N’Sumu noted the movement and said aloud, “You understand, Gaius Vonones—and your friend does—how the Emperor would react if his prize were killed instead of being captured?” He continued to face the opening and Lycon on the plaza beyond, but his eyes glanced sideways once and again to determine the Armenian’s expression.
“Yes, I think I understand my lord and god as well as a barbarian from Nubia can be expected to do,” Vonones said in a savagely controlled voice. The tremble of the whipstock increased, but the Armenian kept his eyes trained on the figure in armor. “And I think I understand Lycon as well.”
As if he were a juggler on the stage, the figure in moonlight tossed something in the air. He tried but failed to catch it, betrayed by the lighting and the full-coverage helmet. His hobnails sparked visibly against the cobblestones of the plaza as he deliberately scuffed the object against the wall of the building before he picked it up again.
“Where did he get that?” N’Sumu snapped, his eyes once more beads of stone. He had kept his hands on the door leaves, blocking them to a safe approximation of being closed. Now in angry amazement, the Egyptian drew the doors further ajar.
“I gave it to him,” said the animal dealer, satisfied for the first time in—far too long—by N’Sumu’s obvious discomfiture. He had not known until that moment what it was that Lycon intended for the crushed remains of the lizard-ape’s offspring. “From the site of the fire. This one, at least, was covered by masonry and not cremated.” As Zoe and the children had been cremated, Vonones thought, and their ashes strewn in the Tiber—safe from further defilement by the creature Lycon had hunted. . . .
In the plaza below, the little corpse flew into the air again and slapped audibly against the brick facade before it fell back. This time the boot was planted squarely on it and ground against the pavement.
“If he kills it,” N’Sumu said, his anger an aura as it could not be an overtone in his voice, “he and you and every member of your household will be killed in the most savage ways the Emperor can imagine. Does he know that?”
“I know that,” said Vonones. The figure in the plaza had paused and was fumbling at the iron-studded apron which protected the thighs beneath the hooped body armor. “Perhaps,” the Armenian said with a tinge of hope which irritated him but could not be suppressed, “the beast is nowhere around after all.”
“I tell you, you mud-sucking primitive, it is nearby!” shouted the bronze-skinned man as the man in armor began to urinate on the lizard-ape’s dead offspring and the adult launched itself from beneath a sewer grating.
The slotted stone cover was still lifting with the impetus that had thrust it aside, though the creature it had hidden was a dozen feet away with its foreclaws locked on the bronze helmet. A set of male human genitalia was spinning through the air much as the infant sauropithecus had done moments before. The screams of the present victim were muffled by the grillwork over his face and the blue-scaled killer clinging to it as both went over in the momentum of the attack.
N’Sumu was through the temple doors and out past the columns in front more quickly than he had ever moved before. Despite that, the pudgy animal dealer was racing across the cobblestones of the plaza just behind the Egyptian. There was no sign of the beast-handlers who should have poured out of the courtyard in response to Vonones’ shouts if not the screams of the victim himself.
The sauropithecus hunched, locking its hind legs at the victim’s right armpit just beneath the iron shoulder flaps. It kicked downward with its claws interlocking like a battery of flensing knives. All the muscles of the arm, from shoulder to wrist, were carved off and flung away. The right hand, still clutching the bundled net and with a skein of bare tendons twisting behind it, sailed off on a separate trajectory. The body armor and helmet rang discordantly as they and the man within them struck the pavement.