Killer

There was scant room for three on the landing proper. Lycon had half expected N'Sumu to squeeze aside and let pass the Watch members with their swords. Instead the Egyptian himself stepped to the door and ran his palms over its framework. The gesture was not casual, but rather a precise survey of the edges of the panel where they butted against the jamb and where, presumably, the bar or bolts were engaged. So far as Lycon could tell, N'Sumu did not actually touch the heavy wood.

The slave with the lantern cowered aside with a look of rigid fear-directed at N'Sumu rather than what might be beyond the door. Neither of the Ethiopians had a good grasp of what was going on-they were present to carry lights, and nobody had bothered to explain the business further. It was reasonable enough that the slave would not regard their quarry with the taut anxiety of those who knew what they were seeking-but why the fear of N'Sumu? It was almost as if the slave, who might well know the Egyptian peoples of the Nile south of Elephantine Island as familiarly as Lycon did Thracians, nonetheless found N'Sumu both unique and unpleasant.

"It's wedged in place," N'Sumu decided. "Not firmly at all. If you want, I think that I can…"

Lycon shook his head in negation. A drop of sweat from the climb stung his eye and made him blink. Vonones panted two steps down from the landing. Behind and below him on the stairs, the backlighted bronze helmets of the Watch patrolmen gleamed like halos. One of the men had drawn his sword and was trying to brace himself upright against the wall with his elbow.

"You," said Lycon, pointing over the rolled and ready net at the lantern-bearer. He spoke a sort of bush dialect that worked well enough in the field and which the Ethiopian understood as much through Lycon's tone as his words. "Jump in and put your back to the wall to the left side of the doorway, while I go to the right. Any delay, any foul-up, and I'll feed you to a hyena. Believe me. One bite at a time."

The slave nodded with his lower lip sucked between his teeth. It would be worth any unknown danger to get away from N'Sumu.

"All right, then," said Lycon. He kicked in the door and it fell with a crash like that of a catapult firing.

The lantern-bearer followed orders with an alacrity that impressed Lycon himself. N'Sumu was inside as abruptly, his eyes blank as marble, and his palms again outstretched.

Lycon spun within to the right, because he was right-handed and his direction of movement would aid a cross-body cast of his net. The shadows cast by the lantern slid across walls and beams in a counterfeit of activity, but for a moment only the newcomers themselves moved in the low-ceilinged attic.

The man who was already sprawled just inside the doorway certainly did not move. He had worn the usual two tunics, the i

Most of the other corpses humped against the floor of the loft had not been stripped with anything like the same playful enthusiasm. In general, the clothing-rags to begin with mostly-had been slashed apart crudely, and the flesh beneath treated in a similar fashion. Lycon could not guess how many corpses-most of them no more than picked and scattered bones-were strewn about the loft. The number itself, a hundred or so perhaps, would not be particularly startling to one who had seen a thousand bodies dragged from the Amphitheater on a long afternoon. Those had been fresh, though-and most of these… such flesh that remained had heated to dripping liquescence under the roof tiles.

Always before, Lycon would have said that a smell was something you got used to. He did not want to believe that now. Not even the accustomed stench of Rome's slums could have continued to mask the presence of this charnel house much longer.

Vonones and the two patrolmen burst into the loft behind N'Sumu. The second lantern-bearer stopped in the doorway, his nerve failing. Vonones snarled a command, and the slave entered-increasing the amount of light available without in the least improving the scene it displayed.

"They're," said Vonones, "they're all…" He slashed out with his whip, not aiming at anything in particular.

"Is it here?" one patrolman demanded as he twisted-fearful that the sideguards of his helmet were keeping him from seeing the taloned demon that approached him.

Recovering from the sight, Lycon jerked his own head to the side. Nothing seemed to move-only N'Sumu, who was walking cautiously toward the man who hung from a roof truss, held there by a swath of something that seemed more like spun metal than any fabric, even silk, N'Sumu's hands were raised and his eyes, when Lycon stepped alongside, were dull.

"By Isis, that's Smiler," muttered the other patrolman. "Ox's partner, and-why that's Carretius!" He pointed toward the half-consumed body whose torso lay before the entrance-only now was the man's memory grasping some sort of awareness out of this nightmarish scene.

"What…?" Lycon said to N'Sumu, and something leaped at them from the hollowed ribcage of one of the corpses.

The shadow thrown by the lanterns distorted and exaggerated both the creature and the motion. It was that exaggeration that called Lycon's attention to the movement while it was within the capacity of his reflexes to respond to it. The creature that launched itself toward his eyes was not the lizard-ape he feared, nor yet was it anything that he had ever seen before.

It was cat-sized and perhaps quicker than a cat, but its leap was a long one-long enough for Lycon to react. Lycon's net, cast by reflex, opened like a spider's web catching the sun. The bronze weights, as delicate as the silken cords themselves, held the net in a momentary orb that collapsed around the leaping thing in midair. The motion with which the beastcatcher had cast his net, still gripped by the cord that pursed shut the outer edge against the weight it held, carried the furious creature safely past Lycon's left shoulder.

The net had been intended to tangle the lizard-ape for the minimal instant Lycon might need to press his attack or to escape. This creature-whatever it was-was well within the size of the prey for which the net had been designed. His unexpected success gave Lycon a momentary thrill of triumph-one that stuck in his throat as he saw the floor and walls of the loft seethe with sudden movement like bubbles rising in a cesspool.

Something the size of the first creature twisted in the air toward N'Sumu. An instant before touching him, its blue-scaled body exploded in a burst of light as green as spring hay. In the fluff that remained of Carretius' linen garment crawled a dozen bright blue things no larger than baby rabbits and fully as blind, but with the bloody determination of so many gadflies. One of them clamped to the ankle of the leading lantern-bearer, and his shriek was louder than that of the two patrolmen-who knew from experience what the hurtling lantern meant in a place like this.

Smiler hung with his mouth and muscles slack. Lycon had assumed the man was as dead as those he had accompanied here, Ox and the halved corpse facing the doorway. Now Smiler's eyelids opened and his head rocked back, trying to tear loose from the shimmering band of stuff that clamped and supported him. One of the dangling arms lifted and pointed toward the beastcatcher. There was a touch on Lycon's sandal, something crawling, and his hobnails ground it against the flooring as he started for the hanging man.