Killer

He licked his lips as he paused. They were dry and hot; he wondered if he'd picked up a fever, gods, Rome was worse than the fetid swamps of the Nile Delta, for things to send you to Hades in screaming delirium. "Look, I don't know how bad things are, the situation I mean," he went on, because it was better to speak the truth than have them afraid of bogies which were worse-and this was the truth, there was a fair chance of it working out. The door at the head of the corridor clanked, promise of a meal of sorts… or perhaps a visitor, Vonones with a diploma releasing at least Lycon himself…

Speaking very quickly, the beastcatcher went on, "I'm here now because things went wrong last night, but the decision was at a pretty low level. I'm pretty sure Vonones can square things-he knows how bad they need me if any of this is going to work."

Zoe nodded understanding with her lips sucked tightly together in hope that this would, by sympathetic magic, prevent the tears from slipping from her eyes. By looking down she managed without that disaster to say, "Then you aren't condemned to the, to… above, I mean." She lifted her head in a gesture and the tears did burst out, not single droplets but runnels that wavered as Zoe twisted her face away again and wiped it on the shoulder of her shawl.

"Oh, Pollux, nothing like that," the beastcatcher said with a brusqueness and near-anger that cloaked his own reactions-all but the catch in his voice, just a brief catch. There was only one set of footsteps rasping down the corridor, so it was the slave with food after all. Who knows, maybe he could eat something now that he'd stood erect for a while, a chunk of bread at least to scrub the tastes of bile and exhaustion from his mouth. "Look, I don't say it won't happen, but I've been in worse places," Lycon said, making himself believe it.

The slave was not carrying a lamp. In fact, he did not appear to have a tray of food.

"Father," Alexandros was saying, "I'm sorry about the way I, I ran away from you yesterday. And-before." The boy was looking at the floor of the intervening cell, but he had the courage to keep his face turned in the direction of Lycon as he spoke. "I won't make you ashamed of me again."

"You there!" Lycon called as he shifted his body and his full attention to the front grating of his cell. He was no longer conscious of his body, of the aches and nausea against which he had been struggling in the time since he had awakened. The slave who shuffled down the corridor past Lycon and toward the cell holding his family wore a Gallic cape with the hood pulled close over his face. "Come here, damn you, or I'll have you flayed this afternoon when they let me out of here!"

"Who is it?" Perses called as he ran to the corridor side of his own cell.

The man in the cape, maybe a woman, of course, the figure was so short, did not look aside despite the beastcatcher's shout. Lycon made a desperate snatch through the bars, but the figure was too far away as it passed.

"Father?" said Alexandros, his voice rising an octave in the course of the two syllables.

"Perses, come h-" cried Zoe, grabbing for the child as he started to repeat, "Who-?" to the figure in the corridor.

"No!" screamed Lycon, and the arm came out from beneath the cape, one arm only but quite sufficient for its purpose. It was quick, cat-quick or even more so, and its claws caught Perses not by his tunic but under the breastbone, punching their multiple paths through the boy's diaphragm and then curling back around the lowest ribs to penetrate the skin again. They held Perses like a fish hooked around the jawbone.

The arm snatched back into the corridor and the boy followed it to the narrow gap between the bars, jerked off his feet. Then the breastbone with associated muscles and cartilage ripped free and the remainder of Perses flopped back onto the floor of the cell. He was still alive, but he could not scream because his chest could no longer force air through his throat. One of the four-year-old's lungs, hooked by the tip of the claw, flopped outside his ruined chest.

"Zoe, Alexandros," Lycon ordered in a calm, clear voice, "get to the back of the cell. Leave Perses, we'll take care of that when it's safe. Move!"

Though they were safe where they stood, you could never tell. They might lunge forward to caress Perses or grapple with the thing in the corridor-equally suicidal, equally pointless. You couldn't change death, not even the gods could change that if there were gods; and there would be a time to kill the blue thing, the lizard-ape, and it would die hard, very hard.

The beastcatcher no longer felt his body, though he knew it would respond as he thought, perhaps even quickly enough to grip the thing's arm if it were extended into Lycon's own cell. He bunched his tunic with his left fist, balling it out from his chest so that the claws would not snatch away his heart and life until his own hands had a throat to grip.