Lies of Light w-2 Read online

  Lies of Light

  ( Watercourse - 2 )

  Philip Athans

  Philip Athans

  Lies of Light

  PART 1

  1

  6 Hammer, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

  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,” P
hyrea 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

  As 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

  15 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 Rymut. “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 Mare
k 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 Rymut.”

  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?”