Scream of Stone

by Philip Athans

  33

  25 Alturiak, the Year of Rogue Dragons (1373 DR)

  PRISTAL TOWERS, INNARLITH

  Fifteen people, including Wenefir, sat on various chairs and sofas in the enormous office of Ransar Pristoleph. Some of them were mages, six were black firedrakes, and the rest were advisors and hangers on, or part-time spies. A few of them read through journal books and ledgers, occasionally making notes. Two of them played a long, half-hearted game of sava. The rest stared at one or another of a score of crystal balls that had been arranged on stands around the room. From those enchanted devices, Pristoleph was able to look in on the comings and goings of friends and enemies alike.

  A small group of men stood around one crystal ball, leering and giggling at the magically conjured image of the wife of a senator they all knew well who was engaged in an illicit dalliance with her upstairs maid. The senator himself appeared in another of the crystal balls, taking tea with two other senators in an opulent sitting room elsewhere in the Second Quarter.

  Pristoleph sighed and propped his head in his hands, his elbows on the gigantic desktop in front of him.

  “Oh, my!” exclaimed one of the men looking into the crystal ball at the senator’s wife and her maid.

  Pristoleph looked up, noticing the sudden change in mood. The men around the crystal ball stared at the image with shock and concern, all leering gone. The crystal ball showed that the senator’s wife’s maid was not a maid at all.

  One of the mages passed a hand over the crystal ball and the group of men dispersed, all looking vaguely embarrassed. None of them looked at the image of the senator still enjoying his tea and gossip, unaware of how bizarre a cuckold he was.

  Pristoleph heaved another sigh, louder and deeper.

  “Is something the matter, Ransar?” Wenefir asked.

  Pristoleph shook his head.

  “Is there anything I can get you, my lord?” one of the advisors inquired.

  Pristoleph ignored him and sifted through the parchment, paper, and vellum on his desk. There were letters, account ledgers, writs, and requests, and they all bored him to tears. He’d fallen behind with all the reading and signing, signing and reading, and the more he tried to force himself to get caught up, the less work he actually did. The advisors had gone from tolerant to testy to insistent and back to tolerant again, having lost interest in the fact that he’d lost interest.

  As the bulk of the people in the room watched the sava game, none of them really interested in it, Pristoleph quickly skimmed one sheet after another, sliding them off the desktop as he read them. He signed one, a request for the release of a man held in the dungeons for stealing a chicken. The request had been entered by the man’s wife nearly a year before, and the man had been in the dungeon for two years before that. A letter from a senator he knew had since died of a particularly nasty strain of social disease no priest in the city was able to cure was sent off the edge of the desk only partially read. And that went on for a long time.

  When one of the black firedrakes announced Ivar Devorast, he stopped.

  “Everyone out,” Pristoleph said as Devorast was shown into the room.

  Devorast glanced sideways at the crystal balls but didn’t stop until he reached one of the chairs that faced the ransar’s desk.

  “Everyone, Ransar?” Wenefir asked, eyeing Devorast with a dangerous scowl.

  Pristoleph clapped the priest on the shoulder and said, “I will be quite all right, my old friend. Please.”

  Wenefir made a point of bowing low before he followed the others out of the room.

  “Sit,” Pristoleph said to Devorast when they were finally alone.

  “You’re busy,” Devorast said, but Pristoleph could tell the man had no intention of volunteering to leave.

  He motioned to the chair and they both sat. Pristoleph let out a long sigh.

  “I’m relieved to see you, Ivar,” Pristoleph said. “May I call you Ivar?”

  Devorast answered with a gesture that was half nod and half shrug. Pristoleph instantly decided to learn how to do that.

  “The Thayan didn’t deliver everything on the list,” Devorast said.

  Pristoleph sighed again and said, “I’m not surprised.”

  “He wasn’t paid?”

  “Oh, he was paid,” said Pristoleph. “He just doesn’t like you.”

  Devorast scowled. “What could that matter?”

  “To me?” Pristoleph replied. “Nothing at all, but the Thayan is a bit … odd. He has to like you, or at least he has to think you like him.”

  “Then I will have to make do without the rest,” said Devorast.

  “For the nonce, yes, I suppose, but don’t give up hope entirely. He may hate you, but he likes—no, he loves—gold. I’ll make sure your needs are met, as we agreed.”

  Devorast made to stand, but Pristoleph waved him down.

  “Please,” said the ransar. “I have very few people to talk to. I think these stacks of parchment are driving me mad. Phyrea seems to hear voices I can’t while mine goes entirely unnoticed. Wenefir has this god of his now, though he still plays the faithful lieutenant. The rest of them I hardly know—useful sycophants, I suppose, but nothing more. I’m starved for someone to talk to.”

  “As the ransar,” Devorast said with the hint of a smile, “couldn’t you just order someone to talk to you?”

  “When I said they were useful sycophants, I meant that they are no more to me than tools. It would be like you having a conversation with one of your shovels.”

  “My shovel serves me, at least.”

  “And these men serve me,” said the ransar. “The citystate is hale and hearty and safe. We have no enemies. The streets are reasonably peaceful.”

  “Does that mean you have succeeded?” Devorast asked.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Pristoleph replied. “All that could turn on a silver piece. When you wield power over other men, you’re never successful, because you’re never finished.”

  “I’ve been getting through to you after all,” Devorast said, and the two men shared a rare and precious laugh.

  34

  17 Tarsakh, the Year of Rogue Dragons (1373 DR)

  THE THAYAN ENCLAVE, INNARLITH

  It was Halina,” Marek said, his head heavy on his neck, his shoulders drooping. “It was my own niece, after all.”

  “I’ll melt her flesh off her bones,” Insithryllax said in a voice even deeper, even more potent than normal. “I’ll dissolve her. I’ll liquefy her.”

  They walked side by side in the courtyard of the ever-growing cluster of buildings, and Marek stopped short. Insithryllax continued another few steps then whirled on the Red Wizard. The dragon wore his human guise, but when he turned, Marek was startled by his eyes, which had gone entirely black. The dragon’s forehead furrowed and his jaw tightened into a trembling grimace.

  Marek smiled, but at the same time had to clench his hands into fists to keep them from shaking.

  “Is there something else amiss, my friend?” the wizard asked. “You seem—”

  Insithryllax turned away, and Marek winced—people didn’t turn their backs on him often, and the Red Wizard didn’t like it.

  “How can you stand it?” the dragon grumbled.

  “Insithryllax, what’s come over you?”

  The dark-skinned man flexed his hands and his fingers stretched into horrible, elongated talons.

  “Insithryllax,” Marek said, stepping closer behind him with some reluctance. “Remember yourself, my friend.”

  The disguised dragon’s right hand shrank to its human form, but his left remained spindly and capped with razor-edged claws. A sound came from him that was something between human speech and the thunderous roar of a great wyrm.

  A young wizard stepped out from one of the doors that opened onto the courtyard. She had been in Innarlith less than a month, having come from Thay to learn alchemy and make minor potions and ointments for the Third Quarter tradesmen. Marek didn’t re
member her name. When she saw Insithryllax, she stopped, her eyes wide. She could see something Marek couldn’t—Insithryllax’s face—and her reaction froze the blood in Marek’s veins.

  “This isn’t like you,” Marek said. “Calm yourself. Now.”

  Insithryllax turned his head and glanced back over his shoulder. Marek gasped at the sight of his twisted features. The transformation was blurring him, combining the human with the draconic to create a hellish mask of black menace.

  “How can you stand it?” the wyrm said. “Your own flesh, a girl you took into your home, who had nowhere else to go and burdened you with her foolishness … and now she destroys something you worked to create? How can you not roar your rage to the skies? How can you not take wing, to drive her down before you and reduce her to paste?”

  “Well,” Marek offered, “what’s a few zombies between an uncle and his favorite niece?”

  “You toy with me,” the dragon growled, and the fingers of his right hand snapped out like whips, transforming instantly into talons to match his left. “Don’t toy with me. Tell me to kill her. Tell me to kill them all.”

  Marek spoke an incantation and gathered a feeling of calm. He took a deep breath, held it for a few heartbeats while Insithryllax continued to slowly transform, bit by bit, in front of him. When the Red Wizard exhaled he sent a wave of calm washing over the dragon. It was a simple spell, but one Marek was confident would at least slow the black dragon’s mounting rage.

  “Save your breath,” the dragon said. “You know you want her dead. She’ll start on the dock workers next. She’ll destroy everything you’ve built.”

  “Not just her, though,” Marek said. The dragon turned away, wings beginning to sprout from his slowly-widening back. “That’s the thing, my friend. Kill her, attack her at the temple, and we make an enemy of her whole faith. They are hardly to be concerned with one at a time, but should their goddess take notice of—”

  “Goddess?” the dragon shot back, his voice so loud and so low-pitched it set Marek’s ears ringing.

  The girl who’d been watching them from the door slapped her hands to her ears.

  “Leave us …” Marek called to her, but he couldn’t remember her name, “… you. Leave us!”

  The girl had her hands over her ears and couldn’t hear.

  “Girl!” Marek screamed.

  Insithryllax turned in her direction and she screamed, her hands still over her ears. Marek shouted for her to run, but she couldn’t hear him. A cloud of black mist washed over her, expelled from Insithryllax’s head, which had fully transformed into the head of a dragon. When the mist hit her, her skin blistered. She opened her mouth to scream again and inhaled a deep breath of acid. Instead of another scream, what came out was a white and pink froth. Her eyes melted into her skull and were gone entirely in less than a single heartbeat. The girl lived too long, dissolving away while trying to breathe and scream, but succeeding only in sizzling.

  When she finally collapsed, Insithryllax tipped his head up into the sky and roared as his neck stretched. His tail lashed out behind him, his wings burst into full form, and he dropped onto all fours.

  Marek ran through a spell more potent than the last, one that would temporarily rid the dragon of any intellect at all, leaving him open to whatever calming suggestion the Red Wizard chose to imbed in his consciousness.

  “Insithryllax, please,” he said.

  The dragon stretched his wings and with a groan his transformation was complete. “My friend, I—”

  “No!” the black wyrm shouted. Marek stepped back, feeling as though the dragon’s voice had physically pushed him. “I’ll kill her. I’ll kill them all. I’ll reduce their temple to mud. I’ll melt them from the face of Toril.”

  Marek tried to make eye contact with the wyrm, but Insithryllax wouldn’t—or couldn’t look him in the eye.

  The Red Wizard brought a spell to mind as the dragon leaped into the air. It wasn’t easy casting it in the wash of dust and leaves under Insithryllax’s titanic wings, but he did his best to hold firm.

  Marek’s spell opened a gray-black doorway in the air an arm’s length in front of the dragon, who flew blindly into the slowly-rotating zone of darkness. Without pause, the dragon, blind with rage, flew into the middle of it. When the last fraction of an inch of the black dragon’s tail passed through the horizon of the effect, Marek slammed it shut with an exertion of his will.

  The door in the sky disappeared and took the dragon with it.

  “Master,” a voice sounded from behind and above the Red Wizard. “Is everything well?”

  “No,” Marek answered, then stopped himself and cleared his throat. “Everything is fine, but someone will have to clean up the … the …” Marek pointed at the still-sizzling remains of the acid-melted apprentice alchemist, “… the mess, over there.”

  “The dragon is gone, Master?” another of the apprentices called from a window.

  “He’s gone, yes,” Marek said with a sigh. He folded his arms across his chest and sighed again. He closed his eyes, thinking, wondering what could have come over Insithryllax. “He’s gone back to the Land of One Hundred and Thirteen.”

  “Will he be back?” asked yet another wizard, one visiting from Thazrumaros to help the growing staff of the Innarlith enclave master the art of creating magic wands.

  “No,” Marek said even as he considered whether he should bother answering at all. “He won’t be back until I bring him back.”

  “Please don’t, Master,” the wandmaker said in a voice loaded with fear and on the edge of panic.

  35

  5 Eleasias, the Year of Rogue Dragons (1373 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  All of his best Shou ceramics—and it was fine indeed—was set out. Not a single detail had been overlooked. The silver shone so brightly in the candlelight it was difficult for him to look at the table. The crystal stemware glimmered with tiny rainbows, and the table linens were as white as fresh-fallen snow. A line of wine bottles had been opened and decanted, left to breathe a little too long already. The food—prepared by a small army of cooks who had long since gone—sat cooling on silver trays on a huge mahogany sideboard he’d purchased specially for the event.

  Willem sat in a stiff, uncomfortable chair he’d had for years and didn’t remember ever having sat in. He let the breath out through his nose.

  “I’ll be going to bed now,” his mother said, her voice barely more than a whisper, from behind him. “Unless you …?”

  She didn’t finish, but Willem shook his head anyway. Of course he didn’t expect his mother, only two months back in Innarlith from Cormyr, to help him clean up. As the only witness to what had become the most humiliating day of his life, he really just wanted her to go upstairs, go to bed, and perhaps forget what she had seen that evening.

  “Willem, my dear?”

  He turned to look at her and winced at the look of disappointment that was written so plainly on her face. She looked away as though he were diseased or in some way deformed. She looked away as though he were a beggar in the street. Without another word she shuffled off, her long silk gown rustling, the jewelry he’d bathed her in tinkling with each step.

  He sat there for some time longer, watching the candles shrink, dripping wax on the clean linen. Willem knew the last thing he’d be able to do was sleep. He needed someone to tell him why—tell him how, tell him when he had been abandoned by everyone. How could all two hundred invitations be ignored?

  He didn’t understand, his mother wouldn’t know, and Willem Korvan had no one else to talk to—no one except Marek Rymüt.

  Willem stood and smoothed his fine wool waistcoat with trembling hands. He didn’t bother calling for a coach, though it was a walk of four long blocks from his home to the Thayan Enclave. He breathed deeply of the summer air, and as he walked he tried not to make eye contact with any of the people who strolled the lanternlit streets. He knew that too many of them—especially the ones wh
o made a point to cross the street when they caught sight of him—had been on his guest list.

  When he presented himself at the gates to the enclave, he was admitted without question, as though the guards had been told to expect him. As he passed through the tall wrought-iron gate, Willem tried to remember when Marek Rymüt had hired guards. He looked up at the building as he approached the door, and though parts of it were familiar, much of it had changed—too much of it, he thought, since the last time he’d been there. But then, try as he might, he didn’t quite remember exactly when he’d last been there—anyway, not long enough for the grand house to be converted into what more closely resembled a castle bailey: a cluster of buildings inside a walled enclosure.

  “Senator?” the guard said, even that one word thick with the peculiar, gruff accent of Thay. When Willem stopped to look at him, the guard continued, “The master will see you in his private study.”

  Willem nodded, not sure what that meant or where he should go. Obviously sensing that confusion, the guard motioned for him to follow and led him to a low stone house—for all appearances a pleasant country cottage surrounded by flowering bushes. The warm orange glow of candles pulsed in the windows, and when the door swung silently open, the familiar round shape of Marek Rymüt filled the doorway.

  “Ah, Willem, my boy,” he said, his voice as warm and welcoming as the cottage itself, “do come in.”

  The guard bowed and backed away, and Willem stepped up to the door then hesitated when Marek didn’t move out of the way. Instead the Thayan stepped forward and before Willem could back away—and his instincts insisted he at least try—the wizard’s arms enfolded him in what was, if anything, too warm an embrace.

  “Ah, Willem,” Marek whispered in his ear. The Thayan’s breath was hot and thick with the cloying aroma of elven brandy. “You know you are always welcome here.”