Lies of Light (29 page)

She glanced up at him, and he smiled as wide and as brightly as he could. The expression caught her eye, but she didn’t return his smile.

“Thank you, Sister,” he said.

“I’m not a sister,” she replied. She spoke with a thick accent that the alchemist couldn’t immediately place. “Not a proper sister, anyway.”

“Your accent,” he said. “You’re not Innarlan.”

She shifted her eyes as if ashamed, at least for a fleeting moment, and said, “I am Thayan.”

“Have we met before?” he asked, before he’d even thought to say it. She didn’t really look familiar, but there was something about her….

She shook her head, her blue eyes narrowed, and she seemed to try to place him but couldn’t.

“My name is—” he started, but was interrupted by a nudge to his shoulder.

The man behind him in line, a rough-looking middle-aged sailor with skin like centuries-old leather was impatient for his soup.

The girl handed Surero his bowl and said, “Please accept this with the prayers of the Pastorals that you will find your way under the blessed eyes of the Earth Mother.”

He’d heard her say precisely the same words to the men in line in front of him.

Surero took the soup and said, “May I have one more, for my friend?”

“Aye, missy,” the old sailor grumbled, “and I’ll be needin’ a dozen fer me crew.”

The old man broke out in gales of toothless laughter,

and Surero laughed a little with him. The girl appeared

embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” Surero said, “but it really is—”

She silenced him with a wave of her hand and poured

another bowl of soup for him. When she handed it to him

she smiled.

“Thank you, Si—” he stopped himself—”sorry.”

“Halina,” she said. “Please accept this for your friend with the prayers of the Pastorals that he will find his way under the blessed eyes of the Earth Mother.”

“Halina,” he replied, “thank you.”

“Aye,” the old sailor cut in again, “thanks be to ye an’ yers, and now maybe the rest o’ us can sup a bit, eh?”

Surero shared another smile with the pretty Thayan girl, took the two bowls of soup, and made way for the rest of the hungry men. As he walked back to the table he tried to imagine that she was watching him go, but in truth he couldn’t feel her eyes on him. The exchange had lifted his spirits some, and he was still smiling when he set the soup bowls down on the table.

“Thank you,” Devorast said as Surero sat. “I could have gotten my own.”

“Think nothing of it,” the alchemist replied. “I thought I’d spare you the blessing. I know how you feel about gods, priests, and prayers.”

“Why the smile?” asked Devorast.

Surero blinked. Though it would have been a perfectly normal question from just about anyone else in Faerun, from Devorast it made Surero’s head spin.

“Why the smile, he asks me,” Surero said. “All right, then, Ivar, it was a girl.”

Devorast began to eat his soup, giving no indication that he was listening at all.

“You know, like people, only female?” Surero said.

“I’m familiar with the species,” Devorast replied between bites.

Surero wanted to laugh, but it caught in his chest. He took a deep breath as a wave of anguish washed over him. Sweat broke out in strange places on his body. When he looked down at the soup, his stomach quivered, and he couldn’t imagine eating it.

“This is it, then,” he said.

He paused, hoping Devorast would say something, but he didn’t.

Surero looked around himself at row upon row of crude tables that had been cobbled together, perhaps by the sisters themselves, from scraps of salvaged lumber. The tables were scattered with dented tin bowls and spoons of one sort or another. The men who sat at the tables were the same: dented, old, salvaged, scattered.

“The fact that they’ve beaten me is easy enough to believe,” Surero said. “I expected it all along. But they didn’t really beat me, though, did they? Who was I? All I did was mix a few common elements together to help you dig faster. It’s you they’ve defeated, and that just… I really didn’t think it was possible.”

“All you’ve talked about for months is how ‘they’ will eventually win,” Devorast reminded him.

“In the name of every god in the steaming Astral, Ivar, I didn’t really think it would happen. I mean, honestly. Marek Rymiit is dangerous—but he’s dangerous to people like me, not to people like you. And Willem Korvan?”

Devorast shrugged at that.

“I should thank you, still,” Surero said. “You’ve been very kind to me, in your own way. I won’t forget that you’ve supported me all this time since the… since we came back to the city. I can never forget that. If I’m alive today it’s because of you.”

“Why did the Thayan have you released?”

Surero almost gasped, he was so startled by the question, but he answered, “I have no idea. And don’t think that question hasn’t plagued me.”

“He would have done it for some reason,” Devorast went

on. “You think you’ve been beaten now, but what of then? He had you in the ransar’s dungeon. All he had to do was say one word in the Chamber of Law and Civility, and they would have hanged you.”

Surero rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, heaved a great sigh, and said, “No, they would have beheaded me.”

“In Cormyr, you would have been hanged.”

Surero laughed and said, “Six of one…”

Devorast went back to his soup, and Surero picked up his own spoon, thinking he might give it a try, but he just didn’t want it.

“I can’t even feed myself,” the alchemist said, his voice quiet, his heart heavy. “I have no means to keep myself alive but the mercy of others.”

“Your smokepowder is unrivaled,” Devorast said. “I’ve never heard of anything like it.”

“I wonder how far away I will have to go before someone will be willing to risk buying it from me.”

“Marek Rymiit’s power doesn’t extend beyond this city,” Devorast told him.

“So at the very least he’s driven us out.”

“Leave if you want to,” Devorast said, then paused to finish his soup. “I still have work to do.”

“No, Ivar, it’s over. The canal is theirs.”

“No,” Devorast said, and Surero almost fell out of his chair, driven back by the weight of Devorast’s self-confidence. “That canal has never been anyone’s but mine, and it always will be.”

29Eleint, the Yearof the Banner (1368 DR) The Nagaflow

Though the water in the wide river was muddy and brown, from a thousand feet in the air, details were revealed. Insithryllax soared on a warm updraft, his huge wings unfurled. The warm air rushed along their surface, and the great wyrm reveled in the sensation of flight. It had been too long since he’d allowed himself to truly fly—too much time spent in the form of a human, contained in their claustrophobic buildings, or in the sharply delineated confines of Marek Rymiit’s pocket dimension.

He dipped down to avoid disappearing into a low cloud where he wouldn’t be able to see the river below him. He would be easier to see from the ground, but no one was expecting him, so there was a good chance they wouldn’t be looking up. Even then, there was little anyone could do from still nearly a thousand feet—not to a creature as powerful as he.

As much as Insithryllax enjoyed the freedom of the air, he longed for the thrill of the hunt as well, and it was that longing that kept his attention on the river. He saw a promising shape, but quickly realized it wasn’t slithering the way it should—it was just a log. The outline of a boat revealed itself from under half a dozen feet of water near the eastern bank. It had been there for at least a year.

He beat his mighty wings once as the cloud passed overhead, and he gained altitude. He’d come almost to the

northern end of the river where it widened into the long, narrow lake, and so he tipped his right wing down to make a gentle turn in that direction. He kept his eyes on the river, and before he was able to turn all the way back around to the south he saw it.

From over a thousand feet it just looked like a snake. The thing slithered through the water, twisting and dipping in pursuit of something he couldn’t see from so high up—a school of fish, most likely.

The dragon moved his wings in subtle ways and turned in a series of ever-narrowing spirals. Flapping his wings again would have helped him align himself in the air better, but it would have made a lot of noise—maybe even enough noise to be heard from the river below. To avoid that he continued to soar, changing the shape of his wings to move in the air.

When he was properly aligned, his lips curled up into a great toothy grin. Eyes still on his prey, he angled his head down at the swimming creature, then tucked his wings to his side. He fell, and fell fast.

The air whistled in his ears. His fifth eyelid slipped over his eyes to protect them, but the transparent membrane still allowed him to see. He arrowed at his target, coming at it from behind. The creature didn’t turn to look at him. It continued on its way, not diving deeper, or trying to avoid the enormous black dragon in any way.

Insithryllax opened his mouth and worked up a full volume of acid in the glands on either side of his lower jaw, under his tongue. It felt as though his face was swelling—and it was an unpleasant sensation. It made him want to empty the acid, spray it over his prey in a deadly black rain, but he resisted the temptation. From so high up and into the water, the acid would be far less effective than it would be when he was closer to his prey.

He was nearly there when he caught motion out of the corner of his eye: another naga swimming toward the one he dived at. The second of the two snake-creatures looked

up and over at him. They didn’t quite make eye contact, but the naga’s eyes widened in surprise—it saw him.

It was too late for Insithryllax to change direction, so he smashed into the river water with a spectacular splash. The naga he should have bitten in half the second after he hit the water had been warned by its companion, and it squirmed out of the black dragon’s path.

Insithryllax arched his back so that he was almost bent in half, and he swooped through the cold water. He broke the surface with the naga—which one of the two he wasn’t sure, but didn’t much care—only a few feet to the side of him. He twisted his neck and bit, but the huge snake-creature slithered out of harm’s way fast, and the black dragon’s jaws came together on nothing but dirty river water.

Though frustrated by the failure to make quick work of the naga, Insithryllax drank in the smell of the river water, which was so like the swamp back in Thay where he’d spent the first ninety-six years of his life—before Marek Rymiit found, charmed, then befriended him.

The dragon’s next instinct was to flood the water in front of him with his caustic acid, but he stopped himself. He had to make it look as though—

Pain flared in his side, and the dragon clawed out with both left legs. He twisted his great neck around and saw the shimmering after-effects of some sort of Weave energy sparking along the ebon scales on his left side.

Movement from the corner of his eye, and he whipped his head at an approaching naga. The thing growled out an incantation as it slithered toward him, and against his better judgment Insithryllax let loose his acid breath. A cloud of what looked like black smoke clouded the water and rolled over the naga. Its words sputtered to a halt and turned into a reedy squeal as the caustic liquid, diluted as it may have been, began to eat at its face.

The flesh fell away from the naga’s skull, and its eyes dissolved into the water. Its long, snake’s body spasmed,

cramping and twitching in a ghastly death-dance that kicked up soot and floating debris—including strips of the naga’s own burned flesh and bone.

Though the naga was dead, in an effort to salvage it for his own purposes, Insithryllax turned in the water and sliced the top quarter of the serpent-creature clean off with one swordlike claw. The body drifted on the river current, and the dragon started to reach for it, but changed direction again—fast—when the second naga passed close enough to be seen in the murky water.

“What do you want here, wyrm?” the naga asked in Draconic.

Insithryllax found her voice pleasing somehow—maybe it was just because she spoke his native language, and it had been so long….

He turned, floating, still submerged in the cold, murky water. He drew in a great lungful and relished it. It had been a long time, too, since he’d spent any time underwater.

Facing the naga, he bared his great fangs in a sneer. The naga twitched in the water and backed off. She began to rattle off a spell, and Insithryllax snapped at her, his long neck closing the distance between them with a single pulse of coiled muscles. The naga managed to slither backward in the water so that the dragon’s jaws came together only inches from her.

She finished her spell, and the water pounded against Insithryllax’s face so hard it curled his lips off his teeth. He had to slam all of his eyelids shut, and still it felt as though the water moved so fast it might scoop them from his skull. Water was forced up his nose, and he coughed out a spray of bubbles—but the bubbles instantly popped. The water pushed his head back and to the side, and it took all of the great black wyrm’s considerable strength to keep his neck from snapping.

He unfurled his wings in the water and brought them down and forward once, pushing as hard as he could.

Though he didn’t quite manage to counteract the fast-moving current, magically generated by the naga, he did lift himself up and out of the focus of its effect. He was at least able to open his eyes.

Insithryllax’s head lay just a few inches beneath the surface. He twisted his head around first right then left, and saw the naga floating, her lips moving, her eyes burning at him.

He pulled together the energy for a spell of his own, feeling the power coalesce in his throat.

The naga finished her spell first, and she shot up out of the water like an arrow loosed from a bow. Insithryllax had only to lift his head above the water to trace her path—straight up, trailing water beneath her like a wake in the sky.