Broken Crescent (42 page)

“Fuck!” Nate pushed himself up and ran to one of the tiny barred windows. He reached it in time to see one of the men club Jane to the ground. He kept clubbing her. She couldn’t fall over completely, because her legs were still frozen in the ground.

Nate pulled out his glowing rock and the notes he had taken with him. On top was the wind spell.

Nate chanted, pointing the largest acceleration vector he could manage, from the jungle, through the men, right at the town. Again, he felt the surrounding ghadi feeding him the strength to speak the runes. He needed the strength because the modified spell seemed harder to slog through than summoning Ghad had been. The air itself filled with an awful anticipation as he chanted. It was as if he had to drag his brain through the icy mud outside.

Then he was finished.

The slave house shook. Outside the air roared like a freight train.

Out the small barred window, Nate saw foliage and parts of trees tear by in the sudden wind. One of the men tried grabbing a fence post, but lost his grip, tumbling down toward the other buildings. One of the doors from the stable tore free and sailed by the window.

The violence was momentary, and Nate already knew what he needed to do next. He stuck his fingers in the muck of the floor, and smeared a runic name on the door of the slave house.

He found the sound spell and replaced the air symbol with the name he had given the door. Then he chanted up the most violent high-frequency vibration he could manage.

The door vibrated, shaking loose dust and splinters. Nails shook themselves free, and the hinges whined as if they were in pain. A cloud of dirt billowed up from the ground. After a moment, the vibration subsided. Nate walked up and pushed.

The door fell into several fragments on the ground in front of him. Nate stepped outside. The ghadi had all collapsed on the ground as well as they could with legs frozen into the ground. With their extra leg joint they managed it better than a human could. The humans, most of them anyway, were getting to their feet about a hundred feet away. Debris and foliage was everywhere.

Nate walked out, between the ghadi and the men, and called out, “Drop your weapons and leave this place!” Nate hoped that his grasp of the language was still good enough to get his point across.

One of them shouted up at Nate, “That is the property of the College!”

“Let the College take them, then!” Nate unfolded the page with the lightning spell on it. “Leave or be destroyed.”

Nate could tell that they were debating it. These guys were just grunts. The only person who probably had a deep investment in the captive ghadi was Skull, and the last Nate had seen of that guy, he was on fire and running toward the shoreline.

Nate decided to make a show of force. He cast a lightning bolt about two thirds of the way toward the men. The blast knocked the men down again, and it still dazzled and half deafened Nate, even though he was expecting it.

That had the desired effect. The men ran for it.

Nate escorted a hundred and twenty-five ghadi back into the jungle. Nate followed at the rear of the migration, to provide some sort of defense if they were followed. They weren’t, at least not closely enough for Nate to see any pursuit.

A hundred and twenty-five. That didn’t include Jane, one of the Steves, and about ten other ghadi who had been killed in the fight. To Nate’s relief, Bill was one of the survivors.

He let Bill lead the ghadi, since Nate had only the vaguest idea of how to get back to the village. Fortunately, Nate was the only one who didn’t know how to live off of the jungle. Everyone they had freed had lived out here all their lives. They were also a lot better about not leaving an obvious trail than their human counterparts.

It was disturbing, being in the midst of such a crowd and not being able to have a conversation. The isolation was made worse because all of them seemed to look at him as a religious icon, not a human being.

Though it probably was a good thing not to be seen as a human being with this crowd.

It seemed to take a lot longer on the way back. Nate understood. Not only did they have a lot more people, but Bill was trying to take them by a less direct route, in case they were being tracked.

When they finally reached the village, it felt as if Nate had been gone for years. It was a triumphant homecoming. He walked into the village, and the ghadi genuflected. Even the ghadi he had rescued, seeing the reaction of the villagers, did likewise.

Nate walked slowly up to the pit and turned around. He looked at the ghadi and sighed. “I’m going to figure out something to lift that language block, just so I can tell you to cut it out.”

As Nate stood there, wondering what to do, Bill came from the crowd and stood in front of him. Bill moved from side to side, bobbing and moving his arms, and it wasn’t until he stomped his feet and clapped in a gesture that recalled a thunderclap that it sank in that Bill had taken on the job of disciple. Bill was preaching the good word to the masses.

Another reason he needed to overcome this linguistic barrier.

The village was now three times its original size. About half the new ghadi were working on building new huts for the expanded population. Nate found himself back in his office, finding a new urgency in his studies. He knew it was only a matter of time before the College caught up with him now. He needed to be ready.

The ghadi needed to be ready.

He didn’t know how he would manage it, but he knew that the answer was in the tablets. He sped through them now. Transcribing two or three a day, desperately wrapping his mind around the shapes of the runes. Picking apart pieces of the Gods’ Language.

He discovered measures that specified time; he found symbols that represented living objects and—to all appearances—elemental matter; he found symbols that were analogous to control structures in the computer languages Nate knew; he found loops, and branches and comparisons that could form decision trees. So there were spells that could react differently depending on what type of matter they were targeted at.

He found segments of spell code that could “read” other parts of other spells, and parts that could actually “write” the Gods’ Language—or anything else. It took a couple of hours before the significance of that began to sink in.

At its heart, you only needed three things for a completely functional computer language. You needed to be able to call other programs from within the main process—call them subroutines, system calls, user functions, classes, or objects. You needed a control structure that could make a simple decision to do one thing if a condition was true, and another if a condition was false. Lastly, the program needed some way to store and retrieve data, be it a register, a variable, or a file system. . . .

The Gods’ Language had all the necessary elements.

It wasn’t
like
a computer language, it
was
a computer language. The only difference was the hardware. He was looking at the code that was running on the universe. . . .

For a few minutes he had a brief sophistic panic that everything he was going through here was actually some sort of sadistically realistic computer game.

But if it was, did it matter? If you created something indistinguishable from reality—wasn’t that just a way of saying you created a new reality? What if what Ghad did was create some universe-making machine, and allowed his creations access to the source code?

To create something as “there” as the world around him, to create a world where the wind bit his cheek, where he could smell the woodsmoke of the ghadi cook fires, where he could touch the damp moss under his hand, had to actually be “there.” The only thing that had as much bandwidth as reality
was
reality.

Nate sat in the little clearing of his office and looked at the sky. Blue shone through a few openings in the canopy. The dense foliage rustled in the wind, and he could hear a few hooting birds in the distance.

“Worrying that the world is some cosmic video game makes as much sense here as it did back home.”

Maybe that was all life was; God’s own first-person-shooter. Accepting or denying the proposition made absolutely zero difference.

Nate looked down and took out a fresh piece of note paper and started working on some of the more practical consequences of unraveling the Gods’ Programming Language.

M
ATE HAD RENAMED the Gods’ Language “MED.” MED stood for Mechanica Ex Deus, which was probably butchered Latin but got the sense of it. Somehow he felt more at home working on something that was an acronym. And, even with a still limited knowledge of MED, after a few days of intense twenty-hour shifts, Nate authored the first completely new spell that had been written in millennia.

The logic of it was simple, though the execution covered several pages. He authored it first in his hexadecimal pseudocode, and spent two days mentally debugging it, running it through every permutation he could think of. When he was satisfied, he wrote the actual runes, which was akin to running a marathon, pushing through the inscription, rune after rune.

When it was done, he had a spell five pages long, consisting only of elements he had learned so far. The vocabulary was a crippled subset of MED, consisting only of around three hundred symbols, but people had programmed entire operating systems on eight-bit machines with less to work with.

When Nate looked up from the freshly written spell, the light had gone from the sky and he was alone. The only light came from his miraculously glowing rock. Fatigue sank into Nate’s bones after writing so much of the language at once. His body could collapse and sleep for a week right where he sat.

He couldn’t do that yet.

He took a sip of tea. All that was left was ice-cold dregs. He swallowed them and set down the new spell.

He had to test it.

He stood up. The long muscles in his legs ached and his left foot had fallen asleep. He limped around the clearing gathering the two things he needed. One of the golden tablets he had transcribed before; he chose the wind spell as fairly innocuous. He also found a blank sheet of paper. On the paper, Nate brushed in, very small, a runic name to allow it as a target. The spell on the tablet was already named.

Nate weighted down the blank paper and set the tablet next to it. Then he pulled out his five-page spell and proceeded to cast it. Fortunately, in his fatigued state, he didn’t have to cast all five pages of the spell. It was designed to be cast by its name by another spell. The other spell was very simple, only a couple of lines long, and all it did was feed the names of the spell and the paper to the long five-page spell. It was short enough that Nate could change the targets on the fly.

It was still difficult to cast. It made Nate realize how much support the ghadi were, how much energy they provided just by being present. Fortunately, long and complicated as the new spell was, what it did was a fairly low-energy process. It wasn’t beyond his ability to cast.

When he was done, he looked down at the paper.

He was Azrael again, right after hacking root access to the Social Security Administration’s web server. . . .

The spell did exactly what it was supposed to do. As Nate watched, hexadecimal code wrote itself across the surface of the page. In a few moments he had a perfect pseudo code translation of the wind spell.

Nate held up the paper and laughed. Not only had he just come up with a way to copy all the gold tablet source code he had access to, in a fraction of the time, but with the spell he had just written, he could reverse the process. The five pages of runes he had just completed would be the last time he had to write MED by hand.