“Let me guess. You locked your keys inside.”
Bill looked at Nate, waiting.
“Sure, sure . . .” He gestured at Bill. “I’ll think of something.”
Bill seemed satisfied and walked over to the other ghadi, gesturing more elaborately. Soon the contingent had broken up into small groups to gather food, fire-wood, and water.
Nate studied the door. The first thing he did was cast the translation spell to copy a pseudocode version of the spell on a nearby rock so he could study it without getting a headache or casting something by accident.
It was good that he didn’t just try casting it. While he didn’t understand all the spell code, he could decipher enough to see that if someone didn’t invoke this with the correct password, something bad would happen involving a lot of heat. He also saw something that appeared to be some sort of delayed conditional clause.
If he understood it right, the same bad thing was supposed to happen if someone tried to physically move this doorway, either by force or by another spell. Like a booby trap or a trip wire. This was his first hint that a spell could have a persistent effect like that.
Then again, while he had transcribed all the ghadi primer tablets, he had only studied the first dozen or so. This concept was probably buried somewhere in the advanced tutorials.
The important thing was he needed the password to open this door.
Nate looked at the door and smiled, “I’ve hacked into better secured sites than this.”
The password protection was actually so simple, Nate wondered that the builders of this thing could possibly imagine it was adequate. The password wasn’t hard-coded into the spell itself—that would be almost as weak as leaving the door open. However, what the builders used wasn’t much better. The spell referred back to a name carved inside the tower somewhere. And since the spell contained the reference to the place where the password was stored, it was easy for Nate to use his translator spell to pull a transcription of the password.
After parsing the code mentally a few times to make sure he didn’t miss anything, Nate cast the spell, password and all.
The slab door slid aside reluctantly, as if chastised at being so easily circumvented.
Bill walked up, looked at the open door, then turned to Nate and gave a bow that was almost a genuflection.
“Yeah, right. So what is this place?”
Bill led him inside.
Walking inside, Bill seemed subdued, even for a ghadi. Even the air was still and quiet, and very cold. It seemed if the atmosphere in this place was fifteen or twenty degrees colder than it was outside in the sun. Nate’s breath fogged in front of him.
The air tasted of something very old.
The room they entered first was obviously not the main entrance. It was small and oddly proportioned, barely ten feet square and twice that high. The ceiling wasn’t flat, but had an uneven shadowed surface as if he was looking up into the base of a flying buttress. There wasn’t much more to see in the light that came in from the doorway. Just two corridors hugging the walls to the left and right, curving into shadow. Bill gestured to the corridor to the right.
“Whatever you say.” Nate pulled his glowing stone from the pouch where he carried it and walked toward the corridor, unwrapping it. The light revealed an arched hallway that followed the outer wall of the tower, sloping gently upward.
Nate walked up the corridor, passing columns and ghadi statuary. The ruin was eerily intact. There seemed to be very little damage from whatever disaster had blown the top off this tower. He stopped and studied one of the walls.
Embedded in it, he found a stone carved with an inscription similar to the one borne on the stone he carried. Bill waited patiently while Nate deciphered the code. It was clear that somewhere there was a trigger, but like the entrance, it was a simple enough bit of code that Nate felt comfortable hacking it. He spoke an impromptu incantation, and when he was done, whispered, “Let there be light.”
All up and down the corridor, stones set into the wall released their light. If Nate startled Bill, the ghadi gave no sign of it.
Nate wrapped his own stone and replaced it in its pouch.
Ironically, in the light, the corridor was even more eerie. Despite a layer of dust, and a few cracked stones, it looked too perfect. It looked as if the builders had just left and would return at any moment.
Ahead, beyond the curve, Nate could see the light get brighter, whiter. He gestured to Bill and resumed the trek upward.
The brightness came from the exit, where the corridor opened out into a balcony inside the building. Nate stepped out onto it and had to catch his breath.
Above them, for fifty or seventy-five feet, buttresses came from the walls to meet in the center of a domed ceiling that was nearly the diameter of the tower that contained it. Each stone that formed the ceiling glowed with its own light, shining down onto a gallery of stone benches. The benches formed concentric circles around a central dais dominated by a large altar or podium. The walls carried frescoes thirty feet high, bearing ghadi figures that dwarfed the two of them.
“What is this place?” Nate asked in a puff of fog.
The balcony where Nate stood was even with the highest rank of benches, and he walked around until he found the steps down to the dais floor. He walked down to the dais, and when he looked back, he saw that several other ghadi had followed him and Bill into the building.
Nate climbed up on the dais to get a better view.
It was like the circles the ghadi put around their death pits. But this was much bigger. This room could easily hold a thousand, maybe more. Nate turned around and looked at the place from all angles.
There were ten separate entrances like the one he had come through. Nate could picture several layers of corridors winding up through the walls like coiled ropes. One entrance was grander than the others, and it directly faced a wide ramp that led down to the dais.
Nate faced that direction and saw the frescoes of ancient ghadi kneeling and making offerings toward the space where the large entrance was. Nate turned and studied the frescoes. Group scenes, many ghadi facing some central figure. This time the central figure wasn’t some alien pan-dimensional monster, but another ghadi.
This was their government.
Nate was sure that, where he stood, once stood a ghadi mayor, or baron, or king . . .
“Why come here?” Nate asked quietly.
He looked up and saw that the whole party had come here now. Fifteen ghadi in human armor, looking down on the dais where Nate stood.
Why do you think we came here?
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
ABAD KARRIK had been a scholar within the College of Man for many more years than he cared to recall. As he stood on one of the high balconies of the College in the center of Manhome, he felt the full weight of his years. The world around him had upended, and he could feel the established order of centuries eroding beneath his feet.
Never had any temporal power challenged the College in such a brazen and open manner. And never had the College taken measures so severe. In Manhome, tomes of knowledge had been opened that had remained sealed since its founding. Now the shores around the College’s great city were red with the blood from the Monarch’s army, and the air ripe with the smell of their bloated bodies. Even where Karrik stood, high above everything, the air smelled of death.
Below him, the streets were nearly empty. Those who could flee had done so long ago. Those who remained stayed inside. The mood was one of terror barely kept in check. Those outside the College feared the College, as they should.
Those in the College feared other things.
The Venerable Master Scholar now saw the machinations of the Monarch in smoke and fire, and in the way the waves crashed against the base of Manhome itself. The defection of Uthar Vailen had disintegrated the remaining bonds of respect and trust at the highest levels of the College, leaving only fear and suspicion. Heretics and traitors were everywhere now.
“What is left?” He stared out at a pillar of smoke where someone was probably disposing of bodies.
“You are left, Karrik, my friend.”
Karrik spun around to find the speaker and saw nothing. He called in a harsh whisper. “Friend?” He shook his head violently. “You call me friend when just speaking to you could cost my life?”
The wind responded in a familiar oily tone, “You exaggerate, and I have no interest in seeing you feed the maw of the Venerable Master Scholar’s justice.”
“Begone! I will strike no deals with you or Ghad.”
“I ask nothing of you but time.”
“Uthar Vailen is no name I wish tied to my own.”
“Very well. If your faith is so much in the College, we will speak no more.”
Karrik nodded slowly and turned back toward Manhome. Looking down at the empty streets, he saw a body being picked apart by sea birds. He couldn’t tell if it had been a scholar of the College, a soldier of the Monarch’s army, or some innocent bystander.
“Wait,” Karrik whispered, half expecting Uthar Vailen to have abandoned him.
He hadn’t.
When Uthar left his tent, the Monarch was upon him.
“What news? What news?”
The person who, until the fall of Zorion, had been the most powerful man outside the College, reminded Uthar of nothing less than some orphan beggar accosting him for some sweetmeat. Having demonstrated his worthlessness as a person, Uthar was beginning to doubt the man’s value as a symbol.
Not yet. There is the loyalty of Ehrid’s men to consider. Still five days to travel.
“Perhaps it will please you to know that the College yet weakens itself, even as it counts its victory in Zorion.”
“Yes, we can regroup for a counterattack.”
Uthar stared up at the sky, which was beginning to darken. He wondered if the gods might be so offended at this man’s stupidity that they might strike him dead on the spot.
It seemed, though, that the gods hated Uthar more, and the Monarch remained alive.
“We shall take Manhome, but we shall do so by taking the College.”
“How, then?”
If I knew this, I would be in Manhome and you would be in an unmarked grave.
“The Angel of Death seems to have not yet outlived his usefulness.” Uthar told the Monarch, leaving the Ruler of Man confused and unenlightened.
When Yerith walked into Arthiz’s tent, the scholar was bent over a map. She didn’t know what all the notations were, but she recognized the great arc of the continent, a crescent with a mountainous spine. Near the western tip would be Manhome, and east of that, along the inner curve would be Zorion. Somewhere, between the two cities, and between the mountains and the ocean, was the place they were camped right now.
Arthiz looked up at her and smiled. It was disturbing to see a scholar unmasked, more so to see such an expression wrapped in scarred flesh. She looked down at the map again.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. He spoke as if it was really a choice on her part.
“I serve at the Monarch’s pleasure.” It was impossible to keep the words from feeling hollow. She had seen the Monarch, and heard him. Now she knew she had been serving little more than another mask.
If Arthiz sensed what she felt, he didn’t comment on it. Instead, he turned toward the map on the table before him. “Can you read this map?”
“I can see Manhome and Zorion.”
Arthiz nodded. “This is where we are headed.” He pointed to a cryptic notation next to a small town that sat in the foothills perhaps a day’s travel north of Manhome.
Looking at the map, Yerith saw some of the other notes and decided that one set, midway between the two cities, showed their location, and another cluster of marks showed the forces of the College around Zorion.
But there were other marks, farther east of Zorion on the coast, and north of Zorion, in the jungle between Zorion and the mountains. Both marks were close to the fringes of human settlement. “What is over here?” she asked.
Arthiz chuckled. “The subject of our conversation, Nate Black.”
He seemed to be pronouncing the name better.
It took a moment for Yerith to gather herself enough to respond. “He escaped?”
“Yes, he escaped. And while we’ve been cautiously moving, avoiding notice, he has been brazenly doing his best to terrify the scholars of the College.” Arthiz tapped the markings on the coast. “A small merchant village. Our pale stranger led the release of over a hundred ghadi.”
“Ghadi?” Yerith looked up, shaking her head.
Arthiz tapped the other markings, north of Zorion. “Here, there was a detachment of troops led by fifteen scholars of the College.”
“Fifteen?”
“You, of all people, can understand that the revolt of the ghadi is infinitely more terrifying to the College than the revolt of any man. They took a force strong enough to slaughter anything they found. They found the ghadi village where our stranger was hiding and reduced it to ashes.”
Yerith felt her heart sink. Nate Black had not escaped the College after all.
Or had he? Arthiz was chuckling quietly.
“What happened?” Yerith asked.
“I cannot be certain, since not one of the College’s force survived to tell anyone.”
“What?”
“Nate Black, and about a hundred wild ghadi, decimated a squad of the College’s best troops, and defeated fifteen scholars trained in the art of combat.”
Yerith stared at the map.
“I want to talk to you about Nate Black,” Arthiz said.
“We needed to isolate your creature from our students.” Osif frowned, staring into a small lamp that was the only source of light in the tent. “It was a dangerous distraction.”
“You did well keeping it.” Uthar sat on a cushion by the door, alert to eavesdroppers. “You followed a prudent course. I was not criticizing you or Bhodan.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I want to understand the heresy the stranger was engaged in.”
Osif nodded. “This was your interest in it all along, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. If the scholars believe rightly, that stranger held devastating knowledge. Knowledge that might threaten the College itself.”
Osif shook his head. “If this is the Angel spoken of in stories, it did not arrive with that kind of knowledge. It told us that it was trying to understand the Gods’ Language.”
“Understand?”
“It wanted to know what the runes themselves meant.”
Some of the rumors that Karrik had related, about a ghadi uprising, and the specter of the Angel of Death in their midst, made more sense now.
“In your opinion,” Uthar asked, “how advanced was the stranger in the studies?”
“It showed none of the discipline or aptitude of an acolyte. But it was still adept. It learned to invoke the spells of a first-year student in less than a sixday. Quickly enough to be frightening, but I saw nothing that showed more than a particularly promising acolyte.”
“Nothing?”
Osif frowned and looked a little unsure. “When it said, ‘Understand the Gods’ Language,’ I felt that it might actually be able to.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
SHORTLY after Nate arrived at the tower, the S ghadi began to arrive. The first day, Nate didn’t even notice the two or three ghadi that joined Bill’s little band. But the next day, Nate saw that half the ghadi were going around unarmored.
They arrived in small groups, by twos and threes, more each day. Some even carried human armor and weapons about whose origin Nate had no way of asking. When he walked among them, the ghadi lowered their heads, and the ones who caught glimpses of him had expressions of reverence and awe.
You poor bastards, if you only knew. . . .
Within a week, a village huddled around the base of the tower. And the ghadi kept coming. Nate looked on the mass of them and wondered what it was he was supposed to do. All the ghadi, all of them, seemed to be massing on this one spot. As frantically as he gestured at Bill, he couldn’t get the concept, bad idea, across to him.
Nate knew that the College wouldn’t leave things with the massacre at Bill’s village. This time, if the College had any sense, it would be massing an army. And they were just giving the College a centralized target. Nate might have the rudiments of spell-casting now, but even the last confrontation had been pushing his luck more than it should be pushed.
They needed some sort of defense, at the very least. Fortunately, by gesturing and sketching in the dirt, Nate got the concept of wall, and trench across to Bill, and within another week, trees were falling in the surrounding forest, and logs were being raised around the perimeter of the new ghadi city.
Soon, groups of ghadi walked the streets with long wooden spears with stone tips. The tips, made from fragments of the fallen tower, glinted white in the sunlight. It was as if Nate was watching an ancestral memory made flesh. Huts of sod and twigs grew up on the hillside, and it seemed as if they grew out of the foundations of some great buried city. The shadows of the ancient, long-fallen Ghadikan, seemed just visible, following the ghadi down the ancient buried causeways that led to the tower.
One day, we will be able to talk. . . .
Nate split his days now. Half the day he worked on the defenses, copying the spells he’d found protecting the doors of the tower, setting them to defend the logs that walled the new city. The other half he spent studying the spell he had found living within the ghadi themselves.
He began to think that if he had a little more time, they might be able to defend this keep.
It was time he didn’t have.
It was long after nightfall, and Nate was in one of the upper rooms of the tower, hunched over the ghadi spell, trying to reverse engineer it. He was pounding his leg in frustration.
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