Broken Crescent (40 page)

“You should have an escort. Take only those close to you who can be trusted, can wield a weapon, and can move with speed. Have your advisers escape in parties of two dozen or so, give them the lesser of your guard and what servants can be armed. Send them away from our route.”

“How many am I to sacrifice?”

“You are giving them a chance to flee the College of Man. You know that any of your household, all those that serve you, would have their lives forfeit should they stay here. Sending them away now gives them some chance, as well as camouflaging our own escape.”

“I will organize this at once. What of you?”

“Have me meet with the survivors of the Shadow College to form a plan to defend our escape.”

Yerith had never felt such a sense of doom. Even when the College arrested her father and started putting his servants to death, even then there was some feeling of hope. Even during the frantic retreat through the tunnels, Osif had managed to keep his handful of acolytes calm and quiet as he led them through tunnels deep into the ancient ghadi ruin, long past any signs of the invasion.

However, by the time they had flanked the College’s army and arrived at Zorion, the mood had become bleak. There had been almost infinite routes of escape from the old ghadi caverns, but despite planning for the possibility, the College had been too swift and too precise in their attack. They had finished two thirds of the Shadow College in the first five minutes.

Osif and his group were the only ones to escape. That was a bad enough blow to the small group of outsiders, but even that realization wasn’t the worst of it. All of them had held hope that the Monarch, the personification of all power outside the College of Man, might be massing armies, preparing to deal some miraculous counterblow to the College and its forces.

Their arrival in the city put an end to that hope.

Even before they reached the gates, they saw the signs. Farms had been abandoned. Livestock roamed the fields at will. What people they saw would see their robes and unmasked faces and flee long before they were close enough to even shout a reassurance.

Close to the city they were met by a unit of guardsmen that seemed to expect them. The guards were a pathetic sight, clad in ill-fitting uniforms, old and hastily donned. The men who wore them were too young or too old. Some looked to be farmers and shopkeepers who barely knew what end of their weapons to point at the enemy. They seemed to have been without sleep for too long.

If anything, Zorion itself seemed less defended than the Shadow College had been. And while no one had explicitly said so, the eyes of every guardsman told Yerith that the College’s Army was on its way here.

What little hope was left to Osif and his people was gone by the time they reached the ziggurat, center of the Monarch’s waning power. The Monarch’s guard led them to an audience chamber deep inside the ziggurat. No one made any attempt to hide the situation. They passed guards and bureaucrats madly racing from room to room carrying boxes of the Monarch’s wealth. Yerith saw a trio of boys rush past them to remove ceremonial swords and armor that had probably decorated the hall here for the past six centuries.

It is over,
Yerith thought.

She hoped that, somehow, Nate Black and some of the ghadi might have escaped.

The guards left them in a chamber that had been stripped bare of all signs of wealth and luxury. For hours they waited. Long enough to worry that the Monarch might have forgotten them, abandoning the seat of his power and leaving them to fight the College’s invasion.

Nearly twelve hours after they had arrived in Zorion, Yerith heard a familiar voice.

“Things have changed.”

It was Arthiz.

She turned to see the man responsible for her presence here, and it was obvious that things
had
changed. Arthiz no longer wore the blank white mask of an anonymous acolyte. His face was bare and his skin twisted with runic scars. Yerith knew little about status inside the College of Man, but she did know that the more glyphs of the Gods’ Language were cut into the skin, the higher the status of the scholar.

Yerith suspected that Arthiz must have been a high scholar in the College, just to have the temerity to fight the institution. But the evidence on his skin was a different thing entirely. Even his eyelids were marked.

As he studied the remnants of his College, Osif stepped forward. “Master Arthiz?”

“Yes.”

“Are there any others?”

The expression on Arthiz’s face said everything. They were all that was left. Someone muttered, “What do we do now?”

“There is a small force at an enclave north of Manhome. I plan to get you there before the College descends on this city.”

“Then what?” Osif asked.

“For the next sixday or two, survival is the only strategy of any importance. We can plan for the future once we secure one.”

M
ATE KNEW that there had to be a point where he would have to decide what he was going to do. He couldn’t study runes forever, and, at some point, all the crap he was hiding from would catch up to him. Nate told himself that he would come up with a plan, once he understood what it was he had to work with.

Apparently, time was too much to ask.

Less than three days after he had managed to call down a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky, a new ghadi came to the village. Nate was hunched over his notes in a new clearing farther away from the main village. He didn’t realize something was happening until he noticed that all the villagers who weren’t out gathering food were running toward one end of the village. Even Bill, who seemed to make it a personal mission to baby-sit Nate, joined the others.

Nate put down the brush and stood up, trying to determine what the commotion was. He walked over to the mass of ghadi, which parted for him, allowing him to face a ghadi he had never seen before.

The new ghadi was female and filthy. She was covered with dirt, soot, and blood. What remained of her clothing was a knot of rags around her waist.

Nate knew she wasn’t a villager when she looked at him. Facing Nate, her face lost all natural reserve. She stared at him with an expression of terror and seemed about to bolt back into the woods from which she came. Before she could, several villagers, male and female, came forward and touched her in what was, apparently, a reassuring manner.

Nate backed away from the new ghadi. Whatever she had just been through, the last thing she needed was him looming over her.

It turned out, though, Nate was exactly what she wanted.

Once she was cleaned, fed, and had her wounds tended to, Bill led Nate to the pit, where the villagers were waiting with the new ghadi. Nate couldn’t get nuances from the ghadi gesticulating, but her story was painfully clear. Humans had attacked her and her village.

Nate hadn’t speculated on how so many ghadi ended up in human captivity. But they had to come from somewhere.

After she had danced and gestured her story, all the ghadi villagers, including Bill, including her, stared at Nate.

Nate stepped forward. “Take me to where this happened.” His words received blank stares, but he got his point across with his clumsy human gestures, pointing at her, pointing at himself, and pointing back the way she had come.

Her village wasn’t far away. Less than a day’s walk starting the next morning. It was close enough for Nate to worry about possible attacks on “his” village. It also made him wonder how densely populated the jungle here was.

The expedition consisted of Jane Doe, Bill, and two other male ghadi from the village who Nate named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack. Jane still seemed to regard Nate with suspicion, but from what Nate had learned about ghadi body language, Bill and the Steves seemed a lot more tense about what might be ahead of them than they were about Nate.

Nate wasn’t sure about this himself. For all the impressive effects he had called forth from the gold tablets, he still barely knew what he was doing. And he also couldn’t carry the tablets with him; the best he could do was take some of his notes folded inside his robe. Even with the long, silent trek through the jungle, he couldn’t come to grips with a coherent strategy.

What if he came across a group of College slave traders? How could he deal with them? Every spell he had took time to cast, and while he could cast transcriptions by their names, what they did in an unmodified state wouldn’t be terribly useful in a confrontation—except the lighting bolt, which sort of abandoned any pretense of stealth.

Nate was still pondering his options when they reached the village. Once they saw it, Nate stopped worrying about strategy and found himself wishing the bastards were still here.

It was a smaller village than Bill’s, just a handful of huts around a central pit. All of them had been burned to the ground. The ghadi the invaders had killed were left to rot where they had fallen. Any ghadi that were above a certain age had been slaughtered. The College apparently wanted their ghadi young.

One old ghadi had been crawling toward the pit when he finally died. He had crawled about fifteen feet with his belly slit open down to his spine.

The site was silent, and smelled of smoke and blood. Jane sat down by the pit and closed her eyes. Nate didn’t blame her.

After a few moments in a hopeless search for survivors, Nate helped Bill and the Steves to dispose of the dead. To Nate it seemed undignified and callous to throw bodies into a mass grave. However, it was clear that this was how the ghadi honored their dead. If nothing else, the old ghadi whose last act was to attempt to crawl into the pit with his ancestors told him that.

It was obvious where the ghadi had been taken. The attackers had no need to cover their tracks. They had left a trail ten feet wide, with cart tracks, horse droppings, trampled foliage and the purple blood of the ghadi.

Even if they could talk, Nate wouldn’t have argued the decision to follow.