Scream of Stone w-3

by Philip Athans

  “I’m sure he’ll be delighted,” said the dragon, even though Marek had just told him that Willem wouldn’t be.

  “Delighted or not,” the Red Wizard said, “he will continue to be mine to command.”

  The dragon watched, occasionally commenting, while Marek finished restoring the dead man’s teeth. When he was finished he stepped back to examine his handiwork and smiled.

  “Willem,” he said, “I have something to tell you.”

  The undead creature gave no indication he’d heard a thing.

  Marek turned to Insithryllax and said, “Just for you, my friend, a little demonstration. This is not a zombie, after all, and not insensate.”

  The dragon shrugged but continued to look on.

  “Willem,” Marek said, “the ransar has released Ivar Devorast from his dungeon.”

  The dead man’s head twitched a fraction of an inch.

  “You don’t like that name, do you, Willem?” asked the Red Wizard. “Ivar Devorast?”

  The dead man’s jaws clacked closed, and Marek gasped, worried the new teeth might crack, but they remained intact.

  “I know you want to kill him,” Marek went on. “You will have your chance soon enough.”

  The corpse moved his head in a way that might have been a nod.

  “I’ve sent others before you to claim his life,” Marek said, “and they have all failed.”

  “You’ve never sent me,” Insithryllax said.

  Marek ignored him and said to the corpse, “It will take everything I’ve put into you to kill that one, I think, though I still can’t put my finger on why he’s managed to live this long. Sheer force of will, I’m sure. But for the nonce I’m going to awaken a force that I left latent inside you when first I helped you transform into your current state. When your heart beats once more you’ll go back to Innarlith and the remains of your life.”

  The undead thing just stood there, silent and unmoving.

  “I want you to go back to being a second-rate human,” Marek said, “before I make you a first-rate monster.”

  28

  19 Nightal, the Year of Wild Magic (1372 DR)

  THE CANAL SITE

  Pristoleph pulled the two boards apart with his bare hands, the too-small nails squeaking and bending as they gave way. He blinked in the drizzling rain and watched as Devorast pried two more boards apart with a crowbar. He placed the board with no nails left in it on a neat stack of weathered planks then went to work on the nails sticking out of the other board.

  “There will be no shortage of disappointed dilettantes in Innarlith this evening,” Pristoleph said.

  Devorast glanced at him but didn’t answer.

  Pristoleph smiled and looked at the viewing stand. It was half the size it was when it was filled, just days before, with gawking spectators. The previous overseers of the canal project had had it moved along the length of the slowly-growing canal so the curious could see the construction and the accidents up close.

  “They’ve gotten used to seeing people killed again,” Pristoleph went on. “When you were operating in secret and the rate of accidents fell sharply off, they’d stopped coming, but while you sat in the dungeon, the bloodshed returned, and so did they.”

  Devorast, who’d removed the nails from the board he was working on, placed it on the stack and went to work on another step with his crowbar. Only he and the ransar worked on disassembling the viewing stand. The rest of the workers were busy on the canal itself, and Devorast refused to allow them to waste their time taking apart something that shouldn’t have been built in the first place.

  “Perhaps I should have left you in there,” Pristoleph said, intentionally baiting Devorast. “I could have sold tickets. As long as things blew up in people’s faces and men were buried alive in mud, I would have made a fortune.”

  “You already have a fortune,” Devorast said.

  Pristoleph laughed, but studied the man at the same time. There was no anger apparent on his face, but he did seem annoyed, if only just a bit.

  “I suppose you’re right,” the ransar said. “I have several fortunes. Perhaps you can go home, abduct your realm’s infant king, and come to me for the ransom. I can pay it.”

  “But would you?”

  Pristoleph stopped, making a show of the surprise he felt hearing Devorast actually ask a question. He didn’t pretend to know the man, but he could feel it was unusual for him. Pristoleph thought he might have been getting somewhere.

  “No,” Pristoleph said, “I wouldn’t. Would you? If you had the means, of course.”

  “The king of Cormyr is not my responsibility,” Devorast said, “and besides, he has the royal family to pay his ransom.”

  “Someone else, then,” the ransar prodded. “Someone closer to you?”

  “It’s a meaningless question, Ransar.”

  “I wasn’t always the man I am today, you know,” Pristoleph said.

  Devorast stacked more weathered lumber then started prying apart another step.

  “I grew up in the Fourth Quarter,” Pristoleph said. “I grew up in the streets, but never in the gutter. I made myself what I am today by the force of my own will.”

  Devorast glanced at him, but Pristoleph couldn’t quite decipher the expression.

  “It was a long and difficult road from the Fourth Quarter,” Pristoleph said, “to here, where I am now: the highest-paid garbage man in Faerun.”

  “I’m not paying you,” Devorast said.

  “Nor are you understanding any of my jokes,” the ransar said. “Still, I get the feeling you have a sense of humor. After all, here you are working peacefully side by side with the man who held you in a stinking hole in the ground for more than a year. I would have killed me.”

  “I’m not stopping you,” Devorast said.

  Pristoleph laughed loud and hard, and for a while they went to work taking the viewing stand apart in silence.

  “I also had to rely on myself as a child,” Devorast said, and Pristoleph was startled as much by the sudden sound of his voice as by the admission itself.

  “Then you know what it’s like,” Pristoleph said, “to struggle for everything, to fight for every hint of power and influence, and every copper.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Pristoleph stopped what he was doing and stared at Devorast, waiting for him to go on.

  He had to wait a long time before Devorast said, “I’ve never been interested in power and influence. I don’t want to control people, and coins are tools to be used when you have them, and replaced by other tools when you don’t.”

  “So what do you want?” Pristoleph asked.

  “I want to take apart this viewing stand, then use the lumber to build two ladders and a pair of trench braces.”

  29

  21 Hammer, the Year of Rogue Dragons (1373 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  My Dearest Mother,

  Where have I been?

  What has happened to me?

  I know it has been so very long since you’ve heard from your dutiful son. Perhaps you, like some here in Innarlith, assumed that I had met my end. I pray to all the gods ever evoked by a desperate man that this was not the case, and that you held me in your heart, always with the fires of hope burning in your bosom, that I was indeed well but in some way occupied.

  And such has been the case, these many months-and can it really have been so long? It seems as though I fell asleep one night and woke up three years later.

  Truly, can it have been that long?

  Three years?

  Three years with no news from me-for that I will spend the entirety of my life apologizing to my steadfast and loving mother, the only woman who would have held out hope for my return, the only woman who had not abandoned me, even when you left Innarlith to return to Marsember.

  And what a disgrace that was-my disgrace, my dear mother, and certainly not yours-that I allowed you to be driven from my own home by a woman in whom I place
d trust, only to have my heart rent from my chest and held, still beating, before my face that she might sink her harpy’s fangs into its meat and draw from it the last drop of the blood you yourself bore into me.

  For that, I am sorry, too.

  But where have I been? How have three years passed without a word from me? Those are questions to which you deserve a long and detailed answer. Though I have thought of little else in the past tendays, I have no answer to any of my own questions that satisfy me, much less that I believe would satisfy you.

  When I was thrown to the side by that cruel woman, that alu-fiend in a girl’s guise, when you were proven right yet again and my own lack of faith in the wisdom of my dear protective mother was held up close to my eyes, when I was shown lacking, when I died, I-

  When I died?

  That is what it felt like. It felt as though I died, but that word has not come to my mind or my lips since I entered my own house to find it closed and musty, with three years’ dust coating every surface-that word hasn’t come to my mind or my lips, strange that it should be summoned by my pen.

  In some ways perhaps I was dead. Dead in the heart. I had opened myself to the love of a woman who was not worthy of me. I put my trust in men who guided me wrong. I let my dear mother return alone to Marsember, there to live without word or support from a son who must have seemed so ungrateful, so disrespectful, as to simply ignore her for so long.

  But that was not my intention, and if you ever believe anything I tell you again, if you have left in you a spark of the fire of the love for your poor son that I once felt burn from within you, please believe that what happened to me must have been beyond my control.

  Of those three years I recall only dreams, Nightmares, in fact. I remember foul odors and wicked deeds. I recall the feeling of my body rotting away, while my soul was imprisoned within to feel every stinging bite of ten thousand flies nibbling away at my flesh.

  But that couldn’t be. None of that could be.

  Here I am now, three years on, hale and hearty, though you would find me thin. Here I am alive and awake and aware.

  Here I am having changed two things about me.

  First, no longer will I hold an image of Phyrea in my mind. Beautiful as she is, she is a being of frozen evil, a mad woman who has now put her spell upon another, and so be it. The man she has ensorcelled will have to care for himself, though for his sake I hope he has a mother like you, to tell him that he has made an error that could well destroy him as it nearly did me. And I hope that he, unlike your penitent son, will have the wisdom to heed his mother’s warnings.

  And second, there is the drink. When last we embraced I know that on my breath was the wind of the still, the stink of fermented grapes-the tell-tale odor of a man without the will to face himself in the mirror.

  My dearest mother, to you I pledge this above all else: I will set aside all drink. I will not drown my sorrows but ever do battle against them. I will regain all of what I lost, and with you by my side, and the continued support of important personages within the city-state, I will achieve yet more. I will finally be the man you always knew I would be, even when I didn’t know that myself.

  And yes, dearest mother, you did not imagine those words: with you by my side. With this letter is a box of coins-enough I am sure for passage to Arrabar. I will meet you there myself with my own coach to hasten you back to our home-not mine but our home-here in the citystate that has given me challenges, to be sure, but has also drawn me into its inner circle. Together, we will found a dynasty here. Together, we will make the house of Korvan synonymous with Innarlith itself.

  Return, Mother.

  Please.

  — Willem

  P.S: I hope that upon your arrival, or by a return letter should that arrive before you, that you will advise me on a remedy for a rather monstrous pain in my teeth.

  30

  22 Hammer, the Year of Rogue Dragons (1373 DR)

  PRISTAL TOWERS, INNARLITH

  Every moment I’m away from him, Phyrea thought, the less sane I become.

  Stop it, the old woman chastised her, the ghost’s tone sharp and imperious-more so than usual.

  It’s true, Phyrea thought in reply.

  No, it isn’t, said the man with the scar on his face.

  Phyrea looked across the table at Ivar Devorast, and when he met her eyes, she looked back down at her plate of untouched curried eel. The snakelike thing’s eyes seemed to mock her.

  While Devorast and Pristoleph discussed the canal-a seemingly endless chatter of supplies and barges and lumber and stone and sand and water-Phyrea palmed the little two-pronged fork that had been included in the elaborate place setting.

  They put it there so you could stab the eel’s eye, gouge it out, and eat it, the little boy with the missing arm said.

  A delicacy, said the man with the scar. I remember it. I can remember eating.

  My mother always told me it was rude to eat the other eye, said the ghost of the little girl. A lady should never flip an eel over on her plate.

  Slowly, careful not to reveal her actions to the two men, Phyrea slid the hem of her skirt up past her knee, and a little farther still.

  What are you doing with that fork? the old woman asked.

  Phyrea sat very still and very quiet while she pressed the two sharp little tines of the eel-eye fork into the soft flesh of her inner thigh. The pain came in a sudden burst, small, but fresh and insistent. She closed her eyes, luxuriating in the wash of it, and the silence that followed, however brief.

  She already had a napkin on her lap, so it was easy for her to dab the little droplets of blood that bubbled to the surface of the wound. The men continued speaking, not noticing her, and so she did it again.

  When she dabbed the second wound she let a finger trace the edge of a bandage that she’d wrapped around her thigh. Beneath it were more little cuts, some still oozing a little blood, every one worth a few moments away from the ghosts.

  Pristoleph had noticed the wounds, of course. The first time he had been worried, then he reacted with anger, and eventually the sight of the little cuts just made him sad. But he was never disgusted. And he never asked her why.

  “Have you spoken with the nagas since you’ve returned?” Pristoleph asked Devorast, and it was the first sentence she’d really heard since Devorast had arrived earlier that evening. She’d gone through the motions, of course, acting the dutiful wife and charming hostess as best she could with apparitions of violet light circling her, telling her to kill her guest and to kill herself.

  “I have,” Devorast replied. He glanced at her again but she couldn’t make herself look him in the eye. “The terms of our bargain remain unchanged.”

  “Then there is nothing in your way,” Pristoleph said with a self-satisfied finality that made Phyrea’s flesh crawl, especially when Devorast shook his head.

  You will have to kill him, the man with the scar in the shape of the letter Z told her. You know-we’ve told you over and over-that you will have to kill him.

  His presence doesn’t ease your mind, child, the old woman told her. He can’t drive us away anymore. You’ve been apart too long. He’s forgotten you.

  He’s given you to the genasi, the woman who cried for her dead baby said. He’s left you in the hand of this half-human thing, this ransar who will be killed soon enough, to make way for the next new ransar. These men will leave you, always, one way or another. Even Willem went away, and so what if he’s back? He came back just the moment you’d forgotten about him entirely, just the precise moment he stopped loving you.

  “Stop it,” Phyrea whispered.

  “Phyrea?” Pristoleph asked. “Did you say something, my love?”

  Phyrea cringed and shook her head. She tried to say she was sorry but wasn’t conscious of saying anything.

  “If you’re not feeling well….” Devorast offered, and when she realized he was trying to take his leave of them, that he was trying to go away again, she shook h
er head.

  “I’m fine,” she said, and by enormous force of will made her lips curl up in a smile. “Please. Go on. I’m perfectly fine.”

  “But you haven’t eaten,” Pristoleph said.

  Phyrea, the man with the scar whispered in her head, are you finally letting yourself see the truth?

  “The truth?” she replied aloud.

  “Of course,” Pristoleph said at the same time as the ghost.

  The truth, the old woman said, is that these men will never love you. All they’ll do is borrow you from each other, trade you back and forth, until there’s nothing left of you.

  Nothing left of you to live on, the little girl said.

  “You don’t like the eel?” Pristoleph asked. “Have you tried the eyes? They’re a delicacy. Or shall I have the cook prepare another dish for you?”

  Phyrea chanced a look up at Devorast, who stared at her in a way she couldn’t comprehend. Either he understood her perfectly, or he didn’t care one bit.

  Come with us, the little boy begged.

  Let this all end, the old woman demanded.

  “No,” Phyrea said, sinking the little fork half an inch into her inner thigh so that a trail of blood ran along her hand, to her wrist, to drip unseen onto the cold marble floor. “I’m fine. I’m just fine.”

  31

  27 Hammer, the Year of Rogue Dragons (1373 DR)

  THE CHAMBER OF LAW AND CIVILITY, INNARLITH

  As they walked together into the senate chamber, Willem couldn’t help thinking Meykhati was afraid of him. The normally jovial, condescending man kept his face turned away-not so much as most people would notice, but he never looked Willem in the eye.

  “It hasn’t changed,” Willem said, thinking Meykhati would expect him to say something like that, his having been away from the senate for three years.

  Meykhati nodded but offered no other reply. When they passed a junior senator Willem didn’t recognize, Meykhati stopped and greeted the young man as though they were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in decades. The junior senator was obviously flustered by Meykhati’s attention, but played along well. He only snuck a few glances Willem’s way, and again Willem thought he saw fear.