“No!” screamed Lycon, and the arm came out from beneath the cape, one arm only but quite sufficient for its purpose. It was quick, cat-quick or even more so, and its claws caught Perses not by his tunic but under the breastbone, punching their multiple paths through the boy’s diaphragm and then curling back around the lowest ribs to penetrate the skin again. They held Perses like a fish hooked around the jawbone.
The arm snatched back into the corridor and the boy followed it to the narrow gap between the bars, jerked off his feet. Then the breastbone with associated muscles and cartilage ripped free and the remainder of Perses flopped back onto the floor of the cell. He was still alive, but he could not scream because his chest could no longer force air through his throat. One of the four-year-old’s lungs, hooked by the tip of the claw, flopped outside his ruined chest.
“Zoe, Alexandros,” Lycon ordered in a calm, clear voice, “get to the back of the cell. Leave Perses, we’ll take care of that when it’s safe. Move!”
Though they were safe where they stood, you could never tell. They might lunge forward to caress Perses or grapple with the thing in the corridor—equally suicidal, equally pointless. You couldn’t change death, not even the gods could change that if there were gods; and there would be a time to kill the blue thing, the lizard-ape, and it would die hard, very hard.
The beastcatcher no longer felt his body, though he knew it would respond as he thought, perhaps even quickly enough to grip the thing’s arm if it were extended into Lycon’s own cell. He bunched his tunic with his left fist, balling it out from his chest so that the claws would not snatch away his heart and life until his own hands had a throat to grip.
The sounds and everything Lycon saw within the cellblock were preternaturally clear, but they were distanced by the fact that he could not change any of them. He had been afraid when the figure shuffled down the corridor, but there was no longer any fear, any emotion whatever, only the taste of blood in his mouth as Alexandros shouted and stepped toward the thrashing remnants of his brother.
Zoe caught the older boy by the wrist and jerked him back, as she had done when he was an infant crawling toward the scorpion which had ridden Lycon’s clothing back from the docks. As she held her remaining son, Zoe turned her back to the corridor so that the thickness of her body was between the infant at her breast and the sauropithecus. She was silent, and she held Alexandros in safety against the wall, though he flailed and screamed to get at the thing which had murdered Perses.
The sauropithecus turned its hand, the only part of its body not still covered by the cape. The gobbet of the boy’s flesh and bone dropped to the floor of the cell. One of Perses’ feet kicked at it blindly as his back arched and lifted his gaping chest toward the ceiling.
The creature’s long claws slid into their sheaths, clearing them of the clinging gore. The paw—hand—twisted back toward the cowl, and a slender tongue lapped at the congealing stickiness which smeared the delicate scales. The claws re-extended.
Lycon ran to the front of his own cell. He gripped the bars with both hands, all his icy planning forgotten. “Guards!” he shouted. The grating was solidly welded so that the bars did not rattle among themselves, but the whole clashed loudly against the locking bar. “Guards! Somebody!”
The click of the sauropithecus’ claws working the wards of the lock down the corridor were inaudible under the present conditions, but they rang as clearly in Lycon’s mind as the drooling whisper of the blood filling Perses’ chest cavity.
“Somebody dear gods! N’Sumu!”
The creature dropped its cape as it swung open the door. The tiger’s claws had left long scars of leprous white against the scales. It had been very badly hurt, and it could surely be killed, would be killed, but for now it stepped with the balance of a rope-dancer into the cell with Zoe and the children, two of them still alive. Had he thought it was an animal? The look in the eyes the lizard-ape turned on Lycon now was quite human, as human as the eyes of N’Sumu when he ordered the arrest of the beastcatcher’s family . . .