Whisper of Waves

by Philip Athans

  For though the ship had been built for the king of Cormyr, it had been built by hands from Innarlith, and the gold from Cormyr would spend as well as any from the Second Quarter. The ship, perfect as she was, impressive as she was, enormous as she was, would make Fharaud’s reputation at last. He sighed at the thought that the rest of his life would be spent in the leisure of contentment and wealth, and to have done it with so fine a ship, a ship to be so proud of—Fharaud’s heart was near to bursting.

  Shaking himself, Fharaud broke his own reverie and went back to his visual inspection of the ship. The rigging was strong, the sailors manning it appeared capable, and the harbor pilot looked as content as such a man could while so deep in the trenches of his specialty.

  Fharaud stepped to the pilot’s side, not failing to note how stable the ship was in the water, and said, “You’ll be taking us straight away to the portal?”

  Sanject gave him a slightly irritated glance and said, “Aye.”

  Fharaud had known the answer but found himself desperate for conversation.

  “The crew,” he went on, “is performing to your satisfaction?”

  “Aye,” the man said again, and Fharaud was reminded of Ivar Devorast.

  He thought it possible that Devorast had been one of the people lined up along the quay to watch the great ship pull away, but perhaps he wasn’t. He had stayed behind simply because he was no sailor and knew that he would serve only limited function aboard. Other business had started to come in the closer they got to the launch of the great ship, and someone had to stay behind to begin those new projects, however small they seemed in the shadow of the mighty Cormyrean cog.

  Still, Fharaud couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps there had been a bit of fear at work as well. Though Ivar Devorast had never shown a lack of courage, he had also made his mistrust of the portal clear, and there had been accidents of late.

  “The portal,” Fharaud said to the harbor pilot. “Is everything …?”

  The pilot only barely glanced at him but said, “The item is ready, and I’ve used them before. The enchantment is of the highest quality, made by the finest native mage in Innarlith. You have nothing to worry about.”

  Of course, Fharaud did have something to worry about, and he knew it. Though ships had passed through portals to the Vilhon Reach and elsewhere many times before, there had been an increasing number of accidents, costing the lives of some of Innarlith’s better people, even a few senators. There were whispers of deliberate sabotage, mostly by the wizards—including the major Sanject had such confident in—whose handiwork had come into question. But nothing had ever been proved, and those ships had all been much, much smaller.

  Still, King Azoun expected a ship, and as Devorast had pointed out time and again during and before its construction, the ship could never be carried overland.

  Fharaud kept to the fo’c’sle, shaped with intent like the guard tower of a keep, battlements and all, for the half an hour or so it took the ship to reach the safety of open water. Sanject climbed the stairs, returning from a final round preparing the crew to enter the portal, and stepped to Fharaud’s side, facing forward. In his hands, the pilot held a wand of clear crystal tipped on each end with shining platinum. With a word he could use it to open the portal.

  “The vessel is ready, Master,” the pilot said. “Are you?”

  Fharaud saw the hint of scorn the pilot let show in his eyes but ignored it. He cleared his throat, nodded, and said, “Proceed.”

  The pilot held the wand up over his head and spoke a word that Fharaud thought sounded like it must have hurt his tongue to pronounce.

  The portal opened in front of them faster and closer to the end of the bowsprit than Fharaud had expected, and he took a few steps back despite himself. The wind blew in all directions at once, disrupted by the sudden hole in the air in front of them. The ring of purple magelight that outlined the enormous circle fought with the dull overcast of the day to give everyone and everything a sickly, unnatural, bluish cast. The sound of the wind in the sails, the creak of the ship so new it still had years of settling ahead of it, and the shouts of the sailors behind them made Fharaud’s ears ring.

  As it was, he almost didn’t hear Sanject ask, “You never told me, sir, what is her name?”

  Fharaud looked at the man, shook his head, and turned back to the portal just as the ship started to cross that preternatural threshold.

  “Sir?” the pilot shouted. “The vessel’s name?”

  Fharaud looked up, watched the circle of violet light pass directly over his head, and called to the pilot, “Everwind. Her name is Everwind.”

  Then they started to fall.

  The rumble and clatter of the passage through the portal grew to a deafening cacophony of sailors’ screams and something else like thunder or a wind so powerful its sound was like the disintegration of an entire city. The deck bucked hard, throwing Fharaud off his feet to sprawl onto his back on the hard deck planks. He saw a sailor fly past right over him, arms pinwheeling and his face a mask of mortal terror. It was the first time in Fharaud’s life that he’d ever seen the face of a man who knew he was going to die.

  “No,” Fharaud managed to utter through lungs that were constricting in his chest, then the ship pitched violently forward.

  Something drew his eyes to the aft of the vessel and Fharaud watched the brilliant purple glow of the portal edge dwindling. At first he thought the ship was pulling fast away from it. An instant later, though, he knew the truth: the portal was closing.

  “Wait!” he shouted and reached out with both hands hoping to find something, anything, to hold on to.

  His right hand found a rope and he tried to pull himself up to a sitting position, aided by another sudden forward lurch of the ship. He squeezed the rope for all he was worth, and he sat up right next to the rail on the forward, starboard side of the ship.

  A huge explosion of grinding wood and shattering glass burst behind him, sending shards and splinters onto his head and back. The portal closed around the back of the ship, shearing off the aft tenth of her and the realization of where that left them flashed through Fharaud’s panic-stricken mind. They would never hold water with the aft end off. Everwind would go down and go down fast.

  Down.

  That word took on new meaning as Fharaud whipped his head forward when the ship pitched again, even more violently.

  The bow turned down and Fharaud slid forward on the deck, but only so far, as he managed to keep his grip on the rigging. He found himself looking down, straight down, at the surface of a wine dark sea a hundred feet below them.

  He couldn’t have explained how he’d judged the height, but something primal in him mixed with a naval architect’s background in the tangible weights and measures gave him that figure: one hundred feet.

  The ship rode a torrent of the Lake of Steam’s sulfurous water down that whole hundred feet. Sailors screamed as they were torn from the deck by the twisting, lurching, chaotic fall made all the worse for the enormous sail that took on some of the air, slowed them, then released it and turned them sharply—utterly useless and out of control, it couldn’t save them from the impact.

  Fharaud closed his eyes and held his breath but couldn’t hold it long enough. He let the breath out but kept his eyes closed. More screams, the crack of wood, the whip of rope torn loose from fittings, the cries of a dying vessel filled his ears.

  When they hit the water Fharaud tried to scream, but every bit of air he had in him was driven out by an impact so violent and sudden that his teeth cracked in his head, one bone after another snapped like so many dried twigs, and his life became a mad maelstrom of pain, screaming, suffocating, and defeat. Everwind exploded around him and he was in the water before fickle Tymora blessed him with unconsciousness.

  18

  16 Alturiak, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  With the aid of half a dozen unseen servants, Marek Rymüt played mi
dwife to a hundred hatchling firedrakes.

  Hour after blood- and slime-soaked hour they came, one egg after another opening with a wet crack to reveal the writhing, already snarling form of the mutant dragon inside it. The babies were hatched with teeth and were born hungry. Marek ran out of piglets only three hours into the day. He’d brought a hundred of them, one for each egg he expected to hatch that day, but he was surprised to find that even the newborn firedrakes could eat more than one piglet. In fact, the black lizard-beasts, their fine scales shining in the torchlight like black patent leather, could take one piglet in three bites.

  “Better get more pigs, my friend,” the great black wyrm Insithryllax chided around a rumbling laugh, “before they turn on you.”

  “Well,” Marek replied, panting, dragging another newborn firedrake out of the remains of its broken egg, “perhaps I’ll get lucky and they’ll turn on their parents first.”

  The black dragon laughed again and said, “Trust me, Marek, that wouldn’t be lucky for anyone here.”

  To emphasize his point, Insithryllax let a drop of his caustic spittle fall to the floor at his feet. The acid ate through a thick piece of broken egg shell, then the flagstone floor and the rock underneath, in less time than it took for Marek to blink once.

  Though he would have enjoyed a bout of banter with the dragon, Marek went back to his work. A great deal of effort had been put into accelerating his breeding program, and the black firedrakes needed time to mature, and time for training, before they could be delivered. He had no time, and no firedrakes, to lose.

  The older generations of black firedrakes packed along the walls of the great underground chamber and looked on while their little brothers and sisters were born. Marek did his best to ignore the hungry looks in their eyes. One of the reasons he’d begun to breed so many at a time, augmenting the black dragon’s potency and the egg-laying capabilities of the firedrake females with spells, was that he knew he’d lose a few in the first tenday or so. The firedrakes would eat one or two, then the older blacks would take as many as a dozen of the runts. Blood would fill the room long after the last egg hatched.

  Having run out of food for the newborns, Marek knew he had only one recourse and that was to accelerate that natural process as well.

  The black firedrake he pulled out of its egg was heavy, and it looked at the Red Wizard with a dangerous gleam in its eye, so Marek knew that one would live. He cast about him, eggs pressing in on all sides, and scooped up a handful of the slimy yellow tissue that wrapped the growing reptiles inside their shells. He pressed the handful of slime into the newborn’s mouth and it took the protein in hungrily. As Marek searched the floor around him for a more substantial meal, he instructed the unseen servants to do the same. All around him handfuls of yolk sacs were offered up by invisible hands to eagerly snapping jaws.

  The adult female drakes, their red scales shining with the vile-smelling moisture that filled the air, hissed and snapped from the periphery. The smell was starting to excite them and was having the same effect on their black offspring.

  Marek finally found what he was looking for and quickly rattled off a simple spell that sent bolts of blue-violet energy ripping into the still-soft scales of a smallish newborn, one he thought looked weak enough to do without. The spell killed the black firedrake, and Marek dragged it to the creature he’d just delivered. Four others of the stronger newborns fell on their slain sister and fought over every last strip of bloody flesh.

  The same began to happen all over the chamber and Marek, for the first time in a while, felt the icy tendrils of fear tickling at the edges of his consciousness. It wasn’t a feeling he relished.

  “Insithryllax….” he said, looking up at the dragon and at the same time calling to mind a spell.

  “Go,” the dragon said. “I will settle things, but you’ll lose more than I know you’re hoping to.”

  Marek looked around at the hellish birthing chamber, the older black and adult red firedrakes were moving in slowly, but he could see in the corded muscles of their powerful legs the inevitability of dozens and dozens of feral pounces.

  “This won’t do,” the Red Wizard said, frustration holding the fear at bay at least for the moment.

  “It’s too crowded in here,” the great black rumbled.

  Marek nodded, looked Insithryllax in the eye, and said, “I’ll send for you when I’ve found a bigger lair.”

  The dragon nodded and Marek cast a spell that got him out of there half a heartbeat before all hell broke loose.

  19

  19 Alturiak, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR)

  FIRST QUARTER, INNARLITH

  In what was left of his pain-addled mind, Fharaud made a list of things he had lost:

  Everwind.

  The ship was utterly destroyed. Hardly any two planks were still nailed together when the Cormyrean ship that had been waiting for them in the Vilhon Reach dragged the few bodies, and even fewer survivors, from the unforgiving sea.

  Fharaud, or so he was told tendays later when he first regained consciousness, had been “lucky”—that’s how the priest of Waukeen in Arrabar had put it: lucky—in that he had been wrapped in ropes that remained tied to a larger piece of wreckage and so had been dragged up and out of the water. They’d found him lashed to his makeshift raft and at first thought he was dead, so grievous were his wounds and so shallow his breathing.

  The Cormyreans had dropped the survivors in Arrabar and buried the dead at sea. Ayesunder Truesilver, a Cormyrean naval officer of some note, had been aboard the ship that Everwind was supposed to have met. He’d written a short letter and tucked it into one of Fharaud’s pockets. When he regained some sense in the temple of the Merchant’s Friend one of the acolytes had read it aloud to him:

  Master Fharaud,

  Please accept the best wishes of the Kingdom of Cormyr and our sincerest hope for your speedy and complete recovery.

  As the cog Everwind was still under your command and with a pilot from Innarlith at the helm, we must consider her to have been scuttled in your possession. In the interest of time and the proper maintenance of His Majesty’s Fleet, Cormyr shall look elsewhere for her ships and shall consider no balance owed to you.

  Regrets,

  Ayesunder Truesilver, Harbormaster

  And that brought him to:

  His Family Fortune.

  There was hardly a silver piece left.

  Everwind had not been built from the pocket of King Azoun IV but from gold and collateral of Fharaud’s family fortune. His parents had left him with a sizeable trust, and with that he had built his business, all the while holding back enough to live on and to pay his modest staff.

  He had gambled it all on Everwind.

  Why shouldn’t he have? The ship was the finest afloat. He and Devorast had outdone the finest shipbuilders in Faerûn, if not the whole of Toril. The purse and honor of King Azoun IV was without question. Fharaud had been mere hours from delivering the ship and coming into possession of chest after chest of Cormyrean gold. Instead, the gold had returned to Marsember with Ayesunder Truesilver, and it would not be coming back.

  He had proven himself unworthy of it, after all, and so much for …

  His Reputation.

  From the moment word reached Innarlith that Everwind had been lost, everyone from whom he’d borrowed gold or goods, every enemy he’d ever made, every craftsman who thought he was owed a little extra for his effort, came to call on the business he’d left behind.

  Though Devorast had done an admirable job of holding them at bay, by the time Fharaud returned to Innarlith, carried on a stretcher from the seemingly endless, agonizing carriage ride south from Arrabar, he had simply been picked clean, and people he thought were his friends seemed to have forgotten his name.

  He was the man who lost the Cormyrean king’s gold, the fool who launched a ship and sank it the same day, who had built a ship too big for the portal, or so they said, because he wanted to impress a foreign
king.

  All he was left with was the little room that had been his office but into which Devorast had moved a bed and a scattering of his possessions—enough barely to live on. Alone and an invalid he had lost even …

  The Following Parts of his Body:

  His right leg, right arm, right eye, and right ear.

  Fharaud felt like half a man, and in almost literal terms, he was. The priests in Arrabar had healed him enough to keep him alive, but to do more they wanted gold. Even that soon after the loss of Everwind, the priests—all savvy entrepreneurs in their own right—started to realize that Fharaud had no gold, certainly not enough for that sort of clerical attention.

  They wrapped him up and put him on a carriage, and by the time he got back to Innarlith, there was nothing to pay for healing there either, and there he was left.

  Every day was a long stretch of agonizing torment. The constant pain was so all-consuming there were times when he could feel his mind slipping away and would come back to his senses only hours, even days later, drooling, panting, screaming, tied to his bed and watched over by the one person who hadn’t abandoned him.

  “I don’t deserve this,” he said to Ivar Devorast on the two hundred and fortieth day after the loss of Everwind.

  Devorast looked him in the eye and shrugged.

  Though it made his head virtually explode with agony to do so, Fharaud laughed. He didn’t understand what Devorast meant by that shrug any more than he understood his own words.

  He didn’t deserve what?

  To be ruined, to be maimed, or to be alive?

  Maybe he didn’t deserve any of those things.

  20

  28 Alturiak, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Willem could tell his mother didn’t like the house. Still, she knew enough not to embarrass him in front of the master builder. The look on her face when she first stepped into the confines of the dark, narrow townhouse on the eastern edge of the Second Quarter was one of polite disappointment.