The Elements of Sorcery Read Free Page A

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 know 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