To kill quickly with a knife, you must slash. That is not easy at all when your opponent is a warrior of Theudas’s strength.
The Goth fell sideways, but despite his surprise he managed to twist so that he was facing Perennius. His hands were high. The agent threw himself across Theudas’ upper chest. Perennius’ left hand grabbed a swatch of the pirate’s long blond hair. The big man’s arms locked around Perennius’ chest and squeezed. Snakes kill by keeping their victims’ lungs from expanding, thus suffocating them as effectively as a noose around the throat. Theudas, on the other hand, was strong enough to splinter ribs and kill in a spray of blood from bone-torn organs. The Goth tightened his hold. Perennius stabbed hilt-deep, just above the chieftain’s pubis bone. The agent let his own terror of
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constriction draw the edge up through Theudas’ belly until it lodged in a rib.
The Goth screamed. Even now, the pain was buried under cushions of shock. Theudas’ lower body felt as if it had been liquefied and was flowing from his bones in warm ripples. He flung Perennius away from him easily and sat up. The Goth stared at his wound with the amazement of an atheist viewing a miracle. The knife had parted sheets of muscle for ten inches up the long torso. The severed fibers contracted, pulling the wound open into an oval a hand’s breadth wide in the middle. Blood and pink intestine coiled through the opening.
The chieftain’s eyeballs rolled up. He collapsed. Physical shock was only partly responsible.
All the aches and injuries of the past two days caught up with Perennius when he no longer had the present struggle to sustain him. He knew he had to keep moving, however. His wounds would otherwise bind him as thoroughly as the pirates’ thongs if he permitted them to cool. The agent rolled to his feet, wondering if Theudas had managed to crack a rib after all. Sabellia, holding a sword she had appropriated, was stepping toward Theudas.
“Don’t,” the agent said. “He’s already dead.”
“I know he’s dead,” said Sabellia. She began to probe carefully with the point of the sword. She was extending downward the tear in Theudas’ tunic, exposing his genitals. The Gallic woman wore the cloak pinned about her again, though the gap showed she was bare beneath it. She stood stiffly, teasing the cloth apart at full arm’s length and the sword’s.
“Stop, dammit!” Perennius said. He strode to her, his aches forgotten. For an instant, there was a chance that she might turn the weapon on him. Then his hand gripped hers over the bronze hilt. He used only enough pressure to remind Sabellia that he was there beside her. “Don’t,” he repeated softly.
“Aulus!” Gaius called from behind them. “For god’s sake, man, cut us free!”
Both of them ignored the courier. Sabellia glared at the agent and demanded. “Do you think I’ll regret it tomorrow? Is that what you think?”
“No,” Perennius said. “I think 7 would.” He released her hand and stepped away.
Sabellia sobbed and flung down the sword. “If you knew,” she whispered. “If you could only imagine what I dreamed …”
“You might go cut the others loose,” the agent suggested mildly. “Get some food together for us. I’ll finish up around here.”
The knife he had used was still lodged in Theudas’s body. Perennius worked it loose from the rib. He was always surprised at his strength during a battle. He would not have thought that he could have embedded the knife so deeply in bone with a straight pull.
Then he began to cut the throats of the poisoned Goths, starting with Respa because he was still moving.
Perennius had learned very long before that he should never kill humans. If you kill humans, you wake up screaming in the night. Their faces gape at you at meals or when you make love.. . . What you must kill are animals. Young animals, female animals – it doesn’t matter to the sword, and it need not matter to the swordsman. Sabellia was thinking of Theudas as the man who had raped her, the man she had forced herself to cuddle against . . . the man whom she would mutilate so that everyone who saw him would blanch. And despite her certainty, the Goth’s face would be in her dreams, its eyes wide and its mouth choking on bloody genitals.