Chương 108: 99. Nemesis

"A predator that looks like one is easy to come to grips with. A maw is always visceral. But candidates will learn soon that not all predators walk on four, and that realisation will change them irrevocably." — Codex of the Long Watch, Watcher's Commentary Donna had stopped abruptly on the road. Arthur watched her put up a hand for them to halt, and his own fingers closed around the haft of the maul out of a habit he no longer had to think about. The afternoon light was gold over the coast.

They had started at first light, and Sounion was somewhere ahead, just past the next major headland. Then he heard it. A scream, thin and human, carried up the road on the dry coastal air.

"What is that?" Steve whispered.

"Someone in trouble," Sarah said, already moving off the tarmac and into the brush.

"Careful," Donna said, her hand still up.

"It could easily be a trap." They went up off the road anyway, because none of them was built to just walk past a scream. Donna led them through the cover, tracking a dry gully under the olives that climbed toward a low bluff. The scream came twice more and then stopped completely, which made the four of them look at each other in the silence. From the top of the bluff, the ground opened before them.

A knot of low stone houses sat below in a rough, defensive ring, and before the structures was an old threshing floor that had been beaten flat into the earth over centuries of seasonal use. Wild pine and dead scrub screened the slope where they lay. They dropped onto their bellies and looked down. The scene on the threshing floor was horrific and bizarre at the same time. Six men in mismatched armour were finishing off a large mutated fox.

This beast was a little larger than the ones the party had already encountered outside Athens. Two more of the creatures lay dead on the dirt nearby. The men worked in tight unison with spears and axes, their movements rehearsed and businesslike. One of them bled from a cut on his forearm and swore about it without much real heat. In the dead centre of the floor, a woman was tied securely to a thick wooden post.

Her wrists were lashed high above her head, her dress was filthy, and her voice had gone completely hoarse, which was why the screaming had stopped. Now, she only whimpered. The fox went down. A man crossed to the post, cut the lashings, and led the woman toward the houses by a cord still knotted at her wrists. She went without resistance, on legs that barely held her. The rest moved among the three carcasses, kneeling and working blades into the chests, obviously looking for cores.

"Here," one called out.

"One." Sarah was crouched low, quietly translating the Greek into English for the others.

"Only one, from three?" another asked, disgusted, his voice carrying easily on the still air.

"I keep this one for my mace, eh," a third said, holding a small shape up to the gold light.

"Put it down. Drakos will open you up himself if you start getting ideas about cores."

"I was joking. Po po. A man cannot joke." The men dragged the dead foxes off toward the stone houses, leaving the floor empty except for the bare wooden post and the splotches of dark stain on the dirt. None of the party said anything for a long time.

"What the hell was that," Steve breathed out finally, his voice shaking slightly.

"They tied a woman to a post in the open," Sarah said, her voice entirely flat.

"Yeah, I saw that as well, but what the bloody hell for? Some kind of ritual?" Steve asked, leaning his forehead against the dirt.

"They were killing the creatures around her. A propitiation, a—""It was not a ritual, Steve." Donna had not taken her eyes off the houses for a second.

"She was alive at the end and they put her back inside. You do not store a sacrifice. Unless you think they were sacrificing the foxes to the woman."

"No. You don't bind a figure you sacrifice to. Then what?"

"She was bait, Steve," Sarah said, turning her head to look at him.

"Live, screaming bait. Like a goat tied to a tree to hunt a tiger."

"I have always found that distasteful," Arthur said, his fingers tightening hard against the dark metal of his maul.

"Cowards who haven't got the stomach to face a predator but want the glory of killing one." It is a rather efficient method for farming cores and Ether, Archie said in their heads.

"How can you say something like that?" Sarah snapped back. Oh, I am not commenting on the morality of it, but the efficacy of it. It does not surprise me. Sentient species have a rather flexible moral compass.

"They are luring creatures into a killing field," Donna continued, her face half-shadowed by the wild pine.

"You stake out something that screams, the screaming pulls the creatures onto open ground you control, and you kill them at your leisure. The woman is the lure. The cores are the prize." She let the realisation sink into the group.

"I think we found the people who emptied that village." Arthur lay in the scrub, trying to work through a version of this in his head where they just walked back down to the road. He found there wasn't one.

"None of us can walk away from this," he said, his voice flat and heavy.

"I know I can't."

"No," Donna said. She was already reading the tactical angles, calculating the single road in and the flat killing ground before the stone houses.

"But I am not going down there blind in daylight. I need the dark, and I need at least an hour to scout the perimeter before we do anything." This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. The sun went into the sea and took the gold light with it, turning the coast to charcoal. They held their position in the olive grove, eating the hard paximadia in silence, saying very little.

When the first cookfires finally bloomed in the ring of houses below, Donna handed Steve her canvas pack and went down into the dark alone. She was gone the better part of an hour. She came back so quietly that Steve startled when her shadow settled back into the dirt beside them.

"The structures are built around a central courtyard," she said, her breath steady.

"The houses ring it completely and the only gap out is the farm track we came in on. They keep the prisoners in a stone house on the far side. I got a clean look when two of them carried food across the floor and opened the door long enough for me to count in the firelight. At least seven people inside. Could be more behind the ones I saw."

"And the guards?" Arthur asked.

"At least nine around the fire and the doorways," Donna said.

"And one more we need to be very careful about. There is a man with a bow sitting on the roof of the first house to the left of the track. He has a direct sightline down the whole courtyard."

"A bow," Arthur said, frowning.

"I don't think we have come across anyone using a bow so far."

"We did see a couple of crossbows back in Marseille. Rémy men had them," Steve said, leaning closer.

"But never a proper bow. Stands to reason, mechanically speaking. You can give pretty much anyone a crossbow and they'll shoot semi-straight within an afternoon. Proper ranged weaponry takes proper training. It's much harder to master than just walloping someone with a stick."

"Are you trying to tell me something, Steve?" Arthur asked.

"Or me?" Donna added with a sharp glint in her eye.

"Ten of them," Sarah said, bringing them back to the reality of the numbers.

"For the four of us, that reads like bad maths."

"Not if we are smart," Donna said, her eyes never leaving the campfires below. Arthur looked down at the flickering orange light in the ring of stone houses, and the decision locked into place in his mind.

"We are not leaving those people in that house," he said, his voice quiet but absolute.

"So either we go in fighting, or we go in to try to talk and hope they listen. Though I don't think I'm willing to just let them walk away after what we saw. I would rather start by talking. It costs us a little surprise, and maybe nothing else."

"It will not work. Men who use people as bait do not hand them back just because strangers ask them nicely." Donna shrugged, her shoulder brushing against the brush.

"But ask. I will not lose a minute of sleep over what comes after they say no to your face."

"Then we build the tactical plan around the talking," Arthur said.

"I will need Sarah with me. They will not speak English and I need the words to land exactly right. Donna?"

"I will be with you as well," Donna said, her fingers tracing a line in the dirt.

"There is no other way into that courtyard, and when I trigger Threshold Drive, I want to be as close to the scum as possible. Every second spent running across open ground is a second of Threshold Drive wasted. You and Sarah walk in and start talking. I will be right at your shoulder, near enough that if the talking fails, I am already inside their defensive line."

"What about me?" Steve asked, leaning forward on his knees.

"You are the surprise." Donna tapped a finger in the dirt, marking the left-hand roof.

"The bow is here. When Arthur starts talking, every single eye, including the bowman's, will go straight to him. You hang a hundred metres back in the dark and close the gap while they are watching the big man. The exact second it goes wrong, you forget everything else, and you put that bowman down before he can pick his targets. Nothing matters more than the man on the roof."

"And if it goes wrong before I can get in range?" Steve asked.

"Then Arthur eats a few arrows reaching the leader," Donna said matter-of-factly.

"He can afford to." Arthur shifted his shield against his spine but didn't argue.

"Sarah, stay right behind Arthur," Donna continued, her voice clipping out the orders.

"Anyone who gets inside your reach, you put down, but you do not chase them. Once we are committed, get into the lee of the left house with a clean line to both of us and keep us standing. Steve joins you the moment the bow is dead, and then you pick them off from the edge. We clear the courtyard from the outside in."

"So," Steve said, hefting the focus rod, "we go down, we say good evening and we stave their heads in if they do not say it back."

"That is the plan," Donna said. * They came into view of the courtyard, the flickers of the central fire stretching their long shadows into the dirt behind them. Arthur walked point, Sarah holding half a step behind his right shoulder and Donna tracking a pace off his left. He kept his hands loose, open and visibly away from the maul. Two men stood waiting at the narrow mouth of the track. High up against the stars, a dark shape on the left-hand roof shifted slightly, then went still.

The moment the two guards at the entrance spotted them, their spears snapped up. One of the men barked a sudden command that cracked cleanly across the open field.

"He wants to know who we are," Sarah said quietly. The second guard spoke, his tone sharper as he aggressively waved the point of his spear.

"He says stop right there. Who are we?"

"Tell them we came to talk," Arthur said, keeping his stride steady.

"And tell them we know about the prisoners." Sarah spoke. Her Greek was faster, harsher and far more biting than the domestic cadence Arthur was used to hearing around Eleni's kitchen table. Two more men stepped out of the dark by the fires to see what the commotion was about. The first spearman jeered an answer back at her.

"He asks who the hell we think we are." She did not wait for Arthur's input. She lifted her chin, her voice cutting through the dark, and Arthur caught a single familiar name in the string of words.

"I told him we are here to talk directly to Drakos," she muttered.

"And to stop wasting our time." The name did something to the guards. One of the men jogged quickly inside the nearest house and returned with a taller figure.

"He asks if we have a death wish," Sarah murmured, translating the new arrival's spit.

"And where we find the nerve."

"Drakos," Arthur repeated, his voice carrying into the centre of the ring. The lead man spat on the earth between them, looked the three of them over once from head to toe and jerked his head toward the inner courtyard. They were escorted past the perimeter and stopped roughly twenty metres from the largest fire. A heavy man sat in a wooden kitchen chair near the flames, with four others standing easy around him.

He was older than the rest, built like a stone wall that had just begun to go soft around the edges, and he looked them over for a long, quiet moment before he spoke in heavily accented English.

"Who the hell are you? You don't look Greek."

"You speak English," Arthur said, his eyes tracking the positions of the men around the fire.

"Good. That makes this easier."

"Easier." Drakos smiled around the word, a gold tooth catching the light.

"The only easy thing tonight, friend, is that you put down all that pretty equipment and take off your clothes, and then you enjoy my hospitality a long, long time."

"About that. We know about the people in the house. You should let them go, before this turns ugly for everyone in the yard."

"You come into my house and threaten me?"

"Call it a negotiation, if it sits better with you." Arthur shrugged.

"They walk out, you walk out. Nobody here has to be carried out." Drakos laughed, a genuine, wheezing chuckle of delight. He said something quick in Greek to the man at his right, and the men around the fire laughed.

"He says, can we believe the balls on this one," Sarah translated, her voice perfectly even.

"Four to one in his own yard, and trying to frighten him." Then Drakos shifted his gaze to Sarah, and his expression changed.

"Hello, koúkla," Drakos said, leaning forward in his chair.

"You are Greek. Good, good." He barked a short phrase to his men, and two of them snickered. Sarah went completely still.

"What did he say," Arthur said, his eyes not moving from Drakos.

"He told them to not hurt me too much," Sarah said, her voice dropping a little.

"He said he would have a use for me."

"Wrong choice, asshole," Arthur exploded forward.