Broken Crescent (23 page)

“Nateblack?”
It was strange the way a foreign mouth chewed up the name. Nate doubted he would have recognized his name spoken by this guy if he didn’t know something of the language. “What kind of name is that?”

“A common name where I come from.”

“Where do you come from?”

Nate thought for a few long moments and said finally, “Not here.”

Question-mark looked back behind him, as if there was a group, out of Nate’s view, that was egging him on. “We want to know if you’re a—” Unknown word. Mutated? Deformed? Gifted? “—ghadi.”

“I’m speaking to you.” Nate shook his head. “I am as much man as you. As your friends. Where I come from, I am not strange.”

“You are a strange ghadi.”

I guess I would be.
Nate knew he was being insulted. He considered telling Question-mark what an asshole he was, but Nate decided that wasn’t the greatest idea right now. Feeding this guy some of his own rotten teeth might make Nate feel better, but he doubted it would make life in the immediate future any easier.

Instead, Nate shook his head and said, “In your sight, perhaps.”

It was hard to tell if his visitor was pleased or disappointed at Nate’s failure to rise to the bait.

“Why did you come here?”

“I was brought here.” Nate looked at Question-mark and asked, “Why did you come here?” Nate still had trouble with tone, and his question came out with English intonation which put stress on the pronoun and raised the tone on the end.

“You speak oddly, ghadi.”

“My name is Nate Black.”

Question-mark chuckled. “There are no names here. Only students and teachers.”

“And ghadi,” Nate said.

Question-mark shook his head and muttered something inscrutable too low for Nate to make out the words. He turned and left Nate alone in his doorless alcove.

See you in class,
Nate thought. Which made him wonder what “class” would be like.

During the night, hedging against depression, Nate made a conscious effort to itemize the things he needed to be thankful for. He was definitely in a better situation than the one he had started out in, and, for whatever reason, the locals on Arthiz’s side of things seemed to think Nate was useful, or at the very least, tolerable.

He wasn’t in a fetid hole, he wasn’t sick anymore, and he was being given a chance to at least establish some sort of status beyond that of an untouchable.

When it came down to it, at this moment he was probably better off than at least half of the population of the world he remembered. He was healthy, had a roof over his head, and was not in immediate danger of being killed.

Of course, the irony was that the improvement in his physical state actually made it easier to indulge in self-pity. He kept thinking of home, and he couldn’t shake it. He tried to sleep, and his mind kept fixating on random memories—the smell of pizza, his sister’s slightly nasal voice, the feel of a keyboard, a paperback book.

It was probably a vain hope, but somehow @, the thing in the darkness, had opened a doorway between Nate’s world and this one. There was no reason to assume that travel was strictly one way. At least, telling himself that helped him sleep.

I
N THE MORNING, Nate was ready for class, or whatever passed for it here. Understanding how this place worked was going to be a necessary step on the long road back to planet Earth, and Nate was willing to learn whatever these people were ready to teach him.

The blue-belted guards woke them and called the acolytes forward. Nate walked with them down a long stone corridor. They walked two abreast, and filed into a large open room filled with ranks of high tables with slightly angled tops. At each table burned a thick black candle and a thinner white candle.

Nate filed in with the group. They kept the order imposed by the location of their beds, and when Nate followed his line, he found himself standing next to one of the tables. At the table was a pen and brush set, and a sheet of parchment.

Glancing around, Nate decided that it had to be “his” desk, because it had been raised about four inches higher than anyone else’s.

This was the point where Nate’s expectations diverged from reality. For about five minutes, he stood there, waiting for someone who looked like an instructor to begin whatever the lesson was supposed to be. When no one entered the room to take on that role, it began to sink in that this “class” wasn’t going to be that straightforward.

Arthiz had dropped Nate into the middle of a situation that resembled something more akin to a medieval devotional ritual. So much so, that Nate began second-guessing the exact meaning of words that, until now, he’d thought he understood in the language.

“Great,” Nate muttered in English. Several people shot him sharp looks, including two of the blue-belts by the door.

Nate looked at his desk, trying to get a feel for what they wanted out of him.

The two candles were obviously different in more than size and color. The white one looked merely utilitarian, and dripped wax over a small brass holder as it gave off a fair bit of light. It looked as if it had been freshly placed here.

The black candle looked ancient. It burned dim and slow, and wouldn’t give off enough light to write by. It was as thick around as Nate’s forearm, and had a line of rectilinear symbols carved near its bottom. The same language that was carved in the skin of the people around him, that had been carved in the base of the ghadi statue.

There was a small ledge at the top of the desk, between the two candles. Resting on the ledge was a rectangular length of inlaid wood. It was about the proportions of a wood ruler, but about five times as thick. The inlay, which seemed to be mother-of-pearl, was a long inscription in more of the rectilinear language.

The inscription took effort to look at. It was as if studying the symbols themselves required physical exertion. Nate remembered the strain of copying the inscription off of the statue.

He scanned the inlay across once and blinked his eyes.

The black candle had guttered out.

Nate looked around, hoping he hadn’t broken some bizarre rule by letting the ritual fire burn out. No one seemed to be paying attention to him. His fellow students were bent over their desks, writing with their brushes. The blue-belts were walking the aisles between the desks, glancing at the progress of the student’s work.

From what Nate could see, everyone was making much better progress than he was. The papers he could see were all covered with writing. His was still blank.

Looking around, though, he did see another student whose candle burned out. The guy took the white candle and used it to reignite the black one. Nate followed suit, thankful he hadn’t trod on another taboo.

Nate’s neighbor happened to be Question-mark. Looking at the guy’s page, Nate saw more of the rectilinear writing. There was also the same kind of inlaid block of wood at the top of Question-mark’s desk.

Nate frowned.

It was obvious now what they wanted from him. And it seemed like so much bullshit. What possibly could be taught to anyone by repeatedly copying one line of text, over and over again? Especially when no one told him what the words he copied actually meant?

Nate picked up the brush and started copying.

It was harder to do than it appeared. Just to hold the figures in mind as he drew them took a serious mental effort. There was something about this language that was different. It tried to hook itself inside his skull, burning itself there. When he finished the last stroke of the brush, he sighed in relief. Like when he copied the inscription on the base of the statue, at the end of the line he was sweating and his hand shook.

He glanced up.

The black candle had guttered out again.

Nate looked at the inscription on the base of the candle and at the lines he had just transcribed. There was a chunk of the inscription that matched what was written on the candle. Nate looked around and saw a few other students relighting their own candles. Once they did, they bent over their paper and started copying again.

Nate relit his black candle and started the copying again. It didn’t get easier the second time. It still was fatiguing to hold the symbols in his head as he drew them, and his hand painted the lines as if he moved the brush through thickening cement.

Before he finished the last symbol of the inscription, Nate glanced up at the black candle. The wick still burned. He completed the last character without looking at the paper. He watched the candle as his brush completed the last stroke.

When the brush left the paper, the flame dimmed, flickered, and winked out.

He’d been told about the Gods’ Language, and read about words that could alter the world around them through their own power. For some reason, though, Nate had always kept in the back of his mind the thought that there must be some other element involved. He had expected there to be some aspect of meditation, mental discipline, some actual material aspect to what was described to him. . . .

He had expected that someone should know what the words actually meant. At the very least, how to pronounce them.

Nate relit the candle.

Up to now, it may have been some sort of coincidence.

He very deliberately copied the inscription a third time, keeping an eye on the black candle.

Again, once the alien words had been written on the page, the flame faded and winked out.

It sank in to him what he’d been told about this language, and the College. No one
needed
to know what these words meant. Rote memorization and repetition was all a mage required. The College itself seemed to discourage any deeper understanding.

How long would someone have to do this before they achieved anything useful?

The “class” lasted for a couple of hours. Nate wasn’t exactly sure, but the timing coincided with the melting of the white candle. The guards began collecting the students’ parchment once the white candle had diminished to about an inch in height. The whole episode felt surreal, as if he had walked into the final exam by accident. He also got the feeling that he didn’t pass. Where most of the students had filled their pages with writing, some continuing on the other side, Nate had barely covered half of his sheet of parchment.

One of the guards pulled the sheet away from him as he was studying his own handiwork.

Nate looked at the model on the inlaid block of wood. What did it
mean
? What was the significance of these symbols that were so hard to transcribe, so hard even to visualize?

Nate needed time to think about what he was looking at.

The guards didn’t give that to him. As soon as they collected the last page from the students, the lead blue-belt brought the butt of his staff down on the stone floor with a resonating crack. Everyone took a sideways step to the left, into the aisles between the desks. Nate followed a half beat after everyone else.

In the moments before they filed out of the room, Nate took the opportunity to look at the model inscription on the desk in front of his own.

The same symbols, it seemed. The same—except for one series of characters. Where Nate’s inscription quoted the string of symbols marking the bottom of his black candle, the guy in front of him had a different sequence. They started moving before Nate could get a glimpse of what was carved in that guy’s candle.

Even so, he had a pretty good idea.