Whisper of Waves

by Philip Athans

  Willem, having missed the majority of the man’s speech, had some difficulty understanding his point. From the looks on the faces of the commoners filling the square, though, the speech stirred their passions in a most unsettling way. While puzzling over how the speaker thought his audience of tradesmen and laborers might not struggle with words like “superincumbent,” the man’s parting words were lost on him. Only when the next of the men on the makeshift stage clapped the speaker on the back and said, “Thank you, Marek Rymüt, friend of all common men, for your stirring words,” did Willem start to pay very, very close attention.

  29

  30 Nightal, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR)

  A LITTLE UNIVERSE SOMEWHERE ON THE

  ASTRAL PLANE

  Marek Rymüt stood on an unnamed hill overlooking an unnamed lake in the center of an unnamed valley. The terrain was much like any of the subtropical climes of his native Toril, though in some ways it was a bit more angular. The hill on which he stood might have been called a plateau, so flat was its top, and in the distance rose red-brown rock formations that cut the thick air like serrated knives. The stream that fed the lake from a mountain spring at the very edge of the pocket dimension cut through the landscape in a series of straight lines punctuated by almost right angles.

  The sky was a mass of high clouds that roiled like milk spilled in water, churned by winds Marek had still not even begun to sort out. Below the level of the clouds, the air was thick with the black firedrakes he’d finally been able to portal in from the stinking, overcrowded hatchery beneath the wary streets of Innarlith. The creatures reveled in the freedom and elbow room, and thanks as much to the abundance of native fauna, had largely stopped eating each other.

  A particular favorite of the firedrakes were the fat, six-foot-long worms Marek had taken to calling Fury’s Grubs. They seemed harmless enough and at first failed even to take notice of Marek and even Insithryllax as they first explored, then with great violence of spell and acid, tamed the little nugget of Fury’s Heart.

  Though Insithryllax was late, Marek hardly noticed, he was so caught up in the spectacle of the black firedrakes at play. When the great black wyrm finally emerged from a flash of brilliant red light a thousand feet in the air above his head, Marek didn’t bother to feign impatience.

  “Apologies for my lateness,” the dragon said when he had settled with a ground-jarring boom on the hill beside Marek. “I know you have plans for the evening and peasant uprisings to run.”

  “Bah,” Marek scoffed. “That strike? An amusing diversion is all. A chance to draw certain people out of the crowd of Innarlith’s poor excuse for an intelligentsia. It only lasted a day, and I think the poor, downtrodden commoner is even commoner for the experience.”

  “So then just the odd society ball tonight?”

  Marek shrugged and said, “Another year gone, eh, friend? And a busy one at that.”

  “Indeed,” the dragon replied.

  “So, then,” said Marek, “what is it you needed to show me?”

  “It appears we were not as thorough in our cleansing of this place as we’d thought,” Insithryllax said.

  “Do tell,” Marek prompted with a raised eyebrow.

  “In the lake,” said the dragon.

  Marek studied the calm, dark surface of the small body of water. They had given it only cursory attention, true, and Marek didn’t even know how deep it was.

  “Surely it’s too small to contain anything of consequence,” he said, even then knowing he must be wrong.

  “I’ve only caught a glimpse of them myself,” the dragon said. “The drakes are too like their mothers to go close to water. Still, one of them strayed too near, and not a trace of it has washed up.”

  “Show me,” Marek said.

  As the dragon took wing, Marek closed his eyes against the rush of wind-driven dust and considered the possibilities. If there was something living in the lake that was big enough and mean enough to kill one of the black firedrakes, it might be worth keeping—if it could be tamed, magically or otherwise.

  Insithryllax swooped down into a copse of the native trees—spindly, skeletal things that bore a fruit Marek was currently harvesting for its potent poison—and came back up into the air with one of the fat, squirming grubs writhing in his talons.

  A few of the firedrakes left off their aimless soaring and swooped down to follow their father, one of them even taking tentative snaps in the direction of the grub. When Insithryllax flew past the shore of the little lake, the firedrakes broke off and climbed, avoiding flying over the water.

  Insithryllax dropped the giant worm over the lake and Marek half expected at least one firedrake to swoop in and try to grab it. The best any of them did was level a perturbed glance at their father for wasting so fine and fat a worm.

  Having steeled himself to witness a great splash, Marek was startled when the splash came altogether too early. The disturbance in the water was not caused by the grub falling in, but by something else bursting out.

  It was, for lack of a more educated perspective, a great fish, long like an eel. Fins flapped like sideways wings at the corners of its wide mouth, which opened so fully under the falling worm Marek thought he might be able to step into the thing’s gullet without tipping his head. A jagged row of swordlike teeth latched onto the worm and popped it like a sausage, sending the grub’s yellow-green blood pouring into its mouth.

  Flashes of blue light flickered across its spiny fins and reflected off its slimy wet scales. Before it fell back under the water, graceful arcs of blue-white lightning leaped from its body and dug into the dying grub, lighting it from within.

  All at once the beast was gone.

  Marek, grinning, couldn’t resist the temptation to applaud, and was clapping still, and chuckling, when the great black dragon once again alit beside him.

  “Well?” Insithryllax said.

  “Lovely!” Marek gushed. “Oh, I’ll have to come back with all the appropriate spells.”

  “You mean to tame them?” asked the dragon.

  “Certainly,” Marek replied. “The black firedrakes are a wonder, and now that our little breeding program is finally fully underway they’ll surely be everything I’d hoped for, but these demon-fish … We do live in a coastal city after all, and one never knows.”

  It seemed to Marek as if the dragon had something more to say but was reluctant.

  “That can’t trouble you, my friend,” Marek said. “They’re just fish. Giant, electrical fish, yes, but fish just the same.”

  “Monsters,” said the dragon, an edge in his voice Marek didn’t remember ever hearing before. “Monsters that can be charmed.”

  Marek heaved a great, dramatic sigh and said, “That spell was spent a long, long time ago, my friend.”

  The dragon met Marek’s comforting gaze and after a heartbeat or two seemed satisfied.

  “So,” Insithryllax said, his voice back to normal, “have you settled on a name?”

  “For the fish?” Marek asked.

  “No, damn you,” the dragon huffed, “not the gods-cursed fish. The … whatever this place is.”

  “Technically, it’s a ‘pocket dimension,’ and yes, I think I have,” Marek replied. “I’m going to call it the Land of One Hundred and Thirteen.”

  The dragon puzzled over that for some time while Marek watched the water for any sign of demonic fish, but saw none.

  “One hundred and thirteen?” Insithryllax finally asked.

  “It was the number of days it took us to tame the place,” Marek replied. “It’s been one hundred and thirteen days since I pulled it from Fury’s Heart and made it my own. One hundred and thirteen days later, we made our last discovery.”

  Marek knew that the dragon didn’t necessarily believe the denizens of the little lake would really be the last discovery, but still the black firedrakes were being born, were feeding on things other than themselves, and only a handful had been lost in those last hundred and thirteen da
ys. At least the bulk of their work had been done.

  “The Land of One Hundred and Thirteen,” the black dragon repeated. “I like the sound of it.”

  Marek smiled and stood with his friend for a while longer before once again crossing the endless space between the Land of One Hundred and Thirteen and the hard reality of Innarlith.

  30

  5 Ches, the Year of the Helm (1362 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Meykhati and his wife looked ridiculous. They wore matching robes that Willem supposed were terribly expensive. Both of them droned on and on all evening about how the garments were imported from Shou Lung and “the Celestials” wore them at their most sacred rites and observances. None of their guests inquired as to the details of those rites. No one asked them what they meant by calling people from Shou Lung “Celestials”—and Willem could hear the capital C in the twist of their lips when they said it. No one mentioned that they were far, far away from Shou Lung and the Celestials’ mysterious rites and observances and so they looked foolish and out of place in their own home. No one said any of that because to do so would have been rude, and to be rude to Meykhati and his wife would have been social suicide.

  All that being the case, Willem said to Meykhati’s wife, “The embroidery is astonishing. Such workmanship….”

  The woman beamed as if she had embroidered the thing herself and said, “Isn’t it? Isn’t it really? Can you just imagine the delicate little elfish fingers of those tiny Celestial women stitching away? Stitching and stitching. Could they even imagine, I wonder, that their exquisite handiwork would be enjoyed by people so far away?”

  “Yes,” Willem said, though he’d stopped listening at the word “elfish,” which was a twisted bit of usage the woman had obviously invented on the spot.

  Meykhati’s wife smiled at him, waiting for more.

  “Your taste is impeccable as always,” he obliged and was relieved to see that that was good enough.

  “Ah,” Meykhati himself cut in, “the Master Builder of Innarlith.”

  Willem watched Inthelph approach, smiling and nodding through all the tired greetings and pointless niceties. Not listening to Inthelph’s vapid comments on the host couple’s Shou robes, Willem let his eyes and his mind wander through the crowded parlor. Though he tried not to, he occasionally made eye contact with one of the other guests.

  There was Kurtsson, a well-known wizard from Vaasa. Meykhati had collected the exotic mage the way he collected exotic embroidered silk robes, exotic Shou vases, exotic engineers from Cormyr, and so on. Kurtsson’s toadying manner was well-suited to Meykhati and his wife’s little salon.

  In the corner, trying to appreciate a Impilturan etching, was Horemkensi, a charismatic enough man, native to Innarlith, and the eighteenth to hold the senate seat his old money family had purchased long, long ago. Willem wondered if Horemkensi really existed outside the circle of Meykhati and his wife’s pointless salon.

  Sitre was there too—and why wouldn’t she be there? Her hair was getting longer and she talked about it—how she cared for it, how long she’d been growing it—incessantly. A harsh and angry woman, Willem had barely spoken to her though he’d seen her time and again at Meykhati and his wife’s depressing salon.

  “Isn’t that right, Willem?”

  He looked down at the rug and saw the straight line around the border that revealed it as a fake. Meykhati told everyone—over and over again, in fact—that it was hand-carried from Zakhara on the back of an elephant, though it was probably made in a sweatshop in the Third Quarter, or maybe as far away as Arrabar.

  “Willem?”

  Even the fire in the fireplace looked false. Willem couldn’t feel any heat from it. He held out a hand toward it. Someone touched him on the shoulder.

  “Willem …”

  “Of course,” he found himself saying.

  Inthelph smiled at him, and so did Meykhati and his wife. They expected him to say something more.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been …”

  “He’s been working very hard,” Inthelph provided for him, to the vacant amusement of Meykhati and his wife.

  “It’s hardly work when you enjoy it as much as I do, Master Builder,” Willem said, then intentionally turned away before he could see Inthelph’s standard reaction.

  “So, Master Builder,” Meykhati’s wife said as she slid closer to Inthelph with a rustle of Shou silk, “please tell me you convinced her to come.”

  Willem smelled her first: something he couldn’t immediately put his finger on. Or was it even a smell? The air changed when she walked in. The atmosphere took on an effervescence, and the feeling scared him as much as it excited him.

  He staggered back one step when he saw her. Though young she was the kind of woman who took the wind out of a room only to fill it her own particular aether. Willem knew in an instant that she would be in control of the gathering for the rest of the evening, or at least as long as she wanted to be.

  Her physical form was easy enough to encompass in a glance and fine enough to remember forever with that one blink—dark hair, black really, and eyes to match but eyes that caught the light. Big eyes, round, perfect eyes, cheekbones high and symmetrical and a chin that no sculptor could have dared create from clay, and she had a neck so long it alone was worthy of worship. Any beggar on the street would call her a goddess, but it would take a genius to see the goddess in every inch of her. Her breasts, perfect. Her waist, perfect. The line of her back, her hips, and her long legs, perfect.

  Her open contempt of the gathering of sycophants and dilettantes, perfect.

  “Such a beautiful young woman,” Meykhati’s wife said. If she was trying to mask the crippling jealousy in her voice she failed miserably. “And only seventeen summers.”

  That number penetrated Willem’s consciousness only with great difficulty. Young, but already old in so many ways, and he had asked Halina to marry him. Why would that matter just then anyway?

  Willem closed his eyes and the room began to spin, or was that just his knees failing him?

  “It wasn’t the easiest thing to get her here,” Inthelph said, his voice tired and thick with the effort of being the father of a creature of perfect beauty.

  Gods, Willem thought, who had the master builder married to produce a child like that? She looks nothing like him.

  “Is that your daughter?” Willem asked.

  “Phyrea,” Inthelph answered. “You two finally meet.”

  “Finally,” Willem said.

  Phyrea, he repeated in his mind. Phyrea.

  She looked at the people in the room and didn’t mind that everyone could tell she didn’t like what she saw. Her eyes played over his for the space of a heartbeat and that was all the notice Willem felt he deserved from her.

  I’m going to marry Halina, he told himself.

  He didn’t believe it.

  “I hope you’ll have a chance to speak with her, Willem,” the master builder said.

  Willem nodded because all of a sudden he couldn’t speak.

  “What a lovely couple they would make,” Meykhati’s wife said.

  Willem wondered what she meant by that. But he’d never brought Halina to any of their salons.

  “Lovely, yes,” Meykhati agreed and Willem didn’t think for a second that they really meant he and Phyrea.

  “Really, my boy,” said the master builder. “You might be a … a steadying influence on her.”

  Willem looked around for a place to sit, but it would have been rude to sit when the host, his wife, and the master builder were standing.

  “Perhaps I should have introduced you to her before,” Inthelph said. Willem watched with growing horror and seething excitement as Inthelph turned and held out a hand to his exquisite daughter and said, “Phyrea, dear. Come. There’s someone I’ve been wanting you to meet.”

  The memory of the rest of that evening compressed into the brief moment during which they exchanged insincere
pleasantries. When she left early, he stayed only long enough to offer a smattering of good-byes then he sent word to Halina to meet him at the inn.

  31

  18 Tarsakh, the Year of the Helm (1362 DR)

  FIRST QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Ran Ai Yu, who had a difficult time with languages, struggled with the Common Tongue. For nearly a month she had made her way through the vile-smelling shanty-town that the westerners called Innarlith and had finally come to the shipyards of a man named Djeserka. The consonants were difficult for her to pronounce and they ignored their own families in favor of meaningless single names. Their traditions and their manners were hopelessly alien, but there she was, and she did her best to remain focused and calm.

  Before she could be properly announced, she stepped into the strangely appointed building and into the middle of a one-sided argument. The room smelled of sawdust and tar, with the occasional waft of sulfur from that accursed sea. The sound of a man’s voice echoed in the high rafters, bouncing from wall to ear to wall to ear. Even if she had been unable to understand any of the words he spoke, she would have known that the man named Djeserka was angry.

  The object of his anger, another white-skinned western man with big eyes and wild, unkempt hair the color of rust, stood simply taking it, but he was no underling, no servant. His manner bespoke power, but not necessarily power granted by title or force, but by an inner calm that assumed its mantle and held it close.

  Of what Djeserka was shouting, she understood only: “I know you … that … we have to … on the Weave, but that is a … of life. It’s a … of life not just for shipbuilders, but for any number of people who … any number of … Your … is … and I … you have more good ideas in a day than most men have in a year, if not a … but when you … those ideas by this narrow … you do a … to yourself as well as your patrons. And when I say patron, I … mean me, but those who hire our … and expect certain … And when those … depend on a ship being sent through a … then by Umberlee’s grace we’ll send the … thing through a … Now, I … that … not something you will be able to live with, so I’m afraid that, my … respect for our … friend Fharaud aside, I will have to ask you to consider yourself … and … this very … Now, good day to you, sir.”