Broken Crescent

by S. Andrew Swann

  It was terror, pure and simple. This kind of atrocity had more to do with the people committing the act than those being killed. The people in control were demonstrating what happened to those in dissent.

  “And Solis is frightened of me, Bill. Me.” Nate left the bodies and started to look for places Solis might have gone.

  The College had been thorough in their destruction. They left burned bodies and broken furniture in their wake. They also defaced the ancient ghadi artwork, pulling down columns and ghadi sculpture. Some hallways were littered with piles of dismembered stone hands and heads, mixed with real ones.

  To keep track of where he was, Nate had to pile loose stones at each intersection showing him where he had turned.

  At least it seemed that the College storm troopers had retreated.

  How much oil was left in that lantern? How long before you ended up feeling alone in the dark?

  The thought of being trapped down here without a light source brought back feelings of claustrophobia, so Nate pushed it away.

  It took a few hours before Nate and Bill made it to the entrance to the complex. By then, it was clear that the destruction was nearly complete. The College hadn’t spared anything. Anything burnable had been burned, and what didn’t burn had been smashed to pieces.

  Nate saw daylight ahead and wrapped up his light-stone. He stepped over a fallen column and edged around a corner.

  He stopped, facing a corridor that ended at a doorway framing a slice of orange dawn-tinted clouds. He could hear the rapids, and he could catch a whiff of air that wasn’t heavy with smoke.

  He held up a hand until Bill seemed to understand that he should stay put. Nate handed the ghadi his rock and crept up on the outside entrance.

  He was emerging from higher up than where he first entered the complex. Close to the top of the bluff, Nate thought.

  Nate had the feeling that something was wrong, even before he reached the end of the corridor. Halfway there, it seemed as if the floor and the walls ended too abruptly.

  As he edged closer, his view of the sky was displaced by the green of the forest canopy. Then he saw the clearing across the river.

  They were still here.

  Nate caught a glimpse of movement at the edge of the clearing and fell down on his stomach. He crawled forward on his belly, hiding himself as much as possible.

  Oh, God.

  When Nate reached the end of the corridor, he saw why it seemed so wrong. It dead-ended in midair. He could look about seventy-five feet straight down. What had been the face of the bluff now formed a debris field that extended halfway into the river and was piled about thirty feet high.

  The College’s attack had peeled the face off the cliff, exposing the tunnels inside like termite holes in a piece of rotten wood.

  This was the thunder. . . .

  The river had been no defense at all. The rope bridge was long gone, buried under tons of stone, but there were half a dozen new wooden bridges laid across the frontier. Each could accommodate about five or six men across.

  The river itself was a killing ground. Nate could see bodies, human and ghadi, piled half-submerged on its banks.

  Beyond the river was a massive encampment. The attackers had even widened the clearing to fit the tents in. The trees they had cut down had been piled into a series of diagonal walls between them and the river—though it looked as if the threat from a counterattack was nonexistent.

  Nate could see several men wearing black and red armor. Most of those had shiny circlets around their necks and wrists. The ones Nate saw stood at points around the perimeter of the encampment, holding weapons at attention. Among the tents, near the center of the encampment, a circle of masked and robed men surrounded the prone form of Solis.

  Damn it, you stupid SOB.

  Solis was staked down to the ground, encircled by men in gruesome and surreal masks. Nate couldn’t hear what was being said down there, but he could see that Solis was talking to the men.

  One of the men held a rune-carved dagger that was a twin of Nate’s. The key that Solis had taken from the ghadi temple. The man turned it over with gloved hands, holding it before his gilded mask. The mask was a horned animal, probably a goat. The horns curled around to either side of this guy’s face. It was the most elaborate mask in the crowd, which probably meant this guy was in charge.

  Goat-face confirmed it by nodding and gesturing at the acolytes surrounding Solis. The others responded by moving to the four points of the compass, two men holding down each of Solis’ limbs. One last guy knelt over one of Solis’ legs holding a more utilitarian knife.

  Goat-face’s mask moved, nodding up and down, as he walked in a circle around Solis. To Nate it looked like an interrogation. If that was the case, whatever Solis might have said must have been unsatisfactory. Nate couldn’t see what the kneeling acolyte did with the knife, but the result caused Solis to thrash as if he was having a seizure.

  A sick feeling of helplessness started smothering Nate. Even if he could take on that whole encampment without getting himself killed, he had no way to get down there without jumping the seventy-five feet to the rocks below.

  Solis had stopped moving. His left leg was covered in blood, tracing runes in his flesh. The acolyte with the knife stood and walked around to kneel down at the other leg. Nate could almost hear Solis yelling at them now. He could hear it as isolated high-pitched syllables disconnected from any words or grammar.

  Goat-face wasn’t impressed. He gestured to the acolyte, who began drawing in Solis’ flesh with the knife.

  This time Nate could hear Solis’ screams clearly.

  Nate closed his eyes. “You ruthless fucks.”

  He pushed himself away from the edge, but he froze when the floor of the broken corridor shifted. The damage that had sheared off the front of the cliff face had left the ground less stable than it looked. Nate’s aborted movement had caused the ground to sink under his hands by a quarter inch. The floor groaned under his hands and Nate held his breath.

  When everything stabilized and he could breathe again, Nate looked down at the encampment. No one seemed to have heard or noticed him. Very slowly, he started inching back from the edge. Every three inches or so, he stopped because of the ominous sounds coming from the rock around him.

  He was three feet from the edge when the stress became too much. Something snapped, and the floor started making a prolonged grinding noise. Gravel and debris started falling down the outside, across the broken opening, making a sound like hard rain. For a few surreal moments, the opening to the sky moved downward, tilted, and rotated slightly. Then Nate was scrambling back as fast as he could as the rock in front of him caved in and slid downward in a roar of rock and dust.

  Nate was quick enough to avoid getting caught up in the avalanche. He was standing, dust-covered and coughing, about a foot from the new edge when everything cleared.

  When he blinked the grit out of his eyes, Nate realized he had the attention of everyone down in the College encampment.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “OH, SHIT,” Nate whispered, spitting grit out of his mouth.

  Down in the clearing, Goat-face was making gestures in Nate’s direction. A dozen or two of the armored troops were crossing the new bridges back toward the cliff face.

  Nate retreated back down the corridor, grabbing the light-stone from the ghadi.

  “Come on, Bill, We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Bill put any doubts Nate had about the intellectual capacity of the ghadi to rest. Even with no language, Bill obviously grasped the salient points of their situation. The major two being: One, the College knew they were up here. Two, Solis had fallen into the hands of the College, meaning that retreating to the pit chamber was not an option.

  When Nate tried to return the way they had come, Bill grabbed his arm and pulled him in an entirely new direction. Nate didn’t argue. This ghadi was why he was still alive.

  They passed through the remains of
Arthiz’s Shadow College rather quickly. It was obvious that the would-be dissidents had never occupied more than a small fraction of the ancient underground city. The doors that Bill led Nate through weren’t hidden, strictly speaking. But while none barred passage like the secret pit chamber, they were heavy carved stone that age had blended with the walls so that they were easy to miss if you weren’t expecting them.

  Despite age, the stone doors opened easily at the ghadi’s touch, swinging silently on some counterbalanced axis that had survived for millennia. Bill never slowed down, and Nate quickly lost track of where they were.

  This is good, Bill, but they know I’m down here. If they believe the same things Solis does, they’ll pick through this entire complex now.

  Bill seemed to know that the caverns weren’t safe. What remaining sense of direction Nate had, made him think their twisting passage through the tunnels was taking them directly away from the river and the cliff face. When they reached stairs, they traveled upward.

  The air became fresher, and Nate felt a breeze that didn’t smell of anything burning. The air was heavy with the smell of vegetation, and before Nate expected it, Bill pushed through a mat of vines and they walked outside.

  The sky opened above them, tall trees to either side. The walls of the tunnel continued, but the tunnel itself had become an overgrown trench with a small stream flowing down the center. The walls became little more than overgrown heaps of rubble to either side of them.

  They followed the trench into the jungle. Nate looked around as they emerged, and realized that they were in the aboveground portion of the ancient city. Ruins surrounded them, heaps of stone reclaimed by the jungle, humps of earth marking the foundation of some long-vanished structure, the surreal image of a ghadi statue half enveloped by a tree, appearing as if the stone was being born of the wood.

  Eventually, Bill led him out of the trench and into the jungle. A few minutes later, Nate lost any hope of retracing his steps. He couldn’t even find any visible sign of the path they were following.

  All in all, that was probably a good thing. If Bill had some destination in mind.

  Bill did.

  Bill brought him through the jungle, a three-hour hike that felt like ten. Lack of food, water, and rest started catching up with Nate. His clothing also got in the way. The robe he had slept in was torn, covered in soot and blood, his skin was raw where the fabric rubbed against him, and his sandals weren’t designed for this kind of travel. Nate was ready to call it quits long before Bill had reached where they were going.

  Two things kept him going. The first was Bill’s purposeful stride. The ghadi had been through everything Nate had, and more, and showed no sign of losing focus. Bill had led him through the labyrinth, which was probably why Nate wasn’t being used as a runic scratch pad for some masked sadist right now. For that reason alone, he owed Bill enough to keep up.

  The second, more pragmatic reason, was the fear that if he stopped, Bill might not. As bad as things were right now, Nate knew it would be worse if he lost his guide. Alone, lost in the jungle, Nate would probably make it a day or two at most. The closest he had ever come to living off the land was buying organic produce at the West Side Market.

  When Bill found his objective, Nate shouldn’t have been surprised.

  Even though every ghadi Nate had seen to date had been under the control of human masters, simple logic would dictate that there would have to be ghadi living outside that control, in the wild.

  According to the legends, and the evidence they left behind, the ghadi were once the dominant species. Even if the entire species suffered from a crippling aphasia, that wouldn’t have precluded their survival. . . .

  Still, Nate wasn’t quite prepared for the village.

  They had cleared a space under the jungle canopy, so the entire community seemed housed within a gigantic green cathedral. Despite being woven from grass or reeds, the buildings were far from primitive. The walls were interlaced with sculptural patterns that were reminiscent of the bas-reliefs he had seen in ancient ghadi architecture.

  There were dozens of buildings radiating in concentric circles around a central pit that mirrored what Nate had seen in the secret chamber in the old underground city. There were even stones circling the pit, like the seats inside the chamber.

  Then there were the ghadi.

  The number of them was overwhelming. There must have been close to a hundred of them dressed in rough loincloths and short robes that were obviously hand-woven. For the first time Nate saw ghadi with dull eyes and bones bent with age. Until now he had never seen an old ghadi, or a ghadi child.

  Most disconcerting was the fact that they were completely silent.

  The ghadi met Nate and Bill at the edge of the village, in a mass that slowly parted as Bill led Nate forward. All stared at him with their dark alien eyes.

  They’re staring at me as if they know me.

  Nate still couldn’t read ghadi expressions. What he saw in their faces could have been fear, or awe.

  “This isn’t happening. . . .”

  The last ghadi stepped back, leaving the path open to the central pit, and Nate got his second surprise.

  Standing on the other side of the pit were the two dozen ghadi from the pit chamber. Nate knew them because, like Bill and himself, they were covered with the dirt and soot from escaping the underground. These ghadi didn’t just escape, they had looted the remains of the human settlement there. Nate saw books, weapons, clothing, masks, and central to it all, an elaborate black sarcophagus about eight feet long and four feet wide. The lid was open and Nate could see the gold glinting inside.

  How the hell did they move that thing?

  The exertion caught up with Nate and he sat down on one of the stones orbiting the pit. One of the ghadi handed him a carved husk that was filled with some aromatic liquid.

  Nate drank the bitter liquid, and felt the fatigue pull his eyes shut.

  When Nate woke up, he was lying in a hammock inside one of the woven buildings. His torn, bloody clothing was gone. He looked around, and saw Bill squatting in a corner of the one-room hut, staring at him.

  “Who are you, Bill? My apostle?”

  In response, Bill stood up and carried over a bluish, mango-looking fruit. Bill handed it to him and waited.

  “Thanks, but maybe I can get dressed first?”

  Nate sat up, and a wave of vertigo swamped him badly enough that he almost fell out of the hammock. The feeling surprised him, until he realized that he hadn’t eaten in over a day, probably two. He had been surviving on panic and adrenaline.

  The blue pseudo-mango started looking real good.

  Trusting Bill to stop him if he tried to eat an inedible part of the fruit, Nate sank his teeth into it. The flesh was firm and stringy, like a cooked squash, and colored blood red in contrast to its bluish skin. The taste was a weird sweet-spicy flavor, almost like candied ginger.

  At first it seemed seedless, but when Nate looked down into the fruit, the red flesh was shot through with tiny black specks. Guess those are okay to eat, too.

  Nate was so hungry that it didn’t occur to him until after the ginger-fruit was gone that the ghadi metabolism might be different enough that it could process food that was poisonous to humans.

  Wouldn’t that be ironic?

  No sense worrying about it at this point. “Thanks, Bill. I needed that.”

  Nate got up and stood unsteadily on the dirt floor. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he looked for his clothing. It wasn’t here, which didn’t surprise Nate that much. What he’d been wearing when he’d come here had been in a pitiful state.

  What was here was a pile of other human garments, up to and including a selection of masks. The neatly stacked and folded piles were placed on a low rectangular table as if they were an offering to the clothing god.

  “Aren’t you the thieves?” Nate looked over at Bill. “There’s no way you managed to salvage all this while the College
was attacking. You’ve been looting that place for how long? Months? Years?”

  Nate shrugged. “Don’t bother to answer.”

  The clothes fit him, after a fashion. Normal human clothing here was made for people shorter than he was. Fortunately, he was thin enough to get the stuff on, but a robe that was supposed to cover the whole body, ended mid-calf on him and he had to move the belt down about six inches.

  Once he was dressed, Nate stood there a few long minutes.

  “Now what?” he muttered.

  Bill motioned him to come outside.

  Nate followed Bill. From the light it was either early morning or early evening. In the center of the village, the entire population sat on the stones circling the central pit.

  What?

  As Bill walked forward, Nate shook his head. “No, I don’t think you understand. I can’t just summon Ghad. The other pit had inscriptions I could invoke, but I have no idea what the whole thing—”

  Nate found himself standing in front of the mass of the ghadi, by the edge of the pit. He looked at their faces, and felt suddenly inadequate. “You can’t even understand what I’m saying. I don’t even know why I’m talking to you. You should know you got gypped on your messiah. I’m no savior. I’m just a fucking grad student, and I am sick of all this.”

  Nate looked down into the pit and saw the bones of dozens of dead ghadi. No miraculous visitation here to take all of them away. “You know, if I could figure out how to overthrow the College, I would. If I could fix you people, I would. But I’m just one person who doesn’t belong here. What can I do?”

  Nate shook his head and stared into the pit. After a long time, the ghadi got up by twos and threes, eventually leaving him alone with Bill.

  Alone with Bill and the chest of golden tablets.

  What can I do?

  We don’t really know that yet, do we?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE SECOND DAY out of Manhome, their column of about five hundred men had reached the foothills overlooking the coast. At dawn, Chief Armsman Ravig Kalish came for Ehrid.