Something whispered in the room with him.
“The College is right to be dismayed.”
Nate jumped to his feet, spinning around, looking for the speaker. No one. Just cold stone walls . . .
“Who’s there?”
“It would do for you to speak in a manner that is mutually understood.”
Nate realized that he had been speaking English. It took a moment for the words to come. “Who’s there?”
“One you know, a friend.”
It was hard to recognize the whispering voice. More so since it had been so long since he had heard it.
“Arthiz?”
“Yes. It has taken long for me to find you.”
“Where are you?”
“Far enough that only my voice can reach you at the moment.”
Nate shook his head, backing toward the wall. He expected an ambush any second. “Why are you talking to me?”
“Stand alone with the ghadi and you will be doomed.”
“What choice do I have? The ghadi are all that will stand with me.”
“Join me.”
“What are you asking?”
“The force you saw destroy the Shadow College, the same force that deposed the Monarch’s rule in Zorion, is turning toward your citadel. They only wait to regather their strength. They mean to erase all ghadi resistance for all time. They mean to burn you on a pyre of your own heresy.”
“You mean me to abandon the ghadi to that?”
“The heart of Manhome is weakened and barely defended. Grant me your aid and the College itself will crumble. Without the head, the body cannot strike.”
“How can I trust you?”
“Do not deliberate too long. The army masses even now.”
“Arthiz?” Nate said to the air.
There was no answer.
“Arthiz!” Nate shouted to the empty air.
The room suddenly felt much colder.
The next day brought Arthiz’s envoy. The ghadi stopped a rider coming from the west. Bill grabbed Nate and brought him to the great auditorium to meet the stranger.
The stranger wasn’t as strange as Nate had expected.
Nate walked down toward the dais, where a robed figure was guarded by three large ghadi. “Who are you, and why have you come here?”
The figure turned and lowered her hood. Nate stopped, disbelieving.
“Yerith?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Arthiz sent you?”
“Who should he have sent?”
It took some gesturing to get the ghadi to understand that Yerith was not the enemy. After he got that across, they left Yerith to his care. Nate took her up to the room he used for an office. He cleared some papers off a stool for her and sat down himself.
“Be careful. The furniture here is very old.”
Yerith took her seat and looked at him. “You have done this all yourself?”
Nate laughed. “In case you didn’t notice, there’s about five thousand ghadi down there.”
“You control them?”
“If I controlled them, this place wouldn’t exist. They gather of their own accord. More every day.”
Yerith looked into his face. “You are the Angel of Death.”
“Bullshit,” Nate said in English. “If the ghadi rebel against the College, it isn’t any more than their due. Their slavers burn their homes, steal the children, and slaughter any ghadi too old to be used.”
“I know how the ghadi are treated.”
Nate rubbed his forehead. “Why are you here, then?”
“The College’s armies are gathering. Within a sixday, they will march north; a sixday’s march after that, and they will destroy this place.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Come back with me, help Arthiz take the College, and their army will crumble.”
“I can’t leave them. They massed here because of me.”
“They’ll die here because of you.”
Nate stood up, shaking his head. “They think that somehow I can save them.”
“You can.”
“Do you think that Arthiz can really take down the College?”
“I think you can.”
If there was going to be a war with the College, Arthiz’s proposal made too much sense. The two victories he and the ghadi had won so far had been based entirely on stealth and surprise. With only Nate on their side, they stood little chance against an actual army that included seasoned soldiers and mages prepared to find resistance. Even if the ghadi weren’t outnumbered, they weren’t soldiers, and couldn’t communicate across a battlefield.
Nate knew nothing about warfare outside some novels he’d read, but he could see a massacre coming. If Arthiz could cut into the enemy’s rear and do some damage, maybe the attack on the ghadi could be diverted or maybe even aborted.
So he gathered his important papers, and his book of MED code, and left with Yerith.
The ghadi watched him go, without knowing why. Nate had no way to tell them, and the fear in their eyes made him feel sick.
Ghad protect your people. . . .
Yerith packed his papers into the saddlebags on her horse and looked at him.
“What?”
“Get on.”
Nate looked at the arcane structure of the saddle and shook his head. “How?”
In exasperation, Yerith helped him up on the horse’s back. Nate felt a wave of vertigo as his leg vaulted over the saddle. The fact that the horse was moving, ever so slightly, made his brain scream at him that he was going to fall. Before he even had the chance to get oriented, Yerith suddenly appeared in the saddle in front of him, vaulting out of nowhere.
“Hang on to me, and don’t fall off.”
Then they were moving, Nate clutching Yerith’s waist so hard that his fingers went numb.
The horse galloped, paralleling the mountains, on a trail only it and Yerith seemed to see. For ten minutes Nate watched trees throw themselves at them, branches swinging down in an attempt to decapitate the riders, before he screwed his eyes shut and buried his face in Yerith’s back.
She asked him questions at one point or another, but all Nate could manage was a grunt or two.
The horse had an endurance that was literally supernatural. The few times they stopped to rest, Nate could see that the reins, bit, saddle—everything on the horse, in fact—was marked in the MED language. Among other things, the charms seemed to grant the beast an inexhaustible supply of energy with minimal food and water.
It didn’t grant the same benefits to the riders.
When they stopped their breakneck gallop to rest, Nate discovered that stopping was more painful than hanging on. Cramps tore though his legs, an invisible fist squeezing the muscles and attempting to tear them from the bones. He began wondering if this expedition was worth it.
They somehow compressed a ten-day ride into three.
On the third day their pace slowed enough that Nate could—albeit painfully—straighten up and look around.
They approached a village, surrounded by farms. They passed small thatched cottages, and fields bordered by low stone walls. The cottages became more numerous as they rode toward a low hill. The hill was dominated by a single octagonal stone building.
“Is that where we’re going?”
“Yes.”
Yerith rode them through the town and up a broad road toward the entrance. The walls were plain and unadorned. The only windows were narrow slits set high on the wall. The gate at the end of the road was barely wide enough to let through a single horse-drawn cart.
Because of the simplicity of design and the small entry, it looked smaller than it was. A pair of guards let them in, and Nate was shocked to see the scarlet and black livery of the Manhome guard. He was suddenly afraid that he had been tricked back into the custody of the College. He might have tried to escape then, if he could have gotten his agonized muscles to respond.
When they passed through the g
ate, Nate could see how large the fortress actually was. The high octagonal walls surrounded a massive courtyard that seemed to contain as many buildings as were clustered outside the walls. There were stables, a smithy, and what looked like barracks which—judging by the number of people in armor walking about—were fully occupied. Central to everything was a large, walled, stone building that echoed the octagonal form of the outer wall.
Yerith dismounted and talked to one of the guards. While she talked, Nate half dismounted and half fell off of the horse. It was an effort to get his legs to hold him upright, but with so many people around, Nate managed it just to maintain some level of dignity.
“Come,” Yerith said. “They’re expecting us.”
“I’m sure he is.” They are? Nate said as he opened Yerith’s saddlebags. After a few moments of rummaging, he pulled out his book and the sheaf of notes he was working on. “But I’m not leaving this.”
“Come,” said the guardsman. He escorted the two of them up a stairway that led to the gate of the inner building.
They walked into a long stone hall, at the end of which stood several robed figures in front of a plain throne on a dais. When the guard led Nate and Yerith into the hall, the tallest figure made a dismissive gesture and the others left the hall, leaving him and the man seated on the dais.
“So this is the Angel of Death?” asked the man on the throne. It was someone unfamiliar who couldn’t be any older than Nate.
The standing figure turned to face Nate. The scarred face was unfamiliar, but Nate knew Arthiz’s voice. “You came.”
“I came,” Nate said, “because you want to destroy the College of Man.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
ARTHIZ SMILED. “Welcome, Azrael.” The man butchered the name, but Nate still felt a chill.
“I’d prefer it if you did not call me that.”
The young man on the dais vaulted to the floor and walked past Arthiz to get a good look at Nate. Nate noticed a weird combination of deference and annoyance in Arthiz’s body language.
“So this is going to preserve the Monarch’s rule?” the youth said. “Not terribly impressive.”
Nate resisted the urge to say something rude. He got the sense that this guy wasn’t the right person to annoy at the moment.
“This stranger has done more to undo the power of the College, simply by uttering that name than I have in twenty years of careful work. While he walks the earth, the College can think of little else.”
“Is that why you’ve asked for my help?” Nate asked. “You think I am the Angel of Death?”
“I know you are,” Arthiz said. “All you offer is knowledge, perhaps?”
Nate hugged his book.
“I see your face paler than normal. But those old myths can be read many ways, my friend. I choose to read that you are the instrument of the College’s destruction. Don’t we share that goal?”
“Do not fear,” said the youth. “Those who serve the Monarch will be greatly rewarded.”
“Yes,” Nate replied quietly, his unease growing.
“Then come, let us talk.” Arthiz waved Nate forward, letting the youth lead them into a meeting chamber with a long table.
Yerith stayed behind.
The youth was the Monarch, the Ruler of Man.
Arthiz was Scholar Uthar Vailen, until recently the second most powerful person in the College of Man.
Nate, apparently, was the Angel of Death, or some facsimile thereof.
It was all a bit much to take.
“We are forced to move with haste,” Uthar said. “Decades of preparation were lost when the Shadow College fell. We can now count on only a few loyal acolytes.”
The Monarch smiled, “But you have created the perfect feint in the East. The movement of the ghadi, the rumors of your presence, have been enough for them to send their troops from Zorion into the jungles to lay siege and destroy your citadel. Manhome itself lies unprotected.”
“Why do you need my help?”
Uthar smiled. “We do not want to lay siege to the College’s fortress. The shores are thick with the corpses of the army that would try.” The Monarch frowned at the comment, and Nate wondered whose army had tried.
“We shall bring the College itself down. We need to match the mages that remain behind its walls. We need to defeat the scholars before they can recall any of their force.”
“You think I can give this to you?”
The Monarch smiled. “It is the reason the gods brought you here.”
It took a while, but they told him much of what was going on here, filling in the blanks of the civil war that was going on. Though the Monarch pulled his punches in describing how the College got the upper hand, and while Uthar didn’t correct the man, Nate could tell that he was listening to a major screwup.
It made him worry all the more about the ghadi. If the Shadow College was a sacrifice to draw forces away from Manhome—no one said it quite like that, but Nate could read the subtext—what was going to happen to the ghadi, who were even more expendable in a human conflict.
Of course Uthar kept saying how they could bring the College down before the forces massed against them, but Nate kept feeling as if the man was just humoring him.
This probably was a mistake.
Eventually, the Monarch left Nate in Uthar’s custody.
Probably past his bedtime.
“I still don’t see how what I know can help you win a war.”
Uthar steepled his fingers. “What you know is enough to frighten the College of Man. You have called forces equal to those of mages with many years carved into their skin.”
In some cases, the same forces.
“Don’t expect me to pull stones from the sky. I know little more than a sixth of the Gods’ Language.” Nate set down his book. “All I know is from studying ancient ghadi spells.”
“Ghadi spells?” Uthar said, staring at the book. “That is a history textbook.”
“It was.” Nate smiled slightly. “My one novel experiment. I created a spell that helps me transcribe other spells. The text that used to fill this book has been replaced by my own notes.”
“May I see?”
“Yes,” Nate pushed it over. “Bear in mind, it won’t mean much to you.”
Uthar picked up the volume and opened it. He turned the pages, looking at the hexadecimal notation. The script was tiny and precise, forming long columns that repeated across the pages. Uthar ran his fingers down the columns of numbers. “What is this?”
Machine code. The assembly language of the universe.
“The words, the runes, that form the Gods’ Language, just to write them, or speak them, or think too hard about them, is to invoke them. To study what they mean, I use other symbols to represent the runes. Those long columns of characters have no meaning of themselves, but if I know that this represents the third character in a spell—”
“I see,” Uthar nodded. “A map. It is a map, so you can see the shoreline without walking to the ocean.”
“I think that’s a good way to put it.”
“I have studied with the College, and without, for four decades. Half that time I have tried to learn beyond the boundaries the College placed around its knowledge, and never had such a simple concept come to me. Name the words of power by something else, see their order, their grouping.” He looked up. “You could actually see two or three spells at once, and see all of them, their contents, how the words flow—” Uthar closed the book. His eyes were fixed on the middle distance.
“Tell me,” he asked Nate. “How can you see which of the countless runes are written in your code.”
“Akin to how you know how to pronounce them. The rune’s name comes from its shape, so do these symbols.”
It took a long time for Nate to explain. While going from binary to hexadecimal was a near trivial step for him, Uthar didn’t have any experience in other base numbering systems, or powers of two. It was, in fact, a measure of the mage’s i
ntelligence that he was able to grasp the concept in only a couple of hours.
Uthar shook his head. “Where could I be, what could I know, if I had only had this a decade ago.”
“I doubt an alternative notation for the Gods’ Language will help against the College.”
“Perhaps not . . . But you said you created a spell?”
“One.”
“You know that the College itself forbids such a practice. It has been long since any man could claim that for even the humblest incantation. All the College knows is what has been written in metal and stone, and carved into skin. I know as much as any, and all I have was written millennia ago.”
“I know. I also know why. If you don’t study the internal structure of these things, and just make random changes, the result won’t be pretty.”
“But you crafted a spell?”
“Restricting myself to the part of the language I knew. Inefficient as hell, but it works.”
“Show me.”
Nate looked up into Uthar’s face, at the tracery of scars there. There was a terrible earnestness there, the eyes staring at him with an intensity that matched the ghadi’s.
Nate took back the book and opened it to a page near the end, where the pages still carried the words of the history text. In the corner was a short runic label. Nate had “named” each page in the book, to make the transcriptions easier.
Of course, there was only one real target to transcribe, so Nate used the spell named on Arthiz’s left cheek. Nate called on his one spell, and there seemed something more ritualistic, darker, to it now than there had been before.
After the words were spoken, the words on the page moved. It was as if the ink had become oil on an already slick surface. It blended, and twisted itself into long columns of figures. Uthar touched the page and shook his head. “This is what?”
Nate pointed at his face, and Uthar touched his cheek as if burned. “You peel secrets from the skin itself.”