Phyrea picked up a paring knife from the silver tea tray on the low table between them. Thurene’s eyes fastened to the little silver blade and followed it. With her other hand Phyrea lifted her skirt, showing even more of one firm thigh. She knew that Thurene could see at least the first few in the row of little scars, some still not entirely healed, that marked her otherwise perfect skin. She held the blade to her thigh, but didn’t cut, at least not right away.
“Oh, my, no,” Thurene breathed, but Phyrea could tell she really wanted her to do it. The old woman wanted to see it. “Phyrea …”
Do it, the ghost of the man said.
Phyrea looked up at him, ignoring her mother-in-law. She let her eyes linger on the scar on his face, the scar in the shape of a Z. He sneered at her.
“You want me to,” she whispered.
I want you to, yes, the ghost said.
At the same time Thurene gasped, “Goodness, no!”
But if you cut, the man said, his lips moving but not in time with the words that echoed in Phyrea’s head, keep cutting. Cut and cut and cut until you’re one with us at last.
But not here, the voice of the old woman intruded. “Phyrea …”
Phyrea looked around the dull, dimly-lit sitting room for the old woman, but the apparition was nowhere to be seen. All there was to see was expensive but unremarkable furniture, art that showed an utter lack of taste, and all the little things that made the house more Thurene’s than Willem’s. It was an old woman’s house.
“It makes me feel something,” Phyrea said, turning back to Thurene.
“Phyrea, please, I—”
Phyrea pressed down on the knife and the hot wetness of the blood was the first sensation, followed only after Thurene’s shocked gasp by the pain.
“It isn’t bad, but it hurts,” Phyrea whispered.
Yes, the ghost of the man whispered, it hurts.
Phyrea watched as the man faded away, drifting into nothingness like a wisp of steam.
“For at least the space of a heartbeat,” Phyrea said, her eyes closed, “all you think about is the little stab of pain and not the horrible, bloated beast of a woman that’s sitting across from you, the pretty but frivolous man you’ve sold yourself to like a whore’s whore, and the sad, pathetic ruin of your own life.”
She opened her eyes again and laughed in Thurene’s horrified face.
“Wouldn’t you prefer it back in Cormyr?” Phyrea asked. She held up the pairing knife and a few drops of blood clung to the blade. “If you went back there, you might live out the rest of your life like a sow in a pen, spared the slaughter by a farmer gone sentimental.”
Thurene swallowed, which caused her chins to waggle in a ridiculous way. Her skin was so heavily powdered it was impossible for Phyrea to be sure, but it appeared as though she’d gone pale.
“Willem doesn’t know I do that to myself,” Phyrea said then licked her own blood from the blade, reached down, and cut a sliver of pear. Thurene gagged, a hand at her throat, her eyes wide. “Pear?” Phyrea offered.
She held the slice of ripe fruit out to her mother-in-law, who shook her head and shrank away.
“You s-said,” Thurene sputtered, “you said … you said that you did that … before you met my Will—”
“I said nothing of the kind,” Phyrea interrupted. “It’s not your pathetic son who’s very presence makes me feel as though there may be some hope for our miserable, porcine existences.”
Phyrea placed the slice of pear on her tongue and held it in her mouth, sucking the juices from it until it sizzled. With the tip of her finger she drew up the little smear of blood that oozed from the cut, and licked it off with the tip of her tongue. Thurene gagged again, but Phyrea enjoyed the salty tang of her own blood as it mixed with the tart sweetness of the pear. As she chewed, she pulled the hem of her dress down until it almost touched her knee.
“Phyrea, I—” Thurene started, but choked to a stop when the door opened and Willem walked in.
What are you doing here? the voice of the sad woman murmured.
Phyrea looked to the door, ignoring Thurene’s struggles to stand and her blustered, shrill greetings. The woman stood next to the door, not sparing Willem a glance as he stepped in. Made of pale violet light, she looked as though she was about to cry, the same as always. There was something both comforting and terrifying about that particular undead creature.
Phyrea didn’t stand, even when Willem walked into the room. He looked back and forth between his new bride and his mother with crippling uncertainty. Phyrea imagined she could hear crickets chirping in the still expanse of emptiness inside his handsome head. He drew in a deep, shuddering breath and slipped his rain-soaked weathercloak from around his shoulders.
“Willem, my dear,” Thurene all but screamed.
“Really, Mother,” he said, “are you all right? What have you two been talking about?”
He eyed Phyrea with a look that surprised her. Maybe he wasn’t so stupid after all.
“Oh,” Phyrea said, her voice light, almost girlish, “we’ve been having a wonderful time, just us girls.”
“Really….” Willem said, not believing her. He looked at his mother and raised an eyebrow.
“We’ve been having tea,” Phyrea cut in before Thurene could speak. “Would you like some?”
“Everything is fine,” Thurene said, but her face was pleading and desperate.
“Or would you rather just turn in?” Phyrea asked, and had his full attention.
Phyrea stared at Willem, keeping his eyes away from his mother, but she could sense Thurene sagging, almost falling to the floor.
Willem swallowed and said, “I’d love a cup of tea, thank you.”
He handed his weathercloak to his mother, who almost dropped it and looked at it as though it was some alien creature from a foul outer plane. Phyrea smiled at both of them and turned back to the tray. She picked up the knife, ignored both Thurene’s series of little gasps and the laugh that echoed in her head from the man with the z-shaped scar, and cut another slice of pear. She held it up to Willem, who took it out of her hand without a second thought. She looked at Thurene with fire in her eyes, and the old woman was smart enough to swallow whatever it was she wanted to say. Willem ate the slice of pear with a smile.
“I …” Thurene said, “I’m feeling … tired.”
“Mother?” Willem said, turning to look at her.
Thurene turned her eyes to the floor and started for the stairs.
“I’ll leave you alone,” she muttered. “Good night.”
“Good night, Mother,” Willem called after her. “Sleep well.”
When he turned back to Phyrea, she patted the seat next to her and smiled.
51
2 Ches, the Year of the Shield (1367 DR)
ABOARD THE RANSAR’S YACHT, THE LAKE OF STEAM
It had been some time since Marek Rymüt had been at sea. It wasn’t exactly his preferred method of travel. The deck rose and fell at irregular intervals, but the motion was smooth, almost comforting, without any violent lurches to challenge the stomach. Though it wasn’t yet spring, the air was warm with only a light wind. The smell of the lake had numbed his nose so he hadn’t been able to smell it since only a little while after they’d shoved off from Innarlith. The sail on the single mast fluttered above him. He found the noise irritating.
“It is a lovely day, isn’t it, Master Rymüt?” the young woman standing next to him said. He glanced at her and smiled. “And the ransar’s yacht is most impressive,” she added.
“Well,” Marek said with a sigh, “one does have the responsibility to keep up appearances.”
“Of course,” said the young woman. “And I would also like to tell you again how delighted I am to—”
“Please, Senator Aikiko,” Marek said with a wave of one hand. “You may not want to thank me once you’ve seen this hole in the ground.”
The senator giggled in a way that some men might find alluring, bu
t made Marek cringe. He spared her another glance, noting the clothes she wore. She’d dressed for an expedition, in tan tunic and trousers. Though the sky was a gray overcast, the sunlight dim and diffuse, she wore a hat with a brim. Overall she looked like a petty aristocrat on her way to a masque dressed up as a laborer.
“I can’t wait, Master Rymüt,” she said, her smile never wavering. “I can’t wait.”
She smiled. Aikiko was a pretty woman, small and delicate with features that had a subtle hint of elf to them. She might have been a half-elf, but Marek knew she was in fact entirely human. Her father, himself a senator before his untimely death a decade past at the hands of a bitter political rival, was from Innarlith, but her mother was Kozakuran.
“Do the others know why we’re here?’ she asked.
Marek shrugged and shook his head. One of the reasons he’d thought of Aikiko was as a way to get rid of her. She’d become a fixture at his regular meetings for the junior senators, and her voice and cloying mannerisms irritated him.
Kurtsson emerged from below, his pale skin and bored expression somehow reassuring. When he spotted Marek and Aikiko he approached with the minimum of greetings. Any further conversation was cut short by the approach of the last two of Marek’s guests.
“Ah, Senators Djeserka and Korvan,” said Marek, “so good of you to join us.”
Willem appeared sheepish, embarrassed, though he wasn’t necessarily late. Djeserka’s look was as vacant as usual.
“Djeserka,” Marek said, “is it true that you once apprenticed to the man who built this vessel?”
Djeserka seemed surprised by the question, but gathered himself quickly and nodded.
Marek smiled, stomped a foot on the polished mahogany deck, and said, “Fine workmanship. Do you know its name?”
“She,” Djeserka answered, “is Heart of the Heavens.”
Marek laughed and said, “A strange custom that, referring to boats and ships as ‘she’ and ‘her.’ I’ll never understand why that is.” He looked at Kurtsson and winked. “We should start calling wands ‘she.’” The Vaasan chuckled. “‘She’s as good a wand of fire as any created in the workshops of forgotten Siluvanede.’”
Aikiko laughed along though Marek could tell she didn’t really understand the joke. Willem looked out at the water with an unpleasant grimace. He didn’t seem to enjoy being out in the water, or could it be that he didn’t enjoy the reason. Marek didn’t care either way.
“Well,” the Red Wizard said, “on to the matter at hand, yes? We’re on our way to the site of the canal that we’re certain will one day link the Lake of Steam and the Nagaflow and on and on, talk, talk, talk. It’s an undertaking that I argued strenuously against when it was first presented to me. It’s something that I felt would have a profoundly negative overall effect on the city-state.”
He paused and smiled. Kurtsson at least knew that Marek had no interest in the overall effect that anything but his own trade in magic items might have on the city-state, but the others seemed to accept his words well enough.
Of the four of them, Willem looked the least interested. He appeared unwell, his skin was pale and deep, dark bags hung under his eyes. Somehow he was no less handsome. His eyes darted around, never focusing on anything for long. Marek couldn’t tell if he was drunk, frightened, or both.
“This whole thing was the work of one man,” Marek continued. “For all intents and purposes he’s a renegade from Cormyr who came to Innarlith with selfish designs. He had his way with our fine city-state for longer than he should have been allowed, indulging in his own desires without care for the greater good.”
Marek paused again, happy to see that Willem, Aikiko, and Djeserka seemed to be caught up in his disingenuous oratory. Kurtsson was more concerned with an errant cuticle, but then he was the smartest of the four.
“I’m happy to say that as time went on I changed my opinion of the canal itself,” Marek said. “I’m now of the mind that it will be a crucial part of the future of trade not only in the fair city-state of Innarlith but throughout the coastal regions of Faerûn. What has changed is who will build it, and how it will be built.”
Aikiko smiled and clapped her hands in front of her mouth like a schoolgirl. Kurtsson raised a disapproving eyebrow at the gesture. Djeserka stared at Marek with a blank expression, waiting patiently to hear the rest of it. Willem grew more and more upset with each passing breath.
“You will build it,” Marek said. “You four—not one man alone, but a group of political-minded individuals who can bring different skills and various strengths to the endeavor. This is too big, and too important a job to be left to one man and his costly hubris.”
He watched Willem squirm at that.
“How it will be done,” the Red Wizard went on, “is through the careful and liberal use of the Art. Where once there was a small city of men employed to sweat and dig, there will still be some men, but alongside them will be workers of a less fragile nature. Where previously there was employed a dangerous mix of rare earth elements that but for Tymora’s gracious whimsy would surely have killed hundreds of innocent laborers, there will be predictable spells cast by responsible and experienced mages supervised by Kurtsson and supplied by the Thayan Enclave.”
Marek paused one last time to take a breath and gauge their reactions. Nothing had changed, Aikiko was still the happiest, Kurtsson the most prepared and stoic, Djeserka the least intelligent, and Willem the most terrified.
“You will finish this,” Marek said, “by the command of Ransar Salatis, and with the aid of the Thayan Enclave, for the good of the people of Innarlith. Don’t bother to tell me you accept the responsibility. I know you do.”
He smiled, fended off Aikiko, who tried to embrace him, and watched Willem run to the rail and vomit over the side.
52
17 Flamerule, the Year of the Shield (1367 DR)
THE SISTERHOOD OF PASTORALS, INNARLITH
Warm today, isn’t it?” Surero said to the girl who ladled soup into his bowl.
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 M
other.”
“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 Faerûn, 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.”
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