Lies of Light

by Philip Athans

  “I beg your pardon?” he asked. His voice, pitched no louder than normal, seemed to boom in the still, heavy air of his dining room.

  Phyrea shook her head, still looking at nothing, then turned toward him. Her eyes blazed with what Willem could have sworn was fear—but what could she possibly have to be afraid of?

  “Were you speaking to me?” he asked.

  In an instant the fear turned to contempt, and she said, “No. You aren’t hungry?”

  He glanced down at the raw meat and said, “No, thank you. Are you sure you don’t want me to recall the cook, or perhaps you would feel more comfortable hiring someone else—someone of your choosing?”

  “I told you I don’t like people buzzing around me,” she said.

  “Then tell her to stay in the kitchen.”

  “I might want to go into the kitchen,” Phyrea replied. She put a hand on her wine glass but didn’t pick it up. “I suppose you miss the maids and cooks and little girls you can take to your bed whenever you choose, but things have changed, and it’s time for you to grow up.”

  Willem blinked, both at the accusation, and at the sudden turns her temper took.

  “I never …” he started, but trailed off when he realized she wasn’t listening, and wouldn’t care either way. “It’s good to be home,” he lied instead.

  They’d been married for twenty months, and in that time she’d fired his household staff and scared his mother all the way back to Cormyr. He’d spent fewer than one night in twenty at home, having been overwhelmed by the process of restarting Devorast’s project with the aid of two people even less competent than himself. In most ways that mattered he and Phyrea were still strangers, but Willem remained unable to look at her without reeling at her perfect beauty. Even as tired as she looked, even when she twitched and glanced away at nothing, startled by silence, Phyrea was the most beautiful woman in the world.

  “The fresh air agrees with you,” she said. “You’re a very handsome man.”

  He nodded in thanks, but couldn’t keep the suspicion from his eyes.

  “Eat your dinner, now, before it gets cold,” she said. Phyrea, leering, glanced at the bloody red meat on the plate in front of him. “Be a good boy now. If you eat it, I’ll let you touch me. I’ll take you to bed, but you have to eat it all.”

  He looked down at the raw meat again, and swallowed.

  She shushed him, though he hadn’t said anything, then she whispered, “He will.”

  “Will I?” Willem asked her.

  “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  He picked up his knife and fork, and she laughed at him.

  “Go on, now,” she said. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  He cut a little square off the side of the meat and held it up. Blood the consistency of water ran down the tines of his fork and dripped off the meat onto his plate.

  She looked at him with wide eyes, and her open mouth was turned up in a trace of a smile.

  “I will have to leave again tomorrow,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “I’m not entirely certain when I’ll be back.”

  Phyrea looked to her left and nodded to no one.

  Willem put the raw meat in his mouth and started to chew. It wasn’t bad.

  58

  29 Marpenoth, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR)

  THE CANAL SITE

  Willem had no idea what the man’s name was, but he assumed he was some kind of foreman. Anyway, he was the one who talked to Willem most often, told him what was happening and asked for things. He was a short man, barely taller than a dwarf, but stocky and solid. He had a face like worn leather and dull eyes the color of mud. His greasy hair was always ragged and unkept, even falling out in patches. His clothes were spattered with holes and crusted with dried mud. He smelled of sweat and freshly-turned soil.

  “Please come quickly, Senator,” the little man said, his voice shaking in time with his panic-stricken eyes. “Please … there’s been a terrible accident.”

  Willem sighed. He’d lost track of the number of terrible accidents that had befallen the workers since he’d taken over the construction of the canal. Men died, were injured, fell to disease, and simply walked home in such numbers it frankly amazed him that there was anyone left to dig at all.

  “Senator?” the little man prompted.

  Willem scowled at him, and he backed away a few steps, but still seemed determined to have Willem follow him. Willem stood and the man started off, apparently in the direction of the accident. Willem stretched and looked up into the overcast sky.

  “At least it isn’t raining,” he whispered to himself, then yawned.

  “Senator?” the little man asked.

  “Oh, for the sake of every god in the Outer Planes, man,” Willem huffed, “what do you expect me to do?”

  “Senator?” the man asked with a look of disappointed confusion.

  “Honestly….” Willem went on. “What is it this time? Another trench collapse? Someone hacked his hand off with an axe? Someone blinded by a flying splinter? Do I look like a priest to you?”

  “But, Senator, I thought …”

  Willem waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. Perhaps the grubby little man had finally realized that he hadn’t thought anything at all. He looked down at the ground at his feet, and Willem almost felt sorry for him.

  Willem stepped out of the protection of his tent, and his foot sank half an inch in the mud. He sighed and looked down at his expensive boots, which had long since been ruined.

  “Damn this mud to the Barrens of Doom and Despair,” he muttered. “Aren’t you sick of the constant damp?”

  The foreman shook his head, confused, simple.

  “Did someone die?” asked Willem. “Is that what you’re all in a fluster over?”

  The foreman nodded.

  Willem sighed and said, “Are they buried?” The foreman nodded again. “Loose soil, or mud?”

  “Mud,” the man replied.

  “Mud …” Willem sighed. “Don’t you hate mud? I hate mud. I know people use that word too lightly, too often, ‘hate.’ But I hate this mud. I’m tired of being wet and cold. I’m tired of living outside like an orc. This is a life for savages, sitting in the rain, living in your own bathroom, for Waukeen’s sake.”

  “Yes, Senator,” the foreman agreed—or pretended to.

  Willem saw a trace of annoyance pass through the man’s features, and he fought down the impulse to draw his sword and gut the man where he stood. There were too many others around to see it, and even Salatis might consider that overstepping his bounds.

  “What caused these men to be buried in the mud?” Willem asked. “Was it a naga?”

  “A naga?”

  “Yes, fool, a naga. You know, the giant snake things with human faces that eat slow-witted fools like you just to spite me. Was it a thrice-bedamned naga, or not?”

  “No, Senator,” the foreman replied. “I mean … no one saw any naga.”

  “Just because you couldn’t see it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there,” Willem said. “They’ve turned on us, you know.”

  “They have killed men to the north, I hear,” the foreman said. “But that’s miles away, Senator.”

  “They traveled for miles inland to kill the ambassador from Arrabar,” Willem said. He stepped back into his tent and did his best to wipe the mud from his boots, but all he did was make the dryer, brown grass inside a little bit muddier. “So what happened, then?”

  “It was just a mudslide, Senator. On account of all the rain we’ve been having.”

  “Really?” Willem asked, a growl to his voice that might have been due more to the fact that the cold and damp had settled in his chest than out of anger. “Could it really have been on account of all the rain we’ve been having?”

  The foreman, sheepish, looked down at his feet.

  “How many?” Willem asked.

  “Senator?”

  “How many men, damn it?”
>
  The foreman nodded and said, “Fourteen souls. Tragic, ain’t it, Senator? A human tragedy, this.”

  Willem rolled his eyes and sighed.

  “Senator?”

  “Are you sure they’re dead?” Willem asked. “Well, they’ve been under there a long time.”

  “Have you started digging them out?”

  “I think some of the men went at it while I ran for you, yes.”

  Willem rubbed his eyes and blinked, looking past the grubby foreman, and down a steep hill to the edge of the enormous trench. Most of the length of it that he could see was deserted, not near finished. Men walked here and there, sometimes alongside ox carts with various tools and supplies. He couldn’t draw a sense of urgency out of the scene no matter how hard he tried.

  “There’s so slim a chance that I will live to see this done, it’s impossible to measure with the mathematics known to me,” Willem said.

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” the foreman replied, even though Willem hadn’t asked him anything.

  “Do you like it here?” Willem asked the man.

  “Yes, Senator,” the foreman lied.

  “Are we paying you?”

  “Yes, Senator.”

  “What for?”

  “Senator?”

  Willem looked the man in the eye and said, “What are we paying you for?”

  “To help build the Grand Canal,” he said, and Willem could hear the capital letters in the little man’s prideful voice.

  “What do you mean ‘Grand Canal’?” Willem asked. “That’s what it’s called, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  The foreman looked surprised, and remained confused. He blinked at Willem then glanced off in the direction of the day’s terribly tragic mudslide.

  “No one has named it,” Willem said. “Stop calling it that. Did Devorast call it that?”

  “I never met that man, Senator,” the foreman said. “I started after he was … after I took over for that helf-elf chap.”

  “So there are now fourteen fewer men working,” Willem said.

  “Senator?”

  “Get back to it, then,” Willem said. “Yes, Senator,” the foreman replied, disappointment plain on his leathery face. “We’ll have the bodies dug out by nightfall.”

  “No, you won’t,” Willem said, and the foreman had the nerve to looked surprised, even offended. “I want you to continue with your day’s tasks. Light torches to work past nightfall if you have to, but finish. Then you can dig up your dead if you like.”

  The man stared at him, speechless.

  “Wrap the bodies, but don’t send them back to Innarlith,” Willem said.

  He’d nearly forgotten something Marek Rymüt had told him some tendays before.

  “But their families—” the foreman started.

  “Leave that to me,” Willem said. His skin crawled, and he had to look away from the foreman’s confused, puppy-dog eyes. “On your way, now.”

  59

  6 Uktar, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR)

  THE CANAL SITE

  Willem looked at the line of canvas bundles and frowned. Stained with dried mud, the dull, bone-colored material bore the muddy brown handprints of the men who’d wrapped them and carried them to the open stretch of ground near the shore of the Lake of Steam. The sulfur smell of the water drove away the ripe stench of the dead bodies in the canvas bundles.

  The short, squat foreman stared at Willem as though awaiting orders. When Willem shooed him away with a wave, the man started to turn but hesitated.

  “Oh, what is it?” Willem demanded of him, all patience fled.

  “Shouldn’t I have a few men ready, Senator?”

  “Whatever for?”

  “To load the bodies on the boat?”

  “What boat?” Willem asked.

  The foreman inhaled, was about to answer, then let the breath out in a gasp. He stared, wide-eyed, at something over Willem’s shoulder.

  Willem put a hand to his sword hilt and turned as a strange sound—sort of a mixture of hissing and tinkling—flittered from the air behind him.

  Marek Rymüt stood in the muddy grass and blinked up at the sky. The sparse, scudding rain dampened his bald head and made him grimace. His strange tattoos glimmered under a sheen of rain water.

  “Master Rymüt,” Willem said, taking his hand away from his sword.

  Marek tried to shake the wet from his voluminous robes and nodded in response. He took a couple of steps forward and finally glanced over the scene.

  “Send your man away,” the Thayan commanded.

  Willem turned to the foreman, but the grubby little man was already walking away at a brisk pace, his short legs bouncing him down a little hill. Willem smiled when the foreman lost his footing and slid the rest of the way down the hill on his backside. When he stood, covered in wet mud, he broke into a run and disappeared among a gang of workers loading lumber onto ox carts.

  “Difficult finding good people these days, isn’t it?” Marek said.

  Willem turned and traded smiles with the Thayan, who gestured to the canvas bundles.

  The two of them stepped closer to the line of corpses, and Marek said, “I do wish you’d put them in a tent or something. This incessant rain goes straight to my joints.”

  “I apologize, Master Rymüt,” Willem replied, “but we used all the canvas we had left to wrap the bodies.”

  Marek sighed and said, “Well, that was unnecessary, wasn’t it?”

  Willem looked over at the wizard, watched him wiggle his fingers as if stretching them, warming them up for—what? He’d seen musicians do the same thing.

  “The men were more comfortable wrapping them in something,” Willem said, leaving out the fact that he’d ordered it himself. He was uncomfortable with dead bodies just laying out in the open. He wondered why that could be. What did he care, really? “I can have them—”

  “No, no,” Marek interrupted. “No, it’s better we do it ourselves. If it’s true the men felt uncomfortable with the sight of their dead comrades, I suppose they’ll be even less comfortable with what’s about to become of them. If we compel them to help, you could have a mutiny on your hands before they have a chance to think twice.”

  “Mutiny …?”

  The Red Wizard laughed and said, “Really, Willem, my dear, you didn’t expect your rabble to like that their dead comrades are being put back to work alongside them.”

  Willem took a deep breath and said, “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  Truth be told, Willem didn’t actually care. When he thought about it, he couldn’t help feeling as though there was a time, long ago, when the thought of employing zombies, of having a hand in the desecration of the dead, when any sort of a hint of the use of slave labor, would have turned his stomach. Where he’d come from, in Cormyr, it simply wasn’t done.

  “I’m not in Cormyr anymore,” he said aloud, though he hadn’t intended to speak.

  Marek laughed again and said, “You’ve been out in the cold and wet too long, my boy. Or is it your young bride who’s causing you to talk to yourself? They say that after a time, married couples begin to resemble one another.”

  Willem shook his head.

  “Pardon?” the wizard prompted, and Willem winced at his irritated mien.

  “Shall we unwrap them?” Willem asked.

  Not waiting for an answer, he squatted next to one of the bundles, drew his dagger, and cut the twine that held it closed. Marek stood watching him as he pulled back the heavy, wet material to reveal the still features of a young man barely out of his teens. Though the men had washed his face, mud still clogged his nostrils and crusted in his eyelashes, holding his eyelids closed.

  “Sad, isn’t it?” Marek said.

  Willem didn’t look up at him. He could hear the sarcasm in the Red Wizard’s voice. Willem thought that if he turned and saw that Marek was smiling, he might become offended, and he just didn’t have the energy for that.


  “You look tired,” the wizard said. “You should get back to the city more often.”

  “I’m needed here,” Willem lied.

  “Of course you are,” Marek said, playing along.

  Willem went to the next bundle, and the next, as Marek Rymüt stood watching in silence. By the time he had removed the canvas from all fourteen of the men, he was soaking wet and covered with mud. The smell of the dead bodies mixed with the lake’s stench made him gag several times while he worked. After the first one, he stopped looking at their faces.

  When he was done, he stood and brushed the mud off his hands as best he could.

  “Come here, Willem,” Marek said.

  Willem walked over to the Thayan, who stood with his hand in a velvet sack he must have produced from a pocket while the senator was busy unwrapping the corpses.

  “Take these,” the Red Wizard said, pulling from the sack a handful of little black stones, “and place two in each of their mouths.” He nodded at the bodies, and Willem took the stones. He shifted them in his cupped hands. “Onyx,” Marek explained. “Two in each mouth.”

  Willem turned to go, but Marek reached out and grabbed him by the forearm. Willem flinched at his cold, clammy touch, and almost dropped the gemstones. Before he could speak, Marek’s other hand came up, and Willem didn’t quite have time to register the dagger before the blade bit—not too deeply—into the flesh of both his wrists.

  Willem hissed and again almost dropped the gems, but Marek let fall the dagger and held both his hands over Willem’s, squeezing them together. Pain made Willem’s breath catch in his throat, and he could feel the hot blood mixing with the scudding precipitation, which was cold enough to help soothe the pain. Marek stared down at his hands and began to babble in a language that made Willem’s ears ring. Willem started to shake, and though he could breathe again, he couldn’t speak.