Killer

As Smiler, his face gone blank, obeyed, Carretius gave the bronze piston two quick strokes, then withdrew it. The shaved bay twigs in the chamber, heated by the sudden compression of the air, flared into open flame. The rent-taker ignited the wick of his candle-a poor light, but more practical to carry against the need than was a lamp with oil sloshing in the bowl. His fingers were trembling, and when he had a proper candleflame he dropped the pump onto the landing. The tube and piston were hot from use as well as the resulting tiny fire, and at the moment Carretius did not have the patience to put the pump carefully back in his wallet.

"All right," he said to Ox, glancing to see that the tinder was only a dying glow on the boards.

Both of the smaller men flattened against the lath and plaster partitions as the gri

Ox tested the panel with his fingertips. It was meant to open inward. Smiler fretted impatiently, as uncomfortable with the big man's plodding deliberation as was Carretius himself. The door creaked beneath Ox's touch, and there was an expression of childish delight on Ox's i

"Open it, damn you!" Carretius demanded.

Ox slammed his palm against the point on the door at which he had felt the resistance of a bar. The staples that held the bar in place within ripped free at the impact. Ox shouldered the sagging panel inside, ahead of his rush. Carretius and Smiler lunged in at either heel-half expecting the onslaught of up to a score of beggars, desperate from the murder of their master.

The smell was not expected.

The loft was crisscrossed by the studs that supported the tile roof above, but it had no interior walls. The stench permeated the loft's entire expanse-a miasma that choked them despite their acquaintance with the filth commonplace in such dwellings.

The candle's circumscribed illumination hid the outstretched interior. There were windows-in fact, the outer walls were comprised of removable wicker screens in order to reduce the weight upon the exterior walls beneath-but none of them was open. There were rat-scuttling sounds, but not the anticipated assault by beggars. What it looked like, huddled on the floor and even hanging from the rafters, could not possibly be…

"Get some more light in here!" Carretius shouted to his henchmen. The dagger he always carried, but had never had to draw, was free in his left hand as he held the candle high in his right.

Ox threw down the door panel and started across the creaking floor toward the screens. He shouted and snatched at the back of his neck. Wood splintered as Ox's berserk rush carried him through a roof stud.

Smiler spun about, searching for an unseen threat. His razor flicked through something in midair that was neither a bat nor a pigeon. Something else that had clung to the tiles overhead dropped silently onto Smiler's face.

Carretius screamed in terror-an instant before he felt the pains that lanced through both ankles. He bent and hacked with the point of his dagger at the agony, oblivious of the fact that the blade was cutting his own flesh as well.

A new rush of pain seemed to dip Carretius' right hand into molten lead. He flung away the candle, killing the light. The rent-taker's throat was already locked in a cry for which his lungs no longer held breath, but he straightened and slashed his weapon toward the unseen bulk that was savaging his right hand. The blow brought relief, even though the steel gouged along his wrist and the back of his hand-ripping something loose from his flesh.

For an instant, the only light in the loft was the dim rectangle of the doorway through which the men had entered. Then there was an explosion of laths and wicker as Ox plunged blindly through fragments of screen, out into the twilight and a fifty-foot drop to the street below. Carretius could not possibly have scrambled across the stretch of timbers and horror between him and that new opening, even if it held hopes of anything but a fatal drop. The doorway was only a few yards behind him, but as he turned both the rent-taker's ankles gave way. It was more than mere pain-the Achilles tendons were severed. Carretius crashed to the floor-still trying to crawl toward the door.

A figure appeared in silhouette against the open doorway. It was small and hunched-a woman with the tail of her mantle flipped over her head for propriety's sake, or a short man in a hooded Gallic cloak. The figure paused, just inside the loft and not quite close enough for Carretius' desperate hands to touch.

"Help me!" the rent-taker shouted, knowing the other could not see him in the darkness. His calves prickled as tiny needles advanced, tearing into his flesh. The pain cut through the anesthesia of his fear. Dimly he was aware of other tiny assailants, dropping unseen onto his writhing body.

"Pull me out of here, and you'll never want for anything!"

The figure stepped past the rent-taker and disappeared as it moved out of the light. Carretius clutched toward the whisper of legs on heavy cloth-the only sound the figure made-but his bloody right hand touched nothing, or felt nothing it touched.

The figure reappeared. It was carrying the door panel that Ox had flung away as the three men had burst into the loft. The open doorway, the last hope in the blackness of Hades, disappeared as the figure carefully fitted the door back into place. There was a gentle tapping, as a scrap of timber was wedged between jamb and panel to hold the door in place until permanent repairs could be made. Carretius felt, rather than saw, the figure as it turned back to him.

The jagged touch of unseen climbing things had already shredded the rent-taker's garments across his back. His ragged breath was the only sound in the foetid loft-that and a scrambling, tearing sound, as of many crabs in a wooden trap.

He still had time to wonder what had become of Smiler, and in another moment he knew.

Chapter Thirteen

"He's going fast," said the Watch Centurion, as if Lycon needed help in judging serious wounds. "Maybe it's not what you're after, but I thought maybe-you know-that thousand sesterces reward you're offering for evidence of killings that don't look like your usual brawls and muggings and the like."

"You may have just earned it, Silvius," said Lycon, uncinching his belt so that his tunic could flap and cool him as he bent toward the victim. They had been held to the pace of Vonones' chairmen and the pair of lantern-carrying guides leading them all. In daylight and by a route with which he was familiar, Lycon would have run on ahead of them.

The big man was obviously near death-should be dead already from the injuries suffered in his fall. Perhaps with a body that huge it took time for the brain to know it was useless. Lycon remembered the giant German warriors he had seen in his youth-pierced by a dozen fatal wounds and still shambling forward to slay, froth on their lips and death frozen in their eyes.

The Watch station was converted from what had been a bakery on the corner of an apartment block-two rooms on the ground floor, and a co