Philip Athans - Whisper of Waves

The wall would have to be finished before he could meet Halina’s uncle. She would just have to wait. They both would.

Willem was torn between wanting the project to continue forever that it might never be that last passed hurdle before he’d have to marry Halina and wanting it to be done and done well so that his position in the city would finally be fixed and strong. Though Marek Rymut was an important man, he was Thayan. He was a foreigner, and so was his niece. Could Willem attain the position he wanted in Innnarlith if he was a foreigner married to a foreigner? There was a better girl out there, wasn’t there? Was there?

All thoughts of returning to Cormyr, where he would never be anything but a boarding house owner’s son, had long since fled him. He meant to stay in Innarlith. He meant to buy himself a seat on the senate. He meant to keep going, all the way to the ransar’s Palace of Many Spires.

He was still young, and there was time. Still, he could afford few if any mistakes.

Not only Halina, but Thenmun had begun to show himself as a possible mistake.

Willem had put his trust in the young lieutenant, and for a few months it seemed as though that trust was well placed, but then the senators started to whisper, and those holes in the master builder’s social armor-tiny as they were-were revealed. Thenmun had started to get ideas, and like Ptolnec before him, he started to identify mistakes.

Many sleepless nights of hand wringing and sweating gave Willem a final answer for his problem with Thenmun-or more appropriately, his two problems with Thenmun. The first was Thenmun himself. The lieutenant was too smart, too well-liked, and had scented the master builder’s blood in the water. Even if Willem stopped making the mathematical errors that plagued him and the project itself, the lieutenant wouldn’t stop until he had built a career on the ruins of both Willem’s and Inthelph’s.

He couldn’t remember actually making the decision to kill Thenmun, but one day he found himself researching poisons.

The second problem was the fact that Willem was indeed making one critical miscalculation after another in regards to the renovation of the walls. Confused, over his head with the mathematics required, Inthelph was no help at all. Willem’s greatest fear had been that his mentor would prove incompetent and a bad teacher, and both had proven true, though the master builder was still Willem’s strongest link to the city-state’s elite. Willem would need to complete the wall, and that wall would have to stand.

Willem went to see Ivar Devorast for the first time since they’d parted ways in Cormyr a tenday after Thenmun first fell ill from the poison. Willem kept the visit brief and friendly-and they were friends after all, to the extent that anyone could be friends with Ivar Devorast.

The second visit came the morning after Thenmun was found running naked through the streets, foaming at the mouth for all the world like a rabid dog. The lieutenant was stripped of his rank and confined to a sanitarium on the edge of the Fourth Quarter that very day. While Thenmun was being tied to a bed, Willem asked Devorast for his help.

Devorast didn’t resist or even ask for gold, though Willem could tell Devorast was in need of a coin or two by the way he lived. Having lived with the man and seen him in school, Willem knew how to appeal to Ivar Devorast. He presented Devorast with a problem. How to shore up the wall in such a way as to double its strength, to accommodate twice the number of men and twice the number of artillery pieces, while using as much of the existing structure as possible.

Devorast went to work quickly and though it took two months to copy his wild, almost indecipherable drawings with their conversely precise notations, Willem submitted the plans as his own and heard no complaint from Devorast.

The plans were extraordinary, with every condition not only met but exceeded to the degree that the master builder himself had to study the plans for a full month before he even understood the extent of their genius.

Thenmun was eventually released into the care of his mother, who cared for him in all the ways she had when he was a newborn infant, and no one ever suspected that it was poison that had ruined his mind, much less that that poison had been administered by Deputy Master Builder Willem Korvan.

Work began in earnest on the wall the first of Mirtul, using plans that no one but Willem and one other knew were devised in total by an unknown foreign shipwright by the name of Ivar Devorast.

23 Kythorn, the Year of the Turret (1360 DR)

FIRST QUARTER, INNARLITH

Fharaud stood at the butt end of the bowsprit and did his best to strike an inspiring pose. All around him, the skeleton crew of sailors went on about their business oblivious to him, and the crowd that had gathered along the quay was more intent on the ship itself than the tiny figure of its architect standing behind a tangle of rigging so high above their heads.

After only a few heartbeats, Fharaud gave up on being even a small part of the unfolding spectacle and returned his attention to the matter at hand.

The launching had gone smoothly, the massive vessel settling straight and true in the shallow water at the end of the ramp. They had had to dredge for days to allow for the huge ship’s draft, and even then Devorast had calculated less than a foot between the keel and the muddy bottom of the Lake of Steam. Fortunately, the water deepened dramatically only a hundred yards or so out, and the ship was in deeper water in no time.

Fharaud thought he heard a cheer rise from the watching crowd, but it might have been a flock of gulls. Word had gone round the First Quarter that the great ship was to launch that day, and of the hundreds who’d come to watch, Fharaud knew the majority had no love for the ship, it having been built to strengthen a foreign king, regardless of the work and gold it had provided the First Quarter over the past eighteen months since construction had begun.

Sanject, the harbor pilot who’d come aboard not only to take the ship out past the piers but into the portal itself, barked a few orders to the sailors, who were unfazed by the man. It seemed to Fharaud as if the pilot was telling the men to do what they all knew had to be done and were in the process of doing anyway.

The crew looked too small, and not just in that there weren’t enough of them, but the mast, the deck itself, the rigging, everything about the great ship dwarfed them. Though Fharaud had been responsible for as much of its design as Devorast had, the shipbuilder knew that he’d never have been able to build so magnificent a ship without his young assistant.

And the ship was magnificent indeed.

Wind billowed into the square sail that stood two hundred feet on a side and the ship turned. Fharaud stepped to the rail again and looked down at the water, then back the length of the ship, taking in the particulars of the turn. She was as agile as Devorast had promised her to be, and Fharaud found his mouth hanging agape at the reality of it.

The crew began to settle into a rhythm as the ship took sail northwest, leaving the city of Innarlith spread out behind them. In the dim glow of the overcast dawn, lights flickered in windows and Fharaud thought the city looked like a crowd attending some play or revel at an amphitheater sized for the gods. Indeed, it felt as if they were all watching him.

For though the ship had been built for the king of Cormyr, it had been built by hands from Innarlith, and the gold from Cormyr would spend as well as any from the Second Quarter. The ship, perfect as she was, impressive as she was, enormous as she was, would make Fharaud’s reputation at last. He sighed at the thought that the rest of his life would be spent in the leisure of contentment and wealth, and to have done it with so fine a ship, a ship to be so proud of-Fharaud’s heart was near to bursting.