Broken Crescent (50 page)

“Then help me, damn it! If you want the ghadi free, help me.”

Nate clutched himself against the alien thing around him. He could feel that he was leaking away, his self melting like ice in the sun. He grabbed on to the one kernel of emotion he had: anger.

“Bullshit! You brought me here, you can take me there.”

“What do you mean?”

What?

Nate looked around, and suddenly he could see things in—or through—the darkness. He would stare at something, and it shot into focus.

He saw the Monarch’s encampment, the guards restraining Yerith as Uthar placed guards around the pit where Nate was now absent. Nate shifted focus, and Manhome came into relief with dizzying speed. He could see the face of the guardsman who had first captured him, walking through the ashes of a great library. An acolyte came from nowhere to attack him, but the guardsman took a familiar white wand and touched a phrase that was faintly embroidered in his cloak. The acolyte burst into flame.

Nate blinked and the image was gone, replaced by bodies bloated and floating in the shallows at the base of Manhome.

Blinked and he saw jungles. Then mountains. Then the streets of Zorion, absent of guards or any authority, an exodus of people fleeing a riot of looting and rape.

Then the citadel where the ghadi faced the army of the College. The walls had only held so long with Nate’s protective enchantment. They were falling, and the ghadi were falling with them.

As Nate watched, he saw the ghadi run from the soldiers, being cut down by the dozens. What could he do to help them? He couldn’t halt a whole army. . . .

He could. He had shown himself how to erase a spell. That’s all that muted the ghadi, a spell that was encoded into their bodies, their biology. He had wasted so much time in studying the spell, trying to understand it, when all that was really necessary was to erase it.

As the ghadi retreated in front of the scholars’ army, Nate began to speak the Gods’ Language.

Here, in the presence of Ghad, the words flowed freer than they ever had before, the power behind them immense and terrifying. He had only been tapping a thousandth, a millionth, of the potential of these words. Each syllable seemed to twist the fabric of the universe as it passed, revising reality to conform to its presence.

The words tore through the streets of the burning ghadi village, finding the ancient curse within the bodies of the ghadi, alive and dead. In an instant, molecules and genes revised themselves a hundred million times over. The spell tore through the fabric of the planet itself, finding every corner, and everywhere, all at once, the ghadi awoke.

The scholar that Nate had once called the Red Skull was leading a squad of guardsmen after a trio of retreating ghadi. He was taking a personal pleasure in the attack. There were still scars where his flesh was healing from the fire that the ghadi’s savior had inflicted on him.

He had burned fifteen ghadi already this morning, and he would not be satisfied until he burned the white flesh of their leader.

Until then, seeing the ghadi suffer as he had would have to do.

“Over here!” called one of his guardsmen.

He followed to a makeshift hut where the trio of ghadi—male, female, and a child—huddled in a corner. Behind his mask, he smiled. “You shall see what defying the College means, even for brute animals.”

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.

The alien satisfaction around him was suffocating in its intensity.

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.

Nate blinked, and he could see linoleum.

The floor of the Case campus.

Home.

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?”

Nate felt sick.

Something sank in.

He was still here.

“Wait a minute.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”