Maybe it does know me. Could I tell them apart? How could I tell if I met this one before?
It turned and walked toward the doorway. Solis almost fell on his face as he scrambled out of its way. The ghadi stopped in the doorway and motioned to Nate to follow him.
Nate was worried for a few moments that Solis might jump the creature, but it seemed that Solis didn’t have it in him. He shrank back against the wall as first the ghadi, then Nate, passed by him.
Nate only paused long enough to gather the lantern. “What are you doing?” Solis whispered now, as if he was afraid the ghadi might actually understand him.
“I’m following the ghadi,” Nate said.
The ghadi walked back the way Nate and Solis had come. Nate walked after him, and after a few moments, Nate heard Solis’ footsteps behind them.
Soon they were in another branch of the caverns. The ghadi led them into an unused area, and past a couple of partial cave-ins that made Nate feel nervous. Nate was starting to think that this ghadi wasn’t leading them anywhere, when they stopped in a cylindrical chamber.
It was a dead end, and the ghadi stopped in the center of the room. They seemed to have left the sounds of fighting far behind them.
“What now?” Nate asked.
He looked at the dagger. There weren’t any warriors lining the walls as he had seen under Manhome, so there was no conveniently empty sheath to fill. Even so, he was still convinced that he held a key to something. It was too much like the dagger that Arthiz’s men had used. For all he knew, it could be the same dagger.
Nate held up the lamp and studied the walls. They were carved in bas-relief, an army of flattened ghadi staring out at Nate. These weren’t warriors, and from the way they were dressed, Nate suspected that they had been ghadi of some status. They weren’t armed.
Nate carried the lantern around the circumference of the room, looking at the walls. He heard Solis gasp when Nate illuminated the central focus of the carvings.
It was familiar, he had seen this before. . . .
No, that was wrong, he had only glimpsed a vague outline on a weathered stone that had been defaced. No one had gotten around to defacing this, the carving was as sharp and detailed as the day it was made.
Erupting out of the flat bas-relief was a plant-cloud-creature that extended parts of itself a full foot above the surface of the stone. There were plantlike tendrils, insectile feelers, organic floral shapes, and organs Nate had no name for.
“Ghad,” Solis whispered.
This thing? Nate looked at the ghadi for some reaction. The ghadi did seem transfixed by the sight of the carving, but only for a moment. After a few seconds, the ghadi turned toward Nate and held out a hand.
Nate looked at the extended hand, with its extra joints and too-long fingers. It was still coated with blood.
The ghadi clenched its hand and opened it again, several times, insistently. What do you want?
Tentatively, Nate held up the dagger and the ghadi grabbed it so quickly that Nate worried that he might have misjudged the whole thing. Solis pulled away, stumbling back into the wall, as the ghadi gripped the dagger.
For a moment the ghadi faced both of them with the dagger raised, then he turned and sank the dagger into one of the many orifices that were scattered around the Ghad carving.
Nate watched the dagger slide in to the hilt and he felt the same sense of electric potential that he had when he had last seen something like this done.
The sound of grinding stones filled the chamber as the relief sculptures moved, sliding along the wall. Solis sprang away from the wall, as if it burned him. In front of them, the Ghad sculpture seemed to unravel. It split in two around the dagger with the halves sliding open to reveal a doorway.
Behind them, the bas-relief walls met where the entrance had been, sealing the room off. The air from the new doorway was heavy and damp and smelled of age.
“Now we’re trapped down here,” Solis muttered.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
MATE WALKED up to the part of the Ghad sculpture that still held the dagger. He pulled the dagger free. When he did so, there was a slight resistance, as if there was some suction or magnetic force holding it in place. The ghadi made no move to stop him.
The walls didn’t slide shut. Instead, the newly revealed hallway started glowing. Nate blinked, because it seemed for a moment as if the air itself had become luminescent. The brightness hurt his eyes.
It took his eyes several long moments to adjust enough for him to realize that the light came from stones evenly spaced along the walls of the corridor. Bricks the size of Nate’s fist cast full-spectrum light that seemed as intense as full sun.
The ghadi walked into the hallway, waving them forward.
Nate took a few steps to follow and saw Solis still standing in the entranceway.
“Come on,” Nate said.
Solis hesitated, then started walking after Nate.
Nate touched one of the glowing rocks. The surface was as cold as the surrounding stone, and covered in familiar rectilinear runes. Nate noted the regular positioning of the stones and could see half a dozen that seemed dead. The dead ones all had suffered cracks that obliterated part of the inscription.
There were other, longer inscriptions on the walls along the base and the top. The patterns reminded Nate of an Islamic mosaic, even though these were carved into the stone. Seeing the broken light bricks, Nate could understand why the stone was carved rather than painted or tiled. If these runes served a function, carving them into the rock was the most durable way to record them. Tile could break and fall apart, paint might flake away or fade, and metal could rust or corrode.
Carving into the rock would preserve it for thousands of years.
“How long has this been waiting?” Nate whispered.
Solis looked around and said, “This ghadi knew this was here?”
“It’s easy to keep a secret when you can’t talk.” The ghadi weren’t as completely docile and pliable as they had seemed. The lack of linguistic skills didn’t mean they were only smart animals. There was a human-sized brain in that skull. . . .
Nate wondered what it was thinking.
The ghadi led them down the illuminated hallway and up a stairway to a vast octagonal room. Nate guessed the chamber must have been at least a hundred feet across. Inscribed pillars supported a large arched roof. Seven other corridors led away, one in each wall, though only three were lit.
In the center of the chamber was a series of concentric circles formed by two-foot-square white stone blocks. In the center was a dark pit. Nate looked at one of the white blocks and saw a slight depression worn in the top.
Nate guessed the place was some sort of temple, and Solis confirmed it by saying, “All places of Ghad should have been destroyed long ago.”
Nate looked over at the ghadi, who had walked to the edge of the pit and had taken a seat on one of the blocks.
Nate walked up to the edge of the pit, next to the ghadi, and stood where he could look down. He shook his head and knelt.
Bodies. Dozens or hundreds. All ghadi, with their too-thin, too-jointed, humanoid forms. So many that no bottom could be seen in the pit. Most were long-dead and mummified.
A few though, were fresher.
Some much fresher.
“A graveyard.” Nate muttered.
“What?”
“I don’t know what this place was, but now the ghadi are using it to bury their dead.”
Solis shook his head. “No . . . the ghadi don’t bury their dead.”
“Care to tell me who you think has been throwing ghadi corpses here for—” Nate looked down into the pit. “Several years at least.”
Solis walked up and glanced down. “This is just some old burial ground. Ancient skeletons and mummies . . .”
“Some of those mummies are still bleeding.”
Solis turned away from the pit. “Who cares about a pile of dead ghadi anyway?” He walked away, shaking
his head and talking to himself. “What am I going to do? The College is going to hunt us down. . . .”
“You need to calm down before—” Nate looked up from the pit and whispered in English. “Oh, shit.”
“What . . .” Solis turned around and his voice trailed off as he faced what Nate was looking at.
Ghadi, living ghadi, were filling the opposite end of the chamber. First three, then six, then a dozen, two dozen. They walked purposefully and sat down on the stone cubes, facing the pit. None paid Nate or Solis any attention.
“This can’t be happening,” Solis said.
Nate backed up. It had once seemed so self-evident that language was the basis for intelligence that Nate had been lulled into thinking that the ghadi were animals.
Sure, he had kept telling himself that these creatures could think, but deep down he had known that the species-wide aphasia had knocked them several steps down from a human-level intelligence. Looking at the scene before him he had twin realizations—first, he recognized he had made that unconscious assumption, and second, that assumption was wrong.
He watched the silent procession with a growing sense of unease. It was impossible to read the emotions in the ghadi, as if facial expressions had also been wiped from their palette of communication.
When the seats were a third full, they started carrying in the bodies. The ritual was conducted in silence, giving Nate an eerie feeling of detachment, as if he was only a phantom that no one else could see—or the ghadi were.
Four ghadi carried in the first body. The ghadi pallbearers had duller, less flexible skin, and their coloring was faded and washed out. Nate suspected that meant they were older than all the spectators. Between them they carried the naked body of a dead ghadi.
The four ghadi walked in from one of the lighted hallways and approached the central pit. Once they reached the edge, they tossed the corpse into the pit. The ghadi made no sounds, they just stood at the edge of the pit for a few long moments. Then they turned and walked back the way they had come.
Nate thought that the ritual was over.
Then they brought in another body.
And another.
Nate kept a respectful silence. Solis was silent, too, though Nate supposed his silence was more of disbelief than anything else. Nate was a stranger, and hadn’t been raised with this culture’s prejudices, and he was finding this death ritual a complete surprise. To Solis, this had to be doing fatal violence to his worldview.
Nate finally thought he understood what was happening, when the ghadi suddenly changed the rules on him. In the next procession, between four pallbearers, the corpse they carried was definitely not a ghadi. It still wore the robes of an acolyte, and scars carved their way around its exposed skin.
“I know him . . .” Solis whispered.
It didn’t end there. In a procession of agonizing slowness, the ghadi carried in body after body. Twelve in all. About half of them Nate recognized from Arthiz’s Shadow College. These were the people who had been studying with Nate and Solis. All showed mortal wounds, burns, slashes, crushing blows.
“They’re killing everyone up there,” Solis whispered.
Nate nodded.
In front of them, the ghadi pallbearers spilt up and took seats in the midst of the spectating ghadi. All of them sat, as if waiting.
Why bring us here, to show us this?
Nate began walking toward the pit, the focus of the ritual.
“What are you doing?” Solis whispered.
I am really getting sick of that question.
“We were brought here for a reason,” Nate said.
Solis shook his head. “No. Someone’s directing them, controlling what they do—”
Who? Yerith?
“I don’t think so.”
Nate walked slowly to the pit, carefully, wary that he not disturb what the ghadi were doing. He was alert for any disturbance, any movement that might tell him that he was violating some sacred space. However, the ghadi ignored him as if he wasn’t there at all. Their attention was focused on the pit, as if something was supposed to happen.
Nate reached the edge and looked down at the fresh additions. Then he looked around at the staring ghadi. Oddly, what had seemed like a massive crowd initially, when he wasn’t expecting them, now seemed small. About thirty, including the now-seated pallbearers. The room they sat in could seat a hundred easily, probably more. Nate had been in bigger classes at Case.
“What do you want?” Nate asked them.
They continued watching the pit.
Maybe this is how they grieve?
Nate walked around the pit. The edge was finished in beveled black stone that set it apart from the flag-stone floor. When Nate looked close enough, he wasn’t terribly surprised to see that the black stones were covered in the runes of the Gods’ Language.
So why bring us here? What can we do that they can’t?
Nate followed the inscription until he found the bracketing symbols that marked the “name” of a spell. Nate crouched and wiped some dust and a few drops of violet blood away with his thumb. The symbols were all familiar to him now. He could feel the draw of power just by looking at them, by understanding them.
He looked up from the stone, and saw that every ghadi was looking at him now. It was as if they knew what he had found. Solis was on the opposite side of the pit from Nate, behind the outermost ghadi.
“What is that?” he called to Nate.
The ghadi stared at Nate, the eyes burning into him. Nate understood what they wanted now. It was only a question of whether he should do it. He looked around until he saw the ghadi who had brought them here. He could tell the ghadi by the human blood that still covered his arms.
They weren’t animals. They were slaves. Slaves whose masters had been killed, and who were capable of vengeance. Nate could feel the pressure. Do as they wanted and stay above the pit, or don’t, and possibly join the bodies within it.
Nate licked his lips and looked down at the stone. Five syllables. Very simple to cast. He began reading the syllables out loud.
“What are you doing?” Solis called to him. There was a hint of panic in his voice.
Nate ignored him. It took all his concentration to stay focused on the carving before him. Each symbol took more effort than the last. More than any other spell Nate had read to date, this one required a physical effort. Once he committed to reading it, his pulse began to throb in his neck and his temple. By the end of the second syllable, he was breathing hard and could feel sweat on the palms of his hands and the back of his neck. Even his muscles began to ache, as if he was sprinting up the side of a steep mountain.
As Nate chanted, the air filled with a terrible potential. The energy hung in the air around the pit, making the hair on Nate’s arms stand on end. He could even smell it, metallic ozone. The threatened impulse was several orders of magnitude stronger than Nate had felt with the candle lighting.
He could feel the waves of energy feeding into him, and into the invisible, unformed almost-something he was casting. He could sense it in some way he couldn’t quite name, a directional itch inside his head. An itch that he could taste. An itch he could almost give a color to, even though it was outside his field of vision in a direction he couldn’t point at.
He knew that he was feeling the ghadi. The spectators, all watching the pit again, were feeding him the power to cast this spell. Power he needed. Nate knew that if he stumbled, hesitated, or misspoke, the results would probably be fatal. He could also feel that halfway through the alien phrase that named what he was casting, he was hitting the edge of what his body could take.
The muscles in his arms and torso were locked and trembling. His skin burned with a sudden fever. Sweat stung his eyes. His breath burned in his throat. His voice ached as if he had been screaming at the top of his lungs.
He couldn’t focus on anything now but the blurry image of the runes before him. They seemed distant, as if he was falling away from them. H
is eyes watered, and he had to squint to keep the characters in focus. Each one was taking longer to pronounce, until each rune, each syllable, was a separate mountain to climb. He no longer could place where he was in the name of the spell. The territory was too vast. He barely had enough concentration to hold the rune he was speaking in focus, just enough determination to move on to the next one when that peak was crested.
Then, it was over.
After what seemed hours of chanting, Nate spoke the last rune, completing the name of the spell. The moment he stopped speaking, he could feel the awe-some potential that had been building around the chamber suddenly find shape. He could sense it fall on the pit like a waterfall, flowing into the stones where the spell Nate had named was carved.
Nate was finally free to think, If naming the spell was such an effort, what the hell is the spell itself like?
The runes carved around the pit seemed to glow with the energy. And the lights in the chamber seemed to dim.
Nate pushed himself up to his feet as he began to realize that the lights had not dimmed. The air above the pit was becoming opaque.
“What have you done?”
Nate didn’t have an answer for Solis. All he had was a sense of dread that, maybe, this hadn’t been such a good idea.
He took a couple of steps back from the pit. His stomach lurched and he almost lost his balance because he had the uncanny sensation that the floor was tilting toward the pit. His view through the darkening air was becoming twisted and distorted, as if he was looking through a lens. A black spot distorted Nate’s view beyond it, as if it pushed the light around itself.
The blackness grew, and with it the sense of something inside the blackness. Something alien.
Something familiar.
“Oh, shit . . .”
The blackness unfolded into a shadow of something else. The shape was indistinct and kept distorting, and changing, twisting inside itself. Nate sensed, rather than saw, branches, or tendrils reaching out of a mass that seemed partly botanic and partly insectile. In his mind’s eye, Nate imagined an orchid from hell. . . .
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