Lies of Light Read online

  “He was one of your boys,” Wenefir said. “What has he told you?”

  Marek brushed aside the implication that weighed heavily in Wenefir’s eyes and said, “I have not heard from him, nor seen him, in days. But there is more to consider than Willem Korvan. There’s the master builder. Phyrea is his daughter, after all, and he fought for the marriage with Willem. And he isn’t necessarily counted among Pristoleph’s allies. And the master builder has the ear of the ransar.”

  “And you have the mind of the ransar,” Wenefir retorted. “What have you told Salatis to think?”

  “You overestimate me.”

  “No, Marek, I don’t think I do,” Wenefir said. “You were right to come to me. This relationship has implications, and those implications will have to be more carefully considered.”

  “Carefully considered,” Marek suggested, “by someone with a clearer view, unfiltered by love, lust, and so on.”

  Wenefir’s eyes went cold, and a tickle of fear played along the edges of Marek’s consciousness.

  “I’ll show you the way out,” Wenefir said.

  Turn on each other, Marek thought as he followed the soft, strange man to a hidden door. Turn on each other over a girl.

  He tried not to laugh as he climbed the spiral stairs that would take him a hundred feet up to the street.

  67

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

  THE CITY OF ORMPETARR

  Please, please, can’t you let us go home? the little girl begged. Don’t look at him.

  He has replaced you, said the old woman. He’s replaced you in his heart. There are other women. He didn’t wait for you.

  Surely you didn’t expect him to wait for you, said the man with the scar on his face.

  He should have, the younger woman sobbed. Why didn’t he?

  Phyrea stood at the foot of the skeletal pier that stretched out into the calm expanse of the Nagawater. The ghost of the old woman stood in front of her, and most of what she saw of the pier was filtered through her insubstantial violet form. Phyrea hugged herself and shivered. Even her heavy wool weathercloak didn’t keep the chill away from her bones. When she caught the ghostly woman’s eye she shivered worse. The spirit’s freezing gaze cut her like a dagger, and her head ached.

  “He won’t kill me,” Phyrea whispered.

  Yes, he will, the little girl replied.

  “You will,” she whispered.

  The woman sneered at her, her eyes flickering orange. Phyrea put her hands over her eyes. The old woman’s shriek rattled her skull, and beneath her the planks shuddered.

  “Go away,” she whispered, and opened her eyes.

  The old woman was gone, and before her stood Ivar Devorast.

  Phyrea took a step backward.

  “I can’t go away,” he said. “I have work to do.”

  He wore the same simple tunic and breeches he always wore, and though it was cold, he didn’t have any sort of cloak or coat. He held a carpenter’s hammer in one hand, loose and comfortable at his side.

  “Not you,” she said, shaking her head.

  Phyrea expected one of the ghosts to say something, but they remained silent. She looked around but couldn’t see any of them. She smiled.

  “You’re not surprised to see me,” she said.

  He shook his head, but said nothing. His red hair whipped around his face in the steady wind.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Helping to build a pier,” he said.

  “But why?” she asked.

  “They want to start building ships,” he replied.

  She waited for him to say more—then smiled. It had been a long time since she’d had to do that, to wait for him to say more. She couldn’t believe how much she’d missed it.

  “Will you build ships, then?” she asked.

  “I’ll build the pier,” he told her.

  “And you won’t think of the canal?”

  “I think of the canal every day,” he said, and a darkness descended over his face that made Phyrea shiver.

  “Will you come back?”

  He just looked at her. He didn’t shrug or nod or shake his head.

  “I have something I wanted to tell you,” she said. He waited for her to go on, and that made her smile again.

  “I’m going to be married again,” she said.

  “Again?” he asked.

  “I left Willem over a month ago.”

  “Why did you feel you had to tell me that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “No, yes I do. I had to give you a chance to stop me.”

  “If you don’t want to marry this man,” he said, “then don’t. If you want to be here with me, then stay.”

  “And there’s nothing you want to say to influence me one way or the other?”

  He stood there and stared at her again, and she sobbed and laughed at the same time.

  “You just can’t …” she started. “Can’t you just tell me if you want me or not?”

  He shook his head, and Phyrea thought he looked sad, but wasn’t sure.

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” she admitted.

  “No, you shouldn’t have,” he said, “if you don’t know what you want.”

  She sighed and looked down. Her hair flew around her face, and she hooked it behind her ear. Some of the other men who were working on the pier walked past them. They looked at her, glanced at Devorast, but kept going.

  “I do know what I want,” she said, her eyes darting at the passing men. “I did know what I want. I wanted you. I wanted you to love me. I wanted you to protect …”

  She couldn’t keep talking, but didn’t cry. Devorast didn’t say anything.

  “I wanted to give you the chance to fight for me,” she told him.

  He shook his head.

  “I know,” she said, wiping a tear from her eye. The wind caught her hair again and made her blink. “Maybe I came to tell you that I found someone like you—so like you—in ways I thought were impossible. And he loves me enough to take me away from someone else.”

  “Did you come to say good-bye?” he asked.

  “I’ll never say that to you, Ivar.”

  He looked over his shoulder at the skeletal pier.

  “I’m keeping you from your work,” she said, and turned to go.

  “Stay,” he said.

  She stopped, waiting for more, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “For all the reasons that brought you here in the first place,” he said.

  Phyrea shook her head and replied, “No. I won’t stay here to be a laborer’s wife. But if you take me back to Innarlith and reclaim what’s yours, I’d be happy to be a canal builder’s slave.”

  The boards under her feet rattled and the sound of the hammer hitting them made her jump.

  “Damn it, Phyrea,” he said. “I don’t want a slave.”

  She sighed, didn’t turn around, and said, “I can’t be anything for you but a slave. I can’t do anything for you but surrender myself, body and soul. If you won’t take that from me, there’s another man who will.”

  “Go to him then,” he said.

  Tears fell from her eyes, but she refused to let him see her sob. She walked away, leaving him standing there watching her go.

  68

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

  THE LAND OF ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN

  Lightning flashed across the sharply delineated skies of Marek Rymüt’s private dimension. No thunder followed, and no rain fell.

  He took a deep breath and enjoyed the pure silence of the chamber high atop the tall tower that had finally been completed for him. Its twisted, needle-like architecture had come to him in a dream—a dream of the future of Thay that a part of him hoped he would never see.

  On the floor in front of him lay the motionless form of Willem Korvan. The body was stiff with rigor mortis, and held straight by the long-blad
ed flambergé still sheathed in him from his stomach to the base of his neck.

  Marek sighed at the sight of the handsome face made ugly in death. Not only was his mouth twisted into a grimace, lips pulled back from yellowed teeth and gums turning black, but his cheeks had sunk in so far they almost appeared to have been tucked up under his cheekbones.

  He turned to the side table against the inside wall and tapped the hardwood top in front of each of the items that had been laid out there. A tiny scrap of raw meat—he’d asked for it to be human flesh, though it didn’t necessarily have to be—lay on a fine porcelain plate as big around as Marek’s hand. On an identical plate next to it was a shard of bone, jagged on one end, and rounded on the other. It looked like a finger bone. On a square of red velvet sat a loose black onyx gem he’d paid three hundred gold pieces for. A clay pot filled with brackish water sat next to another that contained a handful of dark brown soil traced with gray dust that had been scooped by Marek’s own hand from a freshly-turned grave. The last item was a glass vial, corked and sealed with wax.

  He picked up the vial first and held it up to one of the whale oil lamps that lit the room. Inside the vial was a clove of garlic that he’d stolen from a rival wizard. That wizard had written, in a delicate and minute hand, an odd little poem on the tiny clove. It was written in Draconic and held power that Marek had waited more than four years to bring to bear.

  “I don’t think he really knew exactly what it would do,” Marek said in a quiet, calm voice, directed at the dead body of Willem Korvan. “Thadat….” He spoke the dead wizard’s name with venomous contempt. “They never know what they have until I take it from them.”

  He looked down at Willem and thought about that.

  “You never knew what you had,” he said.

  Marek frowned and drew a fingernail around the wax seal, breaking it. He pulled out the cork and placed it on the table, then tipped the vial so the garlic clove dropped onto his palm.

  “You’ll thank me for this later, my boy,” Marek whispered, then he bit the clove in half and swallowed what was in his mouth without chewing it. The little nugget of garlic would stay in his stomach, lodged there to soak its power into him for years, even decades. “And this one is for you.”

  Marek sank to one knee, enduring the pain in his hip and ignoring the popping of his joints. He dropped the remaining half of the garlic clove into Willem’s open mouth. With a deep breath, he climbed back to his feet.

  “What next?” he breathed.

  In answer to his own question, Marek picked up the onyx gem and turned back to the corpse. Once again he struggled down to one knee. He had to force the stone into Willem’s mouth, sliding it up under his teeth and forcing it past his bloated, dry tongue.

  “A special stone, for a special boy,” the Thayan whispered.

  He looked up at the table and sighed, smiling. He should have had the black firedrake—the runt he’d kept for himself as a personal servant—place the material components on the floor next to the body, so he wouldn’t have to keep kneeling and standing.

  He stood, and retrieved the two bowls. Kneeling again, he dipped two fingers into the grave dirt and drew a short line on Willem’s bare chest. He went back for more dirt, then more and more as he drew vile sigils across the corpse’s pale flesh. When he was done, he poured the water over the dusty symbols. The water soaked into the grave dirt, adding just the touch of chaos necessary to bend the evil runes into their most potent configuration.

  Marek stood and looked down at the body—it was just right. Everything was perfect.

  He began one of two simultaneous spells, the incantations wrapped together in a way that tested even his experienced tongue. He paused only as long as it took to swallow the sliver of raw meat. His fingers traced intricate patterns in the air, the shard of bone pressed against his left palm with his middle finger. When the bone dissolved into dust, he dropped both hands to his sides.

  Still chanting the interwoven necromancies, Marek bent at the waist and wrapped a hand around the hilt of the flambergé. With one swift motion, he pulled it free. The precise moment that the tip of the blade left Willem’s cold flesh, his body jerked and his bulging, vacant eyes rolled around in their sockets.

  Still holding the extraordinary sword, Marek stepped back, and let Willem—or to be more precise, the creature that Willem had become—roll onto its belly and vomit out the desiccated black gemstone.

  “Stand, thrall,” Marek ordered.

  The creature struggled to its feet, its whole body shaking. It looked down at itself, naked and pale, the lightning that flashed in the window playing over the sword wound that no longer bled. Marek could see its eyes focus, and a dim beginning of sentience returned to its gaze.

  “That’s right,” Marek said, letting a wide grin spread across his face. “You’re no zombie to be made to dig and claw at mud, my boy.”

  The creature looked at its creator, its smoldering eyes running up the wavy length of the blade and stopping on Marek’s grinning face.

  “Yes,” the Thayan said, taking a step closer to the hunched, naked undead wretch. “You know me. You know your master.”

  Recognition flooded into the creature’s eyes all at once, to be replaced a moment later with impotent rage, then a desperate realization of what had become of it.

  “Good morning, my boy,” Marek Rymüt said, then he started to laugh.

  The creature grunted, its lips still pulled away from its teeth in a terrible grimace. It lifted its sunken face, skin stretched tight and so pale it was almost green, up to the ceiling, to the lightning outside.

  Marek laughed.

  The thing that had once been Willem Korvan screamed.

  Marek didn’t stop laughing, and his creation didn’t stop screaming, for a very long time.

  To be concluded in

  Scream of Stone

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Philip Athans lives and writes in the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. Lies of Light is his eighth published novel.

  LIES OF LIGHT

  The Watercourse Trilogy, Book II

  ©2006 Wizards of the Coast LLC

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. FORGOTTEN REALMS, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC, in the U.S.A. and other countries.

  Map by Rob Lazzaretti

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2005935521

  eISBN: 978-0-7869-5684-5

  U.S., CANADA, EUROPEAN HEADQUARTERS

  ASIA, PACIFIC, & LATIN AMERICA Hasbro UK Ltd

  Wizards of the Coast LLC Caswell Way

  P.O. Box 707 Newport, Gwent NP9 0YH

  Renton, WA 98057-0707 GREAT BRITAIN

  +1-800-324-6496 Save this address for your records.

  Visit our web site at www.wizards.com

  v3.0