Broken Crescent (41 page)

They must have been two or three days behind the attackers when they started. But they began catching up almost immediately. A party that was so large must have had to take a fair bit of time to set up and break camp. Nate’s group had no camp to speak of, and it took Bill only a few minutes to forage something for them to eat when they did rest.

Every day it rained, but it wasn’t enough to erase the swath cut through the forest. Even if the trail completely washed away, they could follow the bodies.

Every day they passed two or three ghadi who hadn’t made it. Some were barely infants.

At each corpse, the ghadi set up a cluster of branches, marking the site. Nate guessed it was for other ghadi, to find the bodies and carry them to the appropriate place.

They had followed for three days, and it seemed that they were within hours of catching up with the stolen ghadi. At the last camp they had found, the ashes were still warm.

Then they found the road.

Nate walked out of the jungle, onto a dirt track that was roughly perpendicular to the direction they were going. It was no wildlife trail. There were ruts from wagon wheels, and Nate saw places where brush had been cleared, and fallen trees had been sawed into pieces to clear the way. The road wasn’t straight, so Nate lost sight of it about a hundred yards before and behind.

However, its message was clear enough. They were back in human territory. It was also clear that the party they were following had taken this road. There was a light rain, and the road was just muddy enough to hold tracks, and little used enough to make it obvious which way they had gone.

Nate looked back into the jungle. The ghadi were so far back that they were barely visible. Nate could just see enough of them to realize that he was the center of attention again. No words, but it was clear that it was Nate’s decision whether they should go on or not.

It would have made sense to turn back at this point. They had walked right into enemy territory, and the gods—or Ghad—only knew how many people they would face at the other end of this road. Nate knew that the people who built this road would not be kindly disposed toward wild ghadi, much less toward Nate, the taboo alien, or Azrael, the instrument of Ghad’s wrath. . . .

“Fuck it,” Nate muttered, waving the ghadi to follow him down the road.

They followed the road, paralleling it about ten yards inside the jungle. The foliage was dense enough to keep them out of sight of the road, while they could still follow it by keeping track of the break in the canopy above it. That worked until they ran out of jungle.

They reached the edge of a clearing in sight of where the stolen ghadi had been taken. To Nate, it looked like something out of the Wild West, a town made up of a dozen low wooden buildings. Beyond the town, Nate saw the ocean, and sitting in a natural bay was a large ship at anchor. The ship had four masts, and looked as if it might actually be larger than the town in front of them.

If there was any question in Nate’s mind that this was where the trail had led them, it didn’t last. Even in the fading evening light, he could see the ghadi from Jane’s village.

The building was next to a stable. In front of the stable was a fenced-in clearing where a few bedraggled horses hung their heads trying to pull grass from the muddy soup in which they stood. Behind that clearing was a structure that seemed to be another stable, with the same tiny windows and same compartmental structure. But when Nate watched for a while, he could see ghadi inside. These weren’t the blank impassive servants Nate had seen serving the College. With these, the wounds were still fresh. Nate could still see the bruises, and the fear in their eyes, even from his spot back in the jungle.

From what Nate could tell, there was only one guard by the ghadi barracks. One bored guy in a long cloak who looked as if he’d rather be inside one of the other buildings.

The stable and the slave house were offset from the other buildings. Nate supposed that the residents here didn’t want to be too close to the animals. That would be an advantage. If they were quiet, there would be less of a chance of an alarm being raised. All they had to do was subdue the one guard.

Nate spent about an hour of gesturing to the others before he was confident that they understood his plan, such as it was.

They would wait until after dark, sneak up to the slave house, free the ghadi, and escape. Nate would take care of the guard.

Nate
hoped
he would take care of the guard.

The problem was to disable him without alerting anyone. There were a lot of things he could do, all of which would be noisy and obvious. However, there was one thing he thought might do it.

The last breakthrough he had in his study was a realization—such as it was—of how the first spell he had learned, the candle-snuffing spell, worked. It had a good deal in common with the wind spells on the tablets. There were just a few more lines whose net effect was to cause air to move away uniformly from a single point.

Centered on a candle, the small instant vacuum snuffed it out.

But it didn’t need to be small.

About an hour after nightfall, Nate led his ghadi down toward the slave house. The single guard was still there, paying more attention to his prisoners than anything else. Nate was able to get down to within fifty feet of the guy before he ran out of fence, and cover.

A horse wandered over and snorted at Nate and the ghadi on the other side of his fence, the only creature to notice them.

Nate quietly spoke the runes of the spell, changing a few of the runes that referred to targeting and magnitude. And a sphere of vacuum ten yards in diameter opened across the field, centered on the spot of ground where the one guard stood. Nate could feel a stiff breeze on his face from the displaced air.

The guard reacted instantaneously, and silently. Eyes wide, he started gasping for breath. He was choking and coughing, the sounds unable to leave his body without air to transmit them. He grabbed his throat and shook his head. For several seconds, the man tried to force himself to breathe, but there was nothing to breathe.

He started to stagger toward the other buildings, but he was already disoriented, and he tripped. He managed to get to his feet and walk another ten feet before he passed out.

It sounded like a quick rush of water when the air raced to fill in the shrinking vacuum.

Nate hunched over and darted toward the guard’s post, which was by an entrance to the slave house. Bill and the Steves followed Nate, Jane went toward the fallen guardsman. When Nate got to the door and realized he only had three ghadi with him, he looked back in time to see Jane holding a knife, crouched over the fallen man. The blade was dark and glistened in the firelight leaking from the other houses.

Nate swallowed.

That wasn’t only bullshit, it was dangerous bullshit. But seeing her crouch over a corpse made Nate feel a little sick.

Nate turned his attention to the door. It was held shut with a heavy latch from the outside, but there wasn’t any lock. Nate lifted the latch and opened the door.

The smell hit him first. The fetid odor rolled out of the open door in a cloud so strong it was almost visible. Filth and shit and death. Blinking through watering eyes, Nate saw the outlines of dozens of naked ghadi packed together in the gloom. More than could have come from Jane’s village, the people here had been collecting ghadi for a while.

The ghadi all stared at him.

Nate stepped back and let Bill and the Steves enter. They didn’t show shock, or disgust, or much of anything. They just took the arms of the prisoners and led them outside.

Nate was relegated to watching as his ghadi somehow indicated to the prisoners that they were to sneak back to the cover of the jungle. In a few moments there was a ragged file of naked ghadi making a crouching retreat toward the trees. There were more of them than Nate imagined. Easily over a hundred. The slave house was long and seemingly endless.

For about ten minutes, it seemed as if they were going to get to slip away without anyone noticing them. Then, with about two thirds of the prisoners out of the slave house, a magnesium glow filled the sky above them. The entire town was suddenly lit brighter than daylight, carving Nate’s shadow as black as the void in the clearing.

Nate turned toward the other buildings and saw about a dozen armed men, centered around a robed figure wearing the mask of a red, howling skull. The masked figure had his arms raised, and his companions did not look happy.

R
ED SKULL SHOUTED something, and the men started running toward the escaping ghadi. Then Skull started gesturing in what must have been another spell.

Things were happening too fast; the armed men were already circling around, blocking the ghadi’s exit toward the jungle. When Skull finished his invocation, Nate felt the footing go soft beneath his feet. Between him and the advancing men, the escaping ghadi fell down as the clearing they ran through became a swamp of mud.

Skull had hit some sort of stride; he was already onto something else, just as Nate gathered his wits enough to respond. Skull had to go, and there was no time to reach the bastard, especially now that he stood calf-deep in mud. No time to pull out his notes. That left the spells he had actually memorized. The candle-snuffing spell would take too long, and only worked at all because of the element of surprise.

But the candle-lighting spell . . .

He hadn’t tried using a vector as a target with this one, but if it worked for the snuffing spell—

Nate didn’t have time to debate with himself. As soon as he had the concept in mind, he launched into the spell. Instead of naming a target, he slipped in a vector pointing from him to Skull.

Skull finished his incantation first, and Nate could feel the mud around his ankles freeze solid. They were all immobilized in front of their attackers. The men had reached the first ghadi and started clubbing them.

Nate finished his spell.

Not only did the spell respond in a logical manner to Nate’s impromptu hacking, his aim was dead-on. Red Skull’s robes caught fire. There was a sudden, keening scream that cut through the chaos. The attackers turned to see Skull trying to bat out the flames with his voluminous sleeves. All that did was ignite the sleeves.

Nate aimed a similar spell down toward his own feet. No flame, but there was a small puff of steam, and the ice weakened enough for him to pull his feet free.

At this point the human attackers realized that one of the ghadi wasn’t actually a ghadi. They ignored the immobile escapees and started heading straight for Nate. Nate took the only escape route he could think of, and darted into the slave house.

That turned out to be a tactical blunder. Nate tripped in the muck that lined the bottom of the slave house and rolled into the wall. He had a brief view of the score of ghadi who still remained before his pursuers slammed the door shut and latched it.