bolt sizzled on his armor. Because Perennius was off balance, his dagger-stroke at the Gaul's knee would probably have missed even if the long shield had not buffeted the agent like a ram as he jabbed. Sacrovir knew how to use that shield.
The agent staggered backward. His opponent - younger, taller, fresher - cut at him sideways, holding his spatha waist high. Perennius stepped inside the blow. Perennius chopped at the Gaul's instep as the other man's wrist struck the agent's side. Perennius' sword gouged the shield when the other dropped it to interpose.
The sword-cut was a feint. Perennius' left hand and the dagger swung over the Gaul's outstretched sword arm. Sacrovir looked a good deal like Gaius, the agent thought, as his armed fist slammed against the base of the other's right ear.
It was not until the instant of jarring contact and the brown eyes rolling upward that Perennius realized that he had not killed the man who toppled away from him. Perennius had struck with the knobbed pommel of his dagger, not the point that would have grated lethally through brain and blood vessels across the younger man's skull.
It had happened very quickly, as it had to happen when both opponents were so skilled and so determined. It had happened too fast for conscious decisions. Perennius had not killed, though it would have been as easy to do so.
The agent knelt at the feet of his sprawling opponent. Sacrovir's left arm hung off the trail. The weight of his shield was threatening to tug the supine body with it further into the chasm. Perennius laid down his sword to lift the iron-and-plywood shield. He laid it across the torso of the youth it had been unable to protect.
A slab of stone that must have weighed six talents hurtled to the valley floor. It was safely outward of the trail and of the agent. Perennius looked up. Calvus, her hands freed of the missile she had not thrown at the Gaul, was descending the wall with ease. The woman's awkwardness, did not matter when each handhold locked her as firmly as an iron piton to the limestone. Calvus stepped down beside the agent while he was bending over Sabellia. At full stretch, Calvus' limbs gave her the look of a gibbon from one of the islands beyond Taprobane.
While Perennius struggled with his gauntlets, Calvus ran a slim finger from the point of Sabellia's jaw, up the reddening bruise, to the bloody patch on the Gallic woman's cheekbone. 'Nothing broken,' the traveller said softly. 'Minor concussion, perhaps. Nothing too serious.' Then she said, 'You did recognize him then? I didn't think you would. Could. He'll be all right, too.'
Perennius back-trailed her eyes from his own face to that of the supine Gaul at whom she had glanced before speaking. Sacrovir was snoring. There was a smear of mucus with no sign of blood in it over the Gaul's moustache. 'Him?' the agent said. He was puzzled, but the matter was not important enough to spend time on now.
Perennius began to stand up. He was angry that the motion required him to put down his left hand for support.
'From Rome, you mean? No, I didn't see any of them. He must be the Sacrovir that Ursinus talked about. When he died.' In the same flat voice, the agent said, 'I'm going to see Gaius now. The Sun has received the soul of a brave man.'
'It'll be faster,' said Calvus as the agent began to stumble down the trail, 'if I lower you.' She extended an arm and nodded downwards.
Perennius swallowed, then angrily stripped off his gauntlets. He flung them to the ground. The remainder of his padded armor was hellishly hot and confining, but it would take longer than the agent cared to spend to remove it. He looked at his protege fifty feet below. Gaius moved only when the wind blew the trees against which he rested. 'Calvus,' he said. He extended his hand, stubby and tendon-roped and strong. 'Swear to me that what we're doing is going to save the Empire if we succeed. Swear that.'
Calvus took the agent's hand in her own, slim and stronger yet than that of the agent. She knelt and found a hold in the roots of an olive tree. Perennius swung out, dangling over the slope in her grasp. 'That isn't true, Aulus Perennius,' she said. 'I can't - '
'Easy, I've got a foothold,' Perennius said.
Calvus released the agent's hand with the same care with which she chose her words. 'The Empire is doomed, gone,' she said. 'We have a chance to save humanity from these - others. But not in your day, Aulus Perennius. Not for fifteen thousand years.'
Perennius made a sound in his throat. His face was deep in the tilted crevice which now supported him. Calvus could not see his expression. When Perennius looked back up at the woman, it was only to say, 'All right, I can hold your foot till you've got a hold. Come down.'
Calvus scrambled to obey. The agent said, 'That isn't good enough, you know? I can't care about hum - there, sure, put your weight on it. I can't care about humanity. That's the pirates who raped Bella, that's a kid from Gaul who fights for gray things with arms like worms. That's not worth dying for, Calvus. That's not worth me bringing Gaius to be killed.'
'Do you need my hand here?' Calvus asked. The lower end of the crevice was ten feet above the next switchback.
'No, I - ' Perennius said. His hand gripped a spike-leafed shrub. The stem crackled when he put his weight on it. The agent felt Calvus' fingers link around his ankle, ready to support him if he started to slide. 'That's all right,' he said. Stiffly but under control, Perennius descended half the distance. When his hobnails missed their bite, he skidded the remainder of the way. Calvus was with him in a series of quick, spider-like clutchings.
'You weren't supposed to follow me,' the agent said. He was breathing hard as he eyed the last stage down to the trail. They would be a hundred feet west of Gaius, where he lay in the track the allosaurus had flailed in the vegetation. 'You could've gotten killed.' The agent looked at Calvus. His face was still but not calm. 'Could've gotten Bella killed.'
The tall woman nodded. 'The allosaurus crossed the ford and picked up your track an hour after you had ridden out. Sabellia said we could either draw it away from you ... or if it ignored us, we were safe anyway. She rode, I walked.' Calvus attempted a smile. 'The last distance, I ran, Aulus Perennius. And then I couldn't find any way to help you.'
'I need a hand,' the agent said. As he crawled vertically down the rock face, he added, 'Do you expect to be able to get people to die for nothing, Lucius Calvus? Is that what you expect?'
'Not for nothing,' the woman said. She extended herself so that her right hand alone supported her weight and the agent's. 'Aulus, this is the most important thing on Earth since life appeared.'
Perennius twisted his face upward. He shouted, 'Not to me! Not to Gaius and Sestius and the people we've killed!' He looked down at the trail over which he dangled. In a neutral voice he directed, 'All right, let me go.'
The agent hit with a clang of ironmongery. He staggered. The armored shirt and apron were even more awkward than usual. The lace work of rings had been welded into streaky patterns. They gave the garments the effect of a stiff girdle in addition to their weight.
'Aulus,' Calvus said. She touched Perennius' shoulder as he would have stamped down the short interval seperating him from Gaius' remains. The agent turned, not quite willingly, to face her. Calvus' touch was no more than that; but when Perennius had shifted his weight to stride forward, his shoulder did not move nor the fingers from it. Calvus said, 'Even if I were to intervene, nothing goes on forever. Not your Empire, not humanity as you know it ... or even as I know it.'
'We shouldn't intervene, then? We should let things go?' Perennius demanded harshly. 'Where's the bigger joke in that, Calvus? You saying it or me listening?'
Her calm voice, her ivory face, could not express troubled emotions. Perennius felt them as surely as the hand on his shoulder as Calvus said, 'Aulus, if your Empire should survive another two centuries, as it might, the cost - ' She broke off to wipe sweat or a tear from the corner of one brown eye. 'In my day, nothing, no difference. Events open and close, according to their magnitude. Even what I was sent to do will mean nothing when the sun swells to swallow this world.'
'Praise the Sun for the life he offers,' whispered the agent, an undertone and not an interpolation.
'In my day,' the traveller repeated with emphasis. 'In between, the Christian religion would become a theocracy that would last a thousand years beyond this rump of an Empire. I can't offer more than a few centuries, Aulus. It's time is over. Please understand that.'
'Well then, give me the rump!' Perennius shouted. 'And don't be too sure that there won't be a way out then, my friend. Or - ' and his angry voice dropped into a tone of cold ruthlessness - 'do you think you can force me to help finish the job? Finish your job. Is that what you think?'
