She looked at him with wide eyes, and her open mouth was turned up in a trace of a smile.
“I will have to leave again tomorrow,” he said.
She shrugged.
“I’m not entirely certain when I’ll be back.” Phyrea looked to her left and nodded to no one. Willem put the raw meat in his mouth and started to chew. It wasn’t bad.
58
29 Marpenotk, the Yearof the Banner (1368 DR) The Canal Site
Willem had no idea what the man’s name was, but he assumed he was some kind of foreman. Anyway, he was the one who talked to Willem most often, told him what was happening and asked for things. He was a short man, barely taller than a dwarf, but stocky and solid. He had a face like worn leather and dull eyes the color of mud. His greasy hair was always ragged and unkept, even falling out in patches. His clothes were spattered with holes and crusted with dried mud. He smelled of sweat and freshly-turned soil.
“Please come quickly, Senator,” the little man said, his voice shaking in time with his panic-stricken eyes. “Please… there’s been a terrible accident.”
Willem sighed. He’d lost track of the number of terrible accidents that had befallen the workers since he’d taken over the construction of the canal. Men died, were injured, fell to disease, and simply walked home in such numbers it frankly amazed him that there was anyone left to dig at all.
“Senator?” the little man prompted.
Willem scowled at him, and he backed away a few steps, but still seemed determined to have Willem follow him. Willem stood and the man started off, apparently in the direction of the accident. Willem stretched and looked up into the overcast sky.
“At least it isn’t raining,” he whispered to himself, then yawned.
“Senator?” the little man asked.
“Oh, for the sake of every god in the Outer Planes, man,” Willem huffed, “what do you expect me to do?”
“Senator?” the man asked with a look of disappointed confusion.
“Honestly…” Willem went on. “What is it this time? Another trench collapse? Someone hacked his hand off with an axe? Someone blinded by a flying splinter? Do I look like a priest to you?”
“But, Senator, I thought…”
Willem waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. Perhaps the grubby little man had finally realized that he hadn’t thought anything at all. He looked down at the ground at his feet, and Willem almost felt sorry for him.
Willem stepped out of the protection of his tent, and his foot sank half an inch in the mud. He sighed and looked down at his expensive boots, which had long since been ruined.
“Damn this mud to the Barrens of Doom and Despair,” he muttered. “Aren’t you sick of the constant damp?”
The foreman shook his head, confused, simple.
“Did someone die?” asked Willem. “Is that what you’re all in a fluster over?”
The foreman nodded.
Willem sighed and said, “Are they buried?” The foreman nodded again. “Loose soil, or mud?” “Mud,” the man replied.
“Mud…” Willem sighed. “Don’t you hate mud? I hate mud. I know people use that word too lightly, too often, ‘hate.’ But I hate this mud. I’m tired of being wet and cold. I’m tired of living outside like an ore. This is a life for savages, sitting in the rain, living in your own bathroom, for Waukeen’s sake.”
“Yes, Senator,” the foreman agreedor pretended to.
Willem saw a trace of annoyance pass through the man’s features, and he fought down the impulse to draw his sword and gut the man where he stood. There were too many others around to see it, and even Salatis might consider that overstepping his bounds.
“What caused these men to be buried in the mud?” Willem asked. “Was it a naga?”
“A naga?”
“Yes, fool, a naga. You know, the giant snake things with human faces that eat slow-witted fools like you just to spite me. Was it a thrice-bedamned naga, or not?”
“No, Senator,” the foreman replied. “I mean… no one saw any naga.”
“Just because you couldn’t see it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there,” Willem said. “They’ve turned on us, you know.”
“They have killed men to the north, I hear,” the foreman said. “But that’s miles away, Senator.”
“They traveled for miles inland to kill the ambassador from Arrabar,” Willem said. He stepped back into his tent and did his best to wipe the mud from his boots, but all he did was make the dryer, brown grass inside a little bit muddier. “So what happened, then?”
“It was just a mudslide, Senator. On account of all the rain we’ve been having.”
“Really?” Willem asked, a growl to his voice that might have been due more to the fact that the cold and damp had settled in his chest than out of anger. “Could it really have been on account of all the rain we’ve been having?”
The foreman, sheepish, looked down at his feet.
“How many?” Willem asked.
“Senator?”
“How many men, damn it?”
The foreman nodded and said, “Fourteen souls. Tragic, ain’t it, Senator? A human tragedy, this.” Willem rolled his eyes and sighed. “Senator?”
“Are you sure they’re dead?” Willem asked. “Well, they’ve been under there a long time.” “Have you started digging them out?” “I think some of the men went at it while I ran for you, yes.”
Willem rubbed his eyes and blinked, looking past the grubby foreman, and down a steep hill to the edge of the enormous trench. Most of the length of it that he could see was deserted, not near finished. Men walked here and there, sometimes alongside ox carts with various tools and supplies. He couldn’t draw a sense of urgency out of the scene no matter how hard he tried.
“There’s so slim a chance that I will live to see this done, it’s impossible to measure with the mathematics known to me,” Willem said.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” the foreman replied, even though Willem hadn’t asked him anything.
“Do you like it here?” Willem asked the man.
“Yes, Senator,” the foreman lied.
“Are we paying you?”
“Yes, Senator.”
“What for?”
“Senator?”
Willem looked the man in the eye and said, “What are we paying you for?”
“To help build the Grand Canal,” he said, and Willem could hear the capital letters in the little man’s prideful voice.
“What do you mean ‘Grand Canal’?” Willem asked.
“That’s what it’s called, isn’t it?”
“No.”
The foreman looked surprised, and remained confused. He blinked at Willem then glanced off in the direction of the day’s terribly tragic mudslide.
“No one has named it,” Willem said. “Stop calling it that. Did Devorast call it that?”
“I never met that man, Senator,” the foreman said. “I started after he was… after I took over for that helf-elf chap.”
“So there are now fourteen fewer men working,” Willem said.
“Senator?”
“Get back to it, then,” Willem said.
“Yes, Senator,” the foreman replied, disappointment plain on his leathery face. “We’ll have the bodies dug out by nightfall.”
“No, you won’t,” Willem said, and the foreman had the nerve to looked surprised, even offended. “I want you to continue with your day’s tasks. Light torches to work past nightfall if you have to, but finish. Then you can dig up your dead if you like.”
The man stared at him, speechless.
“Wrap the bodies, but don’t send them back to Innarlith,” Willem said.
He’d nearly forgotten something Marek Rymiit had told him some tendays before.
“But their families” the foreman started.
“Leave that to me,” Willem said. His skin crawled, and he had to look away from the foreman’s confused, puppy-dog eyes. “On your way, now.”
59
6 Uktar, the Yearof the Banner (1368 DR) The Canal Site
Willem looked at the line of canvas bundles and frowned. Stained with dried mud, the dull, bone-colored material bore the muddy brown handprints of the men who’d wrapped them and carried them to the open stretch of ground near the shore of the Lake of Steam. The sulfur smell of the water drove away the ripe stench of the dead bodies in the canvas bundles.