Lies of Light (31 page)

“Ambassador Fael Verhenden of Arrabar,” Insithryllax said.

The ambassador looked up at him, blood trickling down the side of his face from a cut in his scalp. He studied the dragon’s dark face as though trying to place him A black firedrake reared up behind Insithryllax and the man screamed and fell back against the underside of the carriage. He put his arms up to fend the creature off.

Insithryllax knelt down in front of the man and grabbed him by his bloody jacket. Drawing him close, he looked the terrified ambassador in the eye. The spell he’d cast worked on the man’s mind, opening it like a sack into which the dragon could toss whatever he pleased. He

could see the spell working in the way Verhenden’s pupils dilated.

“It was nagas,” Insithryllax said. “You were beset by nagas. Your men managed to kill one, but they overwhelmed you with spells.”

The ambassador quivered, whimpered a little, and nodded.

Insithryllax drew the dagger out of the sheath at the ambassador’s belt. He held it up close to the man’s bulging, accepting eyes.

“You fought as best you could, but were armed only with this dagger. One of the nagas used some kind of magic to take it from you. It danced in the air of its own accord”— Insithryllax bounced the dagger up and down in front of his face—”then it slit your throat.”

“With a flick of his wrist Insithryllax dragged the sharp edge along the side of the ambassador’s throat, pressing it in deep. Blood poured out, the Arrabarran gasped for air and managed only to begin drowning in his own blood. Insithryllax watched him die then stood up, turned, and went to stand over the firedrake that still writhed in the mud with its wind-shattered wing twitching at its side.

“You,” he said. “I told you no acid.”

The wounded firedrake cringed beneath him as Insithryllax shed his human guise. His body trembled then convulsed, and as the black firedrakes watched, he grew to many times his human size. Finally he stood in his true form, his long, lithe body protected by scales the color of the sky at middark. Horns curved forward from each side of his head, and his eyes blazed with crimson light.

The wounded firedrake looked away.

Insithryllax opened his enormous jaws over the crippled monster and bit it in half. With only a few bone-splintering chews, he swallowed the first bite, then took the rest. That done, he ate the acid-burned rider, armor and all.

When he’d swallowed the last bite, made bitter by the black firedrake’s acid, he turned on the other firedrake.

The creature shrank back from him a little but stood his ground before his gigantic father.

“You,” the great wyrm rumbled, “get the dead naga and leave it here.”

The black firedrake bowed and went off in the direction of the place where Insithryllax had hidden the water naga’s remains. He looked around at the carnage and checked for any other signs of acid, or any evidence that the black firedrakes might have been involved, but saw none. Even if they brought the ambassador back from the dead, or questioned his corpse, he would insist that it was water nagas who’d killed them all.

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23 Marpenoth, the Yearof the Banner (1368 DR) Third Quarter, Innarlith

I^ristoleph held a little fire in his hand. Yellow-orange tongues of flame lapped at the chip of black wood at its heart. The heat felt good against his palm. It would have scorched a human, blistered him, but Pristoleph wasn’t quite human. He stared at the fire’s dance, kept small and contained by the power of his will. The movement mesmerized him, and he let it make his mind go blank.

Outside the window of the tall turret in Pristal Towers— his overly large manor home—the city of Innarlith slept. When he started to think again, he thought of the city. It had started out as his enemy. The city tried to kill him when he was a baby, and over and over again through his childhood, but he’d never let it. He beat it, and by the time he’d seen his thirtieth year, the city was his to do with as he pleased. He’d bought a seat on the senate, but kept largely to his own ways and his own circles. He’d never sought, or had been particularly interested in, the Palace of Many Spires, preferring to act at least a bit from the shadows, but…

“But things change,” he whispered to himself.

He closed his palm around the fire. The coal sizzled and popped in his hand. The feeling made him smile.

When it settled, he tossed it into the brazier with the other coals and sighed. Tired, he rubbed his eyes and thought of going to bed. He looked at it, wide and comfortable, and richly appointed in silk, but it had no appeal.

Pristoleph considered going for a walk. It had been a long time since he’d done that. For the longest time he would wander the streets of the Fourth Quarter, visiting the avenues as a senator that he used to haunt as a street urchin. He would mark the passage of time by the houses that had collapsed or burned, the shanties that had been erected, the dead dogs in the midden. But he hadn’t done that in a long time.

He’d stopped going to the docks as well. Since he’d started to “employ” undead dockworkers supplied by Marek Rymiit, he had to pretend, like the rest of the senate, that he was opposed to the very idea. He had to blame it on the guild he’d helped create. He had to make sure that the workers who’d played so easily into his hands and Marek’s were blamed for their own obsolescence.

He didn’t go to the docks because of the smell, and because it made him feel tired to be there. He couldn’t tell anyone, even Wenefir, how tired he felt. Most of he time, he couldn’t even tell himself. Thinking about it just made him more tired.

His eyes settled on the little silver box.

He took a deep breath and blinked. He’d forgotten about it, and there it sat on the side table where he’d left it, next to an oil lamp he hardly ever lit. Pristoleph reached out and picked it up, opened it, and stared down at its contents.

The spectacles didn’t make any sense. The lenses were opaque. He knew they were enchanted in some way-considering the source that was a certainty—but the Thayan had never said how. For all Pristoleph knew, they’d blind him the second he put them on his nose. They’d either

blind him, or show him something.

He thought of a dozen things that Marek Rymiit might want him to see, and that was in the first few heartbeats, before he let his imagination wander. None of the possibilities particularly interested him, but still he lifted the pince-nez from the box, and turned them over in his hand.

He sighed again and stood. Still holding the spectacles, he crossed to his writing desk, pulled a sheet of parchment from a drawer, and wrote a brief note:

“Wenefir, if the pince-nez have harmed me in any way, kill Marek Rymiit.”

He signed it with a certain sigil that would prove to Wenefir that he’d written it himself. He replaced the quill and sat back in his chair.

With a little shrug, he placed the pince-nez on his nose with his eyes closed. There was no sensation of anything out of the ordinary at first, and certainly no pain. After a moment he finally opened his eyes.

When it appeared as though he’d been transported to a strange room he closed his eyes and took the pince-nez off his nose. He blinked his eyes open and was happy, though not entirely surprised to be in his own bedchamber.

Pristoleph looked down at the pince-nez again and thought about what he’d seen. It was another bedchamber, someone else’s. He’d never been there before, but when he had the spectacles on, it was as though he was actually there.

He put them on again, sat back, and studied his new surroundings in more detail. He seemed to be sitting on the edge of a bed. His head turned, but he didn’t feel the muscles in his neck working, and he hadn’t wanted to turn his head. A man or s. woman—he couldn’t tell under the down and linen bedclothes—slept in the bed. He could see the rise and fall of the figure’s breathing.

His head turned again and his vision scanned over the room. It was a cramped space, at least compared to what Pristoleph had grown accustomed to, and decorated in

what he found to be an overly garish fashion.

He reached out with his right hand, but couldn’t see it, even when he was sure he held his palm a scant few inches from the tip of his nose.

A man stood in the open door of the bedchamber, and Pristoleph had the uneasy sensation that they had made eye contact. Something was wrong with the pince-nez, though. The man appeared transparent, as though made of deep violet light. He didn’t seem to entirely belong in the scene, and Pristoleph realized maybe he wasn’t in the scene at all, but—

He flipped the pince-nez off his nose, stood, and whipped his head from side to side. He’d thought perhaps the man was in fact standing in his own bedchamber, and Pristoleph saw him filtered through the magenta lenses.

But Pristoleph was alone.

“Whose eyes am I seeing through, Marek,” Pristoleph whispered, “and why?”

Seeking the answer in the item itself, he put the glasses back on. His host had moved from the bed to sit in front of the dressing table. He saw a woman’s delicate hand where he thought his own should be. She took a silver brush from the dressing table and looked up into a mirror.

Pristoleph gasped.

She was beautiful.

As she brushed her long, straight black hair, Pristoleph found that he could hardly breathe. He watched her, fixated by her deep blue eyes that were so sad and so troubled and so full of promise.

No woman had ever had that effect on him. No woman had ever stopped him cold.

A tear fell from one eye and she let it trickle down her smooth, flawless cheek without wiping it away. He felt uncomfortable watching her cry, but it was as though he’d fallen under the influence of some spell—and perhaps he had done just that, but he didn’t care. He not only couldn’t, but didn’t want to look away.

Still looking deeply into her own eyes, she picked up a little cuticle knife from the dressing table and ran the sharp blade along the inside of her arm. He couldn’t feel any pain, but he could see her wince in the mirror. The little line of red sat among scars and still-healing cuts on the same patch of skin.

When she looked at herself in the mirror again, she was smiling.

Pristoleph grabbed the pince-nez off his face and threw them to the floor. He stood, nearly falling back over his chair, but stayed on his feet.

The door opened, and the guard posted outside stuck his head in, looking around.

“Senator?” he said, seeing nothing amiss.

“It’s all right,” Pristoleph told him, and waved him away.

The guard nodded and closed the door.

With a deep breath to calm himself, Pristoleph knelt and picked up the spectacles. One of the lenses had broken into tiny shards that were no longer magenta, but ordinary clear, colorless glass.

“Why?” he whispered, though the man he was asking— Marek Rymiit—couldn’t hear him. “Why show me her?”

Hours later, Pristoleph finally collapsed into bed without an answer to that question.

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24 Marpenoth, the Yearof the Banner (1368 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith

The meat had not been cooked at all. Willem stared down at it, trying to find it in himself to be disgusted, but he couldn’t quite muster it. He kept his hands in his lap.

“I told you, no,” Phyrea whispered.

She sat at the other end of the dining table, and had no place setting in front of her, just a crystal tallglass of red

wine that she wasn’t drinking. She looked off through the arched doorway to the sitting room, staring at empty space as though someone stood next to the sava board between the two wingback leather chairs.

“I beg your pardon?” he asked. His voice, pitched no louder than normal, seemed to boom in the still, heavy air of his dining room.

Phyrea shook her head, still looking at nothing, then turned toward him. Her eyes blazed with what Willem could have sworn was fear—but what could she possibly have to be afraid of?

“Were you speaking to me?” he asked.

In an instant the fear turned to contempt, and she said, “No. You aren’t hungry?”

He glanced down at the raw meat and said, “No, thank you. Are you sure you don’t want me to recall the cook, or perhaps you would feel more comfortable hiring someone else—someone of your choosing?”

“I told you I don’t like people buzzing around me,” she said.

“Then tell her to stay in the kitchen.”

“I might want to go into the kitchen,” Phyrea replied. She put a hand on her wine glass but didn’t pick it up. “I suppose you miss the maids and cooks and little girls you can take to your bed whenever you choose, but things have changed, and it’s time for you to grow up.”

Willem blinked, both at the accusation, and at the sudden turns her temper took.

“I never…” he started, but trailed off when he realized she wasn’t listening, and wouldn’t care either way. “It’s good to be home,” he lied instead.

They’d been married for twenty months, and in that time she’d fired his household staff and scared his mother all the way back to Cormyr. He’d spent fewer than one night in twenty at home, having been overwhelmed by the process of restarting Devorast’s project with the aid of two people even less competent than himself. In most

ways that mattered he and Phyrea were still strangers, but Willem remained unable to look at her without reeling at her perfect beauty. Even as tired as she looked, even when she twitched and glanced away at nothing, startled by silence, Phyrea was the most beautiful woman in the world.

“The fresh air agrees with you,” she said. “You’re a very handsome man.”

He nodded in thanks, but couldn’t keep the suspicion from his eyes.

“Eat your dinner, now, before it gets cold,” she said. Phyrea, leering, glanced at the bloody red meat on the plate in front of him. “Be a good boy now. If you eat it, I’ll let you touch me. I’ll take you to bed, but you have to eat it all.”

He looked down at the raw meat again, and swallowed. She shushed him, though he hadn’t said anything, then she whispered, “He will.” “Will I?” Willem asked her. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

He picked up his knife and fork, and she laughed at him.