David Drake - Killer

N'Sumu noted the movement and said aloud, "You understand, Gaius Vonones-and your friend does-how the Emperor would react if his prize were killed instead of being captured?" He continued to face the opening and Lycon on the plaza beyond, but his eyes glanced sideways once and again to determine the Armenian's expression.

"Yes, I think I understand my lord and god as well as a barbarian from Nubia can be expected to do," Vonones said in a savagely controlled voice. The tremble of the whipstock increased, but the Armenian kept his eyes trained on the figure in armor. "And I think I understand Lycon as well."

As if he were a juggler on the stage, the figure in moonlight tossed something in the air. He tried but failed to catch it, betrayed by the lighting and the full-coverage helmet. His hobnails sparked visibly against the cobblestones of the plaza as he deliberately scuffed the object against the wall of the building before he picked it up again.

"Where did he get that ?" N'Sumu snapped, his eyes once more beads of stone. He had kept his hands on the door leaves, blocking them to a safe approximation of being closed. Now in angry amazement, the Egyptian drew the doors further ajar.

"I gave it to him," said the animal dealer, satisfied for the first time in-far too long-by N'Sumu's obvious discomfiture. He had not known until that moment what it was that Lycon intended for the crushed remains of the lizard-ape's offspring. "From the site of the fire. This one, at least, was covered by masonry and not cremated." As Zoe and the children had been cremated, Vonones thought, and their ashes strewn in the Tiber-safe from further defilement by the creature Lycon had hunted…

In the plaza below, the little corpse flew into the air again and slapped audibly against the brick facade before it fell back. This time the boot was planted squarely on it and ground against the pavement.

"If he kills it," N'Sumu said, his anger an aura as it could not be an overtone in his voice, "he and you and every member of your household will be killed in the most savage ways the Emperor can imagine. Does he know that?"

"I know that," said Vonones. The figure in the plaza had paused and was fumbling at the iron-studded apron which protected the thighs beneath the hooped body armor. "Perhaps," the Armenian said with a tinge of hope which irritated him but could not be suppressed, "the beast is nowhere around after all."

"I tell you, you mud-sucking primitive, it is nearby!" shouted the bronze-skinned man as the man in armor began to urinate on the lizard-ape's dead offspring and the adult launched itself from beneath a sewer grating.

The slotted stone cover was still lifting with the impetus that had thrust it aside, though the creature it had hidden was a dozen feet away with its foreclaws locked on the bronze helmet. A set of male human genitalia was spinning through the air much as the infant sauropithecus had done moments before. The screams of the present victim were muffled by the grillwork over his face and the blue-scaled killer clinging to it as both went over in the momentum of the attack.

N'Sumu was through the temple doors and out past the columns in front more quickly than he had ever moved before. Despite that, the pudgy animal dealer was racing across the cobblestones of the plaza just behind the Egyptian. There was no sign of the beast-handlers who should have poured out of the courtyard in response to Vonones' shouts if not the screams of the victim himself.

The sauropithecus hunched, locking its hind legs at the victim's right armpit just beneath the iron shoulder flaps. It kicked downward with its claws interlocking like a battery of flensing knives. All the muscles of the arm, from shoulder to wrist, were carved off and flung away. The right hand, still clutching the bundled net and with a skein of bare tendons twisting behind it, sailed off on a separate trajectory. The body armor and helmet rang discordantly as they and the man within them struck the pavement.

Lycon cast his own net from the third-story balcony and vaulted the rail to follow it. He had stripped off his armor, though the victim he had chosen to bait the lizard-ape into view wore another identical set to save the time otherwise to be lost in exchanging the awkward hardware. When the beastcatcher gave up his helmet and body armor, however, he did not lay aside his sword. It was naked in his left hand as he dropped.

Lycon had a jump of two stories and the height of a balcony rail-twenty feet and more to stone pavers. The shock, if he landed correctly, would not be incapacitating-and the risk of landing wrong, of the base of his spine smashing down as his feet skidded on slick stone, was not a factor in Lycon's choice of plan.

For choice, he would have jumped with the net gripped in his hand. He had seen how quickly the lizard-ape moved, however, and he was unwilling to risk the chance that the bulk of his own body would warn the beast while the net itself could descend unremarked as a shimmer of moonlight.

Even in the killing rage that had ripped it from safety into the open plaza, the sauropithecus was aware of its surroundings. A portion of its brain had registered and ignored Vonones with the whip he carried-and had registered N'Sumu as what he was, not the persona he feigned on this planet. The creature had once been captured by the emissary; that would not happen again. Its hind claws buried themselves in the thigh of the schoolmaster Sempronianus-the decoy Lycon had provided to lure it from the sewers. Then, using its own hip-joint as a fulcrum, the creature twisted the victim's armored head and torso up as a buffer between itself and a bolt from the emissary's upraised palm.

Instead of trying to drop the net on its target, Lycon had given it a spin on an axis centered upon the snarling head of the lizard-ape beneath. The brass weights, verdigreed and deliberately unpolished, arced the edges outward as the net fell. The beast, warned by the flicker of shadow on the moonlit brick, tried to unlock its claws and leap from the schoolmaster's howling body.

The silken net, cast with an expert's touch, settled about slayer and slain like flame over oil.

The emissary, thirty feet distant and as shocked by the turn of events as the creature he hunted, screamed a curse in no human language as Sempronianus went silent in a haze of green which should instead have bathed the sauropithecus.

The beast was quick, but the net had dropped quickly enough. While the man who cast it was still in the air, the pattern of silken meshes touched the creature which was trying to spring away. The interrupted spin snatched the weights inward at a velocity which rose geometrically as the radius shortened. The lizard-ape, doubled in on itself like a chicken trussed for the market, somersaulted to the pavement as Lycon crashed down beside it.

The beastcatcher took the shock on his flexed knees, his balance perfect as it had to be. His hobnails bit and held: the slightest angle between them and the stone on which they sparked would have slid Lycon to the pavement with an incapacitating crash. The sword in his hand dipped under its momentum, touching but only touching the stone. Then the sword rose again and Lycon stepped forward, his grin as cold and inexorable as the edge of the steel in his hand.

With more than bestial intelligence-and more than human cunning-the lizard-ape had slid one arm through the meshes and gripped the silken cocoon from the outside. Instead of vainly attempting to push the net aside, the creature pulled against the anchoring thrust of its legs. The cords, even silk, gave as the black eyes glared murder and Lycon's sword ripped downward.

There was death in N'Sumu's eyes also. The emissary, running with the awkwardness of a wildebeest but covering ground as swiftly as that clumsy antelope as well, was a stride short of physical contact as his lethal palm turned to Lycon's back. Vonones, six feet behind N'Sumu, had already committed in the fashion instinct had warned him he would have to do. The merchant had not permitted himself to think about it, nor about the certain results, until the lash of his whip curled about the Egyptian's wrist. Reflex set Vonones' feet while N'Sumu's skidded out from under him as his palm lifted.