Philip Athans - Scream of Stone

After the disappearance of Willem Korvan, the ransar had appointed Senator Horemkensi to complete the canal. If Horemkensi had any experience in the construction trades, any sense of the scale and requirements of the project, he might have had a chance. But the senator was nothing more than a dandy. Surero had made inquiries both discreet and overt, and all he could find out about the man was that he was the nineteenth in his line to hold his family’s seat on the senate and that he enjoyed the social aspect of his position but wasn’t much interested in the work itself. Surero had heard that Horemkensi spent less than one day in twenty at the canal site.

“Is that them?” a woman asked, and Surero’s attention was pulled back to the disgraceful scene before him.

Three men pulled a cart loaded with small wooded kegs. Surero winced. The kegs had been the last of Surero’s contribution to the canal. Packed more tightly than it could be in a sack, the smokepowder was more effective. They were too big for the holes he’d watched them dig, and there was a pile of unfinished lumber too close by. He’d thought-he’d hoped, at least-that they would move the lumber before setting the smokepowder, but the cart clattered to a stop at the edge of the row of holes.

“Is it safe here?” a man in a silk robe, his eyes lined with kohl and his too-soft hands wrapped in a fur muff, asked the pale woman next to him.

The woman shrugged and Surero shook his head. They both looked at the alchemist, obviously interested to hear more, but Surero could only swallow and grimace. He turned away from them and watched the workers-bored, tired, and dirty-unload the cart. They seemed careful enough with the kegs of smokepowder. They must have seen them explode before, but of course they had no idea how and where to place them.

Surero made a series of fast calculations that calmed his racing pulse for at least a dozen heartbeats. The viewing stand, set up on a hill overlooking the enormous trench,was far enough away so that even if the effects of the badly-placed smokepowder kegs were worse than Surero feared, the crowd of spectators would not be killed.

Which was more than could be said for at least two dozen workers.

“Are they undead?” another woman asked. “They look normal enough to me, though they could bathe, couldn’t they?”

Surero took a deep breath and held it. Word of the zombie workers had trickled into Innarlith. Rumors turned into an open secret and then a simmering debate. Everyone seemed to have an opinion on the use of animated corpses for manual labor, but no one was willing to take a stand either way. The only concession Surero was conscious of was that the zombies were kept away from the viewing stand. He could tell that a good portion of the spectators were disappointed by that. They came to see death in all its forms.

The men began to drop the kegs into the too-shallow holes, and Surero knew the people who had come to the viewing stand that day would see more death and destruction than they’d bargained for. He considered trying to do something, but he felt paralyzed. His legs refused to carry him off the wooden steps of the viewing stand. He couldn’t draw in a breath deep enough to shout a warning. He wasn’t sure if his inaction came from fear or resignation. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Not with Devorast gone and Marek Rymut still ensconced in Innarlan society. He didn’t know how much tolerance anyone might have for him. He brewed beer and was good at it. He made a reasonable living. He tried to forget the canal, but he couldn’t. He tried to stay away from it, but he’d made the trip to the viewing stand in the overcrowded coaches with the rest of the impotent onlookers time and again, every time left horrified by what he saw, every time more aware of how much farther away from Devorast’s careful attention to detail Horemkensi had allowed things to get.

Even his considerable skill as an alchemist wasn’t enough to attract Horemkensi’s attention to Surero. He’d been replaced by Horemkensi’s own man, an alchemist who had early on thrown in his lot with the Thayan. The alchemist’s name was Harkhuf, and when Surero had first encountered him some years before, he was nothing but a minor seller of even more minor potions-healing draughts and snake oils-to the tradesmen of the Third Quarter. Surero had often joked that Harkhuf’s greatest achievement as an alchemist was when he stained his fingers green-an accident that had left him permanently marked but otherwise unharmed. Harkhuf wasn’t even good enough at his trade to have blown his fingers off, which is what would have happened if the concoction had done what he was hoping it would do.

And that was the man Horemkensi trusted to place Surero’s smokepowder. No wonder the crowds had grown bigger and more bloodthirsty.

Someone shouted orders. Surero didn’t recognize his voice. It wasn’t Harkhuf. Surero briefly held out hope that one of the foremen-one of the men he’d trained himself-had realized that the holes were too shallow and was putting a stop to it, but that wasn’t the case. The smokepowder had been placed and the man was simply warning the workers to step back as he lit the fuse.

Surero bobbed from side to side to see around the heads of the people in front of him. He watched the workers walk too slowly away from the holes. He couldn’t see or hear the fuse from where he stood, and again all he could do was hope that it hadn’t yet been lit. The men stopped far too short of the safe margin Surero had worked out in his head.

The alchemist sucked in a breath and held it. The dandy with the fur muff looked at him with wide, expectant eyes, and Surero turned away from him. He thought again that he should scream out a warning, but he knew it would do no good. If the fuse was already lit, it was too late. If it wasn’t, his would have only been one more voice from the viewing stand-a sound all the canal builders had long since learned to ignore.

Before he could decide which god to pray to that he was wrong, the first of the kegs erupted in a rumble. The hiss of dirt and rocks in the air masked the excited gasps and nervous laughs of the spectators. The next went off, followed immediately by the third. Surero kept his eyes glued to the last in the line, the one closest to the group of workers and their cart.

Too late the men realized they were too close. They must have instinctively gauged the size of the previous explosions and matched that to the distance they stood from the last hole. They turned and started to run. When the last keg exploded, a wave of dirt and loose stones, broken by the force of the explosion, tore into them. They were lost in the earthy brown cloud, their screams barely audible over the deafening thunder of the blast.

The crowd at the viewing stand held its breath, then sighed as one, disappointed that the very cloud that caused the bloody deaths of the innocent men blocked their view of the carnage. They couldn’t see stones driven through flesh and bone to explode out of dying bodies in a shower of blood.

One woman had the audacity to scream. The sound was theatrical and insincere, and Surero wondered how long she’d practiced it. He heard a man laugh, and the gorge rose in his throat. He closed his eyes and turned away, bumping into someone. He was shoved and almost tripped, scolded and berated, as he pushed his way off the viewing stand. Surero didn’t turn to see the dead men that littered the edge of the great trench. He pressed his hands tightly over his ears to block out the sound of the people laughing and talking in excited, loud whispers. He fled not only from the bloodshed and stupidity, but from the dense air of satisfaction that hung over the viewing stand.

6 Hammer, the Year of the Gauntlet (1369 DR)