Killer

"The Caecuban, I think-mulled," said Vonones. He was no more a co

Now he turned with a smile, he hoped, of quiet sophistication to the Egyptian and said: "Master N'Sumu, may I recommend the Caecuban? Urbicius, the owner here, lays in a stock for me personally."

Lycon had relaxed enough that he had to smother a snort. That was a laugh-still, let Vonones impress upon this Egyptian, the Emperor's chosen sauropithecus stalker, that he and Lycon were themselves men of the world.

N'Sumu looked at the merchant without interest and said, "Water for me. Only water." The filters implanted in his esophagus would keep most of the local foodstuffs from playing hell with his digestive processes, but that did not mean that he intended to press his luck. Nourishment prepared in private from local raw substances would sustain life for as long as he had to remain here. Certainly the notion of actually eating alongside these animals was more unpleasant than the food itself was likely to be.

The shopowner bowed and snapped his finger to a waiter who scampered off. Bowing again, the owner backed away also. Vonones, thought Lycon, probably spent more lavishly on his wine than he did on his animals. And that brought them back to the business at hand.

"All right," Lycon said bluntly before the merchant could waste more time with small talk. "You've hunted sauropitheci in your own homeland, so I can see you might do a better job catching the lizard-ape than we would. When I'm in the field, I always talk to the local hunters before I set up my own plans. Even when the quarry is an animal I'm familiar with, the local terrain may affect hunting conditions. Good enough-you know lizard-apes and I don't. But that isn't going to help either one of us capture something that's at the bottom of the Tiber by now."

N'Sumu shook his head in a gesture unfamiliar to Lycon and Vonones. It was sometimes difficult to fit particular gestures into the correct cultural setting on a world as fragmented as this one. The bronze-ski

"There is a very good probability that the sauropithecus is not on the bottom of the river," he said confidently. "The beasts are quite at home in the water, being in some aspects related to fish. And I very much doubt that the beast would have died from its wounds. In my homeland we often find it necessary to chop them into their separate parts to make certain we have killed them, so quickly do they recover from seemingly mortal wounds. Besides, we know what it did on the grain barge. I suggest that you have simply been looking in the wrong place."

Lycon, his face blank and his voice emotionless, said, "We've been looking in a lot of wrong places, then, I guess. We've got a network of informants throughout every farm and hamlet between Rome and the coast, fifteen miles to either side of the Tiber. We've caught or killed maybe a dozen packs of feral dogs, so I wouldn't say the effort was wasted-but it didn't bring us any closer to the damned thing we were looking for."

"Because you weren't looking in Rome," N'Sumu said. This time he suited the correct gesture, a lift of his chin and eyebrows, to the words. "Because you were looking for a wild animal, Lycon, when in reality the creature is very cu

N'Sumu was smiling when the waiters arrived with the order. There were five of them: one with a mixing bowl and three cups, one with two jugs of wine, and one with a larger jug of water-dark with the moisture that sweated through its unglazed surface to evaporate and cool the remaining contents. The last pair of waiters carried a freestanding stove of bronze by the handles on either side. They walked gingerly with their burden, because live coals had already been shoveled into the firepot.

The stove was of hollow construction. When the men carrying the piece set it down by the arbor, one of them lifted the lid from the container, which was cast integrally with the firepot. A servant with a wine jug tipped it to fill the stove container. The wine gurgled as it rushed through the passages cast into the walls of the firepot. The thin bronze popped and hissed as the fluid cooled metal which the charcoal had already expanded. The other wine bearer poured from his jug into a cup, while the man with the water filled a second cup for N'Sumu with a flourish.

"We can serve ourselves, boys," said Vonones. He did not offer to pay. That he would do discreetly at ten-day intervals, feeling that the show of credit was more impressive than an open display of silver would have been in a business setting. The waiters-one was the cook, Hieron; the owner must be alone in the front-bowed and backed away obsequiously.

The wine in Lycon's cup merged and blended in the swirls it cut through the previously poured water. Slowly the richer color smoothed itself to blanket the buff glaze of the cup's interior. "Where would you look for a lizard-ape, then?" he asked. "And no more jokes about looking for it in Rome."

The Egyptian hunched forward. "A grain of sand would hide on a beach, would it not? A wisp of straw in a hayfield. Where would something human hide, beastcatcher?"

"Well, now, we don't want to overestimate the lizard-ape's cu

"I remind you that it isn't like any other beast known to you," said N'Sumu with his dreadful smile. "The sauropithecus is right here. In Rome." He touched the faucet of the mulling stove, opening it just enough in curiosity to jet a thin line of Caecuban onto the brick paving.

"If you know that," said Lycon sarcastically, "then you can tell us how you know." He sipped his diluted wine and savored the bite of resin and alcohol, as he stared at the strange Egyptian.

N'Sumu paused with his fingers still on the lion's head. He met Lycon's eyes. "Simple logic, my friend. We know that it was on the barge. Now where could it have gone from there?"

As N'Sumu talked, he lifted the lid of the container portion of the hollow stove and peered inside. "It did not jump to the bank of the river between here and Ostia. Either bank. It would have been easy to track if it had done that."

Lycon was trying to hold his cup still, but the tension in his grip set the wine adance in the shallow vessel. "True enough. We've found no sign of tracks, and we've had our noses to the ground up and down both banks of the Tiber. That's why I'm convinced the beast must have drowned."

"It seems reasonable that the sauropithecus stayed with the barge even after it had finished with the sailors," said N'Sumu, as he let the lid fall with a rattle of hollow bronze. "If it had been watching other barges pass along the Tiber from its place of concealment, it is cu