A side effect of the distaste for the localized spirits of ancestral Rome was that this small temple and a hundred like it were falling into ruin . . . and that suited Lycon’s present purpose very well indeed.
“Lycon, you’re too old for this!” Vonones said, wringing his right hand with his left, his thumb polishing knuckles mottled with the pressure of their grip of the whipstock.
N’Sumu looked around, shifting his feet instead of depending on the rotation of his neck to give a panorama of his surroundings. His nostrils did not flare—they did not move when he breathed, either—but he said, “It’s very close, I tell you, its smell is all over. Standing here like this puts us at its mercy.”
“Well, I’m not going to get any younger, am I?” said Lycon as he tied off the thongs that closed his body armor of iron hoops. It was of military pattern, giving enough play to his torso that he could at need cast a net, but solid enough to stop a well-thrown spear. Whether or not it would stop the claws of the lizard-ape, pricking through the interstices between the bands of iron, was a question which could be answered only in the event.
Looking over at the tall Egyptian, the beastcatcher added, “It doesn’t have any mercy, Master N’Sumu. Let’s say ‘at its whim,’ shall we?”
“Lycon, nothing that’s happened is a reason for you to kill yourself,” the Armenian went on. “You were the best, and you’re very good—I know. But there are younger men we could pay to do this and do it better.”
“Do exactly what?” N’Sumu demanded. His hands were generally hidden beneath his toga, but at intervals one or the other palm would flash into sight as the Egyptian saw something . . . or thought he did.
“Put it down to whim,” said the beastcatcher, before the helmet he lowered over his head hid his smile.
Unlike the thorax armor, Lycon’s helmet was a gladiatorial style. It was a bronze basinet, an ogive rising to a peak and surrounded by a flat brim a hand’s breadth wide. The face, instead of being open as in a military helmet, was covered with a grill of heavy bronze rings—sturdy enough to turn a swordcut if not a thrust by a good blade with a strong man behind it. Lycon hinged the grill closed and latched it. His face disappeared. The full moon highlighted the polished bronze rings so that the shadowed flesh beneath became as insubstantial as air. The beastcatcher lifted his net, one identical in design to that which had been fretted to bits in holding the immature sauropithecus.
“You won’t need that to capture the beast,” said N’Sumu, nodding toward the short sword belted at the beastcatcher’s waist.
The brim of Lycon’s helmet lifted in agreement. Unemotionally, his voice slightly muffled by the grillwork, the beastcatcher said, “Guess you’ve got a point there.” He did not move to unbuckle the weapon.
The night was very still, surprisingly still, perhaps because the low arches of the Appian Aqueduct passed directly behind the temple and effectively separated the old building from the northern nine-tenths of the city. The temple stood on a low pedestal, with four columns across the front supporting an extension of the roof and a similar number of pilasters along either side of the enclosed sanctuary. The triangular pediment was decorated by a face and an inscription, both presumably those of the original founder of the temple; but the bas relief was not classifiable even as to sex, and the words were shadows made illegible by discolorations of the underlying stone. The columns had simple Doric capitals, but their shafts were unfluted and the soft stone from which they were carved had pitted badly, especially where the circular section had been joined by iron cramps.
It had never been a prepossessing structure. Now, with the roof half fallen into the sanctuary and the polarized light of the full moon accentuating the flaws pitilessly from above, the temple had the feeling of something to be found on the Street of Tombs outside the city walls.
Five streets met in the plaza which the temple fronted. Two bent around the front of an unusually large apartment block whose ground floor shops opened onto an inner courtyard. The lowest level of the brick facade was pierced only by two doorways: a normal-sized one giving access to the apartments in the upper stories, and a great stone-arched driveway through which goods wagons as well as customers could enter the courtyard.