Still unsure if he was engaged in something whose primary focus was ritualistic, social, or hygienic, he picked one guy out of the crowd and decided to follow his actions, dunking his head, and wiping each part of his body with the cloth.
For Nate’s part, it didn’t seem that he screwed anything up. At least no one came and hit him with a stick. Everyone washed in silence, and the stares he got were covert.
Nate returned the stares, a little less covertly.
Everyone here, it seemed, had been touched by the knife of the College. Nate wore the lone unscarred body. Men and women had, at the least, their faces marked. That made an evil sort of sense. If the College wanted to isolate you, keep you behind their mask, that would be the first place they marked.
Only in a few cases did the scars extend much beyond the head. Nate realized that he was seeing the neophytes, the people who did the scut work for the College. He also started to understand why Bhodan seemed surprised that Nate wished to stay unscarred.
The extent of the carvings was a measure of rank, it defined your place among the scholars and acolytes. Essentially, he had told Bhodan that he didn’t want any status at all.
When he was clean and back up in his little room he began wondering if he’d see Yerith again. That took his thoughts through a downward spiral, itemizing a long list of things he probably would never see again; Mom, Tux, indoor plumbing, stand-up comedy, ice cream.
Nate sat on the edge of his bed and tried to tune out the crowd noises around him. Unlike when Bhodan had first brought him down to this corridor of alcoves, the place was now thick with people. Rooms up and down this particular corridor were home to about a dozen other male students, and gave the place a feel somewhere between a dorm and a barracks.
Outside the baths, they didn’t try to hide the fact that they were staring at him. Nate tried to understand their whisperings, but it only frustrated him. He was still too new to the language to understand anything that wasn’t spoken directly and clearly. A quickly whispered conversation was no more intelligible to Nate than a coughing fit.
Nate was wrapped up in composing a mental list of his favorite restaurants, when someone decided to walk up and confront the stranger who had been dropped in their midst.
“So what, exactly, are you?”
Nate looked up at the speaker. The man had sharp features, and the scars on his face looped around his brow and down the edge of his nose like a large question mark.
Several responses occurred to Nate. As with the guard, the language barrier gave him enough pause not to use any of them.
“My name is Nate Black,” he said.
“Nateblack?” It was strange the way a foreign mouth chewed up the name. Nate doubted he would have recognized his name spoken by this guy if he didn’t know something of the language. “What kind of name is that?”
“A common name where I come from.”
“Where do you come from?”
Nate thought for a few long moments and said finally, “Not here.”
Question-mark looked back behind him, as if there was a group, out of Nate’s view, that was egging him on. “We want to know if you’re a—” Unknown word. Mutated? Deformed? Gifted? “—ghadi.”
“I’m speaking to you.” Nate shook his head. “I am as much man as you. As your friends. Where I come from, I am not strange.”
“You are a strange ghadi.”
I guess I would be. Nate knew he was being insulted. He considered telling Question-mark what an asshole he was, but Nate decided that wasn’t the greatest idea right now. Feeding this guy some of his own rotten teeth might make Nate feel better, but he doubted it would make life in the immediate future any easier.
Instead, Nate shook his head and said, “In your sight, perhaps.”
It was hard to tell if his visitor was pleased or disappointed at Nate’s failure to rise to the bait.
“Why did you come here?”
“I was brought here.” Nate looked at Question-mark and asked, “Why did you come here?” Nate still had trouble with tone, and his question came out with English intonation which put stress on the pronoun and raised the tone on the end.
“You speak oddly, ghadi.”
“My name is Nate Black.”
Question-mark chuckled. “There are no names here. Only students and teachers.”
“And ghadi,” Nate said.
Question-mark shook his head and muttered something inscrutable too low for Nate to make out the words. He turned and left Nate alone in his doorless alcove.
See you in class, Nate thought. Which made him wonder what “class” would be like.
During the night, hedging against depression, Nate made a conscious effort to itemize the things he needed to be thankful for. He was definitely in a better situation than the one he had started out in, and, for whatever reason, the locals on Arthiz’s side of things seemed to think Nate was useful, or at the very least, tolerable.
He wasn’t in a fetid hole, he wasn’t sick anymore, and he was being given a chance to at least establish some sort of status beyond that of an untouchable.
When it came down to it, at this moment he was probably better off than at least half of the population of the world he remembered. He was healthy, had a roof over his head, and was not in immediate danger of being killed.
Of course, the irony was that the improvement in his physical state actually made it easier to indulge in self-pity. He kept thinking of home, and he couldn’t shake it. He tried to sleep, and his mind kept fixating on random memories—the smell of pizza, his sister’s slightly nasal voice, the feel of a keyboard, a paperback book.
You’re alive.
You’re alive and no one has proved that going back is impossible.
It was probably a vain hope, but somehow @, the thing in the darkness, had opened a doorway between Nate’s world and this one. There was no reason to assume that travel was strictly one way. At least, telling himself that helped him sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
IN THE MORNING, Nate was ready for class, or whatever passed for it here. Understanding how this place worked was going to be a necessary step on the long road back to planet Earth, and Nate was willing to learn whatever these people were ready to teach him.
The blue-belted guards woke them and called the acolytes forward. Nate walked with them down a long stone corridor. They walked two abreast, and filed into a large open room filled with ranks of high tables with slightly angled tops. At each table burned a thick black candle and a thinner white candle.
Nate filed in with the group. They kept the order imposed by the location of their beds, and when Nate followed his line, he found himself standing next to one of the tables. At the table was a pen and brush set, and a sheet of parchment.
Glancing around, Nate decided that it had to be “his” desk, because it had been raised about four inches higher than anyone else’s.
This was the point where Nate’s expectations diverged from reality. For about five minutes, he stood there, waiting for someone who looked like an instructor to begin whatever the lesson was supposed to be. When no one entered the room to take on that role, it began to sink in that this “class” wasn’t going to be that straightforward.
Arthiz had dropped Nate into the middle of a situation that resembled something more akin to a medieval devotional ritual. So much so, that Nate began second-guessing the exact meaning of words that, until now, he’d thought he understood in the language.
I told Yerith I was a student. Maybe that word doesn’t mean quite what it does in English? Maybe they’re assuming I know what to do.
“Great,” Nate muttered in English. Several people shot him sharp looks, including two of the blue-belts by the door.
Okay, silence, I get it.
Nate looked at his desk, trying to get a feel for what they wanted out of him.
The two candles were obviously different in more than size and color. The white one looked merely utilitarian, and dripp
ed wax over a small brass holder as it gave off a fair bit of light. It looked as if it had been freshly placed here.
The black candle looked ancient. It burned dim and slow, and wouldn’t give off enough light to write by. It was as thick around as Nate’s forearm, and had a line of rectilinear symbols carved near its bottom. The same language that was carved in the skin of the people around him, that had been carved in the base of the ghadi statue.
Okay, a ritual candle of some sort . . .
There was a small ledge at the top of the desk, between the two candles. Resting on the ledge was a rectangular length of inlaid wood. It was about the proportions of a wood ruler, but about five times as thick. The inlay, which seemed to be mother-of-pearl, was a long inscription in more of the rectilinear language.
The inscription took effort to look at. It was as if studying the symbols themselves required physical exertion. Nate remembered the strain of copying the inscription off of the statue.
He scanned the inlay across once and blinked his eyes.
The black candle had guttered out.
Nate looked around, hoping he hadn’t broken some bizarre rule by letting the ritual fire burn out. No one seemed to be paying attention to him. His fellow students were bent over their desks, writing with their brushes. The blue-belts were walking the aisles between the desks, glancing at the progress of the student’s work.
From what Nate could see, everyone was making much better progress than he was. The papers he could see were all covered with writing. His was still blank.
Looking around, though, he did see another student whose candle burned out. The guy took the white candle and used it to reignite the black one. Nate followed suit, thankful he hadn’t trod on another taboo.
Okay, what are we writing?
Nate’s neighbor happened to be Question-mark. Looking at the guy’s page, Nate saw more of the rectilinear writing. There was also the same kind of inlaid block of wood at the top of Question-mark’s desk.
Nate frowned.
It was obvious now what they wanted from him. And it seemed like so much bullshit. What possibly could be taught to anyone by repeatedly copying one line of text, over and over again? Especially when no one told him what the words he copied actually meant?
Well, at least I’ll get to compare it with what I saw on the statue.
Nate picked up the brush and started copying.
It was harder to do than it appeared. Just to hold the figures in mind as he drew them took a serious mental effort. There was something about this language that was different. It tried to hook itself inside his skull, burning itself there. When he finished the last stroke of the brush, he sighed in relief. Like when he copied the inscription on the base of the statue, at the end of the line he was sweating and his hand shook.
He glanced up.
The black candle had guttered out again.
Wait a minute . . .
Nate looked at the inscription on the base of the candle and at the lines he had just transcribed. There was a chunk of the inscription that matched what was written on the candle. Nate looked around and saw a few other students relighting their own candles. Once they did, they bent over their paper and started copying again.
Is this what I think?
Nate relit his black candle and started the copying again. It didn’t get easier the second time. It still was fatiguing to hold the symbols in his head as he drew them, and his hand painted the lines as if he moved the brush through thickening cement.
Before he finished the last symbol of the inscription, Nate glanced up at the black candle. The wick still burned. He completed the last character without looking at the paper. He watched the candle as his brush completed the last stroke.
When the brush left the paper, the flame dimmed, flickered, and winked out.
Could the act of writing these words be enough to do that?
He’d been told about the Gods’ Language, and read about words that could alter the world around them through their own power. For some reason, though, Nate had always kept in the back of his mind the thought that there must be some other element involved. He had expected there to be some aspect of meditation, mental discipline, some actual material aspect to what was described to him. . . .
He had expected that someone should know what the words actually meant. At the very least, how to pronounce them.
Nate relit the candle.
Up to now, it may have been some sort of coincidence.
He very deliberately copied the inscription a third time, keeping an eye on the black candle.
Again, once the alien words had been written on the page, the flame faded and winked out.
It sank in to him what he’d been told about this language, and the College. No one needed to know what these words meant. Rote memorization and repetition was all a mage required. The College itself seemed to discourage any deeper understanding.
Is there any deeper understanding?
How long would someone have to do this before they achieved anything useful?
The “class” lasted for a couple of hours. Nate wasn’t exactly sure, but the timing coincided with the melting of the white candle. The guards began collecting the students’ parchment once the white candle had diminished to about an inch in height. The whole episode felt surreal, as if he had walked into the final exam by accident. He also got the feeling that he didn’t pass. Where most of the students had filled their pages with writing, some continuing on the other side, Nate had barely covered half of his sheet of parchment.
One of the guards pulled the sheet away from him as he was studying his own handiwork.
The point is? Aren’t we supposed to study this?
Nate looked at the model on the inlaid block of wood. What did it mean? What was the significance of these symbols that were so hard to transcribe, so hard even to visualize?
Nate needed time to think about what he was looking at.
The guards didn’t give that to him. As soon as they collected the last page from the students, the lead blue-belt brought the butt of his staff down on the stone floor with a resonating crack. Everyone took a sideways step to the left, into the aisles between the desks. Nate followed a half beat after everyone else.
In the moments before they filed out of the room, Nate took the opportunity to look at the model inscription on the desk in front of his own.
The same symbols, it seemed. The same—except for one series of characters. Where Nate’s inscription quoted the string of symbols marking the bottom of his black candle, the guy in front of him had a different sequence. They started moving before Nate could get a glimpse of what was carved in that guy’s candle.
Even so, he had a pretty good idea.
Breakfast was after devotions—Nate had mentally stopped calling it a class. From their morning devotions, the acolytes were led into a large hall set with long wooden tables. They sat on long benches in roughly the same order they had stood for their transcriptions.
For Nate, it was just a relief to get off of his feet. He caught a whiff of something cooking, and he felt his stomach tighten. He had worked up one hell of an appetite during the morning.
Once everyone was seated, tall ghadi in togalike outfits walked in, bearing large platters. Each table received one on each end. The platters were metal ovals nearly four feet long, piled indiscriminately with stewed fruits, well-done meats, and starchy vegetables mashed into a lumpy paste. Beside the pile of food were stacks of thick, flat bread.
At first, Nate was at a loss due to the lack of utensils, until it became obvious that the bread was the utensil. He watched as the people next to him used one flat piece as a plate and another to scoop food from the massive platter. People tore at the bread, used chunks of it as a spoon, or used their hands. Nate watched the others eat and didn’t gather his own food until he was certain what the rules were.
The lack of silverware was strange to him, but after the brain-deadening exercise this morning, it was proba
bly a good thing that the students weren’t given anything that could be used as a weapon.
While they ate, more ghadi came by and set down tankards by each student. When Nate tasted his, it was some sort of dark fruity wine that had been warmed slightly above room temperature. Nate didn’t care for it, but he needed to drink something.
At the tables around him, the students all babbled at each other. In the mass of overlapping words, it was very hard for Nate to make anything out. That was fine, since no one seemed to be talking to him. His entire table seemed to be making a point of ignoring him.
The new kid, Nate thought. He wondered if everyone got this treatment, or if his appearance inspired a special effort. The people at other tables didn’t make any effort to hide their stares, and several pointed at him while they talked.
Nate looked down at his hands.
He had always been something of a loner. He had spent way too much time on the computer, and inside his own head. This certainly wasn’t the first time he had sat in a room full of strangers with whom he had no connection. It was the first time he had felt so alone.
As far as they know, I’m not even the same species . . .
. . . as far as I know, they’re right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE HIGHEST scholars of the College of Man filled the audience chamber at the heart of the College’s home in the city of Manhome. Most sat behind the U-shaped table that dominated the center of the room, and all of them wore their most intricate masks and robes.
All but one.
One of their number wore no mask at all. Polan Ostiz had once been as high in the College as anyone aside from the Venerable Master Scholar himself. Now Polan was stripped of his jeweled mask and robes, blindfolded, sitting bound upon the interview chair. Guards held blades at Polan’s throat, lest he attempt to speak any words of power.
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