The goblet which had held the drug had now been refilled with wine as red as blood. Father Ramphion raised it and began intoning a prayer to which his congregation shouted responses. The victim screamed, thumping his wrists against the stone and iron which held them. As the scene receded into blackness, Perennius was telling himself dizzily that this sort of behavior was a threat to the Empire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Hercules,” Perennius muttered, though the process of coming around was no worse than that of being awakened from a sound sleep. His toes and fingers tingled, and there was still the buzzing somewhere in his head. There was no particular pain, however. In fact, the drugging seemed to have helped the agent’s previous collection of aches and throbbing, including that of his spear wound.
Two hands steadied Perennius as he rose to a sitting position, Calvus on one side and Sabellia on the other. In the light creeping through the room’s grated door, the agent could see the forms of Gaius and Sestius. They were slumped and snoring. All five of the party now wore simple belted tunics of local manufacture, like those the two soldiers had donned even before the feast. The agent wondered whether Calvus’ sex had caused any surprise this time. The pirates, after all, had seemed to take the revelation in stride. Perennius shuddered and said, “Hercules!” again.
The light was dim, but the agent’s eyes were fully dark-adapted. “Just like the room they gave us to store things,” he said. “Except that one didn’t have a barred door, did it?”
He stood. Sabellia murmured a warning. The Illyrian tried a step anyway and lurched, grabbing the door for support with a crash. The door was of welded iron bars with no interstices more than a hand’s-breadth apart. Crossbars braced the verticals, inside and out. Like the church, the door was of obviously local design and manufacture.
Equally like the church, the door looked more than solid enough for its intended purpose. As for the living rock that formed the ceiling, floor, and walls –
Perennius saw the shadow of the cudgel slashing at his knuckles just in time to jerk his hand away from the bars. The knobby length of root crashed against the iron. It filled the stone chamber with its vicious cacophony. “Next chappie to touch the door,” said a harsh voice, “is the first to go when they need more meat down there.” The speaker who had suddenly bulked against the light on the other side of the bars made a gesture with his thumb. “Make my life hard and I’ll make yours a little shorter,” he added with a chuckle. “And if the week or two’s difference don’t seem like much now, it will, chappies. Hear the voice of experience. It will.”
“Sorry, friend,” said the agent easily. “I just tripped. The gods know, I’ve got enough problems of my own right now. I’m not looking to make problems for anybody else.” Perennius stood inches back from the grating. He was shifting his weight unobtrusively from one leg to the other to work the life back into the muscles.
Like the other hut, this one had two rooms. The outer one was built out from the hillside, while the inner one was set into the rock with only the doorway and a flue to connect it with the rest of the world. Judging from the patch of gray sky at the end of it, this flue was much like the other one: ten feet long and too narrow to pass a man’s clenched fist. That left the iron-grated door which looked beyond affecting with bare hands even if there were no guard present. Since there was a guard, however, there were additional possibilities.
“Hey, don’t worry,” the big Cilician said with a laugh. “Your problems’ll be over pretty quick now, won’t they?” He walked back to a couch along one of the sidewalls.
“You’d be Azon, then, I guess,” the agent said. The guard was slope-shouldered and covered from elbows to wrists with curling black hair. His appearance was striking enough that Perennius could be fairly certain that the fellow had not been in the church earlier. Besides, the man had a coarseness to him that set him apart from the