Perennius approached cautiously. He did not draw his sword because it took both hands to control the weight of the pole-slung armor. The shrine was leveled by a low base. The pillars were short, square, and thick. They could easily have hidden a tentacled gray form, ready to blast the agent from behind if he stalked past without examining the building.
Perennius leaned the curtaining armor against the low transom. He drew his dagger but not his sword, so that his gauntleted right fist was free. Panting with tension and effort, the agent swung between close-set pillars and into the cramped nave. His mail clashed as it brushed the stone. The sound of his heart was loud in the bronze helmet encasing his head.
There was nothing in the roofless interior, no altar or
cult objects ... and surely no tripedal horror with glittering destruction in its grasp. The rasp of the agent's breath resumed, covering the thump of his pulse again. Perennius sheathed his dagger, guiding its point with his free hand into the slot which he could not see. Almighty Sun, he thought. The stone was dim around him and the further descent was black as the bowels of a corpse.
So be it. The agent slipped back outside and retrieved the dangling mail. He skirted the chapel, pausing before he went on to glance back and see that nothing had played hide and seek with him around the pillars. The smoothly-curving slope continued, and Perennius followed it.
Even in the darkness, the walls were now close enough that he could be sure that nothing could skitter around him unnoticed. As Perennius walked, a ball of cold saffron light the size of his head drifted past to precede him down the cavern. It was as if he were walking down a giant worm-track. The cave shrank only gradually, and none of its twists or falls were dangerously abrupt. It continued to descend. There were dried, straw-matted sheep droppings frequently underfoot for the first quarter mile. After that there were none.
At the base of a slippery drop of ten feet or so, Perennius passed a goat skull from which the horns had been gnawed, along with most of the associated skeleton. The animal had come further than some herdsman had been willing to seek a member of his flock. With the light before him, the scramble down the cavern was less dangerous for Perennius than had been the track along the cliffside. The pale glow drove even the cave's miniature fauna, the mice and insects, to cover in the fissures of the walls. Without a light which did not flicker, without the certainty that the footing was awkward rather than dangerous, hedged about with the myths which the light dispelled ... It was not surprising that few other humans appeared to have penetrated so far into the cave.
The air wheezed. Perennius was wrapped so tightly in his armor that his skin could not feel the brief current. It pulsed against his pupils, however, through the tiny eye-holes of his mask. A door had closed or opened near ahead.
Perennius was not alone in the cave; and not all hobgoblins were things of myth.
The agent had been able to walk upright to that point. Now the rock constricted again and the cave took a twist to the right. Perennius swore very softly and drew his dagger. He knelt, then thrust the slung armor ahead of him around the bend. Nothing happened. Light from the hovering globe spewed through the interstices of the armor, dappling Perennius and the walls around him.
The agent slid forward on his greaves. The eight-foot pole bound against the rock. Perennius shifted the knife to his right hand. He slammed his left shoulder against the pole. The dogwood flexed and sprang free. Perennius lunged around the corner himself as if the extra suit of mail were dragging him forward. The tip of the pole thudded into the seamless door which closed the passage. It could have been rock itself, save for the regular patterning which the ball of light disclosed. Whorls of shadow spun from the center. The background had no color but that of the yellowish light illuminating it.
And then the light slid forward, merged with the barrier, and disappeared.
The first thing Perennius did was to wedge his pole so that the armor hung across the face of the portal. He could not assume that what was a barrier to him barred also the Guardian and its weapons. Calvus had projected the agent into a world whose uncertainties went much deeper than questions of provincial governors and border security. It was easier to doubt whether or not a wall was solid than to worry about a line of defense a thousand miles away. In the case of the wall, there were precautions Perennius himself could take. If the question made the task more involuted, well, solving problems was the greatest merit in life.
The air had begun to smell stale at the instant the light was sucked away.
Perennius did not know what had happened to Calvus or the light, but he restrained his initial impulse to scram-
ble back through the darkness. "Some effort" the tall woman had said. Perhaps it had grown too great, forcing her to pause for a moment like a porter leaning his burden against a wall. The glow might resume any time. If Perennius were running back, it would show him as a fool and a coward - after he had insisted that he was willing to go down with no light at all.
The agent picked carefully at the barrier with the point of his dagger. The surface had the slight roughness of the limestone with which it merged at the edges. Whereas the soft rock crumbled when he scraped at it, the steel had no effect whatever on the material of the barrier. Given time, Perennius could cut away the plug intact, like a miner who encounters a huge nugget of native copper in a deep mine. Given time. Even in close quarters, even blind and encased in armor whose leather padding was slimy with sweat ...
And perhaps Calvus was a cinder blasted by the creature which now crept to eliminate the last threat. To eliminate Perennius, pinned hopelessly against the closed entrance to its lair.
The agent felt through his knees the whisper behind him which his ears could not hear for the din of blood in them.
Perennius turned. He did not shift his curtain of mail. Remembering how Gaius' spatha had caught and channeled blasts away from him, Perennius drew his own sword and advanced it toward the darkness. Sap softly resisted the steel's leaving its sheath. The blade stirred the muggy air with the odor of fresh-cut vegetation. The agent wondered if the first bolt would catapult him backwards, stunned and ready to be finished at leisure. He focused all his will down into the point of the dagger in his right hand. By the gods, he would lunge against the blue-white bolt like a boar on the spear that spitted it, determined to rend its slayer.
"Aulus," Calvus called from just around the last turning, "I needed to be closer to manipulate the barrier. I apologize for leaving you in the dark this way."
"No problem," the agent lied. "Glad you've got an answer to this wall. I sure didn't." Perennius could not find the mouth of his scabbard. His sword scraped twice on his thigh armor, then dropped to the ground so that Calvus could clutch the agent's empty hand. Her touch was firm and cooling, even through the gauntlet.
The tall woman slipped past Perennius in the narrow way. Far more awkwardly, the agent also turned. He could hear the rustle of the draped armor as Calvus reached beneath it to finger the barrier directly. "Yes ..." she murmured. Then she slid back past the agent, a whisper in the darkness. Her fingers rested at the nape of Perennius' neck, where the gorget buckled beneath the brass of the headpiece. "Be ready, Aulus Perennius," she said.