Philip Athans - Lies of Light

“I’ve been at Berrywilde,” she all but whispered.

He knew it well. He’d been to one or another social engagement there-her father’s country estate. The first time he walked into the main house he knew it was haunted, but no one else seemed to sense it, so he’d kept quiet.

“Lovely,” he said. “I’ve been dabbling myself with a little place … outside the city.”

And he would never tell Phyrea just how far outside the city the Land of One Hundred and Thirteen was.

“It’s cold,” she said again, hugging herself, wrapping her slim fingers around her upper arms. She shivered just enough for Marek to notice.

“Has something scared you?” he said. It was a risk to ask, but Marek couldn’t think of a reason not to.

Phyrea stiffened.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked. “Is that why you came here today? To tell me about what-?”

“We don’t know each other that well, Master Rymut.”

There was a long silence before Marek finally said, “Of course that’s true, isn’t it? One could say we’re really little more than distant social acquaintances. I’ll admit that when I received word that you wanted to come see me in my home I was as surprised as I was intrigued. What is it I can do for you, my dear?”

Still not turning to show him her face, she said, “I have a certain item that I … found.”

Marek smiled. He’d heard rumors about her but had never believed them. Could they be true? Could the master builder’s beautiful little debutante really be the leather-clad sneak thief that had stolen from the finest families in the city-state? If she was, Marek puzzled over why. Her father was wealthy and well-placed, and she his only family. She couldn’t want for anything.

Just like me, he thought, before the zulkir came to take me away.

“Tell me all about it,” he prompted, then swept his robes up behind him and sat on a divan of pastel lavender rothehide that had cost him exactly twice the annual income of the average citizen of Innarlith. Marek always liked reminding himself of that otherwise trivial fact.

Phyrea sighed in a way that almost felt to Marek as though she was condemning his musing over the divan, then she said, “It’s a sword.”

“Is it?” he said around a half-stifled yawn.

“I think it’s called a falchion.”

“A falchion, then.”

“Is that what you call it?” she asked. “The blade is wavy, like water.” And as she said that she moved one finger in a series of slow, undulating arcs that almost anyone else in Faerun would surely have found sensual. “Is that a falchion?”

“Flamberge,” he corrected. “But surely that’s not all you’d like to know.”

“I’ve been assured that you know how to …” She paused and he could tell she was searching for the right word, but it also appeared as though she listened intently to something or someone, though the Thayan wizard heard no sound. “You can read, or sense the magic in things. You can tell me what this sword can do.”

“So,” he replied, “you came across an enchanted blade at your daddy’s country retreat and you’d like me to identify its properties for you?”

She nodded, still not looking at him.

He took a deep breath and said, “Well, you certainly have come to the right place. I won’t pretend that I’m not at least a little disappointed that this visit isn’t entirely social. I was so hoping we could get to know one another just a little bit better.”

“I’ll pay you,” she said.

“You insult me,” he shot back fast, his voice cold.

She stiffened again, and still appeared to be listening at the same time.

“But never mind that,” he said. “Do you have the weapon with you?”

She shook her head.

“Well, of course I’ll have to not only see it but handle it in order to give you any relevant information. We can work out a mutually beneficial arrangement as far as payment or exchange of services is concerned. But I get the feeling you have one particular question you’d like me to answer.”

“The sword kills people,” she said.

Marek laughed and said, “Well, then, it’s fulfilled its one true destiny, hasn’t it?”

“No,” Phyrea replied, “that’s not what I mean.”

She turned to face him, and Marek was taken aback by the cold and terrified gaze she leveled on him. Her eyes shook, though her face remained perfectly calm, almost dead.

“Tell me, girl,” he whispered.

“I used it to kill a man,” she said, “and he came back.”

Marek flinched a little, raised an eyebrow, and asked, “He came back …?”

Phyrea shuddered, hugged herself again, turned back to face the window though her head tipped down to look at the floor, and said, “A ghoul.”

“A sword that makes ghouls, is it?”

“No,” she said. “It was a ghast.”

“Have you heard about the canal?” he asked, changing the subject as fast as possible in hopes of snapping her out of what seemed almost a hypnotic state.

She turned and faced him again. The terror in her eyes replaced with annoyed curiosity, she asked, “What?”

“This mad man has convinced our dear ransar to give him all the gold in the city in order to dig a trench all the way from the Lake of Steam to the Nagaflow and fill it up with water. I understand it will take a hundred thousand men a hundred thousand years to dig it, but they’ve begun in earnest.”

She didn’t seem to believe him, and not just because he’d so greatly exaggerated the number of men and the length of time the project would require. She’d been back in the city long enough that surely she’d have heard of Ivar Devorast and his fool’s errand. But she hadn’t.

“Does my father know about this?” she asked.

“Of course,” Marek replied. “He doesn’t like it one bit, of course. A sensible man, your father, his loyalties are with the city-state.”

“A canal,” she said, her voice a breathy, barely audible whisper. “If they can connect the Sea of Fallen Stars to …”

He watched her stare at the floor, thinking about it. She seemed impressed, and Marek hated that. He hated people who were impressed with that dangerous idea, that mad errand.

“You will bring me the flamberge?” he asked.

Phyrea nodded, but her eyes gave no indication that she’d actually heard him. Again, she listened to something or someone Marek couldn’t hear.

So, he thought, the country house isn’t the only thing of the master builder’s that’s haunted.

3 Alturiak, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

What is so special,” Surero whispered into the cold, damp air of his cell, “about one hundred and twenty-five?”

When they first locked him up, he’d been told that they would feed him once a day. Assuming they had been as good as their word, he’d been in the cell for one hundred and twenty-five days, since the first day of Marpenoth in the Year of the Wave.

“The third,” he told himself. “It’s the third day of Alturiak.”

“That’s right,” the voice from beyond the door replied.

The sound of the first human voice he’d heard in four months tickled Surero’s ears. Much as he’d tried to engage his jailers in conversation, none of them had ever answered. All they did was take the bucket of urine and feces, replace it with an empty bucket, then slide in the moldy, hard bread and the tin cup of water. Sometimes they gave him a strip of pork fat or a fish head.

“Why?” he asked the door. “Why today?”

There was no answer right away, and Surero’s heart raced. He stood on legs that had been too weak to support him for most of the last month. They held him, though, even if they were a bit shaky. He’d taken to spending his days sitting against the cool, rough stone of the subterranean cell. He had no window, and after he’d eaten the first two he came across, eventually even the spiders stopped wandering in.