“Gray?” Perennius asked. Calvus was back with a skin of wine. The agent held the open end to Ursinus’ lips, letting the Gaul suck greedily at it while the agent squeezed the skin for him. “A band around it and a hole the size of a cow’s bung near the top?”
“Oh . . .” the Gaul moaned as he took his mouth away from the flask. His eyes were closed. “You think you’re going to join them, then?”
“We’re here to kill them, Ursinus,” the agent said in a level voice. He daubed at the Gaul’s face again. “How many of them are there?”
Ursinus ignored the question if he even heard it. “More guts than I’ve got, then,” the Gaul murmured. “Just wanted to get the fuck away, way from dragons and crinkly monsters that talk. . . . Mithra.” His eyes opened. “Sacrovir stayed,” he said. “Didn’t care what it was, he wanted the guy who’d killed his mother. We followed him here after it all went sour in Rome, but … I said – ” The Gaul’s eyes bulged as if he were straining to swallow some object so great that it was choking him.
“Easy, easy,” the agent said.
It was too late for ease, too late for Ursinus entirely.
The Gaul’s arms and legs began to flail on the stone as he gagged. The movements swelled into a mad, unsynchronized fury as Ursinus’ eyes went blank. His back strained into the arc of his last convulsions.
Perennius swore. He stood up. The agent had seen enough people die. He did not need to watch another.
Gaius caught the older man’s arm. “Blazes, Aulus,” he said. “Q-quintus is gone. It was so quick, one minute and then …” Gaius too had seen his share of dying, but this time it was a peer and a man he had come to know well. The youth was aware also that Fortune had made the archer left-handed. Otherwise the shaft would have been past the other side of the pillar and through Gaius’ pulmonary arteries instead of those of the centurion.
Perennius gripped the shoulder of the younger man – the boy, in this persona. The agent shouted, “Sure he’s gone! And it’s your big mouth that killed him, isn’t it?”
Even the sputtering fire could only suggest color on Gaius’ cheeks. “I didn’t – ” he said. He tried to jerk his shoulder away and found he could not, no more than he could have pulled free a decade before. Perennius’ red, shouting rage was only a suggestion of the murder that already strained to supplant it.
“You didn’t think!” the agent shouted. He shook the tall youth to the harsh rhythms of the words. “You shot off your mouth, handed them who we were on a platter – what else was going to happen when they learned that? We could’ve all been greased in a rat-fuck like that! Couldn’t we? Couldn’t we? And now there’s Sestius lying there – ”
The rigid expression of Gaius’ face, anger and horror molded on an armature of innocence, gave way. The young Illyrian’s free arm had been rising as if to strike a blow or fend one off. The arm encircled Perennius’ waist as Gaius fell sobbing to his knees. “Oh god, Aulus!” he cried, “I did kill him. Oh god, oh god!”
Perennius staggered. His skin was as clammy as if he had been douched with melt water. The great vaulted room sprang into entire focus again. “Blazes,” the agent whispered. Then he said, “I’m going. . . .”
Gaius was not holding him tightly. Perennius stepped
1
away from the other’s kneeling figure, the motion bringing only redoubled sobs. Perennius walked to the door to the courtyard. He was tottering with reaction. He stepped outside; and he was standing there, breathing deeply with his back to the wall, when Calvus joined him a moment later.
“I told you to keep out of my mind,” Perennius whispered. His eyes were closed. “Saw you standing there like a statue . . . Might’ve killed him, Calvus. Me. Might’ve killed him except for you.”
“In some ways he’s very young,” the woman said. “Younger than his age.”