Broken Crescent (38 page)

The man’s body jerked as all his muscles tensed. Wisps of smoke came from the torc around his neck, and Kavish began to smell burning flesh.

“Don’t touch him,” Kavish said, too late.

Three soldiers, seeing one of their own in trouble, reached out to grab him and calm the seizure. It was the last thing they did. Touching the affected body sent a jolt through the men, sending their bodies into spasms. After a moment, all of them collapsed.

The skin under the torc was completely black.

Victory no longer seemed as certain.

And, in the distance, Kavish began to hear the screaming of his men.

M
ORE THAN ONCE Nate wanted to know exactly what the ghadi were thinking. In his more philosophical moments, he wondered
how
they were thinking. Language was such an intimate part of Nate’s mindscape, he couldn’t conceive of any sort of mental dialogue without it. Somehow, though, ghadi had managed to evolve communication, even a culture, without it.

Every evening Nate watched as the ghadi gathered by the pit of their dead. He had first thought that it was simply some meaningless ritual, a phantom pain from an amputated culture. But there was more to it. Each time, a ghadi or a set of ghadi would stand before the audience and dance.

The first time, Nate didn’t pay attention until the sound startled him. He peeked out of the hut to see two dancers circling the pit, and the seated ghadi clapping out a beat. The sound of the beat was startling after seeing the ghadi as silent and ghostlike.

The dance was stylized, the movements exaggerated, the poses reminiscent of the bas-reliefs he had seen. The dancers moving together, then retreating without touching. It was clear that the dancers were acting out something. What, Nate wasn’t sure. He had the feeling that he was looking at some sort of kinetic shorthand, where a single gesture stood in for a whole series of movements.

Perhaps the most disturbing element was the expressions the dancers wore. It was the first time Nate had seen a ghadi face showing an aspect more than shaded neutrality, and the passion they revealed was alien and frightening. One dancer’s face was frozen in a grimace of pure fury, the other in a grin so cadaverous that it was worthy of death itself.

Nate noticed one member of the audience—Bill, it was becoming easier for Nate to tell individual ghadi apart—was doing more than clapping a beat. He was whistling and grunting, adding a surreal music to the performance.

Nate realized that the ghadi didn’t lose language. They might have lost speech, and writing, and words. But looking at the performance, Nate knew that as much information was passing between the performers and the audience as did with any storyteller. These people communicated. They had a language.

The ghadi couldn’t speak to him, but they were very accommodating. They brought him food, water, and strong tea. They would watch him, but carefully, at a distance, either trying to stay out of his way, or because they were afraid of him. The only ghadi who would come within a few feet of Nate was Bill. He was certainly the only ghadi willing to touch Nate.

Nate was grateful for the food and the place to sleep, but he knew that something was expected of him. And while he had some idea of the role he was supposed to fill for these people, he didn’t have a clue about the specifics.

So he did what he could under the circumstances.

He studied the golden tablets of the Gods’ Language and hoped that what else he was supposed to do would eventually become apparent.

The ghadi had a substantial supply of paper and books for him to use, all looted from humans at some point. More than enough for his notes. Unfortunately, he had to start from scratch, since his original notes were long gone.

The good news was that his notation scheme was simple enough that it was only a matter of a day’s work to reconstruct the progress he had made before hell broke loose.

After he refreshed himself on what he had learned, he started on the tablets by selecting a spell to copy in his notation—knowing that he would then have to invoke what was etched on the tablet in order to understand what he copied.

The first invocation had to be a trial of faith, trusting the motives of the ghadi who made it, trusting that there were no traps or Trojan horses hidden in the runes.

He moderated the risk somewhat by choosing a short inscription to start, on the theory that the less complex the incantation, the less dangerous it might be. And while he had learned that one spell could invoke another, he thought he had learned enough to tell such a spell by inspection.

However logical he was about it, though, Nate couldn’t avoid the fact that the first tablet he tried to invoke would be a massive leap into the unknown.

Nate sat cross-legged on the ground in front of the hut the ghadi had given him, his notes sprawled around him in a semicircle. Bill watched him from outside Nate’s circle of paper, the ghadi’s minimalist expression could have been fascination, amusement, or concern.

The tablet that Nate had chosen lay on the ground in front of him, polished and shining even after a millennium or two. The runes engraved in its surface were perfect, the lines straight and angles precise, as if it had been machine-made. The runes were large enough to be easily read at arm’s length, larger than most of the other tablets. Even then, the runes covered only half the surface on this side.

Nate glanced up at Bill. The sun was just right, peeking through the canopy, to bounce metallic reflections off the tablet and onto Bill’s face.

“I wish you could talk to me. Tell me what this means to you. Tell me what your myths and history are.” Nate looked down at the tablet. “Tell me if this is going to blow up in my face.”

Nate sucked in a breath.

As far as his experience with the Gods’ Language went, the runes inscribed here required little effort to read. As with any of the spells he had read, he felt some resistance, a force trying to stop him halfway through. But for this spell, that force was a mere token compared to what he had experienced before. Even the simple lighting of a candle required more effort from the caster.

So light was the effort that Nate wasn’t particularly surprised that when he finished casting the spell, there seemed to be no effect whatsoever. No lights, no smoke, nothing bursting into flame. No sound, no movement.

Just Nate, and Bill, and his perimeter of notes rusting in a gentle breeze.

A gentle breeze . . .

Just as Nate noticed it, the soft wind died down, leaving the air as still as it was when he started.
Was that it?

Nate repeated the casting, paying attention to the runes in case he had misread one. When he was finished, the breeze returned briefly.

Nate reached over and wrote down the effect next to his pseudocode copy of the runes. He smiled at Bill. “Well, good news, Bill. I cast this and the universe didn’t implode.”

Nate flipped the tablet over and copied the inscription that was on the back. After coding it in his notes, it became obvious the other side of this particular tablet carried an inscription that had about ninety percent of the same text as the one he had just cast. Except for a few symbols here or there, it was a line-for-line copy.

Nate highlighted the differences, underlining them in his notes.

Feeling a little pride at how well things were going with his first attempts, Nate cast the new spell. As he expected, since the spell was almost the same, the effect was almost the same.

This one required more effort, and when the invocation was complete, Nate got a little more than a gentle breeze. A stiff wind spun a dust devil around him, picking up all his notes and spinning them around in a brief tornado.

Nate sat there and stared as the wind dropped his notes to the ground as it died.

Six symbols . . .
Nate thought,
only six symbols changed. . . .

F
OR THE FIRST time since he had set foot in this world, Nate felt as if he was back in his element. He was hacking code again. For hours at a time, he hunched over columns of symbols he transcribed, making notes, trying to perceive a pattern. Every time fatigue would set in, he would have some insight that would be just enough to keep him going.

He didn’t have electricity or Mountain Dew, but he had the glowing rock he had taken from the tunnels, and he had the tea the ghadi brewed. So he was able to work long hours into the night.

Around him, the ghadi went on with their lives. They went out and gathered food, their children played, and they sat around the pit and danced their storied dances. Nate paid them little attention. If Bill didn’t bring him fruits and the occasional small roast animal, Nate might not have eaten at all.

There was a nearly inevitable logic to the Gods’ Language that slowly revealed itself to him. He already had notations to begin and end a block of “code” marked by “{” and “}.” There was another pair of symbols, square brackets in Nate’s notes, that enclosed what Nate thought of as labels, a string of symbols that named spells, among other things. Using a label, a spell could call another spell, just like a C++ routine calling another procedure. The spell itself could be called by invoking the label alone, as Nate had done in the pit chamber, calling Ghad him/her/ itself.

Also, as with the code Nate was more familiar with, those labels could be the target of some action. The label could simply name an object, like a candle, and the spell could do something
to
the named object rather than trying to invoke it.

By studying the candle spell he had memorized long ago, and the new spells, Nate discovered a difference in notation that specified how such a label was used in a spell. By itself, in isolation, the label was an invocation. Prefaced with another symbol, which Nate inscribed as a tilde in his notes, it became the target of the calling spell.

Studying the difference in the two wind spells, Nate became certain that he was looking at a primer designed by the ancient ghadi. There seemed no other reason to place those two spells together other than to highlight the meaning of the six elements that varied.

By some careful experimentation, Nate identified each element. Each turned out to be the same kind of data. They were three pairs, and each pair symbolized a vector showing magnitude and direction. The magnitude symbol was a raw value, apparently on a logarithmic scale; the direction symbol gave two angular measurements, splitting the 12 bits into two sets of 6 to divide a circle into 2
⁶
segments between five and six degrees wide. All were bracketed by yet another pair of symbols that Nate wrote down as angle brackets, “...,” in his notes.

The three vectors in the spell were simple enough. The first gave the “location” of the target, the source of the wind, the vector pointing from the location of the spell, the angles measured based on the orientation of the spell itself—an interesting consequence being that moving the tablet while he was casting it actually changed the source of the wind.

The second vector was the velocity and direction of the wind. The third was the magnitude and direction of its acceleration. Of course, from what Nate knew about basic physics, if the acceleration vector was not in line with the velocity vector, the accelerated object started going in circles—in the case of the wind spell, you got a whirlwind.

The other consequence, beyond discovering vector notation in the Gods’ Language, was discovering that his hexadecimal notation was wrong. Wrong, at least insofar as it didn’t follow the “natural” ordering the symbols had when representing actual numbers. Perhaps the largest error was the fact that Nate had mislabeled zero. In his notation, zero would have been a blank, which never appeared in his notation. In actuality, zero was the character where all the lines in the grid were “on”;