Lies of Light

by Philip Athans

  “If you find a worm in there, save it for me,” Hrothgar said, nodding at the bowl of dirt Devorast still sifted through, deep in thought. “I’ve been meaning to take up this ‘fishing’ I’ve heard tell of.”

  Devorast didn’t look up from the bowl when he said, “You won’t like fishing.”

  “Oh, and why not?”

  “It depends too much on the whim of the fish.”

  3

  15 Hammer, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  It’s cold outside,” Phyrea said, staring out the window, her back to Marek Rymüt. “I hate it when it gets cold like this.”

  Marek didn’t feel cold. There was a bit of a chill in the air, but it never really got too cold in Innarlith. The stinking warm waters of the volcanic Lake of Steam kept the air warm and damp most of the year.

  But it wasn’t the weather that Marek found interesting just then. It was Phyrea herself.

  “It’s positively freezing, my dear,” he said to her back.

  She didn’t turn around, but seemed to relax a bit. Her shoulders sagged, but didn’t hunch. Marek couldn’t shake the feeling that she wanted to turn and face him but was afraid to. He couldn’t imagine that she feared him for any reason. She’d never shown any sign of that before, and they had known each other at least in passing for some time.

  “There’s something different about you,” he said, keeping his voice light, though what he began to feel emanating from her was increasingly disturbing. “You’ve been away.”

  “I’ve been at Berrywilde,” she all but whispered.

  He knew it well. He’d been to one or another social engagement there—her father’s country estate. The first time he walked into the main house he knew it was haunted, but no one else seemed to sense it, so he’d kept quiet.

  “Lovely,” he said. “I’ve been dabbling myself with a little place … outside the city.”

  And he would never tell Phyrea just how far outside the city the Land of One Hundred and Thirteen was.

  “It’s cold,” she said again, hugging herself, wrapping her slim fingers around her upper arms. She shivered just enough for Marek to notice.

  “Has something scared you?” he said. It was a risk to ask, but Marek couldn’t think of a reason not to.

  Phyrea stiffened.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked. “Is that why you came here today? To tell me about what—?”

  “We don’t know each other that well, Master Rymüt.”

  There was a long silence before Marek finally said, “Of course that’s true, isn’t it? One could say we’re really little more than distant social acquaintances. I’ll admit that when I received word that you wanted to come see me in my home I was as surprised as I was intrigued. What is it I can do for you, my dear?”

  Still not turning to show him her face, she said, “I have a certain item that I … found.”

  Marek smiled. He’d heard rumors about her but had never believed them. Could they be true? Could the master builder’s beautiful little debutante really be the leather-clad sneak thief that had stolen from the finest families in the city-state? If she was, Marek puzzled over why. Her father was wealthy and well-placed, and she his only family. She couldn’t want for anything.

  Just like me, he thought, before the zulkir came to take me away.

  “Tell me all about it,” he prompted, then swept his robes up behind him and sat on a divan of pastel lavender rothéhide that had cost him exactly twice the annual income of the average citizen of Innarlith. Marek always liked reminding himself of that otherwise trivial fact.

  Phyrea sighed in a way that almost felt to Marek as though she was condemning his musing over the divan, then she said, “It’s a sword.”

  “Is it?” he said around a half-stifled yawn.

  “I think it’s called a falchion.”

  “A falchion, then.”

  “Is that what you call it?” she asked. “The blade is wavy, like water.” And as she said that she moved one finger in a series of slow, undulating arcs that almost anyone else in Faerûn would surely have found sensual. “Is that a falchion?”

  “Flambergé,” he corrected. “But surely that’s not all you’d like to know.”

  “I’ve been assured that you know how to …” She paused and he could tell she was searching for the right word, but it also appeared as though she listened intently to something or someone, though the Thayan wizard heard no sound. “You can read, or sense the magic in things. You can tell me what this sword can do.”

  “So,” he replied, “you came across an enchanted blade at your daddy’s country retreat and you’d like me to identify its properties for you?”

  She nodded, still not looking at him.

  He took a deep breath and said, “Well, you certainly have come to the right place. I won’t pretend that I’m not at least a little disappointed that this visit isn’t entirely social. I was so hoping we could get to know one another just a little bit better.”

  “I’ll pay you,” she said.

  “You insult me,” he shot back fast, his voice cold.

  She stiffened again, and still appeared to be listening at the same time.

  “But never mind that,” he said. “Do you have the weapon with you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, of course I’ll have to not only see it but handle it in order to give you any relevant information. We can work out a mutually beneficial arrangement as far as payment or exchange of services is concerned. But I get the feeling you have one particular question you’d like me to answer.”

  “The sword kills people,” she said.

  Marek laughed and said, “Well, then, it’s fulfilled its one true destiny, hasn’t it?”

  “No,” Phyrea replied, “that’s not what I mean.”

  She turned to face him, and Marek was taken aback by the cold and terrified gaze she leveled on him. Her eyes shook, though her face remained perfectly calm, almost dead.

  “Tell me, girl,” he whispered.

  “I used it to kill a man,” she said, “and he came back.”

  Marek flinched a little, raised an eyebrow, and asked, “He came back …?”

  Phyrea shuddered, hugged herself again, turned back to face the window though her head tipped down to look at the floor, and said, “A ghoul.”

  “A sword that makes ghouls, is it?”

  “No,” she said. “It was a ghast.”

  “Have you heard about the canal?” he asked, changing the subject as fast as possible in hopes of snapping her out of what seemed almost a hypnotic state.

  She turned and faced him again. The terror in her eyes replaced with annoyed curiosity, she asked, “What?”

  “This mad man has convinced our dear ransar to give him all the gold in the city in order to dig a trench all the way from the Lake of Steam to the Nagaflow and fill it up with water. I understand it will take a hundred thousand men a hundred thousand years to dig it, but they’ve begun in earnest.”

  She didn’t seem to believe him, and not just because he’d so greatly exaggerated the number of men and the length of time the project would require. She’d been back in the city long enough that surely she’d have heard of Ivar Devorast and his fool’s errand. But she hadn’t.

  “Does my father know about this?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Marek replied. “He doesn’t like it one bit, of course. A sensible man, your father, his loyalties are with the city-state.”

  “A canal,” she said, her voice a breathy, barely audible whisper. “If they can connect the Sea of Fallen Stars to …”

  He watched her stare at the floor, thinking about it. She seemed impressed, and Marek hated that. He hated people who were impressed with that dangerous idea, that mad errand.

  “You will bring me the flambergé?” he asked.

  Phyrea nodded, but her eyes gave no indication that she’d actually heard him. Again, she listened t
o something or someone Marek couldn’t hear.

  So, he thought, the country house isn’t the only thing of the master builder’s that’s haunted.

  4

  3 Alturiak, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  What is so special,” Surero whispered into the cold, damp air of his cell, “about one hundred and twenty-five?”

  When they first locked him up, he’d been told that they would feed him once a day. Assuming they had been as good as their word, he’d been in the cell for one hundred and twenty-five days, since the first day of Marpenoth in the Year of the Wave.

  “The third,” he told himself. “It’s the third day of Alturiak.”

  “That’s right,” the voice from beyond the door replied.

  The sound of the first human voice he’d heard in four months tickled Surero’s ears. Much as he’d tried to engage his jailers in conversation, none of them had ever answered. All they did was take the bucket of urine and feces, replace it with an empty bucket, then slide in the moldy, hard bread and the tin cup of water. Sometimes they gave him a strip of pork fat or a fish head.

  “Why?” he asked the door. “Why today?”

  There was no answer right away, and Surero’s heart raced. He stood on legs that had been too weak to support him for most of the last month. They held him, though, even if they were a bit shaky. He’d taken to spending his days sitting against the cool, rough stone of the subterranean cell. He had no window, and after he’d eaten the first two he came across, eventually even the spiders stopped wandering in.

  A sound came from behind the door—the clank of keys on a ring.

  “Hello?” Surero called out, his own voice hurting his ears, which had grown so accustomed to the utter silence of the tomb.

  “Stand away from the door,” the man’s deep voice rumbled, and Surero imagined it made the heavy, iron-bound oak door quiver as if in fright.

  He slid one foot back, then the second foot to meet it, and almost fell. He put a hand against the wall, scraping some skin from his palm, but he held himself up. His eyes burned, and if he’d had enough water in his body, he’d have begun to cry. Instead he just stood there and quivered.

  “We’re going to let you go,” the voice said. “Do you understand?”

  Surero’s voice caught in his throat. He nodded, but the man wouldn’t be able to see him. He stood and waited, and it seemed as though an awfully long time had passed. The door didn’t open.

  “Rymüt?” he whispered.

  Then his throat closed again, and his knees were going to collapse under him, so he sat. He ended up leaning half against the rough stone, his cheek pressed against the wall, his nose filled with the spice of mold.

  He’s taunting me, Surero thought. They aren’t going to let me go. It’s Rymüt. He’s playing a trick on me.

  “He’s playing a trick on me,” Surero whispered.

  Then his teeth closed as tightly as his throat, and his wasted, filthy, clammy body trembled with impotent rage. He boiled inside his six by six cell, and tried to close his ears to the sound of men moving on the other side of the door.

  They aren’t there, he told himself. Give up. Give up hope.

  Surero hadn’t had a word of news from the outside world for a hundred and twenty-five days. For all he knew, the hated Marek Rymüt was dead. But he doubted that. Surely the Thayan scum had only further ingratiated himself into the petty aristocracy of Innarlith. Surero had no doubt that Rymüt had taken from more and more people like him. The Thayan had taken his customers, had stolen his formulae, had robbed him of his reputation. Surero, who had lived every moment of his miserable existence in the pursuit of excellence in the alchemical arts, had been reduced to a ragged, homeless, desperate husk of a man, no more substantial a creature than the wretch four months in the ransar’s dungeon had made him. When he’d done the only thing fitting, the only thing a man in his position could do, he had failed. Something had gone wrong. The mixture itself had worked and the explosion was powerful, but Marek Rymüt had lived.

  And Surero had gone to the dungeon to rot. Forever.

  A key turned in the lock. The sound was unmistakable.

  Surero looked up at the door, his eyes locked on the very edge so he could perceive any minute crack that might actually open.

  Fear washed away his hatred, but the source was the same. Was it Marek Rymüt behind that door? Was it the Thayan robber come to kill him once and for all?

  “Rymüt?’ he asked, his voice squeaking past his constricted vocal chords.

  The door swung open to a flash of blinding light and a deafening squeak of hinges that hadn’t been used, much less oiled, in four months. Surero’s eyes locked shut against the brilliant illumination of the single torch, and he could only listen as the man stepped into the room, his steps heavy and confident, shaking the stained flagstones beneath them.

  “Stand up,” the voice commanded, closer and clearer with no door between it and Surero.

  “Kill me,” Surero croaked, his hands pressed hard against his burning eyes. “Go ahead and kill me, Thayan bastard.”

  A hand that seemed the size of a god’s grabbed a fistful of the soiled linen gown that had been his only clothing since the previous Marpenoth, and took a few dozen chest hairs along with it. Surero winced and shook as he was pulled to his feet.

  Hot breath that smelled almost as bad as his cell washed over his face, and the man said, “Who in the Nine perspirin’ Hells are you calling a Thayan?”

  Surero chanced it. He opened one eye.

  “You …” he mumbled. “You’re not … Rymüt.”

  “I’m the jailer, wretch,” the man said. “I’m the bloke what’s been feeding you these months. How’s about a little gratitude here, eh?”

  Surero swallowed, forgetting how much his throat hurt, and replied, “Yes. Sorry. Thanks.”

  That made the jailer laugh, and Surero was just relived enough that it wasn’t Rymüt who’d come to claim him that he laughed a little too.

  “Are you really …?” the prisoner stuttered. “A-are … are y-you going to …?”

  “You’re all done, mate,” the jailer said, setting Surero down and letting go his clothes. “The ‘Thayan bastard’ said you’d had enough so the ransar’s springin’ ya. You’re free.”

  “Free?” Surero asked. It was not possible—not for the reasons the jailer gave. “I’ve had enough?”

  “Well, kid, you didn’t kill him after all.”

  “But I tried.”

  There was a short silence while Surero just looked at the man. He was hardly less filthy that his prisoner, but bigger, better fed, and capable of smiling.

  “Maybe,” said the jailer, “you’ll want to keep that bit to yourself, son.”

  5

  9 Alturiak, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Everybody who would eventually be somebody was there. Willem Korvan made an effort to talk to each and every one of them, but didn’t bother listening. He watched their mouths move. He nodded and smiled. From time to time he tipped his head a bit to one side as if really concentrating on what they had to say then he would nod again and smile. Nodding and smiling, he might make a meaningless comment on what they were wearing. Then he would smile and nod. Each and every one of them smiled back, and nodded.

  What Willem was most concerned with at the time was the smell. Marek Rymüt’s fashionable Second Quarter home had all the right furniture and fixtures, everything predictable and acceptable, but the smell could not be ignored.

  Oranges? he thought. No. Nothing so simple.

  Willem wondered if it could be a combination of things. Oranges after all, maybe, but mixed with … lamp oil?

  No.

  The mortar they’d used on the city wall project combined with a Fourth Quarter beggar’s sick and the porridge his mother used to make when he was a boy?

  Closer.

  “The current
state of things,” another young senator said to Willem’s blank, smiling face, “guarantees naught but that the wealthy grow only wealthier while the poor become increasingly desperate over time. Really, it’s up to us, isn’t it, Korvan, to set things aright once and for all, just as Master Rymüt suggests?”

  Willem smiled and nodded, and the young senator appeared pleased. They wandered away from each other and into the same conversations with different people.

  “It did seem radical to me at first,” a young woman trolling for a husband said behind too much Shou-inspired makeup. “After all, my family has sold horses for generations and hardly worked as hard as they have in order to see our estates divided among the tradesmen. That idea in particular … but, well, if Master Rymüt thinks it’s best….”

  Willem nodded but didn’t smile. He caught the woman’s eye and detected just enough desperation in her gaze that he fled her presence as quickly as he could.

  Looking for Rymüt in the crowded sitting room, Willem began to formulate his excuse for leaving so early. Before he could find his host, though, he was stopped by an apparition.

  It had been some time since he’d seen her, but there she stood. She’d just stepped into the room, and all at once the smell was gone, as though the air had refreshed itself in her honor.

  “Phyrea,” he whispered.

  She either heard him or sensed his eyes on her, and she looked right at him. Willem took a step back and smiled. She stared at him, but didn’t smile back. When she stepped into the room the guests parted for her, and it was as if the air itself gave way before her. They weren’t afraid to touch her, just unworthy.