The Elements of Sorcery

by Christopher Kellen

  A moment later, my rational mind overtook my terror when it reminded me that in all my years as a sorcerer, exploring the mysteries of the world, I had never come across an actual spirit. My mouth was still dry, though, and I dared not look at my hand; I didn’t want to know how badly it was shaking.

  I saw the driver raise the whip again, but then his head turned toward me—my silhouette must have been visible against the last vestiges of sunset. Instead of the whip’s crack, he let out a sharp whistle. It was only then that I realized it might have been smarter to hide, rather than stand in the open, but by that point I was frozen, unable even to breathe.

  Instead of thundering past, the cart screeched to a halt as the driver hauled on the reins. The horses let out whinnies of protest, but it eventually came to a stop only a few dozen yards ahead of me in a cloud of dust.

  The driver reached down beside him, lifted something out, and then pointed at me. He was just too far away for me to make out what he was doing in that strange blue light, but the twang of a crossbow made it perfectly clear. I let out a squawking yelp and flinched; the bolt came within inches of skewering my ribs, but instead merely pinned my cloak to the ground behind me. The twine that served as a clasp suddenly wrapped tightly around my neck, biting into the flesh and choking off my airway.

  “Friend!” I wheezed in Low Valisian, hoping that the driver would recognize the word, at least. I dropped to one knee and reached behind me, yanking the crossbow bolt out of dirt and my cloak. Once I was free, I pulled the twine away and coughed again, “Friend!”

  The only reply was the sound of the crossbow being reloaded, and I swallowed hard, preparing to turn and flee.

  “What the devil is going on out there?” a voice demanded loudly in Valisian from inside the carriage.

  The relief that flooded through me as I actually recognized a language for the first time since awakening on the shore—Valisian! A traveler who spoke a language I was actually familiar with,, what luck!—was cut short as the crossbow twanged again and another bolt whizzed through the air a few inches from my skull. This time I dove aside as the bolt missed, tumbling into the cool grass and rolling for a few feet before coming to a stop. “Please stop shooting at me!” I shouted, as loud as I could, hoping that the person inside the carriage would stop his mad driver from putting a bolt or two through my limbs or chest. I was shaking violently all over with the adrenaline that pounded through my veins... at least, that’s what I told myself.

  There came some low murmuring from up ahead, but I stayed down, hiding myself in the grass as best I could. I was not about to raise my head only to get it skewered. They probably thought that I was some kind of honeytrap bandit ruse, out alone to distract them long enough so that my comrades could spring upon them and take their valuables. This was, unfortunately, not an impression that I could do much to dispel on my own.

  “Are you out here alone?” the voice called out, a warm baritone.

  “Yes,” I called back, hoping that the grass would reflect my voice well enough so as not to give away my position before I was ready. “Of course, if I was a bandit, that’s what I would say, isn’t it?”

  To my surprise, a deep, genuine laugh floated back to me. “I suppose that’s true.”

  My heart’s frantic pounding finally slowed. That didn’t sound like the kind of voice that was likely to want to kill me. Still, something bothered me, but I couldn’t quite place it...

  “If you keep your hands visible,” the voice called out, “You’re more than welcome to extricate yourself from the grass. I promise that Gart here won’t shoot you without my direct order.”

  “How very reassuring,” I muttered dryly. Still, a single crossbow bolt wasn’t likely to kill me, given that the sea had been given weeks and still hadn’t managed it. Gritting my teeth and cursing myself for an idiot, I slowly rose to my feet.

  Something still bothered me. What was it...?

  Even in the single, pale blue light on the carriage, I could see that the man standing beside it possessed a powerful physique. He had broad shoulders, his head as bald as an egg, and a thick beard encircled his mouth and covered his chin.

  “We’re not going to hurt you, lad.”

  Only as I stepped toward them did I realize what my brain was trying to tell me.

  If I was in Grysalta, as I surmised, what were the chances that any given person who lived five hundred leagues or more from the closest Valisian border so fluently spoke a foreign tongue? Building on that, what did those chances become that I would encounter that single person alone on a winding country road?

  As I approached, my heart sank deep, deep into my borrowed boots. The pale blue light from the front of the carriage wasn’t just reflected in the man’s eyes.

  It shone from them, too.

  “Well,” he said, a broad grin flashing in the dark beard. “Edar Moncrief, I presume?”

  VI

  I tried to speak, but found that my mouth had gone entirely dry.

  My mind flicked back to the thought I’d had the previous night. I’d thought that there could be no fate worse than the vagaries of the tides returning me back to my home, to my place of birth, the place I’d abandoned with all due haste the moment I’d been able.

  I’d been wrong. There was something worse, and I was now staring at it, slack-jawed, glassy-eyed.

  Somehow, the cruel sea had delivered me up to an Arbiter.

  He just stood there, watching me impassively, his arms folded and an inquisitive spark in his eyes. I’d swear that an amused glitter danced in there somewhere, which only served to frighten me more. The only Arbiter I’d ever met had been a humorless, single-minded zealot, and he’d been terrifying. It frightened me beyond reason to apply a sense of humor to that veneer.

  “If you’re looking for hospitality,” I rasped after a long moment, “I know this place with the most amazing tents.”

  He laughed again, and even though the sound was warm it sent another chill through me.

  This was it.

  I’d reached the bottom of the sea, as low as I could get..

  There was really no way for this to end well for me. Not only had I stolen the heartblade from D’Arden Tal all those years ago, I’d subsequently used it to save my own life, and then spent three years masquerading as an Arbiter in plain sight. There were so few of them now, I thought that they would never have the manpower to hunt down a small-time sorcerer like me... but then, I'd become something more than small-time, hadn't I?

  “I imagine I have you at something of a disadvantage,” the Arbiter said, and as he shifted his stance slightly I became painfully aware of the black leather-wrapped hilt that protruded over his right shoulder. “I have, after all, spent the better part of two years trying to track you down, whereas you don’t know me from a fel beast.”

  “Well,” I allowed through a constricted, dry throat. “One’s at least as dangerous as the other.”

  He chuckled again. “You’ve got quite the wit, lad.”

  “It’s...” Another flippant remark died in my throat. After everything I’d said and done over the years—if this Arbiter knew half of it, I was as good as dead. Politeness might have been the only chance I had left to save my skin. “...gotten me into trouble,” I finished lamely.

  “I imagine it has, at that. Forgive me my rudeness, Master Moncrief. I am one of the nine Masters of the Arbiter’s Tower. My name is Havox Khaine.”

  I tilted my head at him. People about to kill you rarely introduced themselves, in my experience. “And how do you know me, Master Khaine?”

  He regarded me with that same faintly amused look, but I also saw a bit of the predator in his eyes, making me feel uncomfortably like a deer being watched by a hungry wolf. “Something over two years ago, one of my pupils returned to the Tower from a sojourn in the Old Kingdoms. He told me about the death of our brother, Gaerton Daen, and gave me a rather thorough report on you.”

  “Ah.” I licked my lips nervously. “I�
��m sure he did.”

  “D’Arden spent a not inconsiderable amount of time searching for you, but it seemed that you had simply vanished. Perhaps died in the fire that engulfed your laboratory, the night that he left. In any case, he was able to find no trace of your whereabouts, so he returned to the Tower. You see, a certain sorcerer that he had encountered had given him significant cause for embarrassment.”

  I tamped down a flash of vicious triumph, but said nothing.

  “D’Arden was sent on to more important things, but you see, Master Moncrief—the heartblades are something of a rare treasure. Artifacts, if you will. Each one is unique, and when an Arbiter falls, it is up to his brothers to retrieve the heartblade and return it to the collection. It fell to me, as one of the Masters of the Tower, to retrieve the one left behind.

  “I spent quite some time searching for you in Valisia, and when I’d finally gotten a strong indication that you had spent time in Selvaria, I went there first to find the entire city in an uproar. The Brauch family had been wiped out to a man, and the city had been taken over by a group calling themselves the Circle of Thorns. It seems that the Brauches had been keeping some sort of horrible creature—”

  “It was a shrike,” I muttered.

  “—beneath the city, and the Circle of Thorns had discovered the plot and made a pre-emptive attack.” Something must have shown on my face, because he stopped and flashed a grin at me in his dark beard. “I take it that is not what happened?”

  “A monster slayer named Mendoz killed the shrike. I helped.”

  “Given that none of the members of the Circle of Thorns were able to describe the ‘monster’ with any certainty, I surmised that someone else must have done the actual killing,” Khaine said with a nod.

  “It was hideous,” I said, with a shudder of memory. “Almost a dozen glowing red eyes, claws like curved swords, and inky, oily black flesh.”

  “Yes, that’s a shrike,” Khaine agreed. “So, it was you.”

  I nodded. “And Mendoz.”

  “Well done. A shrike is a creature of fear and death. It is not for the faint of heart.”

  “Uh... thank you?”

  He smiled again. His demeanor was so different from that of D’Arden Tal that I almost had trouble believing that I was standing in the presence of another Arbiter. All my life I’d heard stories about the Arbiters, and they had all described wild-eyed zealots like the one I’d encountered. This Khaine was different: warmth where I’d expected chill disdain, charm where I’d expected intimidation, and almost fatherly in his gentle but respectful speech.

  “Once I straightened out the situation in Selvaria—” I saw a flash of the predator in his eyes again for a moment, but it vanished below the surface almost as quickly as it had come “—I discovered, much to my surprise, that there was reported to be an Arbiter assisting the Kalais offensive in Lannth. Since, to my knowledge, such political battles are strictly off limits for brothers of the Tower, I thought that I would discover for myself just what had happened. Unfortunately, I was then... delayed in Kalais for some time, and arrived in Sevenstone only to find that the Arbiter had vanished. Many surmised that he boarded a ship after the battle, but none could name any ships that had sailed from Sevenstone harbor that day.”

  “That’s because it’s not what happened,” I said.

  “As I surmised. Imagine my surprise when, not two days after I arrived, the new Lannthan Queen Martine was killed rather horribly at her crowning ceremony, almost like she had been undone from the inside out. There was a significant amount of chaos that day.”

  “I bet that shook them up,” I said, unable to keep the snarl out of my voice.

  “You’ve been quite busy, Master Moncrief.” He gave me an oblique look. “Somewhat at odds with the description that D’Arden gave me upon his return to the Tower. He didn’t exactly use the words ‘sniveling coward,’ but...”

  My jaw tightened. “So how did you find me here?”

  “Well, with the standard methods exhausted, I had to turn to something a bit more... exotic. You see, there was once a method used by the ancient Masters of the Tower to track the power possessed by each individual heartblade. It is not something we use lightly, as the cost is rather severe.” He gestured at the blue light, shining from the carriage beside him. “In the days when we were many, the loss of one was perhaps not such a great blow to us, but in these trying times even a small cost is felt all the more.”

  I didn’t understand what he meant, but the import of the rest was clear enough. He’d made a major sacrifice of... something, in order to find me.

  “The spell wound me down the coastline, and since I could only imagine that you were somewhere aboard a ship, all I could do was to wait until it put into port. I spent a fair amount of time at Tarian, the city not far from here, waiting for that very event. Then, when at last it seemed that you had come ashore again, I set out from the city to find you... and here you are.” Khaine at last stopped speaking, and shifted his weight back onto his heels.

  I considered screaming a litany of curses to the sky, but there weren't enough of them in any language that had ever existed to properly express the combination of incoherent rage and desperate fear that gripped my heart in that moment. I’d thought that I’d avoided the Arbiters entirely, but instead, one had been on my tail the whole time I was traveling with Mendoz. A lump in my throat kept me from swallowing, and I coughed. Fear tightened in my chest.

  “So, you’re here for the heartblade.” My lips felt numb, and my hands tingled as panic reigned.

  “I’m afraid that I must ask you to return it, yes.”

  “I don’t have it.” Here it comes...

  “You don’t...?” He trailed off, looking me up and down. Khaine’s expression didn’t falter, but his eyes shifted to disappointment.

  Silence reigned for a long moment, there in the fading sunlight.

  Finally, he spoke again. “How long ago did you use the heartblade on yourself?”

  VII

  My mind flashed back to that dark, rain-soaked alley. My blood, pouring out onto the ground as I tried desperately to put it back where it belonged. The dizziness as my vision clouded and closed in from the edges as the darkness took me. My heart pounding, every beat pushing more of my precious life’s fluid out through the deadly wound, the stink of offal, the knowledge that my guts had been severed and that even if I didn’t die of blood loss, infection and fever would take me before long.

  The one hope, that tiny glimmering spark that whispered promises of life.

  “A little over three years ago,” I admitted quietly, out loud, for the first time. Had it really been that long? “Someone tried to—no, that’s not right. Someone did kill me in that alley. A faceless knife, hired by a man I thought I could trust. A friend. I was as good as dead.”

  “And so you gambled with your life, and made the only choice that you could in the circumstance?” Khaine asked, eyebrows raised.

  “You sound like you’ve heard that one before.”

  He just watched me, azure eyes intent, and made a little go-on motion with one hand.

  I swallowed hard. “There was so much I hadn’t done, and I thought that the heartblade might kill me anyway, but that… that a chance, even a slim one, was better than no chance at all.”

  I’d never spoken those thoughts out loud before, not even to Mendoz. I’d let him think that the glowing eyes had been all just an act, that everything was just my sleight of hand and the sorcery that I commanded. After Vellierz had died—no, after I’d killed the faithless bastard—there had been no one to question me on my word.

  Khaine nodded sagely. “Did you know at the time that the penalty for using a heartblade without prior preparation is death?”

  Something inside me broke. “You’re going to kill me.”

  He blinked, startled. Then he burst into laughter.

  I watched him with wide, terrified eyes.

  When his laughter subsided at last,
he shook his head and even wiped a tear from his eye. “Oh, that’s not what I meant at all, but I can see how it could have been taken that way. Master Moncrief, I would have nothing to do with it. If any given person were to pick up a heartblade and try to use it to save their own life, it would simply kill them, at best, or transform them into a ravening fel beast, at worst. The enchantments simply aren’t designed to save a life taken by mundane means.”

  “I suspected that might be the case, at the time, and yet…” I trailed off. “Why didn’t it do that to me?”

  His gaze sharpened, and a smile showed the points of his canine teeth. “Now you have arrived at the question which validates my journey all the way from the Free Cities,” Khaine said. “Across thousands of leagues and hundreds of days, you are the most interesting puzzle that I have encountered in many, many years, Edar Moncrief. That question stands: why are you still alive?”

  I remembered that my enchantment was keeping Khaine from seeing all of the truth. I licked my lips again and then clenched my teeth together as hard as they would go for a moment, savoring the pain that lanced through my jaw. “Not just alive.”

  Khaine’s brows furrowed in confusion, and I flicked away my hold on the manna.

  For me, nothing changed, but he sucked in a breath and actually staggered back a step.

  “By the black gods,” he swore. “What—?"

  “The Wayward Crystal Warrior wasn’t entirely a lie, Master Khaine,” I said, with just a touch of wry anger in my voice. “It was at least a little bit true.”

  For a moment, the only sound was the faint chirping of the night insects.

  Khaine sighed, but with relief. “Well,” he said at last. “That explains a few things.”

  VIII

  “So you’re not going to kill me?” I ventured after a moment.

  “The night is young yet,” he said, flashing a grin that didn’t really tell me whether or not he was joking. “Perhaps, given that it is night indeed, we should climb aboard my carriage here. There is another errand which may very well make this long journey of mine worthwhile, and though time is hardly of the essence, we can speak just as well on the ride.”