Birds of Prey (44 page)

Perennius was not alone in the cave; and not all hobgoblins were things of myth.

The agent had been able to walk upright to that point. Now the rock constricted again and the cave took a twist to the right. Perennius swore very softly and drew his dagger. He knelt, then thrust the slung armor ahead of him around the bend. Nothing happened. Light from the hovering globe spewed through the interstices of the armor, dappling Perennius and the walls around him.

The agent slid forward on his greaves. The eight-foot pole bound against the rock. Perennius shifted the knife to his right hand. He slammed his left shoulder against the pole. The dogwood flexed and sprang free. Perennius lunged around the corner himself as if the extra suit of mail were dragging him forward. The tip of the pole thudded into the seamless door which closed the passage. It could have been rock itself, save for the regular patterning which the ball of light disclosed. Whorls of shadow spun from the center. The background had no color but that of the yellowish light illuminating it.

And then the light slid forward, merged with the barrier, and disappeared.

*   *   *

The first thing Perennius did was to wedge his pole so that the armor hung across the face of the portal. He could not assume that what was a barrier to him barred also the Guardian and its weapons. Calvus had projected the agent into a world whose uncertainties went much deeper than questions of provincial governors and border security. It was easier to doubt whether or not a wall was solid than to worry about a line of defense a thousand miles away. In the case of the wall, there were precautions Perennius himself could take. If the question made the task more involuted, well, solving problems was the greatest merit in life.

The air had begun to smell stale at the instant the light was sucked away.

Perennius did not know what had happened to Calvus or the light, but he restrained his initial impulse to scramble back through the darkness. “Some effort” the tall woman had said. Perhaps it had grown too great, forcing her to pause for a moment like a porter leaning his burden against a wall. The glow might resume any time. If Perennius were running back, it would show him as a fool and a coward—after he had insisted that he was willing to go down with no light at all.

The agent picked carefully at the barrier with the point of his dagger. The surface had the slight roughness of the limestone with which it merged at the edges. Whereas the soft rock crumbled when he scraped at it, the steel had no effect whatever on the material of the barrier. Given time, Perennius could cut away the plug intact, like a miner who encounters a huge nugget of native copper in a deep mine. Given time. Even in close quarters, even blind and encased in armor whose leather padding was slimy with sweat …

And perhaps Calvus was a cinder blasted by the creature which now crept to eliminate the last threat. To eliminate Perennius, pinned hopelessly against the closed entrance to its lair.

The agent felt through his knees the whisper behind him which his ears could not hear for the din of blood in them.

Perennius turned. He did not shift his curtain of mail. Remembering how Gaius' spatha had caught and channeled blasts away from him, Perennius drew his own sword and advanced it toward the darkness. Sap softly resisted the steel's leaving its sheath. The blade stirred the muggy air with the odor of fresh-cut vegetation. The agent wondered if the first bolt would catapult him backwards, stunned and ready to be finished at leisure. He focused all his will down into the point of the dagger in his right hand. By the gods, he would lunge against the blue-white bolt like a boar on the spear that spitted it, determined to rend its slayer.

“Aulus,” Calvus called from just around the last turning, “I needed to be closer to manipulate the barrier. I apologize for leaving you in the dark this way.”

“No problem,” the agent lied. “Glad you've got an answer to this wall. I sure didn't.” Perennius could not find the mouth of his scabbard. His sword scraped twice on his thigh armor, then dropped to the ground so that Calvus could clutch the agent's empty hand. Her touch was firm and cooling, even through the gauntlet.

The tall woman slipped past Perennius in the narrow way. Far more awkwardly, the agent also turned. He could hear the rustle of the draped armor as Calvus reached beneath it to finger the barrier directly. “Yes…” she murmured. Then she slid back past the agent, a whisper in the darkness. Her fingers rested at the nape of Perennius' neck, where the gorget buckled beneath the brass of the headpiece. “Be ready, Aulus Perennius,” she said.

The door pivoted inward in a hundred or more narrow wedges from its circumference. The fact and the motion were limned by the glaucous light on the other side of the portal. The door's suction pulled a draft past the agent, the reverse of the pistoning thump at his approach when it had closed. A thunderbolt lashed the sudden opening and blew a gap of white fire in the heart of the ring-mail curtain.

The end of the dogwood pole had ravelled to a tangle of fibers. They were a ball of orange flame through which Perennius leaped. His optic nerves were patterned with the white lacework of blazing iron.

Within, the ground curved away in a slope. The cavity was large and spherical and as unnatural as the bilious light which pervaded it. Packed about the interior of the chamber were translucent globules the size of clenched fists. The globules were held against the rock by swathes and tendrils of material with the same neutral consistency as that of the door itself. A narrow aisle crossed the chamber, dipping and rising with the curve to an opening in the far wall. Beyond was a glimpse of another cavity, a bead on a string and certainly not the last.

Perennius cleared the threshold in the air. He missed his expected landing because of the concavity of the floor. Globules smashed between the stone and his own solid mass of flesh and iron. Ten feet from the skidding agent, the Guardian pointed its weapon and screamed. The sound was a chitinous burring with the bone-wrenching amplitude of a saw cutting stone. The creature's weapon did not fire. The alien stood frozen as its fellow had done on the balcony in Rome. This time there was no bravo to stun Calvus and release the energy the woman's mind blocked in the weapon.

Perennius rolled to his feet. Frosty gelatine from the eggs he had crushed slurped away from his left leg and forearm. The agent had poised his dagger to throw despite the poor visibility and his constricted limbs. There was no need for him to take that risk. Two sliding steps brought him to the alien. It did not move, save that the band of cilia beneath its head quivered with its rasping scream. Perennius brought down his armored fist as if he were driving a nail with the pommel of the dagger he held. The conical head shattered. The Guardian's long waist tentacles spasmed. The energy weapon flickered out of the creature's grasp. It clattered into the layer of eggs and stuck there. The creature's braced legs did not give way, and the throat cilia continued to vibrate.

Perennius struck again. His fist was slippery and he lost the dagger at the shock. The agent could no longer see for sweat and the emotions raised by the chitinous scream. Both of his arms began to flail down into the stumpy creature. Bits of exoskeleton prodded back at the iron as the pulpy material within spattered the chamber. Perennius did not know when the screaming stopped. His next awareness was the touch of Calvus' hand on his shoulder and the way the whole world focused down to a point as his muscles gave way.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The air in the chamber felt cool beyond the fact that Perennius breathed it without the mask's constriction. Reaction from his berserk rage could only have left him unconscious for seconds. The tall woman had already stripped Perennius of his helmet, gauntlets, and greaves.

“You have to get out of here quickly,” Calvus said. She rolled the agent over on his belly unceremoniously to get at the catches closing his mail shirt. “I'm taking your armor off because it will save time over all.”

“What do you mean?” the agent demanded of the floor of the aisle. He did not twist against the woman's manipulations. He accepted her good faith; and in any case, Perennius could not have resisted her if she were as serious as she appeared to be. “We're not done till we smash all the—” Calvus flopped him over again and began drawing both sleeves over his arms simultaneously—“eggs, are we?” Perennius gestured with the right hand that was cleared in that instant.

“Aulus,” the woman said, “please run. I won't be able to give you light, and I want to be sure you get clear.” The chamber was distinctly colder, though the frosty glow with which it had been suffused was being supplanted by a warmer hue.

“Lucia, what's going on?” Perennius pleaded. He stood up. Reflexively he wiped at ichor that had splashed his left wrist, but he did not move toward the doorway.

“I was the only kind of hardware they—we—could send back,” Calvus said. She took one of the agent's hands in each of hers. Her flesh was warmer than human. “There aren't any choices now for me, Aulus. I wasn't raised for there to be any choices once I reached the brood chambers.”

The tall woman swallowed, holding the agent's stricken eyes with her own. She continued, “I have no gods to pray by, my friend. But my greatest hope is that when you leave here, you will remember that you
do
have choices. I—I have enjoyed working with you, Aulus Perennius. I respect you as a tool; and I think you know me well enough by now to hear that as the praise it is. But I respect you as a man as well … and I have been close enough to humanity in the time I've spent with you that I—wish you the chance of happiness that tools don't have.”

She bent over and kissed Perennius. Her lips were hot. The chamber swam in a rosy, saturated light like that of iron being forged.

“Goodbye, Lucia,” the agent said. His sense of direction saved him as he turned and bolted for the exit. Even in the lighted brood chamber, Perennius was blinded by tears that turned images into faceted jewels.

*   *   *

On the scramble back through the darkness, Perennius functioned by giving himself utterly to the task at hand. It was the way he had always functioned. It worked no worse this time for the fact he had found a willingness to live in other ways. There were no side branchings. The passage was a single artery to Hell. There were stretches in which the slope jogged into what would have been rapids when rainwater foamed down the cavern. They were difficult but not impossible, even without light. Perennius had scrambled through dark buildings and light-less camps in the past, trusting the senses which remained. Those senses had preserved him from the blades of those intent on his life. The agent was exhausted, but leaving behind the sweaty burden of his armor had freed his spirit … and the muscles would do as the spirit demanded, as they always had.

Calvus' touch was still a memory in his flesh—but not in his mind; Perennius could not afford her in his mind until he had carried out her last injunction.

The cavern was lighted for him long before eyes which had not adapted to total blackness would have seen even a glow. Light bounced into the gorge and threw a hazy grayness down the funneled throat of the cavern. Some of it seeped further down the twisting stone pathway. Even to Perennius' retinas, the amount of light was too little to see by. But it was a brightening goal, a proof of the success he had never permitted himself to doubt.

Where the cave flared around the last major turning, the smooth stone grew light enough to have a visible pattern. Perennius threw his head up. The little chapel was in black contrast to the sky which streamed light through the open roof and past the interstices of the pillared wall. Beside the building, haloed by her back-lit red hair, Sabellia was scrambling down the path into the cave. The head of the spear she carried winked.

“Back, Bella,
back!
” Perennius called in horror. His intended roar was a gasp. His legs for the first time quivered noticeably with fatigue.

“Aulus?” the woman called. “Aulus?” Her eyes saw only a tremble of motion from the cave. Sabellia slid down a dangerous shelf of rock rather than take the path which wound around it.

“Wait!”
cried Perennius. Unconquered Sun, Creator and Sustainer of life, give me now the strength I need. The agent lowered his head and began to run up the zig-zag path. It was easy to believe that the Sun is a god when one stumbled out of Hell. And it is easy to believe in gods when there is no longer help in oneself for one's beloved.

Sabellia could see the agent now. She paused. She had heard his command, but there was more to her hesitation than that. Something in the air was wrong. The woman switched from hand to hand the spear she had found near Sacrovir when she herself regained consciousness.

Perennius had not permitted himself to look up the slope again. It would have thrown him off-stride, and he knew full well that a stumble might be the end. “Please run, darling,” he wheezed. “Please run.”

Sabellia threw her hand out to grasp the agent's in welcoming and fear. She obeyed as the agent had earlier obeyed Calvus. It was a time when trust had to replace understanding. Sabellia's weapon dropped and rolled clanging toward the cave from which Perennius had come. She took the agent's hand in her own, not to hold him but to add her own fresher strength to his as they pounded up the final leg of pathway.

The air their lungs dragged in had a searing dryness to it. Perennius, to whom every breath had been fiery with exertion, did not notice the change. Sabellia's grip on his hand tensed. The base and pillars of the chapel had taken on a rosy glow from the light they reflected. The light behind the couple cast their shadows on the stone.

“Aulus!”
Sabellia shouted.

The agent threw her and himself sideways on the ground, shielded by the squat building as a glare like that of molten steel raved from the throat of Typhon's Cavern.