Whisper of Waves

by Philip Athans

  “You’ve heard of him,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Hasn’t everyone with a pair of ears in Innarlith?” Willem replied. “He has the ear of the ransar, doesn’t he, and friends in all the right places.”

  Halina shrugged.

  “And you’re only now telling me this,” he said, “that you’re the niece of Marek Rymüt.”

  She smiled and shrugged again.

  Willem returned her smile, and his hands went to her body again. They kissed and for a moment, perhaps, Willem felt guilty for what he was about to do, but then the moment passed.

  He drew away from her gently and said, “Perhaps we shouldn’t meet like this again …”

  Her face became a mask of hurt and confusion, changing in a way only a woman’s could.

  “Until I meet your uncle, I mean,” he said, holding her gently by the back of the neck and drawing her in for another kiss. “I should meet him. We should be introduced to him as … as a couple. To him, at least, if not all of Innarlith.”

  Her face changed again, just as fast and just as completely. She thought he had said what he wanted her to think he’d said, and the look on her face made his skin crawl.

  “Oh, Willem,” she said, a tear appearing at the corner of her eye, “my love.”

  Then they kissed and touched each other just long enough for him to think of a reasonable excuse to ask her to leave.

  15

  5 Uktar, the Year of Shadows (1358 DR)

  FIRST QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Fharaud let the brandy sit on his tongue for as long as he could take it, then he swallowed loudly and smiled. He looked over at Devorast, hunched over a drawing table, his own snifter of brandy sitting untouched on the table next to him.

  “Really, Ivar, you should try it,” Fharaud said, pausing to take another sip of the potent liquid. “It’s really among man’s most extraordinary creations.”

  Devorast made a notation on the drawing in front of him. His handwriting was so small Fharaud shouldn’t have been able to read it from where he sat, but it was so precise he found he could make out the words: “Adjust beam angle up one eighth of one degree.”

  One eighth of one degree, Fharaud thought, then said, “I doubt the boatwrights’ tools will allow for so fine a measurement.”

  Devorast looked up at him with an expression Fharaud had come to know too well. It was one of fulfilled expectations at having been confronted with some inadequacy in the world, irritation at having once again to suffer at such a deficiency’s hands, and a determination to set the problem right.

  The next note read: “Refine tools—again—to achieve proper angle.”

  “You know,” Fharaud said, “you could make a fortune on the tools you’ve invented alone.”

  “I’m not interested in tools,” Devorast replied, “only what I can build with them.”

  “A contradiction?” Fharaud asked, just to make conversation. “It takes tools to make tools after all, and isn’t a ship but a tool men use to ply the seas and not an end to itself?”

  Devorast didn’t take the bait, but then why would he?

  “People don’t like you, Ivar,” Fharaud said, the brandy—his second glass—loosening his tongue. “They think you’re arrogant and closed-minded.”

  “A mind isn’t something to be left open,” the younger man said, “so that just anything might crawl in and take up residence there.”

  Fharaud laughed. He had come to treasure those rare bursts of sincere humor and simple, if unsociable, wisdom from Ivar Devorast.

  “Ah, Ivar,” said Fharaud, “I’d take you under my wing if I thought I had a wing big enough.”

  “You have taught me much,” Devorast admitted.

  That made Fharaud sit up straighter in his chair. The air was cold in the little room he called his office, the breeze coming from the north unusually cool but characteristically damp. Neither of them had bothered to get up and tend the little wood stove, and the fire had gone to slowly blackening orange coals.

  “By all the gods above us, Ivar,” Fharaud said, “I do believe you just paid me a compliment.”

  Devorast, try as Fharaud was sure he was trying to hide it, smiled at that, then glanced at the brandy.

  “Go ahead, my boy,” Fharaud urged. “Drink up. It might loosen the reigns you keep on yourself.”

  Devorast shook his head, the smile fading.

  “We’re ready to build it, aren’t we?” Fharaud asked with a nod at the stack of drawings in front of Devorast.

  “You should name it,” Devorast said, thumbing through the drawings. “It’s good.”

  “High praise indeed, my boy. High praise indeed,” Fharaud replied. “Not yet, though. I prefer to see her in the flesh before I name her. She’s like a baby, you know.”

  He paused to see some reaction from Devorast, but there was none.

  “You know when you conceive a child,” Fharaud pressed on, “or at least you know when you might have.” He winked at Devorast, who didn’t look up to see it. “Anyway, you can see it growing in the womb, see it being built in whatever way it is that a baby is built by a woman.”

  “But you don’t name it,” Devorast cut in, “until it’s born.”

  “You don’t name it until it’s born,” Fharaud concurred.

  Devorast sighed, and leaned back from the drawing table, regarding the plans down the length of his nose.

  “Yes, I know,” Fharaud said, having seen the look too many times already.

  “It’s too big,” Devorast said. “It’s too big and it’s too far away.”

  “The client wanted it big, and the client asked that it be built here,” Fharaud said. Devorast shook his head. “It will be fine, Ivar.”

  “It makes no sense,” Devorast said. “Why would Cormyr have us build a ship for them, here, on the shore of the Lake of Steam?”

  “I wasn’t always a used-up, bitter old boatwright, my boy,” Fharaud joked. “I was a fine salesman in my day.”

  Devorast ignored the remark and said, “There’s no way to get this ship from here to Cormyr. There is no navigable waterway to connect us, or the Sword Coast and beyond for that matter, to the Sea of Fallen Stars. This ship is too big to be taken overland. The hull wouldn’t stand it. It would get to the Vilhon Reach in tatters.”

  “She would get to the Vilhon Reach in tatters,” Fharaud corrected.

  Devorast ignored that too and said, “It’s folly.”

  “There are ways to move a ship besides through water, Ivar. We’ve discussed this.”

  Devorast sighed again and said, “I know, I know. These magical portals. You know I don’t trust them.”

  “I don’t know why,” Fharaud said. He took another sip of brandy then stood, stretching limbs that were stiff in the cold air. “We have a long road ahead of us before we have to worry about that anyway. The ship still has to be built, and that will take a year and a half or more. Perhaps two years.”

  Devorast said, “Of course, but not to plan ahead for its delivery is irresponsible.” He shook his head, then glanced again at the brandy.

  Fharaud drained his own glass, coughed when the brandy burned the back of his throat, then set his glass on the table next to Devorast.

  “Build me a grand ship, Ivar,” Fharaud said, reaching out to take the younger man’s untouched snifter, “and I’ll see it delivered to Azoun’s navy.”

  Fharaud downed the brandy in one searing gulp, ignoring the look of doubt from Ivar Devorast, though the look was no less searing.

  16

  9 Mirtul, the Year of the Serpent (1359 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Willem Korvan had a very busy year.

  In that time he continued to rise in the ranks of the office of the master builder. He hadn’t quite become Inthelph’s “right hand” as Halina had predicted, but he had managed to make himself indispensable.

  Most of the time he succeeded by being close at hand. There was not a single day that
went by, even those days Halina hoped he would set aside entirely for her, that he wasn’t at the wall or at the home or offices of the master builder. When an assignment came up he always volunteered, until it became something of a joke among the master builder’s staff. Finally Inthelph stopped asking for volunteers and rewarded Willem ahead of time with the plum assignments.

  Few in the master builder’s staff complained. The few who were not quite friends of Willem’s knew that Willem had too many friends. No one got in his way by choice, though Willem never detected a sense of fear or intimidation in anyone around him. He hadn’t set out to make anyone afraid of him, after all. He just wanted to be indispensable, and he was. He wanted to be liked, and he was. His casual manner and disarming good looks carried him far in the social circles of Innarlith, and he found himself attending an increasing number of posh gatherings and official functions, sometimes with Halina on his arm and sometimes not.

  For her part, Halina continued to be a grateful and attentive lover, and over the months they saw a great deal of each other, though still he had not met her important uncle. She tried time and again to introduce them to each other, and Willem had developed quite a bag of tricks to help him dodge the meeting over and over again. He was delighted, but also a bit disappointed, that Halina never seemed to notice the intent behind his sudden need for a fresh drink, a breath of air, or the uncontrollable urge to whisk her off to a quiet bedchamber away from the guests and the looming specter of her uncle.

  There were two reasons that Willem didn’t want to meet Marek Rymüt. The first was the least of the two, but one he still couldn’t deny, at least to himself. The promise implicit in their meeting, the promise he’d made to Halina, would turn an hourglass. When that sand ran out, the whole of Innarlith would expect there to be a wedding, and though the feel of her skin still thrilled him, and he time and again found himself telling her things he’d promised himself he’d tell no one, he couldn’t bring himself to marry the girl.

  She was the bright spot of true happiness in an otherwise difficult and nervous existence. All the time Willem’s mind spun with plots and schemes and the constant push and pull of social climbing. The wall reconstruction went slowly, ran frighteningly over budget, and one senator after another stepped forward to oppose it, to oppose even the retention of Inthelph as the city’s master builder.

  How could he marry Halina Rymüt-Sverdej, much less meet her uncle, while things were still so uncertain?

  Marek Rymüt had become one of those sunlike men, those bright centers around which others rotate in fixed orbits of favors and secrets. With any hint that the project he’d become so integral a part of was proceeding under any but the most ideal circumstances would put Willem in too precarious a position. Would someone like Rymüt support a young man who some senators were already saying was helping to bankrupt the city? Certainly not.

  The wall would have to be finished before he could meet Halina’s uncle. She would just have to wait. They both would.

  Willem was torn between wanting the project to continue forever that it might never be that last passed hurdle before he’d have to marry Halina and wanting it to be done and done well so that his position in the city would finally be fixed and strong. Though Marek Rymüt was an important man, he was Thayan. He was a foreigner, and so was his niece. Could Willem attain the position he wanted in Innnarlith if he was a foreigner married to a foreigner? There was a better girl out there, wasn’t there? Was there?

  All thoughts of returning to Cormyr, where he would never be anything but a boarding house owner’s son, had long since fled him. He meant to stay in Innarlith. He meant to buy himself a seat on the senate. He meant to keep going, all the way to the ransar’s Palace of Many Spires.

  He was still young, and there was time. Still, he could afford few if any mistakes.

  Not only Halina, but Thenmun had begun to show himself as a possible mistake.

  Willem had put his trust in the young lieutenant, and for a few months it seemed as though that trust was well placed, but then the senators started to whisper, and those holes in the master builder’s social armor—tiny as they were—were revealed. Thenmun had started to get ideas, and like Ptolnec before him, he started to identify mistakes.

  Many sleepless nights of hand wringing and sweating gave Willem a final answer for his problem with Thenmun—or more appropriately, his two problems with Thenmun. The first was Thenmun himself. The lieutenant was too smart, too well-liked, and had scented the master builder’s blood in the water. Even if Willem stopped making the mathematical errors that plagued him and the project itself, the lieutenant wouldn’t stop until he had built a career on the ruins of both Willem’s and Inthelph’s.

  He couldn’t remember actually making the decision to kill Thenmun, but one day he found himself researching poisons.

  The second problem was the fact that Willem was indeed making one critical miscalculation after another in regards to the renovation of the walls. Confused, over his head with the mathematics required, Inthelph was no help at all. Willem’s greatest fear had been that his mentor would prove incompetent and a bad teacher, and both had proven true, though the master builder was still Willem’s strongest link to the city-state’s elite. Willem would need to complete the wall, and that wall would have to stand.

  Willem went to see Ivar Devorast for the first time since they’d parted ways in Cormyr a tenday after Thenmun first fell ill from the poison. Willem kept the visit brief and friendly—and they were friends after all, to the extent that anyone could be friends with Ivar Devorast.

  The second visit came the morning after Thenmun was found running naked through the streets, foaming at the mouth for all the world like a rabid dog. The lieutenant was stripped of his rank and confined to a sanitarium on the edge of the Fourth Quarter that very day. While Thenmun was being tied to a bed, Willem asked Devorast for his help.

  Devorast didn’t resist or even ask for gold, though Willem could tell Devorast was in need of a coin or two by the way he lived. Having lived with the man and seen him in school, Willem knew how to appeal to Ivar Devorast. He presented Devorast with a problem. How to shore up the wall in such a way as to double its strength, to accommodate twice the number of men and twice the number of artillery pieces, while using as much of the existing structure as possible.

  Devorast went to work quickly and though it took two months to copy his wild, almost indecipherable drawings with their conversely precise notations, Willem submitted the plans as his own and heard no complaint from Devorast.

  The plans were extraordinary, with every condition not only met but exceeded to the degree that the master builder himself had to study the plans for a full month before he even understood the extent of their genius.

  Thenmun was eventually released into the care of his mother, who cared for him in all the ways she had when he was a newborn infant, and no one ever suspected that it was poison that had ruined his mind, much less that that poison had been administered by Deputy Master Builder Willem Korvan.

  Work began in earnest on the wall the first of Mirtul, using plans that no one but Willem and one other knew were devised in total by an unknown foreign shipwright by the name of Ivar Devorast.

  17

  23 Kythorn, the Year of the Turret (1360 DR)

  FIRST QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Fharaud stood at the butt end of the bowsprit and did his best to strike an inspiring pose. All around him, the skeleton crew of sailors went on about their business oblivious to him, and the crowd that had gathered along the quay was more intent on the ship itself than the tiny figure of its architect standing behind a tangle of rigging so high above their heads.

  After only a few heartbeats, Fharaud gave up on being even a small part of the unfolding spectacle and returned his attention to the matter at hand.

  The launching had gone smoothly, the massive vessel settling straight and true in the shallow water at the end of the ramp. They had had to dredge for days to all
ow for the huge ship’s draft, and even then Devorast had calculated less than a foot between the keel and the muddy bottom of the Lake of Steam. Fortunately, the water deepened dramatically only a hundred yards or so out, and the ship was in deeper water in no time.

  Fharaud thought he heard a cheer rise from the watching crowd, but it might have been a flock of gulls. Word had gone round the First Quarter that the great ship was to launch that day, and of the hundreds who’d come to watch, Fharaud knew the majority had no love for the ship, it having been built to strengthen a foreign king, regardless of the work and gold it had provided the First Quarter over the past eighteen months since construction had begun.

  Sanject, the harbor pilot who’d come aboard not only to take the ship out past the piers but into the portal itself, barked a few orders to the sailors, who were unfazed by the man. It seemed to Fharaud as if the pilot was telling the men to do what they all knew had to be done and were in the process of doing anyway.

  The crew looked too small, and not just in that there weren’t enough of them, but the mast, the deck itself, the rigging, everything about the great ship dwarfed them. Though Fharaud had been responsible for as much of its design as Devorast had, the shipbuilder knew that he’d never have been able to build so magnificent a ship without his young assistant.

  And the ship was magnificent indeed.

  Wind billowed into the square sail that stood two hundred feet on a side and the ship turned. Fharaud stepped to the rail again and looked down at the water, then back the length of the ship, taking in the particulars of the turn. She was as agile as Devorast had promised her to be, and Fharaud found his mouth hanging agape at the reality of it.

  The crew began to settle into a rhythm as the ship took sail northwest, leaving the city of Innarlith spread out behind them. In the dim glow of the overcast dawn, lights flickered in windows and Fharaud thought the city looked like a crowd attending some play or revel at an amphitheater sized for the gods. Indeed, it felt as if they were all watching him.