Birds of Prey (2 page)

Perennius picked his way past them with more anger than sympathy. The Empire would work if everyone obeyed its rules. No one knew better than the agent how great was the Empire's potential if it would cling together, if its millions would accept what the Empire offered them in the knowledge that it was more than they would get from chaos if each went his own way.

But no, Britain and Gaul separated, as if they could deal with the Franks better alone than if they waited for the central army to handle the irruptions across the Rhine after it had blunted more pressing threats. Generals and governors repeatedly tried to parlay their commands into the Imperial regalia. The attempts guaranteed death for the usurpers, death for their rivals, and almost certainly death for the system over which they squabbled and slew. On a lower level, the rabble, dissatisfied with unproductive sloth, rioted in the streets in an apparent desire to smash the mechanism that fed it.

And shopkeepers defied ordinances aimed at keeping open the thoroughfares on which their business depended. Well, let them lie in the street and moan. They'd made their choice.

Somewhere in the building toward which Aulus Perennius walked was a clerk who had made a similarly bad decision. The clerk had siphoned off funds meant for secret intelligence of the Autarch of Palmyra; intelligence that Perennius was risking his life to supply.

The Headquarters of the Bureau of Imperial Affairs, Western Division, was a converted town-house on the edge of the Caelian Hill. It was a two-story structure, lowered over by the six-floor apartment blocks more prevalent in the district. There was little to distinguish Headquarters from private houses elsewhere in Rome. Its façade was bleak and completely windowless on the stuccoed lower story. The upper floor, beyond the threat of graffiti and rubbing shoulders, had been sheathed in marble. The veneering was not in particularly good repair. Missing chips revealed the tufa core. The windows were narrow and barred horizontally. Most of the glazed sashes were swung open for ventilation despite the nip of a breeze to which spring was coming late.

Originally, the lower story had been flanked on all sides by shops just as the neighboring apartment blocks were. The shop doorways had been bricked up when the building was converted to its present use almost eighty years before, during the reign of Commodus. Even at that distance in time, the windows and doors could be deduced from shadows on the stucco caused by a moisture content in the bricks differing from that of the surrounding stone.

The main entrance was off a closed court, not the street Perennius had been following. He paused on the corner, sighed and cinched up his equipment belt. The agent was used to palaces, to great houses, to headquarters of many sorts; but he had never felt comfortable in this one. It occurred to him that it was because he had no real business there. There were Imperial agents and informers throughout Rome, and no doubt the Emperor had as much need for them here as he did for them anywhere else in the Empire.

That was not a duty Perennius thought he could live with, however. On the borders or across them, the agent could convince himself that he was working to preserve the Empire. When he was at the core of that Empire, he saw that the rot, the waste and treachery and peculation, was as advanced as any nightmare on the borders. What the dour agent was about to do to a finance clerk was a personal thing. If Perennius permitted himself to know that a similar tale could be told of a thousand, a myriad, highly-placed bureaucrats in the capital, he would also have had to know that nothing whatever Aulus Perennius did would have any significant effect.

A pair of armed guards stood in the entrance alcove of the building. Their round shields, stacked against javelins in opposite corners of the short passage, were marked with the blazons of a battalion of the Palatine Foot. The Palatines were one of the elite formations the Emperor was forming as a central field army. All the Empire's borders were so porous that there was no longer a prayer of dealing with hostile thrusts before they penetrated to the cities and farmland of the interior. Because the Palatines were an elite, it was all the more frustrating to Perennius that the younger of the guards had not bothered to wear his body armor.

Both of the uniformed men straightened when they saw that Perennius and Gaius were not sauntering toward the apartment block at the end of the court. The lower floors of that building seemed, from the advertisements painted on the stucco, to have been converted into an inn and brothel. The guard who called out to Perennius was the older of the pair, a man not far short of the agent's own forty years. “All right, sir,” the guard announced with no more than adequate politeness, “if you've got business here, you'll have to state it to us.”

“Get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, straight-leg?” snapped Gaius in reaction to the tone. The young man flopped back the edge of his cloak to display his chest insignia, medallions of silvered bronze. Gaius had been an aide in the Bodyguard Horse before Perennius arranged his secondment to the Bureau as a courier. The morning before, when they had reached Italy—and very nearly the limits of friendly territory—the younger man had unpacked and donned his uniform trappings. That was harmless enough in itself, a boastfulness understandable in an orphan from an Illyrian village no one had ever heard of. What had sent a chill down Perennius' spine was the realization that Gaius had been carrying the gear when he arrived in Palmyra to deliver an urgent message to Perennius.

The situation between Gallienus, who styled himself Emperor of Rome, and Odenathus, who claimed less but perhaps controlled more, was uncertain. The two were not friends … nor, at the moment, were they clearly at swords' points. Perennius travelled as a spice trader, but that was only a veneer over his claim to be a secret envoy from Postumus, Emperor of the Gauls. Given what the agent had learned in those paired personae, there was very little doubt as to what the Palmyrenes would have done if Gaius' vanity had unmasked the pair of them as agents of the central government.

Of what liked to think of itself as the central government, at any rate.

*   *   *

The older guard reacted about the way Perennius would have reacted had he been on entrance duty. “Don't worry about how I slept, sonny,” he said. “Let's just see your pass.” The guard wore a shirt of iron ring mail over his tunic. The metal had been browned, but the linen beneath his armpits bore smudges of rust nonetheless. It was that problem of maintenance which led many men to prefer bronze armor or even leather despite the greater strength of the iron.

Of course, a lot of them now were like the younger guard who wore no armor at all. Blazes! See how comfortable they'd be the first time a Frank's spear slipped past the edge of their shields.

The agent reached into his wallet and brought out one of the flat tablets there. It was of four leaves of thin board. The outer two acted as covers for the inner pair. “These are my orders,” Perennius said, holding out the diploma. “If they're forgeries, then I've made a hell of a long trip for nothing.”

The older guard took the tablet. The wax seal had been broken. He held the document at an angle to the light to see the impression more clearly. The guard's helmet quivered as his high forehead wrinkled beneath it.

“You know,” said the younger man as his partner opened the tablet, “just having a pass won't get you farther than the hall. Now, it happens that the receiving clerk is a friend of ours. You understand that everything's open and above-board inside, what with so many, let's say hands, around. But if I were to tip him the wink as I sent you through, then it might save you, hell, maybe a day warming a bench in—”

“Maximus,” the older guard said. He looked from the diploma to his companion. Perennius was smiling at the corner of his eye.

“—a bench in the hall,” Maximus continued, his conspirator's smile seguing into a quick frown at the partner who was interrupting his spiel.

“Maximus, shut the
fuck
up!” the older man snarled. He thrust the open tablet toward his companion.

What was written on the enclosure was simple and standard. It named Perennius, described him in detail which included his four major scars, and directed him to report to Headquarters—not further identified—with all dispatch. As such, the document served both for orders and for a pass. There was nothing in the written portion to frighten anyone who knew as little about Aulus Perennius as either of the guards could be expected to know.

The tablet had been sealed with the general Bureau signet, a seated woman holding a small sheaf of wheat. It was a hold-over from the days a century before when the organization had officially been the Bureau of Grain Supply. The seal within, at the close of the brusk orders, was a personal one. It impressed in the wax a low relief of a man gripping the steering oar of a ship. Though the guards might never have seen the seal in use before, they knew it for that of Marcus Optatius Navigatus. Navigatus was head of the Bureau, formally the equal of a provincial fiscal officer in authority and informally more powerful than most governors … because he directed men like Aulus Perennius.

Maximus got the point. The helmsman signet smothered his snarl into an engaging grin as he turned from his partner back to the agent. “Hey, just a joke, sir,” he said. “There's just about no traffic through here anyway, except the morning levee and from the courier's entrance.” He gestured with a quick flick of his head. It was more of a nervous mannerism than a direction toward whichever other entrance to the building he meant. “No harm done, hey?”

“There could have been,” said Perennius.

The older guard closed the tablet carefully and offered it back to the agent. “Thank you, sir. Now, if—”

Perennius ignored him. His eyes forced Maximus back a step. The agent's hard voice continued. “It still
could
be, son, couldn't it?
Look
at me, damn you!”

Gaius cleared his throat and laid a hand lightly on his superior's shoulder. He had seen the reaction before, always in rear areas, always in response to someone's attempt to parlay petty authority into injustice. The younger Illyrian knew that it would be to the advantage of everyone if he could calm his protector before matters proceeded further.

For the moment, Perennius noticed Gaius as little as he did the older guard. Maximus squirmed as he met the eyes of the shorter, older man. “Listen, you slimy little thief,” the agent went on in a fierce whisper, “If I ever again hear of you shaking down people on the business of this Bureau, I'll come for you. Do you understand?”

Maximus nodded his head upward in affirmation.

“Do you understand?”
Perennius shouted.

Gaius stepped between the two men. “Say yessir, you damned fool!” he snapped to the guard. “And you better mean it, because
he
does. Aulus,” he added, turning to Perennius, “you back off, he's not worth it.”

“The gods know
that's
true,” Perennius muttered. He gripped Gaius' shoulder for support and took a shuddering breath.

“Yessir,” said the guard. He could not believe what was happening. He had just enough intellectual control to suppress the desire to grasp his sword hilt. This
couldn't
be happening!

Still touching Gaius, though the support needed was no longer physical, Perennius retrieved his orders from the other guard. “Sorry,” he said to the mail-clad man, “but if I don't cure him, who in blazes will?” He thrust the diploma into his wallet and began to unbuckle his equipment belt. Gaius stepped back and wiped his forehead with the inner hem of his cloak.

“Ah, that's right, sir,” said the older guard as Perennius loosed his shoulder strap, then the waist buckle itself. “We'll return your weapons to you when you leave.”

“Sure, couldn't have me going berserk in Bureau Headquarters, could we?” said the agent with the only smile among the four men. His wallet and purse were hung from a separate, much lighter belt. That saved him the problem of unfastening the hook-mounted scabbards when he disarmed, or handing the sword and dagger over bare to be dulled when somebody inevitably dropped them.

“Ah, sir,” the guard added tentatively, “the pass is for you alone.”

Everyone paused. Perennius laughed abruptly. Maximus flinched away from the sound.

The agent was amused, however. He was not just going through some prelude to the murderous frenzy about which he had joked. Perennius had intended to carry his protégé in to see Navigatus. It would be good for Gaius' career, especially if the emergency summons meant the Director might need Perennius' gratitude. Under normal circumstances, the agent could have squared the guards easily enough and taken Gaius into the building. He did not see any practical way of doing that now that he had thrown a wholly unnecessary scene. The guards might be willing to compromise—Maximus looked both confused and terrified—but Perennius' own sense of propriety would not permit him to openly proclaim himself an idiot.

“You know,” the agent said as he gave his sword and dagger to the younger guard, “there's times that even I think I've been on the job too long. The only problem is that when I go on leave, I get wound up even tighter.” He grinned and added, “Don't know what the cure is.” But he did know, they all knew that death was the cure for men in whom frustration and violence mounted higher and higher.

“Well, I'll wait out here,” Gaius said. He was a good kid, prideful but not ambitious enough for his own good. It had probably not occurred to him that he was missing the chance of a real career boost. “Or look, there's a tavern right there—” he thumbed toward the end of the court. “Look me up when you're done with your interview.”

Perennius glanced first at the westering sun, then back to the younger man. Everybody in a cathouse this close to Headquarters was probably an informer or a spy in addition to their other duties. Gaius was the friendly sort who tended to be loose-lipped when he had a cup or two in him or was dipping his wick. Perennius could not imagine that such talk would do any intrinsic harm, but it would get back to the Bureau for sure and Internal Security would drop on the kid like an obelisk. “Look,” the veteran agent said, “why don't you head straight to the Transient Barracks and make sure they've assigned us decent accommodations. There's a nice bath attached to the barracks. I'll meet you there, soon as I can—and there's shops in the bathhouse, better wine than they'll serve around here.”