Lies of Light Read online

  “And you control the city?”

  Marek laughed at that and said, “Only the parts of it that interest me, Senator. For the rest, I will depend on you.”

  “What of Osorkon?”

  Again, the black dragon laughed. Marek caught the senator glancing at the wyrm, fear heavy in his gaze.

  “I suspect that you’ll have one of the black firedrakes kill and eat him,” Marek answered. “Anyway, that’s what I would do. But first things first. I will give you the black firedrakes so that you can be ransar, and in return I will expect what favors from you I might choose to request. You will deny not a single one of those requests, nor shall you pause before seeing to their completion. Otherwise, the city-state is yours to do with as you wish.”

  “What favors—?”

  “What he wishes,” the dragon grumbled. “When he wishes it.”

  Salatis swallowed hard, almost choked.

  “I will require from you only a single word answer, Senator Salatis,” Marek said.

  Without pause Salatis asked, “And if I refuse? I will never leave this strange little world of yours alive, will I?”

  Marek took a deep breath, locked his eyes on Salatis’s, and said, “Since time is a luxury that neither of us can squander on trivialities, we’ll let that be as it may for now. I will have your answer.”

  Salatis swallowed again, looked out over the army of transformed monsters, and said, “Beshaba guide me.”

  Marek smiled, and studied the tall man. Salatis was afraid, but that passed in a few breaths to be replaced by a look Marek had seen too often in men like Salatis. It was a lust for power that transcended all sense of proportion. It was the drive that made empires rise and fall, and rise and fall, over and over and over again for millennium after millennium.

  “This business with religion,” Marek said. “It could be of use in controlling the people, of course, but from henceforth you will set it aside when you speak with me. You will hold sway over the black firedrakes for as long as I have your loyalty. The moment I feel I no longer have that—whether you’ve given it over to another man, or some god or goddess—you will no longer hold sway over the beating of your heart or the breath in your lungs, much less the firedrakes. Remember this gift and who gave it to you, or I will send Insithryllax to see you, and he will send you to the embrace of whatever Power is forgiving enough to take your disloyal soul into its embrace.

  “Are you, or are you not, my ransar?”

  Marek listened for one word, and heard it.

  “Yes, I am your ransar,” Salatis answered with an almost drunken grin.

  My ransar, Marek thought. The ficklest daughter of Tyche will have to look elsewhere for hers.

  20

  16 Kythorn, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

  THIRD QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Willem watched Phyrea wander through the merchants’ stalls for most of the afternoon. He was able to breathe, after a time, only to the rhythm of her footsteps and the graceful sway of her narrow hips. She wore a cloak of shimmering silk and carried a parasol of black lace. He hadn’t recognized her at first because of the parasol. It was an aristocratic lady’s affectation that was beneath her, especially with the thin, high overcast tempering the direct rays of the sun.

  “How much?” she asked a vendor.

  The man studied the boot she held up to him, glanced at her foot, and seemed at a loss for words. Willem slid past a woman who had stopped to admire a spray of cheap pewter jewelry laid out on a blanket on the street so that he could get a better look. He ignored the look of impatience the woman shot his way, even when her face softened and she smiled at him, trying to catch his eye.

  “For the lady’s husband?” the cobbler asked Phyrea.

  She shook her head. The boot was easily twice the size of her own delicate foot, and cut for a man. The craftsmanship was exceptional. Willem could see that even from a distance.

  Someone bumped him, and Willem looked down to see his purse stolen by a boy no older than ten. They looked each other in the eye for half a breath, the boy’s dirty face frozen in fear, his mouth open to show yellow teeth—an old man’s teeth. He ran into the crowd, pushing past a man carrying a crate of live chickens. The chicken farmer shouted some obscenity at the boy, and the chickens put up a fuss of their own. The boy didn’t run too fast, and Willem could have caught him easily enough and got his coins back, but he didn’t bother.

  When he looked back at the cobbler’s stall, Phyrea was gone.

  His heart stuttered in his chest, and he whispered, “Oh, no.”

  He turned his head, unaware that his shoulders twisted at the same time, and he nudged the man with the chickens. One of the crates clattered to the cobblestones, eliciting a loud chorus of complaints from the chickens, and a louder burst of profanity from the man selling the cheap pewter jewelry.

  “Oh,” Willem breathed. “My apologies—”

  But the man had already picked up his chickens and ignored him.

  “Wait,” Phyrea said, and Willem gasped. She put a hand on the chicken farmer’s arm, and the man looked first at her hand, then only briefly at her face, before letting his eyes pour over her like warm, but stagnant water. “I’d like one of those.”

  “Phyrea,” Willem said, not sure if he should, or even could, smile. “I—”

  “A chicken, miss?” the farmer asked, obviously not sure he’d heard her correctly.

  She dropped the boots she was carrying and dug in a pocket of her cloak for a coin. She handed him a gold piece—too much for a single chicken—and looked at Willem while the man pulled a squawking bird from the crude wooden box.

  “It’s a surprise to see you here,” Willem lied, and by her face she didn’t believe it.

  “I may not be able to make change, miss,” the chicken monger said, pocketing the coin at the same time he held out the bird to her.

  “Keep it,” she told him.

  With some difficulty she took the squealing foul from the man, holding it as he had by the legs, at arm’s length to avoid the furious flapping of wings. On the ground beneath them, the pewter merchant gathered up his jewelry, cursing under a shower of chicken feathers. The farmer arrowed off into the crowd before she changed her mind about the gold piece.

  “Why are you following me?” she demanded.

  “I’m not—” Willem started, but stopped himself before she could interrupt. “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “They’re for you,” she said, her eyes darting down to the cobblestones at her feet.

  Willem looked down and saw the boots.

  “Thank you,” he said by reflex alone.

  “You don’t want to know why I bought them for you?” she asked from behind the still-panicked chicken. People on the street began to give the two of them a wide berth.

  A smile came to him, and pleased with himself, he said, “I was actually more curious about the chicken.”

  Without the slightest change in her stony demeanor, she dropped the black lace parasol to the ground, and squinted in the dim light. Her hand free, she grabbed the struggling bird by the neck and twisted once, hard and fast. It sounded like a twig snapping underfoot. The chicken flapped its wings only faster, but not for long.

  “The chicken is for dinner,” she said.

  Willem stepped back from her, and that elicited a smile. She dropped the chicken to the cobblestones next to the boots and retrieved her parasol.

  “They are fine boots,” he said, and found that his mouth was dry, his tongue heavy and sticking to his teeth. Sweat tickled his hair line. “Why are you helping me?”

  “I abhor your taste in footwear,” she said, and Willem blinked at the fire in her eyes.

  Her jaw set tight, Phyrea stared him down. Willem blinked.

  “You know what I mean,” he risked, unable to put as much strength into his voice as he’d hoped to. “You have been talking to people on my behalf.”

  Her lips twisted with undisguised contempt, and sh
e said, “Because they don’t deserve it any more than you do.”

  “I won’t pretend I have any idea what you mean,” he said.

  Something distracted her, and she looked off to one side, listening. Willem could pick out nothing from the background drone of the market.

  “Thank me,” she said, finally turning back to look at him.

  He didn’t speak, but studied her as best he could. Her perfect beauty was undiminished, even by the palpable madness that radiated from her burning gaze.

  “You can keep the chicken, too,” she told him.

  Should I kill her? Willem thought. I should kill her.

  “You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  Phyrea put a hand to her lips and gagged. The skin of her long neck twisted and rippled. Willem looked away, and watched a peasant woman carry a basket of lemons on her head.

  When he looked back, Phyrea was gone. He stood there for a long time, and if passersby noticed him at all they would have assumed he was deep in thought, but he didn’t think at all. He just stood there.

  Eventually he bent and picked up the boots, but left the chicken in the street for the beggars.

  21

  19 Kythorn, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

  FIRST QUARTER, INNARLITH

  The rich and decadent masters of Innarlith have never been in greater danger than through the direct action of our brotherhood of the many, we who do the work of the city-state, but see so little, if any, of the gold that passes through this port.”

  Marek Rymüt paused to let the assembled dock workers cheer in their unruly fashion. Disguised by the simplest of illusions, to them he was but an ordinary worker, a burly, grimy, near-toothless hulk of a man. His magic had made him one of them, and because he was one of them, they listened.

  “And so here we are, not because we are strong or because we are many; for we continue to struggle with tradition even as we remove ourselves inch by inch from the ten-copper words of the Third Quarter tradesmen. For that reason the aristocrats will find it fairly easy for a time to keep us and our confused, confusing brothers in the Third Quarter down.”

  He’d heard from many that his speeches to the tradesmen of the Third Quarter had been too confusing—complex words and concepts directed at simple men. If the skilled tradesmen were simple men, then what were the brutes who loaded and unloaded ships, plying a trade that barely required sentience, let alone skill or craft?

  Whatever they are, Marek thought, as long as they’re disrupting the flow of trade in Innarlith, as long as they’re slitting their own throats by not laboring for at least the pittance they once made, they serve me.

  “The danger to the senate is not that their power is directly menaced, but in the fact that we can not possibly form the guilds we’ve formed without overstepping the false limits placed on us by those thieves in their Chamber of so-called Law and Civility. The Guild of Stevedores is bound only by its own laws—laws that guarantee that we, the men who deserve it most, who have paid the highest price of sweat and blood and poverty, can once and for all take charge of this port and gather for ourselves our fair portion of the coin that trade with Innarlith—our city as much as theirs—brings here.”

  Most of the men were listening, a few jabbered to each other, but Marek could tell that his ideas, if not the finer points of his words, were getting through to them. One man shouted some incoherent muddle of drunken syllables at him and was answered by loud cheers from a small group around him. The rest of the dockhands ignored them, though, so Marek went on.

  “Our guild shows that the simple folk—when we finally exhibit to those doddering dandies the true extent of our power—can seize control of the docks and the storehouses. Because the mastery of the senate depends on the control of the way everything is made and traded in Innarlith—for this reason the senate and its bullies have no choice. They must beat us down, and beat down our Third Quarter brothers, too, with the sharpest means at their command.”

  A thunderous barrage of boos rumbled up from the crowd of workers, and some began to wave torches in the air. Marek worried that someone would be burned, or the long wooden pier might be set ablaze, but Tymora favored the simple-minded once again. He let them revel in the idea that they had threatened the senate to the degree that the senate had no choice but to threaten them.

  Of course, the disguised Red Wizard had no intention of warning them that the senate and their bullies could, should they finally chose to do so, replace them all with summoned and undead servants provided, for a modest fee of course, by a Thayan Enclave of Marek’s creation. And those automatons would never stop to eat, drink, sleep, or do any of the other things that plagued the living. They would work all day and all night, every day, without pause for rest and without the briefest whisper of complaint. Beyond the price of their creation they would require no stipend or upkeep, or even the merest morsel of food.

  “As soon as we let a day go by without unloading their precious cargoes, the aristocrats will answer at once with martial law. Our guild, our long-awaited fraternity of sweat and toil, will be outlawed. Even now they argue over this in the Chamber of Law and Civility. But when a guild like ours comes finally to pass, it stands tall against the laws of the rich and weak-hearted. We will go on whether they like it or not. That, if nothing else, I can promise you!”

  As Marek stood soaking in the cheers of the stinking mob of ungrateful brutes, he noted a disturbance at the far edge of the crowd. Perhaps a thousand of the dirty, sweat-soaked hulks had gathered to hear his words, and the speeches of a few of their comrades who had been duped early on by Marek’s rabble-rousing. Though Marek couldn’t see their faces, the tops of their rusted and dented helms, and the tips of their spears, rose above the heads of the men at the foot of the pier. The crowd began to compress toward Marek.

  “But you will have to help me keep that promise, brothers, by taking up the struggle against the senate. Only if we draw back before them will the aristocrats be able to defeat us. But if we resist with the same strength of arm and heart with which we’ve unloaded their riches for them, the guild will become subject to its own inner law. On the quay, where we have something to say about it, a different law will prevail than what the senators try to make for us in their Chamber of Crime and Oppression.”

  The tenor of the cheer that followed sounded different. In it Marek could hear both the misguided revelry of the powerless empowered, and the growing desperation of men who were beginning to fear the consequences of their actions. The former sound came from the men closest to Marek’s makeshift stage—cobbled together from crates that had been waiting for a tenday to be loaded onto a coaster from Athkatla—and the latter from the men closer to the foot of the pier who had become aware through the press of their fellow workers of the presence of the watchmen who had effectively cut them off from the city.

  For all Toril as though he’d never noticed the helms and spears, Marek went on, letting his false face flush red with insincere passion.

  “Our new law will show itself in our utter contempt of private property. And not because we seek poverty for ourselves—I think we’ve all had enough of that, eh?”

  And there Marek paused, and folded his arms across his barrel-chest. His eyes closed, he couldn’t see if the watchmen pressed the assembly further, but so what if they did?

  “Our new Law of the Quayside will protect us the same way the laws of the senate protect the aristocracy, because the struggle itself makes it necessary. And what we start here today on the very edge of the city, will soon rise in the whole of Innarlith. It is revealed in our Laws of the Quayside that we can do nothing with our power unless we bend the senate to our will the same way they have bent us to theirs for so very, very long now. When our law becomes the only law, our struggle will end.”

  Marek scanned the edge of the crowd and had to struggle not to let his disappointment show through his illusory features. The watchmen stood their ground and after a tim
e only the first few rows of dockworkers continued to send fearful glances their way. The rest of the laborers seemed to have fallen for Marek’s Laws of the Quayside—a concept he had arrived upon the afternoon before and that had given him acute cases of the giggles off and on in the hours before bedtime.

  “So long as our fraternity remains small, and separate from the guilds of our Third Quarter brothers, the tendency toward our mastery of all Innarlith does not come so clearly to light. But if we gather more men into our fold, and come together finally with the trade guilds, then more and more thunder gathers in the storm cloud fists of the working men. The Law of the Quayside must meet the Law of the Third Quarter. From that struggling mass there then comes about a fresh bridge between the common man and the forces by which we’ve been—until now—blown like the wind churns the water. A new era will come to pass. We will raise our voices in victory, even as the senate shrieks in horror!”

  The frightful cheers that rose up from those words once again made Marek struggle not to laugh. It was as though they already celebrated the impossible eventuality he’d just promised them.

  The zombies, he thought, will be quieter, too.

  22

  23 Kythorn, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

  THE CHAMBER OF LAW AND CIVILITY, INNARLITH

  Senators,” the clerk called out in his clear, practiced baritone, “and all those having business with this distinguished body, please be upstanding for the Ransar of Innarlith.”

  Osorkon watched from the doorway, making mental note of those who stood the fastest and those who stood the slowest. Everyone in between were his true enemies.

  He took the podium and said, “Be seated, honored colleagues.”

  He paused for a deep, dramatic breath during the ruckus that followed.

  “I thank you all for allowing me to humble myself before you,” he said, speaking the traditional opening line of a ransar’s address to the senate without a trace of the contempt he held for the majority of that body. “I have come here today to speak once more of a great work.”