Chương 107: 98. Ichni

"One could mistake the silence for peace. It is not peace. It is only that the noise has been gathered somewhere you cannot see." — Codex of the Long Watch, Watcher's Commentary Arthur had been thinking about Steve's question regarding the lack of fires, and the thought had been bothering him more and more. During the three hours of his second watch, he had not heard a single living thing move in the brush. He handed the watch over to Donna, who had come up to stand behind him, looking out at the water as well.

The sea was a flat black sheet going grey along its far edge, and the heavy sound of the swell was the only noise left on the coast.

"Get a few hours," Donna said, her eyes still staring out at the water.

"We can start a little late today. We made good time yesterday." When he woke, the sun had just started to add some warmth to the morning air.

"Sleep well?" Sarah asked, passing him a canteen.

"As well as one could in twenty kilos of iron plate," Arthur said, rolling his neck until a joint popped. They were back on the road south before long. The fresh bread had already gone a little hard, and Arthur chewed his portion slowly as he walked. The villas were sparse now, and the landscape opened up into much older country, marked by terraces of ancient olives and the grey, twisted skeletons of untended vines.

The asphalt climbed a little higher, and the sea fell away to their right, bright and completely empty all the way to the blue haze of the horizon. Donna was walking a few metres ahead of the line, her eyes scanning the road surface rather than the open country around them. After about half a kilometre, she stopped dead and looked around.

"What is it?" Arthur asked, closing the distance.

"Nothing." She crouched down where a dirt farm track met the cracked asphalt, turned a flat stone over with two fingers, and then carefully set it back.

"That is the entire problem. Yesterday we crossed boar sign every half kilometre or so. Churned ground, fresh droppings, the whole lot. I have not seen a single track all morning. No boar, no dog, no wild goat. Nothing has come across this road since the last rain." There are fewer creature signatures in range than there were yesterday, Archie confirmed, his voice dropping coldly into Arthur's mind. Yesterday I held eleven distinct anomalies within a few kilometres of our line.

This morning there is only one reading ahead of us along the coast. The road bent inland and ran them down toward a wide, shallow basin where the land flattened out into the valley floor. Sarah perked up slightly, her eyes scanning the landscape with a look of recognition.

"Anavyssos," she said.

"There were tomato fields all through this basin. My father drove us down to the salt pans on the coast when we were small, and we bought crates of tomatoes off the back of a lorry on the way home." She looked out at the dead, grey vines drooping over their wire trellises.

"People farmed all up through here. There is an old village just above the pans." They came up on the settlement a little after midday. The village was nothing more than a dozen stone houses and a small chapel strung along a single, rising lane. The whitewash on the walls had gone a dull grey, and the wooden shutters were hanging open on rusted hinges. Nothing moved anywhere in the midday heat.

"Stay on the lane," Donna said, her voice dropping as she loosened the strap on the Ravener axe. They moved up the asphalt slowly, keeping to the centre of the lane. The first house they passed had its front door wide open. Inside, on a wooden table thick with flies, lay what looked like the dried remains of a family meal. A clay pot lay broken near the hearth, and a child's leather sandal lay on its side near a chair, as though it had come off in a hurry and nobody had stopped to pick it up.

Donna stood in the doorway, her shoulder pressed against the frame as she evaluated the interior. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"Nobody packed," she said, her eyes tracking the room with their customary precision.

"Look at it. When people run from trouble, they take three things before anything else. They take food, water and their shoes." She nodded at the solitary sandal on the floor, then at a row of heavy work boots still lined up neatly under the window and the full water jugs sitting on the counter.

"A flight is easy to read. You can measure the level of panic by what is missing from a room. Here, absolutely nothing is missing. The food is still on the table, the water is in the jars, and the shoes are by the door." Steve had already moved to the next house along the narrow street. The door on this one was not left swinging open; it had been violently forced. The timber frame was completely split along the jamb right where the heavy iron bolt had sat.

"That came from the outside," Arthur said, stepping up behind him. He laid his thumb against the jagged, splintered wood. The grain had split clean inward under blows, the unmistakable work of someone who knew exactly where a door structure was weak and had wasted no effort anywhere else. Inside, the hatch to the under-floor store was thrown back, the short ladder still leading down into the pitch blackness. Somebody had gone down and come up again.

They had known that people hide under the floorboards when they are terrified, and they had taken the time to look. They found a body at the top of the lane, lying right in the open doorway of the small chapel, and Sarah was crouched beside it before the rest of them had even closed the distance.

"Days," she said, her tone flat and detached.

"Four, perhaps five, in this heat." She held two fingers near the side of the skull, careful not to touch the skin.

"This is what killed him. One impact, just left of the crown, from a flat, heavy edge. The bone is driven straight inward." She sat back on her heels, looking up at Arthur.

"This is definitely not a creature. A tusk gores and a jaw tears and crushes; a thing big enough to put down a man of this size will stay and feed on what it kills. There are no marks of feeding on the body at all. This was blunt force, delivered from a weapon."

"None of this is done by creatures or monsters," Donna agreed, her eyes scanning the high ridges above the village.

"It is all far too methodical." She gestured toward the empty houses.

"There are no signs of a proper fight, except for this body. No barricades. Nothing was dragged across the lane, no claw marks on the road or doors. This was done by humans." The pronouncement sat heavy in the hot afternoon air.

"But what were they doing here, whoever they are?" Steve asked, his voice a low whisper.

"It is plain that people were taken," Donna said.

"These villagers never fortified the lane, which means they had no warning at all. Whoever did this simply forced the doors one at a time, and in strict order." Donna had walked the entire length of the rising lane and come back, reading the thresholds and the disturbed ground between them. The pattern is consistent with a coordinated entry, Archie said, his clinical voice dropping into Arthur's mind.

"Should we turn back?" Steve said, his hand tightening on his focus rod.

"Go back to Athens and tell the Council there is an organised band working the coast?"

"Three days to walk all the way back, and then what?" Donna asked, turning her sharp gaze onto him.

"We tell the Council and they write it down in a report for Vlachos to look at." She shook her head once.

"And the band is between us and the temple either way. The way behind us is clear, but the road to Sounion runs straight through this country, not around it."

"But why?" Steve was still struggling with the scene around him, his mind trying to find a logical explanation for the empty houses.

"To what purpose? Were these people taken as slaves? As labour? Was this some kind of village war?"

"We don't know, Steve," Sarah said softly, placing a steady hand on his shoulder to ground him. Steve gave a deep sigh and turned back toward the lane, his shoulders tense.

"We go on," Arthur said, his voice dropping into that quiet, firm tone he used when a decision was final.

"We go on as if there are armed people ahead of us, not animals." Donna nodded, her eyes already tracking the ridges.

"No fires from here on out. I will scout well forward, and we do not close on any structure until I have laid eyes on it and come back to report." She looked down the row of open doors one last time.

"And we keep our weapons in our hands, not on our backs." Sarah was the last to leave the chapel step. She reached down and tugged the old man's coat straight where it had bunched up under his torso, an act that changed nothing and was not truly done for him, and then she stood. They went back out of the village exactly as they had come, moving down the rising lane and toward the flat, empty line of the water. A few metres on the road, Steve stopped.

"We should have looked in the chapel cellar," he said.

"What if someone's still down there?"

"Nobody is down there, Steve," Donna said, turning on him. Her hand was wrapped tight around the haft of her axe.

"The hatches in the houses were open. These people knew where to look." They walked on in silence, the sea a flat, blinding sheet to their right. The road was clear, the houses were empty, and the world had never felt so large or so quiet. In this world there were monsters and then there were monsters.