"No," the figure said, the word alone without the gesture of negation to be expected with it. "Not thousands. I have hired certain fighters here ... but yours might serve
me yet tonight. Then later, there is a - treasure - to guard. For a year."
"You pledge your support to the Emperor, if we help you tonight and guard a treasure?" Sacrovir demanded. He spoke to release the tension which the figure's grating voice raised in him.
"The treasure is in Cilicia," Julia said, neither a question nor a demand. "We would have gone there, but you in Rome were closer." In her present state, the seeress had little connection with the immediate world. She did not note the way the glittering object shifted toward her when she spoke. Her son noticed. His general tension focused on a tighter grip on his sword.
"That is correct," the figure said. "How did you know?"
"I have seen," Julia replied simply.
"For one year?" repeated Sacrovir He knew that the tension must break in one fashion or the other.
"In Cilicia," the figure said. "For one of your years. After that, there will be no need of guards."
"We agree," said Julia in her dreamy, half-human voice.
"Then," said the figure, "we need only to determine the details." A rippling of its cloak offered them seats on the broad, low couch. "I will have food and drink brought if you require it while we plan. . . ."
CHAPTER FOUR
The peristyle court in the center of Headquarters had been converted into a clerical pool like most of the areas which had been open when the building was a residence. As Perennius returned to the ground floor by a rear staircase, he was amused to see that the back garden was just that again. Flowers and several fruit trees including a cherry were now growing where more ranks of file clerks had squatted two years ago, the last time Perennius had been at Headquarters. Navigatus had been complaining then that he missed the sight and smells of the garden he had had when he was a District Superintendent in Trier. Apparently he had done something about the lack, though Perennius could not imagine where the displaced clerks had gone. The agent had for years believed that the Bureau could accomplish its tasks better with only half the Headquarters personnel; but he knew the system too well to doubt that if half of the clerks were eliminated, it would be the incompetent ones who somehow were retained.
The Director's office was what had been the large drawing room between the peristyle court and the back garden. Eight men of the Palatine Foot lounged in the side passage where the door was placed. Several of them were dicing without enthusiasm. Clerks and a pair of bored-looking ushers in civilian dress mingled with the guards in the passage and spilled back into the court. There they jostled the seated copyists. The large windows in either end of the drawing room were pivoted open to encourage a cross draft from the garden to the court. Through the window from the latter, Perennius could see Navigatus on his couch. Standing with him in the room were a dozen other men: functionaries, personal attendants, and suppliants for the attention of the Director. Navigatus looked very much like a private magnate holding his levee.
Marcus Optatius Navigatus was a plump man of sixty whose primary affectation was the black, curly wig he wore even to the baths. Perennius had known him for almost twenty years, from the days when Navigatus had commanded the battalion of the Rhine Army to which Perennius had been assigned. They were both Illyrians. The younger man had an intelligence and drive which brought him early to Navigatus' attention. Far more rare in a man of his caliber, Perennius had none of the personal ambition that would have made him as potentially dangerous to his superior as he was immediately useful.
Perennius had followed Navigatus to three more line commands, jumping in rank each time. When the older man had transferred to the Bureau of Imperial Affairs, itself a part of the military rather than the civil establishment, Perennius had accompanied him again. Oddly enough, it was then that their paths had begun to diverge again. Perennius' trustworthiness, his intelligence, and his ruthless determination to accomplish a task at whatever cost, would have made him even more valuable to his superior than he had been while in uniform. Four months of staff duty in Trier had driven Perennius to insist on either a field assignment or a return to uniform.
The pettiness, the dishonesty ineradicable in a system built on secrecy, the filth he must know about the Empire which it was his life to protect ... all of those factors had put the Illyrian on the edge of eruption. The eight following years in the field were at least seven more than he could have survived in a Headquarters billet. By now, however, Perennius had come to the gloomy conclusion that nothing would save him from himself much longer.
There was a guard at the window on the peristyle court. He was there to make sure that no one slipped in that way in a desperate attempt to get the Director's approval of a plan or document. Perennius nodded to the soldier.
The man laid a brawny arm across the opening as the agent stepped toward it. "Keep clear, buddy," the guard snapped. "Go see them if you need to get in." He nodded toward the ushers in the passage. They were already hedged about by men who felt they had to talk to Navigatus.
"Calm down," Perennius said. He felt unusually calm himself, now that he had taken care of his business with Zopyrion. It was a state almost like that following orgasm, the relaxation which follows the draining of all the self's resources into a single triumphant moment. It took the edge off the sword of his temper, though the iron baton which remained could be nasty enough in all truth. Perennius reached out to the stone frame, holding his orders closed in his hand.
Navigatus reclined on the other side of the drawing room. He faced three-quarters away from the agent. Unexpectedly, one of the other heads within was turned toward Perennius rather than toward the Director. The man staring at the agent was six feet four inches tall, but much thinner-framed than the norm of protein-fed barbarians of that height. He was starkly bald with only a hint of eyebrows like those which regrow after facial burns. The eye contact surprised Perennius. Its intensity shocked him, stiffening the agent with a gasp which convinced the guard to get involved again.
"Hey there," the soldier said. He set his left palm at the lower end of the agent's breastbone. "Get the hell back, I—"
Perennius gripped the other's wrist with his own left hand and squeezed. There was no emotion in his response. That part of the agent's body was working on instinct. His right hand slapped the wooden tablet three times against the sill. The sharp rattle of sound cut through the buzz of concurrent conversations. It drew all eyes toward Perennius, as it had been intended to do. That was no longer an intellectual act either. The agent's conscious mind was focused on the bald, spare man who looked at him and looked away, just as Navigatus shouted, "Aulus! By Pollux, everybody make way for my friend here!" The Director rose to his feet with a touch of awkwardness because in reclining he had slowed the circulation to his left leg.
Perennius laughed. "Say, I'll come through the window," he called, "if it won't earn me a foot of steel up the ass." He released the guard, looking at the man with interest for the first time. Perennius' grip on the soldier's wrist had paralyzed the man as small bones, already in contact, had grated closer. "Christ the Savior, you bastard!" the soldier hissed as he massaged the injured limb with his good hand. Perennius had been distracted or he would not have squeezed so hard. Still, no permanent harm done, the agent thought as he swung himself over the waist-high sill to meet his superior.
The two men clasped and kissed, to the amazement of most of the others in the room. Navigatus was not, all things considered, a particularly arrogant man, but he had a strong sense of formality. He wore his toga on all public occasions. His subordinates and those outsiders seeking audiences with him had learned early that if they wished to be recognized, they too had best don the uncomfortable woolen garment. Even then the Director tended to keep his distance; though so far as Perennius knew, Marcus had never gotten to the point of greeting everyone through his usher as if direct verbal contact would somehow soil him. Seeing Navigatus embracing the agent and his travel stains was more of a surprise than word of another attempted coup would have been.