were Sabellia and Calvus. Sabellia held her bloody knife advanced. Her legs were splayed, her knees cocked to launch her toward the Gaul if he showed himself. Calvus held a spear awkwardly. The tall woman eyed Sabellia as if hoping to gain pointers from the red-head.
'Hold it!' Perennius shouted as he burst into the central bay.
'Now!' cried Sestius. He and Gaius rushed the hidden Gaul from either side.
Perennius heard the bow-string snap. He did not hear the arrow strike, and he knew what that meant. If the arrow had missed - and men do miss point-blank shots when no prize but life itself is at stake - the iron head would have smashed and sparked clearly on the rock walls. There had been no need of risk. The isolated Gaul could have been talked out, waited out; at worst, charged by men wearing the armor packed on the donkeys outside. Anything would have been more sensible than the present melange of shouts and swords glittering in overarm cuts.
The pillar still hid the sword-wielders and their victim from Perennius as he ran to the slaughter.
The Gaul was sprawled on his face. He had dropped his bow. Apparently he had tried to cover his head with his arms instead of drawing his sword. Sestius slashed a final time at the man. The centurion's heavy blade thunked deep enough into the skull to stick when he tried to remove it. Gaius was still thrusting into the Gaul's abdomen.
Sestius straightened and turned, leaving his sword where it was. The fletching and half an arrow's length protruded from his chest, well-centered and between the second and third ribs. Only a drop or two of blood had seeped onto the centurion's tunic around the shaft. When he opened his mouth to speak or gasp for breath, the blood spewed out. It splashed the stone floor an instant before Sestius' body fell to cover the splotch. The scream the centurion could not voice for choking burst from Sabellia's lips instead.
Perennius caught Gaius by the wrist. 'You're all right?' the older man demanded. Gaius' eyes were glazed, but he bore no obvious signs of injury. He did not answer Perennius. Instead, he leaned on his sword as if it were a cane.
Sabellia was weeping and mopping at the blood on Sestius' face. She was probably unharmed. It wasn't the time to check that, anyway. Calvus anticipated the agent's question, nodding as soon as the agent's eyes fell on her. 'Nothing touched me,' she said. Then she added, 'They were part of the group that attacked us in Rome.'
'I guess everybody's figured that out,' said the agent bitterly. He turned back toward the younger Illyrian. 'If Gaius'd kept his mouth shut, we might even've learned why. Well, maybe we can....'
Ursinus was not dead. He had rolled over, but he had been unable to summon enough strength to rise to his hands and knees. He saw Perennius coming, trailed by the tall woman. The Gaul made another attempt to rise. It too failed. His lips blew a froth of blood. The hole in his chest was making liquid, sucking sounds as Ursinus tried
to breathe. He spat, drooling a line of blood and saliva down his chin.
'It's over, Ursinus,' the agent said. 'We're going to help you now.'
'Bastard,' the Gaul whispered. 'Don't you think / know it's over?' But he relaxed none the less, letting the tension go out of arms that had trembled as they failed to lift him.
'Get some wine,' Perennius hissed in an aside to Calvus. To the dying man, the agent said, 'Were you supposed to ambush us here, then?'
Ursinus coughed red-shot phlegm that the agent wiped away with the hem of his own tunic. 'Mithra,' the Gaul said. He forced a smile. 'We were running away. One of the things what was giving us orders had its mask slip. Hell if I was going to stick around after that, dragon be damned. Not if God offered to come down and wash me in blood.' It was an unfortunate expression and brought on another fit of coughing.
'Gray?' Perennius asked. Calvus was back with a skin of wine. The agent held the open end to Ursinus' lips, letting the Gaul suck greedily at it while the agent squeezed the skin for him. 'A band around it and a hole the size of a cow's bung near the top?'
'Oh . . .' the Gaul moaned as he took his mouth away from the flask. His eyes were closed. 'You think you're going to join them, then?'
'We're here to kill them, Ursinus,' the agent said in a level voice. He daubed at the Gaul's face again. 'How many of them are there?'
Ursinus ignored the question if he even heard it. 'More guts than I've got, then,' the Gaul murmured. 'Just wanted to get the fuck away, way from dragons and crinkly monsters that talk. . . . Mithra.' His eyes opened. 'Sacrovir stayed,' he said. 'Didn't care what it was, he wanted the guy who'd killed his mother. We followed him here after it all went sour in Rome, but ... I said - ' The Gaul's eyes bulged as if he were straining to swallow some object so great that it was choking him.
'Easy, easy,' the agent said.
It was too late for ease, too late for Ursinus entirely.
The Gaul's arms and legs began to flail on the stone as he gagged. The movements swelled into a mad, unsynchronized fury as Ursinus' eyes went blank. His back strained into the arc of his last convulsions.
Perennius swore. He stood up. The agent had seen enough people die. He did not need to watch another.
Gaius caught the older man's arm. 'Blazes, Aulus,' he said. 'Q-quintus is gone. It was so quick, one minute and then ...' Gaius too had seen his share of dying, but this time it was a peer and a man he had come to know well. The youth was aware also that Fortune had made the archer left-handed. Otherwise the shaft would have been past the other side of the pillar and through Gaius' pulmonary arteries instead of those of the centurion.
Perennius gripped the shoulder of the younger man - the boy, in this persona. The agent shouted, 'Sure he's gone! And it's your big mouth that killed him, isn't it?'
Even the sputtering fire could only suggest color on Gaius' cheeks. 'I didn't - ' he said. He tried to jerk his shoulder away and found he could not, no more than he could have pulled free a decade before. Perennius' red, shouting rage was only a suggestion of the murder that already strained to supplant it.
'You didn't think!' the agent shouted. He shook the tall youth to the harsh rhythms of the words. 'You shot off your mouth, handed them who we were on a platter - what else was going to happen when they learned that? We could've all been greased in a rat-fuck like that! Couldn't we? Couldn't we? And now there's Sestius lying there - '
The rigid expression of Gaius' face, anger and horror molded on an armature of innocence, gave way. The young Illyrian's free arm had been rising as if to strike a blow or fend one off. The arm encircled Perennius' waist as Gaius fell sobbing to his knees. 'Oh god, Aulus!' he cried, 'I did kill him. Oh god, oh god!'
Perennius staggered. His skin was as clammy as if he had been douched with melt water. The great vaulted room sprang into entire focus again. 'Blazes,' the agent whispered. Then he said, 'I'm going. . . .'
Gaius was not holding him tightly. Perennius stepped
1
away from the other's kneeling figure, the motion bringing only redoubled sobs. Perennius walked to the door to the courtyard. He was tottering with reaction. He stepped outside; and he was standing there, breathing deeply with his back to the wall, when Calvus joined him a moment later.
'I told you to keep out of my mind,' Perennius whispered. His eyes were closed. 'Saw you standing there like a statue . . . Might've killed him, Calvus. Me. Might've killed him except for you.'
'In some ways he's very young,' the woman said. 'Younger than his age.'
'It's the pretending it just . . . 'happens,' ' the agent went on. He was looking at the empty courtyard now. 'They didn't do it. Sure, we all screw up ... and this is a business that you screw up, maybe somebody gets dead. But if you pretend you didn't do it, the arrow was Fate or Fortune or any damn thing but a kid talking ... I thought he was going to say it wasn't his fault. And then I might've killed him.'
'Don't confuse what men say with what they mean, Aulus Perennius,' Calvus said.
'I don't - ' the agent rasped back.
'No, you don't,' the tall woman responded more sharply than Perennius had ever heard her speak before. 'You take those lies as a personal slur on your intelligence. And you know they aren't! They're the prayer of somebody human that the world not tell him something he already knows. You've watched Gaius. Do you think he really doubts he was responsible for what happened?'
'He shouldn't lie to me,' Perennius muttered.
'He didn't,' Calvus said, 'and he didn't lie to himself.'
The agent looked at her. 'Yeah,' he said. He took Calvus' hand loosely in his own. 'Ah. Thanks.'
