David Drake - Killer

"Yes," said N'Sumu. He seemed to have regained his composure. "It's just that I've lost the element of surprise. I'm certain that the phile-the sauropithecus-caught my scent… We are old enemies, my people and these lizard-apes. It knows I am here-and it will certainly single me out when it attacks."

"You people! Better move away!" Lycon warned the nearest refugees. His tone was so emotionless that he would have been ignored even had he spoken loudly enough to be understood in the uproar. The hunter grinned at N'Sumu. "The lizard-ape won't ignore me ," he said. "Watch."

Lycon braced his right foot on the coping of the basin. It was slick with algae, but he had forded streams where a slip meant half a mile of battering along granite boulders. He would not slip now. The nails in his boots gouged into the tufa, as the hunter jumped to the top of the pillar. From this position he now stood two feet above the surface of the basin. Lycon's arms hunched back to balance himself. Vonones thought he looked rather like a bird of prey balancing on its perch. The net, closely bunched, swung in one hand; in the other, the ivory wand shone a smooth orange in the glow of the flames.

The column was rectangular and only a foot across at the top, but that was adequate for Lycon's purposes. He held up the burden in his left hand at just enough of an angle so that the netted chick, squirming angrily, could not tear his forearm.

"Come get it!" he shouted to the rooftops. "Do you want it? Here it is!" The ivory baton flexed no more than a hair's breadth as Lycon slapped it against the net with all his strength. There was a crack of impact, and something too shrill to be a sound raised hairs on the necks of all those clustered about the fountain.

Lycon had attracted little attention when he forced his way to the basin, and little more even when he leaped atop the central column. His shout and the eerie shriek that followed the blow of the ivory baton drew the crowd's eyes, and then drove back the nearest of those around him.

Lycon had worn only a simple, light tunic tonight-wanting freedom of movement. Thus far the tension and activity had counteracted the effect of the night chill in this, the month Germanicus-September, until the Emperor had renamed it following his triumph over the Germans. Lycon had sweated in the loft and during their escape from it. Now he shivered. His garment was torn loose from one shoulder and shredded on one side where the chick had clawed at him. The trembling in his limbs was both emotional as well as physical, but that would not prevent his muscles from reacting when needed.

It was questionable whether his reactions could save him this time, but a failed hope is nonetheless hope for a time.

"There!" cried Vonones. Lycon turned, but there was nothing in the direction his friend pointed, not even hinted motion.

Because the light was diffused from above, the nearby facades looked as if they were veiled by cobwebs that thinned as they hung closer to the street. Cornices and eaves of red tile, whose true color was only hinted by the light that washed them, dripped long shadows downward. Something could have leaped across a roofline, have clung like a shadow-drenched bat beneath a projecting beam, but it would be invisible.

"Here it is!" Lycon shouted. He struck again with the baton, letting rage drive his arm. He heard a dull crunch of bones; blood spurted from the tiny body broken within the net. Vonones shouted. The adult sauropithecus launched itself toward Lycon, forty feet beneath the ledge upon which it had hung.

The lizard-ape was no more than a blur, an impression too sudden and ill-lit to be seen in detail. Another man would have frozen there, gaped stupidly, and died an instant later. Lycon knew well the blinding speed, the razor-edged deadly claws-and at the first shimmer of movement from above, the hunter was already in motion himself.

Lycon raised his ivory baton-the lizard-ape's scales might turn tiger claws, but in another instant he would know how hard its skull was.

N'Sumu had already reacted to Vonones' shout. A split second after the lizard-ape leaped, midway between the ledge and its quarry, its hurtling form was caught up in a sudden glow of verdant light. Lycon had hoped for the eye-searing emerald flare that had shattered blue-scaled bodies apart earlier in the loft. Instead, the hurtling lizard-ape seemed to stagger in midair-to lose full control of its muscles-but its leap carried it full onto Lycon.

Stunned or not, the lizard-ape struck Lycon and knocked him backward-carrying the hunter from his precarious footing atop the column. Lycon cushioned its impact as best he could-there was no room to duck, nor time to try. The lizard-ape was heavier than he had expected-its flesh must all be of iron-hard muscle-and the force of its fall would have broken half his bones had Lycon not twisted aside, merging with the creature in midair, falling with it into the fountain. The belly-ripping stroke of its claws had no strength, brushed him with only a shadow of their lethal intent-shredding his tunic even so.

Lycon hit the water backward, half-way into a somersault, and the tufa coping grazed his scalp an instant before his back struck the floor of the basin. Water sprayed across the screams of everyone around the fountain. Lycon's arms flailed, but he struck instinctively with his baton, felt it strike hard. The net was slung to one side, balancing the thrust of his right arm in the opposite direction-arm, ivory baton, and the blood-mad creature locked by its teeth to the ivory, as water exploded in all directions.

Lycon was screaming, "Kill it! Kill it, N'Sumu!" The fear and fury in his voice would have made the words unintelligible even without the surrounding chaos.

The wand struck the lip of the tufa as Lycon and the blue killer crashed down again. Ivory was denser than the porous stone, but the stone provided a fulcrum against which Lycon's hysterical grip and the teeth of the lizard-ape could lever with all their strength. The ivory baton shattered at the point of stress-fragments spalling away in layers of concentric rings.

Lycon sprang upright as the baton shattered, narrowly averting the claws of the lizard-ape's hind legs-a kick that would certainly have gutted him had the creature not been stunned by N'Sumu's magic. N'Sumu himself was shielding his eyes with one hand-the other hand pointing threateningly toward the falling spray. A green nimbus burst over the stone nymph.

Whatever magic the Egyptian commanded, the lizard-ape indeed recognized the danger. Abandoning its attack on Lycon, it darted amongst the panicked onlookers. Either the fall or N'Sumu's magic had weakened the sauropithecus, for Lycon was almost able to follow the lightning-quick movements of its claws as it ripped apart anyone too frozen with fear to leap out of its path.

A green lambency snaked through the heart of the crowd, twice, again and again-toppling people as they fled. Weaving through a cover of human bodies, the sauropithecus had already disappeared. Twenty feet from the fountain, the slab covering a sewer catchbasin rocked back onto its seat. The lizard-ape could not have sprung so far, so quickly after N'Sumu had stunned it and it had absorbed the shock of its fall. But the lizard-ape was gone, and the slab clacked as it settled, still ajar, over what had just used the sewers for a bolt-hole.

"You heard me, Armenian!" said a voice in easy Latin, high pitched and angry. "I ordered you to stop!"

Lycon turned. The Emperor's bodyguards had dismounted at last and by now had advanced in a wedge about their tribune. Civilians scattering from the brief, nightmarish struggle at the fountain rebounded in turn from armored chests and bare swords held forward by flat and hilt as fenders and threats. Panic can overload nervous systems, but even those in that dazed condition retained some urge for self-preservation. Cringing citizens curled back from the Germans like clods from the mold-board of a plow.