Lies of Light w-2 Page 2

  “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 Nagaflow 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

  3 Alturiak, 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.

  “Rymut?” 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 Rymut. 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 Rymut 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 Rymut 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 Rymut had lived.

  And Surero had gone to the dungeon to rot. Forever.

  A key turned in the lock. The soun
d 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 Rymut behind that door? Was it the Thayan robber come to kill him once and for all?

  “Rymut?’ 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 perspirin’ Hells are you calling a Thayan?”

  Surero chanced it. He opened one eye.

  “You …” he mumbled. “You’re not … Rymut.”

  “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 Rymut 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

  9 Alturiak, the Year of the 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 Rymut’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 Rymut 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 Rymut 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 Rymut 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 Rymut 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 Rymut.”

  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 Mare
k’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.”