Broken Crescent

by S. Andrew Swann

  “Just symbols,” Nate whispered, trying to talk himself out of the inexplicable reaction. “Just words . . .”

  Just another language.

  The language of the ghadi, perhaps?

  The Language of the Gods?

  Nate sat down and took his brush to copy down the symbols so he could study them back in his cell.

  For such simple symbols, Nate found it very hard to copy them accurately. It seemed to take all of his concentration to copy each mark. The symbols were all composed of some combination of three horizontal and three vertical lines and half lines. The combinations varied from a single hash mark to something that looked like the Microsoft Windows logo.

  Even so, it took all of Nate’s concentration to copy them. The simple transcribing was worse than any of his efforts to translate the common language. By the time he was done, he was covered with sweat and his hand was shaking.

  He had a feeling that he had spent far too long here.

  He ran back, even though fatigue coursed through his body and his legs felt rubbery.

  Nate was back in his cell less than ten minutes when Yerith arrived for her morning visit. When she stared at him, panting and tired, he explained that he had been exercising. If she noticed the fresh ink on his hands, she said nothing about it.

  Ghad was not pleased.

  Mankin believed that Ghad had suffered enough for his boastfulness. He said, “Let us end this wager now. Look at what we have wrought on this world. Let us not let pride destroy what you have created.”

  Ghad cursed his brother. “You have not yet won. Your time is three quarters gone, and your manlings have only one city. They have wrought what destruction they can, but my Ghadikan are still strong. They shall repay your manlings sixtyfold.”

  That, the Ghadikan did. No more did they build great cities, or tend the fields. Each ghadi studied the Language of the Gods to learn the words that had delivered such a blow. They learned this and more. They called such plague and destruction on Mankind that those that didn’t die were scattered throughout the countryside.

  Mankind, seeing themselves scattered, turned to the College of Man who spoke the Gods’ Language.

  “Deliver us from this threat,” they pleaded.

  The men of the College said, “Long have we studied the Language of the Gods. We have learned much. There are words in it too terrible to be spoken.”

  “Please,” said the survivors of the city of men, “speak them so we shall be delivered.”

  The men of the College, seeing their plight, chose to speak those terrible words.

  Within the Ghadikan cities, the matter of the very stones rebelled upon hearing the words of the College of Man. The stones tore themselves apart with such violence that the cities and all who were in them were enveloped by fire, and the fires of their destruction darkened the sun for sixty years.

  There were six more cylindrical chambers. Nate didn’t have to do any more transcription, by inspecting the inscriptions on each of the statues, he saw that the markings were the same. That seemed odd for some sort of memorial, but he wouldn’t be able to explain it until he knew exactly what those markings meant.

  The map was filling out.

  The chambers with the statues and the seated warriors were laid out in a circle as far as Nate could tell, with his cell roughly in the center. The pose of each statue was slightly different, but each faced the entrance to the room, meaning they all faced the center of the “circle.”

  Each time he looked at the inscriptions, he felt an odd sensation, a pressure in his brain. It was as if he almost knew what it said, the meaning on the tip of his tongue. . . .

  Of course, that wasn’t possible.

  The wager had less than sixty years to run out. Both Mankind and Ghadikan hid from the world, in barrows and caves. The land was thick with smoke, and the sun would not deign to shine on the broken crescent of the earth.

  Mankin looked down on the slaughter, a world where more dead lay on the ground than living walked upon it, and mourned the destruction. He turned to his brother and said, “Ghad, you see here the result of your pride. Say the wager ends now and this will be over.”

  “The wager is not yet over. My Ghadikan yet number more than your manlings.”

  Mankind itself was dying, as was the Ghadikan race. Mankind, seeing the doom the war with the ghadi was bringing upon them, turned to the College of Man who spoke the Gods’ Language.

  “Deliver us from this threat,” they pleaded.

  The men of the College said, “Long have we studied the Language of the Gods. We have learned much. There are words in it too terrible to be spoken.”

  “Please,” said Mankind, as one, “speak them so we shall be delivered.”

  The men of the College, seeing their own doom approaching, chose to speak the most terrible of those words.

  Upon hearing those words, the bodies of the ghadi, and their seed, went deaf to the Gods’ Language. The Ghadikan could no longer speak, and their writing became as dust, mute and meaningless. They became no more than the brutes they had once taken men to be.

  Mankind took the ghadi as their servants, to rebuild their cities and till their fields. Ghad finally saw that his pride had lost him the world, and he walked away, never to speak to his brothers again.

  Of course, his last exploration of the catacombs ended with him being caught.

  Nate was walking down one of the corridors, and taking the last corner to return to his cell. He was paying more attention to his hand-drawn map than he was to where he was going and he walked right into one of the alien/ghadi. He dropped the journal and upset the oil lamp so it went out.

  Without a word, the thing enveloped him in its too-long arms and lifted him off of the ground. This time Nate dropped the oil lamp as well. He could smell the oil as it spilled on the floor.

  He struggled, but the thing was too strong.

  The thing holding him let out a high-pitched whistle. Nate couldn’t see much, but there was enough light coming from somewhere for him to spot sudden movements filling the corridor around him.

  There were only three or four ghadi, but the length of their limbs and the insectile way they moved made it seem as if there were many more of them. The only sound they made as they moved was the rustle of their feet across stone.

  The one holding him let him go as one of the newcomers wrapped its hand around Nate’s upper arm. Another alien took hold of Nate’s other arm, and they marched him back toward his cell.

  The door was wide open, spilling light into the corridor.

  Well, this was bound to happen, eventually.

  The ghadi pushed Nate into the room, where Yerith stood, staring at him. A lamp burned on the table.

  “Hi, honey, I’m home,” he said in English.

  It was probably a good thing she couldn’t understand him. She looked to be in no mood for sarcasm. Her eyes were red, she was on the verge of hyperventilating, and the cache of books that had sat neatly by the foot of the bed were scattered everywhere. One had its spine broken in half and was shedding pages on the bed.

  “Liar,” she yelled at him, throwing the book she held at him. “You evil . . . !”

  Nate held up his arms to ward off the missile. The book must have weighed ten pounds and bruised his forearms with the impact. “Yerith, I was coming ba—”

  She grabbed the edges of his jacket and shook him. “He trusted me. How can you . . . need me and you go . . . not safe out in . . .”

  The way her words wove in and out of comprehensibility made Nate’s head hurt. He balled his hands into fists and yelled at her, “Stop it!”

  She stopped shaking him.

  “I am not your—” Slave? Property? Damn the gaps in his vocabulary. “You do not own me. I cannot live in this room all day. Every day. I am losing my mind in here.” The idiom sounded very strange in Yerith’s language but it seemed to get the meaning across.

  Yerith pushed him away. “You have no mind to lose, Nat
e. I told you to read this.”

  She picked up the book of myth Nate had been working his way through.

  “I have been reading it. It does not explain why you keep me here.”

  Yerith threw the book at him with an exasperated curse Nate couldn’t translate. He caught it. “You can read, but can you think?” She slapped the book in his hands. “The College are the ones behind the masks. In their minds, anything from another place, a new thought, a new race, it all must be . . . destroyed, so the College does not suffer the fate of the Ghadikan.”

  “I was only—”

  “You do not come from here. Anyone who looks at you knows that. If you leave our protection, you will die.”

  She pushed past him to the door and paused. “I came to tell you that Arthiz is coming here to meet with you.”

  “You came down here just to tell me?”

  “I knew you would want to know.” She turned around and said, “Thank you for coming back.”

  Nate was feeling like an asshole again, though he didn’t have a reason to. “I am sorry.”

  “We can’t let you go.”

  When the door closed behind her, Nate heard the bolt slam home. After a few moments he heard the screech of metal, and a rusted barrier fell across the small barred window.

  Nate knew if he tried to open it, it wouldn’t budge.

  He stood there a long time before he started gathering up books.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MATE ONLY endured confinement for three more days before she took him to meet Arthiz. She came with her ghadi escort and had him put his hands in front of him so she could bind them together.

  Even so, while the way he left his cell echoed his first day here, binding his wrists seemed more formality than restraint. As if she wanted a concrete reminder of what their relationship actually was.

  She took him down a corridor that ended in one of the cylindrical chambers where a ghadi statue looked over the fallen. A man waited for them there. Yerith’s and Nate’s ghadi escort stopped in front of the man.

  At first, Nate thought it was the long awaited Arthiz.

  He spoke in a very clipped manner, “All is well?”

  “As well as the demons dwelling between the worlds.”

  The man nodded and took an old, tarnished dagger out from under his cloak. Nate briefly saw a blade engraved with the same rectilinear symbols that adorned the statue’s pedestal before the man walked up and inserted the dagger into a sheath worn by one of the long-dead ghadi.

  Nate felt something, like a static charge in the air, then he heard stones grinding together. The massive carved stone chair, where the dead ghadi sat, slowly withdrew into the wall. The armored skeleton disappeared into the darkness, out of range of their lamps. When the grinding stopped, they faced a dark opening in the wall.

  Nate wondered if all the entrances to the catacombs were similarly hidden.

  Yerith led Nate through the opening, with her ghadi attendants following. The man who had guarded the secret passage came out last, walked up to the ghadi skeleton and, carefully standing to the side, withdrew the dagger.

  Nate felt the same static potential in the air, and heard stone grinding again.

  Yerith didn’t wait long enough for him to see the dead ghadi return home. They headed downward, along a series of wide stone steps. There was a breeze down here, the air cooler and fresher than the stagnant atmosphere in the catacombs. As they descended, Nate could smell salt and began hearing the crash of surf.

  At the end of their climb they were greeted by another man standing guard over a narrow crack in the rock ahead of them. Yerith exchanged the same greetings with him as she had with the guard by the secret passage.

  They emerged single file from a fissure in the base of a sheer rock wall that rose impossibly high above them. Nate had to squint because, for the first time in months, he could see daylight.

  The ground was sand and gravel that sloped toward a lagoon that might have been several hundred feet across. The rock cliffs circled the lagoon almost completely, only leaving a narrow gap to Nate’s left that, at this distance, looked barely large enough for one man to walk through.

  Waves crashed at the base of the gap, sending white spray up twenty feet or more. Nate could feel the mist from the waves as a cold breeze on his skin, even this far from the surf.

  Above the waves, through the gap between the cliffs, Nate saw the bluest strip of sky he had ever seen—as if the world itself had cracked open to let some unearthly light seep in.

  Nate kept looking up. Hundreds of feet above their heads, the sheer rock walls leaned together to meet.

  “Where is this?” Nate asked.

  “We are at the foot of Manhome,” Yerith said. She touched Nate’s shoulder and pointed. “That is where we are going.”

  Nate looked in that direction and saw a boat sitting a few feet away from the farthest edge of the lagoon. Nate stared at it, wondering how it could have navigated that pounding surf and eased through a passage that small.

  She led him around the beach, toward the boat. It was larger than it appeared at first, thirty or forty feet long, and had a mast that seemed to loom upward at least as far. It seemed to sit shallow in the water, narrow-bodied with a knifelike bow.

  The boat was moored to a stone pier that emerged from the sand to extend halfway toward the center of the lagoon. The blocks that made the pier were five feet on a side, and must have weighed tons. They had been here long enough for the water to polish their edges smooth. The aisle down the center had been worn concave by long use.

  A trio of grizzled, nasty-looking characters sat on the deck, watching them approach. They were bare chested and wore black canvas pants. Their hair was long and gathered into dozens of tight braids. Unlike Scarface’s ritual mutilations, the scars these guys wore were neither intentional nor followed any intellectual design.

  One of them looked Nate up and down, staring at the alien clothes, and spat over the side of the boat, into the water. One spoke to Yerith. “All is well?”

  “As well as the demons dwelling between the worlds,” she repeated.

  The third one, who was missing the last two fingers of his left hand said, probably unnecessarily, “This is the stranger?”

  “Yes,” Nate answered for Yerith. It probably wasn’t a good idea to surprise these guys, but Nate did get some amusement at how shocked they looked when he spoke.

  The last one waved Nate forward with his mutilated hand, “Come then.”

  Arthiz met Nate in a cramped room down below, in the back of the boat.

  The room held a narrow bed that folded against the wall, allowing just enough room to seat one man at a desk that was little more than a ledge on the opposite wall. Nate stood, crouched in the doorway, until someone brought him a stool to sit on.

  “I understand I did not need to bring this,” his host said, once Nate was seated. Arthiz turned toward Nate, and in his hand was a softball-sized sphere that shone metallic in the lamplight.

  “You are one of them,” Nate said when he saw the white, featureless mask covering Arthiz’s face.

  “You are an intelligent man, by Yerith’s account. But you suffer from incautious thinking.” Arthiz set down the sphere and patted a book that lay on the desk. Nate recognized the journal Yerith had given him. The one he had dropped when the ghadi had grabbed him in the catacombs.

  “Do not think in haste. Do not talk in haste. Do not act in haste. Haste is the father of error, and error is the father of all misfortune.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “If I knew that, I would surely be a wise man.” Arthiz looked down at Nate’s journal. “What I know is that your presence frightens the College, and what frightens the College is of interest to me.”

  Nate frowned. He wished he could think of a way to say, Quit the metaphysical bullshit. Instead, he told Arthiz, “You are an intelligent man. You know what I was asking.”

  “You have an interesting manner of s
peech, Nate Black.” He flipped a page. His fingers were long and jeweled, and Nate could see engravings on the rings, as well as the gems mounted within them. “You are a stranger here, and all you’ve known of this world is violence, disease, and captivity. It must seem an awful place.” Arthiz made no concession to Nate’s linguistic skills, Nate had to concentrate to follow him, even though he wasn’t speaking particularly fast.

  “I would rather be imprisoned in the country of my birth.”

  “This world could be better,” Arthiz said.

  “I would like to return to where I came from.”

  Arthiz laughed. It wasn’t quite what Nate expected. Arthiz said, “And is it in your mind that such a thing is possible? The College of Man, the most powerful—” He used a word Nate did not know. “—in the world, the keepers of all of Mankind’s knowledge since we first trod the stones of Manhome, they want nothing less than to erase your existence from the face of their world. If such was possible, they would have granted you that wish out of their own fear.” He shook his head. “Again, you think in haste.”

  Arthiz turned to face Nate, closing the journal.

  “Why did you take me here?” Nate rubbed his temples. “What do you want from me?”

  “I brought you here so I would know what you are. Do you know what the College of Man is?”

  The name was familiar from the myth in Yerith’s book, but Arthiz went on before Nate could form a response. “They—” Arthiz picked up the sphere. “We bear the knowledge of the Gods’ Language. No one outside the College may write these glyphs or speak their names. These are words of power, of creation, of destruction. They remake the world to their pattern.”

  “Meaning?”

  Arthiz handed it to Nate. “This is an ancient artifact, engraved by many, many artisans.”

  Nate saw the tiny inscription spiraling around the entire object.

  “A single unbroken line, carved continuously over weeks.”