Dazed to confusion, I stumbled back toward the cluster of houses that formed the center of the village. There was no one in sight. Smoke curled from the chimneys of the homes, but there was no one else outside. Only me. Alone.
Had Alina roused them out of their houses, or had they refused to come to her aid? How many more of the villagers were missing?
Numb, raw, hurt and exhausted, I decided that these were questions that would have to wait until dawn. The worst of the night was over, and there was nothing I could do to help those who had been taken. More than anything else, that thought grated on my mind and conscience until I was near-ready to scream with the agony and injustice of it all.
Tears blurred my vision as I dragged myself through the door of Alina's home and closed it behind me. I picked up a large piece of wood and dumped it on the smoldering embers, where it slowly began to burn.
I dropped to the floor in front of the hearth and held out my hands to warm them. For the first time since I'd left Elenia, I missed the cold eyes of the real D'Arden Tal. He would have done better.
He wouldn't have failed Alina.
Who was I, to be playing at being a hero? There were real lives at stake here, and here I was, pretending to be an Arbiter, just so I could get out of the cold for a few hours.
Immersed in troubled thoughts and self-loathing, I fell asleep in front of Alina's hearth.
X
Sometime later, I awoke cold and alone.
My mind dragged itself out of sleep with great reluctance. Part of me thought it would have been better simply to have never woken.
The fire had burned to nothing in the hearth. Through the thick pane of smoked glass that served as a window, I could barely make out a coldly sunny sky. It was impossible to tell how far past dawn it was without going outside, but the sun had clearly risen some time past.
Alina's words rang hollowly in my mind. The second night, and the third, it's the missing people who hunt for the Reaper… and they're dead.
Was that what my failure would cost me? Would I be forced to stare into Alina's dead eyes and destroy her corpse before it could take any more innocent lives?
My teeth clamped down on my lower lip so hard that I tasted blood.
You could leave, my mind offered.
The thought was so sweetly tempting that I nearly sprang to my feet and ran for the door. Would it be possible to simply leave all of this behind, and forget that it had ever happened? Disappear into the world like the coward that I was, leaving no trace behind of the 'Arbiter' who had briefly stopped in Warsil?
Could I leave a village full of innocent lives to be tormented, murdered and brought back from the dead as the pawns of some mad sorcerer?
Fear, cowardice and anger – both at myself and at the Reaper – warred within my exhausted mind. I still felt as though the insides of my mind had been stripped raw, and the thought of conjuring even the smallest lick of manna caused a pounding ache at the base of my skull.
No matter how much I hated this village, no matter how much I wanted to leave, I couldn't bring myself to think that it was a good idea. Regardless of everything else, I had lied to these people. I had made the first move, recklessly declaring that I was an Arbiter in front of all of them. Though I'd never felt a particular need to live up to my word in the past, something compelled me to it now. In the name of D'Arden Tal, I had sworn protection to this village, and I had sworn vengeance to Alina.
The fact that she was dead didn't change that.
With a sluggish stagger, I rose to my feet. Why had Alina and I been alone out there? Where had the villagers been? Why hadn't they come to help us?
I must have looked like death when I emerged from the cold house into the snowy village square. One by one, I could see the villagers slowly emerging from their homes, like terrified squirrels poking their heads out from the boles of trees.
As I gazed upon them, I felt a strange sort of anger spark somewhere deep inside me. A burning rage ignited, brighter than any flame I'd ever seen, and it swept me away on a tide of madness.
"You worthless peons," I snarled, spittle flying from my lips. "Where were you?"
Perhaps it was the raw viciousness of my tone, or the way my hands lit up with brilliant cobalt light as I unconsciously summoned power to my fists, but every one of them in sight stopped to stare at my haggard form. I recognized the faces of some of the people I'd interviewed the day before, including Palis the smith.
"She stood up against that monster all alone," I said, my voice dropping to a hiss. "And where were you? Cowering behind your walls, praying that they wouldn't come for you? Did you offer up your pleas to the dark gods, or the dead ones? How many of you are missing this morning? How did your cowardice fare in the face of evil?"
The venom in my words surprised even me, but if I had ever cared about the opinion of these peasants, it had been burned away when Alina had been taken. The words that would invoke an apocalyptic bloodbath and slaughter all of them where they stood were on my lips, and it was only the faintest vestiges of my willpower that kept me from destroying them.
Cries and desperate pleas began to rise from their lips, but I hardly cared. The blood was pounding in my ears, and I dimly became aware of the crackling energy that leapt between my outstretched fingers like tiny bolts of lightning.
"There was nothing we could have done," Palis the smith said, his voice echoing across the village green. "We can't stand against that thing. That's your job, Arbiter."
I rounded on Palis, ready to destroy him with a single word from my lips, but just that second, her face appeared in my mind; round, soft and open, her blond hair falling across her eyes. My anger faltered in that moment, and the power died away from my fists. Instead of ending them all, I collapsed to my knees in the snow and drew a shuddering breath.
"Cowards," I whispered, and the venomous pronouncement judged me as thoroughly as it did them.
After several minutes, I managed to push myself to my feet again. "I am no Arbiter," I said aloud, ignoring the whispers that ran through the assembled crowd of peasants. "My name is Edar Moncrief, and I am a sorcerer. I may be the only sorcerer ever to best an Arbiter in the battle of wits, and I am powerful enough to kill each and every one of you individually, should you make any attempt on my life."
The looks upon their faces were enough to tell me that I had filled them with fear. The next words that I said were more for myself than they were for them. "Tonight, I am going to destroy this Reaper. It will not take me by surprise again. By your own words, you have told me that tonight, at midnight, those who are dead will return… and they will come for you. If you do not stand and fight with me, I wash my hands of you. They will take you, and without direction from their master, there is no telling what they might do to you.
"If you die tonight, it will be through no one's fault but your own."
With that, I turned around and stalked back into the lifeless hut that had once belonged to a beautiful, broken woman, and slammed the door closed behind me.
The sorcerer that was masquerading himself as this 'Reaper' had concocted a terror glamor so strong that it had entirely overwhelmed my senses. It was a neat trick, something I had read about but never explored in depth.
My ancient books had burned along with all of my other possessions, when I'd set my lab aflame before leaving Elenia. Destroying some of those priceless artifacts had hurt me worse than much of the physical pain I'd experienced in my life, but almost all of it was committed to my exceptional memory. It didn't stop the pain, but it lessened it somewhat.
Here in this dismal village, I didn't even have so much as a scrap of parchment on which to take notes and write out my eldritch formulas. My good pen and inkwell had burned with the rest.
Still, the thoughts needed to be ordered somehow, or I would never devise an incantation that would strip away the Reaper's glamor so that I could get at the man inside. I picked up a piece of coal from the dead ashes of the hearth, and began
to write on the wooden walls.
XI
I barely even noticed the time passing until I looked up, and it was dark outside. To their credit, the villagers had not even tried to bother me.
My stomach was growling, so I rummaged through my pack and managed to choke down a bit of hardened travel bread as I stared at the walls of the house. They were covered from ceiling to floor in black etchings; some had been wiped away when I'd realized that I was chasing the wrong track, but most stood out starkly against the brown wood. Somewhere along the line, I had restarted the fire to give me light to see by, though I had no recollection of actually doing it.
For several minutes after coming out of my haze, I stared at the final line I'd written, on the wall next to the door that led outside. The incantation was complex, but it included a counter ward for the terror glamor, another for the illusion that affected sight, a third to dampen any extraneous effects that he might be using. Without knowing exactly what they were, I could not disperse them directly, but I could affect them more generally.
The last was only a snippet of a much larger, more complex spell. I had included seven words from Yzgar the Black's Verse of Undoing, the very one which had saved my life from the vampires, back in Elenia. Once the rest of the spells had stripped away the layers with which this sorcerer cloaked himself, those seven words would enter his brain, and unmake his mind.
I had never purposely constructed a spell to kill someone before. This was black magic; the blackest, really, designed to do nothing more than systematically wipe away every defense, prevent every counter, and slaughter a human mind at its culmination.
It would be weeks later before I realized that I had never cared about anything – or anyone – enough to design such an incantation.
In that moment, though, I simply regarded my work with a sort of grim satisfaction. There was no escaping what my anger-deranged brain gleefully called Edar's "Reaper" Reaper. It was the spell I should have been prepared with the night before, if not for my idiotic hubris.
Silence reigned supreme around me as I swore to myself that I would never make a mistake like that one again.
Ever.
I turned to the hearth, and spoke a single word in a forgotten tongue. The flames stoked higher, pushed on by my power. Before the night was out, the house would burn to the ground, leaving behind nothing but ash.
With a tiny sigh, I made my way out into the night.
XII
At last, the Deadmoon began approaching its zenith. The dead eye of the old Tellarian goddess stared down upon what would be the reckoning day for a man who had become a monster; a poetic thought, even if I found such a legend hard to believe.
It would soon be midnight.
My stomach twisted and roiled as I stood alone in the cold. The villagers were still safely inside their homes, like the pathetic cowards that they were. Smoke curled lazily from the chimneys of the surrounding huts, and I felt my hatred for them growing as I watched it.
This time, when the Reaper came, there was no baying of hounds.
There was only the crunch of frozen snow as the dead staggered into Warsil.
I stood alone in the moonlight as I watched them emerge from the darkness. The chill breeze of the winter's night brought with it the foul stench of death and decay. Far away, there was a howling noise, though whether it was the wind whistling through some distant hollow or the sound of enraged hounds straining at their chains, I couldn't be sure.
Everything was cast in shades of grey by the bone-white radiance from the sky. The snow stood out starkly against the deep shadows cast by the houses of the village. As the human silhouettes stumbled into the light, a shiver ran down my spine.
One of them stopped a few yards away from me, and turned its rotten visage toward mine. The milky eyes stared at me, twitching in their decaying sockets for a long moment. My breath froze in my chest as I was pinned to the ground by that hideous gaze.
Then, the corpse turned away, and shuffled onward.
I expelled the breath I'd been holding in a rush, even as confusion filled my mind. Why weren't they attacking me?
"Because I told them not to," a voice whispered behind me.
My heart threatened to stop dead in my chest as I turned to behold the Reaper.
The terror that gripped me immediately lessened as the full image entered my mind. The towering, shadowy form of the Reaper had turned strangely translucent. Through the outer shell I could see a man, perhaps a bit shorter than I, with a shock of brown hair. His flesh was pale and sallow, beaded with sweat though the night was cold. The left side of his head was completely ruined, caved in by some impact. It had turned to scars now, but it left him with a grotesque appearance, one that made my stomach clench in response.
The Reaper was flanked on both sides by four figures. Three were thin, pale forms that stared at me with dark, blank gazes; vacant stares which showed no sign of life. I did not recognize their alabaster faces.
The fourth was Alina.
Crimson light glittered from what had once been her deep blue eyes, and a lance of pain went through my heart like nothing I had ever felt before. It was only by the barest margin that I managed to keep myself from crying out in anguish. At the same moment, the stabbing pain came again at the back of my neck, very nearly ripping a different cry from my throat.
They made no move toward me, but simply stood perfectly still, staring at me with blank expressions.
"You have no business here," the man with the ruined face, the Reaper, said. "This village belongs to me."
As my eyes jumped from one face to the next, the family resemblance between the stony faces of the dead children, the crimson eyes which had once belonged to Alina, and the strange man slowly resolved in my mind.
"You're… Ramun," I whispered. "Alina's husband."
He nodded sharply, staring at me with his good eye, like I might have regarded an insectoid test subject in my lab. "As you can see," he said, his voice a hollow rasp, "I have reunited my family at last. I spared your life because you brought my Alina to me. I am grateful. Now we can be a family again."
I stared at Ramun, aghast. "What?"
As he returned my gaze, I could see insanity burning brightly behind his eye. "We are reunited at last. Now, I will have my revenge, and all will be returned to normal."
"Your… revenge?" I asked. The terror glamour was still working on me, rendering it difficult to think. My brain latched onto the words of the spell that I'd written, using it as an anchor to keep me from being swept away by the fear. "What revenge?"
Ramun lashed out one hand, but not at me. The faded image of the Reaper pointed one tentacle-like root simultaneously, and I followed it to where it indicated.
The house of Palis the smith.
My jaw worked frantically as I tried to come up with something to say that wasn't my deadly incantation. "Palis? What does he have to do with anything?"
He looked down, and then fixed me once more with a baleful glare from his remaining eye. "He did this to me!" Ramun snarled, pointing at his ruined face. "After what I discovered his worthless son doing to my daughters…"
The impossibly-pale faces of the twin girls, no more than twelve, stared at me impassively… yet somehow, I could still feel the judgment behind their crimson eyes. My stomach twisted, and my heart felt sick.
"I took them first," Ramun went on in a feverish babble. "I took away my children, took them away from here so that they wouldn't be hurt anymore. I couldn't tell Alina, couldn't tell her what had happened… I just wanted us to be together again…"
My chest felt as though it were being squeezed by a vise. "Ramun… they're dead," I whispered. "You killed them."
His head canted to the side, the motion too deep, his neck twisting too far. His voice echoed strangely, high-pitched and distant. "How can they be dead? They're standing right beside me."
I closed my eyes for a moment, and took a deep breath. The smell of death and decay filled m
y nostrils, and I wanted to retch.
"All I want is my revenge," Ramun said. "That's all I want. Then we will go away, and we will be a family again."
The brilliant red eyes of Alina's corpse bore into me, and the prickling pain spread down my neck and the backs of my arms. The gaze of the children was blank, lifeless, but there still seemed to be something, some intelligence left behind Alina's eyes. Ramun continued on, babbling incoherently now, something about family and happiness, but I wasn't listening. All I could see was the eyes that had once been blue, the woman that had such a short time ago pleaded for my help, and the gaping wound in her chest… the wound inflicted by the man who loved her enough to kill for her. To kill her.
"I'm sorry, Ramun," I whispered at last. "I'm sorry for everything that's happened to you."
"Then you'll help me?" he asked, his voice taking on just the barest hint of desperation.
Legend said that nearly four thousand years past, the Arbiters had left their home in the Old Kingdoms to rot and ruin and had moved east, building their Tower in a place far away from the machinations and politics of the squabbling monarchs. I had read texts which spoke of their reason for such a drastic move: they left because the Old Kingdoms continually called on them to solve the problems of men. The Arbiter's calling was to destroy and disperse corruption where it had collected, but they had no business in the petty evils that lurked in the hearts of men.
In that moment, I understood why they had gone.
Unfortunately, it was too late for me. I had already meddled, and now I needed to set it right, the best way I could.
"No, Ramun," I said. "I can't help you."
"Then you will die like the rest!" he snarled, and suddenly, the Reaper rematerialized before me.
The winds of sorcery buffeted me as he hurled a vicious bolt of energy toward me. My heart ached with sorrow and anguish as I turned it aside with a single word, deflecting it and sending it to explode against the ground a few feet away.
The Elements of Sorcery Page 8
