The young Gaul was almost close enough to take Perennius out in a rush if the agent looked around. At least the bastard wasn’t an archer, like the pair back at the inn.. . . “Who’s ‘they’ who’ve been handing you such a load of crap?” Perennius demanded. He took a short step forward, then another. If he gave his attacker all the physical initiative, the younger man’s charge would be overwhelming. Perennius’ own scalp crawled as he glanced at the Gaul’s shining helmet, bronze sheet stock stiffened with a frame of iron tubes beneath. Perennius’ outfit had been chosen for protection, not for fighting. Certainly not for fighting humans. “You take the word of monsters?”
“By the gods, I saw my mother!” the young man shouted, and Sabellia came down the rocky slope at him naked but for her tunic. It failed as an attack because Sacrovir was
too skillful, and it failed as a diversion because the agent was too sluggish to take advantage of it.
The young man pivoted. His shield rose to deflect the rain of pebbles that had warned him, then jolted up another inch to slam aside Sabellia with similar ease. The woman’s knife sprang into the gorge. Sabellia took the initial shock on her chest and the arm outstretched to snatch at the youth’s neck. Then her impetus brought her head and the pivoting shield-rim into contact. Her body spilled limply to the side of the trail. Dust and pebbles she had dislodged continued to fall as Sacrovir swung toward the agent in a loping rush.
The younger man covered the twenty feet between them in four strides. Perennius had a moment to wonder if the Guardians could somehow affect minds the way Calvus did. Though that was needless. Humans had been leaping to absurd conclusions for ages without needing outside influences.
Perennius blocked with his sword, not his dagger, the youth’s first overarm slash. The agent wanted to try his opponent’s strength before he trusted the lighter weapon in the place of the shield he lacked. The shock of the swords meeting made the agent stumble. His right side burned the way his whole torso had when the Guardian’s bolt sizzled on his armor. Because Perennius was off balance, his dagger-stroke at the Gaul’s knee would probably have missed even if the long shield had not buffeted the agent like a ram as he jabbed. Sacrovir knew how to use that shield.
The agent staggered backward. His opponent – younger, taller, fresher – cut at him sideways, holding his spatha waist high. Perennius stepped inside the blow. Perennius chopped at the Gaul’s instep as the other man’s wrist struck the agent’s side. Perennius’ sword gouged the shield when the other dropped it to interpose.
The sword-cut was a feint. Perennius’ left hand and the dagger swung over the Gaul’s outstretched sword arm. Sacrovir looked a good deal like Gaius, the agent thought, as his armed fist slammed against the base of the other’s right ear.
It was not until the instant of jarring contact and the brown eyes rolling upward that Perennius realized that he had not killed the man who toppled away from him. Perennius had struck with the knobbed pommel of his dagger, not the point that would have grated lethally through brain and blood vessels across the younger man’s skull.
It had happened very quickly, as it had to happen when both opponents were so skilled and so determined. It had happened too fast for conscious decisions. Perennius had not killed, though it would have been as easy to do so.
The agent knelt at the feet of his sprawling opponent. Sacrovir’s left arm hung off the trail. The weight of his shield was threatening to tug the supine body with it further into the chasm. Perennius laid down his sword to lift the iron-and-plywood shield. He laid it across the torso of the youth it had been unable to protect.
A slab of stone that must have weighed six talents hurtled to the valley floor. It was safely outward of the trail and of the agent. Perennius looked up. Calvus, her hands freed of the missile she had not thrown at the Gaul, was descending the wall with ease. The woman’s awkwardness, did not matter when each handhold locked her as firmly as an iron piton to the limestone. Calvus stepped down beside the agent while he was bending over Sabellia. At full stretch, Calvus’ limbs gave her the look of a gibbon from one of the islands beyond Taprobane.