Lies of Light

by Philip Athans

  Kolviss stopped talking when one of the bodyguards dropped him with the butt end of his halberd and said, “Sorry, Master Kolviss, but don’t crowd us or—”

  And it was the bodyguard’s turn to stop in mid-sentence. Kolviss’s hair, then scalp, dissolved away in front of their eyes, in just the blink of an eye revealing a dome of brilliant white skull. The advisor put a hand to his head, felt the bone, and fainted.

  Osorkon decided that was a good thing—Kolviss wouldn’t be able to feel his eyes melt, then his face. No one should have to be awake while his head was liquefied.

  Tlaet squealed like a girl and ran so fast and so suddenly he accidentally avoided a swipe from one of the assassins’ longaxes. Two of the assassins stepped right past him to engage the bodyguards. Osorkon stepped back behind his desk, holding his mace in front of him, his feet wide apart and his knees bent. The reach of the assassins’ longaxes almost matched the bodyguards’ halberds, and the four of them parried and struck, parried and struck.

  One of the assassins grunted loudly and stepped back. Angry, bleeding from a huge wound in his chest, the strange man opened his mouth, but before he could launch a stream of black acid at the bodyguard who’d sliced him, his eyes rolled up in his head and he fell backward. The black fluid oozed out from the sides of his mouth and began to dissolve the wood floor under his still head.

  Another stepped up in his place, and they were back at it again.

  The second bodyguard fell to a disemboweling, low slash of a longaxe. He was at least alive enough to cry out for his mother before the assassin stomped on his neck and cut his plea short with an ear-assaulting crack.

  “Ransar,” Kolviss squealed, “let us away!”

  “For the last time, Kolviss,” Osorkon said stepping back fast to avoid a stream of black fluid that arced through the air at his face, “there is nowhere to go.”

  The acid started working at his desk chair, and Osorkon kicked it away and jumped up onto his desk—kicking the stacks of parchment to the floor. Kolviss, in a blind panic, leaped at him, grabbing at his legs, his face red and tears streaming from his eyes. One of the assassins stepped up behind Kolviss and brought his longaxe down in a smooth arc to imbed the blade into the top of the man’s head. The blade sank down to the tip of his nose, and there was surprisingly little blood. Kolviss’s eyes still moved, following Osorkon’s, and his lips twitched silently a few times before he managed to say, “Osorkon?” in a voice made both wet and nasal by the bloody ruin his sinuses had become. The assassin twisted the handle of his long axe, choking up on it as he did so, and broke Kolviss’s head open like an egg. Kolviss’s legs collapsed, and he fell in a gory heap.

  Two of the assassins crowded the last bodyguard, who bled from half a dozen wounds. The guard growled through gritted teeth and jabbed then swung, jabbed then swung, with his heavy halberd. When he spun the polearm up to parry a downward slash from one longaxe, the other assassin brought his weapon in low and took both of the guard’s legs off at the knees with that one swipe.

  “Surrender, Osorkon!” Salatis shouted over the bodyguard’s agonized shriek.

  The scream was silenced when one of the assassins took the guard’s head off.

  “Surrender!” Salatis called again from the doorway. “It’s over.”

  Knowing the new ransar was right, Osorkon let loose an incoherent battle cry and charged the nearest assassin. He managed by pure luck to get inside the longaxe’s reach and he smashed down on the dark man’s shoulder. The carved steel head of the mace crunched the assassin’s shoulder blade and sent a spiderweb of blue-white sparks crisscrossing over his twitching torso. The assassin’s face screwed up in a spasm of agony, and he stood there, quivering under the mace’s enchanted lightning for a heartbeat, then another, Osorkon shouting in defiance the whole time—which was long enough for another of the intruders to step in and take one of his arms off.

  The lightning disappeared, and the assassin dropped to the floor, still twitching, but otherwise dead. Osorkon staggered back, the mace still in the one hand he had left, and watched the blood pump from his open veins.

  It doesn’t hurt, he thought. Isn’t that strange?

  A dark-skinned assassin charged in, and Osorkon managed to beat his longaxe away with the mace, but he didn’t register the other one standing right next to him.

  The fluid was cold on his skin at first, and thick. It felt heavy, and that along with the weight of the mace made him drop his guard. He took a boot to the chest and fell. He tried to take a deep breath from on his back but couldn’t.

  Just as well, he thought. Now I can’t give Salatis the satisfaction of a scream.

  The acid took his skin and that hurt. Osorkon had never imagined pain like that.

  Kill me, he thought, in some way desperate to communicate with the pain itself. Make me pass out, by Loviatar’s bloody scourge.

  His eyes slammed shut and his teeth chattered as the acid began to work on the meat of his arm. If he even had a hand anymore, he was no longer holding the mace. He watched it roll across the floor, the haft getting smaller and smaller as acid dissolved even the enchanted weapon.

  “What—” he gasped. “What’s that … smell?”

  He caught a glance of the bone of his forearm. It was even whiter than Thensumkon’s skull, if that was possible.

  He looked up, blinking, the pain making all the muscles left in his body quiver so that he felt for all the world as if his blood had reached a rolling boil. Above him stood Salatis, dressed in a fine blue silk robe with a clean white sash, and one of the dark assassins. Osorkon was lost in the assassin’s eyes. He’d never seen eyes so black—at least not on anything but a shark.

  He tried to speak again but couldn’t.

  “The Storm Lord be praised,” Salatis said, then glanced at the assassin. “Well done, Captain Olin.”

  Osorkon coughed. He couldn’t breathe. The pain was starting to go away. That didn’t seem like a good sign.

  “Well, Osorkon, my old friend,” Salatis said. “By the grace of the Destroyer, by the will of Talos, I must inform you that your services to the city-state of Innarlith are no longer required.” Salatis giggled in a way that made him appear, especially from below, like a drooling idiot. “May Talos eat your wretched soul to break his fast on the morrow.”

  Osorkon still couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t get any part of his body except his neck to move, but he could move his neck, and he did, tilting his head away from the gloating, laughing Salatis and his stoic, unamused, silent assassin. He looked at the map, tried to keep his eyes open and on the straight blue line.

  Finish it anyway, he thought. Finish it, Devorast. It was never really mine, after all.

  And those were the words Osorkon took with him to eternity.

  26

  3 Nightal, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Really, Willem, what in the diamond battlements of Trueheart do you have to be afraid of?” Marek Rymüt asked with a sibilant hiss to his accented voice—he pronounced Willem’s name as if it started with a V and not a W. The rotund wizard blinked, almost as though he was batting his eyelashes. “I mean, really. You are well and truly blessed.”

  Willem swallowed and nodded, looking around the high-ceilinged room. Scattered about sat a number of crates. Hay had been piled in the corners, and canvas tarps had been spread over the scuffed wood floor.

  “Willem?” the Thayan prompted.

  “Yes,” Willem replied, still not looking Marek in the eye. “I am well and truly …” He paused to think, then risked: “… cared for.”

  Marek laughed, and the sound was so light and so sincere that Willem was forced to smile.

  “You know, of course, that I can help you,” Marek said as he crossed the room to one of the crates. “Please excuse the mess. We’ve only just begun to move in. Do you like it?”

  Willem nodded, lying. The building was garish and overly large for one man, and he�
�d heard that Marek didn’t even intend to live there.

  “I understand you’ll be keeping the house, too,” Willem said, as much just to make conversation to cover his nervousness than to verify the rumors.

  “Of course,” the wizard replied as he dug through first one crate then another. “This is a place of business. From this compound, the finest in magical items will be made available to the fine people of Innarlith.”

  Willem nodded, watching the man search apparently at random for the promised item, and asked, “It will be an embassy, too, I understand.”

  Marek stopped and turned to regard him with a gaze that made Willem’s skin crawl.

  Marek turned back to the next crate and continued his search, but just a little more slowly than before.

  “It might one day serve a similar function,” said the Red Wizard. “I suppose it’s safe to consider this Thayan ground. But it’s not so much an embassy as an … an enclave. I am here not to influence, but to serve.”

  “You influence anyway,” Willem said.

  Marek chuckled and stopped rooting around in the crate. When he turned he held a small box of polished maple and wore a warm grin.

  “When I am asked a question,” the wizard said, “I answer. When my opinion is sought out, I oblige. If I influence, it is because I have made every effort to help, and always in the best interests of my adopted home.”

  Willem smiled and nodded, but couldn’t help staring at the box. “Is that it?” he asked.

  Marek glanced down at the box in his hand but said, “I understand you’ve had some success recently that has brought considerable coin to your personal coffers.”

  Willem nodded.

  “An apple orchard, of all things,” said the Thayan. “Really, Willem, my lad, I can’t possibly be asked to imagine you a farmer.”

  “I’m no farmer,” he said. “There are tenants to tend the trees. I just …”

  “Own it?” the Thayan prompted.

  “I’ve been told that a senator must have an income,” Willem said. “I was encouraged to acquire land.”

  “But at so meager a price,” Marek replied, “and for so rich a harvest.”

  Willem shrugged, still staring at the box.

  “You can afford more,” the wizard said with a wink. “This is … a trifle.”

  “But it will do what I asked?” Willem asked. “It’ll do what I need it to do?”

  The Thayan nodded and stepped forward, holding the box out. Willem took it, flinching when Marek touched the back of his hand with a cool, clammy fingertip. Willem fumbled the box a little, and almost dropped it. Marek placed it in his hand, and Willem snatched it away a bit too quickly for decorum’s sake. A brief glow passed through Marek’s eyes that made Willem’s breath catch in his throat.

  They both released a breath together, and Willem opened the box.

  “You have but to wear it,” Marek said.

  Inside the box was a simple brooch of fine gold fashioned in the likeness of a heart held in the palm of a hand. Willem had seen better workmanship. There was nothing about the thing that seemed particularly special.

  “And if I do?” Willem asked.

  “You will bear up under the strain,” the Thayan explained with a smirk. “It will embolden you. You will not be so easily intimidated.”

  Willem looked up at him, his jaw tense. Marek was surprised but showed it only for the briefest fraction of a heartbeat before smiling once more.

  “It may even have some benefit where the fairer sex is concerned,” said Marek.

  “What do you mean?” Willem asked, closing the box.

  “May I?”

  Marek nodded and Willem put the box in the deep pocket of his weathercloak. From the same pocket he withdrew a purse heavy with coins.

  “I mean that perhaps with its subtle influence you will finally be able to leave my niece in your wake,” the wizard explained.

  Willem shivered. He looked at his hand, which held the purse out to Marek, and saw it shake.

  Marek wrapped his sausage fingers around the bag of coins and said, “A thousand?”

  “As we agreed,” Willem replied, letting his arm fall to his side. “So, with that I’ll—”

  “Oh, bother,” Marek cut in, dropping the coin purse into one of the open crates. “Don’t be like that, my lad. You know of my fondness for Halina, and certainly your perpetually-impending nuptials would be a rare social event among the least imaginative of Innarlan society, but honestly, is she the best choice?”

  “The only times I can remember feeling even the slightest bit happy have been in her presence,” Willem said. Sweat gathered at his hairline and under his arms. He hadn’t meant to reveal so much, especially to the Thayan. “But my mother is of similar mind to you.”

  “Ah, yes,” Marek replied. “And how fares the lovely Thurene?”

  “She is well.”

  “Just ‘well’?”

  Willem shrugged. He didn’t know what else to say.

  “She whispers a name in your ear, I’ll wager,” Marek said. “I know that the master builder has been, too, and for some time.”

  Willem shook his head, hoping against hope that Marek wouldn’t say the name.

  “I’m happy with Halina,” Willem said.

  “And what of that?” asked the wizard. “Who are you to be happy?”

  Willem looked him in the eye and shook his head. Had he heard the man correctly?

  “I’m …” Willem started.

  “All men are equal,” the Thayan said. “We all have our roles to play in the gods’ great theater. Who are you to expect to be happy when so many suffer? So what if you love Halina? You should marry Phyrea. Her father wishes it, and so do many others in this city—many others who have been watching over you and will continue to watch over you both.”

  “But …” Willem grunted. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to have the conversation Marek seemed intent on bullying him into.

  “I’m sure you find the fair Phyrea pleasing to the eye,” said Marek.

  Willem nodded, but said, “Will you forbid me from marrying your niece? Will you prevent me from seeing her?”

  Willem had tried to keep that last from sounding like a plea, but he couldn’t help it. Anyway, Marek Rymüt was too intelligent and astute a listener not to have sensed it. Willem could see it written plainly in the Thayan’s sparkling eyes and uneven smile.

  “I will do no such thing,” said Marek. “If you are dead set on embarking on a path pointed away from the goals you’ve worked so diligently to achieve, how could I presume to stop you?”

  “Phyrea hates me,” Willem said.

  “Wives hate their husbands, lad,” Marek replied.

  “Before they’re even married?”

  “Well….”

  There was a heavy silence while Willem hoped he looked like he was thinking long and hard.

  “Phyrea….” Willem said, his voice barely more than a whisper.

  Marek smiled and said, “Wear the pin, son. It will help.”

  27

  30 Nightal, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

  THE PALACE OF MANY SPIRES, INNARLITH

  The evening had begun with a lengthy and confusing prayer of appeasement to Malar, given by the newly confirmed ransar himself. Salatis had insisted that his guests attend the festivities in the guise of an animal, and Willem Korvan had chosen for himself the weasel.

  “It’s a creature with its own nobility, wouldn’t you say, Meykhati?” Willem said. “Or should I say, ‘Sir Crane’?”

  The elder senator indulged him with a largely uninterested laugh from behind his avian mask of fine Shou porcelain and said, “If you say so, Will—Senator Weasel.”

  The laughs that sizzled up from the circle of guests Willem had merged with mocked him. He put a hand lightly to the brooch that held his cloak around his shoulders. A palpable sensation of warmth flooded his chest when he touched it.

  “Tell us more, Senator We
asel,” requested the woman with purple hair, a mask in the likeness of an eagle, and the familiar accent of Willem’s homeland.

  “You’re Cormyrean,” he said.

  The woman, stout and heavy, immaculately dressed in a gown that included actual eagle feathers, bowed slightly and introduced herself as Tia Harriman, the newly-appointed ambassador from Cormyr.

  The others—Meykhati behind his crane mask; the master builder with an elephant’s ghastly trunk; Rymüt’s man Insithryllax, wearing a frightening black dragon’s head; Kurtsson with the face of a bear; and his mother, who pressed close to him, her eyes as cold and hard as the tigress whose features she’d borrowed—heaped niceties on the woman.

  “I’m surprised,” Willem said, marveling at the sound of his own voice—so clear and strong.

  “Whatever do you mean, my dear?” his mother inquired. He could feel her nervousness, and perhaps for the first time in his life he didn’t care.

  “Why does Azoun suddenly feel that Innarlith, of all places, requires the presence of an embassy?”

  Willem stood in the center of the ensuing silence feeling like Talos in the eye of a hurricane of his own creation. Thurene squeezed his arm, but he ignored her.

  “His Majesty,” the ambassador replied, correcting his protocol, “has taken an interest in the canal.”

  “Well, you get right to the point, don’t you, Ambassador?” Willem replied. He felt cheerful, and let his voice convey that. Everyone relaxed, at least a little. “I suppose I can see why Cormyr might benefit from it. Too bad it will never come to pass.”

  “Won’t it?” asked the ambassador.

  “No, madam,” Inthelph answered before Willem could, “I don’t think it will. The only two people in Innarlith who might make a go of it”—he nodded to Willem—“are standing before you right now. And neither of us have any interest in that fool’s errand.”