by David Drake
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Drake (born 1945) sold his first story (a fantasy) at age 20. His undergraduate majors at the University of Iowa were history (with honors) and Latin (BA, 1967). He uses his training in both subjects extensively in his fiction. David entered Duke Law School in 1967 and graduated five years later (JD, 1972). The delay was caused by his being drafted into the US Army. He served in 1970 as an enlisted interrogator with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Blackhorse, in Viet Nam and Cambodia. He has used his legal and particularly his military experiences extensively in his fiction also. David practiced law for eight years; drove a city bus for one year; and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1981, writing such novels as Out of the Waters and Monsters of the Earth. He reads and travels extensively. You can sign up for email updates here.
Look for all these TOR books by David Drake
BIRDS OF PREY
CROSS THE STARS
THE DRAGON LORD
THE FORLORN HOPE
FROM THE HEART OF DARKNESS
SKYRIPPER
TIME SAFARI
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
About the Author
Look for all these TOR books by David Drake
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
BIRDS OF PREY
Copyright © 1984 by David Drake
All rights reserved.
A TOR Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, N.Y. 10018
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ISBN: 0-812-53612-6
CAN. ED.: 0-812-53613-4
eISBN 9780765387059
First eBook edition: July 2015
