The Elements of Sorcery

by Christopher Kellen

  After only a moment's reflection, I realized that I had only one good option. Just as Alvar's hands were about to reach the leather pouch concealed around my ankle, I coughed loudly, wracking my chest with deep spasms and jerking my legs a bit, even as I subvocalized the Tellarian syllables that re-enabled just the masking spell on my eyes. I required only a tiny trickle of manna, and I could only hope that Alvar's senses were not finely-tuned enough to detect it. The younger Brauch jerked away from me as I "awakened," and his search never found the heartblade's velvet-lined case.

  There are only two modes to sorcery: deliberate, tinkering research and apocalyptic bloodbath… unless it's in the hands of a master. When I felt the manna coalesce around my eyes in a gentle, almost imperceptible hum, I felt like a master.

  "He's waking up," the Conte said. "What are you going to do with him?"

  Alvar paused for a long moment, and when my coughing subsided, I found that I was holding my breath. Yes, Alvar… are you going to kill me now?

  "Nothing," the younger man huffed at last, his voice retreating as he stood up and took a few steps back. "He will understand my caution."

  Drugging me with nurem root, you mean? Thankfully, that particular knock-out drug had few residual side-effects. I'd studied it extensively as part of my exploration into the local flora, upon arriving in Selvaria, and it only very rarely resulted in the person's sudden death by vomiting out his insides.

  Though my eyes were still closed, I felt it when Alvar crouched down in front of the chair that I was sitting in. Slowly, I let my eyelids flutter open, praying that I'd remembered the spell correctly.

  He didn't react.

  Nailed it.

  "I'm very sorry about that, Edar," Alvar said, and he did truly sound apologetic. "You must understand my precaution. There are many people who would wish my brother and I dead. Sending you in with an enchantment waiting to detonate at an assassin's command is a cowardly tactic, and one which Trulia has attempted to employ against us before."

  "No harm done," I choked. Dizziness lingered in my head, and black lights danced at the edges of my vision. Whether that was a residual effect from the nurem root or a side-effect of my rapidly-reconfigured masking spell, I couldn't be sure.

  "Why don't you take a walk in the garden, clear your head," Alvar said, exchanging a brief glance with the Conte, who nodded. "The night air will do good things for you. It's finally stopped raining."

  "That sounds lovely." Somehow, I managed a smile. "Which way?"

  Alvar stepped back and removed the bonds on my wrists, allowing me to rise; which I did, albeit with a bit of shake in my legs. He proffered an arm to help stabilize me, but I waved him off. The dizziness slowly faded; much more rapidly than I would have expected, in fact.

  Dealing with the nobility of the Old Kingdoms is sort of like charming pit vipers who are possessed of a particularly strong sense of honor. Alvar had merely been doing what any prudent noble would do: completely roll over the proles to make sure that no harm would come to him or his kin. Much like I wouldn't blame a pit viper for flooding my veins with venom when wronged, I couldn't blame Alvar for doing what came naturally to him.

  They knew well that I was working for both sides. So did Trulia, really. Politics is all just a bunch of polite fictions. Alvar and the Conte pretended that I wasn't feeding information to Trulia, just like the Circle of Thorns politely pretended that I wasn't scheming with the nobles on the other side. Each of them just hoped to get the maximum advantage out of me before I outlived my usefulness and ended up dead.

  Politics is a strange, squirrely beast; a dangerous sea filled with hidden rocks, reefs and icebergs, and it was one that I'd taken to like a fish. Unfortunately, it meant getting roughed up from time to time. It wasn't a great system, but it was better than gambling. With politics, my brilliant mind actually helped move the odds in my favor, rather than just calculating how many ways there were to lose.

  "Just go down these stairs and take a left at the bottom," he said. "The courtyard is just outside the door, straight ahead from there."

  With a deaths-head grin on my face, I nodded and headed for the stairs. By the time I reached them, I'd mostly regained my right mind again, and navigated the descent without breaking my neck.

  Every time my foot touched a step, I inwardly cursed myself again. Never, ever ever let your guard down, I chanted silently as I thumped down the stairs.

  When I reached the landing below, a rush of cool air hit me, and I immediately felt better. The door to the courtyard was straight ahead of me, as Alvar had said, and I pushed it aside and stepped out into the night air. The rain and fog had abated, leaving behind only a midnight blanket of sky above, studded with glimmering stars, and a crisp breeze that seemed to sweep away the residual effects of the drug. The current winter was nearly two years old and had shown no sign of slackening, but I was certain that I could feel the promise of spring on the wind.

  As I gazed up at the stars, a soft sound alerted me. It was like the rasp of metal on stone, a strange sound to hear in a peaceful courtyard. I looked around, trying to determine the source, but there was nothing moving.

  Then it came again. Was it louder this time, or was I just listening more carefully?

  Slowly, I crept toward what seemed to be the source of the strange noise. An uncomfortable sensation that reminded me of a sleeping limb prickled at the edges of my fingertips and along the outside of my arms, a strange sensation that reminded me of my time in Warsil. When I reached the spot that seemed to be as close as I could get, I looked down, and discovered a metal grate set into the grass of the courtyard.

  Far below me, cast in deep shadows by flickering torchlight, there was something moving. The shape was almost impossible to make out. With careful trepidation, I crouched down beside the grate to get a better look.

  My foot knocked a small stone into the slats. It struck the metal with a clang, and then dropped into the abyss below.

  The thing startled, and a bellowing snarl echoed up from the pit.

  One crimson eye locked on me.

  Then ten more opened around it, swiveled, and stared.

  X

  In the flickering yellow light far below me, I could just make out the edges of a form which seemed to be carved from the very stuff of nightmares. It was a slick, oily black color from the top of its bulbous head to the end of its barbed, whip-like tail. Huge talons raked the ground beneath it, leaving furrows in the sand. It opened its mouth, revealing rows of yellow dagger-like teeth, and let out a horrible, screeching howl that shocked my nerves into numbness. Given the distance between me and the creature, it must have been the size of an aurochs.

  A shrike.

  The crazy bastard was keeping a shrike in the cellar.

  Pain lanced through my head and shot down my arms to the tips of my fingers, tearing a gasp from my throat. With great haste, I stood up and backed away from the metal grate. The beast thrashed, and I could hear the clattering of chains. Somehow, Alvar had captured that thing and imprisoned it beneath the Brauch manse.

  My brain gibbered.

  Bad.

  This is very very bad.

  I'd never had the misfortune of coming up against a shrike, but I'd read plenty of second-hand accounts... and precious few first-hand ones. They were huge killing machines, twisted by corrupted manna to rend and slay and bathe in the blood of their victims, and they were far from mindless. To the contrary, they were reputed to be some of the most vicious and cunning hunters of the fel beasts.

  Better than ninety percent of the first-hand accounts I'd read had been written by Arbiters. Those who were not blessed with the crystalline swords seemed to have a bad habit of dying gruesomely and having their shrieks written about by one of their friends who ran slightly faster than they did.

  It was also said that they had a nose for sorcery, and preferred a victim who was skilled at controlling manna over all others.

  I'd discovered Alvar's secret weapon. H
e planned to regain full control over the city by—what? Loosing the shrike and hoping that it would kill Trulia and her cabal first? Beyond that, Alvar had trained as a sorcerer himself. Setting that thing free would be tantamount to suicide, unless…

  Dread crept up my arms and rested its skeletal fingers on my temples. For weeks, he'd been pushing me about containment sorcery. His questions had always been oblique and hypothetical: was it possible to set off a reaction and then contain it? Control it? Could that control be extended, exercised over a larger reaction?

  The memory of those seemingly-innocent questions now made my blood run cold.

  Could Alvar Brauch have discovered a way to control a shrike… and use it as a weapon?

  My brain immediately tried to count all the ways that could possibly be bad for me, but petered out while trying to number the shrike's teeth. All I'd ever seen were illustrations, but no one ever seemed to be able to give a clear answer as to how many scything, jagged teeth the things had in their bulbous heads.

  Reeling, my mind initiated its standard defensive mechanism and recounted the theories and known history of the shrike, which was supposedly descended from a much less deadly creature somewhere back in the mists of history. Thousands of years of breeding in the presence of corrupted manna had changed the entire species into—

  With the mental image of slamming shut a door, I cut off my rambling thoughts. Someone needed to be told, someone needed to know about this…

  When I turned back to the door, the light from inside the mansion was shrouded by a figure.

  "I take it you have seen what I wanted you to see?" Alvar's voice purred.

  Unable to call up any words, I swallowed hard and nodded dumbly.

  "Good," the scion of House Brauch murmured. "I want you to return to the wharf and tell that seething bitch what you know. I want her and all of her sniveling drudges to know precisely what I plan for them. I want them to know fear before they die, Edar – and you are going to give them that fear."

  I tried to say something, anything, but no words would come out of my mouth.

  "I take it we understand each other," Alvar said. He knocked loudly on the door frame. "Sorzen," he called, and a retainer appeared as though from thin air. "Please show Master Moncrief to the door. He has some business to attend to before the night is out."

  As Sorzen bustled me away, I looked back at Alvar. He only smiled.

  "Twenty-four hours, Edar. Tomorrow night, the claws will strike."

  XI

  Bewildered, bemused and befuddled, I stumbled out into the streets of Selvaria's Old Town district as the Conte's servant politely ejected me from the front door.

  Horror gripped my heart. I simply could not accept the idea that Alvar intended to unleash a shrike—even one ostensibly under his control—on the citizens of the city that his brother ruled. Not for the first time since I departed Elenia, I found myself wishing to glimpse the cold blue eyes of the Arbiter D'Arden Tal. Whatever icy vengeance he would wreak on me for the theft of the heartblade would be worth the lives of so many of Trulia's hapless slaves.

  But Edar, my mind giggled hysterically. Haven't you looked in a mirror lately? Selvaria already has an Arbiter to save it.

  The thought of solving my "murder" no longer seemed important to me. All that mattered was warning them, all of them…

  A thought crept, unbidden, into my mind. Alvar and the Conte had proven conclusively that they had not been the ones to murder me. That narrowed down the short list of my suspects by a significant margin, and suddenly included only the people that I wanted to warn about the shrike.

  I nearly traveled further down this path of thought when two figures stepped out of the darkness, onto the torch-lit streets. At first I started, readying myself for another attack, before realizing that no assassin would try again on the broad streets of the Old Towne. It took me a few more seconds to recognize them.

  "Mendoz," I said, first spotting the gilded hilt of the sword protruding from over the monster-hunter's shoulder. "Vellierz."

  "Was starting to wonder if you were ever coming out of there alive," the big man said.

  My eyes settled on my short, pudgy friend, who hurried up and clasped my hand warmly. "It's so good to see you, Edar," he said, his eyes flicking toward the ground. "Trulia told us… she said that you'd been killed."

  "It takes more than an assassin with a knife in a dark alley to kill Edar Moncrief," I said confidently, ignoring the continued hysterics in the back of my brain.

  His eyes fell on my wrist, and my heart sank. I'd forgotten to re-establish the illusion of the silver cuff on my arm. Thankfully, the enchantment still masked my eyes. "How did you get the shackle off?" he demanded, seizing hold of my hand and inspecting the absence of the device carefully.

  I grimaced. "Apparently bleeding almost to death is price enough for it," I lied, retrieving my arm. "Trust me, it's not a pleasant method of getting there, and I'm not sure it would work twice."

  Anger flashed in his eyes for the briefest of moments, but he didn't press me further. Vellierz and I had done the most work trying to unravel the enchantments of Trulia's slave shackle, and the only release condition we'd nailed down for certain was the death of the wearer. Because of the dangers involved, we'd never been able to test just what the enchantment used as an activation trigger—was it the stopping of the heart, the death rattle? We just didn't know—and the narrow-eyed stare that he kept on me made my guts writhe.

  Naturally, I was not about to explain the truth of my survival. Not here.

  "There are bigger problems," I said. "It's time I had a conversation with Trulia."

  "She's having a big meeting of all of our people down by the wharf," Vellierz said. "We can't interrupt her."

  "On the contrary, my friend," I countered. "Interrupting her is exactly what we must do."

  "I've done my part," Mendoz said, crossing his arms. "Walking into the lair of the Circle of Thorns with a dead man is not exactly my idea of a good time. I'm out."

  "No you're not," I corrected. "I'm going to repay the favors I owe you, Mendoz. I'm going to make you the hero of Selvaria—but first, you have to come with us."

  "Hero?" the scarred man said, bemused.

  "Come on. We don't have much time." I set out for the wharf at a near-jog, not even checking behind to see if they'd followed me.

  They did.

  XII

  If only there had been some way to preserve the image of the horrified looks upon the faces of the Circle of Thorns when Vellierz, a muscle-bound monster hunter and I busted open the door on their precious "secret meeting", I'd have hung it on my wall and prayed to it daily for the rest of my life.

  Alas, some things even sorcery cannot provide.

  At the head of the long table—despite what the name may have implied, the Circle of Thorns was anything but egalitarian—sat an ancient, wizened old woman with a face wrinkled like a lake on a windy day, snow-white hair and the most intense, mesmerizing green eyes I'd ever seen.

  "Moncrief?" she screeched, surprise evident in her voice reminiscent of a raven's cry.

  "Trulia," I said. I'd have doffed my hat, had I worn one. "Members of the Circle, I come bearing a dire warning." Once, I might have shrunk beneath so many pairs of staring eyes, but the part of my brain still writhing in hysterical laughter would no longer permit such cowardice. "Within a day, Alvar Brauch intends to release a horrific weapon upon this city: a shrike over which he has somehow asserted control."

  I expected a lot of things to happen here. Panic, fear, terror; I had been prepared for all of those.

  What I had not been ready for was the complete and utter silence that hung over the room.

  No one moved. Everyone just stared at me, as though I were an apparition or perhaps a manna-animated corpse with surprisingly cogent things to say. Which, I reflected, was true… in a sense.

  The only person in the room not gazing at me with slack-jawed dismay was Trulia, who was grinning;
her yellowed teeth gleaming in the light, her brilliant emerald eyes glittering like the gems they resembled.

  "A little bird told me you were dead," she purred, and the hunger in her voice unnerved me. "I should have known that if anyone could find a way to cheat death, it would be you,"

  She stood from her chair, moving like a seductive snake, like no one with that many years should have possibly moved. It was both riveting and horrifying as she slowly sidled toward me, seeming to disassemble me with her gaze as she sought to determine the cause of my survival. It was impossible to read anything in those eyes, alight with purpose and a ravening hunger that made me want to scream and drown myself in the lake.

  I brought up my arm to ward her off, realizing too late that it was the wrist upon which Trulia's slave bracelet should have been attached. Her eyes widened with interest, and then narrowed. The grin never flickered.

  "So, you have escaped my trap," she murmured to me, and I heard the whispers running around the table. With one absent-minded gesture, I had undermined her authority throughout the Circle, and yet she seemed unfazed. "How did you do it?"

  "That's hardly of importance," I said, trying to fend her off as she continued to approach, and I backed away. A moment later, I felt the wall against my back. There was nowhere left to run. "What matters here is that Alvar has a weapon, and he's planning to use it against you."

  "Silly boy," she sneered. "You cannot control a creature of corruption. If Alvar believes he can, then he will simply be the first of many to die. If he dies, then seizing power in this city will at last be within my grasp."

  "Unless the shrike hunts you down and kills you, too," I pointed out.

  She placed her palm on the center of my chest and pushed me back against the wall with surprising strength. Trulia leaned close to me; her breath smelled of mildew and charcoal. "Only after it rampages its way through the Old Towne, terrorizing and slaughtering everything in its wake," she purred. "Once it does, I will step in and kill it, and Selvaria will be mine at last."