Birds of Prey (32 page)

Calvus began bearing down on the handle of the club. Perennius gripped the same crossbar and a vertical. The agent used all his strength in a vain attempt to push the one away from the other. It gave him something to do besides wait for the sound he expected, the splintering crash as the grating held and the wooden lever did not.

The cudgel did not break. Instead it bent in a smooth, creaking arc until the tip which Calvus held touched the floor. The root-stock was tough and perfect for the purpose for which Erzites had chosen it. Its whippiness made it a more effective weapon. That meant also that the wood could not transmit the necessary force as a lever.

“Blazing Hell!” the agent shouted. He released his own hold and dropped to the floor. His eyeballs had felt as if they were springing from their sockets with the effort.

“Here, let me try,” Gaius suggested again.

“Gaius, will you
please
wait for orders?” the agent growled up at him. It should have been obvious that the problem was in the tools rather than in the muscles behind them. Gaius was damned well old enough to avoid the childish need to be a part of every activity.

“That was the weakest one,” Calvus said. “If it holds, the others will. Perhaps he—”she gestured toward Erzites with a flick of her chin—“has a knife or the like on him. If we could cut or even chip a weld, then perhaps the lever…?”

“Right,” said the agent. It was a reasonable next step, now that their only real chance of escape had disappeared with the club's flexing.

The grating made it difficult to strip the guard on the other side of it. Calvus' slim hands and arms had advantages over Perennius' bunched muscles, but she herself was so awkward that the agent wound up doing most of the work himself. Erzites came around slowly. When they began to pull his tunics off, he struggled with increasing consciousness and vigor. There were seven of the garments. The outside one was foul. The innermost had decayed to stinking tatters that must have been close to the guard's own adult years. By that point, Erzites was cursing loudly and trying to fight them with his free hand.

Sabellia touched Calvus, then moved to the grating as the taller woman gave her room. The Gaul held another shard of the waste jar, a curving, hand's-length fragment of the rim. It came to a point that was as blunt as a fingertip except for the slight knife-edge extension of the glaze. “Hey!” Erzites shouted. He jerked his head back as far as the bonds would let him. The shard plowed across his cheekbone to his right eye.

“Move and it's gone,” Sabellia said in a soft voice. The villager began to tremble. He squeezed the threatened eye shut. The other one stared out in terror. Perennius finished his task without obstruction.

Sestius was recovered enough to go through the garments as they were passed into the cell. His forearm was badly bruised. It had not been caught between the club and the stone, and neither bone was broken. “Not a damned thing,” the centurion grumbled as he fingered the cloth. The light was too bad to search the tunics in any other fashion. “Lice. And if we could train up this stink, it ought to be able to cut iron. But nothing else.”

“We need a knife, Erzites,” Perennius said in a friendly voice. “It'd be best for you now if we did get away, you know. We'll let you go if we do, I promise that. But if we're still locked in this cell when somebody else comes … well, I'll use the time I've got. You'll be dead before we are, I promise you. If it looks like I'll have a while before they can really interfere … I know tricks that'll make being buggered by a donkey sound like the most fun in the world, chappie.…”

“Christ be my witness, there's
nothing!
” the naked man whimpered. “The club and the food, the bed's just a matteress on a stone ledge, that won't help.… The others'd kill us if we brought anything else here to watch the meat. Look, I'll go get a prybar, that's what I'll—” He stopped when the absurdity of what he was babbling penetrated even to him.

There was a crunching sound. Calvus had set the edge of a piece of pot against one of the welds. The hard-fired stoneware had crumbled beneath her fingers as if it had been terra cotta. As expected, the iron was unmarked. “I wonder if we could use his teeth as a saw?” the tall woman said. “Of course, it would be a problem disarticulating his jaws with no tools, but if we could slice through at one hinge with a piece of the jar.…” No one could listen to Calvus' matter of fact tone and doubt that she was absolutely serious in her suggestion.

Sabellia had removed her claw of pottery when its threat had done the trick. Now Erzites bellowed again in terror and jerked repeatedly against his bonds. Perennius reached between the bars and caught the villager by the throat with one hand. It gave the agent a cold pleasure to squeeze in the knowledge that it was not his anger taking charge. The action was necessary to immobilize their prisoner so that he could not free himself in his struggles.… Erzites' hairy face became flushed. His screams and the bestial rasp of his breathing whispered to a pause. In the wavering lamplight, the whites of the guard's eyes began to turn up.

Perennius took a deep breath himself. He released his prisoner. “When they come with the keys,” the agent said in a voice that was meant to be more calm than he could manage, “how many of them will there be?”

“Christ save me,” Erzites wheezed. He had closed his eyes. Now he was massaging his throat with his free hand. His brief delay to recover ended even as the agent was reaching out again. “They'll come a lot of them,” the villager said. He opened his eyes and jumped, but Perennius was relaxing. “They're careful, Ramphion and the others. They know fighting men, and there won't be less than a score of them with clubs to take you. They don't want you dead, but they've strung up folk unconscious before to croak without coming around. ‘As the Lord wills,' they say.”

Perennius sighed. “All right,” he said matter of factly. “We'll go with the teeth.”

“Wait!”
screamed Erzites. “My brother! He's got a sword!”

“Well, what good does that do,” asked Gaius as the others paused. “He's a mile away on look-out, right?”

Panting, tumbling his words over one another, the villager explained, “He'll be back at dawn. We trade, him and me, day and day when there's meat on the wall and nobody else in the valley to watch. I forgot, Christ strike me dead, I forgot he'd be back, I
swear
it!”

That was probably true, unlikely as it would have seemed to someone with less experience of interrogation under pressure than Perennius had. Even after your subject broke, you had no guarantee of the truth or completeness of what came babbling out. Erzites might well have been shocked into such a state that he forgot to volunteer a crucial detail. Certainly that was more probable than the notion that he had been deliberately concealing his brother's imminent reappearance.

“Well, I don't see it makes any difference,” said Sestius reasonably. “Except we've got to work faster at cutting through the bars.”

“No, no,” Erzites pleaded. “Listen, I'll talk to Azon—
he'll
cut you free with his sword, sure he will, Azon'll do that for me, Christ
save
me! I'm his brother!”

“Shit,” said the centurion, “he'd watch us pick you apart with tweezers, wouldn't he? Before he'd risk pissing off Ramphion and his lot.”

“You know, I think Erzites here will be able to convince his brother,” said the agent thoughtfully. “Of course, we can't leave him naked and tied to the bars like this. Sure.”

Behind Perennius, Sestius and Sabellia exchanged glances of disbelief. Even Gaius was surprised. Calvus and the villager could see the agent's face. The woman's thin lips formed themselves in an answering smile. Erzites, watching them both through the bars, began to tremble.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“Erzites!” demanded the voice from outside. “Lend a hand.”

Erzites stood in the middle of the outer room. He ground the butt of his club into his left palm silently.

“Erzites!” called the voice again. “Where the hell are you?”

“Answer him!” hissed Perennius, giving a twitch to the rope of sashes knotted around the villager's throat. The agent did not hold the free end. Calvus had that duty. Any time the slim woman chose, she could break Erzites' neck with a single jerk on the tether.

“F-fuck off!” Erzites shouted back. “You're late!”

“Fuck yourself!” replied his brother angrily. “I had to gather the fucking eggs so we'd have something to eat, didn't I?” The hut darkened as Azon's big form, a near twin of his brother's, filled the doorway. He bent and entered. Father Ramphion or an earlier leader had decided that a gap of an hour or so in the manning of the look-out point was less dangerous than the chance of unattended prisoners somehow escaping in a similar period. Having tested the physical wards, Perennius was inclined to disagree; but the dearth of traffic past the valley really mooted the point anyway.

“Say,” Azon went on, “I could hear 'em really going to it at the church. They'll be up for more meat any time, I'll bet you.”

His brother hit him alongside the head with the cudgel.

It was a nervously clumsy blow. The shaft instead of the knobbed end of the weapon struck Azon. He was too thick-boned a man to be laid out completely that way. Even so, Azon fell to his knees. He flung out his arms toward his brother in a gesture compounded of defense and supplication. Erzites grabbed him by the hair, screaming, and began to batter at him repeatedly with the club. The two men were locked so closely now that the weapon could not be used effectively. Erzites was mad with fear. He would not back off a step to finish the job properly.

The tip of Azon's sword, thrust sheathless under his belt, clanged on the floor when he fell. Azon made no attempt to draw the weapon against his brother's unexpected attack. His hands clutched wildly. Erzites' tunic, knotted over the shoulder where it had been torn for removal, now tore again. Suddenly tangled in his own garment, Erzites paused and cursed. His brother broke free.

The left side of Azon's head was a mass of blood. A chance poke from the butt of the cudgel had closed his left eye forever. Panic blinded the right eye also and the mind behind it. The big villager bolted forward and slammed into the door of the cell. He bit at the bars with the fury of a wolf in a trap. Sestius lunged forward in an attempt to grapple with him. The centurion jostled Perennius but did not prevent the agent from getting his own iron grip on Azon's throat.

Erzites wheeled. His tunic pooled at his ankles. He gripped his club with both hands, as if it were a threshing flail. It hissed through the air as the guard swung with all his strength. Azon's head deformed. The grating rang from the impact of the skull being driven into it. Erzites struck again. The body was jerking in Perennius' grip, but that was only the dying response of its autonomic nervous system. The cudgel made a liquid sound when its knob struck the second time. Matter splashed the metal and Perennius' forearm. The agent released Azon.

The third time, the club struck the door a foot above the slumping corpse and flew out of Erzites' grasp. The killer also collapsed on the floor, wheezing. In the last instants of the fight, the brothers had been almost equally mindless.

Perennius dragged the corpse closer by its belt. He reached across to draw the sword. It was a standard government-pattern short sword. Its blade was dull and very badly maintained. The hilt was of bronze in a fish-scale pattern which might once have been gilded. Chances were that the weapon had belonged to Azon and Erzites' father when he served with the imperial forces. The valley must have gathered a considerable armory in its decades of murdering travellers. The brothers' own lack of equipment underscored their separation from all communal aspects of village life. There was no need for it to be otherwise, of course.

Perennius gave the sword to Calvus, though the three other of his fellow prisoners were babbling and jostling forward. Erzites was still in a state of collapse. The agent tied off the villager's tether. The villager had just proven he was willing to do anything to save his skin. Perennius saw no point in risking the fellow's escape.

Calvus put the point of the sword at the joint between a vertical and a crossbar. She held the weapon almost point down. Perennius started to apologize for the fact that the sword was so dull and that the point had been rounded by improper sharpening. The tall woman rapped the oval pommel sharply with the heel of her right hand. Metal rang. The crossbar jumped as the sword inserted itself where the weld had been.

“Herakles!” Sestius blurted. Sabellia had more experience or at least more awareness of the other woman's capacities. The Gaul fell silent and drew the centurion back to give Calvus more room to work.

Perennius stopped himself with his mouth open. He had been about to say that if Azon had been correct, the five of them might be only minutes short of being trapped by villagers returning for a new victim. There was no reason to say what they all knew; and it was hard to imagine anyone working faster or more efficiently than Calvus, anyway.

The blade was of good steel. Its dull edge should have been a handicap. If so, the bare-handed blows with which Calvus struck the pommel were more than hard enough to overcome the defect in materials. The bald woman placed the point carefully, rapped the hilt, and shifted the sword to the next joint while it was still singing with the parting sound of the weld it had just cut. When Calvus reached the end, the crossbar dropped to the floor with a clank.

“Wait,” said the agent as Calvus raised her sword to the next higher of the five crossbars. The agent set the freed bar into the grate much as they had attempted earlier with the wooden cudgel. In the outer room, Erzites was watching them. He was fingering his throat where the rope had rubbed it. He was not attempting to break free.