Lies of Light Page 28

“Very well, then,” Pristoleph said, his voice as light and as casual as though they’d just come to agreement to get together later for a game of sava, not that he’d just appropriated a man’s wife. “Let’s eat, shall we?”

  Willem sat through the meal desperately trying not to throw up.

  62

  21 Uktar, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR)

  THE CANAL SITE

  Fifteen more dead men awoke, choked out a dusty black coal, and staggered to their feet.

  “I’m beginning to think,” Willem said with a sigh, “that for every one you bring back from the dead, two or three living workers flee back to the city.”

  Marek Rymüt chuckled and said, “Let them go. We’ve made arrangements to collect bodies from the Fourth Quarter mass graves, so they’ll come back from the city in due course anyway.”

  Willem shuddered at the thought of it. He rubbed his wrists where he’d been cut and healed again. His body shook, his nose ran, and his head throbbed. He wondered if he had any more blood to lose.

  “I hate the winter here,” he muttered. “It’s so cold. Every day it’s so dark and cold.”

  “But isn’t it colder in Cormyr?” Marek asked. “It’s likely snowing there, no?”

  Willem shook his head, but replied, “Yes, I suppose it is. Still, this damp—not damp but incessant soaking rain—sucks the warmth from your body. It’s killing me. Its absolutely killing me.”

  “This?” said Kurtsson, who’d finish creating a handful of zombies himself. “This is warm. It’s warm here.”

  “Ah,” Marek said with a jovial laugh, “the Vaasan perspective. Surely even you can take heart in that, Willem.”

  “No, I can’t,” said Willem.

  “Really, my boy,” Marek said, “perhaps you need to spend more than a night or two with that lovely wife of yours. I’ve been encouraging you to get back to the city more often and for longer stretches.”

  “My lovely wife isn’t there,” Willem said, surprised that Marek, who always seemed to know everything, didn’t know that. “She’s gone off with another man.”

  Kurtsson laughed at him, and Willem spun on the Vaasan, which only made him laugh harder.

  “Kurtsson,” Marek said in a stern tone, “perhaps you could be of use with spells for the cause?”

  The Vaasan wizard quieted a bit, but didn’t stop laughing. He wandered off into the work camp, playfully passing between shambling rows of undead workers. Willem watched him go, not keen to see the look on Marek Rymüt’s face, one way or another.

  “I have to admit that I’m a bit disappointed you’re only now telling me this,” the Thayan said. “I knew, of course, but I was hoping that by now I’d gained your confidence.”

  Willem choked back a sob and wiped snot from his nose onto the back of his sleeve. His clothes were ruined from the wet and mud anyway, so what was the difference?

  “Do you know where they’ve gone?” Marek asked.

  “Do you?” Willem shot back—too fast, too forcefully—and fear that he’d offended the Thayan actually staggered him. “My apologies, Master Rymüt. I’m not myself.”

  “I should say you aren’t,” the Red Wizard replied, his voice devoid of anger. “You look terrible—worse every time I see you. You’re not wearing that item I provided you.”

  “It stopped working.”

  “I can find you an—”

  “I’m dying out here,” Willem said. “This thing is killing me.”

  “That was no one’s intent, Willem. If you’d prefer to come back to the city, no one will fault you.”

  “But we both know that they will,” Willem said. “They will fault me, they will blame me, they will shun me, they will punish me, and as sure as the mud and rain will kill me, they will just as fast.”

  “People will speak and act on your behalf,” Marek promised without sincerity.

  Willem gasped out something like an exhausted laugh and said, “I’m sure they will. Maybe one of the other senior senators will decide to move into my house. Meykhati, maybe? Or what if Salatis covets my eyes? He’ll have them dug from my screaming skull as easily as Pristoleph took my—”

  Willem stopped. His throat closed over anymore words. Tears streamed down to mix with the rain on his face.

  “You’ve put yourself in the dragon’s lair, my boy,” Marek said. “This little city on the edge of the world has its own rules, and chief among those rules is the strong survive. Gold is what they all covet, gold and the power it brings. You’ve gone after power, Willem, and I’m surprised to find you naive enough to believe that there would be no consequences.”

  “This place has no honor,” Willem said.

  That made Marek laugh, and laugh long and loud.

  When the Thayan finally got hold of himself he said, “Please, Willem. The same is true in your precious Cormyr, as it is in my own beloved Thay. The thing is, you see, that as the son of a boarding house wife, you simply weren’t prepared for it.”

  Willem shook his head, though he knew that Marek spoke the truth.

  “So, what now, then?” the Thayan asked.

  “I will stay here and die desecrating the dream of a better man,” Willem said.

  “My, Willem, you do have a sense of the dramatic at times. I’ll grant you that.”

  “Look at them,” Willem said, ignoring the wizard’s last comment. “I know you created them, but have you really ever looked at them?”

  “The zombies, you mean.”

  “The walking dead,” Willem replied, “yes. Don’t you sometimes wish you could be like that?”

  “No,” Marek said. “No, I don’t.”

  “They haven’t a care in the world,” Willem went on. “They aren’t happy, but they aren’t unhappy, either, and do you know why?”

  “Because what little brains they had in the first place are rapidly rotting in their skulls?”

  “No,” Willem replied. “I mean, yes, of course, but no. They’re neither happy nor unhappy because they don’t seek happiness. They don’t know what happiness is—or at least they don’t imagine they might someday know what happiness is. They exist, and that’s enough for them. They do as they’re told, and are left to do it. They aren’t teased with gold, comfort, women, power…. No one leads them on.”

  “Perhaps the cold and damp have gotten to your thinking worse that I thought, my boy,” Marek said. “Healthy men do not envy the undead—at least not this sort of shambling, mindless walking corpse. It almost sounds as though you’d like to be one.”

  “Perhaps I would,” said Willem.

  “Well,” the Red Wizard replied, his voice dense and full of meaning, “that could be arranged.”

  Willem looked at the Thayan and almost screamed at the look he saw in the man’s eyes.

  But he didn’t scream. Instead, he shook his head and excused himself. He walked back to his tent, leaving the Thayan to disappear, sending himself back to Innarlith by means of his own magic.

  In his tent, Willem sat on his canvas chair, opened a new bottle of brandy, and drank it.

  All of it.

  63

  22 Nightal, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR)

  THE SHINING SEA, SEVENTY MILES NORTH OF LUSHPOOL

  They had been at sea for twenty-nine days, and in all that time Phyrea had not heard a single word uttered by anyone who wasn’t physically present—and alive. She spoke almost exclusively with Pristoleph. The crew went about their duties, rarely if ever seen from the sections of the ship reserved for she and the vessel’s master. She’d only ever been on one ship she thought was nearly a match to Pristoleph’s impressive Determined, and that was the strange ship that Devorast had made for the woman from Shou Lung.

  They were impressive because they were unlike anything she’d seen before, and were reflections of the geniuses behind them, but that was where any comparison ended.

  Determined was one of the biggest ship’s she’d ever seen, and she was dedicated to only one purpose: the recrea
tion of her master. Friends of Phyrea’s father owned sailboats and yachts of all sorts, but none of them approached Determined in sheer size and luxury. It was as though a wing of Pristal Towers, gilded appointments and all, had been set afloat.

  Phyrea climbed the stairs to the sun deck, as had become her habit after a light lunch in the salon with Pristoleph. High above the main deck, the sun deck was hidden from the sight of the crew. Though open to the tropical sun and fragrant breezes of the Shining Sea, it was entirely private.

  Her favorite chaise had already been turned to face the sun by a butler she rarely saw, but who’s effect she felt throughout the day—every day. She dropped her silk robe to the deck planks and stretched, naked, basking in the warmth of the sun. She brushed a hand slowly down her flat stomach and could already feel the sun heating her skin. She’d taken on a deep, rich color, and when she looked at herself in the mirror, she couldn’t believe the change. Gone were the bags under her eyes, the haunted, faraway look, the exhausted, defeated droop of her shoulders.

  She heard footsteps climbing the stairs and was so confident that it was Pristoleph that she didn’t cover herself, or even turn around. She sat, stretching, on the padded chaise and closed her eyes, tipping her face up to the warm sun. She imagined she could feel the perfect blue sky, unmarred by even the tiniest wisp of a cloud, soaking into her pores to nourish her in a way no food ever could.

  “You are the most beautiful woman on the face of Toril,” Pristoleph said.

  He sat in a deck chair next to her, and she looked at him and smiled.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  They had repeated the same words every day for the past twenty, and it had become another in a parade of simple comforts.

  “Are we really on our way back?” she asked.

  “We’ll be at harbor in Innarlith as soon as three or four days from now.”

  Phyrea sighed.

  “Are you disappointed?” Pristoleph asked.

  “No,” she replied. “I knew that eventually we would have to go home. All this last month, though, I’ve wondered why I’ve traveled so little in my life. My father’s coin could have carried me to Waterdeep and back a hundred times, but I never really went any farther than our country estate.”

  She took a deep breath and sighed. She didn’t want to think about Berrywilde, and the ghosts she seemed to have finally left behind.

  “I take Determined out at least one month in every twelve,” Pristoleph said, though he’d told her the same many times before. “It never ceases to amaze me what getting away from the city can do for me, especially this time of year when the rain, the dark clouds, are so oppressive.”

  “Oppressive …” she repeated, carefully considering the word. “It is. It is oppressive. I wonder if people there … if people would be better, would treat each other better, if the sun shined more often, and the Lake of Steam smelled like this sea and not the stinking innards of the Underdark.”

  “You know what I think about that,” he replied. “People are people, and the weather might make you tired, or affect your mood, but ultimately what ails Innarlith goes deeper than too many rainy days.”

  “But people there hate each other,” she said. “I know. I’m one of them. I’ve done hateful things, over and over—things to degrade myself and others. Here, under this perfect sky, I can’t imagine what made me such a misanthrope.”

  “Everyone is an altruist on a tropical afternoon,” he said. “When you have to fight for a piece of a pie that can only be cut into so many pieces, you do what has to be done.”

  She sighed and said, “I wish I’d stopped at what I had to do, sometimes.”

  He shrugged that off, but still she could tell he thought about it.

  “Still, I can’t help thinking people would be better to each other if they all had a month like this every year,” Phyrea thought aloud.

  “I have a month like this every year,” Pristoleph said, “and I’m an unconscionable bastard.”

  Phyrea laughed, and Pristoleph joined her. She kept laughing until tears streamed from her eyes. Eventually they both took deep breaths, and finally sat, smiling, in silence for a while.

  “Well,” Phyrea said at last, “I’ll try to overlook that side of you.”

  “That’s the best any man can ask from a woman,” Pristoleph replied.

  “Is it?”

  “No,” he answered without pause. “The best a man can ask is love—true love, if there is such a thing.”

  “There is,” she whispered.

  “And if I thought you felt that way about me I wouldn’t be a bastard anymore.”

  “Oh,” she joked, “I doubt that one thing has anything to do with the other.”

  She did love him, but not the same way she loved Ivar Devorast. To Phyrea, Pristoleph and she were like old friends who hadn’t seen each other in twenty years, but who fit back into a familiar, comforting groove the second they’d reacquainted.

  “When we return,” she said. “I’ll bring my things and stay with you?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “I can’t imagine living in such a beautiful place, surrounded by all that … beauty.”

  “Your father is no pauper, Phyrea,” he reminded her.

  “Of course not, but …”

  “It’s important, I think, to surround yourself with the best of everything.”

  “Why?” she asked. “To impress?”

  “No,” he replied. “To remind me that the works of man are superior to the works of nature.”

  Phyrea smiled at that and nodded.

  “Do you hear that?” he asked.

  She listened, but all she could hear was the crack and pop of the wind in the sails, the creak of the rigging, and the gentle sound of the shallow waves against the hull—the sounds of the sea.

  “Do you?” Pristoleph asked again.

  She shook her head.

  “The whisper of waves….” he said.

  Phyrea nodded and was about to ask him what he meant, but instead she listened again. She could hear it, but only because she didn’t hear the voices telling her to do things, asking her to murder herself. She wondered what else she’d missed under the weight of those voices.

  “I do,” she said, wiping a tear from her eye with one finger.

  “What does it say to you?”

  “Nothing at all,” she said, “and that’s fine with me. I’d rather hear the waves whisper of nothing, than suffer through the lies of light.”

  64

  26 Nightal, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  I just can’t understand why it is that you hate me so, Phyrea,” Willem said. “What have I done to make you see me with such contempt?”

  Phyrea didn’t want to answer him. She opened a drawer in the bureau and shifted through the scant few pieces of clothing she’d left before she went away with Pristoleph.

  “There isn’t really anything here I want anymore,” she said.

  “So you’re going to leave it?” he asked. “What am I going to do with it?”

  She bit her lip, cutting off the sarcastic, hurtful reply that came to mind. Instead, she scooped up the lace undergarments and stuffed them into the bag she had open on the bed.

  “I can have the rest sent to you, if you can’t stand to be here,” he said, “or if you don’t want to go through them. I can imagine how awful this little hovel must seem to you now.”

  “Your house is fine, Willem,” she said. “That’s not it.”

  “Then what is ‘it’?” he pressed. “You ran my mother back to Cormyr and dismissed my staff. I wasn’t even here most of the time, so if you found my presence so distasteful, at least you didn’t have to suffer me much.”

  “Is that the life you wanted?” she asked him, though when all was said and done she didn’t care to hear his answer. It didn’t matter. “Were you really content with simply avoiding my distaste?”

  He exhaled—no
t really a sigh—and leaned against the wall of his bedchamber.

  Phyrea picked up the bag and walked past him, tense and uncertain of what he might do, but he did nothing to stop her. She stepped into the hall, leaving him silently leaning on the wall in the room behind her. The little girl stood at the top of the stairs, her eyebrows drawn into a V that twisted her eyes into smoldering pinpoints. Her purple-black lips pulled away from her teeth, which were needle fangs that glistened with a vile light of their own.

  Phyrea screamed and dropped her bag. She recoiled back so fast and so out of control she nearly fell.

  “No,” she whispered.

  You left us, the little girl’s voice shrieked in Phyrea’s head. You went away and you left us, you bitch.

  “No,” Phyrea whimpered, horrified by how weak her own voice sounded.

  We knew you would come back, the man with the scar said.

  Phyrea closed her eyes so she couldn’t see him.

  “What happened?” Willem asked. He’d come out of the bedchamber. “Phyrea?”

  She shook her head and pushed him away, but not hard. He stopped and didn’t try to come any closer.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  Tell him, the man demanded. Tell him we’re here. Tell him we’ve been waiting here for all this time.

  We have been, the little boy said.

  “No, Willem….” Phyrea gasped.

  We’ve stood over him while he tried to sleep but couldn’t, the old woman said.

  We watched him drown his sorrows in drink, the sad woman told her.

  “Let me go,” she said.

  Go, yes, the little girl said. Go back to Berrywilde.

  “I’m not stopping you,” Willem said.

  Phyrea opened her eyes and stormed forward, grabbing her bag as she passed it. She went past a violet-glowing form that she didn’t look at. She ran down the stairs, leaving Willem behind, but the ghosts followed her. They tormented her out into the street. The little girl sat across from her in the coach and sneered at her.

  “Home, Miss Phyrea?” the driver—Pristoleph’s driver—asked.