Birds of Prey by David Drake

fists clenched together. The agent wondered vaguely what they had been struggling about, the woman and the creature, the Guardian. Blazes, though, there were more more important questions than that to answer.
    Perennius sheathed his dagger and gripped one of the creature’s limbs. It was hard-surfaced but pliant, like a length of chain. The agent’s back crawled. He kept his face impassive as he reached under the slick, conical head with his other hand. He heaved the carcass over the railing. “Somebody’s going to get a good sword in the morning,” he muttered, “but they’re going to get a surprise along with it. Let’s get out of here.”
    The three men stepped out of the room by the hall door Maximus had forced to intervene. Calvus was supporting the centurion with an arm around his shoulders. A fold of the tall man’s toga shielded Sestius’s face from the remains of his companion.
    Under his breath, Perennius muttered, “Told the bastard to wear his armor.” But nothing could erase his awareness that the young guard had saved the life of Aulus Perennius in a situation the agent’s boastful assurance had gotten him into.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    The water began to sizzle and hiss almost as soon as the cloak hit it. Perennius levered the stone sewer grating back with a grunt.
    The tall civilian touched him with the arm that did not support Sestius. “I think we’d better step back,” he said calmly. He suited his own action to the words.
    The agent moved aside at once, though the request had surprised him. He had chosen to ditch the alien paraphernalia in a street grate a few hundred feet from the barracks. Steam-blurred light was flooding through the cuts in the stone trough. The hissing built into a roar, then a scream. “Let’s move on,” Perennius shouted, afraid that the noise would attract the official attention that he thought they had avoided when they left the brothel unchallenged.
    The roar dropped abruptly to the echo of itself reverberating down the sewer pipe. Simultaneously, the grating crackled and several chunks of it fell in. Unperturbed, Calvus resumed walking Sestius toward the barracks.
    Perennius swore as he followed the other men. “Do you have weapons like that?” he asked.
    â€œNot here,” Calvus said. “We could not send any … object. Besides, I was not raised to fight.”
    â€œBlazes,” the agent said. He had thought the tall man was a coward when he froze during the ambush. Nothing Perennius had seen since supported that assessment, however. He did not understand Calvus any better than he did the other aspects of this situation in which monstrous insects flashed thunderbolts in the darkness.
    â€œThis one will die of shock if he isn’t kept warm,” Calvus said. Unexpectedly, he spoke in Illyrian. The stranger’s intonations were as mechanically perfect as those of his Latin had been. “Do you want that?”
    â€œWhat?” the agent blurted. He was sure at first that he was being chided for not showing more concern for the injured centurion. It struck him then like a death sentence that the question had been asked in all seriousness: would he prefer that Sestius die? “Blazes, no, I don’t want him to die!” Perennius said angrily. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
    Calvus shrugged. “You wanted secrecy,” he said simply.
    The transient barracks stood on a middle slope of the Caelian Hill. Externally they were built like a four-story apartment block with a central courtyard. Inside, each wing and floor was divided like a pair of ordinary barracks blocks. There were ten squad-rooms along each face, inner and outer, backed by an equipment storage space attached to each squad-room. In each corner were larger units designed as officers’ quarters.
    The assignment desk was served by a swarthy civilian, probably the slave or hireling of the watch