Birds Of Prey

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

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

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

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

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

Perennius began to stand up. He was angry that the motion required him to put down his left hand for support.

"From Rome, you mean? No, I didn't see any of them. He must be the Sacrovir that Ursinus talked about. When he died." In the same flat voice, the agent said, "I'm going to see Gaius now. The Sun has received the soul of a brave man."

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

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

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

"Easy, I've got a foothold," Perennius said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Shit," the agent said dismally. He reached out to clasp the hand still tighter against his armored shoulder.

Perennius was looking away, toward the crags across the gorge.

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

"Aulus, that won't be necessary," the traveller said.

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

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

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

Perennius nodded. He expected the woman to stand up. After a moment's surprise, he realized his mistake. Calvus was gone from him, all right, but she had retreated not into physical distance but rather into her trance state.

The agent felt a twinge of fear, as if he were walking in front of a cocked and loaded catapult. He stood up. Whatever was happening was not directed at him.

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

Aulus Perennius had no use for failure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

figures in a great barn, framed by metal webbing. Down the long bay were hauled spidery constructs. They bulked out by accreting parts attached by the lines of humans to either side of the growing machines. Everything was glare and motion. Overhead pulleys spun belts which in turn drove tools at the direction of the workmen. The noise

was unheard but obvious from the way everything trembled, from motes of dust in the air to the greasy windows in the roof. It all danced in the abnormal clarity of the agent's vision. The crudity and raw-edged power was at contrast to the slickness of the scene immediately previous - and even more at contrast to the sterile perfection underlying the chaos of the initial set of images. It was evident to Perennius that he was seeing a regression, despite the unfamiliarity of the concept to a mind attuned to stasis rather than to change. The regression was evident, even before the workmen - all men - downed tools together and the vision shimmered to -

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

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

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

And the Emperor's face registered as he signed a document with a vermilion brush -

GAIUS AURELIUS VALERIUS DIOCLETIANUS

Perennius knelt on a narrow trail, holding a woman's cool hands and staring at his unconscious protege and friend. "Almighty Sun," the agent whispered. His mind was fusing the youthful face before him with the same face on the throne marked by thirty years more of age and power. "Gaius ..."

"I had to change him, Aulus Perennius," the tall woman said. "The shock made massive repair necessary and ... he could not have brought the revival I promised you if he remained the Gaius you knew. I'm sorry, Aulus, there was no other tool available . . . and my time is short."

"Almighty Sun," the agent repeated. He drew a shuddering breath. "Always wanted him to be a leader," Perennius went on. He leaned forward to stroke the younger man's stubbled cheek. "Always did want that, he could be a good one." The agent's eyes met Calvus'. "Not like me. I can't lead and I won't follow. Wouldn't be room for me where you come from, would there, Lucia. That's what you were showing me."

"I was showing you a progression toward order and stability in human affairs, Aulus," the woman said. Only Perennius of all living humans could hear the smile behind her flat delivery. "The realization of the goal to which you have devoted your life."

Perennius began to laugh. He could not remember an equal outpouring of gusty humor in the past twenty years. Welds in his armor broke as he hooted and bent over despite the stiffness of his casing. Objectively, the agent realized the literal madness of the scene. At a deeper level, he felt that for the first time in his adult life, his vision was clear enough to be called sane.

"Blazes!" he gasped with his palms clasped to his diaphragm. "Blazes! Well, by the time it comes, I won't be around to get in the way, will I?"

"There's still danger," Calvus said. "One of the Guardians remains."

The agent shrugged. "It going to have any hardware beyond what the other ones did?" he asked. He had resumed his task of stripping Gaius of his armor.

"It won't use area weapons that would threaten the brood it guards," said the woman cautiously. "But Aulus, the - thunderbolts - can kill despite your armor."

Perennius blew a rude sound between dry lips. "I could

be run down by a hay cart, too," he said. "And it'd serve me right if I let something like that happen."

Perennius rose to draw off the mail shirt by the sleeves. The right sleeve showed great gaps burned in the rings by the energy channeled up the out-thrust sword. The leather insulation beneath was seared, but the vaporizing iron had protected Gaius even as it burned away. "Sure," the agent said. He was puffing a little with exertion magnified by his heavy garb. "You just keep back where you won't get hurt. In a few minutes, this'll all be over and we can both start thinking about the future."

Perennius did not notice the expression that flashed across Calvus' face as she listened to him.

The first thing Perennius used his short sword on that day was a sapling from a clump of dogwoods. The blade hacked through the base of the soft trunk and pruned the lesser limbs away with single blows. There were three larger branches splaying up to form the crown, bright with shiny leaves. The agent set each branch separately on the stump. Using the stump as a chopping block, he lopped off those upper limbs a foot above their common fork. When that task was completed, Perennius had a straight, sap-globbed pole eight feet long from its base to its triple peak.

The agent wiped his sword. That only smeared the sap further over the blade's dull sheen. He swore without heat. Too much of Perennius' being was concentrated on greater problems for him really to care about a glitch which did not impair function. "Lucia," he said, "if it's not down there - the, the Guardian - it's going to be up here. Best if you - " and he looked away as he choked back the words that wanted to come, "stayed with Gaius and Bella"; but that would endanger the mission - "got back over the rim where there's some room to move. Safe enough with the dragon gone." Perennius paused. "You're cold meat for those thunderbolts, and the armor we got wouldn't fit you well enough to help."

"It'll be down there," Calvus said, "somewhere. They're raised - engineered, Aulus - never to leave the brood without an adult until the hatching. There's only one left. That's where it will be."

"That's not the best way to protect what they've got," the agent said as he draped the extra suit of mail over the forked end of his pole. "I don't like counting on the other guy to be stupid. It's a good way to get your butt reamed."

Calvus lifted her chin in disagreement. "It isn't a matter of choice," she said, "any more than it was your choice that your right hand be dominant."

"I can do a pretty fair job with my left, too," the agent said, accepting the metaphor as a judgment.

"All right, than it's choice that you don't see with your ears!" the woman snapped. She paused as she heard herself. An expression of beatific wonder spread across her face. "Aulus," she said, "I shouldn't have been able to do that. To become angry."

"Everybody gets mad," Perennius said. This time the misinterpretation was deliberate. The agent was begging the implied question of the tall woman's humanity, because he cared enough about the answer that he was not willing to hear the wrong one. Not about a friend. Blazes, he did have friends, now. "Well, we'll assume you're right till we learn different," Perennius went on. He thumbed toward the rim of the gorge. "I still want you the hell out of the way."

Calvus smiled. "You'll need light when you get into the cave."

"Listen, you wander around holding a light and you're dead," the agent said. His anger did not flare as it normally would have, because he knew the traveller was not stupid - nor even naïve enough to be saying what he seemed to have heard. "He'll just shoot past me, won't he?"

Calvus made a globe of her hands. There was a glimmering through the chinks. The flesh of her fingers themselves became translucent. She opened her hands and a glowing ball swelled out of the hollow to spin away from the woman at a walking pace. The ball continued to expand as it rolled through the air toward the far wall of the chasm. Its smooth outlines were still visible in the daylight as it blurred into the rock a quarter mile away.

Calvus quivered and came out of her trance. "A little effort involved in that," she said, slowly turning her palms to Perennius. The skin was unmarked by the cold light, as his conscious mind had known it would be. His subconscious still could not accept the fact. "But practical at a safe distance. And you'll need the light, my - Aulus."

Perennius noted the hesitation. Sliding his own sword home in its scabbard, he said, "You were going to say weapon ?

"I was going to say 'friend,' " Calvus replied.

"Well, let's go kill things," the agent said. The last word was muffled by the bronze mask. He closed it over his face and waited for Calvus to lace it shut.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Donning the face shield again was itself like entering the passageway to Hell. Perennius paced down the trail steadily, but with the caution required by the drop-off to the side. He could see very little of his surroundings in general and nothing at all of his feet. The mask eliminated normal downward vision. The way it locked to protect his throat kept him from bending his neck sharply enough to repair the deficiency. The abandon with which the agent had flung himself into the chasm initially had been required by the circumstances. It would have been out of place now. Winning in battle requires a willingness to die; but the combatant who seeks death is almost certain to find death without victory. Perennius was determined that when he got the chop, it would be because the other bastards were better - not because he himself played the fool.

Gaius' mail swayed before the agent like a banner slung from the dogwood staff. Unlike a normal banner, its shifting weight seriously interfered with balance. Every step became a doubled effort - first a motion, then a stiffening to damp the rustling iron. When the trail sloped eastward, Perennius held the shirt before him. When the trail switched back to the west, as it did twice before turning finally toward his goal, he slung the pole over his shoulder and allowed the armor to swing behind him. It was not a perfect shield, even against the first blast; but the extra armor was one more factor to concern the Guardian. From previous experience, the agent judged that the chitinous monsters did not react well to the unexpected. The fact of his own survival, however, had not made Perennius contemptuous of the thunderbolts.

The mouth of Typhon's Cavern flared upward like the wide-spread jaws of a snake. The open sky was now almost three hundred feet above the agent. As Perennius plodded forward, what remained of the dome arched overhead. The rock under his feet was smooth. Acidic ground water percolating through the limestone had dissolved away a great bubble until the roofing layer grew too thin to support its own weight. At the bottom of the cavity, the water had polished and widened the fissure through which it had drained toward the bowels of the Earth. It had formed this cave, this track to a mythical Hell ... and to a real horror quite as fearful as the imaginary one, if Calvus were to be believed.

Perennius continued to descend carefully. Already he was beneath the level of the gorge proper, though there was no sense yet of being within a cave. It was more as if night were falling around him, darkening his surroundings without physically enclosing him. Still further beneath the agent, at the point at which the cavern did narrow significantly, was a pillared, rectangular shrine. It had no roof. The natural curve of the wall protected the chapel interior perfectly, even though that curve was fifty feet above the transom.

Perennius approached cautiously. He did not draw his sword because it took both hands to control the weight of the pole-slung armor. The shrine was leveled by a low base. The pillars were short, square, and thick. They could easily have hidden a tentacled gray form, ready to blast the agent from behind if he stalked past without examining the building.

Perennius leaned the curtaining armor against the low transom. He drew his dagger but not his sword, so that his gauntleted right fist was free. Panting with tension and effort, the agent swung between close-set pillars and into the cramped nave. His mail clashed as it brushed the stone. The sound of his heart was loud in the bronze helmet encasing his head.

There was nothing in the roofless interior, no altar or

cult objects ... and surely no tripedal horror with glittering destruction in its grasp. The rasp of the agent's breath resumed, covering the thump of his pulse again. Perennius sheathed his dagger, guiding its point with his free hand into the slot which he could not see. Almighty Sun, he thought. The stone was dim around him and the further descent was black as the bowels of a corpse.

So be it. The agent slipped back outside and retrieved the dangling mail. He skirted the chapel, pausing before he went on to glance back and see that nothing had played hide and seek with him around the pillars. The smoothly-curving slope continued, and Perennius followed it.

Even in the darkness, the walls were now close enough that he could be sure that nothing could skitter around him unnoticed. As Perennius walked, a ball of cold saffron light the size of his head drifted past to precede him down the cavern. It was as if he were walking down a giant worm-track. The cave shrank only gradually, and none of its twists or falls were dangerously abrupt. It continued to descend. There were dried, straw-matted sheep droppings frequently underfoot for the first quarter mile. After that there were none.

At the base of a slippery drop of ten feet or so, Perennius passed a goat skull from which the horns had been gnawed, along with most of the associated skeleton. The animal had come further than some herdsman had been willing to seek a member of his flock. With the light before him, the scramble down the cavern was less dangerous for Perennius than had been the track along the cliffside. The pale glow drove even the cave's miniature fauna, the mice and insects, to cover in the fissures of the walls. Without a light which did not flicker, without the certainty that the footing was awkward rather than dangerous, hedged about with the myths which the light dispelled ... It was not surprising that few other humans appeared to have penetrated so far into the cave.

The air wheezed. Perennius was wrapped so tightly in his armor that his skin could not feel the brief current. It pulsed against his pupils, however, through the tiny eye-holes of his mask. A door had closed or opened near ahead.

Perennius was not alone in the cave; and not all hobgoblins were things of myth.

The agent had been able to walk upright to that point. Now the rock constricted again and the cave took a twist to the right. Perennius swore very softly and drew his dagger. He knelt, then thrust the slung armor ahead of him around the bend. Nothing happened. Light from the hovering globe spewed through the interstices of the armor, dappling Perennius and the walls around him.

The agent slid forward on his greaves. The eight-foot pole bound against the rock. Perennius shifted the knife to his right hand. He slammed his left shoulder against the pole. The dogwood flexed and sprang free. Perennius lunged around the corner himself as if the extra suit of mail were dragging him forward. The tip of the pole thudded into the seamless door which closed the passage. It could have been rock itself, save for the regular patterning which the ball of light disclosed. Whorls of shadow spun from the center. The background had no color but that of the yellowish light illuminating it.

And then the light slid forward, merged with the barrier, and disappeared.

The first thing Perennius did was to wedge his pole so that the armor hung across the face of the portal. He could not assume that what was a barrier to him barred also the Guardian and its weapons. Calvus had projected the agent into a world whose uncertainties went much deeper than questions of provincial governors and border security. It was easier to doubt whether or not a wall was solid than to worry about a line of defense a thousand miles away. In the case of the wall, there were precautions Perennius himself could take. If the question made the task more involuted, well, solving problems was the greatest merit in life.

The air had begun to smell stale at the instant the light was sucked away.

Perennius did not know what had happened to Calvus or the light, but he restrained his initial impulse to scram-

ble back through the darkness. "Some effort" the tall woman had said. Perhaps it had grown too great, forcing her to pause for a moment like a porter leaning his burden against a wall. The glow might resume any time. If Perennius were running back, it would show him as a fool and a coward - after he had insisted that he was willing to go down with no light at all.

The agent picked carefully at the barrier with the point of his dagger. The surface had the slight roughness of the limestone with which it merged at the edges. Whereas the soft rock crumbled when he scraped at it, the steel had no effect whatever on the material of the barrier. Given time, Perennius could cut away the plug intact, like a miner who encounters a huge nugget of native copper in a deep mine. Given time. Even in close quarters, even blind and encased in armor whose leather padding was slimy with sweat ...

And perhaps Calvus was a cinder blasted by the creature which now crept to eliminate the last threat. To eliminate Perennius, pinned hopelessly against the closed entrance to its lair.

The agent felt through his knees the whisper behind him which his ears could not hear for the din of blood in them.

Perennius turned. He did not shift his curtain of mail. Remembering how Gaius' spatha had caught and channeled blasts away from him, Perennius drew his own sword and advanced it toward the darkness. Sap softly resisted the steel's leaving its sheath. The blade stirred the muggy air with the odor of fresh-cut vegetation. The agent wondered if the first bolt would catapult him backwards, stunned and ready to be finished at leisure. He focused all his will down into the point of the dagger in his right hand. By the gods, he would lunge against the blue-white bolt like a boar on the spear that spitted it, determined to rend its slayer.

"Aulus," Calvus called from just around the last turning, "I needed to be closer to manipulate the barrier. I apologize for leaving you in the dark this way."

"No problem," the agent lied. "Glad you've got an answer to this wall. I sure didn't." Perennius could not find the mouth of his scabbard. His sword scraped twice on his thigh armor, then dropped to the ground so that Calvus could clutch the agent's empty hand. Her touch was firm and cooling, even through the gauntlet.

The tall woman slipped past Perennius in the narrow way. Far more awkwardly, the agent also turned. He could hear the rustle of the draped armor as Calvus reached beneath it to finger the barrier directly. "Yes ..." she murmured. Then she slid back past the agent, a whisper in the darkness. Her fingers rested at the nape of Perennius' neck, where the gorget buckled beneath the brass of the headpiece. "Be ready, Aulus Perennius," she said.

The door pivoted inward in a hundred or more narrow wedges from its circumference. The fact and the motion were limned by the glaucous light on the other side of the portal. The door's suction pulled a draft past the agent, the reverse of the pistoning thump at his approach when it had closed. A thunderbolt lashed the sudden opening and blew a gap of white fire in the heart of the ring-mail curtain.

The end of the dogwood pole had ravelled to a tangle of fibers. They were a ball of orange flame through which Perennius leaped. His optic nerves were patterned with the white lacework of blazing iron.

Within, the ground curved away in a slope. The cavity was large and spherical and as unnatural as the bilious light which pervaded it. Packed about the interior of the chamber were translucent globules the size of clenched fists. The globules were held against the rock by swathes and tendrils of material with the same neutral consistency as that of the door itself. A narrow aisle crossed the chamber, dipping and rising with the curve to an opening in the far wall. Beyond was a glimpse of another cavity, a bead on a string and certainly not the last.

Perennius cleared the threshold in the air. He missed his expected landing because of the concavity of the floor. Globules smashed between the stone and his own solid mass of flesh and iron. Ten feet from the skidding agent, the Guardian pointed its weapon and screamed. The sound was a chitinous burring with the bone-wrenching amplitude of a saw cutting stone. The creature's weapon did

not fire. The alien stood frozen as its fellow had done on the balcony in Rome. This time there was no bravo to stun Calvus and release the energy the woman's mind blocked in the weapon.

Perennius rolled to his feet. Frosty gelatine from the eggs he had crushed slurped away from his left leg and forearm. The agent had poised his dagger to throw despite the poor visibility and his constricted limbs. There was no need for him to take that risk. Two sliding steps brought him to the alien. It did not move, save that the band of cilia beneath its head quivered with its rasping scream. Perennius brought down his armored fist as if he were driving a nail with the pommel of the dagger he held. The conical head shattered. The Guardian's long waist tentacles spasmed. The energy weapon flickered out of the creature's grasp. It clattered into the layer of eggs and stuck there. The creature's braced legs did not give way, and the throat cilia continued to vibrate.

Perennius struck again. His fist was slippery and he lost the dagger at the shock. The agent could no longer see for sweat and the emotions raised by the chitinous scream. Both of his arms began to flail down into the stumpy creature. Bits of exoskeleton prodded back at the iron as the pulpy material within spattered the chamber. Perennius did not know when the screaming stopped. His next awareness was the touch of Calvus' hand on his shoulder and the way the whole world focused down to a point as his muscles gave way.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The air in the chamber felt cool beyond the fact that Perennius breathed it without the mask's constriction. Reaction from his berserk rage could only have left him unconscious for seconds. The tall woman had already stripped Perennius of his helmet, gauntlets, and greaves.

"You have to get out of here quickly," Calvus said. She rolled the agent over on his belly unceremoniously to get at the catches closing his mail shirt. "I'm taking your armor off because it will save time over all."

"What do you mean?" the agent demanded of the floor of the aisle. He did not twist against the woman's manipulations. He accepted her good faith; and in any case, Perennius could not have resisted her if she were as serious as she appeared to be. "We're not done till we smash all the - " Calvus flopped him over again and began drawing both sleeves over his arms simultaneously - "eggs, are we?" Perennius gestured with the right hand that was cleared in that instant.

"Aulus," the woman said, "please run. I won't be able to give you light, and I want to be sure you get clear." The chamber was distinctly colder, though the frosty glow with which it had been suffused was being supplanted by a warmer hue.

"Lucia, what's going on?" Perennius pleaded. He stood up. Reflexively he wiped at ichor that had splashed his left wrist, but he did not move toward the doorway.

"I was the only kind of hardware they - we - could send back," Calvus said. She took one of the agent's hands in each of hers. Her flesh was warmer than human. "There aren't any choices now for me, Aulus. I wasn't raised for there to be any choices once I reached the brood chambers."

The tall woman swallowed, holding the agent's stricken eyes with her own. She continued, "I have no gods to pray by, my friend. But my greatest hope is that when you leave here, you will remember that you do have choices. I - I have enjoyed working with you, Aulus Perennius. I respect you as a tool; and I think you know me well enough by now to hear that as the praise it is. But I respect you as a man as well . . . and I have been close enough to humanity in the time I've spent with you that I - wish you the chance of happiness that tools don't have."

She bent over and kissed Perennius. Her lips were hot. The chamber swam in a rosy, saturated light like that of iron being forged.

"Goodbye, Lucia," the agent said. His sense of direction saved him as he turned and bolted for the exit. Even in the lighted brood chamber, Perennius was blinded by tears that turned images into faceted jewels.

On the scramble back through the darkness, Perennius functioned by giving himself utterly to the task at hand. It was the way he had always functioned. It worked no worse this time for the fact he had found a willingness to live in other ways. There were no side branchings. The passage was a single artery to Hell. There were stretches in which the slope jogged into what would have been rapids when rainwater foamed down the cavern. They were difficult but not impossible, even without light. Perennius had scrambled through dark buildings and light-less camps in the past, trusting the senses which remained. Those senses had preserved him from the blades of those intent on his life. The agent was exhausted, but leaving behind the sweaty burden of his armor had freed his spirit ... and the muscles would do as the spirit demanded, as they always had.

Calvus' touch was still a memory in his flesh - but not in his mind; Perennius could not afford her in his mind until he had carried out her last injunction.

The cavern was lighted for him long before eyes which had not adapted to total blackness would have seen even a glow. Light bounced into the gorge and threw a hazy grayness down the funneled throat of the cavern. Some of it seeped further down the twisting stone pathway. Even to Perennius' retinas, the amount of light was too little to see by. But it was a brightening goal, a proof of the success he had never permitted himself to doubt.

Where the cave flared around the last major turning, the smooth stone grew light enough to have a visible pattern. Perennius threw his head up. The little chapel was in black contrast to the sky which streamed light through the open roof and past the interstices of the pillared wall. Beside the building, haloed by her back-lit red hair, Sabellia was scrambling down the path into the cave. The head of the spear she carried winked.

"Back, Bella, back!" Perennius called in horror. His intended roar was a gasp. His legs for the first time quivered noticeably with fatigue.

"Aulus?" the woman called. "Aulus?" Her eyes saw only a tremble of motion from the cave. Sabellia slid down a dangerous shelf of rock rather than take the path which wound around it.

"Wait!" cried Perennius. Unconquered Sun, Creator and Sustainer of life, give me now the strength I need. The agent lowered his head and began to run up the zig-zag path. It was easy to believe that the Sun is a god when one stumbled out of Hell. And it is easy to believe in gods when there is no longer help in oneself for one's beloved.

Sabellia could see the agent now. She paused. She had heard his command, but there was more to her hesitation than that. Something in the air was wrong. The woman switched from hand to hand the spear she had found near Sacrovir when she herself regained consciousness.

Perennius had not permitted himself to look up the slope again. It would have thrown him off-stride, and he knew full well that a stumble might be the end. "Please run, darling," he wheezed. "Please run."

Sabellia threw her hand out to grasp the agent's in welcoming and fear. She obeyed as the agent had earlier obeyed Calvus. It was a time when trust had to replace understanding. Sabellia's weapon dropped and rolled clanging toward the cave from which Perennius had come. She took the agent's hand in her own, not to hold him but to add her own fresher strength to his as they pounded up the final leg of pathway.

The air their lungs dragged in had a searing dryness to it. Perennius, to whom every breath had been fiery with exertion, did not notice the change. Sabellia's grip on his hand tensed. The base and pillars of the chapel had taken on a rosy glow from the light they reflected. The light behind the couple cast their shadows on the stone.

"Aulus!" Sabellia shouted.

The agent threw her and himself sideways on the ground, shielded by the squat building as a glare like that of molten steel raved from the throat of Typhon's Cavern.

Sunlight past the pillars in the other direction had been a cool white. The light which seared from the cavern now was white also, but white of a palpable intensity that made the air scream. It calcined the stone it touched. Perennius remembered Calvus' eyes and the scenes he had watched through them, the blasts ripping rock and the crawling aliens. He understood now the weapons Calvus' folk had chosen to replace the mechanical ones which had failed them against the aliens.

The gout of fire shifted from white through yellow to red, so suddenly that the intermediate step was an impression rather than a sight. The rosy glow lingered somewhat longer. It was diluted by the radiance of the cave walls themselves until they cooled. There seemed to be no sound at all until Sabellia whispered, "Aulus? Is it over?"

Perennius was carefully spreading his bare hands. Part of his mind found it amazing that the play of muscles and tendons beneath the skin proceeded in normal fashion. "Sure, it's over," he said. He did not look at his companion. "She wouldn't have failed, would she?"

"Then we can - " the woman began. She started to grasp one of the agent's hands again, but the motion stopped as her voice had when she saw his face. After a moment Sabellia resumed, "Aulus, your job is over too, then. We could ... you know. Quintus was going to retire with me, after this mission was completed...." She stared

at her own fingertips, afraid of what she might see elsewhere.

Perennius laughed. He put an arm around Sabellia's shoulders. "Retire?" he said. "My, you'd make an administrator, wouldn't you?" The agent quelled the trembling of his arm by squeezing Sabellia the tighter. "I'll make a pretty good administrator too, I think. Time I got out of the field." He glanced at the burnt stone overhead and out toward the sunlit gorge in which a dragon and other things lay. They would be beginning to rot. "I'm getting too old for this nonsense."

Sabellia touched the hand on her right shoulder. "You didn't think," she said, switching deliberately from Latin to the Allobrogian dialect she shared with the agent's youth, "that you could survive the frustrations of a bureau."

Perennius laughed again. "That," he said, "was when we were losing." He stood up with the clumsiness demanded by muscles cramped in his legs and torso. "The job's still got to be done. It doesn't have to be a - religion, now that I know we're going to win."

The woman took his offered hand. She was careful not to put any weight on the battered agent as she rose herself. "We?" she repeated. "You and Gallienus?"

"Civilization," Perennius said, "as I guess I was raised to mean it." He used Calvus' term "raised" in pity and in homage. The image of Gaius in imperial regalia rippled beneath memory of the traveller's calm face.

"Need to convince that Gallic kid," Perennius said as he and the woman began climbing the path, "that I didn't kill his mother. Blazes! With the things I've done, people don't need to imagine reasons to hate me."

"I thought I was coming to kill him myself," Sabellia said, looking at her hand and the agent's. "But he was lying there, so young, and I ... If you left him alive, Aulus, I would."

The agent paused and turned the woman gently to face him. A spray of dogwood overhung the trail edge. It brushed Sabellia's hair with white flowers. "I've been making an assumption," Perennius said. "I've been assuming that you'd want to come with me. As my wife."

"Oh, thank God," Sabellia said. She stepped closer, hugging Perennius with a fierce joy.

Perennius nuzzled her red hair. When he closed his eyes, he thought he could feel Calvus watching them with a smile.