Scream of Stone w-3

by Philip Athans

  He looked up and saw Devorast run away from him.

  “Ivar?” he called after the human.

  “Phyrea!” Devorast screamed into a wind-blown wave of rain.

  “Phyrea?” Hrothgar asked the human’s receding back.

  Hrothgar stood and thought for a moment, the cold making him think as slowly as he moved. Finally he started off after Devorast. The dwarf slipped a few times on his way around a bulge in the ground, and his ankle rolled painfully on a piece of broken lumber, but he eventually limped to Devorast’s side.

  The Cormyrean kneeled in the mud next to what Hrothgar thought at first was the twisted remains of a scaffold or some other wooden structure. Though there was no shortage of that all around them, Devorast knelt before a body.

  “Phyrea….” Hrothgar whispered. “She dead?”

  Devorast shook his head and Hrothgar almost sobbed, but then the girl moved and he gasped instead.

  “She’s alive,” the dwarf said, joining Devorast on the ground.

  Phyrea lay face up in water and mud. Her left leg was twisted behind her, her hip shattered. Her left arm bent at an abrupt angle that made it appear as though she had two elbows. Blood clouded the standing water. She breathed, but only with obvious difficulty. Exhales came followed by trickles of blood.

  “Phyrea,” Devorast whispered. “Why?”

  “Come,” said the dwarf. “We need to make a stretcher, and tie her nice and tight to it.”

  Devorast glanced at him and nodded, but he didn’t stand or show any sign that he was about to leave the dying girl’s side.

  Hrothgar took a deep breath and went to work.

  62

  30 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR)

  THE SISTERHOOD OF PASTORALS, INNARLITH

  One man held his ankles to the floor, two more held his hands, and the fourth kneeled on his chest, tangled a grubby hand in his hair, and cut him. Once, twice, then a third time. His own blood felt so hot it seemed to burn his face. When he opened his mouth to scream he could taste it.

  She held her baby’s head up, her soft, wispy hair in the palm of one hand. When she let the slight weight push her hand down, her baby’s neck gave no resistance. The infant was limp and still, her skin already going cold. A tear dropped onto the baby’s forehead and rolled down her cheek. Her dead eyes dry, it was left to her mother to cry for her.

  He screamed when his arm came away from his body, but not because of the pain. It didn’t even hurt, really, not like you’d think it would. He screamed because he knew that he would live the rest of his life without it. As young as he was, barely seven years old, he screamed from the horror or having been mutilated. Startled, perhaps even guilty at the sound of the boy’s scream, the dog took a better grip on the bleeding, disembodied limb, and ran away with it in his jaws. The boy screamed after it as his blood poured away onto the floor of his bedroom.

  She batted her face with her hands but succeeded only in burning her palms. The oil had had time to soak into her skin, and when her husband touched the torch to her face the burns dug deep. She took a breath to scream and seared her own lungs. She coughed and choked and writhed in blind agony. Her fear turned to anger, then there was no word for the emotions that exploded in her as her brain began to cook in her skull. She died a feral thing, overwhelmed by agony, chewing through her own tongue.

  The little girl took her last breath on the day after her ninth birthday. Dressed in her finest nightgown, on her back under bedclothes of the softest silk and goose down, the woman her mother hired to care for her holding her hand in a cold, dry, unwelcome grip, she stared up at the ceiling over her bed and wondered how long it would take her to die, and if she would find herself in another world. She knew she didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay home. She wanted to stay at Berrywilde. She didn’t care about the gods and their punishments and rewards. If her soul stayed home, could she find some way to make her mommy love her? She was still asking that question when she felt her heart stop. Before her vision fled her, she saw the nanny shrug, stand, and walk away.

  The woman’s face hovered in the air above her in a way that wasn’t natural, that wasn’t right. Her smile was the warmest thing she’d ever seen, and the light that shone from her perfect, glowing skin washed away the images of pain and torture and hopelessness. When she spoke, her lips didn’t move, but the words filled an empty space that brought the world of the living together with the world of the dead.

  Wake up, now, girl, the goddess said. You lived.

  Phyrea drew in a breath and held it. Her eyes stung and watered from a light that was at once blinding and muted. Pain lanced through her, shoving her into consciousness, warning her that she should awake and take stock of herself or die. She tried to sit up, but something held her down-a hand on her chest.

  “Easy there,” a familiar voice whispered.

  “Father?” she guessed, her voice coming to her own ears as a ragged, alien rasp.

  “Phyrea,” the man said. “Breathe deeply.”

  “Pristoleph,” she whispered, and her voice sounded almost like her own.

  She took a deep breath and smelled and tasted incense and sickness.

  She took another breath and the dull throb of pain subsided, replaced by jabbing pinpoints here and there-her hip, her arm, her head. She opened her eyes.

  “There you are,” Pristoleph said, his voice as soft as the look in his eyes. His hair waved like fire on his scalp, and the warmth of his hand in hers drove off the chill touch of death. “There you are.”

  She turned her head, doing her best to ignore the pain that accompanied any movement at all. She lay on her back on a narrow bed set against the rough brick wall of a room no bigger than one of the smaller closets in Berrywilde or Pristal Towers. No artwork adorned the walls, but there was a window with cobalt blue glass that bathed the room in a cool, suppressed light. A candle burned on a short chest of drawers, backlighting Pristoleph, who sat at her bedside on a stool.

  “What happened?” she asked, but even then the memories flooded back. “The canal,” she rasped before Pristoleph could answer.

  “Destroyed,” he told her, but she knew that. She’d seen it happen and had nearly been destroyed with it.

  “How?” she asked.

  “Devorast and that alchemist of his,” Pristoleph answered, and she shook her head. She didn’t care how the canal had been destroyed, she wanted to know how she’d lived, but as he went on she realized it didn’t matter. “He was afraid that it was going to be completed by someone else, that his vision was to be perverted by the Thayan and his cronies.”

  “Ivar?” she whispered, and a tear came unbidden to the corner of her eye.

  Pristoleph sagged a little, in the face and in the body, and his hair looked less like fire.

  “He’s alive,” her husband said. “He brought you here. Devorast and the dwarf.”

  Phyrea tried to nod.

  “He saved me?” she said. It didn’t seem possible-hadn’t she gone there to save him? Or had she gone there to die with him?

  Pristoleph nodded and said, “Why, Phyrea? I thought you safe at Berrywilde.”

  She shook her head in an effort to tell him that she didn’t know why, and that she wasn’t safe at Berrywilde, at any rate.

  “Was he right?” she rasped.

  “Devorast?” asked Pristoleph. “About the canal?”

  She nodded.

  “No,” he said with stern self-confidence. “The city is divided. That much is true. I’ve turned the black firedrakes out of Pristal Towers for fear that they might betray me in favor of Rymut. I have it on good authority that it was the Thayan that created them-or brought them here from whatever dark corner of the Realms he found them in. But I have the wemics, and I still control most of the military-the men at Firesteap Citadel and the Nagaflow Keep. The city watch is doing just that-watching, but doing little else. Fires are burning down parts of the Fourth Quarter, despite the rain.”

&n
bsp; Phyrea didn’t understand any of that at first. She shook her head, wincing at the pain.

  “Ivar?” she asked.

  “He’s safe,” Pristoleph said, and he appeared reluctant to speak. “He’s in Pristal Towers. He’s talked of Shou Lung-going there again, for good this time.”

  Phyrea shook her head and sobbed though it hurt her to do so.

  “I love you,” Pristoleph said. “Had you died I would have given this wretched city to the Thayan and been done with it, but you lived, so I will hold it for you. I will give it to you, along with everything I have. I will kill myself here and now if the gods require my life in exchange for yours, but know this.” He paused, swallowed, gathered himself. “If you take him into your bed or go with him to his I will kill you both.”

  Phyrea closed her eyes and cried.

  63

  6 Mirtul, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR)

  SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Willem Korvan ate his mother’s corpse, little by little, over the course of seventeen days, not because he required sustenance, but out of some dimly-felt sense of necessity.

  Marek Rymut could feel the undead thing’s need and confusion the second he stepped into the house. It hit him just as squarely, though not quite as hard, as the stench. The smell of the rotting carcass of Thurene Korvan mixed with the dried-meat and spice smell of her son. Throughout was the tang of disease.

  “Willem,” the Thayan whispered, “you poor dear.”

  The creature cowered at the sight of the Red Wizard who’d created it, its dull, glassy eyes devoid of any trace of the vibrant if confused young man that had once inhabited that flesh. Willem’s refined good looks had been replaced by desiccated tissue and bulging joints, his skin like a leather cloak left on the street for a year of sun, wind, and rain.

  It opened its mouth but didn’t speak. Marek’s skin crawled at the sound that came forth from it, and he cast another spell to insure his own safety. He was confident enough in the magic that gave him complete control of what was left of the creature’s will, but there were mitigating circumstances that made the wizard uneasy.

  “It’s been a long time, Willem,” he said to the cowering creature.

  The thing responded to Marek’s voice but showed no trace of recognition either for the Thayan or for the sound of his own name. But then it wasn’t his-its-name anymore. The creature that cowered in the corner, one foot tangled in the grisly ribcage of Willem Korvan’s mother, had no name. It didn’t need one. It had no will of its own, not really, because it didn’t need that either.

  “I am sorry,” Marek told the thing, and he didn’t lie. He didn’t have to. “There are any number of other paths I wish both our lives had taken. You were beautiful, Willem, and I could have loved you-if you could have loved me. But you wanted more than that, and I suppose so did I.”

  The creature rolled its eyes and clacked its teeth together-confused, awaiting an order.

  “I didn’t want to make a monster out of you, you know,” said the Thayan.

  One of the monster’s arms twitched.

  “But I have, haven’t I?” Marek concluded. “And I’ve set a task for you. One you have yet to complete.”

  The undead thing drew its knee up to its chest, pulling the body of its mother with it. The torso came away from the limbs, the cartilage and ligaments having long since been chewed through. A fresh wave of rotting stink washed over Marek and he gagged despite himself.

  “Rise,” Marek said when he’d composed himself.

  Its foot still tangled in the ribs, slipping against the tattered strips of rotten flesh that dangled from the graying bones, it rose to its feet with some difficulty. Its foot finally came free and it stood slumped to one side as though the slightest breath would topple it.

  “But it won’t,” Marek whispered to himself.

  It would take more than that-much more than that-to defeat his creation. Though it looked wasted and weak, Marek knew that the creature Willem had become was possessed of strength no human could match. It could be destroyed, but not easily-not easily at all.

  “You have huddled long enough, my boy,” Marek said, his voice clear and commanding, echoing in the dead space, the horrid little charnel house that Willem’s home had become. “The war has begun. You will serve now as you have before.”

  The creature’s head tipped to one side-a death rattle more than a gesture.

  “You still have Ivar Devorast to kill,” Marek said.

  The monster’s leg shook and it lurched half a step forward. The Thayan held his ground.

  “Ivar Devorast,” he said, “among others.”

  64

  10 Mirtul, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR)

  PRISTAL TOWERS, INNARLITH

  A cloud of greasy black smoke brushed against the outside of the glass and Pristoleph breathed deeply of its pungent odor. A human-someone fully human at any rate-would have choked and gagged, even with the glass between him and the smoke, but Pristoleph’s lungs, which had as much in common with his elemental father’s as his human mother’s, took in the smoke with something bordering on relish.

  “Your city burns, Ransar,” Wenefir said.

  The sound of his former confidante’s voice rankled him, and he could feel his hair stir and warm. He closed his hands into hot fists, but kept his consciousness away from the torches that burned in the sunlit chamber.

  He could see Wenefir-a vague outline of him, anyway-reflected in the glass. He was flanked by two wemics who nervously pawed at the floor, their eyes locked on the priest.

  “Ransar?” Wenefir asked.

  Pristoleph took a deep breath that he hoped would let Wenefir know that he would answer in his own time.

  The tower room fell silent, save for the fidgeting wemics, and Pristoleph’s eyes darted from fire to fire. Below him the Fourth Quarter burned. Not all of it, but enough of it to send ragged refugees streaming into the Third Quarter or out the eastern gate. He was too high up to see the gangs of watchmen alternately helping and harrying them. The peasants of the Fourth Quarter had precious little to steal, but word had come to him of rape and murder, of humiliations extreme and petty.

  “It doesn’t take much, does it?” Pristoleph asked.

  “Ransar?” Wenefir replied.

  “To set people on their neighbors,” the ransar went on. “It doesn’t take much to turn men into beasts, brothers into enemies….”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” the priest answered.

  Pristoleph turned to face him, an eyebrow raised. Wenefir wilted almost imperceptibly under his gaze, but managed to stand straight and-almost-look him in the eye.

  “Terrible events and powerful forces conspired to bring this chaos to the streets of the city-state,” Wenefir said.

  “Was that it?” Pristoleph joked, a forced lightness in his voice that he couldn’t possibly have felt at that moment. “Or was it terrible forces and powerful events?”

  “As you wish, Ransar,” Wenefir replied with a smirk.

  “Neither,” Pristoleph said, all traces of gaiety fled from his voice and his manner. “Men made smoke rise over Innarlith. And perhaps one god.”

  “Tread lightly on that path,” Wenefir warned, “if at all, Ransar.”

  The wemics beside him stiffened and sniffed at the threat. Second Chief Gahrzig came up the stairs as if on cue and scowled at the former seneschal.

  “Make one move to work your magic, priest,” the mercenary leader threatened, “and I’ll drop you where you stand.”

  Wenefir glanced at the wemic and Pristoleph could tell the priest believed him.

  “He won’t require an order from me to do so, my old friend,” Pristoleph added.

  Wenefir said, “Understood, Ransar, but I have not come here to ensorcell you.”

  “I think I know why you’ve come here,” said Pristoleph.

  “Believe what you will of me, Pristoleph,” Wenefir said, and the ransar couldn’t help but notice something
of his old friend, that weak little boy he’d saved from a short life on the streets, in the sound of his voice, “but know that I hold this city dear. It is my home. I do my god’s work here.”

  Pristoleph couldn’t help but smile at that. “You’ve taught me enough of your god’s ways over the years, you know. This-” and he jerked his head in the direction of another plume of smoke that blew past the window-“is precisely the sort of work your god values the most.”

  “Be that as it may,” the Cyricist said, too quickly, “I come to offer advice.”

  “You have been discharged,” the ransar reminded him. “You no longer serve the city-state, as my seneschal or in any other capacity.”

  “Then take this as advice from a friend, Pristoleph. Take it as a warning from an enemy, if you must, but heed it. Heed me.”

  The wemics tensed again and Gahrzig drew steel. Pristoleph glanced at the wemic chieftain, but the second chief’s eyes stayed on Wenefir.

  “Speak,” Pristoleph said.

  “The senate is against you,” said Wenefir. “What few allies you had have either turned or been killed. Blood runs in the streets, fires rage in the Second Quarter, too, now, and none of them will long stand for that.”

  “They know how to stop this,” Pristoleph said.

  “And so do you.”

  Pristoleph took a deep breath and said, “So now you’ll tell me to surrender to Marek Rymut. You’ll advise that I gift this city to a Thayan invader to sell on the cheap to his Red Wizards back home?”

  Wenefir sighed, and Pristoleph could tell the priest didn’t have to fake the exhaustion written so plainly on his face. “Hear their demands-the senate’s demands, not the Thayan’s.”

  “Why?”

  “The city burns,” Wenefir said. “It’s the ransar responsibility to keep Innarlith safe, not to watch it burn from atop a tower.”

  Pristoleph’s eyes smoldered at that, and he could see Wenefir struggle not to turn and run.

  “Surely you haven’t climbed all this way,” Wenefir went on, sweating, “from the middens where we first met to the fortune and power you’ve amassed, simply to let it burn around you. Not for the sake of a canal, and certainly not for the sake of one man.”