Philip Athans - Whisper of Waves

11 Mirtul, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR)

THE NAGAFLOW KEEP

Willem had never been more uncomfortable in the presence of the master builder. Inthelph seethed with anger, and Willem suffered through the seemingly endless carriage ride trying not to make eye contact with him. The carriage bounced and jostled for hour after hour, testing the limits of Willem’s patience and the integrity of his kidneys. When they stopped to rest the horses, Willem found new sources of pain and stiffness in his exhausted body.

Inthelph appeared no worse for wear, though. It was as if his anger and outrage were keeping the trip from wearing on him.

Throughout the sixteen-hour ride from Innarlith to the proposed site of the Nagaflow Keep, Willem sat in silence. For the first several hours he’d tried to puzzle out what in Faerun’s name Devorast must have been thinking, but by the time the carriage came to a stop amid the clatter of stonemasons at work, he’d given up trying.

When he’d first heard that Devorast had begun construction on the keep, he’d had a momentary thrill. Though he’d certainly never admit it to the master builder or anyone in the master builder’s acquaintance-and therefore almost no one in Innarlith-he admired the pure outrageous hubris of the whole thing. It was so far beyond mere self-confidence that Willem couldn’t even puzzle at its source. Once confronted by the master builder, Willem had faked shocked outrage and joined Inthelph in days’ worth of steaming, hateful rants. Messages were sent and ignored, agents dispatched and sent home, and finally Inthelph decided to go to the river himself. He didn’t bother asking Willem to go along. It was simply assumed.

Willem let the master builder step out of the carriage first. The softly glowing lamps that swung from the corners of the carriage only made it more difficult to see anything happening at a distance. Willem stepped out of the carriage, stiff muscles protesting all the way, and blinked in a vain attempt to adjust his eyes to the odd lighting.

Torches driven into the rolling grassland turned the sky into a starless expanse of the deepest black. Willem judged it to be near or just after midnight, and still the work site was abuzz with the clatter of hammers on wedges, the grunts of workers, and the barking laughs of men drawn close by hard work toward a common goal. The very air was alight with a sense of order and calm but driven efficiency.

All that was lost on Inthelph.

“Where is he?” the master builder asked, his face flushing red, his lips curling up over his graying teeth. “Where is this man of yours?”

Willem had no idea. He’d never been out into the wild lands north of the city to the river everyone said was infested with the nagas that gave it its name and other creatures less intelligent but no less dangerous.

The master builder didn’t wait for him to answer anyway and instead stomped off into the thick of the crowded work site. Willem followed behind, determined to let the master builder do all the talking. He’d stopped short of practicing a look of crushed disappointment in a mirror but was certain Devorast would know how he felt-or at least how he wanted to appear to be feeling, for the admiration he’d felt when he’d first heard that Devorast had begun work was only intensified with every step they took through the tightly organized site. If Willem had had to guess, he’d have said they’d been at work for the better part of six months, but he knew it had been less than two.

Inthelph stopped a man carrying a bundle of sticks on his back and demanded, “Where is Ivar Devorast?”

The man with the sticks looked at the master builder with a passive, quietly respectful look and Willem realized then that the crew Devorast had assembled had no idea what he’d done, but then, why would they need to know?

“He’s over by the dwarfs,” the man drawled, his accent as much as his occupation marking him as a citizen of the Fourth Quarter.

Inthelph raised an eyebrow, and the man nodded in the direction of a steep, flat-topped hill. Without another word, the master builder stomped off up the hill with Willem in tow. The climb was rough, especially after sixteen hours in a carriage, but the higher they climbed the more of the surrounding territory Willem could see. When they reached the top of the hill, more of the torches revealed the shimmering waters of a wide river below. Willem tried to imagine the scene in the daylight and realized he could see for miles on all sides. He guessed that in the daylight they’d be able to see all the way east to the Golden Road bridge. That crossing was already fortified by the ransar, it being a vital trade link to Arrabar and the Vilhon Reach to the north, but from the hill …

“Perfect,” Willem whispered.

The master builder paid him no mind. He’d spotted Devorast sitting next to a small fire, sipping from a steaming cup of tea and bent over a sheet of parchment. At his side was a squat dwarf with greasy red-brown hair and hands that looked as rough as the stone his hammer and apron said he worked with. Inthelph charged up to them so quickly and radiating such anger that the dwarf, startled, stood and grabbed for his hammer.

Devorast stopped the dwarf with a hand on his forearm then whispered something into his ear.

“Devorast!” Inthelph shouted. “Devorast, you thrice-bedamned fool, what in the name of Toril and the crystal spheres do you think you’re doing here?”

The dwarf smiled at Inthelph, amused either by the master builder or what Devorast had said-or perhaps both. He walked away but kept glancing back at the master builder with-not quite menace but a subtle challenge in his eyes.

Inthelph, livid, ignored the dwarf and instead shouted at Devorast, “I told you to bring me plans, you drooling incompetent, not to begin work without the slightest word of approval from me. Who in the name of every god in the outer planes do you think you are?”

“There was no need to show you anything, Master Builder,” Devorast replied, and there was no mistaking the disdain he put into the words “Master Builder.” “I found the right location, quarried the stone, and now I’m building you and your ransar his keep.”

Inthelph was so taken aback by the brazen reply-a reply Willem fully expected to hear-that he almost fell over.

“On whose authority, boy?” the master builder shrieked. “I have not approved this site. I did not release the gold to pay this crew. I did not examine the design of your fortification. You’ve built one ship-one too-big barge that sank its first day at sea-and now you have the unmitigated audacity to begin a project of this nature, in the name of the ransar of Innarlith, entirely on your own authority?”

Devorast looked at the master builder with one eyebrow raised. Willem waited for the shrug, a gesture he knew would put the master builder completely over the edge, but it didn’t come.

“Do you have a better site in mind?” Devorast said. “Do you have a plan for a keep that will surpass my own?”

“No, you dolt!” Inthelph raged. “That’s precisely the point. What if I had? What if there is a flaw in your location? Sure, we’re up on top of a hill overlooking the river, but have you taken everything into account that the ransar and his generals would expect from a fortification that was meant to have been designed to suit their needs and not yours? Are we close enough to the Golden Road bridge or far enough away? Don’t you dare for one moment stand there and tell me that you know the answers to every question, have taken every last detail into account, drawing, I must point out, from the experience you gained building how many such structures?”