Calvus's words were no more than the truth. Though the injured soldier was a solid man with the weight of his equipment besides, Calvus mounted the stairs at a brisk pace without suggesting the agent help him with his burden. It should not have surprised Perennius after the way the stranger had launched him onto the balcony. Intellectual awareness differed sharply from his instinctive reaction to Calvus's apparent frailty, however.
'We'll want the first - ' the agent had begun to say, when the door to which he was about to direct Calvus opened.
'Hey,' called Gaius, natty in a fresh tunic and polished brass, 'I'd about given up on - ' He paused when he realized that the men ahead of his friend were actually accompanying him. 'Blazes, Aulus,' he said as he stepped back, 'you started the party without me?'
'It was a party I'd have liked to have you at, buddy,' Perennius said grimly as he shut the door behind him. 'See if we've got any field rations in there, will you ... ? Because I'm starved, and we're not going anywhere until Lucius Calvus here has explained a few things.'
The tall man arranged Sestius carefully on one of the beds. 'Give me your cloaks,' he said, stripping off the woolen formality of his own toga. Calvus's skin was the same old-ivory shade wherever it was visible, legs, arms, and face. In the same matter of fact tone, he continued, 'The creature you killed is from another world. There are very few adults on Earth at present - six, only five now, we are quite sure. There are millions of eggs, and the creatures can breed in their larval forms. They dissolve rock and crawl through it. When they all become adults simultaneously, there will be more billions by a factor of ten then the Earth ever held of humans. They will sweep us into oblivion unless we stop them now.' With neither haste nor waste motion, Calvus tucked his own garment around the shivering centurion. He reached for the cloak of the dumbfounded Gaius.
'Aulus, what on earth - ' the younger man blurted.
Perennius stopped him with a raised hand and a frown of concentration. He was trying to blank his mind of preconceptions so that he could really hear what the tall stranger was saying. The words did, after all, make internal sense. It was the way they fit - failed to fit - into the world that made them absurd.
And a tripedal creature four feet tall, with tools and a voice that could have come from a millstone ... that did not fit Perennius's world either. He was professional enough to believe that it might be his world that was wrong.
'Who are you, Lucius Calvus?' the agent asked softly.
The tall man sat on the edge of the bed. His fingers massaged Sestius's forehead. The contact seemed to reduce the centurion's spasmodic trembling far more than it should have done. 'I'm a traveller,' Calvus said, his calm eyes on the older Illyrian. 'An agent like yourself, Aulus Perennius.'
Perennius slammed the heel of his hand against the closed door. It crashed like a catapult releasing. 'Do you think I don't see that?' he shouted. 'Whose agent, damn you?'
'Mankind's,' said the man who called himself by a Latin name. 'But I came from another sort of distance, Aulus Perennius. I come from a place fifteen thousand years into the time that has yet to come.'
Gaius threw up his hands. 'Blazes,' he cried to the
ceiling. 'Aulus, are you all drunk? Him babbling nonsense and you sitting there serious as an owl like you were listening!'
'How are you going to stop them if you didn't bring any weapons?' asked the agent. He did not raise his voice again, but the taut malevolence in it sent a shiver up Gaius's back. Perennius had not liked the world that Fate had shown him, but it drove him to helpless fury to feel all the certainties draining away from even that. There were few things that Aulus Perennius would surrender without a fight. Reality was not one of those things.
'We knew we could find a weapon here, Aulus Perennius,' said the calm, seated figure. His hands continued to stroke the injured centurion. 'We knew that I could find someone like you.'
Gaius seized Calvus by the shoulder. The young courier was a good-sized man, but his attempt to shake the seated figure was as vain as if he had tried to shake an oak. 'My friend isn't a weapon!' Gaius shouted. 'He's a man, and men aren't just things!'
'Let him go, Gaius,' the agent said quietly. He was not really watching the scene. He had a task to perform, five creatures to kill in Cilicia if they did not come to meet him earlier. Perennius was considering ways and means of accomplishing that task.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When the sunlight through the clerestory windows touched his left eye, Perennius blinked. On the bed next to him, Gaius said in a chiding voice, 'You didn't sleep all night, did you?'
Perennius turned sharply toward his protege. 'Sure I did,' he lied. 'Ah - didn't keep you awake, did I?'
Gaius chuckled as he got up. 'Oh, not a bit,' he said. 'Like with my brothers. You share a bunk as often as you and I have, you don't notice how the other fellow tosses and turns any more than you do yourself. But I also know you well enough to know you weren't sleeping.'
There were two beds in the room, because a centurion was expected to travel with at least one personal servant. The two Illyrians had dossed down in one of the bunks, leaving the other to Sestius and the traveller. Calvus had said the body contact as well as the warmth would be good for the injured man. The centurion could not well be moved, and the agent would not have allowed Calvus out of his immediate reach even if the tall man had shown a desire to leave.
'Oh, well, you know how it is,' Perennius said as he got out of bed. 'I need a while to think about things before I go off and do something. A mess like this, blazes - it's better than a week at the sea-side.' He stepped to his baggage and began searching for clean clothes. Nude, the agent's body was ridged with muscles and scar tissue - puckers, the thin lines of cuts, and the knotted, squirming lumps from the time he had been beaten with a studded whip.
'Do you like the sea, Aulus Perennius?' asked Calvus as he also stood up. The traveller was still dressed in the wool tunic he had worn under his toga. The centurion was stirring and grumbling on the bed beside him.
Professionally bland, the agent looked at Calvus and said, 'No, as a matter of fact, I never had much use for the sea. Except as something to get over. Which I figure we'll do this time, little as I care for the idea.'
'Blazes!' Gaius protested. He peered from the folds of the tunic he was shrugging into. 'After what happened on our way back? Look, it's a lot safer to hoof it, even the way roads're likely to be in Cilicia.'
'Maybe true if we were alone, the three of us,' Perennius said. 'But we're going to need a couple squads at least for the job. Archers, slingers . . . and I don't give much of a chance of Odenath or Balista, whichever's boys we run across, letting a body of troops march through Asia. Even a small body of troops.' He smiled grimly at Calvus. 'A better chance than that your rescript from Gallienus would get us anything but a quick chop. Maybe you could come up with something by the Autarch instead?'
'Odenathus, you mean?' said the tall man. He was as serious as Perennius had 'been sardonic. 'Yes, if that's necessary. It will delay us considerably, though; and I think delay is to our disadvantage, now that we know the Guardians are aware of me.'
Gaius laughed. Perennius did not. 'No,' the older man said uncomfortably, 'we'll enter at Tarsus on forged orders from Palmyra, some song and dance. By the time somebody checks back with headquarters, we'll be long gone.' He barked a laugh of his own. 'Or long dead, of course.'
'Let me come with you,' said Quintus Sestius.
The three others looked at the centurion. Sestius was poking fixedly at his welded mail. The night before, he had not really been aware of what had happened to him. 'Look,' he said, 'I come from near Tarsus. I can help you a lot. It's not a province that outsiders get along in real
well.' In the same defensive tone he added, 'Maximus is dead, isn't he? I remember him being right in front of me, and then . . . that was him on the floor, I guess. It was his cloak, so it had to be.'
Sestius had thrown off the wrappings that had kept him alive until his capillaries contracted and brought him out of shock. Calvus now bent and retrieved his toga without speaking. He had set the objective, but it appeared that he was going to allow Perennius full responsibility for the means of achieving that objective.
'Ah,' the agent said. Except for Gaius himself, the troops for the operation were an anonymous rank in his mind. He was not opposed to Sestius being one of them but . . . 'Look,' Perennius said, 'Maximus likely wasn't the last to take early retirement because of this thing, Sestius. It's going to be dangerous.'
'Herakles!' the centurion spat. 'And what isn't now?' He stood abruptly so that the unwelded back of his vest rustled on the leather. 'Listen, sir - I joined the Army because it'd be secure. Nothing's secure now, nothing . . . but if I could be home again, with my kin around me, then at least there'd be somebody to trust, somebody. . . . Sir,
