Philip Athans - Scream of Stone

“It’s a meaningless question, Ransar.”

“I wasn’t always the man I am today, you know,” Pristoleph said.

Devorast stacked more weathered lumber then started prying apart another step.

“I grew up in the Fourth Quarter,” Pristoleph said. “I grew up in the streets, but never in the gutter. I made myself what I am today by the force of my own will.”

Devorast glanced at him, but Pristoleph couldn’t quite decipher the expression.

“It was a long and difficult road from the Fourth Quarter,” Pristoleph said, “to here, where I am now: the highest-paid garbage man in Faerun.”

“I’m not paying you,” Devorast said.

“Nor are you understanding any of my jokes,” the ransar said. “Still, I get the feeling you have a sense of humor. After all, here you are working peacefully side by side with the man who held you in a stinking hole in the ground for more than a year. I would have killed me.”

“I’m not stopping you,” Devorast said.

Pristoleph laughed loud and hard, and for a while they went to work taking the viewing stand apart in silence.

“I also had to rely on myself as a child,” Devorast said, and Pristoleph was startled as much by the sudden sound of his voice as by the admission itself.

“Then you know what it’s like,” Pristoleph said, “to struggle for everything, to fight for every hint of power and influence, and every copper.”

“No, I don’t.”

Pristoleph stopped what he was doing and stared at Devorast, waiting for him to go on.

He had to wait a long time before Devorast said, “I’ve never been interested in power and influence. I don’t want to control people, and coins are tools to be used when you have them, and replaced by other tools when you don’t.”

“So what do you want?” Pristoleph asked.

“I want to take apart this viewing stand, then use the lumber to build two ladders and a pair of trench braces.”

21 Hammer, the Year of Rogue Dragons (1373 DR)

SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

My Dearest Mother,

Where have I been?

What has happened to me?

I know it has been so very long since you’ve heard from your dutiful son. Perhaps you, like some here in Innarlith, assumed that I had met my end. I pray to all the gods ever evoked by a desperate man that this was not the case, and that you held me in your heart, always with the fires of hope burning in your bosom, that I was indeed well but in some way occupied.

And such has been the case, these many months-and can it really have been so long? It seems as though I fell asleep one night and woke up three years later.

Truly, can it have been that long?

Three years?

Three years with no news from me-for that I will spend the entirety of my life apologizing to my steadfast and loving mother, the only woman who would have held out hope for my return, the only woman who had not abandoned me, even when you left Innarlith to return to Marsember.

And what a disgrace that was-my disgrace, my dear mother, and certainly not yours-that I allowed you to be driven from my own home by a woman in whom I placed trust, only to have my heart rent from my chest and held, still beating, before my face that she might sink her harpy’s fangs into its meat and draw from it the last drop of the blood you yourself bore into me.

For that, I am sorry, too.

But where have I been? How have three years passed without a word from me? Those are questions to which you deserve a long and detailed answer. Though I have thought of little else in the past tendays, I have no answer to any of my own questions that satisfy me, much less that I believe would satisfy you.

When I was thrown to the side by that cruel woman, that alu-fiend in a girl’s guise, when you were proven right yet again and my own lack of faith in the wisdom of my dear protective mother was held up close to my eyes, when I was shown lacking, when I died, I-

When I died?

That is what it felt like. It felt as though I died, but that word has not come to my mind or my lips since I entered my own house to find it closed and musty, with three years’ dust coating every surface-that word hasn’t come to my mind or my lips, strange that it should be summoned by my pen.

In some ways perhaps I was dead. Dead in the heart. I had opened myself to the love of a woman who was not worthy of me. I put my trust in men who guided me wrong. I let my dear mother return alone to Marsember, there to live without word or support from a son who must have seemed so ungrateful, so disrespectful, as to simply ignore her for so long.

But that was not my intention, and if you ever believe anything I tell you again, if you have left in you a spark of the fire of the love for your poor son that I once felt burn from within you, please believe that what happened to me must have been beyond my control.

Of those three years I recall only dreams, Nightmares, in fact. I remember foul odors and wicked deeds. I recall the feeling of my body rotting away, while my soul was imprisoned within to feel every stinging bite of ten thousand flies nibbling away at my flesh.

But that couldn’t be. None of that could be.

Here I am now, three years on, hale and hearty, though you would find me thin. Here I am alive and awake and aware.

Here I am having changed two things about me.

First, no longer will I hold an image of Phyrea in my mind. Beautiful as she is, she is a being of frozen evil, a mad woman who has now put her spell upon another, and so be it. The man she has ensorcelled will have to care for himself, though for his sake I hope he has a mother like you, to tell him that he has made an error that could well destroy him as it nearly did me. And I hope that he, unlike your penitent son, will have the wisdom to heed his mother’s warnings.

And second, there is the drink. When last we embraced I know that on my breath was the wind of the still, the stink of fermented grapes-the tell-tale odor of a man without the will to face himself in the mirror.

My dearest mother, to you I pledge this above all else: I will set aside all drink. I will not drown my sorrows but ever do battle against them. I will regain all of what I lost, and with you by my side, and the continued support of important personages within the city-state, I will achieve yet more. I will finally be the man you always knew I would be, even when I didn’t know that myself.

And yes, dearest mother, you did not imagine those words: with you by my side. With this letter is a box of coins-enough I am sure for passage to Arrabar. I will meet you there myself with my own coach to hasten you back to our home-not mine but our home-here in the citystate that has given me challenges, to be sure, but has also drawn me into its inner circle. Together, we will found a dynasty here. Together, we will make the house of Korvan synonymous with Innarlith itself.

Return, Mother.

Please.

— Willem

P.S: I hope that upon your arrival, or by a return letter should that arrive before you, that you will advise me on a remedy for a rather monstrous pain in my teeth.

22 Hammer, the Year of Rogue Dragons (1373 DR)

PRISTAL TOWERS, INNARLITH

Every moment I’m away from him, Phyrea thought, the less sane I become.

Stop it , the old woman chastised her, the ghost’s tone sharp and imperious-more so than usual.

It’s true , Phyrea thought in reply.

No, it isn’t , said the man with the scar on his face.

Phyrea looked across the table at Ivar Devorast, and when he met her eyes, she looked back down at her plate of untouched curried eel. The snakelike thing’s eyes seemed to mock her.