The Elements of Sorcery (7 page)

As I stepped out into the chill morning air and closed the door to Alina's home behind me, a vision appeared in my head: an image of the Deadmoon from the night before, looming in the sky, casting everything around it in black and grey.

It was very nearly full.

My brain did some quick mental calculations, and I muttered a curse under my breath.

Tonight
was the first night of the full moon; which meant that I had only a short winter's day before the Deadmoon rose, and this Reaper – whatever it was – brought its hounds and descended upon Warsil once again.

Unless I stopped it, some of these villagers were going to die tonight.

The sky overhead was iron grey, and the brisk wind that blew through the village bore the promise of snow before the day was out. A small part of me hoped that perhaps if the full moon was invisible, the 'Reaper' might delay his visit in order to have a more dramatic appearance. Nonsense, of course, but it helped to ease the rising panic for a moment.

It didn't take long to find the smithy, located just across the snow-coated square from Alina's humble cottage. The forge was dark as I approached, but smoke curled from the chimney attached to the main part of the house.

Drawing up my courage and adopting an expression that I hoped was a stern one, I knocked on the door. I had admitted my ruse to Alina, but until it became necessary, I did not intend to allow the belief in my Arbiter-hood to dissipate from this small community.

The door cracked open, and an eye peered out. "What?"

My jaw tightened as I prepared a scathing reply, but it seemed the expression was all that was necessary. "Master Arbiter!" the voice cried in shock, and the door opened the rest of the way.

The man who stood just inside was stout, seeming as broad at the shoulders as he was tall. He peered up at me from beneath bushy brown eyebrows, a startled look on his face. It was impossible to miss the pronounced limp that he walked with as he shuffled back away from the door, holding it open for me.

With as much confidence as I could muster, I strode through the doorway, and the burly man closed it behind me. "Palis?" I asked.

"That's me," he grunted. As he spoke, I recognized the voice – it was the man who'd indirectly threatened to hang me the previous night. My mind immediately doubled down on the promise to maintain the Arbiter façade.

"I need information," I said, hoping that I sounded imperious enough. "Alina has explained the situation. She said you had a close encounter with this 'Reaper'."

"True enough," he answered. "Damn hound grabbed me and tried to haul me off, when we tried to kill the thing four months ago." He reached down and pulled the leg of his trouser up over his right knee, which was badly scarred. "Lucky not to lose it."

As I regarded the old wound, something began to prickle at the edges of my awareness. "Looks painful," I agreed, narrowing my eyes as I looked him over. There was something bothering me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on the feeling. "Can you tell me what the hounds looked like? What this 'Reaper' looked like?"

He looked thoughtful for a moment. "Hound was ugly. Big, ugly thing. Might've been a Valisian war hound once, but not anymore. Teeth as long as my pointer." He held up a stubby finger for reference.

"And the Reaper?" I prodded. Fel dogs were fel dogs. It was their master that interested me the most.

"Tall," Palis said, holding one hand above his head, his arm at full extension. "Thin. Looked like a tree, maybe, with long things that clutched the ground when it walked. Like roots."

"Did it have legs?"

He thought for a moment, and then shook his head. "Don't think so."

A frown of concentration crossed my face. He was either a very plain-spoken man with not much to say, or he was concealing something. It was hard to tell, given that the only expression on his face was one of fear.

Worse than that, the description he gave of the Reaper not only matched the vague one that Alina had given me, but it also matched not a single one of the stories and legends I'd heard, read or researched in my lifetime – and that was a large number. Nothing in my experience aligned with a tree-like monster that came accompanied by fel dogs into a village and stole away citizens. I couldn't think of a single tale that related a beast like that, but something was nagging at the back of my mind, like an annoying gnat that you just can't catch.

"Papa? What's going on?" a voice came from behind the burly blacksmith. He turned, and I shot a glance over his shoulder as he did. In an inner doorway that perhaps led into some kind of bedchamber stood a boy, in his mid-to-late teens, with the same burly physique exhibited by Palis the smith.

"Nothing, Murt," the large man said. "Go get the forge stoked for the day."

"Yes, sir," the boy mumbled, but he stared at me for a moment with very large eyes. That strange prickling sensation at the back of my neck returned, and I rubbed one hand along it to neutralize the feeling. Then the boy turned away, disappearing into another doorway beyond.

"Anything else, Master Arbiter?" the smith grunted. "There's work to be done."

Casting one last look after the boy, I shook my head. "No. That's all."

Without another word, I turned and left the smith's home, heading back out into the cold winter morning. Perhaps it had been too much to hope that I would uncover something so quickly that would lead me to the answer, but there had been no choice but to try.

If Palis had been the one with the best look at this 'Reaper', then I was going to accomplish nothing by frantically interviewing every citizen of this tiny backwater. It would be better simply to wait until nightfall, and get a glimpse of the creature myself.

I just had to hope that I wouldn't get killed in the process.

A few moments later, I re-entered Alina's home. From within I could hear a sound of scraping, and when I came through the doorway into the main room, she was leaning over what appeared to be the leg of a chair with an odd-looking knife. A pile of wooden pieces sat at her feet as she worked. Shavings floated to the ground with each stroke.

"You're a furnisher," I said. My voice rang hollow in my ears.

"It was my husband's trade, before he died," she answered, and hers was just as hollow. "I learned from watching him."

"Did he…?" I wanted to ask the question, but the words died on my lips.

She seemed to know what I was asking, and shook her head before I could get any farther. "No. Ramun died more than a year ago, before the Reaper began to come."

A jab of pain lanced through my neck, as though someone had driven a needle into it. I yelped in surprise and swatted at what I thought was an insect, but my hand came away clean. Alina stared at me with a bemused expression.

"Sorry," I said lamely. "I thought there was a bug."

She shook her head with a little smile, and went back to shaving curls of wood off the leg of the chair.

What the hell was going on here? The pain had been fierce enough that I would have expected my hand to come away bloody, except there was no trace of injury. "Palis didn't have anything particularly helpful to say," I said, trying to bring her back around. "You were more helpful than he was, I think."

"He's not a very talkative man," she answered. "And that boy of his…"

My eyes narrowed with sudden interest. "What about the boy?"

She straightened, and waved the hand with the knife in a slashing motion. "A bloody coward, that's what he is," she snapped. "Never saw him the night we tried to fight back."

Oh really?
I thought. My hand moved up to stroke along my jawline in thought. "Well, not everyone can be brave," I said.

"Once it was all over, he came on out of his house, said he'd been hiding under his bed when the howling started," she said, and the hand holding the knife trembled. "There we were, out fighting for our lives, and he was inside…"

The words started pouring out of her in a rush, and I didn't say a word to interrupt. "The boy's strong enough to pick up a shovel, he's strong enough and old enough to fight for our lives, for my
children's
lives, but instead he's hiding inside?" The knife slashed through the air, punctuating her words as she spoke. "We should have cut him open and thrown him to the Reaper's dogs. It would have been a mercy. At least we would have killed him first—"

She choked on the last word and doubled over in grief, her blade slipping from now-nerveless fingers and dropping to the floor, where it struck with a clatter. My eyes had grown steadily wider throughout her tirade… such
vehemence
. I had never felt so strongly about anything. Ever. Was that what it meant to have children, to lose them?

A fresh sob ripped its way out of her, the sound so heartbreaking that I very nearly choked up myself. I took a faltering step toward her, but she looked up at me with shining blue eyes that fixed me in place.

"You promised me that you would do something," she said in a strangled voice. "So what are you going to do?"

Turn tail and run like the wind?
A cynical part of me asked.

That would be the
smart
thing to do
, I agreed with myself.

With a wave of my hand, I dismissed the voices within. There had to be something I could do to ease this poor woman's agony. Despite some efforts during my younger years, I had never been particularly good with people, and especially not women. My books and lab supplies were my friends. They didn't grieve, they didn't even notice when I frittered them away in experiments and midnight readings. The fact was, all I had to offer were facts and stories. She knew I wasn't an Arbiter, but she didn't know my true vocation, though it was distinctly possible that she might suspect. My mind groped for something, anything that I could say that might help her.

"Do you know the origin of the story of the Golden Queen?" I asked her.

The question was so strange that it interrupted her sobbing for a moment. She gave me a queer look, and I was distinctly aware that I hadn't answered her question.

"I haven't even thought about it in years," she said at last. "My mother always just told the story."

With a little sigh, I found a spot on the floor with my back against a wall not far from her, and folded my knees in front of me. "That particular story is actually older than the Old Kingdoms themselves," I said. "It comes from Old Tellar, in fact. It's been told for thousands of years. A beggar comes to each of seven Kings and Queens and pleads for them to hear him, for he brings tidings of great darkness. In turn, six monarchs refuse his pleas, until Alina the Golden Queen agrees to give him an audience. When she does, the beggar transforms into a being of light, and brings the armies of good to her side, for she had shown herself to be wise and just by hearing even the lowest of her servants. In the end, they drive back the darkness, and she becomes Empress of all Tellar for her wisdom." My mouth twisted in an ironic smile. "Of course, it helped that all of the other monarchs died."

There was a long pause, and then she said, "That's not how the story goes."

I blinked, taken aback. "What do you mean?"

"That's not what happens," she answered. "The Shadow King disguises himself as a fool and goes to the court of six Kings and Queens, and one by one, he takes over all of their kingdoms and gives them over to his shadows."

My brow creased in a frown, but I gave her an encouraging gesture. I had never heard this version of the story before. "Go on."

"Well, when he tries to infiltrate the Golden Queen's palace, her gift of light allows her to see who he is and drive him out. Then, he instead brings his great armies to bear at her border, demanding tribute—" she stopped, and pressed her hand to her lips.

"What is it?" I asked.

"All they can hear when the Shadow King invades is the baying of his hounds," she whispered.

With a thoughtful, two-fingered tap of my stubbled chin, I leaned back against the wall. "Well," I said. "Now that's interesting."

She stared at me with wide eyes, searching, asking for answers that I didn't have. "What does it mean?" she asked at last.

"Search me," I said with a shrug. "All I know for sure is that I need to get my own look at this thing, whatever it is – but suddenly I don't think an Arbiter is as necessary as you believe."

Moonrise couldn't come quickly enough.

Alina had work to do, and wasn't fond of my looking over her shoulder every moment. Normally, given time to myself, I would have pondered some theory or another, or gone over one of the textbooks I'd memorized in my head again. There were plenty of ways to entertain myself, but the sleep I'd gotten the night before hadn't been enough, and the rhythmic scraping of metal on wood wasn't exactly soothing. I was too tired to think, and too distracted to sleep.

With nothing else to do, I went out into the village, trying to find any scrap of information that might help me identify whatever – or
whomever
– was tormenting this tiny town. The day was cold and crisp, with a bright blue sky overhead and the golden sun shining as though nothing was wrong in the world. As the minutes and hours dragged on, I heard many complaints, much bellyaching, and far too many thinly-disguised snipes from one neighbor to another, but came up with nothing of worth. Despite the fact that a death curse hung over the village like a fog, the people themselves seemed oblivious to it; too caught up in their own petty little lives to notice.

Throughout the entire day, I was able to confirm one thing. The Reaper always came at moonrise on the first night, at midnight on the second, and in the dark before dawn on the third. It was always the same, and everyone in the village echoed it.

Unfortunately, that seemed to be the only thing that anyone was sure of.

More than once, I asked myself why I was still there. It would have been so easy to simply grab one of the nicer-looking horses from the stables, proclaim that there was nothing an Arbiter could do to help them, and ride off toward the horizon like a character from a child's tale.

So why hadn't I done it?

The more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable I became. The answer wasn't one that I liked overmuch, but no matter how I tried to deny it, I kept coming back to the same place.

It was Alina. Somehow, despite all the failings of this pathetic little berg, she stood out above the rest.

I've never been a fool for a damsel in distress. Or any damsel, really. Women are complicated creatures that tend to put things somewhere when they were already in a perfectly acceptable place, and ask questions about difficult or meaningless subjects. For the most part, I was content to avoid them.

So what was it about this one that compelled me so?

In a lifetime of finding answers in a flash of insight, I had never been so completely without one. The feeling was distinctly uncomfortable.

Just about the time I was ready to chew my own arm off in a desperate attempt to escape the miserable backwater, the sun began its final descent toward the western horizon. After an entire day of interrogating a village full of miserable, ignorant peasants, I briefly considered the idea of volunteering to switch sides and help this 'Reaper' demolish the place. The thought didn't last long, but it was pleasant while it did.

As the western sky turned to molten gold, I returned to Alina's humble abode. She barely looked up as I entered; the scattered pieces of chair that she'd been working on earlier that day had transformed into a work of art, standing on its own now as the pressure from the assembled pieces pressed against one another in a rough-hewn but aesthetically charming way. I blinked a few times as my mind slowly came to terms with what she'd done.

"That's amazing," I breathed, even as a thought slowly percolated through my mind. Everything I'd done in my life, all of my accomplishments seemed to pale before this stunning, simple craft as I looked over the detail.

She flushed, and looked away. "It's nothing. I'll be lucky if I get five princes for it, here in the village."

My mind did the quick mental calculations – I'd forgotten that I'd crossed the border between Amaria and Valisia during my journey, and I wasn't nearly as familiar with Valisian currency. "A few silver marks for something like that?" I asked, aghast. "You must be joking. You could get three, even four times that in Elenia!"

"Is that where you came from?" she asked, turning her cool blue eyes on me at last.

Her twilight gaze caught me like an insect in a pair of forceps. I struggled to say something, anything, but I was entirely lost beneath that stare. "Um… it's the last place I was, yes," I finally managed to say.

"What's your name?" she asked, and held up a hand before I could give the quick answer. "Not the one you gave when you arrived. Your real name."

I was reluctant, but the look in her eyes compelled me to answer. "Moncrief. Edar Moncrief."

As we stood there in an awkward silence, the last rays of sunlight faded from the tiny windows around us, and we were left in darkness. Alina broke the gaze first, moving to light a few candles and lamps around the room, while I stood there in perfect silence.

"The moon will rise soon, Edar Moncrief," she said. "What are you going to do?"

This woman needed my protection. She was lost, alone, and afraid, and I couldn't leave her like that. My time to flee had run out.

"I'm going to put a stop to this," I said flatly. "This 'Reaper' ends tonight."