David Drake - Killer

"I'm a Roman citizen," Sempronianus said, his voice cracking in the middle of the clause. He clamped his thin arms across his chest in a pitiful attempt to deny purchase to the soldiers reaching toward the bed. "What are you doing to me?"

Soldiers lifted the naked, squealing boy, one by each arm, while the centurion stood grinning, arms akimbo. One of the Praetorians pinched the boy's buttocks with his free hand. "Hey," he said cheerfully, "save this one out. Be a crime to send him to the arena."

"Quintus," said the soldier holding the little gunsel's other arm, "this is the wrong outfit to talk about seeing how boys lasso the ram. Unless you want to see the Amphitheater from the inside yourself." He gave a meaningful nod toward their commanding officer.

Together, the Praetorians handed their slight burden to a servant to be tied. "A-arena?" whispered the schoolmaster.

"Get up, Greekling," ordered the centurion in the silky voice of a man who would just as soon meet resistance.

Lycon stepped into view around the centurion's blocky torso. "Good evening, Gaius Sempronianus," the beastcatcher said. "I heard you'd gone to spend some time with a brother in Akragas, folks in the apartment thought. I'm glad it was a short visit."

"You were condemned," Sempronianus said in a voice choking with awe and dawning awareness. "To the arena."

The centurion kicked away one leg of the bed. The frame scrunched down, tipping the schoolmaster onto the floor. "I thought I said get up," the centurion grated.

"You know," Lycon said, "for a while there, I really wanted to talk to you about the education you were giving my son… but one thing and another came up, and now there isn't much point in that after all. It made me think you might be the perfect man to serve our god and lord in a special way, though."

"Oh Zeus, Father Omnipotent!" shrieked Sempronianus as he squirmed on his belly to clutch the beastcatcher's ankles. "Oh dear master Lycon, you mustn't send me to the arena, I swear by the bones of my mother I never touched your Alex-"

The centurion, to whom Lycon had talked about Sempronianus while the section formed up in barracks, kicked the schoolmaster hard enough in the ribs to lift him off the floor. The soldier rubbed the toe of his foot against the calf of the leg on which he balanced. Looking over to the beastcatcher, he said, "It doesn't really dirty your hands to touch his like, you know? But there isn't any need, either. I mean, why not use your foot?"

The centurion had mentioned that he had three sons of his own, the eldest just turned twelve.

"It wasn't so much what he did to Alexandros," Lycon said. "It was when I figured out that he'd made the boy like it. I wouldn't dare touch him." His voice was trembling, just as were the big muscles in his arms and legs. He was not tight but rather janglingly loose like the links of an iron chain. The beastcatcher turned away and slapped at a wall, not particularly hard. He was trying to burn off the nervous energy that surged through him and made it hard for him to stand, much less talk.

"Keep that one separate," the centurion said to the servants bending over Sempronianus with their lengths of cord. "That one comes with us to the compound of Claudius Vonones. The rest of the household is transferred to the arena for tomorrow's games." He smiled down at the schoolmaster, twisting like a salted slug. "Slave and free alike, Greekling," he said in a voice as harsh as the hobnails which had lifted Sempronianus. "To convince you of just how serious the Emperor is that you do everything master Lycon here tells you to do."

"Because if I touched him," Lycon said as he struck the wall again, with both hands this time, and the heels of them, hard enough to make a bronze lamp jounce on its bracket, "then I'd kill him myself for sure. And I need him alive.

"I really need him alive…"

Chapter Twenty-five

The guards hired by the owner of the property watched Vonones and his crew-crews-with the universal interest of idlers for workmen. The guards-off-duty members of the Watch, in this case-had been placed to keep looters and tenants out of the smoldering rubble of the apartment block until the owner settled with a contractor for rebuilding. The Armenian merchant would have been willing to treat with the owner for access, but that was likely to cause delay and curiosity-besides which, the guards themselves could be squared for ten obols, the price of a quick lay for all five members of the contingent. Saving money was not a primary purpose; but saving money was never wholly apart from Vonones' purpose either.

The slave gang he had hired from a building contractor was doing the heavy work of moving stones and charred timbers. Trusted members of the Armenian's own staff watched as each lifted structural element exposed lesser rubble and a cloud of ash. Even four days after the event, there were still hot spots in the wreckage. Once when a beam was lifted away, there was a gush of flames as fresh air touched the blanket swaddling the body of an infant. The construction workers were familiar with the hazard: building in Rome usually meant building on burned-over premises, even when the fire had been the result rather than the cause of the previous structure's collapse. The beast handlers cursed and hopped and threw sidelong glances at their master… but none of them complained aloud. Vonones' temper at present was like a sheet of glass: it was apt to break without warning, and the jagged shards resulting were extremely dangerous.

At the moment, the Armenian watched while two of his own staff shoveled ash from the area of the stairwell onto a sieve-intended for concrete preparation-shaken by four of the construction gang. Ash that looked like smoke and smelled like corpses drifted down the breeze, while anything larger than mid-sized gravel caught in the wooden meshes. One of the men emptied his shovel onto the grate and swung back to rubble to refill it.

"Hold up," Vonones said, sharply enough that the sieve crew froze also, an unintended result but not unfortunate. Dust continued to drift and settle. The animal dealer stepped closer, regardless of the way his sandals and the lower edge of his tunic turned gray. He shifted to his left hand the whip he carried-an enigma to the construction workers, and the one overt sign of the terror Vonones felt at revisiting the site of the sauropithecus' former lair. Very delicately, he reached onto the sieve and plucked from the wood and plaster and bits of bone the object he had come to retrieve.

The men with shovels poised expectantly. One of the construction workers leaned over for a closer look. He drew back abruptly with a grimace. "By Apis' dong!" he blurted, "it's a spider!"

"No," said Vonones in a voice congealed by terror at what he was doing.

The creature he held had four legs rather than eight, and in size it more nearly approximated a large crab. The limbs and body were scaled, not segmented; and where they had been shaken free of ash, the scales were blue. In death it was shrunken so that the clawed feet and hands hugged its own caved-in chest and the flesh of the face was pulled back from the tiny, glittering teeth.

Vonones had not gotten a clear look at the larval monsters in the loft, even this one that Lycon had crushed against the wall as they broke free. His memory of the adult, from the hours he had seen it caged in the distant past, had filled in what he thought was a picture of the offspring. In fact, this flat-bodied creature was far less humanoid than the mother-thing, and even more disturbing.

Vonones dropped it into the leather sack he had brought for the purpose and pulled the drawstrings tight. He handed the container to one of the men with a shovel. It was not obvious that his right hand was shaking, but the staff of the whip trembled like a palm tree in a windstorm.