Lies of Light (34 page)

Willem nodded, his neck stiff, and sweat began to pool under his arms. He wanted a sip of water but was afraid to pick up the goblet for fear of revealing how badly his hands were shaking. He kept his hands in his lap.

“It was a difficult life,” Pristoleph went on, “but not without rewards. Growing up that way, being that sort of a child, made me the man that I am today.”

Willem nodded again and glanced around the cavernous dining room—a space so large Willem’s entire house could easily have been constructed inside it. Part of him wanted to ask Pristoleph if he was, in fact, the richest man in Innarlith, but then he didn’t have to. He was sitting in all the proof of that anyone would ever need.

But then Willem wondered: Wouldn’t he be more important than he is? Wouldn’t he be ransar, if that were true? Instead he seemed to be the senator that everyone deferred to when they had to, but rarely even spoke with. His appearances at social affairs both private and public were rare occurrences.

“I am a man who doesn’t trust easily, Willem,” Pristoleph continued. “I keep my own counsel, and I do what I think is best. Often, that is also what’s best for Innarlith. Rarer still, it’s what’s best for other people.”

“We should always consider others,” Willem muttered. His face flushed, and he cleared his throat again, feeling like a child speaking out of turn.

Pristoleph laughed—laughed at him—and the blood drained from Willem’s face.

“Wherever possible, yes, I suppose so,” the strange man with fiery hair replied. “But not always, and so here we come to the reason I asked you and your lovely young bride to join me for dinner.”

“I’ll admit, Senator,” Willem said, “that I’ve been curious…”

“Three days ago I met Phyrea for the first time,” Pristoleph said. “For the first time in person, at least”—the two of them traded a conspiratorial smile that almost made Willem whimper in fear—”and very quickly afterward I decided to make her my wife.”

Willem blinked, choked back the impulse to chuckle, and shook his head.

“My deepest apologies, Senator Pristoleph,” he said, “but for a moment I thought you said…”

The look on Phyrea’s face made it impossible for him to continue.

“You will step away,” Pristoleph said. “Phyrea and I will leave on the morrow for a long sea journey. When we return, we will be wed.”

“But…” Willem blustered. “But that’s…”

He looked to Phyrea, who smiled at him in a freakishly maternal way that made Willem’s skin crawl anew.

“You will go back to the canal,” Pristoleph went on. “Go back and finish it. Make a name for yourself. From what I understand you don’t deserve it, but Phyrea has asked—by the Nine Hells, she’s demanded—that you be allowed to finish it. It will be your monument, your greatest achievement, and Phyrea will be mine.”

Phyrea smiled and looked down.

Willem’s jaw opened and closed, but no words came out.

“You can, of course, choose to be difficult,” Pristoleph said, and again, Willem’s attention was dragged kicking and screaming to the man’s eyes. A spark blazed in them that Willem didn’t think matched the candlelight, as though his eyes were lit from within. “Will you be difficult about this?”

Willem swallowed, mesmerized by the strange man, and well aware of the otherworldly woman that had attracted his attention. Willem didn’t think either of them were human, certainly not human like he was, not flawed, afraid, incompetent, and—

“Willem?” Phyrea asked.

“I won’t be,” he said. It was so difficult to get the words out he practically barked. “I won’t stand in anyone’s way.”

“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.

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21 Uktar, the Yearof 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 Rymiit 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 Rymiit’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 Rymiit. 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.

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22 Nightal, the Yearof 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 recreation 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.”