the agent said aloud. 'Marcus has the clout to get us clear, whatever the City Prefect thinks about it ... but I guess we're going to have enough problems without a story like this one chasing us to Cilicia.' He shook his head. 'It would, too, sure as sunrise.'
'Do we just leave it, then?' Calvus asked. He was curious rather than concerned, much the way he had been when he allowed Perennius to send him down the passage toward waiting murder.
'Quintus, can you stand?' the agent asked. He offered a hand as the centurion struggled to obey. Sestius's limbs seemed whole, but they were not entirely willing to accept his mind's direction. 'We'll dump it down there with the other meat,' Perennius said with a nod to the court below. 'I don't care what the folks who come to strip them think, I just don't want our names on it. If the gear's that dangerous, we'll wrap it in the cloak and deep-six it in the Tiber. Quintus, I hope for your sake you know how to keep your mouth shut, because if you start blabbing, I swear I'll strangle you with your own - hey, what in blazes happened here?' Perennius touched the soldier's vest of iron rings.
'Their weapons are two-stage,' Calvus said. He did not coin new words, but his use of familiar ones was disconcerting. It was rather like hearing a priest using his sacerdotal vocabulary to describe hog farming. 'An ionizing beam, polarized in three dimensions, that provides the carrier in any liquid or gas. Then - '
Sestius's armor had been of wire links, bent to interlock each with four other rings. It was not an expensive vest. The individual links had not been riveted into shape. Now the front of the vest was no longer a flexible mesh but something as stiff as a sintered plate. There was a hard weld at every point where metal touched metal. Close up, Perennius could separate the odor of burned leather from the avalanche of stenches with which the varied butchery had filled the night. The mail vest was backed with leather to spread the weight of the links and of blows upon them. As the metal flowed and fused, the leather had charred beneath it.
' - the secondary beam, a high-current discharge, travels down the carrier precisely like a thunderbolt,' Calvus was saying. 'It destroys the controls of sophisticated equipment. And, of course, it destroys life forms . . . but their own body casing, though natural, appears to be totally proof to current, at least at the frequencies their weapons discharge it.'
'Blazes,' the agent muttered. He understood nothing of the tall man's explanation. The reality was clear enough, though, the flash and bodies seared to powder in the instant. He did not think Sestius had been alert enough when he awakened to really look at his companion. Maximus had nothing recognizable as a chest or face. His linen tunic was yellowed below the waist, completely missing above it. A chain and gold medallion shimmered on the blackened husk. It had been so hot that the minted features had lost definition.
Calvus had already acted on the agent's plan. He was prodding the creature's instruments onto the cloak of the figure incinerated on the balcony with it. The second body was human, probably female from the breadth of
pelvis exposed when a point-blank discharge fried away flesh. The torso pulverized when Perennius leaped onto it. The bare skull was shrunken to the size of his two fists clenched together. The agent wondered vaguely what they had been struggling about, the woman and the creature, the Guardian. Blazes, though, there were more more important questions than that to answer.
Perennius sheathed his dagger and gripped one of the creature's limbs. It was hard-surfaced but pliant, like a length of chain. The agent's back crawled. He kept his face impassive as he reached under the slick, conical head with his other hand. He heaved the carcass over the railing. 'Somebody's going to get a good sword in the morning,' he muttered, 'but they're going to get a surprise along with it. Let's get out of here.'
The three men stepped out of the room by the hall door Maximus had forced to intervene. Calvus was supporting the centurion with an arm around his shoulders. A fold of the tall man's toga shielded Sestius's face from the remains of his companion.
Under his breath, Perennius muttered, 'Told the bastard to wear his armor.' But nothing could erase his awareness that the young guard had saved the life of Aulus Perennius in a situation the agent's boastful assurance had gotten him into.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The water began to sizzle and hiss almost as soon as the cloak hit it. Perennius levered the stone sewer grating back with a grunt.
The tall civilian touched him with the arm that did not support Sestius. 'I think we'd better step back,' he said calmly. He suited his own action to the words.
The agent moved aside at once, though the request had surprised him. He had chosen to ditch the alien paraphernalia in a street grate a few hundred feet from the barracks. Steam-blurred light was flooding through the cuts in the stone trough. The hissing built into a roar, then a scream. 'Let's move on,' Perennius shouted, afraid that the noise would attract the official attention that he thought they had avoided when they left the brothel unchallenged.
The roar dropped abruptly to the echo of itself reverberating down the sewer pipe. Simultaneously, the grating crackled and several chunks of it fell in. Unperturbed, Calvus resumed walking Sestius toward the barracks.
Perennius swore as he followed the other men. 'Do you have weapons like that?' he asked.
'Not here,' Calvus said. 'We could not send any . . . object. Besides, I was not raised to fight.'
'Blazes,' the agent said. He had thought the tall man was a coward when he froze during the ambush. Nothing Perennius had seen since supported that assessment, however. He did not understand Calvus any better than he did the other aspects of this situation in which monstrous insects flashed thunderbolts in the darkness.
'This one will die of shock if he isn't kept warm,' Calvus said. Unexpectedly, he spoke in Illyrian. The stranger's intonations were as mechanically perfect as those of his Latin had been. 'Do you want that?'
'What?' the agent blurted. He was sure at first that he was being chided for not showing more concern for the injured centurion. It struck him then like a death sentence that the question had been asked in all seriousness: would he prefer that Sestius die? 'Blazes, no, I don't want him to die!' Perennius said angrily. 'Whatever gave you that idea?'
Calvus shrugged. 'You wanted secrecy,' he said simply.
The transient barracks stood on a middle slope of the Caelian Hill. Externally they were built like a four-story apartment block with a central courtyard. Inside, each wing and floor was divided like a pair of ordinary barracks blocks. There were ten squad-rooms along each face, inner and outer, backed by an equipment storage space attached to each squad-room. In each corner were larger units designed as officers' quarters.
The assignment desk was served by a swarthy civilian, probably the slave or hireling of the watch stander properly assigned to the task. The clerk seemed bright and willing, but he was not fluent enough in either Latin or Greek to understand what Perennius was asking. He kept trying to assign the three of them to a room instead of directing them to the room Gaius would already have taken. Soldiers tramped through the lobby at one stage or another of their search for an evening's entertainment. Their babble made more difficult a task which already seemed impossible.
Perennius was unpleasantly aware of Sestius's state. He had seen men die of shock before. Its insidious peace frightened him more than blood or a sucking hole in the chest. Wounds you could at least see to treat. In Aramaic, the agent began, 'I am not Gaius Docleus, I want the room Gaius Docleus is - '
Calvus broke in. The bald man spoke in an Eastern language, one which the agent could not precisely identify. Calvus's free arm flared in broad gestures as he spoke.
The clerk's face blossomed in amazement and under-
standing. Perennius had not been on the verge of losing his temper. To the agent, rage was as much a tool as his sword itself was, and he used it only where some good might result therefrom. Here, the clerk was being as helpful as he could be - though it would not have been a fortunate time for the soldier properly responsible to return to the desk. The anger building behind the agent's hard eyes was evident enough, though; and the clerk was at least as happy to achieve understanding as the others were.
Calvus turned back to the agent. 'The Senior Centurion's chamber,' he said in Latin, 'on the fourth floor, northwest corner.'
'Three flights to lug him,' Perennius muttered with a moue at Sestius. Surprisingly, the comatose man seemed to be getting a little of his color back.
'That won't be a problem,' said the tall civilian as he led the way to the outside staircase.
