'I think,' said the woman, 'that we have grown too good of friends since we met for me ever to try to force you to act. And I think we know each other too well for me ever to think I had to force you to do your duty.'
'Shit,' the agent said dismally. He reached out to clasp the hand still tighter against his armored shoulder.
Perennius was looking away, toward the crags across the gorge.
Still clasping his taller companion, the agent began to walk to where Gaius lay. 'I don't want a thousand years of Father Ramphions, no. But I'd take that if I could give my world a time, a stability like that of the past. And if . . .' Perennius' voice trailed off. He took his hand from his shoulder to place his arm around the woman's waist. The play of muscles as she walked was as finely tuned as that of a dog - or a tigress. 'I'd give the whole game to those fucking gray monsters if I thought it'd bring Gaius back. I almost would.'
'Aulus, that won't be necessary,' the traveller said.
The catch in the tall woman's voice turned the attempt at lightness into something very close to open emotion. 'Gaius will live.' Calvus knelt beside the fallen youth. The laces closing his helmet had not burned through the way Perennius' had. They popped audibly at a tug. Gaius' face was sallow, bloodless beneath the weathered tan of shipboard and the road. 'And so will your Empire, Legate,' the woman added softly. She stripped away the gorget and began breaking the tack-welded hooks and eyes that closed the mail shirt.
Gaius breathed. There was even a flutter from his eyelids each time the woman's fingers brushed his flesh. Perennius drew off the younger man's gauntlets. He said, 'So that I'll go in the cave with you?'
'No, my friend,' the traveller said, concentrating on the injured man before her. 'Because you'd do that anyway. We thought - they thought - ' and she looked at Perennius while her hands continued their gentle work of massaging Gaius' temples - 'that they were sending a machine back to root out those others.... And perhaps they were right, perhaps it was a machine they sent back. But I'm not a machine now, Aulus. I'll do the job, because it is my job and my pleasure. But I'll do it my way. Now, I'm going to leave you for a moment.'
Perennius nodded. He expected the woman to stand up. After a moment's surprise, he realized his mistake. Calvus was gone from him, all right, but she had retreated not into physical distance but rather into her trance state.
The agent felt a twinge of fear, as if he were walking in front of a cocked and loaded catapult. He stood up. Whatever was happening was not directed at him.
Soon enough, though, they would - he would - have to deal with the remaining Guardian and whatever lay beyond. Perennius gave a harsh laugh. He spat away the ball of phlegm that choked him. No water now to drink when his mouth was clear, and no rest for the weary. No rest for the wicked. The agent bent down to examine Gaius' prostrate form. Calvus crouched over Gaius like a mantis awaiting a victim ... but Perennius could not save the youth, and he could not despite his habits bring himself to doubt the traveller's good faith. You did have to trust somebody else, or you would fail and everything would fail.
Aulus Perennius had no use for failure.
Calvus straightened slightly. Beneath her hand, the injured courier sighed like a child relaxing in his sleep. Gaius was still unconscious, but his normal color had returned.
'I'll need to get his armor off,' Perennius said. His voice broke. Looking away, he blinked repeatedly to clear his eyes of the tears. 'I've got an idea for the shirt, and I need his helmet, and greave besides.'
'Take my hands, Aulus Perennius,' said the tall woman. She extended them. Her fingertips were cool on the agent's palms. Even as Perennius opened his mouth to note the need for haste, the pictures began to form in his mind.
At the first, Perennius was not aware of what was happening, because the spires lit by richly-colored discharges were unlike any buildings he had seen. The agent's mind accepted the images as signs of shock or madness. He felt the same horrified detachment that would have accompanied knowledge that the ground had fallen away beneath him and he was dropping toward certain death. Then details of awesome clarity penetrated. Perennius realized that he was seeing - or being shown - something by Calvus in a medium at which the traveller had never hinted.
Gray, segmented creatures used huge machines to bathe the spires in light. In form the creatures were the Guardians that Perennius had seen and slain, but now there were myriads of them covering the ground like shrubs on wasteland and directing machinery of a scale that dwarfed them. Ripples of livid flame dissolved swathes of the creatures, but still more of them crawled out of the cracking, heaving soil. One of the spires settled like a waterfall descending. The structure's walls crumbled in sheets, spilling the figures within as bloody froth in the crystalline shards. The figures were tall, mostly quite hairless; they were as human and as inhuman as Calvus herself. The alien creatures swarmed and died and swarmed in greater numbers. Another spire began to collapse as the scene segued into -
something else in its way as alien. Men and women of proportions which the agent found normal sat one per small, eight-sided room. Perennius saw - visualized—simultaneously the individual units and the ranks and files and stacks of units comprising a whole larger than any construct he had seen, the Pyramids included. The humans had body hair and wore clothing, as did only the hirsute minority of those dying in the crystal spires of the previous scene. But though every detail of this folk's activities was evident to Perennius, he comprehended none of it. The square shafts filling the interstices between alternate facets of the octagons were in some cases filled with conduits. Many shafts provided instead vertical passage for capsules which sailed up and down without visible mechanisms. None of the humans moved more than to reach or glance toward one of the eight shimmering walls of the units which held them. Suddenly, called by an unseen signal, everyone in the structure stood and fed themselves into upward-streaming shafts. They moved with the ordered precision of cogs engaging in a water-mill. And the scene blurred, shifting by increments too minute for separate comprehension to -
figures in a great barn, framed by metal webbing. Down the long bay were hauled spidery constructs. They bulked out by accreting parts attached by the lines of humans to either side of the growing machines. Everything was glare and motion. Overhead pulleys spun belts which in turn drove tools at the direction of the workmen. The noise
was unheard but obvious from the way everything trembled, from motes of dust in the air to the greasy windows in the roof. It all danced in the abnormal clarity of the agent's vision. The crudity and raw-edged power was at contrast to the slickness of the scene immediately previous - and even more at contrast to the sterile perfection underlying the chaos of the initial set of images. It was evident to Perennius that he was seeing a regression, despite the unfamiliarity of the concept to a mind attuned to stasis rather than to change. The regression was evident, even before the workmen - all men - downed tools together and the vision shimmered to -
a kaleidoscope, a montage of discrete images. Imperial troops advanced across a field while their opponents fled. The wrack the defeated left behind included the standards of units the agent knew to be stationed in Britain; the paraphernalia of the barbarian mercenaries fighting at their side; and their dying leader. The sullen rain washed blood from the usurper's gaping belly and the sword onto which he had fallen.
Elsewhere - perhaps a thousand elsewheres - identical proclamations were tacked to the notice-boards of municipal buildings. Perennius recognized a few of the cities. He could have identified other settings at least by province. As many more scenes and the races of those who read the proclamation were beyond the experience of even the agent's broad travels.
And at the center, at the core, though it was no more a physical center than the melange of images was actually viewed by the agent's eyes - there, connected to all the rest by cords of documents and bureaucracy, sat a man enthroned in a vaulted hall. He ruled in state, wearing the splendid trappings which no Roman leader had been permitted save during a military procession, the diadem and gold-shot purple robes.
And the Emperor's face registered as he signed a document with a vermilion brush -
GAIUS AURELIUS VALERIUS DIOCLETIANUS
Perennius knelt on a narrow trail, holding a woman's cool hands and staring at his unconscious protege and friend. 'Almighty Sun,' the agent whispered. His mind was fusing the youthful face before him with the same face on the throne marked by thirty years more of age and power. 'Gaius ...'
'I had to change him, Aulus Perennius,' the tall woman said. 'The shock made massive repair necessary and ... he could not have brought the revival I promised you if he remained the Gaius you knew. I'm sorry, Aulus, there was no other tool available . . . and my time is short.'
'Almighty Sun,' the agent repeated. He drew a shuddering breath. 'Always wanted him to be a leader,'
