Ravig’s cloak suddenly did nothing to relieve the cold. “One example?”
“You understand who.”
“No. It was a single slip, a moment of curiosity. I’ve already reprimanded him.”
“It was a breach of the law, and it was insubordinate.” Ehrid turned to look at Ravig. “I find it a cruel fate, as you do. But the College is within its rights.”
Ravig shook his head. In his mind he was replaying the incident over and over. How his youngest guardsman, Alogas, looked through the items—stared at them—when they took the possessions from the babbling creature they had captured. Such things were taboo, not to be studied except by the eyes inside the College of Man. Ravig had hoped the breach was too minor to notice. “What has Alogas done that my other men have not?”
“Be thankful that the College makes a distinction.” Ehrid’s voice was cold and distant. “They have already taken him.”
“What?” Ravig’s head swam. “They’ve taken—Not even a plea on his behalf?” He grabbed Ehrid and pulled him around. Touching the Armsmaster of Manhome in such a manner was worthy of his own execution, but Ravig was angry past caring. “Did you call me here only to prevent me from intervening? From defending Alogas?”
Ehrid looked down at Ravig. “To prevent you from being lost to the College. I need you. The Monarch needs you.”
Ravig let go. “A Monarch who cannot even defend the men who serve Him.”
“Mind yourself.” Ehrid smoothed his cloak where Ravig had gripped it. “I know your pain right now, but you’ve exhausted the license it gives you.”
Ravig backed up a step, straightened, and gave a stiff salute. “I await the Armsmaster’s pleasure, and that of the Monarch.”
“Good. Then please relate exactly the events you were a party to.” Ehrid turned back toward the ocean. “Especially what the scholars of the College might have said in your presence once you delivered to them the creature they sought.”
Dawn broke over Manhome, burning off the mists that hugged the base of the plateau and bringing the call of sea birds feeding off the waste of the city. Ehrid stood on his balcony, looking into the ocean. Something about the water both terrified and fascinated him. Like fate or history, it was something whose depth and breadth was unimpressed by any one man. Something vast and implacable to which all men, from Monarch to beggar, were little more than grains of sand.
He had yet to sleep. Ravig had told him things that disturbed him greatly. The College itself seemed worried. In what Ravig had said there were hints that the scholars weren’t as sanguine as they would like to appear. Ehrid had some cause to believe that what the College might be worried about was not an angel striding from the mythic shadow, but something closer to Ehrid’s mundane reality.
“What words have you for me?” came a familiar voice from behind him.
Ehrid turned to face the acolyte with the plain mask. He looked into the featureless white face, attempting to discern something beyond the black eyeholes that were the only break in its surface. This anonymous scholar from the College of Man had come to him with the sanction of the Monarch himself. However, Ehrid now wondered if it was the plots germinating behind that white mask that had the College nervous.
Did they know how close they were to a contest for their power?
“I have many words,” Ehrid spoke finally. “I would like some in return.”
“I serve at the Armsmaster’s pleasure.” There was an irritating tinge of amusement in the way he said it. Ehrid ignored it.
“What is this pale creature to the College?”
“A stranger. A trespasser from beyond the realm of our ken. Something to be kept from public knowledge and examination. Something to be interrogated and destroyed before any harm is done.”
“There is more.”
“There is always more.”
“The College acts in a manner to suggest that it fears something. Is it this creature, or do they intuit your machinations?”
The acolyte laughed.
“I do not share your amusement.”
A bow toward Ehrid. “Forgive me. You have not lived in the College, so you do not know its mind. Suffice it to say that the only emotion permitted by doctrine is fear. The College itself is fear personified, and views plots and omens in the shapes of clouds and the entrails of slain ghadi.”
Ehrid frowned. “The Venrable Master Scholar himself displayed nervousness and uncertainty enough for my Armsman Ravig to comment on it. Whatever state of mind is normal within the College, it is not normal for them to allow outsiders to see it.”
“A different thing, I am sure. However, what Armsman Ravig might have seen was none of my doing, to answer your question. The distress they display is solely of their own making.”
“Meaning the stranger?”
“Meaning what they have convinced themselves the stranger might be.”
“What then?”
“Have you read the legends of the Angel of Death?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
AFTER THE FIRST hour, Nate’s hands were too sore to pound on the door. After the third hour, his voice died. After the fifth hour, fatigue won out and he had to sit down.
Nate paced around, probing the ground with his feet, kicking aside things that felt too squishy. He sat down, back to the wall, wondering if he had gone completely insane.
The complete darkness made it too easy to imagine that he had never left the blackout he had fallen into, running down the halls of Case. The thought was almost comforting, until he realized that he hadn’t been wearing lice-infested burlap then, and that darkness didn’t smell like mold and shit.
Perhaps worst of all right now was the fact that he had beaten his hands too sore to scratch himself.
A masochistic voice in his brain started a list of things that he would do just about anything for now. A ticket home was top on the list, even if it was to a life sentence in a Federal Supermax prison. Food was high on the list, along with some water. He would kill for some clean jockeys.
What’s going on at home? Does everyone think I’m dead? Has it made the news?
Nate thought of Mom and Sis being surrounded by reporters asking about the fugitive hacker Nate Black. Nate pictured a CNN reporter shoving a mike into Mom’s face and shouting, “Did you know your son was a criminal wanted by the FBI?”
That was when Nate finally started to cry.
They didn’t kill you, so they’ll be back. . . .
The thought kept returning. When they came back, Nate knew that somehow, despite the language barrier, he could make a deal. There had to be something he could do to convince them to let him go, or at least put him in a clean cell with clean clothes.
At least some air, and some food. He had a craving for sausage stuffing, which made him think of Mom again. . . .
I’m making myself crazy. . . .
Nate tried to put his mind somewhere else.
He closed his eyes, and tried to force himself to forget about the smell, the filth, and the itching. To give himself something to focus on, he started composing C++ code in his head. Every time he felt distracted, he punished himself by starting over from the first line.
It worked, and soon he was deep inside his own head, putting together a simple bubble-sort algorithm.
When he was satisfied with the algorithm, he translated the C++ code to Perl, then he translated it into AZ, a programming language he had invented when he was fourteen.
When he traced the code in his head, it showed up a bug in the way AZ worked. He fell asleep mentally rewriting the code for AZ to properly handle recursive subroutines.
Light woke him up.
For a few moments he didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him. But the memories came back too quickly as he blinked in the sudden torchlight.
Boy, am I fucked.
As his eyesight cleared, Nate got to see one of the aliens close-up for the first time.
Its face was elongated and tilted back,
the mouth wide and rubbery, the brow smooth and hairless above round eyes with no whites and irises the same purple-black as its skin. The arms had an extra elbow, and the fingers had an extra joint, and it had a gait showing legs with the same design.
It wore a dirty-white toga, bound with a rope at a waistline that would be even with the sternum in a normal anatomy. The torso was way too small for the spidery legs and arms. Nate couldn’t guess gender.
It stood in the doorway, carrying a bucket.
Nate slowly pushed himself upright, thinking he might push past this thing. Then he saw the masked men with the torches, out in the hallway.
The alien set the bucket down on the floor and backed away. The door shut behind it. Everything was dark again.
Nate felt for the bucket and found it. Inside it was a bowl filled with a lumpy broth and half a loaf of some hard, flat bread. However plain the food was, it awoke Nate’s hunger. He hadn’t eaten in at least twenty-four hours, if not longer.
It took only a few moments to realize what the bucket itself was for. It was a bit of a trick relieving himself while holding his meal. But he didn’t have much choice, it would be unthinkable to eat anything that came in contact with any surface of his cell.
Fortunately, the bucket was wooden with a fairly thick rim, so he could raise his robe and sit on it without much discomfort.
He ate his first meal sitting on the piss bucket, soaking the bread in the broth so he could manage to chew it.
He woke up in the middle of the “night” chilled and sweaty, and threw up that first meal into the half-full bucket.
The alien came with a new bucket and took the old one.
Nate didn’t move from the corner. He was shivering and weak, and it felt as if his insides were melting away.
He tried to eat, but he threw up again. When he managed to pull himself up on the bucket, he had diarrhea as thin as his urine.
Not good, Nate thought.
He couldn’t stand up to get the next meal. He dragged himself across the floor without paying much mind to what lived in the straw. He felt around for the broth, and fearing he’d vomit again, left the hard bread. He sucked the broth through his teeth leaving the solids in the bowl.
That he managed to keep down.
His time was spent mostly in semiconscious darkness. He was so weak that sometimes he didn’t reach the bucket. When the alien came and saw this, it responded by fetching more straw and shoveling away the most solid part of the mess.
He tried to play with code in his head, but the fever had scrambled the focus of his mind.
He would wake up, shouting into the blackness. . . .
“Is this what you want? @, you fucker? Why? What the hell is the point? I’m going to rot away here and not even know where the fuck I am. If you wanted something out of me, you bastard, boy, did you blow it. . . .”
“I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t mean to do this to you. But tell those CNN bastards to back off. . . .”
“You ‘Mission Impossible’ bastards did it, I admit it. I’m Azrael, I’ll sign anything, you can all stop the act now. . . .”
“Microsoft will always have security holes, they have a business cycle that’s based on a two-year product turnaround no matter what shape the software’s in. If it wasn’t for folks like me, testing the holes, you think they’d even code the patches?”
“You know, I don’t think I’m going to make Thanksgiving dinner.”
“For Christ’s sake, it’s not like I killed anyone . . .”
“Who the fuck else would you want running your network security?”
“Please, God, don’t let me die down here.”
When they came for him, Nate was lucid enough to know what was happening, to know how bad off he was. He was suffering from some filth-borne disease. Dysentery, cholera, or some other infection was dehydrating him. The diarrhea wouldn’t stop, and he could barely keep the broth down. He could feel his own ribs, and under a scraggly beard it felt as if his cheek-bones might slice open his face.
When the robed figures gripped his arms, it was more to hold him upright than it was to restrain him.
The walk was exhausting, but Nate didn’t have a choice, they forced him to go on. A few times Nate stumbled and nearly collapsed, but they held on, dragging his feet behind him.
They pulled him through corridors, and up stairs, until Nate could smell the sea air again. It was a shock to be suddenly reminded that there was, in fact, a world beyond the stone walls that had imprisoned him.
They took him through a plain wooden door that opened into a massive arcade. Unlike the dungeons that they’d been in up to now, this long gallery was wide, well-lit, and clean. Huge tapestries hung from the walls and light shone in from small windows set near the top of the vaulted ceiling. Statues flanked the tapestries, showing figures that were unquestionably human, and of the same breed as his captors. The tapestries carried scenes of warfare, showing cities burning and people being slaughtered. Nate saw that the battles all seemed to be between the humans and alien creatures like the one that had brought him his daily bucket.
One of the last tapestries showed a thing. Nate couldn’t name it, but it had the same insect-tentacle-plantlike characteristics as the defaced sculpture he had seen on the hillside what seemed like a millennium ago. It hovered over a blasted landscape, piled with smoldering bodies.
They didn’t stop to allow Nate a better look. They were headed for the massive doors at one end of the huge gallery.
They entered a great circular chamber and dragged him to a high chair set in the center of the room. He faced a tall U-shaped desk that half circled him. Ten masked figures looked down at him from behind that desk. Their masks were all equally elaborate, with shining highlights of silver, gold, ivory, and precious stones. All were different. Nate saw Scarface’s red devil mask, but he also saw a clown, a cat, some sort of bird, an abstract pattern with no nose or mouth, and a frowning face that was very realistically human.
Nate saw the box that held his clothes sitting off to the right. The padlock was gone and it was guarded by a pair of Scarface’s cronies with the red-yellow devil masks.
After setting Nate down, the pair who had carried him walked up to the desk and conferred with Scarface. Nate looked around. His skin felt flushed and his neck felt rubbery. He knew he was too weak to make a run for it, even though the doors were still open behind him.
As he watched, two of the toga-clad aliens closed the doors.
Nate looked back at the desk facing him and realized that he was the focus of attention. He called out, “What do you want? Just let me go and you’ve got it.”
No one responded. At this point he didn’t expect them to.
Another pair of cronies left Scarface’s side, taking a small box, and walked over to Nate. They set the plain-looking box down at the foot of the chair Nate sat in, almost under his feet.
One of them opened the box to reveal a metallic sphere about the size of a softball. It sat, cushioned by black velvet. Nate stared at it and realized that it was the most elaborately engraved thing he had seen here. Like the cuts in Scarface’s skin, the sphere’s engravings were repeated square rectilinear symbols. Only, in the sphere’s case, the individual characters—Nate was becoming convinced that these symbols represented a language of some sort—were vanishingly tiny, little more than a few millimeters across, wrapping the metal ball in a tight spiral.
Scarface chanted something in that liquid second language.
Everyone around the desk repeated the words, if that’s what they were.
At his feet, the sphere was vibrating. Nate could hear a high-frequency hum coming from it. The two masked characters next to him backed away.
Nate pushed himself upright and muttered, “This is getting fucking weird.”
The sphere resonated with his voice. It almost seemed to speak in the strange common language these people spoke.
Scarface said something.
With a tone rather
like overstressed metal and fingernails across a blackboard, Nate heard the sphere speak.
“UNDERSTANDCOMPREHEND YOUUSME.”
Nate looked up at the masked people and whispered, “Holy shit.”
CHAPTER NINE
MATE STARED at the sphere as he heard its vibrations resonate in the guttural tones of his captors. What a wonderful impression that’s going to make. How’s that going to translate?
Scarface barked something, and Nate could tell that he didn’t like what had come through his end of the sphere. “ANSWERRESPOND YOUUSME.”
Nate looked up. The sphere was weak in carrying tone, inflection, or emotion, but Nate had heard Scarface speak and the words out of his mouth, incomprehensible as they were, sounded terse.
“Yes, I understand you, somewhat.” Nate looked at all of them in turn. Who were these people? What was this place?
“NAMEIDENTITY TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.” Who are you?
“My name’s Nate Black. Look, I don’t have anything against you people. Can we come up with—”
“QUESTIONSREQUESTS TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME NOCANNOTBAD. QUESTIONSREQUESTS TELLCOMMUNICATE MEUSYOU YESWILLGOOD.” We are the ones asking questions here.
Nate looked up at Scarface’s mask and felt afraid in a way that made him ashamed at the same time. “Please, just tell me what you want from me.” Nate’s voice cracked, and he felt dizzy. It was a good thing that they set him in a chair, because the effort of speaking might have made him collapse.
Nate saw the masked figures deliberating in whispered tones. He wondered if what he said made any sense to them.
Scarface’s voice was threatening even before the sphere got hold of it. When the words rang off the metal orb, they were dry-ice cold. “LIFEEXISTENCE YOUNATEBLACK HEREWORLDMANHOME VIOLATIONFORBIDDENDANGER. DESCISIONCONTROL LIFEEXISTENCE YOUNATEBLACK MINEOURS. DECISIONCONTROL PAINDEATH YOUNATEBLACK YOUYOURS.”