Birds of Prey Read online

  But the stranger had no accent whatever. He spoke with the mechanical fluency of water trembling over rocks. Calvus’ voice had no more character than that of a professional declaiming a rich man’s poem for pay. He gave the words only the qualities required by grammar and syntax.

  “If we sit here with our backs to the building,” Calvus was saying with a nod toward one of the benches around the fountain, “we can have our privacy. I should explain, Director—” he nodded in an aside to Navigatus—“that the reason I have not taken you into my confidence before now is that I felt Aulus Perennius should be informed by me directly. This way he will make up his own mind. There are risks involved, and I understand your relationship goes beyond bare professionalism.” The tall man seated himself on the curved berth, gesturing the others to places to either side of him as if he were host.

  Perennius grinned as he sat down. He wondered if Calvus had been told that the agent was Marcus’ chicken. Perennius had been a number of things over the years, but not that. Only the Empire had screwed him.

  Navigatus frowned. “I’ve read the letter,” he said, tapping the wallet into which he had returned the rescript, “and I understand my duty.”

  “Ah,” said Calvus, “but one owes duty to more than the State, surely. There is one’s—” He paused, his tongue groping for a word that was not there—“there are friends, that is; and there is humanity as a whole, don’t you agree?”

  “Sir, I’m not a philosopher,” Navigatus said. His uncertainty as to the other man’s position made him more uncomfortable than he might have been in the presence of the Emperor himself. “The Bureau is to give you full support, and it will—if you’ll tell us what you require.”

  Calvus nodded his head upward in agreement. The agent was watching him out of the corner of his eye, keeping his face turned toward the fountain. The pool curb of porous tufa was very old, like the statue itself. The fountain could have been original to the house. Perennius knew that only two years ago, the garden had been smoothly gravelled with no features but the battery of clerks who filled it. On drizzly days, tarpaulins overhead had permitted work if not comfort. By choosing the furnishings he had, Navigatus was trying to turn the garden into a time capsule. It was not merely an enclave of color and beauty on which the Director could rest his eyes: it was a way of returning to an age long before his birth, when the Empire could be embarrassed by foreign disaster but never threatened.

  “I have made the Emperor aware of a conspiracy,” Calvus said, “and he has empowered me to put it down.”

  The Director started to say something, but a flick of Perennius’ hand kept him from interrupting. The agent’s open attention had been focused by the word “conspiracy.” He wanted to hear the story in the informant’s own words, with as little as possible imported to it by cross-examination. There would be time for that later.

  “There would be some advantages to using military force directly,” Calvus continued, “but I believe that would draw a response that itself would be a terrible risk. It seems better to deal with the matter through a few individuals.”

  Perennius did not nod, but his mind flashed agreement. Slip in, bribe a bedroom attendant to suffocate the leader, and slip the hell out again while his lieutenants cut each others’ throats. Finesse had ended revolts that a battalion couldn’t have touched.

  “The right man,” Calvus said with a gesture of his eyes toward Perennius, “can put me in a position to destroy this, this—” and again the lips tried to form a word which did not exist in the language Calvus had been speaking flawlessly. “Unspeakable thing,” the tall man chose at last. He loaded the term with the first genuine emotion the agent had heard from him.

  Calvus swallowed, then added, “The site is in Cilicia, not far from Tarsus.”

  “Blazes!” Navigatus spat out.

  Calvus looked surprised. That surprise might become anger when the disgust of the Director’s outburst sank in. The agent said, “Ah, sir, as my superior and I are well aware, Cilicia has always been a—difficult area, even in less, ah, troubled times.” Perennius sought eye contact with the taller man to give the impression of utter candor. As before, the black eyes jolted him. Out of sheer discipline, the agent stumbled onward, “At the—this particular time, the province is one of those under the con—ah…”

  “The direction of the Autarch Odenathus, who has recently recovered it—most of it—from the Prefect Callistus,” Navigatus supplied helpfully. He had gotten his irritation under control during the breather Perennius had offered him. Now the Director continued smoothly, “Your dedication to his Majesty is beyond question, Lucius Calvus; but if I may suggest something from my, ah, peculiar perspective, a threat in Odenath’s back garden, so to speak, is not necessarily a threat to his Majesty at the moment. And an outbreak of banditry in Cilicia would be more conspicuous by its absence.” He smiled affably. There were crackpots less harmless, the Almighty Sun knew; and this one had at least the ear of the Emperor.

  Calvus smiled. It was a gesture, not an expression. He continued to look toward Perennius rather than toward the Director who was seated on the other side of him. “Not bandits, your Respectability,” the tall man said. His quiet formality was as daunting as a more direct reference to the rescript. The formal relationship of the two Bureau personnel to Calvus was that they were under his absolute control. The stranger continued, “You may think of them as a sect, if you like. Yes, a religious sect, very like that. Small at the moment, but going to grow in the future.”

  “How long were you a member of this sect?” the agent asked. He deliberately begged the question of Calvus’ participation in what appeared to have been an illegal organization.

  The reaction surprised him. “Don’t ever say that!” shouted the tall man in an access of loathing. “I and—those?” His face smoothed itself with difficulty. The virulence of the stranger’s emotion was the more shocking for its contrast with the nearly flat personality he had displayed until that moment. “Yes, of course,” he said, aloud but not particularly to the men beside him. “You wonder how I came to know about the situation.”

  Calvus attempted his smile again. He glanced toward Navigatus before continuing, “I’m afraid that for the moment, you will simply have to take it on faith that I’m correct. I’ll try to find an acceptable mechanism to explain my knowledge, but I don’t suppose that will affect your plans. That is—” he turned up his right palm—“the worst case is that I will be proven correct. If you plan for that, then the event of my being proven wrong and a madman—” he flipped up his left palm—“will not increase your risk or difficulties. Since the effort must be made in either event.”

  If you think, Perennius mused, that I can’t find a way to grease you between here and Cilicia, and a tragic story of your end that’ll satisfy Gallienus or any damn body, then you’re wrong. But aloud he said to the placid face, “I used to—live with a woman who saw visions. She insisted I listen the same way I would if it were something she’d seen with her eyes. I didn’t much like it then, but I took it from Julia; and I’ll take it now, I suppose.”

  Navigatus relaxed slightly on the other side of the tall man. He knew as well as the agent did that Gallienus’ writ ruled little beyond Italy and parts of Africa, at the moment … and that nothing but a sense of duty could be truly said to rule Aulus Perennius. Perennius had accepted the assignment now. That meant there was the best chance possible of satisfying this seeming confidant of the Emperor.

  A small butterfly landed on the web of Calvus’ right hand. He watched it palpate him with its proboscis as he continued: “You will want to know the strength of our opponents. There are only six of them, we believe. Six—true devotees. But they may have any number of hirelings. And they are almost certain to have very powerful weapons, weapons that you could compare only to natural catastrophes, thunderbolts and volcanoes.”

  Perennius smiled and said, “Yes, well … I told you, I have experience accepting the remarkable.” But
the fact that he joked instead of nodding gravely implied that there was a level of belief in the expressed skepticism. As Calvus had said, it was cheaper to believe him and be wrong than it would be to be surprised the other way.

  The shadows of the hills had cut off the sun. Now Navigatus glanced over his shoulder at the Headquarters building and saw the windows of the upper story were being swung shut by the cleaning crews against the threat of rain. The lamps hanging from the drawing-room ceiling silhouetted against the panes the figures of men whose need to see the Director outweighed their dignity.

  Navigatus stood, scowling. “Here,” he said, “this is foolish. We’ll go to my house, bathe there, and discuss this over dinner.” He looked anxiously toward the bald man. “If you don’t mind something simple, Lucius Calvus? I work here so late that I almost never have time to attend a proper dinner party, much less give one.”

  Perennius and the stranger rose also. “Marcus, I appreciate it, but your household servants already know as much about my affairs as I intend to let them,” the agent said. “Besides, if you don’t clear those out of your office properly—” he nodded toward the lamps and those waiting beneath them—“it’ll eat at you till you don’t sleep tonight. Even though there isn’t one of them who’s worth a gray hair to either of us.”

  The Director touched his wig unconsciously. “Well, if you wouldn’t feel offended, Aulus,” he said apologetically. “I probably would feel better if I dealt with them.” He eyed the lighted window again. “Not that you’re wrong about the … lack of consequence,” he added morosely. “I sometimes fear that I’ve concentrated too much on minutiae in the past few years because the major problems are…” His voice trailed off.

  “No problem is insoluble,” said Calvus. His flat calm made the statement an article of faith. He must have been surprised at how he sounded, because his body at once gave a tiny shudder as if to settle its contents. “Aulus Perennius,” the tall man went on, “I will accompany you, then.”

  “No,” said the agent, dipping his head in negation, “that won’t be necessary, sir. I’ll call for you at the palace in the morning.” He smiled. “We’re in a transit barracks, my companion and I. I doubt you’d find the accommodations much to your taste.” The three of them were drifting back toward the door, now. The social circumstances were too unclear for either of the Bureau employees to act as decisively as they would have preferred to do.

  “I’ll have to get used to worse accommodations and to none at all,” Calvus said simply. He stepped briskly ahead of the others, knowing that the discussion would end when an attendant opened the door for them. “And you’ll have to get used to me, I’m afraid, because it is quite necessary for me to reach the site.”

  The agent laughed. It was Navigatus who actually found words to comment. “In school,” he said, “I read Homer’s accounts of ships that sailed themselves and gods trading spear-thrusts with mortals.…” He gestured his companions onward, through the doorway and into the corridor with the men eagerly awaiting their pointless audiences with him.

  “I couldn’t imagine how anyone ever had believed such nonsense,” the Director went on. “But I see now that I just needed exercise to increase my capacity for faith.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Perennius swore as his iron-cleated boots skidded on a greasy stone. “Slow up, damn you,” he snarled to the linkman. “I hired you to light our way, not run a damned race with us!”

  It embarrassed the agent that Calvus seemed to walk the dark streets with less trouble than he did. Anyone lodging in the palace should have done all his night rambling on the legs of litter bearers.

  Tall buildings made Rome a hard place for Perennius to find his way around in the dark. He supposed that he used the stars more or less without thinking about it in cities where the apartment blocks did not rear sixty feet over narrow streets as they did in the capital. Even though the barracks were nearby, he had hired a man with a horn-lensed lantern to guide them. The fellow was a surly brute, but he had been the only one in the stand at the whorehouse who was not already attending someone inside.

  The raised lantern added a dimension to the linkman’s scowl. “Through here,” he muttered in a Greek that owed little to Homer. “Me go first.” As he spoke, he scrambled into a passage less than three feet wide. The narrow slit of sky was webbed with beams cross-connecting the upper floors of the apartment buildings to either side. Poles draped with laundry slanted from windows, though it was doubtful there was ever a breeze there to be caught.

  “Hold the damned light where it does some good!” Perennius said. He turned to his companion. “Here, sir, you go first. It won’t hurt this—” he gave his travelling cloak a flick—“to get dropped in the slops again.”

  “This is safe, then?” Calvus asked as he stepped past the agent. There was curiosity but no apparent concern in his voice.

  “Slow down,” Perennius shouted. In normal tones he continued, “Safe for us. I wouldn’t advise you to wander around here without your own attendants, but—we’re sober, and even a boyo like the one ahead of us knows the pay-out wouldn’t be worth the trouble of trying to bounce the pair of us.”

  “I wondered,” said the tall man, “because this—” he rapped the right-hand wall. He had been tracing his fingers along it as if he needed support—“is the back of the building where we hired this guide. The brothel.”

  “Well, that doesn’t—” Perennius started to say. Metal rang behind them, at or near the entrance to the passage. Darkness and the curve of the walls hid the cause. The agent’s sword whined against the mouth of its scabbard as he cleared the blade hastily. “Come on, quick,” he hissed to Calvus. His arm gestured the tall man forward, around a blind angle after the linkman.

  The right-hand wall angled back abruptly, widening the passage into a court ten feet broad at the far end. There, another wall sharply closed the reentrant. The court was large enough for a second-floor balcony above the brothel’s rear entrance. There were figures on the balcony, and there were at least half a dozen men in the court beneath.

  “Take the dagger!” Perennius said. He thrust the ball pommel against his companion’s hand. Calvus was as still as a birch tree. His fingers did not close on the knife. The agent saw sweat glittering on the tall man’s face and scalp as the guide lifted his lantern higher.

  “Yes,” rasped one of the figures on the balcony. The voice was indescribably harsh. Only the word itself was human. “Kill them.”

  “Aulus!” cried the other figure, a woman, but twenty years smothered Perennius’ recognition of the speaker.

  As the agent lunged forward, he pivoted his sword arm to slash rather than to stab. His blade was Basque steel, forged in the Bilbao Armory before it slipped away with Postumus. It had a sharp edge and held it while Perennius sliced through the lantern, the hand holding the lantern, and into the pelvis of the guide who had betrayed them. The bravos waiting in the court surged forward in the darkness.

  Perennius was on the stones and rolling, now. He would have called to Calvus, but there was nothing useful to say. Their retreat was surely blocked. It would be a miracle if even confusion allowed either victim to escape through the other end of the court. Besides, the tall man had funked too badly to move, much less to fight or run.

  The guide spun off screaming. The sword that was killing him had bitten so deeply in the bone that Perennius had let it go. There was a crash and double screams as the wounded man collided with his friends and another blade. Someone stumbled on Perennius’ torso. The agent thrust upward with the dagger Calvus had refused, ripping one of the ambushers from thigh to sternum.

  “Gaius, go back!” the woman was crying in Allobrogian. The passage the agent had followed to this killing ground was alive with voices and the ring of blades too long for the surrounding walls. A club or a boot numbed Perennius’ right arm. His legs were tangled with the thrashing body of the man he had just disemboweled. The agent slashed his dagger in a brutal arc a han
d’s breadth above the pavement. Boot-webbing and tendons parted. Someone screamed like a hog being gelded. A club swished toward the sound. The weapon must have been a section of water pipe, because it crunched against a skull with none of the sharpness of wood on something solid.

  “Hold up! Hold up!” a male voice bawled from the passage.

  The door serving the balcony from within opened.

  To the men who had been fighting below in total darkness, the rectangle of light was dazzling. The two figures on the balcony were struggling with one another. Calvus stood as white and frozen as an unpainted statue. He had not moved since the lantern shattered. Now one of the bravos hit him in the face with the lead-studded glove of a professional boxer.

  “Hey!” cried someone from the open doorway. Perennius was raising his dagger for a left-handed throw at the man who had just struck Calvus. He thought he recognized the speaker—Maximus, the guard from Headquarters—just as the first of the lightning bolts struck.

  One of the figures locked together on the balcony fell in on itself in a blue glare. There was a hissing roar like that of a wave on the rocks. The flash was momentary, but the roar echoed hellishly in the angled court.

  The two thugs still on their feet ran for the door in the other building. The men who had followed Perennius down the passage did not exit into the court. Their accoutrements clattered as they ran back the way they had come. Calvus’ knees had buckled. The tall man had slid down. His back and sagging head were supported by the wall behind him while his legs splayed out on the stones. All this Perennius could see clearly in the strobe of the second world-shattering flash.

  The balcony had a wicker guard-wall. The figure pressed back against it was short and dressed in cape and cowl. Those details were clear because the actinic glare flooded through every interstice as its fury exploded in the balcony doorway. The roar and the screams merged in a sound that could have come from fiery Phlegethon.