Broken Crescent

  One of them shouted up at Nate, “That is the property of the College!”

  “Let the College take them, then!” Nate unfolded the page with the lightning spell on it. “Leave or be destroyed.”

  Nate could tell that they were debating it. These guys were just grunts. The only person who probably had a deep investment in the captive ghadi was Skull, and the last Nate had seen of that guy, he was on fire and running toward the shoreline.

  Nate decided to make a show of force. He cast a lightning bolt about two thirds of the way toward the men. The blast knocked the men down again, and it still dazzled and half deafened Nate, even though he was expecting it.

  That had the desired effect. The men ran for it.

  Nate escorted a hundred and twenty-five ghadi back into the jungle. Nate followed at the rear of the migration, to provide some sort of defense if they were followed. They weren’t, at least not closely enough for Nate to see any pursuit.

  A hundred and twenty-five. That didn’t include Jane, one of the Steves, and about ten other ghadi who had been killed in the fight. To Nate’s relief, Bill was one of the survivors.

  He let Bill lead the ghadi, since Nate had only the vaguest idea of how to get back to the village. Fortunately, Nate was the only one who didn’t know how to live off of the jungle. Everyone they had freed had lived out here all their lives. They were also a lot better about not leaving an obvious trail than their human counterparts.

  I wish I could talk to them. . . .

  It was disturbing, being in the midst of such a crowd and not being able to have a conversation. The isolation was made worse because all of them seemed to look at him as a religious icon, not a human being.

  Though it probably was a good thing not to be seen as a human being with this crowd.

  It seemed to take a lot longer on the way back. Nate understood. Not only did they have a lot more people, but Bill was trying to take them by a less direct route, in case they were being tracked.

  When they finally reached the village, it felt as if Nate had been gone for years. It was a triumphant homecoming. He walked into the village, and the ghadi genuflected. Even the ghadi he had rescued, seeing the reaction of the villagers, did likewise.

  Nate walked slowly up to the pit and turned around. He looked at the ghadi and sighed. “I’m going to figure out something to lift that language block, just so I can tell you to cut it out.”

  As Nate stood there, wondering what to do, Bill came from the crowd and stood in front of him. Bill moved from side to side, bobbing and moving his arms, and it wasn’t until he stomped his feet and clapped in a gesture that recalled a thunderclap that it sank in that Bill had taken on the job of disciple. Bill was preaching the good word to the masses.

  Another reason he needed to overcome this linguistic barrier.

  The village was now three times its original size. About half the new ghadi were working on building new huts for the expanded population. Nate found himself back in his office, finding a new urgency in his studies. He knew it was only a matter of time before the College caught up with him now. He needed to be ready.

  The ghadi needed to be ready.

  He didn’t know how he would manage it, but he knew that the answer was in the tablets. He sped through them now. Transcribing two or three a day, desperately wrapping his mind around the shapes of the runes. Picking apart pieces of the Gods’ Language.

  He discovered measures that specified time; he found symbols that represented living objects and—to all appearances—elemental matter; he found symbols that were analogous to control structures in the computer languages Nate knew; he found loops, and branches and comparisons that could form decision trees. So there were spells that could react differently depending on what type of matter they were targeted at.

  He found segments of spell code that could “read” other parts of other spells, and parts that could actually “write” the Gods’ Language—or anything else. It took a couple of hours before the significance of that began to sink in.

  Holy shit . . . !

  At its heart, you only needed three things for a completely functional computer language. You needed to be able to call other programs from within the main process—call them subroutines, system calls, user functions, classes, or objects. You needed a control structure that could make a simple decision to do one thing if a condition was true, and another if a condition was false. Lastly, the program needed some way to store and retrieve data, be it a register, a variable, or a file system. . . .

  The Gods’ Language had all the necessary elements.

  It wasn’t like a computer language, it was a computer language. The only difference was the hardware. He was looking at the code that was running on the universe. . . .

  For a few minutes he had a brief sophistic panic that everything he was going through here was actually some sort of sadistically realistic computer game.

  But if it was, did it matter? If you created something indistinguishable from reality—wasn’t that just a way of saying you created a new reality? What if what Ghad did was create some universe-making machine, and allowed his creations access to the source code?

  To create something as “there” as the world around him, to create a world where the wind bit his cheek, where he could smell the woodsmoke of the ghadi cook fires, where he could touch the damp moss under his hand, had to actually be “there.” The only thing that had as much bandwidth as reality was reality.

  Nate sat in the little clearing of his office and looked at the sky. Blue shone through a few openings in the canopy. The dense foliage rustled in the wind, and he could hear a few hooting birds in the distance.

  “Worrying that the world is some cosmic video game makes as much sense here as it did back home.”

  Maybe that was all life was; God’s own first-person-shooter. Accepting or denying the proposition made absolutely zero difference.

  Nate looked down and took out a fresh piece of note paper and started working on some of the more practical consequences of unraveling the Gods’ Programming Language.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  MATE HAD RENAMED the Gods’ Language “MED.” MED stood for Mechanica Ex Deus, which was probably butchered Latin but got the sense of it. Somehow he felt more at home working on something that was an acronym. And, even with a still limited knowledge of MED, after a few days of intense twenty-hour shifts, Nate authored the first completely new spell that had been written in millennia.

  The logic of it was simple, though the execution covered several pages. He authored it first in his hexadecimal pseudocode, and spent two days mentally debugging it, running it through every permutation he could think of. When he was satisfied, he wrote the actual runes, which was akin to running a marathon, pushing through the inscription, rune after rune.

  When it was done, he had a spell five pages long, consisting only of elements he had learned so far. The vocabulary was a crippled subset of MED, consisting only of around three hundred symbols, but people had programmed entire operating systems on eight-bit machines with less to work with.

  When Nate looked up from the freshly written spell, the light had gone from the sky and he was alone. The only light came from his miraculously glowing rock. Fatigue sank into Nate’s bones after writing so much of the language at once. His body could collapse and sleep for a week right where he sat.

  He couldn’t do that yet.

  He took a sip of tea. All that was left was ice-cold dregs. He swallowed them and set down the new spell.

  He had to test it.

  He stood up. The long muscles in his legs ached and his left foot had fallen asleep. He limped around the clearing gathering the two things he needed. One of the golden tablets he had transcribed before; he chose the wind spell as fairly innocuous. He also found a blank sheet of paper. On the paper, Nate brushed in, very small, a runic name to allow it as a target. The spell on the tablet was already named.

  Nate weighted down the blank paper and
set the tablet next to it. Then he pulled out his five-page spell and proceeded to cast it. Fortunately, in his fatigued state, he didn’t have to cast all five pages of the spell. It was designed to be cast by its name by another spell. The other spell was very simple, only a couple of lines long, and all it did was feed the names of the spell and the paper to the long five-page spell. It was short enough that Nate could change the targets on the fly.

  It was still difficult to cast. It made Nate realize how much support the ghadi were, how much energy they provided just by being present. Fortunately, long and complicated as the new spell was, what it did was a fairly low-energy process. It wasn’t beyond his ability to cast.

  When he was done, he looked down at the paper.

  “Yes!”

  He was Azrael again, right after hacking root access to the Social Security Administration’s web server. . . .

  The spell did exactly what it was supposed to do. As Nate watched, hexadecimal code wrote itself across the surface of the page. In a few moments he had a perfect pseudo code translation of the wind spell.

  Nate held up the paper and laughed. Not only had he just come up with a way to copy all the gold tablet source code he had access to, in a fraction of the time, but with the spell he had just written, he could reverse the process. The five pages of runes he had just completed would be the last time he had to write MED by hand.

  The next day, Nate discovered that what he had created had broader uses. The I/O of the spell was infinitely more flexible than any computer language. Just by changing the target for the “translation,” he could have it transcribed into a rock, a tree, or in midair. The source could be anything, not just the name of the spell. In many cases he discovered he could use it to unearth the “name” of something. Nate used vectors to point it at a tree, a stone, the air, a blank piece of paper.

  In each case he got a string of symbols he could use to target that tree, that stone, that piece of paper.

  When he used it to read from Bill, he got one hell of a surprise.

  Instead of a runic “name” that could refer to Bill the ghadi, Nate got a seemingly endless stream of figures. Writing to the air in front of Nate, pages and pages of pseudocode shot by in front of him.

  What the . . . ?

  How did the ghadi fall in the first place?

  The men of the College said, “Long have we studied the Language of the Gods. We have learned much. There are words in it too terrible to be spoken.”

  “Please,” said the men of Manhome, “speak them so we shall be delivered.”

  The men of the College, seeing their own doom approaching, chose to speak the most terrible of those words.

  Upon hearing those words, the bodies of the ghadi, and their seed, went deaf to the Gods’ Language.

  Somehow, an aeon ago, the College cursed the ghadi with some form of aphasia. A curse that propagated through generations. Nate had assumed, if the story was true, that the ancient College of Man had inflicted some sort of congenital brain damage on the ghadi.

  But what if what caused it was the spell itself? Some constant, self-replicating bit of code in MED . . .

  Then it could be reversible.

  That was the day the College caught up with him.

  The warning came from a trio of ghadi running in from the surrounding jungle. For a culture without a spoken language, they got their message across within seconds. By the time Nate realized that there was something going on, ghadi were already evacuating the village.

  Nate picked up his papers, and retreated to the edge of the village, finding cover in the surrounding jungle. He found a place behind the mossy root system of a massive tree and watched. He didn’t have long to wait.

  Nate heard them coming ten minutes before he saw the first soldier. The soldier he saw was dressed like the ones he had seen outside Arthiz’s Shadow College. In fact, it could have been the same guys.

  Unhurried and deliberate, the soldiers marched into the village. With them came over a dozen masked, robed acolytes.

  Shit . . .

  They lost no time. Once they had walked into the village, the huts began to explode. Nate didn’t know what the mages were doing, but it was blowing the carefully woven huts apart in clouds of reeds and splinters. When some slow-moving ghadi were flushed out by a hut’s disintegration, archers in the small army cut them down.

  It was clear that this group of men weren’t interested in prisoners.

  Nate scrambled, looking through the notes he had with him. He had the transcription spell he had been experimenting with, and nothing else actually functional.

  Christ, this was why they carved the spells in their skin; otherwise someone could catch them with their pants down.

  Another three huts exploded, and three more elderly ghadi fell with arrows through their chests. Half the village was gone.

  Carved into the skin . . .

  With one simple change, Nate suddenly realized he could copy a spell without any “translation” at all. And if he could copy a spell—

  Nate cast the translator to read from the mage that seemed to be doing the most damage. The rest of the village was being blown to pieces, but the acolytes were fortunately fairly stationary, allowing Nate to point a vector right at the mage he wanted.

  Above him, runes carved themselves into the body of the tree. Lines snaked around the bark as if they were a living thing. Nate watched, as all the spells carved into the mage’s body were copied in wooden flesh. Nate stared into the remains of the village, trying to gather a clue to the spell from the mage’s gestures. The tracing of the runes in air showed what the spell was named.

  Nate couldn’t see much at this distance, but he did see a stroke of three parallel downward lines.

  Nate quickly tried to find that character in the name of one of these spells. He found it, just as the last building fell to pieces.

  With the village in ruins around them, the soldiers started marching outward, in a ring toward the surrounding jungle. The mages started casting other spells, and Nate could see the ground cover wither, and the canopy disintegrate. The mages were deconstructing the jungle, taking away the ghadi’s hiding places.

  Not to mention Nate’s. His tree was only about twenty feet in from the edge, and the plants were turning brown and yellow around him. The soldiers were only ten or fifteen yards away and heading straight for him.

  By the time he saw how the spell was targeted, he was already casting it at the center of the group of mages.

  There was a satisfying explosion, throwing mages everywhere. The soldiers stopped their advance and Nate cast the spell at the soldier immediately in front of him.

  The man’s chest burst open, through his breastplate, and he collapsed with a puzzled expression on his face.

  As if they’d been waiting for a cue, the jungle suddenly vomited a hundred pissed-off ghadi. The soldiers were caught completely off-guard. The ghadi were armed only with clubs and stones to the humans’ bows and swords, but the humans were outnumbered three to one.

  Within the first ten seconds that ratio was five to one.

  Nate concentrated on keeping the mages from being a factor. Two more explosions, and none of them were moving.

  In five minutes, he was the only human standing.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  THE GHADI LOOTED the bodies and took to the jungle. Human armor and weapons looked odd on their elongated forms, but Nate could see the echoes of ancient ghadi warriors in them. For once, Nate could see that the same blood flowed in these veins, that these ghadi were ready to take their place next to the ghadi elders in the tombs under Manhome.

  They left the gold tablets, as Nate had found them, in a chest, buried in the pit under the ghadi dead. He didn’t need them anymore. The ancient ghadi primers had been etched into the pages of an old book, replacing the mundane text that had once graced its pages. Also in the book were copies of what the mages had carried on their own bodies.

  The human bodies end
ed up in a ravine.

  Many times, Nate wanted to talk, to devise some sort of strategy. But all he had was the ability to do broad gestures to get very simple things across. It seemed, at times, that the ghadi weren’t quite in the same world that Nate was in. So he did what he could, and followed.

  The ghadi, at least, seemed to have some clue what they were doing. When this human expedition was missed, there would be more. The College wouldn’t allow what amounted to a ghadi insurrection.

  Nate stayed with Bill and the cadre of ghadi who had salvaged the soldiers’ armor and weapons. The other ghadi dispersed, fading into the jungle in all directions.

  For the best, Nate thought. We shouldn’t drag everyone into a war. Especially when the College is probably looking for me.

  Bill’s commandos marched north, toward the mountains. Away from the ocean and, Nate suspected, away from the bulk of humanity. They moved fast, and Nate hoped that he wasn’t slowing them down. The pace was hard and, when they stopped, Nate only had the energy to eat what food Bill gave him, and sleep.

  In his sleep, Nate dreamed of empty blackness, filled with a slithering alien thing. The thing was everywhere, and it was laughing.

  As they moved north, the jungle fell away. The land became drier, the nights became colder, and the plant life became more temperate. By the time Nate saw patches of snow between the trees, they had reached their destination.

  A tower of white stone emerged from the ground. Cylindrical and slightly tapered, it spiraled up about a hundred feet. The top was jagged and broken, and the visible mountainside was scattered with white stone, showing that the ruin had once been much taller.

  Bill walked around the perimeter of the structure, which was almost as wide as it was tall, until he came to a large stone panel. He stopped and waved Nate over.

  The slab was covered in the runes of the Gods’ Language.