Whisper of Waves (13 page)

Hrothgar’s own predicament worsened when the frog managed to find the strength or the leverage to finally lift him bodily off the ground. The tongue pulled him to the very edge of the giant frog’s mouth, but the dwarf set the soles of his wide, hard boots onto the thing’s puckered yellow lips and pressed with all his might. He managed to balance out the pull of the tongue, and there they stood, the frog trying to draw him in, the dwarf trying to pull the tongue out. The giant frog, not knowing any better, kept up the fight.

Before the hammer was pulled from his grip, Devorast stabbed into the slimy yellow tongue, then dragged his blade around in a circle as if he were peeling some huge, rotten apple. The last three feet of the long tongue came away, trailing a string of pale yellow sinew then snapping off entirely. Devorast staggered back, shaking the dismembered tongue from his hammer.

Hrothgar, pressing with all his might, looked down into the giant frog’s mouth. Behind him, the sound of the

other amphibian’s deep, grumbling screams were punctuated by thud after thud as Devorast beat the thing with his hammer over and over. Hrothgar let his own hammer fall to the ground in order to free up the hand closest to his enemy’s mouth. Bending at the knees, giving the frog the impression that he was being pulled farther in, Hrothgar reached, straining every muscle and tendon in his arm until they creaked. When his hand found human flesh, he squeezed as tightly as he could and pulled with his arm, his back, and both legs. Swallowing, the giant frog fought against him, but Hrothgar could feel the boy starting to slide in his direction.

Something made the giant frog bounce, and the grip of the tongue weakened just enough that Hrothgar, with one great pull, wrenched the boy’s face clear of the thing’s gullet. The dwarf made eye contact with the waterboy, whose face was a reddened, slime-covered mask of sheer terror, his mouth open wide in a silent scream, his eyes as red as his cheeks.

The frog jerked again, and Hrothgar realized that Devorast, having taken down his own giant frog, stood next to the thing, pounding away at it with his hammer.

The hammer blows, combined with Hrothgar’s relentless pull on the struggling boy and the natural impulse of any animal when it finds something lodged half in and half out of its throat, finally forced the boy free. The dwarf tossed him to the ground where he rolled away, mouth still gaping, eyes wide, body shaking, skin and eyes red, clothes torn, and drenched in the frog’s vile, slimy spittle.

Devorast paused in his attacks only long enough to hand Hrothgar his hammer. The two of them—the human standing in the tall grass and the dwarf still pushing against the relentless pull of the massive tongue—went to work on the giant frog one stone-splitting hammer blow at a time.

It took dozens and dozens of those blows to kill the thing, but in time, Hrothgar fell from the dead tongue’s embrace.

He sat on the ground for half a dozen deep, rattling breaths before he looked up at Devorast. The human looked around, brushing away the grass with the back of one hand.

A cheer and a smattering of applause came from the top of the hill, where the other workers had gathered. Hrothgar didn’t allow himself to wonder how long the whoresons had been standing there watching, not helping, while he and Devorast saved the Waterboys and killed two giant frogs all on their own. He looked back at Devorast instead.

The human said, “Where are the water buckets?”

Hrothgar took a breath, almost answered, then lay back in the tall grass and laughed.

Had he looked up just then he might have seen a pair of cold, hard eyes half in and half out of the water and the top of what would have looked like a woman’s head barely breaking the river’s surface. Those malevolent, critical eyes watched every move Ivar Devorast made until he finally strode back up the hill to get back to work. Then it slid back into the unforgiving waters of the Nagaflow.

24_

UMirtul, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR) The Nagaflow Keep

Willem had never been more uncomfortable in the presence of the master builder. Inthelph seethed with anger, and Willem suffered through the seemingly endless carriage ride trying not to make eye contact with him. The carriage bounced and jostled for hour after hour, testing the limits of Willem’s patience and the integrity of his kidneys. When they stopped to rest the horses, Willem found new sources of pain and stiffness in his exhausted body.

Inthelph appeared no worse for wear, though. It was as if his anger and outrage were keeping the trip from wearing on him.

Throughout the sixteen-hour ride from Innarlith to the proposed site of the Nagaflow Keep, Willem sat in silence. For the first several hours he’d tried to puzzle out what in Faerun’s name Devorast must have been thinking, but by the time the carriage came to a stop amid the clatter of stonemasons at work, he’d given up trying.

When he’d first heard that Devorast had begun construction on the keep, he’d had a momentary thrill. Though he’d certainly never admit it to the master builder or anyone in the master builder’s acquaintance—and therefore almost no one in Innarlith—he admired the pure outrageous hubris of the whole thing. It was so far beyond mere self-confidence that Willem couldn’t even puzzle at its source. Once confronted by the master builder, Willem had faked shocked outrage and joined Inthelph in days’ worth of steaming, hateful rants. Messages were sent and ignored, agents dispatched and sent home, and finally Inthelph decided to go to the river himself. He didn’t bother asking Willem to go along. It was simply assumed.

Willem let the master builder step out of the carriage first. The softly glowing lamps that swung from the corners of the carriage only made it more difficult to see anything happening at a distance. Willem stepped out of the carriage, stiff muscles protesting all the way, and blinked in a vain attempt to adjust his eyes to the odd lighting.

Torches driven into the rolling grassland turned the sky into a starless expanse of the deepest black. Willem judged it to be near or just after midnight, and still the work site was abuzz with the clatter of hammers on wedges, the grunts of workers, and the barking laughs of men drawn close by hard work toward a common goal. The very air was alight with a sense of order and calm but driven efficiency.

All that was lost on Inthelph.

“Where is he?” the master builder asked, his face flushing red, his lips curling up over his graying teeth. “Where is this man of yours?”

Willem had no idea. He’d never been out into the wild lands north of the city to the river everyone said was infested with the nagas that gave it its name and other creatures less intelligent but no less dangerous.

The master builder didn’t wait for him to answer anyway and instead stomped off into the thick of the crowded work site. Willem followed behind, determined to let the master builder do all the talking. He’d stopped short of practicing a look of crushed disappointment in a mirror but was certain Devorast would know how he felt—or at least how he wanted to appear to be feeling, for the admiration he’d felt when he’d first heard that Devorast had begun work was only intensified with every step they took through the tightly organized site. If Willem had had to guess, he’d have said they’d been at work for the better part of six months, but he knew it had been less than two.

Inthelph stopped a man carrying a bundle of sticks on his back and demanded, “Where is Ivar Devorast?”

The man with the sticks looked at the master builder with a passive, quietly respectful look and Willem realized then that the crew Devorast had assembled had no idea what he’d done, but then, why would they need to know?

“He’s over by the dwarfs,” the man drawled, his accent as much as his occupation marking him as a citizen of the Fourth Quarter.

Inthelph raised an eyebrow, and the man nodded in the direction of a steep, flat-topped hill. Without another word, the master builder stomped off up the hill with Willem in tow. The climb was rough, especially after sixteen hours in a carriage, but the higher they climbed the more of the surrounding territory Willem could see. When they reached the top of the bill, more of the

torches revealed the shimmering waters of a wide river below. Willem tried to imagine the scene in the daylight and realized he could see for miles on all sides. He guessed that in the daylight they’d be able to see all the way east to the Golden Road bridge. That crossing was already fortified by the ransar, it being a vital trade link to Arrabar and the Vilhon Reach to the north, but from the hill…

“Perfect,” Willem whispered.

The master builder paid him no mind. He’d spotted Devorast sitting next to a small fire, sipping from a steaming cup of tea and bent over a sheet of parchment. At his side was a squat dwarf with greasy red-brown hair and hands that looked as rough as the stone his hammer and apron said he worked with. Inthelph charged up to them so quickly and radiating such anger that the dwarf, startled, stood and grabbed for his hammer.

Devorast stopped the dwarf with a hand on his forearm then whispered something into his ear.

“Devorast!” Inthelph shouted. “Devorast, you thrice-bedamned fool, what in the name of Toril and the crystal spheres do you think you’re doing here?”

The dwarf smiled at Inthelph, amused either by the master builder or what Devorast had said—or perhaps both. He walked away but kept glancing back at the master builder with—not quite menace but a subtle challenge in his eyes.

Inthelph, livid, ignored the dwarf and instead shouted at Devorast, “I told you to bring me plans, you drooling incompetent, not to begin work without the slightest word of approval from me. Who in the name of every god in the outer planes do you think you are?”

“There was no need to show you anything, Master Builder,” Devorast replied, and there was no mistaking the disdain he put into the words “Master Builder.” “I found the right location, quarried the stone, and now I’m building you and your ransar his keep.”

Inthelph was so taken aback by the brazen reply—a reply Willem fully expected to hear—that he almost fell over.

“On whose authority, boy?” the master builder shrieked. “I have not approved this site. I did not release the gold to pay this crew. I did not examine the design of your fortification. You’ve built one ship—one too-big barge that sank its first day at sea—and now you have the unmitigated audacity to begin a project of this nature, in the name of the ransar of Innarlith, entirely on your own authority?”

Devorast looked at the master builder with one eyebrow raised. Willem waited for the shrug, a gesture he knew would put the master builder completely over the edge, but it didn’t come.

“Do you have a better site in mind?” Devorast said. “Do you have a plan for a keep that will surpass my own?”

“No, you dolt!” Inthelph raged. “That’s precisely the point. What if I had? What if there is a flaw in your location? Sure, we’re up on top of a hill overlooking the river, but have you taken everything into account that the ransar and his generals would expect from a fortification that was meant to have been designed to suit their needs and not yours? Are we close enough to the Golden Road bridge or far enough away? Don’t you dare for one moment stand there and tell me that you know the answers to every question, have taken every last detail into account, drawing, I must point out, from the experience you gained building how many such structures?”

There was a silence and Willem knew that Devorast had no intention of filling it.

“None!” the master builder answered himself. “You’ve never done anything like this, even as a stonemason, even as a common laborer, yet here you are, building the damned thing already, and with the ransar’s coin!”

“The ransar will be satisfied,” Devorast said.

Willem took a deep breath and held it. Looking at Devorast’s face, seeing the look in his eyes and hearing the perfect control in his voice, Willem had no doubt that

the ransar would be satisfied indeed, but he also knew that it would never get that far.

Inthelph took a deep breath too but didn’t hold it and didn’t look into Devorast’s eyes. Instead he turned away and walked in a circle, taking fast, short steps and shaking his head and shoulders in an effort to calm himself. Sweat soaked his silk tunic in the warm spring night.

“Because he has served me well for a long time now,” said the master builder, “your friend Willem will not suffer for your spectacular display of hubris, and if… if—”he screamed—”your plans have any merit at all you might just avoid a stay in the ransar’s dungeons. I want you gone. I want you away from here this very instant. If you ever set foot here again or ever so much as appear in my presence, no friend, no kind word of recommendation will save you from my wrath. You have ruined yourself with this insanity, Devorast, so I won’t trouble myself to take you the rest of the way down. This is no misstep, no blunder on the way that will educate you. This is incompetence, insolence of the highest order.”

Devorast did something then that Willem had so seldom seen. He smiled.

“If I’m incompetent,” Devorast said, “it’s only in my ability to suffer the opinions of lesser minds, and that, -Master Builder, is a fault I’m prepared to live with.”

Inthelph’s eyes bulged, and his mouth hung open.

“Ivar,” Willem said, doing his best to seem compassionate yet firm, “I think that’s quite enough.”

The look that Devorast gave him in return made Willem’s blood run cold.

“Go,” the master builder growled.

Then came that shrug, but Inthelph had already stomped away. When Willem watched Devorast walk off in the other direction and saw the looks on the faces of the crowd of workmen who had stopped to watch Inthelph’s display of righteous indignation, he realized just how wrong the master builder was.

9Eleint, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith

Before Marek cast the first spell he paused to consider what the neighbors would think. He let his attention drift to the window that looked out over the street, lined by fashionable townhouses, the finest addresses in the city. Close on all sides were the wealthiest people in Innarlith, and sure they all had their share of secrets, but Marek couldn’t imagine any of them were doing anything like what he was about to do. That made him smile.