55
19 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR)
PRISTAL TOWERS, INNARLITH
Had Wenefir not thought to cast a spell to protect him from the ravages of heat and fire, he likely would have been dead after his first few breaths in Pristoleph’s private chamber. The braziers had all been piled high with wood, and torches blazed so bright and hot on sconces all along the walls that the already black stone behind them was beginning to melt.
And in the center of that furnace stood Pristoleph, his strange red hair replaced by a crown of dancing, sizzling flame. His eyes blazed yellow and smoke began to billow from his robes.
“Ransar,” Wenefir called, feeling he had to shout over the roar of the flames. “Pristoleph—how long have you been in here?”
Pristoleph looked at him and shook his head, making the flames on his scalp quiver.
Wenefir swallowed and looked away, terrified by the genasi’s fiery gaze.
“Ransar,” he said. “Please. Let me help you. What is it you require?”
“What is it I require?” the ransar shot back, and though he didn’t want to look, Wenefir thought flames shot from his mouth and smoke puffed from his nostrils. “What is it I require?”
The heat grew so intense that even Wenefir’s Cyric-granted spells began to fail him.
“Please, Pristoleph,” he said. “You’ll burn the place down. For the Mad God’s sake, please.”
Pristoleph took a deep breath and the flames died down a little—as if he’d drawn them into his lungs.
“Better,” Wenefir said, risking a smile. “Thank you.”
“I don’t suppose you can explain what happened while I was away,” the ransar said, his eyes losing some of their fire but none of their intensity.
Wenefir swallowed again and said, “You left Willem Korvan in charge. I—”
“I left no one in charge, Seneschal,” Pristoleph interrupted. “Devorast trusted Korvan. That was his mistake. I trusted the Thayan, and that was mine. Tell me, Wenefir, my oldest friend, which was the greater mistake?”
“Perhaps neither,” Wenefir chanced.
A spark of yellow darted through Pristoleph’s eyes when he said, “The nerve of them.”
“It was a risk on their part, indeed,” Wenefir concurred. “But perhaps there was no real effort to undermine your authority.”
“Undermining Devorast undermines me,” said the ransar.
“As you have said, Ransar, but consider this,” Wenefir said. “Korvan, Kurtsson, and Aikiko were trying to help. Perhaps there was a difference of … vision, but—”
“Damn it, Wenefir!” Pristoleph shouted, and all of the fires burst hotter and bigger to punctuate it before moderating once more. “There can be only one vision.”
Not fully understanding, Wenefir replied, “But surely you agree that Devorast could never have finished something so great on his own.”
Shaking his head, Pristoleph said, “Something so great can only be done by one man alone.”
Wenefir, his eyes narrow and his brow furrowed, shook his head.
“You don’t understand, do you?” the ransar asked.
Wenefir replied, “Not entirely, no, but I think I understand you, Pristoleph. After all this time, who but me could?”
“And?”
“And I hope that you will see that no harm was done to you while you were away.”
Pristoleph looked deep into Wenefir’s eyes, and the Cyricist’s knees shook.
“I have your loyalty, still, after all this time?” asked Pristoleph.
“You do,” Wenefir said, and it wasn’t entirely a lie.
“Then do this,” Pristoleph commanded, the fires rising when he squared his broad shoulders. “Send for the wemics, and have them place the Vaasan wizard Kurtsson, Senators Korvan and Aikiko, and the Thayan Marek Rymüt under arrest.”
“Under arrest?” Wenefir asked, stalling. Despite the dangerous heat in the chamber, the priest’s blood ran cold. “On what charge?”
“For Willem Korvan, the charge is murder,” Pristoleph said, and Wenefir almost gasped at the look of grief that came over his old friend. “He murdered the alchemist Surero in clear view of at least one witness. Beware, though, he is no longer human, but some sort of diseased undead.”
“And the others?”
“Treason.”
“But the Thayan—”
“What of him?” Pristoleph asked through clenched teeth. The fire on the top of his head blazed hot yellow and Wenefir had to blink and turn his face away.
“He is not, technically … legally speaking, one of your subjects, Ransar,” Wenefir explained. “He stands on Thayan soil when he is in his enclave, and I surely doubt that he’ll leave there until you—” he paused and swallowed once more—“forgive me, Ransar … cool down.”
“Thayan soil….” Pristoleph sneered.
“Perhaps an investigation first,” Wenefir suggested, hoping to stall the ransar in any way possible. “If we have the proper evidence, an appeal can be made to the Thayan authorities. After all, Marek Rymüt is not without superiors of his own.”
“An investigation …” Pristoleph growled. He seemed to be biting his tongue. “Very well. But Willem Korvan is a murderer, and he became a citizen of the city-state of Innarlith when he became a senator. Find him and destroy him.”
Wenefir, caring not the slightest bit for the fate of Willem Korvan, bowed and got out of that room as fast as he could.
56
20 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR)
THE SISTERHOOD OF PASTORALS, INNARLITH
The wall was high, but not impossible to climb. Willem looked up and saw the glow of the broken glass that had been mortared to the top of it, reflecting the wan light of the coming dawn. He dug his fingernails—talons, really, that had grown an inch in one night—into the space between the smooth rocks. Moving slowly but with purpose, he scaled the wall. When the broken glass tore his trousers and bit into his legs, he didn’t care, and he didn’t bleed.
Willem dropped to the mud between two shrubs and kneeled in the darkness of the wall’s shadow. He moved his head from side to side, and though he didn’t actually draw any air into his lungs—he no longer needed to do that—he was sure of the smell of her.
The name came to him once more—Halina—but it faded as quickly as it came, and there was only his quarry, his prey. There was only a goal he didn’t understand.
He crossed the manicured grounds, his chin up, his nose trolling the air for the scent. He found it again, and it was as though a finger formed in the air to point him in the right direction.
He followed the scent to a shorter stone wall, one more ornamental than the high wall that surrounded the place.
Willem didn’t know exactly where he was. He was on the grounds of some kind of building, and there was something about that building, about the ground itself, that repelled him as much as the scent attracted him.
He stepped over the little wall and found himself in a graveyard.
Maybe three dozen stones had been scattered, seemingly at random, on the cut grass. None more than three feet tall, they were simple and carved with names.
Willem sniffed the air again and stepped between the stones.
The sound of a voice drifted from far away, carried on the cool pre-dawn air. Willem looked in the direction he thought the voice had come from, but he saw nothing. Looking into the shadows he felt a sense of impending doom wash over him, so strong he almost fell to his knees.
He shook his head when the scent intruded on him—if it even was a scent. It could have been more an impulse—a need to find her.
Whatever the mechanism, Willem knew she was close, and he was certain that when he found her, she would make everything all right. She would save him. He didn’t know her name or how they knew each other. He could form no picture of her in his reeling, increasingly dull mind. But he knew her, and he knew she was—
There.
He let a ragged growl tremble unvoiced in his throat, and he fell to his knees in front of a stone. His fingers found the engraving and traced the letters. He blinked but couldn’t see them, and though he wasn’t conscious of being able to read, he knew the letters came together to spell her name.
HALINA.
“Who is that there?” a woman called out to him.
He jumped to his feet, his head spinning, and cast about for the source of the voice.
Though so much of what was left of him longed for it to be her, he knew it wasn’t Halina.
“By the Blessed—” the woman shrieked.
He saw her step out from behind a tree, just inside the low wall around the cemetery. She clutched at her chest. The light from her lantern lit her face from below, twisting her features into a grotesque mockery of human.
Willem, overwhelmed by the need to kill the woman, moved toward her, his hands poised to rip her head from her shoulders. The woman raised the thing she’d clutched at her neck for and a brilliant white light overwhelmed Willem’s vision.
He couldn’t see any details of the symbol, but he knew what it was. The power of a goddess he was unfit to name rolled over him like a thunderhead rolls across an open plain.
He turned and ran. His legs moved, and his arms bounced at his sides. He couldn’t think. The need to find Halina was gone, the overwhelming necessity to kill Ivar Devorast also fled, and all that was left was the immediate, irrepressible need just to get away.
The woman drove him before her, and he ran all the way to the high wall. He climbed it faster than before, cut himself more deeply, too, but once he was over he ran and ran and ran into the growing light of the awakening city.
By the time he found an abandoned shed behind a ramshackle storefront in which to hide, there was nothing left of Willem Korvan. The man had been erased, and the monster knew only one thing.
Kill.
Kill Ivar Devorast.
57
20 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR)
BERRYWILDE
Phyrea heard someone call her name. In the dark, still expanse of the country estate, she had heard her name come from nowhere before, had for years spoken with apparitions of violet light, but the voice that came to her that night was different.
She lay in a tub of warm water that she’d scented with lavender oil. The little knife she’d brought from the kitchen lay on the marble tile within easy reach, but she hadn’t cut herself yet. The little girl floated a few inches off the floor in the corner of the room, adding a purple glow to the orange candlelight.
“I like your dress,” Phyrea told the little girl. “It’s pretty.”
The girl grimaced—an expression that looked wrong on her baby face—but she didn’t say anything. After a tenday at Berrywilde, they had spoken enough.
They’d told her again and again that Pristoleph meant to destroy them. They told her that her father was still alive but that he’d abandoned her, and the only family she had left was them. They begged her to kill herself, then they demanded that she do it, then they begged some more. They made her cry more than once, and she even put a knife to her throat one night. She looked the old woman in the eyes, then, and the desperation she saw there, the longing, almost made her slit her own throat, but she didn’t. Even days later she didn’t know why she’d spared her own life.
Just then all she wanted was to sit in a lavender-scented bath, close her eyes, and soak as much in the silence as the water.
You’ve already become one of us, you know, the little girl said. You just don’t know it yet.
Phyrea looked at her, met her eyes, and smiled. The girl faded away.
And that was when she heard her name.
She closed her eyes and whispered, “Leave me alone. I’ll die soon enough.”
Phyrea.
She shook her head and was about to speak, when the voice came again.
Stay away from the canal.
“Ivar,” she said, and her eyes flickered open.
She sat up in the tub and looked behind her. There he was—made of the same violet light as the rest of them.
Phyrea, I know you can hear me.
“Ivar,” she whispered. “Can you see me?”
She looked at his eyes, but they didn’t meet hers. He stood, his feet an inch off the floor, and he looked up at the ceiling. When he spoke, the movement of his lips didn’t quite match the sound of his voice—a voice that sounded in her head, but not in her ears.
Tell Pristoleph. It isn’t safe.
“Where are you?” she asked, the sound of her own voice so loud in the otherwise silent house that it startled her.
I’m not there. I’ll find you. She blinked and he was gone.
“Ivar?” she whispered.
She gasped and held the breath. She rose to her knees and came part of the way out of the bath water. There was no sign of him, and no sound in either her ears or her head. Tears welled in her eyes and she wiped them away with a lavender-scented forearm.
“Ivar?” she whispered. “What’s happened?”
There’s no one here named Ivar, the man with the scar on his face said.
The cool violet glow once again mixed with the candlelight, but she didn’t look at it. She knew it wasn’t Devorast.
“He was here,” Phyrea whispered.
No one was here, the man said.
They didn’t see him, Phyrea thought. They didn’t hear him.
She let herself sink back into the tub so that only her face was above water.
“Why would he warn me away?” she whispered.
Because he is finished with you, said the old woman.
He doesn’t want you anymore, the melancholy woman added.
“He looked like you,” Phyrea whispered. “Is he dead?”
She sat up straight in the tub, her jaw clenched tight and her hands shaking.
“He’s dead,” she said, again too loudly, startling herself and sloshing water from the tub. It splashed onto the knife, which slid a few inches across the slick marble floor.
“Is he dead?” she whispered, and reached for the knife.
She gasped for a breath and felt her chest tighten around her heart as though her own body meant to squeeze the life out of her.
“Ivar?” she gasped. “Are you alive?”
No, the old woman said. He’s dead.
He has to be dead, the little girl said.
There’s only one way to see him now, said the sad woman.
Phyrea sank the blade of the kitchen knife into her forearm and screamed through the pain that made her hands stop shaking. She cut herself again and she could breathe.
She held her eyes closed until the initial wave of pain passed, then she opened them to see that the room was lit only by the orange glow of her candles.
58
23 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR)
PRISTAL TOWERS, INNARLITH
The forces aligned against you are too great,” Wenefir said.
He stared at Pristoleph, waiting for some response, but the ransar sat in silence, staring at the crystal balls. Not one of them showed anything but a reflection of the room in which they sat. They had stopped working all at once, and the arcane words that Marek Rymüt had given Pristoleph failed to bring them back to life.
“Ransar?” Wenefir asked.
Still Pristoleph sat in silence, ignoring his seneschal. “Pristoleph….” Wenefir said.
Pristoleph’s hair flickered on his head, and Wenefir brought to mind the spell that would keep him from being burned should the ransar’s temper once again get the better of him.
“Is it raining?” Pristoleph asked.
“Wh—pardon me?” Wenefir responded. “Is it raining … outside?”
Pristoleph nodded.
“Yes, Ransar.”
“I thought so,” said Pristoleph. “I could feel it.”
“Yes, well, be
that as it may,” Wenefir pressed on, keeping his voice low and calm. “I’m convinced you must allow Kurtsson and Aikiko to finish the canal their way. Master Rymüt will provide for the operation of the portal. He’s willing to entertain a mutually acceptable arrangement for the collection of tolls and associated fees for that service. The Thayan Enclave will maintain the magic and guarantee its safety and accuracy.”
Pristoleph smoothed one of his eyebrows with the tip of a finger. Wenefir had never seen that gesture.
“As your closest advisor,” Wenefir went on, “I advise you to agree to this.”
“Do you?” Pristoleph asked. He didn’t seem surprised, and Wenefir could tell he was disappointed.
“There’s nothing for it, Pristoleph,” he said.
The ransar smiled and said, “There’s always …”
After a moment, Wenefir realized that Pristoleph didn’t intend to finish his thought, so he said, “Is it that bad? Is it really some defeat?”
“Wenefir—”
“It has come down to a simple choice,” Wenefir interrupted, and pressed on even when Pristoleph turned to give him a dangerous look. “The time has come to choose between Ivar Devorast and Marek Rymüt.”
“Has it?” Pristoleph asked, his eyes flashing yellow. “Has it really come down to that? And of course you would have me chose the Thayan.”
“The Thayan, yes,” Wenefir said. “And why not? It was the Thayan that helped make you ransar, after all, not Devorast. You want a canal. You want ships to stop in Innarlith from the ports of Cormyr and Sembia on their way to Baldur’s Gate and Waterdeep, and vice versa. What could it possibly matter to you if those ships float on water or on magic?”
Pristoleph looked away, again staring at the blank, useless crystal balls. Wenefir sighed and his shoulders sagged.
“I’m tired,” Wenefir said.
“Tired of me?” the ransar asked. “After all these years?”
Wenefir took a moment to consider his answer then said, “No, Pristoleph. The truth is I still admire you. In ways that I’ll probably never understand I’m still that gutter kid, the castrated chimney rat that you rescued, that you dragged up with you into a life worth living.”
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