“Discussions were had,” Zaeliira cut in. Her blue-green scales looked dull and old in the meager light from the surface and the glow of Svayyah’s shield.
“Zaeliira has been swimming the Nagaflow for eight centuries,” said Shuryall, “and however weakened by age, Zaeliira may be, all naja’ssara heed the counsel of Zaeliira.”
“We make our own way,” Shingrayu hissed. “We are Ssa’Naja.”
“Shingrayu went above the waves and brought violent magic to the naja’ssara in the employ of Ivar Devorast,” Svayyah accused. “Does Shingrayu deny this?”
“Is there denial?” asked Zaeliira, who appeared to smart from Shingrayu’s comment.
Shingrayu pulled himself out to his full length, an impressive eighteen feet, and drew his scales in tight so that he seemed to blaze green in the murk. “We see prey and we eat. We see invaders and we defend. We see insult and we take offense. We see Svayyah’s ambition and we protect ourselves and our ways. There will be no serpent queen here.”
The other nagas raced through the water at the sound of those words, whirling faster and faster around the bubble Devorast floated in until it began to turn in the water. He held out his hands—those freakish appendages of the dista’ssara—and steadied himself. Svayyah waited for him to speak, but he said nothing. He met her eyes finally, and she fell into his gaze in a way she couldn’t understand—in a way that almost made her believe that Shingrayu had been right all along.
“What this dista’ssara works will be of great benefit to all the naja’ssara of the Nagaflow and the Nagawater,” she said, shouting into the tempestuous waters.
The other nagas began to calm, but Shingrayu remained just as rigid.
“Ivar Devorast comes here of his own will,” Svayyah went on, “and entirely at our mercy. Should we but wish it, the water would rush in to fill his human lungs and take him to whatever afterlife awaits him. He braves this, for a work.”
“A work?” Shuryall asked.
“We have heard of this thing the dista’ssara seeks to build,” said the young and impetuous Flayanna. “It will bring human after human, ship after ship to our waters. Human filth. Shingrayu speaks and acts true. We should also like to go to these dista’ssara and kill.”
“If Flayanna wishes to kill Svayyah first to do so, then we stand at the ready,” Svayyah challenged, knowing the younger naga would back down.
Flayanna wouldn’t look at her, and only swam more slowly in a circle around Devorast.
“If this human wishes it,” Shingrayu said, “let it ask us all, not only Svayyah, who is no queen here.”
“Again, that word,” Svayyah growled. She twitched her tail to bring herself closer to Shingrayu. “Speak it once more, and it will be the last word to pass Shingrayu’s poison tongue.”
The other nagas swam then, not too fast, but with a purpose. They gave the two combatants room. They knew what was going to happen. And Svayyah knew that the future of the canal would rest with her. If Shingrayu killed her, Devorast would never live to see the surface again. He likely wouldn’t outlive the last dying spasm of Svayyah’s own heart.
“There will be no canal to bring human excrement into our home waters, Svayyah,” Shingrayu said, his voice heavy with challenge. “There will be no Queen of the Nagaflow.”
Svayyah opened her mouth wide, showed her fangs, let her forked tongue taste the familiar waters, and shrieked her challenge at the damnable Shingrayu. The sound, amplified by magic, sent visible ripples through the water. The other nagas pulled even farther back. When the wave front hit Shingrayu, he closed his eyes and withstood the battering force. The side of his face he’d turned into the shockwave burned red, and a welt rose fast to mar his smooth skin. Though his eyes were closed tightly, his tongue slipped through a fast incantation.
Shingrayu opened his eyes to watch three jagged bolts of lime green light slice through the water, leaving not a bubble in their wakes. They crashed into Svayyah’s spell shield with force enough only to sting her, but the shield unraveled fast, drifting away into the water like a cloud of luminescent sediment.
Svayyah closed the distance between them with a single lash of her muscular body. In the brief moment that passed before their bodies met, Shingrayu rattled off another spell.
Svayyah wrapped her serpentine body around Shingrayu’s, and the first touch sent a nettling ripple through her veins. The touch of the other naga was painful to her. Scales stood out from her flesh, and the ridge of long spines on her back leaped to attention. A painful cramp raced up the entire length of her body and slammed into her jaw.
But she felt it coming, and before it got there, she opened her mouth wide again. Perhaps confident that his shocking grasp would fend her off, Shingrayu left his all too vulnerable neck open. Svayyah’s fangs pressed down, and the lightning touch of his spell clamped her jaws closed like a vise. She bit so deeply into Shingrayu’s neck that she felt her teeth come together. She couldn’t swallow, and couldn’t release the hot mouthful of flesh. The blood in the water, like black-red smoke in the air of the surface world, burned her eyes and filled her nose so she could neither see nor smell. The sound of her own blood whooshing through veins and arteries as clamped tight as her jaw drowned out all other sounds.
Holding her breath, Svayyah writhed against Shingrayu as though they were mating. The series of cramps that wrapped her ever tighter around her adversary threatened to snap every bone in her body, and Svayyah steeled herself against that certainty. A loud snap, then the second and third, came to her not through her ears but through her scales. She thought at first that her bones had begun to break under Shingrayu’s magic, but there was no pain.
It wasn’t her bones that were breaking.
The effect of Shingrayu’s spell fled all at once. Svayyah uncoiled, out of control, like a string from around a child’s toy. She floated away from Shingrayu and spat the mouthful of his throat out into the water between them. She coughed and shuddered, just trying to breathe.
Shingrayu drifted limp, but his eyes were open. He blinked and opened his mouth to speak. He had something to say, but couldn’t get the words out. His lips twitched. Intelligence and intent left his eyes first, then the life itself fled.
Svayyah continued to gasp for a breath as the other water nagas circled closer.
“Svayyah says that this is a great work this dista’ssara does,” Zaeliira said. “Does that make this human a great being? Does it make it senthissa’ssa?”
Does it? Svayyah thought.
She turned to Devorast, who’s expression had not changed at all. She felt a sense of inevitability from him. It wasn’t that he knew she would kill Shingrayu, but something else—something that depended in no way on what she did, what Shingrayu did, or what any of the naja’ssara did.
“Are you, Ivar Devorast?” she managed to whisper through a throat still struggling open. “Is Ivar Devorast a teacher worthy of emulating?”
“Well?” Zaeliira pressed.
Svayyah turned to her kin and said, “If he builds it.”
She had spoken like a human, and had done it on purpose. The phrasing was not lost on Zaeliira at least.
“Very well,” said the aged water naga. “Let this dista’ssara build its great work. If it succeeds, it will have proven itself senthissa’ssa. Do the naja’ssara of the Nagaflow and Nagawater agree? All of like mind on this?”
Each of the other five nagas signaled their agreement and one by one swam off to their own business. Zaeliira and Svayyah shared a look, then she too swam off at her own slow pace.
Svayyah looked at Devorast in his bubble and shook her head. He had done precisely what he should have, and Svayyah found herself wholly unable to believe it.
He hadn’t said a thing the whole time.
13
10 Ches, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)
THIRD QUARTER, INNARLITH
How did you—” Phyrea began, then quickly chose from two possible endings to that question—“fi
nd me?”
Devorast stepped closer to her, but stopped more than her arm’s length away. He’d been sitting in one of the uncomfortable old chairs that came with the rented flat, waiting for her in the dark. In the light of the candle she’d lit before she knew he was sitting there, his skin looked softer than she knew it to be, but his eyes were no less guarded, no more forthcoming.
“Osorkon,” he said. His voice sounded different, softer too, but that couldn’t have been the candlelight.
“The ransar?” she asked. She didn’t really care how he’d found her, but a chill ran down her spine at the revelation that the ransar knew of what she thought of as her hiding place. Of all the conversations, of all the things she hoped would pass between them that night, the wheres and whys and hows of the things Osorkon knew about her was of the least interest. “How did he—?”
Phyrea stopped when Devorast moved even closer to her. He smelled of the dry earth, the poison sea, and the bitter wind.
“Is that it?” she asked, her voice below even a whisper, but she knew he heard her. “Is that how you can do this to me? Is that your secret? Are you an elemental? Some creature of all the forces of nature—earth, air, fire, water … the Astral ether itself?”
He reached out a hand and though her mind wanted her body to flinch away, she found herself leaning forward. When the tip of his finger found the lace of her bodice she fell half a step closer to him.
“What are you?” she asked.
He raised his other hand and began to unlace her bodice. Phyrea’s knees shook, then her hips, then her shoulders. Her hands had been shaking already. She found it difficult to breathe in, but exhaled in throaty gasps.
“I’m all I ever needed to be, and all you ever need from me,” Devorast said. “A man.”
“No,” she said, even while wishing it was true. “That can’t be. That can’t be all.”
The stiff leather bodice fell away.
“I’ve said things about you,” Phyrea told him as he put his hand to the side of her face. His palm was warm and rough. “I’ve hurt you.”
He kissed her on the cheek, and she leaned against him. She put her hands on his forearms. The thin tunic he wore was made of rough material, cheap peasant clothes.
“I poison people against you,” she told him as his tongue played on her ear. Her body quivered at his touch. She couldn’t quite breathe. “I hurt you on purpose.”
“No, you don’t,” he whispered, then kissed her on the mouth.
She tried to melt into him, tried her best to disappear into his embrace, but couldn’t.
“If you tell me to stop, I’ll stop,” she said when their lips finally parted. “If you demand my obedience, you’ll have it. If you want me as your wife, your harlot, your slave, or your mistress, you will have me. I will remake myself to whatever standards you impose. I will erase myself if that’s what you wish. I’ll cut myself. I’ll kill myself. I’ll—”
“Do none of those things,” he said into the skin of her neck. “You don’t need to do anything to satisfy me, the same way I’ll never do anything simply to satisfy you.”
Tears streamed from her eyes.
“I can’t have you, can I?” she asked.
“Not the way you mean,” was his answer.
She cried while he held her for a little while, and she only stopped when she realized that in that time, she hadn’t heard one of the voices, or seen a single apparition. She hadn’t wanted to hurt herself, though she’d offered to.
“I have to destroy you,” she told him even as she let him carry her to her bed. “This world is too small for you.”
He moved to kiss her again, but she stopped him.
“There are people who are trying to stop you,” she told him, though he must have already known. “They’ll succeed, too, because it’s easy to do what they do. It’s the easiest thing in the world to tear a man down, to pick at his flesh till there’s nothing left of him but bones. I can’t watch that happen. Do you understand me?”
He smiled in a way that made Phyrea’s heart seem to stop in her chest.
“I won’t let you live to be so degraded,” she whispered as he finished undressing her. “Not by them.”
Those were the last words either of them spoke that night, and the ghosts didn’t come back until Devorast finally left.
14
5 Kythorn, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)
SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH
Marek Rymüt couldn’t see the ghosts that haunted Phyrea, but he knew they were there. Though he was no necromancer—enchantments were more his cup of tea—he knew enough of the ways of the undead. He knew their power and their sharply delineated limitations. Over the past few tendays he’d learned more and more about the spirits that had taken up residence in that poor little rich girl, that tortured daughter of a wealthy idiot, and he found himself inventing more and more excuses to see her.
“My apologies, gentlesir,” Phyrea said to Marek’s oldest friend, “please help me to pronounce your name.”
“In-sith-rill-ax,” the black dragon said, enunciating each syllable with great care. In the guise of a human, he smiled at her without the barest sliver of interest.
“Insithryllax,” the girl repeated. “It’s an imposing name. To look at you I would have to say you are Chondathan, but that doesn’t sound like a Chondathan name.”
“I suppose,” the disguised dragon replied, “that I’m more Mulhorandi than Chondathan, but the name is … a very old one.”
Marek caught the twinkle in Phyrea’s eyes that told him she might have been close to figuring out that Insithryllax was no more Mulhorandi than Marek was a field mouse.
“How are you enjoying the tea, my love?” Marek asked her, returning the twinkle.
She did her best not to look him in the eye when she answered, “I’ve never been one for tea, Master Rymüt, but I’m sure it’s wonderful.”
“The leaves are harvested on Midsummer’s eve from the slopes of one particular mountain high in the Spine of the World,” he told her, inventing every word of the preposterous tale as he went along. “Orc slaves carry them whole to a shop in the heart of fair Silverymoon, where they are purified with spells granted by the grace of Chauntea. One must have a signed writ from the Lady Alustriel herself to buy it.”
Phyrea laughed and said, “Somehow I doubt you possess such a writ, Master Rymüt.”
“You wound me with the truth, my darling girl,” he responded with an entirely false chuckle. “The owner of the tea shop knows someone who knows someone who knows someone.”
Phyrea nodded, making it plain she’d lost interest in stories about tea she didn’t even drink. Instead she looked at Insithryllax.
“The way your eyes dart around the room,” she said to the dragon, “constantly on the lookout for—what? Another mad alchemist? A rival wizard determined to resist the inevitable? I was under the impression that no such attacks have come for some time.”
So, Marek thought, you’ve been studying me, too. Well done, girl. But tread lightly.
“I am happy to report,” Marek said before the even more wary black dragon could assume the worst from her playful question, “that my efforts to civilize the trade in enchanted items and spellcraft in Innarlith has met with some success of late. It is a credit to the city of your birth.”
Phyrea forced a smile and said, “Any foreigner can have his way with Innarlith. It’s to your credit only that you have tamed the other foreigners.”
Marek laughed that off and said, “You hold so low a regard for your own city, I wonder why you stay here.”
That elicited a look so grave Marek was momentarily taken aback.
“Please, Marek,” Insithryllax said, “you’ll offend the girl.”
When the Red Wizard regarded his old friend, he was happy to see no trace of real concern on his face.
“Please do accept my—” Marek started.
“No,” Phyrea cut in. “Don’t bother. Of course I h
old this cesspool in low regard.” She paused to listen to something, but the tea room was characteristically quiet. “Of course I do.”
Marek put the cup to his lips and whispered a spell, hiding the gestures as a momentary indecision over which of the little pastries to sample.
… him the sword, a voice whispered from nowhere. It was a strange sensation. Marek had heard voices in his head before, had often communicated in that way, but it was something else entirely to hear a voice in someone else’s head. It’s for you.
Then a woman: We meant it for you.
And a little boy: If you give it to him, we will be cross with you.
Marek resisted the urge to shudder. Instead he took a sip of tea and studied Phyrea’s face.
She was beautiful, of that there was no doubt, but she looked older than he knew her to be. She’d seen only twenty summers, but to look at her eyes he’d say she was fifty.
“You’re not well,” he ventured.
She shook her head, but told him, “I’m fine.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve heard the things you’ve been saying about that horrid man,” Marek said. “You know, that ditch digger?”
“Devorast,” she whispered, then cleared her throat and said more loudly, “Ivar Devorast.”
Use the sword on him, a man all but screamed at Phyrea and Marek brought to mind a spell that he hoped could save his life if she followed that order.
Devorast, the little boy whined. I hate him. You need to kill him with the flam … the flam …”
“The flambergé,” Marek said aloud, risking that the ghosts would realize he could hear them.
Phyrea looked him in the eye for the first time that day, but before Marek could do so much as smile she looked down at the tightly-wrapped bundle at her feet—a sheet of soft linen precisely the dimensions of a sheathed long sword, tied together with twine.
No! one of the spirits screamed.
Wait, breathed another.
“You’ll be able to tell me …” she started, but was interrupted by the boy.
Lies of Light Page 6
