Silvius handed Lycon a scrap of wine-soaked cloth. It was a rag that had been used to polish brass, but at this point that mattered as little to the victim as it did to Lycon. The hunter swabbed at the dying man’s mouth. The astringent wine rinsed blood momentarily from broken lips. Lycon wrung the cloth, trying to get the man to swallow a little wine.
“Mephibaal was never no trouble,” the dying man whispered. “Why’d he want to do this? Like knives . . .”
The three of them—Vonones, Lycon, and N’Sumu—had been dining together to discuss a week’s accumulation of useless rumors and wasted searches, when the messenger from the Watch station had appeared at Vonones’ ground-floor suite. The merchant had thrown a cloak over his tunic of pastel blue silk—Lycon would have permitted him no time to change, even had Vonones wanted to.
Now Vonones grasped the Centurion’s shoulder—his grip firm with excitement. “Mephibaal,” Vonones whispered urgently. “Find out who he is—and where he lives!”
“We went in when he didn’t open the door,” Ox mumbled. A heavy leather strap was sewn over the shoulders of his tunic and down the front, and the rent purse nestled upon his chest like a well-fed tick.
Lycon indicated the purse. “Well, we know he wasn’t mugged and robbed.”
“Ox?” laughed one of the Watch members as he strolled closer. “Nobody’d go for Ox. Not Hercules. Even without Smiler there to change their faces with his razor.”
“We’re close,” said N’Sumu, trying to examine the back of the dying man’s neck. Ox resisted his efforts. “He must have discovered the lizard-ape’s lair.”
“Couldn’t see,” whispered Ox. “Couldn’t see . . .” The big shattered man lunged upward from the bare couch as N’Sumu tried to lift him. Lycon tried instinctively to hold him back. Ox swept him aside unnoticed, flinging the beastcatcher across the room.
“Got to get out!” the dying man shouted, in a spray of blood and spittle. His eyes were open, but they saw nothing in this world or the next. Ox took two steps, and the sound of the bone ends grating in his right thigh was audible even over the cries of the startled men around him. He struck a wall, rebounded, and struck it again—as if the bright splash of pulmonary blood he had coughed onto the stucco at his first impact was a target for the second. The back of the big man’s tunic had been shredded by sharp claws, and bright bone showed yellow beneath the bloody tatters.
When his knees buckled, Ox sagged like a half-filled wine skin. His head fell forward onto his chest, and he might have been praying for the first and last time in his life. A circular hole the size of a pigeon’s egg gaped from the back of his neck. Blood oozed but did not spurt from reopened wounds.
Lycon swore as he got to his feet from where Ox had sent him sprawling. He was not so much concerned that the man had died without saying much, as he was that Ox apparently had had very little to say. The attack had been unseen and unexpected. Perhaps it had been the work of the lizard-ape—N’Sumu thought so—but the question remained: where had it taken place?
The Centurion had stepped to the inner door of the station. “Basileus!” he shouted. “Check the codices for someone named Mephibaal in this district. Hurry!”
The patrolman who had been standing near tapped Silvius on the shoulder. “Mithras, sir,” he said. “Don’t worry about that. Everybody knows where old Mephi lives: the whole top floor of the building Hieronymos the tax-farmer owns, across from the Baths of Pulcher.”
Silvius’ eyes narrowed. “Where the dice game meets?” he asked.
“Other direction,” said another Watch member. “But Castor—that’s where they brought Ox from. Could’ve jumped from the seventh floor as well as from a roof, like we figured.”
“Sixth floor,” said a short man with Hamitic features, who trotted from the inner room with a volume of square-cut papyrus sheets open in his hands. “Mephibaal, son of Jeroboam, freedman of . . .”
“Basileus,” said Lycon, pointing a finger toward the clerk though his eyes were on the Centurion. “Shut up for a minute. Silvius—can you locate the room we want?”