by David Drake
The door had double leaves which pivoted inward. Before they had swung open a hand's breadth—too narrow a slit to pass even a creature as lithe as the sauropithecus—the Egyptian paused. A beam of light, tinged slightly with blue and seemingly as palpable as a jet of water, gushed into the sanctuary and flooded the walls, floor, and ceiling. Only then did N'Sumu open the door leaves the rest of the way so that he and the Armenian could enter. The light appeared to have come from somewhere on his chest; but his toga was unmarked and unremarkable, and Vonones had only memory and the afterimage to assure him that the light had existed at all.
"If you're worried about it getting in b-before us," the animal dealer said with the hint of a stutter despite his attempts to control it, "it could be behind those." His whip nodded toward one of the door leaves, then the other. At the moment, he was more afraid of N'Sumu than he was of the sauropithecus itself.
"No, it couldn't," said the Egyptian as he stepped into the sanctuary. There was no reason not to hide what had happened, because neither Vonones nor Lycon would survive the capture of the phile. They knew too much, and they had made dangerously accurate extrapolations from what they knew. Still, the emissary saw no reason to add that the light would have stained itself bloody red had it played over the crouching form of the creature they sought.
The walls of the sanctuary were not pierced by windows, but several square feet of roof tile had blown off in past years to let in a dim column of moonlight like the sun drawing water through a break in the clouds. Vonones' eyes adapted to see in a room ten feet square and perhaps thirteen feet to the ridgepole. The cult statue had been replaced at the time the temple was reconstructed; but the replacement was of wood also and had decayed thoroughly during decades of neglect. Splits along the grain of the wood had cracked off much of the paint from the limbs and features of the goddess, and the torso had not been painted at all: a robe would be draped over the figure in the unlikely event of a ceremony at this shrine. The statue had less character in the moonlight than did the water-marks on the interior stucco of the walls.
The Armenian looked upward sharply, as the fact of the moonlight made him consider the opening through which it fell. But the Egyptian—and almost certainly Lycon, when he chose the location, though he had not said anything about it—had already considered and rejected that concern. Though the tiles were gone, the framing members of the roof were spaced too tightly for the beast to enter between them. That it could tear its way through beams which rain and the sun's heat had gutted of their strength was probable; but the delay would leave it at the mercy of whatever force it was that N'Sumu controlled.
That thought aroused a more serious question. The animal dealer shifted so that he could see past the bronze-skinned man and out through the hand's-breadth slit to which N'Sumu had again closed the sanctuary doors. Lycon's armored figure had disappeared into the apartment building where he claimed to have stowed the remainder of his paraphernalia for this operation. The distance between the temple and the entrances to the apartment block had seemed short when the three men had been standing outside the sanctuary—a clout shot for an archer, certainly. But it was not archers involved this time . . . not that an arrow could be more than an instrument of revenge, for only if the lizard-ape were gripped by someone sure to be its victim would it be unable to dodge the missile.
Aloud, Vonones said, "Master N'Sumu, will you be able to strike the creature down from this distance?"
The Egyptian did not look away from the facade of the building opposite. "I should be closer," he muttered. "Perhaps he'll lead it this way." He turned his head and added more sharply, "You understand that I can't afford to hit your friend Lycon instead of the beast?"
"Yes, of course," said Vonones, who misunderstood.
"The sauropithecus will give me only one opportunity," N'Sumu explained, "just as it did the first time. If I waste that chance, it will certainly deal with me before it finishes off your friend."
In a neutral voice, and returning his eyes to the empty doorways of the apartment block, Vonones said, "I see what you mean." He did, and he was more uncomfortable than ignorance had permitted him to be. His whip nodded in time with the angry pulse in his throat.
"Lycon," he added sharply, and the whip bobbed and held.
The man in armor stepped into the plaza, not from the arch to the courtyard as Vonones had expected but from the stairwell entrance giving onto the apartments above. He looked around, the motion and implied hesitation exaggerated by the rimmed globe of his helmet. His right hand touched the pommel of his sword, despite the fact that he already held a net with that hand.
N'Sumu noted the movement and said aloud, "You understand, Gaius Vonones—and your friend does—how the Emperor would react if his prize were killed instead of being captured?" He continued to face the opening and Lycon on the plaza beyond, but his eyes glanced sideways once and again to determine the Armenian's expression.
"Yes, I think I understand my lord and god as well as a barbarian from Nubia can be expected to do," Vonones said in a savagely controlled voice. The tremble of the whipstock increased, but the Armenian kept his eyes trained on the figure in armor. "And I think I understand Lycon as well."
As if he were a juggler on the stage, the figure in moonlight tossed something in the air. He tried but failed to catch it, betrayed by the lighting and the full-coverage helmet. His hobnails sparked visibly against the cobblestones of the plaza as he deliberately scuffed the object against the wall of the building before he picked it up again.
"Where did he get that?" N'Sumu snapped, his eyes once more beads of stone. He had kept his hands on the door leaves, blocking them to a safe approximation of being closed. Now in angry amazement, the Egyptian drew the doors further ajar.
"I gave it to him," said the animal dealer, satisfied for the first time in—far too long—by N'Sumu's obvious discomfiture. He had not known until that moment what it was that Lycon intended for the crushed remains of the lizard-ape's offspring. "From the site of the fire. This one, at least, was covered by masonry and not cremated." As Zoe and the children had been cremated, Vonones thought, and their ashes strewn in the Tiber—safe from further defilement by the creature Lycon had hunted. . . .
In the plaza below, the little corpse flew into the air again and slapped audibly against the brick facade before it fell back. This time the boot was planted squarely on it and ground against the pavement.
"If he kills it," N'Sumu said, his anger an aura as it could not be an overtone in his voice, "he and you and every member of your household will be killed in the most savage ways the Emperor can imagine. Does he know that?"
"I know that," said Vonones. The figure in the plaza had paused and was fumbling at the iron-studded apron which protected the thighs beneath the hooped body armor. "Perhaps," the Armenian said with a tinge of hope which irritated him but could not be suppressed, "the beast is nowhere around after all."
"I tell you, you mud-sucking primitive, it is nearby!" shouted the bronze-skinned man as the man in armor began to urinate on the lizard-ape's dead offspring and the adult launched itself from beneath a sewer grating.
The slotted stone cover was still lifting with the impetus that had thrust it aside, though the creature it had hidden was a dozen feet away with its foreclaws locked on the bronze helmet. A set of male human genitalia was spinning through the air much as the infant sauropithecus had done moments before. The screams of the present victim were muffled by the grillwork over his face and the blue-scaled killer clinging to it as both went over in the momentum of the attack.
N'Sumu was through the temple doors and out past the columns in front more quickly than he had ever moved before. Despite that, the pudgy animal dealer was racing across the cobblestones of the plaza just behind the Egyptian. There was no sign of the beast-handlers who should have poured out of the courtyard in response to Vonones' shouts if not the screams of the victim himself.
The sauropithecus hunched, locking i
ts hind legs at the victim's right armpit just beneath the iron shoulder flaps. It kicked downward with its claws interlocking like a battery of flensing knives. All the muscles of the arm, from shoulder to wrist, were carved off and flung away. The right hand, still clutching the bundled net and with a skein of bare tendons twisting behind it, sailed off on a separate trajectory. The body armor and helmet rang discordantly as they and the man within them struck the pavement.
Lycon cast his own net from the third-story balcony and vaulted the rail to follow it. He had stripped off his armor, though the victim he had chosen to bait the lizard-ape into view wore another identical set to save the time otherwise to be lost in exchanging the awkward hardware. When the beastcatcher gave up his helmet and body armor, however, he did not lay aside his sword. It was naked in his left hand as he dropped.
Lycon had a jump of two stories and the height of a balcony rail—twenty feet and more to stone pavers. The shock, if he landed correctly, would not be incapacitating—and the risk of landing wrong, of the base of his spine smashing down as his feet skidded on slick stone, was not a factor in Lycon's choice of plan.
For choice, he would have jumped with the net gripped in his hand. He had seen how quickly the lizard-ape moved, however, and he was unwilling to risk the chance that the bulk of his own body would warn the beast while the net itself could descend unremarked as a shimmer of moonlight.
Even in the killing rage that had ripped it from safety into the open plaza, the sauropithecus was aware of its surroundings. A portion of its brain had registered and ignored Vonones with the whip he carried—and had registered N'Sumu as what he was, not the persona he feigned on this planet. The creature had once been captured by the emissary; that would not happen again. Its hind claws buried themselves in the thigh of the schoolmaster Sempronianus—the decoy Lycon had provided to lure it from the sewers. Then, using its own hip-joint as a fulcrum, the creature twisted the victim's armored head and torso up as a buffer between itself and a bolt from the emissary's upraised palm.
Instead of trying to drop the net on its target, Lycon had given it a spin on an axis centered upon the snarling head of the lizard-ape beneath. The brass weights, verdigreed and deliberately unpolished, arced the edges outward as the net fell. The beast, warned by the flicker of shadow on the moonlit brick, tried to unlock its claws and leap from the schoolmaster's howling body.
The silken net, cast with an expert's touch, settled about slayer and slain like flame over oil.
The emissary, thirty feet distant and as shocked by the turn of events as the creature he hunted, screamed a curse in no human language as Sempronianus went silent in a haze of green which should instead have bathed the sauropithecus.
The beast was quick, but the net had dropped quickly enough. While the man who cast it was still in the air, the pattern of silken meshes touched the creature which was trying to spring away. The interrupted spin snatched the weights inward at a velocity which rose geometrically as the radius shortened. The lizard-ape, doubled in on itself like a chicken trussed for the market, somersaulted to the pavement as Lycon crashed down beside it.
The beastcatcher took the shock on his flexed knees, his balance perfect as it had to be. His hobnails bit and held: the slightest angle between them and the stone on which they sparked would have slid Lycon to the pavement with an incapacitating crash. The sword in his hand dipped under its momentum, touching but only touching the stone. Then the sword rose again and Lycon stepped forward, his grin as cold and inexorable as the edge of the steel in his hand.
With more than bestial intelligence—and more than human cunning—the lizard-ape had slid one arm through the meshes and gripped the silken cocoon from the outside. Instead of vainly attempting to push the net aside, the creature pulled against the anchoring thrust of its legs. The cords, even silk, gave as the black eyes glared murder and Lycon's sword ripped downward.
There was death in N'Sumu's eyes also. The emissary, running with the awkwardness of a wildebeest but covering ground as swiftly as that clumsy antelope as well, was a stride short of physical contact as his lethal palm turned to Lycon's back. Vonones, six feet behind N'Sumu, had already committed in the fashion instinct had warned him he would have to do. The merchant had not permitted himself to think about it, nor about the certain results, until the lash of his whip curled about the Egyptian's wrist. Reflex set Vonones' feet while N'Sumu's skidded out from under him as his palm lifted.
A pigeon roosting under the eaves sixty feet in the air disintegrated in a green flash while N'Sumu, Lycon and the beast crashed together like inexpert handball players.
The sauropithecus was least affected by the collision, but the net still wrapped its head and lower body. It slashed at what it could reach, willing to die so long as first it could kill. N'Sumu's scream changed in mid-note as the claws which had just been pulled out of Sempronianus' body now raked the emissary. Then Lycon thrust, finding the scales tough but no match for his sword or his resolution.
N'Sumu, not the lizard-ape, cried out again and tried to roll away. The emissary's right hand may have been trying to caress the terrible damage to his face, but Vonones could not afford to take chances now. He jerked on the stock of his whip. N'Sumu's palm twitched back from its chosen course like a fish played on a heavy line.
Lycon withdrew the short, heavy blade of his weapon, a smooth reversal of the thrust that had fleshed it, until the arm of the sauropithecus shot out with the quickness that had torn a tiger's throat apart. The claws clicked and held on the slight waist of the blade, an inch beneath the crossguard and the flesh of Lycon's hand.
The creature grinned. There was a slot in the taut, scaled skin over its ribcage like a cross-section of the blade at its widest point: a finger's length by a finger's breadth, and the beastcatcher had felt paving stones grate against his point to end the thrust. He smiled as if he or the scaly thing were a mirror image of the other; and he drew back on his sword against the thing which gripped it as if a hand and claws could be harder than a steel edge.
The claw points left deep gouges as they slid along the metal until the blade's double edges had severed all the tendons in the scaly hand.
Lycon had thrust from the half-sprawled, half-kneeling position into which N'Sumu's impact had thrown him. Now he stood and backed a step while he looked down at the creature half-bound by the net he had thrown. One clawed digit gleamed like a sapphire brooch from the cobblestones, a few inches from the hand from which it had been cut. The ichor which pulsed from the lizard-ape's torn chest was too nearly transparent to color the scales beneath it, but the creature's belly shone liquidly in the bathing moonlight.
The beast's arms were still moving slightly, but it was not trying to squeeze life back in through the fatal swordcut as a man would do, as most men would do. It was reaching for Lycon, the way Lycon would have reached for it were he on the stones with his belly torn away. And they smiled at one another, the killers, until the light went out of the eyes of the one with blue scales and the other stumbled because his knees no longer needed to support him.
Vonones did instead, catching his friend from behind and easing him backward while the sword rang disregarded on the pavement.
"Won't bring Zoe back," whispered the beast-catcher. "But I beat it, and it knew it there at the end. It knew that I'd won."
Dead, the netted lizard-ape was as formless as a shrouded insect found hanging from a spiderweb: unpleasant for its associations, but quite harmless now. The other two figures sprawled in the plaza were moaning.
Vonones had assumed the man wearing armor was dead, as anyone who had received such injuries deserved to be. Shock seemed to have pinched off the blood vessels which should have nourished the man's right arm and leg—now bones and ragged tangles of flesh like offal from a slaughteryard. The effect of the bolt which was meant to stun the sauropithecus had worn off of the human victim N'Sumu had struck instead.
Lycon grimaced at the writhing thing. The beastcatcher
felt drained but normal again, as normal as could be expected. He picked up the sword he had dropped.
"What about the men in the courtyard?" the Armenian asked, nodding toward the archway but keeping his eyes on his friend.
"Sent them away, out the other side," Lycon said. The blade of his sword glistened with the clear gelatin-like substance which covered it. "Didn't want them to interfere when there wasn't any good they could have done anyhow." He thrust quickly, expertly, between the body armor and the grill of the gladiatorial helmet. The plaza echoed as the iron hoops arched and fell with the death throes of the man they had failed to protect.
"That one?" Vonones wondered with slight curiosity. The merchant's palms were sweaty now that he had taken sides against the Emperor's desires, without recourse and without hope.
"A schoolmaster," Lycon said as he wiped blood and ichor from the blade on Sempronianus' tunic. "He volunteered to act as bait, though he may not have been aware of that at the time."
And then both men looked at the other figure, the man who had called himself N'Sumu . . . the thing that had called itself a man named N'Sumu.
Vonones swore, more in wonderment than fear but with a tinge of fear as well. While Lycon and the two—others—were tangled on the ground, the sauropithecus had kicked down with its hobbled legs at the same time its arm slashed upward. None of the multiple claw-tracks were deep enough to be fatal, but they had snatched away the wool and linen of N'Sumu's clothing, and they had gouged deeply through the bronzed integument which previously appeared to be skin.
That it was not skin was as obvious as the fact that the face which claws had bared beneath the bronze mask was no human face. The jaws were twitching convulsively as N'Sumu breathed, but they moved from side to side instead of up and down. In that, the visage was insect-like, but for the rest of its conical smoothness it was more reminiscent of a moray eel. The teeth were pegs with flat grinding surfaces, and they appeared to be arranged in multiple rows within the mouth.
