Birds of Prey (37 page)

“And tonight,” the agent went on, “we'll talk about what we're going to do when we get there. When we get to Typhon's Cavern.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“Well, there's
some
body home,” Perennius commented as he watched the thread of smoke. Because the inn was half-way down the slope to the ford, the party had a view of the stables within the far sidewall of the courtyard. There were no immediate signs of activity there, but three of the stable doors were closed as if they were occupied. The smoke was from a flue of the vaulted common room to the rear. The structure could easily sleep a hundred men on straw pallets, but the evidence of the single fire suggested the handful whose beasts might be in the stable.

“Part of the estate,” Sestius said. There was a low tower on one corner of the common room. The bath and the gatehouse, on opposite sides of the gate in the front wall, looked as if they were adapted for defense also. The centurion added morosely, “They may have got a caretaker to stay on when Kamilides and his crew lit out.”

Gaius had bent to tie his donkey's reins to a bush. He straightened with a puzzled expression. There was a piece of bone in his hand. “Aulus, look at this,” he said, stepping closer to the older man.

Perennius glanced at the bone. “Part of an ox thigh,” he remarked. “What about it?”

“Camel, I'd guess,” said Sestius, peering at the courier's find. “Ox would be—”

Gaius ignored the technical discussion. “Not
what
it is, but look at it,” he said. “Here, at the break.”

The thigh had been worried by dogs or jackals, then nibbled by rodents who had hollowed out the narrow cavity completely. There was deeper scarring on the dense bone than either of those causes could account for. “Chisels,” the agent said with a frown. He rotated the bone. “Somebody cracked it with pointed chisels to get the marrow out.” At the broken end, among the jagged points left when the bone snapped, were cleanly-sheared surfaces reaching over an inch into the bone from either side.

Sabellia had noticed something which the men had not. As they talked, the Gallic woman picked up an object a foot or two from where the thigh-bone had lain. Perennius glanced over at her and saw what she held. He swore softly.

“Here,” she said, handing the object to the agent. “I think it'll fit.”

The object was a triangular tooth three inches long. Both its cutting edges were lightly serrated. The tooth fit the “chisel marks” in the thigh bone perfectly. Perennius tossed the bone away. He handed the tooth back to Sabellia. “I think,” he said as he unhitched his donkey's reins, “that I'd as soon be inside walls for a while—” he nodded down toward the inn—“until we learn a little more about what in blazes is going on in these hills.”

Perennius clucked to his donkey. The animal obeyed without the usual struggle. The five of them kept close together on the fork leading from the main road to the inn three hundred feet from stream-crossing. They all, even Calvus, spent far more effort watching their general surroundings than they did in watching the road or the inn which spelled safety at the end of that road.

The inn was built around a courtyard. The gatehouse in one front corner doubled as accommodations for the manager and special guests. The common room across the rear was for drovers and others without the wealth or prestige needed for one of the private apartments in the gatehouse. Both sides of the courtyard were lined with stalls which could also be used to store merchandise. The corner tower in the back, and the arrow slits in all four walls, were not merely decoration. The building had been designed with an eye to more than the casual banditry.

As the party neared the inn, Gaius kicked up his donkey to reach the gates before the others did. Still mounted, the courier pushed at the center of the double leaves. When they did not budge, he began to hammer on them while he shouted, “Gate! Gate, damn you, we want to get inside!”

Nothing happened before the others had joined him. “I don't suppose they're expecting guests, whoever they are,” Perennius said dryly. “One of us can go around to the back and try shouting into the common room, I suppose. It'd probably be simpler to shinny over the wall here, though, and—”

The sound that broke over the agent's comments came from back along the road the way they had come. It was not a bugling or a roar in any normal sense. The sound it most reminded Perennius of was that of a cat vomiting. It was a hollow, chugging noise, followed by a horrid rattling. The sound was so loud that, like a waterfall, it provided an ambiance rather than an individual noise.

The inn wall was eight feet high. Perennius' face went blank. “Lucia,” he said to the tall woman, “give me a leg up like you did before.” It was the first time he had used the feminine form of her assumed name, as if she were a woman of his acquaintance.

As if he were acquainted with her as a woman.

Calvus cupped her hands in a stirrup. “Yes, Aulus,” she said. Her donkey brayed and turned in a tight circle when she dropped his reins. Sestius' beast was restive also, though the other three donkeys seemed to be rather calmer than their human owners.

The centurion hammered on the gate with his spear-butt. “Hey!” he shouted. “Herakles! Open the fucking gate, will you?”

Perennius knew this time to expect the lift which the woman gave him when she straightened. The agent swung over and down into the courtyard in a single arc, his right hand pivoting on the top of the wall to swing him past. It might have been smarter to pause for an instant and make sure that the wall was not faced with spikes or sharpened flints. At this juncture, the agent thought he could better afford the injury than the loss of time. He hit the ground upright with his knees flexed against the shock. There was some motion across the courtyard, but he ignored it as he ran to the heavy bar of the gate. The—call it a roar—was sounding again. It was noticeably louder, even through the thick timbers of the gate.

“Legate! Perennius!” Sestius screamed. Gaius and Sabellia were shouting something too. “Legate!”

Perennius put his shoulder under the bar and used his knees to lift. The bar was of iron-bound oak. It was not really meant to be worked by a single man. In his present state of directedness, the agent could have lifted it with one hand.

The leaves of the door knocked Perennius backward. They were driven by Sabellia's donkey, bolting through the first hint of an opening despite anything the rider could do. Perennius' own donkey and Calvus', the latter streaming the tags of broken reins, slammed in after the Gallic woman. Gaius followed. He was actually controlling the donkey he rode. He had drawn his spatha in his right hand and was looking back over his shoulder.

The dragon that was charging them drew Perennius' stare also. The agent threw his weight against a gate leaf even before Sestius and Calvus had run inside. The mass of the panels meant a delay before even Perennius' strength could start them swinging closed again. That alone was more delay than he liked to think about.

More hands joined Perennius, those of his party and a tall, fair man the agent had never seen before. The leaves slammed against the stop carved in the inner face of the stone lintel. The stranger was screaming in Latin, “The bar! The bar!” It was Perennius who first spun to grip the bar where it had fallen, but Calvus plucked it from his hands and banged it home in the slots. The dragon hit the gate from the other side.

The really terrifying thing about the dragon was that it looked over the wall at them.

The creature had stridden down the hillside on its two hind legs. Now its forelimbs snatched at the humans scattering back from the gate. The hooked claws left deep triple scratches in the gate panels and the stone. The beast's eyes glittered like polished jet. Its scales were black and red—the latter not rusty mottling but the angry crimson of a cock's wattles.

Perennius opened his mouth to shout orders, everyone to hide in the gatehouse, lest the creature leap the wall or batter through with its elephantine mass. The dragon's jaws opened also, wide enough to engulf most of a man's torso. The beast gave its hunting cry. The sound was felt in its paralyzing intensity by everything in the echoing courtyard. One of the donkeys threw itself on its back and began kicking the air while its burden scattered. Other hooves battered at the reinforced doors of the stables. The dragon's breath stank like the air of a well-sealed tomb.

The open door of the common room sucked the humans out of the courtyard like water through a tap. The agent was not sure which of them had led the rush. Perhaps the idea had struck them all at the same time. Running the length of the courtyard was like charging through the zone beaten by hostile artillery, but that hundred foot distance was a necessary insulation. The gatehouse was simply too close to the monster.

The creature was forty feet long and as vicious, ounce for ounce, as a shrew. Even Gaius went scrambling at the roar. He had dismounted—landed on his feet, at any rate—and brandished his sword in the dragon's face. The courage involved in the action was both pointless and insane, so the sound that shook the youth to his senses did at least a little good. The six of them, Perennius' party and the stranger, bolted within the common room and closed the door. The dragon had begun chewing on the top of the wall.

*   *   *

It was close to pitch dark inside to eyes that had been under an open sky. The two men facing the newcomers were only figures in silhouette against the glow of the cookfire in a wall niche. The agent did not need the details he would get when his eyes adjusted, however, to read the others' stance as that of archers with their bows drawn.

“What in blazes
is
that thing?” Perennius asked. He threw his back to the door in a disarming pantomime of terror at the dragon outside. At the moment, the agent's greatest concern was for the arrow pointed at his midriff. It would not advance the situation to admit that, however.

“If it gets in, you bastards,” said the man who had joined them at the gate, “it's your fault. Jupiter preserve us if it gets the horses. We'll
never
get clear of here on foot!”

“Where do you come from?” demanded one of the bowmen. Like the other speaker, his Latin had a pronounced Gallic accent. The head of his arrow was beginning to wobble with the strain of holding the bow fully drawn. The man relaxed slightly, a good sign but dangerous in case his fingers slipped while the weapon was still pointed as it was.

“Well, from Tarsus,” the agent said. His companions were extending to either side of him along the wall of the room. The Gaul who had first spoken was sidling to join the archers. It was clear that if the stand-off exploded into violence, the three of them were dead even if the arrows hit home. “They talked about Typhon and dragons, but blazes! I had a wool contract and I don't make my living by listening to bumpf from silly women. But…” Perennius gestured back with his thumb, then added ingenuously, “You fellows part of a garrison from hereabouts?”

That the three of them were soldiers was as obvious as their Gallic background. Their professional bearing, bowstrings drawn to their cheeks; their issue boots; the youthful similarity of the men themselves—all bespoke army. The question was, whose army? And Perennius was beginning to have a shrewd notion of the answer to that one, too. The alleyway in Rome and the Gallic voices closing the end of it whispered through his memory.

“Slack 'em, dammit,” grunted the first speaker. As the archers obeyed, he added, “Yeah, we were, ah, going on leave and this thing…” Then, “Magnus, Celestus—I'm going to check this goddam thing from the tower.”

The arched doorway in a back corner led to the crenelated tower above the roof proper. Perennius stepped forward to join the Gallic—non-com was more likely than officer. “Gaius,” the agent said, “you others—be ready to get the donkeys in if that thing moves away, right? Don't take chances, but we need to get them closed up or they'll draw him back themselves.”

Perennius was off before either of the archers could decide to stop him. The agent's boots made precisely the same echoing clatter on the stairs as did those of the man in front of him. The meeting could not be pure coincidence, but the agent strongly hoped that it was not as—someone, some
thing,
had planned either.

The dragon was hissing into the courtyard at the donkeys. The sound was like that of flames in ripe wheat. The creature did not appear to notice the men rising behind the battlements of the tower, but something else invisible to them made it turn abruptly. “Have you tried shooting it?” the agent asked.

The Gaul snorted. “Do I look crazy?” he demanded. “This is how it acts when it's
not
pissed off!”

The dragon's turn was complicated by the length of the rigid tail which balanced the body. It did not spin as a man would have done. Instead, the creature backed as it rotated like a swimmer reversing at the end of a pool. The new object of its attentions veered into sight also. It was a donkey, the one Sestius had ridden. By now it had shed its saddle and all accoutrements. Instead of bolting into the courtyard with the remainder of the party, it had broken away and run around the building in panic.

The donkey might have been as safe behind the common room as it would be within the courtyard, but the madness to which the dragon's bellows had driven it did not permit the beast to halt there. When it galloped past the bath house at the south front corner of the complex, both donkey and dragon realized what had happened. The former vectored off braying, back up toward the main road. The dragon strode after it. As Perennius had found its power and savagery stunning when the creature roared and clawed at the wall, so its speed was a horrible augury for the agent's chances of being able to leave the inn and complete his mission.