Broken Crescent (16 page)
After that, he timed his explorations carefully.
He left the room at “night” a few hours after her second visit. While there was some variation in the times she came during the day, she never came before Nate woke up in the “morning,” so Nate was sure of something like ten or twelve hours by himself.
After she would leave in the evening, Nate would study for long enough that he was certain that Yerith was no longer in the vicinity, then he would unhook the oil lamp and open the door.
The first few times sent his pulse racing, as if masked acolytes waited in the shadows to pounce on him. It was nerve-racking enough that he confined his first travels to the corridor in the immediate area.
The corridor was stone, with a peaked arch for a roof about fifteen feet above him. Doors like the one to his room were spaced at irregular intervals, though all had been rusted shut. Nate noticed that the face of his door looked no different. When shut, it would appear, at first glance, as frozen and immobile as the rest.
Not far down the hall from his room, Nate discovered what this place was.
Between sets of doors were low, long niches set into the walls. Nate held the oil lamp close and saw a pile of bones.
Catacombs,
Nate thought,
they’re hiding me in a place of the dead.
Nate thought,
they’re hiding me in a place of the dead.
The bones weren’t human. He saw the extra joint in their limbs.
Are these the ghadi?
First the ghadi thought the new creatures brute animals. They kept them as slaves and pets, which amused Ghad. For six hundred years, they used Mankind as slaves, to bear the work that no Ghadi should do. Ghad was pleased with this; he saw it right that his creation should do no mean labor.
“See,” Ghad told Mankin, “Your race is fit for nothing but slaves to my beautiful ghadi.”
However, because the Ghadikan kept Mankind so close, Mankind learned. Mankind learned to speak, to use tools. They learned writing and science. Some were also able to learn the Language of the Gods.
One day the Ghadikan woke up to find their servants had gone. Their food was left uncooked, their crops left unharvested, their palaces left unfinished. So long had they relied on Mankind’s labor that the whole Ghadikan nation ceased to function.
Overnight, it seemed to the Ghadikan, Mankind had raised their own city far from the ghadi, halfway around the great crescent of the world from the farthest ghadi outpost.
This displeased Ghad, and Mankin said, “Why should you fret? Our wager’s half done and your wondrous Ghadikan still rules all the world—except this small bit.”
Ghad knew that Mankin taunted him. So he ordered the Ghadikan to prepare for war.
After the first few days of exploring, Nate realized that it was a good thing he was cautious in his exploration. It was a maze down here. Seemingly endless stone corridors, walls piled with bone, and iron doors—all the same.
One time he passed a door that had frozen partway open, and Nate got a look at what his little cell must have looked like, originally. This room had the same long narrow footprint, but occupying the center of the floor was a marble sarcophagus.
Great,
Nate thought,
I’ve been living in someone’s crypt for the past three months. Damn good thing I’m not superstitious.
Nate thought,
I’ve been living in someone’s crypt for the past three months. Damn good thing I’m not superstitious.
Not long after that, he had to take his journal along with him so he could map out the passages to keep himself from getting lost.
On the page, lines grew from the small box representing his cell, spreading out like a spiderweb. It was clear that there were miles of these passages that twisted and turned in on themselves.
Nate began to think that the only way he’d ever find his way to the surface would be to follow Yerith there.
In the six hundred years that Mankind were slaves, the Ghadikan had grown soft. It took them many years to prepare their war against Man. While the Ghadikan prepared for war, Mankind studied, learning of the world, and of the Language of the Gods.
When Ghad sent his Ghadikan against Man, he was prideful and confident. “See,” he told Mankin, “What a glorious army. Surely nothing could stand before it.”
“Indeed,” Mankin said, “Nothing in the world can stop such a force.”
But Ghad feared, because he knew Mankin taunted him again.
True to Mankin’s word, nothing in the world stopped the mighty army of the Ghadikan. The men of the city, seeing the force upon them, turned to the College of Man who spoke the Gods’ Language.
“Deliver us from this threat,” they pleaded.
The men of the College said, “Long have we studied the Language of the Gods. We have learned much. There are words in it too terrible to be spoken.”
“Please,” said the men of the city, “speak them so we shall be delivered.”
The men of the College, seeing their plight, chose to speak those terrible words.
The Ghadikan did not know that Mankind could speak words of such power. When the great army heard them, it trembled, for those words called stones to fall from the sky. Great boulders, as large as mountains, fell and slew the whole Ghadikan army. The fires of their destruction were so great that the smoke blocked out the sun for sixty years.
One foray, one of the farthest from his cell, brought him into a chamber that was different from any of the others he had seen so far in this labyrinth. It was nearly a half-hour’s walk in a nearly, straight line from his cell. In terms of his map, his cell was near the center of the page, while this place was over the edge of the neighboring page.
It was the terminus of one of the corridors, the first place he had come to that dead-ended rather than looping back on itself, or branching into two or more corridors.
The hall emptied into a cylindrical chamber with a peaked ceiling twice as high as the corridor itself. Stone chairs were carved into the walls, and seated on them were skeletal remains that seemed to be held in place by elaborate suits of armor. The bodies were the alien race, that Nate had now mentally named “ghadi” from the mythos he was reading.
Unlike the living ghadi Nate had seen, these Nate could picture taking part in a great army. As long dead as these ghadi were, they still bore a great fierceness that showed through their expressionless skulls and corroded armor.
Standing, central to the chamber, was an oversized sculpture of a ghadi, resting its gauntleted hands on a massive sword. One foot stood on its helmet as its bare face looked upward—
Waiting for the asteroid to hit? Looking for Ghad? Expecting rain?
At the base of the statue was a plaque. Nate looked at it, hoping for an inscription in the common language that he could try to translate. Instead he saw a rectilinear scratching that was all too familiar.
The same symbols that Nate had seen marking Scarface’s flesh, marking the sphere that had spoken, that Scarface had carved into the doomed guardsman’s chest.
For some reason he couldn’t fathom, the presence of these runes frightened Nate.
“Just symbols,” Nate whispered, trying to talk himself out of the inexplicable reaction. “Just words . . .”
Just another language.
The language of the ghadi, perhaps?
The Language of the Gods?
Nate sat down and took his brush to copy down the symbols so he could study them back in his cell.
For such simple symbols, Nate found it very hard to copy them accurately. It seemed to take all of his concentration to copy each mark. The symbols were all composed of some combination of three horizontal and three vertical lines and half lines. The combinations varied from a single hash mark to something that looked like the Microsoft Windows logo.
Even so, it took all of Nate’s concentration to copy them. The simple transcribing was worse than any of his efforts to translate the common language. By the time he was done, he was covered with sweat and his hand was shaking.
He had a feeling that he had spent far too long here.
He ran back, even though fatigue coursed through his body and his legs felt rubbery.
Nate was back in his cell less than ten minutes when Yerith arrived for her morning visit. When she stared at him, panting and tired, he explained that he had been exercising. If she noticed the fresh ink on his hands, she said nothing about it.
Ghad was not pleased.
Mankin believed that Ghad had suffered enough for his boastfulness. He said, “Let us end this wager now. Look at what we have wrought on this world. Let us not let pride destroy what you have created.”
Ghad cursed his brother. “You have not yet won. Your time is three quarters gone, and your manlings have only one city. They have wrought what destruction they can, but my Ghadikan are still strong. They shall repay your manlings sixtyfold.”
That, the Ghadikan did. No more did they build great cities, or tend the fields. Each ghadi studied the Language of the Gods to learn the words that had delivered such a blow. They learned this and more. They called such plague and destruction on Mankind that those that didn’t die were scattered throughout the countryside.
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