Birds of Prey (7 page)

Perennius smiled and said, “Yes, well … I told you, I have experience accepting the remarkable.” But the fact that he joked instead of nodding gravely implied that there was a level of belief in the expressed skepticism. As Calvus had said, it was cheaper to believe him and be wrong than it would be to be surprised the other way.

The shadows of the hills had cut off the sun. Now Navigatus glanced over his shoulder at the Headquarters building and saw the windows of the upper story were being swung shut by the cleaning crews against the threat of rain. The lamps hanging from the drawing-room ceiling silhouetted against the panes the figures of men whose need to see the Director outweighed their dignity.

Navigatus stood, scowling. “Here,” he said, “this is foolish. We'll go to my house, bathe there, and discuss this over dinner.” He looked anxiously toward the bald man. “If you don't mind something simple, Lucius Calvus? I work here so late that I almost never have time to attend a proper dinner party, much less give one.”

Perennius and the stranger rose also. “Marcus, I appreciate it, but your household servants already know as much about my affairs as I intend to let them,” the agent said. “Besides, if you don't clear those out of your office properly—” he nodded toward the lamps and those waiting beneath them—“it'll eat at you till you don't sleep tonight. Even though there isn't one of them who's worth a gray hair to either of us.”

The Director touched his wig unconsciously. “Well, if you wouldn't feel offended, Aulus,” he said apologetically. “I probably would feel better if I dealt with them.” He eyed the lighted window again. “Not that you're wrong about the … lack of consequence,” he added morosely. “I sometimes fear that I've concentrated too much on minutiae in the past few years because the major problems are…” His voice trailed off.

“No problem is insoluble,” said Calvus. His flat calm made the statement an article of faith. He must have been surprised at how he sounded, because his body at once gave a tiny shudder as if to settle its contents. “Aulus Perennius,” the tall man went on, “I will accompany you, then.”

“No,” said the agent, dipping his head in negation, “that won't be necessary, sir. I'll call for you at the palace in the morning.” He smiled. “We're in a transit barracks, my companion and I. I doubt you'd find the accommodations much to your taste.” The three of them were drifting back toward the door, now. The social circumstances were too unclear for either of the Bureau employees to act as decisively as they would have preferred to do.

“I'll have to get used to worse accommodations and to none at all,” Calvus said simply. He stepped briskly ahead of the others, knowing that the discussion would end when an attendant opened the door for them. “And you'll have to get used to me, I'm afraid, because it is quite necessary for me to reach the site.”

The agent laughed. It was Navigatus who actually found words to comment. “In school,” he said, “I read Homer's accounts of ships that sailed themselves and gods trading spear-thrusts with mortals.…” He gestured his companions onward, through the doorway and into the corridor with the men eagerly awaiting their pointless audiences with him.

“I couldn't imagine how anyone ever had believed such nonsense,” the Director went on. “But I see now that I just needed exercise to increase my capacity for faith.”

CHAPTER SIX

Perennius swore as his iron-cleated boots skidded on a greasy stone. “Slow up, damn you,” he snarled to the linkman. “I hired you to light our way, not run a damned race with us!”

It embarrassed the agent that Calvus seemed to walk the dark streets with less trouble than he did. Anyone lodging in the palace should have done all his night rambling on the legs of litter bearers.

Tall buildings made Rome a hard place for Perennius to find his way around in the dark. He supposed that he used the stars more or less without thinking about it in cities where the apartment blocks did not rear sixty feet over narrow streets as they did in the capital. Even though the barracks were nearby, he had hired a man with a horn-lensed lantern to guide them. The fellow was a surly brute, but he had been the only one in the stand at the whorehouse who was not already attending someone inside.

The raised lantern added a dimension to the linkman's scowl. “Through here,” he muttered in a Greek that owed little to Homer. “Me go first.” As he spoke, he scrambled into a passage less than three feet wide. The narrow slit of sky was webbed with beams cross-connecting the upper floors of the apartment buildings to either side. Poles draped with laundry slanted from windows, though it was doubtful there was ever a breeze there to be caught.

“Hold the damned light where it does some good!” Perennius said. He turned to his companion. “Here, sir, you go first. It won't hurt this—” he gave his travelling cloak a flick—“to get dropped in the slops again.”

“This is safe, then?” Calvus asked as he stepped past the agent. There was curiosity but no apparent concern in his voice.

“Slow
down,
” Perennius shouted. In normal tones he continued, “Safe for us. I wouldn't advise you to wander around here without your own attendants, but—we're sober, and even a boyo like the one ahead of us knows the pay-out wouldn't be worth the trouble of trying to bounce the pair of us.”

“I wondered,” said the tall man, “because this—” he rapped the right-hand wall. He had been tracing his fingers along it as if he needed support—“is the back of the building where we hired this guide. The brothel.”

“Well, that doesn't—” Perennius started to say. Metal rang behind them, at or near the entrance to the passage. Darkness and the curve of the walls hid the cause. The agent's sword whined against the mouth of its scabbard as he cleared the blade hastily. “Come on, quick,” he hissed to Calvus. His arm gestured the tall man forward, around a blind angle after the linkman.

The right-hand wall angled back abruptly, widening the passage into a court ten feet broad at the far end. There, another wall sharply closed the reentrant. The court was large enough for a second-floor balcony above the brothel's rear entrance. There were figures on the balcony, and there were at least half a dozen men in the court beneath.

“Take the dagger!” Perennius said. He thrust the ball pommel against his companion's hand. Calvus was as still as a birch tree. His fingers did not close on the knife. The agent saw sweat glittering on the tall man's face and scalp as the guide lifted his lantern higher.

“Yes,” rasped one of the figures on the balcony. The voice was indescribably harsh. Only the word itself was human. “Kill them.”

“Aulus!” cried the other figure, a woman, but twenty years smothered Perennius' recognition of the speaker.

As the agent lunged forward, he pivoted his sword arm to slash rather than to stab. His blade was Basque steel, forged in the Bilbao Armory before it slipped away with Postumus. It had a sharp edge and held it while Perennius sliced through the lantern, the hand holding the lantern, and into the pelvis of the guide who had betrayed them. The bravos waiting in the court surged forward in the darkness.

Perennius was on the stones and rolling, now. He would have called to Calvus, but there was nothing useful to say. Their retreat was surely blocked. It would be a miracle if even confusion allowed either victim to escape through the other end of the court. Besides, the tall man had funked too badly to move, much less to fight or run.

The guide spun off screaming. The sword that was killing him had bitten so deeply in the bone that Perennius had let it go. There was a crash and double screams as the wounded man collided with his friends and another blade. Someone stumbled on Perennius' torso. The agent thrust upward with the dagger Calvus had refused, ripping one of the ambushers from thigh to sternum.

“Gaius, go back!” the woman was crying in Allobrogian. The passage the agent had followed to this killing ground was alive with voices and the ring of blades too long for the surrounding walls. A club or a boot numbed Perennius' right arm. His legs were tangled with the thrashing body of the man he had just disemboweled. The agent slashed his dagger in a brutal arc a hand's breadth above the pavement. Boot-webbing and tendons parted. Someone screamed like a hog being gelded. A club swished toward the sound. The weapon must have been a section of water pipe, because it crunched against a skull with none of the sharpness of wood on something solid.

“Hold up! Hold up!” a male voice bawled from the passage.

The door serving the balcony from within opened.

To the men who had been fighting below in total darkness, the rectangle of light was dazzling. The two figures on the balcony were struggling with one another. Calvus stood as white and frozen as an unpainted statue. He had not moved since the lantern shattered. Now one of the bravos hit him in the face with the lead-studded glove of a professional boxer.

“Hey!” cried someone from the open doorway. Perennius was raising his dagger for a left-handed throw at the man who had just struck Calvus. He thought he recognized the speaker—Maximus, the guard from Headquarters—just as the first of the lightning bolts struck.

One of the figures locked together on the balcony fell in on itself in a blue glare. There was a hissing roar like that of a wave on the rocks. The flash was momentary, but the roar echoed hellishly in the angled court.

The two thugs still on their feet ran for the door in the other building. The men who had followed Perennius down the passage did not exit into the court. Their accoutrements clattered as they ran back the way they had come. Calvus' knees had buckled. The tall man had slid down. His back and sagging head were supported by the wall behind him while his legs splayed out on the stones. All this Perennius could see clearly in the strobe of the second world-shattering flash.

The balcony had a wicker guard-wall. The figure pressed back against it was short and dressed in cape and cowl. Those details were clear because the actinic glare flooded through every interstice as its fury exploded in the balcony doorway. The roar and the screams merged in a sound that could have come from fiery Phlegethon.

Options were clicking through Perennius' mind, overprinted with the retinal memory of the flash. Better to act and bear the consequences than to freeze and become the pawn of others' actions. He gave his dagger a half-flip, caught it by the blade, and threw it with all his strength toward the figure which had been silhouetted above him.

The balcony door was still open, and a lamp burned beyond. The doorway was only a yellow dimness, however. It was no longer able to illuminate the court to eyes which the lightning had blinded. The air stank with burning wool and burning flesh, with wastes voided in terror and wastes spilled from disemboweled victims.

The bravo who had died across Perennius' legs held a meat cleaver. It was an awkward, foolish weapon, but it was the closest one now to hand. The agent appropriated it as he slid from beneath the corpse. His own right shoulder felt swollen to twice its normal size, but he had the use of that hand again, after a fashion. He stepped carefully to where Calvus had fallen. There were moans and even movements from the ambushers who had not run, but none of them was likely to be a threat. They were all fools. In the darkness, they had been worse enemies to each other than Perennius had been to them.

A white form lifted jerkily against the wall. “Did you kill it?” asked Calvus. His voice was weak but unmistakable for its near lack of emotion. The tall man touched the agent's forehead. That minute contact seemed to give Calvus the strength to pull himself fully erect.

“We've got to get the hell out of here before the clean-up squad comes in,” Perennius whispered. “I'll go first and we'll try the door to the left there.” He gestured with the cleaver. His sight was returning, though he still saw dancing purple flashes every time he closed his eyes.

“No,” said Calvus, “we'll go up. None of the fighters were on the balcony. And we have to see that it is dead.”

Anger at being contradicted rolled almost at once into an awareness that this time the panicky civilian was right. But though the floor of the balcony was only some eight feet above the pavement, Perennius' own injury—

“Here,” said Calvus, lacing his fingers into a stirrup. “If it still moves, kill it. But draw me up quickly if it is dead.”

The agent started to protest, but the bald man appeared to know what he was about. He was in a half squat, with his buttocks braced against the wall as a fulcrum. Lean as Calvus looked, there had been nothing of softness in his lines; and anyone who could shrug off a blow like Calvus had received had to be in good physical condition.

Besides, the first one over the wicker railing might need an aptitude for slaughter. There was no doubt as to which of the pair of them that called for.

Perennius measured the distance, measured the chances. He shifted the cleaver to his right hand, hoping his fingers could grip the weapon while he jerked himself up with the other arm. He socketed his foot in the stirrup, touched the balcony with his free hand, and said, “Go!”

The tall man shot Perennius upward as abruptly as a catapult. Instead of having to catch himself on the railing and pull his body over, Perennius soared. He scarcely brushed the wicker. The agent tried to swing his legs under him, but he hit the floor in an awkward sprawl anyway. Something crunched beneath him like underfired terra cotta. Remembering the violence that was always his companion, Perennius switched the cleaver to his better hand even as he twisted to see who shared the balcony with him.

The agent had landed on a body that powdered under his weight. The second figure lay face down with half the length of Perennius' dagger pinning its cape to its shoulders. The doorway into the building proper was shattered. The door itself was in splinters, and the stucco over the stone and brick core of the wall was crazed away in a six-foot circle. On the floor of the room within lay two men. One of them was shrunken to scarcely the bulk of a child. A triple ceiling lamp, suspended from bronze phalluses, lighted the room. Other faces peered around the jamb of the door on the other side, where the room opened into a hallway. “Imperial Affairs!” the agent croaked to the frightened onlookers. “Get the Watch here fast!”