Chương 131: 121. Diórthosi

I kept the ledger for the pass at Kleisoura for thirty-one years and I counted everything through it. Carts, plague summers, the two winters the road stayed shut. I have a number for the men who went up and a number for the men who came down, and the gap between the two numbers is a village. — Codex of the Long Watch, Field Observation, 6th Century, Epirus Arthur swung the courtyard gate through its arc a fourth time and listened for the catch that was no longer there.

He knew the gate was fine, he had fixed it himself. He knew it wouldn't catch, but his hands wanted a job. The rest of him was out on a lane he could not see and on a road he could not walk. The house had arranged itself around the table to wait without once acknowledging that was what they were doing. Footsteps came up the lane and Arthur peeked over the gate. Petros was walking back, his shoulders hunched and feet dragging.

Arthur drew the bolt and stepped back, and the gate took Petros through it without a sound. Petros crossed the yard with his hands in his coat and his face ashen. He slumped down across from Eleni, put both hands flat on the wood and left them there. Nobody asked him anything. He needed the time more than they needed the information.

"They are dead. All nine of them," he said finally, still watching his hands.

"I watched them walk through a door into the ground, and then I knelt down in the dirt and sang with the rest of them while it happened." Sarah reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. Behind her Eleni crossed herself, her lips moving, but did not get up. • • Petros told them about the church in fragments, with long spaces between them. The church on the hill, which was walled and guarded. About the priest in it.

Papa-Damianos, who preached about a king in Arcadia who fed a god human meat and was rewarded instead of struck down. Petros looked at Steve when he came to that part.

"There were names on the wall," Petros said.

"Hundreds. Cut into the stone inside the compound. And under every one, the same word. Anevike. Ascended."

"This story," Donna said, looking at Steve.

"Isn't it the same one you told us at Kastella? When we found the dungeon."

"Mostly." Steve put his pencil down flat on the table.

"The rite Damianos described. The flesh in the meal for Zeus, the change, the mountain." He was choosing his words with care.

"Did he mention what happens after? Anything about the man coming back?"

"Back from what?"

"After the nine years. Did anyone mention a return?"

"No. He talked about Zeus Lykaios, the wolf god, and Mount Lykaion. He tells the people the man who ate the flesh was not cursed, he was lifted." He shook his head.

"Given a better body and set loose on the mountain to walk it mighty and afraid of nothing. And then he points at the hill, at the things standing up on it on two legs, and he tells the mothers those are the ones who went before. Their son did not die. Their son ascended. Go through the door and you go up to join him."

"He left a piece out," Steve said.

"He left out probably the most important part of that story." Steve looked at the room.

"The structure of the legend Damianos told is correct. It's from Pausanias. Book eight. At the sanctuary of Zeus at Lykaion, there was an annual sacrifice where human flesh mixed with the sacrificial flesh."

"The tale goes that the man who ate it became a wolf for nine years." He tapped the pencil once against the table.

"And if he abstained from human flesh for all nine years, he turned back to human. And this part the priest left out conveniently."

"Pausanias even names a man who managed it. A boxer called Damarchus, who came through and went on to win at Olympia."

"So he is manipulating people with half a legend," Donna said.

"The return is half the story. It is the whole point of the story, it is the mercy in it. That is the redemption." Steve raised a finger.

"Damianos preaches the change and buries the return. There is no coming back in his version. In his version, turning into a wolf is the happy ending." He sat back.

"A myth with a way home is a myth about people coming back from something. That defeats the purpose of whatever he is trying to do. Take out the way home and you have something else entirely."

"I saw it," Petros said.

"On two legs, with the sea behind it. Everyone around me dropped onto their knees, weeping, throwing their arms open, calling names up at the hill." He looked at his hands.

"So I went down too. And I stayed down until it was finished. A standing man in that yard would not have walked out." • •"So what is happening exactly? We have a delusional priest and a group of broken people. What is the whole story?" Donna asked.

"Petros, do they ask for something?" Arthur asked, settling back on the chair.

"Do they ask people to give their belongings or food? Something like that."

"What belongings, Re?" Petros shook his head.

"These people are destitute, they have nothing."

"So it's not a scam. What then? Human sacrifice?"

"People walk down that door smiling," Petros said.

"And everybody cries tears of joy, the people, Damianos, Lefteris, all of them. Either all of them are good actors or they are actually happy for the people going down."

"So what, they genuinely believe that these poor sods are being changed into werewolves? And where are these people going down from the church?" Donna asked.

"That would actually be worse than if this was a scam. No reasoning with a lunatic," Arthur said. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Steve was flipping through his notebook. He looked up when he found the page where he had sketched the Kastella dungeon's environs.

"Archie. Is it possible for a dungeon to have two entrances?" It is possible. Higher-level anomalies can have multiple entrances and exits. Some higher-level anomalies could be bigger than your current cities, with multiple ingress and egress points on each floor.

"Then the explanation is simple." Steve nodded.

"We know Kastella overflows, that is where the container yard wolves came from. From what the cult is preaching, they believe people are changing into werewolves. And to do that, these people need to consume flesh and then walk down somewhere." Eleni crossed herself again.

"I would bet there is an opening to Kastella underneath the church. These people are walking into a dungeon, expecting to be changed by it."

"And a mouthful of human tissue from a communion spoon," Sarah said, "does nothing to anybody. Repeated exposure over years might give you the prion disease. Kuru. A single mouthful will have no effect. There is no version where such consumption will make a person strong. It is only a person being eaten, no magic in it."

"Sarah," Eleni gasped." Stamatíste to. Talk respectfully of those gone. You talk like your father sometimes. You are doctor, not God. Respect." Sarah opened her mouth to object, then looked at the horrified face of her mother and thought better of it." Sygnómi," she said softly.

"Then what is it for?" Arthur said.

"Commitment," Sarah said, glancing at her mother again.

"Nine people have now done something so appalling that they cannot undo it and cannot explain it to anyone who was not in the room. Walking through the next door is easier than walking home as the person who did that for nothing." She paused, and her jaw tightened around the next words.

"The flesh is a lock on the front door. It does not transform anyone. It makes sure they do not turn around." A person who has done an irreversible thing will defend the belief that asked it of them.

"Damianos heard the story and misunderstood the subject," Steve said, moving the discussion down a different path.

"The legend is man eats flesh of another and is turned into a wolf. What I suspect is happening here is that a wolf eats a man and becomes more man. The story is inverted."

"Archie. What decides the creature types in an anomaly?" Concentrated Ether will try to recreate creatures that originally inhabited an anomaly. Depending on the concentration of Ether, the anomaly would also replicate other compatible and indigenous forms.

"So what happens if, say, a cave full of goats is turned into an anomaly and then a large group of rabbits go into it? How would the anomaly change?" The anomaly itself will not change. But as it replenishes creatures or creates new ones, it would use the advantages of both the rabbits and goats for these new creatures. I must also add that the example was rather lacklustre.

"I agree," Arthur said with a smile.

"And I also see where Steve is going with this. The reason these wolves from Kastella are more werewolves and less wolves is because the dungeon has been fed humans. So the dungeon is using human traits." Eleni muttered something under her breath and got up from the table. She touched Petros's face one last time and went up the stairs.

"Wolf eats man becomes more man." Steve nodded.

"The inversion of the myth that is being preached."

"And they see these werewolves who look half men and take that as their myth becoming real, not knowing that these are just dungeon creatures mutated on what the dungeon had been fed." Donna smoothed a map in front of her.

"The cart tonight took nine people down that door. Nine that added to the dungeon. The wolves it cannot hold spill out and hit the countryside. Next week there is another cart and it does the same thing." She looked up.

"Every day we leave it, it gets worse at both ends. The dungeon fattens and the coast bleeds."

"The paper on that cart was real." Petros turned his coffee cup.

"Not a forgery I could respect a man for. Somebody in an office with a Council seal is on it, and either he knows what he signs or he has been made a fool." Arthur sat with the problem. Two men had asked him for two things, and both of them started at the Kastella dungeon. Antoniou wanted the spill stopped and the coast quiet. The archbishop wanted the church on the crest ended and his lost sheep walked home before they went through the door. Clear the dungeon and everything stops.

One kill closed the whole account.

"We go in," Arthur said. • •"The cult first or the dungeon?" Donna asked. She was on board.

"Petros. When is the next cart going in?" Arthur asked.

"Next week, from what Lefteris said."

"Then we clear the dungeon first," he went on.

"We go through the main entrance, the one we saw. Clear the thing and then worry about the cult." Steve was already following it further than that.

"If the church door drops into the same space, and it must, then in theory once we clear the dungeon, we can take the second exit, straight into the middle of them." He caught himself.

"In theory."

"If that happens, then it's a gift." Arthur said it plainly.

"It is not the plan."

"Getting into the church is not the hard part in any case," Donna said.

"Petros knows the way. If we wanted the church we would have the church by lunch." She set a finger on Kastella.

"The hard part is at the bottom." Petros pushed his cup away, and the smile was back on his face.

"You say it like it is nothing," he said.

"Easy on the cabbages, the four of you. In, down, kill the god, out in time for the bread."

"He means we are being far too casual about it," Sarah translated.

"Far too casual," Petros agreed. FIELD NOTE OF STEVEN PARR Greece The Redaction Textual criticism was the part of my discipline I was best at and the part I was proudest of. You take a story that survives in forty manuscripts, no two of them alike, and you can build a family tree out of the errors, because errors breed true.

A monk miscopies a line in the dark, and every manuscript descended from his carries the same error, so by mapping the error you can climb back up the tree toward what the author actually wrote before a thousand tired hands wore it down. I taught it as archaeology done on words. Every variant was damage, a step further from the truth, and the job was to scrape the damage off and reach the clean original underneath. I marked students on how ruthlessly they could tell corruption from text.

Tonight a man cut a single sentence out of Pausanias, and I understood I have had the whole model upside down for twenty years. The rite on Lykaion is a circle. A man eats the flesh and is a wolf for nine years, and if he keeps off human flesh for those nine years he will be a man again. Pausanias even hands us the proof of the turning back, a boxer who served his nine years and came home and won at Olympia. The wolf is one sentence. Becoming man again is the other.

The story only carries its meaning because it has both halves. Papa-Damianos kept the first sentence and cut the second, and not because a weary hand dropped it in the copying. He cut it because he stood in front of frightened people and needed the first part to be permanent and glorious, and a story in which the wolf turns back into a grieving man after nine years does not sell a one-way walk down a set of stairs.

So he performed surgery on Pausanias for anaesthetic, and the version he preaches is cleaner and stronger and better built for its purpose than the original ever was. Which forces the question I have spent a career declining to ask. How many of the variants I called corruption were somebody, once, making a story say something that it did not? A myth does not wear smooth by accident like a coin in a pocket.

It is edited, on purpose, by whoever has a use for it, and the original I was trained to dig back toward is only the oldest edit I can still reach. ✎ Could some corruptions I red-pencilled come from men getting what they wanted. Myth does not decay. It is edited for the people it is about to be used on.