A pigeon roosting under the eaves sixty feet in the air disintegrated in a green flash while N’Sumu, Lycon and the beast crashed together like inexpert handball players.
The sauropithecus was least affected by the collision, but the net still wrapped its head and lower body. It slashed at what it could reach, willing to die so long as first it could kill. N’Sumu’s scream changed in mid-note as the claws which had just been pulled out of Sempronianus’ body now raked the emissary. Then Lycon thrust, finding the scales tough but no match for his sword or his resolution.
N’Sumu, not the lizard-ape, cried out again and tried to roll away. The emissary’s right hand may have been trying to caress the terrible damage to his face, but Vonones could not afford to take chances now. He jerked on the stock of his whip. N’Sumu’s palm twitched back from its chosen course like a fish played on a heavy line.
Lycon withdrew the short, heavy blade of his weapon, a smooth reversal of the thrust that had fleshed it, until the arm of the sauropithecus shot out with the quickness that had torn a tiger’s throat apart. The claws clicked and held on the slight waist of the blade, an inch beneath the crossguard and the flesh of Lycon’s hand.
The creature grinned. There was a slot in the taut, scaled skin over its ribcage like a cross-section of the blade at its widest point: a finger’s length by a finger’s breadth, and the beastcatcher had felt paving stones grate against his point to end the thrust. He smiled as if he or the scaly thing were a mirror image of the other; and he drew back on his sword against the thing which gripped it as if a hand and claws could be harder than a steel edge.
The claw points left deep gouges as they slid along the metal until the blade’s double edges had severed all the tendons in the scaly hand.
Lycon had thrust from the half-sprawled, half-kneeling position into which N’Sumu’s impact had thrown him. Now he stood and backed a step while he looked down at the creature half-bound by the net he had thrown. One clawed digit gleamed like a sapphire brooch from the cobblestones, a few inches from the hand from which it had been cut. The ichor which pulsed from the lizard-ape’s torn chest was too nearly transparent to color the scales beneath it, but the creature’s belly shone liquidly in the bathing moonlight.
The beast’s arms were still moving slightly, but it was not trying to squeeze life back in through the fatal swordcut as a man would do, as most men would do. It was reaching for Lycon, the way Lycon would have reached for it were he on the stones with his belly torn away. And they smiled at one another, the killers, until the light went out of the eyes of the one with blue scales and the other stumbled because his knees no longer needed to support him.
Vonones did instead, catching his friend from behind and easing him backward while the sword rang disregarded on the pavement.
“Won’t bring Zoe back,” whispered the beast-catcher. “But I beat it, and it knew it there at the end. It knew that I’d won.”
Dead, the netted lizard-ape was as formless as a shrouded insect found hanging from a spiderweb: unpleasant for its associations, but quite harmless now. The other two figures sprawled in the plaza were moaning.
Vonones had assumed the man wearing armor was dead, as anyone who had received such injuries deserved to be. Shock seemed to have pinched off the blood vessels which should have nourished the man’s right arm and leg—now bones and ragged tangles of flesh like offal from a slaughteryard. The effect of the bolt which was meant to stun the sauropithecus had worn off of the human victim N’Sumu had struck instead.
Lycon grimaced at the writhing thing. The beastcatcher felt drained but normal again, as normal as could be expected. He picked up the sword he had dropped.
“What about the men in the courtyard?” the Armenian asked, nodding toward the archway but keeping his eyes on his friend.