Philip Athans - Lies of Light

Phyrea wiped the tears from her eyes only to feel her cheeks soaked with tears again a scant heartbeat later.

Trust us , the old woman insisted.

Phyrea started to nod, and the ghosts started to laugh.

7 Ches, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

THE CANAL SITE

This is disgraceful,” Phyrea said.

She glanced to her left to make sure the strange man was looking at her-he was.

She folded her arms in front of her and let a breath hiss out through her nose. The man didn’t speak, but Phyrea knew he’d heard and understood her.

A very short man-no taller than a halfling, but he looked human-rushed up to the stranger and spoke to him in a language Phyrea didn’t recognize, though she assumed it was the language of Shou Lung, from whence they’d come.

Lau Cheung Fen answered the little man in clipped tones that sent the servant scurrying away as fast as he’d approached.

“You object, Miss, to the viewing station or to the endeavor itself?” the Shou merchant asked.

Phyrea paused to consider her response carefully. She’d learned from Meykhati’s dreary wife that Shou would only respect slow speech and careful responses.

“Please accept my assurance, Master Lau,” she said, “that this is a subject that I have given considerable study. I object to both.”

The merchant nodded.

“This canal is a fool’s errand,” she added.

“I have heard quite differently of this Ivar Devorast,” Lau replied.

“There are some who mistake madness …” she began, but stopped to think. Then she continued, “Thank you, Master Lau, for letting me reconsider what I was … for letting me think.”

“One should do precisely that,” he said, “before one speaks. But in fact there is more of interest to me in what your first response might have been than in what you might believe I wish to have you say.”

Phyrea let one side of her mouth turn up in a smile. Though he was alien to her in so many ways, she could feel him respond to her beauty the same as any Innarlan.

“I hope,” she said, “that those who have given you reason to believe that this canal will be of use to your trade will think again. This Devorast has ideas and passions, but he has no true skill.”

“He will not be able to finish this?” the Shou asked.

Phyrea looked down at the toes of her boots and sighed. She scraped a line of dried mud from her boot across the wood planks.

“I think this … station, as you called it,” Phyrea said, “is all one needs to see to understand the nature of this canal.” She put as much sarcasm as she could into that last word-and feared it might have been a bit too much. “This is for show. It’s a performance. A master manipulator is at work here, not a master builder.”

Lau Cheung Fen nodded, and looked out over the men scurrying this way and that, going about the complicated business of digging a miles-long trench from the Lake of Steam to the Nagaflow.

“Soon,” Phyrea went on, “this will all stop. This will all be closed down, and all these men will go back to Innarlith.”

“I was to understand that he had the support of your ransar,” Lau said.

“And he does, for the time being. That will surely change once the gold has run out.”

“The ransar’s gold?” Lau asked.

“The gold he’s already given Devorast,” Phyrea told him. “It’s all the gold he’s going to get-all the gold the ransar will give him. And from what I have been told, there might be enough coin left for a tenday’s work. No more.”

Lau Cheung Fen nodded again, and she thought it appeared as though he was considering her words. At least she hoped he was.

You’re hurting him , the sad woman’s voice asked her. Why?

She felt her cheek begin to twitch and so she turned away from the Shou merchant.

“To begin, and not to end….” Lau Cheung Fen said, trailing off with a shake of his head.

“It might still be finished,” Phyrea offered, “but not by Devorast.”

Why? the woman asked again.

But it was the old man, his voice a hoarse croak, who answered, Because she can .

Phyrea smiled and Lau asked, “By someone else then?”

“The master builder of Innarlith,” she said, “has an apprentice who by all accounts has surpassed him in skill if not position. This man is a senator in Innarlith, well liked and with all the right friends. He will be master builder himself soon, and this canal, should the ransar decide it’s indeed something that should be finished, will be-should be-completed by him.”

Phyrea swallowed. Her mouth and throat had gone entirely dry. Her chest felt tight, and she drew in a breath only with some difficulty.

“For me,” said Lau Cheung Fen, “it matters only that there is a canal. If Ivar Devorast or …?”

“Willem Korvan,” she said.

“Or Willem Korvan builds it, it will mean nothing to my ships. If there is water between here and there, they will float.”

Phyrea bobbed down in a small bow and grinned. Her upper lip stuck for half a heartbeat on her sand-dry teeth.

“Then I won’t belabor the point,” she said.

“I did expect to see him here,” said Lau, “but I’m told he is away.”

“He’s gone to beg peace from the nagas,” Phyrea replied. She had been at the canal site for less than a day, but had heard things. “They agreed to let him build the canal at first-or so he told the ransar-but came recently and killed some of the workers. I fear that if the canal is completed it might succeed only in spilling ships out into hostile waters, controlled by those monstrous snake things.”

She saw the very real concern that prospect elicited on the Shou’s face, and turned away.

7 Ches, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

THE NAGAFLOW

We feel anger,” Svayyah said for all the assembled naja’ssara to hear. “We feel great, grave, crippling anger, and that anger is directed not toward this dista’ssara before you, but for one of our own.”

The source of her frustration glowered back at her from where he hung suspended, almost motionless in the cool, murky water. Six more of their kind swirled around them, their attentions struggling between the accused-Shingrayu-and the human, Ivar Devorast. Their tension began to heat the water, and Svayyah’s red-orange spines grew redder still.

“Anger?” Shingrayu replied, literally dripping venom from his fangs into the water with each sneered syllable. “What does Svayyah know of anger? Let us tell our tribe-mates of anger.”

Svayyah brought to mind a spell that would heat the water around Shingrayu to so scalding a temperature that his scales would slough from his body. But rather than cast it, she said to the other water nagas, “This dista’ssara , this human, is known to us. We have given it our word. We have made an agreement with it.”

She looked at Devorast, who floated in the bubble of air she’d made for him with his arms folded across his chest. She could read nothing in his face, but his irritation came off him in waves that nettled at her sea-green scales.

“We care nothing for an agreement with this low monkey of the dry cities,” Shingrayu spat. His serpentine body twitched, and he moved forward-only a foot or two-but Svayyah reacted to the threat by enveloping herself in a protective shield of magic. It lit around her with a pearlescent glow, reflecting off the particles of dirt that floated in the water. “You made this agreement, Svayyah.”

The other half dozen water nagas writhed at the sound of that word: you.