Broken Crescent (25 page)

Yerith shook her head, dissatisfied.

“That is the only answer I can provide you,” Osif said.

As he walked away he turned and told her, “You keep the ghadi well.”

A
FTER A FEW days, Nate was desperate for anything approaching an actual class.

Nate wanted an instructor, a lecture, a textbook, a syllabus, something that gave him some sort of guidance to what they were trying to accomplish. His days were filled with activity that seemed more appropriate to a monastery than a college. They copied their model text, then after a meal they spent as much time chanting and gesturing the same string of—

Nate didn’t even know if “words” was the appropriate term. What they had them memorize was so divorced from context that it could have been language, mathematical symbols, or machine code.

The day would end with all of them standing in a large amphitheater that was open to the sky. The first time Nate had the vain hope that they were going to get their lecture, finally. But after about twenty minutes of sitting in silence with his other classmates, Nate realized that wasn’t going to happen.

He looked at the others and saw that most had their eyes closed, and a few moved their lips as if they were chanting silently. Nate shook his head and rubbed his temples. He wasn’t looking at an institute of learning, he was looking at a place of worship.

By day three, Nate knew two things.

First, he didn’t have the patience for this, and unless these guys radically altered the agenda in the next couple of days, he would probably go nuts.

Second, he still had to go through the motions.

Nate racked his brain trying to think of some way to reconcile those two facts. He needed something to keep the oppressive routine from making him crazy.

Day three ended the same as the first two, with another ritual bath. That marked the end of the regimented part of the day. Nate walked back into what he thought of as the “dorm” with most of his classmates. A few people wandered off toward other areas after the baths.

Nate was tempted to wander off himself, but he deferred his curiosity for when he had a better mental picture of the floor plan here. At the very least, getting lost would be embarrassing. And, with the blue-belted chaperones everywhere, Nate suspected that there were places they didn’t want him to go.

Back in the dorm, Nate stood facing his alcove, mentally exhausted and still trying to figure out what was expected of him. He didn’t see the point of dropping him in here without any instruction at all. Right now he wanted to question Arthiz. Or Bhodan. Or Yerith. Or even Osif, if the guy would lower himself to answer him.

He needed to talk to someone, anyone, at this point.

Nate looked around, and saw Question-mark sitting on the chest at the foot of his own bed. It looked as if he was sewing something.

Nate walked over to Question-mark’s alcove. When he approached, Nate saw that the sewing project was an elaborate mask. It was half complete, the outside a mass of twisted wire forming some sort of superstructure, the inside a layer of quilted padding that Question-mark was busy sewing into place.

“Shall I talk to you?” Nate asked. His language skills still gave him trouble, and the question didn’t come out exactly right.

Question-mark looked up from his mask and looked at Nate with an expression that had become too familiar to Nate—

“You wish to talk to me?”

“I wish to talk to someone.” Nate looked around.

“You are here. You talked to me before.”

“I did,” he answered, looking as if he regretted the decision. He looked down at his project and said. “Then talk to me, ghadi.”

“You know my name.”

“There are no names here.”

“Then what name do you not have?”

He glanced up at Nate, hesitated a moment, then told him, “Solis. But it would not be proper to address me by it.”

“Why not?”

“Do you know where you are?”

“That may be the only thing I do know.” Nate knelt down and looked at Solis. “I am a stranger here. Not just to this place. To everything. I don’t know why I was taken here. I don’t know what I am expected to do here. I don’t know the meaning of anything I have done here.”

Solis stared at him.

“Help me,” Nate said.

The silence was uneasy. For a few long moments, Solis stared at him. Nate was afraid that his fumbling efforts had been pointless.

Finally Solis spoke, his voice a little above a whisper. “If the gods brought you from Outside, the College should have destroyed you. An alien is—” Solis used an unfamiliar word.

“They almost did,” Nate said. “But they seemed to want to question me first.”

“And you have nothing of our ways?”

“When I came here, I didn’t even have the language.”

Solis stood, setting the mask on his bed. “Perhaps we should take a walk.”

Solis led him through several corridors, until they reached open air. They walked through overgrown vines and bushes into a small clearing, and at first Nate thought they had left the underground city completely. However, around the edges of the clearing, Nate could still see stone walls rising above the foliage on every side and they walked past piles of overgrown mossy stone, the remains of an ancient cave-in.

Solis sat on a broken column and looked up at the emerging stars. The clearing was silent except for the sound of insects chirping.

After a long time, Solis said, “Do you know what you are?”

“Just a man,” Nate said, hoping they weren’t going into the deformed ghadi nonsense again.

“You are a stranger.” The way Solis said it, the word carried more sinister connotations. “The College of Man will not abide a stranger. You are a tool of the gods.”

“I could be a tool of your god.”

Solis stared at him. “You are very strange if you think a man can possess a god. Stranger still if you think I am such a man.”

Nate shook his head in frustration. “No, that’s not what I meant—” He was about to add,
“and you know it,”
when he realized that maybe Solis didn’t.

“What else could you possibly mean?”

“Maybe I don’t understand. I come from a different place. A different language. I know what the gods are there. What are the gods here?”

Solis still looked as if he was trying to get his head around the concept.

“How would you explain it to a child?” Nate asked, hoping to glean some information.

Solis nodded. “The world is the gods’ siege-board and we are the stones they play with. They dwell between the worlds, playing their games. Mere men are fortunate if they never attract their attention, or worse, become part of their game.”

“No temples or offerings? No one worships any gods here?”

“No one sane. Long ago, men made offerings to the gods. Longer still, before the—” Solis used a word that Nate couldn’t immediately translate. It was familiar though, from the book of the local mythos that Yerith had given him. It seemed to refer back to the war between the Ghadikhan and Mankind. “—then the ghadi ancestors worshiped such a god. All believed that they might receive some measure of favor.”

“Did they?”

“Any fortune brought by the gods brings sixfold of misfortune with it. Including you, I suspect.”

“Arthiz does not seem to believe I am a misfortune.”

“He may believe that your misfortunes will plague our enemies rather than ourselves.”

“What happened to the men who worshiped the gods?”

“The College of Man,” Solis said.

“What do you believe, Solis? Why are you here?” Nate walked over to a large stone block and sat down himself.

“The College was founded to protect Mankind from the whims of the gods, and the power of the Gods’ Language. It is corrupt now, more interested in serving its own power.”

“And Arthiz would replace it?”

“The Monarch would.”

Nate nodded. For all his hope at progressive reform, it was probably too much to ask for a fundamental revolution spontaneously erupting in a totalitarian dictatorship. Without war or an economic collapse, a factional war was probably all anyone was going to get.

“Can you tell me what we are doing here?” Nate asked.

“You do not know?”

“I was told that I would be taught.”

“That is so.”

“This is . . .” Damn his vocabulary. “This is how we are taught?”

“This is how you become a scholar. This is how you receive the . . .” He used an unfamiliar word, though Nate gathered it was something like “mysteries.”

“Just by repeating things over and over, without guidance?”

“The effect on the world is enough guidance.” Solis touched his forehead where the line of symbols carved its arch above his eye. “To use the Gods’ Language, it must be carved in your mind, and your heart.”

“And skin?”

“So it cannot be taken from you.”

Nate looked at Solis’ face. Darkness had fallen and only a small amount of moonlight leaked through the branches. The scars carved into Solis’ skin raised shadows that made a third of his face an abstract collage of light and dark.

“How does it help you? You can’t read the . . . marks.”

“The marks have their own power, by themselves. If you know its name,” Solis traced the carving on his face with his finger. “You can invoke the whole—” another unfamiliar word,
Series? Sentence? Spell?
“—by calling on its name.”

It sounded more and more like a computer language to Nate. Code a function, then you just have to call it with some parameters to run it. But, instead of residing in some computer memory somewhere, this “language” was physically represented somewhere. Written on paper, inlaid into wood, or carved into someone’s skin.

There actually was a practical reason for the scarification.

“What does that do?” Nate asked.

Solis lowered his fingers. “It is an old spell to purify water. Invoked on the foulest swamp, all disease, poison, and filth sink to the bottom, leaving the clean water on top.”

“Sounds useful.”

Solis frowned. “All the salt in Manhome comes from seawater the College mages purify to irrigate crops.”

“That was what they had in mind for you?”

“That is what I did for them.” Solis shook his head and touched the unblemished part of his face. “You thought me unfinished?”

“Well, I—”

“The College thought me finished.”

Nate didn’t know what to say. He had gotten the guy talking and now Nate was paranoid that somehow he had insulted him. Especially since Solis had gotten Nate’s first impression right on the nose. Nate had thought the guy
was
a work in progress.

“Did they—” Nate started, halting on his imperfect language.

“Did they what?”

“Is that all they wanted from you?”

“All they ever want,” Solis said. “Their acolytes don’t serve to preserve the sacred language, or to honor the mysteries, or to protect Mankind. Their servants are taught just enough to be used. I was recruited into the great College of Man, had this carved in my face, and I was shown how to invoke it. That was all.”

Nate looked back at the now darkened walls that surrounded them. “The College doesn’t do this?” Nate waved back where they had come from.

“Only for those destined to lead the College one day.”

“I see.”

“A strange honor to bestow upon someone such as you,” Solis said. “Appreciate what you are being taught.”