Scream of Stone (34 page)

Phyrea hit the ground hard but rolled with it, throwing one arm out to slow her fall then tucking it close to her side with the other as she rolled to a muddy, chilling stop on the rain-saturated ground.

The horse kicked and struggled, its sides quivering. Its mouth was open and its lips pulled back over its teeth. A twisted abomination of a man, which still shared enough of Willem’s features that Phyrea had no choice but to accept that it was indeed him, rose from behind it, lit by a flash of lightning.

Phyrea screamed.

Whatever she’d thought of Willem Korvan, and she’d changed her mind about him more than once in the years she’d known him, she’d always found him handsome. But whatever had happened to him to turn him into a vicious, monstrous, blindly violent killer, had disfigured him in ways that brought a tang of bile to the back of her throat.

Phyrea had to look away while Willem killed her horse. The animal didn’t have the air in its lungs to scream, but it kicked and rolled as Willem pounded it. The sound of its ribs breaking stung Phyrea’s ears. She clasped her palms against the sides of her head, but she could still hear it.

Someone touched her and she screamed and flinched away, striking out, but not hitting anyone.

“Phyrea,” Devorast said from right next to her. “Phyrea, it’s me.”

She tried to say his name, but her throat closed around it.

The sword, the voice said and something made Phyrea turn away from Devorast, even though at that moment she wanted nothing in the world more than just to look at his face.

Another ghostly figure stood in the pouring rain, a few paces from the dying horse. Phyrea blinked at first because she wasn’t sure it was really him, then she blinked away tears.

The sword, the ghost of her father said. Our family’s sword …It was the sword that made him this way.

“Phyrea,” Devorast said, pulling her to her feet. “What could possibly have brought you here?”

“Father?” Phyrea called, her voice squeaking.

And it’s the sword that will put him to rest, said Inthelph.

The man with the scar on his face screamed into Phyrea’s head with such a profound rage it made her knees fall out from under her. Devorast held her up, and began to pull her away.

“He’ll kill you,” she gasped when her head cleared and she saw the ruin of Willem Korvan, her horse’s blood washing off him under the relentless downpour, stalking toward them with so single-minded and burning a hatred she felt as though she was going to wither in the face of it. “He’ll kill you.”

“Run,” Devorast urged her—almost begged, if such a one as he could ever have begged. “Go, Phyrea. He’s here for me.”

He’s here for you both, Inthelph said.

Phyrea tore herself from Devorast’s arms and he pushed her away. She almost fell, but she slid a little and got her feet under her. Devorast ran in the opposite direction.

“Here!” he shouted, though Willem gave no indication that he even saw Phyrea. “It’s me you want.”

Willem opened his mouth and screamed. The sound was like metal scraping on metal. Phyrea’s hair stood on end and her breath caught in her chest. She scrambled for the horse.

Hurry, Phyrea, her father urged.

Phyrea fell facefirst into the warmth of the horse’s spilled blood. She dug into the soft earth with her fingers, clawing away at it, and her hand finally wrapped around something solid.

She heard a sound like a sack of grain dropped from a great height and sobbed. She couldn’t see. It was too dark and there were piles of rubble everywhere.

“Ivar!” she screamed into the storm, and pulled back with all her might.

The sword came loose from its scabbard and the undulating blade shone in a flash of lightning.

The ghosts whirled through the air, spinning wildly,

drawing her attention up. It was as though they churned in agony. Their screams rattled in Phyrea’s head. She staggered back and fell, sitting in a puddle of water. She shivered, still looking up, blinking against the rain— and another form was flung through the whirling ghosts, passing through two of them.

It was Devorast. Phyrea opened her mouth to scream at the sight of him hurtling through the air. She imagined he’d been thrown by the undead creature, but when he hit the ground, Devorast landed on his feet.

Of course, she remembered. The banelar’s ring.

He spun. While Phyrea stood, Devorast took three long strides to stand beside her.

And Willem was there, his ghastly visage lit by a blue-white blast of lightning. The hate and fury she’d seen in his face was gone, though. She couldn’t read his expression, his face was too disfigured for that, but something about the way he stood there, the way he looked at them, made her profoundly sad.

The flamberge slipped from her fingers and splashed into the mud. Willem looked down at it, then back up to her. Though it was dark, she could see his eyes—black, desperate pits in his horror of a face.

“I won’t,” Willem said, his voice grinding and harsh.

He was a good man, Inthelph said, and his voice in her head made Phyrea start to cry. Don’t let this go on. Whatever he’s done, or whatever he’s failed to do, this he doesn’t deserve.

Phyrea bent and picked up the sword. Willem’s head tilted up with it then turned to Devorast. Phyrea looked at him too and shook her head.

Devorast took the sword from her hand and Willem lurched forward.

“Willem,” Devorast said. “I’m sorry.”

Willem stepped forward again and Devorast thrust the flamberge into his withered chest, into the space where his heart once beat.

“No,” Willem grunted as Marek Rymut’s necromancy unwound inside him. “Don’t be sorry. It was my fault. It always was.”

Phyrea sobbed and fell to her knees. Willem slid off the blade and crumpled to the rain-soaked mud.

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13Flamerule, the Year ofLightning Storms (1374 DR) Third Quarter, Innarlith

Iristoleph stood under a dying tree on a street in the Third Quarter, baking under a deep woolen cowl in the late summer heat. The genasi didn’t mind it. He was comfortable, in fact, but what he saw across the street bothered him greatly.

A cooper, a man he knew by reputation as one of the city’s finest craftsmen, stood with downcast eyes. His chest—once as big around and as sturdy as the barrels he fashioned— appeared sunken and slack. He watched with dull, beaten eyes as a gang of animated corpses pounded away at tasks that had once been performed by young apprentices, boys in their teens who would one day open workshops of their own, either in Innarlith or in neighboring cities from the Vilhon Reach to the Border Kingdoms. But those apprentices were gone, replaced by Marek Rymut’s zombies.

The undead barrel-makers poured water into a barrel they’d finished. It was bad enough that the thing sprung leaks in a dozen places or more, but as they poured the water in, strips of their own rotting flesh fell into the barrel, fouling it. The cooper looked away in disgust, and so did Pristoleph.

He brushed past a man who sat on the street, his hand out, his eyes pleading. Children scurried after a rat, laughing only because they hadn’t yet had to come to grips with the fact that they had no future. They would not apprentice to the cooper, nor the baker, nor the chandler,

but would likely grow up as Pristoleph had, struggling for scraps left from the tables of the Second Quarter, fighting every day for any meager existence, fighting just to survive. Stealing. Killing.

He put a hand against the wall of a boarded-up shop, what once was a baker of fine pastries had been forced to close when the undead work gangs brought disease and took the wages of the neighbors so that his steady business trickled to a few silvers here and there. Pristoleph had heard the baker moved his family to Arrabar.

Having gathered himself, his anger suppressed enough so that at least the heat that poured from him didn’t set his clothes on fire, Pristoleph continued on his way past another beggar and another, past another vacant shop and another. At least the tavern was still open. One thing anyone could count on was that when times were hard, men drank. When they had nowhere to go, and nothing to occupy them, they drank a lot.

Though it was still long before highsun, the tavern was crowded—packed to the walls. Pristoleph entered and all conversation came to a sudden halt. More than two hundred sets of eyes turned to him, and he paused in the door to study their faces. Perhaps only one in ten held a flagon of ale, and more than half wore hooded cloaks despite the Summertide heat.

Pristoleph drew the cowl from his head and smiled, his strange hair waving on his head like a roaring campfire. The people gathered in the tavern and the barkeep himself stood a little straighter. Wemics stepped out of the crowd, their snarling smiles giving a few of the assembled pause. Second Chief Gahrzig tipped his maned head and touched the haft of a pole arm to his temple and the other wemics followed suit.

The men who’d come from the ranks of the city watch, and from Firesteap Citadel and the Nagaflow Keep, saluted him as well, smiles splitting their faces, perhaps for the first time in a month.

A woman stepped out of the crowd, her fine features and olive skin marking her as Shou. Her face, as beautiful as it was exotic, was one Pristoleph instantly recognized.

“Greetings, noble Ransar,” Ran Ai Yu said and bent at the waist in a deep bow.

Beside her another Shou, a man Pristoleph knew as Lau Cheung Fen, bowed alongside her, his unnaturally long neck swaying with the motion.

“Greetings, Miss Ran,” Pristoleph said, “and greetings to you all.”

The place remained as silent as a tomb, all eyes on Pristoleph.

“On the eighth day of Eleasias,” Pristoleph said, his voice carrying strong and stern to every ear in the room, “Innarlith will live again.”

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8 Eleasias, the Year ofLightning Storms (1374 BR) The Chamber of Law and Civility, Innarlith

Marek Rymiit stood on the dais of the senate chamber, in the place normally reserved for the ransar. The significance of that was lost on no one, especially Marek himself.

“My dear friends, one and all,” Marek shouted over the din of the assembled senators, who quickly began to shush each other and turn their attention to the dais. “Please rise for three of your number, any one of whom would make a fine, steady, and resolute ransar.”

Marek then introduced Aikiko, Asheru, and Meykhati to thunderous applause. All three of them held up their hands in conciliatory gestures, calling for quiet even as their gloating smiles and limpid eyes soaked up the admiration of their peers like a spider draws the essential fluids from a doomed fly.

“Thank you, Khazark,” Meykhati said, and Marek grinned and bowed, charmed by the senator’s use of the Thayan

honorific he’d only recently revealed to the Innarlans. He’d revealed it to Meykhati first, in fact, at the same time he’d cast a spell over the senator that suppressed his willfulness and ambition. “We three stand before you, humbled by the grand traditions of the city-state we love so dearly, our hearts swelled with pride over having rescued Innarlith and her people from the vile clutches of the inhuman Pristoleph.”

Another thunderous ovation, but when Marek scanned the faces of the senators, he saw no few scowls among the dead-eyed grins.

“I come here today to deliver a message of a personal nature,” Meykhati went on, speaking the words Marek had recited to him that morning. If any of the senators, many of whom had known Meykhati for decades, detected any wavering in his sincerity, none would question it. “With a heavy heart, but a firm dedication to a greater purpose, I formally withdraw my name from your consideration to serve as the next Ransar of Innarlith.”

What followed was a dead-pan murmuring no more sincere than Meykhati’s statement. The murmurs were replaced by applause when Meykhati bowed to the room and took a largely ceremonial step backward—but he didn’t leave the dais.

Aikiko stepped forward even as Meykhati stepped back, and raised her hand, silencing the assembly.

“My fellow senators, hear me,” she said. “I stand before you, like Meykhati, reluctant to set myself above any of you. I call for a new way. Let us set aside the post of ransar and let the senate itself hold executive power. Let us lead by consensus, and by the communal will of the aristocracy!”

That was met with applause as well, though many of the senators appeared confused. That made Marek smile. They were afraid of the reality of the power they told each other they already had.

“An idea worth debating further,” Asheru called out as the din once more died down. “But I offer another. There is one among us who—though compared with those of us born

and raised within her walls is something of a newcomer to Innarlith—has time and again proven not only his worth but his loyalty. His steadfast determination and progressive ideas have brought a new economy to Innarlith and cowed the rise of a worker’s army—or have we forgotten those dark days when foreign agitators appealed to the baser instincts of the Third Quarter?”

Shouts of “No! No!” and hisses followed, and Marek hid a chuckle with a hand to his mouth. After all, he was the foreign aggitator they so feared.

“There is one man who, I believe, should be granted the post of Ransar of Innarlith, with all the duties and privileges so implied,” Asheru went on, “and that man is Marek Rymiit.”

Marek didn’t flinch at the heartbeat of silence that weighed so heavily over the room before the senators broke into another round of applause. Maybe they knew what was happening to them after all, even if they couldn’t voice it or give it a name. They certainly couldn’t stop it.

Marek shook his head and waved his hands and said, “Alas, my dear, dear friends, I must of course decline that most singular of honors. My duties as khazark of the enclave, and the diplomatic status that post confers, would of course make it impossible for me to serve as your ransar. I do, however, offer my services to the next ransar, to the senate, and to the people of the fine city-state of Innarlith, so that I might advise and help in any way.”

A less enthusiastic round of applause followed, and Marek, ever taking the pulse of those around him, knew that the senators were tiring of speeches. Though more was said, Marek pressured in ways both magical and mundane to move the proceedings along, once more without a vote, and when the congress was finally drawn to a close, he took a deep breath and tried not to feel as though he’d made a narrow escape.