“I wondered,” said the tall man, “because this – ” he rapped the right-hand wall. He had been tracing his fingers along it as if he needed support – “is the back of the building where we hired this guide. The brothel.”
“Well, that doesn’t – ” Perennius started to say. Metal rang behind them, at or near the entrance to the passage. Darkness and the curve of the walls hid the cause. The agent’s sword whined against the mouth of its scabbard as he cleared the blade hastily. “Come on, quick,” he hissed to Calvus. His arm gestured the tall man forward, around a blind angle after the linkman.
The right-hand wall angled back abruptly, widening the passage into a court ten feet broad at the far end. There, another wall sharply closed the reentrant. The court was large enough for a second-floor balcony above the brothel’s rear entrance. There were figures on the balcony, and there were at least half a dozen men in the court beneath.
“Take the dagger!” Perennius said. He thrust the ball pommel against his companion’s hand. Calvus was as still as a birch tree. His fingers did not close on the knife. The agent saw sweat glittering on the tall man’s face and scalp as the guide lifted his lantern higher.
“Yes,” rasped one of the figures on the balcony. The voice was indescribably harsh. Only the word itself was human. “Kill them.”
“Aulus!” cried the other figure, a woman, but twenty years smothered Perennius’ recognition of the speaker.
As the agent lunged forward, he pivoted his sword arm to slash rather than to stab. His blade was Basque steel,
forged in the Bilbao Armory before it slipped away with Postumus. It had a sharp edge and held it while Perennius sliced through the lantern, the hand holding the lantern, and into the pelvis of the guide who had betrayed them. The bravos waiting in the court surged forward in the darkness.
Perennius was on the stones and rolling, now. He would have called to Calvus, but there was nothing useful to say. Their retreat was surely blocked. It would be a miracle if even confusion allowed either victim to escape through the other end of the court. Besides, the tall man had funked too badly to move, much less to fight or run.
The guide spun off screaming. The sword that was killing him had bitten so deeply in the bone that Perennius had let it go. There was a crash and double screams as the wounded man collided with his friends and another blade. Someone stumbled on Perennius’ torso. The agent thrust upward with the dagger Calvus had refused, ripping one of the ambushers from thigh to sternum.
“Gaius, go back!” the woman was crying in Allobrogian. The passage the agent had followed to this killing ground was alive with voices and the ring of blades too long for the surrounding walls. A club or a boot numbed Perennius’ right arm. His legs were tangled with the thrashing body of the man he had just disemboweled. The agent slashed his dagger in a brutal arc a hand’s breadth above the pavement. Boot-webbing and tendons parted. Someone screamed like a hog being gelded. A club swished toward the sound. The weapon must have been a section of water pipe, because it crunched against a skull with none of the sharpness of wood on something solid.
“Hold up! Hold up!” a male voice bawled from the passage.
The door serving the balcony from within opened.
To the men who had been fighting below in total darkness, the rectangle of light was dazzling. The two figures on the balcony were struggling with one another. Calvus stood as white and frozen as an unpainted statue. He had not moved since the lantern shattered. Now one of the bravos hit him in the face with the lead-studded glove of a professional boxer.
“Hey!” cried someone from the open doorway. Perennius was raising his dagger for a left-handed throw at the man who had just struck Calvus. He thought he recognized the speaker – Maximus, the guard from Headquarters – just as the first of the lightning bolts struck.