Broken Crescent (45 page)

“We needed to isolate your creature from our students.” Osif frowned, staring into a small lamp that was the only source of light in the tent. “It was a dangerous distraction.”

“You did well keeping it.” Uthar sat on a cushion by the door, alert to eavesdroppers. “You followed a prudent course. I was not criticizing you or Bhodan.”

“What do you want, then?”

“I want to understand the heresy the stranger was engaged in.”

Osif nodded. “This was your interest in it all along, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. If the scholars believe rightly, that stranger held devastating knowledge. Knowledge that might threaten the College itself.”

Osif shook his head. “If this is the Angel spoken of in stories, it did not arrive with that kind of knowledge. It told us that it was trying to understand the Gods’ Language.”

“Understand?”

“It wanted to know what the runes themselves meant.”

Some of the rumors that Karrik had related, about a ghadi uprising, and the specter of the Angel of Death in their midst, made more sense now.

“In your opinion,” Uthar asked, “how advanced was the stranger in the studies?”

“It showed none of the discipline or aptitude of an acolyte. But it was still adept. It learned to invoke the spells of a first-year student in less than a sixday. Quickly enough to be frightening, but I saw nothing that showed more than a particularly promising acolyte.”

“Nothing?”

Osif frowned and looked a little unsure. “When it said, ‘Understand the Gods’ Language,’ I felt that it might actually be able to.”

S
HORTLY after Nate arrived at the tower, the S ghadi began to arrive. The first day, Nate didn’t even notice the two or three ghadi that joined Bill’s little band. But the next day, Nate saw that half the ghadi were going around unarmored.

They arrived in small groups, by twos and threes, more each day. Some even carried human armor and weapons about whose origin Nate had no way of asking. When he walked among them, the ghadi lowered their heads, and the ones who caught glimpses of him had expressions of reverence and awe.

Within a week, a village huddled around the base of the tower. And the ghadi kept coming. Nate looked on the mass of them and wondered what it was he was supposed to do. All the ghadi,
all
of them, seemed to be massing on this one spot. As frantically as he gestured at Bill, he couldn’t get the concept,
bad idea,
across to him.

Nate knew that the College wouldn’t leave things with the massacre at Bill’s village. This time, if the College had any sense, it would be massing an army. And they were just giving the College a centralized target. Nate might have the rudiments of spell-casting now, but even the last confrontation had been pushing his luck more than it should be pushed.

They needed some sort of defense, at the very least. Fortunately, by gesturing and sketching in the dirt, Nate got the concept of
wall,
and
trench
across to Bill, and within another week, trees were falling in the surrounding forest, and logs were being raised around the perimeter of the new ghadi city.

Soon, groups of ghadi walked the streets with long wooden spears with stone tips. The tips, made from fragments of the fallen tower, glinted white in the sunlight. It was as if Nate was watching an ancestral memory made flesh. Huts of sod and twigs grew up on the hillside, and it seemed as if they grew out of the foundations of some great buried city. The shadows of the ancient, long-fallen Ghadikan, seemed just visible, following the ghadi down the ancient buried causeways that led to the tower.

Nate split his days now. Half the day he worked on the defenses, copying the spells he’d found protecting the doors of the tower, setting them to defend the logs that walled the new city. The other half he spent studying the spell he had found living within the ghadi themselves.

He began to think that if he had a little more time, they might be able to defend this keep.

It was time he didn’t have.

It was long after nightfall, and Nate was in one of the upper rooms of the tower, hunched over the ghadi spell, trying to reverse engineer it. He was pounding his leg in frustration.

Something whispered in the room with him.

Nate jumped to his feet, spinning around, looking for the speaker. No one. Just cold stone walls . . .

“Who’s there?”

Nate realized that he had been speaking English. It took a moment for the words to come.
“Who’s there?”

It was hard to recognize the whispering voice. More so since it had been so long since he had heard it.

“Arthiz?”

“Where are you?”

Nate shook his head, backing toward the wall. He expected an ambush any second. “Why are you talking to me?”

“What choice do I have? The ghadi are all that will stand with me.”

“What are you asking?”

“You mean me to abandon the ghadi to that?”

“How can I trust you?”

“Arthiz?” Nate said to the air.

There was no answer.

“Arthiz!” Nate shouted to the empty air.

The room suddenly felt much colder.

The next day brought Arthiz’s envoy. The ghadi stopped a rider coming from the west. Bill grabbed Nate and brought him to the great auditorium to meet the stranger.

The stranger wasn’t as strange as Nate had expected.

Nate walked down toward the dais, where a robed figure was guarded by three large ghadi. “Who are you, and why have you come here?”

The figure turned and lowered her hood. Nate stopped, disbelieving.

“Yerith?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Arthiz sent you?”

“Who should he have sent?”

It took some gesturing to get the ghadi to understand that Yerith was not the enemy. After he got that across, they left Yerith to his care. Nate took her up to the room he used for an office. He cleared some papers off a stool for her and sat down himself.

“Be careful. The furniture here is very old.”

Yerith took her seat and looked at him. “You have done this all yourself?”

Nate laughed. “In case you didn’t notice, there’s about five thousand ghadi down there.”

“You control them?”

“If I controlled them, this place wouldn’t exist. They gather of their own accord. More every day.”

Yerith looked into his face. “You are the Angel of Death.”

“Bullshit,” Nate said in English. “If the ghadi rebel against the College, it isn’t any more than their due. Their slavers burn their homes, steal the children, and slaughter any ghadi too old to be used.”

“I know how the ghadi are treated.”

Nate rubbed his forehead. “Why are you here, then?”

“The College’s armies are gathering. Within a sixday, they will march north; a sixday’s march after that, and they will destroy this place.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Come back with me, help Arthiz take the College, and their army will crumble.”

“I can’t leave them. They massed here because of me.”

“They’ll die here because of you.”

Nate stood up, shaking his head. “They think that somehow I can save them.”

“You can.”

“Do you think that Arthiz can really take down the College?”

“I think you can.”

If there was going to be a war with the College, Arthiz’s proposal made too much sense. The two victories he and the ghadi had won so far had been based entirely on stealth and surprise. With only Nate on their side, they stood little chance against an actual army that included seasoned soldiers and mages prepared to find resistance. Even if the ghadi weren’t outnumbered, they weren’t soldiers, and couldn’t communicate across a battlefield.

Nate knew nothing about warfare outside some novels he’d read, but he could see a massacre coming. If Arthiz could cut into the enemy’s rear and do some damage, maybe the attack on the ghadi could be diverted or maybe even aborted.

So he gathered his important papers, and his book of MED code, and left with Yerith.

The ghadi watched him go, without knowing why. Nate had no way to tell them, and the fear in their eyes made him feel sick.

Yerith packed his papers into the saddlebags on her horse and looked at him.

“What?”

“Get on.”

Nate looked at the arcane structure of the saddle and shook his head. “How?”

In exasperation, Yerith helped him up on the horse’s back. Nate felt a wave of vertigo as his leg vaulted over the saddle. The fact that the horse was moving, ever so slightly, made his brain scream at him that he was going to fall. Before he even had the chance to get oriented, Yerith suddenly appeared in the saddle in front of him, vaulting out of nowhere.

“Hang on to me, and don’t fall off.”