Chương 95: 86. Lykanthropoi

My predecessor seeded warnings into the stories of this region: a king who became a wolf, a hunter torn apart by his own hounds. The stories have outlived him by twenty-six centuries. We taught them to fear the right things, and then we let them believe the fear was entertainment. — Codex of the Long Watch, Watcher's Commentary Their voices announced them before either woman reached the kitchen.

Eleni came down first, drying her hands on her apron as if the conversation upstairs had been one more chore on the morning's list. Sarah followed two steps behind, looking like a woman who had won an argument and was still paying for it.

"I hope that when you have children," Eleni said to Sarah, "they do to you exactly what you do to me." She went to the stove and put the briki on, muttering something that made Petros smile. Sarah took the chair beside Donna.

"She doesn't understand it," she said quietly.

"But she won't stand in our way."

"How much did you tell her?" Donna asked.

"Enough." Eleni came back to the table with a spoon in her hand and laid down her terms in the voice she must once have used on suppliers.

"You will eat before you leave this house. You will be back before dark, all of you. And if my daughter comes home with one scratch on her," the spoon found Arthur, "I will know whose fault it is."

"That's fair," Arthur said.

"Fair," she repeated, like the word had disappointed her, and went back to the stove. The smell of coffee started to climb through the kitchen.

"While we are asking things of you," Steve said when the briki came off the stove.

"The professor you mentioned at dinner. Markopoulos. We met years ago at a conference, and we exchanged a few emails about megalithic construction. I would very much like to talk to him."

"Kostas?" Eleni poured without looking up.

"What does an Englishman want with Kostas?"

"His brain. He knows more about the ancient sites of this country than almost anyone alive."

"Then you will need a whole afternoon and somewhere comfortable to sit, because once Kostas starts, po po po." She set the first cup in front of Yiayia.

"I will speak to him. He comes to the market to argue with the stall keepers. It will not be difficult."

"He has been fighting with mother about her chickpeas since before I was born," Sarah added.

"He has not won once, but he has also not given up."

"He sounds perfect," Steve said, with open delight. The table laughed, even Eleni, briefly, before she remembered she was still angry with all of them. They gave the rest of the day to edges and straps and the hundred small jobs a fight asks for in advance, and went to bed early.

They left while the sky was still grey. At the door Eleni had pushed a cloth bundle of bread and cheese into Sarah's hands and said one thing only. Before dark. The market ground by the old container yard sat empty at that hour, trestles stacked and roped under tarpaulins, the smell of yesterday's fish still present. Beyond it the yard itself rose in walls of rusting steel, containers stacked four and five high, gantry cranes dead against a brightening sky.

Arthur was glad when Donna chose a route that kept them out of the maze. She saw the patrol before any of them. She raised a hand and the party stepped off the road into the gap between two gutted warehouses. They waited in the shadows while six men came up the harbour road in the same deliberate spacing as the night patrol on the walled road. They moved with the ease of a group running a familiar route, but their eyes were sharp and alert.

"We could just talk to them," Sarah breathed.

"They might know the packs better than anyone."

"And they would want to know who we are and what makes us run towards danger," Donna said.

"Then they would want to report to their superiors. We don't give ourselves away unless we have to." They waited in silence for the patrol to turn a corner and then took the road in the other direction, past the last stacked containers and out of the city. They had walked for the better part of an hour when they saw the first signs. The carcass of a dog, dragged a long way by the smear it had left, stripped to the spine. Then the claw marks, four parallel gouges scored on tree trunks.

These were at a height above Arthur's shoulder, and he was not a short man. He measured the spacing of the gouges against his spread hand and put the paw that made them at twice the size of his. A low hill sat off to the left of the road, a stand of pines growing through the collapsed fence of some dead depot. Donna stepped off the tarmac and made for it.

"Up here," she said.

"I want numbers before anything out there wants us."

"Six," she said.

"Three asleep in the shade of that dead lorry, and three more walking a slow circuit around them." She monitored the groups for almost fifteen minutes and then lowered herself.

"The near group is sleeping and the far one is on watch, and I'd put money on them trading over. Similar to the boar packs in Marseille." Wolf was the wrong word and the right one. The shape was wolf, but the scale belonged to something else, bodies the size of calves. The forequarters were heavy out of all proportion, the forelegs too long for a wolf's gait.

The creatures on all fours could have passed for animals from a distance, but every once in a while one of them stood on its hind legs for a breath too long and broke that illusion.

"I can't believe it. Damn werewolves," Arthur said, still staring.

"Lykanthropoi," Steve said.

"Lykos, wolf. Anthropos, man. The word is Greek because the origin story is Greek." He was making quick scribbles in his ledger.

"The first werewolf anyone ever wrote down was a king of Arcadia called Lycaon, maybe three hundred kilometres west of here. Zeus turned him into a wolf as a punishment. There is a fascinating story about it."

"Let's take it slow. We pull the roaming three on ground we choose," Donna said.

"Steve can lure them with a fire lance."

"Whatever happened to nobody swinging first?" Steve asked.

"That was for the looking. We've looked." Donna picked the ground as they came down, a wide stretch of open tarmac at the foot of the rise, with the slope at their backs so nothing could come at them from behind. Sarah took position beside Steve, a few steps behind the line. They have not registered you yet, Archie said. Pack predators of this saturation class probe the formation before they commit, and they do not probe the strongest member. They are also patient.

Steve levelled the rod and sent a lance of flame across the open ground. It struck one of the roaming creatures at the far edge of its circuit, as distant from the sleepers as it was going to get, and the thing howled and went down for a second before coming back up. The howl woke all six. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"Shit," Arthur said, watching every head on the field turn toward them at once. He had a heartbeat to decide. Six of them, loping in from two directions, and if they reached the party together and surrounded it, this turned into a very bad day very quickly.

"Donna, Steve, give it everything. Sarah, you keep Donna and Steve standing. I can take the punishment."

"What do you mean, punishment?" Sarah asked in alarm. The answer she got was Arthur charging out to meet the pack, roaring at the top of his lungs.

"Idiot," Donna said.

"Steve, control first. Once he has their attention I engage. Make the ground between here and the pack difficult." Arthur was less than fifty metres from the pack now, roaring his defiance at creatures that had no business existing. The open ground had become a painting. Thomas Cole's The Destruction, rendered in cracked tarmac, storm-grey light and one man charging into the ruin instead of away from it. He tucked in his shoulder against the shield and collided with the pack.

A battering ram of muscle, tissue and bone. The creature that took the impact flew back, and then the other five fell upon him. He triggered Structural Reinforcement and became the immovable wall he was built to be, and through the hammering he saw Donna already closing the gap. The alpha, a head taller than the rest, did what Petros had warned them about: it reared mid-charge, two hundred kilos of it coming upright onto its hind legs like a man, and the front claws went to work on the shield.

Four strikes landed in under a second. Another four came in from his left and opened shallow gashes along his ribs. He let Structural Reinforcement go before a fourth creature could pile on, ploughed forward behind the shield and turned to face the pack from the far side. Despite everything, he cracked a smile. Steve had a word for this from the other life: tanking. Keep their faces on you while the damage arrives from behind.

He was bleeding along his left side and the next four strikes came down on the shield, and he kept moving, kept shouting, kept their attention. Donna was half a dozen metres behind the pack now. As the next creature reared, Arthur activated Counterforce Plant and took all four swipes square on the shield. He needed the borrowed punch; the hammer alone was lagging behind these things. The strikes went through the shield and settled in him, humming, waiting to be let go. The move cost him.

While he stood and absorbed, a claw from one of the others curved past the rim and raked his forearm. He screamed and brought the hammer down. The blow was meant for the head, and the creature twisted at the last second and took it on the collarbone instead, which changed nothing. The stored charge of four swipes plus his own strength exploded the joint, and the hammer caved in half the ribs below it before sticking fast.

In the same moment Donna reached the back of the pack and burned Threshold Drive, and turned into her telltale flickering self. The axe met the base of a skull and bit shallow. Arthur heard a muffled curse and registered two more strikes landing somewhere behind the wall of bodies, and then a spinal cord gave; the creature managed half a turn before it found itself on the ground, dead.

Arthur put a boot on the dying alpha, wrenched the hammer free and took another blow on the shield as Donna fell on the next one, spending every flicker of the Drive window. A hundred metres back, Steve watched her sprint into the knot of monsters.

"Come on, come on." His hands twitched at his sides. He had to time it right; too early and the changed ground would catch Donna's footing along with theirs. The instant he saw her flicker he released the wave of cold, the same trick he had pulled on the goats in Malta, and the ground between him and the pack turned to half-frozen slick. Sarah was clutching his vest.

"There are too many." Arthur took another four-blow combination on the shield and swung with the stored force of his second Counterforce Plant. The hammer passed through empty air, and the wasted momentum dragged him into a stumble. The creature had thrown itself backward off its own fourth strike, and now he was open, shield out of position, and they made him pay. Three strikes raked his back before he could square up. The vest held against the first two.

The third met the muscle beneath and gouged a chunk of it, and Arthur screamed and took an unsteady step backward. Donna came out of Threshold Drive as her second kill went down hamstrung; it had taken four blows to finish. She rolled left without engaging another. With the technique spent, she needed room to reassess. Three dead. The other three were circling now, two on Arthur, the third advancing on Donna with more caution than anything had shown all morning.

"Donna, go left. Arthur, bait one," Steve shouted. Arthur's forearms were jelly from the absorbed blows and his back was three lines of fire. Being bait sounded like a terrible idea, but Steve would have a plan. He was just less certain his body could afford the part where the plan involved him. He dropped the shield a fraction and gave the nearest creature an opening. It pounced at once, going for his throat, and the shield came back up just in time and the staccato four swipes rang out again.

As the fourth landed and the creature gathered itself to spring away, a concussive blast caught it from behind and threw it back onto the shield. It hit with a heavy clang and stumbled, and Arthur's hammer found its head a heartbeat later. It took a second strike to cave the skull in, but that was a foregone conclusion after the first. Two left, and Steve's blast had bought attention.

The one circling Donna changed tack; unable to pin her down, it broke and loped for the two softer targets standing a hundred metres away. Ten metres in, its feet hit the ice and the lope became an uncontrolled skid. Then three things happened in quick succession. Donna's thrown axe took it in the broad of the back, adding speed to the slide. It reached Steve and Sarah in a tangle of limbs and claws, and before it could right itself Sarah touched its elbow, and her Matrix overload got its second live test.

The creature spasmed and dropped. Then its face froze mid-howl, ice creeping down past the jaw to the neck, and a heartbeat later the whole head shattered. Steve had converged ice and force for the first time. The last creature tried to bolt, only to find Donna planted in its path with the backup crowbar.

"No you don't," she said, and burned Threshold Drive again. Three seconds of her at that speed was the worst thing on the field by a margin, and with the crowbar it was barely enough. The creature turned her first pass, took her second on a forearm that barely buckled, and only lost the exchange when Arthur arrived and put every joule left in him through the hammer and into its knee. It dropped to the height of a kneeling man. The end came soon after.

Then the morning was quiet again, and the only sound was four people breathing hard. ETHER ABSORBED: +2, 520 INTEGRATION: 4, 852 / 2, 688 LEVEL UP: LEVEL 17 INTEGRATION: 2, 164 / 2, 944 ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE: 3 SARAH INTEGRATION: 4, 066 / 2, 440 LEVEL UP: LEVEL 16 INTEGRATION: 1, 626 / 2, 688 ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE: 3 Arthur let the shield fall and went down after it.

His shield arm felt like it had been through a meat tenderiser and sported a bleeding gash besides, and his back was agony, the receding adrenaline making it worse by the second. Through a haze he saw Sarah drop to her knees beside him, and the familiar warmth of her Ether rushed through him, and he closed his eyes and let go.

Arthur came back to find Sarah still beside him, working on his arms. His vest was off, and the fire across his back had banked down to embers.

"How long?" he asked, without making any effort to sit up.

"Not long. Half an hour, maybe," Sarah said in a soothing voice. He looked over to find Donna had taken the harvesting duty, Steve beside her keeping a wary eye on the open ground. Donna came back and sat down next to him.

"Next time you want to play the hero, you give me twenty-four hours' notice. I don't want you going off script like that." Arthur groaned and said nothing.

"When the tactical picture changes, you retreat, regroup and retry," she went on.

"Steve could have iced the ground to cover a withdrawal. Instead you went in with half a plan and half a prayer."

"We found four cores," Steve cut in, in a transparent attempt to change the subject. Donna looked at him, scrunched her face and decided the debrief could wait.

"You mean I found four cores and you pocketed them."

"Tomato, tomahto." I see no reason to use the code word when we are alone, Archie said, his geometry coming into focus above them. Steve realised what he had done and burst out laughing, and the group went with him.

It took another hour and two more passes from Sarah before Arthur felt well enough to walk.

"Weapons are the priority," Donna said.

"These ones are just not cutting it."

"It's the devs telling you something, when the trash mobs start kicking your arse," Steve added with a smile.

"We have six cores now. That's two weapons and an armour upgrade for all of us," Donna said.

"Now we need decent equipment worth putting them in."

"Alright, let's get back and see what we can find," Arthur said, testing his range of motion, which turned out to be awfully limited.

"It's not a muscular injury, Arthur, it's a gash. You don't test your range of motion with three cuts on your back." Sarah pushed more Ether into the muscle.

"Keep your arms down." As they picked up their bags and packed away the food Eleni had given them, Steve muttered something to himself and walked a few paces off. Arthur watched him crouch and examine something on the ground.

"Guys. You should see this." Arthur saw at once what had unsettled him. A line of dried blood and gore ran along a game path, and beyond it more of the same, long smears braiding up through the pine scrub, a dozen trails converging as they climbed. Torn pieces of clothing mingled with the fur. A shoe lay overturned next to what looked like a broken length of deer antler.

"What do you think is up there?" Steve asked, in a hushed voice.