The guards who held Niger released the young Roman’s arms so that he could take the shield. One of them boomed something to him, probably in Latin, but Vibulenus heard it only as a rumble of sound. Niger’s brow knitted as he tried vainly to make sense of the order,
Clodius Afer’s hand was back on the tribune’s shoulder in a gesture of comradeship rather than control. The two men were blank-faced because they had dissociated their intellects as completely as possible from their bodies and from the memory that would flesh out the data their eyes were receiving.
Two of the armored guards stood close to Niger, near the corner formed with the front wall. Legionaries on that side of the room shifted so they were farther from the comrade snatched from among them than they had been from the original line of guards.
“There’s five thousand of us, aren’t there?” said Vibulenus softly, rationally. “Well, less after this morning, maybe.” But Arrius Crescens stood, open-eyed and stolid, no longer a subject of fear in the midst of newer uncertainties. . . .
“And there’s twenty of them,” the tribune went on. “Twenty-one, yes. . . .”
The file-closer’s hand tightened enough to remind Vibulenus that they would wait and watch, the two of them.
Rufus and the guards directing him marched toward the Commander who stood slim and aloof with the bulkhead behind him and the legion in front — the one with no more volition than the other.
The blue figure glanced toward Niger and perhaps spoke something into his ears alone. The young legionary raised the shield over his head, holding it by the lower rim so that the soft highlights of the boss were toward the Commander. The shield wavered a little; Niger steadied it and himself by backing a step to the sidewall and bracing his shoulder there.
“Our own weapons — those of my guild,” said the Commander as his shimmering eyes swept the legion again, “are of greater destructiveness than even this demonstration will prove. Nevertheless, watch the shield which your fellow is holding.”
While the Commander spoke, his hands swung forward a black cylinder slung behind him, visible but unremarkable in this interval that held so many remarkable things. The cylinder was about the length and diameter of the Commander’s forearm. The irregularities on it, including the handles by which the Commander raised the device to his shoulder, gave it the look of plumbing which should have been decently hidden behind stone facings or molded bronze.
The guards holding the other Pompilius cousin halted near the Commander — behind him, actually, now that he was facing the side — but the blue figure ignored them. There was a glitter in the air above the cylinder, something that could have been static electricity but suggested an image of the shield toward which the cylinder was aimed.
A jet of light so cohesive that Vibulenus thought it was a fluid spurted from the cylinder to the shield. The boss exploded in a fountain of green sparks as the flash-heated metal burned in the air. Niger was one of a hundred men who screamed in surprise. He flung the shield away from him as drops of molten bronze spattered twenty feet in every direction.
The shield hit the floor, walking on its rim in a slow pirouette before clanging down on its convex face. The hole burned through the boss was large enough to pass a clenched fist. Strips of wood glued to form the shield’s core sprang outward at the edge of the burned metal so that they looked like ravelled ends of rope.
Pompilius Niger bolted back into the mass of legionaries from which he had been taken. None of the guards tried to stop him — but Rufus found, when he made a similar attempt, that his arms were still held firmly.
“When I or any employee of my guild give you an order,” said the Commander with his usual cool precision, turning toward his audience again, “you must obey instantly and utterly.”
He released the cylinder. It snuggled itself to his back, out of the way but quickly available at need. Charred wood and burning felt created a musty reek in the atmosphere as the shield continued to smolder.