Lies of Light

by Philip Athans

  “Everything is possible,” Marek said, “but to answer that with any accuracy one would have to ask the very people who would be most intent on keeping the secret.”

  “And I suppose it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  A bell rang, and one of the younger Waukeenar called the faithful—and those just visiting—into the temple’s central hall for some formal rite or another. Pristoleph gave Marek a smile and started to move off into the crowd. The Thayan stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. The genasi glanced down at the touch with a face so stern it seemed carved from stone. Marek took his hand away and reached into a pocket. Pristoleph watched his every move, and Marek had no doubt that the senator was ready for anything—including an assassination attempt.

  Marek withdrew a polished silver box from his pocket, two inches by six inches, and hinged on one side. He offered the box to Pristoleph with a shallow bow.

  “What is this?” the senator asked.

  “A gift,” Marek replied. “Consider it a token of good will from the Thayan Enclave.”

  Pristoleph took the silver box and looked Marek in the eye. He’d been taken off guard, and Marek made a note of that.

  “Please don’t try them on,” Marek said when Pristoleph opened the box to reveal a pair of pince-nez spectacles with lenses of opaque magenta, “until you are in a private place.”

  Pristoleph closed the box and smiled. Marek could see that he had intrigued the genasi, and worried him at least a little.

  55

  2 Marpenoth, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR)

  THE GOLDEN ROAD

  Insithryllax, in the form of a human, stepped out into the middle of the road and crossed his arms in front of his chest. The rider pulled his horse to a stop and regarded the dark man with a soldier’s critical, suspicious eye, but didn’t draw his sword.

  “Let me guess,” the rider said. “‘Stand and deliver,’ is it?”

  Insithryllax laughed, hiding an incantation in the stuttering chuckle. The power gathered inside him, tingling first the tips of his fingers, then making his forearms almost sizzle. The sensation made him stop laughing and just smile.

  “I am a rider in the service of the League of Lightning Mercenary Company and House Wianar of Arrabar,” the soldier said. “Think twice, bandit.”

  “Ah,” the disguised dragon replied, “good. You’re the ambassador’s escort.”

  The soldier’s eyes narrowed, and his cheeks flushed. Insithryllax let the gathered Weave energy loose, thrusting his arm up and out to point at the rider. The soldier got a hand almost to his sword before the blinding blue-white flash of lightning arced from the dragon’s outstretched palm and slammed into him.

  The soldier jerked forward, not back, in his saddle. The horse screamed, but the man made no sound at all. It was if he screamed in reverse. He lungs seized, drew in air, but kept it lodged in his collapsed chest. The skin stretched tight over cramping muscles, and his eyes popped in his skull.

  The warhorse bucked, trying to dislodge its rider. The man’s armor had begun to glow red from heat, and Insithryllax could smell the stench of smoldering horseflesh. The lightning bolt disappeared, and finally the horse was able to dislodge its rider. Insithryllax fought down the urge to transform into his true form and make a meal of the animal, and he let it run westward up the Golden Road in a blind, agonized panic.

  The soldier lay motionless in the middle of the road, slowly broiling inside his own armor.

  A bloodcurdling scream ripped through the air from the east, and Insithryllax broke into a run, casting a spell as he went.

  “Remember what I told you, children,” he whispered into the wind, “no acid, and no survivors.”

  He ran half a mile down the middle of the road, uphill most of the way, and when he came to the hillcrest, he skidded to a stop, sending a little splash of standing water into the still, cool air. Rain began to patter on the muddy road around him. A black shape passed over his head with a flutter of leathery wings, but Insithryllax didn’t flinch. He followed the black firedrake’s swooping dive. It went for another of the riders, a man so like the one he’d just killed they could have been twins. The rider got his sword out of his scabbard before the firedrake tore his face off as it passed. He screamed and fell from his mount. Another black firedrake perched on him and started eating him while he died.

  His horse reared and shrieked, confused, until it was taken down by a firedrake’s crocodilian fangs. As it went down, it kicked the side of the carriage, popping it up on two wheels. The firedrake, its mouth still on the horse’s neck, pushed out with one wing and tipped the carriage the rest of the way over. The driver ran, heading perpendicular to the road and downhill.

  Insithryllax cast a spell as he walked toward the overturned carriage. When he was done, he sent five slivers of green light speeding after the fleeing driver. The missiles twisted around each other in the air, dipping up and down as though avoiding a series of invisible obstacles in the air, but they hit the running man in a cluster in the middle of his back, and dropped him. He slid in the mud for half a dozen yards on his face, his arms limp at his sides.

  The rear outrider thundered up, a lance held firmly at his side. He growled out a long, guttural battle cry that made Insithryllax laugh, but then the dragon’s attention was drawn to the carriage. A hand appeared in the open window, smeared with blood.

  A black firedrake roared, and Insithryllax broke into a run, casting another spell as he did so. A crackling sizzle cut the air. The approaching rider let loose a shriek of agony, and before Insithryllax even turned to look he knew the source of the sizzle. The smell hit him next, and he redirected the spell away from the carriage and to his errant child.

  The gust of wind knocked the black firedrake on its face and caught in its wing. The veiny black membrane ballooned up, and the force of the magic-driven air twisted its wing back and up so hard the bones snapped like twigs.

  The firedrake shrieked in concert with the melting rider. The other firedrake turned on Insithryllax with an angry hiss, but backed off when the dragon merely tipped his head to one side.

  He stood next to the carriage and muttered another spell, allowing himself the luxury of using the human gestures. The exercise gave the man time to crawl through the window and on to the side—which had become the top—of the carriage.

  Insithryllax reached up, grabbed the man around the wrist, and pulled. With a yelp the man tumbled to the mud at the dragon’s feet.

  “What—?” the man demanded, struggling to get to his feet. “What in the name of Toril do you think you’re doing?” He got to his feet, but staggered. Stepping back from Insithryllax, he steadied himself with a hand on the carriage. “Have you any idea who I am?”

  “Ambassador Fael Verhenden of Arrabar,” Insithryllax said.

  The ambassador looked up at him, blood trickling down the side of his face from a cut in his scalp. He studied the dragon’s dark face as though trying to place him. A black firedrake reared up behind Insithryllax and the man screamed and fell back against the underside of the carriage. He put his arms up to fend the creature off.

  Insithryllax knelt down in front of the man and grabbed him by his bloody jacket. Drawing him close, he looked the terrified ambassador in the eye. The spell he’d cast worked on the man’s mind, opening it like a sack into which the dragon could toss whatever he pleased. He could see the spell working in the way Verhenden’s pupils dilated.

  “It was nagas,” Insithryllax said. “You were beset by nagas. Your men managed to kill one, but they overwhelmed you with spells.”

  The ambassador quivered, whimpered a little, and nodded.

  Insithryllax drew the dagger out of the sheath at the ambassador’s belt. He held it up close to the man’s bulging, accepting eyes.

  “You fought as best you could, but were armed only with this dagger. One of the nagas used some kind of magic to take it from you. It danced in the air of its own accord”—Insithryllax bounced the dagg
er up and down in front of his face—“then it slit your throat.”

  With a flick of his wrist Insithryllax dragged the sharp edge along the side of the ambassador’s throat, pressing it in deep. Blood poured out, the Arrabarran gasped for air and managed only to begin drowning in his own blood. Insithryllax watched him die then stood up, turned, and went to stand over the firedrake that still writhed in the mud with its wind-shattered wing twitching at its side.

  “You,” he said. “I told you no acid.”

  The wounded firedrake cringed beneath him as Insithryllax shed his human guise. His body trembled then convulsed, and as the black firedrakes watched, he grew to many times his human size. Finally he stood in his true form, his long, lithe body protected by scales the color of the sky at middark. Horns curved forward from each side of his head, and his eyes blazed with crimson light.

  The wounded firedrake looked away.

  Insithryllax opened his enormous jaws over the crippled monster and bit it in half. With only a few bone-splintering chews, he swallowed the first bite, then took the rest. That done, he ate the acid-burned rider, armor and all.

  When he’d swallowed the last bite, made bitter by the black firedrake’s acid, he turned on the other firedrake. The creature shrank back from him a little but stood his ground before his gigantic father.

  “You,” the great wyrm rumbled, “get the dead naga and leave it here.”

  The black firedrake bowed and went off in the direction of the place where Insithryllax had hidden the water naga’s remains. He looked around at the carnage and checked for any other signs of acid, or any evidence that the black firedrakes might have been involved, but saw none. Even if they brought the ambassador back from the dead, or questioned his corpse, he would insist that it was water nagas who’d killed them all.

  56

  23 Marpenoth, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR)

  THIRD QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Pristoleph held a little fire in his hand. Yellow-orange tongues of flame lapped at the chip of black wood at its heart. The heat felt good against his palm. It would have scorched a human, blistered him, but Pristoleph wasn’t quite human. He stared at the fire’s dance, kept small and contained by the power of his will. The movement mesmerized him, and he let it make his mind go blank.

  Outside the window of the tall turret in Pristal Towers—his overly large manor home—the city of Innarlith slept. When he started to think again, he thought of the city. It had started out as his enemy. The city tried to kill him when he was a baby, and over and over again through his childhood, but he’d never let it. He beat it, and by the time he’d seen his thirtieth year, the city was his to do with as he pleased. He’d bought a seat on the senate, but kept largely to his own ways and his own circles. He’d never sought, or had been particularly interested in, the Palace of Many Spires, preferring to act at least a bit from the shadows, but …

  “But things change,” he whispered to himself.

  He closed his palm around the fire. The coal sizzled and popped in his hand. The feeling made him smile.

  When it settled, he tossed it into the brazier with the other coals and sighed. Tired, he rubbed his eyes and thought of going to bed. He looked at it, wide and comfortable, and richly appointed in silk, but it had no appeal.

  Pristoleph considered going for a walk. It had been a long time since he’d done that. For the longest time he would wander the streets of the Fourth Quarter, visiting the avenues as a senator that he used to haunt as a street urchin. He would mark the passage of time by the houses that had collapsed or burned, the shanties that had been erected, the dead dogs in the midden. But he hadn’t done that in a long time.

  He’d stopped going to the docks as well. Since he’d started to “employ” undead dockworkers supplied by Marek Rymüt, he had to pretend, like the rest of the senate, that he was opposed to the very idea. He had to blame it on the guild he’d helped create. He had to make sure that the workers who’d played so easily into his hands and Marek’s were blamed for their own obsolescence.

  He didn’t go to the docks because of the smell, and because it made him feel tired to be there. He couldn’t tell anyone, even Wenefir, how tired he felt. Most of he time, he couldn’t even tell himself. Thinking about it just made him more tired.

  His eyes settled on the little silver box.

  He took a deep breath and blinked. He’d forgotten about it, and there it sat on the side table where he’d left it, next to an oil lamp he hardly ever lit. Pristoleph reached out and picked it up, opened it, and stared down at its contents.

  The spectacles didn’t make any sense. The lenses were opaque. He knew they were enchanted in some way-considering the source that was a certainty—but the Thayan had never said how. For all Pristoleph knew, they’d blind him the second he put them on his nose. They’d either blind him, or show him something.

  He thought of a dozen things that Marek Rymüt might want him to see, and that was in the first few heartbeats, before he let his imagination wander. None of the possibilities particularly interested him, but still he lifted the pince-nez from the box, and turned them over in his hand.

  He sighed again and stood. Still holding the spectacles, he crossed to his writing desk, pulled a sheet of parchment from a drawer, and wrote a brief note:

  “Wenefir, if the pince-nez have harmed me in any way, kill Marek Rymüt.”

  He signed it with a certain sigil that would prove to Wenefir that he’d written it himself. He replaced the quill and sat back in his chair.

  With a little shrug, he placed the pince-nez on his nose with his eyes closed. There was no sensation of anything out of the ordinary at first, and certainly no pain. After a moment he finally opened his eyes.

  When it appeared as though he’d been transported to a strange room he closed his eyes and took the pince-nez off his nose. He blinked his eyes open and was happy, though not entirely surprised to be in his own bedchamber.

  Pristoleph looked down at the pince-nez again and thought about what he’d seen. It was another bedchamber, someone else’s. He’d never been there before, but when he had the spectacles on, it was as though he was actually there.

  He put them on again, sat back, and studied his new surroundings in more detail. He seemed to be sitting on the edge of a bed. His head turned, but he didn’t feel the muscles in his neck working, and he hadn’t wanted to turn his head. A man or a woman—he couldn’t tell under the down and linen bedclothes—slept in the bed. He could see the rise and fall of the figure’s breathing.

  His head turned again and his vision scanned over the room. It was a cramped space, at least compared to what Pristoleph had grown accustomed to, and decorated in what he found to be an overly garish fashion.

  He reached out with his right hand, but couldn’t see it, even when he was sure he held his palm a scant few inches from the tip of his nose.

  A man stood in the open door of the bedchamber, and Pristoleph had the uneasy sensation that they had made eye contact. Something was wrong with the pince-nez, though. The man appeared transparent, as though made of deep violet light. He didn’t seem to entirely belong in the scene, and Pristoleph realized maybe he wasn’t in the scene at all, but—

  He flipped the pince-nez off his nose, stood, and whipped his head from side to side. He’d thought perhaps the man was in fact standing in his own bedchamber, and Pristoleph saw him filtered through the magenta lenses.

  But Pristoleph was alone.

  “Whose eyes am I seeing through, Marek,” Pristoleph whispered, “and why?”

  Seeking the answer in the item itself, he put the glasses back on. His host had moved from the bed to sit in front of the dressing table. He saw a woman’s delicate hand where he thought his own should be. She took a silver brush from the dressing table and looked up into a mirror.

  Pristoleph gasped.

  She was beautiful.

  As she brushed her long, straight black hair, Pristoleph found that he could hardly breath
e. He watched her, fixated by her deep blue eyes that were so sad and so troubled and so full of promise.

  No woman had ever had that effect on him. No woman had ever stopped him cold.

  A tear fell from one eye and she let it trickle down her smooth, flawless cheek without wiping it away. He felt uncomfortable watching her cry, but it was as though he’d fallen under the influence of some spell—and perhaps he had done just that, but he didn’t care. He not only couldn’t, but didn’t want to look away.

  Still looking deeply into her own eyes, she picked up a little cuticle knife from the dressing table and ran the sharp blade along the inside of her arm. He couldn’t feel any pain, but he could see her wince in the mirror. The little line of red sat among scars and still-healing cuts on the same patch of skin.

  When she looked at herself in the mirror again, she was smiling.

  Pristoleph grabbed the pince-nez off his face and threw them to the floor. He stood, nearly falling back over his chair, but stayed on his feet.

  The door opened, and the guard posted outside stuck his head in, looking around.

  “Senator?” he said, seeing nothing amiss.

  “It’s all right,” Pristoleph told him, and waved him away.

  The guard nodded and closed the door.

  With a deep breath to calm himself, Pristoleph knelt and picked up the spectacles. One of the lenses had broken into tiny shards that were no longer magenta, but ordinary clear, colorless glass.

  “Why?” he whispered, though the man he was asking—Marek Rymüt—couldn’t hear him. “Why show me her?”

  Hours later, Pristoleph finally collapsed into bed without an answer to that question.

  57

  24 Marpenoth, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  The meat had not been cooked at all. Willem stared down at it, trying to find it in himself to be disgusted, but he couldn’t quite muster it. He kept his hands in his lap. “I told you, no,” Phyrea whispered. She sat at the other end of the dining table, and had no place setting in front of her, just a crystal tallglass of red wine that she wasn’t drinking. She looked off through the arched doorway to the sitting room, staring at empty space as though someone stood next to the sava board between the two wingback leather chairs.