Chương 27: Sacifice

They left at first light. Liam was already waiting, obviously. Mia arrived a minute later, bow strung, moving with the particular quiet of a person who had checked her gear four times and would check it twice more. Jeremy and Ace came together, and Jeremy was carrying a plain wooden shield, mundane, unenhanced, bought cheap off the store that morning.

"You hate shields," Alex said.

"I hate dying more." Jeremy shrugged it higher on his arm.

"Ace made a compelling argument."

"I threatened him," Ace said. They stopped at Chris's tent before they went. His father looked them over, five people about to walk into an enemy fortress, and said very little, and what he did say he said to all of them at once.

"Nothing out there is worth any of you. If it looks wrong, come home." Alex felt the shape of what wasn't said, which was I have already buried one man for standing his ground, and neither of them touched it. One of Cassandra's people walked them out to the treeline and pointed the way with a stick in the dirt. Their map was garbage, a scratched approximation of a place they'd fled in the dark, but the outpost wasn't far and it sat in a direction, and a direction was enough. The savanna made the first stretch easy.

They moved through the same open grass Alex had scouted a lifetime ago, and the wildlife gave them room. Warthogs, mostly, plus the things that hunted warthogs, and Alex ran Identify across a herd out of habit and stopped walking. [Warthog - Level 7] Level seven. Three weeks ago they'd been four. Nothing in this savanna was killing anything to earn that, and the implication sat down hard in his chest. The beasts leveled anyway.

The whole map was climbing on its own, patiently, whether anybody fought or not, and if that was true, then every day they spent behind a wall was a day the world outside got stronger for free. He shared it with the group. Liam turned it into a theory within thirty seconds and Mia turned it into a threat assessment, and both of them were right.

"So the zones we scouted on day three," Mia said quietly, "aren't the zones anymore."

"No."

"Then we should stop calling them anything." She adjusted her grip on the bow.

"We should just assume everything out here is worse than we remember." The beast zones ringed the outposts like a moat, that was the pattern they'd puzzled out, monsters on all four sides with an outpost sitting in the middle of the ring, and crossing one took time and care and a lot of skirting the edges. It took them three hours to reach the far side of theirs, and then the grass thinned, and Alex saw walls. The refugee outpost had died badly.

Blood everywhere, dried black and days old, streaked across timber and packed into the dirt in long drag marks that Alex made himself follow with his eyes all the way to their ends. There were bodies. Not many, and not whole. Bolt marks pocked the inner walls. Arrows still stood in the ground where they'd fallen short. Scorch craters from mana bolts, some of them wide enough that whoever cast them had been panicking. And weapons, everywhere, dropped where hands had stopped holding them. Nobody spoke.

Liam made a small sound and turned away and was sick against a fence post, and no one gave him grief for it. Mia stood very still, taking the whole thing in with an expression that had gone flat and strange. Ace crouched by one of the bodies, checked something with a doctor's hands, and stood back up without saying what she'd found. Jeremy put his shield down and helped Liam up. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Alex looked at a small shoe near the gate and made himself keep looking until he could think again.

"Mia," he said.

"Tracking." She activated it, and her eyes changed, and for a long moment she turned in a slow circle in the middle of the ruin.

"Two trails leaving." Her voice came out sanded down.

"Same direction. One's older. They came back through here more than once."

"Then that's the way." The second beast zone was worse than the first. Deer moved through it, or things shaped like deer, with horns that glowed a faint sick green and a way of turning their heads that suggested more thought than any deer had ever had. Alex tagged one at level nine and quietly readied himself, and nothing happened. The herd watched them walk through and did not so much as shift their weight.

"They're not attacking," Liam whispered.

"I noticed."

"Alex, they're level nine and they're not attacking, that's not, that's, odd" They walked out the other side untouched, and Alex spent the next hour turning it over and getting nowhere. Maybe the beast zones were territorial and they'd stayed politely on some invisible path. Maybe the system had built lanes into its own map for anyone patient enough to find them. Maybe those deer simply hadn't been hungry. He hated all three answers.

Not being attacked when everything in you expects to be attacked, it turned out, was its own specific kind of exhausting. Two hours after that, Mia raised a hand and everyone stopped. The Canifolk outpost sat in a shallow bowl of land ahead, and it was, unmistakably, a fortification, wooden walls thrown up in a rough ring, gates, watch positions. It was also ugly work.

Timber lashed and jammed together with no care for line or fit, gaps where gaps shouldn't be, the whole thing built by hands that understood walls conceptually and had no patience for them. They went to ground behind a rise two hundred meters out. Mia crawled up to the crest, and Alex watched her settle her breathing, and watched the change come over her eyes. Eagle Eye.

"Twenty-five, maybe thirty," she murmured.

"Level eights and nines. No sevens." A pause.

"That's strange. There were sevens in the group that came at us."

"They sent their weakest," Jeremy said.

"Or they've leveled since."

"Either way." She went quiet, scanning, and Alex was about to ask what else she saw when Mia made a sound he had never heard from her, a small, wet, wrong sound, and then she was scrambling backward off the crest on her hands, and then she was on her knees in the grass vomiting everything she had. Everyone moved at once. Ace got to her first, hands on her back, healer's voice already going. Liam hovered uselessly.

Jeremy put himself between them and the outpost with his shield up, because that was who Jeremy was now.

"Mia." Alex crouched in front of her.

"Mia. What's in there?" It took her a full minute. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and looked up at him, and her eyes were red and her voice, when it came, was very level, and the levelness was worse than shaking would have been.

"Bodies. There's a platform in the middle. Wood, raised, they built it." She swallowed.

"The bodies are laid out on it. Arranged. In rows." Nobody said anything.

"Children too," Mia said.

"They put the children in a row." Ace's hand went still on her back.

"They're not eating them." Mia's jaw worked.

"That's what I don't understand. They're not touching them at all, they're just walking around it, back and forth, all of them, like they're waiting for something, like it's a, I don't know what it is, it's a-" She stopped. Started again.

"It's a ceremony. They're doing a ceremony. And they've been doing it a long time, because some of those bodies are old."

"How many," Alex said. His voice sounded strange in his own ears.

"Fifty." Mia looked at him.

"At least fifty. Alex, the group that came to our gate lost twenty. There are fifty people on that platform." The arithmetic landed on all of them at once.

"They've hit other outposts," Jeremy said quietly.

"This isn't about our refugees at all. This is what they do." Alex stood up. He was aware, distantly, of the sound in his own head, a flat white roar that had arrived somewhere around the word children and hadn't left. He was aware of his hands. He was aware that Ace was watching him with a very specific expression, the one she used on patients who were about to do something stupid. Mia got to her feet beside him, and her face had gone somewhere cold and clean.

"I want them dead," she said. Not loudly.

"All of them. Today."

"Yeah," Alex said. He made himself breathe. Made himself sit back down in the grass, because sitting down was the opposite of what every muscle in him wanted, and because Chris had said if it looks wrong, come home, and because he had promised a man in a grave that the count stopped at two.

"Okay," he said.

"Then we do it properly. Sit down, all of you. We're going to need a plan, and I'm going to need every one of you to talk me out of at least three bad ones." Liam sat down slowly, staring at him.

"That's, uh. That's surprisingly self-aware."

"I've been working on it," Alex said, and looked back toward the ugly little fortress full of monsters that stacked children in rows.

"Now let's talk about how to kill twenty-five of them."