Chương 110: 101. Lytrosis

"When war came we took nine from the burned villages below the pass and kept them through the winter. In spring they went on toward the coast, and I gave each of them bread and a blade. I have done this work many times and I have learned not to ask their names. The ones you name are the ones you wait for." — Codex of the Long Watch, Field Observation, 11th Century, Anatolia Sarah went inside first, her hands open and held well away from her sides.

The long house had only a single shuttered window, leaving the interior thick with the heavy stench of unwashed bodies and pervasive fear. Arthur stopped in the doorway; a man of his size clad in heavy iron plate was not what the people inside needed to see coming at them out of the night. There were eight of them, huddled tightly against the back wall, more shapes than distinct faces in the gloom. The nearest, a young man with one eye swollen shut, had stepped in front of the others with his fists half raised.

It was either an act of incredible bravery or total suicide. Sarah spoke softly, her hands still raised, keeping her tone low and measured, the kind used to calm a skittish animal. The young man's fists lowered by degrees, and somewhere behind him in the dark, a woman began to cry.

"I've told them the men are dead," Sarah said over her shoulder.

"All of them. Told them we're not with them."

"Do they believe you?" Arthur asked.

"They're deciding." She crouched down, dropping herself well below the young man's eyeline, and kept talking in that same quiet voice. After a moment, she unhooked the canteen from her hip and set it gently on the floor between them, leaving it there without pushing it any closer. The young man stared at the canteen for a long moment. Then he reached out, picked it up, took a drink and passed it back into the dark behind him. That small, ordinary act of sharing seemed to break the tension holding the room together.

They began to file out into the courtyard one at a time, blinking against the light and staring at the broken bodies of their tormentors. Donna had dragged the corpses near the entrance over to one side. Now, the shifting firelight danced across a macabre pile of bodies. If Arthur didn't know better, he would have thought they had stumbled into some cult's death ritual. Steve remained resting against the low wall where Sarah had left him, his injured leg stretched straight out in front of him.

He watched the captives emerge, his focus rod balanced across his knees, and offered them a small, tired smile as they came out. The last woman to come out stopped abruptly near the threshold. She was maybe in her early twenties, her clothes tattered and hair covered in straw. Arthur followed her gaze and saw she was staring at the body of Drakos. The woman came out slowly and picked her way to where Drakos lay.

She stood over the dead captor unblinking, then gave a shriek and stamped down hard on his ruined chest, and again, and a third time, all the while sobbing. Nobody moved to stop her. When she was finished, she stood there shivering, catching her breath, before she turned and walked back to join the others. The matter was closed. Arthur looked away, focusing on the dying embers of the scattered fire instead. Sarah moved among them, learning their names and healing the ones who needed it.

The questions began as they did with frightened people, in fragments and rooted in fear. Sarah kept her soothing tone and her warm smile.

"It's worse than the one village," she said to Arthur after the group had finally settled in one corner.

"They'd been at this for over three weeks. Bringing people in from all down the coast, a few at a time." Sarah looked over at an older woman who was gently tending to an even older man.

"She says they lost count of how many went on that post. Twenty, maybe twenty-five. Sometimes the mutated creatures came down from the hills faster than the men could put them down."

"They were farming," Steve said quietly, from the wall. He had a hollow look in his eyes. He had been turning the empty village over in his mind since they first walked through it, hunting for the underlying logic behind the silence. Now that the answer had arrived, he clearly hated the maths.

"A human kill is worth three times a beast. Archie told us that back in London." He nodded toward the wooden post out on the threshing floor.

"So you'd think the cold choice, the efficient choice, would be to just put down everyone in that house and take the raw yield. But instead, they were keeping prisoners."

"Because the people are worth more alive," Donna said. She had stepped out of the shadows to stand at the very edge of the firelight, the Ravener held loose in one hand. She had read the setup from the bluff before the first blow was even struck.

"A dead man pays you once. A screaming one keeps pulling the creatures down out of the hills for as long as he lasts."

"And when one breaks, you just fetch another," Sarah said, her voice turning brittle.

"That's the count. Twenty-five people, used up like a torch you hold until it gutters, and then you light a new one." Steve dragged a heavy palm down his face.

"It's grotesque, and it's mathematically sound. Those two things sitting in the same sentence is exactly what I've been failing to stomach since this morning." Killing them outright would waste potential yield, Archie's voice spoke into all their heads at once, entirely unprompted. Keeping the lure alive is the refinement. Kheveth reached it without instruction, and outlasted their cohort by three of your generations. The name landed heavily in the quiet yard and simply sat there. None of them had heard it before.

"Kheveth," Steve repeated, testing the syllables. A candidate line, on a world that is no longer producing data. The floating construct's geometry turned once in the dark. I raise it only because you appear to find the method novel. It is not. Wherever the system reaches, the method is discovered, eventually. The species that discover it early tend to last a little longer, and lose anyway. I have a number of funerals catalogued under it.

"That's a horrible thing to keep a catalogue of," Sarah said, looking up at the space where the construct drifted. I keep a catalogue of everything, Archie said. * The cores were in the big house where Drakos had slept. Donna found the hoard hidden inside a leather grain sack stuffed under the cot and tipped it out onto the table. They counted twenty-nine. They were mostly small and dull, only a hair larger than the fox cores; a season of the coast's creatures rendered down into a rattle of glass.

"Three to each of them," Arthur said, looking down at the table.

"Eight of them, so twenty-four. We keep five. Three each gives them something to trade or build with when they reach a settlement, and five keeps our own equipment rebuild moving."

"We should see the blacksmith once we are back in Athens," Donna agreed. They distributed the stones, three to a person. Sarah explained through the older woman what they were and what could be done with them, watching understanding slowly creep across faces that had not expected to own anything ever again. The young man with the swollen eye held his three cores tightly in a closed fist, pressing them against his chest.

"Tell them to take the equipment too. Some of it is core-bound," Arthur said, with a tilt of his head toward the dead men and the racks of mismatched arms inside the houses.

"The spears, the axes, the armour; whatever is sound. It's too low-level for us, and the road they're walking isn't a kind one." Sarah translated for them. After a long moment of hesitation, the young man tucked his three cores carefully into a pocket, walked over to the nearest fallen spear, and picked it up. The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

* They slept in the smallest of the houses, the one furthest from the bodies, with Donna taking first watch at the window and the door barred from the inside. The freed slept in their own house across the yard with the lamps lit and the captors' weapons within reach. Arthur could hear low voices murmuring in the night, but the voices were not afraid, only awake. Steve could not get comfortable. He turned against the wall, hissed in discomfort, and shifted back.

"It's the leg," he said to nobody in particular.

"Both legs, technically. One's got a hole in it, and the other's been compensating for it so hard it's staging a protest."

"You could try not being shot next time," Donna said from the window, without turning around.

"I'll add it to the list. Just under 'don't let Donna miss a bowman.'""I didn't miss him. I deprioritised him."

"That's a very expensive word for my thigh." Sarah had run her Ether through him right before bed, easing the worst of the strain.

"It will be almost fully healed by morning," she said.

"One more session before we leave, and you'll be hopping all the way to Sounion."

"That reminds me of something," Donna said, her eyes still scanning the dark outside.

"The arrows should have done a lot more damage. Archie, what levels were the bowmen?" A level twelve and a level fourteen, Archie responded.

"That is actually a good point," Steve said, forgetting his pain for a moment.

"Arthur's plate is barely even scratched. Even for me, I would have expected the arrow to punch all the way through my thigh."

"High-level bowmen, shoddy equipment," Arthur murmured from the dark corner.

"If you go find that bow tomorrow, I'm willing to bet you'll find a normal, mundane weapon."

"Good for us, I suppose."

"We should spend the attribute points before we sleep," Donna said, her eyes fixed on the window.

"Walking up to a node with banked points would be stupid." Nobody argued, and Arthur went first, as was becoming the custom. He fed two points into Strength, two into Constitution, and the last two into Acuity.

"Hold on there, mate. Acuity?" Steve had his ledger open, his leg apparently feeling fine enough for him to track the numbers.

"Counterforce Plant," Arthur replied simply.

"That skill packs a serious punch, and Acuity gives me the Ether reserve to use it more."

"Hmmm. Yeah, I suppose that does make sense," Steve said. The restructuring moved through Arthur in the small, deep tightenings he had stopped flinching at, the dirt floor suddenly feeling a fraction more certain under his boots. ARTHUR ASHWORTH — L19: STR 32 | DEX 15 | CON 31 | ACU 8 | RES 10 Donna split hers without comment, as was her way: one to Strength, one to Dexterity, one to Constitution, and three to Acuity.

"Threshold Drive," she said before anyone could ask.

"Need more juice to run it longer." DONNA CALLAS — L19: STR 20 | DEX 36 | CON 22 | ACU 10 | RES 8 Steve went next. He allocated two into Acuity, one into Strength, and one into Dexterity.

"So I can carry a bag and outrun a second arrow. Ideally in that order." He paused, looking down at the remaining tally.

"Alright, now for the big one. Resonance threshold at twenty-five. Let's see what the fuss is about." The last two points went into Resistance, and for a moment, nothing happened. Then his eyes became unfocused and his fingers started to twitch.

"Well, there we go. At least now we know something is happening," Donna said, looking over from her post. The twitching quickly spread from Steve's fingers to his major muscle groups. For about five minutes, he sat against the stone wall, jerking and spasming as if his limbs were being operated by a drunk puppeteer. When his eyes finally focused again, he blinked, looking over at the three of them watching him anxiously.

"Steve?" Sarah asked.

"I'm fine. Better than fine," he said, his breathing leveling out.

"I think I just stopped doing something I've been doing since Level five." He wrote a line in the ledger and underlined it with a firm stroke.

"I never noticed the constant effort of controlling Ether," he said, manifesting a perfectly stable, glowing ball of Ether in his palms.

"It's gone. I feel like I could thread a needle with it." STEVE PARR — L19: STR 8 | DEX 8 | CON 15 | ACU 40 | RES 25"Intuitive Channeling," Archie added, "Your Matrix has learned your patterns well enough that it no longer waits for your explicit instruction. The technique will engage entirely on the thought. Do not mistake that for it being free, however." Sarah went last. She put one into Strength and three into Acuity.

"Steve was right about the bag," she murmured.

"Walking everywhere with gear this heavy is a chore." The last two went into Constitution, breaching the twenty-five-point threshold for her. Arthur moved instantly, stepping next to her and catching her before she could collapse to the floor. Her entire body had gone rigid, her muscles tightening as the system rewrote the tissue. He laid her down gently on the blankets, and they all waited in silence for the restructuring to run its course.

"If you think about it, it's remarkable how calm we all are," Steve said, watching the process.

"I remember the absolute panic of the first threshold." After about five minutes, Sarah gasped for breath and sat bolt upright. She pressed a palm flat against her own sternum, reading her internal state the same way she read everyone else's.

"Denser," she said, her voice quiet.

"Everything pulled in by a fraction. But it is not the same as Arthur's." She turned her hand over, studying her skin.

"Arthur's felt like he had been bolstered from the inside after his Constitution breakthrough. I feel like I've simply been fine-tuned." She paused, listening to the flow of her system.

"My reserves are filling faster. The Ether I spent on healing Steve's leg is coming back in a torrent. This is going to be useful." SARAH VASSILOU — L18: STR 8 | DEX 8 | CON 25 | ACU 23 | RES 26"Good," Donna said to the window, her gaze never shifting from the dark courtyard outside.

"Now sleep." Across the darkness, Arthur felt the weight of the day leave him by inches. The last thing he registered before sleep finally took him was Archie's geometry holding a slow, patient rotation by the cold hearth, keeping a watch of its own. * In the morning the freed gathered in the yard with their cores and their borrowed spears.

They would make their way to the nearest standing settlement, a day and a bit up the valley, where some of them had kin and the rest would be taken in because that was what was done now. The thank-yous were tearful and full of hope. The older woman held both of Sarah's hands and said a great deal; Sarah said a great deal in turn. Panagía mou, the woman kept saying, and na 'ste kalá, be well, all of you, be well.

Before turning away she put her palm flat against Arthur's breastplate as though blessing the metal itself. The young man came last. He spoke no English and Arthur spoke no Greek, so he gripped Arthur's forearm, looked into his eyes, nodded and let go. As far as Arthur could tell, it was Greek for "Be seeing you, mate." Then they gathered up their new equipment, went up the lane and over the rise and were gone. After watching the last of them disappear, the four of them shouldered their own packs and turned south.

"What's the rule for undead? Are there undead?" Steve was asking Archie.

"We are leaving a lot of bodies in the open." From up ahead, Arthur didn't hear Archie respond. * Steve had stopped mentioning his leg, a detail Sarah noted with quiet satisfaction but chose to leave unsaid. The day grew warm, the coastal road stretching out entirely empty ahead of them. Ever since they had reached the prisoner camp, Arthur had been feeling the familiar, persistent tug of a node behind his eyes, a steady pressure pulling him toward the coast.

They rounded the last great shoulder of the headland a little before midday. The cape ran out before them into the open water, a long, pale spur of rock hemmed in by the sea on three sides. On the very point of the ridge, lifted high against the blank blue of the sky, stood the columns. Even ruined, even from this distance, the temple held the eye, positioned perfectly above the drop where the land simply stopped and the horizon kept going on forever. The ancient white marble had turned a deep gold in the high sun.

Below the ridge, the cliffs fell straight away to water so clear that the submerged rocks showed through, dark and jagged far below. Steve stopped dead on the road.

"Sounion," he said. Arthur saw Donna loosen the Ravener in her grip, adjusting her stance even as he brought out his own shield, letting the weight of the iron settle against his arm. THE ETHER ATLAS: FIELD NOTES OF STEVEN PARR The Attic coast THE LIVING LARDER I have spent the morning trying to file what we found, and the only honest place to file it is here, against my own name, because I got the model wrong. I assumed the cruelty was the point.

That a man who ties people to a post does it because he is the kind of man who ties people to posts, and the cores are an excuse he tells himself. That is the comfortable reading. It lets you keep the cruel and the rational in separate boxes. The boxes do not hold. The post is not an indulgence. It is infrastructure. A dead captive pays a fixed yield once, three times a beast and finished.

A living one is a renewable draw: held in the open, screaming, it pulls the saturated fauna down out of the hills onto ground you have chosen, for as long as it can make a sound. You are no longer harvesting people. You are using people to harvest the country, and harvesting the country does not run out as a body does. So you keep them fed enough to scream and replace them when they break, and you have turned a massacre into husbandry. Twenty-five went on that post.

The number is not a measure of how angry the men were. It is a measure of how long the herd was kept. Archie did not blink at any of it. He gave it a name from a world that is gone and told me the early adopters last slightly longer and die anyway. I have catalogued a great many human monstrosities in my career and consoled myself that they were aberrations, failures of an otherwise upward machine. I am no longer sure the machine has a direction.

I think it has an appetite, and the only question it ever asks is whether you will feed it with your neighbours or refuse and be eaten in their place. ✎ I thought the horror was that men could do this. The horror is that the arithmetic is correct, and the system is the kind of thing that rewards getting the arithmetic right.