They walked in unconscious unison toward the waiting beast. The forward bulkhead quivered with a red glow so deep that it felt brighter than human eyes could perceive. The creature began to growl. Though the room’s noise-deadening acoustics must have absorbed the physical volume of the sound, the hatred behind it was projected like a volley of missiles.
“Got slack in his chain, the bastard does,” observed Niger. They were walking gingerly now, as if they stood on glass or eggshells. “Hopes we’ll come maybe a step too close to look at him, he does.”
The side entrance opened and closed soundlessly, but the motion took the men’s attention as well as that of the giant hyena. The beast turned only its head and, after a moment of observing Quartilla’s quick-footed figure in silence, began to growl again.
“Milady,” muttered both the centurions, glancing away in at least the semblance of being embarrassed as Vibulenus and the woman kissed demurely.
Quartilla wore sandals, a tunic, and over that a dark blue woolen stola. The garments were chaste and had as much the appearance of being Roman as she herself had of being human.
“That’s gonna be a bitch t’ deal with,” said Clodius with his eyes on the pacing, growling carnivore only twenty feet in front of them now. “And I just don’t see any choice.”
“Unless you could, ah, lady,” said Niger as his tongue and words wrapped a sudden idea clumsily. “I mean, maybe it’d let you get past it t’ the door since you’re not — I mean, maybe you’re like the Commander or the guards to it and it’d let you be?”
“I’m not,” said Quartilla with a smile that replaced a blank expression as soon as Vibulenus’ hand reached over to squeeze hers. “It wouldn’t swallow down pieces of either one of us, Publius, but it wouldn’t hesitate to bite those pieces out.”
“Wouldn’t help anyhow,” muttered the pilus prior. The older veteran scowled as he watched Vibulenus step cautiously nearer to the tethered carnivore. “Only use to getting the door open’s so the rest of us can get through. Which we sure don’t do while that’s still standing there, grinnin’.”
Vibulenus was close enough to really hear the growls now, and the hair at the back of his neck rose in response. The whine of the slotted disk on the carnivore’s chest was a waspish undercurrent to the deliberate sound, doing what it could mechanically to make the Roman even more uncomfortable.
There was a loop of slack in the cable, cunningly or even intelligently hidden behind the creature’s pacing feet, but the mark of its claws in an arc of the flooring provided the tribune with an accurate deadline.
If he stepped within the jaws’ length of that line, he was dead.
This close, he could feel the pressure of the carnivore’s exhalations. Its breath did not stink, exactly, but its odor was of something darker than the vegetation-based smell of any animal of similar size in Vibulenus’ past experience.
“You can fix the lock?” Clodius Afer asked from closer than the tribune had realized.
“Yes,” Quartilla answered simply. Then she added, “I’ve — never touched the bulkhead, of course, because of the barrier. But I’ve seen the pattern lighting up before the door opens, and I’ve seen crewmen tap out the same pattern in the hexagon there when they open it from this side. It never changes.”
“Well, I figure,” said Niger, “that we take the practice equipment from the Exercise Hall, like we planned. I don’t care how mean this bastard is, there’s enough of us t’ put him down regardless.”
The carnivore suddenly, leaped to the limit of its tether, snarling rage and crashing to a halt with its hind legs on the floor and its foreclaws slashing the air above the Romans and Quartilla. The centurions broke back instinctively, one of them sweeping the woman away more swiftly than her own muscles and training could take her.
Vibulenus stood his ground, lost in observation that freed him from the panic that experience had taught him was false. He had come here many times since the day they had last reboarded the vessel.