Three-Spire stood at the Commander’s side. The bastard sure did get around.
The barbs from the village walked into the tunnel. There was another click, click, click-clickclick, and the opening fused to solid rock again.
Glabrio turned to his centurion, his face white. The dagger trembled in his hand. He wasn’t worried by flying chariots or the way the metal ships climbed through the air, but this was new.
It was new to Froggie too, but he was a centurion. He couldn’t let anything show on his face, or his boys might go off in a panic that got some of them killed.
He motioned to Glabrio and backed out of sight of the outcrop before turning to start down the trail again. He heard the muted tunk of the dagger going home in its sheath; then Glabrio whispered, “Aren’t we gonna follow ’em when they leave, Top?”
“Hercules, we know where they’re going back to, don’t we?” Froggie said. “And if they didn’t, that’d be two fewer to take care of when the time comes. Not that I’d mind the extra work in this case.”
The blue glow hadn’t been real bright, but it was enough to leave Froggie just better than stone blind on the starlit trail. He’d like to have hurried, though he didn’t suppose it mattered. However long the barbs stayed inside the tunnel, they weren’t going to see well enough to run up the Romans’ back when they got out.
“The thing I don’t figure . . .” Glabrio said—and if there was only one thing, he was doing better than Froggie— ” . . . is what the Commander’s doing there? Does he have some kinda plan?”
“Your people were farmers, weren’t they, Glabrio?” Froggie said. As his sight came back, he was stepping up the pace. His left foot flicked a spark off into the night.
“Huh?” Glabrio said. “Yeah, wheat and a garden, the usual. So what?”
“We were shepherds,” Froggie said. “Now, if you’re not used to them, all sheep look alike—but they don’t all act the same way. You learn to tell them apart by the way they stand, by the way one’s left ear curls back—that sort of thing.”
“Yeah?” said Glabrio.
“So the guy in a blue suit we just saw was standing straight, not hip-shot, and when he called the barbs inside he tapped his left fingertips into the other palm,” Froggie said. “He was a Commander, son, but he wasn’t the guy who’s supposed to be in command of us.”
* * *
The sun had just come over the horizon, and the birds that roosted in treetops at night were lifting into the sky. They flew on sheets of skin rippling along either side of their snake-slim bodies, more like flounders swimming through the air than the birds Froggie’d grown up with.
These would fly to the sea three days march to westward. They’d gorge on the jellyfish swarming in sheltered waters between the mainland and the chain of offshore islands, then fly back. The birds were free to go anywhere they pleased—and it pleased them to go the same place every day.
Glabrio was sleeping but Froggie stood at the fort’s west gate, facing Kascanschi. He thought about the birds and all the similar birds he’d seen in scores of places, and he tried to imagine his life if he’d never been sold to the Guild. Maybe for him there wouldn’t have been any difference between being a freeborn Roman citizen and a Guild slave . . . but he knew he hated his Commanders as he’d never hated a Roman general, not even that idiot Crassus who put him here.
The city gates creaked open. Local women shoved the sagging panels outward, supervised by one of the squad of axemen who’d spent the night in the gatehouse.
The guard noticed Froggie. He balanced his long-hafted axe on the fingers of one hand, then did a complicated series of sweeps that involved him stepping forward and back through the spinning weapon. His eyes remained locked with the centurion’s.
One of the girls chirruped in fear as steel flicked toward and past her. Given the blade’s weight and edge, the axe would’ve taken her arm off if she’d lurched in the wrong direction as she stepped back from the gate. Froggie was willing to bet that the axeman wouldn’t have let that prevent him from finishing with the flourish that brought his weapon to rest precisely as it had been at the start.