Whisper of Waves (3 page)

“Is there a problem, sir?” Wenefir asked.

He’d appeared, as Wenefir usually did, as if from nowhere, stepping out from behind the tent. The lieutenant was surprised and confused, but his breeding and arrogance quickly calmed him.

“Is there a problem, soldier?” the young officer asked Wenefir. “Yes, I should say there is.” He turned his attention back to Pristoleph. “This… man. Is he a friend of yours?”

“He is,” Wenefir replied.

“Then you shall both—” the lieutenant began then was interrupted by a loud groan, almost a wail, from the inside of the tent and the woman laughed instead of just giggling. “For Innarlith’s sake,” the officer pressed on, “this is a military camp not a … a … a brothel! What could you possibly be thinking, the both of you?”

The young officer made a move toward the tent, and Wenefir stepped sideways, meaning to put himself between the lieutenant and Pristoleph. Both of them stopped short

and again the young lieutenant had to mask his initial shock and intimidation with the haughty arrogance demanded of his position.

A small crowd of soldiers started to gather behind the officer. Pristoleph could read in their glances and the way they whispered to each other what they were thinking, and he recognized an opportunity to put on a show that would have benefits for a long time after. The men started shifting position, growing increasingly anxious, and the young officer’s face tightened further.

“Do you feel that?” Pristoleph asked, pitching his voice in such a way that at least the first few rows of onlookers would be able to hear him.

The sounds of mumbled conversation and giggles from inside the tent came to a shushing halt.

“I’m quite sure I have no idea what you—” the lieutenant started.

“Sure you do,” said Pristoleph. “A child could sense it—that moment when the air begins to charge with a feeling of imminent danger?”

Pristoleph let a relaxed smile drift across his face. Always careful to keep the sun behind him, Pristoleph didn’t have to squint up at the lieutenant.

“I should say so,” the young officer replied. “The pen- -alty for this sort of gross dereliction of—”

“It’s a feeling,” Pristoleph interrupted again, “that I grew up… what’s the word?”

He glanced at Wenefir, who offered, “Immersed?”

Immersed in,” Pristoleph finished with a smile.

The lieutenant narrowed his eyes and Pristoleph would swear the man wanted to take a step back but was fighting the impulse with all his might.

“That was on the streets, you understand,” Pristoleph added. “The Fourth Quarter, against the wall.”

Pristoleph held his eyes still while the lieutenant studied him. He was confident that his face betrayed nothing, and by doing so, told the young officer all he needed to know.

Still, the lieutenant wouldn’t allow his position to abandon him entirely and he said, “I will thank you not to interrupt me again, soldier. Do so one more time, stay seated in my presence, and continue this ludicrous 1 conversation one more breath and you will find yourself I standing tall before the man.”

| “What in all Nine Hells is that supposed to mean?” I Wenefir asked with a sneer and a quiver in his voice that I almost made Pristoleph nervous.

Wenefir edged a little closer to the lieutenant, who twitched ever so imperceptibly away, and Pristoleph stood. He held up a hand and Wenefir backed off, but he kept his steely red eyes locked on the young officer, who was subtly beginning to squirm.

“You’ll have to excuse my comrade-in-arms, here, Lieutenant,” Pristoleph said. “He can be sensitive sometimes. Is it any wonder, after what he’s been through?”

“I assure you,” the lieutenant said, “I have no—”

“He used to climb down chimneys,” Pristoleph went on. “That was how he made his living, if you could call it that. You know what a few years of that does to you? It poisons you. The soot, the black grime inside a chimney when it’s scraped into every crevice of your naked body … eventually he had to be emasculated. The soot warts, they call them. Nasty things. They’ll kill you if you leave them alone, if you can suffer the pain. Can you imagine pain so bad you’d rather castrate yourself than endure it another moment? That’s my friend, here. He’s got nothing between his legs, but he’s still a better man than most.”

Wenefir blushed, suppressed a smile, and continued to stare down the lieutenant. The young officer’s face drained of color and he drew in a breath that hissed its way into his lungs.

“I say, I…” the lieutenant said.

Shifting, hissing sounds came from the tent, another giggle, and the clatter of a sword belt. Pristoleph continued to smile.

“If you’ve come for the young lady, sir,” Pristoleph said, “I’ll have to ask you to wait a moment while she finishes ; up with another customer.”

The lieutenant puffed out his chest, his tabard still hanging unfilled over his unimpressive physique. Pristoleph took a moment to admire the young officer’s armor while the lieutenant made a great show of being so offended and shocked—mortified even—that he was momentarily unable to speak. It wasn’t practical, fighting armor, but the kind of decorative parade plate rich mothers bought for their sons to play soldier in while Father finished shoring up the family business before having the good graces to die and let the former army officer step into his fortune.

“I have no interest in your filthy little—”

“Shut up, lieutenant,” the captain said as he stepped out from the tent, his sword belt in his left hand, and his right arm around the waist of a blonde woman wrapped in a silk sheet.

Pristoleph didn’t laugh at the lieutenant’s reaction, but Wenefir did. When both Pristoleph and the captain glanced his way, though, Wenefir shut up. That was not the case for the bulk of the assembled soldiers, some of whom laughed heartily at the young lieuten-. ant’s expense.

“Captain, I… I…” the lieutenant blustered, and it looked for a moment as if he might fall down.

The captain, a convivial, gray-haired man with arms like oak trees, clapped Pristoleph hard on the back and said, “You’ll go far in this man’s army, boy.” Then he looked at the young lieutenant. “I paid him up front, Lieutenant Ptolnec, and I expect you’ll do the same.”

With that, the captain gave the lady a kiss on the cheek that was greeted with another giggle.

“Until tomorrow, Nyla my dear,” said the captain, then he stomped happily off through a parting sea of cheering soldiers.

It took Ptolnec nearly a full hour to finally hand over the coin and take his turn in Pristoleph’s tent.

5

9 Uktar, the Year of the Snow Winds (1335 DR) The Surmarsh, Thay

IVIarek had no interest in all the killing and sword-play. A simple spell rendered him invisible, so he could stand apart from the fray, watching his people dispatch one lizardman after another.

The lizardmen shone with slime and bog water. Their green-and-yellow scales twitched over tightly bunched muscles. Long snouts like a crocodile’s snapped at the Thayans, and unsettlingly humanlike hands tipped with terrible claws ripped and pawed. Marek couldn’t help but notice that when the lizardmen bled, their blood was as red as any human’s.

He’d been sent deep into the untamed marsh in the northern reaches of the realm on what he was certain was a suicide mission. Though since he hadn’t sent himself there, it was more properly a homicide mission, and he was the victim.

I’ve made as many enemies as friends, Marek Rymiit told himself as a Thayan warrior died gurgling at the hands of one of the humanoid reptiles. I guess that means I’m doing something right.

With a mumbled incantation and a casual swipe of his hands in front of him, he stopped the lizardman in its tracks. The warrior’s blood dribbled into the brackish water, mingling with the green-yellow slime floating on the top. Little fish appeared from below the murk to gum the droplets of blood.

The lizardman’s breathing grew fast and shallow, and Marek was concerned that the thing might pass out. Having cast the spell, Marek could be seen, but there

were so few of the lizardmen left, and enough of his own people still wading through them, that he was comfortable with his own safety.

The cold swamp water leaking into his boots, however, was quite a bit less than comfortable.

“If you understand me,” Rymiit said to the lizardman, “say so now or 111 kill you and find one of your kind that does.”

The lizardman thought about it for a few beats of its racing heart then said, “I… understand.”

Rymiit smiled, remaining silent, and watching while one of his people—a young woman named Zhaera who was a promising little necromancer—was disemboweled by a lizardman’s ragged claws. The yellow-gray ropes that came out of her body splashed into the swamp water and glistened in the sunlight filtering through the trees above. Flies landed on them and took off again quickly, taking their little nibbles even as the guts sank into the swamp. It took her a few seconds to die, but Marek imagined she was happy to be able to see the lizardman who’d killed her fall before the blade of the strapping young sergeant who was ever so handy with a battle-axe.

“If not Thay,” Marek asked the paralyzed lizardman, “whom do you serve?”

The lizardman’s lips curved and Marek could see strips of human flesh festering between its triangular teeth.

“Speak, lizard,” Marek Rymiit urged. “Whatever you fear from your new master, I can assure you will be tripled at the hands of the Red Wizards. Speak, then I will release you, you can go back to serving your proper masters in peace, and I can leave this stinking, insect-infested hell hole once and for all.”

“A dragon…” the lizardman hissed, reluctant to explain further.

Marek raised an eyebrow and said, “A dragon? Oh, do tell.”

The lizardman stood twitching silently for a moment.

“This dragon has a name, I take it?” Marek asked, noticing only in passing that the last of the lizardmen had fallen to a Thayan blade.

“Insithryllax,” a deep, powerful voice swept over the stagnant water.

Marek looked up at the source of the voice: a tall, thin man with skin the color of freshly turned soil. His head was shaved clean, and he was dressed in traveling clothes of thin oiled leather and fine shimmering silk. His eyes betrayed his nature, being a human’s eyes, save for the triangular irises.

“Insithryllax,” Marek said with a beaming smile. “It’s a lovely name, really.”

The dragon in his human form drew one side of his lips up in a thin, tight smile.

“Well,” Marek went on, “since I have you here, sir, I must inform you that I have been sent here by the Tharchion of Eltabbar to collect one thousand pieces of gold in lawfully levied taxes owed by the Swamp Scale Tribe. Am I to understand that you are holding that gold on their behalf?”

Insithryllax laughed, and Marek all but bathed in the sound of it, it was so beautiful.

“You aren’t afraid of me,” Insithryllax observed.

The dragon’s eyes twitched from side to side, noting the Thayans moving to surround him. The warriors had their weapons ready, and the few surviving mages were poised to cast spells.

“Aren’t they darling?” Marek said with a smile.

“Indeed,” replied the dragon. “Are they yours?”

“For the time being.”

The Thayan agents looked at each other, uncertain, waiting for orders, not understanding what they were hearing.

“You’re a black, aren’t you?” Marek asked.

Insithryllax shrugged in the affirmative.

“Show me?” asked Marek, his mouth beginning to water.

The dark-skinned man began to twitch, then he shook, then he spasmed. Loud popping noises assaulted Marek’s ears, and the man fell to all fours, his face dipping into the fetid water. When his head tipped up again to look at the Red Wizard, the human face was gone, and in its place was something that looked more like the lizardmen.

“Sir…” one of the warriors, the dashing young sergeant in fact, said.

He, like the others, was stepping back, the ring around the transforming thing growing larger and thinner with each step.

“Take no action without my direct command,” Marek ordered.

By the looks on more than one of their faces, he had some reason to doubt they’d all wait once the dragon fully revealed itself.

More cracking, popping, grunting, and shaking stretched across several increasingly tense moments, and soon a massive wyrm stood in the rippling swamp water. Insithryllax’s batlike wings stretched two dozen feet from tip to tip. On the end of a long, scaled neck was a head like a lizard’s, with forward-curving horns protruding from either side of his head. A tongue as long as Marek’s arm flicked from between teeth as wide and as sharp as kitchen knives.

Marek Rymiit found that he could hardly breathe.

“You knew you would find me,” the dragon rumbled, his voice shaking the Red Wizard’s eardrums, “didn’t you, human?”

Marek smiled and bowed in answer.

“And you’ve readied yourself, I suppose?” the great wyrm asked.

Again, Marek smiled and bowed.

“We’ll speak again in a moment,” said the dragon.

It drew in a deep breath, its chest filling out, almost bulging.

“Sir!” the handsome sergeant shouted, the beginnings of a thin, almost feminine wail sullying his last word.

Two of the surviving wizards began to cast spells but never finished them.

The dragon opened his great jaws and poured a black mist from his throat into the air around him. Spinning, Insithryllax swept the mist across the Thayan agents. When the mist touched their flesh, it sizzled and popped. Some of them turned and tried to run, but they couldn’t get nearly far enough away. Exposed flesh began to slough off so that at least three of Marek’s people lived long enough to touch their own skulls with rapidly disintegrating fingers, their last screams rattling out through mouths devoid of tongue or lips.

Marek was barely able to finish his own spell for the gorge that rose in his throat, but by the time the dragon had come full circle and his team was dead, Marek Rymiit was done with his casting, and the dragon presented a brief moment of vulnerability.

The wyrm’s eyes came around to meet Marek’s and the Red Wizard could see a change come over them. It was subtle. Only a trained few could spot it, but there it was.