Perennius had not permitted himself to look up the slope again. It would have thrown him off-stride, and he knew full well that a stumble might be the end. “Please run, darling,” he wheezed. “Please run.”
Sabellia threw her hand out to grasp the agent’s in welcoming and fear. She obeyed as the agent had earlier obeyed Calvus. It was a time when trust had to replace understanding. Sabellia’s weapon dropped and rolled clanging toward the cave from which Perennius had come. She took the agent’s hand in her own, not to hold him but to add her own fresher strength to his as they pounded up the final leg of pathway.
The air their lungs dragged in had a searing dryness to it. Perennius, to whom every breath had been fiery with exertion, did not notice the change. Sabellia’s grip on his hand tensed. The base and pillars of the chapel had taken on a rosy glow from the light they reflected. The light behind the couple cast their shadows on the stone.
“Aulus!” Sabellia shouted.
The agent threw her and himself sideways on the ground, shielded by the squat building as a glare like that of molten steel raved from the throat of Typhon’s Cavern.
Sunlight past the pillars in the other direction had been a cool white. The light which seared from the cavern now was white also, but white of a palpable intensity that made the air scream. It calcined the stone it touched. Perennius remembered Calvus’ eyes and the scenes he had watched through them, the blasts ripping rock and the crawling aliens. He understood now the weapons Calvus’ folk had chosen to replace the mechanical ones which had failed them against the aliens.
The gout of fire shifted from white through yellow to red, so suddenly that the intermediate step was an impression rather than a sight. The rosy glow lingered somewhat longer. It was diluted by the radiance of the cave walls themselves until they cooled. There seemed to be no sound at all until Sabellia whispered, “Aulus? Is it over?”
Perennius was carefully spreading his bare hands. Part of his mind found it amazing that the play of muscles and tendons beneath the skin proceeded in normal fashion. “Sure, it’s over,” he said. He did not look at his companion. “She wouldn’t have failed, would she?”
“Then we can – ” the woman began. She started to grasp one of the agent’s hands again, but the motion stopped as her voice had when she saw his face. After a moment Sabellia resumed, “Aulus, your job is over too, then. We could … you know. Quintus was going to retire with me, after this mission was completed….” She stared
at her own fingertips, afraid of what she might see elsewhere.
Perennius laughed. He put an arm around Sabellia’s shoulders. “Retire?” he said. “My, you’d make an administrator, wouldn’t you?” The agent quelled the trembling of his arm by squeezing Sabellia the tighter. “I’ll make a pretty good administrator too, I think. Time I got out of the field.” He glanced at the burnt stone overhead and out toward the sunlit gorge in which a dragon and other things lay. They would be beginning to rot. “I’m getting too old for this nonsense.”
Sabellia touched the hand on her right shoulder. “You didn’t think,” she said, switching deliberately from Latin to the Allobrogian dialect she shared with the agent’s youth, “that you could survive the frustrations of a bureau.”
Perennius laughed again. “That,” he said, “was when we were losing.” He stood up with the clumsiness demanded by muscles cramped in his legs and torso. “The job’s still got to be done. It doesn’t have to be a – religion, now that I know we’re going to win.”
The woman took his offered hand. She was careful not to put any weight on the battered agent as she rose herself. “We?” she repeated. “You and Gallienus?”
“Civilization,” Perennius said, “as I guess I was raised to mean it.” He used Calvus’ term “raised” in pity and in homage. The image of Gaius in imperial regalia rippled beneath memory of the traveller’s calm face.
“Need to convince that Gallic kid,” Perennius said as he and the woman began climbing the path, “that I didn’t kill his mother. Blazes! With the things I’ve done, people don’t need to imagine reasons to hate me.”