II
My workbench was in ruins. The devices I used to create my potions and charms, the things that kept food on the table and a fire burning in my hearth, lay in disarray across the table and the floor where I’d swept them aside in my haste to begin the experiments on the heartblade.
None of that mattered. Beakers, vials, coins and trinkets could all be replaced. This was the work I lived for; unraveling ancient mysteries and developing my understanding of how manna truly functioned. It was believed by most to be entirely arbitrary, but I knew that could not be true. I was a sorcerer, and I had an inkling of the system behind the mystery. There was logic, purpose and reason there, somewhere. I had touched it, used it… but even I had only tiny fragments of the knowledge necessary to truly exert control over that force.
My hand holding the dropper quivered with excitement, and two extra drops of solution fell into the dish where the heartblade rested. The whole thing immediately gelled into a syrupy purple paste.
“Damn it,” I muttered for the dozenth time.
Nothing was working. My frustration level was rising – this thing was a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a tiny knife. The layers of magic around it were tied so tightly, woven and intertwined like a masterful tapestry. They were intricate, detailed in a way I had never before seen woven around any kind of physical artifact.
In the homes of very rich men for whom I occasionally worked, I had seen devices meant to track the passage of time, much the way the common soldier does with his marks on the candle. The master craftsmanship of the layers around this blade reminded me very much of the inner workings of those timepieces – careful and delicate, the type of work which would have taken a good practitioner a lifetime to develop.
Wrinkling my nose against the smell of sulfur, I carefully lifted the heartblade from the violet goo and shook off the worst of it. In order to determine just how the enchantments would come undone, I first had to understand what each of them were for, and even the most basic one on the outer edges was beyond my understanding.
I laid the heartblade on my workbench, and stared at it for a long moment, watching its pale light glimmer and flicker to some kind of unfathomable rhythm. It was mesmerizing, really; I found that my eyes were focused intently on it, almost as though it were drawing me in somehow. The pattern of light was almost hypnotizing in its randomness, and many times I was certain I could see repeating patterns, and then they would not resolve, continuing on to some other sequence that did not quite fit.
With a sigh, I turned away from the workbench and back to a shelf of ancient, musty tomes that I had collected over many years of searching and practice. Very few were brave enough to even open a tome of sorcery, for fear that the mysterious Arbiters might come for them in the middle of the night and make them disappear. I had no such fear, of course. The Arbiters were rarely seen in the Old Kingdoms – the dead man in the street was the first one to cross this city in more than a decade. They spent their time in dark caves filled with horrors, not the realms of civilization.
Selecting the tome I wanted, I pulled it from its place on the shelf with my slender fingers and placed it open on the workbench, a few inches to the left of the glittering knife. I leafed through the pages of Madmen of the Dark Spire with my left hand, trying to find the passage that I was looking for.
The author of this particular book, an eccentric gentleman by the name of Urzugan the Unworthy, claimed to be a rejected Arbiter, dismissed by the mysterious order at a young age, who knew all of the secrets of the Tower. Naturally, as with most such works, the book was heavy on rhetoric and inflammatory exaggeration, and short on real facts.
With a sigh, I slammed the book shut. I needed another way.
Inspiration hit me in a flash, and I snapped my fingers as the thought struck. There was something else I could do, an incantation which would provide a kind of feedback for the enchantments surrounding the heartblade. If I were to employ it properly, the spells which were woven around the tiny crystalline knife would slowly unravel as I called their power in reverse, and I could observe the intricacies of their creation as they came apart. It would render the heartblade useless, of course, but something had to be done.
"Another book, another book," I muttered, sliding Madmen of the Dark Spire back into its place on my shelf, and searching instead for the grey leather-bound tome I wanted.
At last, I laid my fingers upon the spine and drew it out slowly. The work of Yzgar the Black was rare and highly prized by certain circles, and I had obtained an early copy of one of his experimental grimoires in a particularly clever transaction several years back. The owner hadn't known what they had acquired, and I'd gotten it for easily a tenth its full value.
Yzgar himself had been dead for nigh on three hundred years, but he'd had absolutely no scruples about his practice or his theory work. The Arbiters had made an attempt to destroy all of his work after they'd killed him for the mass corruption that he'd accomplished in one of the southern kingdoms, but they hadn't gotten all of it. You can never completely snuff out the written word – someone is always willing to sacrifice everything to preserve it.
A thin bookmark made of red silk marked the page I was looking for. I'd been poring through Yzgar's grimoire a few nights past, and this particular incantation had caught my interest. The idea of reversing the flow of a tightly-woven spell in order to observe its creation was a fascinating one, though dangerous if not done properly. I placed the open book on my lab table and began to study the script.
It was long, and written in a dialect of Old Tellarian that was difficult to decipher, but my memory had been honed for theory and formula and immediately began recalling what I'd translated a few nights before. Some of the letters were so tightly packed that they were difficult to read.
As I leaned forward to peer at the pages of cramped script, the candle illuminating my workbench guttered and died. A frown creased my forehead as I stared at the red-hot wick in the dark for a moment.
That was odd.
Just as I opened my mouth to speak the syllable which would re-light it, something grabbed my robes from behind. I was lifted into the air, almost flying through it, tumbling to the ground several feet away. My tools and beakers rattled as the whole lab shook with the force of my body hitting the floor, and it was all I could do to simply hope that nothing had broken. I didn't seem to be, which was a start.
I rolled over and opened my eyes, immediately closing them again as cold blue light flooded my vision. I blinked a few times and looked up at my assailant.
He had a long face, the thin, straight nose of a zealot dividing it neatly in half. Dark hair, like the wing of a raven, fell across his face in thick strands. His eyes burned with a kind of purpose and intensity I had never seen before in my life, and indeed, his irises shone with the same azure glow that illuminated the crystal sword now pointed at my throat.
I swallowed hard, trying to back up, but then there was a boot on my knee, pressing it into the ground and causing enough pain to make me cry out at the injustice.
"Sorcerer," he hissed, voice low and chill like the winds of winter.
An Arbiter had come for me.
They were uncommon, rarely seen in the Old Kingdoms which occupied the remnants of the great Empire, and this was the first time I'd actually interacted with one… save for the unfortunate fellow in the alley earlier that day. Normally they have little use for sorcerers, looking upon us like gnats – powerless, generally harmless but annoying – unless a particular practitioner does something to draw their attention. One of my life's goals had been specifically to avoid attracting that kind of scrutiny. I'm not ashamed to say that the Arbiter's blazing eyes frightened the living daylights out of me.
"Please don't hurt me," I whimpered, the pain from his boot on my knee radiating up and down my leg.
"I was supposed to meet someone here," the Arbiter growled. "A brother, another member of my Order. His name is Gaerton Daen. Do you kno
w anyone by that name?"
My head shook in a negative. My hands were trembling uncontrollably. "I… can honestly say that I do not know that name."
His heel ground down on my leg, and I could feel the tendons beginning to stretch. I howled in agony. "Enough, enough!" I exclaimed, my voice rising in pitch until it might well have shattered the glass beakers on my lab table. "I don't know the name, but I might know something about what happened to him!"
The pressure on my leg suddenly vanished. The Arbiter took a step backward, lowering his sword from my eye-level to beside him, so that the lambent tip nearly brushed the floor. The pain echoed up and down my body, but began to fade rapidly.
"Happened?" the Arbiter asked, a note of genuine confusion in his voice. He stared at me with those eyes, and I felt my blood run cold. "Something happened to Gaerton?"
He didn't know.
I'd opened my mouth, like a fool – again – assuming he already knew that something had gone amiss with his friend. Instead, I'd made myself into the herald of ill fortune, which did not do good things to my life expectancy.
His gaze began to roam around my lab, and I felt my heart sink into my shoes. When his attention landed on the tiny, glimmering knife on my lab table, I saw him freeze. One moment he was moving, and the next he was still as solid stone. It was eerie, watching him stand there, as though he were suddenly carved from marble.
For what seemed like an eternity, there was no sound in the room.
At last, his lips moved. "Is that…?"
In two lightning-fast strides he crossed my lab and swept the heartblade into his palm. He stared at it incredulously, looking from the knife to my face and then back again. His eyes were wide with anger, and something else. It took me several moments to realize that it was fear I saw in his eyes, doubt and uncertainty dancing in his head like a carnival troupe on Midsummer's Day.
That only served to frighten me more.
"Where did you get this?" his words rushed out in a whisper.
In that moment, he was too confused to even take off my head with that razor-sharp crystal blade of his. Since that could change in a split-second, I decided I had one sentence in which to convince him that I was not at fault for the death of his friend. My only hope in living was that my mind would not betray me, and would give me the few simple words I needed to convince the man before me that I was friend, and not foe.
"Gaerton Daen is dead," I declared. "I am searching for his murderer."
Of course, I had been doing no such thing, but the impact of my words was, for once, exactly what I wanted. The Arbiter's eyes fixed on me, unblinking, twin spheres of blazing cobalt boring into me as though I were a specimen on a lab table. The cold, unfeeling regard in that gaze made a shudder run down my spine and settle in below my belly.
"Dead?" the Arbiter whispered. "That's… impossible."
He seemed frozen, paralyzed by the news, though not as still as he'd been when he'd first spied the heartblade on my workbench. I took the opportunity to climb to my feet, dusting off my robes as I did so. "I'm afraid it's not impossible," I said, choosing my words slowly and deliberately. This was one uninvited guest that I couldn't afford to offend. "I encountered his body in the street earlier today. That knife in your hand was the only thing of value left on him, save for his clothes. I took it with me to determine who might have been able to kill an Arbiter."
"No one," the Arbiter whispered.
I spread my hands in a helpless gesture. "Clearly someone could."
He looked at me again, his features contorting into an expression of frigid rage. He took a step toward me, menacing, and the tip of his crystal sword lifted up off the floor. "How do I know you're not lying to me?"
My throat constricted with fear, and I coughed to try to clear it as I stumbled a half-step backward. "The… the Sorcerer's Code, of course. We cannot lie. Surely you know that."
The Arbiter barked out a sound, and it took me a moment to realize it had been a laugh. "A sorcerer lies when it fits his need, which is most of the time."
"That's simply not true," I answered, raising one hand in a warding gesture. "A sorcerer composes, he equivocates, he may extend the facts in one direction or another when necessary, but it is the search for truth that drives all true scholars into the arms of the Art. No true sorcerer can lie when asked a direct question."
He tilted his head at me, and once again I felt like an insect regarded with curiosity by a distant observer. "You're serious, aren't you?"
"Never been more so in my life," I answered, hoping it came across with some measure of confidence.
There was a long pause as he studied my face in the cold light of his manna sword. I found myself growing increasingly uncomfortable under the pressure of his glare, to the point where sweat beaded on my spine and trickled down the back of my neck. At last, he made a sort of throat-clearing sound and stepped back. It was only then I realized I'd been holding my breath.
"Very well then, sorcerer," he growled, "Tell me this. Did you kill Gaerton Daen?"
"I did not," I answered, and it was the most confident I'd felt all day.
His glare scrutinized me – or, it seemed, the air around me – for a long, long eternity before he grunted, relaxing his stance and returning his sword to the thin scabbard across his back. I nearly pissed my breeches in relief.
"Take me to where you found Daen's body," the Arbiter said.
"One question," I said, holding up a hand. "How did you find me in the first place?"
He tapped the side of his head with two fingers impatiently. "The manna coalesces around those who use it. There was only one place within the city walls that held a high enough concentration to be Daen, and when he did not arrive at our meeting place, I came here to search him out."
"So you had no idea what this place was until you hurled me across the room?"
"Precisely." His lips split in a grimace that showed glittering white teeth. "Now, take me to the body."
"Do I at least get an introduction first?" I asked, regretting the words and their flippant tone the instant they passed my lips.
He brushed by me, the scent of stale musk and another, stranger odor that I could not immediately identify tickling my nose in the breeze of his wake. "My name is D'Arden Tal. You are Edar Moncrief. You are going to help me find a murderer."