Lies of Light

by Philip Athans

  Willem stepped forward to meet her and almost stumbled to a stop when Marek Rymüt slid between them. Focused only on Phyrea’s jaw-dropping beauty, he hadn’t seen the pudgy Thayan.

  “Ah, Phyrea,” Marek said. “Did I invite you?”

  Phyrea smiled at him, and the sight of it made Willem’s mouth go dry.

  “Ah, Marek,” Phyrea replied. “I came anyway.”

  They shared a conspiratorial smile that made Willem feel as though he should get out of that house as fast he could, then they both noticed him at the same time.

  “You’ve met Willem Korvan,” Marek said.

  Phyrea nodded but didn’t smile, and Willem smiled but didn’t nod. The other guests around them seemed to quiver.

  “So these are the young masters?” Phyrea asked Marek.

  “The heirs apparent, yes,” he answered with a grin.

  Phyrea, unimpressed, said, “This canal-builder I’ve heard about …” She turned to Willem. “It’s not you.”

  “No,” Willem said. He wanted to elaborate, but the words failed him. Phyrea wasn’t listening anyway.

  “Is he here?” she asked Marek.

  “No, he isn’t,” said the Thayan, with a hint of fire in his eyes.

  “I’m not surprised,” Willem ventured, “that you and he wouldn’t see eye to eye, Master Rymüt.”

  Phyrea scanned the room, bored, even exhausted. She wasn’t listening.

  “The young fool our unfortunate ransar has trusted with this exercise in endless ditch digging?” Marek replied.

  “You don’t know him?” Willem asked Phyrea.

  She shrugged the question off. How could she know Ivar Devorast, after all?

  “The last time we spoke, you inquired about a certain item,” Marek said to Phyrea. “Tell me you brought it along.”

  “Hardly,” she said, looking around the room so she didn’t register Marek’s annoyed look.

  Their host’s expression changed back to its placid, friendly mien and he muttered, “Enjoy my little caucus.”

  With a bow Phyrea didn’t return but Willem did, he was gone.

  “Phyrea,” Willem said when he saw her begin to take a step away from him.

  She turned, impatient, and folded her arms in front of her.

  “Come with me,” he said, reaching out to take her by the elbow.

  She flinched away from him as if his touch would scald her, and Willem’s heart leaped.

  “Please,” he said.

  She wouldn’t look at him, but turned and let him follow her to Marek’s veranda. They had to wave their way through huge clay pots that someone told him Marek had gotten from as far as Maztica. The plants were local, but appeared unhealthy.

  “Phyrea,” he said when he hoped they were alone. He tried to touch her again and she flinched. She made no effort to mask her contempt for him.

  “Hate me if you want to,” he told her. “It doesn’t make me want you any less.”

  “I don’t hate you,” she said.

  Relieved, Willem sighed.

  “I would have to think about you at all to hate you.”

  She isn’t ignoring me, he told himself, then shook his head to try to rid himself of not only the words but the feeling of relief that washed over him.

  “I don’t care if you hate me, or think of me at all, or love me, or think of me as a brother,” he said, the words spilling out of him. “I will serve you. I will be your slave, if that’s what you wish. I will do anything to have you. And I may be the only man in this wretched city who understands you—the only one willing to give you everything and ask for nothing in return.”

  She allowed him the briefest, unconvinced glare.

  “I understand that you’re the kind of woman that the world has got to come to a screeching halt for,” he went on. “You have to be the center not only of attention but of infinity itself.”

  “If you tell me you love me, I’ll kill you where you stand,” she said, and he could tell she meant it.

  “And if I told you I thought that might be worth dying for?” he asked.

  “Then all you’d be telling me is that you’re a fool,” she shot back. “A boy.”

  “If—” he started.

  “When I was away from the city last summer,” she interrupted, “at my father’s estate in the country, there was a man. He had me in a way you’ll never have me.”

  Willem could swear at that moment that his heart turned to glass.

  “You’re pretty,” Phyrea said. “You serve well. You make friends easily. You have position and potential, and all of that meaningless stupidity I couldn’t possibly find less interesting.”

  Willem closed his eyes against her words, but they kept coming.

  “That man, last summer,” she went on, “was a stone mason. He was nothing … no one. He was a brute, but he was more than you’ll ever be, and no matter what happens between us for the rest of our lives, Willem, you will never be a tenth the man he is. I’m not even sure it’s because he’s so great a man or you’re so insignificant, but likely a bit of both. And not only did he fail to offer me his mortal soul, when he left, he didn’t even say good-bye.”

  Willem couldn’t quite breathe.

  “There,” she said. “Still want me?”

  He moved his lips, but no sound came out.

  “You’re pathetic,” she whispered as she brushed past him and disappeared behind the dying potted plants.

  A drop of cold rain hit the bridge of Willem’s nose and made him flinch. He took a breath and sighed.

  “Yes,” he said to the cool night air, to the rooftops of Innarlith, “I still want you.”

  6

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

  FIRST QUARTER, INNARLITH

  The brutish man came at her with a hook, but it was his smell that Ran Ai Yu found most disturbing. They all smelled bad, as though they were rotting from within—and they looked it too. She’d fought animated corpses that didn’t stink so bad.

  She slit the dockworker’s wrist, and the hook clattered onto the pier. She didn’t recognize any of the words that spewed at her from his mostly toothless mouth, but his intent was clear.

  “You will stop this,” she said to the wounded dockworker while she kept him at bay with her sword. “I will pay you fairly.”

  Another string of unintelligible curses followed, and the man made the mistake of reaching for the hook. She cut him again, and he backed away.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” she said.

  Another dockworker fell at her feet, pushing the man she’d cut even farther back from her. That man held some kind of crude club and had been kicked in the face hard enough to flatten his nose and soak his face with his own blood.

  Ran Ai Yu glanced back in the direction the bloody man had come from. Lau Cheung Fen stood with the great porcelain ship Jié Zuò behind him. He stood on one foot, the other hanging in front of him, his knee at waist level. The morning sun shone from his shaved head, which sat atop his unusually large neck in a loose, comfortable way, as if suspended from above by a wire.

  The little hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

  Something hit her on the side of the face. Her teeth rattled, and her vision flared white, but she was still able to get her blade up fast enough to slap away the second blow. The man she’d cut had been joined by two more, as ragged and reeking as he. Though it was barely past dawn, they were drunk. Ran Ai Yu heard her passenger kick two more men. She could only hope that he could take down enough of them to get to her before the two dockworkers that fast approached her joined the three she did her best to fend off. They were drunk, slow, and brutish, but five was too many for her.

  “I will pay you,” she said.

  Her face felt hot. The horrible men leered at her like hungry dogs.

  “You’ll pay all right,” the man she’d cut growled at her—perhaps he was a dog. “But not with coin.”

  Ran Ai Yu shifted her weight back ont
o her rear foot and set her sword blade parallel with the pier. She looked the lead thug in the eyes, sensed he was going to shift right, and that’s what he did. She let him step into the sword tip, but didn’t stab him. The blade only went in the barest fraction of an inch. She didn’t want to kill him. If she killed him, she’d have to kill the rest of them.

  His two friends lunged at her, and Ran Ai Yu stepped back a few fast steps. Then one of the men fell flat on his face. She watched a stone roll along the wood planks, and blinked at it.

  When the second man fell she relaxed her stance, and let her sword arm fall to her side, the blade crossed in front of her legs. She stood like that and watched Ivar Devorast knock the other man to the ground with his fist. He smiled at her over the man’s limp form, and she smiled back. A thud from behind her turned her attention back to her passenger. Lau Cheung Fen, like Devorast, stood over the unconscious bodies of drunken dockhands.

  “Miss Ran,” Devorast said.

  She turned back to face him, sheathed her sword, and said, “Master Devorast, is good to see you once again.” Lau Cheung Fen stepped up behind her, and she added, “May I present my passenger, the honorable Lau Cheung Fen of Liaopei.”

  “Mister Lau,” he said. “Are you injured? Do you need any further assistance?”

  “Your manner …” Lau said. “So like Shou.”

  Devorast just looked at him.

  “We will require a crew to unload our cargo,” Ran Ai Yu answered. “These men tried to …” She paused, searching for the word.

  “Who is this man?” Lau asked her in Kao te Shou, their native tongue.

  She looked at Devorast, but detected no outward trace that he was offended by Lau’s speaking in front of him in a language he did not understand.

  “Master Ivar Devorast is the man who created the great Jié Zuò,” she answered in the Common Tongue of Faerûn.

  “Ah,” Lau responded, and his head bent low on that strange long neck of his. His eyes glittered black in the sunshine. “You are the great genius. It is truly an honor to meet you, Master Devorast.”

  “Master Lau is a most important dignitary from my province,” Ran said in hopes that she could help Devorast frame his response properly.

  “Thank you, Master Lau,” Devorast said, but his eyes stayed on Ran Ai Yu.

  “You have built many such ships, then,” Lau said. “I should purchase a number of them. Though my home is far from the sea, many in Shou Lung have commented on the strange and wonderful ship of Ran Ai Yu, and would pay much for one of her kind.”

  “There are no more of her kind,” Devorast said before Ran could say the same thing.

  “You have sport of me,” said her passenger.

  “No,” Ran Ai Yu cut in. “He has built only this one, and will build no more like her.”

  “This is true?” he asked Devorast.

  “It is,” was the Faerûnian’s only reply.

  “Is this some secret the white men seek to keep from us?” Lau asked in Kao te Shou.

  “With apologies, Master Devorast,” she said, then turned to Lau. “It is no secret. He is a very unusual man, and that is all. He will likely find it rude, however, if we continue to speak in a language he does not understand. With respect, Master Lau, he is a friend and important trade contact.”

  “Indeed,” Lau replied, then bowed to Devorast. “Please accept my most humble apologies for my rudeness, Master Devorast. Perhaps you would be so kind … if you no longer build your tile ships, what is it that occupies you? Perhaps if it is one of a kind as well, I might have it instead.”

  “It’s a canal,” Devorast replied.

  The two Shou merchants exchanged a glance.

  “Pardon me,” Lau said. He asked Ran Ai Yu, “Kuhnahl?” She gave him the word in their language, and he nodded. “Well, then I will not be able to take it with me. Pray, where is this canal?”

  “Northwest of here,” he replied.

  “To connect the Lake of Steam with your great Inner Sea,” Ran Ai Yu said.

  Devorast nodded.

  “This will be a mighty boon to trade,” said Lau.

  “For me,” said Devorast, “it’s a canal.”

  “I should like to see it,” Ran Ai Yu said. A memory tickled the edge of her consciousness—a similar conversation that she had had with Devorast when she’d last seen him.

  “I should like to show it to you,” he said. “But in the meantime, we should see to a dock crew for you.”

  “Is this the way trade is always conducted here? With such violence?” asked the tall merchant—a man Ran Ai Yu had her suspicions was no human at all. He gestured to the fallen dockhands, some of them beginning to rise.

  “It was not so when I was last here, two years and three months ago,” said Ran.

  “They made a mistake,” Devorast said.

  Ran Ai Yu smiled.

  7

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

  THE CANAL SITE

  When she first saw the work site Ran Ai Yu thought it was some kind of military drill. The sight of it gave the immediate impression of rigid organization that she had only experienced at the edge of a parade ground. But then details presented themselves, pieces took shape out of the whole, and that impression disappeared. She was left with chaos—madness, even—a barrage of colors and dizzying movement that erased any sense of organization at all, until she once again let those details melt into the beautiful whole.

  “These men are all at your command?” she asked Devorast, who stood beside her on a low hill.

  The sound of the men working deafened her, but then Devorast didn’t answer anyway. Picks chipped stone, shovels moved dirt and clay, and carts trundled past full of rocks, earth, wood, and more men. Oxen grunted, foremen shouted orders, and it was like music for a great dance.

  “This is as it should be,” she said, unconcerned with whether or not Devorast could hear her. “You will find your destiny here. Your spirit will fill itself with this work.”

  The heavy, damp air carried the smell of the Lake of Steam, but only faintly under the stench of turned earth and sweating bodies. It smelled like hard work.

  “I hope you live to see its completion,” she said.

  Devorast shrugged—a response that would have been considered rude in Shou Lung—but she took no offense.

  Ran Ai Yu crouched and touched the dirt at her feet. It was damp but not muddy, and she was able to scoop up a handful, testing the weight of it in her hand. She tried to imagine the weight of the dirt and rock, the trees and weeds, that Devorast meant to move to make the trench for his canal. Then she tried to imagine the weight of the water that would fill it, and though she’d plied the waters of a far greater canal in her far-off homeland, still the weight felt unbearable.

  “You will not require that I tell you how many people there must be … powerful people even … who will wish for you to fail,” she told him.

  He waited for her to look up at him before he shrugged again.

  She let the dirt pour out through her fingers, and something made her touch the tip of her tongue. She didn’t try to understand the impulse to taste it any more than she wanted to stop it. She just wanted to taste it—wanted to experience it with every one of her senses. It tasted like life, but not the same way food or water tasted; not physical life, but a deeper need within each human, the drive to build, the imperative to leave something behind, to make some mark. It tasted like the vital necessity to say, “I was here.”

  “Yes,” he said, “you are.”

  Ran Ai Yu felt her cheeks redden and her ears burn. She stood, avoiding his eyes.

  “I had not meant to … to speak that,” she stammered, her Common almost deserting her.

  Devorast said, “I’ve tasted it too.”

  She smiled at that, and smiled wider than she felt proper in front of a man she had not—

  The Shou merchant pushed that thought away before it was completed.

  “This is su
pported by your leader,” she asked, “your ransar?”

  “I don’t consider him my ransar,” Devorast replied, “but yes, it is.”

  “Both with the gold to pay these men and to buy their tools and materials, and so on,” she said then had to pause to again search her memory for the correct word. “Politically?”

  Devorast nodded. He didn’t look at her. Instead, his eyes darted from one part of the realization of his genius to another.

  “It is my understanding, having traveled to Innarlith on more than one occasion,” she went on, “and over more than a few years, that their ransar is a temporary post. Is this not true?”

  He glanced at her with a mischievous grin that further embarrassed her, and said, “Any job that is answerable to others could be called temporary.”

  “Ah, and is that not true of master builder?”

  “I’m not the ransar’s master builder,” he said.

  “Even worse for you, I should think.”

  He looked at her again, but for a longer time, and she finally met his gaze.

  “If it is the ransar’s gold and the ransar’s men,” she said, “then you work for him, whether either of you admit it or not. If … pardon me, when there is a new ransar, will that ransar be as generous? Will he be as taken with this canal as is Osorkon?”

  Devorast replied, “Perhaps, but perhaps not. Of course, I’ve considered that.”

  “And you have a plan?”

  Devorast was silent.

  “Meykhati,” she said. “You’ve heard this name? You know this man?”

  “I’ve heard the name.”

  “There is a reception at his home in six days’ time,” Ran Ai Yu said. “I have been invited, and you should come with me there.”

  “I have no time for social—”

  “Do you have time to bury your garbage to keep the seagulls away?” she asked, glancing up at the sky but gesturing with one open hand at a refuse pit.

  He didn’t follow her gaze. He knew there were no gulls.

  “Of course you do,” she said. “You make time for what is important for the completion of your canal, even if it is not pleasant to consider or to do.”