Broken Crescent (44 page)

Walking inside, Bill seemed subdued, even for a ghadi. Even the air was still and quiet, and very cold. It seemed if the atmosphere in this place was fifteen or twenty degrees colder than it was outside in the sun. Nate’s breath fogged in front of him.

The air tasted of something very old.

The room they entered first was obviously not the main entrance. It was small and oddly proportioned, barely ten feet square and twice that high. The ceiling wasn’t flat, but had an uneven shadowed surface as if he was looking up into the base of a flying buttress. There wasn’t much more to see in the light that came in from the doorway. Just two corridors hugging the walls to the left and right, curving into shadow. Bill gestured to the corridor to the right.

“Whatever you say.” Nate pulled his glowing stone from the pouch where he carried it and walked toward the corridor, unwrapping it. The light revealed an arched hallway that followed the outer wall of the tower, sloping gently upward.

Nate walked up the corridor, passing columns and ghadi statuary. The ruin was eerily intact. There seemed to be very little damage from whatever disaster had blown the top off this tower. He stopped and studied one of the walls.

Embedded in it, he found a stone carved with an inscription similar to the one borne on the stone he carried. Bill waited patiently while Nate deciphered the code. It was clear that somewhere there was a trigger, but like the entrance, it was a simple enough bit of code that Nate felt comfortable hacking it. He spoke an impromptu incantation, and when he was done, whispered, “Let there be light.”

All up and down the corridor, stones set into the wall released their light. If Nate startled Bill, the ghadi gave no sign of it.

Nate wrapped his own stone and replaced it in its pouch.

Ironically, in the light, the corridor was even more eerie. Despite a layer of dust, and a few cracked stones, it looked
too
perfect. It looked as if the builders had just left and would return at any moment.

Ahead, beyond the curve, Nate could see the light get brighter, whiter. He gestured to Bill and resumed the trek upward.

The brightness came from the exit, where the corridor opened out into a balcony inside the building. Nate stepped out onto it and had to catch his breath.

Above them, for fifty or seventy-five feet, buttresses came from the walls to meet in the center of a domed ceiling that was nearly the diameter of the tower that contained it. Each stone that formed the ceiling glowed with its own light, shining down onto a gallery of stone benches. The benches formed concentric circles around a central dais dominated by a large altar or podium. The walls carried frescoes thirty feet high, bearing ghadi figures that dwarfed the two of them.

“What is this place?” Nate asked in a puff of fog.

The balcony where Nate stood was even with the highest rank of benches, and he walked around until he found the steps down to the dais floor. He walked down to the dais, and when he looked back, he saw that several other ghadi had followed him and Bill into the building.

Nate climbed up on the dais to get a better view.

It was like the circles the ghadi put around their death pits. But this was much bigger. This room could easily hold a thousand, maybe more. Nate turned around and looked at the place from all angles.

There were ten separate entrances like the one he had come through. Nate could picture several layers of corridors winding up through the walls like coiled ropes. One entrance was grander than the others, and it directly faced a wide ramp that led down to the dais.

Nate faced that direction and saw the frescoes of ancient ghadi kneeling and making offerings toward the space where the large entrance was. Nate turned and studied the frescoes. Group scenes, many ghadi facing some central figure. This time the central figure wasn’t some alien pan-dimensional monster, but another ghadi.

Nate was sure that, where he stood, once stood a ghadi mayor, or baron, or king . . .

“Why come here?” Nate asked quietly.

He looked up and saw that the whole party had come here now. Fifteen ghadi in human armor, looking down on the dais where Nate stood.

A
BAD KARRIK had been a scholar within the College of Man for many more years than he cared to recall. As he stood on one of the high balconies of the College in the center of Manhome, he felt the full weight of his years. The world around him had upended, and he could feel the established order of centuries eroding beneath his feet.

Never had any temporal power challenged the College in such a brazen and open manner. And never had the College taken measures so severe. In Manhome, tomes of knowledge had been opened that had remained sealed since its founding. Now the shores around the College’s great city were red with the blood from the Monarch’s army, and the air ripe with the smell of their bloated bodies. Even where Karrik stood, high above everything, the air smelled of death.

Below him, the streets were nearly empty. Those who could flee had done so long ago. Those who remained stayed inside. The mood was one of terror barely kept in check. Those outside the College feared the College, as they should.

Those in the College feared other things.

The Venerable Master Scholar now saw the machinations of the Monarch in smoke and fire, and in the way the waves crashed against the base of Manhome itself. The defection of Uthar Vailen had disintegrated the remaining bonds of respect and trust at the highest levels of the College, leaving only fear and suspicion. Heretics and traitors were everywhere now.

Since the fall of Zorion, the College had imprisoned three hundred “traitors.” Dozens from within its own ranks. Far too many to even make a pretense of any investigation.

“What is left?” He stared out at a pillar of smoke where someone was probably disposing of bodies.

Karrik spun around to find the speaker and saw nothing. He called in a harsh whisper. “Friend?” He shook his head violently. “You call me friend when just speaking to you could cost my life?”

The wind responded in a familiar oily tone,
“You exaggerate, and I have no interest in seeing you feed the maw of the Venerable Master Scholar’s justice.”

“Begone! I will strike no deals with you or Ghad.”

“Uthar Vailen is no name I wish tied to my own.”

Karrik nodded slowly and turned back toward Manhome. Looking down at the empty streets, he saw a body being picked apart by sea birds. He couldn’t tell if it had been a scholar of the College, a soldier of the Monarch’s army, or some innocent bystander.

“Wait,” Karrik whispered, half expecting Uthar Vailen to have abandoned him.

He hadn’t.

When Uthar left his tent, the Monarch was upon him.

“What news? What news?”

The person who, until the fall of Zorion, had been the most powerful man outside the College, reminded Uthar of nothing less than some orphan beggar accosting him for some sweetmeat. Having demonstrated his worthlessness as a person, Uthar was beginning to doubt the man’s value as a symbol.

“Perhaps it will please you to know that the College yet weakens itself, even as it counts its victory in Zorion.”

“Yes, we can regroup for a counterattack.”

Uthar stared up at the sky, which was beginning to darken. He wondered if the gods might be so offended at this man’s stupidity that they might strike him dead on the spot.

It seemed, though, that the gods hated Uthar more, and the Monarch remained alive.

“We shall take Manhome, but we shall do so by taking the College.”

“How, then?”

“The Angel of Death seems to have not yet outlived his usefulness.” Uthar told the Monarch, leaving the Ruler of Man confused and unenlightened.

When Yerith walked into Arthiz’s tent, the scholar was bent over a map. She didn’t know what all the notations were, but she recognized the great arc of the continent, a crescent with a mountainous spine. Near the western tip would be Manhome, and east of that, along the inner curve would be Zorion. Somewhere, between the two cities, and between the mountains and the ocean, was the place they were camped right now.

Arthiz looked up at her and smiled. It was disturbing to see a scholar unmasked, more so to see such an expression wrapped in scarred flesh. She looked down at the map again.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. He spoke as if it was really a choice on her part.

“I serve at the Monarch’s pleasure.” It was impossible to keep the words from feeling hollow. She had seen the Monarch, and heard him. Now she knew she had been serving little more than another mask.

If Arthiz sensed what she felt, he didn’t comment on it. Instead, he turned toward the map on the table before him. “Can you read this map?”

“I can see Manhome and Zorion.”

Arthiz nodded. “This is where we are headed.” He pointed to a cryptic notation next to a small town that sat in the foothills perhaps a day’s travel north of Manhome.

Looking at the map, Yerith saw some of the other notes and decided that one set, midway between the two cities, showed their location, and another cluster of marks showed the forces of the College around Zorion.

But there were other marks, farther east of Zorion on the coast, and north of Zorion, in the jungle between Zorion and the mountains. Both marks were close to the fringes of human settlement. “What is over here?” she asked.

Arthiz chuckled. “The subject of our conversation, Nate Black.”

He seemed to be pronouncing the name better.

It took a moment for Yerith to gather herself enough to respond. “He escaped?”

“Yes, he escaped. And while we’ve been cautiously moving, avoiding notice, he has been brazenly doing his best to terrify the scholars of the College.” Arthiz tapped the markings on the coast. “A small merchant village. Our pale stranger led the release of over a hundred ghadi.”

“Ghadi?” Yerith looked up, shaking her head.

Arthiz tapped the other markings, north of Zorion. “Here, there was a detachment of troops led by fifteen scholars of the College.”

“Fifteen?”

“You, of all people, can understand that the revolt of the ghadi is infinitely more terrifying to the College than the revolt of any man. They took a force strong enough to slaughter anything they found. They found the ghadi village where our stranger was hiding and reduced it to ashes.”

Yerith felt her heart sink. Nate Black had not escaped the College after all.

Or had he? Arthiz was chuckling quietly.

“What happened?” Yerith asked.

“I cannot be certain, since not one of the College’s force survived to tell anyone.”

“What?”

“Nate Black, and about a hundred wild ghadi, decimated a squad of the College’s best troops, and defeated fifteen scholars trained in the art of combat.”

Yerith stared at the map.

“I want to talk to you about Nate Black,” Arthiz said.