David Drake - Killer

"Pull me out of here, and you'll never want for anything!"

The figure stepped past the rent-taker and disappeared as it moved out of the light. Carretius clutched toward the whisper of legs on heavy cloth-the only sound the figure made-but his bloody right hand touched nothing, or felt nothing it touched.

The figure reappeared. It was carrying the door panel that Ox had flung away as the three men had burst into the loft. The open doorway, the last hope in the blackness of Hades, disappeared as the figure carefully fitted the door back into place. There was a gentle tapping, as a scrap of timber was wedged between jamb and panel to hold the door in place until permanent repairs could be made. Carretius felt, rather than saw, the figure as it turned back to him.

The jagged touch of unseen climbing things had already shredded the rent-taker's garments across his back. His ragged breath was the only sound in the foetid loft-that and a scrambling, tearing sound, as of many crabs in a wooden trap.

He still had time to wonder what had become of Smiler, and in another moment he knew.

"He's going fast," said the Watch Centurion, as if Lycon needed help in judging serious wounds. "Maybe it's not what you're after, but I thought maybe-you know-that thousand sesterces reward you're offering for evidence of killings that don't look like your usual brawls and muggings and the like."

"You may have just earned it, Silvius," said Lycon, uncinching his belt so that his tunic could flap and cool him as he bent toward the victim. They had been held to the pace of Vonones' chairmen and the pair of lantern-carrying guides leading them all. In daylight and by a route with which he was familiar, Lycon would have run on ahead of them.

The big man was obviously near death-should be dead already from the injuries suffered in his fall. Perhaps with a body that huge it took time for the brain to know it was useless. Lycon remembered the giant German warriors he had seen in his youth-pierced by a dozen fatal wounds and still shambling forward to slay, froth on their lips and death frozen in their eyes.

The Watch station was converted from what had been a bakery on the corner of an apartment block-two rooms on the ground floor, and a connected upper room in which on-duty personnel could sleep until needed. Although public order was a concern, the fourteen battalions of the Watch were intended primarily for fire-fighting duties, despite their military organization and helmets. The front room in which the dying man now lay was steamy and odorous from the sausages that a few of the men on duty were grilling for supper. They watched and munched, more curious about Lycon than they were about what was, after all, just another corpse-or soon would be.

"All over me," the dying giant whispered. His eyes were open but unfocused, so he probably did not see Lycon bending over him. "They just kept coming. I hit them and it was like knives, like knives…"

"His name is Ox, and he and another bad one work with a rent-taker named Carretius," Silvius explained. "Don't know where they are, but it seems Ox fell off a roof or out of a window or something. Broke his fall somehow, and we found him crawling along the street out of his head from pain. Couldn't have happened too far from here-can't get too far with your arms and legs all busted up, no matter how strong a man you are. But it's these wounds he's got all over his back that puzzled me, so I thought maybe you'd want to see."

"Wine!" Lycon called. "We've got to get him to talk!"

N'Sumu's long-fingered hand reached past Lycon and raised the dying man's right arm. The flayed palm and the obvious break in both bones of the forearm could have been results of the fall. The cuts on the upper side of the arm had been made by dozens of piercing claws that had sunk an inch or more into the powerful arm before they were dragged free. They were sharp enough to cut rather than simply tear. Lycon thought of a net tied with fishhooks-fishhooks with their inside curve sharpened to a razor edge. The wounds covered his arms and shoulders.

Silvius handed Lycon a scrap of wine-soaked cloth. It was a rag that had been used to polish brass, but at this point that mattered as little to the victim as it did to Lycon. The hunter swabbed at the dying man's mouth. The astringent wine rinsed blood momentarily from broken lips. Lycon wrung the cloth, trying to get the man to swallow a little wine.

"Mephibaal was never no trouble," the dying man whispered. "Why'd he want to do this? Like knives…"

The three of them-Vonones, Lycon, and N'Sumu-had been dining together to discuss a week's accumulation of useless rumors and wasted searches, when the messenger from the Watch station had appeared at Vonones' ground-floor suite. The merchant had thrown a cloak over his tunic of pastel blue silk-Lycon would have permitted him no time to change, even had Vonones wanted to.

Now Vonones grasped the Centurion's shoulder-his grip firm with excitement. "Mephibaal," Vonones whispered urgently. "Find out who he is-and where he lives!"

"We went in when he didn't open the door," Ox mumbled. A heavy leather strap was sewn over the shoulders of his tunic and down the front, and the rent purse nestled upon his chest like a well-fed tick.

Lycon indicated the purse. "Well, we know he wasn't mugged and robbed."

"Ox?" laughed one of the Watch members as he strolled closer. "Nobody'd go for Ox. Not Hercules. Even without Smiler there to change their faces with his razor."

"We're close," said N'Sumu, trying to examine the back of the dying man's neck. Ox resisted his efforts. "He must have discovered the lizard-ape's lair."

"Couldn't see," whispered Ox. "Couldn't see…" The big shattered man lunged upward from the bare couch as N'Sumu tried to lift him. Lycon tried instinctively to hold him back. Ox swept him aside unnoticed, flinging the beastcatcher across the room.

"Got to get out !" the dying man shouted, in a spray of blood and spittle. His eyes were open, but they saw nothing in this world or the next. Ox took two steps, and the sound of the bone ends grating in his right thigh was audible even over the cries of the startled men around him. He struck a wall, rebounded, and struck it again-as if the bright splash of pulmonary blood he had coughed onto the stucco at his first impact was a target for the second. The back of the big man's tunic had been shredded by sharp claws, and bright bone showed yellow beneath the bloody tatters.

When his knees buckled, Ox sagged like a half-filled wine skin. His head fell forward onto his chest, and he might have been praying for the first and last time in his life. A circular hole the size of a pigeon's egg gaped from the back of his neck. Blood oozed but did not spurt from reopened wounds.

Lycon swore as he got to his feet from where Ox had sent him sprawling. He was not so much concerned that the man had died without saying much, as he was that Ox apparently had had very little to say. The attack had been unseen and unexpected. Perhaps it had been the work of the lizard-ape-N'Sumu thought so-but the question remained: where had it taken place?

The Centurion had stepped to the inner door of the station. "Basileus!" he shouted. "Check the codices for someone named Mephibaal in this district. Hurry!"

The patrolman who had been standing near tapped Silvius on the shoulder. "Mithras, sir," he said. "Don't worry about that. Everybody knows where old Mephi lives: the whole top floor of the building Hieronymos the tax-farmer owns, across from the Baths of Pulcher."

Silvius' eyes narrowed. "Where the dice game meets?" he asked.

"Other direction," said another Watch member. "But Castor-that's where they brought Ox from. Could've jumped from the seventh floor as well as from a roof, like we figured."