Nate put down the brush and stood up, trying to determine what the commotion was. He walked over to the mass of ghadi, which parted for him, allowing him to face a ghadi he had never seen before.
The new ghadi was female and filthy. She was covered with dirt, soot, and blood. What remained of her clothing was a knot of rags around her waist.
Nate knew she wasn’t a villager when she looked at him. Facing Nate, her face lost all natural reserve. She stared at him with an expression of terror and seemed about to bolt back into the woods from which she came. Before she could, several villagers, male and female, came forward and touched her in what was, apparently, a reassuring manner.
Nate backed away from the new ghadi. Whatever she had just been through, the last thing she needed was him looming over her.
It turned out, though, Nate was exactly what she wanted.
Once she was cleaned, fed, and had her wounds tended to, Bill led Nate to the pit, where the villagers were waiting with the new ghadi. Nate couldn’t get nuances from the ghadi gesticulating, but her story was painfully clear. Humans had attacked her and her village.
Nate hadn’t speculated on how so many ghadi ended up in human captivity. But they had to come from somewhere.
After she had danced and gestured her story, all the ghadi villagers, including Bill, including her, stared at Nate.
So what are you going to do?
Nate stepped forward. “Take me to where this happened.” His words received blank stares, but he got his point across with his clumsy human gestures, pointing at her, pointing at himself, and pointing back the way she had come.
Her village wasn’t far away. Less than a day’s walk starting the next morning. It was close enough for Nate to worry about possible attacks on “his” village. It also made him wonder how densely populated the jungle here was.
The expedition consisted of Jane Doe, Bill, and two other male ghadi from the village who Nate named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack. Jane still seemed to regard Nate with suspicion, but from what Nate had learned about ghadi body language, Bill and the Steves seemed a lot more tense about what might be ahead of them than they were about Nate.
Nate wasn’t sure about this himself. For all the impressive effects he had called forth from the gold tablets, he still barely knew what he was doing. And he also couldn’t carry the tablets with him; the best he could do was take some of his notes folded inside his robe. Even with the long, silent trek through the jungle, he couldn’t come to grips with a coherent strategy.
What if he came across a group of College slave traders? How could he deal with them? Every spell he had took time to cast, and while he could cast transcriptions by their names, what they did in an unmodified state wouldn’t be terribly useful in a confrontation—except the lighting bolt, which sort of abandoned any pretense of stealth.
Nate was still pondering his options when they reached the village. Once they saw it, Nate stopped worrying about strategy and found himself wishing the bastards were still here.
It was a smaller village than Bill’s, just a handful of huts around a central pit. All of them had been burned to the ground. The ghadi the invaders had killed were left to rot where they had fallen. Any ghadi that were above a certain age had been slaughtered. The College apparently wanted their ghadi young.
One old ghadi had been crawling toward the pit when he finally died. He had crawled about fifteen feet with his belly slit open down to his spine.
The site was silent, and smelled of smoke and blood. Jane sat down by the pit and closed her eyes. Nate didn’t blame her.
After a few moments in a hopeless search for survivors, Nate helped Bill and the Steves to dispose of the dead. To Nate it seemed undignified and callous to throw bodies into a mass grave. However, it was clear that this was how the ghadi honored their dead. If nothing else, the old ghadi whose last act was to attempt to crawl into the pit with his ancestors told him that.
It was obvious where the ghadi had been taken. The attackers had no need to cover their tracks. They had left a trail ten feet wide, with cart tracks, horse droppings, trampled foliage and the purple blood of the ghadi.
Even if they could talk, Nate wouldn’t have argued the decision to follow.
They must have been two or three days behind the attackers when they started. But they began catching up almost immediately. A party that was so large must have had to take a fair bit of time to set up and break camp. Nate’s group had no camp to speak of, and it took Bill only a few minutes to forage something for them to eat when they did rest.
Every day it rained, but it wasn’t enough to erase the swath cut through the forest. Even if the trail completely washed away, they could follow the bodies.
Every day they passed two or three ghadi who hadn’t made it. Some were barely infants.
At each corpse, the ghadi set up a cluster of branches, marking the site. Nate guessed it was for other ghadi, to find the bodies and carry them to the appropriate place.
They had followed for three days, and it seemed that they were within hours of catching up with the stolen ghadi. At the last camp they had found, the ashes were still warm.
Then they found the road.
Nate walked out of the jungle, onto a dirt track that was roughly perpendicular to the direction they were going. It was no wildlife trail. There were ruts from wagon wheels, and Nate saw places where brush had been cleared, and fallen trees had been sawed into pieces to clear the way. The road wasn’t straight, so Nate lost sight of it about a hundred yards before and behind.
However, its message was clear enough. They were back in human territory. It was also clear that the party they were following had taken this road. There was a light rain, and the road was just muddy enough to hold tracks, and little used enough to make it obvious which way they had gone.
Nate looked back into the jungle. The ghadi were so far back that they were barely visible. Nate could just see enough of them to realize that he was the center of attention again. No words, but it was clear that it was Nate’s decision whether they should go on or not.
It would have made sense to turn back at this point. They had walked right into enemy territory, and the gods—or Ghad—only knew how many people they would face at the other end of this road. Nate knew that the people who built this road would not be kindly disposed toward wild ghadi, much less toward Nate, the taboo alien, or Azrael, the instrument of Ghad’s wrath. . . .
“Fuck it,” Nate muttered, waving the ghadi to follow him down the road.
They followed the road, paralleling it about ten yards inside the jungle. The foliage was dense enough to keep them out of sight of the road, while they could still follow it by keeping track of the break in the canopy above it. That worked until they ran out of jungle.
They reached the edge of a clearing in sight of where the stolen ghadi had been taken. To Nate, it looked like something out of the Wild West, a town made up of a dozen low wooden buildings. Beyond the town, Nate saw the ocean, and sitting in a natural bay was a large ship at anchor. The ship had four masts, and looked as if it might actually be larger than the town in front of them.
If there was any question in Nate’s mind that this was where the trail had led them, it didn’t last. Even in the fading evening light, he could see the ghadi from Jane’s village.
The building was next to a stable. In front of the stable was a fenced-in clearing where a few bedraggled horses hung their heads trying to pull grass from the muddy soup in which they stood. Behind that clearing was a structure that seemed to be another stable, with the same tiny windows and same compartmental structure. But when Nate watched for a while, he could see ghadi inside. These weren’t the blank impassive servants Nate had seen serving the College. With these, the wounds were still fresh. Nate could still see the bruises, and the fear in their eyes, even from his spot back in the jungle.
From what Nate could tell, there was only one guard by the ghadi barracks. One bored guy in a long cloak wh
o looked as if he’d rather be inside one of the other buildings.
Okay, we can do this. . . .
The stable and the slave house were offset from the other buildings. Nate supposed that the residents here didn’t want to be too close to the animals. That would be an advantage. If they were quiet, there would be less of a chance of an alarm being raised. All they had to do was subdue the one guard.
Nate spent about an hour of gesturing to the others before he was confident that they understood his plan, such as it was.
They would wait until after dark, sneak up to the slave house, free the ghadi, and escape. Nate would take care of the guard.
Nate hoped he would take care of the guard.
The problem was to disable him without alerting anyone. There were a lot of things he could do, all of which would be noisy and obvious. However, there was one thing he thought might do it.
The last breakthrough he had in his study was a realization—such as it was—of how the first spell he had learned, the candle-snuffing spell, worked. It had a good deal in common with the wind spells on the tablets. There were just a few more lines whose net effect was to cause air to move away uniformly from a single point.
Centered on a candle, the small instant vacuum snuffed it out.
But it didn’t need to be small.
About an hour after nightfall, Nate led his ghadi down toward the slave house. The single guard was still there, paying more attention to his prisoners than anything else. Nate was able to get down to within fifty feet of the guy before he ran out of fence, and cover.
A horse wandered over and snorted at Nate and the ghadi on the other side of his fence, the only creature to notice them.
Here goes.
Nate quietly spoke the runes of the spell, changing a few of the runes that referred to targeting and magnitude. And a sphere of vacuum ten yards in diameter opened across the field, centered on the spot of ground where the one guard stood. Nate could feel a stiff breeze on his face from the displaced air.
The guard reacted instantaneously, and silently. Eyes wide, he started gasping for breath. He was choking and coughing, the sounds unable to leave his body without air to transmit them. He grabbed his throat and shook his head. For several seconds, the man tried to force himself to breathe, but there was nothing to breathe.
He started to stagger toward the other buildings, but he was already disoriented, and he tripped. He managed to get to his feet and walk another ten feet before he passed out.
It sounded like a quick rush of water when the air raced to fill in the shrinking vacuum.
Nate hunched over and darted toward the guard’s post, which was by an entrance to the slave house. Bill and the Steves followed Nate, Jane went toward the fallen guardsman. When Nate got to the door and realized he only had three ghadi with him, he looked back in time to see Jane holding a knife, crouched over the fallen man. The blade was dark and glistened in the firelight leaking from the other houses.
Nate swallowed.
I didn’t want to kill anyone. . . .
That wasn’t only bullshit, it was dangerous bullshit. But seeing her crouch over a corpse made Nate feel a little sick.
Nate turned his attention to the door. It was held shut with a heavy latch from the outside, but there wasn’t any lock. Nate lifted the latch and opened the door.
The smell hit him first. The fetid odor rolled out of the open door in a cloud so strong it was almost visible. Filth and shit and death. Blinking through watering eyes, Nate saw the outlines of dozens of naked ghadi packed together in the gloom. More than could have come from Jane’s village, the people here had been collecting ghadi for a while.
The ghadi all stared at him.
Nate stepped back and let Bill and the Steves enter. They didn’t show shock, or disgust, or much of anything. They just took the arms of the prisoners and led them outside.
Nate was relegated to watching as his ghadi somehow indicated to the prisoners that they were to sneak back to the cover of the jungle. In a few moments there was a ragged file of naked ghadi making a crouching retreat toward the trees. There were more of them than Nate imagined. Easily over a hundred. The slave house was long and seemingly endless.
For about ten minutes, it seemed as if they were going to get to slip away without anyone noticing them. Then, with about two thirds of the prisoners out of the slave house, a magnesium glow filled the sky above them. The entire town was suddenly lit brighter than daylight, carving Nate’s shadow as black as the void in the clearing.
Nate turned toward the other buildings and saw about a dozen armed men, centered around a robed figure wearing the mask of a red, howling skull. The masked figure had his arms raised, and his companions did not look happy.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
RED SKULL SHOUTED something, and the men started running toward the escaping ghadi. Then Skull started gesturing in what must have been another spell.
Things were happening too fast; the armed men were already circling around, blocking the ghadi’s exit toward the jungle. When Skull finished his invocation, Nate felt the footing go soft beneath his feet. Between him and the advancing men, the escaping ghadi fell down as the clearing they ran through became a swamp of mud.
Skull had hit some sort of stride; he was already onto something else, just as Nate gathered his wits enough to respond. Skull had to go, and there was no time to reach the bastard, especially now that he stood calf-deep in mud. No time to pull out his notes. That left the spells he had actually memorized. The candle-snuffing spell would take too long, and only worked at all because of the element of surprise.
But the candle-lighting spell . . .
He hadn’t tried using a vector as a target with this one, but if it worked for the snuffing spell—
Nate didn’t have time to debate with himself. As soon as he had the concept in mind, he launched into the spell. Instead of naming a target, he slipped in a vector pointing from him to Skull.
Skull finished his incantation first, and Nate could feel the mud around his ankles freeze solid. They were all immobilized in front of their attackers. The men had reached the first ghadi and started clubbing them.
Nate finished his spell.
Not only did the spell respond in a logical manner to Nate’s impromptu hacking, his aim was dead-on. Red Skull’s robes caught fire. There was a sudden, keening scream that cut through the chaos. The attackers turned to see Skull trying to bat out the flames with his voluminous sleeves. All that did was ignite the sleeves.
Nate aimed a similar spell down toward his own feet. No flame, but there was a small puff of steam, and the ice weakened enough for him to pull his feet free.
At this point the human attackers realized that one of the ghadi wasn’t actually a ghadi. They ignored the immobile escapees and started heading straight for Nate. Nate took the only escape route he could think of, and darted into the slave house.
That turned out to be a tactical blunder. Nate tripped in the muck that lined the bottom of the slave house and rolled into the wall. He had a brief view of the score of ghadi who still remained before his pursuers slammed the door shut and latched it.
“Fuck!” Nate pushed himself up and ran to one of the tiny barred windows. He reached it in time to see one of the men club Jane to the ground. He kept clubbing her. She couldn’t fall over completely, because her legs were still frozen in the ground.
Okay, you bastards, you want it?
Nate pulled out his glowing rock and the notes he had taken with him. On top was the wind spell.
Magnitude seems to be on a logarithmic scale, let’s see how high the fucker can go.
Nate chanted, pointing the largest acceleration vector he could manage, from the jungle, through the men, right at the town. Again, he felt the surrounding ghadi feeding him the strength to speak the runes. He needed the strength because the modified spell seemed harder to slog through than summoning Ghad had been. The air itself filled with an awful anticipation as
he chanted. It was as if he had to drag his brain through the icy mud outside.
Then he was finished.
The slave house shook. Outside the air roared like a freight train.
Was this a good idea?
Out the small barred window, Nate saw foliage and parts of trees tear by in the sudden wind. One of the men tried grabbing a fence post, but lost his grip, tumbling down toward the other buildings. One of the doors from the stable tore free and sailed by the window.
The violence was momentary, and Nate already knew what he needed to do next. He stuck his fingers in the muck of the floor, and smeared a runic name on the door of the slave house.
He found the sound spell and replaced the air symbol with the name he had given the door. Then he chanted up the most violent high-frequency vibration he could manage.
The door vibrated, shaking loose dust and splinters. Nails shook themselves free, and the hinges whined as if they were in pain. A cloud of dirt billowed up from the ground. After a moment, the vibration subsided. Nate walked up and pushed.
The door fell into several fragments on the ground in front of him. Nate stepped outside. The ghadi had all collapsed on the ground as well as they could with legs frozen into the ground. With their extra leg joint they managed it better than a human could. The humans, most of them anyway, were getting to their feet about a hundred feet away. Debris and foliage was everywhere.
Nate walked out, between the ghadi and the men, and called out, “Drop your weapons and leave this place!” Nate hoped that his grasp of the language was still good enough to get his point across.