Broken Crescent

by S. Andrew Swann

  He pushed his sleeves back on arms that were still scarred pink from the burns, and began an incantation that would immolate these ghadi alive. As he started, he felt something odd, as if he—or someone—had already cast a spell. He could feel the fringe of an immense energy brush by him, tantalizingly close. He ignored it, deep in the concentration of the spell.

  So deep in concentration, he barely registered surprise when the ghadi spoke.

  Then the words choked deep in his throat and he gasped.

  The ghadi in front of him were standing, no longer cowering.

  Suddenly afraid, he tried to complete the incantation even as he felt the potential evaporate around him. All he could do was cough and sputter. The guardsman was not smart enough, or imaginative enough, to realize what was happening when the ghadi turned toward him.

  Five words the male ghadi spoke.

  Five words in the Gods’ Language.

  Five words and the guardsman was on his knees, vomiting blood.

  He was frozen, sputtering, unable to speak, as the female ghadi walked up to him and removed his mask. To his horror, she spoke in words that he could understand. “It is humbling to be silent.”

  He was silent all the way until the end, when they let him scream.

  The ghadi knew.

  They had always known.

  That part of the brain the curse had shut away was neither broken nor missing. The part that Ghad had created was always there, learning, watching, building an invisible and hateful intelligence that was walled off from everything, even the ghadi themselves.

  With one spell, the ancient race, the race hardwired to the Gods’ Language, that breathed its runes the way man breathed air, had returned. The race where every member was more powerful than the highest adept of the College of Man had been unleashed.

  And they were pissed.

  What the fuck did I just do?

  The alien satisfaction around him was suffocating in its intensity.

  “You have done well.”

  Everything began to sink in in full force. He was the Angel of Death. Ghad had handpicked him not to destroy the College of Man, but to destroy Man, period. Nate had just restarted the war that had nearly destroyed the planet in the first place.

  Ghad couldn’t have done better than to drop him in there. He had just the right skill set to completely destroy the balance of power. He had managed to pass off just enough knowledge so Uthar and the Monarch could decimate the College of Man. And now, out of pity and some sense of remorse, he had just unleashed the ghadi on them.

  “I have opened the passage back to where you belong.”

  Nate blinked, and he could see linoleum.

  The floor of the Case campus.

  Home.

  Ghad, you bastard.

  Easy now. Just reach over, and it would be over. All of this would be some nightmare. Just let this world disintegrate without him.

  Let Man die here while Ghad laughed.

  “You’ve won, haven’t you?”

  “My ghadi belong to this world, this world to them.”

  Nate felt sick.

  “Go home, Azrael.”

  Something sank in.

  He was still here.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “Go home, Nate Black.”

  “That’s my decision, isn’t it?”

  Silence.

  “You can’t do anything, can you? Other than open a gate? I still have to walk through, don’t I?”

  “Your purpose here is concluded. This world has nothing for you.”

  “Whatever I do is mine, isn’t it? Your power only comes from manipulating others, giving them enough information to destroy themselves.”

  The darkness slithered around Nate; it felt suffocating and tight within his chest. The intensity of Ghad’s presence was blinding in its power.

  But that was it. It was feeling without substance, potential without action.

  “You haven’t won. Damn it, you blackmailer, e-mailing bastard, you haven’t won.”

  “Do not anger me.”

  “Your threats are empty. Whatever rules you’ve established, whatever divine game you’re playing, all you can do is talk to me.”

  “Test me and . . .”

  Something happened, and the threat trailed off. The slithering darkness suddenly gained another character, another presence. A different voice came out of the void.

  “You would void our wager, my brother.”

  Brother?

  “The wager is concluded. You can see my ghadi rise as I have said they would.”

  “You cannot have this man do other than what he would.”

  “He has, my brother.”

  “But he defies you yet.”

  It sank in what was happening, what had happened. Just like the myths he had read, he had been caught in some sort of game between these deities. “What was it?” Nate muttered.

  “It challenges us.” said the new voice, the one that wasn’t Ghad.

  “What wager?” Nate asked again.

  “Ghad, my brother, claimed that he could do to my manlings with one person in a year, what my manlings had done to the ghadi in six centuries.”

  Nate swallowed. It must be Mankin that addressed him, and it began to make sense, this world’s attitude toward their “gods.” Mankin voiced Ghad’s wager without emotion, as if the elimination of Mankind was little more than a loss in a hand of cards.

  I can still leave. . . .

  Nate kept thinking of Yerith, and Bill, and abandoning them both to a world where they would be forced to kill each other. He thought of Uthar and what the man already knew, how there could easily be an arms race with the newly-awakened ghadi. This world had already been through it once.

  But he could buy some time. . . .

  It wasn’t easy coding the spell in his head with the slithering alienness engulfing him, trying to distract him. But Ghad was right, Nate was at the center of power, and it was as if the heart of the Gods’ Language, the superstructure of Ghad’s world was open to him.

  “What does your Angel do, my brother?”

  There was actually an uncertain note in Ghad’s voice. “No, you do not understand what you do.”

  Nate ignored everything around him, and spoke a spell of erasure, like the spell that had freed the Ghadi. It only had a few more lines of code, lines of code that were modeled on stuff he wrote when he really was Azrael, when he didn’t give a fuck about the consequences of his actions, and back when there wasn’t such a thing as knowledge too dangerous to possess.

  “What have you done?” Ghad’s words echoed pain, as if the thing around him felt the import of what Nate had just done.

  “Back where I come from,” Nate said, in English, “it’s called a virus.”

  Armsmaster Ehrid Kharyn, bloodied by confrontations with acolytes and suddenly hostile ghadi, stumbled into one of the last vaults in the College of Man. The shadows down here were long and odd, and he stood in the half-open doorway before the scene made any sense to him.

  “May Ghad avert his eye,” he whispered, sure that Ghad had done no such thing.

  The shadows were cast by a lantern that had tumbled onto the floor and somehow remained lit. Desks and shelves had been upended, scattering books and papers and ancient scrolls everywhere. In the middle of the floor lay the Venerable Scholar himself, neck twisted, demon mask sightlessly staring at the ceiling. Around his throat were the fingers of a ghadi that lay in a pool of purple blood.

  The scholar’s hand was still on the dagger embedded in the ghadi’s flesh.

  When he was sure he was alone, Ehrid lowered his weapon and stepped into the room. He knew where he was. Here was the holiest and darkest repository of the College. Everything written in the Gods’ Language too dangerous to be etched in skin was kept here. The scholar was obviously down here to find something with which to mount an apocalyptic defense.

  I probably owe my life to that ghadi, Ehrid thought.

&nb
sp; He knelt down to look at one of the books that had tumbled to the floor. One of the most secret of mysteries, to be defended and secreted by the College to the end of time itself.

  He opened the book.

  The pages were blank.

  He flipped through, and all the pages were blank.

  Ehrid frowned and picked up a loose scroll. Before the aged paper disintegrated, he could see there was nothing written on it. All of it—he looked at dozens of books, parchments, scrolls—all of it was blank.

  He walked over to the body of the Venerable Master Scholar and removed the demon mask. Looking up at Ehrid was a completely unmarked face, the skin flaccid and completely unscarred.

  Nate sat up next to the pit.

  Casting the virus had thrust him out of the netherland between the worlds. It wasn’t completely unexpected, but he couldn’t help feeling a deep sense of loss.

  I guess I’m not going home. . . .

  He was still chained up, and as he stood, a number of guards rushed him, and the only thing that kept them from running him through was a shout of “Hold” from Uthar.

  Uthar pushed himself through to Nate. His face no longer bore any trace of scar tissue.

  “What have you done?” he demanded.

  Nate raised his wrists. “Can someone remove these?”

  “What have you done!” Uthar sounded frantic.

  “Leveled the playing field.” It wasn’t a local idiom, but it was one of a few English phrases that translated in a way that made sense.

  Uthar grabbed him. “You called the presence of Ghad down on us, and now none of the enchantments remain. Even the ones carved into the skins of the acolytes . . .”

  “It’s all erased.”

  “What?”

  “All documentation of the Gods’ Language, every written source, has ceased to be. Even if the words are spoken into the air, they will be undone before any spell is spoken.”

  The color drained from Uthar’s face. “How long?”

  “As long as my virus keeps propagating itself,” Nate said in English. “How long is forever,” Nate added, in Uthar’s tongue.

  Uthar seemed to cave in on himself. “Why, why would you cause something like this?”

  “Basically to keep you and the ghadi from destroying each other, now that they’re awake.”

  Uthar stared at him.

  “Also, I think you should get me back to those ghadi. I may be the only person who can talk some sort of settlement with them.” I am their messiah, after all.

  “Negotiate? With the ghadi?”

  “You should show gratitude,” Nate said, “The ghadi managed to destroy the greater part of the College’s army for you.”

  Things had obviously progressed too fast for Uthar. He couldn’t absorb it all. He just kept shaking his head.

  For a while Nate was a prisoner. But he was patient, and eventually Uthar came around when his own people started coming back with reports confirming what he was saying. He was completely convinced when he brought Nate in front of some ghadi prisoners and they genuflected in Nate’s presence.

  So, the fourth week after the fall of the College of Man, Nate was on a horse, heading back toward the citadel with Yerith. The horses moved at an unenchanted pace, and by the time they reached the ghadi frontier, Nate was actually getting used to riding.

  As they approached the citadel, they began to see piles of human bodies, left to rot on the plains. The sky above was filled with the shadows of carrion birds.

  “I’m frightened,” Yerith told him.

  “You didn’t have to come with me.”

  “You couldn’t go alone, and what other experts on ghadi did the Monarch have?” Nate smiled at how easily Uthar had slipped into the title. “Do you really think there can be peace here?” She kept looking at the bodies they passed. Some piles were little more than bones now, and Nate saw one skull that still wore half a mask. In a touch of surrealism, the mask was, itself, a red openmouthed skull.

  “As long as the gods ignore us,” Nate slipped honestly into the local idiom. He looked up and saw riders approaching from the citadel. “We’re about to find out.”

  A party of about twenty ghadi came down and surrounded them, and Nate really wasn’t surprised when the one leading them turned out to be Bill.

  There was an intelligence in the familiar ghadi’s eyes that hadn’t been there before—or Nate hadn’t recognized before. His voice was old, low, and threatening. “You abandoned us.”

  “To save you,” Nate said. “I spoke the words that allowed you to defend yourselves.”

  “A great darkness has lifted,” Bill said. “But the words of Ghad have been stolen from us.”

  “You are free,” Nate said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  Bill stared at him. For a short time Nate thought he might have lost all the goodwill he might have had here. But Bill’s expression changed slightly, and it took a moment for Nate to realize that it might be a ghadi smile.

  “As ancient belief would have it, you have delivered us. We shall show you and your house our hospitality. And we will listen to what wisdom you bring.”

  The ghadi turned and led them both toward the citadel and the city growing at its base. As they approached, Nate patted the pack on his hip where he kept a book of notes in hexadecimal.

  Not stolen, Bill. Only borrowed.