Killer

The beast's arms were still moving slightly, but it was not trying to squeeze life back in through the fatal swordcut as a man would do, as most men would do. It was reaching for Lycon, the way Lycon would have reached for it were he on the stones with his belly torn away. And they smiled at one another, the killers, until the light went out of the eyes of the one with blue scales and the other stumbled because his knees no longer needed to support him.

Vonones did instead, catching his friend from behind and easing him backward while the sword rang disregarded on the pavement.

"Won't bring Zoe back," whispered the beast-catcher. "But I beat it, and it knew it there at the end. It knew that I'd won."

Dead, the netted lizard-ape was as formless as a shrouded insect found hanging from a spiderweb: unpleasant for its associations, but quite harmless now. The other two figures sprawled in the plaza were moaning.

Vonones had assumed the man wearing armor was dead, as anyone who had received such injuries deserved to be. Shock seemed to have pinched off the blood vessels which should have nourished the man's right arm and leg-now bones and ragged tangles of flesh like offal from a slaughteryard. The effect of the bolt which was meant to stun the sauropithecus had worn off of the human victim N'Sumu had struck instead.

Lycon grimaced at the writhing thing. The beastcatcher felt drained but normal again, as normal as could be expected. He picked up the sword he had dropped.

"What about the men in the courtyard?" the Armenian asked, nodding toward the archway but keeping his eyes on his friend.

"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.