“Let him go, Gaius,” the agent said quietly. He was not really watching the scene. He had a task to perform, five creatures to kill in Cilicia if they did not come to meet him earlier. Perennius was considering ways and means of accomplishing that task.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When the sunlight through the clerestory windows touched his left eye, Perennius blinked. On the bed next to him, Gaius said in a chiding voice, “You didn’t sleep all night, did you?”
Perennius turned sharply toward his protege. “Sure I did,” he lied. “Ah – didn’t keep you awake, did I?”
Gaius chuckled as he got up. “Oh, not a bit,” he said. “Like with my brothers. You share a bunk as often as you and I have, you don’t notice how the other fellow tosses and turns any more than you do yourself. But I also know you well enough to know you weren’t sleeping.”
There were two beds in the room, because a centurion was expected to travel with at least one personal servant. The two Illyrians had dossed down in one of the bunks, leaving the other to Sestius and the traveller. Calvus had said the body contact as well as the warmth would be good for the injured man. The centurion could not well be moved, and the agent would not have allowed Calvus out of his immediate reach even if the tall man had shown a desire to leave.
“Oh, well, you know how it is,” Perennius said as he got out of bed. “I need a while to think about things before I go off and do something. A mess like this, blazes – it’s better than a week at the sea-side.” He stepped to his baggage and began searching for clean clothes. Nude, the agent’s body was ridged with muscles and scar tissue – puckers, the thin lines of cuts, and the knotted, squirming lumps from the time he had been beaten with a studded whip.
“Do you like the sea, Aulus Perennius?” asked Calvus as he also stood up. The traveller was still dressed in the wool tunic he had worn under his toga. The centurion was stirring and grumbling on the bed beside him.
Professionally bland, the agent looked at Calvus and said, “No, as a matter of fact, I never had much use for the sea. Except as something to get over. Which I figure we’ll do this time, little as I care for the idea.”
“Blazes!” Gaius protested. He peered from the folds of the tunic he was shrugging into. “After what happened on our way back? Look, it’s a lot safer to hoof it, even the way roads’re likely to be in Cilicia.”
“Maybe true if we were alone, the three of us,” Perennius said. “But we’re going to need a couple squads at least for the job. Archers, slingers . . . and I don’t give much of a chance of Odenath or Balista, whichever’s boys we run across, letting a body of troops march through Asia. Even a small body of troops.” He smiled grimly at Calvus. “A better chance than that your rescript from Gallienus would get us anything but a quick chop. Maybe you could come up with something by the Autarch instead?”
“Odenathus, you mean?” said the tall man. He was as serious as Perennius had “been sardonic. “Yes, if that’s necessary. It will delay us considerably, though; and I think delay is to our disadvantage, now that we know the Guardians are aware of me.”
Gaius laughed. Perennius did not. “No,” the older man said uncomfortably, “we’ll enter at Tarsus on forged orders from Palmyra, some song and dance. By the time somebody checks back with headquarters, we’ll be long gone.” He barked a laugh of his own. “Or long dead, of course.”
“Let me come with you,” said Quintus Sestius.
The three others looked at the centurion. Sestius was poking fixedly at his welded mail. The night before, he had not really been aware of what had happened to him. “Look,” he said, “I come from near Tarsus. I can help you a lot. It’s not a province that outsiders get along in real