Lies of Light

by Philip Athans

  Again, silence.

  “Meykhati will likely be the next ransar,” she said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I do not know that,” Ran Ai Yu replied. “I have heard it said by people who I have reason to believe have reason to believe it. That is enough, for me, to begin to acquaint myself with this man so that he knows my name and my face, knows my trade, in the event that these people are correct.”

  “And I should do the same,” he said. “I should ingratiate myself to this pointless, mumbling busybody so that on the off chance that he succeeds Osorkon he will continue to support the canal?”

  “Master Lau Cheung Fen will be there,” she added, “at this gathering of Meykhati’s friends and associates.”

  “And sycophants.”

  “And those who think ahead.”

  He shook his head.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “if Meykhati feels well toward you and your efforts here, with Meykhati as ransar, you will be his master builder, even if you are not Osorkon’s.”

  “I have no interest in titles and offices,” Devorast told her. “I build to build, not to advance myself in the Second Quarter.”

  “I understand that the master builder of the moment may have decided to keep hold of that title and office anyway, should Meykhati advance. He will be there with his daughter.”

  Devorast stiffened—not much, barely enough for Ran Ai Yu to notice. Could it be that Devorast sought the post of master builder after all? Or was it something else she’d said?

  “Perhaps,” he said. “Yes. Fine.”

  8

  26 Alturiak, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Marek watched the dancers for a few heartbeats, then watched one of the partygoers watching the dancers, then the dancers again, then another guest, on and on. He hadn’t come to Meykhati’s ridiculous affair for the pleasure of it, after all, but to do what he always did.

  The dancers had been brought by the exotic merchant Lau Cheung Fen, and the guests were dazzled by their otherworldly beauty and alien gestures. Seven women dressed in silk gowns covered in tiny brass bells and what appeared to be miniature cymbals, twitched and jerked to the strains of a Shou “musician” who made the most horrendous, atonal bleats on some kind of unwieldy string instrument. Marek’s head began to pound, and he found he had to use a spell to make the “music” fade from his hearing, to be replaced by the private, often whispered conversations of Meykhati’s other guests.

  “Miss Phyrea,” the Shou woman Ran Ai Yu, who Marek found almost as fascinating as he did frustrating said with a shallow bow. “I have not had the pleasure to see your father this evening.”

  “He’s not here,” Phyrea choked out.

  The beautiful, haunted daughter of the inept master builder couldn’t even look at the Shou woman. Her eyes had fastened themselves to the red-headed man who stood at Ran Ai Yu’s side. Marek had never been formally introduced to the man, but he knew who Ivar Devorast was. So too, it would seem, did Phyrea. Devorast, if he recognized the master builder’s daughter at all, gave no outward sign of it. For all that, the man gave no outward sign of anything. Phyrea squirmed under his ambivalent glances.

  Yes, Marek Rymüt thought, much more interesting than dancing girls.

  “May I introduce you to Ivar Devorast of Cormyr,” Ran Ai Yu said.

  Marek found the look on Phyrea’s face so priceless he just had to smile and clap his hands. The other guests around him clapped as well, apparently thinking he was applauding the performance.

  “Aren’t they just?” a shrill voice invaded from his side. The effect of the spell made it painfully loud, and Marek couldn’t stifle a grunt and body-racking twitch. “Goodness, Master Rymüt. Are you well?”

  Meykhati’s awful wife.

  He forced a smile and nodded. “Yes, quite,” he whispered, his own voice rattling his ears. “I would hate to further interrupt the music.”

  The woman smiled and made a childlike motion as though she were locking her lips closed. A spell that would actually do that came to Marek’s mind, but he suppressed the nearly overwhelming urge to cast it, and a second incantation that would make the lock permanent. Instead, he kept his ears on the Shou merchant and her odd little couple, while his eyes made a great show of adoring the dancers from beyond the Utter East.

  “No,” Phyrea said, her voice so thick with the lie that Marek wished he could at least glance at Ran Ai Yu’s face to be sure she detected it as well, but alas Meykhati’s hideous wife still stood at his elbow, believing him to be every inch the dilettante her husband was. “No, we haven’t met.”

  “I would have remembered, I’m sure.” Devorast must have lied too, but there was no hint of that in his steady, uninterested voice.

  “Of course, though,” Phyrea said, “I have heard of your great … your great undertaking.”

  Two of the dancers swayed their hips to the jarring rhythm while the other five stood as still as statues. Marek found their utter lack of motion interesting, but only passingly so. The two lead dancers jangled their bells and otherwise made rhythmic hissing and pinging noises. They waved their hands in a way that Marek thought looked a bit like they might be casting spells, but he detected no fluctuation in the Weave.

  “It keeps me occupied,” Devorast replied. “I am away from the city for prolonged periods.”

  “Are you?” Phyrea accused. Marek raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps that explains why our paths have never even once crossed, though we seem to know many of the same people.”

  “Not too many,” Devorast assured her.

  “Meykhati, at least,” she said.

  Devorast shook his head, but it was Ran Ai Yu who said, “I asked Master Devorast to come with me tonight so that he might make the acquaintance of the senator.”

  “And have you?” Phyrea asked Devorast.

  “We have been introduced,” he replied.

  The two lead dancers wiggled back to the line behind them, and looking for all the world like water foul plucking food from a still pond, pecked one each of their companions and froze. Those so pecked began to sway and slipped out of line to take over the incomprehensible series of motions. The music changed too, going from one set of atonal pings to a series of bursts of grinding metal. Marek resisted the urge to flee.

  “It can be a burden, can’t it?” asked Phyrea.

  “Ma’am?” Devorast prompted.

  “Having too many friends.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” she asked, and Marek got the feeling she thought she might be toying with Devorast. Silly girl. “You seem like a man who would have unusual friends. Like Miss Yu, here.”

  “Miss Ran,” Devorast corrected, and Marek so wanted to see Phyrea squirm. But instead, he watched the dancers sway around each other like two snakes reluctant to mate. “I have friends, yes. I don’t feel burdened by them.”

  “Sometimes I feel so burdened I can hardly stand,” Phyrea said, and again Marek lifted an eyebrow.

  “Perhaps you don’t have enough to occupy your mind,” Devorast said.

  “Should I build a canal then?”

  “No,” he told her, still without a trace of emotion. “But you can do anything else.”

  “I wish that were so.”

  “It is,” he assured her, and Marek felt bile rise in his throat.

  “Oh, yes, my darling,” Meykhati’s pinch-faced wife whispered at Marek’s elbow. Her hissing voice was so loud to him that Marek had to close his eyes. “Straight away.”

  With that, at least she was gone.

  As the new lead pair of dancers worked their way back to the line behind them, Marek turned to glance at Phyrea and Devorast. Ran Ai Yu had wandered off to be replaced by Lau Cheung Fen, who took Devorast by the arm.

  The Shou gentleman had no trouble pulling Devorast away from Phyrea, who all but ran to the farthest corner of the large room, disappearing into a crowd of her f
ather’s friends and political associates. Devorast didn’t watch her go, but a twitch of his eye betrayed him to one as observant as Marek Rymüt.

  This, the Red Wizard thought, is a relationship I will need to follow as closely as possible.

  Two new dancers began to quiver so quickly they appeared in the throws of some sort of catalepsy. The jangle of their various bells and cymbals began to intrude on Marek’s spell, and he noted a few in the crowded room place hands to their ears to fend off the foreign cacophony.

  “I will leave it to you to determine the advantages to you and your trade,” Devorast told Lau Cheung Fen.

  “And there is nothing you wish to add?” the Shou asked. “I should think that to have the endorsement of the merchant fleets of Shou Lung would be for you a very … ah, but help with the word …?”

  “Advantageous?” Devorast provided.

  Sharp, Marek thought. Very sharp of mind indeed, this shipwright turned canal builder.

  Lau sketched a shallow bow and said, “To have this advantageous support from afar would give you greater support at home, is that not true?”

  “I have all the support I need,” Devorast replied, and Marek cringed at the supreme self-confidence of that, the bold naïveté. “I will build the canal, who uses it and why makes no difference to me.”

  “Ivar,” Willem Korvan said, appearing from the crowd holding a half-full tallglass of Inthelph’s upstart local vintage. He took Devorast by the arm and bowed to the Shou. “If I may.”

  Lau Cheung Fen appeared reluctant to release him, but apparently felt he had no choice and returned Willem’s bow.

  All seven of the dancers began to move in a slow, fluid motion that Marek assumed most men would find alluring. For him, though, there was Willem Korvan. The young senator’s immaculate dress complimented his perfect features. Next to the disheveled, weather-beaten, ill-dressed Devorast, Willem appeared soft, still in the full flower of youth. Though Marek had heard the two were of an age, he would have thought Ivar Devorast at least a decade Willem Korvan’s senior.

  “Is that the best you can do?” Willem said to Devorast, the contempt soaking each word in bile.

  “Hello, Willem,” Devorast said.

  “Is that the best you can do?”

  “Is there something you need from me?” asked Devorast.

  Willem’s handsome face went flat, his jaw tight and his lips twisted.

  “Do you realize that that one man could—” Willem started to say, and just then Marek’s spell faded out, and the clashing harmonics of the exotic music once more assaulted his ears.

  He started moving in the direction of the two Cormyreans before he even made up his mind as to which of the several reasons for doing so drove him over there. Did he want to break up what might become and unseemly brawl? Other than the fact that it would be a shame should something happen to damage Willem’s face, why on spinning Toril would he care if the two men came to blows? Of course, he wanted to hear their conversation but knew that as soon as he was close enough to hear them without the aid of a spell they’d stop talking in front of him.

  Whatever the reason, he arrived at their side in a shot, but refused to look at Devorast.

  “Ah, Senator Korvan,” he gushed, “there you are.”

  “Master Rymüt,” Willem mumbled, his face red, his eyes darting around as though he were a rabbit caught in a snare. “May I present—”

  Marek didn’t want to be introduced to Ivar Devorast just then. Not yet, he thought. So he clamped his hand on Willem’s arm and squeezed.

  “Master Rymüt….” Willem almost protested, but let himself be led away at a pace that drew alarmed glances from the mingling aristocrats around them.

  When they were out of earshot of Ivar Devorast, Rymüt said, “Really, Senator, you should take care with whom you’re seen conversing.”

  “But—” the pretty weakling started to protest.

  “Go tell our host how much you enjoy this hideous clanging and stomping about,” he said, pushing Willem away, but releasing his grip only slowly, and with some reluctance.

  Willem looked down at his hand with vague discomfort, but Marek was quickly distracted by Phyrea. The girl stood on her tiptoes, peering as best she could above the heads of the other guests. The crowd erupted in insincere applause for the imported entertainment, and Marek stopped to make a show of it. His eyes never left Phyrea though, and he took some interest in her crestfallen mien.

  As the applause died down, he made his way to her side. She looked up at him as if he were the last man in Faerûn she wanted to see, and maybe he was.

  “Master Rymüt,” she said, “hello again.”

  “Hello again to you too, my dear. I couldn’t help but notice … were you looking for someone?”

  She sighed, her shoulders slumped, and she looked off to her right at nothing.

  “Phyrea?”

  “Yes,” she answered fast. “No. I mean … that man. Devorast is his name.”

  “The savior of merchant captains across Toril, yes,” Marek mumbled. “What of him?”

  “He’s …”

  “Gone, yes,” Marek said. “I’m sure Senator Korvan told me he was just leaving. Surely you don’t have anything to do with that beastly man.”

  She nodded and shook her head at the same time, and Marek risked a playful laugh at her confusion.

  “The ransar—” she started.

  “Is not immune to the occasional ill-considered decisions, my dear,” he finished for her. “I assure you that Ivar Devorast is just that.”

  “Still, there’s something about him, don’t you think?”

  “No,” he lied. “There’s nothing about him at all but a man in deep water who hasn’t sorted out that he’s already drowned.”

  Phyrea wasn’t listening. Marek could tell. She listened to someone else, and nodded ever so slightly in response.

  What do you hear? Marek Rymüt wondered. What do you know?

  9

  27 Alturiak, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

  THE CANAL SITE

  The stout wooden planks that braced the sides of the trench shattered. They crumbled to sawdust all at once; an explosion of brown dust that followed a loud sizzling sound that must have been a million softer cracks all intermingled.

  Hrothgar looked up at the sound. He’d heard a lot of new, strange sounds in his time among humans, under the limitless sky and so near the unforgiving sea, but he’d been at the canal site long enough to grow accustomed to its noises, and that one—those millions at once—didn’t belong. Because of the sound, though, he saw the planks shatter, and the dried-mud walls begin to crumble. He saw the men inside paw at their dust-blinded eyes, and their screams tore up from the depths of the trench. As tall as the humans were, the lip of the trench towered over their heads, twice again as tall as the tallest of the diggers.

  “By the unhewn rock of Deepshaft Hall,” the dwarf cursed. “They’ll be—”

  Devorast pushed past him at a run, but it took some time for Hrothgar to realize they were being attacked. At first the trench collapse was just another accident—not that there had been many. In fact, Hrothgar had commented to Devorast and to his cousin Vrengarl on many occasions already how surprised he was that so few men had been injured, and how incomprehensible it was that no one had yet died for the cause of the canal. What they were building was so big, there were so many men, and so many things that could go wrong.

  A trench could cave in, but what made the planks explode into dust?

  The wind had been light all day, the clouds gray but thin and dry. Though Hrothgar could hardly be called an expert on the ways of wind and storm, the wind that blew the dirt onto those poor diggers didn’t just blow in on its own from the Lake of Steam.

  He ran after Devorast, not bothering to consider how many times he’d done just that in only the past few years. Devorast reached the crumbling edge of the trench long before the dwarf. He skidded to a stop, sending dust swirling ar
ound his toes only to be whipped into a series of tiny little tornadoes around his feet.

  Then the wind changed again, and lifted Devorast off the ground. The human hurtled backward through the air, his arms pinwheeling at his sides in a vain attempt to either stop or control his sudden flight. He slammed hard into Hrothgar. The dwarf tried to wrap his arms around the human’s waist, made every effort to catch him, but was rewarded with a broken nose, a poked eye, and an impact on his chest hard enough to drain his lungs of air.

  They ended up on the ground in an undignified sprawl, their hair and clothing still whipping around them in the sourceless gust of hurricane-force wind.

  “The men!” Devorast barked.

  His eyes were closed, and blood trickled from under the line of his shaggy red hair. Hrothgar blinked back unwelcome tears and shot blood and snot out of his nose in a painful exhalation that at least let him start to breathe again. The two of them stood at the same time, neither helping the other to his feet.

  By the time Hrothgar reoriented himself, the trench was gone. Wind whipped the dirt so thoroughly that anyone passing by who had not seen it only moments before, would never have suspected that there had been a hole there at all.

  “Five men,” Hrothgar growled to himself.

  He looked to Devorast, who stood tall but still. His head moved to one side, then the other.

  “What is it?” the dwarf asked casting about for a weapon. Where’s my gods bedamned hammer? he thought. “Is it some mage? Some wind wizard?”

  Devorast stopped—he saw something. Hrothgar moved back and his foot kicked something heavy. Without looking, he reached down and grabbed it—just an old tree limb the clean-up crew had missed.

  It’ll do, he thought, then followed Devorast’s gaze.

  “Sweet Haela’s bum,” the dwarf oathed.

  “Naga,” Devorast said.

  The human relaxed. Hrothgar couldn’t believe it. He hefted the makeshift club and stepped forward, but Devorast didn’t move. He faced the creature as if they were old friends, and Hrothgar realized that perhaps they were.