Whisper of Waves

by Philip Athans

  Inthelph appeared no worse for wear, though. It was as if his anger and outrage were keeping the trip from wearing on him.

  Throughout the sixteen-hour ride from Innarlith to the proposed site of the Nagaflow Keep, Willem sat in silence. For the first several hours he’d tried to puzzle out what in Faerûn’s name Devorast must have been thinking, but by the time the carriage came to a stop amid the clatter of stonemasons at work, he’d given up trying.

  When he’d first heard that Devorast had begun construction on the keep, he’d had a momentary thrill. Though he’d certainly never admit it to the master builder or anyone in the master builder’s acquaintance—and therefore almost no one in Innarlith—he admired the pure outrageous hubris of the whole thing. It was so far beyond mere self-confidence that Willem couldn’t even puzzle at its source. Once confronted by the master builder, Willem had faked shocked outrage and joined Inthelph in days’ worth of steaming, hateful rants. Messages were sent and ignored, agents dispatched and sent home, and finally Inthelph decided to go to the river himself. He didn’t bother asking Willem to go along. It was simply assumed.

  Willem let the master builder step out of the carriage first. The softly glowing lamps that swung from the corners of the carriage only made it more difficult to see anything happening at a distance. Willem stepped out of the carriage, stiff muscles protesting all the way, and blinked in a vain attempt to adjust his eyes to the odd lighting.

  Torches driven into the rolling grassland turned the sky into a starless expanse of the deepest black. Willem judged it to be near or just after midnight, and still the work site was abuzz with the clatter of hammers on wedges, the grunts of workers, and the barking laughs of men drawn close by hard work toward a common goal. The very air was alight with a sense of order and calm but driven efficiency.

  All that was lost on Inthelph.

  “Where is he?” the master builder asked, his face flushing red, his lips curling up over his graying teeth. “Where is this man of yours?”

  Willem had no idea. He’d never been out into the wild lands north of the city to the river everyone said was infested with the nagas that gave it its name and other creatures less intelligent but no less dangerous.

  The master builder didn’t wait for him to answer anyway and instead stomped off into the thick of the crowded work site. Willem followed behind, determined to let the master builder do all the talking. He’d stopped short of practicing a look of crushed disappointment in a mirror but was certain Devorast would know how he felt—or at least how he wanted to appear to be feeling, for the admiration he’d felt when he’d first heard that Devorast had begun work was only intensified with every step they took through the tightly organized site. If Willem had had to guess, he’d have said they’d been at work for the better part of six months, but he knew it had been less than two.

  Inthelph stopped a man carrying a bundle of sticks on his back and demanded, “Where is Ivar Devorast?”

  The man with the sticks looked at the master builder with a passive, quietly respectful look and Willem realized then that the crew Devorast had assembled had no idea what he’d done, but then, why would they need to know?

  “He’s over by the dwarfs,” the man drawled, his accent as much as his occupation marking him as a citizen of the Fourth Quarter.

  Inthelph raised an eyebrow, and the man nodded in the direction of a steep, flat-topped hill. Without another word, the master builder stomped off up the hill with Willem in tow. The climb was rough, especially after sixteen hours in a carriage, but the higher they climbed the more of the surrounding territory Willem could see. When they reached the top of the hill, more of the torches revealed the shimmering waters of a wide river below. Willem tried to imagine the scene in the daylight and realized he could see for miles on all sides. He guessed that in the daylight they’d be able to see all the way east to the Golden Road bridge. That crossing was already fortified by the ransar, it being a vital trade link to Arrabar and the Vilhon Reach to the north, but from the hill …

  “Perfect,” Willem whispered.

  The master builder paid him no mind. He’d spotted Devorast sitting next to a small fire, sipping from a steaming cup of tea and bent over a sheet of parchment. At his side was a squat dwarf with greasy red-brown hair and hands that looked as rough as the stone his hammer and apron said he worked with. Inthelph charged up to them so quickly and radiating such anger that the dwarf, startled, stood and grabbed for his hammer.

  Devorast stopped the dwarf with a hand on his forearm then whispered something into his ear.

  “Devorast!” Inthelph shouted. “Devorast, you thrice-bedamned fool, what in the name of Toril and the crystal spheres do you think you’re doing here?”

  The dwarf smiled at Inthelph, amused either by the master builder or what Devorast had said—or perhaps both. He walked away but kept glancing back at the master builder with—not quite menace but a subtle challenge in his eyes.

  Inthelph, livid, ignored the dwarf and instead shouted at Devorast, “I told you to bring me plans, you drooling incompetent, not to begin work without the slightest word of approval from me. Who in the name of every god in the outer planes do you think you are?”

  “There was no need to show you anything, Master Builder,” Devorast replied, and there was no mistaking the disdain he put into the words “Master Builder.” “I found the right location, quarried the stone, and now I’m building you and your ransar his keep.”

  Inthelph was so taken aback by the brazen reply—a reply Willem fully expected to hear—that he almost fell over.

  “On whose authority, boy?” the master builder shrieked. “I have not approved this site. I did not release the gold to pay this crew. I did not examine the design of your fortification. You’ve built one ship—one too-big barge that sank its first day at sea—and now you have the unmitigated audacity to begin a project of this nature, in the name of the ransar of Innarlith, entirely on your own authority?”

  Devorast looked at the master builder with one eyebrow raised. Willem waited for the shrug, a gesture he knew would put the master builder completely over the edge, but it didn’t come.

  “Do you have a better site in mind?” Devorast said. “Do you have a plan for a keep that will surpass my own?”

  “No, you dolt!” Inthelph raged. “That’s precisely the point. What if I had? What if there is a flaw in your location? Sure, we’re up on top of a hill overlooking the river, but have you taken everything into account that the ransar and his generals would expect from a fortification that was meant to have been designed to suit their needs and not yours? Are we close enough to the Golden Road bridge or far enough away? Don’t you dare for one moment stand there and tell me that you know the answers to every question, have taken every last detail into account, drawing, I must point out, from the experience you gained building how many such structures?”

  There was a silence and Willem knew that Devorast had no intention of filling it.

  “None!” the master builder answered himself. “You’ve never done anything like this, even as a stonemason, even as a common laborer, yet here you are, building the damned thing already, and with the ransar’s coin!”

  “The ransar will be satisfied,” Devorast said.

  Willem took a deep breath and held it. Looking at Devorast’s face, seeing the look in his eyes and hearing the perfect control in his voice, Willem had no doubt that the ransar would be satisfied indeed, but he also knew that it would never get that far.

  Inthelph took a deep breath too but didn’t hold it and didn’t look into Devorast’s eyes. Instead he turned away and walked in a circle, taking fast, short steps and shaking his head and shoulders in an effort to calm himself. Sweat soaked his silk tunic in the warm spring night.

  “Because he has served me well for a long time now,” said the master builder, “your friend Willem will not suffer for your spectacular display of hubris, and if … if—” he screamed—“your plans have any merit
at all you might just avoid a stay in the ransar’s dungeons. I want you gone. I want you away from here this very instant. If you ever set foot here again or ever so much as appear in my presence, no friend, no kind word of recommendation will save you from my wrath. You have ruined yourself with this insanity, Devorast, so I won’t trouble myself to take you the rest of the way down. This is no misstep, no blunder on the way that will educate you. This is incompetence, insolence of the highest order.”

  Devorast did something then that Willem had so seldom seen. He smiled.

  “If I’m incompetent,” Devorast said, “it’s only in my ability to suffer the opinions of lesser minds, and that, Master Builder, is a fault I’m prepared to live with.”

  Inthelph’s eyes bulged, and his mouth hung open.

  “Ivar,” Willem said, doing his best to seem compassionate yet firm, “I think that’s quite enough.”

  The look that Devorast gave him in return made Willem’s blood run cold.

  “Go,” the master builder growled.

  Then came that shrug, but Inthelph had already stomped away. When Willem watched Devorast walk off in the other direction and saw the looks on the faces of the crowd of workmen who had stopped to watch Inthelph’s display of righteous indignation, he realized just how wrong the master builder was.

  25

  9 Eleint, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Before Marek cast the first spell he paused to consider what the neighbors would think. He let his attention drift to the window that looked out over the street, lined by fashionable townhouses, the finest addresses in the city. Close on all sides were the wealthiest people in Innarlith, and sure they all had their share of secrets, but Marek couldn’t imagine any of them were doing anything like what he was about to do.

  That made him smile.

  On the polished wood floor all around him were the components and foci it had taken him tendays to collect. Two of his spellbooks lay open in front of him, and three scrolls were unfurled, held down with stones. The writing was in half a dozen languages, Draconic being the least exotic of them. He looked at the script, the drawings and diagrams, and he tried to sort out whether the shaking in his hands, the sweat on his palms, and his inability to take a deep breath were signs of fear or excitement.

  The first series of spells would protect him from at least some of what he imagined he might encounter. He would be able to withstand extremes of heat and cold and be protected from things that might be able to drain his life-force or sap his will. He also knew there could be any of a million other things he hadn’t planned for.

  The next spell, a complex one he’d cast only once before, made the very reality around him fade away. The walls melted into a gray nothing, the floor below him slipped into eternity, and he stood in the thin air of a separate reality.

  A gray the color of an overcast sky surrounded him on all sides and quaint conceits like up, down, left, and right lost all meaning.

  “Welcome to the Astral,” he whispered to himself.

  Marek drew in a deep breath and took stock of the things floating in the air around him. The scrolls were there, but they no longer needed stones to hold them open. The foci he required were all there too. Thus far everything had happened the way he’d planned it, so he had no excuses for not continuing. Still, he hesitated, but only long enough to remind himself why he was doing what he was doing. The black firedrakes, those fierce beasts he was so proud of and so terrified by, were his greatest creation and his most valuable commodity. The correct application of their feral strength would cement his position in the city, would buy him a ransar, and would help complete his mission. The Red Wizards would have Innarlith, for whatever good it might do them.

  The firedrakes needed space. He needed a refuge from the city—not just for breeding half-dragons but a place he could go where his work would be safe from prying eyes and escapes, and what better place than a little plane of existence he could call his own.

  With a smile, Marek bent about the task of doing just that. Through a series of powerful spells, and the focused magic of the items that floated in the Astral aether around him, he sifted through the fabric of the multiverse itself, thumbing through an array of environments until he found the right one.

  “Fury’s Heart,” he said aloud, letting the words mix with the feeling of the plane that rolled in his head and burned in his veins.

  He could see into the depths of that universe of chaos from the safety of the Astral, and what he saw frightened him but excited him too. There were things there, terrible things, things that were alive but hated life, things that lived on fear, panic, lust, and rage the way humans lived on food, water, and air. There were gods there too, and they weren’t the sort of entities anyone, even other gods, would think to trifle with, black forces named Umberlee, Malar, and others with names never spoken by human tongues.

  Marek Rymüt borrowed a piece of their domain, hoping it was a small enough piece that they wouldn’t notice, or if they noticed, they wouldn’t care. For beings made from the very stuff of chaos, who could know what they would care about from one moment to the next?

  He did as much as he could do without actually stepping across the unreal threshold between the Astral and his little pocket dimension. When he pinched off a bubble of that space he’d brought some of the things from Fury’s Heart with it, he knew, and prepared as he was, he didn’t want to face all of them right away and certainly not alone.

  Instead he drew a series of protective spells around the outside of the dimension, which from where he floated appeared as a perfect sphere of swirling indigo and violet light small enough that he could hold it with both hands. He would leave it floating in the Astral but only he would know where. Only Marek Rymüt would ever be able to see it, and when he was done weaving a thread of magic around it like a web of shimmering light only he would be able to come and go from it—he and whoever he wanted to bring with him.

  He would come back with Insithryllax and some of the black firedrakes, and he would tame that finite piece of the infinite expanse of Fury’s Heart. Perhaps he’d tame a few of the things that called it home, too, but the rest of them he’d destroy.

  The space inside the little ball of light was bigger than the city-state of Innarlith itself, and when he let his consciousness peek inside it he saw a lake, something like mountains, and a swamp. Insithryllax would like that. Black dragons liked swamps.

  It was all the room he’d need, and it was all his.

  The effort of what he’d done had so exhausted him that by the time the walls of his house in Innarlith slid back into the reality around him and the floor once more supported his weight, he was already half asleep. He struggled to his bed and collapsed, there to sleep for a full day and night, smiling all the while, at rest on a cushion of self-satisfaction that would have sustained a lesser man for decades.

  26

  16 Marpenoth, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  They had begun to meet at a discreet little inn in the Second Quarter. With Willem’s mother living with him and Halina living with her uncle, it was the only way to ensure their privacy. Though it had become a drain on Willem’s always just-full-enough personal coffers, he had come to look forward to their occasional afternoon or evening together. The gold would come back, but those stolen moments felt more precious to him than anything.

  He stood in front of the door, his body already beginning to anticipate the afternoon’s pleasures. He took a deep breath then knocked twice on the door, paused, then knocked three more times in rapid succession. The playful little signal they’d created bolstered the illusion that they were doing something they should be ashamed of, something they should keep secret, though neither of them seemed able to explain why they felt that way.

  Halina opened the door, hiding behind it so all he could see was the side of her face, one gently blushing cheek and one eye.

  �
�May I help you?” she purred, her cheek and eye being drawn up by a sly smile.

  “I’ve come to check the floorboards,” he said, letting a smile of his own spread across his face. “The innkeeper has been complaining of a loud, regular squeaking sound.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, sir,” she replied, then opened the door a bit wider, “but do come in and … satisfy yourself.”

  Willem felt his face burn from within, and he walked with a stiff gait into the little room. She’d had a fire lit in the small fireplace though it was warm outside. The curtains were drawn and the bedclothes turned down. It had been some time since they’d bothered with real pretensions.

  She closed the door behind him and leaned against it. He turned to her, standing a couple steps away, and just drank the sight of her in. She was dressed in a long gown, simply cut but elaborately decorated with lace that left holes to reveal her soft, pale skin, though the rest of it, dyed a pale pink, was transparent enough that there was no doubt she wore nothing else. Her lips parted and she stood in silence, watching his eyes roam her body, and waiting for him to have his fill of the sight of her.

  “Your hair …” he said, the dim light and quiet anticipation that weighed the air in the room made his voice low and quiet.

  Halina touched the hair at her temple and let a fingertip trace a slow path down along her ear and to her neck. She looked down, away from his eyes.

  “My uncle—” she whispered, then cleared her throat in a dainty, artificial way. “My uncle suggested it.”

  Her hair was shorter and done in a style not unlike some men wore theirs. It was not unattractive, but Willem preferred it long.

  “Your uncle is a man of impeccable taste,” he said, “or so I’ve heard.”

  She smiled and let a sigh of relief pass her lips.