30 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR) The Sisterhood of Pastorals, Innarlith
One man held his ankles to the floor, two more held his hands, and the fourth kneeled on his chest, tangled a grubby hand in his hair, and cut him. Once, twice, then a third time. His own blood felt so hot it seemed to burn his face. When he opened his mouth to scream he could taste it.
She held her baby’s head up, her soft, wispy hair in the palm of one hand. When she let the slight weight push her hand down, her baby’s neck gave no resistance. The infant was limp and still, her skin already going cold. A tear dropped onto the baby’s forehead and rolled down her cheek. Her dead eyes dry, it was left to her mother to cry for her.
He screamed when his arm came away from his body, but not because of the pain. It didn’t even hurt, really, not like you’d think it would. He screamed because he knew that he would live the rest of his life without it. As young as he was, barely seven years old, he screamed from the horror or having been mutilated. Startled, perhaps even guilty at the sound of the boy’s scream, the dog took a better grip on the bleeding, disembodied limb, and ran away with it in his jaws. The boy screamed after it as his blood poured away onto the floor of his bedroom.
She batted her face with her hands but succeeded only in burning her palms. The oil had had time to soak into her skin, and when her husband touched the torch to her face the burns dug deep. She took a breath to scream and seared her own lungs. She coughed and choked and writhed in blind agony. Her fear turned to anger, then there was no word for the emotions that exploded in her as her brain began to cook in her skull. She died a feral thing, overwhelmed by agony, chewing through her own tongue.
The little girl took her last breath on the day after her ninth birthday. Dressed in her finest nightgown, on her back under bedclothes of the softest silk and goose down, the woman her mother hired to care for her holding her hand in a cold, dry, unwelcome grip, she stared up at the ceiling over her bed and wondered how long it would take her to die, and if she would find herself in another world. She knew she didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay home. She wanted to stay at Berrywilde. She didn’t care about the gods and their punishments and rewards. If her soul stayed home, could she find some way to make her mommy love her? She was still asking that question when she felt her heart stop. Before her vision fled her, she saw the nanny shrug, stand, and walk away.
The woman’s face hovered in the air above her in a way that wasn’t natural, that wasn’t right. Her smile was the warmest thing. she’d ever seen, and the light that shone from her perfect, glowing skin washed away the images of pain and torture and hopelessness. When she spoke, her lips didn’t move, but the words filled an empty space that brought the world of the living together with the world of the dead.
Wake up, now, girl, the goddess said. You lived.
Phyrea drew in a breath and held it. Her eyes stung and watered from a light that was at once blinding and muted. Pain lanced through her, shoving her into consciousness, warning her that she should awake and take stock of herself or die. She tried to sit up, but something held her downa hand on her chest.
“Easy there,” a familiar voice whispered.
“Father?” she guessed, her voice coming to her own ears as a ragged, alien rasp.
“Phyrea,” the man said. “Breathe deeply.”
“Pristoleph,” she whispered, and her voice sounded almost like her own.
She took a deep breath and smelled and tasted incense and sickness.
She took another breath and the dull throb of pain subsided, replaced by jabbing pinpoints here and thereher hip, her arm, her head. She opened her eyes.
“There you are,” Pristoleph said, his voice as soft as the look in his eyes. His hair waved like fire on his scalp, and the warmth of his hand in hers drove off the chill touch of death. “There you are.”
She turned her head, doing her best to ignore the pain that accompanied any movement at all. She lay on her back on a narrow bed set against the rough brick wall of a room no bigger than one of the smaller closets in Berrywilde or Pristal Towers. No artwork adorned the walls, but there was a window with cobalt blue glass that bathed the room in a cool, suppressed light. A candle burned on a short chest of drawers, backlighting Pristoleph, who sat at her bedside on a stool.
“What happened?” she asked, but even then the memories flooded back. “The canal,” she rasped before Pristoleph could answer.
“Destroyed,” he told her, but she knew that. She’d seen it happen and had nearly been destroyed with it. “How?” she asked.
“Devorast and that alchemist of his,” Pristoleph answered, and she shook her head. She didn’t care how the canal had been destroyed, she wanted to know how she’d lived, but as he went on she realized it didn’t matter. “He was afraid that it was going to be completed by someone else, that his vision was to be perverted by the Thayan and his cronies.”
“Ivar?” she whispered, and a tear came unbidden to the corner of her eye.
Pristoleph sagged a little, in the face and in the body, and his hair looked less like fire.
“He’s alive,” her husband said. “He brought you here. Devorast and the dwarf.”
Phyrea tried to nod.
“He saved me?” she said. It didn’t seem possiblehadn’t she gone there to save him? Or had she gone there to die with him?
Pristoleph nodded and said, “Why, Phyrea? I thought you safe at Berrywilde.”
She shook her head in an effort to tell him that she didn’t know why, and that she wasn’t safe at Berrywilde, at any rate.
“Was he right?” she rasped.
“Devorast?” asked Pristoleph. “About the canal?”
She nodded.
“No,” he said with stern self-confidence. “The city is divided. That much is true. I’ve turned the black firedrakes out of Pristal Towers for fear that they might betray me in favor of Rymiit. I have it on good authority that it was the Thayan that created themor brought them here from whatever dark corner of the Realms he found them in. But I have the wemics, and I still control most of the militarythe men at Firesteap Citadel and the Nagaflow Keep. The city watch is doing just thatwatching, but doing little else. Fires are burning down parts of the Fourth Quarter, despite the rain.”
Phyrea didn’t understand any of that at first. She shook her head, wincing at the pain.
“Ivar?” she asked.
“He’s safe,” Pristoleph said, and he appeared reluctant to speak. “He’s in Pristal Towers. He’s talked of Shou Lunggoing there again, for good this time.”
Phyrea shook her head and sobbed though it hurt her to do so.
“I love you,” Pristoleph said. “Had you died I would have given this wretched city to the Thayan and been done with it, but you lived, so I will hold it for you. I will give it to you, along with everything I have. I will kill myself here and now if the gods require my life in exchange for yours, but know this.” He paused, swallowed, gathered himself. “If you take him into your bed or go with him to his I will kill you both.”
Phyrea closed her eyes and cried.
62
6 Mirtul, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
Willem Korvan ate his mother’s corpse, little by little, over the course of seventeen days, not because he required sustenance, but out of some dimly-felt sense of necessity.
Marek Rymiit could feel the undead thing’s need and confusion the second he stepped into the house. It hit him just as squarely, though not quite as hard, as the stench. The smell of the rotting carcass of Thurene Korvan mixed with the dried-meat and spice smell of her son. Throughout was the tang of disease.
“Willem,” the Thayan whispered, “you poor dear.”
The creature cowered at the sight of the Red Wizard who’d created it, its dull, glassy eyes devoid of any trace of the vibrant if confused young man that had once inhabited that flesh. Willem’s refined good looks had been replaced by desiccated tissue and bulging joints, his skin like a leather cloak left on the street for a year of sun, wind, and rain.