Scream of Stone (29 page)

She shook her head in an effort to tell him that she didn’t know why, and that she wasn’t safe at Berrywilde, at any rate.

“Was he right?” she rasped.

“Devorast?” asked Pristoleph. “About the canal?”

She nodded.

“No,” he said with stern self-confidence. “The city is divided. That much is true. I’ve turned the black firedrakes out of Pristal Towers for fear that they might betray me in favor of Rymiit. I have it on good authority that it was the Thayan that created them—or brought them here from whatever dark corner of the Realms he found

them in. But I have the wemics, and I still control most of the military—the men at Firesteap Citadel and the Nagaflow Keep. The city watch is doing just that—watching, but doing little else. Fires are burning down parts of the Fourth Quarter, despite the rain.”

Phyrea didn’t understand any of that at first. She shook her head, wincing at the pain.

“Ivar?” she asked.

“He’s safe,” Pristoleph said, and he appeared reluctant to speak. “He’s in Pristal Towers. He’s talked of Shou Lung—going there again, for good this time.”

Phyrea shook her head and sobbed though it hurt her to do so.

“I love you,” Pristoleph said. “Had you died I would have given this wretched city to the Thayan and been done with it, but you lived, so I will hold it for you. I will give it to you, along with everything I have. I will kill myself here and now if the gods require my life in exchange for yours, but know this.” He paused, swallowed, gathered himself. “If you take him into your bed or go with him to his I will kill you both.”

Phyrea closed her eyes and cried.

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6 Mirtul, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith

Willem Korvan ate his mother’s corpse, little by little, over the course of seventeen days, not because he required sustenance, but out of some dimly-felt sense of necessity.

Marek Rymiit could feel the undead thing’s need and confusion the second he stepped into the house. It hit him just as squarely, though not quite as hard, as the stench. The smell of the rotting carcass of Thurene Korvan mixed with the dried-meat and spice smell of her son. Throughout was the tang of disease.

“Willem,” the Thayan whispered, “you poor dear.”

The creature cowered at the sight of the Red Wizard who’d created it, its dull, glassy eyes devoid of any trace of the vibrant if confused young man that had once inhabited that flesh. Willem’s refined good looks had been replaced by desiccated tissue and bulging joints, his skin like a leather cloak left on the street for a year of sun, wind, and rain.

It opened its mouth but didn’t speak. Marek’s skin crawled at the sound that came forth from it, and he cast another spell to insure his own safety. He was confident enough in the magic that gave him complete control of what was left of the creature’s will, but there were mitigating circumstances that made the wizard uneasy.

“It’s been a long time, Willem,” he said to the cowering creature.

The thing responded to Marek’s voice but showed no trace of recognition either for the Thayan or for the sound of his own name. But then it wasn’t his—its—name anymore. The creature that cowered in the corner, one foot tangled in the grisly ribcage of Willem Korvan’s mother, had no name. It didn’t need one. It had no will of its own, not really, because it didn’t need that either.

“I am sorry,” Marek told the thing, and he didn’t lie. He didn’t have to. “There are any number of other paths I wish both our lives had taken. You were beautiful, Willem, and I could have loved you—if you could have loved me. But you wanted more than that, and I suppose so did I.”

The creature rolled its eyes and clacked its teeth together—confused, awaiting an order.

“I didn’t want to make a monster out of you, you know,” said the Thayan.

One of the monster’s arms twitched.

“But I have, haven’t I?” Marek concluded. “And I’ve set a task for you. One you have yet to complete.”

The undead thing drew its knee up to its chest, pulling the body of its mother with it. The torso came away from the

limbs, the cartilage and ligaments having long since been chewed through. A fresh wave of rotting stink washed over Marek and he gagged despite himself.

“Rise,” Marek said when he’d composed himself.

Its foot still tangled in the ribs, slipping against the tattered strips of rotten flesh that dangled from the graying bones, it rose to its feet with some difficulty. Its foot finally came free and it stood slumped to one side as though the slightest breath would topple it.

“But it won’t,” Marek whispered to himself.

It would take more than that—much more than that—to defeat his creation. Though it looked wasted and weak, Marek knew that the creature Willem had become was possessed of strength no human could match. It could be destroyed, but not easily—not easily at all.

“You have huddled long enough, my boy,” Marek said, his voice clear and commanding, echoing in the dead space, the horrid little charnel house that Willem’s home had become. “The war has begun. You will serve now as you have before.”

The creature’s head tipped to one side—a death rattle more than a gesture.

“You still have Ivar Devorast to kill,” Marek said.

The monster’s leg shook and it lurched half a step forward. The Thayan held his ground.

“Ivar Devorast,” he said, “among others.”

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10 Mirtul, the Yearof Lightning Storms (1374 Dffl Pristal Towers, Innarlith

A. cloud of greasy black smoke brushed against the outside of the glass and Pristoleph breathed deeply of its pungent odor. A human—someone fully human at any rate—would have choked and gagged, even with the glass between him and the smoke, but Pristoleph’s lungs, which

had as much in common with his elemental father’s as his human mother’s, took in the smoke with something bordering on relish.

“Your city burns, Ransar,” Wenefir said.

The sound of his former confidante’s voice rankled him, and he could feel his hair stir and warm. He closed his hands into hot fists, but kept his consciousness away from the torches that burned in the sunlit chamber.

He could see Wenefir—a vague outline of him, anyway-reflected in the glass. He was flanked by two wemics who nervously pawed at the floor, their eyes locked on the priest.

“Ransar?” Wenefir asked.

Pristoleph took a deep breath that he hoped would let Wenefir know that he would answer in his own time.

The tower room fell silent, save for the fidgeting wemics, and Pristoleph’s eyes darted from fire to fire. Below him the Fourth Quarter burned. Not all of it, but enough of it to send ragged refugees streaming into the Third Quarter or out the eastern gate. He was too high up to see the gangs of watchmen alternately helping and harrying them. The peasants of the Fourth Quarter had precious little to steal, but word had come to him of rape and murder, of humiliations extreme and petty.

“It doesn’t take much, does it?” Pristoleph asked.

“Ransar?” Wenefir replied.

“To set people on their neighbors,” the ransar went on. “It doesn’t take much to turn men into beasts, brothers into enemies….”

“I’m not so sure of that,” the priest answered.

Pristoleph turned to face him, an eyebrow raised. Wenefir wilted almost imperceptibly under his gaze, but managed to stand straight and—almost—look him in the eye.

“Terrible events and powerful forces conspired to bring this chaos to the streets of the city-state,” Wenefir said.

“Was that it?” Pristoleph joked, a forced lightness in his voice that he couldn’t possibly have felt at that moment. “Or was it terrible forces and powerful events?”

“As you wish, Ransar,” Wenefir replied with a smirk.

“Neither,” Pristoleph said, all traces of gaiety fled from his voice and his manner. “Men made smoke rise over Innarlith. And perhaps one god.”

“Tread lightly on that path,” Wenefir warned, “if at all, Ransar.”

The wemics beside him stiffened and sniffed at the threat. Second Chief Gahrzig came up the stairs as if on cue and scowled at the former seneschal.

“Make one move to work your magic, priest,” the mercenary leader threatened, “and I’ll drop you where you stand.”

Wenefir glanced at the wemic and Pristoleph could tell the priest believed him.

“He won’t require an order from me to do so, my old friend,” Pristoleph added.

Wenefir said, “Understood, Ransar, but I have not come here to ensorcell you.”

“I think I know why you’ve come here,” said Pristoleph.

“Believe what you will of me, Pristoleph,” Wenefir said, and the ransar couldn’t help but notice something of his old friend, that weak little boy he’d saved from a short life on the streets, in the sound of his voice, “but know that I hold this city dear. It is my home. I do my god’s work here.”

Pristoleph couldn’t help but smile at that. “You’ve taught me enough of your god’s ways over the years, you know. This—” and he jerked his head in the direction of another plume of smoke that blew past the window—”is precisely the sort of work your god values the most.”

“Be that as it may,” the Cyricist said, too quickly, “I come to offer advice.”

“You have been discharged,” the ransar reminded him. “You no longer serve the city-state, as my seneschal or in any other capacity.”

“Then take this as advice from a friend, Pristoleph. Take it as a warning from an enemy, if you must, but heed it. Heed me.”

The wemics tensed again and Gahrzig drew steel. Pristoleph glanced at the wemic chieftain, but the second chiefs eyes stayed on Wenefir.

“Speak,” Pristoleph said.

“The senate is against you,” said Wenefir. “What few allies you had have either turned or been killed. Blood runs in the streets, fires rage in the Second Quarter, too, now, and none of them will long stand for that.”

“They know how to stop this,” Pristoleph said.

“And so do you.”

Pristoleph took a deep breath and said, “So now you’ll tell me to surrender to Marek Rymiit. You’ll advise that I gift this city to a Thayan invader to sell on the cheap to his Red Wizards back home?”

Wenefir sighed, and Pristoleph could tell the priest didn’t have to fake the exhaustion written so plainly on his face. “Hear their demands—the senate’s demands, not the Thayan’s.”

“Why?”

“The city burns,” Wenefir said. “It’s the ransar responsibility to keep Innarlith safe, not to watch it burn from atop a tower.”

Pristoleph’s eyes smoldered at that, and he could see Wenefir struggle not to turn and run.

“Surely you haven’t climbed all this way,” Wenefir went on, sweating, “from the middens where we first met to the fortune and power you’ve amassed, simply to let it burn around you. Not for the sake of a canal, and certainly not for the sake of one man.”

Pristoleph sighed and said, “And still you don’t understand. You of all people should, Wenefir. Nothing worth doing is done for the sake of or by anyone but one man. It is men, it is their will alone, that shapes our world.”

“There are gods,” Wenefir argued, “who would disagree.”

“Men,” Pristoleph replied, “by any other name.”

The priest bristled but held his tongue.

“Your message has been delivered,” Pristoleph said, turning his back on the priest to stare down at the angry fires below. “Good day.”

The wemics edged closer, but Wenefir didn’t wait for them to take him by the arms. He turned on his heel and walked down the stairs, the wemic guards close behind. When their footsteps faded away, Second Chief Gahrzig stepped closer.

“Is it wise, Ransar,” said the wemic, “to let him go?”

“No,” Pristoleph said. “No, it isn’t. But let him go anyway. No matter what he does, that man will not die by my hand.”

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20Mirtul, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR) The Chamber of Law and Civility, Innarlith

I think we can all agree that the present ransar’has brought all of this on himself,” Senator Asheru said, his voice clipped and hollow, resonating in his chest as though he shouted up from the bottom of a deep well. “Worse, that he brought this on us all.”

Marek Rymiit nodded along with the other small group of senators gathered in one of the many private parlors in the labyrinthine cellars of the Chamber of Law and Civility. Warded against magical eavesdropping and arcane forms of egress, the room was meant to be a safe place for committees and quorums to gather and discuss the business of the city-state. The parlor in which Marek sat had become something of a war room.

“Senator Asheru is of course correct,” Sitre agreed. Her voice had grown deep and rough with age, and her hands, lined with veins, showed brown spots. Her once beautiful face, though still handsome, was deeply lined, her skin

gone thin and pale. “Can he not see the damage this standoff is wreaking on his own city?”

Asheru harrumphed and said, “Apparently not.”

Marek smiled at Asheru and considered the senator. A middle-aged man with long black hair he certainly dyed to mask the gray, his gray-green eyes shone with intelligence and perhaps a spell or two that allowed him to see in ways that mundane humans could not. Asheru had been, before the Thayan Enclave had come to Innarlith, the head of an underground college of wizards, and the chief supplier of spell components, scrolls, and other arcane paraphernalia. The speed with which he abandoned all that to Marek, for a few new spells and a seat on some senate committee he’d had his eyes on, still boggled the Thayan’s mind.

“Though it falls well outside my purview as Ambassador from the Court of Cormyr,” Tia Harriman interjected, “I must say I agree with you both.” The Cormyrean ambassador still wore her hair tinted a garish shade of purple that only made her pale skin, as old and as weathered as Sitre’s, less attractive. “For my part, and on behalf of Their Majesties, King Azoun the Fifth and the Steel Regent, I wished only to see the canal completed. Should it have employed some teleportation magic was not relevant. That it was destroyed, is.”

The fact that Marek bribed her with magic that was making her younger by the day, and Meykhati provided a stipend of gold that more than tripled what her king paid his ambassadors had something to do with her being there as well.