Scream of Stone (33 page)

to the mud. He meant to rip the man’s head off. He wanted to taste Devorast’s blood, to gouge out his eyes, to rip his spleen from his still-warm guts.

But something stopped him in mid-air with the force of a battering ram. He’d only barely registered a glow in the air like some sort of phosphorescent mist.

If he’d had any air in his lungs it would have been driven from him by the impact of his chest, but instead he simply flew backward through the air, whirling in the driving rain. He hit the ground in a rolling confusion of limbs and scattered stones, but was quickly back on his feet.

He screeched a hollow, atonal battle-cry across the dark distance between him and Devorast, but the human didn’t stand and fight. Instead, he turned and jumped. It was a jump no human should have been capable of—both too high and too far. He landed with uncertain footing on a tall pile of broken stone blocks, and turned to look back at Willem.

Willem began to close the distance between them in whatever rough approximation of running he was capable of. His feet slipped in the mud and he staggered and grunted. Devorast stood high on the mound, watching him.

“Willem, is that you?” the human shouted over the rumble of thunder and the drumming of the rain. “Willem? What’s happened to you? What have you become?”

“What do you care?” Willem coughed out, then repeated it in a feral, shrieking wail. He hadn’t willed himself to speak, and when he tried again his brain wouldn’t send words to his mouth. He lumbered toward Devorast, toward the man he was created to kill.

“Willem,” Devorast called. “Do you understand me?”

But Willem Korvan staggered on, his mouth open, his eyes rolling in his skull. The cold and the pain and every hideous sensation that came from his withering, deteriorating, rotting body tore through him. But instead of stopping him or slowing him even, it was the pain and the misery that drove him on.

He clambered up the side of the mound and Devorast looked down at him. It was too dark for Willem to see his face, and the undead thing he’d become wouldn’t have recognized anything but fear in Devorast’s expression. And that was the one thing that, even in his crumbling state, Willem knew he would never see. Devorast might pity him, hate him, or be disgusted by him. He might be disappointed. But he would never be afraid.

“Willem, stop,” Devorast said, not having to yell so loudly, with Willem only a few feet beneath him.

Maybe that was pity in his voice. Maybe he was disappointed.

Willem let loose a rattling, throat-shredding scream and grabbed a piece of broken wooden brace that protruded from the pile of rubble. With a strength granted him by the Red Wizard’s necromancy, Willem yanked the board free of the pile. The rocks on which Devorast stood shifted then fell, toppling the human off. He fell backward, arms pinwheeling, and disappeared from sight over the other side of the mound.

Willem scrambled to the top, the board hanging from his open hand by a long, thick sliver of wood that had come loose and impaled him through the palm of his hand. When he tried to use that hand to climb with, the splinter broke and the board fell free, but wood stayed in his hand.

He didn’t care.

Once atop the mound of rubble, Willem looked down. Devorast lay on his back, his chest heaving, his mouth open wide. He struggled to breathe and to sit up. Willem hissed and leaped from the top of the mound.

Devorast coughed then sputtered something, the sound of his voice lost to another crash of thunder. Rainwater and spittle few from the man’s lips.

Willem was stopped once more in midair. The force of the glowing mist—mist in the shape of the head of a ram, its curved horns traced with shimmering luminescence-tipped him up and drove him into the mound. He hit hard,

and some combination of bones snapped. Willem screamed out of some half-buried instinct, though the pain was no worse than always.

He slid to the muddy ground in front of Ivar Devorast, who scurried away from him, still not able to stand, and still desperately gasping for a decent breath. Willem rose to his feet and took a step toward Devorast. The human spat out a word, the same word that had conjured the spectral ram, and Willem steeled himself for another blow, but it didn’t come.

Something passed through Devorast’s gaze that might have been fear—might have been. Or was he simply annoyed? He held a hand to his face, a ring gleaming on one finger, and spoke the word again, but again the magic did not appear. He was left scrambling away on his back, gasping for breath and helpless.

72_

lOKythorn, the Yearof Lightning Storms (1374 DR)

The Canal Site

H e isn’t there! the sad woman screamed, the “sound” echoing in Phyrea’s head and setting her teeth on edge. He doesn’t love you. He’ll use you. He’ll ruin you. He’ll kill you. He’ll bleed you dry.

They all do, the old woman said. Turn, girl. Turn away.

Let her go, the little girl squealed. Let her die by his hand, or the creature’s. Let her die and come with us that way. Let her join us covered in mud.

No, the man with the scar on his face warned. She must die at Berrywilde.

Phyrea screamed into the blast of thunder and kicked her horse forward. The animal stumbled on the loose rocks and started at a flash of lightning. She forced the horse’s head down and screamed again, anger flooding through her, washing away all the fear and doubt.

The flamberge bounced against the saddle horn, clattering in its scabbard. She grabbed it and steadied it as the horse calmed—at least calmed enough for her to urge it deeper into the ruin of the canal.

“What creature?” she screamed into the night, then half-screamed, half-grunted when a ghost appeared in front of her. She pulled her horse around the ghost of the old woman.

Go home, girl, the withered old crone wheezed, there’s nothing for you here.

Phyrea shook her head and let a frustrated growl rumble from her throat. As she passed, the old woman’s face changed. Phyrea had to turn in her saddle to see it, and she blinked in the cold, driving rain. The old woman’s face twisted into a hideous, monstrous mask like the face of a demon, all fangs and open, worm-ridden sores.

Phyrea yanked her eyes off the horrifying visage and urged her horse into the storm. She didn’t know where she was going.

“Where are you?” she howled into the night. Her body shook with a sob that almost knocked her from the saddle. She began to weep. “Where are you?”

Show her, said the man with the scar on his face.

Phyrea pulled her horse up short. The beast was only too happy to oblige. Fear made it quiver under her. It kept its head down, scanning what it could see of the ground in the lightning-punctuated darkness. It shifted, desperate for footing in the mud and loose stones.

“Show me,” Phyrea sobbed.

But if she dies here____the little boy said. If Willem

touches her….

Willem? Phyrea thought.

She saw the boy standing at the top of a hill made of the sundered remains of the canal. His missing arm had been replaced by a ghastly tentacle that waved and curled with an intelligence all his own. The violet light was tinged with green. His face was locked in a rigid death mask—a silent’ scream of incalculable agony.

Phyrea sobbed again, “Show me. Help me.”

Show her, said the man with the scar on his—no, Phyrea realized. His “voice” was different.

She dug her heels into her horse’s flanks and drove it toward the hideous phantasm of the little boy. The mount fetched up near the base of the mound and pulled around to the left. Phyrea held on for dear life, almost sliding off—then she hopped back straight onto the saddle, flinching away from the ghostly tentacle. The little boy had disappeared only to reappear in the air right next to her.

Phyrea’s attention was drawn up to the sky above her. The ghosts whirled in the air, their arms and legs flailing as though they were falling, but they spun in circles-opposing orbits that intersected with each other so that Phyrea winced several times in the space of a few heartbeats, certain that two or more of them would collide.

They had all changed—their mouths lined with fangs, their eyes bulging and distorted. Hands shrank to feeble claws or grew to swollen, diseased proportions.

There, the new voice said.

Phyrea’s head turned of its own accord, as though gently nudged that way. Lightning flashed and she saw a man scrambling through the mud on his back, and another figure stalking up to him, murder coming off him in waves.

“Ivar,” she gasped.

The sword… the voice whispered.

Phyrea screamed, “Ivar!” and jammed her heels into the horse’s flanks, whipping its neck with the reins.

73_

10 Ky thorn, the Yearof Lightning Storms (1374 DR) Third Quarter, Innarlith

Despite the presence of the black firedrakes, fighting his way out of the senate chamber had been the easy part.

Obviously ordered not to injure any of the senators, who ran through the chamber like flocks of panicked birds, the black firedrakes didn’t spit their streams of deadly acid at him—until he finally burst into the outer chamber.

Pristoleph had been burned in spots and it hurt, but he pressed on. The wemics he’d had lying in wait, surrounding the Chamber of Law and Civility, engaged the black firedrakes, cutting open a path out of the building.

Expecting trouble, perhaps, the city watch had cordoned off the streets for a few blocks around the senate seat. The streets were clear of innocent bystanders when the black firedrakes met the wemics and blood filled the middens.

Spells flared as Marek Rymiit’s wizards took to the streets. Wemics were burned or frozen where they stood, “some just disappeared in flashes of green and yellow light, or puffs of vile-smelling smoke.

Pristoleph burned his share of Red Wizards and black firedrakes as he made his way out of the cordoned area. The wemics pulled him along in a ring of fierce, barbaric warriors. Their weapons spilled blood and batted back spears. Acid burned them, only to be cooled by a splash of an enemy’s blood.

The watchmen at the edges of the safe area stepped aside when they passed, not even looking Pristoleph or any of the wemics in the eye. They didn’t seem to know or care who would be the victor that day, who would end up with the city-state in his grasp, so they had apparently decided not to anger either side. Most of them simply went home or holed up in a tavern or festhall. Many of them stayed at their posts, watching with a mix of horror and fascination. None of them fought.

The sun had already set by the time Pristoleph made his way out of the Chamber of Law and Civility, and though the black firedrakes made full use of the dark streets of the Second Quarter, in the Third Quarter, where the tradesmen lit their streets with lamps, Pristoleph started burning them.

The black firedrakes abandoned their human guises to swoop in at Pristoleph from the rooftops. The genasi turned his attention to the street lamps, shattering the glass with sudden bursts of heat and sending thin columns of white-hot flame lancing into the sky. The fire cut through one of the firedrake’s wings like a hot knife through butter, and the creature spiraled to a spine-shattering stop in front of a cabinetmaker’s workshop.

The wemics were as afraid of the fire as the drakes, and were further confused by the tradesmen and their customers scurrying through the nighttime streets, all wondering what manner of inhuman war had suddenly fallen upon them. Rain pelted the ground, making burned firedrakes sizzle on the streets. In the far distance, well to the northwest, lightning flickered on the horizon, and even over the din of the running battle, Pristoleph could hear the distant rumble of faraway thunder.

Pristoleph stopped, his back against the wall of a tannery, and scanned the confusion for Second Chief Gahrzig. He spotted the wemic, his arm cleared of fur, an angry acid burn still sending tendrils of pungent smoke into the air. The mercenary impaled a twitching black firedrake to the gravel street. The polearm he used to kill the firedrake was one Pristoleph had purchased from the Thayan himself. The sight made Pristoleph smile.

“Gahrzig!” he called, shouting over the dying scream of another black firedrake, and the agonized bellow of another burned wemic. “Second Chief—to me!”

The wemic yanked his weapon free of the quivering firedrake, which fell still when the blade came out of it with a gout of blood and a trail of slippery yellow-gray guts. The wemic, its claws kicking up gravel, dodged a falling firedrake as he made his way to the ransar’s side. Behind him, the fallen drake was ripped apart by two of Gahrzig’s tribemates, who swallowed the pieces they’d torn out with their vicious fangs.

“Make your stand here,” Pristoleph said. “I will find you again at Pristal Towers.”

“We will go together,” the wemic argued. “The plan was to-“

“No, my friend,” Pristoleph interrupted. “No. It has to be this way. Protect my house.”

“Where will you go?” the wemic asked.

Pristoleph smiled and shook his head, and the wemic returned his smile, his fangs glistening in the wild firelight. A black firedrake screamed as it was torn to shreds behind him.

Gahrzig turned back to the fight just in time to avoid a spray of acid from the roof above—and the spray was answered by a volley of arrows that burned with a magical blue-green light, fired from a wemic on the other side of the street.

Pristoleph disappeared into the shadows of an alley that would take him away from Pristal Towers. He had more than one route in mind, and though it had been some time since he’d lived on the streets, he still knew Innarlith. He made his way as fast as he could to the Fourth Quarter, back to the streets from whence he came.

74_;__

lOKythorn, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR) The Canal Site

When the horse smashed into the twisted, freakish thing that once was Willem Korvan, Phyrea flew from the saddle, screaming. The horse went down, puffing out the air from both lungs. Willem was tossed underneath it, raking at the beast’s flanks as it slid over him, pushing him into the mud and driving shards of broken stone into his sandpaper skin.