Lycon cast his own net from the third-story balcony and vaulted the rail to follow it. He had stripped off his armor, though the victim he had chosen to bait the lizard-ape into view wore another identical set to save the time otherwise to be lost in exchanging the awkward hardware. When the beastcatcher gave up his helmet and body armor, however, he did not lay aside his sword. It was naked in his left hand as he dropped.
Lycon had a jump of two stories and the height of a balcony rail—twenty feet and more to stone pavers. The shock, if he landed correctly, would not be incapacitating—and the risk of landing wrong, of the base of his spine smashing down as his feet skidded on slick stone, was not a factor in Lycon’s choice of plan.
For choice, he would have jumped with the net gripped in his hand. He had seen how quickly the lizard-ape moved, however, and he was unwilling to risk the chance that the bulk of his own body would warn the beast while the net itself could descend unremarked as a shimmer of moonlight.
Even in the killing rage that had ripped it from safety into the open plaza, the sauropithecus was aware of its surroundings. A portion of its brain had registered and ignored Vonones with the whip he carried—and had registered N’Sumu as what he was, not the persona he feigned on this planet. The creature had once been captured by the emissary; that would not happen again. Its hind claws buried themselves in the thigh of the schoolmaster Sempronianus—the decoy Lycon had provided to lure it from the sewers. Then, using its own hip-joint as a fulcrum, the creature twisted the victim’s armored head and torso up as a buffer between itself and a bolt from the emissary’s upraised palm.
Instead of trying to drop the net on its target, Lycon had given it a spin on an axis centered upon the snarling head of the lizard-ape beneath. The brass weights, verdigreed and deliberately unpolished, arced the edges outward as the net fell. The beast, warned by the flicker of shadow on the moonlit brick, tried to unlock its claws and leap from the schoolmaster’s howling body.
The silken net, cast with an expert’s touch, settled about slayer and slain like flame over oil.
The emissary, thirty feet distant and as shocked by the turn of events as the creature he hunted, screamed a curse in no human language as Sempronianus went silent in a haze of green which should instead have bathed the sauropithecus.
The beast was quick, but the net had dropped quickly enough. While the man who cast it was still in the air, the pattern of silken meshes touched the creature which was trying to spring away. The interrupted spin snatched the weights inward at a velocity which rose geometrically as the radius shortened. The lizard-ape, doubled in on itself like a chicken trussed for the market, somersaulted to the pavement as Lycon crashed down beside it.
The beastcatcher took the shock on his flexed knees, his balance perfect as it had to be. His hobnails bit and held: the slightest angle between them and the stone on which they sparked would have slid Lycon to the pavement with an incapacitating crash. The sword in his hand dipped under its momentum, touching but only touching the stone. Then the sword rose again and Lycon stepped forward, his grin as cold and inexorable as the edge of the steel in his hand.
With more than bestial intelligence—and more than human cunning—the lizard-ape had slid one arm through the meshes and gripped the silken cocoon from the outside. Instead of vainly attempting to push the net aside, the creature pulled against the anchoring thrust of its legs. The cords, even silk, gave as the black eyes glared murder and Lycon’s sword ripped downward.
There was death in N’Sumu’s eyes also. The emissary, running with the awkwardness of a wildebeest but covering ground as swiftly as that clumsy antelope as well, was a stride short of physical contact as his lethal palm turned to Lycon’s back. Vonones, six feet behind N’Sumu, had already committed in the fashion instinct had warned him he would have to do. The merchant had not permitted himself to think about it, nor about the certain results, until the lash of his whip curled about the Egyptian’s wrist. Reflex set Vonones’ feet while N’Sumu’s skidded out from under him as his palm lifted.