Birds of Prey (43 page)

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 protégé 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 eyeholes of his mask. A door had closed or opened near ahead.