Broken Crescent

by S. Andrew Swann

  “What?”

  “You. They’re coming for you!”

  Oh, God. They are bombing us.

  Another blast. Nate could feel the stones shift around him. His pulse throbbed in his neck and his temples as he sucked in air, filtering the dust though his hand. He felt the panic envelop him like quick-sand. The more he tried to think clearly and calmly, the more his heart raced, and the more he felt the weight of the stone above pressing down on him.

  “Got to get out of here,” he said in English. Even as he said it, he knew it made no sense. Whatever bombardment was happening, was happening on the surface. They were probably in the safest place they could be. The tons of rock between them and the explosions was the best protection they had. . . .

  But Nate was more afraid of the tons of rock than he was of the explosions.

  When he started slamming his shoulder into the metal door, he rationalized that he really wanted to go deeper, away from the blasts, away from the danger of a cave-in.

  Another blast.

  Spitting dust, Nate yelled at Solis, “What are they doing?”

  “Cleansing,” Solis told him.

  Nate kept on slamming his shoulder into the door. The iron was as immobile as the stone wall that it was set in. All Nate managed to do was bruise himself and raise even more dust as rust particles mixed in the air with crushed stone.

  Nate slammed into it, again, again, again . . .

  It took him a moment to realize that the bombardment, or whatever it was, had stopped. He staggered back from the door, and realized that the air was still and quiet. The stone dust was settling in the hazy light from the lantern.

  “They stopped . . .” Nate whispered.

  “They will destroy this place looking for you.” Nate shook his head. “The College has enough reason to destroy this place without me.”

  Solis gave Nate a look that made it obvious what he thought of the College’s reasons.

  “You don’t even know that it is the College.”

  “Who else could it be?”

  Before Nate could gather his thoughts on how to react, the door began moving. The door scraped across the stone sounding like an opening sarcophagus.

  Nate backed away, looking madly for something usable as a weapon. He grabbed a three-legged stool and brandished it over his head like a club. The inquisitors of the College weren’t going to take him back without a fight.

  Solis stood there with the same deadpan fatalism that he’d shown since Bhodan and company had locked him up with Nate.

  The door opened outward into an inky darkness barely touched by the lamp. Nate squinted, trying to make out their visitor, or at least determine how many there were.

  “Who’s there?” Nate called out.

  The door stopped moving.

  For several long moments, the only sound Nate could hear was the sound of his own breathing. Then Nate heard footsteps, one person, limping. Nate backed up as a pale shadow emerged from the darkness beyond the door.

  A ghadi?

  The hunched alien form limped into the room. The creature looked thinner and paler than most of the ghadi Nate had seen. Its large eyes were clouded slightly gray, and violet blood dripped from a wound in the side of its torso.

  It was bent forward, one long arm wrapped around itself, the other pressing against the iron door.

  Solis backed away from it and Nate. “What is it doing here? What does it want?”

  The ghadi had trouble moving forward. Its feet scraped along the floor, the joints on both legs seemed frozen. Nate took a step forward, and the ghadi seemed to finally see him. The large eyes blinked, and the rubbery, expressionless mouth silently opened as if the creature did have the power of speech.

  It let go of the door and reached a long spindly arm toward Nate. Nate lowered the stool and looked into the thing’s clouded eyes. He didn’t know what it was he saw there.

  Recognition?

  Solis pushed Nate out of the way and tackled the ghadi. Nate stumbled back, dropping the stool. Nate knew the things were stronger than they looked, but as Solis fell on top of it, his body looked like a crushing weight on the spindly form.

  “What are you doing?” Nate shouted. “It’s hurt.”

  Solis was shouting too fast for Nate to translate. Nate stepped up and grabbed the other man’s shoulders and pulled him off the unmoving ghadi. “What are you doing?”

  As Nate pulled him away, he could understand the words, “It has a knife.”

  Nate looked down. The creature did have a blade, clasped in the hand that it had been holding close to its body. However, the ghadi made no move to threaten them with it.

  The ghadi made no move at all.

  The stones beneath the ghadi were slick with violet blood, and its skin was a pasty gray color. Nate swallowed as he knelt down next to the ghadi. He didn’t see any sign of breathing, and the creature’s eyes didn’t move. Now that Nate saw the wound, he wondered how it could have been walking around.

  The creature was past being a threat.

  Nate tried his rudimentary first aid knowledge. But, even if the thing had a remotely human anatomy, the hole in its side was too massive. There was no way to stop the bleeding, and even if there was, the thing had bled into, and past, shock already.

  “He’s dead,” Nate said, as he peeled the ghadi’s fingers off of the dagger it had gripped. At first, he wondered if the massive wound was self-inflicted. Once he looked at the dagger, he realized that there was no way it could have caused the damage. Not only was the blade too small, it was also corroded and dull. In a fight, this weapon would probably be more of a hindrance than a help.

  Nate looked into the dead gray face. “Did Yerith send you?”

  Where was Yerith? He didn’t even know where the ghadi were kept here. He had no idea how to find her, even if she had the bad sense to stay put when this place was under attack. . . .

  With the door open, Nate began to smell smoke wafting in from the hallway. He could also hear echoes in the distance. People shouting, metal clashing, wood splintering . . .

  “They’re here,” Solis whispered. “They’re in the caves.”

  Nate turned the violet-stained dagger in his hands. He had seen something like it before. He stood up and held the blade over the hooded oil lamp. He smeared the ghadi’s blood from the blade with his thumb. There were carvings in the blade and hilt, inlaid in gold and ivory.

  The linear glyphs of the Gods’ Language.

  “He was trying to help us,” Nate whispered.

  “What?”

  “The ghadi. He wanted to help us. This dagger isn’t a weapon. It’s a key.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw something like this, in the catacombs under Manhome. One of Arthiz’s men used a dagger like this to open a passage. A passage the Ghadikan had built.”

  Solis looked at Nate and the blade dumbly.

  Nate picked up the lamp and said, “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere safer, I hope.” Nate stepped though the doorway and into the hall beyond. The air hung heavy with a haze of dust and smoke. Nate looked in both directions.

  Where to now?

  The problem was, he had no idea where the door this dagger opened might be. The ghadi caverns honeycombed the cliffside and it would be very easy to get lost. Wandering around at random, with the lantern announcing their presence to all who cared to look, was little better than waiting in their cell for the bad guys.

  Nate looked down and saw splatters of slick violet on the floor by the door. “Okay,” Nate muttered in English. “Let’s hope this guy pulled this from its normal resting place.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to follow the ghadi’s trail,” Nate told Solis. “Back to where he picked up the dagger.” Nate started following the blood splatters on the floor.

  “That’s toward the fighting,” Solis said, hanging back.

  “You can sta
y here.” Nate half hoped that Solis would stay with the dead ghadi. He kept following the blood trail, and Solis eventually jogged after him.

  That was probably a good thing. Solis irritated Nate, but his presence helped rein in his own panic. The last thing he wanted to do was admit to Solis that he didn’t know what he was doing. Nate felt the pulse in his neck, and every breath he took tasted of fear, but he kept moving to keep Solis from seeing it.

  Nate only barely reined in his strides so Solis could keep up. He followed the blood through several branchings, and up one short flight of stairs, before Solis grabbed his arm. “No!” Solis urged in a harsh whisper. “Up ahead!”

  Nate looked up and saw another light, much brighter, shining out of a doorway down the stone hallway. It was about thirty yards down the arched corridor. When Nate hooded his lantern and squinted, he could make out splashes of violet on the flagstones in front of the open door.

  Nate barely had a chance to hope that the light was from some unattended lamp or torch, when the air was cut through by an animal’s scream. The sound cut through Nate like an ax blade, felt down deep behind his sternum.

  “God . . .” Nate whispered, in English.

  In response to that terrified, pain-filled wail, someone—several someones—laughed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  MATE GRITTED his teeth, knelt, and set the lantern on the ground. He gripped the inlaid dagger like a weapon, even though it looked to have been dull and ceremonial when it was new. Slowly, he walked along the wall toward the door.

  Solis whispered something desperate, but Nate didn’t answer him. He wasn’t thinking about what he was doing. He was only thinking about what was happening in the room up ahead.

  Another wail, this one more agonized than the last.

  Nate ran up to the edge of the light, losing his pretense at stealth. It didn’t matter, the men inside the room weren’t paying attention to him. They were more concerned with the ghadi.

  The smell hit Nate and he had to suck in a breath and clench his teeth to keep his bile down.

  And they think the ghadi are animals?

  The floor was covered in straw bedding. The straw was a shiny violet under the torchlight, almost black. Two ghadi corpses had been dumped in a small alcove each with a massive hole in its torso. One ghadi lay on a table, its back arched, gasping for the breath to scream again, as a demon-masked human sank his arm into its chest. Another masked human held an uninjured ghadi facing the wall.

  A third human in a similar mask stood guard, though he seemed to pay more attention to the torture in front of him than the door behind him.

  Something bumped into Nate. Nate whipped around and grabbed Solis by the neck and slammed him into the wall before he realized who it was.

  From inside the room came the words, “Did you hear something?”

  “Yes, the last of this creature’s power squeezed into my hand.”

  Nate backed up a step and placed his hand over Solis’ mouth. He turned to face the doorway. Fortunately, he hadn’t stumbled into the light and it seemed the guard couldn’t see him from inside the brightly lit room.

  “No, Thantis, something outside. Could that ghadi come back here?”

  There was laughter from the one holding the remaining ghadi. “All that thing could do is find a place to curl up and die.”

  The one at the table, Thantis, rolled off the now-dead ghadi. The guard kicked the too light body into the corner with the other corpses. The one holding the last ghadi laughed and spun the creature toward the table. “Now I will enjoy this.” This last one had lost his mask, and his scars were fully visible across his face and his shaved head. There were also a set of fresh scratches across his left cheek.

  So the ghadi fight back?

  Apparently, at least, this one did. The ghadi kicked and clawed, and it took all three men to restrain it.

  Nate let go of Solis and gripped the dagger.

  Think, you can’t just charge in there. These aren’t fumbling acolytes. They are scholars of the College and who knows what the hell they can cast just by naming a spell.

  Naming a spell.

  Naming.

  Nate stared at the man without the mask. He knew the runes carved into the flesh, and he could see three spells.

  The names of the spells.

  Like the candles were named.

  Nate concentrated and whispered the incantation, one of the three invocations he had memorized. Instead of naming a candle, however, he named one of the spells on the face of the man holding the ghadi.

  Nate could feel the pull of energy, the potential force building in his words, released when he completed casting the simple beginner spell.

  This time he wasn’t lighting a candle.

  The man screamed and clutched at his face as if someone had poured acid into his eyes. The runes in the man’s skin were traced in fire, the spell branding the man’s skin.

  “God help me,” Nate whispered. The one who had guarded the door had his back to Nate. Nate jumped him, stabbing with the dull ceremonial dagger.

  Nate’s subconscious suffered from a perverse sense of humor, only letting him realize the full implications of what he was doing when he had grabbed the masked man from behind.

  What the fuck am I doing?

  Nate jabbed the dagger into the man’s back, above the kidney. It seemed to do little more than bruise his opponent. The dull blade couldn’t pierce the man’s robes, much less his skin.

  The man reacted to Nate’s attack by letting go of the ghadi and stumbling backward into Nate as they both slid on the blood-slick straw. Nate felt the man grabbing for his arm and Nate tried another blow with the dagger, under the arm this time where the clothing seemed thinner. The blade tore the fabric and might have gone in half an inch.

  I’m in trouble.

  The man threw himself backward, slamming Nate into the wall next to the doorway. The impact stunned Nate enough to loosen his grip on his opponent’s neck. The man pulled away and spun around, reaching for a blade hanging from his own belt. As he moved, Nate could hear the unmistakable syllables of the Gods’ Language emerging from behind the snarling demon mask that faced him.

  That couldn’t be good.

  Nate clutched the handle of the dagger in his fist, and punched the demon as hard as he could in the center of its crooked nose. Nate’s fist, weighted with the dagger, made a satisfying crunch against the mask. Satisfying enough that Nate barely noticed the skin on his knuckles splitting open.

  The blow had the intended effect. Nate could feel the dissipating potential as the incantation was interrupted. Nate threw his fist again at the cracked demon face. The left cheek of the mask caved in and the man’s head snapped back. He was still trying to pull his weapon.

  Nate kicked him, low. As the man doubled over, Nate brought the pommel of the dagger down on the back of his skull. The demon mask came off as the man fell to his knees. He was about to hit the man again, when something slammed into the small of his back, sending him tumbling over his kneeling opponent.

  “Shit . . .”

  Nate rolled over on his back just in time to see the end of a staff hurtling toward his face. He jerked his head to the side just in time. The staff struck the floor next to him, close enough to burn his ear and deafen him with the sound of the impact.

  Above him, Nate saw his attacker’s snarling face. Freshly burned runes wept clear fluid over the man’s cheek and shaven head. Nate tried to scramble to his feet, but he saw the next swing coming.

  I’m dead.

  Before the staff came down, someone jumped the man from behind. The swing went wild, giving Nate a chance to scramble upright. Nate saw his chance and ducked inside the staff’s reach. He began slamming his weighted fist into the guy.

  With the third blow, the man dropped the staff.

  By six or seven, the guy was on the ground.

  Nate turned to face the table, looking for the third man.

  The last one lay
on the table, still wearing his mask. A massive gash ran the length of his torso. Nate shook his head and turned back to the man he had just dropped.

  “Thank you, you probably saved my life . . .” Nate trailed off. He had thought Solis had jumped the guy to help him out. But he wasn’t talking to Solis.

  Standing next to him was the last living ghadi, its arms stained red with blood. Nate stared at the blood-drenched ghadi.

  “Kill it!” Solis yelled from the doorway.

  Nate looked at him. “What?”

  “It killed a man.”

  Yeah, and you watched. “Good for him,” Nate said. “These—” He choked back the words because he didn’t have the appropriate vindictiveness in this language. Now that the adrenaline was leeching away, he was thinking about Yerith. What had happened to her and the other ghadi? Looking at the straw bedding and the chambers off the main room, Nate thought that this place must be where the ghadi had been kept.

  Where Yerith worked.

  The rooms were small enough that he could just turn around and see the whole of it. There was no one left here, not Yerith, not any other ghadi.

  Nate dropped into English.

  “Bastards!” He kicked the unconscious man closest to him. He looked back at Solis, who still stood in the doorway, refusing to enter. “I’m not crying for them.”

  Solis was shaking his head “That thing isn’t human. If it realizes it can hurt us—”

  What a fucking revolutionary.

  Nate walked up to the remaining ghadi. “The one that came to our cell. He was here.” He talked as he approached, even though he knew the ghadi couldn’t understand him. Nate hoped that a calm tone and body language would get his point across.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Shut up,” Nate snapped at Solis. The coward made him nostalgic for Osif.

  Nate didn’t make any sudden moves. He didn’t want to startle the ghadi. “A ghadi brought us this.” Nate slowly held up the dagger. “Maybe you know why.”

  Solis sounded panicked. “You can’t speak to these things. They don’t conspire. They barely think. . . .”

  Nate ignored him, and fortunately, so did the ghadi. The ghadi looked at Nate, then at the dagger. Like the other ghadi, Nate saw something akin to recognition in its eyes.