The rim of the sinkhole had been undercut by the hungry ground waters. One of the earth-slips to which Cilicia is prone had shaken down much of the south wall into a jumble on the chasm's floor. The slope that resulted was steep, but at least it had some outward batter. Perennius ran to the edge without pausing for the tentacled thing that sprawled in his path. The edge of Gaius' sword had volatized with the energy it had sprayed back into the atmosphere. The weapon struck the Guardian as a blunt, glowing bar. It had the weight of a horse and armored rider behind it. The creature's conical head was not sheared but caved in. Shards of gray chitin were trapped in a magenta gelatine.
There were three more Guardians toiling up the trail toward the rim. They wore no masks or disguises, only their gray exoskeletons and a shimmering array of tools. The alarm that summoned them had been a little too late. It was unlikely that they were prepared for what came sliding down the slope toward them.
The trail itself slanted broadly to the right for several hundred feet before it cut back in the other direction. Gaius, whooping and still astride his horse, ignored the trail. He blasted gravel straight downslope toward the pair of Guardians a level below him. The gradient was
one to one, too steep for real control given the gallop that had taken man and mount onto it. It was not quite abrupt enough to make the descent a fall rather than a ride.
Horse and horseman bathed in a roaring dazzle. The Guardians had neither the desire nor the ability to direct their bolts at the man alone as their shattered fellow had done on the chasm's edge. The mane and tail of the horse flared out and burned. The powerful neck and shoulders withered as if they were at the core of a furnace. Shattered bone ends protruded from the carcase which was otherwise charred too black and dense to be seen as from an animal. It plummeted between the two leading Guardians, taking brush and a hail of limestone with it as it rolled toward the chasm's floor.
Gaius' long iron shirt flashed brighter and whiter than the sun in the instant the alien bolts gnashed at it. The spatha folded back on itself as if its blade were wax and not steel. Gaius flew forward, separating from the horse whose forequarters had been devoured beneath him. His armor glowed red and then red on black as air quenched the thousands of spot-welded wires which comprised the mail. Stiff as a statue and surely as unknowing, Gaius skidded until he hit a trio of mulberry trees, eighty feet below the rim.
No one, not even Perennius, was watching Gaius. The dragon was on top of the leading pair of Guardians.
For something that weighed as much as a yoke of oxen, the beast had incredible agility. It could not avoid the abrupt descent, but even as inertia carried its leading right foot over the side, its tail was swinging around. That long, cartilage-stiffened member was the lever by which the allosaurus pivoted its mass. As the beast slid into the chasm, it was already twisting broadside, cat-quick, to scrape itself to a halt in the shortest possible time. The allosaurus was not intelligent, but its nervous system housed bundles of reflexes as finely honed as ever an assassin's razor. The pair of gray, chitinous things on the ledge where its claws slashed for purchase were no more of an incident than the creosote bushes shredded in the same instant.
Perennius made his own reflexive judgment. He leaped over the side himself. The price of being wrong was death, but that was nothing new.
The dragon came to a skidding halt on the trail, facing the third Guardian at a distance of twenty feet. One of the beast's three-clawed forelegs was extended up-hill. It clutched an outcrop at the end of a triple furrow in the thin sod. The jaws which had crushed their way through the bones and tough muscle of the donkey were open. The allosaurus had just begun its terrible, gulping cry when the Guardian's shot tore its head off.
The crackling discharge blew apart the beast's calvarium in an explosion of shrinking bone and expanding, gaseous nerve tissue. Its teeth shattered like glass as dentine responded to the induced heat. The dragon reacted like a beheaded chicken. Its hind legs thrust it forward in an uncoordinated lunge that spilled it off the trail and past the Guardian. The great beast began to roll sideways down the slope. It gathered speed as the angle steepened. The tail and neck flailed wildly, but the massive torso merely rotated faster and faster. The cream belly-scales alternated with the red-shot black of sides and back. Fifty feet above the floor of the chasm, an outcrop gave the huge carcass impetus enough to hurl it away from the wall. Limbs spasming with momentum and death reflexes, the dragon smashed down on the quake-strewn boulders which had preceded it into Typhon's Cavern.
The Guardian rotated on what might be a ball joint above its tripodal legs. It was raising to meet Perennius the weapon which had just ripped the allosaurus. The agent was skidding on his armor-protected left hip and shoulder. He kicked the creature off the trail and grappled with it as they rolled together after the dragon.
Perennius gripped with both his hands the tentacle holding the weapon. He squeezed and pulled as if he were disjointing a lobster to get at the meat in the claws. The rock and brush through which they careened meant nothing to him, would have meant nothing even if the iron and leather encasing him did not absorb much of the punishment. Rock gouted in a spray of splinters and quicklime as the weapon fired into the ground. Then Perennius held the creature in his left hand. His right hand flung away
the weapon and the separated fragment of tentacle that still wrapped the glittering object.
Both combatants were brought up by a clump of holly. The bush had been flattened by the tons of dragon, but the stems had sprung up again in time to stop Perennius and his victim short of fifty sheer feet neither of them would have survived. The greave had been pulled from Perennius' right shin. His bare forehead was bleeding from a gash he could not remember getting. The Guardian's own flexible exoskeleton was dusty and abraded. Pores and the joint of head and segmented carapace were oozing a pink, waxy substance with an odor like that of bergamot. The creature had not made any sound, even when Perennius pulled it apart.
One of its remaining arms snatched a globular object that clung to its chitin like steel to a lodestone. Perennius watched the trebly-opposed fingers rotate the object toward his head while he tried to interpose his own arm. The agent's flesh moved far slower than the images of disaster which flickered through his brain. He saw his carcass burned or sawn apart, perhaps simply vanishing....
The object struck his blood-matted hair and recoiled. The blow was no worse than a child could have delivered, scarcely noticeable to Perennius in his adrenalin-heightened state. The Guardian had no weapon beyond that hurled into the brush with its dripping limb attached. It was using in desperation some piece of gear as a hard object to arm its blows. That showed a courage that Perennius could have appreciated if he had been more nearly human at the time. As a response to what he was about to do, the blow was on a par with spitting in his face.
The agent stood up. He lifted the Guardian easily. The creature weighed some eighty pounds. The blows with which it pummeled him were light even in reference to its size. The exoskeleton that smoothly covered the alien's limbs had no room in it for muscles like those which bulged Perennius' arms. The agent knelt with his weight on his right knee and left foot. He lifted the creature over his head, holding it by one leg and the stump of the arm he had severed. Then, shouting in a bestial triumph, Perennius brought the alien down across the armored shelf of his braced left thigh as if he were breaking a bundle of reeds. The Guardian's thorax crackled in minuscule echo of the crashing discharge of its weapon seconds before. Fluids leaked and coated Perennius' knee stickily as he raised the creature for a second blow. Its legs and arms had gone limp. In a fit of revulsion, the agent instead flung the alien away from him. He watched it bounce down the wall of the chasm.