Perennius sighed. "All right," he said matter of factly. "We'll go with the teeth."
"Wait!" screamed Erzites. "My brother! He's got a sword!"
"Well, what good does that do," asked Gaius as the others paused. "He's a mile away on look-out, right?"
Panting, tumbling his words over one another, the villager explained, "He'll be back at dawn. We trade, him and me, day and day when there's meat on the wall and nobody else in the valley to watch. I forgot, Christ strike me dead, I forgot he'd be back, I swear it!"
That was probably true, unlikely as it would have seemed to someone with less experience of interrogation under pressure than Perennius had. Even after your subject broke, you had no guarantee of the truth or completeness of what came babbling out. Erzites might well have been shocked into such a state that he forgot to volunteer a crucial detail. Certainly that was more probable than the notion that he had been deliberately concealing his brother's imminent reappearance.
"Well, I don't see it makes any difference," said Sestius reasonably. "Except we've got to work faster at cutting through the bars."
"No, no," Erzites pleaded. "Listen, I'll talk to Azon - he'll cut you free with his sword, sure he will, Azon'll do that for me, Christ save me! I'm his brother!"
"Shit," said the centurion, "he'd watch us pick you apart with tweezers, wouldn't he? Before he'd risk pissing off Ramphion and his lot."
"You know, I think Erzites here will be able to convince his brother," said the agent thoughtfully. "Of course, we can't leave him naked and tied to the bars like this. Sure."
Behind Perennius, Sestius and Sabellia exchanged glances of disbelief. Even Gaius was surprised. Calvus and the villager could see the agent's face. The woman's thin lips formed themselves in an answering smile. Erzites, watching them both through the bars, began to tremble.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
"Erzites!" demanded the voice from outside. "Lend a hand."
Erzites stood in the middle of the outer room. He ground the butt of his club into his left palm silently.
"Erzites!" called the voice again. "Where the hell are you?"
"Answer him!" hissed Perennius, giving a twitch to the rope of sashes knotted around the villager's throat. The agent did not hold the free end. Calvus had that duty. Any time the slim woman chose, she could break Erzites' neck with a single jerk on the tether.
"F-fuck off!" Erzites shouted back. "You're late!"
"Fuck yourself!" replied his brother angrily. "I had to gather the fucking eggs so we'd have something to eat, didn't I?" The hut darkened as Azon's big form, a near twin of his brother's, filled the doorway. He bent and entered. Father Ramphion or an earlier leader had decided that a gap of an hour or so in the manning of the look-out point was less dangerous than the chance of unattended prisoners somehow escaping in a similar period. Having tested the physical wards, Perennius was inclined to disagree; but the dearth of traffic past the valley really mooted the point anyway.
"Say," Azon went on, "I could hear 'em really going to it at the church. They'll be up for more meat any time, I'll bet you."
His brother hit him alongside the head with the cudgel.
It was a nervously clumsy blow. The shaft instead of the knobbed end of the weapon struck Azon. He was too thick-boned a man to be laid out completely that way. Even so, Azon fell to his knees. He flung out his arms toward his brother in a gesture compounded of defense and supplication. Erzites grabbed him by the hair, screaming, and began to batter at him repeatedly with the club. The two men were locked so closely now that the weapon could not be used effectively. Erzites was mad with fear. He would not back off a step to finish the job properly.
The tip of Azon's sword, thrust sheathless under his belt, clanged on the floor when he fell. Azon made no attempt to draw the weapon against his brother's unexpected attack. His hands clutched wildly. Erzites' tunic, knotted over the shoulder where it had been torn for removal, now tore again. Suddenly tangled in his own garment, Erzites paused and cursed. His brother broke free.
The left side of Azon's head was a mass of blood. A chance poke from the butt of the cudgel had closed his left eye forever. Panic blinded the right eye also and the mind behind it. The big villager bolted forward and slammed into the door of the cell. He bit at the bars with the fury of a wolf in a trap. Sestius lunged forward in an attempt to grapple with him. The centurion jostled Perennius but did not prevent the agent from getting his own iron grip on Azon's throat.
Erzites wheeled. His tunic pooled at his ankles. He gripped his club with both hands, as if it were a threshing flail. It hissed through the air as the guard swung with all his strength. Azon's head deformed. The grating rang from the impact of the skull being driven into it. Erzites struck again. The body was jerking in Perennius' grip, but that was only the dying response of its autonomic nervous system. The cudgel made a liquid sound when its knob struck the second time. Matter splashed the metal and Perennius' forearm. The agent released Azon.
The third time, the club struck the door a foot above the slumping corpse and flew out of Erzites' grasp. The killer also collapsed on the floor, wheezing. In the last instants of the fight, the brothers had been almost equally mindless.
Perennius dragged the corpse closer by its belt. He reached across to draw the sword. It was a standard government-pattern short sword. Its blade was dull and very badly maintained. The hilt was of bronze in a fish-scale pattern which might once have been gilded. Chances were that the weapon had belonged to Azon and Erzites' father when he served with the imperial forces. The valley must have gathered a considerable armory in its decades of murdering travellers. The brothers' own lack of equipment underscored their separation from all communal aspects of village life. There was no need for it to be otherwise, of course.
Perennius gave the sword to Calvus, though the three other of his fellow prisoners were babbling and jostling forward. Erzites was still in a state of collapse. The agent tied off the villager's tether. The villager had just proven he was willing to do anything to save his skin. Perennius •saw no point in risking the fellow's escape.
Calvus put the point of the sword at the joint between a vertical and a crossbar. She held the weapon almost point down. Perennius started to apologize for the fact that the sword was so dull and that the point had been rounded by improper sharpening. The tall woman rapped the oval pommel sharply with the heel of her right hand. Metal rang. The crossbar jumped as the sword inserted itself where the weld had been.
"Herakles!" Sestius blurted. Sabellia had more experience or at least more awareness of the other woman's capacities. The Gaul fell silent and drew the centurion back to give Calvus more room to work.
Perennius stopped himself with his mouth open. He had been about to say that if Azon had been correct, the five of them might be only minutes short of being trapped by villagers returning for a new victim. There was no reason to say what they all knew; and it was hard to imagine anyone working faster or more efficiently than Calvus, anyway.
The blade was of good steel. Its dull edge should have been a handicap. If so, the bare-handed blows with which Calvus struck the pommel were more than hard enough to overcome the defect in materials. The bald woman placed the point carefully, rapped the hilt, and shifted the sword to the next joint while it was still singing with the parting sound of the weld it had just cut. When Calvus reached the end, the crossbar dropped to the floor with a clank.
"Wait," said the agent as Calvus raised her sword to the next higher of the five crossbars. The agent set the freed bar into the grate much as they had attempted earlier with the wooden cudgel. In the outer room, Erzites was watching them. He was fingering his throat where the rope had rubbed it. He was not attempting to break free.