Broken Crescent

by S. Andrew Swann

  From out of this black mass came a dark, wet voice.

  “I come before you, Azrael, to receive your sacrifice.”

  It spoke English.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  MATE BACKED AWAY.

  It was too much to absorb. Nate was still too much of his own world. Despite everything, an actual deity was beyond what Nate was prepared for. The reasoning part of his brain wanted to deny it, rationalize it.

  Its presence couldn’t be denied.

  Nate felt power radiating out of the pulsating thing hovering above the pit—a blazing sun whose heat was felt deep in the core of his brain. The sight made his head ache, but he couldn’t turn away. The ever-changing organic form seemed to move through spaces that were beyond the capacity of Nate to perceive, or even imagine.

  No. @ is not Ghad. Can’t be.

  “You brought me here.” Nate was surprised that he had the breath left to form a complete sentence, even a rhetorical one. The sweat on his skin had gone clammy, and his mouth was dry. His pulse raced in his neck.

  Blackness enveloped Nate, trapping him in the same netherworld he had fallen into at Case. Feeling that, and remembering Ghad’s first appearance, managed to snap his mind into focus.

  Fighting the fear and disorientation, Nate shouted into the darkness, “You brought me here. Send me back!”

  Around him he felt the sudden presence of an unseen, fleshy weight. As if something the mass of a small planet was slithering by him, just barely out of reach.

  “Your purpose is not fulfilled.”

  It was all Nate could do to keep a grip on his own thoughts. Losing the ability to see the thing made its presence worse, more overwhelming. The undulating blackness was now the whole of existence outside of Nate himself.

  Nate managed to whisper, “What purpose?”

  “Do not ask for what you already know.”

  Nate swallowed. He felt as if the darkness itself was curling around him, trying to slither down his throat and smother him.

  He could still think. Deep in the recess of his brain, where reason had retreated, a small voice said, It needs you.

  Despite the crushing omnipotent weight moving around him, despite the hellish claustrophobia that gripped him, Nate tried to focus.

  It needed him.

  And Nate had called it here.

  Nate spoke. “How do I get back?” The words were barely audible.

  “Complete your task and you will have that choice.”

  Nate closed his eyes. Even though there was nothing to see, it helped him hold his wits together in the face of this thing. It will not crush me, or drive me mad. It needs me. It needs me. It needs me.

  “Can. You. Help. Me?” Each word was an effort. He had to pull each word as if the structure of language itself was disintegrating in the face of this thing.

  “I offer information.”

  “What. Information?”

  “Ask.” The force of command felt as if it ripped Nate’s brain free of his body. He was transfixed, unable to move. He wasn’t even sure if his question was spoken, or merely thought, “What are you?”

  “I am.”

  Uncontrollable panic started tearing at Nate. He was being tested, and blowing it. It was playing some sort of game, and Nate didn’t know what the rules were, or how he was being scored. And this thing’s very existence was eating into his consciousness.

  And the words were now being torn from him without his volition. As if Ghad’s tendrils were burrowing into his brain to pull half completed thoughts free.

  “How can I survive this mess? I don’t belong here.”

  “You belong. You will survive.”

  “How can I fight the College of Man?”

  “Use what you already know to create what you do not know.”

  “Why? Why is it me? Why did you pick me?”

  “You understand more than you know. You know more than others understand.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Do what you have already done.”

  Nate felt the presence withdrawing. The blackness was sliding out of his brain, slithering away.

  Nate opened his eyes saw the darkness lightening around the edges. The alien presence, the shadow around him, folded in on itself, a dark implosion above the pit.

  The darkness collapsed inward, falling into the distorted view of the other side of the room without actually moving. Nate felt as if reality itself was moving, swirling to fill a hole above the pit like water toward a bathtub drain.

  Then the blackness was gone.

  Everyone looked at him. The expressions of the ghadi were as impassive and unreadable as ever, but Solis was wide-eyed. The dark skin of his face was ashen and the lines of his scars had become almost pure white.

  “It talked to you,” Solis accused him. “It knows you.”

  Nate took a few deep breaths. It was hard adjusting to being suddenly back in light and gravity. His legs felt weak. He looked up at Solis and said, “It should. That thing brought me here.”

  Looking at the expression on Solis’ face, that probably wasn’t the right thing to say. The man looked as if he had just confirmed his worst fears. Nate couldn’t work himself up to give a shit. After what had just happened, Solis couldn’t even rate as a minor annoyance.

  Nate looked around at the ghadi and wondered what it was they had seen. It must have made an impression, because they were all standing and staring at him.

  How long have they been waiting for that ritual to be completed?

  Nate looked over the edge of the pit.

  The bodies were gone.

  “Ghad brought you here?” Solis said. “You are the Angel of Death.” He kept backing away from the pit.

  “Give it a rest,” Nate said. The English idiom didn’t translate well, at all really, but at least the non sequitur caused Solis to stop talking. Nate crouched down and stared into the pit.

  There was still something down there, but it was hard to see. Nate could barely see the floor, a radial mosaic that was nearly fifty feet down.

  The pile of bodies was forty feet deep.

  How long had it been accumulating? A hundred years? A thousand? How long before weight and age turned the lowermost bodies into dust? Had the ghadi here reached an equilibrium point where the sinking from decay matched the rate at which new bodies were added?

  How morbid is that?

  There was, however, something left down there. Darker than the floor, and rectangular. Nate was wondering how to get a better look at whatever it was when he noticed that there was a ramp of sorts carved in the side of the pit.

  A path had been carved into the stone wall, providing a steep spiral ramp as the way down. Nate stepped onto the path.

  Solis said something, but Nate was beyond caring what. He walked down toward the object Ghad had left in the pit.

  Nate stepped out onto the floor of the pit, giving his eyes a few minutes to adjust to the gloom down here. Solis shouted something, but the acoustics down here were muffled and Nate couldn’t make out the words.

  He walked over to the object that had brought him down here. It was an elaborate chest about eight feet long and four feet wide. The surface was made of some black material, cold and smooth to the touch. It was hard to tell what the material was, it could have been wood, or metal—or plastic for all Nate could tell.

  Nate looked for a means of opening the thing, but he couldn’t find one. Could this have been here, under all those bodies, all this time?

  Nate felt along the edges of the chest, and couldn’t even find a seam. He looked at the markings etched into the chest, and couldn’t find any runic carvings waiting to be invoked. The carvings themselves seemed out of character. Stylistically, they resembled the ghadi artwork he had seen off and on since he came here. But the composition was very different. The figures on the chest were trapped in poses that seemed to represent the dead and the dying. Nate was reminded of pictures he had seen of medieval European artwork duri
ng the black plague.

  A sarcophagus?

  That would make sense; this was a sacrificial spot. But if this was an offering, why wasn’t it taken with the rest of the bodies?

  Nate felt the relief carvings of dead and diseased ghadi until he came to something very disturbing on the top surface of the chest—a human being. The carving was unquestionably human; the proportions made that obvious. The human figure stood on a rise that overlooked a vast field of ghadi corpses. The ones closest to the human were still falling.

  Or rising?

  Nate couldn’t get the imagery of the last judgment out of his head, medieval paintings showing tombs releasing their dead before a risen Christ.

  On that panel, Nate found a hole about three inches long and an inch wide, above the man’s head. The edges felt as if they tapered inward.

  After a moment of hesitation, Nate pulled out the ghadi dagger and slid it into the hole. The fit was perfect, so perfect that it felt as if a magnetic force or a vacuum sucked the blade home the last quarter inch. Then the hilt was pulled out of his hand as the panel started moving.

  Nate backed up as he heard a low hiss of rushing air. He felt a slight breeze as air fed into the crack that had appeared in the edge of the lid. Movement stopped as the pressure equalized, then the whole massive lid swung upward, away from Nate, on invisible hinges.

  Nate could smell something slightly metallic in the air now. He couldn’t see down into the sarcophagus from where he stood, but he could see glints of reflected light coming from inside it.

  Nate walked up to the edge of the sarcophagus feeling a mixture of dread and anticipation. What, exactly, had the ancient ghadi buried here?

  Nate leaned over and looked down. He sucked in a deep breath.

  Gold. That was the first thing. The unmistakable reflection of gold shone off of every surface inside the sarcophagus. Even as the presence of that much precious metal began sinking in, Nate began realizing the true value of what was in here.

  The sarcophagus was filled with oblong gold platters covered in the Gods’ runic text—gold rectangles about the height, width, and thickness of a thin paperback book. Hundreds of them.

  Nate reached in tentatively and removed one. It was heavy, solid metal. The carvings were etched deeply into its surface, on both sides. Without committing the mental resources to absorbing the whole text, Nate could see the symbols marking the beginnings and endings of at least three unique spells.

  Maybe the language itself was some sort of sacrifice? Or maybe they saw the end coming and made a time capsule, just in case.

  The people who constructed this thing knew what they did. Gold was a good archival medium. Nonreactive, and short of being melted down, it would last pretty much forever.

  When Nate came up out of the pit, Solis was gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THE FIRST MOMENTS after the attack began were so frantic and disjointed that Yerith wasn’t consciously aware of where she was running until after the initial explosions subsided. First, she ran through tunnels so opaque with dust and smoke that her lamp was all but useless. Then, somewhere, she lost the lantern and she was feeling her way through complete darkness. All she could do was move away from the sounds of fighting.

  When she reached a light that wasn’t something burning, she edged up carefully. It was a lantern abandoned in the acolytes’ residence. The chambers were empty. She looked around and realized that the Monarch’s Shadow College was doomed.

  She was out of breath, and this was the first moment she had to think.

  The College is attacking. They’ll destroy everything here.

  Arthiz’s plans were over. The man she had trusted with her destiny was probably dead at the College’s hands. Everything she thought she was working toward was crumbling around her. When the College found her . . .

  Yerith grabbed the lantern with a shaking hand. The College wasn’t going to find her. She couldn’t even consider the possibility. She had survived before Arthiz, she could survive after him. She just had to get out of this warren before it became a tomb.

  The sounds of fighting and burning were distant from here. Aside from a haze in the air, this place was momentarily untouched.

  It gave time for the panic to recede.

  Nate Black . . . The ghadi . . .

  It sank in that Nate Black and the ghadi she was caring for were trapped behind locked doors.

  She ran again, and this time she knew where she was going.

  The ghadi chambers were a slaughterhouse. The College had been here. Yerith stood a long time in the doorway, trying to make sense of the scene.

  The bodies of the ghadi had been slit open, their blood soaking into the straw bedding. Until now, she had only heard rumors of some of the College’s more perverse rituals—how some scholars discovered that there were more gruesomely efficient ways to drain the power from their ghadi servants.

  The bodies here were too few. They had dozens of ghadi housed here; most must have escaped or been taken.

  A burning anger replaced the fear she had felt up to now. To do this to a creature that could not even defend itself. . . .

  Someone groaned.

  Yerith suddenly realized that some of the bodies here were human, and by the masks, scholars of the College. If it wasn’t clear enough what they had been doing here, the ghadi blood on their hands told her.

  One was alive and stirring.

  By the time Yerith realized she had picked up a staff, the surviving scholar had stopped stirring. She pulled the end out of the man’s face and dropped the staff. She couldn’t quite believe what she had just done.

  If they were here . . .

  Nate Black was only a short distance away.

  Yerith ran.

  The Monarch had timed his betrayal with a precision worthy of the scholars he wished to displace. He had taken Uthar in at just the moment when it appeared impossible to moderate the damage. But as soon as Uthar was left alone in the Monarch’s apartments, he tried to contact Bhodan.

  When Uthar had been elevated to a full scholar of the College of Man, he had been given a choice of a phrase in the Gods’ Language to become a permanent part of his body to commemorate the event. The far-speaking spell had been cut into the few remaining areas of unmarked flesh on his body. The only spell he had chosen himself.

  Even then, before he had begun planning the overthrow of the College, he knew that communication was the most important tool of power.

  Unfortunately, this time, it did him little good.

  “We are under attack!” Bhodan’s voice came from a spot on the floor in front of Uthar. The floor itself was smooth marble and spotless. The voice sounded far away, even though Bhodan was yelling as loud as he could. Under the voice, Uthar could hear sounds of fighting.

  “Can you get out of there?”

  “Only retreat is the jungle. They’re between us and the City.”

  “The jungle, then!”

  “Cave-ins. Half our people are cut off. We can’t . . .” Bhodan was interrupted by a loud crashing noise. Suddenly Uthar was hearing several different muffled voices, and the sounds of something burning.

  “Bhodan.”

  No answer, but Uthar heard a muffled scream.

  “Bhodan.”

  Nothing but the sound of fire.

  The situation was moving quickly there. Bhodan might just have retreated from the area that Uthar had contact with. The hope wasn’t very likely. The College’s punishments had left the man incapable of defending himself. His only defense had been being deep inside the warrens where they had set up the Shadow College. If the College of Man was already that deep inside, there really was no hope of salvaging anything.

  Over a hundred handpicked acolytes who would have been loyal against the College itself, gone. Years of work and training, gone in a single stroke.

  Uthar sat down on an embroidered couch and held Arthiz’s mask in his hands. The blank white face shook until he lifted it up
and threw it at the marble floor.

  The mask shattered.

  Remember, Uthar Vailen, you have chosen sides. You cannot go back.

  Uthar cursed the Monarch for a fool. There would be nothing left. Without a trained loyal cadre to take the College’s place, a void would be left for Ghad only knew what kind of chaos. And when things went out of control, the only people who could restore order would be the displaced members of the College themselves. It would take years to create new scholars. . . .

  It had taken years.

  He looked down at the shattered white mask. Nothing but the empty shell of the Monarch’s agent, Arthiz. . . .

  Again, too late.

  Yerith stood in front of the chambers where they had housed Nate Black. The strange man she was charged to protect, and his reluctant roommate, were both gone. The iron door hung open and the chambers were empty except for slowly settling dust.

  And the corpse of another ghadi.

  Yerith stared for long moments, trying to make sense of the body. It lay sprawled on the floor, gray from loss of blood, clutching a massive wound in its side.

  Why would Nate kill a ghadi?

  Yerith answered her own question. It was obvious that the ghadi hadn’t bled to death in this room. From the amount of blood on the floor, it had obviously been near to death when it collapsed in here.

  Yerith looked around the door and saw blood on the ground, leading back where she had come. Ghadi blood also covered the outside of the door. At first she thought that the wounded ghadi had just leaned against the door, but as she examined the door, she realized that there was a very distinct handprint on the latch.

  The ghadi had opened the door. As a final act, it freed Nate Black.

  She walked in and knelt down next to the ghadi. She recognized it as one of the ghadi who had been serving Nate Black and the other person here, Solis. It had been bringing food and water, emptying waste.