Birds of Prey (6 page)

“Blazes,” the agent repeated aloud. He had an urge to wrap his cloak around him again, even in the sunlit garden. “He's the tall one in there, isn't he?” Perennius added in sudden certainty.

Both men glanced toward the drawing room. The window was lined with the faces of men waiting with an impatience which bid fair to master their senses of decorum. In the center was the bald man with whom Perennius had locked eyes earlier. He was the tallest of those watching and the only one who looked calm. His face was as still as a statue's as he watched the men in the garden.

“Why yes,” said Navigatus in surprise. “You know him, then? Frankly, I haven't been able to find anybody who did.”

Perennius grinned at his Director. He wondered briefly whether an appearance of omniscience might not be worth cultivation. Not with Marcus, though; not with family. “Don't know a thing but what I can tell by looking at him,” the agent admitted. “Must just have been his name.” But the cognomen Calvus, Baldie, could have come from generations before. There was something in his easy identification that bothered Perennius in a way that hunches generally did not.

“Umm,” said his superior. “He told me nothing at all, Marcus, except that he needed my best agent for a dangerous mission. And then he named you.” Navigatus smiled. “Not that there was any question in my mind, of course, but I'm not sure I would have withdrawn you from Palmyra if he hadn't been so specific. And while the fellow was polite enough, well … he knew what the rescript he brought said, didn't he?”

Perennius turned his head so that the other man would not see his expression and grimaced ruefully. Another startled lizard ran spraddle-legged a dozen feet along the vertical surface of the wall. “I've been doing you an injustice, Marcus,” the agent said. “I thought you'd jerked me because you were getting nervous again.”

“I didn't want the Palmyra mission assigned to you, that's correct,” the older man said carefully. “You've paid your dues, and I think it's time you left some of the risk to others. But I've never scrubbed you from a mission which you wanted and for which you were qualified. Which is anything short of a bed-chamber attendant for the Empress, as I well know.”

Perennius laughed. He slapped his would-be protector on the shoulder and said, “Hell, what good did my balls ever do me, Marcus? But if the well-connected gentleman has been roosting in your chamber since Gaius was sent for me, you'll probably be glad to be shut of him. Let's bring him out here, learn what he needs and then the two of us'll get out of your hair.” He stood up.

Navigatus rose also. “That's an odd thing, Aulus,” the Director said. “He brought the rescript eighteen days ago today. I said I'd send for him as soon as you arrived—he has an apartment in the palace, but nobody there seems to know him. Except his Majesty, I suppose.… But he returned today without being summoned. I was rather concerned because we didn't expect you, you know, not for a week at least.”

The two men looked back toward the building proper. To their mutual surprise, the door was open and the chief usher was ceremoniously bowing out the tall, marble-bald subject of their conversation.

“Blazing Noon,” muttered Navigatus in the Dalmatian dialect of his childhood. “If he can get around Delius that way…” And then both of them put on false smiles to greet the man whom Gallienus had sent to them.

CHAPTER FIVE

On closer examination, Lucius Cloelius Calvus was a stage more unusual than Perennius' initial glance had suggested. Calvus' skin had the yellowish pallor of old ivory, but it was as smooth as a young child's. The skin's gloss suggested someone much younger than the black eyes did. Perennius had heard that the Chinese, on the far end of the route by which silk arrived at government warehouses in Alexandria, had honey-gold complexions. He wondered if the stranger could have come from that far away. Like his skin, Calvus' features were flawlessly regular; but their proportions, their symmetrical angularity, were not those of anyone Perennius had met before. Also, there was something in the slim neck that nagged him.…

“Interesting that your usher reads lips,” said Calvus in accentless Latin as he approached, “but I suppose it's a valuable ability for someone in his position.” He shifted his eyes to Perennius. “Or yours, sir.”

“Delius reads
lips?
” sputtered Navigatus.

Only a facet of Perennius' conscious mind listened for content. Calvus blandly expressed surprise that Navigatus had not known that his attendant could follow conversations out of earshot. The agent did not care about that—Delius, in his position, could be expected to know enough to get his superior hung whether or not he was a lip-reader. What interested Perennius more was the chance to determine Calvus' homeland from the patterns within the Latin he was now speaking.

With two languages, Latin and Greek, a traveller could wander the length and breadth of the Empire without ever being unable to order a meal or ask directions. From the British Wall, to Elephantine on the Nile where a garrison watched the Nubians south of the Cataract; and from the Pillars of Hercules to Amida across the Tigris, those tongues were in themselves entrée to almost the smallest village. The addition of Aramaic would add textures to the East and to areas of Eastern immigration like Rome itself; but even there, the Greek was sufficient.

But Latin and Greek were not always, even not generally, first languages. There were still farms within a hundred miles of the capital in which nurses crooned to infants in Oscan, for instance. Childhood backgrounds gave a distinctness that went beyond mere dialects to versions of the common tongues. Languages were as much Perennius' present stock in trade as swords had been when he served in uniform. He was very good with both.

But the stranger had no accent whatever. He spoke with the mechanical fluency of water trembling over rocks. Calvus' voice had no more character than that of a professional declaiming a rich man's poem for pay. He gave the words only the qualities required by grammar and syntax.

“If we sit here with our backs to the building,” Calvus was saying with a nod toward one of the benches around the fountain, “we can have our privacy. I should explain, Director—” he nodded in an aside to Navigatus—“that the reason I have not taken you into my confidence before now is that I felt Aulus Perennius should be informed by me directly. This way he will make up his own mind. There are risks involved, and I understand your relationship goes beyond bare professionalism.” The tall man seated himself on the curved berth, gesturing the others to places to either side of him as if he were host.

Perennius grinned as he sat down. He wondered if Calvus had been told that the agent was Marcus' chicken. Perennius had been a number of things over the years, but not that. Only the Empire had screwed him.

Navigatus frowned. “I've read the letter,” he said, tapping the wallet into which he had returned the rescript, “and I understand my duty.”

“Ah,” said Calvus, “but one owes duty to more than the State, surely. There is one's—” He paused, his tongue groping for a word that was not there—“there are friends, that is; and there is humanity as a whole, don't you agree?”

“Sir, I'm not a philosopher,” Navigatus said. His uncertainty as to the other man's position made him more uncomfortable than he might have been in the presence of the Emperor himself. “The Bureau is to give you full support, and it will—if you'll tell us what you require.”

Calvus nodded his head upward in agreement. The agent was watching him out of the corner of his eye, keeping his face turned toward the fountain. The pool curb of porous tufa was very old, like the statue itself. The fountain could have been original to the house. Perennius knew that only two years ago, the garden had been smoothly gravelled with no features but the battery of clerks who filled it. On drizzly days, tarpaulins overhead had permitted work if not comfort. By choosing the furnishings he had, Navigatus was trying to turn the garden into a time capsule. It was not merely an enclave of color and beauty on which the Director could rest his eyes: it was a way of returning to an age long before his birth, when the Empire could be embarrassed by foreign disaster but never threatened.

“I have made the Emperor aware of a conspiracy,” Calvus said, “and he has empowered me to put it down.”

The Director started to say something, but a flick of Perennius' hand kept him from interrupting. The agent's open attention had been focused by the word “conspiracy.” He wanted to hear the story in the informant's own words, with as little as possible imported to it by cross-examination. There would be time for that later.

“There would be some advantages to using military force directly,” Calvus continued, “but I believe that would draw a response that itself would be a terrible risk. It seems better to deal with the matter through a few individuals.”

Perennius did not nod, but his mind flashed agreement. Slip in, bribe a bedroom attendant to suffocate the leader, and slip the hell out again while his lieutenants cut each others' throats. Finesse had ended revolts that a battalion couldn't have touched.

“The right man,” Calvus said with a gesture of his eyes toward Perennius, “can put me in a position to destroy this, this—” and again the lips tried to form a word which did not exist in the language Calvus had been speaking flawlessly. “Unspeakable thing,” the tall man chose at last. He loaded the term with the first genuine emotion the agent had heard from him.

Calvus swallowed, then added, “The site is in Cilicia, not far from Tarsus.”

“Blazes!”
Navigatus spat out.

Calvus looked surprised. That surprise might become anger when the disgust of the Director's outburst sank in. The agent said, “Ah, sir, as my superior and I are well aware, Cilicia has always been a—difficult area, even in less, ah, troubled times.” Perennius sought eye contact with the taller man to give the impression of utter candor. As before, the black eyes jolted him. Out of sheer discipline, the agent stumbled onward, “At the—this particular time, the province is one of those under the con—ah…”

“The direction of the Autarch Odenathus, who has recently recovered it—most of it—from the Prefect Callistus,” Navigatus supplied helpfully. He had gotten his irritation under control during the breather Perennius had offered him. Now the Director continued smoothly, “Your dedication to his Majesty is beyond question, Lucius Calvus; but if I may suggest something from my, ah, peculiar perspective, a threat in Odenath's back garden, so to speak, is not necessarily a threat to his Majesty at the moment. And an outbreak of banditry in Cilicia would be more conspicuous by its absence.” He smiled affably. There were crackpots less harmless, the Almighty Sun knew; and this one had at least the ear of the Emperor.

Calvus smiled. It was a gesture, not an expression. He continued to look toward Perennius rather than toward the Director who was seated on the other side of him. “Not bandits, your Respectability,” the tall man said. His quiet formality was as daunting as a more direct reference to the rescript. The formal relationship of the two Bureau personnel to Calvus was that they were under his absolute control. The stranger continued, “You may think of them as a sect, if you like. Yes, a religious sect, very like that. Small at the moment, but going to grow in the future.”

“How long were you a member of this sect?” the agent asked. He deliberately begged the question of Calvus' participation in what appeared to have been an illegal organization.

The reaction surprised him. “Don't
ever
say that!” shouted the tall man in an access of loathing. “I and—
those?
” His face smoothed itself with difficulty. The virulence of the stranger's emotion was the more shocking for its contrast with the nearly flat personality he had displayed until that moment. “Yes, of course,” he said, aloud but not particularly to the men beside him. “You wonder how I came to know about the situation.”

Calvus attempted his smile again. He glanced toward Navigatus before continuing, “I'm afraid that for the moment, you will simply have to take it on faith that I'm correct. I'll try to find an acceptable mechanism to explain my knowledge, but I don't suppose that will affect your plans. That is—” he turned up his right palm—“the worst case is that I will be proven correct. If you plan for that, then the event of my being proven wrong and a madman—” he flipped up his left palm—“will not increase your risk or difficulties. Since the effort must be made in either event.”

If you think, Perennius mused, that I can't find a way to grease you between here and Cilicia, and a tragic story of your end that'll satisfy Gallienus or any damn body, then you're wrong. But aloud he said to the placid face, “I used to—live with a woman who saw visions. She insisted I listen the same way I would if it were something she'd seen with her eyes. I didn't much like it then, but I took it from Julia; and I'll take it now, I suppose.”

Navigatus relaxed slightly on the other side of the tall man. He knew as well as the agent did that Gallienus' writ ruled little beyond Italy and parts of Africa, at the moment … and that nothing but a sense of duty could be truly said to rule Aulus Perennius. Perennius had accepted the assignment now. That meant there was the best chance possible of satisfying this seeming confidant of the Emperor.

A small butterfly landed on the web of Calvus' right hand. He watched it palpate him with its proboscis as he continued: “You will want to know the strength of our opponents. There are only six of them, we believe. Six—true devotees. But they may have any number of hirelings. And they are almost certain to have very powerful weapons, weapons that you could compare only to natural catastrophes, thunderbolts and volcanoes.”