Scream of Stone

by Philip Athans

  An angry scowl darkened the Red Wizard’s face even more, and Pristoleph found his pulse beginning to race. The other two men looked up at him and blinked, and he realized he’d inadvertently raised the temperature in the room enough for them to notice. He calmed himself, but it took a while for the room to cool.

  Marek took the hint, though, and calmed himself as well. Harkhuf was one of Marek’s men, at least after a fashion, and the Red Wizard was not someone a man like Harkhuf should ever disappoint. Pristoleph hoped only for a little more information from the alchemist, then he’d do what ransars often did: turn a blind eye while Marek Rymüt did what he thought was best.

  “I don’t want to go back up there,” Harkhuf said. “I beg you not to compel me to do so. I beg you both.”

  “You will go where your ransar commands you to go,” Marek warned.

  “It was not Horemkensi, then,” Pristoleph said, “who was responsible for the increase in productivity.”

  Harkhuf shook his head and replied, “It could have been, but …”

  “But?” the Thayan prompted.

  “But only over the past couple months I began to notice that when he gave an order, it looked as though the men meant to carry it out, but often went off and did something else entirely. It was as though they knew he was wrong, and to a man knew what to do instead.”

  “Or someone else was telling them what to do,” Pristoleph said.

  Harkhuf replied, “All I know is it wasn’t me.”

  23

  4 Marpenoth, the Year of the Unstrung Harp (1371 DR)

  THIRD QUARTER, INNARLITH

  Just enough of Willem Korvan’s mind was functioning for him to realize that the roar of the heavy, incessant rain would mask his shuffling footsteps as well as it masked his odor. That, and a cunning he didn’t remember from his days as a living man, kept him behind but in sight of his quarry.

  Though he had followed people before—Ivar Devorast and others—it wasn’t too often that he was commanded to track someone but not kill him. But as he shadowed the shivering, stumbling alchemist through the dark streets of the Third Quarter, it was not for the purpose of ending the man’s life but of protecting it.

  “He has use to me,” Marek Rymüt had told him as the sun set that evening. “Limited use, to be certain, but I would prefer him alive. Let him wander, though, to flush out the assassin. The assassin, I want dead.”

  Willem set out to find the alchemist that night because he had no choice. Even if he tried to will it, he couldn’t resist the commands of his master. He existed only as a tool for the Red Wizard, and perhaps the same tiny fragment of what was left of the living man that made him thankful for the concealing rain, made him wish his death would finally be complete and he could be free of the Thayan, and free of the reality of what he had become.

  The alchemist passed a tavern and seemed about to enter, but when two men, drunkenly propping each other up as they splashed into the street, burst out of the door, he turned in his tracks and scurried away. The drunkards paid him no heed, but as they passed the entrance to the alley in whose impenetrable shadows Willem lurked, their sodden, moaning song quieted, and their eyes twitched with instinctive nervousness.

  Willem let them pass and soon their voices regained their ale-inspired confidence and were lost to the drumming rain.

  After a few more twists and turns Willem lost his way. He still had the alchemist in front of him, but none of the buildings around him were familiar. The dark streets wound like a maze, or like a mass of writhing snakes, and like snakes seemed to constantly change their shape. But it didn’t matter where he was, only that the man he’d been told to watch was still in sight.

  He smelled the pigs before he heard them, and even that was a long time before he rounded the corner of a low brick building and saw the animals. The pen sat next to a slaughterhouse, and the pigs were half-buried in mud, sleeping huddled together, painfully oblivious to the fate that would soon befall them. Willem didn’t have time to think about how lucky those pigs were that their masters granted them a quick death.

  The alchemist stopped, his hand resting on the wooden fence that formed the pig pen. It wasn’t until Harkhuf took one slow, deliberate step backward that Willem knew for certain that the assassin had presented himself.

  Harkhuf put his hands up and took another step backward, but stopped in the middle of a third step. He spoke to someone Willem couldn’t see, someone who stood around the corner of the slaughterhouse so that the three of them made the points of a triangle, and only Harkhuf could see both Willem and the assassin.

  Willem moved closer, leaving any pretense of hiding behind him. He stepped out into the street.

  The alchemist didn’t hear or sense his approach, but the pigs did. They smelled him, even in the rain. They stirred, and one by one began to stand, their flat noses wriggling in the air, expelling rain water with every other breath.

  “Please,” the alchemist called to the darkness in front of him. “Just let me go home.”

  Willem sensed something wrong in the way Harkhuf’s voice trailed off. The man stood still as stone, caught in midstep. Something told Willem to move faster, that if he didn’t put himself between the assassin and the alchemist fast, he would fail his master.

  Willem stepped over the low wooden fence. He sank ankle-deep in the muck that covered the floor of the pigsty, but it didn’t slow him much. As he passed along the wall of the slaughterhouse, making for the far corner, the pigs grew increasingly agitated, nudging each other out of the way, all of them trying to flee the thing they instinctively knew was a dangerous, unnatural abomination.

  One was too slow or too weak to push its way into the mass of porcine bodies in front of it, and it was stuck in Willem’s path. Willem reached down and swatted it away.

  The pig, which must have weighed well over two hundred pounds, came off the ground as though it didn’t weigh an ounce. It fell on top of its brothers, squealing, bleeding, but alive—at least for the time being. Though it would take a moment for it to show, the other pigs seemed to sense that their unlucky fellow was diseased, and they tried as hard to avoid it as they did Willem.

  Had he made that ruckus on purpose? He didn’t know—at least, he didn’t let himself think about it lest the Red Wizard could read his mind—but the disturbed pigs drew the attention of the assassin.

  Willem saw only the curve of a woman’s hip, then a hand, and a blast of orange flame poured over him.

  The pain was dull, barely there, but the sensation Willem felt was something different, something the living don’t have a name for. He screamed, and felt sheets of dried skin flake away in his throat. The rags he wore blazed, curled, blackened, then went out under the force of the steady downpour. Had it not been raining, the fire might well have destroyed him.

  When he could see again, he found he’d not stopped walking forward, and he nearly fell over the fence at the other end of the pig pen. The assassin came around the corner again and grunted in surprise to see Willem so close to her.

  She was, like anyone who bothered to go out that night, drenched from head to toe. Her clothing was plastered to her, showing every curve of her body, but the sight stirred nothing in Willem—nothing like it would have when he still breathed. All he saw was the assassin he’d been commanded to kill.

  “Stand back,” she said, her voice haughty and commanding, but it had no effect at all on Willem. “Who are you?”

  “Your executioner,” he growled.

  She stepped back, waving her hands in front of her. Afraid of another blast of flames, Willem lunged at her, knocking one hand away and raking across her breast with his claws. She hissed in pain and skipped back away from him, her spell ruined.

  “Is this man really worth it to you?” she asked. “Just look at me.”

  Willem looked at her but didn’t stop moving toward her. She locked her eyes on his and swayed on her feet, but Willem came on anyway. When she found her back pressed up against th
e wall on the other side of the alley, her eyes widened in fear.

  “Yes,” he told her, “you should be afraid.”

  He threw a fist out at her, but she fell into a crouch and Willem’s hand crashed into the bricks behind her, passing straight through in a clatter of stony fragments and a puff of mortar-turned-dust.

  She slipped away from him to the side, and by the time he’d wrestled his hand free of the wall and turned to look at her, she had changed.

  Gone was the slight woman with dark brown skin and eyes to match, and in her place was a snake of monstrous proportions, in every way a serpent, but with the head of the same woman. The chocolate skin had turned to a pastel violet, and even in the sparse light from neighboring windows her myriad tiny scales shimmered in a thousand rainbows of a thousand colors each. If Willem hadn’t been too far gone to appreciate beauty, the sight of the creature would have stopped him cold—stopped him like the alchemist had been stopped.

  Her voice sounded much the same but had taken on an echoing, sibilant quality. He didn’t recognize the language she spoke, but knew as soon as the slivers of blue-green energy slammed into his chest that it had been the incantation for a spell.

  Willem staggered back, and again there was that sensation that wasn’t pain so much as a vague realization that he was in some way injured.

  When he stepped back, the creature slithered forward, her jaws open wider than any human would have been capable of, and thin fangs like gently-curved needles dripped caustic venom into the rain.

  Willem didn’t actually care if she bit him, so he let her come in and raked her again with his jagged claws. The feeling of her flesh was strange to him, and the scales left miniscule cuts on his desiccated fingers. But she screamed at the injury, and she bled. The wound he’d already given her was starting to show signs of festering—four long furrows high on her serpentine body, going brown and yellow at the edges.

  Willem hit her again and dug some flesh out from under her scales. Her fangs latched onto his shoulder and he could feel the poison dribble through his dead flesh and just sit there. There was no blood for it to mingle with, and the veins that would have brought it to his heart and his head had long since shriveled to the consistency of brittle twine.

  He clawed her again and the iridescent creature withdrew, slithering backward, twitching and spasming from the pain.

  “What are you?” She hissed at him. “You undead thing. You shambling horror. What are you?”

  Willem didn’t have a word for what he was, so he didn’t say anything. He moved relentlessly toward her, and though she did her best to fend him off, tried again to cast a spell, the fact that he didn’t care if he “lived” or died kept him pressing ever forward.

  “I didn’t kill him,” the creature gasped. “It was Devorast’s all along, and I’m glad I didn’t kill him. Tell your master that.”

  Finally the rot caught up to her and she collapsed into a deep puddle.

  “You should kill Harkhuf, too,” she said. “He doesn’t deserve to …”

  The alchemist screamed—a shrill, girlish sound—and the creature opened her mouth, closed her eyes, and choked out her last breath into the pouring rain.

  The alchemist screamed again, and Willem looked over at him. He met the man’s gaze, and Harkhuf promptly collapsed onto the cobblestones. Willem could smell the urine that drenched his already rain-soaked trousers.

  When Willem turned back to the creature she had already begun to dissolve. Her body sagged in on itself, rotting from the inside out as though she’d been dead for a month, then a year, then all that was left of her was a dull gray dust that was scattered by the rain and driven into the mud of the pigsty.

  “Go home,” Willem said to Harkhuf, but the alchemist lay on the street quivering, staring at him in open-mouthed horror.

  Willem stood there for a few moments before he finally picked up the alchemist, who fell into an uneasy faint, and carried the man home.

  24

  6 Marpenoth, the Year of the Unstrung Harp (1371 DR)

  THE CANAL SITE

  By Thard Harr’s belt-bustin’ gut,” Hrothgar growled at the gray sky, “I think I might be gettin’ used to all this constant drippin’.”

  Surero smiled at the wet dwarf, his long beard pasted to his leather apron. His boots were sunk as much as an inch deeper into the mud than Surero’s, though the alchemist had two feet in height on the stonemason from the Great Rift.

  “Careful, there, Hrothgar,” the dwarf’s distant cousin Vrengarl warned. “Sayin’ things like that out loud in front of all these humans … people’ll think you’ve gone soft.”

  Hrothgar puffed out a scoffing laugh and said, “Then they’ll see how soft my boot is when I stick it up their—”

  Surero looked up when the dwarf stopped speaking. Hrothgar had lifted one foot out of the mud, and the deep brown dirt fell off it in clumps.

  “Well, maybe that wouldn’t feel so hard after all,” he said.

  The two dwarves shared a loud, raucous laugh, and Surero joined them, only a little more quietly. He’d been uneasy since word had begun to filter through the camp of the murder of Horemkensi.

  Devorast, who worked at Surero’s side at that very moment, measuring the depth of the holes they dug in the wet ground to set kegs of smokepowder, had refused to discuss the murder in detail. Surero knew that Devorast hadn’t arranged the man’s death, though by all rights he should have. And something about that made the crime all the more disturbing to Surero.

  Whoever had killed Horemkensi likely had his eye on the canal, either to seize control of the construction, or to once again put a stop to it. Either way, it would interfere with their work, and whoever this new player was, surely he wouldn’t be as easy to fool as Horemkensi had been.

  Surero had suggested that Devorast step up and publicly reclaim the realization of his own genius, but that, at least as of yet, didn’t happen. Devorast seemed maddeningly content just to do the work, leaving the credit to whomever was in that position upon its completion.

  “That’s deep enough,” Devorast said, standing and flicking mud off his hands.

  “Well, let us get out of here before you bring in that smokepowder,” Hrothgar insisted. “That boomin’ o’ yours hurts my delicate ears.”

  “And we wouldn’t want you to have any trouble listenin’ to yourself whine, now would we?” Vrengarl shot back.

  “How ’bout we test the hardness of my muddy boots on your disrespectful arse, eh?” Hrothgar said as the two dwarves scrambled up the muddy side of the shallow trench.

  “You can try,” Vrengarl replied, “but let’s do it back at camp. I’m hungry.”

  The dwarves complained and threatened and harrassed each other until they finally crested a hill and disappeared from sight. Devorast watched them go with a strange expression.

  “Is something—?” Surero began, but Devorast held up a hand to silence him. He was listening, and Surero did the same.

  All the alchemist heard was the rumble of the rain pounding the saturated ground.

  Devorast reached out, grabbed Surero’s arm, and pulled him down into the mud. The alchemist gasped, then spat dirty water out of his mouth. He almost spoke, then he heard it—a leathery rustle.

  A bird, he thought, but a big one. Too big.

  Surero looked up into the driving rain, squinting, but the clouds were low and dark, and he couldn’t see anything above them. The sound was gone anyway.

  “What is it?” he whispered to Devorast, who drew the long knife he’d taken to carrying—more as a tool than a weapon. Surero had nothing like a weapon himself.

  “I think you will find,” a stern, deep voice came from above them, “that you will live longer if you throw the knife away and submit.”

  Surero saw Devorast wince at the sound of that word, “submit,” then he looked up to the lip of the trench, which was only a few inches above his head. A man dressed entirely in black armor, with a long black weathercloak
fluttering in the wind, stood looking down at them. His long sword was sheathed at his belt, and his hands were at his side, hanging loose, but Surero could feel a tension there, and he knew that the man could draw and strike in the blink of an eye.

  “You are Ivar Devorast,” the man said.

  Devorast stepped away from the wall of the trench to get a better look at the man, and Surero heard the flapping of wings again. On the other side of the trench, only a few yards away, a strange creature like a tiny black dragon—tiny for a dragon, but still a bit larger than the biggest man Surero had ever seen—alit in the mud and stared at them with smoldering red eyes that glowed in the dim light.

  More black figures emerged from the rain, some human, some not.

  “We’re surrounded,” the alchemist breathed.

  The man in black laughed—a cold, humorless sound—and said, “Indeed. Master Devorast … the knife?”

  “Ivar?” Surero said. His hands started to shake, then his knees. He couldn’t make himself decide if he wanted Devorast to drop the knife and “submit,” or lunge at the man in black and fight for their lives.

  Devorast tossed the knife away without a word, and it sank halfway in the mud on the floor of the trench. The black monster on the other side of the trench ruffled its wings and gnashed its teeth, and Surero couldn’t help thinking the thing was disappointed.

  “I am Captain Olin of the ransar’s black firedrakes,” the man in the black armor said. “I have come on the orders of Ransar Pristoleph to place you both under arrest for the murder of Senator Horemkensi.”

  Surero’s heart sank and his hands began to tingle and go numb.

  Don’t faint, he told himself. Do what Ivar does.

  Devorast heaved a tired sigh, seemed not the slightest bit surprised, and said nothing.