Broken Crescent

by S. Andrew Swann

  Fade out.

  In.

  Cold air. Damp, salty. Dripping. Still being carried.

  Out.

  The bag is gone, he can breathe easier. Footsteps echo in a vast space around him, though he cannot summon the energy to open his eyes.

  The robe is gone. His skin is damp. He feels a gentle hand drying him. His eyes are open, but a gauze cloth covers his face. He’s forgotten what clean feels like.

  “Who’s there?”

  Nate had been drifting in and out of semiconscious-ness. He was weak, and his insides burned as if someone had scoured his body out with a wire brush. He blinked his eyes. The candlelight was too bright, making his eyes water.

  While his eyes focused, Nate was able to harbor a slight hope that he was waking from a long hallucination. It didn’t last. The first thing he saw was the face of the woman tending him. She was the same dark Asiatic race as everyone else he had seen so far. Her hair was straight, long, and tied in a braid.

  Nate’s initial guess at her age was early twenties, then he saw a streak of gray that wove in through her braid. When she leaned over him, Nate saw the wrinkles marking her eyes and mouth.

  Then, abruptly, he felt her hand on his shoulder, and she rolled him on his side. Nate’s body moved as if he didn’t weigh any more than the bedding he lay on. He felt a damp cloth on his backside, and was too weak to move. All he could do was tremble in embarrassment.

  He had borne it for so long he had ceased to notice it. But as the nurse washed the mess from him, Nate realized that the fetid stench that filled the air wasn’t from his cell. It was from him.

  Through some sleight of hand, after she had washed him, she somehow managed to change the bedding without removing Nate from the bed. She rolled him from side to side as she worked, as if he was an inconveniently placed sack of potatoes.

  “This can’t be fun for you, can it?” His voice was hoarse and whispery, and he could taste blood through his cracked lips.

  She had been washing her hands off in a basin that was set up by Nate’s bed. She turned around and looked at him, studying his face. She said something in the “common” language.

  “Fuck if I know, sister.”

  She looked in his eyes. It took a moment, but Nate realized that she was trying to determine if his babbling meant anything.

  She spoke again.

  “The name’s Nate Black. Pleased to meet you.”

  She walked up and pressed the back of her hand on his forehead. It was damp and cold from washing. Nate was grateful for the touch. It was the first physical contact in ages that wasn’t there to restrain him or do him injury.

  “What’s the prognosis—?” Nate started to ask. Then his voice broke up, coughing.

  She backed up and let Nate’s coughing fit subside. Then she walked over and placed a hand on his lips and gave him a look that was easily read as “shut up.”

  Then she washed her hands in the basin again.

  At least she has some concept of sanitation.

  Nate tried to elbow himself upright, but his arms didn’t seem quite right. He couldn’t get them under him.

  She turned around and barked something at him that made him stop moving. She pointed at him with one hand, and passed the other over her face, closing her eyes.

  Think I need sleep?

  Nate had to admit that it was very easy to lie on the bed, unmoving. It was even easier to let his eyes close. . . .

  BOOK TWO

  There was a slave whose child was sick unto death. She prayed unto Mankin, the god of her people, and was not heard. She prayed unto her master, the richest of all ghadi, and was not heard. At last she took her son’s body and laid it on the white marble altar where offerings to Ghad were placed before being cast into the pit. There she prayed unto Ghad for her son’s life.

  The slave’s son was spared, and his life given to service of the ghadi. His master was pleased with his service and gave him charge of all his slaves. In time his mother became too old to work for his master, and the duty to cast her into the offering pit fell to him.

  She prayed unto her son to spare her life, and was not heard.

  —The Book of Ghad and Man,

  Volume I, Chapter 5

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “DO YOU NOT appreciate the severity of this?” ‘The voice echoed off the high stone walls of the audience chamber. Two men sat at the great U-shaped table, both men robed and masked in a manner appropriate to their station. The speaker, the Venerable Master Scholar Jardan Syn, wore a red devil mask whose fierce expression seemed to mirror his mood precisely.

  The other man, Scholar Uthar Vailen, wore a mask of a clown with two mouths, one frowning, one smiling. Uthar had known Jardan for many, many years. He had, in fact, been instrumental in the power struggles inside the College that made Jardan the Venerable Master Scholar. Uthar often served him as an adviser, and knew Jardan very well.

  “I merely suggest that rash actions will not serve you or the College well,” Uthar responded to his superior.

  “We must take all resources to recover the creature before any more damage is done.”

  Uthar shook his head and tapped his fingers on the table. His elaborately carved rings glittered in a beam of sunlight streaming in from the high windows. The light picked out the sacred runes of the Gods’ language carved in their surface.

  “You say nothing?” asked Jardan.

  “I defer to the Venerable Master in all things.”

  “Do not be false to me. What faults do you see?”

  “How is it you plan to recover this creature? Send armsmen to the countryside? Search the site of every ghadi shrine? Question the populace?”

  “These acts allowed us to find the creature once.”

  “My Master should consider two important facts. First, what you propose will inform everyone, far and wide, that we have lost control of this creature. Is it in the College’s interest to admit such a humbling weakness? It may embolden the Monarch and his civil authorities to challenge our will elsewhere.”

  The Venerable Master Scholar dismissed that concern with a wave of his hand. “The College is supreme, and always has been. We have nothing to fear from men. The Monarch knows that to challenge the College would cost him his own power.”

  Uthar tapped the table again. The stones of his ring cast multicolored reflections on the walls of the meeting chamber.

  “But you said two facts,” Jardan said. “What other fear do you have?”

  “Just this. This creature was near to death. If it could so easily escape on its own, it would have done so long before now. This means that the creature was stolen from us—as were its possessions. Therefore, we must ask, stolen by whom?”

  “Perhaps you know?” Jardan asked.

  “What people knew where this thing was imprisoned? The cellars of the College here are vast and unmapped, but the people who took this prize knew exactly where it was housed. Therefore, either it was plucked free by the hand of Ghad himself, or—”

  “—or this was done by someone inside the College.”

  Uthar nodded. “Who else would know its value, or its danger?”

  “I cannot believe such a thing.”

  “Why not? There are arguments every day in these halls about what knowledge is fit to be learned. There are many who believe that, in this age, man is supreme enough to know all of Ghad’s mind.”

  “You know how we punish such heresy.”

  “When it is spoken, Master.”

  Uthar knew the Venerable Master Scholar well enough to know the seed had been planted. He could tell in the shift of Jardan’s shoulders, and in how the nose of his mask tipped downward. Behind his own mask, Uthar smiled.

  Yerith carefully brushed cobwebs and niter from her skirts before she emerged from behind an ancient tapestry. The heavy fabric hid a long unused doorway that led to several ancient cells. And while Yerith had a ready excuse for any acolyte who might see her emerge from this hidden passa
ge—as keeper of the ghadi she needed to look for available storerooms and sleeping chambers to ease the overcrowding—she didn’t want her appearance to raise any more questions than necessary.

  She especially didn’t want anyone to think she had gone beyond the dozen rooms immediately accessible from here, or to even think there were such passages beyond the last room.

  She took several deep breaths and listened. Even with her story scripted before her, the ideal would be to avoid the questions entirely.

  Fortunately, beyond the tapestry was only silence.

  Yerith slipped out from behind the tapestry, releasing a cloud of dust that made her sneeze. She stood still, heart racing, feeling as if the sneeze had alerted every scholar in the College above her. The brief panic didn’t keep the dust from making her sneeze again.

  The gods must not have noticed her, because no one else seemed to.

  Yerith replaced the tapestry so it was hanging as it had before her exit. She smiled to herself. She had done it, and for all the supposed omnipotence of the College, no one knew. No robed acolytes waited to take her into custody.

  She walked down the corridor, doing her best to hide her feelings.

  She was in the lowest level of the College. The air was heavy down here, and there were too few lamps. But she was not very far from her work. The College’s ghadi were housed in a small set of chambers not quite removed from the cells where heretics were imprisoned.

  Yerith made a point not to look at the iron doors she passed, because it would make her think of the desperate souls behind them. Doomed victims of the College who were not going to be spirited away. Victims who weren’t important enough to . . .

  Stop it.

  She forced her mind away from defying the College, and on to doing her job. She had several ghadi that needed some sort of attention. Then there was the evening feeding.

  Yerith stopped at another iron door that was larger and in better repair than the others, one that saw a lot more use. She pulled it open, and the warm smell of the ghadi rolled across her.

  She stepped inside and did a quick inspection. The bedding in the open cells looked in good shape. That had been a major improvement ever since she trained the ghadi to change it themselves. When she had taken over down here, the ghadi had to rely on guardsmen on punishment detail to keep them from standing and sleeping in their own filth.

  None of the ghadi standing in the common area, or in the stalls, seemed to require any immediate attention, so Yerith walked down the central aisle to the rear, where there were a few cells closed off.

  She checked on the isolated ghadi. The pregnant ones seemed to be doing fine. The one with a broken arm seemed to be healing up nicely. But, when she checked on the cells where the more critical ghadi were, the cells were empty.

  “What?”

  Yerith looked around. The cells only opened from the outside, and the trained ghadi here had never shown any interest in opening the doors.

  “I’m afraid they were taken.”

  Yerith turned to face an acolyte in a brown robe wearing a blank white mask. She knew him.

  “Taken?” She had a sick feeling.

  The acolyte nodded. “It was decided that those ghadi were a waste of your efforts and resources. They’ll be used elsewhere.”

  “A waste?” Yerith shook her head. “I’m the ghadi master here. That was my decision.” Her decision, but only at the pleasure of the Masters of the College. The ghadi here were nothing to them other than resources to be used up and discarded. Yerith had never officially disposed of a ghadi, because she knew all too well what that meant. Better to let the creature die of disease, or infection, or age.

  She leaned against the door of one of the empty cells. “Why are you here, Arthiz?”

  The acolyte stepped into the aisle and looked at the ghadi. The ghadi parted before him, casting wary glances at his mask and robe. “I wanted to compliment you on your efforts.”

  Yerith felt nervous talking about it here, in the College. However, she knew enough about the acolyte calling himself Arthiz to know that he would not be here if there was any chance of the wrong person hearing the conversation. “You’ve never told me why,” she said.

  “This is a dangerous game. I am necessarily cautious.”

  “Maybe. But your creature is freed, and hidden. Is it too much to ask why I used my ghadi to save this deformed half-human monstrosity, and not one of the hundreds of men, women, or children that the College keeps here?”

  Arthiz shook his head. “Not too much to ask, no. Just too much to answer.”

  “I deserve something.”

  “All I can say is that your act has had the intended effect, and this pleases me.”

  Yerith closed her eyes. She shouldn’t trust this man, even if he showed the seal of the Monarch and claimed to have the end of the College in his mind. For all she knew, this was part of some elaborate game the College itself was playing.

  However, all the doubts in the world would not change what she had already done. She had to keep to the course she’d set for herself, and hope that it was going in the right direction.

  “What do I do now?”

  “Treat it with the same care as one of your ghadi charges. It must remain hidden until it can be moved, and moved without notice.”

  “You realize this thing is chalk-white and as tall as a ghadi. How can it escape notice?”

  Arthiz chuckled. “There is more than one way out of Manhome, my lady.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MATE’S LUCID moments were getting longer. Still, it was a while before he had the energy to do more than daydream about greasy hamburgers, Chinese takeout, and deep-dish pizza. When it became undeniable that there was a world outside his own head, and it wasn’t going anywhere, he took stock of himself.

  Upon his self-examination, Nate decided that he probably should have been dead. He had always been skinny, but his body now was skeletal. There didn’t seem to be any muscle mass left at all. He could see the details of every joint, every bone, through sickly-pale skin.

  Sores dotted his body, scabbed over for the most part, but a few were actively discharging.

  The reason he didn’t feel his insect companions anymore was because someone, probably his nurse, had shaved him bald. Not just beard and the hair on top of his head, but also his eyebrows, his armpits, and his pubic hair. It was all just now growing back.

  His groin itched so badly with the hair growing in that he would have scratched it until it bled if he was up to that kind of exertion.

  His new home had walls of yellowing plaster, revealing carved stone underneath a few major cracks. Light came from a brass oil lamp that hung from a wrought-iron hook by the door. Soot from the lamp had cast permanent shadows on the wall behind it and the high-arched ceiling above. The bed was long and narrow, and still seemed to fill more than half the width of the room.

  He was not yet strong enough to get up and try the massive iron door and see if it was locked.

  Where am I?

  The question had worn such a deep groove in his psyche that it was nearly meaningless. The words were little more than an arcane incantation that might have been chanted by Scarface behind his demonic red mask.

  A forever ago Nate had decided that he had permanently left what he had known as the real world. The place he occupied was no more a part of the planet Earth of the twenty-first century than was the land of Oz. The darkness he had fallen through had been some sort of rift, some portal or transition between his world and someplace else.

  A few times Nate tried to decide exactly how “real” this world was, but ended up tying himself in the kind of solipsistic knots that had made him drop the one philosophy course he had tried to take in college.

  He had no end of theories that could deny the reality around him; he could postulate his own hallucinatory madness; he could invent some entity trying to manipulate his perceptions; he could even pretend that he was embedded in the ultimate virtual r
eality role-playing game. The problem with all of that was the fact that he had nearly died in that black pit where they had kept him. Reality itched. Reality made him smell his own shit. Reality was a painful bite of hunger burrowing in his nonexistent stomach.

  Pretty much, reality sucked.

  In a way, it was even worse here than in the pit he’d been rescued from. Up until now he’d been too sick and delirious to really contemplate what was happening. Now he was well enough to think, and to brood.

  He wondered how long he had been here. He wondered what was happening to his family. He wondered if Thanksgiving had come and gone yet. And he wondered if all his speculation meant anything when he had so clearly and completely left his own reality.

  If there was anything open to question, it was the world he had come from. The only proof he had that his memory of another world had any validity at all was his physical appearance. Racially, he was so different from the people who lived here, he had to come from somewhere else.

  His nursemaid came in twice a “day.” She would examine him, and feed him a bowl of thick, bland broth. When Nate seemed to have regained his senses, if not his strength, she left him a chamber pot.

  Each time, Nate would ask her, “Who are you?”

  Each time she’d mutter something in her incomprehensible language and get down to her business.

  On the eighth visit after Nate regained the ability to count, she did something new. After helping him eat, she took his left leg and bent the knee upward. She held it there and gave Nate a meaningful look.

  Nate stared back.

  She put his leg down and repeated the motion. Nate could feel unused muscles tightening in his thighs. She looked at him again, and appeared frustrated that Nate didn’t get it right away.

  She sighed and started doing it repeatedly, chanting, “Phi. Ghno. Ka. Lek. Dho. Shin.”