Birds Of Prey

inner room be warmer in the winter, the arrangement avoided the dangers implicit when thatched roofs covered open fires as they did in most rural areas.

"You may leave your burdens here," one of the villagers called from outside. "They will be safe." After a moment, she added, "They would be safe anywhere in the valley."

Perennius had insisted on carrying a pack as heavy as any of the others did - any of them besides Calvus. The suggestion made him feel suddenly as if the straps were trying to ram him into the soil like hammer blows on a tent peg. The process of shrugging off his load was more painful than the carrying of it had been. He had been suppressing the latter pain over many harsh miles of goat track.

"Do you ever feel like settling down yourself," he asked the bald woman in Latin. "Just saying the hell with it, I've done all the job one man can do, the rest can try fighting it for a while?"

Calvus set down her own pack. She was still a little awkward, so the load touched the stone floor with a clank. None of the villagers outside seemed to care or notice. "Sometimes I feel that way, Aulus Perennius," she said carefully. Her face was in shadow. It would probably not have betrayed her feelings to the agent anyway. "I suppose everyone with a duty feels that way on occasion." Calvus started to walk back through the archway again.

Perennius' hand stopped her. "Why don't you, then?" he demanded. Echoes from the rock deepened his voice and multiplied its urgency. "Why don't you just pitch it when there's places like this in the world?"

Most people would have replied, "Why don't you?" and it was perhaps that response for which the target was hoping. Instead, the tall woman backed a half step so that she could straighten to her full height again. "Because," she said, "I know that it isn't true. I'm luckier than many, I suppose, because I will know exactly when I've done everything possible to accomplish my duty." Perennius thought she might be smiling as she added, "Of course, I

won't retire then, in the usual sense. But that doesn't matter."

Perennius muttered something unintelligible even to himself as he led his companion outside again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

As they followed their escort of villagers to the church, the agent fingered the garland of daisies and columbines which he had not removed with his pack. Another ragged procession was wending toward the hut, carrying the burdens of the three bathers. Those villagers were singing something more cheerful than any hymn had a right to be. The two soldiers and Sabellia, who must have been hurried through her own chance at a bath, were being led toward the church directly from the alcove. The Gallic woman wore her own garments, but the two men seemed to have accepted tunics of bleached wool in place of their own travel-stained garments.

Perennius had refused a similar offer of clothing because he would have had to give up more than his tunic. The agent had shed his spear and equipment belt in the hut - it would have been insultingly churlish to do otherwise - but he had found a tiny, ivory-hilted dagger in the pirates' loot. That knife now weighted the hem of his inner tunic, a comfort to his paranoia. Perennius's groundless fears irritated him, but he had learned that sometimes it was better to feed them discreetly instead of depending on his control to prevent embarrassment.

The bell had ceased its warning from the tower when Father Ramphion met the strangers. Now it pealed again, but with a joyous exuberance in contrast to the measured beats before. The black-clad priest bustled out the door of the church even as the streams bearing the outsiders converged on it. Ramphion raised both hands and cried, "God's blessing on this day and its works!"

"God's blessing!" chorused the villagers, both without the building and, mutedly, within.

It occurred to Perennius with some embarrassment that he had in the past been treated with equal pomp - but only under a false persona. Odenath had feted the envoy from Postumus, not Aulus Perennius himself; and there had been similar occurrences before. The agent had spent too many years among lies to be fully comfortable with the present situation. When he reached Father Ramphion, beaming by the doorway, Perennius said in his halting Cilician, "Father, we needn't be a burden to you. Our needs are simple, and we're willing to pay."

The village priest bowed to him. "We regard strangers as God's gift to our valley, the opportunity he gives us to repay the agony of his sacrifice by which we all are saved. Enter, and join our feast of love." Father Ramphion's broad gesture within had a compulsion to it as real as if it had created a suction in the air by its passage. Bemused and still uncertain, Perennius obeyed.

The interior of the spire was lighted primarily by rush-candles - pithy reeds dipped in grease. There were good-sized windows in the building's upper levels. Because the sun was low, the windows could only throw rectangles on the curved surface of the wall across from them. The church was designed much the way Perennius had assumed from the exterior. Eight thick columns supported the second level; four separate columns reached up the full forty feet to the base of the third. The belfry which was perched on top of even that must have been constructed of wood, because there was no evidence of the additional bracing which that structure would have required if it were stone. Though the church looked massively large from the outside, the columns filled its interior and gave it a claustrophobic feeling despite its volume.

What Perennius had not expected - though it might have been the norm for Christian churches - was the fact that all the stonework inside had been brightly painted. The porous limestone provided a suitable matrix for the paint, and the rock's natural soft yellow color was used both for

backgrounds and for the flesh of the figures. Those figures were painted in stiff, full-frontal poses which seemed to reflect local taste as much as they did the crudity of the efforts. While the paintings were not the work of trained artists, their execution displayed some of the same raw power that suffused the architecture of the church itself. The bright colors and the depictions of calm-faced men undergoing gruesome tortures affected Perennius as real events were not always able to do. The agent kept remembering Calvus' face and the way it retained its surface placidity during her multiple rape.

It was Calvus herself who shook the agent from his grim imaginings. "How would they have gotten high enough to do that painting?" the bald woman asked in Latin. She gestured with a flick of her chin instead of raising her hand.

"Ah, that?" the agent said. "Scaffolding." He had to swallow the "of course" that his tongue had almost tacked on. Calvus did not ask questions to which the answers would have been obvious if she had thought. There were surprising gaps in the traveller's experience, but her mental precision was as great as her physical strength. "Would have needed it just to build the walls," the agent went on. He wondered how on earth the tall woman had thought the stones had been lifted into place. Perhaps there were people - where - she came from who could make stones fly. She had denied that she herself could move anything of real size without touching it, but . . . "You're right, they seem to have built this without so much as a staircase integral to it."

Perennius was thinking as a military man. Any tendencies the architect - if that were not too formal a term - had toward military design were exhausted when the bottom level was pierced with arrow slits. A rope ladder served as access to the belfry, adequate for religious ends and as a watchtower. If there was no easy way to use the height of the upper levels against putative assault, then there seemed to be no reason to do so either. The thick walls, with the modicum of offensive capacity which the slits gave, would suffice against raiders. A real military force would make short work of an isolated tower, however strong it was individually. The waste of capacity still prompted an inward sneer. The agent thought that perhaps it was that from which arose his growing sense of unease.

"Herakles, Legate," Sestius called cheerfully from behind him, "This isn't the sort of place I expected to find out in the sticks. Or the kind of spread I thought we'd be offered, neither. Hey, what do you suppose they've got for wine?"

"Quintus," the agent said. His voice was as flat as a bowstring. "Bag it. Pretend you're at a formal dinner given by the Emperor. We need the help of these people."

The centurion winked and clapped Perennius on the shoulder.

The thick columns had trefoil cross-sections which increased their resemblance to walls. Perennius had the impression that he was in a spacious maze. Ramphion himself guided the strangers to a table beneath the belfry. There was no aisle from the door to the other side of the circular building. Those entering the church had immediately to dodge one of the outer ring of pillars. There was another such pillar in alignment across the room. It might be barely possible to see from the outer wall at one point to the equivalent point across the building, but the focus of any mass services would have to be the center of the room rather than the side.

Villagers were entering and filling the long trestle tables set up between the two rings of columns. The movement was not quite formal enough to be a procession, but many of the local people were singing. The agent was not sure whether a number of separate hymns were being intoned at the same time, or whether the acoustics of the room were so terrible that they created muted cacophony from a single work. The drab, joyous villagers flitted among the brilliantly-painted stones like sparrows in a flower garden.

Perennius paused and waved on the other members of his party as they followed the village priest. Sabellia was at the end of the line. The agent fell in step beside her and asked in Celtic, "Where's the altar? You have one for sacrifice, don't you?"

"Not for sacrifice," the woman snapped. "Christ was the world's sacrifice." But her face promptly pursed into the look of uncertainty it had shown before the agent's gaffe. "It must be movable," Sabellia said. "The building isn't like any church I've been in. Anything I've been in."

"Sit down, guests," Father Ramphion said with a two-handed gesture. "Accept the thanks of this valley which your presence blesses."

The central table was, like those around it, a cloth-draped panel supported by two trestles. There was nothing of civilized formality about the meal, with guests reclining on couches around a small table filled with delicacies. At the other tables, villagers sat on benches. In the center, six stools surrounded the table. Father Ramphion had positioned himself at the end further from the hidden door. Perennius nodded and took the chair across from the local man. When the remainder of the party had ' seated themselves along the sides, the priest clapped his hands. The singing and shuffling of feet on stone floors ceased at once. Muffled echoes continued to rasp among the odd angles for long seconds thereafter.

Villagers joined hands with their neighbors to either side. Those who were standing moved into the gaps between tables and joined them so that the whole room was linked by a double ring of hands. Father Ramphion made a ritual gesture, crossing his torso. Then he lifted his eyes and his hands. "Almighty God," he prayed in a voice which the room made reedy, "we thank you for blessing us, your servants, by sending the Anointed and Dioscholias his apostle into our midst to make known your will. For thirty-three years we have kept your ordinances that the Anointed may return when the way has been made smooth for him. Continue to bless your servants, and bless these strangers to your use. Let it be so."

Sixty-odd feet above the table, the bell clanged twice. The dim air quivered among the heavy columns. The priest relaxed. "Welcome, strangers, to our feast of love," he said in a normal voice. When he sat down, the cheerful bustle resumed all around.

While the offered meal was not of urban refinement, neither was it a simple one. The skeleton of it was wheat bread and chunks of lamb roasted on skewers. Both dishes were marvellously fresh and delicious. Beside those staples of a rural feast, there were a score of different cheese, egg, and vegetable courses, most of them offered cold. The one most to Perennius' taste was a collation of cucumbers and cultured goat's milk touched with additional herbs. The agent noted Sabellia's eyes open in surprise. Her tongue spread the morsel she had taken carefully around her mouth as she separated flavors and piquancies. Her expression was appreciative.

There was no difference Perennius could see between the servitors and the villagers eating at the other tables. They all wore homespun and had the calluses and sunburn of people who worked outdoors. Those who carried food and water among the diners did so with enthusiasm if not the polished obsequiousness of men and women whose whole lives were sent in ministering to others. As the meal progressed, those who had first been doing the serving sat down to eat. They were replaced by some who had eaten already.

Sestius noticed the situation, too. He pointed with a cheese-laden wedge of bread and remarked, "Father, where's all the slaves? Don't tell me you all work your plots alone out here." Sestius' Cilician was rusty, but it was still more serviceable than the agent's own.

Ramphion smiled. "We have no slaves in this valley, no. But then, we have no private plots of land, either. We decided, our forefathers - " Someone came by with a bowl of chives in yogurt. The priest dipped some out with his index and middle fingers, licked the taste off, and waved the dish down to the others at the table. Perennius noticed that each dish was offered first to Father Ramphion, and that he always sampled it openly - even ostentatiously - before the strangers were asked to try it.

"Everyone in the valley was touched with the fire of truth when Dioscholias preached," Father Ramphion resumed. "Slaves and free-holders, men and women together." He gestured, crooking his elbow so that the arc of his hand did not threaten the centurion or Calvus who sat nearest to him. "It was a night whose like may never again take place - until the return of the Anointed,

of course," the priest added quickly. "You who are not saved cannot possibly imagine."

Sabellia coughed and shot an offended glance at the local man. She had not, Perennius noticed, made any mention of the fact that she too was a Christian.

Father Ramphion took a skewer of meat from a tray, offered the skewer and then the tray itself to Sestius, and continued, "We could not continue a society in which man was the servant to man, once we knew that all men were the servants of God alone. That night we carried away the stones of fences which had stood between fields for as long as human memory survives. We plowed across the old boundaries. Since then we have lived in common, as the Anointed taught us through Dioscholias."

The grilled lamb was delicious, particularly as it was set off by the tartness of some of the vegetable side-dishes. Perennius swallowed a bite and said, "Including your Ophitics, Azon and Erzites? In the commonality, that is?"

Father Ramphion spilled water from the earthenware goblet at his lips. He lowered the vessel and patted himself hard on the breastbone until the fit let him speak again. "Yes and no," the priest said. He raised his eyes to the agent's. "Their father was a local man who returned here after he received his discharge from the Army." All three of the other men at the table nodded in understanding. "That was after Dioscholias had brought the fire of the Spirit to fall on the valley, however. There was discussion and prayer about the matter, of course. At last Dioscholias announced that the Lord would not have so arranged events except as evidence of his purpose. The father and his wife, and the sons of their marriage, have since shared fully in all the valley's wealth - save its greatest wealth, the faith by which we are saved. They are not our slaves or our servants, but they perform tasks which free the rest of us to worship together in full community."

Perennius nodded again and took more meat. He had wondered who stood guard while the whole village feasted. The symbiosis Ramphion had described made sense. The agent imagined that each party felt superior to those on the other side of the equation. The Christians could look down on the brothers damned to eternal Hell, while the brothers could sneer at the remainder of the village which labored in their behalf as surely as in its own. The present feast made the valley's wealth certain; and from their generosity to strangers, Perennius did not doubt that the Christians treated their local sectarians as well as Father Ramphion had suggested.

Perennius was no longer worried about Sabellia. Father Ramphion had made it clear if not overt that the village did not want proselytes. It was equally clear that to the locals, the only Christians were those who were present or descended from those present when Dioscholias converted the village. The apostle was probably a local man himself, given the introversion of the faith as practiced here. A convert returning home from Caesarea, Egypt - some center of the new sect - with his own slant on the faith to which he was devoting himself. The situation seemed to make Sabellia angry, probably because of the sense of kinship she had briefly expected. That thought - that the Gallic woman had hoped for a sodality from which her present companions were barred - was unexpectedly painful to the agent. He returned to his meal.

Not only was the food excellent in itself, it was not flawed as it would have been at a rich man's table by being eaten from metal dishes. The slightest astringence - pomegranate cells or a vinegar dressing - would bring with it an aftertaste of silver or even gold. Poor men who drank their wines from glazed earthenware tasted them with a purity denied to those who could afford the best - in jeweled metal. The water of the valley was all that thus far had been offered to accompany the food, however. It was clean and cool, complementing the meal without attempting to compete with it.

Eventually, even Gaius was full to repletion. The young courier swayed in a forgetful attempt to recline on a stool. The bulk of the meal had left Perennius logy. The headache with which he had tramped for a day and a half was gone. Even his wounded thigh could almost be ignored. The agent was wondering whether or not he could bathe

BIRDS OF PREY

229

now. It would make a perfect conclusion to the relaxing meal.

Father Ramphion rose. The building whispered slowly into a hush as before. At the priest's side stood another villager with a goblet. The vessel was of glass so clear and colorless that it might properly have graced an emperor's table. The wine within it was of a tawny hue accented by the flaring rush-lights.

Ramphion took the goblet and raised it. "May all those present be turned to the Lord's service," he said, "as Dioscholias taught." He drank noisily from the goblet, then handed it to Sestius. The level of the wine had dropped appreciably.

The centurion had asked for wine twice in the course of the meal. Now he took the goblet in surprise. The priest continued to stand. Sestius obviously wondered if he should stand up also, but Father Ramphion's eyes held no such encouragement. Sestius drank and passed the cup.

Sabellia's hesitation had come when the wine was offered to the centurion. When it came her turn, she gripped the slick glass surface without concern. Because the villagers had tacitly barred her from full membership in the circle of their faith, there was a bitter reaction in the Gallic woman to damn them all as heretics themselves. Like the wine, her red hair absorbed highlights from the blazing, grease-soaked rushes. The color was no bad suggestion of the anger within Sabellia. But with her temper came control, and a remembrance of the mission for which she and the others had suffered so much already. Sabellia drank quickly and handed the goblet to Perennius. She wiped her mouth with her shawl.

It was not a particularly good vintage, the agent thought. More tannin, it seemed, than was to be expected from a white wine. Though one got used to the resins and honey added to amphoras to preserve wines for hard travelling. There was none of that in this local vintage. Perennius passed the cup.

Gaius drank with the noisy assurances of a youth whom exhaustion and a full belly had robbed of such sophistication as he might otherwise have displayed. He slurped, belched, and then took another deep draft though the level in the wide-bellied goblet had already sunk near the bottom.

Perennius was trying to decide whether to negotiate for donkeys now or to wait for the morning. It was not a hard decision. He was tired. The feeling of sluggish tranquility that blotted away his aches and pains at the close of the meal would make him a less-effective bargainer. This valley community might well feel it needed its livestock more than it needed gold. Father Ramphion stood, his shaven pate gleaming in the lights above him. He looked as if he were one of the haloed figures painted on the walls. The agent's eyes focused but his head did not seem to want to turn away from the priest's fixed smile.

Calvus lowered the cup. The wine had been strained through cloth. Nothing clung to the inside surface of the glass but a film no yellower than the light itself. Fire wavered on the whorls which marked the goblet's colorless purity. There was a collective babbling from the surrounding tables. Villagers were standing up.

"Aulus Perennius," the tall woman said. She was speaking Schwabish. Sabellia and Sestius might understand her, but the less stable Gaius would not. "There was an alkaloid in the wine. It should not be fatal, but it will numb you all."

Perennius clenched his left hand on the table's edge. He stood up. It was as if he were a squat male caryatid trying to lift the roof of a temple. The agent's stool crashed to the stone floor behind him.

"Aulus," the bald woman said, "I don't think this is a good idea. If they meant to kill us, they would have used something else, surely. ..."

Father Ramphion's deep-sunk eyes glared at the agent. Villagers who had been chattering with joy now noticed the Illyrian's struggle with himself. There was further commotion behind Perennius, toward the door of the church. He could not turn to see what it was. "I'm as much of a man as this bastard," the agent whispered. He stared back at Ramphion while his right hand tried to find the dagger in his hem. There was no feeling in the agent's fingers, in any of his limbs.

Sestius slid to the floor, Sabellia did not fall, but she

was obviously fighting as hard to stay upright as Perennius had fought to stand. Gaius flopped forward. He was trying to mouth the words of a song through lips too numb to have formed sounds. Perennius' ears were buzzing. Over that empty burr came Calvus' voice saying, "He has built up an immunity to the drug, Aulus. This must be part of a long practice for them. Let yourself go or they may - "

Someone kicked Perennius' feet sideways. The agent crashed to the floor. He did not feel the impact, though he could still see perfectly well. The two women toppled, Calvus by choice with the appearance of collapse, Sabellia when her stool was jerked away. Rough farmer's hands gripped the table and the trestles supporting it, spilling Gaius beside his would-be protector in happy somnolence.

Father Ramphion had been leaning much of his own weight on the table. Villagers, one of them the young man who had brought the goblet, stepped close to the priest as the panel was removed. Ramphion straightened slowly. He did not need the hands that hovered in nervous helpfulness near his elbows. "Praise be to God," he said, enunciating very distinctly.

"Praise be to God!" rattled the response of his congregation among the curves of the chamber.

No one bothered to move the drugged victims from where they sprawled. The sound in Perennius's ears was taking on the magnitude of the roaring surf. The scene was becoming darker though no less sharply defined. Four villagers, one of them a husky woman, were carrying a naked, bawling stranger toward the pillar behind Father Ramphion. Other villagers plucked the rush-candles from sconces on the same pillar. A crucified man was painted garishly against the double-lobed surface of the column. The sconces, Perennius noticed now, were of heavy iron. They were set into the wrists of the painted figure.

"Dear God," wailed the stranger in Greek. "I'm a Christian! You mustn't do this!" His nude body was pale and soft-looking. Folds in the skin of his abdomen suggested recent privation. Someone's house-slave, run away from Tarsus or even further to a valley of fellow-believers? Or perhaps a government official, making quiet inquiries into the district's tax rolls? In any case, a man alone or in

a small group, charmed no doubt by the hospitality offered by these jovial sectarians. . . .

" 'This is my body, that is broken for you,' saith the Anointed," Father Ramphion recited. His voice was made squeaky either by the drug he had taken or by the dose now ringing like a carillon in Perennius' ears. "So must we break the bodies of the unbelievers who oppressed him, that the Anointed may return to rule on Earth. All praise be to God, and to Dioscholias who taught his commandments to us!"

"Praise to God!" trembled and blended with the screams of the man who was about to be sacrificed.

The villagers who held the man had no difficulty with either the victim's weight or his struggles. At the pillar, the pair holding his arms lifted them. Two more villagers, taller than the norm, seized the victim's wrists and began lashing them to the sconces. The step at the feet of the painted figure was not itself painted, but rather a brief curb jutting from the surface of the stone. A real victim could rest his feet and weight on the curb until fatigue dragged him off to die of suffocation.

Someone with Calvus' length of leg could stand flat-footed on the ground, the agent thought. Perhaps they would break her shins before they tied her up. ...

The goblet which had held the drug had now been refilled with wine as red as blood. Father Ramphion raised it and began intoning a prayer to which his congregation shouted responses. The victim screamed, thumping his wrists against the stone and iron which held them. As the scene receded into blackness, Perennius was telling himself dizzily that this sort of behavior was a threat to the Empire.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

"Hercules," Perennius muttered, though the process of coming around was no worse than that of being awakened from a sound sleep. His toes and fingers tingled, and there was still the buzzing somewhere in his head. There was no particular pain, however. In fact, the drugging seemed to have helped the agent's previous collection of aches and throbbing, including that of his spear wound.

Two hands steadied Perennius as he rose to a sitting position, Calvus on one side and Sabellia on the other. In the light creeping through the room's grated door, the agent could see the forms of Gaius and Sestius. They were slumped and snoring. All five of the party now wore simple belted tunics of local manufacture, like those the two soldiers had donned even before the feast. The agent wondered whether Calvus' sex had caused any surprise this time. The pirates, after all, had seemed to take the revelation in stride. Perennius shuddered and said, "Hercules!" again.

The light was dim, but the agent's eyes were fully dark-adapted. "Just like the room they gave us to store things," he said. "Except that one didn't have a barred door, did it?"

He stood. Sabellia murmured a warning. The Illyrian tried a step anyway and lurched, grabbing the door for support with a crash. The door was of welded iron bars with no interstices more than a hand's-breadth apart. Crossbars braced the verticals, inside and out. Like the church, the door was of obviously local design and manufacture.

Equally like the church, the door looked more than solid enough for its intended purpose. As for the living rock that formed the ceiling, floor, and walls -

Perennius saw the shadow of the cudgel slashing at his knuckles just in time to jerk his hand away from the bars. The knobby length of root crashed against the iron. It filled the stone chamber with its vicious cacophony. "Next chappie to touch the door," said a harsh voice, "is the first to go when they need more meat down there." The speaker who had suddenly bulked against the light on the other side of the bars made a gesture with his thumb. "Make my life hard and I'll make yours a little shorter," he added with a chuckle. "And if the week or two's difference don't seem like much now, it will, chappies. Hear the voice of experience. It will."

"Sorry, friend," said the agent easily. "I just tripped. The gods know, I've got enough problems of my own right now. I'm not looking to make problems for anybody else." Perennius stood inches back from the grating. He was shifting his weight unobtrusively from one leg to the other to work the life back into the muscles.

Like the other hut, this one had two rooms. The outer one was built out from the hillside, while the inner one was set into the rock with only the doorway and a flue to connect it with the rest of the world. Judging from the patch of gray sky at the end of it, this flue was much like the other one: ten feet long and too narrow to pass a man's clenched fist. That left the iron-grated door which looked beyond affecting with bare hands even if there were no guard present. Since there was a guard, however, there were additional possibilities.

"Hey, don't worry," the big Cilician said with a laugh. "Your problems'll be over pretty quick now, won't they?" He walked back to a couch along one of the sidewalls.

"You'd be Azon, then, I guess," the agent said. The guard was slope-shouldered and covered from elbows to wrists with curling black hair. His appearance was striking enough that Perennius could be fairly certain that the fellow had not been in the church earlier. Besides, the man had a coarseness to him that set him apart from the

other villagers. He looked like what the rest had proved themselves in fact to be: a red-handed murderer.

The guard turned to face Perennius again. The light from the single oil lamp on the floor opposite him fell slantingly across his face. "That's close," he said. His hand worked menacingly on his cudgel. "It's Erzites. And just what might you know about that, chappie?"

"Hey, friend," Perennius said. His raised his palms in a gesture of innocence though he knew the bars hid him from the guard more than the reverse. "Nothing meant at all. Life's too short, right? It's just that before I went under, I heard Ramphion say something about hauling us out to Azon, shits to a shit. I don't mean - "

The cudgel whipped out and slammed the door again. Erzites followed the blow with a kick that must have hurt even though he hit the iron with his sandaled heel instead of his toe. "Those goddam bastards say that?" he shouted. "Goddam, I think sometimes we ought to - " He caught himself, breathing heavily. "Well," he said, "they can say what they like. But I know who the really smart ones in this valley are."

A less experienced man might have pressed Erzites further, while his anger boiled and waited to be released at the nearest target. Perennius instead moved back from the door. Sabellia was massaging the limbs of her man and murmuring quietly. The bands of light which fell across her were too pale to bring out the colors of her skin and hair. With his mind on other things, the agent knelt beside Gaius and began working to arouse him also.

"Have you had a chance to look at the bars?" Perennius asked in low-voiced German.

"Yes, Aulus Perennius," Calvus responded where someone else might have added, "of course." She reached past Perennius and began kneading Gaius, under the tunic as if direct contact with his flesh were important. Perennius filed the fact with the way the woman's hands had drawn much of the fire from his thigh as she bandaged him. "The welds are all too solid for me to break them with my bare hands in these cramped quarters."

"Hey, you can't tell that by glancing at it in the dark!" Perennius objected. The courier was beginning to make conscious noises beneath the agent's hands- or more probably, beneath Calvus'. "Even if it's not dark to you," Perennius amended, reminded to his unease that there were facets of the tall woman which were closed to him. "There may be scale in the middle of the best-looking joint in the world. Put pressure on it and it'll snap like glass. It's not like you can see through iron, after all ... is it?"

"Damn, what the hell's going on?" Gaius muttered. He tried to roll over so that he could look at the people touching him. His own hands did not quite have the degree of feeling which would permit them to support him.

"No, I wasn't raised to see through iron," the tall woman said. Perennius could not be sure whether or not there was humor in her voice. "When the guard struck the grating, though, it rattled as a unit - not as so many discrete bars. They must have been very careful in their work. If one bar could be loosened, I could use it to snap a hole in the remainder; but that doesn't seem to be the case."

"Yeah, bastards are careful, all right," the agent muttered. He lifted Gaius into a sitting posture, ignoring the younger man's repeated demands for information. "And you can tell that just by hearing a club hit it?"

"Yes, Aulus Perennius," the tall woman said patiently. She slid herself over to Sestius. The Gallic woman had been listening to the conversation as she continued to massage the centurion.

"All right," Perennius said. "Would the club be enough of a lever to get things started?"

Calvus paused and looked out into the other room. Erzites was invisible from where she knelt, but the cudgel leaning against his bed was in her line of sight. "Perhaps," she said. "Perhaps."

"Well, something better may turn up ... and it may not," the agent muttered. "I figure we'll go with what we've got." He snorted under his breath. "What we're going to have if we get lucky." He stood up again and walked to the door. He was careful not to touch the metal.

Erzites noticed the motion. One large, hairy hand gripped the end of the cudgel, though the villager neither spoke nor moved further at the moment. Behind Perennius, Sestius was beginning to groan into wakefulness. The agent called in a mild voice, "How long's it going to be before they decide to kill us, Erzites?"

The cudgel head tapped the floor lightly while the villager made a decision as to how to react. At last he got up and walked toward the grating. Light reflected by the bars would make Perennius behind them little more than a voice and a blur. At last Erzites said, "When the Lord sends them a sacrifice - so they say - they spend as long in church, praying and singing, as it takes him to die. Him or her," the villager corrected himself.

Erzites fingered the coin he wore as a medallion. It hung by a thong reeved through a hole punched in its rim. It was a Termessian double obol, old enough to be ' real silver and so worn that the snakes intertwined on its obverse were only a pattern of shadows. "Fucking sick, I call it," the guard continued, "but it's their business. . . . Mostly it's one at a time or two. You lot were rare, getting that many who really wouldn't be missed. But who's to say you ever got clear of the pirates, Ramphion puts it to me when I wonder? And it's their business, my brother and me we just watch the larder."

Perennius nodded encouragingly. He was wondering whether he would have an opportunity to torture the guard before killing him.

"They won't come for any of you while the last one's still alive," Erzites went on. "That'll take, who knows? Maybe three days? Had one flat croak when they clamped him to the wall a couple years ago...." The guard frowned and began counting with his left index finger against the fingers wrapped around the grip of his club. "Maybe it was four years ago?" he said in puzzlement. "But I figure you got a while yet. Way this last one bellered when they dragged him out, he ain't going to croak for a while."

Perennius noticed that while the villager was no longer showing any particular hostility toward his charges, neither was he coming incautiously close. Any attempt to grab Erzites through the bars would fail a foot short, even given the length of Calvus' slender arms.

"Why, they'd be lost without you and your brother, wouldn't they?" prompted the agent. He was careful to avoid any suggestion of treachery. It wasn't time for that yet, especially since Perennius had not yet figured out what sort of offer might be attractive to someone in Erzites' position.

"Too damn right!" the villager agreed with a series of vigorous nods. "Why, they'd go nuts trying to pick who'd watch the meat and who'd watch the road. Figure they'd be damned to bloody Hell if they missed the vigil, so they call it. Course it's damned hard lines for Azon and me when they get big eyes the way they did with you lot." He spat against the bars, but the anger behind the gesture was clearly directed at Ramphion and his sectaries rather than at their imprisoned victims. "Talk about freezing your butt off up there on the rock . . ." Erzites continued. "And it's no damn pleasure being stuck here with the meat, either, every damn hour I'm not up there." He jerked his cudgel, presumably toward the head of the valley. It was an angry, sexual gesture.

"Just like you weren't even human," Perennius sympathized. "Say, any chance of getting some wine? I know, I don't suppose we're meant to have it, but just a taste'd sure make - "

"Shit!" the guard said. "You get wine? / don't get wine, not a sip. It's a fucking sacrament, it's only for them when they're nailing somebody up, don't you know. Wine." He turned away from the door. As he walked back to his couch, he muttered, "I hear other places people just drink wine any time they feel like it." His couch squealed under his weight. "They don't have to steal a cupful and hide when they drink it...."

"That's right, Erzites," the agent said. Perennius was irritated at the pleading note he seemed to hear in his own voice. That was bad form for a pitch like the one he was making. "And you know, smart men like you and your brother could make it big with help from - "

"Shut the hell up!" the guard shouted. "I don't want to hear about it, you know? Shut up!"

Perennius slipped back a step into the protective darkness of the cell. His companions watched him silently. All of them were now alert. The agent spread his arms, drawing the others' heads close to his by suggestion rather than by actual contact. The couch continued to creak in the other room as their guard settled his weight. "We need to get his attention," Perennius said softly, "and we need to get it on one of you. Now, I don't like the choices, but it seems to me the only thing we've got to offer is sex. . . ."

Sabellia's sudden tautness was no greater than the tension that had gripped Perennius' bowels for minutes, while his mind planned and his mouth had spoken friendly words. The agent continued to speak now as if he were ignorant of the effect he was having.

Because like it or not, they had no other choice.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

"Hey, Erzites?" Sestius called in a husky whisper. There was no need for silence, but the tone seemed appropriate to the purpose.

The greatest problem had been to convince Sestius of what he must do. The centurion had foreseen Sabellia's role in the skit, but it had been a shock to him that he would have to act as her pimp. Sestius could see that Perennius had to remain as far out of focus as possible; and it was obvious that neither Gaius nor Bella herself spoke enough Cilician to carry out the task. The centurion had still balked, with an increasing and unreasoning anger that came near explosion. That would have called Erzites' premature attention, so the possibility had Perennius measuring Sestius for a rabbit punch.

It was only after Calvus laid long fingers on the centurion's cheek and throat that Sestius had grown calm again.

Even that had not ended the discussion - or rather, had not brought Sestius around to what the others regarded as reason. He had shuddered frequently while Perennius pressed his case. No one suggested that Calvus could do the talking. Though the woman had not spoken a word of Cilician in his hearing, the agent was sure of her fluency in that dialect. Her grotesque appearance - grotesque if one knew her real sex and did not know her as a person - made her a dangerous risk for the job, however.

The darkness had been enhanced by the fact that the prisoners were huddled in a back corner of the cell. The two large pots along the wall, for water and their wastes, screened them further. Sabellia had whispered abruptly, "Morals don't matter. You can do it easy, you have to do it if we're going to get out. You didn't watch them crucifying the fellow they brought in, you were gone by then. I don't want to be up on that wall next."

"Easy!" the centurion sneered. "Sure, I saw you prancing with those goddamned Germans, I saw you - "

"Did you see me before that, too?" the woman rasped back. Her right hand gripped Perennius' shoulder. He could feel her tremble like an arrow drawn to the head. "Did you watch them rape me, Quintus? Twenty-three times. I counted every one, I could only count. . . . Did you want that to go on every day until I - don't you turn your head away! Every day till I bled out! Is that what you wanted?"

"I'm sorry, Bella," the centurion had mumbled.

"Don't be sorry," she snapped back. "Act like a man and it won't happen again."

The Cilician had nodded. "All right," he said, "all right."

Now the guard turned to his charges. They had waited until he got up and tore off a piece of a loaf from the hamper of food near the lamp. Every moment's delay increased the risk that the current victim would die and the congregation would come out in force to choose another. The escape attempt would certainly fail, however, if Erzites were angry at being awakened. Even now there was a hostile rasp in the guard's voice as he replied, "You'll get food when I'm damned good and ready to feed you."

"Naw, not like that," Sestius said in a clumsy attempt to be ingratiating. Perennius was moving slowly to the grating by the centurion's side. "Look, you can't have much fun with these crazies, right?" Sestius continued. "I don't mean just wine. I mean sex. I'll bet you've never been laid, not the way a man as strong as you has a right to be."

The guard began to laugh unexpectedly. He walked toward the door, slapping his club against his palm. There was real humor in Erzites' laugh. The twitching cudgel was a motion and not a threat. "Say," he said, "I'll bet you're going to offer to get my ashes hauled, ain't you? Going to have one of the women do it, or do you figure I'd rather have the kid? Sure, I'm going to open the door for that. Or maybe you were going to say I could just stick my cock through the bars and let somebody get his teeth in it?" Erzites slammed the knotted head of his club against the iron in another burst of anger. "You think I haven't heard it?" he shouted. "You think I haven't heard it all?"

In Perennius' right hand was a shard from the waste jar. The two pottery vessels were the only source of solid weight in the cell. Calvus had broken the waste receptacle by the pressure of her fingers on the rim. There had been a popping sound like that of the tendons of a knee going out, but there was no sharp crash to bring the guard's attention. Erzites would not have taken any action - if the prisoners wanted to slide in their own slops, that was their business. But it would have made the guard curious and even more cautious than before.

"Look, I'm going to tell you," Erzites was saying. He was dangerously cheerful, in charge and aware of it. The Cilician had dropped the chunk of bread in his flash of anger. Now he picked it up, wiped it on his trousers, and took a bite. Erzites' teeth were as strong and yellow as a camel's. "The old man made do with what came in trade, sure, and that was damn all," the guard said through the wad of bread. "None of the others - " "others" tripped out so naturally as a term for the sectaries that it was obviously the one the brothers used between themselves - "would give him the time, of course, and the bastards wouldn't let him keep a pretty one around until the next lot came through. Not even after Ma died."

The villager walked back to the hamper and drew out a skin of water. He was obviously pleased to have an audience. Perennius suspected that Father Ramphion and his fellows circumscribed to the extent possible all intercourse, not just sexual, with the two Ophitics. Out of the guard's sight, behind the rock of the wall, the agent was carefully coiling again the sash tied around the potsherd. Perennius would have liked to double the length, but he was afraid that a knot in the middle of the line would throw off his cast.

"Well, the old man knew some field expedients from his army days," Erzites continued. He smirked. The guard was obviously relaxed, but the habit of caution was so well ingrained that even now he remained at a safe distance from the bars. "Brought me and my brother up on it, too. Donkeys." He pumped his cudgel up and down. "And I tell you, women don't compare to a stump-broke jenny. Nor boys, neither, though the others wouldn't let us use them since my brother wasted one." Erzites frowned at the memory. "Weren't his fault the brat bled out."

Perennius had not realized quite how much of reality he had saved Gaius from until then. The younger Illyrian began to gag in the background of the cell. Apparently he understood enough Cilician to get at least the drift of the description. Erzites laughed. Then he noticed that the agent was almost touching the bars. "Move back, damn you!" the guard ordered with a gesture of his club. Not quite close enough.

"Calvus, can you make him come closer?" whispered the agent as he obeyed by a step.

Sabellia had been hovering behind the centurion. She was waiting for the moment she would strip for the guard's inspection. The grating was not wide enough for her to see past the torsos of the two men in front. Now Calvus eased the nervous Gaul aside. "Erzites," the bald woman called over Sestius from her greater height, "that sounds marvellous. Do the women here make love to donkeys also?"

Sestius looked back in shock. Perennius could imagine the slim-fingered hand gripping the centurion where Erzites could not see it. The soldier shifted out of the way.

The guard also was surprised, in part by the grammatically-correct Cilician coming from a prisoner whom he had never before heard speak. Calvus smiled at him and continued, "I've always wanted real satisfaction, you know, Erzites." She pressed close to the bars. "Tell me about the donkeys. Tell me about their - members." Her hands touched the lower hem of her tunic. Instead of lifting it, as even Perennius expected at that point, Calvus

tore the tough homespun as if it had been gauze. She extended the tear upward at a deliberate pace as she straightened. Sestius muttered something behind her. Erzites' eyes were drawn, but it was under a frown of puzzlement. The guard was taken aback by more than Calvus' hairless groin. "Quit that," the villager muttered uneasily.

"Do you ever let the jacks mount you, Erzites?" Calvus asked, spreading the halved garment away from her body. The tall woman was thin, even by male standards. There was nothing conventionally attractive about her form. Perennius beside her felt himself oddly moved. The effect on Erzites was quite different - but the agent was sure it was intended to be different, despite the woman's phrasing. "I think that would be really satisfying," Calvus said. "I'd die for that, you know, a member so long and thick...."

"Don't talk about that, woman!" the guard shouted as he took a step backward. "A donkey on me? That's - " He broke off because he could not think of an adequate word for the feeling which the concept engendered in him.

Calvus pressed her groin forward against one of the vertical bars. She rubbed up and down it. Her torso was thrown backward to emphasize the obscenity of what she was doing. "You know what I mean by satisfying, don't you, Erzites?" she said. Then she froze like a wax mannequin.

"Quit that!" Erzites screamed. He lunged, ramming his cudgel at the narrow pelvis kissing the iron. The root-wood smacked, just as Perennius flipped his weighted cord around the guard's neck.

Erzites jerked back and swung at Perennius. The head of the club rang on the grating. If the guard had instead unwrapped the single coil from around his neck, he might have been free before Sestius clutched wildly and caught his right ankle. Erzites shouted again. Perennius yanked hard at the sash. Because the other end was not knotted, it slid loose when the guard bent toward the pull. Erzites' club slammed down against Sestius' gripping arm. The centurion yelped and lost the hold he had just taken.

Calvus, recovering from the brutal blow, shot out a hand and caught Erzites' club wrist. There was no fumbling to hold the big villager, only a straight pull that hauled his arm back through the grating like a gaffed trout. The iron boomed at the soggy impact. Erzites' forehead hit a bar a millisecond after his shoulder made the first contact. That fractional delay and the force absorbed by his torso saved the guard's skull from crushing. He sagged unconscious. There was a line of blood across his forehead and cheek.

"Get back!" Perennius ordered as Gaius and Sabellia tried to grab handfuls of the guard. The agent sprawled over Sestius. The centurion was moaning and clutching his bruised arm to his chest with the good hand. Perennius wrapped the sash around Erzites' arm and one of the bars against which Calvus held it. Alone of the six people in the hut, the tall woman was not gasping for breath. The splotch of blood on her left hip was her own. The club had cut her flesh by smashing it against the wing of her pelvis.

Perennius snugged the loop against the guard's arm, then locked it with a square knot. The sash would not hold Erzites permanently, but neither would it have to. The agent straightened. "There, you bastard," he gasped. "Try and get loose from that and I'll break your arm besides."

Sabellia reached under the lowest crossbar and snaked the cudgel inside. She handed it silently to the agent. Then she cradled Sestius in her arms to help him slide back from the door where they were in the others' way.

Perennius was still breathing rapidly and through his mouth. He handed the knobbed, arm's-length club to Calvus. "You all right?" he asked.

"Here, let me try that," Gaius said. He was puzzled that the agent had given the lever to the woman instead of using it himself. If the older Illyrian was injured or exhausted, then the younger man was more than willing to show his own mettle.

Calvus and Perennius ignored him. Gaius' attempt to push past the woman and take the cudgel failed unremarked. Calvus carefully set the knobbed end of the stick so that a vertical bar provided a fulcrum with which to pop one weld of a crossbar. "I'll be all right," the tall

woman said. "I didn't care for it, but it was necessary." The agent could not be sure whether her answer was limited to the blow she had taken on the hip. As Calvus now knelt, the tear in her tunic had fallen closed again.

Calvus began bearing down on the handle of the club. Perennius gripped the same crossbar and a vertical. The agent used all his strength in a vain attempt to push the one away from the other. It gave him something to do besides wait for the sound he expected, the splintering crash as the grating held and the wooden lever did not.

The cudgel did not break. Instead it bent in a smooth, creaking arc until the tip which Calvus held touched the floor. The root-stock was tough and perfect for the purpose for which Erzites had chosen it. Its whippiness made it a more effective weapon. That meant also that the wood could not transmit the necessary force as a lever.

"Blazing Hell!" the agent shouted. He released his own hold and dropped to the floor. His eyeballs had felt as if they were springing from their sockets with the effort.

"Here, let me try," Gaius suggested again.

"Gaius, will you please wait for orders?" the agent growled up at him. It should have been obvious that the problem was in the tools rather than in the muscles behind them. Gaius was damned well old enough to avoid the childish need to be a part of every activity.

"That was the weakest one," Calvus said. "If it holds, the others will. Perhaps he - "she gestured toward Erzites with a flick of her chin - "has a knife or the like on him. If we could cut or even chip a weld, then perhaps the lever . . . ?"

"Right," said the agent. It was a reasonable next step, now that their only real chance of escape had disappeared with the club's flexing.

The grating made it difficult to strip the guard on the other side of it. Calvus' slim hands and arms had advantages over Perennius' bunched muscles, but she herself was so awkward that the agent wound up doing most of the work himself. Erzites came around slowly. When they began to pull his tunics off, he struggled with increasing consciousness and vigor. There were seven of the garments. The outside one was foul. The innermost had decayed to stinking tatters that must have been close to the guard's own adult years. By that point, Erzites was cursing loudly and trying to fight them with his free hand.

Sabellia touched Calvus, then moved to the grating as the taller woman gave her room. The Gaul held another shard of the waste jar, a curving, hand's-length fragment of the rim. It came to a point that was as blunt as a fingertip except for the slight knife-edge extension of the glaze. "Hey!" Erzites shouted. He jerked his head back as far as the bonds would let him. The shard plowed across his cheekbone to his right eye.

"Move and it's gone," Sabellia said in a soft voice. The villager began to tremble. He squeezed the threatened eye shut. The other one stared out in terror. Perennius finished his task without obstruction.

Sestius was recovered enough to go through the garments as they were passed into the cell. His forearm was badly bruised. It had not been caught between the club and the stone, and neither bone was broken. "Not a damned thing," the centurion grumbled as he fingered the cloth. The light was too bad to search the tunics in any other fashion. "Lice. And if we could train up this stink, it ought to be able to cut iron. But nothing else."

"We need a knife, Erzites," Perennius said in a friendly voice. "It'd be best for you now if we did get away, you know. We'll let you go if we do, I promise that. But if we're still locked in this cell when somebody else comes ... well, I'll use the time I've got. You'll be dead before we are, I promise you. If it looks like I'll have a while before they can really interfere ... I know tricks that'll make being buggered by a donkey sound like the most fun in the world, chappie...."

"Christ be my witness, there's nothing!" the naked man whimpered. "The club and the food, the bed's just a mattress on a stone ledge, that won't help.... The others'd kill us if we brought anything else here to watch the meat. Look, I'll go get a prybar, that's what I'll - " He stopped when the absurdity of what he was babbling penetrated even to him.

There was a crunching sound. Calvus had set the edge of a piece of pot against one of the welds. The hard-fired

stoneware had crumbled beneath her fingers as if it had been terra cotta. As expected, the iron was unmarked. "I wonder if we could use his teeth as a saw?" the tall woman said. "Of course, it would be a problem disarticulating his jaws with no tools, but if we could slice through at one hinge with a piece of the jar. . . ." No one could listen to Calvus' matter of fact tone and doubt that she was absolutely serious in her suggestion.

Sabellia had removed her claw of pottery when its threat had done the trick. Now Erzites bellowed again in terror and jerked repeatedly against his bonds. Perennius reached between the bars and caught the villager by the throat with one hand. It gave the agent a cold pleasure to squeeze in the knowledge that it was not his anger taking charge. The action was necessary to immobilize their prisoner so that he could not free himself in his struggles. . . . Erzites' hairy face became flushed. His screams and the bestial rasp of his breathing whispered to a pause. In the wavering lamplight, the whites of the guard's eyes began to turn up.

Perennius took a deep breath himself. He released his prisoner. "When they come with the keys," the agent said in a voice that was meant to be more calm than he could manage, "how many of them will there be?"

"Christ save me," Erzites wheezed. He had closed his eyes. Now he was massaging his throat with his free hand. His brief delay to recover ended even as the agent was reaching out again. "They'll come a lot of them," the villager said. He opened his eyes and jumped, but Perennius was relaxing. "They're careful, Ramphion and the others. They know fighting men, and there won't be less than a score of them with clubs to take you. They don't want you dead, but they've strung up folk unconscious before to croak without coming around. 'As the Lord wills,' they say."

Perennius sighed. "All right," he said matter of factly. "We'll go with the teeth."

"Wait!" screamed Erzites. "My brother! He's got a sword!"

"Well, what good does that do," asked Gaius as the others paused. "He's a mile away on look-out, right?"

Panting, tumbling his words over one another, the villager explained, "He'll be back at dawn. We trade, him and me, day and day when there's meat on the wall and nobody else in the valley to watch. I forgot, Christ strike me dead, I forgot he'd be back, I swear it!"

That was probably true, unlikely as it would have seemed to someone with less experience of interrogation under pressure than Perennius had. Even after your subject broke, you had no guarantee of the truth or completeness of what came babbling out. Erzites might well have been shocked into such a state that he forgot to volunteer a crucial detail. Certainly that was more probable than the notion that he had been deliberately concealing his brother's imminent reappearance.

"Well, I don't see it makes any difference," said Sestius reasonably. "Except we've got to work faster at cutting through the bars."

"No, no," Erzites pleaded. "Listen, I'll talk to Azon - he'll cut you free with his sword, sure he will, Azon'll do that for me, Christ save me! I'm his brother!"

"Shit," said the centurion, "he'd watch us pick you apart with tweezers, wouldn't he? Before he'd risk pissing off Ramphion and his lot."

"You know, I think Erzites here will be able to convince his brother," said the agent thoughtfully. "Of course, we can't leave him naked and tied to the bars like this. Sure."

Behind Perennius, Sestius and Sabellia exchanged glances of disbelief. Even Gaius was surprised. Calvus and the villager could see the agent's face. The woman's thin lips formed themselves in an answering smile. Erzites, watching them both through the bars, began to tremble.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

"Erzites!" demanded the voice from outside. "Lend a hand."

Erzites stood in the middle of the outer room. He ground the butt of his club into his left palm silently.

"Erzites!" called the voice again. "Where the hell are you?"

"Answer him!" hissed Perennius, giving a twitch to the rope of sashes knotted around the villager's throat. The agent did not hold the free end. Calvus had that duty. Any time the slim woman chose, she could break Erzites' neck with a single jerk on the tether.

"F-fuck off!" Erzites shouted back. "You're late!"

"Fuck yourself!" replied his brother angrily. "I had to gather the fucking eggs so we'd have something to eat, didn't I?" The hut darkened as Azon's big form, a near twin of his brother's, filled the doorway. He bent and entered. Father Ramphion or an earlier leader had decided that a gap of an hour or so in the manning of the look-out point was less dangerous than the chance of unattended prisoners somehow escaping in a similar period. Having tested the physical wards, Perennius was inclined to disagree; but the dearth of traffic past the valley really mooted the point anyway.

"Say," Azon went on, "I could hear 'em really going to it at the church. They'll be up for more meat any time, I'll bet you."

His brother hit him alongside the head with the cudgel.

It was a nervously clumsy blow. The shaft instead of the knobbed end of the weapon struck Azon. He was too thick-boned a man to be laid out completely that way. Even so, Azon fell to his knees. He flung out his arms toward his brother in a gesture compounded of defense and supplication. Erzites grabbed him by the hair, screaming, and began to batter at him repeatedly with the club. The two men were locked so closely now that the weapon could not be used effectively. Erzites was mad with fear. He would not back off a step to finish the job properly.

The tip of Azon's sword, thrust sheathless under his belt, clanged on the floor when he fell. Azon made no attempt to draw the weapon against his brother's unexpected attack. His hands clutched wildly. Erzites' tunic, knotted over the shoulder where it had been torn for removal, now tore again. Suddenly tangled in his own garment, Erzites paused and cursed. His brother broke free.

The left side of Azon's head was a mass of blood. A chance poke from the butt of the cudgel had closed his left eye forever. Panic blinded the right eye also and the mind behind it. The big villager bolted forward and slammed into the door of the cell. He bit at the bars with the fury of a wolf in a trap. Sestius lunged forward in an attempt to grapple with him. The centurion jostled Perennius but did not prevent the agent from getting his own iron grip on Azon's throat.

Erzites wheeled. His tunic pooled at his ankles. He gripped his club with both hands, as if it were a threshing flail. It hissed through the air as the guard swung with all his strength. Azon's head deformed. The grating rang from the impact of the skull being driven into it. Erzites struck again. The body was jerking in Perennius' grip, but that was only the dying response of its autonomic nervous system. The cudgel made a liquid sound when its knob struck the second time. Matter splashed the metal and Perennius' forearm. The agent released Azon.

The third time, the club struck the door a foot above the slumping corpse and flew out of Erzites' grasp. The killer also collapsed on the floor, wheezing. In the last instants of the fight, the brothers had been almost equally mindless.

Perennius dragged the corpse closer by its belt. He reached across to draw the sword. It was a standard government-pattern short sword. Its blade was dull and very badly maintained. The hilt was of bronze in a fish-scale pattern which might once have been gilded. Chances were that the weapon had belonged to Azon and Erzites' father when he served with the imperial forces. The valley must have gathered a considerable armory in its decades of murdering travellers. The brothers' own lack of equipment underscored their separation from all communal aspects of village life. There was no need for it to be otherwise, of course.

Perennius gave the sword to Calvus, though the three other of his fellow prisoners were babbling and jostling forward. Erzites was still in a state of collapse. The agent tied off the villager's tether. The villager had just proven he was willing to do anything to save his skin. Perennius •saw no point in risking the fellow's escape.

Calvus put the point of the sword at the joint between a vertical and a crossbar. She held the weapon almost point down. Perennius started to apologize for the fact that the sword was so dull and that the point had been rounded by improper sharpening. The tall woman rapped the oval pommel sharply with the heel of her right hand. Metal rang. The crossbar jumped as the sword inserted itself where the weld had been.

"Herakles!" Sestius blurted. Sabellia had more experience or at least more awareness of the other woman's capacities. The Gaul fell silent and drew the centurion back to give Calvus more room to work.

Perennius stopped himself with his mouth open. He had been about to say that if Azon had been correct, the five of them might be only minutes short of being trapped by villagers returning for a new victim. There was no reason to say what they all knew; and it was hard to imagine anyone working faster or more efficiently than Calvus, anyway.

The blade was of good steel. Its dull edge should have been a handicap. If so, the bare-handed blows with which Calvus struck the pommel were more than hard enough to overcome the defect in materials. The bald woman placed the point carefully, rapped the hilt, and shifted the sword to the next joint while it was still singing with the parting sound of the weld it had just cut. When Calvus reached the end, the crossbar dropped to the floor with a clank.

"Wait," said the agent as Calvus raised her sword to the next higher of the five crossbars. The agent set the freed bar into the grate much as they had attempted earlier with the wooden cudgel. In the outer room, Erzites was watching them. He was fingering his throat where the rope had rubbed it. He was not attempting to break free.

Perennius braced his left leg on the stone doorjamb and gripped the lever with both hands. Nothing moved. The agent's closed eyes sizzled with sheets of violet and magenta. He began to breathe out. The framework and his lever were rigid, and his muscles bunched like the surface of a sheet of water-glass. "By god!" Perennius shouted. Two welds popped like hearts breaking. Calvus slammed her sword through the third and top-most. The vertical bar banged away. With that and the one crossbar gone, there was now a gap through which even Sestius, the bulkiest of the prisoners, could squeeze.

The agent had fallen when the bars gave. Now, panting heavily, he allowed Gaius to help him to his feet again. Perennius felt a mingled pride and embarrassment. He knew that Calvus could have made a surer job of it if he had asked her to. But Perennius had succeeded . . . and it had been important to burn away in action some of the emotions raised by the bloody fight he had just finished.

Sabellia crawled through the opening without being told. Military discipline held back the other men until Perennius said, "Right, but don't go out of this hut." He nodded Calvus through with a rueful smile. She most of all of them must have recognized his doubtful judgment in using the prybar himself. Well, she'd seen him use worse judgment too, in that alley in Rome. Perennius was damned if he knew why she trusted him. . . .

The others were peering through the doorway. They made room for the agent when he joined them. Perennius lay flat and scanned as wide an arc as he could without actually sticking his head outside. The situation was about

as he had expected. They were in one of the huts, differing in no external respect from the others to either side of it. Perennius had not checked the hinges on the iron door, but he suspected that they could be unpinned and the door removed at need. Even a careful search of the village would display nothing more than that the locals were Christians . . . illegal but common, and of no particular concern outside cities where they came into violent conflict with other communities.

From the circular tower of the church came the faint sound of singing. The door might open at any moment to a procession that would soon become the head of a hunting party.

Erzites screamed. The sound was so unexpected that Perennius dodged sideways before he even looked to check the cause. As he did so, Sestius struck the villager a second time with the sword.

"Hell and Darkness!" the agent shouted. He leaped up, grappling the centurion from behind and immobilizing the bloody sword. He was too late. Azon's weapon had done its work. Erzites still whimpered and clutched his neck, but there was no disguising the arterial pulses from between his fingers. Perennius shook the bigger man in fury until the sword dropped. "I told him he could live if he helped us!" the agent said as he pushed Sestius away.

"I didn't tell him that," Sestius said. His eyes were on the floor. He was rubbing his wrists.

Perennius swore again and returned to the door. He did not care about Erzites, whose bare heels were now thumping the floor. He cared very much for the principle of keeping faith with agents, however. It always mattered, because you always knew you had played false before; and in the uniquely personal relationship of intelligence principal and agent, more passed between the two than either intended.

So be it. There was other work waiting.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Perennius pointed. He crooked his elbow to keep his hand inside the hut. "Calvus," he said, "do you see the wagon they were loading with hay down there? The half-full one."

"Yes, Aulus Perennius," the woman agreed. It was an ordinary, rugged farm cart with two wheels and a shaft to which a pair of donkeys could be harnessed. A saw-bladed hay knife projected from the stack from which the cart was being filled. The load was presumably intended to feed the draft animals in the stone corral. Work had been broken off when the strangers were announced.

"Can you move it to the church?" the agent asked. The haystack and the building were a quarter mile apart. There was no direct road, and the ground was only nominally level.

"Yes," said Calvus. The simplicity of her answer was disquieting, because it seemed inhuman. It was also the only thing simple about Calvus. . ..

"The hut our gear was stored in should be the third one over," Perennius continued. He gestured with his left thumb. "The rest of you go, take weapons - not armor - and some gold. Run for it till you get to the head of the valley. Don't take animals, that'll cause a stir and they'll slow you down. By the time you get there, you ought to know if it's safe to come back and load up properly. If it isn't, get to the nearest post and report this ... hive. You're on your own from there."

"I'm coming with - " Gaius began.

Perennius jumped to his feet. "You're doing as I damned well say, boy!" he shouted. He shook his fist in the younger man's face. The anger Perennius had banked at Erzites' murder now blazed again from his eyes. "Now, hop!"

The fit passed as if it had never occurred, as so many outbursts had passed in previous years. Some day .. . Perennius handed to Calvus the bar he had used for a lever. He took Azon's sword himself. It was blunt but still bloodily serviceable. Sabellia looked at the agent, then darted through the doorway with the two soldiers behind her.

"Well, noble lady," Perennius said to his companion. "We're either going to create a diversion or do something that should have been done thirty-odd years ago. Let's see which." He paused to take along the oil lamp, still burning, before he led Calvus outside.

The two of them had not quite reached the haycart when Sabellia and the soldiers exited the storage hut. The two men carried spears and belted swords. Sabellia presumably had retrieved the long knife she had brought in preference to weapons whose size made them awkward in her hands. Perennius had half-expected at least one of the men to carry a packload of loot - which would not even make a good monument for them if the pursuit caught up. The woman waved. When Gaius paused behind her, she caught his hand and tugged him back toward the shortest line to the valley's head. The spike outcropping, now vacant, was their towering endpost.

Calvus looked over the cart, then gripped the shaft to lift it. "Wait," the agent said. The hay had an Autumn smell, an undertone called a "green odor" though it was a part of vegetation whether green or a year chopped, the way this hay was. Perennius held the lamp flame under the edge of the hay piled against the rear stakes of the cart. Only when the hay was burning with a popping, smoky flame did the agent dump the slight remnant of olive oil onto the cart. "Let's go," he said, bracing himself against the side of the cart. "We need to jam this into the door of the church."

As at other times, Calvus' initial clumsiness was almost a match for her strength. She more or less got the hang of

pulling the cart after the second time she overbalanced. Both times the cart rocked onto the back of its bed with a crash and a shower of sparks. After a point, the center of gravity shifted when the pole went up. Holding the cart became a matter of weight rather than strength. Calvus could lift the cart level again from behind, despite the flames, but when she raised the pole too high from the front, she could not keep the load from flopping all the way over till it grounded.

Sparks flew harmlessly into the green wheat. They lodged in Perennius' hair and tunic, snapped at his palms like mice when he crushed them out. The smells of hair and of wool burning were similar and similarly nauseating. Perennius had blisters on the back of his neck where the skin had no protection but the sweat that streaked from his scalp in quick runnels. The load of hay was burning faster than he had expected. It had been densely compressed by a year in the stack, but the process of chopping and loading it on the cart had loosened the mass a great deal. Still, it was necessary to have a very good fire going before they reached their goal. They had that. The unconquered Sun could see!

The smoke, the crackling of the flames, and the way the cart jolted the agent's shoulder in bouncing over the uneven soil were all parts of the same blurred continuum. It ended when Perennius' downcast eyes saw the cartwheel bump onto the surface of the roadway proper. He looked up. They were twenty feet from the door of the church. The stone cylinders mounted up higher than he could see for the haze of smoke above him.

"We've got to turn it and back it to the door," the agent called. He thought Calvus could not have heard over the crackling of the fire which now involved the whole rear of the cart. Perennius stepped away from the side-stake he had been pushing against. The heat, more than a discomfort now, was driving him off anyway. Before he could touch Calvus' arm and repeat his command, the woman had slowed and begun to swing the shaft to reverse the vehicle.

"Blazes, be careful," the agent muttered in unconscious humor. He gripped the shaft also, ready to throw his weight across it if it started to lift. "This goes over and we won't tilt it back from behind." Sparks and the bitter, cutting smoke enveloped them as the pair thrust the cart backwards at increasing speed.

The squeal of the church door opening inward was even louder than the shouts which immediately followed.

"Now!" roared Perennius, a prayer in the form of an expressed hope. The cart smashed to a halt. It was caught by the stone doorjambs on either side. The blazing load shifted, caught its breath, and spewed up with redoubled fury.

"Get ready for them," the agent said to Calvus. He drew the dull, bloody sword from the hay where he had thrust it. "They'll use benches to shove it back, and you've got to hold."

From the cries within, some of the villagers had been burned when the vehicle jarred to a halt and the hay continued to slide. Perennius dropped to his hands and knees to peer under the tilting bottom of the cart. Orange fire swished and bloomed in the doorway. Villagers had begun to rake it back into the interior and out of their immediate way. Something heavy thumped against the framework of the cart. Calvus held her grip on the shaft without twitching a muscle of her limbs or her thin, still face.

There was a tattoo of orders from within. They were loud enough for Perennius to hear them over the roar, but the words were not intelligible. The agent was still bent over in a salamandrine crouch. A makeshift ram beat the flames and slammed into the cart. Charred wood collapsed. Perennius saw legs that capered in sparks and smoke while the owner screamed. Calvus held, the beginnings of a smile on her face. The assault dissolved and the legs disappeared again behind the bright-shot haze.

The hay and the cart itself were licking the stone with an orange tongue. At the edges, soot smeared the fresh-hewn yellow rock. At the center, in a scar tapering upward, the fire was hot enough to burn the stone on the outermost level of the church into quicklime. It was white but dreadful with the reflection. The tongue left whorls of soot across the face of the next cylinder also.

A man started to crawl under the cart. He held a spear and muffled his face with a cloak. Perennius heard singing behind the attacker. The villager was blinded by the cloth that kept the fire from his skin. Perhaps it protected him from what he knew he would see waiting. Perennius reached in and thrust at where he thought the villager's neck would be. The agent would have cut instead, but the wheel blocked a sidearm swing and the cart itself prevented a vertical chop. The sword's mutilated point met bone. Perennius shouted and threw his shoulder against the pommel. He remembered the way the blade had chiseled its way through iron with Calvus' strength behind it. The sword grated a hand's breadth inward.

Above the agent and his victim, the cart shuddered to another attempt to ram it out of the way. The vehicle rocked inches forward, toward Calvus. Then the woman slammed it back against the church harder than it had struck the first time. The axle broke. The left wheel spun lazily outward. The whole cart lurched toward Perennius. The agent rolled backwards in a cloud of sparks belched from the shifting hay. His sword was still gripped firmly by the villager's body, as firmly as that body was held by the weight of the cart above it. An arrow snapped from one of the slits. It missed by a hand's breadth the agent who until then had been in the dead zone hidden by the cart. The barbed point pinned his tunic to the hard soil. '

The section of roof over the doorway collapsed into the interior of the church.

Gasping, Perennius worked the arrow out of the ground without haste. He knew there would be no more shooting. Edges of flame were cutting from the nearer arrow slits. They left their own stains of soot and caustic across the face of the church. Thatch and wooden beams roared inside, shaking the stones as hymns had never done.

"We'd best move away, Aulus Perennius," Calvus shouted over the voice of the fire.

The agent looked up at her. She extended a hand to lift him from his splay-legged seat on the ground. Perennius stared past the woman to the church. The outer cylinder had begun to act as a chimney, drawing air through the slits and the part-blocked door to feed the Hell within.

Everything must be ablaze by now. Not only roof members but clothing and furniture, paint from the walls and gases driven from corpses that were being reduced to calcined ash. There could be no screaming now, not that voices could have been heard over the roar.

"Right," Perennius said. He accepted the offered hand and rose slowly. As they walked away from the funnel of fire, he said, "I wonder if they drained the bath. I'd really like to get clean."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

"All right, let's see your papers," demanded the commander of the detachment at the west gate of Tarsus. "Dis-mount, dammit."

"Hey, you're not checking them," said Gaius. He waved toward the stream of traffic into the city.

Sestius was already off his donkey. He grimaced, only partly at his stiffness from the ride. It was for Perennius to say, "Gaius, let me handle this." He walked over to the officer. The agent's hand was in his purse.

The ride on a donkey's narrow back had left Sestius with a limp. Perennius could imagine what similar punishment would have done to him. Instead of riding, the agent had walked, leading his donkey. The miles had left his wound afire, but they had also worked his thigh to suppleness again. It had been a punishing two days, but now the agent did not limp. Under other circumstances, he might have ridden anyway so as not to delay his companions. Because of Calvus, that question had not arisen.

Gaius rode splendidly and loved it. His only objection was that a donkey was not a fit mount for a cavalry decurion. Donkeys were what was available in the valley they had depopulated, however. The small-holdings they passed later had nothing better, so Gaius had made do. Sabellia, like Perennius himself when the agent was healthy, had no great affection for riding, but she did it adequately when the need arose. Sestius was scarcely adequate - he had fallen several times and under unexpected circumstances - but he was too much a soldier to put any weight on his own feet that could go on others'.

Calvus had been awkward the first few days on shipboard. Mounted, she was a disaster. When she made an effort to cling to the donkey with her knees, the animal stumbled and fell from the crushing grip. When Calvus attempted to mitigate that vise, she inevitably fell off. There could be no question of the traveller's strength, but she did not have the instinctive control needed for some very ordinary tasks until she had practiced them for days.

They did not have days to spend on this. Calvus walked.

"Yeah, sonny," said the guard commander, "it could be that we do let local people through without checking them. What's it to you?" He tapped his baton on his left palm as he walked toward Gaius.

The gateway thrust out from the wall. Pillars supported a groined vault over the intersection of the road that Perennius and his troupe were on and the north-south road along the outside of the city wall. The guards were a detachment of heavy infantry, Syrian Greeks by the look of them. Even an argument between their commander and a traveller left them disinterested.

"Of course you're right to question us, sir," Perennius said. "Gaius, get off that donkey! Sir, we're travelling in cotton. Other fabrics as well, but I'm told this is the time and place to make a market in Cilician cotton." The agent slipped his right hand palm-down over the commander's upturned left. The baton hesitated. "A terrible thing, this disruption," Perennius continued smoothly. "But of course that means profits for a man who's willing to take a few risks ... and profits for men who do their duty as well. I trust our papers are in order? And do forgive my bodyguard, you know, he's young."

The fact of the coin did not surprise the officer of the guard. The light weight did, especially after he spread his own enfolding fingers and saw the sun wink on gold, not silver-washed bronze. The pirates' loot had more than made up for losing the bank drafts with the expedition's gear aboard the Eagle. "Hermes!" the commander muttered. He covered the aureus again as quickly as he had exposed it. "Yes sir," he said. "Well. I'm sure a gentleman

of your experience can imagine how careful we need to be, what with the Games and all the talk of portents - dragons in the countryside! And they say the Borani have been raiding near Ephesus again."

Sestius started to say something, but he managed to restrain himself. It was very difficult not to make yourself a center of attention by blurting out facts that everyone nearby would want to hear. At the moment, however, Perennius needed to gather information rather than to give it out. And the gods knew, it did not matter in the least to these folk if they were about to be raided by Germans rather than by Scyths.

The agent nodded toward the stream of people still making their way into the city. Whole families were travelling together, but without the impedimenta that would suggest a panicked flight from the countryside. In families wealthy enough to have slaves, the latter preceded the father to clear the way. The children were strung out behind their father in descending order of age. Then came any older members of the extended family; and last, the wife and mother. Submissive womanhood was by no means a virtue universally accepted among the Cilicians. It was noticeable that in families which owned a single mule or donkey, the wife was as likely to be mounted as the husband was. The women wore their finery under travelling shawls. Coiled earrings dangled nearly to their shoulders. The jewelry was gold if they could afford it, silver or brass if they could not. Sabellia, aware of her own battered appearance, glared back at the bold-eyed women as they passed.

"All the traffic's for the Games, then?" Perennius said to the officer. "Who's giving them?"

"Our lord Odenath," the commander replied proudly. "Holding a day of supplication all over the province in thanks for his victory last year over the Persians. His latest victory. You know - " the men had not been speaking loudly, but now the officer bent closer to Perennius and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper - "there's those who say a dragon appearing here means the same thing among princes. The one in Rome replaced by one from the East. I don't know about that .. . but between you, me, and the bedpost, I wouldn't mind if they were right." The officer straightened and swept his hand out. "Who's helped us while other folks loll around, screwing their way through all the titled sluts in Rome?"

The agent nodded in false agreement. Blazes, he'd heard worse. It was not Gallienus to whom Perennius' loyalty was given, whatever that current holder of the office might believe. Besides, the last gibe amused the agent. The Autarch of Palmyra had his virtues, to be sure; but there was nothing in the scores of beautiful women entering Odenath's seraglio to suggest that one of those virtues was chastity.

"You'll have Hell's own time finding lodgings today," the commander called after them as they entered the gate. Perennius waved back with a smile. He knew from experience that gold would get them food and lodging as quickly as it had gotten them entry to Tarsus. Money was never necessary. Its effective use, like that of violence, involved more subtleties than many folk realized. But money smoothed most paths if one were willing to use it.

Tarsus was an ancient foundation. It had grown under the direction of various peoples, all of whom found the Roman fascination with straight streets to be unaesthetic and dangerous. Why go out of your way to make the key points of your city accessible to an invader? Let every branching be a potential cul-de-sac to trap him under the fire of rooftops on three sides. Let his spears if leveled jam in narrow turnings and if vertical catch in the second-story overhangs. And besides, who ever saw a straight line in nature?

The maze did not concern Sestius, nor was it intended to do so. It was local knowledge of the convoluted street-scape which made the maze so useful. The centurion had not been in Tarsus for five years or more, but the pattern of alleys and "boulevards" scarcely wider might not have changed significantly in five millenia.

Because of the crowd, all five of the group had to lead their donkeys as Calvus and Perennius had done during the whole journey. Even with training, most animals will not try to force their way through a mass of humans,

though they could do so easily. If the crowd parts for their bulk and sharp hooves, well and good. But infantry with shields locked and spear-points advanced is proof against the finest cavalry in the world - proof even against elephants, unless the beasts are already blind and maddened by previous wounds. Sestius, in the lead, made better time with his own shoulders and elbows than the keel-like breastbone of his donkey would have done if the centurion insisted on riding.

Sestius stopped at an archway. He began trying to pull his mount through the narrow opening into the side of a building. Perennius, further back by the donkey's length, had just passed a doorway into the same structure. The entrance was gorgeously tiled. The interior of the building exhaled echoes and steam. The agent dropped the reins of his animal. It had nowhere to wander to in the crowd anyway. The Illyrian squeezed forward to Sestius and asked, "A bath? We're staying in a bath?"

"The front of the building's an inn," the centurion said. He waved the hand which was not tugging at his recalcitrant donkey. "The Mottled Fleece. Run by a family from my district since, oh, well . . . forever."

Perennius nodded. There was a fleece hanging at the far corner of the building where the street they were following debouched into a broader one. There was no way of telling what color the wool had been originally. The lower portion of the fleece had been polished to the leather by the shoulders of every man and beast to turn the corner sharply. Even the upper part was black with the grime of ages. The fleece was mottled for the same reason that the family of the inn proprietors were countrymen of Sestius: historically, that had been the case.

Perennius' party had entered Tarsus through the Jewish quarter. It was a street of sailmakers who sat in their shops, whole families in order of age. They pushed their needles through heavy canvas while they chattered to one another in Hebrew. They would deal with customers in Common Greek, but the present holiday crowds were only objects and a hindrance to trade. Adjoining the Jewish quarter was apparently a quarter of native Cilicians. Elsewhere in the city there would be Greek communities, and Armenians, and a score of others: Kurds and Scyths and Italians. Some of the groups would be no more than a dozen or two souls, and yet they would still look to the welfare of their own national community before troubling about the welfare of the city. Even so, Tarsus ranked far higher in their minds than did an abstraction like "the Empire," though it was from that Empire that the peace and safety of them all depended.

It was daily realizations like that which drove Perennius to wild frustration or the narrow focus of a knife edge. The impending disaster itself was beginning to weld the disparate strands into a unity which no deliberate policy had been able to create. But that disaster would have to be delayed longer than the agent believed possible, or the Empire would run its course before the unifying process could.

For now, the knife edge. Perennius gave the centurion's mount a judicious kick in the ribs. The animal bolted through the archway. Perennius' own donkey followed, without urging and so abruptly that the agent had to jump out of the way. Perennius' fingers were touching the handle of the sling he had retrieved from the gear jumbled in the pirate camp.

The courtyard they had entered through the arch gave onto the inn's stables. The area was already crowded with beasts and men. An ostler saw the newcomers and began waving them back angrily. Someone should have barred the archway, but that had been neglected in the confusion. Sestius ignored the directions. Sabellia was leading her mount through the narrow opening with the other two behind her, so the centurion could not have left even if he had intended to do so. Sestius began talking to the ostler with a series of sweeping gestures. The other man's face cleared. He embraced Sestius, both of them gabbling in a conversation which seemed to consist primarily of proper names and relationships.

At last the centurion broke off. He waved his companions to a flight of stone steps into the three-story building. "In here," he cried. "Zenophanes'll take care of our animals and baggage."

Perennius let Sabellia precede him up the stairs. Gold

was a good general key, he thought, but the networks of families and nations which riddled the Empire were themselves a better entree for those who could tap in on them.

"My god, Quintus," a white-haired man was crying to Sestius in the hallway. "They quarter eight soldiers on us - Arabs, can you believe it? - and now you come home. What we'll do, I can't imagine, but we'll manage. But my boy - aren't you supposed to be lined up already for the parade? The others left hours ago!"

"Ah, I'm - " the centurion began. He caught Perennius' eye and went on, "I've been discharged, Cleiton. My friends and I have some business in the area, and then my wife and I'll be settling down."

"Oh, well, then you'll want to watch the parade," the innkeeper determined aloud. "Come on, quickly, up to the roof with you or you'll miss the start."

Sestius looked at the agent. Perennius in turn looked at Calvus and then shrugged. They obviously would not accomplish a great deal more in the present confusion. "Why not?" the Illyrian agreed. He began climbing the ladder that served as access to the inn's upper floors.

The roof already held a number of family members and other guests of the inn. There was a low parapet, less for safety than to collect rain water draining down the shallow, tiled incline toward the front of the building. Drains at either corner then sucked the water into cisterns. Roman administration had brought aqueducts and public water supplies to Tarsus; but the cisterns continued to work and to be used.

A blare of horns demonstrated that Cleiton was correct about the parade starting. The agent found a spot at the parapet and sat on his folded ankles. He forced his right leg to comply with the posture. The street below was so crowded with onlookers that the marchers had virtually to clear a path for themselves as they advanced.

Probably for that reason, the front ranks of the parade were infantry marching four files across. All the men wore dress armor. The feather plumes were fitted into their helmet slots. On the leather-faced shields were designs freshly picked out in gilt. Perennius catalogued the represented units reflexively. Elements of the Fifth, the Twelfth ... Imperial line formations, as befitted Odenath in his capacity of Restorer of the East. Hobnails clashed in unison on the cobblestones. Then the cornicines with their curved bronze horns and the trumpeters blew a salute. The crowd cheered. Some of the onlookers cheered Odenath as Emperor.

Two pairs of heavy cavalrymen followed, restricted by the narrow front. They were cataphracts: horses and men both were armored with great scales of bronze which had been polished for the occasion. Instead of combat headgear, the men wore helmets with anthropomorphic face-pieces of silvered bronze. The masks glared stiffly at the crowd. One thought of the mounted figures as statues until a head turned or nodded. The effect was one which Perennius had always found to be disconcerting. Now it reminded him of the stiff-carapaced Guardian he had killed unknowing . . . and the five more like it he had come so far to face. But the armor also made him think -

"Aulus!" Gaius whispered. He tugged on the agent's arm. "I heard people shouting - "

Perennius touched the younger man's lips to hush him gently. In the past, the agent's patience had extended only to the actions of enemies. Clumsy execution by an ally, ill-timed interruptions by friends, would set Perennius off in a blast of rage. He was changing, and he looked in puzzlement at Calvus on his other side before whispering, "I know what they're cheering, Gaius. We're not in that business right now, and this might not be a healthy place to suggest otherwise. Hey? Sit and watch the parade." The agent's hand moved from Gaius' face to his shoulder. He guided the young courier down to sit.

Calvus looked at the two men. Perennius wondered if she too had noted the change in his temper. Well, he always handled himself better when he was on assignment than when he viewed the world with only his own eyes.

The parade involved only token units from Odenath's forces. If the officer at the gate was correct, similar displays were going on all over Cilicia today, so the small scale was inevitable. The troops following the four cata-

phracts were also cavalry - of a sort. They were Arabs in flowing robes and burnooses, carrying long lances and mounted on dromedaries. Though the Palmyrene horses ahead of them must have been used to camels, the odor still made them skittish. Perennius could well imagine the havoc in Persian columns when their cavalry boiled away from the Palmyrene lancers. Now - snorting, aggressive and hesitant by degrees - half a dozen of the big animals straggled down the street. Their dark-skinned riders studied the crowds without affection. The Arabs fingered their weapons as they watched the packed city-dwellers. The troopers managed to give the impression of housewives, testing the edges of knives in a chickenyard.

Following the cavalry were more foot-soldiers escorting wagons. The wagons carried a selection of loot from Odenath's victories in past years, along with prisoners and beasts intended for the Games which were to be a part of the celebration. In a traditional Roman triumph, the troops would have worn tunics and wreaths. This was neither Rome nor a triumph. Odenath obviously felt that his own propaganda purposes were better served by men in full armor, their weapons glittering in a hedge about the wagons. Persian prisoners were tied facing outward from stakes in the center of the wagons carrying them. Some of them might have been among the men who had sacked Tarsus before Odenath's forces harried them back across the frontier.

Suits of gilded chain mail. Tiny steel bucklers whose surfaces were silvered or parcel gilt. Long curved swords whose watermarked blades impressed Perennius more than did the precious stones with which some of the hilts were inlaid. Peaked, chain-veiled helmets ... Two full wagons of such military hardware. Then came loads of silk garments, dyed crimson or purple and shot with gold wire, to demonstrate that the Palmyrenes had captured some of Shapur's personal baggage. That was a useful datum to file mentally and to check against Odenath's official account of his victories.

But Perennius was tired, and he was not really interested even in the paraphernalia of battle and victory. The agent was almost dozing when the animals for the beast show were rolled by next in their cages. A dozen gazelles leaped nervously and clacked their horns against the bars. Wild, straight-horned bulls followed. Each was tethered between a yoke of draft oxen which dragged the intended victims along despite their efforts to break loose and gore. Two russet, angry lions snarled past in iron cages. Their manes were torn short by the scrub of northern Mesopotamia where they had been captured. There was an elephant from the Mediterranean coast of Africa, smaller and more docile than the Asian species whose importation had been ended by the renewed power of Persia across the trade routes. Even so, the elephant was too valuable to slaughter in a local affair like this. The beast was fitted with a howdah in which four archers sat. The men showed more interest in overhanging buildings than they did in the cheering citizenry.

The last cage held a -

"What in blazes is that?" Perennius demanded aloud.

Cleiton had followed them onto the roof. He was sitting in the group around Sestius and - Sestius' woman, that's what she was - but he heard the question. Leaning toward the agent, the innkeeper said, "Now that's something isn't it? Not from Palmyra, either. Some shepherds caught it right here in Tarsus, not a mile from the wall. I figure it must be a dog, don't you? But a portent, like if it had been born with two heads instead of - " He waved.

The beast could almost have been a dog ... and as the innkeeper had suggested, animals are born misshapen on occasion. Unlike human monsters, monstrous beasts became tokens of the gods instead of trash to be tossed on the midden while they still wailed with hunger. The creature looked more like a wolf than a dog, and a damned big wolf besides . . . though a wolf so close to a bustling city would itself have been cause for some surprise. . . .

Its head was not that of any dog or wolf the agent had ever seen. It was outsized, even on a creature with the bulk of a small lion. The jaws were huge, and the red tongue lolled over a serrated row of teeth as the beast paced its narrow cage.

"Killed everything in the cave they were using for a sheepfold," Cleiton continued. "Forty-three sheep and a

boy, way I heard it. They rolled a wagon across the mouth to hold it till people got to them with nets. Mean bastard."

"It's a dire wolf," Calvus said. She was watching the animal with an interest which longer association with her permitted the agent to read beneath the calm. "It shouldn't be here, of course. Now. Like the tylosaurus."

"In Rome," Perennius said as he watched the great wolf, "I saw the head of a lion with fangs longer than my fingers. Did that come from the same place as these others?"

"In a way," the traveller agreed. "A sabretooth - " she looked at the agent. "It must have come the same way, the way I came and the result of my coming. Aulus Perennius, I was not sent to interfere with your world, but my coming has done so."

There were more horns and marching feet in the boulevard below, drawing cheers and echoes. Perennius glanced toward the parade. He jerked back to look at Calvus because of what he thought he had seen there. There was a tear at the corner of the tall woman's eye.

The agent's mind worked while his muscles paused. It was as if he had walked into a potential ambush, where the first move he made had to be right or it would be his last. Perennius did not curse or blurt sympathy. He had seen the traveller accept multiple rape without overt emotion. All the agent understood of the tear now was that it chilled him to see it on a face he had thought imperturbable.

Perennius reached out. Only someone who had experience of the agent's reflexes would have realized that there had even been a pause. He touched the traveller's wrist with his fingertips. Then he turned back to face the parade without removing his hand.

"I had four sisters," Calvus said in her cool, empty voice. "Like the fingers of your hand, Aulus Perennius, five parts and not five individuals. And now I am here alone in your age, and along the route I travel there are anomalies ... but not my sisters. Not ever my sisters." She squeezed the agent's hand with a wooden precision which bespoke care and the strength beneath her smooth skin.

The crowd gave a tremendous roar. Behind the infantry, a pair of fine horses pulled a chariot. The vehicle's surfaces were gilded and embossed. In the car stood two statues, probably of wood but again gilded and glittering and draped with flowers. The statue placed behind was of the Sun God, crowned with spiked rays and himself holding a laurel crown over the figure in front of him. Perennius did not need the signs being carried before the chariot to know that the leading figure represented Odenath. The statue stood taller than the agent remembered the Autarch to do in person; but that was to be expected, and the statue's expression of arrogant determination was real enough. Odenath's statue was draped in the gold and purple of triumphal regalia. Its left hand held a sceptre and its right a sheaf of wheat to symbolize the prosperity its victories had returned.

More cataphracts rode behind the chariot. The leader carried Odenath's war standard on a pole. A bronze dragon's head caught the breeze through snarling jaws. The crimson silk tube attached to the bronze neck swelled and filled. The gold-shot tail snapped in the air twelve feet behind the pole that supported it.

"The Dragon from the East!" people shouted in the street. "Hail the Dragon from the East!"

Perennius spoke because he was the man he was, and because he himself found concentration on the task in hand the best response to grief. It was with that motive, and not in the savage cruelty with which the words might have come from a less-directed speaker, that he said, "If you had four sisters, Calvus, then I wonder what we can expect to see besides the three we have."

In the street the mob boomed, "Hail the Dragon from the East!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

"What I don't understand ..." said Perennius. He dipped his bread into the pot of lamb stew which had been brought up to the roof for Gaius, Calvus, and himself - "... is why they sent a woman. Your - government, I mean."

Gaius nodded vigorously around his own dripping mouthful of stew. The group's baggage was stacked around them, along with straw-filled leather mattresses. The agent had suggested the roof, despite its ten degrees of slope, in preference to being crammed into one of the common rooms. The family's own apartments were more crowded still, because the members had doubled up in order to devote half the space to paying guests in the present glut. The roof gave the party a measure of privacy and protection from thieves that they would not have had inside under the present circumstances. They would be better off under a tree if the weather broke, of course; but at the moment, it was a pleasant evening.

"That wasn't really a matter of choice," Calvus said. "We - my sisters and I..." She paused for a moment, but her eyes showed nothing until she continued, "We are female for the same reason that workers ants are female, or bees."

"They are?" the younger Illyrian asked. He felt the thought which Perennius did not express even by a glance. Mumbling an apology for the interruption, Gaius took some celery from the condiment tray and began to concentrate on it.

The traveller nodded placidly and took more stew herself. Calvus ate with a quiet neatness that suggested boredom with the process. "Sterile females, myself and my sibs. With a ... common lineage."

Calvus paused again. "I don't have all the words I need to explain," she said, spreading her hands. "But I don't mean only a common parentage, or that we five are as close as twins from the same egg. We are one. The thoughts I think, my sibs think - all of us." The tears suddenly brightened the tall woman's eyes again. "We were one. We were one."

Perennius ate. He refused to look at Calvus beside him. If she wanted to steer a practical question into emotional waters, it was her doing alone. Tarsus climbed a few steps out of the sea behind him, so that there were facades facing the agent against the further background of the Taurus Mountains. Higher yet, clouds covered the sky like etchings on silver. Every shade of gray and brightness was represented in swatches which blended imperceptibly with one another. Like life, like the Empire . . . and sunset was near.

"One effect of sisterhoods like mine," Calvus continued in a dry voice, "is that the birth group is more important to the individual than her self. The species as a whole is worthy of the sacrifice of the self; and this by nature without any necessity of training. You will have seen ants react when their nests are broken open with a stick."

"Some run," the agent said softly to the sky.

"Some run," the traveller agreed, "to assess and repair damage, and to carry the young of the nest to places of greater safety. Because they were raised so that their natures would cause them to do so for the good of the nest. And some bite the stick, or swarm up it to bite the hand wielding the stick. . . . We were not all raised to patch walls and carry babies, Aulus Perennius."

"If we had some time," Perennius said, "I'd teach you to use a sword - if I thought I could find one that would hold up. I'm not complaining, Lucius Calvus. I just wondered."

A slave popped up the ladder with a mixing bowl of wine held in both hands. He switched it without com-

ment for the bowl which the three diners had almost emptied already. From below, where Sestius and Sabellia shared dinner with the innkeeper's family, came a burst of laughter and an order which the house slave appeared to understand. He grumbled a curse in Phrygian. Holding the bowl, he disappeared through the trap door again with his body vertical and his back to the ladder.

Perennius gazed after the slave with amusement. "Nice to meet somebody who's good at his job," the agent said.

"Well, that still doesn't explain why you pretend to be a man when you're really a woman," Gaius said. His tone and the frown on his face suggested that the tall woman's words had not explained very much else to him either.

"When I'm really neither, you mean?" Calvus asked, and she had to know that the courier had not meant anything of the sort. "Think of me as a mule, Decurion. What the pirates did mattered as little to me as it would have to a board with a knothole."

Perennius turned. Calvus would not meet his eyes. He touched her cheek and guided her face around until she was looking at him. "They're all dead," the agent said. "Every one of them. Now, do you want to tell the boy why you passed yourself off for a man, or shall I?"

The face that Perennius could not have forced to turn now softened into a smile. "You tell him, Aulus," the woman said, "if you can."

"Blazes, what do you think I spend most of my life doing?" the agent grumbled. "Chopping weeds?" He patted his protege lightly on the knee to return the discussion to him. "Look, Gaius," the agent said, "how many six foot four bald women have you met in embassies to the Emperor?"

"We'll, he could have worn a wig," the courier mumbled through his wine. He was startled enough to have continued to use a masculine pronoun.

"Fine, how many six foot four women whose wigs slip in a breeze or a scuffle - have you forgotten what we went through before we met the Goths? Blazes, friend - " Perennius had to catch himself every time so as not to address Gaius as "boy" - "who takes a woman seriously? Oh, I know - Odenath's tough, but his wife Zenobia could eat him for breakfast. And sure, there's been some at Rome, too. But not openly, not at Rome. Queens are for wogs, and lady ambassadors would be an insult, however - " he looked at Calvus - "persuasive she might be. There are limits." Perennius' voice lost its light tone as he repeated, "There are limits." In the agent's mind, Germans knelt and laughed and grunted. "But those things can be worked out too," he concluded.

With a barking laugh and a return to banter as he looked at Calvus, Perennius added, "Damned if I yet know how you managed it, though. Manage it."

"I was raised to have control of my muscles - and bodily functions," the tall woman said. The agent was beginning to understand that "raised" was a euphemism for "bred" when the woman applied it to herself. "And as you know, I can be persuasive. There are many things for sailors to look at at night beside details of who's squatting at the rail." Calvus laughed. It was the first time Perennius had heard her do so. She twitched her outer tunic. "Full garments help too, of course."

There was again a bustle at the trap door. This time Cleiton himself climbed through ahead of Sestius. Sabellia followed the two men. Her red hair was beginning to curl into ringlets as it grew out.

"Quintus has told me where you were planning to go," the innkeeper said, gesturing as soon as he no longer needed his arms to haul him onto the roof. "This is impossible now. Besides, Typhon's Cavern has a bad reputation at the best of times. I'm not superstitious, but . . ."

The centurion broke in on the sentence whose thought, at least, had been completed. "Cleiton says the story is that there's a dragon in the area around the gorge, now. Some people are saying it's Typhon himself, released from Hell."

The agent grimaced. Sestius had been told to get information, and the soldier could not help the sort of nonsense he was told. Perennius thought he had heard an undercurrent of belief in the myth Sestius was retailing, however. That sort of crap, like tales of hostile armies a million men strong, buried reality and made a hard job harder.

Cleiton saw and understood the agent's expression. The innkeeper straightened. His voice regained for him whatever dignity he might have lost through the gravy stains on his tunic and his wispy beard. "These are not stories, honored guest," Cleiton said stiffly. "Kamilides, the son of Sossias, sister of my wife's uncle, manages a villa on the edge of the gorge, Typhon's Cavern. Something began raiding their flocks over a month ago. Kamilides organized a hunt with dogs and nets, thinking a lion must have crossed the mountains. What they found was a dragon as big as - "

The innkeeper paused. The best recommendation for his truthfulness was the fact that he rejected as preposterous the simile he had probably heard from his informant. Instead Cleiton went on, "Very big, hugely big. It was a dragon with legs, and when it chased them it ran faster than the horses of those who were mounted. Three of the men were killed. The rest were saved only because they scattered in all directions and the beast could follow only a few. They left the villa just as it was. Kamilides says if the owner wants his sheep, he can come up from Antioch and look for them himself. The monster is worse than the Persians, because everybody at least knew there were Persians."

Perennius stood up so that he could bow. "Gracious host," he said, "I apologize for my discourtesy."

Not that the fact Cleiton believed the story made it more likely to be true. Still, the agent had once seen a crocodile arise from its mudbank and chase the horsemen who were trying to collect it with lassoes for the arena. Mud had slopped house-high, and it was only the horsemen's initial lead that saved them from the reptile's brief rush. Perhaps, perhaps . . . and there was that thing in the sea before.

But there was no choice. They were going to Typhon's Cavern, myth and the Guardians be damned.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The sun was not directly as grim a punishment as was the dust which rose from the road's seared surface. Perennius swirled the mouthful of water repeatedly before spitting it out. The dark stain on the road dried even as he watched.

"I don't know anything about Typhon," Calvus said. Her outstretched legs were long enough that her toes were lighted by the sun over the wall against which the party sat. Her feet were slim. The big toes seemed abnormally pronounced by comparison with the other toes. "Tell me about him."

One result of the dragon scare was that Perennius had not been able to hire drivers to take charge of the baggage animals. Sabellia was an effective drover. The rest of them had proven they were not, at considerable cost in temper and bruises. You cannot expect to hit a donkey with your hand and hurt the beast nearly as much as the blow will hurt you. "Blazes, what would I know?" Perennius said. "I haven't had the advantages of a rhetorical education."

"Well, / didn't ask you for it, did I?" said Gaius in a hurt voice. He sprawled against the wall to the other side of the older Illyrian. Gaius leaned forward from the wall so that he could look directly at Calvus. "Typhon," he continued in the declamatory sing-song that was indeed the mark of the education Perennius had procured for him, "was the son of Tartaros and Gaia, Hell and Earth. Typhon is the Hundred-Headed Serpent, the Hundred-Voiced, who strove against the gods. He was cast down from the very threshold of Olympus by the thunderbolt of Zeus - or, as others have it, by the blazing arrows of the unconquered Sun in his guise as Apollo by which the Greeks know him."

Only Perennius' exhaustion had spoken in his gibe about rhetorical educations, but that was not an excuse he would have accepted from anybody else. The advantages Perennius had had as a boy were intelligence and the willingness to be as ruthless as a task required. The agent saw very quickly that flowery prose and the ability to argue points of grammar by citing minor poets dead a thousand years were the only routes to preferment in the civil service.

They were routes open to the talented poor as well as to the rich, since the Empire itself and many individual communities provided schooling by accomplished rhetoricians. Perennius could have fought his way alone to a position as a high-placed jurist, the way the poet Lucian had. Or he might have accepted the private tutoring that Navigatus had offered to pay for early in their association. Perennius had been handicapped; but the Goth, Theudas, had started as the agent's apparent superior also.

The system of choosing administrators for the Empire was fair enough, to the extent that anything in life is fair. Perennius refused to become involved with it simply because he saw the process as the greatest and most ineluctable threat which the Empire faced.

There had been threats to the borders ever since Rome was a hilltop settlement of bandits. The Germans, the Moors, the glittering host of the Persians ... all could be turned back or slaughtered by the Imperial forces - if the latter were intelligently marshalled, competently led, and supplied in accordance with their needs and the Empire's abilities. Venal officials were a problem as old as government. The damage they did was inevitable; and, like that of caterpillars in a fruit tree, was supportable under all but the most extreme situations.

What was far more dangerous than graft was the increasing number of administrative documents which were unintelligible even to the men who drafted them. Archaic

words; neologisms; technical terms borrowed for effect from other disciplines and then misused in a number of different fashions - all of these horrors were becoming staples of the tax laws and the criminal code, of reports on barley production and the extent of flood-damage on the Pyramos. Civil servants were affecting Tacitean variation without the brevity Tacitus had prized equally; fullness beyond that of Cicero without Cicero's precision.

And not a damned one of them could add his own household accounts, much less figure the income of a province. Slaves did both, and both badly.

But Perennius' mind that saw the Empire talking itself in declining circles toward destruction was by that the more fiercely determined that Gaius would succeed. The darker the shadows over the general future, the greater Perennius' need to emphasize his closest approximation to personal continuance. Thus the tutors he had not suggested but rather forced on his protege. Even now, listening to a series of glosses on Homer and Hesiod which were as impressive as they were pointless, the agent could not wish that Gaius had been apprenticed to a mule driver.

The younger Illyrian paused. Sestius, in the shade further along the wall, said, "Around here, we always said Typhon came out of the earth in Cilicia." When Calvus turned, the centurion made a languid east-west gesture. "All along the Taurus here, there's straight-walled valleys, hundreds of feet deep . .. and sometimes a mile across."

The tall woman nodded in understanding. "Sinkholes," she said. "Your rocks are limestone. When the water eats them away under the surface, there's enough volcanic activity to collapse the shell covering the holes."

Sestius shrugged. Beside him, Sabellia appeared to be more interested in the sounds their hobbled donkeys made foraging on the other side of the wall. All members of the party were too tired to act animated. "Whatever," the centurion said. "Anyway, some of the gorges have caves at one end. The one that's called Typhon's Cavern, the one you need to go to - " Sestius had not been told the full purpose of their mission, but he had seen the tentacled thing from the balcony and must have had suspicions - "is . . . well, nobody knows how far that cave goes. There's a path into the gorge along one of the walls. I mean, the place is big, there's trees and sometimes they pasture sheep down in it. And you can get into the cave itself easy, it's got a mouth like a funnel and it just keeps going down, getting a little tighter and a little slicker each step of the way."

The Cilician paused and shrugged again. "Some people think it leads all the way to Hell, sure. There's a chapel built at the throat of it, of stone and real old. And I suppose some people even believe that Typhon crawled up out of the cave. But though the place has never had a good reputation, this latest stuff about a dragon is new. And it isn't a myth."

"Your Guardians?" Perennius asked with his eyes closed against the shimmering road.

"I doubt it," Calvus replied. Her voice drifted out of the tawny blur. "More likely it's another result of my arrival. We hadn't any experience with the process before my sibs and I were sent here. The side effects of the process - " the catch in the tall woman's voice might have resulted from nothing more than a dry throat - "were not things that had been foreseen. At least, not things that we were warned to expect."

"Would you have come anyway?" the agent asked the world beyond his eyelids.

"Yes." The word seemed too flat to convey a loss of siblings which was more traumatic than a multiple amputation. "But I'm not sure they knew that we would come. I'm not sure the technicians realized how well they had raised us."

"Well, if we've got dragons as well as Guardians to deal with," Perennius said, "we'll deal with them. At least the bastards don't seem to be able to track you down while we're moving."

The appearance of another variable did not distress the agent. Rather the contrary, and Perennius knew himself well enough to guess why. The agent was practical and experienced enough to make all the preparations possible under the circumstances. He could never be comfortable risking failure because of his own laziness. That would

have been as unthinkable as refusing to take a useful action because it might involve his own injury or death.

But when it was impossible to plan, when Aulus Perennius had to react to what the moment brought . . . when success or failure balanced on his wits and a sword's edge - that was when life became worthwhile for its own sake. If the mission were entering the mists of chance more deeply as they approached their goal, then so be it. They would deal with what came. He would deal with what came.

"Time we got moving again," the agent said aloud. "According to the itinerary, there's an inn some five miles farther on."

"It may be abandoned," the centurion suggested. "Cleiton said there isn't any traffic past the gorge any more."

"There'll be somebody there to serve us," Perennius said unconcernedly, "or we'll make do with what they left behind." The agent began to stand. He used his hands in the chinks of the wall behind him to support his weight until he was willing to ease it back onto his legs. The spear wound was warm to the touch, but it seemed to have caused less swelling than even a bruise usually would. Again he wondered whether Calvus could influence muscles as well as minds.

"And tonight," the agent went on, "we'll talk about what we're going to do when we get there. When we get to Typhon's Cavern."

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

"Well, there's somebody home," Perennius commented as he watched the thread of smoke. Because the inn was half-way down the slope to the ford, the party had a view of the stables within the far sidewall of the courtyard. There were no immediate signs of activity there, but three of the stable doors were closed as if they were occupied. The smoke was from a flue of the vaulted common room to the rear. The structure could easily sleep a hundred men on straw pallets, but the evidence of the single fire suggested the handful whose beasts might be in the stable.

"Part of the estate," Sestius said. There was a low tower on one corner of the common room. The bath and the gatehouse, on opposite sides of the gate in the front wall, looked as if they were adapted for defense also. The centurion added morosely, "They may have got a caretaker to stay on when Kamilides and his crew lit out."

Gaius had bent to tie his donkey's reins to a bush. He straightened with a puzzled expression. There was a piece of bone in his hand. "Aulus, look at this," he said, stepping closer to the older man.

Perennius glanced at the bone. "Part of an ox thigh," he remarked. "What about it?"

"Camel, I'd guess," said Sestius, peering at the courier's find. "Ox would be - "

Gaius ignored the technical discussion. "Not what it is, but look at it," he said. "Here, at the break."

The thigh had been worried by dogs or jackals, then nibbled by rodents who had hollowed out the narrow cavity completely. There was deeper scarring on the dense bone than either of those causes could account for. "Chisels," the agent said with a frown. He rotated the bone. "Somebody cracked it with pointed chisels to get the marrow out." At the broken end, among the jagged points left when the bone snapped, were cleanly-sheared surfaces reaching over an inch into the bone from either side.

Sabellia had noticed something which the men had not. As they talked, the Gallic woman picked up an object a foot or two from where the thigh-bone had lain. Perennius glanced over at her and saw what she held. He swore softly.

"Here," she said, handing the object to the agent. "I think it'll fit."

The object was a triangular tooth three inches long. Both its cutting edges were lightly serrated. The tooth fit the "chisel marks" in the thigh bone perfectly. Perennius tossed the bone away. He handed the tooth back to Sabellia. "I think," he said as he unhitched his donkey's reins, "that I'd as soon be inside walls for a while - " he nodded down toward the inn - "until we learn a little more about what in blazes is going on in these hills."

Perennius clucked to his donkey. The animal obeyed without the usual struggle. The five of them kept close together on the fork leading from the main road to the inn three hundred feet from stream-crossing. They all, even Calvus, spent far more effort watching their general surroundings than they did in watching the road or the inn which spelled safety at the end of that road.

The inn was built around a courtyard. The gatehouse in one front corner doubled as accommodations for the manager and special guests. The common room across the rear was for drovers and others without the wealth or prestige needed for one of the private apartments in the gatehouse. Both sides of the courtyard were lined with stalls which could also be used to store merchandise. The corner tower in the back, and the arrow slits in all four walls, were not merely decoration. The building had been designed with an eye to more than the casual banditry.

As the party neared the inn, Gaius kicked up his donkey

to reach the gates before the others did. Still mounted, the courier pushed at the center of the double leaves. When they did not budge, he began to hammer on them while he shouted, "Gate! Gate, damn you, we want to get inside!"

Nothing happened before the others had joined him. "I don't suppose they're expecting guests, whoever they are," Perennius said dryly. "One of us can go around to the back and try shouting into the common room, I suppose. It'd probably be simpler to shinny over the wall here, though, and - "

The sound that broke over the agent's comments came from back along the road the way they had come. It was not a bugling or a roar in any normal sense. The sound it most reminded Perennius of was that of a cat vomiting. It was a hollow, chugging noise, followed by a horrid rattling. The sound was so loud that, like a waterfall, it provided an ambiance rather than an individual noise.

The inn wall was eight feet high. Perennius' face went blank. "Lucia," he said to the tall woman, "give me a leg up like you did before." It was the first time he had used the feminine form of her assumed name, as if she were a woman of his acquaintance.

As if he were acquainted with her as a woman.

Calvus cupped her hands in a stirrup. "Yes, Aulus," she said. Her donkey brayed and turned in a tight circle when she dropped his reins. Sestius' beast was restive also, though the other three donkeys seemed to be rather calmer than their human owners.

The centurion hammered on the gate with his spear-butt. "Hey!" he shouted. "Herakles! Open the fucking gate, will you?"

Perennius knew this time to expect the lift which the woman gave him when she straightened. The agent swung over and down into the courtyard in a single arc, his right hand pivoting on the top of the wall to swing him past. It might have been smarter to pause for an instant and make sure that the wall was not faced with spikes or sharpened flints. At this juncture, the agent thought he could better afford the injury than the loss of time. He hit the ground upright with his knees flexed against the shock.

There was some motion across the courtyard, but he ignored it as he ran to the heavy bar of the gate. The - call it a roar - was sounding again. It was noticeably louder, even through the thick timbers of the gate.

"Legate! Perennius!" Sestius screamed. Gaius and Sabellia were shouting something too. "Legate!"

Perennius put his shoulder under the bar and used his knees to lift. The bar was of iron-bound oak. It was not really meant to be worked by a single man. In his present state of directedness, the agent could have lifted it with one hand.

The leaves of the door knocked Perennius backward. They were driven by Sabellia's donkey, bolting through the first hint of an opening despite anything the rider could do. Perennius' own donkey and Calvus', the latter streaming the tags of broken reins, slammed in after the Gallic woman. Gaius followed. He was actually controlling the donkey he rode. He had drawn his spatha in his right hand and was looking back over his shoulder.

The dragon that was charging them drew Perennius' stare also. The agent threw his weight against a gate leaf even before Sestius and Calvus had run inside. The mass of the panels meant a delay before even Perennius' strength could start them swinging closed again. That alone was more delay than he liked to think about.

More hands joined Perennius, those of his party and a tall, fair man the agent had never seen before. The leaves slammed against the stop carved in the inner face of the stone lintel. The stranger was screaming in Latin, "The bar! The bar!" It was Perennius who first spun to grip the bar where it had fallen, but Calvus plucked it from his hands and banged it home in the slots. The dragon hit the gate from the other side.

The really terrifying thing about the dragon was that it looked over the wall at them.

The creature had stridden down the hillside on its two hind legs. Now its forelimbs snatched at the humans scattering back from the gate. The hooked claws left deep triple scratches in the gate panels and the stone. The beast's eyes glittered like polished jet. Its scales were

black and red - the latter not rusty mottling but the angry crimson of a cock's wattles.

Perennius opened his mouth to shout orders, everyone to hide in the gatehouse, lest the creature leap the wall or batter through with its elephantine mass. The dragon's jaws opened also, wide enough to engulf most of a man's torso. The beast gave its hunting cry. The sound was felt in its paralyzing intensity by everything in the echoing courtyard. One of the donkeys threw itself on its back and began kicking the air while its burden scattered. Other hooves battered at the reinforced doors of the stables. The dragon's breath stank like the air of a well-sealed tomb.

The open door of the common room sucked the humans out of the courtyard like water through a tap. The agent was not sure which of them had led the rush. Perhaps the idea had struck them all at the same time. Running the length of the courtyard was like charging through the zone beaten by hostile artillery, but that hundred foot distance was a necessary insulation. The gatehouse was simply too close to the monster.

The creature was forty feet long and as vicious, ounce for ounce, as a shrew. Even Gaius went scrambling at the roar. He had dismounted - landed on his feet, at any rate - and brandished his sword in the dragon's face. The courage involved in the action was both pointless and insane, so the sound that shook the youth to his senses did at least a little good. The six of them, Perennius' party and the stranger, bolted within the common room and closed the door. The dragon had begun chewing on the top of the wall.

It was close to pitch dark inside to eyes that had been under an open sky. The two men facing the newcomers were only figures in silhouette against the glow of the cookfire in a wall niche. The agent did not need the details he would get when his eyes adjusted, however, to read the others' stance as that of archers with their bows drawn.

"What in blazes is that thing?" Perennius asked. He threw his back to the door in a disarming pantomime of terror at the dragon outside. At the moment, the agent's greatest concern was for the arrow pointed at his midriff. It would not advance the situation to admit that, however.

"If it gets in, you bastards," said the man who had joined them at the gate, "it's your fault. Jupiter preserve us if it gets the horses. We'll never get clear of here on foot!"

"Where do you come from?" demanded one of the bowmen. Like the other speaker, his Latin had a pronounced Gallic accent. The head of his arrow was beginning to wobble with the strain of holding the bow fully drawn. The man relaxed slightly, a good sign but dangerous in case his fingers slipped while the weapon was still pointed as it was.

"Well, from Tarsus," the agent said. His companions were extending to either side of him along the wall of the room. The Gaul who had first spoken was sidling to join the archers. It was clear that if the stand-off exploded into violence, the three of them were dead even if the arrows hit home. "They talked about Typhon and dragons, but blazes! I had a wool contract and I don't make my living by listening to bumpf from silly women. But ..." Perennius gestured back with his thumb, then added ingenuously, "You fellows part of a garrison from hereabouts?"

That the three of them were soldiers was as obvious as their Gallic background. Their professional bearing, bowstrings drawn to their cheeks; their issue boots; the youthful similarity of the men themselves - all bespoke army. The question was, whose army? And Perennius was beginning to have a shrewd notion of the answer to that one, too. The alleyway in Rome and the Gallic voices closing the end of it whispered through his memory.

"Slack 'em, dammit," grunted the first speaker. As the archers obeyed, he added, "Yeah, we were, ah, going on leave and this thing . . ." Then, "Magnus, Celestus - I'm going to check this goddam thing from the tower."

The arched doorway in a back corner led to the crenelated tower above the roof proper. Perennius stepped forward to join the Gallic - non-com was more likely than officer. "Gaius," the agent said, "you others - be ready to get the donkeys in if that thing moves away, right? Don't

take chances, but we need to get them closed up or they'll draw him back themselves."

Perennius was off before either of the archers could decide to stop him. The agent's boots made precisely the same echoing clatter on the stairs as did those of the man in front of him. The meeting could not be pure coincidence, but the agent strongly hoped that it was not as - someone, some thing, had planned either.

The dragon was hissing into the courtyard at the donkeys. The sound was like that of flames in ripe wheat. The creature did not appear to notice the men rising behind the battlements of the tower, but something else invisible to them made it turn abruptly. "Have you tried shooting it?" the agent asked.

The Gaul snorted. "Do I look crazy?" he demanded. "This is how it acts when it's not pissed off!"

The dragon's turn was complicated by the length of the rigid tail which balanced the body. It did not spin as a man would have done. Instead, the creature backed as it rotated like a swimmer reversing at the end of a pool. The new object of its attentions veered into sight also. It was a donkey, the one Sestius had ridden. By now it had shed its saddle and all accoutrements. Instead of bolting into the courtyard with the remainder of the party, it had broken away and run around the building in panic.

The donkey might have been as safe behind the common room as it would be within the courtyard, but the madness to which the dragon's bellows had driven it did not permit the beast to halt there. When it galloped past the bath house at the south front corner of the complex, both donkey and dragon realized what had happened. The former vectored off braying, back up toward the main road. The dragon strode after it. As Perennius had found its power and savagery stunning when the creature roared and clawed at the wall, so its speed was a horrible augury for the agent's chances of being able to leave the inn and complete his mission.

The dragon moved its legs with the deliberation of a robin picking its way across a lawn. Distance and the absurdity of a biped on that scale permitted the strides to seem dainty, but each one thrust the body forward another ten feet. There was a serpentine grace to the movements. The neck and tail swung sideways in unison toward the leg lifting for each stride. When the clawed feet struck the ground, dirt and gravel blasted away in a volume that mocked the cloud raised by the donkey's frantic hooves.

The dragon reached its prey well short of the hilltop. It strode in parallel with the donkey for a moment, like a greyhound with the rabbit it is coursing. Then the great head dipped lower than balance alone would have required. The jaws hung open. The slam of their closing was like the sound of a marble statue hitting the ground. The donkey responded with a screech that had no semblance to the noises that living things make.

Inertia carried the dragon a further two steps. It tossed its head, spraying the air and its belly with a vast quantity of blood. The donkey was silent and flopping limp by now. The tossing did not tear loose the gobbet encircled by the great jaws.

The dragon stopped. It raised its head again and threw it from side to side while it gripped the carcass with its front claws. The forelimbs were powerful, but the size of the great hind legs made them look small by comparison. Muscles, tendons, and bone gave way with a ripping sound. The donkey, missing part of its pelvic girdle and hams, thudded to the ground.

The dragon's jaws unhinged like those of a great snake. Its head cocked skyward while the tongue and throat muscles combined to force the huge mouthful down the esophagus. The beast's nostrils made sucking sounds until the lump disappeared further downward and the jaws fitted themselves once more into their sockets. The dragon bent forward for another bite.

It was a shocking demonstration, but the Gaul looked more sickened than afraid. He felt the agent's eyes on him and read their expression. Gruffly, the Gaul explained, "There was four of us. Marcellus was late getting mounted like always. We'd hoped he might be joining us anyhow. Mithra!"

On the hill fronting the inn, a third of the full-grown donkey had already disappeared down the slayer's maw.

The Gaul ran a hand through his short, under-helmet haircut and went on, "Now this on top of that other. I swear, I don't know.. . ." He turned, eyeing Perennius more carefully while his fingers drummed the cross-guards of his spatha. "I'm Ursinus," he said. "Like you figure, we're soldiers." He did not mention his post or unit.

The agent nodded. "I'm Perennius," he said. "I've been other things, but I'm a wool buyer now." He frowned toward the dragon before adding in corroboration, "It can't have eaten all the sheep, but I don't suppose there's been much shearing going on lately. You been here long?"

"A day." Put like that, Perennius' question had not aroused suspicion. "Thought we could outrun it, even without remounts, if we travelled light. Mithra. Lay-over here, then ride on in the morning. Only it jumped us when we were watering the horses, and we beat 'em so hard for the next mile that hell, I don't know when I'll want to chance going out again. Plenty of food and fodder here, but not a soul. Not a goddam soul."

The dragon had finished its meal. It was a sloppy eater. Behind on the blood-splashed ground lay the donkey's head and left forequarters. The latter, at least, was meatier than some of the chunks the creature had bolted. The dragon wandered back up the hill with its tail swinging, as if the beast had forgotten the inn and those trapped there. Perennius was far from sure that was the case.

Judging from his expression, Ursinus was equally doubtful. "We thought it might leave us be if we kept hidden a couple days," the Gaul said. Then he added, echoing the statement an archer had thrown out in anger, "I hope by the Bull that your lot didn't convince it to stick around longer."

"It's fed now," the agent suggested mildly. He walked toward the spiral staircase again as if oblivious to the way the Gaul's fingers were toying again with his sword hilt. There was not enough room on the narrow stairs to draw the long spatha quickly. "Might be a good time for a break if your horses have had a day to rest."

Ursinus snorted as he fell in behind the agent. Their boots clicked and scuffled again on the stone treads. The Gaul's hand was relaxed again. "Right, with it south of the ford for sure we're supposed to ride past it. Not fucking likely, bud. And don't think one donkey's going to fill that bastard up, no. . . ."

The mortar had been less discolored than the stones by soot from the poorly-vented fires. The walls of the common room, curving upward to groins, were a latticework of pale on dark to Perennius as he stepped out of the stairwell again. He was in time to hear Gaius asking, "Say, you fellows were in Rome about a month ago, weren't you?"

The younger man had seen Perennius work. In the youth's ignorance, he thought he was duplicating the agent's subtlety. He should never have done that on his own hook, and even he should have realized that the question identified the asker as surely as the answer could have done the Gauls.

"It's them!" shouted one of the archers, out of Perennius' sight beyond a pillar.

Somebody else would have to handle that, the agent thought. Behind him he heard the rattle and curse of Ursinus trying to clear his spatha and jarring his elbow on stone. It was Perennius' own damned fault. He knew that Gaius was smart enough to connect these Gauls with the earlier ambush ... and he should have known that Gaius was too inexperienced to keep from blurting the connection in his pride.

Ursinus was good. Reflex had tangled his arms with a sword half-drawn in the strait stairway, but the Gaul met Perennius' lunge with a kick. The agent had not delayed to draw a weapon of his own. He had thought he would be on Ursinus before the Gaul could respond effectively. Now Perennius did the best he could, grabbing the bigger man's foot even as Ursinus tried to hop back around the core of the helical staircase.

Perennius had underestimated the Gaul once. Now it was Ursinus' turn to think he could surprise his opponent by leaping toward him instead of trying to pull away. Perennius had the advantage of being at the base of the stairs with all the room he needed to maneuver the flying Gaul. The agent stepped back and kept Ursinus' right leg rising. The Gaul hit the floor on his shoulders and left

hand, unwilling to release his sword to take some of the shock with his right arm too. The crash did not stun Ursinus, but it left him open for Perennius' hob-nailed kick to the head.

The agent drew his own sword and dagger. He put the sword into Ursinus' chest with a swift lunge that ended when the point jarred against the stone beneath the Gaul. The killing was a judgment call that Perennius did not especially care to make .. . but the fight was not over, and Ursinus had proven himself too damned good to be put out of it by a quick boot. Perennius tugged the blade free without examining the damage. He was running toward the sounds of fighting from the far end of the big room.

One of the Gauls was crumpled in the central bay over an arrow nocked too late to be used. The agent did not have to guess who had cut the man's throat so deeply that only the spine and the cartilaginous windpipe kept the lolling head attached to the body. Gaius and Sestius crouched to either side of a pillar. Their swords angled up, threatening the archways that opened into the final bay. Fanned back from the pillar which hid the remaining Gaul were Sabellia and Calvus. Sabellia held her bloody knife advanced. Her legs were splayed, her knees cocked to launch her toward the Gaul if he showed himself. Calvus held a spear awkwardly. The tall woman eyed Sabellia as if hoping to gain pointers from the red-head.

"Hold it!" Perennius shouted as he burst into the central bay.

"Now!" cried Sestius. He and Gaius rushed the hidden Gaul from either side.

Perennius heard the bow-string snap. He did not hear the arrow strike, and he knew what that meant. If the arrow had missed - and men do miss point-blank shots when no prize but life itself is at stake - the iron head would have smashed and sparked clearly on the rock walls. There had been no need of risk. The isolated Gaul could have been talked out, waited out; at worst, charged by men wearing the armor packed on the donkeys outside. Anything would have been more sensible than the present melange of shouts and swords glittering in overarm cuts.

The pillar still hid the sword-wielders and their victim from Perennius as he ran to the slaughter.

The Gaul was sprawled on his face. He had dropped his bow. Apparently he had tried to cover his head with his arms instead of drawing his sword. Sestius slashed a final time at the man. The centurion's heavy blade thunked deep enough into the skull to stick when he tried to remove it. Gaius was still thrusting into the Gaul's abdomen.

Sestius straightened and turned, leaving his sword where it was. The fletching and half an arrow's length protruded from his chest, well-centered and between the second and third ribs. Only a drop or two of blood had seeped onto the centurion's tunic around the shaft. When he opened his mouth to speak or gasp for breath, the blood spewed out. It splashed the stone floor an instant before Sestius' body fell to cover the splotch. The scream the centurion could not voice for choking burst from Sabellia's lips instead.

Perennius caught Gaius by the wrist. "You're all right?" the older man demanded. Gaius' eyes were glazed, but he bore no obvious signs of injury. He did not answer Perennius. Instead, he leaned on his sword as if it were a cane.

Sabellia was weeping and mopping at the blood on Sestius' face. She was probably unharmed. It wasn't the time to check that, anyway. Calvus anticipated the agent's question, nodding as soon as the agent's eyes fell on her. "Nothing touched me," she said. Then she added, "They were part of the group that attacked us in Rome."

"I guess everybody's figured that out," said the agent bitterly. He turned back toward the younger Illyrian. "If Gaius'd kept his mouth shut, we might even've learned why. Well, maybe we can...."

Ursinus was not dead. He had rolled over, but he had been unable to summon enough strength to rise to his hands and knees. He saw Perennius coming, trailed by the tall woman. The Gaul made another attempt to rise. It too failed. His lips blew a froth of blood. The hole in his chest was making liquid, sucking sounds as Ursinus tried

to breathe. He spat, drooling a line of blood and saliva down his chin.

"It's over, Ursinus," the agent said. "We're going to help you now."

"Bastard," the Gaul whispered. "Don't you think / know it's over?" But he relaxed none the less, letting the tension go out of arms that had trembled as they failed to lift him.

"Get some wine," Perennius hissed in an aside to Calvus. To the dying man, the agent said, "Were you supposed to ambush us here, then?"

Ursinus coughed red-shot phlegm that the agent wiped away with the hem of his own tunic. "Mithra," the Gaul said. He forced a smile. "We were running away. One of the things what was giving us orders had its mask slip. Hell if I was going to stick around after that, dragon be damned. Not if God offered to come down and wash me in blood." It was an unfortunate expression and brought on another fit of coughing.

"Gray?" Perennius asked. Calvus was back with a skin of wine. The agent held the open end to Ursinus' lips, letting the Gaul suck greedily at it while the agent squeezed the skin for him. "A band around it and a hole the size of a cow's bung near the top?"

"Oh . . ." the Gaul moaned as he took his mouth away from the flask. His eyes were closed. "You think you're going to join them, then?"

"We're here to kill them, Ursinus," the agent said in a level voice. He daubed at the Gaul's face again. "How many of them are there?"

Ursinus ignored the question if he even heard it. "More guts than I've got, then," the Gaul murmured. "Just wanted to get the fuck away, way from dragons and crinkly monsters that talk. . . . Mithra." His eyes opened. "Sacrovir stayed," he said. "Didn't care what it was, he wanted the guy who'd killed his mother. We followed him here after it all went sour in Rome, but ... I said - " The Gaul's eyes bulged as if he were straining to swallow some object so great that it was choking him.

"Easy, easy," the agent said.

It was too late for ease, too late for Ursinus entirely.

The Gaul's arms and legs began to flail on the stone as he gagged. The movements swelled into a mad, unsynchronized fury as Ursinus' eyes went blank. His back strained into the arc of his last convulsions.

Perennius swore. He stood up. The agent had seen enough people die. He did not need to watch another.

Gaius caught the older man's arm. "Blazes, Aulus," he said. "Q-quintus is gone. It was so quick, one minute and then ..." Gaius too had seen his share of dying, but this time it was a peer and a man he had come to know well. The youth was aware also that Fortune had made the archer left-handed. Otherwise the shaft would have been past the other side of the pillar and through Gaius' pulmonary arteries instead of those of the centurion.

Perennius gripped the shoulder of the younger man - the boy, in this persona. The agent shouted, "Sure he's gone! And it's your big mouth that killed him, isn't it?"

Even the sputtering fire could only suggest color on Gaius' cheeks. "I didn't - " he said. He tried to jerk his shoulder away and found he could not, no more than he could have pulled free a decade before. Perennius' red, shouting rage was only a suggestion of the murder that already strained to supplant it.

"You didn't think!" the agent shouted. He shook the tall youth to the harsh rhythms of the words. "You shot off your mouth, handed them who we were on a platter - what else was going to happen when they learned that? We could've all been greased in a rat-fuck like that! Couldn't we? Couldn't we? And now there's Sestius lying there - "

The rigid expression of Gaius' face, anger and horror molded on an armature of innocence, gave way. The young Illyrian's free arm had been rising as if to strike a blow or fend one off. The arm encircled Perennius' waist as Gaius fell sobbing to his knees. "Oh god, Aulus!" he cried, "I did kill him. Oh god, oh god!"

Perennius staggered. His skin was as clammy as if he had been douched with melt water. The great vaulted room sprang into entire focus again. "Blazes," the agent whispered. Then he said, "I'm going. . . ."

Gaius was not holding him tightly. Perennius stepped

1

away from the other's kneeling figure, the motion bringing only redoubled sobs. Perennius walked to the door to the courtyard. He was tottering with reaction. He stepped outside; and he was standing there, breathing deeply with his back to the wall, when Calvus joined him a moment later.

"I told you to keep out of my mind," Perennius whispered. His eyes were closed. "Saw you standing there like a statue . . . Might've killed him, Calvus. Me. Might've killed him except for you."

"In some ways he's very young," the woman said. "Younger than his age."

"It's the pretending it just . . . 'happens,' " the agent went on. He was looking at the empty courtyard now. "They didn't do it. Sure, we all screw up ... and this is a business that you screw up, maybe somebody gets dead. But if you pretend you didn't do it, the arrow was Fate or Fortune or any damn thing but a kid talking ... I thought he was going to say it wasn't his fault. And then I might've killed him."

"Don't confuse what men say with what they mean, Aulus Perennius," Calvus said.

"I don't - " the agent rasped back.

"No, you don't," the tall woman responded more sharply than Perennius had ever heard her speak before. "You take those lies as a personal slur on your intelligence. And you know they aren't! They're the prayer of somebody human that the world not tell him something he already knows. You've watched Gaius. Do you think he really doubts he was responsible for what happened?"

"He shouldn't lie to me," Perennius muttered.

"He didn't," Calvus said, "and he didn't lie to himself."

The agent looked at her. "Yeah," he said. He took Calvus' hand loosely in his own. "Ah. Thanks."

Calvus smiled at him. Her expression was still untrained but now real. "Aulus Perennius," she said, "I didn't touch your mind. I promised you. Even if I thought you were wrong, I wouldn't have gone back on that promise. To you. I don't trust my instincts that far, you see."

"Blazes, you don't have to lie," Perennius said with a return of his earlier anger. "Look, I saw you, you did what you had to, and I want to forget it."

"He felt guilty," the woman said. "He wanted to admit it, but he was young. Pride and embarrassment, you can understand. But he wanted so desperately to ask forgiveness that it didn't take much of a, well, nudge." Calvus was still smiling.

"The hell you say," Perennius said mildly. "Well. Not that it mattered." He cleared his throat. "Besides the Guardians, we've got that dragon to take care of now, don't we? And one man."

"An allosaurus," Calvus agreed. They were both looking across the courtyard. The fresh scarring near the gate was evident even in twilight. "The dragon is an allosaurus, that is."

"Umm," the agent grunted, accepting the datum. Hydra, chimaira, allosaurus ... it didn't much matter. After a moment he said, "Blazes, I wonder if there's some truth in the old stories after all. Hercules and women turning into trees and everything? Well, we'll handle it, however things shape up."

The door swung open again. Both faced around quickly. The agent took a half step to see past Calvus. Sabellia stepped out. Her eyes were reddened but dry. "Our gear's in with the animals," she said, nodding to the block of stables. Four more doors were barred shut than had been when the party looked in from the hillside. "I'll get a meal together. Those - others were just boiling porridge."

"Right, I'll give you a hand," said the agent. He looked away from Sabellia as he spoke. "Need to see to the horses, too, it seems." They began walking toward the stables in parallel, though they were not precisely in concert.

"I was raised to believe in an ordered, understandable universe, Aulus Perennius," Calvus called after the agent. "I think that I am coming to believe in heroes as well."

CHAPTER THIRTY

"Blazes, this is going to be awkward," said Gaius as he held up the mesh gauntlet. Even with the fireplace niche stoked high, the lighting of the common room was more an occasional absence of shadow than good working illumination. The room's volume and blackened stone saw to that.

"I'm coming too," said Sabellia. She did not raise her head or her voice.

"Awkward, but the only thing I see working with that many of them, Guardians, and the way the land lies," Perennius said with a shrug. He lifted the facemask from one of the sets of parade armor.

"Listen, there's three horses!" the red-haired woman said loudly. "You're not going to leave me here!"

"You stay here, like you've been told," Perennius said. Sabellia's mouth opened for a retort. The agent overrode it, shouting, "There aren't three bloody sets of armor, are there? Just what the hell good do you figure to do getting wasted the first time they shoot? You didn't see what that does to a man. Believe me, it's quick and it's final, just as final as it comes."

The woman's set look gave way to dejection though not despair. "Oh, I know, Aulus," she said softly. "It's just ... there's another of the gang there, you say, the ones who killed Quintus. I - I'd like that one. God, I wish you'd brought another suit of this. God I do."

"You don't know what it took to get just these," the agent remarked. He held the mask to his face where it covered his judicious expression. The difficulty had been less the intrinsic value of the parade armor than the question of how the prefect would report the loss of the armor to his superiors. The masks were cast of bronze to a pattern of plump-featured male beauty, then silvered for dazzling effect. The back-piece laced to each mask covered the rest of the wearer's head. Because the back-pieces were of brass rather than bronze, they could be polished to a sheen that the sun would turn golden.

For present purposes, the look of the armor was not as significant as the fact that the ensemble cased the whole head of the person wearing it. There were two tiny holes for the pupils of the eyes, and an air passage replacing the nostrils and septum of the large, hooked nose. Calvus had said that the mask might work, but at no point should metal touch the wearer's skin.

"Here, give me that," Sabellia said. She had already trimmed backing pads for one set of greaves. Now she whet her knife, using spittle and the stone that was a part of Perennius' baggage even when he was travelling light. The greaves were silvered also. The low-relief figures of Mars and Goddess Rome on them were parcel gilt to set them off. The prefect had parted with them and the helmets only for an equal weight of solid silver from the pirates' loot. Perennius did not know whether the man planned to use part of the massive bribe to square his superiors in Palmyra, or whether he simply intended to desert and keep the whole amount for himself.

Sabellia began cutting deftly at the piece of hide. The agent's own attempt had been too small to cover the interior of the mask. The blank Perennius had cut did not allow enough overage to fill the mask's face-following concavity. Sabellia trimmed with only an occasional glance at the arrogant metal visage turned up beside her.

It struck Perennius how unusual the group was in its attitude toward the valuables to which they had fallen heir on the bloody strand. The agent had promptly appropriated the wealth to the purposes of the mission. It had not even occurred to him to do otherwise. Gaius had accepted that without comment, both because his protector had so decided and because his own longings were

toward a sort of heroic glory which had little to do with wealth.

Sestius had been after the security which grew from land and family. The centurion would not have been averse to abandoning the mission and dividing the bullion, but he was too good a soldier to press for that; and anyway, wealth was not his first priority. Sestius had gotten another kind of security, but that had been awaiting him in any event—on his farm or wherever his choices took him. Sabellia's hopes might have been directed prosaically on her man, or at some higher spiritual plane on the religion which she had emphasized only when they entered the valley of cultists. Perennius was inclined to doubt that the woman was as simple as either of those focuses would imply; but whatever was in her secret heart, it was not a love of wealth for itself.

And Calvus. In this at least, Perennius thought he saw himself in the tall woman. Objects and occurrences were good or bad depending on how they affected the success of the mission.

But as surely as Perennius recognized that, he recognized that a more human side was developing in the woman's character. Just as he knew it was appearing in his own. "Blazes," he muttered. His three companions looked at him. Calvus was smiling.

The footsteps up the stairs were quiet, but they would have awakened Perennius even if he had been able to get to sleep. They paused.

"Come on up," the agent called. He did not turn his head.

"I thought you must be asleep," Sabellia said as she walked out onto the top floor of the watch tower.

Perennius was wrapped in his cloak with his back to one wall of the parapet. The high curtain of clouds had thinned enough that the moon was a noticeable glow in the heavens. There were no stars. The agent shook back his cowl when Sabellia settled carefully on the dewy stones beside him.

"Thought it might be a good place to get some sleep tonight," Perennius said. He looked at the woman, then motioned around the tower with his eyes. "Reminds me too much of back when I was a kid on guard duty, though. I just dozed, waiting for Franks to hit the palisade."

The cloak Sabellia wore was the one a pirate had given her while she gathered herbs and poison. The brown wool was the same soft shade as her hair, since the light was too faint to show colors. "It's going to be dangerous tomorrow," the woman said. Her sandals peeked out beneath the hem of the cloak. Her hands kept the garment tight about the rest of her body.

Perennius shrugged. "It's always dangerous," he said. He met her eyes and added, "I'm sorry about Quintus. I - wouldn't have had it happen that way if I'd planned a little better."

"I think he wanted to do something himself," the woman said, letting her eyes drift up toward the empty sky. "He was jealous, you know."

"Listen," the agent said. The statement had touched a sore point. "I may not be the best damned leader going, but I am in charge. I don't expect a lot of crap from centurions under me!"

"I don't mean that, Aulus Perennius," Sabellia said.

"Oh," Perennius said. He looked away, feeling foolish. "Well. I never gave him cause, I think."

"Maybe I did, then," Sabellia said. Her bare arm reached out to Perennius. He twisted clumsily to meet her. He was trapped by his own weight on the folds of his cloak. Sabellia's garment opened as her arms released the front hems. She wore nothing beneath the soft wool.

When Perennius cupped her breast, the woman shuddered. He cursed and jerked back, ashamed of his awkwardness and of forgetting the bruises and cuts that laced her torso.

"No, no, darling," Sabellia whispered. One of her arms drew his head down while the other caught his hand and pressed it back to the breast. "Not pain, no." Her flesh was firmer than he expected, and the nipple was already rising to meet his tongue.

Perennius had time to wonder whether Sestius had been given a similar send-off the night before. But that really did not matter.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

"If this doesn't work," Perennius said, "the best I can suggest is you gather up people in Tarsus, archers, slingers. Artillery for the dragon. It'll take somebody as persuasive as you are, but it's better than trying it alone if we don't make it back." The agent was aware that the bronze facemask muffled his voice to those outside while it made the words echo in his own ears. His voice was hollow, as hollow as he felt the words themselves to be.

Perennius' headgear was hot, heavy, and almost blinding. He bent over at the waist, directing his eyeholes like weapons at Calvus as she lifted up the bar of the gate. Perennius could not see what her expression was as she said calmly, "They'll probably use area weapons, despite the traces that would leave for the future to find. They wouldn't do that in Rome or even Tarsus, because there'd be too many surviving witnesses to pique the curiosity of a later age. Out here ... if they think they know where I am, they'll risk a few acres of glazed earth so long as it's an anomaly in the wilderness rather than a disaster more riveting than Pompeii." The gate began to creak open as Calvus pulled at it.

"Still clear," called Sabellia from the roof of the gate house. The dragon, the allosaurus, patrolled a broad territory. The best way Perennius had come up with to deal with the monster was to avoid it. Riding north while the beast was still to the south of the inn was a good way to achieve that end. Perennius wasn't a hero. Heroes gained fame and medals for the chances they took. Aulus Perennius had instead a reputation for getting the job done. If he had any regret about that fact, it was that the job he wished to do more than anything else was to save the Empire. That was beyond him as it was beyond every man. And perhaps beyond all men, the agent thought in the gloom of his nightmares.

"Blazes, we'll be back," Perennius said. He pressed his horse with his heels. "Don't guess there'll be a better time," he called to Gaius. "Let's do it."

The younger man obviously did not hear the instruction. Neither did he see that Perennius had ridden off until the agent was a length ahead. Then Gaius kicked his own mount forward with a clatter, pulling abreast of Perennius in the easy canter the agent had chosen until external influences forced their pace. Gaius rejoined just as Perennius realized that they had been separated.

The masks made vision just as difficult as they did hearing. Perennius had bought gorgets and shirts of leather-padded chain mail, standard heavy-cavalry issue, at the same time he acquired the parade greaves and helmets. The gorget in particular made it very uncomfortable to swivel his head the way the narrow field of view required. "I know this's got problems, these masks," he said to Gaius in the raised voice they needed to hear one another, "but I'm more afraid of the Guardians than I am the lizard. The rigs take so damn long to lace together. ..."

"Oh, I ..." the courier said. "I didn't - I mean, I wasn't thinking of taking it off or anything."

Gaius had almost added "sir." Perennius could hear it in the abject tone. That hurt worse than a blow would have. It hurt the more so because it was a reaction which the agent had over the years tried to stamp into just about everyone else he had known. "Look," he began. He realized his voice was an inaudible murmur and went on louder, "Look, Gaius, all my life I've been telling myself it's all right to lose my temper. It's not all right. I know it's not. I apologize, and I swear by - by the Goddess Rome that I'll never do it again, at least with you."

Gaius twisted to face the agent as squarely as the four-pommeled military saddle would allow. The silvered bronze hid his face, but the courier's surprise was evident in his

stance. He knew that Perennius had as little belief in the formal gods of the State as he did in any of the Oriental cults that had been appealing to the more superstitious of Rome for the past five centuries. Gaius knew also that Perennius would willingly die before he trivialized Roma, the personification of the Empire. "I, I deserved it, Aulus," the youth said awkwardly. "I did what you said. I killed him."

Perennius felt cooler and more supple than he had in months. The merely physical discomfort of the gear he wore was forgotten. "Gaius," he said, "when you screw up as often as I've done and as bad as I've done, then maybe I'll have a right to shout at you. As for what happened, well ... we needed these horses - " he patted the shoulder of his mount - "so it was going to come to that. I figure we got off about as cheap as we were going to. Those Gauls were pros. You and Quintus were damned fools to rush the last one that way, but Quintus was a big boy. Only thing I care about is that you learn from what happened so the next time you screw up some new way." The agent smiled, forgetting that the other man could not see his face. "The way I do."

Gaius nodded vigorously, causing his equipment to jingle. "Aulus," he said, "I will. I swear I'll make you proud of me. I swear by - " and he had sense enough to swallow the next thought without voicing it.

"Blazes, friend, you have made me proud," said Perennius. And he was quite serious.

They paused at the crest. "Wouldn't hurt to water the horses," Gaius said as he noticed the rivulet they would have to ford at the bottom of the hill. "I wonder if we dare take a sip or two ourselves?"

The question was hesitant. A drink would require them to unlace the masks. It would have been possible to cut and hinge the face-covering so that the wearers could drink - as the sun and their constricting gear made almost imperative - but Perennius had not thought of that. Perhaps one of the others had, but the agent had made the plan so intensely his own that no one else had - or had dared - offer significant suggestions.

That was one of the things Perennius was kicking himself about. There were others. "Good idea," the agent said after a moment's consideration. "I'd been sort of hoping they'd have an outpost or the like short of the hole. Try these out." He slapped his body armor with his chaingauntleted hand. "With one or two of them, I mean. If it's going to be all five at once, I think we'd better chance - getting undressed for not being parched when we hit them." The agent made a quick sweep of the horizon. He turned his body to the right, then to the left as far as the saddle permitted.

Gaius clucked his own horse forward, down the trail. Perennius recalled something Ursinus had said while they watched the donkey being killed. "It jumped us when we were watering the horses. ..." Instead of following his companion, the agent tugged his horse's head around. By turning the animal, he had a full view of their back-trail despite the constricting gear. "Fucking whoreson," Perennius muttered.

Half a mile behind them, hunching over the previous ridge as if following a scent trail, was the black and crimson figure of the allosaurus.

Perennius' horse saw the great hunter at the same time its rider did. The horse froze momentarily. The agent's quick tug at the reins became a vicious yank as he felt himself balked. "Ride!" he shouted as he spurred the horse. "Bastard's after us!"

Gaius had not had time to react to the warning before the dragon's savage cry echoed around them both.

The road was wide enough for two horses abreast under normal circumstances. At their present headlong gallop, Perennius thought it better to follow Gaius than to attempt to close on him. The call of their pursuer was a better spur than anything on a rider's heels, but the cry was driving the horses to the limits of their footing. They were following a country track hacked along hillsides, rather than a well-laid military road. Perennius was a competent rider but not a brilliant one. Now he braced himself with one hand on a fore-pommel to keep from sliding onto the horse's neck as they pounded downhill.

Ahead of them, Gaius' mount leaped the narrow creek

without slacking or wetting its hooves. Perennius knew the limits of his own ability too well to risk prodding his own horse into a similar jump. A trick that was simple if executed with proper timing would be skidding disaster if that timing were off. As it was, one of the horse's unshod hooves did turn on a smooth stone. There was an explosion of spray and a heart-stopping moment for the rider. Only Perennius' iron grip on the saddle kept him from high-siding. That would have left him stunned in the creek as the monster bore down. The agent swayed drunkenly. As his horse bolted up the rise, he was forced to drop the reins and clutch the pommels with both armored hands.

The men would not have had the opportunity to check on their pursuer even had they not been encumbered by the metal they wore. The beast's gurgling roar burst over them redoubled as the horses were only starting to gallop up from the creek. The dragon had crested the rise from which they had first seen it. That meant that it was covering at least three feet of ground to every two of theirs. Perennius had assumed that nothing as huge as the allosaurus could keep up a high rate of speed for more than a short spurt. The truth was a draining surprise.

Ursinus had been wrong. He and his two companions had not escaped because they outrode their pursuer. They had been saved by the sacrifice of the fourth member of their party. It was as brutally simple as that. And with the same horses burdened by men in full armor, there could be no question at all of how the present race would end unless the riders found a haven which their speed could not vouchsafe them.

Gaius charged over the rise, by now three lengths ahead of the agent. The younger man tried to wheel his horse to face the monster. Perennius, half-blind from sweat and frustration, almost rode into him. Gaius was drawing his spatha. "Ride you idiot!" the agent screamed. He was aware that Gaius must be speaking also and that both of them were barely able to hear their own voices over the cry of the allosaurus.

Perennius' mount had checked no more than required to veer around its fellow. They were on a rolling pasture of brush and sheep-cropped grass. Four hundred feet ahead of them was the near rim of a sinkhole, the mouth of Typhon's Cavern. A quarter mile beyond, with the rose and saffron of its rocks standing out against the dusty vegetation above it, was the far rim of the gorge.

The great gap in the earth stretched half a mile to either side. The eastern end was blocked from sight by a range of knobby outcrops, while the road wound around the western end of the rim. There was a separate track worn more by sheep's hooves than human deliberation. It plunged straight toward the gorge's south rim. Perennius lashed his horse in that direction instead of trying to skirt the cavity. The agent had Sestius' description of the site to guide him. The horse was too wild with fear to know or care that it was being driven toward a gulf.

The situation was out of control. Perennius knew he did not even rule the horse he rode. The agent's input was tolerated because the animal was not consciously aware that it was being driven forward instead of to the left. The agent had hoped that they would be able to deal with the Guardians in scattered pickets along the way. If that did not occur, then he had intended to reconnoitre the gorge at leisure, seeking a path to its floor besides the one switching back and forth along the south wall. Sestius had claimed there was no other path because the lips of the cavity overhung the floor elsewhere around the edge. Perennius had still hoped that care and the long rope lashed to each man's saddle would provide access in secrecy.

Right at the moment, Perennius' greatest hope was that the allosaurus would not be able to turn sharply enough when it blundered through the screening brush and confronted the sinkhole. The agent was quite certain that his own mount would plunge over the side. And Perennius was more than doubtful that he would be able to leap clear himself.

A figure rose from the cover of a ragged succulent. It wore a hooded cloak of blue so dark as to be black. Though the figure was little more than a shadow in a blur of sweat and dust to Perennius, the object it held and aimed glittered.

The world went red. Perennius' skin had crawled with

prickly heat. Now his whole body contracted with what its surface told it was a bath of ice. The agent's ears rang at a frequency high enough to be a perception rather than a sound. The ringing filled his head so completely that even the call of the dragon only strides away was swept into nothingness. All over Perennius' body, hair sprang up against his clothing with a violence that moved the iron-sheathed leather.

The agent was not shot off his mount. The horse, goaded by the crash and glare above it, hurled itself in an insane caracol. Even if Perennius had been fully aware, he was not horseman enough to have kept his seat amid that fury. Battered, his senses stunned by the ride and the discharge that turned him into a momentary flare, the agent sailed off when his mount shifted from beneath him. Perennius was unwitting of the fact until he hit the ground in a spray of dust and clangor.

The air stank of ozone and charred leather. The thongs that held the mask to the back of Perennius' helmet burned through when the mask took the point of the Guardian's blast. A rosette was seared across the silver facing. At the tips of the rosette, the brass back-piece and the iron gorget still shimmered as they cooled. Perennius' eyelashes had been burned away. At the moment, the agent was not sure that he was alive at all. His vision had tumbled dizzyingly from the mask's near blindness, through a red flare that was a result of direct nerve stimulation rather than sight, to the unmasked dazzle of a bright Cilician day. Nothing quite registered yet in his mind.

Gaius leaped his horse over Perennius' prostrate body. The beast was a white-bellied blur above the fallen man as the Guardian fired again. The air sizzled with the corona enfolding the young rider. His out-thrust sword roared with the cascade of sparks pouring from its point and double edges. Gaius lost neither his seat nor control of his mount. The horse gathered itself and sprang again as its rider's heels demanded. The Guardian made a high, keening sound nothing like the syllables which had come from the vocalizer of the thing in Rome.

The tip of Gaius' spatha split the cowled head as the horseman charged on by.

Reflex raised Perennius to join the battle his intellect was still too disoriented to comprehend. As the agent's shoulders lifted from the ground, the long-taloned leg of the striding allosaurus brushed him aside. Gaius' mount was skidding over the edge of the chasm. The monster's jaws slammed so close behind the horse that a fluff of long tail-hairs scattered from the edge of the carnivore's jaws. Dust, gravel, and the dragon followed the young Illyrian over the side.

Perennius wore over eighty pounds of armor and equipment. His thigh wound pinched him even at rest. The agent had been enervated by fear and the ride, then stunned by the shot he had taken and his fall. When he saw Gaius ride into the gorge with the dragon following, Perennius rolled to his feet. There is a limit to how long a man can live on his nerves. Aulus Perennius would reach that limit when he died on his feet.

The rim of the sinkhole had been undercut by the hungry ground waters. One of the earth-slips to which Cilicia is prone had shaken down much of the south wall into a jumble on the chasm's floor. The slope that resulted was steep, but at least it had some outward batter. Perennius ran to the edge without pausing for the tentacled thing that sprawled in his path. The edge of Gaius' sword had volatized with the energy it had sprayed back into the atmosphere. The weapon struck the Guardian as a blunt, glowing bar. It had the weight of a horse and armored rider behind it. The creature's conical head was not sheared but caved in. Shards of gray chitin were trapped in a magenta gelatine.

There were three more Guardians toiling up the trail toward the rim. They wore no masks or disguises, only their gray exoskeletons and a shimmering array of tools. The alarm that summoned them had been a little too late. It was unlikely that they were prepared for what came sliding down the slope toward them.

The trail itself slanted broadly to the right for several hundred feet before it cut back in the other direction. Gaius, whooping and still astride his horse, ignored the trail. He blasted gravel straight downslope toward the pair of Guardians a level below him. The gradient was

one to one, too steep for real control given the gallop that had taken man and mount onto it. It was not quite abrupt enough to make the descent a fall rather than a ride.

Horse and horseman bathed in a roaring dazzle. The Guardians had neither the desire nor the ability to direct their bolts at the man alone as their shattered fellow had done on the chasm's edge. The mane and tail of the horse flared out and burned. The powerful neck and shoulders withered as if they were at the core of a furnace. Shattered bone ends protruded from the carcase which was otherwise charred too black and dense to be seen as from an animal. It plummeted between the two leading Guardians, taking brush and a hail of limestone with it as it rolled toward the chasm's floor.

Gaius' long iron shirt flashed brighter and whiter than the sun in the instant the alien bolts gnashed at it. The spatha folded back on itself as if its blade were wax and not steel. Gaius flew forward, separating from the horse whose forequarters had been devoured beneath him. His armor glowed red and then red on black as air quenched the thousands of spot-welded wires which comprised the mail. Stiff as a statue and surely as unknowing, Gaius skidded until he hit a trio of mulberry trees, eighty feet below the rim.

No one, not even Perennius, was watching Gaius. The dragon was on top of the leading pair of Guardians.

For something that weighed as much as a yoke of oxen, the beast had incredible agility. It could not avoid the abrupt descent, but even as inertia carried its leading right foot over the side, its tail was swinging around. That long, cartilage-stiffened member was the lever by which the allosaurus pivoted its mass. As the beast slid into the chasm, it was already twisting broadside, cat-quick, to scrape itself to a halt in the shortest possible time. The allosaurus was not intelligent, but its nervous system housed bundles of reflexes as finely honed as ever an assassin's razor. The pair of gray, chitinous things on the ledge where its claws slashed for purchase were no more of an incident than the creosote bushes shredded in the same instant.

Perennius made his own reflexive judgment. He leaped over the side himself. The price of being wrong was death, but that was nothing new.

The dragon came to a skidding halt on the trail, facing the third Guardian at a distance of twenty feet. One of the beast's three-clawed forelegs was extended up-hill. It clutched an outcrop at the end of a triple furrow in the thin sod. The jaws which had crushed their way through the bones and tough muscle of the donkey were open. The allosaurus had just begun its terrible, gulping cry when the Guardian's shot tore its head off.

The crackling discharge blew apart the beast's calvarium in an explosion of shrinking bone and expanding, gaseous nerve tissue. Its teeth shattered like glass as dentine responded to the induced heat. The dragon reacted like a beheaded chicken. Its hind legs thrust it forward in an uncoordinated lunge that spilled it off the trail and past the Guardian. The great beast began to roll sideways down the slope. It gathered speed as the angle steepened. The tail and neck flailed wildly, but the massive torso merely rotated faster and faster. The cream belly-scales alternated with the red-shot black of sides and back. Fifty feet above the floor of the chasm, an outcrop gave the huge carcass impetus enough to hurl it away from the wall. Limbs spasming with momentum and death reflexes, the dragon smashed down on the quake-strewn boulders which had preceded it into Typhon's Cavern.

The Guardian rotated on what might be a ball joint above its tripodal legs. It was raising to meet Perennius the weapon which had just ripped the allosaurus. The agent was skidding on his armor-protected left hip and shoulder. He kicked the creature off the trail and grappled with it as they rolled together after the dragon.

Perennius gripped with both his hands the tentacle holding the weapon. He squeezed and pulled as if he were disjointing a lobster to get at the meat in the claws. The rock and brush through which they careened meant nothing to him, would have meant nothing even if the iron and leather encasing him did not absorb much of the punishment. Rock gouted in a spray of splinters and quicklime as the weapon fired into the ground. Then Perennius held the creature in his left hand. His right hand flung away

the weapon and the separated fragment of tentacle that still wrapped the glittering object.

Both combatants were brought up by a clump of holly. The bush had been flattened by the tons of dragon, but the stems had sprung up again in time to stop Perennius and his victim short of fifty sheer feet neither of them would have survived. The greave had been pulled from Perennius' right shin. His bare forehead was bleeding from a gash he could not remember getting. The Guardian's own flexible exoskeleton was dusty and abraded. Pores and the joint of head and segmented carapace were oozing a pink, waxy substance with an odor like that of bergamot. The creature had not made any sound, even when Perennius pulled it apart.

One of its remaining arms snatched a globular object that clung to its chitin like steel to a lodestone. Perennius watched the trebly-opposed fingers rotate the object toward his head while he tried to interpose his own arm. The agent's flesh moved far slower than the images of disaster which flickered through his brain. He saw his carcass burned or sawn apart, perhaps simply vanishing....

The object struck his blood-matted hair and recoiled. The blow was no worse than a child could have delivered, scarcely noticeable to Perennius in his adrenalin-heightened state. The Guardian had no weapon beyond that hurled into the brush with its dripping limb attached. It was using in desperation some piece of gear as a hard object to arm its blows. That showed a courage that Perennius could have appreciated if he had been more nearly human at the time. As a response to what he was about to do, the blow was on a par with spitting in his face.

The agent stood up. He lifted the Guardian easily. The creature weighed some eighty pounds. The blows with which it pummeled him were light even in reference to its size. The exoskeleton that smoothly covered the alien's limbs had no room in it for muscles like those which bulged Perennius' arms. The agent knelt with his weight on his right knee and left foot. He lifted the creature over his head, holding it by one leg and the stump of the arm he had severed. Then, shouting in a bestial triumph, Perennius brought the alien down across the armored shelf of his braced left thigh as if he were breaking a bundle of reeds. The Guardian's thorax crackled in minuscule echo of the crashing discharge of its weapon seconds before. Fluids leaked and coated Perennius' knee stickily as he raised the creature for a second blow. Its legs and arms had gone limp. In a fit of revulsion, the agent instead flung the alien away from him. He watched it bounce down the wall of the chasm.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The sound that Perennius heard as the Guardian's corpse disappeared was the patter of a pebble against the rocks above him. The agent turned and looked up. The stone, no larger than a walnut, pinged on his mailed shoulder as it followed the earlier corpses into the sinkhole. No one was visible to Perennius at the rim above. He drew the short sword which still hung at his right hip despite the scrambling to which the agent had subjected his gear.

"Aulus?" called Sabellia's voice from the brink. "Where are you, Aulus?"

"Watch out," Perennius croaked. The sword in his hand felt heavier than it should, because of the ring mail clinging to and weighting his sword arm. The agent thought of stripping the armored gauntlets from his hands. "There's another one coming. I think it's human."

The figure striding up the trail was clearly human. There could have been no question had not so many other questions stalked into the agent's life so recently. The newcomer walked at a swinging pace despite his burden of armor and a long, six-sided shield. He did not attempt to run or to clamber up between switchbacks. The man was obviously smart enough to make sure that he was fresh when he reached the agent.

"You're alone, boy," Perennius called to the figure. The man was now only a hundred double-paces from the agent. The portion of trail between them was narrow, picked out by sheep for their convenience. Perennius was considering whether it would be to his advantage to retreat to a wider section of trail with more room for maneuver. "Let's talk about this."

"Sure, let's talk," the other man said. He had a spear but he dropped it to draw instead his long sword from its shoulder-belted scabbard. He continued to walk forward. "How do you like Rome, old man? Are you one of Gallienus' pimps? Maybe that's why he trusted you all this way out here."

Gallic accent, of course. Ursinus had called him Sacrovir, it must be the same one. "Hey, I've never been to Rome," the agent called. Blazes, his legs were too weak for fancy footwork. Even if the kid didn't know his business, Perennius was out of his depth now. The agent drew his dagger. He held the blade thumb-side for thrusting rather than heel-side to stab. "I was with a Fifth Legion patrol from Melitene. You helping these monsters?"

"I saw my mother after what you did to her," the young man said. He wore a mail vest whose waist and short sleeves were trimmed with leather in a zig-zag pattern. The shield had an iron boss and rim, but there was no insignia. The agent suspected the shield had been purchased somewhere nearby instead of being packed the length of Europe to get here. "Burned her alive when she wouldn't tell you what you wanted to know. When I got here, they told me you'd be coming."

The young Gaul was almost close enough to take Perennius out in a rush if the agent looked around. At least the bastard wasn't an archer, like the pair back at the inn.. . . "Who's 'they' who've been handing you such a load of crap?" Perennius demanded. He took a short step forward, then another. If he gave his attacker all the physical initiative, the younger man's charge would be overwhelming. Perennius' own scalp crawled as he glanced at the Gaul's shining helmet, bronze sheet stock stiffened with a frame of iron tubes beneath. Perennius' outfit had been chosen for protection, not for fighting. Certainly not for fighting humans. "You take the word of monsters?"

"By the gods, I saw my mother!" the young man shouted, and Sabellia came down the rocky slope at him naked but for her tunic. It failed as an attack because Sacrovir was

too skillful, and it failed as a diversion because the agent was too sluggish to take advantage of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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