When his knees buckled, Ox sagged like a half-filled wine skin. His head fell forward onto his chest, and he might have been praying for the first and last time in his life. A circular hole the size of a pigeon's egg gaped from the back of his neck. Blood oozed but did not spurt from reopened wounds.
Lycon swore as he got to his feet from where Ox had sent him sprawling. He was not so much concerned that the man had died without saying much, as he was that Ox apparently had had very little to say. The attack had been unseen and unexpected. Perhaps it had been the work of the lizard-ape-N'Sumu thought so-but the question remained: where had it taken place?
The Centurion had stepped to the inner door of the station. "Basileus!" he shouted. "Check the codices for someone named Mephibaal in this district. Hurry!"
The patrolman who had been standing near tapped Silvius on the shoulder. "Mithras, sir," he said. "Don't worry about that. Everybody knows where old Mephi lives: the whole top floor of the building Hieronymos the tax-farmer owns, across from the Baths of Pulcher."
Silvius' eyes narrowed. "Where the dice game meets?" he asked.
"Other direction," said another Watch member. "But Castor-that's where they brought Ox from. Could've jumped from the seventh floor as well as from a roof, like we figured."
"Sixth floor," said a short man with Hamitic features, who trotted from the inner room with a volume of square-cut papyrus sheets open in his hands. "Mephibaal, son of Jeroboam, freedman of…"
"Basileus," said Lycon, pointing a finger toward the clerk though his eyes were on the Centurion. "Shut up for a minute. Silvius-can you locate the room we want?"
The Centurion nodded. "Yes, yes. But there were to be one thousand sesterces…?"
"N'Sumu," said the beastcatcher, turning his gaze. "You're in charge. Tonight, or do we wait for daylight?"
"You'll get your money," Vonones murmured to Silvius. "Maybe a lot more-if you help us and be quick about it."
N'Sumu shrugged. "Daylight would be better," he said, "but if we wait-who knows? The sauropithecus might shift its lair. Certainly it will shift it if it thinks this one could have led others to it." He waved toward the huge, half-flayed corpse.
"I think it may have difficulty moving just now, but…" During the pause, the bronzed face was as still and false as a statue's profile. "Yes. Best we go after it at once."
Lycon rubbed his face with his hands. "Right," he said without looking up, his palms covering his eyes and mouth. He brushed his hands down sharply. "Vonones," he said in a crisp, emotionless voice. "We'll use your litter bearers for messengers. I've got people waiting at your compound with gear. We'll need nets with the men too.
"Yes, and we'll need your troop," he added in an aside to the Centurion of the Watch. "Don't worry. You'll be paid for it-and our lord and god will have your guts out if there's a moment's delay."
"I said, we'll go at once," said N'Sumu. "Ourselves." His expression was unreadable, but there was a clear note of command in the words.
"We'll go when I say we're ready," snapped Lycon. "I've seen this beast work, and you haven't. And I don't mean to be gutted like a perch-or end up like this one." He toed Ox's corpse without looking down at it.
"You have been at close quarters with these lizard-apes before, of course-haven't you, N'Sumu?"
N'Sumu seemed about to assert his authority, then backed down. "Make your plans, beastcatcher," he said. "Then I will deal with the situation in the way best suited."
He continued to stare at Lycon as the hunter scribbled orders onto pieces of papyrus supplied by the Watch Centurion. Vonones felt his dinner roil uneasily in his belly, but his fear was not only of the lizard-ape.
Chapter Fourteen
From the street where Lycon waited with the others, the preparations on the rooftops around them were invisible. An occasional wedge of broken tile pattered between outthrust balconies to smash on the pavement, and the fitful glow of lanterns overhead provided uncertain evidence of the men who moved into position above the streets.
There were laws regulating set-back from the street against building height-intended to guarantee sunlight for every stretch of pavement in order to burn away the noxious effluvia that would otherwise, according to the best medical opinion, propagate themselves in shadows. Save for a handful of major boulevards, however, the laws were an excuse for Watch commanders to extort bribes instead of being genuine subjects for enforcement. There had been nothing about this portion of the north slope of the Aventine Hill that precluded the builders from developing it as they pleased-and at a price.
So the close-shouldering apartment blocks hid the direct sun from the streets except at noon on certain days. It also meant that a fire in one building involved potential disaster for the region or the city as a whole-as had already happened twice since a blaze had given Nero room enough for a sprawling palace and grounds in Rome's center. So far as Lycon was concerned at the moment, the interlocking balconies and eaves might prevent him from directing his men by sight, but this amounted to no more of a handicap than the scrub or high grass in which he normally worked. The narrow interstices made it possible to reach the roof of their objective without going through the top floor that Mephibaal leased.
Had leased until recently, at any rate. Lycon wiped his palms on his tunic, not for the first time.
A three-note call drifted down from above. It was from no certain direction by the time it bounced through the maze of walls and projections.
"That's Hippias," said Vonones, gripping the stock of his whip with his hands and firmly enough to flex it into a bow. "They're all in position."
N'Sumu waited with the placid arrogance of one of the huge stone dolphins at the horseraces, ready to tip and signal completion of a lap but utterly disdainful of all other matters of human endeavor. Lycon noticed that when the Egyptian turned his gaze upward toward darkness, his eyeballs frosted into dull opacity. The beastcatcher thought that it might be a trick of the light, until the same thing happened when N'Sumu looked directly down the street past him, and his eyeballs gleamed, dulled, and gleamed normally again without any change in external circumstances. N'Sumu grinned starkly when he noticed Lycon's attention, but he made no comment about what the Greek thought he had seen.