It knew they were in danger. It came here to save them.
Yerith had worked with ghadi most of her life. She knew how intelligent they could be when given the proper direction. Even so, she had never seen one show anything approaching this kind of sacrifice of its own volition. Until now, she wouldn’t have believed they could.
She was so absorbed in the ghadi and its implications that she didn’t realize anyone else was in here until she felt an arm wrap around her neck.
She dropped the lantern and started screaming and kicking as the man behind her lifted her up.
Then a familiar voice called, “Let her go, she isn’t from the College!”
Her attacker let her go, and she collapsed, gasping, almost on top of the ghadi corpse. She looked at the doorway through watering eyes. “Osif?” she managed to croak.
“Yes, may the gods continue to ignore us.” He turned to the acolyte who had grabbed her. “Help her up. We don’t have time to waste.”
Yerith managed to scramble to her feet without help.
“You wouldn’t know where our stranger is?”
She rubbed her neck and shook her head.
Osif cursed.
“What is happening out there?” she asked.
“The end of the world,” Osif said. “Come with us, we’re retreating to the jungle.”
She walked out into the hallway, where about a dozen men and women stood, tensely watching for any activity back toward the ghadi chambers. She started to ask where Bhodan was, or the rest of the acolytes. But she already knew the answer.
This was what was left.
“You take care of the three back there?” asked the acolyte who escorted her out of the room.
Yerith didn’t know what to say, so she just shook her head.
Osif started leading them deeper into the tunnels.
Armsmaster Ehrid Kharyn knew that a catastrophe was brewing. Over the past two sixdays he had seen the College mass an unprecedented force, pressing Ehrid’s most able-bodied guardsmen into service, forcing on them the circlet of direct bondage to the College. The better part of the civil guard in Manhome had departed with the better part of the College itself.
Ehrid had never seen the College mass such a force. They had never needed to. The threat from the mysteries they held was, in itself, enough to overwhelm any adversary. That they had gone to such lengths meant only one thing—
Someone had risen up in opposition to the College of Man.
Of course, Ehrid knew of only one place from where such opposition might come. And this was not how that opposition was supposed to reveal itself.
As small a part as he played in the Monarch’s conspiracy, Ehrid knew the plan as Arthiz explained it did not call for large armies to clash outside of Manhome. Not now. The College was supposed to rot from inside, collapse almost before the first move was made against them.
Something had gone very wrong, and Ehrid was fearful that he and his men would suffer for his support of the Monarch. He stood on his balcony overlooking the sea and tried to consider options.
He didn’t have any.
As he leaned on the stone rail and stared into the tumult of gray that beat at the base of Manhome, the wind spoke to him.
“Armsmaster.”
It was a voice he hadn’t heard for quite a while. Not since his men had seized the College’s pale stranger. It was a voice that, at the moment, he cursed ever hearing in the first place.
“What calamity do you present me with now?” Ehrid whispered. He glanced back at the balcony, but the accursed white-masked acolyte wasn’t there. Only his voice.
“The Monarch moves as we speak, as Manhome is left weakened.”
“Now?” Ehrid frowned. “The College prepares for war as we speak, sending armies into the wilderness to battle.”
“It is a feint.” The disembodied voice sounded unconvinced. “It has drawn the main force of the College away from the defense of Manhome.”
“You tell me now, why?”
“Events move quickly. The Monarch needs your force in reserve, not wasted in Manhome.”
“But here we can aid in the siege, seize power—”
“The Monarch is decided in his strategy. Manhome will be emptied of all its fighting force. Nothing will remain to be pressed into service by the College.”
Ehrid thought of the bulk of his men, wearing collars of servitude that made a mockery of a soldier’s discipline. He would defer to the Monarch’s wisdom in this instance. “How do I accomplish this without alerting the College of an imminent attack?”
“The Venerable Master Scholar is preoccupied with issues beyond the borders of Manhome. While he has been distracted, his servant Uthar Vailen has ordered all the remaining guard to support the Master Scholar’s efforts. You will leave the city in support of their force, at their orders.”
“And then?”
“And then, free of Manhome, you will follow the directions I specify, where you will arm, rest, and wait until the Monarch has need of your force.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
SOLIS WASN’T in the big chamber. Where would he go?
Maybe he wanted to look around this hidden ghadi temple. Corridors lit and unlit snaked away from the pit chamber. There was certainly more to see.
Yeah, Solis has this real big streak of curiosity.
What did the bastard think he was doing?
Nate could answer his own question.
Ghad was the closest thing this culture had to Satan, and Azrael was what they had for an Antichrist. Nate had thought along these lines before, but he hadn’t quite taken it seriously. In his mind, mythic stories were just that: stories. It just never really sank in that the people here might take such things as more than allegory.
What would Solis do?
Kill me . . .
No, there were ghadi everywhere, and Solis had seen a violent demonstration that the ghadi weren’t passive animals. The safer course would be to slip away, and try to warn someone.
Try to warn the College.
Nate shook his head.
How many temples of Ghad had the College destroyed? The stones on the hill overlooking Manhome, the plateau city, must have come from a place like this. Not only had Solis seen the Angel of Death out of his myths, he had seen a manifestation of Ghad in an undesecrated temple.
“You stupid bastard.”
Nate looked at the impassive ghadi. They were standing and filing away, and he began to wonder exactly what would happen to this place, the ghadi, and the trunk of golden tablets—not to mention himself—if Solis did run to the College.
I have to stop this guy.
As the ghadi had retreated to wherever the ghadi went, they left one behind. Nate could still see human blood on its arms.
My ghadi, Nate thought.
“You didn’t see where he went, did you?” Nate asked rhetorically in English.
His ghadi, however, saw him looking around and actually seemed to get the gist of what Nate wanted. The ghadi gestured at him to follow. He didn’t have any better options, so Nate followed the ghadi.
The ghadi led him out of the pit chamber and down a different corridor than the one the other ghadi were taking, stopping in front of a narrow doorway. Nate stepped inside and looked around.
“Solis, you bastard.”
In the room was a tall narrow wall that was completely covered with deep cylindrical niches. In about a quarter of the niches, Nate could see the hilt of a dagger. After picking up three, Nate found one with an intact blade. Comparing it to the one hitched in his belt, Nate couldn’t see a difference.
This was where it had come from.
Solis had come here, swiped a dagger key, and must have slipped out the way they had come. If he was lucky, he wouldn’t be too far behind.
But when he returned to the entrance, he realized he had a problem. The door reacted as expected, there was a hole to receive a dagger key, and inserting and removing the blade opened the outer
chamber so he could leave.
But Solis had taken the only lantern. The tunnels beyond the secret ghadi chamber were in complete darkness.
Nate stood in the circular antechamber, the only light coming from the glowing stones in the hallway he had come from. No convenient torches, and no way to light it if he had one. Nate walked back into the hallway, his ghadi pacing him and watching his every move.
Nate felt around one of the glowing bricks. There was no way to remove it from the wall.
He could, however, see the runes carved in the face of the brick.
Maybe?
It took a little bit of searching, but Nate was able to find a loose stone with a large flat surface on one side. Nate took it and a small, hard stone chip back to the hallway.
He intended to copy the spell inscribed on the glowing stone, but staring into the bright surface for very long wasn’t going to work. Fortunately, there were a few broken light-stones where the runes had been chipped and the surface was dark. Nate found a pair of damaged ones where the cracks were in different locations, allowing him to see two halves of the spell. Nate knew enough—at least he hoped he knew enough—to tell what parts of the spell referred to a uniquely named stone.
Nate took the stone chip, and with very tiny strokes, began to etch the flat surface with the runes. With the first stroke, he could feel the energy flowing from the core of his being down to what he was writing. The feeling was more intense than any he had felt putting runes to paper. His hand felt as if it moved though thick mud. The stone chip pulled against him, pressing into the flesh of his fingers. It was becoming difficult to breathe. . . .
Nate felt something touch his shoulder. He was too absorbed in carving the spell to determine what it was.
Suddenly, his movements became easer, as if his hand had broken through some membrane that had been dragging against him. Nate looked down at what he was scratching into the stone and saw tiny blue sparks where the stone chip wrote against the surface of the rock.
Almost unexpectedly, he was finished writing. He dropped the stone chip, which was now too hot for him to hold. The air smelled of smoke, heat, and electricity. The surface of the stone was etched with the runes and covered with a fine layer of dust.
Nate realized that the ghadi’s hands were on his shoulders.
Somehow, the ghadi knew enough to donate some sort of energy to the process. Like at the pit. Nate looked at the alien creature.
“Thanks,” Nate said, as if the ghadi could understand him.
Though, language or not, maybe in some way it could. Back home there were any number of animals that could communicate without a human language, and the ghadi here was more intelligent than any animal. . . .
Nate hefted his stone. “If you’re going to stick around, I have to call you something besides, ‘Hey, You.’ ” He stared into the alien face and thought for a moment, and then said, “You sort of look like a Dali portrait of Bill Gates. I’ll call you Bill.”
Nate shook his head, looked back at the stone, and spoke the words to invoke the runes he had just carved. It was much easer than scratching the spell in the first place.
His effort paid off. The stone in his hand started glowing with a cold white light, brighter than a hundred-watt bulb. It was almost too bright for what he wanted, the glare hurt his eyes. In order to obtain a measure of control over the light, Nate tore off a wad of fabric from his robe and wrapped the stone in it, leaving an opening to provide him with a flash-lightlike aperture.
“Come on, Bill, let’s find our wayward acolyte.”
Nate had thought he’d known what to expect. He had seen the College at work on his ghadi Bill. He knew that people would be dead. He knew that there would be remnants of some sort of battle.
Nate had been kidding himself. Nothing could have prepared him for what the College of Man had done.
The first sign was the smell.
As Nate carefully walked back toward the caverns that Bhodan’s people had been using, the first sense of wrongness was the odor of smoke. A heavy, greasy smoke that held a sickening weight Nate could almost taste.
As he got closer to the inhabited caverns, he had to step over debris that had fallen from the walls and the ceiling. The claustrophobia was back, the weight of the rock above him pressing down on the back of his mind.
What if they caved in the whole tunnel system? What if we’re trapped down here?
Nate ran into several dead ends that brought him to near panic as he looked at the piles of broken stone filling the corridors. Two things kept him from falling on the first pile of rock and trying to madly dig himself out of here.
First, the air was still moving, carrying the burned smell with it. So there had to be an opening to the surface somewhere.
Second, he hadn’t caught up with Solis yet, and Nate was positive he had gone this way, back toward Arthiz’s enclave—or what remained of it.
It took nearly an hour of backtracking and trying alternate routes, Bill dutifully following, before Nate found a passable corridor. Barely passable. At first it looked like another dead-end cave-in, but as Nate stood in front of the broken pile of rock, he could feel a slight breeze on his face.
Nate swallowed the growing feeling of pressure inside him as he walked up, close to the cave-in. His heart beat in his throat as he shone his glowing rock around every angle to see where the breeze came from. Nate found the source. Two flat rocks, each the size of a small car, had fallen nearly parallel, leaving a gap between them, cutting diagonally into the cave-in. At first, Nate thought that the gap was impassible. It didn’t look as if a human being could slip through.
Then he saw the footprint.
A single footprint leading away from him, into the crevice.
No, I could get stuck in there.
Nate could feel sweat rolling down his back as he edged up to look down the crevice. The footprints in the stone dust were oneway. Whoever entered hadn’t come back.
Solis made it through . . .
Or he’s wedged somewhere ahead.
The crack wasn’t straight. About ten or fifteen feet down, there was a sharp turn that took the exit, if any, out of Nate’s line of sight.
What if there’s another cave-in while I’m in there?
Nate’s breathing had become rapid and shallow. He felt his pulse in the back of his throat. He turned sideways and took a step into the crack.
“Oh, fuck,” Nate whispered.
The panic was barely controllable. His back was flat against an angled rock, and a slab of rock was less than an inch in front of his face. He barely had enough clearance to turn his head. He had to wave his arms as he moved, frantically trying to fight the feeling of being trapped.
Over and over he forced himself to think, I have enough clearance to move. I’m not trapped. I can still back out.
His body didn’t believe him. He gasped for breath like he was drowning, and his heart raced so badly it was painful. His light source cast strange shadows in the confined space, and all he could see was rock or dead blackness.
It seemed he shuffled along the narrow passage for miles, even though it couldn’t have been more than twenty feet. He nearly panicked when his hand touched the wall where the crack abruptly turned left. For a few seconds he was convinced that the passage had dead-ended. It took a few long moments of convincing, telling himself that the footprints were oneway and that he still felt a breeze, before he could attempt to manage the turn.
Once he did, he was suddenly in a much larger space. He was still in the midst of a cave-in, but the rubble on this side was mostly confined to one side of the corridor. He had just emerged from behind the largest pile.
Nate leaned against the rock pile, closed his eyes, and started sucking in breaths as if he had just been saved from drowning. He stayed there for several minutes, relieved that there wasn’t a giant rock half an inch from his face.
When something touched his shoulder, he jumped, dropping the glowing rock in his hand
. He found himself facing Bill the ghadi, looking at him with what might have been a quizzical expression.
Nate suddenly felt a twinge of remorse.
“Oh, Christ, I’m sorry,” Nate spoke English. “I left you in the dark.” He looked back at the passage he had just emerged from. “Oh, boy, you went through that without any light? You’re braver than I am.”
Nate looked back at Bill’s alien face. The eyes showed no whites, and had irises that were almost as dark as the pupils. As Nate looked at them, he realized that, while the exposed part of the ghadi eye covered proportionately the same amount of the face as the human variety, the eye sphere itself seemed to be half again as large.
Nate realized that the ghadi builders could have added their glowing stones anywhere, but they only bothered lighting the ritual space. Maybe they didn’t need the light.
Nate turned around to pick up his own glowing rock. It had fallen out of its cloth binding, so it shone over the entire corridor. When Nate faced the passage ahead, he saw the first real signs of what had happened here.
Three bodies had been left here. All had been burned so badly that the only way to determine if they had been human or ghadi was to count the number of joints in the extremities. The realization that the greasy smoke smell came, in part, from the carbonized flesh that still barely clung to these blackened skeletons was too much for Nate. He turned around and emptied his violently churning stomach on to the rock pile.
When his body stopped objecting, he stood there for a few minutes, leaning against the rock pile and breathing from his mouth. “Bill, if I’m your messiah, you must really be impressed now.”
Nate turned around and picked up the light-stone. Steeling himself, he looked at the bodies. Forcing it, as if in penance for embarrassing himself.
Human. From the position of the limbs, they had been bound.
Nate couldn’t help thinking of the green fire burning through the guard’s body after Scarface carved those runes in his chest.
How can a human being do that? Tie someone down and not just kill the poor bastard, but burn him alive? What point does it serve?
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