“Sent them away, out the other side,” Lycon said. The blade of his sword glistened with the clear gelatin-like substance which covered it. “Didn’t want them to interfere when there wasn’t any good they could have done anyhow.” He thrust quickly, expertly, between the body armor and the grill of the gladiatorial helmet. The plaza echoed as the iron hoops arched and fell with the death throes of the man they had failed to protect.
“That one?” Vonones wondered with slight curiosity. The merchant’s palms were sweaty now that he had taken sides against the Emperor’s desires, without recourse and without hope.
“A schoolmaster,” Lycon said as he wiped blood and ichor from the blade on Sempronianus’ tunic. “He volunteered to act as bait, though he may not have been aware of that at the time.”
And then both men looked at the other figure, the man who had called himself N’Sumu . . . the thing that had called itself a man named N’Sumu.
Vonones swore, more in wonderment than fear but with a tinge of fear as well. While Lycon and the two—others—were tangled on the ground, the sauropithecus had kicked down with its hobbled legs at the same time its arm slashed upward. None of the multiple claw-tracks were deep enough to be fatal, but they had snatched away the wool and linen of N’Sumu’s clothing, and they had gouged deeply through the bronzed integument which previously appeared to be skin.
That it was not skin was as obvious as the fact that the face which claws had bared beneath the bronze mask was no human face. The jaws were twitching convulsively as N’Sumu breathed, but they moved from side to side instead of up and down. In that, the visage was insect-like, but for the rest of its conical smoothness it was more reminiscent of a moray eel. The teeth were pegs with flat grinding surfaces, and they appeared to be arranged in multiple rows within the mouth.
The real skin was dark though not black, indeterminate in the moonlight but seemingly closer to purple than brown. The blood that welled from the gashes in it was very dark indeed.
“What under heaven?” Lycon murmured as he knelt beside N’Sumu and began, with his swordpoint, to extend a tear in the bronze overskin down the length of N’Sumu’s right arm. Beneath that false skin was a pattern of interconnected nodes, a large one on the inner angle of the elbow and another which covered the palm of the right hand.
The sword had been blunted by use and the pavement. Vonones touched his friend’s arm to restrain him and finished undressing N’Sumu’s hand with the pen-sharpening knife he carried in his wallet. The false skin was resistant to direct pressure, but it parted like a maidenhead once the cut was started. One of N’Sumu’s fingers was actually a part of the integument.
What remained when the small knife had picked away the counterfeit was something slimmer than human, with three fingers and an opposable thumb. Lycon stared at it and stared at the whole sprawling body in the light of present revelation. He could not imagine that N’Sumu had ever seemed human. A praying mantis the height of a man would have seemed less strange.
Vonones lifted the node away from N’Sumu’s palm. Interconnecting it with the similar flat bulb at the elbow and a score of lesser nodes were a series of tendrils, thin enough to have an orange sheen in the moonlight where the thicker lumps of the same material were dull and colorless. The node had the wet flaccidity of a spleen with barely enough structural integrity to keep from tearing apart under its own weight. It had not been attached to N’Sumu’s body or to the bronze overskin by any evident means beyond friction and the slight tackiness of its surface.
Lycon nodded and touched the skein of tendrils with his sword. The roughness of its edge gave it purchase on the material which stretched briefly, then fell away like gossamer. “If that’s why he could—do with his hands,” said the beastcatcher, “then we don’t want . . .”
The severed ends of the material steamed. For an instant there was a spicy odor, as if cassia had been flung on a hot stove. “There’s more,” said the Armenian, and the two men huddled together to flay the moaning figure of N’Sumu. The head was the worst part. Even with the portion the sauropithecus had ripped from the mask, the full reality was more disturbing than either of them had imagined.