Sorcerer's Code



  SORCERER'S CODE

  A Tale of Eisengoth

  by Christopher Kellen

  Copyright 2011 by Christopher Kellen

  Original Cover Art by

  Christopher Kellen

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you once more to my amazing support group, particularly the Great Bay Writers. Their keen insight and targeted criticism is second-to-none.

  Thanks to Dave B. for his spot-on criticism and editing notes. You really should be an editor. Seriously, have you ever considered that line of work?

  The tone and spark behind this particular work owe a great deal of debt to a certain author whose work I adore, and from whom I firmly believe most, if not all writers have something to learn. Sincere thanks and abject apologies to that author – nobody does snarky first-person like he does.

  To my lovely wife; for without her, I would be but a pale shadow of the vibrant life I am so blessed to live.

  I

  I love this town.

  There's just something special about a place where the name changes twice a year, when some new warlord or monarch declares themselves in charge. Right now it's called Elenia, I think, and the rumor is that the new queen likes to bathe in the blood of virgins. To each their own, of course; I'd have a different use for those virgins, but they're probably just rumors anyway.

  Every time the name changes, there's a huge celebration. People pour into the streets, shouting and cheering the name of their new ruler. It's an amazing sight. These spontaneous parties usually last better than a day and a night, and everyone is sopping drunk by the end. The streets are practically paved with wine and spirits. You can see people hanging out of doorways and windows for days afterward, just trying to recover from the massive collective hangover brought on by that extreme level of debauchery.

  There are always a few fatalities, from fights and the accidental trampling. It's an unfortunate, but inevitable, byproduct of that much alcohol.

  Of course, no one ever actually uses the new name; not even the town guards. The declining nobility still calls it Vrydanus, which was its name before the Empire crumbled. The merchant class usually uses some diminutive, like Vryd – except for traveling merchants, who don't know any better and don't want to offend whoever might be in the pocket of the current monarch.

  The poor, the thieves, the drunks and the murderers call it the "Old Bitch." That's how I tend to think of it, too. No matter how awful a place is, though, you just can't argue with a huge drunken bash.

  It was just before twilight, after the latest of these celebrations, that I found the body.

  Stumbling across someone too drunk to move isn't uncommon in these situations, but when I tripped over this one – my mind was thoroughly absorbed by the calculations behind Lord Azegrath's theorem of manna distribution, and I wasn't paying attention – and it didn't emit so much as a groan, plus the limpness of how it rolled as I stumbled, gave me the clue that this one was dead.

  Normally when one trips over a corpse in the streets of the Old Bitch, especially before the sun has set, one does their best to look innocent and move on quickly – before, for instance, the town guards get off their drunk arses long enough to arrest you for manhandling a corpse. This one, though, inexplicably caught my eye, and forced me to take a closer look.

  He had short brown hair, cut close to his head, and his face was plain. He was dressed in the dullest clothing I'd ever seen. It had none of the frills and ruffles so popular in the Old Kingdoms, no extraneous adornments at all. He had clearly needed a new tailor before his untimely demise, but it was too late to develop a fashion sense now.

  Naturally, anything valuable would have been long gone, but it was rare that anyone stole clothing from the dead. These days, you didn't want to stick around long enough to find out whether the body was going to wake up and decide to take it back by ripping off your face.

  The plain blue tunic the body wore had just a few patches of darker color on the front, and there was a heavy leather belt encircling his middle. Across his back was an empty, black scabbard that would have held a long, thin sword.

  Even though my good sense was screaming at me to move on, my natural curiosity overcame my better judgment. Gingerly, with one foot, I pushed the body over. The cause of death was plain – there was a huge open gash at the base of his neck, and the back of his tunic was veritably covered with a dark, bloody stain.

  Someone had caught him by surprise, I mused; simple enough. Still, something was bothering me. It wasn't the fact that there was no blood on the ground around the body, which clearly meant that he'd been moved some time after death. The stage of death was hard to pin down – somewhere after rigidity had faded but before rapid decomposition had set in, putting the death somewhere between one and five days past. That was a long time for a body to be lying in the street, but even that wasn’t impossible.

  It didn't quite click in my head until I looked at the scabbard again. The blade it would have held was straight, as long as my arm, and slender. Now, I'm no expert on weaponry, but I am an expert on materials. It comes with the territory. A sorcerer who couldn't quote you the tensile strength of steel, copper and silver alloys without checking his notes was a sorry sorcerer indeed. It was this knowledge that led to my next conclusion: any steel blade that thin would have been next to useless in a real fight, which meant that it was no usual weapon.

  Something had fallen out of his tunic, perhaps from a hidden pocket inside, when I had accidentally kicked the poor sod over, so I retrieved it. It was a small, dark leather case, rigid to the touch. It was fastened with a small buckle on the front and a knotted strip of black cloth. I untied it and opened the case, dumping the contents into my hand.

  A tiny, glimmering, needle-like dagger fell into my outstretched palm, leaving a shallow scratch across the creases of my hand. I yelped and nearly dropped the thing, but managed to catch it by the handle with the tips of my fingers.

  It was barely four inches from pommel to tip of the needle-sharp blade. Most curious of all, it seemed to be made of some kind of transparent substance, perhaps crystalline in nature.

  Crystal.

  The individual pieces suddenly resolved into a clear picture, much as the pieces of a stained-glass window become an image when you take three steps backward, and I realized what kind of person this was, laying on the ground before me. The thought took my breath away.

  This is an Arbiter.

  Someone had killed an Arbiter.

  A part of my mind – the good sense that I mentioned before – suddenly overwhelmed everything else and started screaming at me to run, damn you, run before you get yourself killed!

  I wanted to run. I really did, but getting the signals from my mind to my limbs was like wading through a neck-high swamp. Nothing would move.

  "Ho there!" a voice called from the far end of the alley I was passing through.

  Of course.

  "Um… hello?" I choked out.

  "City guard!" exclaimed the voice. "Everything all right down there?"

  "Uh… well…"

  My body finally decided to move, but it was too late. All I managed to do was to shove the tiny blade back into its case and slide it into one of my many pockets. Three monstrous town guards, clad from head to toe in dull steel links of chain, jangled down the street toward me, where I was standing over a dead man. The only way it could have been any worse was if I'd still been holding that tiny knife in my hand.

  I looked into the faces of the three guardsmen. Unfortunately for me, they all appeared to be stone-cold sober, and the unpleasant expressions on their faces seemed to reflect that as being a significant impediment to their enjoyment of life.

  "I'll have you know, I didn't
touch him," I babbled.

  The apparent leader of the three guardsmen looked me up and down, and then ran his gaze over the crumpled body on the street. He looked at me again, his glower deepening. "And just who are you?"

  My throat constricted. I considered lying, but if they decided to take me back down to the barracks, it would be too easily found out. Instead, I steeled my quailing will and bit down hard on my words. "My name is Edar Moncrief, sorcerer and scholar. Is there something I can do for you gentlemen?"

  "Moncrief, eh?" grumbled the guard. "Ain't you that hedge wizard, makes love potions and wart remover?"

  "Those are some of the things I do, yes," I stammered, bewildered that my name had actually been recognized. "A man has to make a living, you know, and there's not much coin in scholarly research…"

  The guard's frown was changing to a glower, and I knew I was just digging myself in deeper.

  I'm at my best when I'm in charge of the situation, when I know that I have the leverage. As soon as the odds are against me, my mouth starts saying stupid things, which tends to make the odds even longer.

  "You'd do well to just keep moving on," I blurted.

  Case in point.

  The guardsman seemed to gain three inches in height – or maybe I was just shrinking in fear after those idiot words left my lips. "What?"

  "Um, nothing, I was just…"

  The world exploded into color and light.

  A few minutes later, I found myself lying on the dusty street, staring up at the sky. It felt as though my jaw had shattered, but working it gently back and forth told me that it wasn't broken. Thankfully.

  I could have retaliated. The strike had been unprovoked, and it was far from beneath me to defend myself. Unfortunately, sorcery really only has only two modes: deliberate, tinkering research and apocalyptic bloodbath. If I had risen from those cobblestones with fire in my eyes and the intent to kill, the guardsmen would have died in screaming agony, melting inside their armor as they pleaded with me to stop the pain.

  It was a pleasant enough thought, and I entertained the vision for a moment. Of course, were I to do such a thing, these guards would only be replaced by more, and those by more, until I was either overwhelmed and killed or driven from the city like a dog. Neither of those options was particularly enticing, and thus I stayed silent.

  "What do you think?" I heard one of the guards say.

  "Couldn't have been him," said the leader. "Ain't got no spine."

  Hah.

  "What do we do with the body?"

  "Drag it off. Nobody gonna come looking for a dead Arbiter. Most will be happy to see him that way."

  "Know I will."

  Instead of moving, I chose to lie still and admire the white clouds drifting by in the blue sky overhead. It was easier that way, and they were really quite lovely. Long strands of cottony mist strewn across the heavens, carefully crafted in lines as though an artist had painstakingly detailed each one. Every small movement of my head and neck caused pain to darken my vision.

  Despite the agony, a giddy thrill rose up in my chest. It took everything I had not to start laughing out loud; first, because it would have drawn the guards back to me, and secondly, it would have only worsened my suffering.

  I had a heartblade.

  In my possession was one of the most treasured and secretive artifacts in the entire world.

  Despite my best efforts, I snorted with glee. Thankfully, the guards were far enough away and distracted by their grisly task to notice.

  I waited there, in the dust, for a long time.

  Eventually, their voices had died away and I was certain that they were gone. Testing my jaw and neck once more, I decided at length that nothing was broken. Slowly, deliberately, I picked myself up off the ground and looked about.

  The street was entirely deserted now. The only trace of the body that had been lying there moments before were light drag marks of sand on the paving stones, and those would be erased soon enough by the wind. There was no blood left behind, which still struck me as odd – but there were many things I did not know about Arbiters. Mysterious men all, locked away in their Tower in the lawless lands of the east, only venturing out when something needed killing.

  Another laugh bubbled up within me, and this time I let it out – a wild, cackling sound that reverberated off the nearby walls. Those mysteries were about to become much less mysterious, if I had my druthers.

  Nearly singing to myself, I headed off in the direction of my lab, patting the leather case beneath my shirt with gleeful intent. As I did, a misplaced step jarred my neck, causing pain to lance through my jaw and skull, the pain so bright it felt like it would blind me.

  With a muttered curse, I rubbed my aching jaw and sullenly walked the streets back to my lab, making sure to keep my neck still and straight.