"Unconquered Sun," Perennius whispered. Sestius, who had crawled forward, gave a shout compounded of fear and loathing when he saw what the agent had uncovered.
The head was not featureless, as shock had insisted in the first instant; but the features resembled those of an elbow joint more than they did a human face. Death had relaxed an iris of bone around what had to be a mouth, though it was at the point of the skull. A thin fluid, not blood and not necessarily the equivalent of blood, drooled between the bony plates of the iris. There were no eyes, no nose ... no skin, even, as the agent learned by prodding the head gingerly. The surface was chitinous and slick as waxed bone. There appeared to be smudges of pigment shadowing the generally pale surface. Perennius ran a fingertip over them. Sestius watched in horror, Calvus with the detached calm of a woman carding wool. The large blotch where a human's mouth or nose might have been was made up of pores pitting the surface of the chitin in whorls. Higher on the conical head was a circumferential ring like a diadem. The tissue there was brown and flaccid, unlike the surface that supported it. It felt like fresh liver or the eye of a week-dead corpse.
Perennius swore. He jerked the cape completely away from the thing he had killed. His other hand kept the dagger pointed so that if the corpse reared up, it would impale itself. The pose was unconscious and an indication of how great was the fear that the agent controlled when he touched the creature. Sestius continued to stare with the fascination of someone watching a tapeworm thrashing from a friend's anus. None of those peering from the hallway could have seen past the centurion's torso. Perennius had cleared most of the gawkers by naming the Bureau. The madam might possibly summon the Watch; but no one cared to display too much interest in the secrets of the Bureau of Imperial Affairs.
"We thought somebody was being mugged," Sestius said in a low voice. "We'd stopped in for a drink when we got relieved. Maximus was shook, you know, you . . . We knocked the door open and then . . . sir, what is this?"
The creature's torso was segmented like one fashion of body armor. Its surface was of the same glaucous chitin as that of the head. There was a collar of tiny tentacles, only inches long, where a human's shoulders would have been. At approximately the midpoint of the body was a girdle of three larger arms spaced evenly around the circumference. Two of them held objects in the triple fingers with which they terminated. The limbs were hardened, like the body itself, but the thin hoops of chitin with which they were covered made them as flexible as a cat's tail.
The body beneath the trio of arms was a pliable sac on three stumpy legs. The creature vaguely reminded Perennius of a lobster or a spider; but those familiar animals were oriented on a horizontal axis, while this one was as upright as a man.
"Yeah, Calvus," the agent whispered. "That's a good question. What is it?"
"An adult," said the bald man, "a Guardian. There should be five more of them. They are your opponents."
"A religious cult, you said," Perennius snarled. His control was crumbling in reaction to what he had just done and seen. "Six cultists!" he said even louder. The point of his dagger wove intricate patterns in the air as the agent's right arm trembled.
"I said you could think of them that way," the tall man said. As the agent rose, Calvus straightened also to tower over the shorter Illyrian. Greatly to the agent's surprise, Calvus's eyes and the icy will behind them remained steady despite the volcanic fury they faced. Perennius had met those who could match his rage with rage, but he had never before known a man who could meet his savage bloodlust and remain calm. "And I said I would find some way to explain it to you," Calvus continued. "I did not expect to be attacked here in Rome, but it seems to
have done a better job of explaining what you face than any method I had considered using." His eyes jerked down. "No, don't touch that," he said to Sestius.
Perennius looked down as the centurion snatched back his hand. Sestius had reached out toward not the dead creature itself but rather toward one of the metallic objects in its hands. Now he stared up in surprise at the two men standing above him. "The, the whatever it was that hit me." Sestius explained. "I thought it came from ..." He gestured at an object that looked like a bell-mouthed perfume flask.
Calvus dipped his head in agreement. "Very likely it did," he said. "But if anyone but one of them - " again the disgust loaded one word of an otherwise neutral sentence - "handles the weapon, all its energy will be liberated against the person holding it." The tall man turned up his palm. "And those nearby," he added.
The Watch was not coming, that was clear. Someone burly enough to be the bouncer looked through the doorway to the hall, then leaped back as if struck when his eyes met Perennius's angry glare. "Probably just as well," the agent said aloud. "Marcus has the clout to get us clear, whatever the City Prefect thinks about it ... but I guess we're going to have enough problems without a story like this one chasing us to Cilicia." He shook his head. "It would, too, sure as sunrise."
"Do we just leave it, then?" Calvus asked. He was curious rather than concerned, much the way he had been when he allowed Perennius to send him down the passage toward waiting murder.
"Quintus, can you stand?" the agent asked. He offered a hand as the centurion struggled to obey. Sestius's limbs seemed whole, but they were not entirely willing to accept his mind's direction. "We'll dump it down there with the other meat," Perennius said with a nod to the court below. "I don't care what the folks who come to strip them think, I just don't want our names on it. If the gear's that dangerous, we'll wrap it in the cloak and deep-six it in the Tiber. Quintus, I hope for your sake you know how to keep your mouth shut, because if you start blabbing, I swear I'll strangle you with your own - hey, what in blazes happened here?" Perennius touched the soldier's vest of iron rings.
"Their weapons are two-stage," Calvus said. He did not coin new words, but his use of familiar ones was disconcerting. It was rather like hearing a priest using his sacerdotal vocabulary to describe hog farming. "An ionizing beam, polarized in three dimensions, that provides the carrier in any liquid or gas. Then - "
Sestius's armor had been of wire links, bent to interlock each with four other rings. It was not an expensive vest. The individual links had not been riveted into shape. Now the front of the vest was no longer a flexible mesh but something as stiff as a sintered plate. There was a hard weld at every point where metal touched metal. Close up, Perennius could separate the odor of burned leather from the avalanche of stenches with which the varied butchery had filled the night. The mail vest was backed with leather to spread the weight of the links and of blows upon them. As the metal flowed and fused, the leather had charred beneath it.
" - the secondary beam, a high-current discharge, travels down the carrier precisely like a thunderbolt," Calvus was saying. "It destroys the controls of sophisticated equipment. And, of course, it destroys life forms . . . but their own body casing, though natural, appears to be totally proof to current, at least at the frequencies their weapons discharge it."
"Blazes," the agent muttered. He understood nothing of the tall man's explanation. The reality was clear enough, though, the flash and bodies seared to powder in the instant. He did not think Sestius had been alert enough when he awakened to really look at his companion. Maximus had nothing recognizable as a chest or face. His linen tunic was yellowed below the waist, completely missing above it. A chain and gold medallion shimmered on the blackened husk. It had been so hot that the minted features had lost definition.
Calvus had already acted on the agent's plan. He was prodding the creature's instruments onto the cloak of the figure incinerated on the balcony with it. The second body was human, probably female from the breadth of