Perennius’ mount had checked no more than required to veer around its fellow. They were on a rolling pasture of brush and sheep-cropped grass. Four hundred feet ahead of them was the near rim of a sinkhole, the mouth of Typhon’s Cavern. A quarter mile beyond, with the rose and saffron of its rocks standing out against the dusty vegetation above it, was the far rim of the gorge.
The great gap in the earth stretched half a mile to either side. The eastern end was blocked from sight by a range of knobby outcrops, while the road wound around the western end of the rim. There was a separate track worn more by sheep’s hooves than human deliberation. It plunged straight toward the gorge’s south rim. Perennius lashed his horse in that direction instead of trying to skirt the cavity. The agent had Sestius’ description of the site to guide him. The horse was too wild with fear to know or care that it was being driven toward a gulf.
The situation was out of control. Perennius knew he did not even rule the horse he rode. The agent’s input was tolerated because the animal was not consciously aware that it was being driven forward instead of to the left. The agent had hoped that they would be able to deal with the Guardians in scattered pickets along the way. If that did not occur, then he had intended to reconnoitre the gorge at leisure, seeking a path to its floor besides the one switching back and forth along the south wall. Sestius had claimed there was no other path because the lips of the cavity overhung the floor elsewhere around the edge. Perennius had still hoped that care and the long rope lashed to each man’s saddle would provide access in secrecy.
Right at the moment, Perennius’ greatest hope was that the allosaurus would not be able to turn sharply enough when it blundered through the screening brush and confronted the sinkhole. The agent was quite certain that his own mount would plunge over the side. And Perennius was more than doubtful that he would be able to leap clear himself.
A figure rose from the cover of a ragged succulent. It wore a hooded cloak of blue so dark as to be black. Though the figure was little more than a shadow in a blur of sweat and dust to Perennius, the object it held and aimed glittered.
The world went red. Perennius’ skin had crawled with
prickly heat. Now his whole body contracted with what its surface told it was a bath of ice. The agent’s ears rang at a frequency high enough to be a perception rather than a sound. The ringing filled his head so completely that even the call of the dragon only strides away was swept into nothingness. All over Perennius’ body, hair sprang up against his clothing with a violence that moved the iron-sheathed leather.
The agent was not shot off his mount. The horse, goaded by the crash and glare above it, hurled itself in an insane caracol. Even if Perennius had been fully aware, he was not horseman enough to have kept his seat amid that fury. Battered, his senses stunned by the ride and the discharge that turned him into a momentary flare, the agent sailed off when his mount shifted from beneath him. Perennius was unwitting of the fact until he hit the ground in a spray of dust and clangor.
The air stank of ozone and charred leather. The thongs that held the mask to the back of Perennius’ helmet burned through when the mask took the point of the Guardian’s blast. A rosette was seared across the silver facing. At the tips of the rosette, the brass back-piece and the iron gorget still shimmered as they cooled. Perennius’ eyelashes had been burned away. At the moment, the agent was not sure that he was alive at all. His vision had tumbled dizzyingly from the mask’s near blindness, through a red flare that was a result of direct nerve stimulation rather than sight, to the unmasked dazzle of a bright Cilician day. Nothing quite registered yet in his mind.