David Drake - Killer

"That's true enough," Lycon agreed.

"Let's go back to my house," Vonones suggested. "We'll need to get organized on this right away, and we'll use my men." He looked for landmarks. They might do better to hire one of the City Watchmen as a guide through the unfamiliar streets between the grain docks and his house on the Caelian. But the merchant did not especially want anyone else present during their conversation.

"The lizard-ape had a couple of days to recover from its fight with the tiger, probably holed up under the river bank along there. Either it had escaped serious injuries, or else it heals exceptionally fast-perhaps both. We know it couldn't have been crippled or badly hurt to have killed all those men without causing an uproar. It may well be that there was an hour or more between the separate attacks, while it caught its breath and… ate its fill. And that means it didn't go into the river at Portus."

"All right," Lycon said grimly. "What else do you think it means?"

"I don't…" Vonones began, not liking the conclusion he had reached. "I don't see any reason to assume the beast went into the river at all. Lycon, on the tiller-I saw that you noticed it too-there were fresh notches cut into the wood. I don't believe it was from the helmsman whittling at the tiller with a knife just before he was killed. And I don't think you believe that either."

Lycon spoke, but he spoke so softly that Vonones could not hear him. A great derrick lay halfway across the street ahead. Its axle squealed as men paced within the winding cage, providing power to raise a twenty-foot beam to the building crew awaiting it on the third floor of an apartment under construction.

Instead of trying to force his way around the obstruction, Vonones reined in and dismounted. He put his arm around Lycon's shoulders and bent his ear to the other's voice.

"I said," repeated the hunter with finality, "that if the sauropithecus is still alive, we've got to get it, and quickly. I've seen it kill, my friend. If it was smart enough to steer a barge up the Tiber, then it's too dangerous to be alive, that's all."

"Too dangerous to be loose, at any rate," said the merchant.

"I mean exactly what I said, Vonones," Lycon shouted, more loudly than Vonones thought prudent. "I hope we find it dead. I really do. Because no matter what, it's going to be dead the next time I leave it. I'm not turning it over alive to anybody." His voice dropped to a whisper that Vonones understood only because he knew what the words would be even before they were spoken: "Especially not to our lord and god, the Emperor."

Vonones pulled himself onto his mount again, lifting his weight with one hand on either of the pair of forward pommels on his saddle. Under normal circumstances, a slave would have given him a leg-up, but he would not ask a friend for that service.

"We'll see when the time comes," Vonones agreed cautiously. "We'll see when we've actually found the sauropithecus."

The imperial lodge east of Rome was not itself very large, but its grounds enclosed over a thousand acres of the Alban Hills. The Emperor was at his leisure in a clearing within sight of the main house. There were over a hundred men around him: guards, slaves, and a half dozen of his closest advisors.

"Loose!" the Emperor called.

A slave opened a basket and gave it an underarm swing that tossed the pigeon within airborne in the right direction. One of the bird's flight feathers on either wing had been clipped. That slowed its rise, but it also gave the bird a deceptive stagger through the air. Domitian drew his bow and tracked the pigeon's flight against the arrowhead. When he shot, the bird was almost twenty yards out. The release was part of the same smooth motion with which the Emperor had drawn the bow. The arrow's flat arc flicked it across the pigeon and past. The bird fell in two pieces, the head and the remainder.

Onlookers cheered wildly. The boy who was sprinting to pick up the arrow well down-range began to turn cartwheels. A microcephalic dwarf in a saffron tunic waddled up to Domitian and hugged his knee. The Emperor reached down and caressed the dwarf's head.

"What do you think of Glabrio for Upper Germany, Crispinus?" the Emperor asked, as he handed his bow to a slave to have another arrow nocked.

Crispinus, a greying man with a wizened face and eyes like a shark's, shrugged. "I think he's trustworthy, lord and god. I just don't think he's bright enough to tell dung from mincemeat."

"With four legions under him, I think we'll go with trustworthy," Domitian remarked languidly, as he reached for his bow.

A party of men, half a dozen of them, was coming from the lodge. That was unexpected. The six guards closest to the Emperor stood in an arc at his back, facing outward. They already held swords naked in their hands, but they stiffened to lift their armored heads a half-inch higher, like cats sighting prey. The outlying curtain of guards straightened also, but the newcomer, whoever he was, was being escorted by household staff members in normal fashion.

"Excellency, I'm so embarrassed," now whined a plump steward who had been conversing in a low voice with the slaves who were handling the pigeon baskets. "We haven't any more birds ready for your excellency. Some very nice deer, some panthers, or…"

The steward broke off and swallowed. Domitian had said nothing, but the Emperor's eyes were focused unblinkingly upon the steward. The unhappy servant forced his tongue to continue speaking, although he had very little consciousness of the words. "Or we could drive peacocks by, of course."

"Regular arrow," Domitian said, handing his bow to the loader without looking away from the steward.

Down the field, the slave boy was still cartwheeling expertly with bloody palms and sandals toward the distant arrow. There were scores of pigeons strewn between ten and forty yards of the imperial archer. Almost all of them had been lopped apart by arrows like the one now being exchanged for a normal point by the loader. The heads of the arrows that Domitian was using on the birds were double-pointed sickles a hand's breadth wide. The crescent blades were razor sharp across the whole inner curve. A few of the pigeons had fluttered to safety in the distant woods, but very few; the blood of the remainder had spattered the grass across a wide area as they fell. The slave had cartwheeled across the expanse of carnage, concerned only that he not slip in the blood and loose feathers. He had often seen worse.

The last six arrows had fallen at some distance one from another, depending on the angle at which panic had taken individual pigeons into the air. The slave stuck the shaft of each arrow into his mouth so that he could continue to cartwheel to the next. He had known before the steward had realized it that there were no more pigeons ready to be shot. The slave was determined to end his performance on a high note.

At Domitian's feet, the dwarf attempted a cartwheel of his own. Midway through, he shifted into a series of forward and backward somersaults, then stood on his hands giggling.

The slave boy caught up the sixth arrow and sprang into the air with his arms spread wide, a trio of arrows in either hand. Domitian moved, drawing the bow as if he and the bow and the boy down-range were all part of the same complex machine. The slave had a bright smile as his feet touched the ground again. His eyes did not have time to focus on what the Emperor was doing, much less on the arrow that was only a flicker in the air as it snapped toward him.

The boy yelped and fell over.

The house staff-a senior usher, two ushers, and a pair of armed Germans-had arrived with the newcomer, a richly tanned foreigner over six feet tall.

"You go stand against that beech tree there," the Emperor said to the steward responsible for the morning's recreation. He gestured with an eyebrow toward a tree ten yards away. Its size, four feet in diameter at head height above the ground, had caused it to be spared when lesser trees were cleared for the sports area. "Hold your hand above your head and spread your fingers."