The Elements of Sorcery Read Free

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.