“And skin?”
“So it cannot be taken from you.”
Nate looked at Solis’ face. Darkness had fallen and only a small amount of moonlight leaked through the branches. The scars carved into Solis’ skin raised shadows that made a third of his face an abstract collage of light and dark.
“How does it help you? You can’t read the . . . marks.”
“The marks have their own power, by themselves. If you know its name,” Solis traced the carving on his face with his finger. “You can invoke the whole—” another unfamiliar word, Series? Sentence? Spell? “—by calling on its name.”
It sounded more and more like a computer language to Nate. Code a function, then you just have to call it with some parameters to run it. But, instead of residing in some computer memory somewhere, this “language” was physically represented somewhere. Written on paper, inlaid into wood, or carved into someone’s skin.
There actually was a practical reason for the scarification.
“What does that do?” Nate asked.
Solis lowered his fingers. “It is an old spell to purify water. Invoked on the foulest swamp, all disease, poison, and filth sink to the bottom, leaving the clean water on top.”
“Sounds useful.”
Solis frowned. “All the salt in Manhome comes from seawater the College mages purify to irrigate crops.”
“That was what they had in mind for you?”
“That is what I did for them.” Solis shook his head and touched the unblemished part of his face. “You thought me unfinished?”
“Well, I—”
“The College thought me finished.”
Nate didn’t know what to say. He had gotten the guy talking and now Nate was paranoid that somehow he had insulted him. Especially since Solis had gotten Nate’s first impression right on the nose. Nate had thought the guy was a work in progress.
“Did they—” Nate started, halting on his imperfect language.
“Did they what?”
“Is that all they wanted from you?”
“All they ever want,” Solis said. “Their acolytes don’t serve to preserve the sacred language, or to honor the mysteries, or to protect Mankind. Their servants are taught just enough to be used. I was recruited into the great College of Man, had this carved in my face, and I was shown how to invoke it. That was all.”
Nate looked back at the now darkened walls that surrounded them. “The College doesn’t do this?” Nate waved back where they had come from.
“Only for those destined to lead the College one day.”
“I see.”
“A strange honor to bestow upon someone such as you,” Solis said. “Appreciate what you are being taught.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
MATE MANAGED to keep his sanity for the full week before they offered him any break in the routine.
Nate woke and dressed for the morning devotion. He started to follow the rest of the acolytes, but he was stopped by one of the blue-belted chaperones.
The man took Nate’s arm and pulled him out of line. “Stay with me.”
Nate had learned enough at this point not to speak to the guards. They were very touchy about novices knowing their place.
He stood with the guard as everyone filed out of the dorm area. Several of his peers cast furtive glances in his direction, while the majority stoically ignored him. Nate didn’t need anyone to say anything for him to pick up the vibe—
Being singled out for anything was not a good thing.
Bad or not, the break in monotony was welcome, as long as no one threw him back into a cell.
“We go this way.” Blue-belt took Nate down a side corridor, away from the dorm and where the devotions were held. They walked through stone corridors that gradually became more familiar.
Back toward Bhodan, Nate thought.
They didn’t return to exactly where Nate had come into the complex, but they were close enough that Nate knew that they were in the same general area.
If he listened hard, he could hear the river that passed the facade of the old ghadi city.
Also, if he listened hard, he could hear an argument raging ahead of them. More precisely, he heard half an argument.
If Nate concentrated, he could make out some of the words.
“—an insult. This place is not Arthiz’s personal kingdom—”
Pause.
“—I know what you believe. That does not mean we disrupt our—”
Pause.
“—How can it not be disruptive? Anyone who looks at him knows he is a—” The speaker used an unfamiliar word. “—they will think of him more than their studies.”
As they approached, Nate could make out another, calmer, voice. That speaker’s words were too low for him to catch.
“—then do it away from our students. We risk too much—”
Nate recognized the speaker now. Osif.
“I guess the bastard really doesn’t like me,” Nate muttered to himself in English.
Blue-belt glared at Nate, and Nate smiled back at him.
They stopped by a massive wooden door held together by black iron bands and square nails with heads the size of Nate’s fist. The voices came from behind it.
“Wait,” said Blue-belt.
Like I have much choice at this point.
Blue-belt knocked on the door, interrupting the argument on the other side. After a moment, the door swung aside.
Osif looked at Nate and waved him in. Blue-belt didn’t follow.
The room was a high-arched chamber with faded frescoes on the wall. The paintings were of ghadi, pastoral scenes showing what the city had once looked like. The rough wood table and benches looked odd contrasted against the graceful old columns—like Archie Bunker’s chair in a Frank Lloyd Wright house.
Bhodan was seated at the head of the table, his damaged face looking toward a spot about three feet to the left of the entrance.
“Our stranger has arrived. Good.”
Nate stood in front of the table, looking from Bhodan to Osif and back again. Again, communicating in an alien language gave him the pause to think about what he was going to say.
He looked over at Osif and asked, “Have I done something wrong?”
Osif ignored him and walked to the side of the room where he retrieved a small carved chest from a niche set in the wall. Bhodan answered Nate, still talking to the phantom spot to the left of the entrance. “No, Nate Black, that isn’t why you are here.”
“Why am I here?”
“A test,” Bhodan said. “We wish to see what kind of progress you are making.”
Osif set the carved chest on the table, casting a look at him as if Nate was a vile insect floating in his bowl of favorite porridge.
“I have only been here seven days.” Nate said.
Osif spoke. “If you have any capacity, we will see results.”
And this is your idea, isn’t it?
Osif opened the chest and Nate saw a familiar-looking black candle. As Osif took the candle out of the chest and placed it on the table Nate asked, “Do you do this with all your students?”
“Only some,” Bhodan said. “When there is a question of their ability to absorb the mysteries.”
Osif set a sheet of parchment and a brush on the table before Nate. Then he walked over and lit the candle. “After seven days, there is a question about me?”
“You are a stranger,” Osif almost spat. “If you—”
Bhodan raised a hook to silence Osif. He smiled, his face becoming skull-like in the process. “You are a special case, Nate Black. I think you know that. You, we must observe most closely.” He waved toward the parchment. “Please compose yourself and show what you have learned.”
Damn, they could at least warn you the midterm is coming. . . .
Fortunately, he had memorized the sequence they were studying. He was beginning to see it in his sleep.
He took the brush in his hand and began the laborious proce
ss of transcription. Without a model, the effort was even more taxing. He had to force himself to visualize the symbols, and holding them in his mind was almost as difficult as committing them to paper.
He sweated through the line of mystical script without pausing. He could feel, in the back of his skull, the pressure of the incantation building. He knew that, if he hesitated in his writing, that energy would break loose prematurely. He could feel it.
When he finished the transcription, he felt the wave break and sighed with relief as he set the brush down. The characters filled the first line in the page. He knew that he had done it correctly because of the way it felt to look at what he’d written. It took effort to study the characters, more than it should have. . . .
His smile lasted until he looked up at the candle. It still burned.
What the—?
He had followed the script down to the last line. Nate knew that he had written an exact copy of what he was writing every day.
He glanced at Osif, who looked way too pleased with himself.
Nate looked back at the candle.
The inscription on the candle was different.
“You sneaky little bastard,” Nate whispered in English. “You’re setting me up.”
“Are you finished?” Bhodan asked.
Am I?
Nate decided that he shouldn’t play it cagey, since he didn’t know what they’d do with him if they decided he wasn’t getting anything out of their lesson plan. Besides, he didn’t like Osif’s shit-eating grin. It would be just too galling for Nate to let Osif believe he’d outsmarted him.
“No,” Nate said, “I made a mistake. I need to do it over.”
He picked up the brush again. Before he started, he saw Osif’s expression waver, then he was too absorbed in the spell.
Hopefully it was just a matter of replacing the candle’s label in the script. That’s what Nate did, retaining the remainder of the characters as is. It was actually easier, now that he had a line of text to use as a model.
This time, upon completion, the candle obediently snuffed itself out.
Nate looked up, smiling. “I suppose that was an easy mistake for a novice.”
Osif looked at the candle. His expression told Nate all he needed to know. It had been a set up. Whatever ability Nate might have picked up in the last couple of days, Osif hadn’t expected him to get the idea that the ritual candles were individually labeled.
Probably part of the advanced course . . .
“Does he perform satisfactorily?” Bhodan asked.
“He completed the task.”
“Then send him back.” Bhodan waved toward the door with a hook. “You may test him again next sixday.”
Osif clapped his hands, and the door to the chamber opened, letting in the blue-belted guard who had escorted Nate here.
That’s it?
Nate turned back toward Bhodan and said, “Can I ask a question—”
“We did not speak to you,” Osif snapped. “If you are to be an acolyte, do not forget your place.”
Nate glanced at Bhodan, who he had thought had been on his side. The damaged old man said nothing, his empty sockets staring somewhere else. Nate felt a wave of frustration. “No one has told me my place.”
Osif’s skin turned a shade darker, deepening the contrast of his facial scars. He clenched his hand into a fist, and when he talked, his voice was cold.
“You will not address your betters unless you are asked a question. Any future break in discipline will be punished. If we must have you as an acolyte, you will behave as one.”
But no one has told me the rules. . . . Nate thought better of saying that out loud.
Osif waved at the guard, and Blue-belt took Nate’s arm and led him away from the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MATE’S “TRAINING” went on.
Devotions and rote memorization—no context, no explanation, and very few obvious principles to follow. You inscribe this set of symbols, you invoke it, this happens. The ability of an acolyte was measured in how many strings of arbitrary symbols could be remembered accurately.
It was as if he had descended into a medieval monastery where the liturgy was taught, but no one knew Latin or cared to learn.
Worse, every time he broached the subject to Solis, one of the few acolytes he could actually talk to, he seemed to be running into some sort of taboo. At the very least, some sort of conceptual barrier. When Nate asked why they couldn’t be told the meaning of these symbols, the answer was along the lines of, “One cannot know the mind of the gods, and hope that speaking their words does not drive you mad.”
Worse, it appeared that some were driven mad. In the first two weeks, Nate saw three people collapse, and one who, one day, stayed in his alcove in the dorm, staring at the wall, and had to be carried away by the blue-belted guards.
There was obviously a real danger in what they did.
Nate could only imagine what a mistranscription might do. Like a typo in an English sentence, nine times out of ten a random error would be gibberish. But who knew what the tenth error might produce? Instead of snuffing a candle, it could snuff something in your own skull.
If that was the case, doing random experiments was a bad idea.
However, that didn’t mean Nate wasn’t going to experiment.
How in the hell could he avoid it? It wasn’t as if he could turn off his brain and stop thinking about it. Even if he wanted to, that would have been hopeless. What he needed was a discreet and safe way to, at the very least, think about what he was learning in some structured manner. Not only did he want to make some sense out of the symbols he was memorizing, but he needed to engage his mind in something or he was going to go nuts.
But that wasn’t easy. Not only did the daily ritual devotions take most of Nate’s time, but there were difficulties in even the basic process of taking notes. In the case of the Gods’ Language, the map was the territory. If you transcribed a symbol, you transcribed a spell. Not only did it require concentration and an unbroken effort to do so, but writing down symbols in isolation or in differing orders would have some sort of effect and would be, in essence, the sort of random experiment that Nate was trying to avoid.
Nate had need of something that was just a map. He needed to refer to the symbols in his notes without actually using them. At first it daunted him, because there were more potential symbols in the Gods’ Language than in any written tongue he knew of. It was daunting to come up with a means of representing them. It was laid out so simply;
But each one of the twelve lines could be on or off, like the lines in the numbers on an old-fashioned LED calculator. Twelve lines, which meant there were thousands of possible characters.
It took an embarrassingly long time for it to occur to him how to transcribe the symbols. It was a full two days before he realized that each symbol was a representation of a twelve-digit binary number. When that finally occurred to him, it made him want to turn in his hacker hat.
Even more embarrassing was the fact that the way the runes were pronounced observed the same sort of concept, breaking the symbol into parts that represented different syllables. Not that anyone went out of their way to tell Nate that this line was named “H-” and when it was half there, it was “Hö,” but the pattern was fairly obvious. Obvious enough that after a week of exposure, explanation or not, pronouncing a new rune wasn’t any more difficult than pronouncing a new word in any phonetic language.
Once the code warrior inside him was duly chastised, he calculated exactly how many symbols there were. There were 212-1 symbols in the Gods’ Language. When considered as single indivisible objects, it was a staggering number to memorize, worse than any ideographic language that Nate had heard of.
But considered in the proper organizational framework, it was no harder to conceptualize than the numbers between 0 and 4095, or the subset of English words of six letters or less. That made it simple to come up with a mapping scheme that gave ea
ch symbol a unique label that Nate could understand almost instantly, but had none of the side effects of using the actual characters.
He started transcribing spells in his notebook in hexadecimal notation, lining the pages with columns of three-digit hex numbers that mapped to the twelve “digit” “numbers” of the Gods’ Language.
He stole what time he could. He began smuggling his own paper into the morning devotion, sliding it under the parchment they gave him for practice.
Then he could spend half the time copying the model, and the other half jotting down the hex equivalent of the spell, as well as the fragments of spells he saw carved into the skin of his comrades.
Making his own copy was a nerve-racking process, since everyone was so closely observed by the blue-belts. He only risked one number, sometimes only one digit, at a time. However, time was on Nate’s side here, since they spent several days on one string of symbols.
Into the fifth week, they had just begun Nate’s fourth spell.
So far, they had snuffed out a ritual candle, lit it again, and caused a pebble to rise to the surface in a glass of water. Also, with clockwork regularity, two days into the new study, he would be pulled aside to demonstrate to Osif and Bhodan that he was, in fact, absorbing the lesson.
Now they were returning to the candle-snuffing ritual. Nate had to suppress a groan, until he realized that the model he was working on was different from the first.
He copied the model dutifully on the parchment, as did the other acolytes, but he noticed that the spell was, in fact, several characters longer than the first spell they had taught here. It started with some minor variations, then copied the first spell almost exactly, then ended with a brand new sequence.
Then Nate noticed something about the new sequence.
In five weeks of surreptitious study, the single breakthrough Nate had managed in understanding the Gods’ Language was a small grasp of syntax, the idea that some of the runes existed for the purpose of punctuation.
The first punctuation symbols he found were from looking at what was inscribed on the candles, and the way that it was copied into the spells affecting that particular candle. On all the candles, Nate saw the same pair of symbols beginning and ending the candle’s “name.” To Nate, those symbols appeared to set off a string of symbols as a label, an identifier rather than part of a spell.
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