to give Calvus the strength to pull himself fully erect.
'We've got to get the hell out of here before the clean-up squad comes in,' Perennius whispered. 'I'll go first and we'll try the door to the left there.' He gestured with the cleaver. His sight was returning, though he still saw dancing purple flashes every time he closed his eyes.
'No,' said Calvus, 'we'll go up. None of the fighters were on the balcony. And we have to see that it is dead.'
Anger at being contradicted rolled almost at once into an awareness that this time the panicky civilian was right. But though the floor of the balcony was only some eight feet above the pavement, Perennius' own injury -
'Here,' said Calvus, lacing his fingers into a stirrup. 'If it still moves, kill it. But draw me up quickly if it is dead.'
The agent started to protest, but the bald man appeared to know what he was about. He was in a half squat, with his buttocks braced against the wall as a fulcrum. Lean as Calvus looked, there had been nothing of softness in his lines; and anyone who could shrug off a blow like Calvus had received had to be in good physical condition.
Besides, the first one over the wicker railing might need an aptitude for slaughter. There was no doubt as to which of the pair of them that called for.
Perennius measured the distance, measured the chances. He shifted the cleaver to his right hand, hoping his fingers could grip the weapon while he jerked himself up with the other arm. He socketed his foot in the stirrup, touched the balcony with his free hand, and said, 'Go!'
The tall man shot Perennius upward as abruptly as a catapult. Instead of having to catch himself on the railing and pull his body over, Perennius soared. He scarcely brushed the wicker. The agent tried to swing his legs under him, but he hit the floor in an awkward sprawl anyway. Something crunched beneath him like under-fired terra cotta. Remembering the violence that was always his companion, Perennius switched the cleaver to his better hand even as he twisted to see who shared the balcony with him.
The agent had landed on a body that powdered under his weight. The second figure lay face down with half the length of Perennius' dagger pinning its cape to its shoulders. The doorway into the building proper was shattered. The door itself was in splinters, and the stucco over the stone and brick core of the wall was crazed away in a six-foot circle. On the floor of the room within lay two men. One of them was shrunken to scarcely the bulk of a child. A triple ceiling lamp, suspended from bronze phalluses, lighted the room. Other faces peered around the jamb of the door on the other side, where the room opened into a hallway. 'Imperial Affairs!' the agent croaked to the frightened onlookers. 'Get the Watch here fast!'
One of the sprawled men groaned and lifted to one elbow. It was Sestius, the centurion, and that meant the shrunken thing beside him must be Maximus. What in blazes had hap
'Perennius!' Calvus called from the alley. 'Get me up!'
'Stand clear,' the agent ordered. He glanced down to make sure that Calvus was not gripping the balcony floor. Then he split the woven guard-wall with a single blow of the heavy knife he had appropriated. Perennius left the blade an inch deep in the balcony framework. He reached through the slit to give the other man the lift he requested. Calvus' legs flexed as Perennius jerked upward. The tall man thumped to the floor, then squirmed upright.
'Herakles!' the injured centurion muttered. 'What was that?'
There were more questions than that to be answered, Perennius thought as he tugged his dagger clear. A hand's breadth of the blade was greasily discolored in the lampglow. A lighter blade might have disconcerted the
man it struck, but not even the power of the agent's arm could have guaranteed it would sink deep enough to be fatal.
'Yes, turn it over,' Calvus said as Perennius reached toward the cowl that still shrouded his victim. The cloth was cheap homespun. It slipped back from the head it had covered.
'Unconquered Sun,' Perennius whispered. Sestius, who had crawled forward, gave a shout compounded of fear and loathing when he saw what the agent had uncovered.
The head was not featureless, as shock had insisted in the first instant; but the features resembled those of an elbow joint more than they did a human face. Death had relaxed an iris of bone around what had to be a mouth, though it was at the point of the skull. A thin fluid, not blood and not necessarily the equivalent of blood, drooled between the bony plates of the iris. There were no eyes, no nose ... no skin, even, as the agent learned by prodding the head gingerly. The surface was chitinous and slick as waxed bone. There appeared to be smudges of pigment shadowing the generally pale surface. Perennius ran a fingertip over them. Sestius watched in horror, Calvus with the detached calm of a woman carding wool. The large blotch where a human's mouth or nose might have been was made up of pores pitting the surface of the chitin in whorls. Higher on the conical head was a circumferential ring like a diadem. The tissue there was brown and flaccid, unlike the surface that supported it. It felt like fresh liver or the eye of a week-dead corpse.
Perennius swore. He jerked the cape completely away from the thing he had killed. His other hand kept the dagger pointed so that if the corpse reared up, it would impale itself. The pose was unconscious and an indication of how great was the fear that the agent controlled when he touched the creature. Sestius continued to stare with the fascination of someone watching a tapeworm thrashing from a friend's anus. None of those peering from the hallway could have seen past the centurion's torso. Perennius had cleared most of the gawkers by naming the Bureau. The madam might possibly summon the Watch; but no one cared to display too much interest in the secrets of the Bureau of Imperial Affairs.
'We thought somebody was being mugged,' Sestius said in a low voice. 'We'd stopped in for a drink when we got relieved. Maximus was shook, you know, you . . . We knocked the door open and then . . . sir, what is this?'
The creature's torso was segmented like one fashion of body armor. Its surface was of the same glaucous chitin as that of the head. There was a collar of tiny tentacles, only inches long, where a human's shoulders would have been. At approximately the midpoint of the body was a girdle of three larger arms spaced evenly around the circumference. Two of them held objects in the triple fingers with which they terminated. The limbs were hardened, like the body itself, but the thin hoops of chitin with which they were covered made them as flexible as a cat's tail.
The body beneath the trio of arms was a pliable sac on three stumpy legs. The creature vaguely reminded Perennius of a lobster or a spider; but those familiar animals were oriented on a horizontal axis, while this one was as upright as a man.
'Yeah, Calvus,' the agent whispered. 'That's a good question. What is it?'
'An adult,' said the bald man, 'a Guardian. There should be five more of them. They are your opponents.'
'A religious cult, you said,' Perennius snarled. His control was crumbling in reaction to what he had just done and seen. 'Six cultists!' he said even louder. The point of his dagger wove intricate patterns in the air as the agent's right arm trembled.
'I said you could think of them that way,' the tall man said. As the agent rose, Calvus straightened also to tower over the shorter Illyrian. Greatly to the agent's surprise, Calvus's eyes and the icy will behind them remained steady despite the volcanic fury they faced. Perennius had met those who could match his rage with rage, but he had never before known a man who could meet his savage bloodlust and remain calm. 'And I said I would find some way to explain it to you,' Calvus continued. 'I did not expect to be attacked here in Rome, but it seems to
have done a better job of explaining what you face than any method I had considered using.' His eyes jerked down. 'No, don't touch that,' he said to Sestius.
Perennius looked down as the centurion snatched back his hand. Sestius had reached out toward not the dead creature itself but rather toward one of the metallic objects in its hands. Now he stared up in surprise at the two men standing above him. 'The, the whatever it was that hit me.' Sestius explained. 'I thought it came from ...' He gestured at an object that looked like a bell-mouthed perfume flask.
Calvus dipped his head in agreement. 'Very likely it did,' he said. 'But if anyone but one of them - ' again the disgust loaded one word of an otherwise neutral sentence - 'handles the weapon, all its energy will be liberated against the person holding it.' The tall man turned up his palm. 'And those nearby,' he added.
The Watch was not coming, that was clear. Someone burly enough to be the bouncer looked through the doorway to the hall, then leaped back as if struck when his eyes met Perennius's angry glare. 'Probably just as well,'
