He didn't let himself look at Sam at all. He remembered Laonides saying that the hunters preyed on each other, too. If she turns her back on me...
But she wouldn't. Captain Samantha Carter, even under alien influence, was much too smart for that.
"Yo," a shadow said, and Daniel squinted up to see Jack's face haloed by cold blue afternoon light. "Up and at `em. Let's move. I want to find these Dark Company guys before Werewolf Hour."
"Not funny," Daniel sighed.
"Yeah." Jack studied him, then offered him a hand up. Daniel shook his head and managed a smooth, athletic sort of grace coming up - easier than he'd expected, actually. His legs felt steady, and his body centered and running a little hot...
... a little hot, like Sam's.
Oh, God.
Jack was still looking at him, those dark eyes sharp and knowing.
"Tell me," Daniel said, and pointed at his collar.
Jack jerked his chin once. "Coming up on half full. Been rising all afternoon."
He took off his glasses and dug the heels of his hands into his eyesockets until he saw multicolored stars and rockets. Jack looked so tired. It was indecent to feel so damn good.
This shouldn't happen.
"Daniel," Jack said, and he felt the man's hand fall on his shoulder. Couldn't control the flinch. "We're gonna get through this."
"I know." He carefully put his glasses back on again. "I know, Jack."
"You good to go?"
From Jack, that was as good as a three-minute speech, followed by a hug. Daniel gave him a faint, wintry smile - best he could manage, or had since Sha're had been taken away - and left the shelter of the portico to step out into the late-leaning sun.
Jack grabbed his shoulder and yanked him back, off balance, stumbling, a second before an arrow - an arrow - hissed past him to shatter on a conveniently-placed piece of fallen roof.
"Cover!" Jack yelled, and bodily shoved Daniel toward some. "Carter! Down!"
He and Teal'c weren't dropping, though. They were armed and deadly and scanning the ruined buildings facing across from them.
Jack held his fire, even when another volley of arrows cut the air, arched, and fell short. One slid to a stop at his feet.
"Jack?" Daniel asked urgently. Jack shook his head.
"They want to see what kind of firepower we've got. Otherwise they'd have hit us already."
Chess. It had surprised Daniel, how good a player Jack was, but he supposed it shouldn't have; you didn't reach the exalted rank of Colonel without having an advanced grasp of tactics. It was on the tip of his tongue to demand his gun back. Or the knife, the thing inside whispered. Yes. The knife.
He broke out into a cold, trembling sweat as he watched dark shad ows separate themselves from the buildings opposite and step out into the clear daylight.
They wore black tunics - the thick long robes of the tribute sacrifices cut into rough knee-length chitons, tied with rags. A kind of uniform. At least ten, that Daniel could see immediately, all men. They were armed with the familiar bronze daggers, a few with battered swords and spears, and two with homemade bows. The arrows were fire-hardened, carefully shaped sticks.
"Declare yourselfl" one of them yelled. He was young, blond, and either hadn't been here long or wasn't genetically prone to beards. Daniel's stubble was thicker after only - God, had it only been two days? "What world?"
"Earth," Jack said. "Hi. Wanna quit trying to impress us?"
The men exchanged looks, and the two archers lowered their weapons. They kept arrows on the strings, Daniel noticed, and he was pretty sure that they could aim and fire in about the same time it would take Jack to let loose with the MP5.
"The boy spoke of you," the blond said, and took a couple of steps forward. "He said you were friends to him and the girl."
"The boy - ah. Pylades." Jack's expression eased, just a little. "He's okay?"
"We let him pass our ranks. I tried to tell him, but he would not listen." The blond shrugged. "Most abandon their loved ones, when the moon takes them. He was different. The girl - he was determined she would live, even at the cost of his life."
"Where'd he go?"
"To the Temple." The man held out his hand and turned it over, a gesture like pouring something out onto the ground. "A waste. I told him the goddess would slaughter them, but he paid no mind. His sister had a vision, he said. She is a seer."
"You let them go."
"She is a seer. Should I argue with the gods?" He jerked his chin at Jack. "I am called Eseios. I lead the Dark Company."
Daniel stood up, slowly, and saw that Sam was coming out of cover too. Teal'c stayed where he was, statue-still, with his staff weapon raised to fire.
Every one of the men in the black chitons had a fully black stone in their silver collars. Not one of them had bloody hands.
"Two of you may stay," Eseios said, and pointed at Daniel and Sam. "Two must go. It is not safe for you here, past night. This is our hunting ground."
Jack walked down the steps to stand face to face with the man - he was taller, Eseios broader and more muscular.
"We're going to the temple," Jack said. "We're going to take down the Jaffa, find Artemis and kick her snake-infested ass. Want to help?"
Eseios blinked at him, and for a second he looked very young. They all did. Daniel remembered Skaara and the boys on Abydos, training grimly on the Earth weapons to be ready to kill. These young men hadn't even been given that choice.
"You think to destroy a god?" Eseios asked doubtfully.
"Wouldn't be the first time," Jack said. "And if you ask me, looks like this one really needs killing."
Eseios looked at him for a long time, then turned on one callused heel and walked away. When Jack didn't follow, he stopped and made a firm gesture.
"No offense, but we've been offered as much local hospitality as we can stand," Jack said. "Let's talk out here."
"Out here is not safe for you," Eseios said. "Unless you think that your death will accomplish this god-slaying; and I warn you, I have seen a great many men die. She lives yet."
He kept walking. Jack looked at Teal'c. Teal'c gave a little, nearly imperceptible shake of his head.
Jack said, "What the hell," and led them after Eseios.
The Dark Company - a dramatic name for a bunch of ragged, scruffy post-adolescents - took them through a twisting maze of alleys, shattered houses, down into a tunnel lined with brick, tall enough to stand in. Sewers, Daniel thought. He recognized the construction, although it was more advanced than that of ancient Greece; the arches were more Roman in origin. They came out into a kind of underground wheelhouse, round, with a number of entrances like spokes radiating from a central hub. In the center was a bubbling cistem.
"Fresh water," Eseios said, and indicated it. "Drink and wash."
Jack tasted it first, then nodded; they gathered around and scooped up cool, fresh mouthfuls, and Daniel splashed grit from his face and hair. Eseios and his band watched them, then nodded to one of the radiating tunnels. "That way," he said. "Safer."
The tunnels looked the same - mud-colored bricks, tightly sealed. There was a sound of trickling water, and the air felt stale and humid.
They'd only gone about fifty feet down the tunnel when Daniel caught the sound of voices, and looked across at Sam; the glitter of her eyes told him she'd caught it, too. Jack and Teal'c hadn't, yet. The Dark Company was massed in behind them, following close, and there was a sense of heat to them, shimmering invisibly. A kind of magnetic energy Daniel felt himself drawn to.
"Voices, O'Neill," Teal'c said, after another thirty seconds of walking.
"I hear `em."
We heard them first, Daniel thought. It meant his senses were sharpening. He could smell things more clearly now, see better in the dark. Werewolf Hour Jack had been only a little ironic.
Up ahead, there was a shine of orange, flickering light. Torches? It glittered on slick, moist, well-trampled mud, and the voices were clearer.
Men, women, children. Daniel flashed back to the memory of the children in Laonides' dirty temple, their bellies bulging with emptiness, their eyes blank and hungry. Not again.
Eseios, leading them, turned the corner, with Jack and Teal'c behind him, Sam next and Daniel last.
Daniel felt hands fasten over his shoulders, and one covered his mouth before he could do more than suck in a startled breath, and then he was gone, lifted off his feet and carried off. He caught a confused glimpse of the same thing being done to Sam, and felt a rush of fury and despair. Ambush. They had walked right into it.
"Quiet," a whisper said near his ear, and the hands holding him squeezed tighter in emphasis. "If you want to live, quiet."
There wasn't anything he could do about it.
The men carrying him turned a corner, and he lost sight of Jack and Teal'c altogether.
Damn, these guys were good.
Eseios had given absolutely no signs; he'd been relaxed and open, leading the way. Jack had been wary, but wariness wasn't enough; maybe the pain and lack of sleep had compromised him, or maybe it was the collar, sucking away his strength and purpose.
When they'd turned the comer and seen the people crowded into the big room, talking or sitting casually together, Jack had turned back to glance at Daniel and Carter, and found nobody back there except the bearded, grim faces of Eseios's not-very-merry men. Eseios had said from behind them, "Surrender your weapons."
Knives and swords were out, but that didn't matter. Teal'c moved.
Ought to have him teach me that, Jack thought in the second he had to watch Teal'c convert his energy weapon into a blunt-ended staff and sweep it masterfully through the ranks of the Dark Company, sending men flying. Teal'c didn't stop, even as he was completing that move, flowing into something else... Jack lost track, because he swung around, grabbed Eseios and fired two deafening rounds into the ceiling, then put the MP5 to the kid's head.
"Call them off!" he yelled. Eseios didn't struggle; he felt stiff and muscular in Jack's hold. "Dammit! I'll kill you!"
"No you won't," Eseios said. "I have your friends."
"And I'll go find them over your dead body."
He didn't expect to be hit from behind, because after all, the enemies were in front of him, but suddenly there was weight on his back and somebody was screaming in his ear, and the weight was unmistakably female. He staggered. Eseios flowed smoothly out of his grip, turned and with a blindingly fast motion ripped the MP5 out of his hands, reversed it and smashed it with brutal but precise force into Jack's face.
He went down, the woman under him, and rolled off of her to probe at the stunning ache in his cheekbone. Not broken, but damn close.
The woman - very young, only a couple of years older than Iphigenia - glared at him and bounced up to wrap her arms around Eseios, who was still holding the MP5 like a blunt instrument. She was a pretty thing, golden-haired, with a sharp tilt to her chin that made her look like somebody with an opinion and the mind to speak it.
Eseios's attention was focused on Jack with a predator's intensity, but some part of his mind was on the girl, too; his hand kept smoothing over her hair, her shoulders, her back.
His collar was all black, hers pure white.
"My wife," he introduced her. "Briseis. Stay down, friend. We mean you no harm."
Teal'c was still fighting, but they were bringing him down by sheer force of numbers. Some of them looked like they were having a pretty good time - hell, for that matter, so did Teal'c. As Jack watched, one of them finally hit Teal'c in the bend of the knees and sent him crashing down to the floor, and then piled on to keep him down. Somebody produced rope.
"Yeah, I can see that," Jack said, sharp with sarcasm, and probed his nearly-broken cheekbone again. "What the hell is this?"
"Safety," Eseios said somberly. "You will need it, come sunset."
He motioned to his wife, who stepped forward and took Jack's knife out of its sheath, then, doubtfully, the M9 pistol.
"Have you other weapons?" she asked.
"No."
"You lie."
"Search me."
Eseios waved his wife off and did, carefully; he came up with Jack's hideout boot knife, puzzled over the radio in his vest and finally decided it wasn't dangerous. The thick GDO device on Jack's wrist held his attention, too, and he finally took it off.
"Need that," Jack said tersely.
"I will keep it safe." Eseios looked up at the ceiling, as if studying the sky. "We haven't much time."
He squatted down next to Jack - Teal'c was dragged over and deposited at his side - and Briseis followed suit, along with five or six of the other Dark Company goons. The others in this big room -more like a cell, Jack saw now, every exit securely barred - kept to themselves, but nobody looked particularly frightened. They'd seen this happen before.
"You would stand no chance out there at night," Eseios said, and jerked his chin at the outside world. "Only hunters stand a chance, and many of them will not survive the night. You - you would be nothing but meat."
"So what's this?" Jack shot back. "Protective custody?"
"We save those we can."
« by?„
Eseios's eyes turned dark. "Perhaps you are not the only one who hopes to be a godslayer."
Jack understood that look; he'd seen it in the mirror, seen it on Daniel's face as he'd watched Apophis laying possessive hands on his wife. Seen it on Teal'c's face in that dungeon on Chulak as he made the decision to betray his god-king.
Pure, uncomplicated hate.
"I want my people back," Jack said. "Now."
"I don't put wolves among the sheep. Your two will stay with us tonight."
"We'll tie them up. Keep them out of trouble."
"Useless," Eseios countered. "The influence of the goddess gets stronger, the closer you come to the temple. When the moon takes them, they will rip their own flesh to free themselves. You can't stop it. Let them run."
"No."
Briseis, the wife, said, "I watched my brother die, fighting the moon. He had fits, in the end. If he'd run, if he'd obeyed the call, he might have lived. Let them go, if you care for them. In the morning, they will return to you. As Eseios returns to me."
"My people aren't killers."
The two of them sent him identical, pitying looks. "We are all killers," Briseis said, not unkindly. "When you wear the dark moon of Artemis, you can be nothing else. Even those of us without it are capable of killing if we must. As are you, yes?"
Eseios signaled his men, and they all stood with that strange, athletic grace Jack had seen in Carter, was starting to see in Daniel. Eseios bent to kiss his wife.
"We go," he said. "I will look after your friends. See that you look after my wife with the same care."
Briseis laughed. "He well knows I can look after myself."
Discretion was definitely the better part of valor, with Eseios holding the firepower and Teal'c trussed up hand and foot; Jack sat up, wincing at the additional damage inventory, and began working at the knots holding his wrists.
At the far end of the room, Eseios and his guys clanged shut a heavy barred door and fastened it with some kind of flat key - Eseios kissed it and tossed it effortlessly to Briseis, who caught it with the same grace. She slipped it into the neck of her chiton - was that right? Couldn't ask Daniel - where the fabric was held in a criss-cross pattern with strips of fabric. Probably wrong to notice that she wasn't wearing a bra, so Jack decided not to. Notice.
"You keep the key?" he asked her.
Her bright brown eyes sparkled. "If you think to take it and run, you'd be a fool," she said. "Look around you. My husband and his Company have saved almost a hundred thus far, and they fight every morning to stay true to their purpose. Most of them have loved ones here. That helps. But at night... not even I can go out with any security, and Eseios would cut his own throat before harming me, in daylight."
She said it with the calm certainty of a woman in love. Jack didn't dou
bt her; he'd seen it in the other man's expression when they were together. Last time he'd seen something like that, it had been on Daniel's face as he held Sha're in his arms.
This was bound to end just about as badly.
"Look," he said, and succeeded at freeing Teal'c's hands; the Jaffa quickly sat up to finish the job on his feet. "Not that I'm not grateful for all this tender care, but I'm going to have that key, one way or the other."
She raised her eyes from him to stare at someone standing behind him. Jack felt the cold prickle of a knife at the back of his neck.
"You say...?" she asked patiently.
"But not right now," he finished, and then she was all smiles.
"Then come and meet my friends."
No telling how far away they were from Jack and Teal'c; Daniel had lost track somewhere in the twists and turns. He supposed that was deliberate. Somebody had covered his eyes with a tattered rag, at some point, and turned him around in circles to make him dizzy and disoriented. By the time they'd removed the blindfold, he'd been completely lost. No way to figure out which way was back.
At least Sam was with him... although, at the moment, that didn't seem necessarily to be a plus.
"You can't keep us here!" Sam snarled. Daniel winced at the ferocity of it, but he understood it; he felt the same furious energy screaming through his veins. Fighting wasn't just a good idea, it was an imperative. Evidently, the men holding them knew that; they weren't taking any chances, and he hadn't sensed a single opening to exploit. Not that he could, of course. But Sam hadn't been able to break free, either. "Let go or I swear to God I'll"
"Kill us?" The blond, Eseios, stepped around the men holding Sam and considered her for a few seconds with dark, hooded eyes. He looked older now, watchful, tense with control. Like Sam, like Daniel himself, he was starting to feel the tidal pull of the moon. "Are you so dangerous, do you think?" He reached out and put one finger on Sam's moonstone, which was occluded to three-quarters dark. "You have a road to go before you're ready for that, I think."
"Let go!" She twisted furiously, fluidly, but didn't succeed in breaking free. "What did you do with Colonel O'Neill and Teal'c?"
Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon Page 16
