not even the person responsible to the absentee owner for management of the shop. He had acted not from necessity or even from personal involvement. In frustration and ah anger more general than the immediate impetus, he had lashed out against the closest permissible target.

Perennius felt a rush of fellowship for the counterman as he watched the thief screaming. His palm sweated on the worn bone hilt of his sword.

The mob streamed past with the ragged implacability of the tide on a strand. The front ranks were of husky men who probably had a purpose. They were shouting, "Down with Baebrio!" The slogan meant little to Perennius and perhaps less to the jeering multitude following those leaders. This was simply entertainment for most of the crowd, the landless and jobless, the helpless and hopeless. They would pour on, shouting and smashing, until a company of the Watch was mustered to block them. Perhaps by that time, their numbers would have grown so that it was the Watch instead that scattered in a hail of bricks and roof tiles. If the riot went that far, it would last a day or more before squadrons of imperial cavalry arrived from Milan to wash the streets clear with blood.

Thugs with cudgels were running down the sidewalks like outriders, banging on doors and shutters. Gaius and the agent were hidden by their dark cloaks and the shade of the pillar-supported sidewalk covering. A thug who had just bellowed something back at his companions recoiled in surprise from the alcove. He was young and burly, with a touch of Germanic pallor to his face. The cudgel that had halted in surprise he now cocked back with a snarl and a curse. He did not know the pair of them or care about them as men, but license faced control and reacted to it like acid on lime.

As the cudgel rose, Perennius grinned and spread his cloak with his left hand. His sword had been slung centurion-fashion from the left side of his equipment belt. It was that sword rather than the ball-pommeled dagger in the other scabbard that poised to respond to the club. But it was the grin that froze the thug, not the twenty inches of bare steel in Perennius' hand. The fellow dropped his weapon and rushed on.

"Let him go," Perennius ordered as Gaius lunged to catch the man. He was nothing but flotsam on a dirty stream. Perennius, a cloaked figure in the shadows, would be forgotten by nightfall. The death the agent had been so willing to offer would be forgotten also, until it came calling again in a tavern brawl or a drunken misstep. The thug did not matter to the world, and to Perennius he was only the latest of the hundreds who, for one reason or none, had considered killing him.

More interesting than that exchange was the head of the cat which was both banner and probable occasion for the mob. The great canines winked like spear-points from the upper jaw. Perennius had seen cats as big, but he had never seen one similarly armed. The folk surging down the street past the agent were inured to strangeness by the beast shows of the Circus, but this was to them also a unique marvel, an omen like a cow which spoke or thunder from a clear sky. It was reason enough for riot; it, and the barren wasteland of their lives.

Perennius felt the cat grin at him as it was swept past; but the feeling, of course, was nonsense.

Ten minutes after the head of the mob had passed, the street was empty enough that Gaius and Perennius could walk against what had been the flow. The agent was weary from a journey of over a thousand straight-line miles - and he had not traversed them in a straight line. He was used to being weary. He was used to being delayed as well. Throughout the past six months, Perennius had been delayed repeatedly because the draft transferring funds to his account in Antioch had not arrived.

The agent had made do because he was the sort of person who did make do. Perennius had never learned patience, but he knew the value of restraint and the power of necessity. The banker in Antioch had advanced some money and more information when he understood precisely what alternatives the stocky Imperial agent was setting before him. The sum Perennius had set as the bottom line for both of them to walk out of the room alive would not bankrupt the other, even if the "mistake" in Rome were never cleared up.

The banker never seriously considered the possibility that Perennius was bluffing.

The mob had not done a great deal of damage, since its racket was warning enough for most potential victims to drop their shutters or scamper out of the way. Half a dozen shopkeepers had dared a police fine by spreading their merchandise out on the sidewalks in front of their alcoves. Anarchy had punished them more condignly and suddenly than anything the law might have metered out. One old man moaned in the remains of his trampled, looted woolen goods. His wife was chattering in Egyptian as she dabbed blood from the pressure-cut in the fellow's scalp.

Perennius picked his way past them with more anger than sympathy. The Empire would work if everyone obeyed its rules. No one knew better than the agent how great was the Empire's potential if it would cling together, if its millions would accept what the Empire offered them in the knowledge that it was more than they would get from chaos if each went his own way.

But no, Britain and Gaul separated, as if they could deal with the Franks better alone than if they waited for the central army to handle the irruptions across the Rhine after it had blunted more pressing threats. Generals and governors repeatedly tried to parlay their commands into the Imperial regalia. The attempts guaranteed death for the usurpers, death for their rivals, and almost certainly death for the system over which they squabbled and slew. On a lower level, the rabble, dissatisfied with unproductive sloth, rioted in the streets in an apparent desire to smash the mechanism that fed it.

And shopkeepers defied ordinances aimed at keeping open the thoroughfares on which their business depended. Well, let them lie in the street and moan. They'd made their choice.

Somewhere in the building toward which Aulus Perennius walked was a clerk who had made a similarly bad decision. The clerk had siphoned off funds meant for secret intelligence of the Autarch of Palmyra; intelligence that Perennius was risking his life to supply.

The Headquarters of the Bureau of Imperial Affairs, Western Division, was a converted town-house on the edge of the Caelian Hill. It was a two-story structure, lowered over by the six-floor apartment blocks more prevalent in the district. There was little to distinguish Headquarters from private houses elsewhere in Rome. Its facade was bleak and completely windowless on the stuccoed lower story. The upper floor, beyond the threat of graffiti and rubbing shoulders, had been sheathed in marble. The veneering was not in particularly good repair. Missing chips revealed the tufa core. The windows were narrow and barred horizontally. Most of the glazed sashes were swung open for ventilation despite the nip of a breeze to which spring was coming late.

Originally, the lower story had been flanked on all sides by shops just as the neighboring apartment blocks were. The shop doorways had been bricked up when the building was converted to its present use almost eighty years before, during the reign of Commodus. Even at that distance in time, the windows and doors could be deduced from shadows on the stucco caused by a moisture content in the bricks differing from that of the surrounding stone.

The main entrance was off a closed court, not the street Perennius had been following. He paused on the corner, sighed and cinched up his equipment belt. The agent was used to palaces, to great houses, to headquarters of many sorts; but he had never felt comfortable in this one. It occurred to him that it was because he had no real business there. There were Imperial agents and informers throughout Rome, and no doubt the Emperor had as much need for them here as he did for them anywhere else in the Empire.

That was not a duty Perennius thought he could live with, however. On the borders or across them, the agent could convince himself that he was working to preserve the Empire. When he was at the core of that Empire, he saw that the rot, the waste and treachery and peculation, was as advanced as any nightmare on the borders. What the dour agent was about to do to a finance clerk was a personal thing. If Perennius permitted himself to know that a similar tale could be told of a thousand, a myriad, highly-placed bureaucrats in the capital, he would also have had to know that nothing whatever Aulus Perennius did would have any significant effect.

A pair of armed guards stood in the entrance alcove of the building. Their round shields, stacked against javelins in opposite corners of the short passage, were marked with the blazons of a battalion of the Palatine Foot. The Palatines were one of the elite formations the Emperor was forming as a central field army. All the Empire's borders were so porous that there was no longer a prayer of dealing with hostile thrusts before they penetrated to the cities and farmland of the interior. Because the Palatines were an elite, it was all the more frustrating to Perennius that the younger of the guards had not bothered to wear his body armor.

Both of the uniformed men straightened when they saw that Perennius and Gaius were not sauntering toward the apartment block at the end of the court. The lower floors of that building seemed, from the advertisements painted on the stucco, to have been converted into an inn and brothel. The guard who called out to Perennius was the older of the pair, a man not far short of the agent's own forty years. "All right, sir," the guard announced with no more than adequate politeness, "if you've got business here, you'll have to state it to us."

"Get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, straight-leg?" snapped Gaius in reaction to the tone. The young man flopped back the edge of his cloak to display his chest insignia, medallions of silvered bronze. Gaius had been an aide in the Bodyguard Horse before Perennius arranged his secondment to the Bureau as a courier. The morning before, when they had reached Italy - and very nearly the limits of friendly territory - the younger man had unpacked and donned his uniform trappings. That was harmless enough in itself, a boastfulness understandable in an orphan from an Illyrian village no one had ever heard of. What had sent a chill down Perennius' spine was the realization that Gaius had been carrying the gear when he arrived in Palmyra to deliver an urgent message to Perennius.

The situation between Gallienus, who styled himself Emperor of Rome, and Odenathus, who claimed less but perhaps controlled more, was uncertain. The two were not friends . . . nor, at the moment, were they clearly at swords' points. Perennius travelled as a spice trader, but that was only a veneer over his claim to be a secret envoy from Postumus, Emperor of the Gauls. Given what the agent had learned in those paired personae, there was very little doubt as to what the Palmyrenes would have done if Gaius' vanity had unmasked the pair of them as agents of the central government.

Of what liked to think of itself as the central government, at any rate.

The older guard reacted about the way Perennius would have reacted had he been on entrance duty. "Don't worry about how I slept, sonny," he said. "Let's just see your pass." The guard wore a shirt of iron ring mail over his tunic. The metal had been browned, but the linen beneath his armpits bore smudges of rust nonetheless. It was that problem of maintenance which led many men to prefer bronze armor or even leather despite the greater strength of the iron.

Of course, a lot of them now were like the younger guard who wore no armor at all. Blazes! See how comfortable they'd be the first time a Frank's spear slipped past the edge of their shields.

The agent reached into his wallet and brought out one of the flat tablets there. It was of four leaves of thin board. The outer two acted as covers for the inner pair. "These are my orders," Perennius said, holding out the diploma. "If they're forgeries, then I've made a hell of a long trip for nothing."

The older guard took the tablet. The wax seal had been broken. He held the document at an angle to the light to see the impression more clearly. The guard's helmet quivered as his high forehead wrinkled beneath it.

"You know," said the younger man as his partner opened the tablet, "just having a pass won't get you farther than the hall. Now, it happens that the receiving clerk is a friend of ours. You understand that everything's open and above-board inside, what with so many, let's say hands, around. But if I were to tip him the wink as I sent you through, then it might save you, hell, maybe a day warming a bench in - "

"Maximus," the older guard said. He looked from the diploma to his companion. Perennius was smiling at the corner of his eye.

" - a bench in the hall," Maximus continued, his conspirator's smile seguing into a quick frown at the partner who was interrupting his spiel.

"Maximus, shut the fuck up!" the older man snarled. He thrust the open tablet toward his companion.

What was written on the enclosure was simple and standard. It named Perennius, described him in detail which included his four major scars, and directed him to report to Headquarters - not further identified - with all dispatch. As such, the document served both for orders and for a pass. There was nothing in the written portion to frighten anyone who knew as little about Aulus Perennius as either of the guards could be expected to know.

The tablet had been sealed with the general Bureau signet, a seated woman holding a small sheaf of wheat. It was a hold-over from the days a century before when the organization had officially been the Bureau of Grain Supply. The seal within, at the close of the brusk orders, was a personal one. It impressed in the wax a low relief of a man gripping the steering oar of a ship. Though the guards might never have seen the seal in use before, they knew it for that of Marcus Optatius Navigatus. Navigatus was head of the Bureau, formally the equal of a provincial fiscal officer in authority and informally more powerful than most governors . . . because he directed men like Aulus Perennius.

Maximus got the point. The helmsman signet smothered his snarl into an engaging grin as he turned from his partner back to the agent. "Hey, just a joke, sir," he said. "There's just about no traffic through here anyway, except the morning levee and from the courier's entrance." He gestured with a quick flick of his head. It was more of a nervous mannerism than a direction toward whichever other entrance to the building he meant. "No harm done, hey?"

"There could have been," said Perennius.

The older guard closed the tablet carefully and offered it back to the agent. "Thank you, sir. Now, if - "

Perennius ignored him. His eyes forced Maximus back a step. The agent's hard voice continued. "It still could be, son, couldn't it? Look at me, damn you!"

Gaius cleared his throat and laid a hand lightly on his superior's shoulder. He had seen the reaction before, always in rear areas, always in response to someone's attempt to parlay petty authority into injustice. The younger Illyrian knew that it would be to the advantage of everyone if he could calm his protector before matters proceeded further.

For the moment, Perennius noticed Gaius as little as he did the older guard. Maximus squirmed as he met the eyes of the shorter, older man. "Listen, you slimy little thief," the agent went on in a fierce whisper, "If I ever again hear of you shaking down people on the business of this Bureau, I'll come for you. Do you understand?"

Maximus nodded his head upward in affirmation.

"Do you understand?" Perennius shouted.

Gaius stepped between the two men. "Say yessir, you damned fool!" he snapped to the guard. "And you better mean it, because he does. Aulus," he added, turning to Perennius, "you back off, he's not worth it."

"The gods know that's true," Perennius muttered. He gripped Gaius' shoulder for support and took a shuddering breath.

"Yessir," said the guard. He could not believe what was happening. He had just enough intellectual control to suppress the desire to grasp his sword hilt. This couldn't be happening!

Still touching Gaius, though the support needed was no longer physical, Perennius retrieved his orders from the other guard. "Sorry," he said to the mail-clad man, "but if I don't cure him, who in blazes will?" He thrust the diploma into his wallet and began to unbuckle his equipment belt. Gaius stepped back and wiped his forehead with the inner hem of his cloak.

"Ah, that's right, sir," said the older guard as Perennius loosed his shoulder strap, then the waist buckle itself. "We'll return your weapons to you when you leave."

"Sure, couldn't have me going berserk in Bureau Headquarters, could we?" said the agent with the only smile among the four men. His wallet and purse were hung from a separate, much lighter belt. That saved him the problem of unfastening the hook-mounted scabbards when he disarmed, or handing the sword and dagger over bare to be dulled when somebody inevitably dropped them.

"Ah, sir," the guard added tentatively, "the pass is for you alone."

Everyone paused. Perennius laughed abruptly. Maximus flinched away from the sound.

The agent was amused, however. He was not just going through some prelude to the murderous frenzy about which he had joked. Perennius had intended to carry his protege in to see Navigatus. It would be good for Gaius' career, especially if the emergency summons meant the Director might need Perennius' gratitude. Under normal circumstances, the agent could have squared the guards easily enough and taken Gaius into the building. He did not see any practical way of doing that now that he had thrown a wholly unnecessary scene. The guards might be willing to compromise - Maximus looked both confused and terrified - but Perennius' own sense of propriety would not permit him to openly proclaim himself an idiot.

"You know," the agent said as he gave his sword and dagger to the younger guard, "there's times that even I think I've been on the job too long. The only problem is that when I go on leave, I get wound up even tighter." He grinned and added, "Don't know what the cure is." But he did know, they all knew that death was the cure for men in whom frustration and violence mounted higher and higher.

"Well, I'll wait out here," Gaius said. He was a good kid, prideful but not ambitious enough for his own good. It had probably not occurred to him that he was missing the chance of a real career boost. "Or look, there's a tavern right there - " he thumbed toward the end of the court. "Look me up when you're done with your interview."

Perennius glanced first at the westering sun, then back to the younger man. Everybody in a cathouse this close to Headquarters was probably an informer or a spy in addition to their other duties. Gaius was the friendly sort who tended to be loose-lipped when he had a cup or two in him or was dipping his wick. Perennius could not imagine that such talk would do any intrinsic harm, but it would get back to the Bureau for sure and Internal Security would drop on the kid like an obelisk. "Look," the veteran agent said, "why don't you head straight to the Transient Barracks and make sure they've assigned us decent accommodations. There's a nice bath attached to the barracks. I'll meet you there, soon as I can - and there's shops in the bathhouse, better wine than they'll serve around here."

Gaius shrugged. "Sure," he agreed. "I'll catch you there." The glance he cast over his shoulder as he walked off was from concern over Perennius, not because the older man was manipulating him.

The agent took a deep breath. "Look," he said to Maximus in a calm, even friendly, tone, "if you wear your body armor, you'll live longer. Whether or not that's a benefit to the Empire sort of depends on whether you have sense enough to take good advice."

Maximus nodded stiffly, but there was no belief in his eyes - only fear of the result of giving the wrong answer to a test that he did not begin to understand.

Perennius sighed. He looked at the older guard, the one with the mail shirt and the scar snaking up his right arm to where the sleeve of his tunic hid it. The infantryman smiled back at the agent, The expression was forced but perhaps it was the more notable for that. "Quintus Sestius Cotyla," he volunteered. "Third Centurion of the Fourth Battalion, Palatine Foot."

"Tell him about it," Perennius said with a nod toward the younger guard. "When the shit comes down, habits'll either save you or get your ass killed. For a soldier, walking around on duty without armor is a damned bad habit. But blazes, I've got work to do, I guess."

Sestius nodded. He rapped sharply on the door with a swagger stick. "Pass one," he called through the triangular communication grate.

"The tribune doesn't object so long as our brightwork's polished," said Maximus unexpectedly. He held a rigid brace with his eyes on the opposite building instead of on the man he was addressing.

The door groaned and began to swing inward. Perennius looked at the guard without anger. "Your tribune," he said "may not have seen as many feet of intestine spilled as I have, sonny. But, like I say, it's a problem that'll cure itself sooner or later." He stepped between the men into the short passageway that led to the shabby elegance of the entrance hall.

The interior of the building was very dark by contrast to the sunlit street. Perennius nodded to the functionary who had opened the door, but he did not notice that the fellow had raised a hand for attention. "A moment, sir," the man said in a sharp voice as Perennius almost walked into the bar separating the passage from the hall proper.

The hall was a pool of light which spilled through the large roof vent twenty feet above. The agent's eyes adapted well enough to see by the scattered reflection that the man who spoke was too well dressed to be simply a slave used as a doorkeeper. There was a shimmer of silk woven into the linen of his tunic. "Your pass, sir," he said with his hand out. Beside him stirred the heavy-set man with a cudgel, the civilian equivalent of the two uniformed men outside. Since the last time Perennius had been here, the Bureau had added its own credentials check to duplicate that of the army. Clerks seated at desks filling the hall glanced up at the diversion.

Perennius fingered out his diploma again and handed it to the doorman. "First," he said, "I need to see a fellow named Zopyrion, Claudius Zopyrion, in one of the finance sections."

The doorman ignored what the agent was saying. He closed the document with a snap and a smile. "Very good, Legate Perennius," he said in a bright voice. "The Director has requested that you be passed through to him at once. His office is - "

"I know where the Director's office is," Perennius said quietly. He could feel muscles knotting together, but he managed not to let his fists clench as they wanted to do. Rome always did this to him; it wasn't fair. "First I need to see - "

"You can take care of your travel vouchers later, I'm sure, Legate," the functionary interrupted. His smile was a caricature, now, warping itself into a sneer. "The Director says - "

"Read my lips!" the agent hissed. His voice did not carry to the assembled clerks, but the bruiser in the passage straightened abruptly. "I said, I'll see Navigatus when I've finished my business with Zopyrion. Now, if you want to tell me where to find the bastard, fine. Otherwise - " and his eyes measured the bruiser with cool detachment before flicking back to the doorman - "I guess I'll go look for myself." Unconquered Sun, Father of Life! He should never have come back.

"Upstairs," the doorman said. He slid aside a curtain behind him. There was a doorway, punched through a frescoed wall when the house was converted. The plain wooden staircase might have been original. "He's the head of Finance Two. Follow the corridor to the left."

"Thank you," Perennius said with a nod. He strode to the staircase.

"I'll inform the Director that you're here, Legate," the doorman said in a distant voice. "No doubt he'll be amused by your priorities."

"Wish to blazes his priorities amused me, buddy," the agent flung over his shoulder as he stamped upward. He had replaced his orders in the wallet. Now he was taking out another, similar tablet.

CHAPTER TWO

When the building was a residence, its upper floor had been divided into small cubicles - slave quarters, storage, and ladder-served additions to the shops and rental housing on the exterior of the lower floor. The open peristyle court and the garden provided light wells for the rooms to the rear. The entrance hall, though double height, was roofed except for the vent which served as a skylight and fed the pool beneath it. The area at the top of the stairs was lighted and ventilated only by the outside windows.

Most of the partition walls had been knocked down during conversion. The windows were opened out from their frames like vertical louvers to catch what breeze wandered through the maze of higher buildings and surrounding hills. Even so, the atmosphere within was warm and stuffy. Perennius unpinned his cloak and gripped it with his left hand. Even in the street, he had worn the garment mostly to keep his weapons from being too obtrusive. The sword and dagger were legal for him but he preferred to avoid the hassle of explanations.

A unit of forty or so clerks occupied the area to the left of the staircase. They sat on low stools in front of desks which were boards slanted from pedestals with holes for ink pots. There was an aisle between the desks and the enclosed main hall. Perennius followed the aisle in accordance with the doorkeeper's instructions. The room was alive with noise. Most of the clerks read aloud the reports which they copied or epitomized. Baskets of scrolls and tablets sat on the floor beside each desk. The din seemed to bother neither the men who were working nor those who were talking with others at neighboring desks. Some of the clerks worked and chatted simultaneously. Their fingers and pens followed lines of manuscript while their tongues discussed the chariot races of the day before.

A supervisor almost walked into Perennius at the corner. "Yes sir?" the man said, startled into Greek.

"I need Claudius Zopyrion," the agent replied. He flashed the document in his hand so that the other man could see the name of the addressee. Battle in closed ranks had made Perennius as facile at separating information from noise as any of the gobbling clerks around him.

The supervisor gestured down the aisle in the direction from which he had come. Perennius edged around the corner so that he could follow the pointing finger. A dozen cubicles remained along the outside wall, though the partitions of most of the rooms which had faced the light wells had been removed to seat more clerks. "Third office on the left," the supervisor said.

"Thanks," replied the agent. "And who's his boss? Zopyrion's?"

"Gnaeus Calgurrio," the other man said. He had begun to frown, but he did not ask the agent's business. "Head of Finance. First office."

Perennius smiled his gratitude and walked off in the indicated direction. He could feel the bureaucrat's eyes follow him past the ranks of clerks.

The first office was double the width of the others in the row. As Perennius stepped past, he caught a glimpse through the doorway of a plump, balding man reclining on a brocaded couch. Seated upright between the couch and the door was a younger man with hard eyes and a face as ruthless in repose as Perennius' own. Perfect, the agent thought. He had no immediate need for the department head and his aide, however. Not until he had prepared things in the second office over.

Perennius slipped in the door and closed it before the cubicle's inhabitant could more than glance up from the scroll in his hand. "Zopyrion?" the agent asked in a husky whisper.

"Herakles! Who are you?" the other demanded. Zopyrion was a short man with the cylindrical softness that marked him as a eunuch more clearly than his smooth chin. Like his department head, Zopyrion had a couch and window; but only one window and a couch with a frame of turned wood instead of the filigree of his superior's.

The section head spoke Latin with a pronounced Carian accent. Perennius answered in that dialect, though he was not fully fluent in it. The partitions separating the offices were thin, and the agent wanted only Zopyrion to understand him at the moment. "I've got a letter from Simonides," the agent said, preferring the sealed tablet in his hand. "He said for me to take back an answer."

There was a one-legged tablet near the head of the couch. It held writing instruments. "Simonides?" the bureaucrat repeated as he took the document. He picked up a stylus with which to break the thread which held the tablet closed. Concern had replaced the initial anger in his voice.

"Simonides of Antioch, the banker," Perennius said as he stepped closer. "You know, the one you used to wash the - "

"Silence, by Herakles!" Zopyrion gasped. He too had slipped into his native Carian. That was a result of confusion rather than a conscious desire for secrecy, however. He looked down at the document in his hand.

It was a tablet of three waxed wooden leaves, hollowed to keep the writing from being flattened to illegibility when they were closed. Zopyrion began to read the first page in a low sing-song, holding the page by habit at a flat angle to the light so that shadows brought the wax impressions into relief. " 'Simonides, son of Eustachios, greets Sextus Claudius Zopyrion. I return herewith the draft by which you ordered me to transfer two hundred gold solidi from Imperial accounts to your brother-in-law, Nelius Juturnus. .. .' " The clerk looked up again in utter, abject terror at Perennius, who now stood beside him. The agent's left hand rested on the table, covering the alabaster ink pot there. "Why in the name of Fortune did he write this?" Zopyrion demanded.

The agent laughed. "Oh," he said, "maybe it was when I asked him which orifice he wanted to swallow my sword through, hey? But take a look at the draft - " he tapped with his right forefinger the pair of pages which were still closed. "You know, it seems to me your department head's seal is a bit fuzzy, like somebody used a plaster copy instead of the original."

Zopyrion's eyes followed the tapping finger. As his head bent slightly, Perennius hit him behind the ear with the base of the ink pot. It was an awkward, left-handed blow, but there was enough muscle behind it to spill the clerk flaccidly onto the floor. The table went over on top of him with a crash.

Perennius set the stone pot down on its side carefully, so that there would be no additional noise. There was a neat circle of ink on the palm of his left hand. He did not wipe it off, because the smear might be harder to hide than the ink where it now was. Working fast, the agent unhooked a skin of powerful wine from the inner hem of his cloak where it had been hidden. He tilted up Zopyrion's face and squirted a jet of wine into the corner of the unconscious man's mouth. The liquid drooled back down his chin. The air of the office filled with the wine's thick, sweet odor. Perennius laid the skin, still uncorked, beside the eunuch's outflung hand. Its contents leaked and pooled across the terrazzo, drawing whorls of ink into them.

The agent straightened. In a voice that even he could barely hear, he said to the fallen man, "Next time you leave somebody hanging in hostile territory, make damn sure that he doesn't make it back."

He threw open the office door. "Sir! Sir!" he cried as he ran toward the double office at the head of the row. "Sir, you've got to come here!"

Calgurrio's sharp-eyed aide was on his feet before Perennius completed the two strides to his door. The department head himself was far slower to react, though he did swing his heavy thighs over the edge of his couch. Startled clerks leaped from stools in the aisle to crowd around the door of Zopyrion's office. "Get back!" snapped the aide. The group dissolved in a flurry fearfully righting the stools they had knocked over in their haste.

Speaking rapidly, Perennius followed the aide back to the unconscious eunuch. "A banker in Antioch wouldn't fund my mission like he was supposed to," the agent said, "but he gave me a letter for this Claudius Zopyrion when I got to Rome. The guy was drinking when I got here - "

The aide knelt down by Zopyrion, keeping the hem of his tunic clear of the pooled ink and wine. He picked up the open tablet and skimmed it, keeping the wax side turned away from Perennius at his elbow, "Ah, I looked at it after he fainted," the agent said softly. "I was horrified. What sort of punishment could be sufficient for an embezzler like that?"

"What happened, Anguilus?" demanded Calgurrio as he waddled into the room. The department head stared at Zopyrion in amazement. The eunuch was beginning to moan. "Isis and the Child, what is this?"

Anguilus swung the door closed and handed the tablet to his superior. "I think we have a problem with Zopyrion, sir," the aide said. Calgurrio began to read the document to himself with increasing astonishment. To Perennius, Anguilus whispered, "And just who are you, good sir?" The words were polite, but there was no deference in the aide's tone. His face was as blank as a sheet of marble and as hard.

The agent handed over the diploma with his orders. The clerks had returned to noisy confusion as soon as the door had closed them from Calgurrio's sight - or more probably, from Anguilus'. Using the hubbub to mask his words from everyone but the aide, Perennius said, "If he were transferred to a garrison unit in the sticks - one of the little posts in Africa out on the fringe of the desert where the Moors raid every few months. He wouldn't be able to lie about how he split the money with his department head then."

Anguilus closed and returned the diploma. His eyes were as chill as steel in the winter.

"Mother Isis!" Calgurrio blurted. "Anguilus, did you read this? It says - "

The aide put a hand on his superior's shoulder. "Yes, sir," he said with his eyes still watching Perennius, "but I think we can deal with the problem without it having to go beyond these walls." He nodded toward the closed door and the commotion beyond it before he added, "This gentleman is Aulus Perennius, one of the Bureau's top field agents, you may remember. We're very fortunate that the situation was uncovered by someone of his proven discretion." Anguilus flashed a tight rictus, not really a smile, toward the agent.

Zopyrion moaned again. His eyes opened, though without any intellect behind them. The right pupil was fully dilated: the left was not. Anguilus glanced down at the eunuch. When he looked back at Perennius, his sour grin showed that the evidence of concussion only supported what the aide had known all along.

"Sure, I trust you to clean house yourselves," Perennius said. "Maybe the next time I'm here at Headquarters, I'll check just how it did come out." He nodded toward Zopyrion. "Until then, be well." The agent turned and reached for the door's lever handle.

"It won't happen to you again, fellow-soldier," said Calgurrio's aide. The Bureau's field staff was recruited from the Army, but Perennius would not have guessed that Anguilus had the right to use that particular honorific. "Don't worry."

Perennius turned again to look at the aide with his silk and his smooth hands and his eyes like a wolf's. They came from different backgrounds but the two of them recognized each other. "I don't worry," the agent said. "I leave that to other people."

As Perennius left the office, thrusting his broad shoulders through the press of clerks, he heard Calgurrio saying plaintively, "But why did he put something like this in writing?"

CHAPTER THREE

One of the troopers muttered in disbelief. The decision, Ursinus, hushed the man, but Ursinus' face showed some doubt also.

"You don't mean here, Mother?" asked Sacrovir. He glanced toward the building they were passing on the way to what must be a brothel. The corner building had military guards, showing it had official status of some kind. That seemed a more likely resort of the "source of power" they sought than did a whorehouse, even a whorehouse in Rome.

Julia nodded to her son like a bird bobbing its head. She wore an enveloping gray cloak, hooded and pinned shut in front. The garment was not for warmth but to hide from view the costume she wore beneath it. The seeress' breeches and long-sleeved shirt were a patchwork of skins from over a hundred species of animals and birds. Alone, the outfit was that of a tattered scarecrow. Those who saw Julia wearing the costume, moving in it, could not doubt that the garb had purposes beyond those of mere clothing. "I know where I am being led," the seeress said. Her voice, though distinct, had the unworldly quality of a distant echo. The soldiers, all but Julius Sacrovir, her son, stirred uneasily.

"Let's go, then," Sacrovir ordered. He was slightly the youngest of the five-man escort, but he had been born to authority. Further, Sacrovir had a familiarity with his mother's work so that it did not make him uneasy as it did the others.

Sacrovir himself had sung the prelude to the rites in Trier from which this mission had sprung. The youth's clear falsetto had rung from the stone arches as dignitaries waited tensely and the Emperor Postumus shivered in the armor he wore as a public reminder of his military valor. On the feather-cushioned throne, Julia had begun to speak in a voice like the piping of birds. . . .

Now the little woman followed as if drawn by the wake of her tall, powerful son. The other troopers marched to either side of the seeress, pair and pair. They kept step by habit, unremarkable in this city of soldiers and troop-guarded administrators. If the entourage was unusual, it was for the fact that it surrounded a woman afoot.

It was too early in the afternoon for the brothel to be busy, though there was probably a back entrance and a latchbell for emergency service even during the hours the front doors were barred. Those doors were open now, however, and the madam was in her barred kiosk just within them. She looked startled by the size and ordered bearing of the party. A slave who had been mopping the gray and green terrazzo floor scampered off, perhaps to wake the bouncer. Alcoves led off the entrance hall. An open staircase led up to the rooms on the second story.

"How can I help you, gentlemen?" the madam asked brightly as her fingers clicked shut the cash box. Cartoons frescoed over the arch of each alcove suggested a variety of possibilities. In some cases, these official displays had been supplemented by notes and still cruder drawings added by customers waiting on a full night.

"There's someone here we need to see," said Sacrovir, wishing he had more details.

"Why of course, honey," the madam began with her false smile.

Julia reached out from beneath her cloak. "Up there," she said to her son. She pointed with a hand wearing a cat-skin mitten. The fur side was inward, but it spilled out in purest white where the mitten was drawn over the seeress' wrist. Sacrovir obeyed the direction, striding to the stairs without another glance at the woman in the kiosk. The young man was wired into another universe, though by no means as thoroughly as was his mother.

The madam paused with one hand on the door of her cage. Her mouth was open to cry out. Ursinus rang a coin on the travertine counter, silencing the alarm before it was uttered. "Won't be any trouble," the soldier said in his Gallic accent. He waved the other troopers by with his left hand. "Kid's a little strange, you know, but it won't be any trouble." Ursinus followed the rest of the group up the stairs, his hand close by the hilt of his cloak-covered sword. In the kiosk, the madam was looking with surprise at the face on the coin she had just been given.

Two girls were arguing over a bracelet in the upper hall. Their shrill voices softened quickly into overtures as the men and Julia pushed by. One of the troopers paused a half-step when the blond prostitute caught his eye and stroked her bare breast. A snapped command from Ursinus moved him on again.

"Here," said Julia. She reached out and tapped a door. The usual price marker had been removed from its peg, leaving a lighter square on the door panel.

"Hey, you can't go in there," called the blond girl who had tried to accost them. "That's a special rental, sort of."

Sacrovir knocked louder.

The latch snicked, allowing the door to open a crack. It would have closed again if one of the troopers had not blocked it with his foot. "Go away," rasped an indescribable voice. "I am not to be disturbed."

"We offer you help for help," said the seeress. She shrugged and her cape dropped away. The different sheens and patterns of the costume beneath blended into an odd unity. Perhaps that was a trick of the uncertain light. "The power of our Emperor, for the - power you control."

The bouncer, naked except for breeches and a three-foot cudgel, pounded up the stairs. The oil with which he had been being massaged shone on his bunched shoulders. Ursinus motioned one of his men to his side, though neither Gaul drew a weapon for the moment.

The door opened fully. The figure within the room was short, caped and cowled as the seeress herself had been. It wore a veil. The features beneath the shadowing veil were so still as to belie their appearance of flesh. "Come," said the figure in its harsh voice that did not move its lips. Something bright as jewelry, too bright for a weapon, winked from a fold in its garment. "What is it that your Emperor thinks he allies himself with?"

Julia moved like a sleepwalker. She followed the figure back into the chamber. On the other side of the room was a door open onto a balcony. Daylight blurred and haloed the other figure. Sacrovir paused on the threshold and looked back to the other men of the escort.

Ursinus clenched his fist with the thumb displayed in a gesture from the amphitheatre. "We'll keep our friend company out here," the decurion said. He nodded toward the bouncer. "Convince him that there's nothing going down that he needs to worry about."

Sacrovir jerked his head in assent. He slipped into the private room after his mother. The door latched behind him.

"With your help," Julia was whispering, "there can be an Empire united again on Trier. I have seen it, seen armies melting away before Postumus like trees struck by summer lightning. . . . What do you wish of Postumus, then? We are sent to make it yours."

Sacrovir backed without noticing his own motion until his shoulders pressed against the door panel. His eyes jumped around the room like sparrows in a bush. The youth did not let them light too long on either his mother or on the sunlight-shimmering figure his mother had journeyed so far to meet.

"You know nothing," the figure said in wonder. The object it held was no longer so clearly not a weapon.

"We know you have the power to destroy armies," the seeress replied without emotion.

"These others are fighters?" the figure asked abruptly. Its gesture rumpled but did not pass the enveloping cloak.

"My son, yes, and soldiers," Julia said. "There are thousands more soldiers for the Emperor Postumus to lead at your bidding - and with your aid. There are infinite futures, but I have seen ..."

"No," the figure said, the word alone without the gesture of negation to be expected with it. "Not thousands. I have hired certain fighters here ... but yours might serve

me yet tonight. Then later, there is a - treasure - to guard. For a year."

"You pledge your support to the Emperor, if we help you tonight and guard a treasure?" Sacrovir demanded. He spoke to release the tension which the figure's grating voice raised in him.

"The treasure is in Cilicia," Julia said, neither a question nor a demand. "We would have gone there, but you in Rome were closer." In her present state, the seeress had little connection with the immediate world. She did not note the way the glittering object shifted toward her when she spoke. Her son noticed. His general tension focused on a tighter grip on his sword.

"That is correct," the figure said. "How did you know?"

"I have seen," Julia replied simply.

"For one year?" repeated Sacrovir He knew that the tension must break in one fashion or the other.

"In Cilicia," the figure said. "For one of your years. After that, there will be no need of guards."

"We agree," said Julia in her dreamy, half-human voice.

"Then," said the figure, "we need only to determine the details." A rippling of its cloak offered them seats on the broad, low couch. "I will have food and drink brought if you require it while we plan. . . ."

CHAPTER FOUR

The peristyle court in the center of Headquarters had been converted into a clerical pool like most of the areas which had been open when the building was a residence. As Perennius returned to the ground floor by a rear staircase, he was amused to see that the back garden was just that again. Flowers and several fruit trees including a cherry were now growing where more ranks of file clerks had squatted two years ago, the last time Perennius had been at Headquarters. Navigatus had been complaining then that he missed the sight and smells of the garden he had had when he was a District Superintendent in Trier. Apparently he had done something about the lack, though Perennius could not imagine where the displaced clerks had gone. The agent had for years believed that the Bureau could accomplish its tasks better with only half the Headquarters personnel; but he knew the system too well to doubt that if half of the clerks were eliminated, it would be the incompetent ones who somehow were retained.

The Director's office was what had been the large drawing room between the peristyle court and the back garden. Eight men of the Palatine Foot lounged in the side passage where the door was placed. Several of them were dicing without enthusiasm. Clerks and a pair of bored-looking ushers in civilian dress mingled with the guards in the passage and spilled back into the court. There they jostled the seated copyists. The large windows in either end of the drawing room were pivoted open to encourage a cross draft from the garden to the court. Through the window from the latter, Perennius could see Navigatus on his couch. Standing with him in the room were a dozen other men: functionaries, personal attendants, and suppliants for the attention of the Director. Navigatus looked very much like a private magnate holding his levee.

Marcus Optatius Navigatus was a plump man of sixty whose primary affectation was the black, curly wig he wore even to the baths. Perennius had known him for almost twenty years, from the days when Navigatus had commanded the battalion of the Rhine Army to which Perennius had been assigned. They were both Illyrians. The younger man had an intelligence and drive which brought him early to Navigatus' attention. Far more rare in a man of his caliber, Perennius had none of the personal ambition that would have made him as potentially dangerous to his superior as he was immediately useful.

Perennius had followed Navigatus to three more line commands, jumping in rank each time. When the older man had transferred to the Bureau of Imperial Affairs, itself a part of the military rather than the civil establishment, Perennius had accompanied him again. Oddly enough, it was then that their paths had begun to diverge again. Perennius' trustworthiness, his intelligence, and his ruthless determination to accomplish a task at whatever cost, would have made him even more valuable to his superior than he had been while in uniform. Four months of staff duty in Trier had driven Perennius to insist on either a field assignment or a return to uniform.

The pettiness, the dishonesty ineradicable in a system built on secrecy, the filth he must know about the Empire which it was his life to protect ... all of those factors had put the Illyrian on the edge of eruption. The eight following years in the field were at least seven more than he could have survived in a Headquarters billet. By now, however, Perennius had come to the gloomy conclusion that nothing would save him from himself much longer.

There was a guard at the window on the peristyle court. He was there to make sure that no one slipped in that way in a desperate attempt to get the Director's approval of a plan or document. Perennius nodded to the soldier.

The man laid a brawny arm across the opening as the agent stepped toward it. "Keep clear, buddy," the guard snapped. "Go see them if you need to get in." He nodded toward the ushers in the passage. They were already hedged about by men who felt they had to talk to Navigatus.

"Calm down," Perennius said. He felt unusually calm himself, now that he had taken care of his business with Zopyrion. It was a state almost like that following orgasm, the relaxation which follows the draining of all the self's resources into a single triumphant moment. It took the edge off the sword of his temper, though the iron baton which remained could be nasty enough in all truth. Perennius reached out to the stone frame, holding his orders closed in his hand.

Navigatus reclined on the other side of the drawing room. He faced three-quarters away from the agent. Unexpectedly, one of the other heads within was turned toward Perennius rather than toward the Director. The man staring at the agent was six feet four inches tall, but much thinner-framed than the norm of protein-fed barbarians of that height. He was starkly bald with only a hint of eyebrows like those which regrow after facial burns. The eye contact surprised Perennius. Its intensity shocked him, stiffening the agent with a gasp which convinced the guard to get involved again.

"Hey there," the soldier said. He set his left palm at the lower end of the agent's breastbone. "Get the hell back, I—"

Perennius gripped the other's wrist with his own left hand and squeezed. There was no emotion in his response. That part of the agent's body was working on instinct. His right hand slapped the wooden tablet three times against the sill. The sharp rattle of sound cut through the buzz of concurrent conversations. It drew all eyes toward Perennius, as it had been intended to do. That was no longer an intellectual act either. The agent's conscious mind was focused on the bald, spare man who looked at him and looked away, just as Navigatus shouted, "Aulus! By Pollux, everybody make way for my friend here!" The Director rose to his feet with a touch of awkwardness because in reclining he had slowed the circulation to his left leg.

Perennius laughed. "Say, I'll come through the window," he called, "if it won't earn me a foot of steel up the ass." He released the guard, looking at the man with interest for the first time. Perennius' grip on the soldier's wrist had paralyzed the man as small bones, already in contact, had grated closer. "Christ the Savior, you bastard!" the soldier hissed as he massaged the injured limb with his good hand. Perennius had been distracted or he would not have squeezed so hard. Still, no permanent harm done, the agent thought as he swung himself over the waist-high sill to meet his superior.

The two men clasped and kissed, to the amazement of most of the others in the room. Navigatus was not, all things considered, a particularly arrogant man, but he had a strong sense of formality. He wore his toga on all public occasions. His subordinates and those outsiders seeking audiences with him had learned early that if they wished to be recognized, they too had best don the uncomfortable woolen garment. Even then the Director tended to keep his distance; though so far as Perennius knew, Marcus had never gotten to the point of greeting everyone through his usher as if direct verbal contact would somehow soil him. Seeing Navigatus embracing the agent and his travel stains was more of a surprise than word of another attempted coup would have been.

Much more of a surprise than that.

Navigatus continued to hold the agent by one hand as he turned to his head usher. "Delius," he said, "clear this - no, Aulus and I will go out in the garden, that's what we'll do. Close that - " he pointed at the window opening into the garden - "and see that we're not disturbed."

"Just one moment, your Respectability," begged an intense young man with the broad stripe of Senate membership along the hem of his tunic. The Senate itself was a debating club rather than the governing council of the Empire, but those who debated there tended to be rich and powerful men in their own right. The young Senator

reached out with a scrolled petition in his right hand, while his left hand tried to clutch at the Director's sleeve.

The usher thrust out his ivory baton. The broad stripe saved the man who wore it from rapped knuckles, but it did not bring him any nearer to the response he sought. "Later, Felix, later," Navigatus grumbled over his shoulder. "My goodness, Aulus, you're looking so fit that it makes a used-up old man like me jealous. And how's that boy of yours, Docleus? Pleased with his appointment, I trust? You know, we sent him to bring you the recall orders because we weren't sure you'd accept them from anybody else."

Perennius looked sharply at his superior. The guards in the passage were pushing the civilians among them back into the peristyle court. Navigatus had a bland expression as he stepped out of the drawing room and led the agent away from the confusion. "Gaius is well, thank you," Perennius said cautiously. "He does indeed appreciate the favor you've shown him; and of course, I appreciate it as well. His father was a friend of mine until I enlisted. When he drowned, I sort of - tried to look after the boy, you know."

"Of course I know," agreed Navigatus as he stepped out into the sunbright garden. "No children of your own - just like me. Though of course I married, at least. Would you like some wine, Aulus? I'll admit we didn't expect you for another several days at best."

Perennius ran an index finger down the side of a young fig tree. The bark was as gray and dry as the skin of the lizard that scuttled around the trunk to where it could no longer see him. "Why did you recall me, Marcus?" the agent asked softly. "I was perfectly placed, perfectly." He looked up at the older man. "Marcus, I was helping plan the attack. Personal representative of the Emperor Postumus of Gaul - oh, they were very pleased, they'd been planning an embassage themselves but it had been let slip in the press of other business."

The Director sighed as he bent over a bed of russet gladiolas. "It's come to that, then?" he said. He clipped a stalk beneath its spray of blooms, parting the pithy stem with his long thumbnail. "The Autarch of Palmyra is

disloyal to the Emperor after all?" He lifted the regal blooms to his nose and sniffed.

"Marcus," Perennius pleaded, "Odenath was never loyal. He's a jumped-up princeling who fought the Persians because they wouldn't accept his surrender. He won because he knew his deserts and because he's a sharp bastard, a really sharp one, I give him that. But he didn't save the Empire; he saved his ass ... and now he figures that fits him to rule the whole business in place of his Majesty, the Emperor."

"Well, we can use him, I'm sure," said Navigatus. "Such lovely flowers as these, you'd expect them to have a marvelous odor also." He laid the spray against the hem of his toga. The russet blossoms were almost identical to the pair of narrow stripes that marked the Director as a Knight. "But instead there's nothing, only the color."

"Damn it, Marcus!" the agent cried. He slammed the heel of his hand against the fig. The lizard catapulted through the air, twisting madly until it hit the ground and scurried off. "Can we use Postumus too? Is it to the Empire's benefit that Gaul, Britain, Spain all claim they're independent now? Can we make clever policy out of the fact that every field commander with a thousand men thinks he ought to be on the throne instead of Gallienus?"

A large carpenter bee with a black abdomen lighted on the gladiola spray in Navigatus' hand. The Director's attention appeared to be concentrated on the bee as he said, "Aulus, we can't worry about every little thing that goes wrong. We have to carry out our assigned duties as best we can, and we have to trust that other people do the same." He sighed again. "Now if all my personnel were like you .. . are you sure I can't convince you to join me here in Rome? There's so many things ..."

"We're not talking about little things, Marcus," the agent said with dispassionate certainty. "We're talking about Franks raiding from the Rhine to the Pillars of Hercules, while Goths and Herulians spill through the Bosphorus into the Aegean."

"Well, I know that, of course, but - "

"Do you know that we were damned near caught by those German pirates when we sailed from Sidon? That

they were this close - " Perennius snapped his fingers - "before a little storm blew up and separated us?"

"I've said how much I appreciated your haste in returning, haven't I?" the Director said. The spray in his hands was trembling so much that the bee retreated from its flower cup and hung an inch or two away in the air, buzzing querulously.

"Marcus, sir," the agent went on, "everywhere I go, I see the big landowners shutting off their estates. They grow for themselves, they manufacture whatever they need in house, they've got their own armies . . . and the good gods help the tax gatherer who dares to set a foot on their lands."

"Aulus, there are agents assigned to that duty - " the Director began.

"Then they're doing a piss-poor job!" his subordinate shouted. "Piss poor. And the coinage!" Perennius reached into his purse. "Have you tried to get someone to take a recent denarius, Marcus? Without feeding it to him at the point of your sword, I mean?" He found the coin he wanted, a freshly-minted piece with the bearded visage of Gallienus on the obverse. The stocky agent strode to the fountain in the center of the garden. A marble boy held a marble goose on his shoulder. Water spurted from the beak of the goose and the penis of the boy. Gesturing with the coin like a conjuror introducing a sleight, Perennius then rang it leadenly on the stone curb.

"No difference but shape between this and a sling bullet," he asserted with bitter accuracy. "Even the goddam wash on it - " his thumb kneaded the shiny surface - "is tin, not silver."

Navigatus said nothing. Perennius took a deep breath. In a voice much quieter than that of his last diatribe, and without meeting the Director's eyes, he said, "Marcus, you say 'trust other people to do their duty.' Nobody does their duty but you and me, and the Emperor. And when I see this - " he spun the coin expertly off his thumb. It made a glittering arc over his head, then splashed down in the fountain where the two jets merged - "I swear if I don't think I'm giving his Majesty too much credit."

"You don't want to say that," Navigatus murmured, correct in a number of ways. The bee had left him, but the spray of blossoms was still again in his hand. "You know, Aulus," he said to the flower, "I've never meant to be other than a friend to you - "

The agent paced quickly to the older man's side. "I know that, Marcus," he said. "I didn't mean - "

" - but I sometimes regret what I've done," the Director continued, quelling the interruption by raising his eyes. "If I hadn't - pushed you, you might be much happier now, one of Postumus' battalion commanders and married to that little girl of yours."

"Nobody makes another person into something he wasn't before," said the younger man quietly.

"I often tell myself that, my friend," said Navigatus. He let the gladiolas fall and took Perennius by the hand again.

The agent stared at something far distant from the clasped hands on which his eyes were focused. "Besides," he said, "Julia ended it herself. Her - emotional state was causing conflict with her duties as a priestess." As old as the phrase was in his memory, it still had edges that could tear. "That's why I accepted the transfer to Numidia with you, Marcus. Not because of the promotion." He smiled at their linked hands.

"Ah," said Navigatus. "I, ah. ... Well, of course, there's still the matter that forced me to recall you from Palmyra, isn't there?"

"Indeed there is," agreed the agent as he led the other man to one of the stone benches against the back wall of the garden. "When all else fails, there's always duty."

"You see," said Navigatus as he fished a slim scroll from the wallet beneath his toga, "he came with this, which isn't something that I see every day. Even here." He slipped off the vellum cover and handed the document to Perennius.

The agent read the brief Latin inscription carefully. "Can't say it's not to the point," he remarked as he rolled the document again. It had read, "The Emperor Caesar Publius Licinius Gallienus Pius Augustus to Marcus Navigatus. The bearer of this rescript, Lucius Cloelius Calvus, is to be afforded the full support of your Bureau.

All his requests are to be executed as if from my lips. When it is necessary to accomplish the tasks thus imposed, you may apply for assistance from my Director of Administration, Aurelius Quirinius."

The damned thing was in vermilion ink, Perennius noted, and it didn't look to be in the handwriting of a professional scribe either. Blazes! "All right," he said as he handed back the imperial rescript, "what does he request?"

"You, Aulus," said the Director, meeting Perennius' gaze steadily. "He wants you."

"Blazes," the agent repeated aloud. He had an urge to wrap his cloak around him again, even in the sunlit garden. "He's the tall one in there, isn't he?" Perennius added in sudden certainty.

Both men glanced toward the drawing room. The window was lined with the faces of men waiting with an impatience which bid fair to master their senses of decorum. In the center was the bald man with whom Perennius had locked eyes earlier. He was the tallest of those watching and the only one who looked calm. His face was as still as a statue's as he watched the men in the garden.

"Why yes," said Navigatus in surprise. "You know him, then? Frankly, I haven't been able to find anybody who did."

Perennius grinned at his Director. He wondered briefly whether an appearance of omniscience might not be worth cultivation. Not with Marcus, though; not with family. "Don't know a thing but what I can tell by looking at him," the agent admitted. "Must just have been his name." But the cognomen Calvus, Baldie, could have come from generations before. There was something in his easy identification that bothered Perennius in a way that hunches generally did not.

"Umm," said his superior. "He told me nothing at all, Marcus, except that he needed my best agent for a dangerous mission. And then he named you." Navigatus smiled. "Not that there was any question in my mind, of course, but I'm not sure I would have withdrawn you from Palmyra if he hadn't been so specific. And while the fellow was polite enough, well ... he knew what the rescript he brought said, didn't he?"

Perennius turned his head so that the other man would not see his expression and grimaced ruefully. Another startled lizard ran spraddle-legged a dozen feet along the vertical surface of the wall. "I've been doing you an injustice, Marcus," the agent said. "I thought you'd jerked me because you were getting nervous again."

"I didn't want the Palmyra mission assigned to you, that's correct," the older man said carefully. "You've paid your dues, and I think it's time you left some of the risk to others. But I've never scrubbed you from a mission which you wanted and for which you were qualified. Which is anything short of a bed-chamber attendant for the Empress, as I well know."

Perennius laughed. He slapped his would-be protector on the shoulder and said, "Hell, what good did my balls ever do me, Marcus? But if the well-connected gentleman has been roosting in your chamber since Gaius was sent for me, you'll probably be glad to be shut of him. Let's bring him out here, learn what he needs and then the two of us'll get out of your hair." He stood up.

Navigatus rose also. "That's an odd thing, Aulus," the Director said. "He brought the rescript eighteen days ago today. I said I'd send for him as soon as you arrived - he has an apartment in the palace, but nobody there seems to know him. Except his Majesty, I suppose. . . . But he returned today without being summoned. I was rather concerned because we didn't expect you, you know, not for a week at least."

The two men looked back toward the building proper. To their mutual surprise, the door was open and the chief usher was ceremoniously bowing out the tall, marble-bald subject of their conversation.

"Blazing Noon," muttered Navigatus in the Dalmatian dialect of his childhood. "If he can get around Delius that way ..." And then both of them put on false smiles to greet the man whom Gallienus had sent to them.

CHAPTER FIVE

On closer examination, Lucius Cloelius Calvus was a stage more unusual than Perennius' initial glance had suggested. Calvus' skin had the yellowish pallor of old ivory, but it was as smooth as a young child's. The skin's gloss suggested someone much younger than the black eyes did. Perennius had heard that the Chinese, on the far end of the route by which silk arrived at government warehouses in Alexandria, had honey-gold complexions. He wondered if the stranger could have come from that far away. Like his skin, Calvus' features were flawlessly regular; but their proportions, their symmetrical angularity, were not those of anyone Perennius had met before. Also, there was something in the slim neck that nagged him. ...

"Interesting that your usher reads lips," said Calvus in accentless Latin as he approached, "but I suppose it's a valuable ability for someone in his position." He shifted his eyes to Perennius. "Or yours, sir."

"Delius reads lips?" sputtered Navigatus.

Only a facet of Perennius' conscious mind listened for content. Calvus blandly expressed surprise that Navigatus had not known that his attendant could follow conversations out of earshot. The agent did not care about that - Delius, in his position, could be expected to know enough to get his superior hung whether or not he was a lip-reader. What interested Perennius more was the chance to determine Calvus' homeland from the patterns within the Latin he was now speaking.

With two languages, Latin and Greek, a traveller could wander the length and breadth of the Empire without ever being unable to order a meal or ask directions. From the British Wall, to Elephantine on the Nile where a garrison watched the Nubians south of the Cataract; and from the Pillars of Hercules to Amida across the Tigris, those tongues were in themselves entree to almost the smallest village. The addition of Aramaic would add textures to the East and to areas of Eastern immigration like Rome itself; but even there, the Greek was sufficient.

But Latin and Greek were not always, even not generally, first languages. There were still farms within a hundred miles of the capital in which nurses crooned to infants in Oscan, for instance. Childhood backgrounds gave a distinctness that went beyond mere dialects to versions of the common tongues. Languages were as much Perennius' present stock in trade as swords had been when he served in uniform. He was very good with both.

But the stranger had no accent whatever. He spoke with the mechanical fluency of water trembling over rocks. Calvus' voice had no more character than that of a professional declaiming a rich man's poem for pay. He gave the words only the qualities required by grammar and syntax.

"If we sit here with our backs to the building," Calvus was saying with a nod toward one of the benches around the fountain, "we can have our privacy. I should explain, Director - " he nodded in an aside to Navigatus - "that the reason I have not taken you into my confidence before now is that I felt Aulus Perennius should be informed by me directly. This way he will make up his own mind. There are risks involved, and I understand your relationship goes beyond bare professionalism." The tall man seated himself on the curved berth, gesturing the others to places to either side of him as if he were host.

Perennius grinned as he sat down. He wondered if Calvus had been told that the agent was Marcus' chicken. Perennius had been a number of things over the years, but not that. Only the Empire had screwed him.

Navigatus frowned. "I've read the letter," he said, tapping the wallet into which he had returned the rescript, "and I understand my duty."

"Ah," said Calvus, "but one owes duty to more than the State, surely. There is one's - " He paused, his tongue groping for a word that was not there - "there are friends, that is; and there is humanity as a whole, don't you agree?"

"Sir, I'm not a philosopher," Navigatus said. His uncertainty as to the other man's position made him more uncomfortable than he might have been in the presence of the Emperor himself. "The Bureau is to give you full support, and it will - if you'll tell us what you require."

Calvus nodded his head upward in agreement. The agent was watching him out of the corner of his eye, keeping his face turned toward the fountain. The pool curb of porous tufa was very old, like the statue itself. The fountain could have been original to the house. Perennius knew that only two years ago, the garden had been smoothly gravelled with no features but the battery of clerks who filled it. On drizzly days, tarpaulins overhead had permitted work if not comfort. By choosing the furnishings he had, Navigatus was trying to turn the garden into a time capsule. It was not merely an enclave of color and beauty on which the Director could rest his eyes: it was a way of returning to an age long before his birth, when the Empire could be embarrassed by foreign disaster but never threatened.

"I have made the Emperor aware of a conspiracy," Calvus said, "and he has empowered me to put it down."

The Director started to say something, but a flick of Perennius' hand kept him from interrupting. The agent's open attention had been focused by the word "conspiracy." He wanted to hear the story in the informant's own words, with as little as possible imported to it by cross-examination. There would be time for that later.

"There would be some advantages to using military force directly," Calvus continued, "but I believe that would draw a response that itself would be a terrible risk. It seems better to deal with the matter through a few individuals."

Perennius did not nod, but his mind flashed agreement. Slip in, bribe a bedroom attendant to suffocate the leader, and slip the hell out again while his lieutenants cut each others' throats. Finesse had ended revolts that a battalion couldn't have touched.

"The right man," Calvus said with a gesture of his eyes toward Perennius, "can put me in a position to destroy this, this - " and again the lips tried to form a word which did not exist in the language Calvus had been speaking flawlessly. "Unspeakable thing," the tall man chose at last. He loaded the term with the first genuine emotion the agent had heard from him.

Calvus swallowed, then added, "The site is in Cilicia, not far from Tarsus."

"Blazes!" Navigatus spat out.

Calvus looked surprised. That surprise might become anger when the disgust of the Director's outburst sank in. The agent said, "Ah, sir, as my superior and I are well aware, Cilicia has always been a - difficult area, even in less, ah, troubled times." Perennius sought eye contact with the taller man to give the impression of utter candor. As before, the black eyes jolted him. Out of sheer discipline, the agent stumbled onward, "At the - this particular time, the province is one of those under the con - ah ..."

"The direction of the Autarch Odenathus, who has recently recovered it - most of it - from the Prefect Callistus," Navigatus supplied helpfully. He had gotten his irritation under control during the breather Perennius had offered him. Now the Director continued smoothly, "Your dedication to his Majesty is beyond question, Lucius Calvus; but if I may suggest something from my, ah, peculiar perspective, a threat in Odenath's back garden, so to speak, is not necessarily a threat to his Majesty at the moment. And an outbreak of banditry in Cilicia would be more conspicuous by its absence." He smiled affably. There were crackpots less harmless, the Almighty Sun knew; and this one had at least the ear of the Emperor.

Calvus smiled. It was a gesture, not an expression. He continued to look toward Perennius rather than toward the Director who was seated on the other side of him. "Not bandits, your Respectability," the tall man said. His quiet formality was as daunting as a more direct reference to the rescript. The formal relationship of the two Bureau personnel to Calvus was that they were under his

absolute control. The stranger continued, "You may think of them as a sect, if you like. Yes, a religious sect, very like that. Small at the moment, but going to grow in the future."

"How long were you a member of this sect?" the agent asked. He deliberately begged the question of Calvus' participation in what appeared to have been an illegal organization.

The reaction surprised him. "Don't ever say that!" shouted the tall man in an access of loathing. "I and - those?" His face smoothed itself with difficulty. The virulence of the stranger's emotion was the more shocking for its contrast with the nearly flat personality he had displayed until that moment. "Yes, of course," he said, aloud but not particularly to the men beside him. "You wonder how I came to know about the situation."

Calvus attempted his smile again. He glanced toward Navigatus before continuing, "I'm afraid that for the moment, you will simply have to take it on faith that I'm correct. I'll try to find an acceptable mechanism to explain my knowledge, but I don't suppose that will affect your plans. That is - " he turned up his right palm - "the worst case is that I will be proven correct. If you plan for that, then the event of my being proven wrong and a madman - " he flipped up his left palm - "will not increase your risk or difficulties. Since the effort must be made in either event."

If you think, Perennius mused, that I can't find a way to grease you between here and Cilicia, and a tragic story of your end that'll satisfy Gallienus or any damn body, then you're wrong. But aloud he said to the placid face, "I used to - live with a woman who saw visions. She insisted I listen the same way I would if it were something she'd seen with her eyes. I didn't much like it then, but I took it from Julia; and I'll take it now, I suppose."

Navigatus relaxed slightly on the other side of the tall man. He knew as well as the agent did that Gallienus' writ ruled little beyond Italy and parts of Africa, at the moment .. . and that nothing but a sense of duty could be truly said to rule Aulus Perennius. Perennius had accepted the assignment now. That meant there was the best chance possible of satisfying this seeming confidant of the Emperor.

A small butterfly landed on the web of Calvus' right hand. He watched it palpate him with its proboscis as he continued: "You will want to know the strength of our opponents. There are only six of them, we believe. Six - true devotees. But they may have any number of hirelings. And they are almost certain to have very powerful weapons, weapons that you could compare only to natural catastrophes, thunderbolts and volcanoes."

Perennius smiled and said, "Yes, well ... I told you, I have experience accepting the remarkable." But the fact that he joked instead of nodding gravely implied that there was a level of belief in the expressed skepticism. As Calvus had said, it was cheaper to believe him and be wrong than it would be to be surprised the other way.

The shadows of the hills had cut off the sun. Now Navigatus glanced over his shoulder at the Headquarters building and saw the windows of the upper story were being swung shut by the cleaning crews against the threat of rain. The lamps hanging from the drawing-room ceiling silhouetted against the panes the figures of men whose need to see the Director outweighed their dignity.

Navigatus stood, scowling. "Here," he said, "this is foolish. We'll go to my house, bathe there, and discuss this over dinner." He looked anxiously toward the bald man. "If you don't mind something simple, Lucius Calvus? I work here so late that I almost never have time to attend a proper dinner party, much less give one."

Perennius and the stranger rose also. "Marcus, I appreciate it, but your household servants already know as much about my affairs as I intend to let them," the agent said. "Besides, if you don't clear those out of your office properly - " he nodded toward the lamps and those waiting beneath them .- "it'll eat at you till you don't sleep tonight. Even though there isn't one of them who's worth a gray hair to either of us."

The Director touched his wig unconsciously. "Well, if you wouldn't feel offended, Aulus," he said apologetically. "I probably would feel better if I dealt with them." He eyed the lighted window again. "Not that you're wrong

about the .. . lack of consequence," he added morosely. "I sometimes fear that I've concentrated too much on minutiae in the past few years because the major problems are ..." His voice trailed off.

"No problem is insoluble," said Calvus. His flat calm made the statement an article of faith. He must have been surprised at how he sounded, because his body at once gave a tiny shudder as if to settle its contents. "Aulus Perennius," the tall man went on, "I will accompany you, then."

"No," said the agent, dipping his head in negation, "that won't be necessary, sir. I'll call for you at the palace in the morning." He smiled. "We're in a transit barracks, my companion and I. I doubt you'd find the accommodations much to your taste." The three of them were drifting back toward the door, now. The social circumstances were too unclear for either of the Bureau employees to act as decisively as they would have preferred to do.

"I'll have to get used to worse accommodations and to none at all," Calvus said simply. He stepped briskly ahead of the others, knowing that the discussion would end when an attendant opened the door for them. "And you'll have to get used to me, I'm afraid, because it is quite necessary for me to reach the site."

The agent laughed. It was Navigatus who actually found words to comment. "In school," he said, "I read Homer's accounts of ships that sailed themselves and gods trading spear-thrusts with mortals. ..." He gestured his companions onward, through the doorway and into the corridor with the men eagerly awaiting their pointless audiences with him.

"I couldn't imagine how anyone ever had believed such nonsense," the Director went on. "But I see now that I just needed exercise to increase my capacity for faith."

CHAPTER SIX

Perennius swore as his iron-cleated boots skidded on a greasy stone. "Slow up, damn you," he snarled to the linkman. "I hired you to light our way, not run a damned race with us!"

It embarrassed the agent that Calvus seemed to walk the dark streets with less trouble than he did. Anyone lodging in the palace should have done all his night rambling on the legs of litter bearers.

Tall buildings made Rome a hard place for Perennius to find his way around in the dark. He supposed that he used the stars more or less without thinking about it in cities where the apartment blocks did not rear sixty feet over narrow streets as they did in the capital. Even though the barracks were nearby, he had hired a man with a horn-lensed lantern to guide them. The fellow was a surly brute, but he had been the only one in the stand at the whorehouse who was not already attending someone inside.

The raised lantern added a dimension to the linkman's scowl. "Through here," he muttered in a Greek that owed little to Homer. "Me go first." As he spoke, he scrambled into a passage less than three feet wide. The narrow slit of sky was webbed with beams cross-connecting the upper floors of the apartment buildings to either side. Poles draped with laundry slanted from windows, though it was doubtful there was ever a breeze there to be caught.

"Hold the damned light where it does some good!" Perennius said. He turned to his companion. "Here, sir, you go first. It won't hurt this - " he gave his travelling cloak a flick - "to get dropped in the slops again."

"This is safe, then?" Calvus asked as he stepped past the agent. There was curiosity but no apparent concern in his voice.

"Slow down," Perennius shouted. In normal tones he continued, "Safe for us. I wouldn't advise you to wander around here without your own attendants, but - we're sober, and even a boyo like the one ahead of us knows the pay-out wouldn't be worth the trouble of trying to bounce the pair of us."

"I wondered," said the tall man, "because this - " he rapped the right-hand wall. He had been tracing his fingers along it as if he needed support - "is the back of the building where we hired this guide. The brothel."

"Well, that doesn't - " Perennius started to say. Metal rang behind them, at or near the entrance to the passage. Darkness and the curve of the walls hid the cause. The agent's sword whined against the mouth of its scabbard as he cleared the blade hastily. "Come on, quick," he hissed to Calvus. His arm gestured the tall man forward, around a blind angle after the linkman.

The right-hand wall angled back abruptly, widening the passage into a court ten feet broad at the far end. There, another wall sharply closed the reentrant. The court was large enough for a second-floor balcony above the brothel's rear entrance. There were figures on the balcony, and there were at least half a dozen men in the court beneath.

"Take the dagger!" Perennius said. He thrust the ball pommel against his companion's hand. Calvus was as still as a birch tree. His fingers did not close on the knife. The agent saw sweat glittering on the tall man's face and scalp as the guide lifted his lantern higher.

"Yes," rasped one of the figures on the balcony. The voice was indescribably harsh. Only the word itself was human. "Kill them."

"Aulus!" cried the other figure, a woman, but twenty years smothered Perennius' recognition of the speaker.

As the agent lunged forward, he pivoted his sword arm to slash rather than to stab. His blade was Basque steel,

forged in the Bilbao Armory before it slipped away with Postumus. It had a sharp edge and held it while Perennius sliced through the lantern, the hand holding the lantern, and into the pelvis of the guide who had betrayed them. The bravos waiting in the court surged forward in the darkness.

Perennius was on the stones and rolling, now. He would have called to Calvus, but there was nothing useful to say. Their retreat was surely blocked. It would be a miracle if even confusion allowed either victim to escape through the other end of the court. Besides, the tall man had funked too badly to move, much less to fight or run.

The guide spun off screaming. The sword that was killing him had bitten so deeply in the bone that Perennius had let it go. There was a crash and double screams as the wounded man collided with his friends and another blade. Someone stumbled on Perennius' torso. The agent thrust upward with the dagger Calvus had refused, ripping one of the ambushers from thigh to sternum.

"Gaius, go back!" the woman was crying in Allobrogian. The passage the agent had followed to this killing ground was alive with voices and the ring of blades too long for the surrounding walls. A club or a boot numbed Perennius' right arm. His legs were tangled with the thrashing body of the man he had just disemboweled. The agent slashed his dagger in a brutal arc a hand's breadth above the pavement. Boot-webbing and tendons parted. Someone screamed like a hog being gelded. A club swished toward the sound. The weapon must have been a section of water pipe, because it crunched against a skull with none of the sharpness of wood on something solid.

"Hold up! Hold up!" a male voice bawled from the passage.

The door serving the balcony from within opened.

To the men who had been fighting below in total darkness, the rectangle of light was dazzling. The two figures on the balcony were struggling with one another. Calvus stood as white and frozen as an unpainted statue. He had not moved since the lantern shattered. Now one of the bravos hit him in the face with the lead-studded glove of a professional boxer.

"Hey!" cried someone from the open doorway. Perennius was raising his dagger for a left-handed throw at the man who had just struck Calvus. He thought he recognized the speaker - Maximus, the guard from Headquarters - just as the first of the lightning bolts struck.

One of the figures locked together on the balcony fell in on itself in a blue glare. There was a hissing roar like that of a wave on the rocks. The flash was momentary, but the roar echoed hellishly in the angled court.

The two thugs still on their feet ran for the door in the other building. The men who had followed Perennius down the passage did not exit into the court. Their accoutrements clattered as they ran back the way they had come. Calvus' knees had buckled. The tall man had slid down. His back and sagging head were supported by the wall behind him while his legs splayed out on the stones. All this Perennius could see clearly in the strobe of the second world-shattering flash.

The balcony had a wicker guard-wall. The figure pressed back against it was short and dressed in cape and cowl. Those details were clear because the actinic glare flooded through every interstice as its fury exploded in the balcony doorway. The roar and the screams merged in a sound that could have come from fiery Phlegethon.

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 under-fired 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 mechanically 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 - "

Calvus broke in. The bald man spoke in an Eastern language, one which the agent could not precisely identify. Calvus's free arm flared in broad gestures as he spoke.

The clerk's face blossomed in amazement and under-

standing. Perennius had not been on the verge of losing his temper. To the agent, rage was as much a tool as his sword itself was, and he used it only where some good might result therefrom. Here, the clerk was being as helpful as he could be - though it would not have been a fortunate time for the soldier properly responsible to return to the desk. The anger building behind the agent's hard eyes was evident enough, though; and the clerk was at least as happy to achieve understanding as the others were.

Calvus turned back to the agent. "The Senior Centurion's chamber," he said in Latin, "on the fourth floor, northwest corner."

"Three flights to lug him," Perennius muttered with a moue at Sestius. Surprisingly, the comatose man seemed to be getting a little of his color back.

"That won't be a problem," said the tall civilian as he led the way to the outside staircase.

Calvus's words were no more than the truth. Though the injured soldier was a solid man with the weight of his equipment besides, Calvus mounted the stairs at a brisk pace without suggesting the agent help him with his burden. It should not have surprised Perennius after the way the stranger had launched him onto the balcony. Intellectual awareness differed sharply from his instinctive reaction to Calvus's apparent frailty, however.

"We'll want the first - " the agent had begun to say, when the door to which he was about to direct Calvus opened.

"Hey," called Gaius, natty in a fresh tunic and polished brass, "I'd about given up on - " He paused when he realized that the men ahead of his friend were actually accompanying him. "Blazes, Aulus," he said as he stepped back, "you started the party without me?"

"It was a party I'd have liked to have you at, buddy," Perennius said grimly as he shut the door behind him. "See if we've got any field rations in there, will you ... ? Because I'm starved, and we're not going anywhere until Lucius Calvus here has explained a few things."

The tall man arranged Sestius carefully on one of the beds. "Give me your cloaks," he said, stripping off the woolen formality of his own toga. Calvus's skin was the same old-ivory shade wherever it was visible, legs, arms, and face. In the same matter of fact tone, he continued, "The creature you killed is from another world. There are very few adults on Earth at present - six, only five now, we are quite sure. There are millions of eggs, and the creatures can breed in their larval forms. They dissolve rock and crawl through it. When they all become adults simultaneously, there will be more billions by a factor of ten then the Earth ever held of humans. They will sweep us into oblivion unless we stop them now." With neither haste nor waste motion, Calvus tucked his own garment around the shivering centurion. He reached for the cloak of the dumbfounded Gaius.

"Aulus, what on earth - " the younger man blurted.

Perennius stopped him with a raised hand and a frown of concentration. He was trying to blank his mind of preconceptions so that he could really hear what the tall stranger was saying. The words did, after all, make internal sense. It was the way they fit - failed to fit - into the world that made them absurd.

And a tripedal creature four feet tall, with tools and a voice that could have come from a millstone ... that did not fit Perennius's world either. He was professional enough to believe that it might be his world that was wrong.

"Who are you, Lucius Calvus?" the agent asked softly.

The tall man sat on the edge of the bed. His fingers massaged Sestius's forehead. The contact seemed to reduce the centurion's spasmodic trembling far more than it should have done. "I'm a traveller," Calvus said, his calm eyes on the older Illyrian. "An agent like yourself, Aulus Perennius."

Perennius slammed the heel of his hand against the closed door. It crashed like a catapult releasing. "Do you think I don't see that?" he shouted. "Whose agent, damn you?"

"Mankind's," said the man who called himself by a Latin name. "But I came from another sort of distance, Aulus Perennius. I come from a place fifteen thousand years into the time that has yet to come."

Gaius threw up his hands. "Blazes," he cried to the

ceiling. "Aulus, are you all drunk? Him babbling nonsense and you sitting there serious as an owl like you were listening!"

"How are you going to stop them if you didn't bring any weapons?" asked the agent. He did not raise his voice again, but the taut malevolence in it sent a shiver up Gaius's back. Perennius had not liked the world that Fate had shown him, but it drove him to helpless fury to feel all the certainties draining away from even that. There were few things that Aulus Perennius would surrender without a fight. Reality was not one of those things.

"We knew we could find a weapon here, Aulus Perennius," said the calm, seated figure. His hands continued to stroke the injured centurion. "We knew that I could find someone like you."

Gaius seized Calvus by the shoulder. The young courier was a good-sized man, but his attempt to shake the seated figure was as vain as if he had tried to shake an oak. "My friend isn't a weapon!" Gaius shouted. "He's a man, and men aren't just things!"

"Let him go, Gaius," the agent said quietly. He was not really watching the scene. He had a task to perform, five creatures to kill in Cilicia if they did not come to meet him earlier. Perennius was considering ways and means of accomplishing that task.

CHAPTER EIGHT

When the sunlight through the clerestory windows touched his left eye, Perennius blinked. On the bed next to him, Gaius said in a chiding voice, "You didn't sleep all night, did you?"

Perennius turned sharply toward his protege. "Sure I did," he lied. "Ah - didn't keep you awake, did I?"

Gaius chuckled as he got up. "Oh, not a bit," he said. "Like with my brothers. You share a bunk as often as you and I have, you don't notice how the other fellow tosses and turns any more than you do yourself. But I also know you well enough to know you weren't sleeping."

There were two beds in the room, because a centurion was expected to travel with at least one personal servant. The two Illyrians had dossed down in one of the bunks, leaving the other to Sestius and the traveller. Calvus had said the body contact as well as the warmth would be good for the injured man. The centurion could not well be moved, and the agent would not have allowed Calvus out of his immediate reach even if the tall man had shown a desire to leave.

"Oh, well, you know how it is," Perennius said as he got out of bed. "I need a while to think about things before I go off and do something. A mess like this, blazes - it's better than a week at the sea-side." He stepped to his baggage and began searching for clean clothes. Nude, the agent's body was ridged with muscles and scar tissue - puckers, the thin lines of cuts, and the knotted, squirming lumps from the time he had been beaten with a studded whip.

"Do you like the sea, Aulus Perennius?" asked Calvus as he also stood up. The traveller was still dressed in the wool tunic he had worn under his toga. The centurion was stirring and grumbling on the bed beside him.

Professionally bland, the agent looked at Calvus and said, "No, as a matter of fact, I never had much use for the sea. Except as something to get over. Which I figure we'll do this time, little as I care for the idea."

"Blazes!" Gaius protested. He peered from the folds of the tunic he was shrugging into. "After what happened on our way back? Look, it's a lot safer to hoof it, even the way roads're likely to be in Cilicia."

"Maybe true if we were alone, the three of us," Perennius said. "But we're going to need a couple squads at least for the job. Archers, slingers . . . and I don't give much of a chance of Odenath or Balista, whichever's boys we run across, letting a body of troops march through Asia. Even a small body of troops." He smiled grimly at Calvus. "A better chance than that your rescript from Gallienus would get us anything but a quick chop. Maybe you could come up with something by the Autarch instead?"

"Odenathus, you mean?" said the tall man. He was as serious as Perennius had "been sardonic. "Yes, if that's necessary. It will delay us considerably, though; and I think delay is to our disadvantage, now that we know the Guardians are aware of me."

Gaius laughed. Perennius did not. "No," the older man said uncomfortably, "we'll enter at Tarsus on forged orders from Palmyra, some song and dance. By the time somebody checks back with headquarters, we'll be long gone." He barked a laugh of his own. "Or long dead, of course."

"Let me come with you," said Quintus Sestius.

The three others looked at the centurion. Sestius was poking fixedly at his welded mail. The night before, he had not really been aware of what had happened to him. "Look," he said, "I come from near Tarsus. I can help you a lot. It's not a province that outsiders get along in real

well." In the same defensive tone he added, "Maximus is dead, isn't he? I remember him being right in front of me, and then . . . that was him on the floor, I guess. It was his cloak, so it had to be."

Sestius had thrown off the wrappings that had kept him alive until his capillaries contracted and brought him out of shock. Calvus now bent and retrieved his toga without speaking. He had set the objective, but it appeared that he was going to allow Perennius full responsibility for the means of achieving that objective.

"Ah," the agent said. Except for Gaius himself, the troops for the operation were an anonymous rank in his mind. He was not opposed to Sestius being one of them but . . . "Look," Perennius said, "Maximus likely wasn't the last to take early retirement because of this thing, Sestius. It's going to be dangerous."

"Herakles!" the centurion spat. "And what isn't now?" He stood abruptly so that the unwelded back of his vest rustled on the leather. "Listen, sir - I joined the Army because it'd be secure. Nothing's secure now, nothing . . . but if I could be home again, with my kin around me, then at least there'd be somebody to trust, somebody. . . . Sir, take me along. I'm as good a man as you'll find, and I know the territory. And when you've done what you need done, just . . . turn your head. But I'll stay with you until then, I swear I will."

Perennius listened without expression. An Imperial soldier was planning desertion aloud and proposing to make the agent himself an accomplice in the plan. But Perennius had a task now on which he could focus. He could use that task as a set of blinders by which to shut out every other flaw and cancer in the Empire . . . and if the centurion's proposal was as sincere as it sounded, there was nothing in it to intrude on the present mission.

"All right," said the agent. Gaius, prepared for violence, sighed out a tiny breath in relief. Perennius found a scriber and one of the blank tablets he kept in his wallet. He sat on the corner of the bed and began writing in firm, rapid strokes as he continued, "Gaius, I'm giving you this note and the orders recalling me. Between them, they ought to get you to Marcus. If you can get through the mob inside without acting like me, fine. But remember, we're in a hurry, however much fuss you have to make."

"I couldn't act like you, Aulus," the younger man said with a grin. He was lacing his right boot, braced on the footboard. The tips of its iron nails winked where the rust had been polished clean.

"Sure, anybody can act like me," Perennius said. He began to work the signet ring off his left little finger. "Just remember that everybody you meet in a place like Headquarters is more afraid of a scene than you are. Blazes, boy, you've got the right - this is all on his Majesty's orders." He tossed Gaius the tablet, signed and sealed. "Or are you going to let some jumped-up pretty boy in silk make you cool your heels because you're afraid to raise hell?"

"Here, take this too," the agent added more gently. He handed his pass to the courier as he had said he would. Gaius waited uncertainly, ready to lace his other boot as soon as he was sure that nothing else was going to be flipped to him. "I won't bother to write down what we need, you tell Marcus personally and he'll dictate the orders. First - "

"Sir," Sestius interrupted, "I should be on duty now myself, and - "

"If you'll hold your damned water," Perennius snapped, "you'd hear that you're going along with Gaius. I'll get the Director to release you from your duties as of last night." He frowned. "Your buddy too, Maximus. Might save inquiries that wouldn't do us any good, damned paper-pushers. But first - " he continued, turning back to the courier who jumped up from his boot laces - "I want letters to the Prefect of the Fleet at Misneum and whoever the hell his lieutenant is at Ostia. Full cooperation, he'll understand. Make sure they're countersigned by Respectabilities in the right offices so that we don't get a lot of crap when we're ready to move. While you get the paperwork going, Lucius Calvus and I - " he nodded to the tall man - "are going to see whether we can find what we'll need in Ostia."

The agent rose from the bed and began to buckle on his

equipment belt. "That's the first thing we do when we leave this room," he said as he fingered the empty slot of his sword scabbard. "After I replace some hardware I figure we'll need."

CHAPTER NINE

"Just a moment, gentlemen," said the usher. "I'll see if the Tribune is free."

Perennius had been quite honest in saying he did not care for the sea. Ostia was no beach resort like Baiae, either. It was a working port, and it stank like one. The breeze drifting through the colonnades of the old Customs Station was ripe with spoiled goods dumped into the harbor along with the burden of the town's sewer system. Still, the agent was feeling unexpectedly cheerful. "You know," he said in a low voice to his companion. "I wasn't counting on being able to see anybody officially until Marcus got some orders cut. All I figured we'd be able to do was look around and probably buy some information for a cup or wine or two."

The reception room in which they waited was dingy. It seemed to be used to store old Customs records, judging from the seals on the dusty document cases stacked along one wall. The naval contingent at Ostia was under the Naval Prefect at Misenum, one hundred miles south on the Bay of Naples. The vessels here were attached to the Customs Service, and their command staff was housed in a corner of the Customs Station. Ill-housed, not surprisingly, and furnished with cast-offs from their senior partner.

Calvus looked around the room. Monochrome stucco was flaking from the walls which were not covered by boxes, and some of the marble bits of the mosaic flooring had worked loose from their concrete bed. "I mention this because it may be necessary for you to know it, Aulus Perennius," the tall man said. "I can sometimes influence persons to fall in with a course of action. Especially when the emotional temperature is low, or when the other person is very excited and considering the desired course of action himself. The course I desire."

It did not occur to Perennius to doubt what the other man was saying. The agent's skin flashed cold and his right hand curved over the grip of the sword he had been issued only hours before. "Now, tell me what that had to do with me being here," the agent said softly.

The hands that had lifted Perennius without effort remained crossed in Calvus' lap. His eyes were alert but fearless as they met the agent's. "That ability had nothing to do with you," the tall man said simply. "I don't want - could not use - anyone who needed prodding to act. I told you, Aulus Perennius: I was not raised to handle weapons." Calvus grin was brief and unreal. "My weapons have to handle themselves."

Shoes slapping down the hall and a burst of voices discussing insect netting drew the attention of the waiting men to the doorway. A plump man in his mid-twenties stepped into the reception room, calling one last objection over his shoulder to someone unseen. The newcomer had a curly beard, well-trimmed, and wore a tunic with the two thin stripes of equestrian rank. He nodded to Calvus and Perennius before seating himself on the wood-framed couch facing them. A layer of dust lifted from the couch pad, provoking first a curse, then a sneeze. When he had recovered himself, he said, "All right, gentlemen, Terentius Niger at your service. Nine chances in ten, what you need isn't in my department. This is the Naval contingent, not Customs. If you're the lucky tenth, I probably can't do a thing for you either - you know that those bastards won't issue gauze curtains for my office? You try and work there some night when you can't read a document for the gnats in your eyes!"

"I'm Aulus Perennius from Imperial Affairs," the agent said, watching the young tribune stiffen. The agent saw no reason to hide his identity or that of his office. "I realize you won't have received the orders yet, but it

would help us a great deal if you could tell us what major naval units are available here - and of course at Portus." The administrative offices had remained at Ostia when Portus, the artificial harbor for heavier vessels, was constructed adjacent to Ostia some two centuries before. Perennius had learned not to be over-specific when trying to learn something from a bureaucrat.

"Major naval units available," Niger repeated. He grinned bitterly. The tribune was young enough to hope that by being frank, he might be able to get word back up the line to where it might help correct the situation which he deplored. "How about jack shit?" he said bluntly. He leaned forward in his couch. "You know how quick Rome'11 start to starve if the grain supply from Africa is cut off? Weeks if we're lucky! And that's if nothing happens to the warehouses here." He waved his hand in a dramatic, ring-glittering circuit in the air. "The only things to stop pirates from sailing right into the harbor and burning it down around our ears are the gods, may they continue to preserve us, and my twelve customs scows. There's half a dozen light galleys laid up in Portus, but they haven't been in the water since Commodus died - and I couldn't crew them anyway." Niger grimaced and added, "Besides which, my Marine contingent just got drafted into a Field Force legion. Now you two tell me - is that a safe state for the capital of the Empire?"

Hell, no; but it's the state that everything else's in, Perennius thought. Aloud he said, "I'd like to take a look at those galleys you mentioned. I'm sure something could be arranged about crews . . . and we wouldn't need all of the ships, of course."

Niger stood up. "You think I'm joking?" he asked. "They haven't touched keel to water in seventy years - and Neptune alone knows when the damned things were built! But come along, you can see for yourself." He stepped to the doorway by which he had entered. "Rufio!" he called. "Rufio!"

The attendant who had greeted Perennius initially appeared in the hallway. "Sir?" he said.

"I'm taking these gentlemen to Shed Twelve," the tribune explained. "They want to see what passes for naval power in this wretched excuse for an age."

As Perennius and Calvus followed him to the stand of government litters and bearers, the agent thought of how many times he had performed this basic task: checking garrisons, fortifications, or supply dumps so that Rome could better estimate the war-making capacity of an enemy. Normally, however, the agent would have been equipped with a packet of documents - forged, of course, but convincing even to a skeptic. It did not strike Perennius as particularly humorous that he was being shown Rome's own defenses without any of the preliminaries he would have thought necessary as a spy.

"Well, here they are," Niger said. His voice whispered back and forth between the brick walls and high roof timbers of the dry dock. "Go on, tell me it's not as bad as you expected."

The shed was a single building with six separate roof peaks. The troughs were supported by columns rather than by walls. From where the three men stood on the raised entrance platform, they could see all six of the docked galleys. The murky water of the harbor lapped just beyond the open front of the building, but the hulls were on dry ground. Timber baulks held each upright.

Niger had opened the shed door using a key with two large prongs to turn the wards. Now he stepped to the nearest of the stored vessels and pressed the prongs against the railing without result. Patiently, he tried a few feet further, then further yet. On the third attempt, the iron prongs sank in as easily as if they had encountered a cheese. "There," said the tribune in gloomy satisfaction, "dry rot. What did I tell you?"

The rear platform of the shed was nearly of a height with the galley's stern rail. The bowsprit and stern posts of the vessels curved up sharply above either end. The poop itself was raised a full deck above the planking that covered the waist of the ships. Perennius stepped aboard the nearest ship. His hob-nails echoed like rats scurrying along the roof of the shed. Though one whole side of the

building was open, its interior was hot and dry and smelled of pine tar.

"All right, these look like what we need," the agent said. He swung himself down to the main deck with a thump, disregarding the ladder pegged to the bulkhead. "What sort of complement do they carry?"

The agent began to walk toward the bow. The hull, shrunken by years in storage, quivered enough in the baulks to give itself a queasy sort of liveliness. Two long ventilator slots before and abaft the mast step ran most of the length of the deck. The ventilator gratings had been removed and were leaning against their low coaming, giving Perennius a view of the interior as his eyes adapted. In the ovals of gray light through the oar locks, he could see four axial columns of benches. The outboard pair, nearer the hull strakes, were low and barely wide enough for one man and the oar he had to swing. The interior benches were separated by a storage well three feet wide which ran the length of the lower deck, directly above the keel.

"For oarsmen, thirty-six men on the lower bank, seventy-two on the upper," Niger said. There was a slight pique in his tone at the agent's refusal to be horrified at the ship's condition. Perennius had seen border posts whose garrisons were equipped primarily with the farm implements they needed to raise their own supplies. The tribune might think that dry-rotted hulls were a disgrace, but that was because of his youth and the parochialism of a central-government official. "You can use fewer oarsmen, of course, the ship just doesn't move as fast. If you depend on what I've got available, you use a lot fewer oarsmen."

"It's a bireme, then?" the agent asked. The main deck was almost flush with the hull. It was capped with a coaming a hand's breadth high rather than a railing or bulkhead. Outboard of and a step down from the deck proper was a covered outrigger whose frame supported a bank of oars. In a battle the catwalk would permit a rank of Marines to fight with locked shields while archers on the main deck fired over their heads.

"If you want to be technical, it's a liburnian and a sort of trireme," Niger said, "but I never noticed that putting a name to something made it sail faster. Or found a crew for it. You need a couple dozen seamen, too, you know, unless you expect to row all the way - which you can't. And I told you what happened to my Marines, didn't I?"

An animal miasma still drifted up from the rowing chamber, despite its decades of standing empty. Normally the oarsmen would have voided their wastes over the side, like the Marines and the deck crew. That would not have been possible while the vessel was under oars, however. Beyond that was the effluvium of over a hundred men straining in the rowing chamber while the sun baked the deck above them and glanced from the oar-foamed surface of the water. The whole blended in an amalgam sweeter than the vegetable odors of the ship herself, and as permanent as the pine timbers which it had impregnated.

"She'd carry fifty soldiers comfortably?" Perennius estimated aloud. He had reached the bow and was peering over it, past the upcurved bowsprit.

"Eighty on war service," Niger called, "if she didn't break up under their weight as she probably would now. You see the bronze sheathing's gone from the ram, the gods know how long ago. Stolen or turned to coinage, it doesn't matter. Ram anything with the hull this rotten and the bronze'd be the only thing that didn't powder."

Perennius turned and looked back the way he had come. Calvus stood just inside the open street door, spare and silent. Distance and the lighting hid the stranger's face, but Perennius had enough experience now to imagine its expression of preternatural calm. A damned strange man, but at least Calvus did not complicate with instructions the task he had set for the agent.

The tribune was poised on the platform with one hand on the stern rail. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, but he had not quite decided to jump onto the deck as the agent had done. Not a bad kid. Like Gaius, one of those there would have been some hope for, if there were any hope for the Empire they served. "All right," Perennius said. He began to stride back along the hundred feet of deck separating him from the other men. "How long would it take you to put one of these in shape

for a long voyage? If you had the men and stores turned over to you, whatever you said you needed and could be found in the port."

For the space of six measured strides, the only sound in the drydock was that of the agent's boots on the planking. When Niger spoke, it was with caution and none of the bitter wise-cracking of his earlier remarks. "Not less than three days," he said. "Maybe as much as seven. She'll have to be caulked and repitched. . . . For that matter, we'll have to survey all six and see which is most likely to hold the water out. Mast and spar, fighting towers, oars . . ."

The tribune's musing aloud paused when Perennius fell below his line of sight past the poop deck. When the agent had climbed the ladder, their eyes met again. Niger looked troubled. "I'd appreciate it if you'd start the list of men and materials required," Perennius said to the younger man. "Figure out where you could get them if you had a blanket authorization. In an hour or two, that's just what you'll have."

Niger dipped his oiled beard in assent. "Yes, sir," he said. The animation, the sharpness of tone, was gone as he contemplated the situation. "Sir ..." he went on diffidently. "I'll see to it that she's put in order to the extent possible. But she'll still be an over-age, under-maintained disaster waiting to happen. If she's really being fitted out for a long voyage ... I don't envy the men aboard her."

"Don't envy anybody, my friend," said Aulus Perennius. He braced his left hand on the stern rail, then swung himself back to the platform with a clash and sparkling of boot studs and concrete. By the blazing Sun, he could still eat men half his age for breakfast, he thought in a surge of pride springing from the exertion. He grinned at the surprised tribune like a wolf confronting a lamb. "No," he repeated, "don't envy anybody."

The single, unsprung axle of the carriage found a harmonic with the courses of paving stones. The sympathetic vibration escalated what had been a burr into a series of hammering jolts. Perennius, at the reins, had been lost in thought before the jouncing lifted him back to present realities. He clucked to the pair of mules, urging them into the extra half-stride per second that broke the rhythm.

The agent looked over at his companion. Calvus had braced himself firmly with one hand on the seat and the other locked on the frame holding the carriage top. They had taken the vehicle from Rome to Ostia because Calvus had said he had never ridden a horse. Perennius had the feeling that the tall man had never ridden a carriage, either, now that he had watched him in one. Calvus seemed to have no subconscious awareness of where the next bump would come from and how he should shift to receive it. He was using his surprising strength to keep from being literally bounced out of the vehicle, but the battering that earned him must have been equivalent to all-in wrestling with a champion. Calvus never complained, though.

"How did you get that imperial rescript?" Perennius asked without preliminaries.

"The way I told you," the other man said. "I can't force a decision, but I can influence one. Like the wheels just now."

"Eh?" The agent glanced back from the road, but only for an instant. They were overtaking an official carriage. Common sense and the quartet of tough-looking outriders enjoined caution.

"Normally the vibrations of the wheels cancel themselves," Calvus explained. "There for a moment, the bumps and the period of oscillation of the carriage were perfectly in tune. Instead of a constant tingle, each bounce was higher and higher - until you changed the rate at which we encountered the bumps."

He paused. The agent continued to watch the road as they swept by the larger vehicle. Nothing in Perennius' face betrayed emotion. He was gathering information. From past experience with Calvus, it would make sense eventually.

The bald man went on, "I can advance an idea. Nothing complex, nothing like - what the ability was meant for. Pure communication with my siblings. But 'Help this man' or 'Believe this' ... or simply, 'Run!' A little prod-

ding of the recipient's mind at a level of which he isn't aware, so it becomes his thought. And it keeps returning, a little stronger each time, until he acts on it. Nothing that he might not have done anyway, of course, but there are so many actions that are within the capacity of an imperial usher, for instance, that it isn't hard to find one that prepares for the next stage of action. And at last, the Emperor comes to believe something which is in fact true but which he would probably not have acted on if approached in any other fashion."

The rumble of their iron wheels on the road made Perennius' bowels quiver and his head nod toward the sleep it had not gotten the night before. Everything was going smoothly now. He had conceived his plan and put it into operation. The agent's mind was ready to relax, now, until the next of the inevitable disasters lurched into its path to be dealt with. "Calvus," the Illyrian said.

"Yes, Aulus Perennius," the other replied.

"Don't screw with my mind. I know myself pretty well. If I ever find myself acting . . . some way I don't, I'll come after you. It ... This world doesn't always seem to have a lot for me in it, but that's always been my own."

"Would you file the edge of a good sword?" asked the tall man.

Perennius had been avoiding Calvus' eyes. Now he glanced back at the tall man. "Hell no," he said.

"Neither would I, Aulus Perennius," Calvus said.

They were nearing the formal boundaries of the city. Both sides of the road were lined with tombs and funerary steles. In recent years, many of those who could afford it were being buried whole instead of being cremated as their ancestors had been. Instead of a single stone plate with a prayer for their spirits and a base on which a wine and food offering could be left by relatives, they wanted to be embalmed to await resurrection. Fools and their mystery religions, their Isis and Attis and Christos. But when there was increasingly little hope or security in the world, how could anyone blame people who looked for hope elsewhere?

Perennius muttered a curse. Easily. If the damned cowards would buckle down and do something about the present, they wouldn't need to despair about it. Miniature pyramids, polished granite sarcophagi with peaks on the corners in Syrian style . . . Those were the fancy ones. For the poor, there were boxes of tufa, so strait that even short men must have their legs folded at the knees or separated by a bone saw.

The agent's face stayed blank, but his hands were gripping the reins so tightly that the skin striped white and red over his knuckles. Calvus watched him closely. With the care of a scout trying to disarm a deadfall, the tall man said, "I couldn't have affected the gang which waylaid us last night, even if I hadn't been immobilizing the Guardian's weapon. There were too many of them, too hopped-up, and it was too sudden. But I did encourage the group behind us to run, after you killed the Guardian."

"What?" Perennius said. Curiosity dissolved from his mind the anger directed at his whole world. The agent's muscles relaxed to the normal tautness of a man driving a pair of spirited mules. "What were you doing to the thunderbolt thing? That is what you mean?"

The bald man nodded. "For the weapon to work, two small metal parts had to touch each other inside it. While I could, I kept them from touching by keeping a layer of - " he risked a gesture with his left hand - "part of the air between them. Until I was hit on the head, that is." He smiled.

Perennius had the impression that the smile was real, not a gesture trotted out for a suitable occasion. That lightened the agent's mood as much as did the interesting problem which the statement posed. The stable from which they had rented the carriage was in sight. Wheeled vehicles were unlawful in the city during daylight, and only goods wagons were permitted on the streets even after dark. They would walk to Headquarters. Perennius had a dislike for sedan chairs, a fear of being closely surrounded by four strong men who had every reason to dislike him as a burden. No doubt chairmen who really did hate the folk who hired them soon enough found another line of work, but the feeling persisted.

"Then you can make things move without touching them," Perennius asked in a neutral voice. Calvus' abili-

ties interested him, but he was able to discuss them without concern except for when they involved meddling in his own head.

"Nerve impulses, very easily." the bald man said with what was only the semblance of agreement. He buffed his thumb against the two fingers as if there were something in between. "Tiny bits of the air, not so easily . . . but that too. If you mean move a sword or a key, no. No more than you could lift those mules and throw them." He nodded toward the team. The mules, familiar by years of experience with the route, had left the road without command and were turning into the stable to be unharnessed. Calvus held onto the frame with both hands again as the wheels rang over the curb. "It's important that you know my limitations, you see."

"Whoa," called Perennius to the mules. They had already stopped, and he drew back on their reins needlessly. The ostler was walking toward them, turning a sharp eye on the condition of his animals. Habit, habit. The agent jumped down to the stable yard and walked around the back of the vehicle to help Calvus dismount. "Just remember," Perennius said as he reached a hand up to his awkward companion, "I have limitations too. I'm only human."

"Actually, Aulus Perennius," said the tall man as he stepped down, "you aren't even that, not entirely . . . not at least as we would define the term, my people." He released the callused, muscular hand that had just braced him. "That's what makes you so valuable, you see," Calvus concluded with a smile.

CHAPTER TEN

The crew was inarching aboard the forward gangplank of the liburnian Eagle under the eyes of a squadron of Household Cavalry. Working over the stern gangplank was a gang of a dozen slaves with their tunics knotted up around their waists. The slaves were singing cheerfully as they brought aboard the last of the provisions, grain and wine in sealed pottery jars. Their light-heartedness was in stark contrast to the attitude of the free crewmen.

"Blazes," Gaius complained as he squinted against the sunlight, "what prison do you suppose they rounded the crew up from?"

Perennius was on the Eagle's poop with Gaius, Calvus, and a pair of preoccupied ship's officers. The agent watched the shuffling column with an interest equal to his protege's and with far greater experience to draw from. The number of sailors was right or close to it. The men were more or less of working age, with the swarthy complexions and muscles of men used to labor outdoors. For that matter, they seemed to be in good health when one made allowance for the sores, scars, missing limbs and eyes, and the other similar blemishes to be expected in any group of sailors. "No," the agent said, "they were probably all free men until last night or so when the Army swept some fishing village." He frowned as he considered. "Or maybe some boarding houses here in Ostia. Bad in the long run. Bad for taxes, bad for trade . . . bad for the Empire, I guess, for an imperial decree to affect its citizens like - "

he gestured to the glum file of seamen - "this. But in the short run, it had to be done."

Gaius snorted. "You're convinced of that?" he gibed.

Perennius looked from his friend to Calvus, standing beside the young courier and showing no concern at the conversation. "I'm always convinced that what I'm told to do is necessary," the agent said. He laughed. "I only get into trouble when I come up with ideas myself."

Gaius started to laugh with the older man, but the question on the surface of his mind made the laughter thinner than he had intended.

"Who are these, then?" asked Calvus. He pointed to a separate contingent marching down the quay toward the Eagle. There were scarcely twenty of them. They carried arms - spears and belt gear, with helmets and plain shields slung on their field packs - but they showed no more capacity to keep step than the sailors had. The section leader was at the left front of the short column of fours. He gave a sharp salute to the officer in charge of the detachmen of Household Cavalry. That worthy ignored the salute after a disdainful look at the newcomers.

Perennius swore with a bitter fury. He leaped to the main deck with the lithe twist of a cat charging. Officers were trying to organize the milling seamen, sending rowers below to their benches to clear the vessel for casting off. The agent slipped through the mass behind the point of his left shoulder, making as little contact with the other frustrated men as was consistent with the swiftest possible progress through them to the stern gangway. Gaius followed, using his greater size to make up for his lack of finesse. His chest and shouted threats cleared a path for Calvus, behind him, as well. By the time they caught up with Perennius, however, the agent was already reading the diploma handed him by the leader of the section of troops.

"By the icy shades of Hell!" Perennius shouted. He slapped the wooden tablet closed against a palm no less hard and handed the document to Gaius. "Read that," he snapped. "How in the ..." The Illyrian's voice trailed off as he glared at the contingent of troops. The tight-lipped leader of the unit had made two attempts to defend him-

self against the agent's fury. Now he was staring straight ahead. His men were describing a series of variations on "At ease."

Aloud, Gaius read, " 'Master of Soldiers, West, Bureau of Assignment, to Commanding Officer, Liburnian Eagle. April 14. This order transmits Draft 737, twenty effectives under a watch-stander, as Marine complement of said vessel. In accordance with instructions 12th instant, Director of Administration.' " The courier looked up from the document to the troops. "But Aulus," he said, "you said there'd be a full eighty men including the ones that'd be getting off with us. And none of these are missile infantry."

"None of them are goddam infantry at all!" the agent snapped.

The troops were an assortment more varied than the sailors had been. One in the front rank was a Nubian from well below Elephantine. His head had been shaven, but the hair was beginning to grow out again in tight ringlets against his sepia skin. By contrast, several of the others were Germans - tall and blond and sunburned to the point of blistering. The remainder of the draft fell between those extremes with a certain bias toward eastern physiognomies, Syrians and Cappadocians predominating. The closest thing to a common denominator among the troops was the prevalence of shackle-scars on their ankles. In some cases, the marks were fresh enough to be bleeding.

"You," said Perennius to a blond man. "How long have you been a soldier?"

The fellow turned to the man beside him and whispered a question. Without waiting for the other to translate, Perennius switched from Latin to Border German and repeated, "How long have you been a soldier?"

The blond man drew himself up proudly. His exposed skin was pocked with sores, and a sunburn gave him the complexion of an over-rouged corpse. "All his life, Hermann has been a warrior," the man said. He spoke in heavy Schwabish, the dialect of the tribe which had grown to the point of calling itself the 'All-Men,' Alemanni. He gripped the pommel of his standard-issue sword. It looked absurdly small beneath his huge, bony hand.

"But Hermann's leg irons got struck off some time this morning, didn't they?" Perennius said bitterly. He turned to Calvus. "Our so-called Marines are a draft of freed slaves," he said. "The orders were clear, so somebody's playing games in the Ministry of Soldiers. Well, we'll send these back and start looking for the whoreson who's getting in my way!"

"How long will that take?" the tall man asked.

Perennius had not really expected a response to his diatribe. He paused in mid-stride and looked back at Calvus. His mind was assimilating the implications of the question. "Two, maybe three days," he said carefully. "Do we have a deadline you haven't told me about?"

Calvus glanced down the section of Marines. The agent made the same calculation simultaneously. He walked along the quay toward a lighter unloading hyenas destined for the amphitheatre. Gaius frowned, but this time he did not follow the other men without being summoned. Perennius had a useful vocabulary in a score of languages, and the traveller had proven his fluency in still others. Neither of them were willing to bet that they had a language in common which was not shared with at least one of the newly-conscripted Marines, however.

"I haven't made a point of this," said Calvus against the backdrop of growling beasts, "because I knew you were acting as quickly as possible. But the - " he swallowed - "Guardians located me once. By now it seems evident that the one you killed was here by himself and that there will not be another attempt until another can arrive from Cilicia. . . . But even if they must rely on - locally-available transportation, every day makes the second attempt more probable."

Perennius sucked his lower lip between his teeth. He turned. "Longidienus!" he shouted down the quay. "Watch-stander!"

The leader of the Marines braced to attention. He at least was a trained soldier. "Sir?" he replied.

"Get your men aboard. We'll be sailing as soon as the captain tells me he's ready," Perennius ordered. In a low voice, he went on to the traveller, "I suppose you know how the bug found you?"

Calvus lifted his forehead in negation. "We hadn't ex-

pected anything of the sort," he said. "They - you see, we're used to dealing with th-them in a different aspect. It's easy to underestimate them, because the individuals are treated as so many blood cells, so many flakes of skin. But the gestalt . . ." He turned his palms upward. "My arrival here would have caused an enormous shift of energies. We didn't think they would be able to detect it. Obviously, they detected something. Perhaps it was that."

The hyenas stank with a feline musk which made the agent's stomach turn even in the general reek of the harbor. He stared at the spotted, scabby beasts while his hands rested lightly on the weapons beneath his cloak. There were a dozen of the hyenas, each of them a man's size or larger; and Perennius thought he understood the frustrated rage with which they glared out of their crates. "How are chances that they can keep right on tracking you?" the agent asked. He spoke toward the beasts.

"If they simply located my - point of arrival," Calvus said, "then they have no more way of following us when we leave the vicinity that anyone else in this age would have. They will be waiting, of course, but you will still determine how and when to strike." He paused as if to take a deep breath; though in fact, Calvus' breathing was, as always, mechanically regular.

"That's one possibility," said Perennius to the hyenas.

"Yes," Calvus agreed. "And yes, they may be able to locate me at all times, wherever I am, whatever I do. In that case, I see very little possibility that our mission will succeed."

"Yeah, that was how it looked to me, too," the agent said. He met the tall man's eyes again. Neither of their faces held any particular expression. "Let's get aboard," Perennius said. "We'll assume that they'll lose us as soon as we get under way."

The three and a half hours of unexpected delay which followed would have grated on Perennius even if Calvus had not given him a specific reason to fear delay. He tried to react as he would have done if he were simply waiting for a Bay of Naples ferry to cast off to take him back to base from a brothel. The stocky Illyrian stood in a curve of the poop rail, letting his senses absorb the confusion around him while his mind saw only the dance of sunlight on the murky waters.

The problem was the oars. Perennius was not familiar with the process of fitting out a large warship - nor, for that matter, were many of the crewmen and dockworkers involved. Because the liburnian was decked, there was no practical way that the twenty-two foot long upper-bank ' oars could be inserted from inside the seventeen-foot wide rowing chamber. Instead, each oar handle had to be thrust through its port by men on the quay, then grasped and drawn in by the oarsmen inside the vessel. The oarsmen were experienced sailors and generally used to the shattering drudgery of rowing, but the Eagle's cramped rowing chamber was new to them and thus chaotic. Most merchant ships - all but the monstrously largest ones - carried a few pairs of sweeps to maneuver them in harbor or to make landfall when the inshore breeze failed at evening. Such work, and that of trawling with a dingy, were just as hard as anything the liburnian demanded. The Eagle ranked over a hundred men in blocks of six, with four feet separating oars horizontally and only one vertical foot between the ports of the upper row and the lower.

Upon consideration, it was not surprising that it took so long to position the port-side oars, then to warp the starboard side to the quay and repeat the awkward process. It was not something Perennius had considered ahead of time, though, and only by excising his consciousness from the events could the agent restrain his fury. Under certain circumstances, he could wait with the patience of a leopard. Now, however, there was no kill in prospect.

"Cast off bow!" a ship's officer called, and the halves of Perennius' mind segued into alignment again.

A pair of sailors in the bow were thrusting at the quay with boathooks, while someone on the dock loosed a hawser from the bollard holding it. The cavalry squadron had remounted. It was forming in column of twos, while wagons and stevedores bustled on other quays. The face of one of the onlookers was unexpectedly familiar: Terentius Niger, the tribune who had handled the arrangements with verve and skill. Perennius saluted him. Those virtues

made up for any lack of security-consciousness the younger man had shown.

"Where the hell is Sestius?" the agent asked suddenly. He had been ambivalent about the Cilician initially. Now, given the size and quality of the Marine complement, Perennius did not care to miss even a single trained soldier—whether or not the soldier knew the ground where the operation would climax.

"He and his friend boarded just as they were about to raise the gangplanks," Gaius said. He stood near Perennius, but he knew the agent too well to intrude on his brown study until called to do so. "I thought they'd come back here, but they've stayed up in the bow." He nodded. Perennius, following the motion, caught sight of the centurion in a group of Marines. "I didn't think you'd want to be disturbed, so I didn't say anything."

"Cast off aft!" cried the officer. The shaft of a boathook missed Calvus' gleaming pate by inches as a sailor swung the tool over the rail.

"Let's go see him," Perennius said. He wondered with a certain humor what would happen if Calvus were brained in a boating accident. He had a gut feeling that the whole fantastic nightmare would melt back to the reality of a few weeks before.

Though that reality was nightmare enough, the Sun knew.

"Hope to blazes his friend's a soldier," the agent muttered as he stepped down the ladder. "That's the least of the help we need."

A drum thudded in the rowing chamber, thudded again, and then the coxswain began screaming curses forward as oarblades clattered together. The officer responsible below decks was trying to ease the vessel out of harbor with a few oars, leaving the rest shipped until the Eagle gained sea room. Even that conservative plan had not proven an immediate success.

"I thought of using a merchant ship," Perennius said to the tall man. Calvus had not asked for an explanation, but the obvious chaos seemed to Perennius to demand one. "Might've been faster, and for sure it was simpler.

But I just came from those waters. I don't see us making Tarsus without having to run or to fight at least once."

The ship lurched forward as a dozen oars bit the water simultaneously. A Marine stumbled against Perennius and caromed off as if from a stone post. The soldier's tunic hung over his bones as if from a rack, and he cringed away from the agent as if he expected a boot to follow the contact. "Right now," Perennius added gloomily, "I'm praying that it's run."

The fighting towers were wooden and six feet in each dimension. At one time they had been painted to look like stone. In combat they gave both vantage and a little extra wallop to missiles flung at an enemy from them. For carriage, the towers were knocked down and laid flat on the decking where they would be erected at need. The forward tower thus made a slightly raised table. A number of enterprising Marines had already started a dice game on it. Sestius and others looked on. As he approached the centurion, Perennius' face began to go blank. Gaius knew him well enough to know the expression was more threatening than another man's open rage.

"I haven't met your friend, yet, Quintus," the agent said in a tone that only a ferret might have thought was friendly and bantering.

The centurion had watched them approach, at first out of the corner of his eye but at last with a stiff smile of greeting. Sestius moved a step toward the unrailed edge of the deck, drawing his companion along with a gesture. "This is my friend, Sabellius," he said nervously. He converted the summons into an introductory gesture. "He'll be a lot of help to us." Froth scudded off in the breeze as the oars feathered. It spattered Sestius' high-laced boots and the Gallic trousers of his companion.

Perennius paced toward his quarry, past the oblivious Marines and a pair of sailors checking the forestays of the mast. Calvus and Gaius followed him like the limbs of a V. The courier's face showed a concern which the tall man never seemed to feel. The agent was staring at Sabellius. Shorter than Sestius, Sabellius wore a waist-length cloak over tunic and trousers. The hood of the cloak was raised over reddish, rough-cut hair. The gar-

ment's throat-pin was arranged so that the cloak hung closed.

"Sir, pleased to meet you - " Sabellius began, extending a hand toward the agent.

Perennius reached past the preferred hand and gripped the throat of Sabellius' drab brown tunic. Sabellius screamed. The centurion shouted in anger and tried to seize Perennius' wrist with both hands. The agent used Sestius' weight and his own strength to jerk the tunic down. The blend of wool and linen tore as Sabellius' knees banged against the deck. The breasts displayed behind the cloak and torn tunic were large-nippled - flat for a woman, but a woman's beyond any question.

Perennius released his prey. "All right, soldier," he demanded grimly as he turned to Sestius, "what the fuck do you think you're playing at?"

The dice game had broken up with a cry of interest. The shooter had raised his eyes from the board to call on Fortune and had caught a glimpse of tit instead. Gaius shifted between the agent and the Marines. His instinct was to give Perennius room to handle the situation whichever way he chose. Help against one man, even an armed soldier like Sestius, was not something the agent would need or want.

"Look, buddy," the centurion blustered, "we agreed that I'd bring a friend, and Sabellia's - "

Sestius still held Perennius' right wrist and forearm, though his grip was loosening as the soldier drew back in embarrassment. Perennius locked the other's elbow with his right hand. He cracked Sestius across the face with the callus-ridged fingers of his left hand. The shock would have put Sestius among the threshing oars had not the agent held him simultaneously. "Don't give me that shit!" Perennius shouted. "You were hiding her, weren't you? Do you think I'm stupid? Do you think everybody aboard's blind so they won't notice the first time she takes a shit over the side? There's a hundred and fifty of us on this tub. That's pretty close quarters for a bit of nookie, don't you think?"

"Sir," the centurion said. All the hectoring arrogance was gone from his voice. "It's not that, it was for after - "

Perennius released him. The man slid a heel back for balance. His boot thudded on the coaming. "And you thought if I didn't catch on before we left port that I wouldn't put her ashore at the first landfall, is that it?" the agent demanded in a quiet, poisonous tone. Voice rising again, he added, "That I wouldn't dump her over the side?"

"Sir," repeated Sestius, grimacing.

Perennius turned his back on the other man. What he saw behind him was a chilling surprise. Not the raucous Marines, not the back of tall, capable Gaius as he acted as a buffer. Calvus was frozen in the concentration which the agent had mistaken for fear that night in the alley. Sabellia was quiet also. She knelt where Perennius had thrown her down in ripping her tunic. The knife in her hand was short-bladed, but it looked sharp enough to have severed ribs on its way to the agent's heart.

"I don't think that's necessary any more," Perennius said very softly. He did not reach for the knife or the woman, though the weight came off his right boot minus-

culy.

"Bella," Sestius said in a strangled voice. "Put that

away!"

The sheath was inside the waistband of her trousers, where the fall of the tunic hid the hilt. Sabellia looked at Perennius, not the centurion, as she slipped the weapon away again. "I should have put it in you," she said. Her throaty contralto was actually deeper than the masculine tone she had tried to counterfeit in greeting. "Then we'd see how tough you were." She rose to her feet with a sway of cloth and flesh. Calvus relaxed visibly.

One of the Marines had enough Latin to call, "Hey Legate - save me sloppy seconds!"

Perennius looked at the soldiers. His smile sent the speaker flinching back while the others quieted. "Tell you what, boys," the agent said in Greek, as being the closest thing to a common language for the unit, "why don't you all go back to your game? We're short-staffed for the work anyhow, and I'd hate to lose some of you."

The hint was too clear and too obviously serious for the troops to ignore it. The dice rattled in the palm of a short

man with a beard like the point of a knife. The other Marines looked at him, then hunkered down on the forecastle again with only a glance or two back toward Perennius and his companions.

Gaius turned. "Look, Aulus," he said, "we don't even have to turn around. We can put her aboard one of the Customs - "

Perennius laid a hand on the younger man's elbow to silence him. The agent looked from Sestius to the woman, then back. The centurion had struck a brace. His face was as still as dicipline could make it. The Eagle was leaving the inner harbor now. The constriction between the column-headed moles caused the swell to dash itself into whitecaps. Sestius appeared queasy, but he did not move forward from the edge of the deck.

Now that she had been exposed, literally and figuratively, Sabellias looked obviously to be a woman in dumpy clothes. Her hair had been cut short. Her face was broad and her small nose turned up, giving her almost a Scythian look which her Gallic accent belied. She glared eye to eye at Perennius. One hand clasped her cape across the torn front of her tunic, while the other hand was still obviously on the hilt of her knife.

"Sestius," the agent said, "you acted like a fool, and it could have gotten you killed." The agent's tone was flat, his words neutral enough to leave doubt whether the implied slayer was an enemy or Perennius himself in an access of rage. Perennius' hand was on the courier's arm, as if the older man were drawing some support from the contact.

"Yes, sir," the centurion said. His eyes stared across at the shore. He had sense enough not to add anything to the minimum required. Sestius had seen men like the agent before, and it was only need that had put him in the Illyrian's path.

"You told me what you planned to do after the operation," Perennius continued in the same flat voice, "and that was all right; I could plan for it. But I can't plan for what I don't know, can I, soldier?"

"No sir." Sestius' cheek was red and swelling with the print of the agent's fingers. Sabellia glanced at her companion and sucked in her breath. The slap had been lost to her in the wave of her own confusion.

"And would you like to guess how I feel about people who think they've fooled me, soldier?" the agent went on. His fingers tensed, only momentarily but hard enough that Gaius winced.

"Sir," said Sestius to the air, "I didn't think we'd fool you, but I was desperate. Having Bella with me was the only way I was willing to, to settle. I'm sorry."

Perennius looked at the woman. She was younger by a decade than Sestius, but that was normal for a soldier with some rank on him. She edged closer to her man. The agent remembered another Gallic girl who had not been willing - or able, but it was all the same to love's victim - to stand by a soldier. "All right, Quintus," Perennius said softly, "she can stay until I hear some reason why she shouldn't. But don't ever try to play me for a fool again." He turned abruptly. "I'll show you our cabin," he threw over his shoulder. "You can get your gear stowed properly." Calvus was with him, a half step toward the stern before even Gaius realized what was happening. To the tall man, Perennius muttered, "Thanks. I was so mad about what the fool had done that I forgot it wasn't a thing he'd tried to smuggle aboard, it was a person. Spunky bitch."

They were striding between the ventilator grating and the starboard edge of the deck. Though the span of deck was as wide as any sidewalk in Rome, Calvus stumbled badly enough to make the agent nervous. Perennius crossed behind the taller man to walk outboard of him, just in case. The coxswain had shifted stroke to the lower bank of oars, endeavoring to exercise the raw company by thirds before trusting them to keep time in synchrony. The principle was all well enough, but it did not wholly prevent clattering and lurches of the hull as rowers caught crabs. "You noticed immediately that the companion was female," Calvus remarked. His hand brushed the agent's shoulder to save his balance. Gaius was directly behind them, with the couple a pace further back. Though it did not appear to matter, the traveller spoke no louder than Perennius alone could hear.

The agent shrugged. "Sestius was hiding something," he said. "Something he didn't want noticed. I thought he'd brought his chicken aboard. Then I saw her move, the way her throat looked - and knowing there was something going to be wrong with her . . . Well, it wasn't chicken, it was coney." He looked sharply at Calvus. "You knew before I did, didn't you?"

The tall man nodded. "I didn't realize it would matter to you. It can be difficult to know what information you want - or when I ought to give it to you."

The liburnian was anything but luxurious. Still, the five passengers had as much privacy as one of the pair of stern cabins could give their number. Perennius opened the hatch and pegged it back to the bulkhead. Amidships, a party of sailors was preparing to hoist the mainsail under directions shouted from the poop. "She earned a berth when she pulled the knife on me," the agent said quietly. Louder and with a gesture toward the diffident centurion, he called, "Stow your duffle, but remember this is all the shelter we'll have if the weather turns sour, Quintus."

Sestius stepped into the cabin between Calvus and the agent. He swung his stuffed field pack off his shoulder to clear the low lintel. Sabellia followed him with a burden scarcely smaller. Her eyes watched Perennius with wary acceptance.

"But I really don't like to be played for a fool," the agent repeated to the figure across the hatch from him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"Dolphins ahead!" cried the lookout at the masthead, but Perennius in the prow could see that the monster approaching them was no line of dolphins. Presumably the sailor from his better vantage knew that too and had spoken in the same hopeful euphemism that caused the Furies to be referred to as the 'Kindly-minded Ones.' The friendly, man-aiding dolphins were traditionally bearers of good luck, while the creature now rippling toward the Eagle looked to be none of those things.

Gaius and Sestius were aft, giving the Marines their third day of weapons drill. When they broke up for individual fencing practice, the agent would join them. At the moment it was as least as important to teach the contingent the meaning of basic commands in Latin. The Eagle was west of Corcyra, the landfall intended for that evening. The liburnian was proceeding with a fair wind and a slow stroke - practice for the rowers, while the Marines drilled above them.

Sabellia, at the agent's left in the bow, squinted and said, "That's what a dolphin looks like?"

"No," said Calvus, "not a dolphin. Not anything at all that should be on Earth at this time."

"Blazes, that's the truth!" Perennius said. He glanced around quickly to see what weapons there were that might be more useful than his sword.

The creature's head was broader than a horse's and was more than twice as long. Because the thing was approaching and Perennius was low enough that spray wetted him even in a calm sea, the agent could not be sure of the beast's length. It appeared to be an appreciable fraction of the ship's own hundred-plus feet. The yellow teeth in its jaws were large enough to be seen clearly as the distance closed. Porpoises undulate vertically. The mottled fin along this creature's spine did rise and fall, but the body itself rippled sideways in a multiple sculling motion. It looked like nothing Perennius had ever seen in his life, and it looked as dangerous as the agent himself was.

"Stand to!" Perennius roared in a barrack's-square voice which even the open horizon did not wholly swallow.

It was incredible that this ragged-toothed monster could have thrashed within a ship's length of them and attract so little attention. The lookout was paralyzed at his post now that proximity gave the absolute lie to his optimism. The deck crew had its tasks or its leisure, neither category worth interruption for a pod of dolphins. Sabellia was willing enough to act in a crisis, but the sea and its creatures were all so new to her that she did not even realize there was a crisis at the moment.

As for Calvus, Calvus was - as always - calmly interested. While Perennius shouted and ran for one of the boat-pikes racked against the mast, the tall man watched the dark, serpentine creature until it sounded and disappeared beneath the liburnian's keel.

The Marines had exploded out of formation at Perennius' cry. They gripped their spears for use as they stumbled forward to join the agent. The crew, seamen and officers alike, jumped up alertly as well. Like the Marines - and Perennius himself - they were looking toward the bow. The waves continued to foam around the stem and the barely-submerged stump of the ram. The sea held no tracks, and there was no sign of the creature remaining.

"It won't be back, I think," Calvus said before Perennius could ask his question or the mob of men on deck could ask theirs of him. "Calm them. It won't do any good to have them wondering."

"Easy for you to say," Perennius snarled. He knew full well that anything he could say to calm the men around him would make him look a fool. Well, any attempt to convince them that he had really seen a monster with

daggers for teeth would have the same effect - if he were lucky. If his luck was out, he'd have a mutiny no threats could quell.

"I guess it was a log," the agent said aloud, giving the onlookers a weak smile. Sestius had stepped quickly to Sabellia's side. She took his arm. The woman walked the ship with a hand on her knife, but she was never far from the centurion or Perennius either. Any dangers the agent posed went beyond a bout of unwanted slap and tickle. "Or maybe it was - " Perennius wet his lips - "some dolphins, yes." He glanced up at the lookout involuntarily. The sailor stared back at him in frozen agreement.

By the unconquered Sun, thought the agent, maybe it was all a dream, a mirage. They were alone on the sea with no more than the waves and a single high-flying seabird as company.

"All right, fall in again," Gaius ordered harshly. He liked the authority he got from drilling the Marines; but after he spoke, he looked back carefully to Perennius. As the sailors returned to their own duties, one of the mates said, "His Highness is seeing mermaids. Maybe one of you lads ought to offer to haul his ashes for him before he hurts himself on a knothole." There was general laughter.

Perennius appeared not to be listening. He walked back to the bow. The fourteen-foot long pike was still in his right hand. He carried it just ahead of the balance so that its butt brushed the deck and its point winked in the air ahead of him at the height of a man's throat. The only sign the agent made to show he was not simply bemused at making a foolish mistake was his peremptory gesture to Calvus to join him by the bowsprit. It was unnecessary. The tall man had already turned in unison with the agent. Sabellia followed also, unasked but expected as Sestius went back to his training duties.

"Now, what in blazes was that?" the agent asked. His voice held the fury of Father Sun, reswallowing the life that was his creation in tendrils of inexorable flame. "And don't give me any crap about dolphins!" Even to himself, Perennius would not admit how fearful he was that what he had "seen" was only a construct of his diseased mind.

"It was less like a dolphin than you are," said the traveller calmly, always calmly. "It appears to have been a - " he looked at the agent, his lips pursing around the choice of a word - "marine reptile, a tylosaurus. It eats fish, though it would probably make short enough work of a man in the water. The ship itself is far too large to be potential prey, so I was not concerned."

The fact of identification has its own power over the thing identified. Perennius looked from Calvus to the pike in his hand. "Oh," he said in chagrin, conscious of the woman's eyes as well. He had made a fool of himself in his panic. "I hadn't seen one before."

"No, you certainly hadn't," the traveller agreed. "The last of them disappeared from Earth sixty-five million years ago. I don't think it will be able to stay alive very long in this age. The seas must be far too salty, so that it will dehydrate and die."

In a society that valued rhetoric over communication, mathematics were a slave's work - or a spy's. Numbers - of men, of wealth, of distances - were a part of Perennius' job, so he had learned to use them as effectively as he did the lies and weapons which he also needed. But even in a day when inflation was rampant and the word for a small coin had originally meant 'a bag of money,' the figure Calvus had thrown out gave the agent pause. While Perennius struggled with the concept, the Gallic woman sidestepped the figures and went to the heart of the problem. "You say they're all dead," she said in her own smooth dialect of Latin, "and you say we just saw one. Where did it come from?"

The traveller was looking astern, toward the empty waves past the rope-brailed canvas of the mainsail. Perhaps he was looking much farther away than that. "Either there is something completely separate working," he said "or that was a side-effect of the way I came here. I can't be sure. I was raised to know and to find - certain things. And to act in certain ways. This isn't something that I would need to understand, perhaps .. . but I rather think it was not expected."

The tall man shrugged. He looked at Sabellia, at the agent, with his stark black eyes again. "This was not tested, you see. It was not in question that the technique

would work, but the ramifications could be as various as the universe itself. That's why they sent all six of us together . . . and I am here."

"Calvus, I don't understand," Perennius said. He watched his hands squeeze pointlessly against the weathered gray surface of the pike staff. "But if you say that it's all right, I'll accept that."

"Aulus Perennius, I don't know whether or not it is all right," the tall man said. "We didn't have time to test the procedure that sent us here." The smooth-skinned, angular face formed itself - relaxed would have been the wrong word - into a smile. "We did not have time," Calvus repeated wonderingly. "Yes, I've made a joke. I wonder how my siblings would react to me now?" He smiled again, but less broadly. "Contact with you has changed me more than could have been expected before we were sent off."

Sabellia began to laugh. Perennius looked at the woman. "You too?" he said sourly.

Sabellia's hair was beginning to bleach to red-blond after days of sea-reflected sunlight. "It's the idea of anyone getting a sense of humor by associating with you. Lord Perennius," she said. Her giggle made the sarcasm of "Lord" less cutting, though abundantly clear.

"That wasn't quite what I meant," said Calvus. He looked from one of his companions to the other.

But as the agent strode toward the mast to rack the pike again, he too began to laugh.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The sails were to windward of them. That was bad enough. What was worse was the fact that their attitude shifted even as Perennius watched them. If he was correct, the vessels were turning toward the Eagle, not away. In this age, in these waters west of Cyprus, no honest seaman wanted to meet another ship.

"Those two ships are turning toward us," said Calvus, as if to put paid to the hopeful doubt in the agent's mind. Perennius glanced sidelong at the tall man, wondering just how sharp his eyesight really was. "Why are they doing that?"

"Herakles, Captain!" cried the lookout who had given the initial alarm a minute before. "They're making for us! Pirates!"

"That seems to me to cover it, too," said Perennius. He struggled to keep from vomiting. Disaster, disaster . . . not unexpected in the abstract, but its precise nature had been unhinted only minutes before. The voyage had been going well. The oarsmen and the Marines were both shaking down in adequate fashion -

Across the surface of the agent's mind flashed a picture of his chief, Marcus Optatius Navigatus, burying himself in trivia as the Empire went smash. It was easier to think about the way a rank of Marines dressed than it was to consider chitinous things that spat lightning - or the near certainty that he would have to battle pirates with a quarter of the troops he had thought marginally necessary to the task.

Screw'em all. Aulus Perennius had been given a job, and he was going to do it. Not "or die trying"; that was for losers.

There were men shouting on deck and below it. The captain was giving orders to the coxswain through a wooden speaking tube. The agent turned his eyes toward the putative pirates again. They were still distant. Though interception might be inevitable, it would not be soon. With genuine calm rather than the feigned one of a moment before, Perennius said, "It could be that these aren't simply pirates, Calvus. Like the bravos we met in Rome weren't just robbers. Can you protect us against thunderbolts here like you did then?"

"No," Calvus said as he too continued to watch the other sails. The upper hull of the nearer of the vessels was barely visible. It was a sailing ship, and that was at least some hope. "Their weapons - and I can only assume that what you face here is identical to what we knew - their weapons will strike at a distance of - " a pause for conversion. The agent would have given a great deal to know the original measurement - "two hundred double paces, a thousand feet. My capacity to affect anything physical, or even - " a near smile - "mental, falls off exponentially with distance. At ten feet, perhaps, I could affect their weapons. No further."

"All right, we'll keep you out of the way," Perennius said. His mind was ticking like the fingers of an accountant. "Put you on an oar, you're strong, or maybe the cabin's the best idea, just in case we do get close enough you can - "

"Aulus Perennius," the traveller said, interrupting for the first time, "I said that if there are Guardians on those ships, they can tear this craft apart from a thousand feet."

"And if it's just pirates, they can't!" the agent snapped back. "Think I didn't goddam listen to you?" He pointed toward the cabin into which Gaius and Sestius had disappeared at a run. Their armor was there. "I'll have hell's own time finishing this job if you've caught a stray arrow on the way. And if it's your lobster buddies after all, well ... I just might be able to arrange a surprise for them

even at two hundred paces. For now, get to blazes out of my way so that I can get on with what I need to do!"

Which was to kill people, the agent thought as he strode to the forward fighting tower. "You two!" he shouted to a pair of nervous-looking seamen. "Give me a hand with these cables!"

It was nice to have a skill that was in demand.

Perennius and his scratch team had three sides of the tower cleated together and were raising the fourth when Sestius and a pair of the Marines staggered forward. The soldiers were in armor and were carrying the ballista. With its base and a bundle of iron darts, it was a load for all of them.

"Drive home that peg!" the agent ordered. He thudded one warped timber against another with the point of his shoulder. Sestius dropped his burden obediently and rapped at the peg with his helmet, the closest equivalent to a hammer. Perennius grunted and lunged at the wall again. Sestius struck in unison, and the pieces of the tower locked in place. The sailors were already completing the task by dogging the bottom edges of the tower into the bronze hasps sunk permanently in the deck for the purpose.

"You pair, lift the roof in place," Perennius wheezed to the Marines. "There's a horizontal stud on the inside of the walls to peg it to."

The men looked at one another blankly for an instant. Then the centurion repeated the order in Greek. With a willingness that at least mitigated their ignorance of every goddam thing, the men dropped the ballista and began lifting the remaining square of planking.

"Do you want me to raise the aft tower while you arm yourself?" Sestius asked. Perennius had stripped off his cloak and equipment belt for the exertion of erecting the tower. Sweat glittered on his eyebrows and blackened the breast of his tunic in splotches. The Centurion looked fully the military professional by contrast. His oval plywood shield was strapped to his back in carrying position. His chest glittered with armor of bronze scales sewn directly to a leather backing. The mail shirt was newly-issued, replacing the one whose iron rings were welded to uselessness during the ambush in Rome.

"No goddam point," the agent said. "We don't have enough men to need this one," he added, levering himself away from the tower which supported him after he no longer needed to support it. It wasn't that he was getting old, not him. Even as a youth Perennius had paced himself for the task, not the ultimate goal. Here his strength and determination had gotten the heavy fighting tower up in a rush that a dozen men could have equalled only with difficulty. It didn't leave him much at the moment, but the pirates weren't aboard yet either. He could run on his nerves when they were. "Get the ballista set up and pick a crew for it - "

"Me?" Sestius blurted. "I don't know how to work one of these things." He stared at the dismantled weapon as if Perennius had just ordered it to bite him. "Sir, I thought you ... I mean, these Marines, what would they . . . ?"

"Good work, Centurion," Gaius called brightly as he strode to the fighting tower. He wore his cavalry uniform complete to the medallions of rank. They bounced and jingled against the bronze hoops of his back-and-breast armor. The armor was hinged on his left side and latched on the right. The individual hoops were pinned to one another in slots so that the wearer could bend forward and sideways to an extent. That was fine for a horseman who needed the protection of the thick metal because he could not carry a shield and guide his mount with his left hand. It should serve Gaius well here, also, in a melee without proper ranks and the support of a shield wall.

Perennius had a set of armor just like it back in the cabin, and he would not be able to wear it - blast the Fates for their mockery!

"I'll take over with this now," the younger Illyrian was saying cheerfully. He lifted the heavy ballista base. "You, sailor - scramble up there and take this! And I'll need both of you to crew the beast."

The seamen Perennius had commandeered looked doubtful, but it was toward the agent and not toward their own officers that they glanced for confirmation. Perennius nod-

ded briefly to them. "Right," he said. "I'll be back myself in a moment."

"Marines to me!" Sestius was calling in Latin, then Greek, as he trotted amidships. He obviously feared that if he stayed nearby, Perennius would assign him to the ballista after all. The centurion was more immediately fearful of the hash he would make trying to use a weapon of which he was wholly ignorant than he was of the fight at odds which loomed.

Perennius slapped Gaius on the shoulder and ran back toward his cabin. Men and gear made an obstacle course of the eighty-foot journey. The deck was strewn with the personal gear of the Marines. They were rummaging for the shields and ill-fitting cuirasses which might keep them alive over the next few hours. There was neither room nor permission for them to store their belongings below as did the deck crew and oarsmen. The seamen resented the relative leisure of men so recently slaves. Now, the rush to packs lashed to the deck cleats had created more incidental disruption than one would have guessed a mere score of men could achieve.

It occurred to the agent that this might well be Gaius' first real action. That at least explained the youth's enthusiasm. The boy had been given all the considerable benefits of training and preferment which Perennius could arrange for him. Gaius had thrown himself into each position with ability, though without the driving ambition that might have gained him a provincial governorship before he reached retirement age.

Or a stage above that, whispered a part of the agent's mind. Perennius hurtled a Marine an instant before the fellow straightened up the spear he had drawn through the lashings of his pack. How many provincial governors had become emperors during Perennius' own lifetime?

But Gaius, for all his skills and willingness, had never been closer to the front lines of a battle than the day he stood with the troop of personal bodyguards around the Emperor at Arlate. Accidents could occur - as they had to Gallienus' own father and co-emperor, captured two years before by the Persians. But as a general rule, the safest place to be during a battle is with a commander. It had proven so that day, despite the vicious struggle of the Alemanni. The boy's first front-line experience was going to be in this shipboard chaos without real lines.

As accommodations on the small warship went, the poop cabins were the height of luxury. Each had a glazed window in the rear bulkhead. The stocky agent still had to pause to let his eyes expand for the dimmer interior. Time was at a premium, and he knew consciously that no one inside was waiting to brain him; but it was a survival reflex of more value than the seconds he might have saved by over-riding it.

Sabellia edged aside to let Perennius by. The centurion had presumably ordered her under cover, but she had taken station in the hatchway. Perennius did not need the glint of steel to know what the Gallic woman held in her hand. Calvus stood silently at the inner bulkhead which separated the passengers' cabin from that retained by the ship's officers. Calvus was clear, by chance or intention, of the agent's gear stored against the curving outer hull of the ship.

The tall man could not be as calm as he looked, Perennius thought as he thrust aside his own heavy body armor to get at the pack beneath it. He had seen Calvus' face work when the tall man discussed the Guardians and the threat he was sure they posed to the Empire. And while Calvus had a level of unworldliness as surprising as his linguistic knowledge, he was not a fool. It required no particular experience to understand how dangerous a threat to their mission was posed by the two raw-looking pirate vessels bearing down on the Eagle.

Perennius found the weapon and ammunition in their leather pouch. "If you want to curse me for the chance I took going by sea, you can," he said angrily to Calvus. He slung the strap of the pouch over his shoulder and reached for his helmet. "But it was still the better chance, Hell take it!"

"Aulus Perennius," the traveller replied, "you will do what can be done by man." Calvus' smile looked thin, but again - as a rarity - it looked real. "I was not raised to be concerned about tasks that are the domain of others."