Philip Athans - Scream of Stone

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 the 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.

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.