Broken Crescent (21 page)

In fact, for once, Nate was looking at someone who seemed as out of place as he was.

Nate understood Arthiz’s reasoning. Yerith wasn’t a bodyguard, a guide, or a warden. She was here with him because she knew about Nate. Nate couldn’t make much sense of what was happening to him, but he did know that something about him made him important to the College of Man, if only because he frightened them.

If Arthiz wanted to keep Nate out of the hands of the College—a goal Nate supported—the fewer people who knew of Nate and what happened to him, the better. Yerith knew too much to hang around the College safely. If Nate was Arthiz, he’d send her into hiding, too. If there was one thing he understood from his days as Azrael, it was paranoia and covering your own tracks.

Nate just wished he knew
why
he was so important and so threatening to these people.

All he had was a partial explanation of why the College of Man wanted him imprisoned; he just had the bad luck to walk into a culture with a taboo on foreigners so draconian that it made fifteenth century China look welcoming. But there had to be more to it than that if Arthiz’s intervention was to make any sense. The man wasn’t in a position to be altruistic.

The man wanted Nate to “help” his cause, and while Nate could sympathize with people fighting a totalitarian regime—and until he found a way back to the world he knew, it made no sense to cast his lot with anyone else—Nate couldn’t see what Arthiz got out of the deal. He simply didn’t buy Arthiz’s vague references to games. A person in Arthiz’s position had to be pragmatic. Nate doubted that what he added to Arthiz’s side of the equation was purely hypothetical. He had to mean something specific to Arthiz.

None of which informed Nate what he was bringing to the table, or what he meant to any of these people. He was an alien here, and the rules were so different that it could be anything.

Nate’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of rustling foliage. He looked at where the pier met the jungle, and for a long time didn’t see anything. Then, some tropical bird exploded from the bush, propelled by a flutter of primary colors.

Nate stared at where the bird had come from and saw a shadow in the midst of the leaves. The shadow seemed to have eyes.

He kept looking and decided that the shadow also held a wicked-looking crossbow pointed at them.

“I think your friends are here,” Nate said.

Now that he was looking, he could make out half a dozen people hidden just inside the tree line, attention focused on Nate and Yerith. Yerith was still looking around, as if she didn’t notice the men in the woods. Maybe she didn’t.

Nate was surprised at exactly how calm he felt. This kind of episode would have easily fired off his panic reflexes pre-“@.”
Guess I lost that particular reflex, along with everything else.

After a few more long moments where Yerith became visibly more tense, someone pushed aside the foliage where the stone pier met solid land, about sixty or seventy feet away from them. The man who walked out carried a long machete. His skin was as dark as anyone’s Nate had seen in this world, which made the scars that marked his skin all the more apparent.

Unlike Scarface, this man was young, and the detailed ritualistic inscriptions did not cover every inch of skin. Words rolled across his forehead, and down his cheeks, but the skin of his arms, neck, and the visible portions of his chest were unmarked.

He wore sandals and the baggy black canvas pants that seemed to be the universal peasant garb here. Over it he wore a short robe that made him look like a refugee from a martial arts movie. As the guy strode down the pier to meet them, Nate realized that their welcoming committee had waited until the boat had completely vanished in the distance.

The man stopped about ten feet from them, and looked Nate up and down. For the first time in quite a while, Nate was self-conscious about his appearance. His hair and beard had grown out the past three months or so, and were both at about the same length. And both probably looked like hell. His skin was an awful, dead-looking, pasty white. The only touches of color were ropy blue veins under the skin on the back of his hands. Not to mention clothes that hadn’t been washed in how long?

“So this is his stranger?” The man asked Yerith.

“You are Bhodan?”

The man snorted. “Bhodan is too important to waste on frivolities like this. I am Osif. I am to guide you and our prize back to the mountain.” Nate wasn’t quite adept at reading subtext in the new language, they didn’t use tone to carry emotion, but Nate received the distinct impression of sarcasm.

Yerith said. “I was told—”

“I am sure that you were told many things,” Osif interrupted. “We were told to fetch this dubious creature.” Osif sighed. “Does it take instruction?”

Yerith opened her mouth, and it was all Nate could do to keep from laughing. The bastard had no clue. Nate stood and walked up to Yerith, who was busy watching Osif as he looked at all the cargo the ship had off-loaded.

Osif shook his head. “Well?” He looked up. “How well behaved is this thing?”

“What do you—” Yerith looked at Nate, who hadn’t said anything up until now. He gave Yerith a look that said,
Let him think I’m a deformed ghadi.

Yerith sucked in a breath and said, “We should move on while there’s daylight.”

G
HADI IN LOINCLOTHS carried most of the cargo. Nate, at Osif’s insistence, carried one of the bags himself. He was the only human who carried anything that wasn’t a weapon. Nate didn’t mind all that much. The time he had spent working out in the catacombs had left him more fit than he had been when he came to this place, he was just a little wobbly from the sea voyage.

Nate kept within earshot of Yerith and Osif, listening to the Sandanista-lite bitching about being pulled from his important studies to escort Nate to the mountain. For this guy, Arthiz had been too long away from the Monarch’s people in the jungle, and he didn’t understand what things were like here. He was out of touch.

What they needed here were new recruits, fresh mages to learn the skills needed to fight the College. They didn’t need pale novelties. Now they had to spend their own resources on studying this stranger when it would have been better to let the College keep the misbegotten thing, and let Arthiz’s intelligence within the College gather what information on it they found.

After all, what possible use could this creature be to anyone?

Nate listened to about two hours of this guy before he suspected that they were reaching their destination.

The signs were old stonework—first, in the path they followed, where ancient pavestones peeked from the earth, then in mounds that formed unnatural geometric patterns in the jungle floor, marking the sites of long crumbled buildings.

They walked toward the sound of water, and about ten minutes after first hearing it, they stepped out from under the jungle canopy, to face a cliff towering about three or four hundred feet straight up before the face fell back into an eroded bluff.

At its base surged violent rapids that filled the air with a gray mist and the sound of rushing water.

The cliff face itself was carved over its entire surface area, except for a few places where the river had claimed a portion of it. Paths switchbacked across the face of the cliff, stairs were carved into the stone, man-sized holes peppered the surface accessing some interior structure.

Stone vines and leaves competed with the real thing. Columns reached up fifty, a hundred feet, some even taller. Balconies and terraces jutted from the face of the cliff. And, everywhere, statues.

Ghadi statues.

A stone skyscraper. A whole city carved into the valley wall. An
old
city. But it was only a ruin at first glance. After more than a casual observation, Nate could tell that the clearing that he followed Osif into was not a natural occurrence. Looking back and forth, the ground had been cleared and exposed from the river to about a hundred yards back. No one could approach here from the south without being completely exposed to the inhabitants of the cliff face.

There was a single bridge crossing the river, a rope and wood construction that was placed about fifty feet downstream from the remains of a stone bridge—the rubble was obviously the result of recent demolition. The rope bridge was over one of the more violent parts of the rapids, and was so narrow that people would have to cross single file.

A single torch there could stop the advance of an army.

Admittedly, most of what Nate knew about strategy came from computer gaming, but to him at least, it looked as if the people here were serious about defending themselves.

Osif led them across the rope bridge, which was more stable than it looked, and up one of the ramps that hugged the cliff face. It reminded Nate a lot of the road that spiraled up the plateau of Manhome. The construction was the same, as was the artwork.

He glanced back at the ghadi porters, wordlessly carrying their burdens for their human masters. Nate wondered how they could go from point A to point B. The artwork alone made it clear that the same creatures built this place.

Osif led them into one of the holes in the cliff wall. Nate’s feelings of being watched were confirmed when, once inside the cliff, a quartet of men stopped Osif and double-checked everyone. They gave Nate the once-over half a dozen times, muttering to themselves.

“—This is what they’ve been talking about—”

“—what is that it’s wearing?”

“—ever seen skin that white? Is it alive?”

“Ugly, isn’t it?”

Osif turned to Yerith and said, “Have him put that down. I have to present you to Bhodan.”

Nate dropped the crate he was carrying before Osif had finished his sentence. Osif was a little too self-involved to notice, but the four guards did a double take, and Nate made it a point to smile at them as Osif led him and Yerith deeper into the cliff face.

Bhodan was deep inside a warren of caverns. They reminded Nate of the catacombs under Manhome, except these were larger and better lit. The occasional tapestry hung on the wall, half disintegrated. The carving was finer and more precise, giving Nate the feel that this was carved for living space.

At the end of a long maze of corridors, they walked through an unornamented door into a darkened chamber. Nate felt a wave of claustrophobia, as if he was going to be locked up in a dungeon again. He felt his heart race, and was prepared to rush the door if it started to close.

Instead, a raspy voice called out, “Osif, my son?”

“I’ve come back with Arthiz’s gift to us.”

“Let me provide you some light.” Something sparked a few times, on the far side of the room, and eventually an oil lamp was burning.

Yerith gasped.

Nate sucked in a breath, too. The man by the lamp looked as if he shouldn’t be alive. His face was a twisted mass of scar tissue, ragged cuts following the lines of the typical College writing. The man’s eyes were gone, in their place more sunken scar tissue filling the orbits of his skull. He didn’t have hands, his arms ended in two leather cups where a complex set of blunted hooks emerged.

The man smiled, the expression rendering his face even more skull-like. Nate could understand why this man wouldn’t come to meet them himself.

“Welcome guests. I am Bhodan, and this is
my
College.”

Osif started to say, “Master, this is the stranger that—”

Nate stepped forward and said, “My name is Nate Black. Thank you for meeting with us.”

Osif’s expression was worth the price of admission. He turned to face Nate and said, “You can speak,” as if it was an accusation.

Nate smiled at him. “Yes, I can.”

“Slowly,” Bhodan said. “Your words are spoken strange.”

Osif turned on Yerith. “Why did you hide this from me?”

Because you’re an asshole.
Nate answered Osif. “She answered every question you addressed to her.” Nate turned to face Bhodan. “Why was I sent here?”

Bhodan got to his feet with a slight limp. “Arthiz said he had a special student for us. He believes that you might cause the College of Man much distress.”

Osif grunted, causing Bhodan to laugh. “Osif doesn’t share Arthiz’s opinion.”

“Even if he can be trained at all, what use is he? Even in an acolyte’s robe and mask, he could not walk among men without being known. He couldn’t leave here, so what use is that?”

Bhodan kept chuckling. He pointed a hook at Osif and said, “I cannot leave this refuge, so you say I am useless?”

“No—I—Master, you are a great teacher, a great leader. We cannot say the same about this interloper.”

“You judge too quickly.” Bhodan faced Nate and asked, “Why did you not speak to my student, Osif?”

Nate looked across at Osif, who looked pissed. A long time ago, Nate hadn’t cared about making social enemies. There were other things to worry about in life rather than whether people liked you or not. Either he, or the situation, was different enough now for Nate to realize that he had made a diplomatic misstep.

One consolation—the guy was an asshole who probably wouldn’t have been on Nate’s side anyway.

“I learned more about him by remaining silent,” Nate said.

Bhodan seemed to find that amusing.

“Do you actually believe that he is who Arthiz thinks—” Osif began to say.

Bhodan whipped around and snapped at him, “This is not the time. Raise such questions to me, alone.”

“Master—”

“Go now, make sure there are rooms for our guests. We will speak of this later.”

Osif opened his mouth, but Bhodan made a violent gesture with his hook, and Osif grimaced, glared at Nate, and left.