THE STORY THUS FAR
The city-state of Innarlith sits on the far eastern shore of the Lake of Steam, all but ignored by the wider Realms. There, the poor suffer in the crime-ridden streets of the Fourth Quarter, craftsmen ply their trades in the Third Quarter, the privileged few live in luxury in the Second Quarter, and ships come and go from the docks of the First Quarter.
Pristoleph was born into the day-to-day horrors of the Fourth Quarter slums, but even as a boy he dreamed of greater things. As a man he's become one of the city's most powerful men.
Marek Rymiit, son of a wealthy Thayan merchant, was indoctrinated into the ranks of the mysterious Red Wizards. Decades later he's sent to Innarlith where he quickly insinuates himself into the city-state's inner circles.
Ivar Devorast and Willem Korvan, students from Cormyr, both find their way to Innarlith as well. There, Devorast learns shipbuilding, while Willem pursues power and influence.
Phyrea, daughter of the city's influential master builder, is the perfect young lady by day—and a cunning thief by night. When she spends the summer at her family's country estate, she meets Devorast and is changed forever, encounters the ghosts of the haunted manor, and is slowly driven mad.
As Willem's star rises in Innarlan society, Devorast sinks into poverty, but only one of them feels the icy chill of desperation. Willem sees all his dreams come true, but satisfaction eludes him. Devorast is inspired to build a canal to link the Lake of Steam with the Sea of Fallen Stars. When completed, it will change the face of Faerun forever. But for everyone who wants to see that day come, there's at least one who would kill to prevent it.
1
6 Hammer, the Year of the Sword (1365DR) Berrywilde
Phyrea watched it eating, and it was the most horrifying thing she'd ever seen.
After only the first few bites the mystery of what had been killing the workers at her father's vineyard had been explained. They'd blamed one animal after another, hunted for wolves, then bears, then giant boars. The remains had always been found in the morning—bones with a few strips of bloody flesh or tendon hanging from them like threads off the edge of an old blanket. They never found the skulls.
At first, Phyrea didn't pay any attention. She didn't even know anything was wrong at the camp until a tenday and a half and six murders had passed. It had been more than three months since she'd left Berrywilde for Innarlith, and she wasn't happy about having to go back.
The ghosts had come with her, but at least in the city she didn't feel so alone with them, so much like them.
But when her father told her about the murders, complained that the workers were beginning to desert the site and the winery construction was woefully behind schedule, something nudged at her. She wanted to call it guilt, but wasn't sure what the feeling was. It wasn't as though she had killed and eaten those men herself. She'd been miles away when it happened, but the voices that spoke to her when no one was there seemed to relish the news of the murders. They took some kind of spiteful glee in the fact
that something was eating those innocent men. It was the feeling that they knew something she didn't that brought her back to the country estate. Her own instincts, and her sense of smell, brought her to the ghast.
It didn't see her, hear her, or smell her. At least it hadn't yet. Phyrea wanted to look away from it, but couldn't. In the dim starlight it was difficult at first to tell that it wasn't human—or at least was no longer human. She had heard of things like it before—ghouls—undead creatures that feasted on the flesh of humans, but what was killing the workers was something similar, but stronger, more dangerous.
Phyrea sighed.
The ghast took another bite, a huge mouthful of bloody skin from the dead man's thigh. It came away with a tearing sound, duller than fabric. Thick blood pattered on the wet grass. The thing's jagged fangs ripped the skin and meat into strips that it gulped down with undisguised relish. Its burning red eyes rolled back slightly in its misshapen skull, and its shoulders twitched. The ghast's purple flesh was the color of a bruise, but a single bruise that covered its entire bony, naked form. Even from a distance Phyrea could smell rotting flesh, decaying meat, blood both old and new... the odor of a crypt.
You made that, a voice—one she had come to associate with the old woman who'd lost the skin from the side of her face in what must have been a terrible fire—echoed in Phyrea's mind.
Pretty, pretty thing, a little girl's voice added.
Phyrea tried to answer with a feeling of impatience. She tried to tell them to be quiet without words, and for the moment at least it seemed to have worked.
They were well outside the perimeter torches of the work camp—far enough that no one could hear the ghast feed. The workers who remained, and the guards her father had hired to protect them, slept as soundly as they could knowing that the murders were still going on. Phyrea couldn't see in the dark any better than any other human girl her
age, but the starlight would just have to be enough.
You don't want to see it any better anyway, a man's voice told her.
She smiled, nodded, and took a step closer to the still-feeding ghast. It didn't hear her first step, and went on chewing with the same calm abandon. She had the gentle winter breeze in her face, so had reason to hope that the undead cannibal couldn't smell her either.
As she moved closer still, one silent footstep at a time, she wrapped the fingers of her right hand around the pommel of her sword. The grip tingled at her touch, almost as though the beautiful blade were trying to communicate with her. She'd been getting that feeling more and more from the sword she'd found in the hidden tomb beneath her family's country manor. Like before, she ignored it. The weapon felt good when she used it, so she let it nettle her when she wasn't.
Though the blade didn't make the faintest whisper of a sound when it left the scabbard, the ghast looked up when she drew it. Perhaps the finely crafted, wave-shaped blade had caught a bit of the starlight. Maybe the creature finally smelled her despite the cool breeze. It could have heard the toe of her boot sink into the rain-soaked, muddy grass.
It can taste you already, the burned old crone told her. It remembers you.
Remembers me? she thought, and was answered with the feeling of morbid amusement.
The ghast growled and lunged at her. She stepped back, skipping on the tips of her toes, and brought her sword up in front of her. She stopped, and froze for half a heartbeat, for two reasons. First, she was hit by the stench like she'd fallen from a tree onto her head. And second, she recognized the thing.
Closer, a break in the gathering clouds letting through just enough starlight to reveal it's violet-hued features, she could see its face. Skin stretched taut over its skull, it appeared to be a man who hadn't eaten in weeks. Stretched
back over teeth that would have been even more horrifying to the man it had once been, its cracked lips drew back into something that might have been a smile.
"You," the ghast said, its voice a desiccated mockery of its living counterpart. "I know you."
"Yes," Phyrea replied. "Yes."
"It's you," the thing hissed.
Phyrea tried to speak again but gagged instead. The smell of the thing was thick in the air. She could taste it as much as smell it. The damp night around her had a greasy quality to it. Bile rose in her throat, and she found herself fighting just to breathe. Her lungs at once lusted for air and rejected the putrescence, and they had no choice but to inhale.
"Why?" the ghast asked, and Phyrea thought it was going to cry.
She shook her head and coughed. The ghast took that as an opportunity to lunge at her, its yellowed talons out in front of it to rake her flesh from her bones. Its fang-lined mouth opened wide. If she could have breathed, she would have screamed, but instead she acted.
Was it her arm that reacted or the sword itself? She didn't know, but in the moment, she didn't care. All she knew was that the blade took one of the ghast's hands off at the wrist before the claws could touch her.
The undead thing scrambled back, screeching so loudly that Phyrea's eyes closed against the sound. The cry was one part pain, one part anger, and it was the second part that snapped Phyrea's eyes open as fast as they'd shut. It was going to come at her again.
The sword once again moved her arm, pulling at her. She stabbed at the ghast, letting the enchanted blade do the work for her. The wavy steel sank deep into the thing's chest, releasing black blood that fell in clumps to the ground. The smell made her stomach twist and her eyes water. She was too close to the thing and tried to back away, tried to pull the sword out of it, but the blade only went deeper.
"What now?" the ghast rattled, it's voice like the last gasp of a drowning man.
A chorus of voices, none of them her own, echoed in Phyrea's head: Obliteration.
"Obliteration," she whispered to the man she'd killed three months before.
"No," the ghast whimpered.
Dissolution, the voices cried out.
"I'm sorry," Phyrea breathed.
The second time, one of the voices told her, is forever.
"The foreman," Phyrea whispered, and the ghast, with the last bit of strength left to it, nodded. "I killed you."
The ghast froze, every muscle tense, and only then did Phyrea realize it was on its knees. She coughed, and the face she recognized blew away, the purple-bruised skin turned to dust. A white skull glowed in the meager starlight, then more bones as the rest of the undead flesh drifted away on the damp winter breeze. It fell apart, clattering to her feet, a pile of bleached white bones.
The smell was gone.
Phyrea took a step back and looked at the sword. It tingled in her hand, and more than ever, she was afraid of it.
Yes, the voice of the man—the man with the scar on his cheek in the shape of a Z—whispered into her consciousness,' it was the sword. It was the sword that killed him.
"And the sword that brought him back," Phyrea whispered in reply.
2_
7 Hammer, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) The Canal Site
J\.8 far as Hrothgar could tell, no one in the camp worked harder than Ivar Devorast. And by all rights, Devorast was the one who should have been working the least. It was
his project after all, his brainchild, his life's work. Or was it?
"There are times, Ivar," Hrothgar told him that cool, gray morning in the first month of the year, "that I think this mad delusion of yours is more whim than obsession."
Devorast heard him, though he gave no outward sign. The human read from a list of provisions that had recently been delivered to the work site by one of the ransar's supply caravans.
"That half-elf... what's his name?" the dwarf prodded.
"Enril," Devorast replied.
"For the sake of Moradin's sweatin' danglies, Ivar, do you really know the name of every swingin' hammer at work here?" That drew the slightest trace of a smile from Devorast, and Hrothgar pressed on. "Can't Enril see to that? It's his job, isn't it?"
"He has," Devorast said.
Hrothgar was about to heave a dramatic, world-weary sigh, but stopped himself, knowing full well it would be lost on that peculiar human he'd come to call a friend.
"There's a difference, you know, between a dwarf and a pick-axe," Hrothgar said.
A warm breeze blew in from the south, bringing the sulfur-tinged breath of the Lake of Steam with it, rattling the wood shutters that closed the window from the morning's damp. Devorast got to the end of the list, folded the parchment once in half, then stuffed it into the wood stove that warmed the little cabin that was Devorast's home, office, command post, and...
"Temple," Hrothgar mumbled. It felt like a temple of sorts, but devoted to no god but Devorast himself. A god who asked for and accepted no worshipers, no prayers, no mercy, no pity, but enormous responsibility.
"I'm going to understand you one day," the dwarf said. "I may have to live as long as a withered old elf, but I'm going to figure your mind out if it's the death of me."
Devorast ignored him, moving on from the list of
provisions to a written report from one of the foremen. Hrothgar didn't bother trying to read over the human's shoulder. He didn't really care what the foreman had to say, and by the look on his face neither did Devorast. Still, Hrothgar could see by the way his eyes moved that Devorast read every word before stuffing it, too, into the fire.
"It's an old saying from the Great Rift," Hrothgar went on. "Wisdom from home, right? 'There's a difference between a dwarf and a pick-axe.'"
Devorast looked at him, and Hrothgar was momentarily taken aback by the sudden shift in his friend's attention. The dwarf swallowed.
"It means," Hrothgar said after clearing his throat, "that a good king doesn't use his people like tools."
"I'm no one's king," Devorast said.
"Close enough, out here," the dwarf said.
"I've read the complaints."
"I'm not talking about complaints. A man signs up to dig he should shut up and dig; he signs up to cut trees he should get to sawin'. What I mean is how you use your own self, my friend. Doin' the work of a thousand men is only necessary when you don't have a thousand men to do as you say. You don't have to do everything. You don't have to wield every tool, read every supply list. Trust yer people for the Gray Protector's sake."
"You know I don't mean any disrespect at all when I remind you that I don't do anything for the Gray Protector's sake," said Devorast. "I trust the people here to do what they do, but I hold myself to a certain standard and so I hold this canal to that standard, which means I have to hold everyone who touches it to the same standard. You never struck me as the sort who would find that unreasonable. I've seen the standards you set for your own work."
Hrothgar took a breath with the intent to argue, but he couldn't find the words. He wasn't quite sure what to say. If Devorast noticed his discomfiture he made no sign.
The dwarf let his breath out in a sigh and let his gaze
roam around the single room as Devorast sifted through a bowl of loose soil with his fingers. The room was a clutter of sheets of parchment, some as big square as Hrothgar was tall. Drawings had been tacked to the walls, clothes lay in rumpled piles on the floor, and a meager collection of dishes sat clean—perhaps never used—on a little shelf by the stove. Devorast looked much like his quarters. His red hair was clean but in a fashion Hrothgar thought atypical of humans and elves, it was long and uncombed. His skin was weathered from their time in the damp and rain of a winter north of the Lake of Steam. His clothing was simple and practical, sturdy and unadorned. He wore not a single piece of jewelry. His fingertips were stained with the charcoal he used to write and draw, and the dirt he was in some ways moving himself, handful by handful, to form his straight-line river to connect sea to sea.
"If you find a worm in there, save it for me," Hrothgar said, nodding at the bowl of dirt Devorast still sifted through, deep in thought. "I've been meaning to take up this 'fishing' I've heard tell of."
Devorast didn't look up from the bowl when he said, "You won't like fishing."
"Oh, and why not?"
"It depends too much on the whim of the fish."
3__
IS Hammer, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
It's cold outside," Phyrea said, staring out the window, her back to Marek Rymiit. "I hate it when it gets cold like this."
Marek didn't feel cold. There was a bit of a chill in the air, but it never really got too cold in Innarlith. The stinking warm waters of the volcanic Lake of Steam kept the air warm and damp most of the year.
But it wasn't the weather that Marek found interesting just then. It was Phyrea herself.
"It's positively freezing, my dear," he said to her back.
She didn't turn around, but seemed to relax a bit. Her shoulders sagged, but didn't hunch. Marek couldn't shake the feeling that she wanted to turn and face him but was afraid to. He couldn't imagine that she feared him for any reason. She'd never shown any sign of that before, and they had known each other at least in passing for some time.
"There's something different about you," he said, keeping his voice light, though what he began to feel emanating from her was increasingly disturbing. "You've been away."
"I've been at Berrywilde," she all but whispered.
He knew it well. He'd been to one or another social engagement there—her father's country estate. The first time he walked into the main house he knew it was haunted, but no one else seemed to sense it, so he'd kept quiet.
"Lovely," he said. "I've been dabbling myself with a little place... outside the city."
And he would never tell Phyrea just how far outside the city the Land of One Hundred and Thirteen was.
"It's cold," she said again, hugging herself, wrapping her slim fingers around her upper arms. She shivered just enough for Marek to notice.
"Has something scared you?" he said. It was a risk to ask, but Marek couldn't think of a reason not to.
Phyrea stiffened.
"Do you want to tell me about it?" he asked. "Is that why you came here today? To tell me about what—?"
"We don't know each other that well, Master Rymiit."
There was a long silence before Marek finally said, "Of course that's true, isn't it? One could say we're really little more than distant social acquaintances. I'll admit that when I received word that you wanted to come see me in my home I was as surprised as I was intrigued. What is it I can do for you, my dear?"
Still not turning to show him her face, she said, "I have a certain item that I... found."
Marek smiled. He'd heard rumors about her but had never believed them. Could they be true? Could the master builder's beautiful little debutante really be the leather-clad sneak thief that had stolen from the finest families in the city-state? If she was, Marek puzzled over why. Her father was wealthy and well-placed, and she his only family. She couldn't want for anything.
Just like me, he thought, before the zulkir came to take me away.
"Tell me all about it," he prompted, then swept his robes up behind him and sat on a divan of pastel lavender rothehide that had cost him exactly twice the annual income of the average citizen of Innarlith. Marek always liked reminding himself of that otherwise trivial fact.
Phyrea sighed in a way that almost felt to Marek as though she was condemning his musing over the divan, then she said, "It's a sword."
"Is it?" he said around a half-stifled yawn.
"I think it's called a falchion."
"A falchion, then."
"Is that what you call it?" she asked. "The blade is wavy, like water." And as she said that she moved one finger in a series of slow, undulating arcs that almost anyone else in Faerun would surely have found sensual. "Is that a falchion?"
"Flamberge," he corrected. "But surely that's not all you'd like to know."
"I've been assured that you know how to..." She paused and he could tell she was searching for the right word, but it also appeared as though she listened intently to something or someone, though the Thayan wizard heard no sound. "You can read, or sense the magic in things. You can tell me what this sword can do."
"So," he replied, "you came across an enchanted blade at your daddy's country retreat and you'd like me to identify its properties for you?"
She nodded, still not looking at him.
He took a deep breath and said, "Well, you certainly have come to the right place. I won't pretend that I'm not at least a little disappointed that this visit isn't entirely social. I was so hoping we could get to know one another just a little bit better."
"I'll pay you," she said.
"You insult me," he shot back fast, his voice cold.
She stiffened again, and still appeared to be listening at the same time.
"But never mind that," he said. "Do you have the weapon with you?"
She shook her head.
"Well, of course I'll have to not only see it but handle it in order to give you any relevant information. We can work out a mutually beneficial arrangement as far as payment or exchange of services is concerned. But I get the feeling you have one particular question you'd like me to answer."
"The sword kills people," she said.
Marek laughed and said, "Well, then, it's fulfilled its one true destiny, hasn't it?"
"No," Phyrea replied, "that's not what I mean."
She turned to face him, and Marek was taken aback by the cold and terrified gaze she leveled on him. Her eyes shook, though her face remained perfectly calm, almost dead.
"Tell me, girl," he whispered.
"I used it to kill a man," she said, "and he came back."
Marek flinched a little, raised an eyebrow, and asked, "He came back... ?"
Phyrea shuddered, hugged herself again, turned back to face the window though her head tipped down to look at the floor, and said, "A ghoul."
"A sword that makes ghouls, is it?"
"No," she said. "It was a ghast."
"Have you heard about the canal?" he asked, changing the subject as fast as possible in hopes of snapping her out of what seemed almost a hypnotic state.
She turned and faced him again. The terror in her eyes replaced with annoyed curiosity, she asked, "What?"
"This mad man has convinced our dear ransar to give him all the gold in the city in order to dig a trench all the way from the Lake of Steam to the Nagaf low and fill it up with water. I understand it will take a hundred thousand men a hundred thousand years to dig it, but they've begun in earnest."
She didn't seem to believe him, and not just because he'd so greatly exaggerated the number of men and the length of time the project would require. She'd been back in the city long enough that surely she'd have heard of Ivar Devorast and his fool's errand. But she hadn't.
"Does my father know about this?" she asked.
"Of course," Marek replied. "He doesn't like it one bit, of course. A sensible man, your father, his loyalties are with the city-state."
"A canal," she said, her voice a breathy, barely audible whisper. "If they can connect the Sea of Fallen Stars to..."
He watched her stare at the floor, thinking about it. She seemed impressed, and Marek hated that. He hated people who were impressed with that dangerous idea, that mad errand.
"You will bring me the flamberge?" he asked.
Phyrea nodded, but her eyes gave no indication that she'd actually heard him. Again, she listened to something or someone Marek couldn't hear.
So, he thought, the country house isn't the only thing of the master builder's that's haunted.
4_
3Alturiak, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
What is so special," Surero whispered into the cold, damp air of his cell, "about one hundred and twenty-five?"
When they first locked him up, he'd been told that they would feed him once a day. Assuming they had been as good as their word, he'd been in the cell for one hundred and twenty-five days, since the first day of Marpenoth in the Year of the Wave.
"The third," he told himself. "It's the third day of Alturiak."
"That's right," the voice from beyond the door replied.
The sound of the first human voice he'd heard in four months tickled Surero's ears. Much as he'd tried to engage his jailers in conversation, none of them had ever answered. All they did was take the bucket of urine and feces, replace it with an empty bucket, then slide in the moldy, hard bread and the tin cup of water. Sometimes they gave him a strip of pork fat or a fish head.
"Why?" he asked the door. "Why today?"
There was no answer right away, and Surero's heart raced. He stood on legs that had been too weak to support him for most of the last month. They held him, though, even if they were a bit shaky. He'd taken to spending his days sitting against the cool, rough stone of the subterranean cell. He had no window, and after he'd eaten the first two he came across, eventually even the spiders stopped wandering in.
A sound came from behind the door—the clank of keys on a ring.
"Hello?" Surero called out, his own voice hurting his ears, which had grown so accustomed to the utter silence of the tomb.
"Stand away from the door," the man's deep voice rumbled, and Surero imagined it made the heavy, iron-bound oak door quiver as if in fright.
He slid one foot back, then the second foot to meet it, and almost fell. He put a hand against the wall, scraping some skin from his palm, but he held himself up. His eyes burned, and if he'd had enough water in his body, he'd have begun to cry. Instead he just stood there and quivered.
"We're going to let you go," the voice said. "Do you understand?"
Surero's voice caught in his throat. He nodded, but the man wouldn't be able to see him. He stood and waited, and it seemed as though an awfully long time had passed. The door didn't open.
"Rymiit?" he whispered.
Then his throat closed again, and his knees were going to collapse under him, so he sat. He ended up leaning half against the rough stone, his cheek pressed against the wall, his nose filled with the spice of mold.
He's taunting me, Surero thought. They aren't going to let me go. It's Rymiit. He's playing a trick on me.
"He's playing a trick on me," Surero whispered.
Then his teeth closed as tightly as his throat, and his wasted, filthy, clammy body trembled with impotent rage. He boiled inside his six by six cell, and tried to close his ears to the sound of men moving on the other side of the door.
They aren't there, he told himself. Give up. Give up hope.
Surero hadn't had a word of news from the outside world for a hundred and twenty-five days. For all he knew, the hated Marek Rymiit was dead. But he doubted that. Surely the Thayan scum had only further ingratiated himself into the petty aristocracy of Innarlith. Surero had no doubt that Rymiit had taken from more and more people like him. The Thayan had taken his customers, had stolen his formulae, had robbed him of his reputation. Surero, who had lived every moment of his miserable existence in the pursuit of excellence in the alchemical arts, had been reduced to a ragged, homeless, desperate husk of a man, no more substantial a creature than the wretch four months in the ransar's dungeon had made him. When he'd done the only thing fitting, the only thing a man in his position could do, he had failed. Something had gone wrong. The mixture itself had worked and the explosion was powerful, but Marek Rymiit had lived.
And Surero had gone to the dungeon to rot. Forever.
A key turned in the lock. The sound was unmistakable.
Surero looked up at the door, his eyes locked on the very edge so he could perceive any minute crack that might actually open.
Fear washed away his hatred, but the source was the same. Was it Marek Rymiit behind that door? Was it the Thayan robber come to kill him once and for all?
"Rymiit?' he asked, his voice squeaking past his constricted vocal chords.
The door swung open to a flash of blinding light and a deafening squeak of hinges that hadn't been used, much less oiled, in four months. Surero's eyes locked shut against the brilliant illumination of the single torch, and he could only listen as the man stepped into the room, his steps heavy and confident, shaking the stained flagstones beneath them.
"Stand up," the voice commanded, closer and clearer with no door between it and Surero.
"Kill me," Surero croaked, his hands pressed hard against his burning eyes. "Go ahead and kill me, Thayan bastard."
A hand that seemed the size of a god's grabbed a fistful of the soiled linen gown that had been his only clothing since the previous Marpenoth, and took a few dozen chest hairs along with it. Surero winced and shook as he was pulled to his feet.
Hot breath that smelled almost as bad as his cell washed over his face, and the man said, "Who in the Nine perspi-rin' Hells are you calling a Thayan?"
Surero chanced it. He opened one eye.
"You..." he mumbled. "You're not... Rymiit."
"I'm the jailer, wretch," the man said. "I'm the bloke what's been feeding you these months. How's about a little gratitude here, eh?"
Surero swallowed, forgetting how much his throat hurt, and replied, "Yes. Sorry. Thanks."
That made the jailer laugh, and Surero was just relived
enough that it wasn't Rymiit who'd come to claim him that he laughed a little too.
"Are you really...?" the prisoner stuttered. "A-are ... are y-you going to... ?"
"You're all done, mate," the jailer said, setting Surero down and letting go his clothes. "The 'Thayan bastard' said you'd had enough so the ransar's springin' ya. You're free."
"Free?" Surero asked. It was not possible—not for the reasons the jailer gave. "I've had enough?"
"Well, kid, you didn't kill him after all."
"But I tried."
There was a short silence while Surero just looked at the man. He was hardly less filthy that his prisoner, but bigger, better fed, and capable of smiling.
"Maybe," said the jailer, "you'll want to keep that bit to yourself, son."
5_
9Alturiak, the Year ofthe Sword (1365 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
Everybody who would eventually be somebody was there. Willem Korvan made an effort to talk to each and every one of them, but didn't bother listening. He watched their mouths move. He nodded and smiled. From time to time he tipped his head a bit to one side as if really concentrating on what they had to say then he would nod again and smile. Nodding and smiling, he might make a meaningless comment on what they were wearing. Then he would smile and nod. Each and every one of them smiled back, and nodded.
What Willem was most concerned with at the time was the smell. Marek Rynuit's fashionable Second Quarter home had all the right furniture and fixtures, everything predictable and acceptable, but the smell could not be ignored.
Oranges? he thought. No. Nothing so simple. Willem wondered if it could be a combination of things. Oranges after all, maybe, but mixed with... lamp oil? No.
The mortar they'd used on the city wall project combined with a Fourth Quarter beggar's sick and the porridge his mother used to make when he was a boy?
Closer.
"The current state of things," another young senator said to Willem's blank, smiling face, "guarantees naught but that the wealthy grow only wealthier while the poor become increasingly desperate over time. Really, it's up to us, isn't it, Korvan, to set things aright once and for all, just as Master Rymiit suggests?"
Willem smiled and nodded, and the young senator appeared pleased. They wandered away from each other and into the same conversations with different people.
"It did seem radical to me at first," a young woman trolling for a husband said behind too much Shou-inspired makeup. "After all, my family has sold horses for generations and hardly worked as hard as they have in order to see our estates divided among the tradesmen. That idea in particular ... but, well, if Master Rymiit thinks it's best...."
Willem nodded but didn't smile. He caught the woman's eye and detected just enough desperation in her gaze that he fled her presence as quickly as he could.
Looking for Rymiit in the crowded sitting room, Willem began to formulate his excuse for leaving so early. Before he could find his host, though, he was stopped by an apparition.
It had been some time since he'd seen her, but there she stood. She'd just stepped into the room, and all at once the smell was gone, as though the air had refreshed itself in her honor.
"Phyrea," he whispered.
She either heard him or sensed his eyes on her, and she
looked right at him. Willem took a step back and smiled. She stared at him, but didn't smile back. When she stepped into the room the guests parted for her, and it was as if the air itself gave way before her. They weren't afraid to touch her, just unworthy.
Willem stepped forward to meet her and almost stumbled to a stop when Marek Rymiit slid between them. Focused only on Phyrea's jaw-dropping beauty, he hadn't seen the pudgy Thayan.
"Ah, Phyrea," Marek said. "Did I invite you?"
Phyrea smiled at him, and the sight of it made Willem's mouth go dry.
"Ah, Marek," Phyrea replied. "I came anyway."
They shared a conspiratorial smile that made Willem feel as though he should get out of that house as fast he could, then they both noticed him at the same time.
"You've met Willem Korvan," Marek said.
Phyrea nodded but didn't smile, and Willem smiled but didn't nod. The other guests around them seemed to quiver.
"So these are the young masters?" Phyrea asked Marek.
"The heirs apparent, yes," he answered with a grin.
Phyrea, unimpressed, said, "This canal-builder I've heard about..." She turned to Willem. "It's not you."
"No," Willem said. He wanted to elaborate, but the words failed him. Phyrea wasn't listening anyway.
"Is he here?" she asked Marek.
"No, he isn't," said the Thayan, with a hint of fire in his eyes.
"I'm not surprised," Willem ventured, "that you and he wouldn't see eye to eye, Master Rymiit."
Phyrea scanned the room, bored, even exhausted. She wasn't listening.
"The young fool our unfortunate ransar has trusted with this exercise in endless ditch digging?" Marek replied.
"You don't know him?" Willem asked Phyrea.
She shrugged the question off. How could she know Ivar Devorast, after all?
"The last time we spoke, you inquired about a certain item," Marek said to Phyrea. "Tell me you brought it along."
"Hardly," she said, looking around the room so she didn't register Marek's annoyed look.
Their host's expression changed back to its placid, friendly mien and he muttered, "Enjoy my little caucus."
With a bow Phyrea didn't return but Willem did, he was gone.
"Phyrea," Willem said when he saw her begin to take a step away from him.
She turned, impatient, and folded her arms in front of her.
"Come with me," he said, reaching out to take her by the elbow.
She flinched away from him as if his touch would scald her, and Willem's heart leaped. "Please," he said.
She wouldn't look at him, but turned and let him follow her to Marek's veranda. They had to wave their way through huge clay pots that someone told him Marek had gotten from as far as Maztica. The plants were local, but appeared unhealthy.
"Phyrea," he said when he hoped they were alone. He tried to touch her again and she flinched. She made no effort to mask her contempt for him.
"Hate me if you want to," he told her. "It doesn't make me want you any less."
"I don't hate you," she said.
Relieved, Willem sighed.
"I would have to think about you at all to hate you."
She isn't ignoring me, he told himself, then shook his head to try to rid himself of not only the words but the feeling of relief that washed over him.
"I don't care if you hate me, or think of me at all, or love me, or think of me as a brother," he said, the words spilling out of him. "I will serve you. I will be your slave, if that's what you wish. I will do anything to have you. And I may be the only man in this wretched city who understands you—the only one willing to give you everything and ask for nothing in return."
She allowed him the briefest, unconvinced glare.
"I understand that you're the kind of woman that the world has got to come to a screeching halt for," he went on. "You have to be the center not only of attention but of infinity itself."
"If you tell me you love me, I'll kill you where you stand," she said, and he could tell she meant it.
"And if I told you I thought that might be worth dying for?" he asked.
"Then all you'd be telling me is that you're a fool," she shot back. "A boy."
"If-" he started.
"When I was away from the city last summer," she interrupted, "at my father's estate in the country, there was a man. He had me in a way you'll never have me."
Willem could swear at that moment that his heart turned to glass.
"You're pretty," Phyrea said. "You serve well. You make friends easily. You have position and potential, and all of that meaningless stupidity I couldn't possibly find less interesting."
Willem closed his eyes against her words, but they kept coming.
"That man, last summer," she went on, "was a stone mason. He was nothing... no one. He was a brute, but he was more than you'll ever be, and no matter what happens between us for the rest of our lives, Willem, you will never be a tenth the man he is. I'm not even sure it's because he's so great a man or you're so insignificant, but likely a bit of both. And not only did he fail to offer me his
mortal soul, when he left, he didn't even say good-bye."
Willem couldn't quite breathe.
"There," she said. "Still want me?"
He moved his lips, but no sound came out.
"You're pathetic," she whispered as she brushed past him and disappeared behind the dying potted plants.
A drop of cold rain hit the bridge of Willem's nose and made him flinch. He took a breath and sighed.
"Yes," he said to the cool night air, to the rooftops of Innarlith, "I still want you."
6_
l2Alturiak, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) First Quarter, Innarlith
The brutish man came at her with a hook, but it was his smell that Ran Ai Yu found most disturbing. They all smelled bad, as though they were rotting from within—and they looked it too. She'd fought animated corpses that didn't stink so bad.
She slit the dockworker's wrist, and the hook clattered onto the pier. She didn't recognize any of the words that spewed at her from his mostly toothless mouth, but his intent was clear.
"You will stop this," she said to the wounded dock-worker while she kept him at bay with her sword. "I will pay you fairly."
Another string of unintelligible curses followed, and the man made the mistake of reaching for the hook. She cut him again, and he backed away.
"I don't want to kill you," she said.
Another dockworker fell at her feet, pushing the man she'd cut even farther back from her. That man held some kind of crude club and had been kicked in the face hard enough to flatten his nose and soak his face with his own blood.
Ran Ai Yu glanced back in the direction the bloody man had come from. Lau Cheung Fen stood with the great porcelain ship Jie Zud behind him. He stood on one foot, the other hanging in front of him, his knee at waist level. The morning sun shone from his shaved head, which sat atop his unusually large neck in a loose, comfortable way, as if suspended from above by a wire.
The little hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.
Something hit her on the side of the face. Her teeth rattled, and her vision flared white, but she was still able to get her blade up fast enough to slap away the second blow. The man she'd cut had been joined by two more, as ragged and reeking as he. Though it was barely past dawn, they were drunk. Ran Ai Yu heard her passenger kick two more men. She could only hope that he could take down enough of them to get to her before the two dockworkers that fast approached her joined the three she did her best to fend off. They were drunk, slow, and brutish, but five was too many for her.
"I will pay you," she said.
Her face felt hot. The horrible men leered at her like hungry dogs.
"You'll pay all right," the man she'd cut growled at her—perhaps he was a dog. "But not with coin."
Ran Ai Yu shifted her weight back onto her rear foot and set her sword blade parallel with the pier. She looked the lead thug in the eyes, sensed he was going to shift right, and that's what he did. She let him step into the sword tip, but didn't stab him. The blade only went in the barest fraction of an inch. She didn't want to kill him. If she killed him, she'd have to kill the rest of them.
His two friends lunged at her, and Ran Ai Yu stepped back a few fast steps. Then one of the men fell flat on his face. She watched a stone roll along the wood planks, and blinked at it.
When the second man fell she relaxed her stance, and let her sword arm fall to her side, the blade crossed in front
of her legs. She stood like that and watched Ivar Devorast knock the other man to the ground with his fist. He smiled at her over the man's limp form, and she smiled back. A thud from behind her turned her attention back to her passenger. Lau Cheung Fen, like Devorast, stood over the unconscious bodies of drunken dockhands. "Miss Ran," Devorast said.
She turned back to face him, sheathed her sword, and said, "Master Devorast, is good to see you once again." Lau Cheung Fen stepped up behind her, and she added, "May I present my passenger, the honorable Lau Cheung Fen of Liaopei."
"Mister Lau," he said. "Are you injured? Do you need any further assistance?"
"Your manner..." Lau said. "So like Shou." Devorast just looked at him.
"We will require a crew to unload our cargo," Ran Ai Yu answered. "These men tried to..." She paused, searching for the word.
"Who is this manfLau asked her in Kao te Shou, their native tongue.
She looked at Devorast, but detected no outward trace that he was offended by Lau's speaking in front of him in a language he did not understand.
"Master Ivar Devorast is the man who created the great Jie ZuoV'she answered in the Common Tongue of Faerun.
"Ah," Lau responded, and his head bent low on that strange long neck of his. His eyes glittered black in the sunshine. "You are the great genius. It is truly an honor to meet you, Master Devorast."
"Master Lau is a most important dignitary from my province," Ran said in hopes that she could help Devorast frame his response properly.
"Thank you, Master Lau," Devorast said, but his eyes stayed on Ran Ai Yu.
"You have built many such ships, then," Lau said. "I should purchase a number of them. Though my home is far
from the sea, many in Shou Lung have commented on the strange and wonderful ship of Ran Ai Yu, and would pay much for one of her kind."
"There are no more of her kind," Devorast said before Ran could say the same thing.
"You have sport of me," said her passenger.
"No," Ran Ai Yu cut in. "He has built only this one, and will build no more like her."
"This is true?" he asked Devorast.
"It is," was the Faerunian's only reply.
"7s this some secret the white men seek to keep from us?" Lau asked in Kao te Shou.
"With apologies, Master Devorast," she said, then turned to Lau. "It is no secret. He is a very unusual man, and that is all. He will likely find it rude, however, if we continue to speak in a language he does not understand. With respect, Master Lau, he is a friend and important trade contact."
"Indeed," Lau replied, then bowed to Devorast. "Please accept my most humble apologies for my rudeness, Master Devorast. Perhaps you would be so kind.. .if you no longer build your tile ships, what is it that occupies you? Perhaps if it is one of a kind as well, I might have it instead."
"It's a canal," Devorast replied.
The two Shou merchants exchanged a glance.
"Pardon me," Lau said. He asked Ran Ai Yu, "Kuh-nahl?" She gave him the word in their language, and he nodded. "Well, then I will not be able to take it with me. Pray, where is this canal?"
"Northwest of here," he replied.
"To connect the Lake of Steam with your great Inner Sea," Ran Ai Yu said. Devorast nodded.
"This will be a mighty boon to trade," said Lau.
"For me," said Devorast, "it's a canal."
"I should like to see it," Ran Ai Yu said. A memory tickled the edge of her consciousness—a similar conversation that she had had with Devorast when she'd last seen him.
"I should like to show it to you," he said. "But in the meantime, we should see to a dock crew for you."
"Is this the way trade is always conducted here? With such violence?" asked the tall merchant—a man Ran Ai Yu had her suspicions was no human at all. He gestured to the fallen dockhands, some of them beginning to rise.
"It was not so when I was last here, two years and three months ago," said Ran.
"They made a mistake," Devorast said.
Ran Ai Yu smiled.
7___
20Alturiak, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) The Canal Site
When she first saw the work site Ran Ai Yu thought it was some kind of military drill. The sight of it gave the immediate impression of rigid organization that she had only experienced at the edge of a parade ground. But then details presented themselves, pieces took shape out of the whole, and that impression disappeared. She was left with chaos—madness, even—a barrage of colors and dizzying movement that erased any sense of organization at all, until she once again let those details melt into the beautiful whole.
"These men are all at your command?" she asked Devorast, who stood beside her on a low hill.
The sound of the men working deafened her, but then Devorast didn't answer anyway. Picks chipped stone, shovels moved dirt and clay, and carts trundled past full of rocks, earth, wood, and more men. Oxen grunted, foremen shouted orders, and it was like music for a great dance.
"This is as it should be," she said, unconcerned with whether or not Devorast could hear her. "You will find your destiny here. Your spirit will fill itself with this work."
The heavy, damp air carried the smell of the Lake of Steam, but only faintly under the stench of turned earth and sweating bodies. It smelled like hard work.
"I hope you live to see its completion," she said.
Devorast shrugged—a response that would have been considered rude in Shou Lung—but she took no offense.
Ran Ai Yu crouched and touched the dirt at her feet. It was damp but not muddy, and she was able to scoop up a handful, testing the weight of it in her hand. She tried to imagine the weight of the dirt and rock, the trees and weeds, that Devorast meant to move to make the trench for his canal. Then she tried to imagine the weight of the water that would fill it, and though she'd plied the waters of a far greater canal in her far-off homeland, still the weight felt unbearable.
"You will not require that I tell you how many people there must be... powerful people even... who will wish for you to fail," she told him.
He waited for her to look up at him before he shrugged again.
She let the dirt pour out through her fingers, and something made her touch the tip of her tongue. She didn't try to understand the impulse to taste it any more than she wanted to stop it. She just wanted to taste it—wanted to experience it with every one of her senses. It tasted like life, but not the same way food or water tasted; not physical life, but a deeper need within each human, the drive to build, the imperative to leave something behind, to make some mark. It tasted like the vital necessity to say, "I was here."
"Yes," he said, "you are."
Ran Ai Yu felt her cheeks redden and her ears burn. She stood, avoiding his eyes.
"I had not meant to... to speak that," she stammered, her Common almost deserting her.
Devorast said, "I've tasted it too."
She smiled at that, and smiled wider than she felt
proper in front of a man she had not—
The Shou merchant pushed that thought away before it was completed.
"This is supported by your leader," she asked, "your ransar?"
"I don't consider him my ransar," Devorast replied, "but yes, it is."
"Both with the gold to pay these men and to buy their tools and materials, and so on," she said then had to pause to again search her memory for the correct word. "Politically?"
Devorast nodded. He didn't look at her. Instead, his eyes darted from one part of the realization of his genius to another.
"It is my understanding, having traveled to Innarlith on more than one occasion," she went on, "and over more than a few years, that their ransar is a temporary post. Is this not true?"
He glanced at her with a mischievous grin that further embarrassed her, and said, "Any job that is answerable to others could be called temporary."
"Ah, and is that not true of master builder?"
"I'm not the ransar's master builder," he said.
"Even worse for you, I should think."
He looked at her again, but for a longer time, and she finally met his gaze.
"If it is the ransar's gold and the ransar's men," she said, "then you work for him, whether either of you admit it or not. If... pardon me, when there is a new ransar, will that ransar be as generous? Will he be as taken with this canal as is Osorkon?"
Devorast replied, "Perhaps, but perhaps not. Of course, I've considered that."
"And you have a plan?"
Devorast was silent.
"Meykhati," she said. "You've heard this name? You know this man?"
"I've heard the name."
"There is a reception at his home in six days' time," Ran Ai Yu said. "I have been invited, and you should come with me there."
"I have no time for social—"
"Do you have time to bury your garbage to keep the seagulls away?" she asked, glancing up at the sky but gesturing with one open hand at a refuse pit.
He didn't follow her gaze. He knew there were no gulls.
"Of course you do," she said. "You make time for what is important for the completion of your canal, even if it is not pleasant to consider or to do."
Again, silence.
"Meykhati will likely be the next ransar," she said. "How do you know that?"
"I do not know that," Ran Ai Yu replied. "I have heard it said by people who I have reason to believe have reason to believe it. That is enough, for me, to begin to acquaint myself with this man so that he knows my name and my face, knows my trade, in the event that these people are correct."
"And I should do the same," he said. "I should ingratiate myself to this pointless, mumbling busybody so that on the off chance that he succeeds Osorkon he will continue to support the canal?"
"Master Lau Cheung Fen will be there," she added, "at this gathering of Meykhati's friends and associates."
"And sycophants."
"And those who think ahead."
He shook his head.
"Perhaps," she said, "if Meykhati feels well toward you and your efforts here, with Meykhati as ransar, you will be his master builder, even if you are not Osorkon's."
"I have no interest in titles and offices," Devorast told her. "I build to build, not to advance myself in the Second Quarter."
"I understand that the master builder of the moment
may have decided to keep hold of that title and office anyway, should Meykhati advance. He will be there with his daughter."
Devorast stiffened—not much, barely enough for Ran Ai Yu to notice. Could it be that Devorast sought the post of master builder after all? Or was it something else she'd said?
"Perhaps," he said. "Yes. Fine."
8_
26Alturiak, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
]Marek watched the dancers for a few heartbeats, then watched one of the partygoers watching the dancers, then the dancers again, then another guest, on and on. He hadn't come to Meykhati's ridiculous affair for the pleasure of it, after all, but to do what he always did.
The dancers had been brought by the exotic merchant Lau Cheung Fen, and the guests were dazzled by their otherworldly beauty and alien gestures. Seven women dressed in silk gowns eovered in tiny brass bells and what appeared to be miniature cymbals, twitched and jerked to the strains of a Shou "musician" who made the most horrendous, atonal bleats on some kind of unwieldy string instrument. Marek's head began to pound, and he found he had to use a spell to make the "music" fade from his hearing, to be replaced by the private, often whispered conversations of Meykhati's other guests.
"Miss Phyrea," the Shou woman Ran Ai Yu, who Marek found almost as fascinating as he did frustrating said with a shallow bow. "I have not had the pleasure to see your father this evening."
"He's not here," Phyrea choked out.
The beautiful, haunted daughter of the inept master builder couldn't even look at the Shou woman. Her eyes
had fastened themselves to the red-headed man who stood at Ran Ai Yu's side. Marek had never been formally introduced to the man, but he knew who Ivar Devorast was. So too, it would seem, did Phyrea. Devorast, if he recognized the master builder's daughter at all, gave no outward sign of it. For all that, the man gave no outward sign of anything. Phyrea squirmed under his ambivalent glances.
Yes, Marek Rymiit thought, much more interesting than dancing girls.
"May I introduce you to Ivar Devorast of Cormyr," Ran Ai Yu said.
Marek found the look on Phyrea's face so priceless he just had to smile and clap his hands. The other guests around him clapped as well, apparently thinking he was applauding the performance.
"Aren't they just?" a shrill voice invaded from his side. The effect of the spell made it painfully loud, and Marek couldn't stifle a grunt and body-racking twitch. "Goodness, Master Rymiit. Are you well?"
Meykhati's awful wife.
He forced a smile and nodded. "Yes, quite," he whispered, his own voice rattling his ears. "I would hate to further interrupt the music."
The woman smiled and made a childlike motion as though she were locking her lips closed. A spell that would actually do that came to Marek's mind, but he suppressed the nearly overwhelming urge to cast it, and a second incantation that would make the lock permanent. Instead, he kept his ears on the Shou merchant and her odd little couple, while his eyes made a great show of adoring the dancers from beyond the Utter East.
"No," Phyrea said, her voice so thick with the lie that Marek wished he could at least glance at Ran Ai Yu's face to be sure she detected it as well, but alas Meykhati's hideous wife still stood at his elbow, believing him to be every inch the dilettante her husband was. "No, we haven't met."
"I would have remembered, I'm sure." Devorast must have lied too, but there was no hint of that in his steady, uninterested voice.
"Of course, though," Phyrea said, "I have heard of your great... your great undertaking."
Two of the dancers swayed their hips to the jarring rhythm while the other five stood as still as statues. Marek found their utter lack of motion interesting, but only passingly so. The two lead dancers jangled their bells and otherwise made rhythmic hissing and pinging noises. They waved their hands in a way that Marek thought looked a bit like they might be casting spells, but he detected no fluctuation in the Weave.
"It keeps me occupied," Devorast replied. "I am away from the city for prolonged periods."
"Are you?" Phyrea accused. Marek raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps that explains why our paths have never even once crossed, though we seem to know many of the same people."
"Not too many," Devorast assured her. "Meykhati, at least," she said.
Devorast shook his head, but it was Ran Ai Yu who said, "I asked Master Devorast to come with me tonight so that he might make the acquaintance of the senator."
"And have you?" Phyrea asked Devorast.
"We have been introduced," he replied.
The two lead dancers wiggled back to the line behind them, and looking for all the world like water foul plucking food from a still pond, pecked one each of their companions and froze. Those so pecked began to sway and slipped out of line to take over the incomprehensible series of motions. The music changed too, going from one set of atonal pings to a series of bursts of grinding metal. Marek resisted the urge to flee.
"It can be a burden, can't it?" asked Phyrea.
"Ma'am?" Devorast prompted.
"Having too many friends."
"I wouldn't know."
"Wouldn't you?" she asked, and Marek got the feeling she thought she might be toying with Devorast. Silly girl. "You seem like a man who would have unusual friends. Like Miss Yu, here."
"Miss Ran," Devorast corrected, and Marek so wanted to see Phyrea squirm. But instead, he watched the dancers sway around each other like two snakes reluctant to mate. "I have friends, yes. I don't feel burdened by them."
"Sometimes I feel so burdened I can hardly stand," Phyrea said, and again Marek lifted an eyebrow.
"Perhaps you don't have enough to occupy your mind," Devorast said.
"Should I build a canal then?"
"No," he told her, still without a trace of emotion. "But you can do anything else." "I wish that were so."
"It is," he assured her, and Marek felt bile rise in his throat.
"Oh, yes, my darling," Meykhati's pinch-faced wife whispered at Marek's elbow. Her hissing voice was so loud to him that Marek had to close his eyes. "Straight away."
With that, at least she was gone.
As the new lead pair of dancers worked their way back to the line behind them, Marek turned to glance at Phyrea and Devorast. Ran Ai Yu had wandered off to be replaced by Lau Cheung Fen, who took Devorast by the arm.
The Shou gentleman had no trouble pulling Devorast away from Phyrea, who all but ran to the farthest corner of the large room, disappearing into a crowd of her father's friends and political associates. Devorast didn't watch her go, but a twitch of his eye betrayed him to one as observant as Marek Rymiit.
This, the Red Wizard thought, is a relationship I will need to follow as closely as possible.
Two new dancers began to quiver so quickly they appeared in the throws of some sort of catalepsy. The jangle
of their various bells and cymbals began to intrude on Marek's spell, and he noted a few in the crowded room place hands to their ears to fend off the foreign cacophony.
"I will leave it to you to determine the advantages to you and your trade," Devorast told Lau Cheung Fen.
"And there is nothing you wish to add?" the Shou asked. "I should think that to have the endorsement of the merchant fleets of Shou Lung would be for you a very ... ah, but help with the word... ?"
"Advantageous?" Devorast provided.
Sharp, Marek thought. Very sharp of mind indeed, this shipwright turned canal builder.
Lau sketched a shallow bow and said, "To have this advantageous support from afar would give you greater support at home, is that not true?"
"I have all the support I need," Devorast replied, and Marek cringed at the supreme self-confidence of that, the bold naivete. "I will build the canal, who uses it and why makes no difference to me."
"Ivar," Willem Korvan said, appearing from the crowd holding a half-full tallglass of Inthelph's upstart local vintage. He took Devorast by the arm and bowed to the Shou. "If I may."
Lau Cheung Fen appeared reluctant to release him, but apparently felt he had no choice and returned Willem's bow.
All seven of the dancers began to move in a slow, fluid motion that Marek assumed most men would find alluring. For him, though, there was Willem Korvan. The young senator's immaculate dress complimented his perfect features. Next to the disheveled, weather-beaten, ill-dressed Devorast, Willem appeared soft, still in the full flower of youth. Though Marek had heard the two were of an age, he would have thought Ivar Devorast at least a decade Willem Korvan's senior.
"Is that the best you can do?" Willem said to Devorast, the contempt soaking each word in bile.
"Hello, Willem," Devorast said. "Is that the best you can do?"
"Is there something you need from me?" asked Devorast.
Willem's handsome face went flat, his jaw tight and his lips twisted.
"Do you realize that that one man could—" Willem started to say, and just then Marek's spell faded out, and the clashing harmonics of the exotic music once more assaulted his ears.
He started moving in the direction of the two Cormyreans before he even made up his mind as to which of the several reasons for doing so drove him over there. Did he want to break up what might become and unseemly brawl? Other than the fact that it would be a shame should something happen to damage Willem's-face, why on spinning Toril would he care if the two men came to blows? Of course, he wanted to hear their conversation but knew that as soon as he was close enough to hear them without the aid of a spell they'd stop talking in front of him.
Whatever the reason, he arrived at their side in a shot, but refused to look at Devorast.
"Ah, Senator Korvan," he gushed, "there you are."
"Master Rymiit," Willem mumbled, his face red, his eyes darting around as though he were a rabbit caught in a snare. "May I present—"
Marek didn't want to be introduced to Ivar Devorast just then. Not yet, he thought. So he clamped his hand on Willem's arm and squeezed.
"Master Rymiit...." Willem almost protested, but let himself be led away at a pace that drew alarmed glances from the mingling aristocrats around them.
When they were out of earshot of Ivar Devorast, Rymiit said, "Really, Senator, you should take care with whom you're seen conversing."
"But—" the pretty weakling started to protest.
"Go tell our host how much you enjoy this hideous
clanging and stomping about," he said, pushing Willem away, but releasing his grip only slowly, and with some reluctance.
Willem looked down at his hand with vague discomfort, but Marek was quickly distracted by Phyrea. The girl stood on her tiptoes, peering as best she could above the heads of the other guests. The crowd erupted in insincere applause for the imported entertainment, and Marek stopped to make a show of it. His eyes never left Phyrea though, and he took some interest in her crestfallen mien.
As the applause died down, he made his way to her side. She looked up at him as if he were the last man in Faerun she wanted to see, and maybe he was.
"Master Rymiit," she said, "hello again."
"Hello again to you too, my dear. I couldn't help but notice... were you looking for someone?"
She sighed, her shoulders slumped, and she looked off to her right at nothing.
"Phyrea?"
"Yes," she answered fast. "No. I mean ... that man. Devorast is his name."
"The savior of merchant captains across Toril, yes," Marek mumbled. "What of him?"
"He's..."
"Gone, yes," Marek said. "I'm sure Senator Korvan told me he was just leaving. Surely you don't have anything to do with that beastly man."
She nodded and shook her head at the same time, and Marek risked a playful laugh at her confusion.
"The ransar—" she started.
"Is not immune to the occasional ill-considered decisions, my dear," he finished for her. "I assure you that Ivar Devorast is just that."
"Still, there's something about him, don't you think?"
"No," he lied. "There's nothing about him at all but a man in deep water who hasn't sorted out that he's already drowned."
Phyrea wasn't listening. Marek could tell. She listened to someone else, and nodded ever so slightly in response.
What do you hear? Marek Rymiit wondered. What do you know?
9_
27Alturiak, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) The Canal Site
The stout wooden planks that braced the sides of the trench shattered. They crumbled to sawdust all at once; an explosion of brown dust that followed a loud sizzling sound that must have been a million softer cracks all intermingled.
Hrothgar looked up at the sound. He'd heard a lot of new, strange sounds in his time among humans, under the limitless sky and so near the unforgiving sea, but he'd been at the canal site long enough to grow accustomed to its noises, and that one—those millions at once—didn't belong. Because of the sound, though, he saw the planks shatter, and the dried-mud walls begin to crumble. He saw the men inside paw at their dust-blinded eyes, and their screams tore up from the depths of the trench. As tall as the humans were, the lip of the trench towered over their heads, twice again as tall as the tallest of the diggers.
"By the unhewn rock of Deepshaft Hall," the dwarf cursed. "They'll be-"
Devorast pushed past him at a run, but it took some time for Hrothgar to realize they were being attacked. At first the trench collapse was just another accident—not that there had been many. In fact, Hrothgar had commented to Devorast and to his cousin Vrengarl on many occasions already how surprised he was that so few men had been injured, and how incomprehensible it was that no one had yet died for the cause of the canal. What they were building was so big, there were so many men, and so
many things that could go wrong.
A trench could cave in, but what made the planks explode into dust?
The wind had been light all day, the clouds gray but thin and dry. Though Hrothgar could hardly be called an expert on the ways of wind and storm, the wind that blew the dirt onto those poor diggers didn't just blow in on its own from the Lake of Steam.
He ran after Devorast, not bothering to consider how many times he'd done just that in only the past few years. Devorast reached the crumbling edge of the trench long before the dwarf. He skidded to a stop, sending dust swirling around his toes only to be whipped into a series of tiny little tornadoes around his feet.
Then the wind changed again, and lifted Devorast off the ground. The human hurtled backward through the air, his arms pinwheeling at his sides in a vain attempt to either stop or control his sudden flight. He slammed hard into Hrothgar. The dwarf tried to wrap his arms around the human's waist, made every effort to catch him, but was rewarded with a broken nose, a poked eye, and an impact on his chest hard enough to drain his lungs of air.
They ended up on the ground in an undignified sprawl, their hair and clothing still whipping around them in the sourceless gust of hurricane-force wind.
"The men!" Devorast barked.
His eyes were closed, and blood trickled from under the line of his shaggy red hair. Hrothgar blinked back unwelcome tears and shot blood and snot out of his nose in a painful exhalation that at least let him start to breathe again. The two of them stood at the same time, neither helping the other to his feet.
By the time Hrothgar reoriented himself, the trench was gone. Wind whipped the dirt so thoroughly that anyone passing by who had not seen it only moments before, would never have suspected that there had been a hole there at all.
"Five men," Hrothgar growled to himself.
He looked to Devorast, who stood tall but still. His head moved to one side, then the other.
"What is it?" the dwarf asked casting about for a weapon. Where's my gods bedamned hammer? he thought. "Is it some mage? Some wind wizard?"
Devorast stopped—he saw something. Hrothgar moved back and his foot kicked something heavy. Without looking, he reached down and grabbed it—just an old tree limb the clean-up crew had missed.
It'll do, he thought, then followed Devorast's gaze.
"Sweet Haela's bum," the dwarf oathed.
"Naga," Devorast said.
The human relaxed. Hrothgar couldn't believe it. He hefted the makeshift club and stepped forward, but Devorast didn't move. He faced the creature as if they were old friends, and Hrothgar realized that perhaps they were.
"What do you want here, nqja'ssara?" Devorast called out.
The creature hissed at him. For all the world it was a giant snake, but with a human's face. That face held all the hate, anger, and violent rage Hrothgar had ever associated with humans, and more. The dwarf could only guess that the thing was a male.
"Ivar," he said, "you told us that you—"
"Speak," Devorast called to the naga, ignoring the dwarf.
"This false river will not be realized," the thing said. Hrothgar didn't like its voice, not one bit. "Go from here, dista'ssara. Go now, or more will die."
Devorast crouched and picked up a rock. The action elicited from the naga a sound that Hrothgar assumed to be a laugh. He liked that sound even less than its speaking voice.
"What of Svayyah?" Devorast demanded. "She and I-" "Svayyah?" the naga shrieked, hurling the name at Devorast as if it were a spear. What it said next had no
meaning Hrothgar could fathom. Devorast threw the rock at the same time it spoke.
As the rock arced through the air, four slivers of red-orange light appeared perhaps a yard in front of the naga and arrowed through the intervening space, unerringly for Devorast. When they hit him, the human staggered back with a grunt. His face twisted in what Hrothgar perceived to be frustration, not pain—certainly not fear-but he kept on his feet.
The rock Devorast had thrown went wide—but then, it shouldn't have.
Hrothgar blinked and shook his head. The naga was there, then it was just a step or two to the side of there. The rock was supposed to hit the thing but...
But you've seen it use foul magic, the dwarf told himself. Now here's more.
"All right then," he said aloud so Devorast could, perhaps, benefit from his wisdom, "aim a yard or so to the snake's left."
As if they'd planned it that way, a work gang bearing all sorts of nasty implements—shovels, awls, picks, and hammers—came up over a rise, attracted by the wind and commotion. They'd seen Devorast staggered by the naga's magic, and though Devorast had assured them all that he'd garnered the snake-people's support, even those simple men could add two and two. They rushed at the naga.
"Careful, boys," Hrothgar tried to warn them, "it's—"
The thing let loose another string of nonsense words, and light flashed in the air. There was no getting a sense of the source of it and there were so many colors it was impossible for the eye to pick one from the next. Devorast turned his face away.
"Don't look at it!" Devorast shouted, but only Hrothgar was able to heed his words.
The on-rushing gang stopped dead in their tracks, eyes wide, moths agape, fixed in their places and thoroughly mesmerized by the naga's incandescent display.
"Damn their eyes," Hrothgar muttered.
He charged, trying not to consider what bizarre and horrendous fate the snake monster with the human face had in store for him.
One hit, he thought, slapping the tree limb against his palm as he ran. Just one.
Devorast threw another rock, and the naga started to rattle off another one of its spells. Hrothgar sent a silent thanks to Clangeddin Silverbeard that the rock not only beat the incantation from its mouth, but actually struck the creature a glancing blow. Surprised more than hurt, the thing stumbled over its words then growled in frustration. Sparks of blue and green light played in the air around its head, but that was all, and Hrothgar was there.
He swung hard and spun a full circle when the club missed its target. All his warrior's instincts—by the Nine Hells, all his stonecutter's instincts—told him he should have hit the thing, but it simply wasn't where it appeared to be.
"Fool!" the naga hissed at him, then said something else in either the language of the wizards or the language of the nagas. The dwarf hoped it was the latter.
Hrothgar swung again with the tree limb, but at what appeared to him to be thin air just to the creature's left. He felt the branch scrape something, but couldn't see anything. The naga twitched its tail and though it appeared as if the tip of it was a full armslength from Hrothgar's side, it slapped him hard enough to crack a rib—but that was the least of it.
The dwarf's body spasmed and shook, and his teeth clamped down hard.
He'd lost his club and tried to find it. There it was—in Devorast's hands.
The human swung the club hard from right to left across his body, and it hit something more or less near the naga, who reacted as though it had taken the full force of
the blow. Devorast lost his grip on the club, and it went whirling past Hrothgar's face.
"It pays!" the naga shrieked. "It pays or more of its stinking kind dies!"
Hrothgar looked up at the sound of another muttered incantation—a short one—and watched the naga slither away at such a speed____
"Look at it... go," he huffed out.
Devorast dropped the club on the ground at his feet. Hrothgar stood, his whole body still tingling from whatever the naga had done to him.
"You hurt it bad, my friend," the dwarf said, bending to retrieve the makeshift weapon. "But you can bet it'll be back."
Devorast didn't even bother to shrug that off. He ran for the spot where the trench had collapsed. Hrothgar followed, grunting with pain the whole way. They dug as fast as they could, brought in as many men as would fit around the trench, but not one of the five diggers were pulled out alive.
IP _
5 Ches, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) Third Quarter, Innarlith
S he hadn't done any of the things she would have expected herself to do.
She had taken no one's advice. She'd used none of her father's—her family's—gold. The rented flat wasn't in the worst part of Innarlith, but it wasn't in the best either. Deep in the Third Quarter, it was a tradesman's flat above a vacant storefront that used to sell cheese. She hated the smell that was left behind and under any other circumstances never would have put up with it. It was the kind of building she'd have burned down just because she didn't like it. She spent not a single silver on
furniture or decorations, and even promised herself—and any disembodied spirits that might be listening in—that she would sleep on the stained mattress, sit on the flea-ridden chair, and keep her clothes in the cupboard with the rat skeleton and the hardened undergarment the previous tenant—perhaps the cheesemonger's wife—had left behind. She didn't bring the flamberge, and had not even a slim dagger or kitchen knife with which she might cut herself.
Phyrea sat on the floor. She had a candle, but had forgotten to bring anything with which to light it, so she sat in the dark.
She folded her arms in front of her and doubled over. Her stomach hurt almost as much as her head throbbed She wanted to cut herself so badly she wanted to scream. ¦ But she wouldn't let herself do either of those things.
The ghosts screamed louder and louder as the room grew darker and darker.
Cut yourself.
You long for it, came a shrieking wail. We know you crave the cold bite of steel. That thin chill of the blade passing through your own flesh, and the delicious quiver of your hand as you force it to draw your own blood.
The sword.
That blade bites the best.
Use the flamberge, they screamed at her in a chorus of disembodied howls. Let it drink you in. Let it bring you to us.
One of them said, Take me home. I don't like it here. Take me back to Berrywilde. Berrywilde____
It sounded like a little girl, but Phyrea could feel its soul sometimes, and it was the cold, bitter, mean spirit of a devil.
"No," she whimpered into the deathly quiet of the merchant quarter at night. "Get out of me."
A man screamed into her ear in inarticulate rage, but no real sound disturbed the silence. The voices didn't
speak into her ear, but rather from it.
"Tell me what you want," she asked, though they'd told her before. She wanted a different answer.
Cut yourself.
Use the sword—the sword I gave you.
Don't give it to him. Don't give it to the Thayan.
Go home.
Take us back to our pretty home and stay with us there forever.
Kill forme. Give us your life. Spill your blood. Phyrea shook her head.
She'd gone there—rented the flat, broken from her life in whatever ways she could—in the hope of gaining some clearer understanding. Perhaps, she'd thought, in the silence of a strange place, away from the people and the places that kept the ghosts rooted in her, she might find some answers.
Did you hope to catch us off guard? one of them—a little boy by the sound of his voice, but a monster by the cold dread that followed his words—asked. What did you hope? That we would just rot in the ground, or that we would be frightened by the stench of rotten cheese? Have you ever smelted the inside of your own moldering casket?
Phyrea shook her head.
Of course you haven't, a woman whispered at the edge of a sob. But you will.
Phyrea opened her eyes, wondering how long she'd had them closed, and saw them gathered all around her. They loomed over her, each one drawn in the air from violet light. They existed as a glow, as a sourceless luminescence, and as voices.
Free us, a little boy with one arm demanded through stern, gritted teeth.
Free yourself, the man with the scar on his cheek said.
Phyrea shook her head, pressed her hands to her temples.
Cut yourself, a woman whispered in her ear so close it made her jump. The desperation plain in the woman's voice made tears well up in Phyrea's eyes. Maybe it will make it go away.
Phyrea began to sob so hard she feared her ribs would crack, and that fear only made her cry some more.
Feel that little pain, the woman—the ghost—went on. Just a little pain of the body makes all the pain of the mind go away. At least for a little while, yes? Just a little? Isn't that good? Doesn't that make it go away? Can't you just make it go away?
Still crying, Phyrea nodded.
Trust us, said the man with the z-shaped scar—some long-dead relative she'd never known. We love you. Will you listen while we tell you some things you need to do?
Phyrea wiped the tears from her eyes only to feel her cheeks soaked with tears again a scant heartbeat later.
Trust us, the old woman insisted.
Phyrea started to nod, and the ghosts started to laugh.
11_
7 Ches, the Yearofthe Sword (1365 DR) The Canal Site
This is disgraceful," Phyrea said.
She glanced to her left to make sure the strange man was looking at her—he was.
She folded her arms in front of her and let a breath hiss out through her nose. The man didn't speak, but Phyrea knew he'd heard and understood her.
A very short man—no taller than a halfling, but he looked human—rushed up to the stranger and spoke to him in a language Phyrea didn't recognize, though she assumed it was the language of Shou Lung, from whence they'd come.
Lau Cheung Fen answered the little man in clipped
tones that sent the servant scurrying away as fast as he'd approached.
"You object, Miss, to the viewing station or to the endeavor itself?" the Shou merchant asked.
Phyrea paused to consider her response carefully. She'd learned from Meykhati's dreary wife that Shou would only respect slow speech and careful responses.
"Please accept my assurance, Master Lau," she said, "that this is a subject that I have given considerable study. I object to both."
The merchant nodded.
"This canal is a fool's errand," she added.
"I have heard quite differently of this Ivar Devorast," Lau replied.
"There are some who mistake madness..." she began, but stopped to think. Then she continued, "Thank you, Master Lau, for letting me reconsider what I was ... for letting me think."
"One should do precisely that," he said, "before one speaks. But in fact there is more of interest to me in what your first response might have been than in what you might believe I wish to have you say."
Phyrea let one side of her mouth turn up in a smile. Though he was alien to her in so many ways, she could feel him respond to her beauty the same as any Innarlan.
"I hope," she said, "that those who have given you reason to believe that this canal will be of ;use to your trade will think again. This Devorast has ideas and passions, but he has no true skill."
"He will not be able to finish this?" the Shou asked.
Phyrea looked down at the toes of her boots and sighed. She scraped a line of dried mud from her boot across the wood planks.
"I think this ... station, as you called it," Phyrea said, "is all one needs to see to understand the nature of this canal." She put as much sarcasm as she could into that last word—and feared it might have been a bit too much. "This
is for show. It's a performance. A master manipulator is at work here, not a master builder."
Lau Cheung Fen nodded, and looked out over the men scurrying this way and that, going about the complicated business of digging a miles-long trench from the Lake of Steam to the Nagaf low.
"Soon," Phyrea went on, "this will all stop. This will all be closed down, and all these men will go back to Innarlith."
"I was to understand that he had the support of your ransar," Lau said.
"And he does, for the time being. That will surely change once the gold has run out."
"The ransar's gold?" Lau asked.
"The gold he's already given Devorast," Phyrea told him. "It's all the gold he's going to get—all the gold the ransar will give him. And from what I have been told, there might be enough coin left for a tenday's work. No more."
Lau Cheung Fen nodded again, and she thought it appeared as though he was considering her words. At least she hoped he was.
You're hurting him, the sad woman's voice asked her. Why?
She felt her cheek begin to twitch and so she turned away from the Shou merchant.
"To begin, and not to end____" Lau Cheung Fen said,
trailing off with a shake of his head.
"It might still be finished," Phyrea offered, "but not by Devorast."
WAy?the woman asked again.
But it was the old man, his voice a hoarse croak, who answered, Because she can.
Phyrea smiled and Lau asked, "By someone else then?"
"The master builder of Innarlith," she said, "has an apprentice who by all accounts has surpassed him in skill if not position. This man is a senator in Innarlith, well liked and with all the right friends. He will be master builder himself soon, and this canal, should the ransar
decide it's indeed something that should be finished, will be—should be—completed by him."
Phyrea swallowed. Her mouth and throat had gone entirely dry. Her chest felt tight, and she drew in a breath only with some difficulty.
"For me," said Lau Cheung Fen, "it matters only that there is a canal. If Ivar Devorast or... ?"
"Willem Korvan," she said.
"Or Willem Korvan builds it, it will mean nothing to my ships. If there is water between here and there, they will float."
Phyrea bobbed down in a small bow and grinned. Her upper lip stuck for half a heartbeat on her sand-dry teeth.
"Then I won't belabor the point," she said.
"I did expect to see him here," said Lau, "but I'm told he is away."
"He's gone to beg peace from the nagas," Phyrea replied. She had been at the canal site for less than a day, but had heard things. "They agreed to let him build the canal at first—or so he told the ransar—but came recently and killed some of the workers. I fear that if the canal is completed it might succeed only in spilling ships out into hostile waters, controlled by those monstrous snake things."
She saw the very real concern that prospect elicited on the Shou's face, and turned away.
12_
7 Ches, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) Thk Nagaflow
We feel anger," Svayyah said for all the assembled naja'ssara to hear. "We feel great, grave, crippling anger, and that anger is directed not toward this dista'ssara before you, but for one of our own."
The source of her frustration glowered back at her from where he hung suspended, almost motionless in the
cool, murky water. Six more of their kind swirled around them, their attentions struggling between the accused— Shingrayu—and the human, Ivar Devorast. Their tension began to heat the water, and Svayyah's red-orange spines grew redder still.
"Anger?" Shingrayu replied, literally dripping venom from his fangs into the water with each sneered syllable. "What does Svayyah know of anger? Let us tell our tribe-mates of anger."
Svayyah brought to mind a spell that would heat the water around Shingrayu to so scalding a temperature that his scales would slough from his body. But rather than cast it, she said to the other water nagas, "This dista'ssara, this human, is known to us. We have given it our word. We have made an agreement with it."
She looked at Devorast, who floated in.the bubble of air she'd made for him with his arms folded across his chest. She could read nothing in his face, but his irritation came off him in waves that nettled at her sea-green scales.
"We care nothing for an agreement with this low monkey of the dry cities," Shingrayu spat. His serpentine body twitched, and he moved forward—only a foot or two—but Svayyah reacted to the threat by enveloping herself in a protective shield of magic. It lit around her with a pearles-cent glow, reflecting off the particles of dirt that floated in the water. "You made this agreement, Svayyah."
The other half dozen water nagas writhed at the sound of that word: you.
"We close upon the place where words fail," Svayyah warned him.
"Discussions were had," Zaeliira cut in. Her blue-green scales looked dull and old in the meager light from the surface and the glow of Svayyah's shield.
"Zaeliira has been swimming the Nagaflow for eight centuries," said Shuryall, "and however weakened by age, Zaeliira may be, all naja'ssara heed the counsel of Zaeliira."
"We make our own way," Shingrayu hissed. "We are Ssa'Naja."
"Shingrayu went above the waves and brought violent magic to the naja'ssara in the employ of Ivar Devorast," Svayyah accused. "Does Shingrayu deny this?"
"Is there denial?" asked Zaeliira, who appeared to smart from Shingrayu's comment.
Shingrayu pulled himself out to his full length, an impressive eighteen feet, and drew his scales in tight so that he seemed to blaze green in the murk. "We see prey and we eat. We see invaders and we defend. We see insult and we take offense. We see Svayyah's ambition and we protect ourselves and our ways. There will be no serpent queen here."
The other nagas raced through the water at the sound of those words, whirling faster and faster around the bubble Devorast floated in until it began to turn in the water. He held out his hands—those freakish appendages of the dista'ssara—and steadied himself. Svayyah waited for him to speak, but he said nothing. He met her eyes finally, and she fell into his gaze in a way she couldn't understand—in a way that almost made her believe that Shingrayu had been right all along.
"What this dista'ssara works will be of great benefit to all the naja'ssara of the Nagaflow and the Nagawater," she said, shouting into the tempestuous waters.
The other nagas began to calm, but Shingrayu remained just as rigid.
"Ivar Devorast comes here of his own will," Svayyah went on, "and entirely at our mercy. Should we but wish it, the water would rush in to fill his human lungs and take him to whatever afterlife awaits him. He braves this, for a work."
"A work?" Shuryall asked.
"We have heard of this thing the dista'ssara seeks to build," said the young and impetuous Flayanna. "It will bring human after human, ship after ship to our waters.
Human filth. Shingrayu speaks and acts true. We should also like to go to these dista'ssara and kill."
"If Flayanna wishes to kill Svayyah first to do so, then we stand at the ready," Svayyah challenged, knowing the younger naga would back down.
Flayanna wouldn't look at her, and only swam more slowly in a circle around Devorast.
"If this human wishes it," Shingrayu said, "let it ask us all, not only Svayyah, who is no queen here."
"Again, that word," Svayyah growled. She twitched her tail to bring herself closer to Shingrayu. "Speak it once more, and it will be the last word to pass Shingrayu's poison tongue."
The other nagas swam then, not too fast, but with a purpose. They gave the two combatants room. They knew what was going to happen. And Svayyah knew that the future of the canal would rest with her. If Shingrayu killed her, Devorast would never live to see the surface again. He likely wouldn't outlive the last dying spasm of Svayyah's own heart.
"There will be no canal to bring human excrement into our home waters, Svayyah," Shingrayu said, his voice heavy with challenge. "There will be no Queen of the Nagaflow."
Svayyah opened her mouth wide, showed her fangs, let her forked tongue taste the familiar waters, and shrieked her challenge at the damnable Shingrayu. The sound, amplified by magic, sent visible ripples through the water. The other nagas pulled even farther back. When the wave front hit Shingrayu, he closed his eyes and withstood the battering force. The side of his face he'd turned into the Shockwave burned red, and a welt rose fast to mar his smooth skin. Though his eyes were closed tightly, his tongue slipped through a fast incantation.
Shingrayu opened his eyes to watch three jagged bolts of lime green light slice through the water, leaving not a bubble in their wakes. They crashed into Svayyah's spell
shield with force enough only to sting her, but the shield unraveled fast, drifting away into the water like a cloud of luminescent sediment.
Svayyah closed the distance between them with a single lash of her muscular body. In the brief moment that passed before their bodies met, Shingrayu rattled off another spell.
Svayyah wrapped her serpentine body around Shingrayu's, and the first touch sent a nettling ripple through her veins. The touch of the other naga was painful to her. Scales stood out from her flesh, and the ridge of long spines on her back leaped to attention. A painful cramp raced up the entire length of her body and slammed into her jaw.
But she felt it coming, and before it got there, she opened her mouth wide again. Perhaps confident that his shocking grasp would fend her off, Shingrayu left his all too vulnerable neck open. Svayyah's fangs pressed down, and the lightning touch of his spell clamped her jaws closed like a vise. She bit so deeply into Shingrayu's neck that she felt her teeth come together. She couldn't swallow, and couldn't release the hot mouthful of flesh. The blood in the water, like black-red smoke in the air of the surface world, burned her eyes and filled her nose so she could neither see nor smell. The sound of her own blood whooshing through veiiis and arteries as clamped tight as her jaw drowned out all other sounds.
Holding her breath, Svayyah writhed against Shingrayu as though they were mating. The series of cramps that wrapped her ever tighter around her adversary threatened to snap every bone in her body, and Svayyah steeled herself against that certainty. A loud snap, then the second and third, came to her not through her ears but through her scales. She thought at first that her bones had begun to break under Shingrayu's magic, but there was no pain.
It wasn't her bones that were breaking.
The effect of Shingrayu's spell fled all at once. Svayyah
uncoiled, out of control, like a string from around a child's toy. She floated away from Shingrayu and spat the mouthful of his throat out into the water between them. She coughed and shuddered, just trying to breathe.
Shingrayu drifted limp, but his eyes were open. He blinked and opened his mouth to speak. He had something to say, but couldn't get the words out. His lips twitched. Intelligence and intent left his eyes first, then the life itself fled.
Svayyah continued to gasp for a breath as the other water nagas circled closer.
"Svayyah says that this is a great work this dista'ssara does," Zaeliira said. "Does that make this human a great being? Does it make it senthissa'ssa?"
Does it? Svayyah thought.
She turned to Devorast, who's expression had not changed at all. She felt a sense of inevitability from him. It wasn't that he knew she would kill Shingrayu, but something else—something that depended in no way on what she did, what Shingrayu did, or what any of the naja'ssara did.
"Are you, Ivar Devorast?" she managed to whisper through a throat still struggling open. "Is Ivar Devorast a teacher worthy of emulating?"
"Well?" Zaeliira pressed.
Svayyah turned to her kin and said, "If he builds it."
She had spoken like a human, and had done it on purpose. The phrasing was not lost on Zaeliira at least.
"Very well," said the aged water naga. "Let this dista'ssara build its great work. If it succeeds, it will have proven itself senthissa'ssa. Do the naja'ssara of the Nagaflow and Nagawater agree? All of like mind on this?"
Each of the other five nagas signaled their agreement and one by one swam off to their own business. Zaeliira and Svayyah shared a look, then she too swam off at her own slow pace.
Svayyah looked at Devorast in his bubble and shook her head. He had done precisely what he should have, and Svayyah found herself wholly unable to believe it.
He hadn't said a thing the whole time.
13_
10 Ches, the Yearofthe Sword (1365 DR) Third Quarter, Innarlith
H ow did you—" Phyrea began, then quickly chose from two possible endings to that question—"find me?"
Devorast stepped closer to her, but stopped more than her arm's length away. He'd been sitting in one of the uncomfortable old chairs that came with the rented flat, waiting for her in the dark. In the light of the candle she'd lit before she knew he was sitting there, his skin looked softer than she knew it to be, but his eyes were no less guarded, no more forthcoming.
"Osorkon," he said. His voice sounded different, softer too, but that couldn't have been the candlelight.
"The ransar?" she asked. She didn't really care how he'd found her, but a chill ran down her spine at the revelation that the ransar knew of what she thought of as her hiding place. Of all the conversations, of all the things she hoped would pass between them that night, the wheres and whys and hows of the things Osorkon knew about her was of the least interest. "How did he—?"
Phyrea stopped when Devorast moved even closer to her. He smelled of the dry earth, the poison sea, and the bitter wind.
"Is that it?" she asked, her voice below even a whisper, but she knew he heard her. "Is that how you can do this to me? Is that your secret? Are you an elemental? Some creature of all the forces of nature—earth, air, fire, water ... the Astral ether itself?"
He reached out a hand and though her mind wanted her
body to flinch away, she found herself leaning forward. When the tip of his finger found the lace of her bodice she fell half a step closer to him. "What are you?" she asked.
He raised his other hand and began to unlace her bodice. Phyrea's knees shook, then her hips, then her shoulders. Her hands had been shaking already. She found it difficult to breathe in, but exhaled in throaty gasps.
"I'm all I ever needed to be, and all you ever need from me," Devorast said. "A man."
"No," she said, even while wishing it was true. "That can't be. That can't be all."
The stiff leather bodice fell away.
"I've said things about you," Phyrea told him as he put his hand to the side of her face. His palm was warm and rough. "I've hurt you."
He kissed her on the cheek, and she leaned against him. She put her hands on his forearms. The thin tunic he wore was made of rough material, cheap peasant clothes.
"I poison people against you," she told him as his tongue played on her ear. Her body quivered at his touch. She couldn't quite breathe. "I hurt you on purpose."
"No, you don't," he whispered, then kissed her on the mouth.
She tried to melt into him, tried her best to disappear into his embrace, but couldn't.
"If you tell me to stop, I'll stop," she said when their lips finally parted. "If you demand my obedience, you'll have it. If you want me as your wife, your harlot, your slave, or your mistress, you will have me. I will remake myself to whatever standards you impose. I will erase myself if that's what you wish. I'll cut myself. I'll kill myself. I'll-"
"Do none of those things," he said into the skin of her neck. "You don't need to do anything to satisfy me, the same way I'll never do anything simply to satisfy you."
Tears streamed from her eyes.
"I can't have you, can I?" she asked.
"Not the way you mean," was his answer.
She cried while he held her for a little while, and she only stopped when she realized that in that time, she hadn't heard one of the voices, or seen a single apparition. She hadn't wanted to hurt herself, though she'd offered to.
"I have to destroy you," she told him even as she let him carry her to her bed. "This world is too small for you."
He moved to kiss her again, but she stopped him.
"There are people who are trying to stop you," she told him, though he must have already known. "They'll succeed, too, because it's easy to do what they do. It's the easiest thing in the world to tear a man down, to pick at his flesh till there's nothing left of him but bones. I can't watch that happen. Do you understand me?"
He smiled in a way that made Phyrea's heart seem to stop in her chest.
"I won't let you live to be so degraded," she whispered as he finished undressing her. "Not by them."
Those were the last words either of them spoke that night, and the ghosts didn't come back until Devorast finally left.
14 _
5Kythorn, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
]\Iarek Rymiit couldn't see the ghosts that haunted Phyrea, but he knew they were there. Though he was no necromancer—enchantments were more his cup of tea—he knew enough of the ways of the undead. He knew their power and their sharply delineated limitations. Over the past few tendays he'd learned more and more about the spirits that had taken up residence in that poor little rich girl, that tortured daughter of a wealthy idiot, and he found himself inventing more and more excuses to see her.
"My apologies, gentlesir," Phyrea said to Marek's oldest friend, "please help me to pronounce your name."
"ln-sith-riU-ax," the black dragon said, enunciating each syllable with great care. In the guise of a human, he smiled at her without the barest sliver of interest.
"Insithryllax," the girl repeated. "It's an imposing name. To look at you I would have to say you are Chondathan, but that doesn't sound like a Chondathan name."
"I suppose," the disguised dragon replied, "that I'm more Mulhorandi than Chondathan, but the name is ... a very old one."
Marek caught the twinkle in Phyrea's eyes that told him she might have been close to figuring out that Insithryllax was no more Mulhorandi than Marek was a field mouse.
"How are you enjoying the tea, my love?" Marek asked her, returning the twinkle.
She did her best not to look him in the eye when she answered, "I've never been one for tea, Master Rymiit, but I'm sure it's wonderful."
"The leaves are harvested on Midsummer's eve from the slopes of one particular mountain high in the Spine of the World," he told her, inventing every word of the preposterous tale as he went along. "Ore slaves carry them whole to a shop in the heart of fair Silverymoon, where they are purified with spells granted by the grace of Chauntea. One must have a signed writ from the Lady Alustriel herself to buy it."
Phyrea laughed and said, "Somehow I doubt you possess such a writ, Master Rymiit."
"You wound me with the truth, my darling girl," he responded with an entirely false chuckle. "The owner of the tea shop knows someone who knows someone who knows someone."
Phyrea nodded, making it plain she'd lost interest in stories about tea she didn't even drink. Instead she looked at Insithryllax.
"The way your eyes dart around the room," she said to
the dragon, "constantly on the lookout for—what? Another mad alchemist? A rival wizard determined to resist the inevitable? I was under the impression that no such attacks have come for some time."
So, Marek thought, you've been studying me, too. Well done, girl. But tread lightly.
"I am happy to report," Marek said before the even more wary black dragon could assume the worst from her playful question, "that my efforts to civilize the trade in enchanted items and spellcraft in Innarlith has met with some success of late. It is a credit to the city of your birth."
Phyrea forced a smile and said, "Any foreigner can have his way with Innarlith. It's to your credit only that you have tamed the other foreigners."
Marek laughed that off and said, "You hold so low a regard for your own city, I wonder why you stay here."
That elicited a look so grave Marek was momentarily taken aback.
"Please, Marek," Insithryllax said, "you'll offend the girl."
When the Red Wizard regarded his old friend, he was happy to see no trace of real concern on his face.
"Please do accept my—" Marek started.
"No," Phyrea cut in. "Don't bother. Of course I hold this cesspool in low regard." She paused to listen to something, but the tea room was characteristically quiet. "Of course I do."
Marek put the cup to his lips and whispered a spell, hiding the gestures as a momentary indecision over which of the little pastries to sample.
... him the sword, a voice whispered from nowhere. It was a strange sensation. Marek had heard voices in his head before, had often communicated in that way, but it was something else entirely to hear a voice in someone else's head. It's for you.
Then a woman: We meant it for you.
And a little boy: If you give it to him, we will be cross with you.
Marek resisted the urge to shudder. Instead he took a sip of tea and studied Phyrea's face.
She was beautiful, of that there was no doubt, but she looked older than he knew her to be. She'd seen only twenty summers, but to look at her eyes he'd say she was fifty.
"You're not well," he ventured.
She shook her head, but told him, "I'm fine."
"You've been busy."
"What do you mean?"
"I've heard the things you've been saying about that horrid man," Marek said. "You know, that ditch digger?"
"Devorast," she whispered, then cleared her throat and said more loudly, "Ivar Devorast."
Use the sword on him, a man all but screamed at Phyrea and Marek brought to mind a spell that he hoped could save his life if she followed that order.
Devorast, the little boy whined. I hate him. You need to kill him with the flam... the flam..."
"The flamberge," Marek said aloud, risking that the ghosts would realize he could hear them.
Phyrea looked him in the eye for the first time that day, but before Marek could do so much as smile she looked down at the tightly-wrapped bundle at her feet—a sheet of soft linen precisely the dimensions of a sheathed long sword, tied together with twine.
No!one of the spirits screamed.
Wait, breathed another.
"You'll be able to tell me..." she started, but was interrupted by the boy.
I'll hate you if you give it to him. He'll kill you with it. He wants to kill you.
She shook her head.
"I will make a study of it," he promised her. "And I won't give it back."
We'll shred your mind if you let him take it away, said
the voice of an old woman.
It was for you, another ghost whimpered.
"I can't hand it to you," she said and took a sip of her tea. She grimaced.
"Leave it on the floor then," Marek told her. "I'll take it with me when I go."
Don't let him, a woman moaned. Plea—
His spell had run its course, but Marek had heard all he needed to hear of the voices in Phyrea's head.
"I hate to keep bringing him up, as he seems to upset you so," Marek said. "But I wish you would tell me why you're so opposed to the Cormyrean and his ludicrous mission. After all, isn't he, like me, a foreigner manipulating the weaknesses of the city you hate so? Why, one would think you'd have invited him to tea with us."
"I hope you two will never meet again," she said. "And anyway I don't care about the canal. I hope it is finished ... anyway it makes no difference to me if it is or isn't, as long as Devorast—" and only someone as astute as Marek Rymiit could have detected the pause in her voice just then—"doesn't get to see it through."
"Well, then..." Marek chuckled. "Still, I wonder why Willem Korvan."
"What?"
"I know you've mentioned his name to a number of people," he pressed.
With a shrug Phyrea answered, "My father thinks highly of him. And he's a foreigner. Why not him?"
"Why not Devorast?" Marek continued to press.
Phyrea paused, almost froze in place. It appeared to Marek as though she searched deep within herself for an answer.
Or is she listening to the ghosts again? he thought.
"Because," she finally answered, "I hate him."
Marek took a breath to speak, but stopped himself when he realized he didn't know who she was talking about. Did she hate Devorast or Korvan? Or both?
15
9 Kythorn, the Yearofthe Sword (1365 DR) The Land of One Hundred and Thirteen
TTnder any other circumstances, Marek would have demanded complete silence. He would have roared that order in a magically-enhanced voice loud enough to burst the eardrums of the offending parties, and he would have followed the order with threats so cruel the sound of them could peel the paint from a wall.
But he didn't do that. He unwrapped the sword to the accompaniment of saws and shovels, shouted orders and pained grunts, and stone grating against stone and hammers clanging on hot metal. As anxious as he'd been to examine that fascinating flamberge of Phyrea's there was still work to be done on his keep, after all.
The huge black dragon alit several paces away, scattering some of the black firedrakes that had been bent to their work beneath him. They scampered out of his way as he moved to the unfinished wall and craned his massive, serpentine neck down to regard Marek.
"Ah," said the dragon, "there you are."
The linen sheet came away from the scabbarded sword, and Marek stifled a giggle.
"Lovely, isn't it?" the Red Wizard said. "Such craftsmanship."
"Elven," Insithryllax said, betraying a dragon's appreciation for the finer things.
"I believe so, yes," Marek agreed. "And do you feel it?"
"How could I not?"
"Such a powerful enchantment," the wizard said. The dragon made a show of sniffing the air in front of him and said, "Necromancy." "Yes," Marek replied. "What do you want with it?"
Marek looked up at the wyrm and smiled. Behind him, ringing the flat-topped hill upon which his keep was being built, was the sprawling camp of his army of black firedrakes.
"They're almost ready, aren't they?" Marek said, ham-handedly changing the subject.
The dragon snorted, releasing a puff of gray-black mist that made Marek's eyes itch even from a distance.
"Sorry," the dragon said when Marek blinked and rubbed his eyes.
"Part of the joys of your friendship," the Red Wizard quipped. "But be that as it may"—he pulled the wavy-bladed sword from its scabbard—"how could I not want a weapon such as this?"
"But you?" asked the dragon. "A wizard?"
"Phyrea thinks that anyone who is killed by this blade is reanimated in some state of undeath," Marek said.
"Is she right?"
Marek shrugged and replied, "Care to try? Haven't you always secretly wished to be a dracolich?"
The wyrm's nostrils flared, but he held his acidic mist
in.
"A jest, I assure you, my friend," the wizard covered. With some difficulty—he almost cut himself twice—Marek sheathed the sword. "I will study this in great detail."
"Tell me in no uncertain terms, Marek, that you have no plans for that blade that involve me," the dragon insisted. "Unless you mean to give it to me."
Marek locked eyes with the dragon—not an easy thing to do—and said, "I would do nothing of the kind without your consent. My thoughts run toward... someone else."
Marek hoped the dragon would accept that. He was nowhere near ready to reveal any plans he had for that blade, especially since it could be some time, years even, before he set those plans in motion.
"Good," the black dragon said.
"I will offer yet another apology, my friend," said the
Red Wizard. "I have not been back here as much as I would have liked. Matters in the city have kept me occupied, but the progress here is a credit to your efforts, and you have my thanks."
The dragon twisted his neck in what Marek had come to know as one variation on a shrug, and said, "The black firedrakes are learning more quickly every day. They act almost entirely on their own now."
Marek placed the sword on a table crowded with other items of varying power and went to the edge of the incomplete wall. He looked out over the finite confines of his tiny little universe and sighed. The air tasted stale, and he realized that every breath he took felt less satisfying than the last. He could feel Insithryllax eyeing him.
"We can't last much longer here," the dragon said.
Marek shook his head and replied,."No, not with so many lungs to fill."
The black firedrakes, some in human form, others resembling small dragons, walked or flew in a constant flurry of activity. They'd built what could best be described as a small village on the rocky plain of the Land of One Hundred and Thirteen.
"Could be they sense it, too," Insithryllax said. With his eyes, and his great long neck he drew Marek's gaze up into the always-cloudy sky.
Two black firedrakes wheeled in the air, swooping in fast at each other to spray jets of hissing black acid. They dodged and weaved in the dead air, clawing and snapping their jaws. Another dozen or so of their kind circled the pair, watching their every move and sometimes spinning in the air in reaction to some surprise bite or well-placed spray of acid.
"They'll always do that, I think," Marek mused, watching the circling drakes.
One of the creatures managed to get under the other and bit down hard on its opponent's right foot. Though he was too far away to hear it, Marek could imagine the
mighty crunch of the black firedrake's talon shattering under its sister's fangs.
"There are ways to replenish the air. Spells...." Marek began.
The black firedrake that had been bitten snapped its head down and spat a mist of corrosive fluid at the drake that still had it's broken foot in its mouth. The acid poured over its wing like syrup, and pieces of the thin membrane tore off and wafted to the ground, sizzling on the edges.
"Still," Insithryllax said, "at least some of the firedrakes will have to be taken out."
The burned firedrake opened its mouth to scream, and it fell away from its opponent's shattered foot. With one wing burned almost entirely away, it spun in the air like .the seed from a maple tree, shrieking in agony the whole way down.
"Higharvestide, I think," Marek said, pausing only when the burned firedrake hit the ground and seemed to collapse in on itself.
Others of its kind dived in to tear chunks of flesh from its still twitching corpse and Insithryllax asked, "Why Higharvestide?"
"I don't know," Marek answered with a shrug. "I just have a feeling everything will be aligned properly by then."
Four black firedrakes went after the one with the shattered foot and brought it down in pieces.
"That's less than four months away," sighed the dragon. "We should survive until then."
16_
9Kythorn, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) Aboard Jie Zud, in Innarlith Harbor
Ihe air was so warm she didn't mind being wet, even so late at night. The thin material of her undergarments clung to her, and Phyrea was reminded of her leathers,
which she hadn't worn in a very long time.
You have as much right to it as she does, the old woman with the terrible burn scars on her face and neck whispered, maybe more so. It should be yours.
Phyrea shook her head and looked at the woman. She stood only a few paces down the rail from her, though "stood" might not have been the right word. Her feet didn't quite touch the deck. Phyrea could easily make out the outlines of the sterncastle through her incorporeal form, and when she spoke her lips didn't move.
"No," Phyrea answered aloud, shaking her head.
You could have killed that man, the little boy said from behind her. Phyrea didn't turn to look but she could feel him there. No one will do anything to you if you do it. You won't get in trouble. They're not from here. They're not like us.
"I don't want to kill anyone," Phyrea said. "Not these people."
She looked out over the still water to the lights of the city. The moon was bright in the clear, star-speckled sky, trailing her glittering tears behind her. Phyrea felt a sudden urge to offer a prayer to Selune—a prayer of forgiveness, perhaps.
You have nothing to be ashamed of, the voice of the man murmured in her head. He sounded bored, old, and tired. Except for relinquishing the sword.
Yes, said the old woman, you should be ashamed of giving away that sword.
"No," Phyrea sighed.
Yes, the woman repeated as she drifted closer. The Thayan will destroy you and everything you've ever loved with that sword.
And it was meant for you, the man said.
And we want it back, said the boy.
"You're wrong," Phyrea said, not looking at the ghosts. She ran a finger along the cool, smooth tiles on the railing. The glazed ceramic shone in the moonlight. "No, you're lying. He can't destroy everything I've ever loved,
because I've never loved anything, except—"
"Who are you?" a strange, heavily-accented voice interrupted. Phyrea dismissed it as another ghost, until she heard a footstep. "Answer me, woman, or your head and your body will go separately into the next world."
Phyrea turned her head. The woman that had been there before, the one that had taken up residence in Phyrea's head, was gone. The silhouette of a woman stood at the hatch to the sterncastle. Phyrea couldn't see her face, but the straight-bladed long sword she held in her right hand reflected Selune's brilliance. "Speak," the woman demanded.
Phyrea sighed, and made a point to leave both her hands on the railing in front of her where they could be clearly seen.
Another hatch opened, and a man's voice rattled through a sentence's worth of words in some incomprehensible tongue. He was answered by a single word from the woman.
"I am master of this vessel," the woman said, "and I command you to explain yourself."
"I just wanted to see it," Phyrea said, her voice quiet and small, weak even, but carrying well enough in the still night air. "No... I mean, I wanted to touch it. I wanted to feel it."
The woman and the man kept quiet and still while Phyrea fought back tears.
"My man," the woman—Ran Ai Yu—said, "did you kill him?"
Phyrea shook her head.
The woman stepped closer, and Phyrea could feel her eyes on her. Phyrea was unarmed. She was practically naked. There were more footsteps, more men, more of Ran Ai Yu's crew.
"I might have hurt him," Phyrea said. "I'm sorry."
"I know you," Ran Ai Yu said. "You are the daughter of the master builder."
She wants him too, you know, the old woman's voice whispered inside her.
"Why wouldn't she?" Phyrea answered aloud. Ran Ai Yu stepped closer still.
"Are you drunk?" the Shou woman asked. "Are you mad?"
Phyrea laughed and sobbed at the same time.
"He built this," Phyrea said. "He made it with his own hands, but more than that, he formed it in his mind from nothing. He conjured it, you know, but not the way a wizard would. It was an act of pure creation, the invention of something from nothing."
"Ivar Devorast," Ran Ai Yu said, "yes."
Phyrea cringed, almost seized when the woman of purple light shrieked, You see?
"Stop it," Phyrea demanded of the ghost. "You don't know."
"I do," the Shou answered.
Phyrea shook her head, her tears mingling with the harbor water that still dampened her face.
"What haunts you, girl?" Ran Ai Yu asked.
Phyrea looked up into the black sky, purposefully turning her head away from dazzling Selune, and said, "Him, more than anything."
We are your blood, Phyrea, the voice of the little girl who walked through walls sighed, and we love you. We love you more than he ever will, no matter how much you smile at him, or whatever presents you bring.
"You lie," Phyrea whispered.
"You must find someone to help you," Ran Ai Yu said. "But not here. You are not welcome here."
One of the men spoke to his mistress in their native tongue, and again Ran Ai Yu answered with but a single word.
Then in Common she said, "No, I can not let her swim back at night. There will be tonrongs. I will have my men lower a boat and row you back to the city. I hope you will never again be so foolish as to do this, and if my man here
is dead, or dies as a result of your attack upon him, there will be a debt owed."
Phyrea couldn't move, even just to shrug, nod, or hake her head. Her hands warmed the tiles on the railing, and her feet caressed the deck. Her heart seemed to swell in her chest and she stood there, her hair beginning to dry and swirl in a sudden breeze, while they lowered a boat.
Before she climbed down into it, she looked at the Shou sailor sprawled on the deck, and in the quiet she could hear him breathing.
You should have killed that slant-eyed foreign bastard, the little boy told her.
Phyrea saw him standing there, the outline of Ran Ai Yu visible through the violet luminescence, and she was all but overcome with sadness.
"Perhaps," the Shou woman said, "if you too had something of his..."
Not wanting her to continue, Phyrea turned and followed a wary sailor into the waiting boat.
17_
lOKythorn, the Yearofthe Sword (1365 DR) The Palace of Many Spires, Innarlith
Though his skin was pale, verging on pink, and his features were typically brutish, the Ransar of Innarlith reminded Ran Ai Yu of the monks of her homeland. His head was shaved clean, and his dress was simple, functional, and devoid of ornamentation. Though in the strictly confined limits of the city-state he was a sort of king, it would have been impossible to draw any such conclusion merely by looking at him. When he walked, his arms swung at his side in an undisciplined, even boyish manner. He smelled faintly of garlic and the rough tallow soap the Innarlans too rarely used. His feet were clad in simple leather sandals that exposed his long, crooked toes.
"Her name is Phyrea," Ran Ai Yu said. "She is the daughter of your master builder."
Osorkon nodded as they strolled, and replied, "Of course. Everyone knows Phyrea, at least, as much as she allows us to know her. No small number of men would like to take her as a mistress if not a wife. There are rumors of a dark side to her, too—some accusations of thievery, even. What interest can she be to Shou Lung?"
"She is of interest to me, Ransar," Ran Ai Yu said. She didn't bother to once again correct him, to tell him that she was a merchant—mistress of a sailing vessel of her own—and not an official, ambassador, or other sort of representative of her homeland. "Only just before middark last night did I find her standing by the rail of my ship. She had swim... swum... I don't... but she swam there in the dark of the night at great risk, and with motives I am having trouble understanding."
"She can't have been trying to steal from you," Osorkon said.
"I do not have reason to believe that."
Ran Ai Yu let her fingertips brush a blooming rose as she strolled past a particularly healthy bush. The ransar's garden was impressive for a private residence, though the palaces of Shou Lung had gardens far larger. She'd noted the ransar's gaze darting from bloom to bloom as they walked and could see that he appreciated the foliage and the peacefulness of the place. Somehow, it didn't match the man.
"She is haunted," the Shou merchant said. "Phyrea?"
"Spirits have attached themselves to her," she explained. "One of my men is sensitive to such things. Even without his counsel, I would have seen it in her myself. She speaks to people who can not be seen."
The ransar shrugged and said, "Maybe she didn't swim to your ship alone."
Ran Ai Yu skipped a step. Her hesitation elicited a
scant smile from the ransar. She hadn't considered that possibility—that Phyrea might have been accompanied by some number of compatriots cloaked in spells of invisibility—but somehow it simply didn't ring true.
"Nothing was missing of my cargo or personal items," she said. "I am sure she was alone."
"And you have a sensitive man____"
Ran Ai Yu let that pass.
"Would you like me to inform the master builder?" he asked.
"If you feel that would be proper."
Ran Ai Yu let her gaze drift up from the flowers to the towering ramparts of the Palace of Many Spires. One tower in particular struck her eye. It was newer than the others and possessed of an ethereal beauty that was out of place in the otherwise underwhelming city of Innarlith.
"I find it difficult, sometimes," the ransar said, "to determine precisely what is and what isn't proper. It can plague one, don't you agree?"
"With all honor and respect, Ransar, but I do not. I have come to know many of the ways of Innarlith, so to me I am not surprised by what you have been so kind to confide in me, but in my realm we are schooled from our youngest age—from before we can even speak—in the ways of polite and civilized society. We are taught always to know what is proper in any situation. It is the blood and sinew of our very culture."
What she'd said seemed to please him, and he replied, "Well then I guess I will have to rely on you to tell me if it would be proper for a man like me to ask to see a woman like you in a social setting."
Ran Ai Yu was struck momentarily dumb. She wasn't even entirely certain what the ransar was asking.
"I am certain we will encounter each other again at receptions and such," she said. "My business demands that I-"
"Tell me if you are uncomfortable with my advances,
Ran Ai Yu," he said, his voice sending a chill down the Shou woman's spine.
"I am uncomfortable only because I have been here so long, and have been unable to unload precious cargo for trade in Innarlith," she said.
He sighed at the change in subject and said, "There are men in this city who are inflaming the passions of the working class, though I have no idea of the purpose behind it. I strive diligently, I assure you, to take matters in hand. You will unload your cargo when limited resources make it possible."
"It is warm today," she said.
Ransar Osorkon grunted in the affirmative.
"I arrived on the twelfth day of Alturiak," she said. "Though I greatly enjoy your city and its people, now it is four months gone by, the warm winds of summer blow, and still my ship is at anchor in the harbor."
"Take your complaints to the harbor master," the ransar replied.
Ran Ai Yu nodded and changed the subject. "I have been to visit the site of the canal that Ivar Devorast constructs in your name. It is of great interest to me, to one day be able to sail into the Sea of Fallen Stars, which I have long heard tell of, but have never seen."
"Devorast didn't tell you that he was building it in my name, did he?"
"I only assumed."
The ransar sighed, and Ran Ai Yu risked a glance at his face. His pinkish skin had turned a deeper red, and she could feel that he was embarrassed by her rebuff.
"It honors you, nonetheless," she told him.
"Devorast____" said the ransar. "Now that one is
haunted."
"But not in the same way as the master builder's unfortunate daughter?"
"No," Osorkon replied. "Devorast is haunted by his own greatness. If the son of a whore had an once of political
ambition I would have had to have him killed a long time ago."
It was Ran Ai Yu's turn to be embarrassed. She said, "She knows Ivar Devorast, yes?" "Phyrea?"
Ran Ai Yu nodded, and the ransar shrugged and said, "I suppose so."
"I think she came to my ship because he built it." "Devorast built your ship?"
"He did, yes," said the Shou merchant, "some three years ago."
"That's right," the ransar said. "He did build ships."
They went a few slow steps in silence, and Ran Ai Yu could no longer ignore the feeling that he wanted her to leave.
"I will allow you to proceed with your day, Ransar," she said. "Please accept my most humble thanks for the honor of your time, and your garden."
He stopped walking and turned to look at her. Though she didn't want to, etiquette demanded she do the same.
"I will try to convey to the master builder that his daughter is haunted," he said with a trace of a bow, "by Ivar Devorast, and other ghosts."
She didn't believe him, because it was obvious then that he didn't believe her. Still, she bowed, thanked him, and went back to her ship.
18_
11 Kytkorn, the Yearofthe Sword (1365 DR) The Chamber of Law and Civility, Innarlith
Willem Korvan wasn't drunk, but he had been drinking. He'd come straight from the inn where he'd been with Halina. He still smelled of her—or at least he feared he did, but it was the smell of the wine he feared most. The air inside the giant chamber that served as a meeting room—a
sort of temple—for the senate of Innarlith was dry and hot. Though it was many dozens of times the size of the room in the inn, he felt more closed in by the senate chamber. He found it more difficult to breathe there.
"Do you think it a waste of your time, my boy," the master builder said, "if I tell you again how proud I am of you?"
Willem couldn't answer, so he shook his head.
But I can't believe this, he told himself. She can't be the one I end up with. My mother is right. Marek Rymiit is right. They're all right. Halina is wrong.
"You've done well these past months, Willem," Inthelph droned on. "We are all very happy with you—all your generous patrons."
He thought of a dozen sycophantic replies to that but spoke none of them. He couldn't muster the energy to push that much air out of his lungs.
"But you should also know that I expect more of you than a vote in these chambers," Inthelph went on.
His voice made Willem's skin crawl. The master builder spoke to him in paternal tones, and Willem wanted nothing more than to strike out. He couldn't gather the strength to speak to him, but he felt sure he could snap the old man's neck in the blink of an eye. They were alone in the chamber, after all. It would be a simple enough thing to concoct a story—a tragic fall, almost silly really, that such a great man might trip on a stair and fall just so as to break his neck. No one would question, would they? Would they take the master builder's still corpse to a priest and inquire of his departed soul? Would Inthelph accuse Willem from beyond the grave? It was the sort of thing one had to consider, though they never did that with Khonsu____
"Though you're a senator now you're still a very talented young man, and the city needs your talents, perhaps now more than ever."
But then the old man was wrong, wasn't he? Willem had no talent—none at all—save the talent for impressing
easily impressed old men and shy, bookish foreign women. He couldn't build anything. He couldn't leave a legacy, or a mark on the world. But he could kiss withered old arse with the best of them. Willem desperately craved more wine, or something stronger.
"I just simply deplore the notion that any serious program of public works should proceed without your involvement. It's a disservice to the city, the ransar, and the people of Innarlith—a grave disservice indeed."
Willem tried to sigh, but had no strength to do it, so he just sat there trying to keep a picture of Devorast's canal from forming in his head. They both knew that that was what the master builder was talking about. But apparently only Willem knew that there was no way in all Nine screaming bloody Hells that he would be able to build it. Willem couldn't even really imagine the thing. He understood the basic concept of course: Build a trench from the shore of the Lake of Steam to the bank of the Nagaflow and somehow fill it with water to form a man-made river. But it was such a long way, and would have to be so deep.
"I'm sure you know that the ransar will soon enough discover the sort of man your old friend Ivar Devorast is, after all. That fool—it's Tymora's most fickle whimsy that the man has avoided his unfortunate patron's wrath this long. I mean, honestly...."
Maybe, Willem thought, this ransar is not as stupid as you or I. Maybe he understands that though Devorast was no one's idea of a sparkling conversationalist, he was perhaps the only human being on the whole of spinning Toril that might ever have even conceived of the thing, let alone was in possession of the skills necessary to see it done. If the master builder insisted that Willem finish the canal, he would have to do it, and he would have to fail.
"But that's all just fancy now, isn't it? We'll let it be as it may, yes?"
Yes, yes, yes, Willem thought. Let it be. Let it be damned with the both of them to the endless Abyss. Willem rubbed
his face, and an image of Halina came unbidden to his mind's eye. She lay naked on the bed in the inn where he'd left her. She smiled at him in that way she had of smiling at him that made him not want to kill himself.
"Really, Willem, I worry about you. You don't look all together well. Please tell me you've been sleeping. It's sleep that is the finest tonic for any man's body and soul. You've earned some rest, at least until you are called upon to finish some endeavor or another for your dear adopted home."
Rest? Sleep? With Halina, yes, two or three days out of every ten. The rest of the time he couldn't sleep. No half dozen bottles of wine could make him pass out, even. All. he did was sit at home in the dark and think, the sound of his mother's snoring wafting through the strangely unfamiliar halls of his townhouse. That sound reminded him of his childhood, and was just barely enough to keep him from opening his veins in the wee hours before dawn, but the house he'd bought was no home for him.
"Perhaps you need a diversion, or better yet, a family. You know my feelings on this, Willem, and I think Phyrea's coming around. In fact, I know for a fact she is. By the Merchantfriend's jingling purse, my boy, I've long considered you a son—a part of the family already. Marry Phyrea, Willem, and let's make that truly the case, eh?"
Marry Phyrea? The thought made his head spin more than the wine or the memory of the softness of Halina's skin. Phyrea had shown him nothing but scathing contempt, and her mouth-breathing old imbecile of a father thought that she was "coming around?" Her disdain was something Willem carried around with him like other men carried knives. It had become a comfortable part of him. Marry Phyrea? He had a better chance of wedding Chauntea herself in a grand ceremony in the Great Mother's Garden.
"I suppose you've heard the things she's been saying about you. My daughter has become quite the devotee of
Senator Willem Korvan. She's mentioned you to the ransar himself—to all the finest people. She's sung your praises to Marek Rymiit, and even to some visiting celestial from Shou Lung ... you've met him, haven't you? The tall, willowy one that looks even more like an elf than the rest of his kind. She's made you something of a cause. All the wives are gossiping. They've sussed out her motives and I swear the wives of half the senators in Innarlith have already bought their dresses for the wedding."