Broken Crescent (43 page)

The next day, Nate discovered that what he had created had broader uses. The I/O of the spell was infinitely more flexible than any computer language. Just by changing the target for the “translation,” he could have it transcribed into a rock, a tree, or in midair. The source could be anything, not just the name of the spell. In many cases he discovered he could use it to unearth the “name” of something. Nate used vectors to point it at a tree, a stone, the air, a blank piece of paper.

In each case he got a string of symbols he could use to target that tree, that stone, that piece of paper.

When he used it to read from Bill, he got one hell of a surprise.

Instead of a runic “name” that could refer to Bill the ghadi, Nate got a seemingly endless stream of figures. Writing to the air in front of Nate, pages and pages of pseudocode shot by in front of him.

How did the ghadi fall in the first place?

Somehow, an aeon ago, the College cursed the ghadi with some form of aphasia. A curse that propagated through generations. Nate had assumed, if the story was true, that the ancient College of Man had inflicted some sort of congenital brain damage on the ghadi.

But what if what caused it was the spell itself? Some constant, self-replicating bit of code in MED . . .

That was the day the College caught up with him.

The warning came from a trio of ghadi running in from the surrounding jungle. For a culture without a spoken language, they got their message across within seconds. By the time Nate realized that there was something going on, ghadi were already evacuating the village.

Nate picked up his papers, and retreated to the edge of the village, finding cover in the surrounding jungle. He found a place behind the mossy root system of a massive tree and watched. He didn’t have long to wait.

Nate heard them coming ten minutes before he saw the first soldier. The soldier he saw was dressed like the ones he had seen outside Arthiz’s Shadow College. In fact, it could have been the same guys.

Unhurried and deliberate, the soldiers marched into the village. With them came over a dozen masked, robed acolytes.

They lost no time. Once they had walked into the village, the huts began to explode. Nate didn’t know what the mages were doing, but it was blowing the carefully woven huts apart in clouds of reeds and splinters. When some slow-moving ghadi were flushed out by a hut’s disintegration, archers in the small army cut them down.

It was clear that this group of men weren’t interested in prisoners.

Nate scrambled, looking through the notes he had with him. He had the transcription spell he had been experimenting with, and nothing else actually functional.

Christ, this was why they carved the spells in their skin; otherwise someone could catch them with their pants down.

Another three huts exploded, and three more elderly ghadi fell with arrows through their chests. Half the village was gone.

With one simple change, Nate suddenly realized he could copy a spell without any “translation” at all. And if he could copy a spell—

Nate cast the translator to read from the mage that seemed to be doing the most damage. The rest of the village was being blown to pieces, but the acolytes were fortunately fairly stationary, allowing Nate to point a vector right at the mage he wanted.

Above him, runes carved themselves into the body of the tree. Lines snaked around the bark as if they were a living thing. Nate watched, as all the spells carved into the mage’s body were copied in wooden flesh. Nate stared into the remains of the village, trying to gather a clue to the spell from the mage’s gestures. The tracing of the runes in air showed what the spell was named.

Nate couldn’t see much at this distance, but he did see a stroke of three parallel downward lines.

Nate quickly tried to find that character in the name of one of these spells. He found it, just as the last building fell to pieces.

With the village in ruins around them, the soldiers started marching outward, in a ring toward the surrounding jungle. The mages started casting other spells, and Nate could see the ground cover wither, and the canopy disintegrate. The mages were deconstructing the jungle, taking away the ghadi’s hiding places.

Not to mention Nate’s. His tree was only about twenty feet in from the edge, and the plants were turning brown and yellow around him. The soldiers were only ten or fifteen yards away and heading straight for him.

By the time he saw how the spell was targeted, he was already casting it at the center of the group of mages.

There was a satisfying explosion, throwing mages everywhere. The soldiers stopped their advance and Nate cast the spell at the soldier immediately in front of him.

The man’s chest burst open, through his breastplate, and he collapsed with a puzzled expression on his face.

As if they’d been waiting for a cue, the jungle suddenly vomited a hundred pissed-off ghadi. The soldiers were caught completely off-guard. The ghadi were armed only with clubs and stones to the humans’ bows and swords, but the humans were outnumbered three to one.

Within the first ten seconds that ratio was five to one.

Nate concentrated on keeping the mages from being a factor. Two more explosions, and none of them were moving.

In five minutes, he was the only human standing.

T
HE GHADI LOOTED the bodies and took to the jungle. Human armor and weapons looked odd on their elongated forms, but Nate could see the echoes of ancient ghadi warriors in them. For once, Nate could see that the same blood flowed in these veins, that these ghadi were ready to take their place next to the ghadi elders in the tombs under Manhome.

They left the gold tablets, as Nate had found them, in a chest, buried in the pit under the ghadi dead. He didn’t need them anymore. The ancient ghadi primers had been etched into the pages of an old book, replacing the mundane text that had once graced its pages. Also in the book were copies of what the mages had carried on their own bodies.

The human bodies ended up in a ravine.

Many times, Nate wanted to talk, to devise some sort of strategy. But all he had was the ability to do broad gestures to get very simple things across. It seemed, at times, that the ghadi weren’t quite in the same world that Nate was in. So he did what he could, and followed.

The ghadi, at least, seemed to have some clue what they were doing. When this human expedition was missed, there would be more. The College wouldn’t allow what amounted to a ghadi insurrection.

Nate stayed with Bill and the cadre of ghadi who had salvaged the soldiers’ armor and weapons. The other ghadi dispersed, fading into the jungle in all directions.

For the best,
Nate thought.
We shouldn’t drag everyone into a war. Especially when the College is probably looking for me.

Bill’s commandos marched north, toward the mountains. Away from the ocean and, Nate suspected, away from the bulk of humanity. They moved fast, and Nate hoped that he wasn’t slowing them down. The pace was hard and, when they stopped, Nate only had the energy to eat what food Bill gave him, and sleep.

In his sleep, Nate dreamed of empty blackness, filled with a slithering alien thing. The thing was everywhere, and it was laughing.

As they moved north, the jungle fell away. The land became drier, the nights became colder, and the plant life became more temperate. By the time Nate saw patches of snow between the trees, they had reached their destination.

A tower of white stone emerged from the ground. Cylindrical and slightly tapered, it spiraled up about a hundred feet. The top was jagged and broken, and the visible mountainside was scattered with white stone, showing that the ruin had once been much taller.

Bill walked around the perimeter of the structure, which was almost as wide as it was tall, until he came to a large stone panel. He stopped and waved Nate over.

The slab was covered in the runes of the Gods’ Language.

“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.