The Elements of Sorcery (9 page)

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.

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 my 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.

Then, I began my incantation.

The Reaper howled in agony and rage. The children looked on with dead eyes as my intoned words did precisely what I had designed them to do. Wind screamed around us, and Ramun threw everything he had at me, but he was an amateur. I didn't know where he had gained his power, but he was no expert practitioner. He had never spent long nights understanding precisely how much manna could be used, how it could be plied to achieve exactly the right result without damaging oneself or the subject.

He had not spent a lifetime learning, like I had.

My spell stripped away every layer of defense he had. First the terror glamour dispersed to the winds, and then I countered as he tried to bring it back to life. Then I destroyed the illusion of the Reaper itself, and its crimson eyes guttered out like candles in a harsh wind.

Next I dampened all other power save for my own, and though he tried to conjure a wave of fire to burn me alive, all he got was the flickering flame of a torch.

Ramun shrieked and screamed epithets at me, all while I systematically took away every ounce of power he had built up around himself. He was reacting purely on instinct now, throwing random effects and attacks at me, but none of them connected. My wards were too strong, my spell was too tightly woven to allow anything to penetrate its web.

After what seemed like an eternity, Ramun dropped to his knees in the snow, frothing at the mouth. Blood dripped from his right nostril, and his eye rolled wildly as it tried to focus.

"I truly am sorry," I said. The words were more for Alina than they were for him.

Then I spoke the seven final words of my incantation.

Ramun's eye fixed, staring straight ahead, and blood gushed from his nose. His pupil visibly dilated, and then he pitched over into the snow, unmoving.

Bile rushed up into my throat, and I doubled over, expelling the meager contents of my stomach onto the snow. In the same instant, all three of the children dropped to the ground, staring at the sky with their blank eyes.

All around me, I heard the crunch of snow as the animated dead collapsed. The power which had been driving them was gone, and now they were nothing once again.

When at last I looked up again, my heart skipped a beat.

Alina still stood before me, staring at me with those frightening crimson eyes. The pain was like fire now, and I moaned in agony. It felt like I was burning alive.

I looked around. As far as I could see in the moonlight, all of the other corpses had collapsed when Ramun had died. There was no movement in the moonlight. Ramun was face-down in the snow, his body already going stiff and rigid in death.

What was happening here?

Slowly, Alina's impossibly-pale face turned toward the house of Palis the smith.

My heart began to thunder in my chest. Sweat broke out on my forehead, although I was shivering with cold.

"I destroyed the Reaper," I whispered. "I can't… I can't do any more."

Her gaze turned back to me, and her head jerked to one side. Her frozen lips formed two words.

You promised.

I twitched as though I'd been stung. This was worse, far worse than anything I had ever imagined. How had I gotten myself into this mess?

Right. By pretending to be an Arbiter.

If I had truly been the person I'd claimed to be when I entered Warsil, it would have been my duty to strike down Alina's corrupted body with my crystal sword. The evils of men would have been none of my business.

I wasn't that person.

I wasn't an Arbiter.

Dead though she was, Alina had a point. I had promised.

Jerkily, I rose to my feet. The incantation had rendered me drastically ill, and the world swayed in front of me as I staggered through the snow.

Her corpse followed silently behind me, until I opened the door of Palis the smith's house.

Clenching my jaw as tightly as it would go, I stepped back out of the way. Though I tried to look away, her crimson gaze caught mine one final time, driving another jab of flame through me.

Thank you
.

I lit the house on fire just as the screams began. No one would escape. The corruption that had been born here would die here… but not until a score was settled.

Then, I ran for my life.

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