Birds of Prey (40 page)

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

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

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

“Oh, I…” the courier said. “I didn't—I mean, I wasn't thinking of taking it off or anything.”

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

Gaius twisted to face the agent as squarely as the four-pommeled military saddle would allow. The silvered bronze hid his face, but the courier's surprise was evident in his stance. He knew that Perennius had as little belief in the formal gods of the State as he did in any of the Oriental cults that had been appealing to the more superstitious of Rome for the past five centuries. Gaius knew also that Perennius would willingly die before he trivialized Roma, the personification of the Empire. “I, I deserved it, Aulus,” the youth said awkwardly. “I did what you said. I killed him.”

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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