The man who was already sprawled just inside the doorway certainly did not move. He had worn the usual two tunics, the inner one of a fine close weave of linen, before it was stripped away in threads and tendrils. Now he lay in a semicircle of fluff. His face was upturned and frozen in a startled expression. His arms and torso were naked and from his hips on down all that remained were bare bones that gleamed yellow beneath the dried blood and thin patches of adherent flesh. Blood still oozed from the exposed tangle of guts and organs laid bare above his pelvis.
Most of the other corpses humped against the floor of the loft had not been stripped with anything like the same playful enthusiasm. In general, the clothing—rags to begin with mostly—had been slashed apart crudely, and the flesh beneath treated in a similar fashion. Lycon could not guess how many corpses—most of them no more than picked and scattered bones—were strewn about the loft. The number itself, a hundred or so perhaps, would not be particularly startling to one who had seen a thousand bodies dragged from the Amphitheater on a long afternoon. Those had been fresh, though—and most of these . . . such flesh that remained had heated to dripping liquescence under the roof tiles.
Always before, Lycon would have said that a smell was something you got used to. He did not want to believe that now. Not even the accustomed stench of Rome’s slums could have continued to mask the presence of this charnel house much longer.
Vonones and the two patrolmen burst into the loft behind N’Sumu. The second lantern-bearer stopped in the doorway, his nerve failing. Vonones snarled a command, and the slave entered—increasing the amount of light available without in the least improving the scene it displayed.
“They’re,” said Vonones, “they’re all . . .” He slashed out with his whip, not aiming at anything in particular.
“Is it here?” one patrolman demanded as he twisted—fearful that the sideguards of his helmet were keeping him from seeing the taloned demon that approached him.
Recovering from the sight, Lycon jerked his own head to the side. Nothing seemed to move—only N’Sumu, who was walking cautiously toward the man who hung from a roof truss, held there by a swath of something that seemed more like spun metal than any fabric, even silk, N’Sumu’s hands were raised and his eyes, when Lycon stepped alongside, were dull.
“By Isis, that’s Smiler,” muttered the other patrolman. “Ox’s partner, and—why that’s Carretius!” He pointed toward the half-consumed body whose torso lay before the entrance—only now was the man’s memory grasping some sort of awareness out of this nightmarish scene.
“What . . . ?” Lycon said to N’Sumu, and something leaped at them from the hollowed ribcage of one of the corpses.
The shadow thrown by the lanterns distorted and exaggerated both the creature and the motion. It was that exaggeration that called Lycon’s attention to the movement while it was within the capacity of his reflexes to respond to it. The creature that launched itself toward his eyes was not the lizard-ape he feared, nor yet was it anything that he had ever seen before.
It was cat-sized and perhaps quicker than a cat, but its leap was a long one—long enough for Lycon to react. Lycon’s net, cast by reflex, opened like a spider’s web catching the sun. The bronze weights, as delicate as the silken cords themselves, held the net in a momentary orb that collapsed around the leaping thing in midair. The motion with which the beastcatcher had cast his net, still gripped by the cord that pursed shut the outer edge against the weight it held, carried the furious creature safely past Lycon’s left shoulder.
The net had been intended to tangle the lizard-ape for the minimal instant Lycon might need to press his attack or to escape. This creature—whatever it was—was well within the size of the prey for which the net had been designed. His unexpected success gave Lycon a momentary thrill of triumph—one that stuck in his throat as he saw the floor and walls of the loft seethe with sudden movement like bubbles rising in a cesspool.