Broken Crescent (30 page)

“Arthiz, do not lower yourself with such pleas. You are more than that. You know how the powers move in the world. I will remember you as a good ally, and you may yet head whatever I put in place of the College of Man. But forces are moving as we speak, and your role has ended.”

“I serve at the pleasure of the Monarch.”

“My guard will escort you to a set of apartments you should find comfortable.” The Monarch waved his hand to dismiss him.

Uthar walked to the door.

“Remember, Uthar Vailen, you have chosen sides. You cannot go back.”

Uthar heard his own name and swore that he would live to see the Monarch’s death.

S
IX DAYS later, in the middle of the night, Nate awoke to the sound of thunder.

He blinked his eyes open and tried to get his bearings in the semidarkness. The only light was that which leaked from a hooded lantern at the end of the hall. At first, Nate only saw various shadings of shadow.

Another roll of thunder came, loud enough to make Nate’s chest ache.

Grit stung his eyes, and his lips tasted of sand. At about the same time, he realized that his alcove was filled with a cloud of dust and that he shouldn’t be hearing thunder this deep underground.

Nate didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t good.

“Solis?” he called out as he rolled out of his cot. The blankets and the robe he’d worn to bed were coated with dust and grit.

Nate heard coughing from down the hall, where Solis had made his room. Up by the light.

It came again. Nate grabbed the archway in front of his room, and felt the chamber shake around him, rumbling in response to the rolling resonant blast from somewhere above. Dust and powdered rock sprayed from gaps in stones that seemed much less permanent than they had when Nate had gone asleep.

When the floor stopped moving, Nate let go and ran to Solis’ end of the corridor.
“Solis!”

At first, all Nate could make out was a white mound of dust on the floor, but in a second, he saw the mound go into spasms with a racking cough. Nate reached down, found an arm, and pulled Solis up and out of the room.

Another blast, larger, throwing them both as if the whole chamber had been dropped from a height of about twenty feet.

“Are you all right?” Nate asked.

Solis pushed him away. “This is your doing!”

“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.

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.

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.

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 stay 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.

M
ATE 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.

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.