Broken Crescent (28 page)
“All of them?” Osif asked.
“Yes.”
Bhodan spoke without raising his face. “For what purpose?”
“I am trying to understand what you are teaching me.”
They both nodded, as if they had expected his answer. “Do you know the path you tread?” Bhodan tapped the pages with one of his hooks. “Well trod, by the mad and the dead.”
Nate looked from one to the other, and the expression on both their faces was grave. The fact that Osif didn’t even look satisfied at Nate’s predicament made the atmosphere even more ominous.
“What is it I’ve done? I am supposed to be learning here, that’s how I learn . . .”
Osif tapped the desk. “A single step into the mysteries as an acolyte and you’ve indulged in the most dangerous of heresies.” Nate’s mental translation of heresy was a guess.
“How am I to know what is a heresy—” Nate stumbled over the word, “—and what is not? I was a student, but what you have here is more worship than learning.”
Bhodan leaned back and faced the ceiling. “I wonder sometimes if our patron Arthiz is much wiser or much more foolish than we.”
“Will you at least explain what I did wrong?” Nate asked.
“The College of Man had a purpose once,” Osif said. “Its law was meant to defend man from the mind of the gods.”
“Originally,” Bhodan said. “Much of that law now exists only to serve the College and the scholars within it.”
Osif shook his head. “Staring too deeply into the mysteries will destroy a man and those around him.”
Nate got the vibe. He had screwed up and alienated the only folks on this planet who seemed willing to cut him a break. For all the excuses he might make about no one telling him the rules, he knew it was so much bullshit.
If you thought it was okay, why did you try and hide your notes, huh?
If you thought it was okay, why did you try and hide your notes, huh?
“What do you want me to do?” Nate asked.
“That is our question,” Bhodan said. He pointed a hook at the remains of his face. “This you see before you was payment for a much more minor heresy—valuing the acolytes I taught as more than human ghadi.”
Nate swallowed. “What are you going to do with me?”
“You cannot remain with the acolytes,” Osif said.
“Your influence is disruptive to their study. You would encourage them to gain just enough understanding to destroy themselves. What is it you think our acolytes learn here?”
“I thought—”
“They learn discipline. Self-control. The skill to stay on the path in front of them without losing themselves.”
“However,” Bhodan said, “I cannot be unsure that this is not what Arthiz and the Monarch expected from you.”
“What?”
“We are all heretics here, Nate Black. The existance of this Shadow College is a heresy. You are here not because this—” Bhodan tapped the papers, “violates the laws of the College of Man. You are here because this is dangerous. I suspect you have little idea how dangerous.”
“I have been careful.”
Osif laughed.
“You do not understand.” Bhodan said. “Even a careless thought about the mysteries you have here can kill.”
“I have not been careless.”
Bhodan nodded and waved a hook at Osif. Osif called to the guard by the door, “Bring in the other one.”
Other one?
Nate turned around to face the doorway and saw a pair of blue-belts walking Solis into the room.
What?
“Why is he here?”
“We cannot be careless either,” Bhodan said. “Arthiz may want to see what your curiosity gains. Perhaps he wants a fool to bear the consequences of his own curiosity—but those consequences will begin and end with you. And him.”
Nate shook his head. “Why Solis? He didn’t do anything.”
Osif walked around the edge of the desk. “He saw. He talked to you.”
Solis looked at Nate with fear in his eyes.
“You shouldn’t punish him for something that isn’t his fault.”
“This isn’t punishment,” Osif said, “we are protecting our students from the consequences of your actions.”
A pair of blue-belted guards escorted Nate and a very subdued Solis to a twin of what Nate had been thinking of as the dorm. It was deeper, and aside from being empty, the only major difference between this place and where they housed the students was the presence of a heavy, barred iron door.
When the guards brought them in, a quartet of ghadi was just finishing placing lamps, cots and the few possessions Nate and Solis had been allowed in their dorm rooms.
“Could be worse,” Nate muttered to himself in English as the guards left them alone in the room with the ghadi.
Solis stared at Nate. The look was a dangerous mix of fear and anger.
Guess you have a right to be pissed.
Guess you have a right to be pissed.
“I didn’t intend for you to be caught up in this.”
“Do not talk to me,” Solis said coldly. He walked over and sat on the cot in the alcove where the ghadi had placed his chest and clothing. He picked up the unfinished mask from one of the piles and threw it against the wall.
“Solis—”
“Begone, demon!” Solis shouted at him. “Just by talking you’ve tainted me. I do not want to hear anything more from the Angel of Death.”
“What?”
Solis refued to respond, or even look in his direction.
Nate wasn’t even sure he was translating what Solis had said correctly. Given what little he’d already found out about gods and such, the word Angel could mean Demon or Devil. . . .
Now that Nate thought about it, the word could apply to anything from another world. The more he thought, the more the implications began to sink in. . . .
No, there’s no way . . .
“Solis, look at me.” Nate stepped up, grabbed Solis’ shoulder and turned the man around. “Why did you call me that?”
The fact was, Nate’s old hacker handle, Azrael, wasn’t just a name picked out of a hat or made up at random. The name was specifically a Judaic name for the Angel of Death.
“Don’t touch me!”
Solis cringed and struck out in such desperation that it might have been comical if the blow didn’t lay Nate out on his ass in the aisle.
Solis cringed and struck out in such desperation that it might have been comical if the blow didn’t lay Nate out on his ass in the aisle.
Solis looked down at Nate and the anger seemed to have won out over the fear. “Arthiz might be willing to take the council of Ghad’s own demon. Not me.”
Nate shook his head. It had to be some sort of superstitious nonsense.
Yeah, but why the sudden change of mood—
Yeah, but why the sudden change of mood—
Unless he had heard something from Osif or Bhodan.
You’re being paranoid.
Even as he tried to second-guess himself, he remembered an exchange from when he had arrived here:
Osif: “Do you actually believe that he is who Arthiz thinks—”
Bhodan: “This is not the time. Raise such questions to me, alone.”
Who, exactly did Arthiz think Nate was?
When the College had imprisoned him, he had told them his handle, Azrael. But they wouldn’t know anything about what the name meant.
No, I told the sphere. . . .
What if that golden sphere had “translated” Azrael?
Nate pushed himself up. Solis had turned away again, and Nate decided that pushing him any further wouldn’t be productive. The man was going to be his roommate for who knew how long. If he was lucky things might cool down enough for them to be on speaking terms again.
Nate stood up and brushed stone dust off his robe.
The ghadi, finished with their work, filed by him. When the door opened to let them out, Nate saw a familiar face.
“Yerith!”
“Osif finally agreed to allow me to see you.” Yerith sat on Nate’s cot while he sorted through the items the ghadi had brought him. Solis was a dark silence on the other side of the hall, by the iron door. “It seems that I won’t disrupt the students’ studies now that you are here.”
Nate shook his head. “From one cell to another. It’s all beginning to look the same to me.”
“I’m supposed to take care of you,” Yerith said. “Just let me know and we can arrange to go outside. They just want to keep you from interacting with the students.”
Nate opened his mouth, but he decided it would take too long to explain why supervised, guarded excursions did not exactly make it feel less like a prison. Besides, belief systems aside, the powers that be did have a point. Given Solis’ reaction to him, his isolation might serve his own safety more than the students’. Nate decided to change the subject. “They have you keeping the ghadi here?”
Yerith nodded. “This is a small enclave, made entirely of scholars and acolytes. They have the ghadi to do most of the labor, but they only had acolytes to tend the ghadi. They might be wise in many ways, but they knew little about caring for them.”
“I guess it worked out for you.”
“Your phrases are still strange, Nate Black.”
“I am strange,” Nate said, putting away the last book—the myths that Yerith had given him. “Can you tell me something?”
“What?”
“Do you know any stories about something called ‘The Angel of Death’?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
F
OR CENTURIES after the great war between Mankind and Ghadikan, men worked to rebuild the broken crescent of the world. The College of Man who spoke the Gods’ Language, seeing what had been wrought, closed the tomes that held the most terrible words so that no person who walked the earth might speak them again.
OR CENTURIES after the great war between Mankind and Ghadikan, men worked to rebuild the broken crescent of the world. The College of Man who spoke the Gods’ Language, seeing what had been wrought, closed the tomes that held the most terrible words so that no person who walked the earth might speak them again.
Ghad walked alone between the worlds.
He watched his ghadi enslaved and mute for six centuries. He saw his people broken under the weight of their labor. He felt their bodies consumed by the College of Man who spoke the Gods’ Language.
Ghad saw all this and thought, “How cruel is man to curse a race so, when one word could heal these wounds.” After thinking this, Ghad sat down in the darkness in the center of the world.
He watched as men forced armies of ghadi to dismantle the great temples that once proclaimed Ghad’s glory. He saw the great cities rebuilt to house manlings. He felt man cut forests that Ghad meant to be uncut and move rivers that Ghad meant to be eternal.
Ghad saw all this and thought, “How wasteful is man to destroy such beauty, when one word could serve their needs.” After thinking this, Ghad closed his eyes.
For six centuries more, Ghad listened to man spread across the face of the world as the Ghadikan slowly died. The ghadi could not even give voice to their pain, and this hardened Ghad’s heart with rage.
Ghad thought, “How proud is man to come to this world as a stranger and live now as my ghadi had?”
Ghad decided that man needed to learn humility as Ghad himself had. Ghad wrapped himself in the skin of an old man and walked before the College of Man who spoke the Gods’ Language.
The men of the College trembled because they knew that it was no old man who addressed them.
“How foolish is man?” Ghad asked.
The men of the College trembled and said, “We bow to your power, Ghad of old. We know much, but we cannot answer your question.”
Ghad opened his hand and revealed a book that was not a sixth of the size of the great tomes where the College of Man had written the Gods’ Language. “I created the language you study. I have seen you struggle where one word could ease your labors. Take this gift.”
One wise man asked, “We know your name and who you are. Why should we trust your gift?”
Ghad laughed. “All I offer is knowledge.”
And the men of the College accepted Ghad’s gift.
The words within were indeed more powerful than any man had spoken before. At first, the College of Man reveled in their new power, the youngest among them forgetting the lessons of the war with the ghadi. For, though a word could raise a mountain from which an acolyte could view the world, somewhere else a chasm would open and swallow an innocent town. The College would call forth the rains with a word to make their land fertile, and elsewhere a desert would spread. They could call up a city out of the earth itself, and the ground beneath it, bled of its stone, would swallow it up into mud again.
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