Erzites wheeled. His tunic pooled at his ankles. He gripped his club with both hands, as if it were a threshing flail. It hissed through the air as the guard swung with all his strength. Azon’s head deformed. The grating rang from the impact of the skull being driven into it. Erzites struck again. The body was jerking in Perennius’ grip, but that was only the dying response of its autonomic nervous system. The cudgel made a liquid sound when its knob struck the second time. Matter splashed the metal and Perennius’ forearm. The agent released Azon.
The third time, the club struck the door a foot above the slumping corpse and flew out of Erzites’ grasp. The killer also collapsed on the floor, wheezing. In the last instants of the fight, the brothers had been almost equally mindless.
Perennius dragged the corpse closer by its belt. He reached across to draw the sword. It was a standard government-pattern short sword. Its blade was dull and very badly maintained. The hilt was of bronze in a fish-scale pattern which might once have been gilded. Chances were that the weapon had belonged to Azon and Erzites’ father when he served with the imperial forces. The valley must have gathered a considerable armory in its decades of murdering travellers. The brothers’ own lack of equipment underscored their separation from all communal aspects of village life. There was no need for it to be otherwise, of course.
Perennius gave the sword to Calvus, though the three other of his fellow prisoners were babbling and jostling forward. Erzites was still in a state of collapse. The agent tied off the villager’s tether. The villager had just proven he was willing to do anything to save his skin. Perennius •saw no point in risking the fellow’s escape.
Calvus put the point of the sword at the joint between a vertical and a crossbar. She held the weapon almost point down. Perennius started to apologize for the fact that the sword was so dull and that the point had been rounded by improper sharpening. The tall woman rapped the oval pommel sharply with the heel of her right hand. Metal rang. The crossbar jumped as the sword inserted itself where the weld had been.
“Herakles!” Sestius blurted. Sabellia had more experience or at least more awareness of the other woman’s capacities. The Gaul fell silent and drew the centurion back to give Calvus more room to work.
Perennius stopped himself with his mouth open. He had been about to say that if Azon had been correct, the five of them might be only minutes short of being trapped by villagers returning for a new victim. There was no reason to say what they all knew; and it was hard to imagine anyone working faster or more efficiently than Calvus, anyway.
The blade was of good steel. Its dull edge should have been a handicap. If so, the bare-handed blows with which Calvus struck the pommel were more than hard enough to overcome the defect in materials. The bald woman placed the point carefully, rapped the hilt, and shifted the sword to the next joint while it was still singing with the parting sound of the weld it had just cut. When Calvus reached the end, the crossbar dropped to the floor with a clank.
“Wait,” said the agent as Calvus raised her sword to the next higher of the five crossbars. The agent set the freed bar into the grate much as they had attempted earlier with the wooden cudgel. In the outer room, Erzites was watching them. He was fingering his throat where the rope had rubbed it. He was not attempting to break free.
Perennius braced his left leg on the stone doorjamb and gripped the lever with both hands. Nothing moved. The agent’s closed eyes sizzled with sheets of violet and magenta. He began to breathe out. The framework and his lever were rigid, and his muscles bunched like the surface of a sheet of water-glass. “By god!” Perennius shouted. Two welds popped like hearts breaking. Calvus slammed her sword through the third and top-most. The vertical bar banged away. With that and the one crossbar gone, there was now a gap through which even Sestius, the bulkiest of the prisoners, could squeeze.