Bladesorrow (The Agarsfar Saga Book 1) Read online

  Taking a deep breath, he shut his eyes and grasped Stephan’s Chronometer, reaching to the elements that resided within. There were four now—the earth, water, and fire it had held from the start, and now shadow too. Val’s shadow. The pain that must be causing him—in whatever time and place he’d crawled away to—gave Devan some little satisfaction. Not so long ago he would have pitied his friend. But not now. Not after the murders and the revelation of his insane plan.

  To the power he drew from the chronometre, Devan added the light beaming down upon him from the late morning sun. The five elements flooded his senses and he weaved them together until they fell into place with the satisfying click of key in lock.

  All things, from pieces of furniture to men and dwarfs, were made up of varying degrees of the five elements. Most living things could only ever master one, perhaps two, of them. These gave them some control of the basic building blocks of nature. Power to channel combative hexes like summoned fireballs; growing vegetables in days or even minutes, rather than weeks or months; mending maladies and curing disease; turning a puddle into enough water to hydrate a whole family.

  But it didn’t give them any control over their life experiences. Linears were stuck moving in a single direction on the Path, ever forward, like a boat stuck in a river’s current. Each moment of their lives came and left, never to be had again, at least not until the Path circled once more. The present was an illusory thing for them, for by the time their minds reflected on the present, it was already the past.

  The Aldur, however, possessed mastery over all the elements, giving them power over all things, be they living or inanimate. For if you could understand every single particle of a thing, your influence over it was boundless. You could alter the place of things, move them from one location to another. This could be on both a large scale—moving a person halfway across the land in an instant—and the most minute of scales—shifting individual particles in a person’s mind to influence their thinking.

  It went even further than that, though. Controlling all five elements gave him power over not just the place of things, but the time of them as well. When he channeled all five elements and shut his eyes, he could see all of time—from the very beginning to the very end. Every experience of every person that had ever happened. This was a function of elemental conservation. Because all things of this world were made up of varying amounts of the five elements, and the total amount of each element in the world was finite, that amount was also constant when considered on the scale of the whole Path. Elements were never destroyed; they had always existed and always would exist. Thus, when an Aldur connected with all five of the elements, he or she gained access to every particle that ever had been and ever would be. Consequently, the ability to move backwards and forwards in time. Four-dimensional thinking and manipulation.

  His eyes opened.

  He stood on the shore of a river. Sun glinted off its flowing surface, the crisp sharpness of spring water prickling his nostrils. Gravel washed smooth by the currents of time crunched underfoot. The silence of the place was like a loved-one’s embrace, cool and soothing. A narrow pathway of well-trodden earth snaked along the waterway. Beyond that, the land quickly elevated, sloping into a hill of indeterminate height. The view along the river was the same as far as Devan could see in either direction—the pathway leading off into the distance, the hill looming over it. He could just make out an indistinct darkness at the edge of the horizon across the river. The Elsewhere.

  This was all illusion, of course. Not unlike his memory parlor. His physical body remained standing just outside the Conclave, high up in the mountains.

  What he looked upon was the True Path. A mental visualization of it, anyway. Viewing the Path in its natural state was useless for most. It was merely infinite points of sparkling light—dazzling, blinding, mind-crushing infiniteness. All of time, all of its incalculable possibilities, blazing like beacons in a night sky. Even most Aldur couldn’t handle viewing the Path in such a manner. It would drive them mad, or they would at least lose themselves in the inexorable vastness.

  He didn’t suffer from such weaknesses, of course. Interpreting the Path in its raw, unadulterated state was something Stephan had trained him to do nearly from birth. The Master Horologer must be able to act without the aid of any crutch.

  But even for him, the vastness of the Path’s pure state was daunting. Like reading a book in a language you only half knew. So Stephan had also taught him the art of mental allegory, training his mind to view the Path in a schema of familiar settings, easier for the mind to process.

  He would need to climb. One could see next to nothing standing this close to the Path’s flow. Devan inhaled one last time to enjoy the river’s aromas. He stopped, frowning. The sharp freshness of the water remained. But it also held an underlying tang. Brine. Sulfur. His frown deepened as he glanced upwards. The sky was blue, but he now noticed the streaks of red too. Like veins in a bloody yolk. Ill tidings. If his mental conception of the Path was showing such symptoms, it meant the Path was in dire straits indeed.

  Without further prelude, he began to climb. It was simple at first. An easy stroll. Grasses of vibrant greens and blues edged a well-packed, earthen walkway, sloping gradually upward. Trees sprouted from the hillsides, his mind adding birds that chirped merrily as he passed. After several minutes, he turned back to view the river. He could see more of it now, from this higher vantage, stretching to the edge of vision in either direction. But he was still far too close to get any true idea of where Val’s treachery had interrupted its flow.

  He climbed on. The way became harder. The plush grasses became withered and dry, yellows and browns, as his mind worked harder to grasp more of the Path. Like trying to read the name of every city on a map all at once.

  Early on in his training, he’d made these treks alongside Stephan. Devan had envied him, seeming to always climb without even a trace of exertion. And whenever Devan slipped, Stephan would always be there to offer a hand. He’d come to know every plane and valley of Stephan’s strong hands. Often, once they reached a plateau, they would grasp hands, locking fingers, and just gaze out to the flowing waters of the Path together, enjoying the contact and the peaceful silence about them.

  “Stop that,” he muttered to himself. Bad enough his subconscious had tortured him with memories as he’d recovered. He certainly didn’t have to dredge up such thoughts voluntarily. Climbing onward, he silenced his thoughts, though he couldn’t eliminate the desire for a helping hand that wasn’t there.

  Finally, legs burning, head pounding, he reached a level precipice. Heaving a breath of relief, he approached its edge to look upon the Path.

  The river stretched out in a perpetual vastness below him. If he climbed higher, he’d be able to see the river slowly begin to curve around the hill. The Path was like a wheel, no beginning, no end. But this view was good enough for his current purposes. From here, he could see minor tributaries snaking from the Path, always returning to the main flow before long. Those had once been rogue strands, now corrected. Even during the best of times, such deviations cropped up and had to be corrected. Most could simply be reattached without being eliminated, like a five-minute detour that only causes you to miss some pretty scenery. Not a problem. Plant an idea here, nudge a single Linear from one course of action to another, and the strand was resolved. These tiny changes in the Path’s geography kept things interesting. He knew the many possibilities, but never which one would happen at any given point.

  Other rogues, however, were more like detours that caused you to miss an entire city. A tributary that threatened to become a new river, permanently altering the Path’s circular flow. Untenable, requiring immediate fixing. A chaos-level event. That was what he was facing now.

  Val had murdered Taul... Bladesorrow. Even now, the man’s proper name was fading from Devan’s mind, as the alterations Val had wrought became more firmly entrenched on the Path.

  Bladesorrow. Devan would
have to use that name for now until he’d corrected whatever Val had done. The man was a Constant, one of the dams in time that kept the Path flowing in its proper direction. From this height, it wouldn’t take Devan long to see where the problem was.

  As he scanned the river below, his eyes played over a rogue strand he’d purposefully created long ago. It tickled at his mind, like a nagging chore he kept putting off. A time loop. A pond disconnected from the rest of the Path, so time flowed neither forward nor backward. Static. Unchanging. Devan thought he could almost see the small home built there, smoke snaking from the chimney. That was absurd, of course. Just a fancy of his imagination.

  The Path often complained of this unresolved strand to him. That was how Devan thought of it anyway. When one spent as much time alone as he did, he tended to personify ideas and inanimate objects. This particular strand was a clearing in the woods, and the Path didn’t like it. Devan had made it, meddled with the makeup of the Path, then tied it up and left it unresolved. But he wasn’t ready to resolve it yet. Couldn’t resolve it. It was an old wound, full of guilt and shame. But he could bear it longer. Devan pushed it from his mind.

  His eyes continued to search over the flowing waters of time. Then he saw it. Storm clouds swirled over a section of the river far below. Multiple tributaries branched from a point where there should have been none, water spraying in a myriad of directions. Flames belched from the shoreline where there ought to have been nothing but peace and serenity.

  And there was something else. A thing Devan had never seen before, even with the worst of the deviations he’d dealt with in his centuries as Master Horologer. The far-off darkness at the river’s horizon. It was leaching onto the Path. Like a ship sprung a leak, murky sludge was sluicing into the water from the darkness beyond.

  “Cattle crossing the road and I’m in a hurry!” Devan exclaimed. He sucked air through his teeth in dismay, vaguely feeling his physical body back at the Conclave stagger several paces backward. This was bad. The worst he’d seen.

  He ought not have been surprised, though, knowing as he did what Val had done. As close to a clean break as he’d ever witnessed, one part of the river simply dissolving into bleeding veins, gushing away the life force of time, never meeting with the remainder of the river on the other side. This left one part of the Path with no future, the other no past. A path with no future would slowly decay and fade away, as there was nowhere for it to go—a wounded animal that could see no hope for survival. The decay would spread further and further down the Path until nothing remained. A broken ship slowly sinking.

  The other half—the Path with no past—would remain afloat, but devolve into chaos and anarchy, for time and the creatures living in it cannot evolve without a past from which to learn. This was what Val had sought. An end to the sure circularity of the Path’s flow, forcing it to an entirely foreign course. New events, unknown futures. A new age.

  Utter madness. That’s what it was. A theory that could never be tested, save with existence itself hanging in the balance. There was a reason the Aldur existed. And it was to maintain the Path’s integrity. They possessed great power, could even change the course of history itself in some cases. But the Path was what it was. A circle ever repeating. There were variations, but the Constants had to remain or time would break down. Devan couldn’t believe that someone he’d once called friend now threatened that sanctity.

  He took a deep breath. Now was a time for focus, not rage. The Inciting Event—the trigger of the break, Val’s murder—would be somewhere on the sinking portion of the path. He’d need to start there.

  It was a delicate task, as laws broke down at break sites, forming anomalies and recursive loops. Horology was never an exact science even under the best of circumstances. Here, it was like trying to read a tome that had been torn to shreds, then tossed in the ocean. But the goal remained the same as always—find the Inciting Event, then stop it, or at least steer it in such a way that Bladesorrow would live, maintaining his position as a Constant of the Path. Bring the tributary back to the main flow.

  Bladesorrow’s Landmark event had been—was—the Riverdale Peace Accords. There, he had reunited the North and South of Agarsfar, ending centuries of mistrust and worse. That had been around... 1015 A.A. Chances were that Val had chosen some point around that time to carry out his blasphemy.

  The Path was too muddled to navigate precisely. So he’d just have to take his best guess and go from there.

  For a moment, fear struck him. What if Val had done something truly unspeakable? Worse even than murdering the others. Devan’s mind and eyes darted back to the murk oozing onto the Path from the darkness beyond the river. If those trapped in the Elsewhere had somehow gained control over Bladesorrow, then resolving this rogue strand would only lead to even worse realities.

  No. He couldn’t think like that. Even Val, depraved state and all, couldn’t contemplate such abomination. Devan would fix this. He’d failed once before to find an answer he’d desperately needed. An answer for which he still searched to this day. He’d vowed to never let that happen again. The rest of his people might be dead, but he was still Master Horologer. Time was an examination and he its star pupil. He would heal the Path, save it from what Val had done.

  So he reached out to the point in time that best approximated where the Riverdale Accords ought to have been, allowing all five of the elements to flow through him once more. He was pointed right into the heart of the storm. Glancing at Stephan’s chronometre to confirm his reckoning, he willed every particle of his being to that point.

  He peregrinated.

  Once more in his physical body, his eyes opened. The air was dry and hot around him. The sun was shining in a blue sky, though he could barely tell through a sooty haze that seemed to hang over the place like a sickness.

  “Ah, the North,” Devan muttered to himself. “Such a lovely place.”

  Technically he’d been in the North even before peregrinating. But the Conclave’s location high up in the Raging Mountains—inaccessible save by way of peregrination—put it above the hazy, arid conditions the rest of the North endured.

  He glanced down at his own chronometre, tucking Stephan’s away. Its sole-remaining hand indicated 1015 A.A. The year of the Riverdale Peace Accords. Impressive. He wished someone was there to witness such precision. Peregrinating into a maelstrom such as that and hitting the mark?

  But even with the assurance of the chronometre, Devan paused for a moment to get his bearings. Getting to the right when was only half the job. He also needed to pinpoint the precise where. And there was also the more mundane reality of peregrination, namely that transporting every particle of his body from one spot to another—with the precision necessary to ensure he didn’t scatter himself across all of place and time—was a touch disorienting.

  Unfortunately, everything looked the same in this barren wasteland. So eventually he just set off in a direction that felt right. His instincts were usually sound.

  The ground was rough, porous stone, a result of ancient—and occasionally still active—lava flows. Steam floated from fissures in the ground. The place stank of rotten eggs. It seemed devoid of life, though Devan knew better. The North was diverse in strange—some might say grotesque—fauna. Like an alchemist’s culturing dish. Its harsh environs demanded adaptation and mutation, producing creatures that were both fascinating and the stuff of nightmares. Shadow eels that slithered through both water (what little there was here) and dry land like snakes. Manticores—bastard cousins of the hallowed, and long extinct (in this time anyway), lion—that belched flame. Beetles that hunted in packs like wild dogs and sucked their prey dry of moisture. And even the occasional wyvern, though most of those resided on continents north of Agarsfar.

  Yes, the North was a lifeologist’s dream to be sure, and although Devan himself had little time for the baser sciences, he nonetheless thought it a shame the South allowed disdain for the shadow to taint its view of the many wonders the N
orth held. It was absurd, really. But Linears would be Linears, after all. Short life, short sight, as Stephan had always said.

  Devan sighed. He’d cared for the Linears more than most of his comrades, but common man’s frequent inability to see past their own insignificant lifespans still grated on him. Indeed, despite what Southerners might say, the North boasted some of Agarsfar’s grandest towns and richest resources. Trimale City, the City on the Mount, capital of the North, was almost as large as Tragnè City and home to the Second Symposium. Hope’s Hill, upon which sat the Stronghold of House Glofar, the center of the North’s dwarvish mining community. And at one time, Ral Falar had been a center of Northern craftsmanship.

  Thought of this last location sent an involuntary chill through him. Ral Falar had been beautiful once. Then had come the Great Chaos and the Cataclysm. The uprising of the Seven. Civil War amongst the Aldur. The Seven had ultimately been imprisoned in the Elsewhere, shut away from the True Path. But victory had come at great cost. A large part of that bill had been Ral Falar. Gone. Not just destroyed. Annihilated. Anyone who had ever lived there, anything that had ever happened there, wiped out like it’d never happened. Because it hadn’t. The fact that the ruins were still called Ral Falar at all was an artifact of the damage the Path had suffered, like a boulder jutting from the waters of time, slightly disrupting its flow. Only towns built after Agarsfar’s founding bore the name “Ral,” after Ral the Builder, one of Agarsfar’s founders. But no Linears seemed to notice. Anomalies had a funny habit of doing that to their minds.

  The sound of voices drifting over a rise brought Devan out of his ruminations and he smiled to himself. Instincts right again. As he crested the rise, a flat plane stretched out before him. Far in the distance were outlines of several tall buildings surrounded by innumerable smaller ones. Riverdale. The dueling cities. Split into northern and southern halves by the River of Her Lady’s Justices, a microcosm of the entire continent.