Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon (24 page)

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
doubt 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?"

"Your companions are safe, with the others." Eseios leaned toward
her, looking directly into her eyes. "Safe from us. So they will remain.
Now, you need to give your attention to what will happen to you. It is
very easy to die, tonight."

Daniel felt a hot wave crest over him, and said in a low, dangerous
voice, "Probably easy for you, too."

The man's dark eyes flicked toward him. "Always," he agreed.
"Dying is the simplest thing in this world - what are you called?"

"Daniel."

"Daniel," Eseios repeated slowly. "You have the wolf in you. You
know this?"

"Leave him alone," Sam snapped. "You were talking to me."

"I don't need your protection, Sam."

"The hell you don't!"

And suddenly their anger was directed at each other, sparking and
bright as a cutting edge; if he'd been free of the hands holding him,
Daniel knew he would've been going for her, and her for him. Fists
pounding flesh, breaking bones, blood...

He sucked himself back from the abyss and saw Eseios watching
them with that dark, unsurprised stare.

"You see?" he asked, and quirked pale eyebrows up and down. "So
easy. The goddess will use that against you, be warned. The Company
has learned to be stronger than such things. So must you." He put his
hand on the pommel of the dagger thrust through his rag belt, and
then deliberately took it away. "Sunset is coming, and she will hunt
tonight. If you can remember nothing, remember this: do not go to
her. She will call, but you must stay with us. There is strength in a
pack."