Gaius leaped his horse over Perennius’ prostrate body. The beast was a white-bellied blur above the fallen man as the Guardian fired again. The air sizzled with the corona enfolding the young rider. His out-thrust sword roared with the cascade of sparks pouring from its point and double edges. Gaius lost neither his seat nor control of his mount. The horse gathered itself and sprang again as its rider’s heels demanded. The Guardian made a high, keening sound nothing like the syllables which had come from the vocalizer of the thing in Rome.
The tip of Gaius’ spatha split the cowled head as the horseman charged on by.
Reflex raised Perennius to join the battle his intellect was still too disoriented to comprehend. As the agent’s shoulders lifted from the ground, the long-taloned leg of the striding allosaurus brushed him aside. Gaius’ mount was skidding over the edge of the chasm. The monster’s jaws slammed so close behind the horse that a fluff of long tail-hairs scattered from the edge of the carnivore’s jaws. Dust, gravel, and the dragon followed the young Illyrian over the side.
Perennius wore over eighty pounds of armor and equipment. His thigh wound pinched him even at rest. The agent had been enervated by fear and the ride, then stunned by the shot he had taken and his fall. When he saw Gaius ride into the gorge with the dragon following, Perennius rolled to his feet. There is a limit to how long a man can live on his nerves. Aulus Perennius would reach that limit when he died on his feet.
The rim of the sinkhole had been undercut by the hungry ground waters. One of the earth-slips to which Cilicia is prone had shaken down much of the south wall into a jumble on the chasm’s floor. The slope that resulted was steep, but at least it had some outward batter. Perennius ran to the edge without pausing for the tentacled thing that sprawled in his path. The edge of Gaius’ sword had volatized with the energy it had sprayed back into the atmosphere. The weapon struck the Guardian as a blunt, glowing bar. It had the weight of a horse and armored rider behind it. The creature’s conical head was not sheared but caved in. Shards of gray chitin were trapped in a magenta gelatine.
There were three more Guardians toiling up the trail toward the rim. They wore no masks or disguises, only their gray exoskeletons and a shimmering array of tools. The alarm that summoned them had been a little too late. It was unlikely that they were prepared for what came sliding down the slope toward them.
The trail itself slanted broadly to the right for several hundred feet before it cut back in the other direction. Gaius, whooping and still astride his horse, ignored the trail. He blasted gravel straight downslope toward the pair of Guardians a level below him. The gradient was
one to one, too steep for real control given the gallop that had taken man and mount onto it. It was not quite abrupt enough to make the descent a fall rather than a ride.
Horse and horseman bathed in a roaring dazzle. The Guardians had neither the desire nor the ability to direct their bolts at the man alone as their shattered fellow had done on the chasm’s edge. The mane and tail of the horse flared out and burned. The powerful neck and shoulders withered as if they were at the core of a furnace. Shattered bone ends protruded from the carcase which was otherwise charred too black and dense to be seen as from an animal. It plummeted between the two leading Guardians, taking brush and a hail of limestone with it as it rolled toward the chasm’s floor.
Gaius’ long iron shirt flashed brighter and whiter than the sun in the instant the alien bolts gnashed at it. The spatha folded back on itself as if its blade were wax and not steel. Gaius flew forward, separating from the horse whose forequarters had been devoured beneath him. His armor glowed red and then red on black as air quenched the thousands of spot-welded wires which comprised the mail. Stiff as a statue and surely as unknowing, Gaius skidded until he hit a trio of mulberry trees, eighty feet below the rim.