Killer

by David Drake

  "I'm a Roman citizen," Sempronianus said, his voice cracking in the middle of the clause. He clamped his thin arms across his chest in a pitiful attempt to deny purchase to the soldiers reaching toward the bed. "What are you doing to me?"

  Soldiers lifted the naked, squealing boy, one by each arm, while the centurion stood grinning, arms akimbo. One of the Praetorians pinched the boy's buttocks with his free hand. "Hey," he said cheerfully, "save this one out. Be a crime to send him to the arena."

  "Quintus," said the soldier holding the little gunsel's other arm, "this is the wrong outfit to talk about seeing how boys lasso the ram. Unless you want to see the Amphitheater from the inside yourself." He gave a meaningful nod toward their commanding officer.

  Together, the Praetorians handed their slight burden to a servant to be tied. "A-arena?" whispered the schoolmaster.

  "Get up, Greekling," ordered the centurion in the silky voice of a man who would just as soon meet resistance.

  Lycon stepped into view around the centurion's blocky torso. "Good evening, Gaius Sempronianus," the beastcatcher said. "I heard you'd gone to spend some time with a brother in Akragas, folks in the apartment thought. I'm glad it was a short visit."

  "You were condemned," Sempronianus said in a voice choking with awe and dawning awareness. "To the arena."

  The centurion kicked away one leg of the bed. The frame scrunched down, tipping the schoolmaster onto the floor. "I thought I said get up," the centurion grated.

  "You know," Lycon said, "for a while there, I really wanted to talk to you about the education you were giving my son . . . but one thing and another came up, and now there isn't much point in that after all. It made me think you might be the perfect man to serve our god and lord in a special way, though."

  "Oh Zeus, Father Omnipotent!" shrieked Sempronianus as he squirmed on his belly to clutch the beastcatcher's ankles. "Oh dear master Lycon, you mustn't send me to the arena, I swear by the bones of my mother I never touched your Alex—"

  The centurion, to whom Lycon had talked about Sempronianus while the section formed up in barracks, kicked the schoolmaster hard enough in the ribs to lift him off the floor. The soldier rubbed the toe of his foot against the calf of the leg on which he balanced. Looking over to the beastcatcher, he said, "It doesn't really dirty your hands to touch his like, you know? But there isn't any need, either. I mean, why not use your foot?"

  The centurion had mentioned that he had three sons of his own, the eldest just turned twelve.

  "It wasn't so much what he did to Alexandros," Lycon said. "It was when I figured out that he'd made the boy like it. I wouldn't dare touch him." His voice was trembling, just as were the big muscles in his arms and legs. He was not tight but rather janglingly loose like the links of an iron chain. The beastcatcher turned away and slapped at a wall, not particularly hard. He was trying to burn off the nervous energy that surged through him and made it hard for him to stand, much less talk.

  "Keep that one separate," the centurion said to the servants bending over Sempronianus with their lengths of cord. "That one comes with us to the compound of Claudius Vonones. The rest of the household is transferred to the arena for tomorrow's games." He smiled down at the schoolmaster, twisting like a salted slug. "Slave and free alike, Greekling," he said in a voice as harsh as the hobnails which had lifted Sempronianus. "To convince you of just how serious the Emperor is that you do everything master Lycon here tells you to do."

  "Because if I touched him," Lycon said as he struck the wall again, with both hands this time, and the heels of them, hard enough to make a bronze lamp jounce on its bracket, "then I'd kill him myself for sure. And I need him alive.

  "I really need him alive . . ."

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The guards hired by the owner of the property watched Vonones and his crew—crews—with the universal interest of idlers for workmen. The guards—off-duty members of the Watch, in this case—had been placed to keep looters and tenants out of the smoldering rubble of the apartment block until the owner settled with a contractor for rebuilding. The Armenian merchant would have been willing to treat with the owner for access, but that was likely to cause delay and curiosity—besides which, the guards themselves could be squared for ten obols, the price of a quick lay for all five members of the contingent. Saving money was not a primary purpose; but saving money was never wholly apart from Vonones' purpose either.

  The slave gang he had hired from a building contractor was doing the heavy work of moving stones and charred timbers. Trusted members of the Armenian's own staff watched as each lifted structural element exposed lesser rubble and a cloud of ash. Even four days after the event, there were still hot spots in the wreckage. Once when a beam was lifted away, there was a gush of flames as fresh air touched the blanket swaddling the body of an infant. The construction workers were familiar with the hazard: building in Rome usually meant building on burned-over premises, even when the fire had been the result rather than the cause of the previous structure's collapse. The beast handlers cursed and hopped and threw sidelong glances at their master . . . but none of them complained aloud. Vonones' temper at present was like a sheet of glass: it was apt to break without warning, and the jagged shards resulting were extremely dangerous.

  At the moment, the Armenian watched while two of his own staff shoveled ash from the area of the stairwell onto a sieve—intended for concrete preparation—shaken by four of the construction gang. Ash that looked like smoke and smelled like corpses drifted down the breeze, while anything larger than mid-sized gravel caught in the wooden meshes. One of the men emptied his shovel onto the grate and swung back to rubble to refill it.

  "Hold up," Vonones said, sharply enough that the sieve crew froze also, an unintended result but not unfortunate. Dust continued to drift and settle. The animal dealer stepped closer, regardless of the way his sandals and the lower edge of his tunic turned gray. He shifted to his left hand the whip he carried—an enigma to the construction workers, and the one overt sign of the terror Vonones felt at revisiting the site of the sauropithecus' former lair. Very delicately, he reached onto the sieve and plucked from the wood and plaster and bits of bone the object he had come to retrieve.

  The men with shovels poised expectantly. One of the construction workers leaned over for a closer look. He drew back abruptly with a grimace. "By Apis' dong!" he blurted, "it's a spider!"

  "No," said Vonones in a voice congealed by terror at what he was doing.

  The creature he held had four legs rather than eight, and in size it more nearly approximated a large crab. The limbs and body were scaled, not segmented; and where they had been shaken free of ash, the scales were blue. In death it was shrunken so that the clawed feet and hands hugged its own caved-in chest and the flesh of the face was pulled back from the tiny, glittering teeth.

  Vonones had not gotten a clear look at the larval monsters in the loft, even this one that Lycon had crushed against the wall as they broke free. His memory of the adult, from the hours he had seen it caged in the distant past, had filled in what he thought was a picture of the offspring. In fact, this flat-bodied creature was far less humanoid than the mother-thing, and even more disturbing.

  Vonones dropped it into the leather sack he had brought for the purpose and pulled the drawstrings tight. He handed the container to one of the men with a shovel. It was not obvious that his right hand was shaking, but the staff of the whip trembled like a palm tree in a windstorm.

  "We've got what we came for," the animal dealer called, overriding the tremor in his voice by sheer volume. "You can down tools. We're going back to the compound." He paused. "And keep your eyes open," he added, without specifying the reason for vigilance—because he did not care to make his fear concrete in his own mind.

  The workmen obeyed with a noisy enthusiasm, tossing their equipment into the builder's cart which had been hired along with the construction gang. Vonones' own employees were more circumspect; and when they handed
over their tools, they took from the wagon the nets and lassos which their master had ordered them to carry on the march back. The four archers who had watched the proceedings with arrows nocked fell in at the front and rear of the forming column.

  "Good work, chief," one of the guards called.

  Vonones nodded without really hearing the words. Any one of the offspring would do, Lycon had said, and the beastcatcher was quite certain that the little creatures were tough enough that the body of at least one would exist despite the chances of fire and tumbling stone.

  The Armenian dealer had been far more doubtful of success: his memory of flames clawing the sky was vivid and had been strengthened by his subconscious desire that all the events of the night be washed as clean as quicklime.

  But of this Vonones was certain: Lycon would have whatever he said was needed to capture the sauropithecus if that thing were in the Armenian's gift.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The temple had been dedicated to a female deity, very possibly Venus in one of her manifestations. Roman gods, unlike those of the Greeks, had tended to be very circumscribed in the extent of their powers. Jupiter Greatest and Best was no more the same—spirit—as Jupiter Stayer of Armies than the Claudius who built the Appian Way was the same as the Claudius who ordered the invasion of Britain five centuries later . . . and indeed, the latter connection may have been the less tenuous.

  That was changing, had changed already since Roman armies had stormed through Greece—and Greek ideas, held as haughtily as the eagle standards of Aemilius Paullus, had taken Rome in turn. The newer temples were Graecicized and eclectic, universal as the emperors wished their rule to be universal. Above all, the cult of the reigning emperor. Scarcely less prominent, the Goddess Rome who personified not a city but the imperial rule. And even the foundations to deities whose names would have been familiar to the Romans who broke Hannibal, Jupiter and Venus and Minerva were cast now in a foreign mold.

  A side effect of the distaste for the localized spirits of ancestral Rome was that this small temple and a hundred like it were falling into ruin . . . and that suited Lycon's present purpose very well indeed.

  "Lycon, you're too old for this!" Vonones said, wringing his right hand with his left, his thumb polishing knuckles mottled with the pressure of their grip of the whipstock.

  N'Sumu looked around, shifting his feet instead of depending on the rotation of his neck to give a panorama of his surroundings. His nostrils did not flare—they did not move when he breathed, either—but he said, "It's very close, I tell you, its smell is all over. Standing here like this puts us at its mercy."

  "Well, I'm not going to get any younger, am I?" said Lycon as he tied off the thongs that closed his body armor of iron hoops. It was of military pattern, giving enough play to his torso that he could at need cast a net, but solid enough to stop a well-thrown spear. Whether or not it would stop the claws of the lizard-ape, pricking through the interstices between the bands of iron, was a question which could be answered only in the event.

  Looking over at the tall Egyptian, the beastcatcher added, "It doesn't have any mercy, Master N'Sumu. Let's say 'at its whim,' shall we?"

  "Lycon, nothing that's happened is a reason for you to kill yourself," the Armenian went on. "You were the best, and you're very good—I know. But there are younger men we could pay to do this and do it better."

  "Do exactly what?" N'Sumu demanded. His hands were generally hidden beneath his toga, but at intervals one or the other palm would flash into sight as the Egyptian saw something . . . or thought he did.

  "Put it down to whim," said the beastcatcher, before the helmet he lowered over his head hid his smile.

  Unlike the thorax armor, Lycon's helmet was a gladiatorial style. It was a bronze basinet, an ogive rising to a peak and surrounded by a flat brim a hand's breadth wide. The face, instead of being open as in a military helmet, was covered with a grill of heavy bronze rings—sturdy enough to turn a swordcut if not a thrust by a good blade with a strong man behind it. Lycon hinged the grill closed and latched it. His face disappeared. The full moon highlighted the polished bronze rings so that the shadowed flesh beneath became as insubstantial as air. The beastcatcher lifted his net, one identical in design to that which had been fretted to bits in holding the immature sauropithecus.

  "You won't need that to capture the beast," said N'Sumu, nodding toward the short sword belted at the beastcatcher's waist.

  The brim of Lycon's helmet lifted in agreement. Unemotionally, his voice slightly muffled by the grillwork, the beastcatcher said, "Guess you've got a point there." He did not move to unbuckle the weapon.

  The night was very still, surprisingly still, perhaps because the low arches of the Appian Aqueduct passed directly behind the temple and effectively separated the old building from the northern nine-tenths of the city. The temple stood on a low pedestal, with four columns across the front supporting an extension of the roof and a similar number of pilasters along either side of the enclosed sanctuary. The triangular pediment was decorated by a face and an inscription, both presumably those of the original founder of the temple; but the bas relief was not classifiable even as to sex, and the words were shadows made illegible by discolorations of the underlying stone. The columns had simple Doric capitals, but their shafts were unfluted and the soft stone from which they were carved had pitted badly, especially where the circular section had been joined by iron cramps.

  It had never been a prepossessing structure. Now, with the roof half fallen into the sanctuary and the polarized light of the full moon accentuating the flaws pitilessly from above, the temple had the feeling of something to be found on the Street of Tombs outside the city walls.

  Five streets met in the plaza which the temple fronted. Two bent around the front of an unusually large apartment block whose ground floor shops opened onto an inner courtyard. The lowest level of the brick facade was pierced only by two doorways: a normal-sized one giving access to the apartments in the upper stories, and a great stone-arched driveway through which goods wagons as well as customers could enter the courtyard.

  The third floor—above the shops and the dwellings of the shop keepers—seemed to be given over to the suites of the wealthy. At that level, a loggia was corbelled out over the street. Planting boxes on the tiled roof of the loggia indicated that the inhabitants of the fourth story drew some benefit from the structure as well. The fountain serving the area was built against the wall of the apartment building, between the two doorways, instead of being sited in the center of the plaza. The fountain was something over eighty feet from the doors of the temple across from it.

  N'Sumu looked around again, his eyes opaque, and hugged himself in what was clearly a response to the shudder which did not appear on the surface of his rich bronze skin. "You're unbalanced," he said aloud in angry wonder. "It could attack at any time—from anywhere—and you stand here in the open."

  Lycon's helmet turned to the Egyptian. "It had a chance to kill me under the Amphitheater," the beastcatcher said softly. "It passed me by. I think I'll have to give it a reason to change its mind about leaving me alive."

  "It didn't pass me by," N'Sumu snapped. He hugged himself again, and the agitation which never seemed to enter his tone showed itself in the sudden volume with which he spat out the words. "It knows that it's safe if it can kill me!"

  "Does it know that?" asked the voice from the bronze grillwork. "Then you'd best get out of danger, hadn't you?" The helmet nodded toward the leaves of the sanctuary door, behind Vonones and the bronze man.

  Vonones reached for his friend, hesitated, and then transferred the whip to his left hand to grip Lycon with his right. "Goddess Fortune be with you, my friend," he said, and he sounded as if he wished that he could truly believe in any god, even Chance.

  Lycon chuckled, and it might have been the helmet's constriction which made the sound that of a drowning man. He clasped Vonones' arm, hand to wrist, then released the merchant and shook him
self. The bronze and the iron armor had the same pale sheen in the colorless moonlight. The beastcatcher touched the net slung over his left shoulder, but he did not transfer it to his hand for ready use as he stumped off across the plaza.

  N'Sumu watched the armored Greek with a stride as careless as that of a male lion at the height of his powers. The eye Vonones watched in profile flickered from sandy opaqueness to the abnormal, glittering clarity which was nonetheless normal for N'Sumu. "Do you know what he intends to do?" the Egyptian demanded without looking away from Lycon's back. The beastcatcher was nearing the apartment building opposite.

  "I think so," said Vonones. "I'm afraid I do." Then he added, "Let's get inside."

  There was a large party of animal-handlers in the courtyard of the apartment block; most of them trained in the arena rather than the field but the best that could be assembled in Rome on the present schedule. Vonones had as little confidence in their ability to capture the lizard-ape in time as he did in the hope that Lycon's armor would preserve him for more than one swipe of the beast's talons. A creature which could unlock a cage with its claws was unlikely to be seriously deterred by protection which did not cover the throat or the great arteries of its victim's thighs.

  Such benefit as the sword could bring would be effectively posthumous; and even that was doubtful.

  N'Sumu opened the sanctuary door whose corroded hinges had proven more of an obstacle than the padlock which Lycon had struck off in preparation for this night. Temples were centers of ceremony, not worship. In all likelihood, this sanctuary had not been opened in eighty years, ever since the Emperor Augustus had refurbished and rededicated it and scores of similar temples in superficial homage to the ancient values which his programs were undermining.