Authors: Philip Athans
“You do your best,” she whispered, her voice growing heavier, sleepy.
“That’s precisely the problem, and if I was the only one who suffered for it, that would be enough.”
“No one has suffered for what you’ve done,” she said, her fingertips beginning to play at the hair on the back of his head.
“There was a man,” Willem said, closing his eyes, concentrating on the feel of her skin against his, “who would tell you differently, a lieutenant with a promising career ahead of him.”
“Not Thenmun,” she said, then started to nibble on his earlobe.
“No,” he replied, “No, not Thenmun, but someone very much like him. I had him reassigned … exiled, almost, for arguing with a decision I’d made, for questioning my figures.”
She had no response, only continued to work at his ear because she knew how much he liked it.
“He was right, you see,” Willem admitted, “and I was wrong.”
Her tongue began to caress the inside of his ear and he drew away playfully, unable to keep the grin from splitting his face. They turned onto their sides, facing each other, and Halina pulled the thin white sheet over their heads. He couldn’t look her in the eye, not when her body lay exposed so. He couldn’t take his eyes or his hands off her and didn’t bother trying, and she did nothing to stop him.
“The master builder may have made a mistake,” he said.
“Stop it,” she whispered. “Who else would he trust the way he trusts you?”
“I told you: He trusts me for the wrong reasons,” replied Willem “There’s someone else. Someone I… someone I used to know. He would have been the better choice.”
“Someone from Cormyr?”
Willem nodded and said, “He’s here too. He came a few days, maybe a month, after I did.”
“Then if he was so much better than you,” asked Halina, “why isn’t he becoming the master builder’s right hand instead of you?”
Willem’s heart sank and he said, “Why not indeed?”
“I believe in you,” she whispered, then they kissed.
When they parted a few minutes later, he smiled and finally did look her in the eye. He brushed a strand of hair from her crystal blue eyes with the tip of a finger.
“Why do we always end up here?” he asked, making his voice as light as he could, and finding it surprisingly easy to do.
“Well, Master Korvan,” Halina replied, her voice a mockery of a chaste lady’s indignation, but the blush in her pale cheeks was all too sincere. “You should know better not to ask a lady why she”
“No, no, no,” he interrupted, placing a fingertip gently to her thin lips to silence her. As he went on, the tip of her tongue drew circles around his fingertip. “I meant, why do we always come here and not to the lady’s bed?”
She gently brushed his finger away with a hand she then placed on his rough, unshaven face.
“You know I live with my uncle,” she said. “Though there are many nights he doesn’t come home, I never know when he’ll be there, and I doubt he would approve.”
“You know,” he said, “you’ve never told me about this uncle of yours, just that you live with him and the two of you are from Thay. What is he, a Red Wizard come to enslave the fair city-state of Innarlith?”
A dark look crossed her eyes for so brief a moment, Willem couldn’t be sure he’d really seen it.
“I’m sorry,” he said before she could speak. “That was boorish of me to make a joke like that… to assume everyone from Thay was some”
She silenced him with a kiss, then said, “My uncle has come here on his own, not as an agent of the realm. He has some business interests here, but he doesn’t trouble me with specifics. His name is Marek Rymiit.”
She must have seen the effect the mention of that name had on him. Her eyes went wide and she took her hand off his cheek.
“Marek Rymiit?” he said, pulling the sheet off his head so that they could see each other in the light from the fireplace. “Marek Rymiit is your uncle?”
“You’ve heard of him,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Hasn’t everyone with a pair of ears in Innarlith?” Willem replied. “He has the ear of the ransar, doesn’t he, and friends in all the right places.”
Halina shrugged.
“And you’re only now telling me this,” he said, “that you’re the niece of Marek Rymiit.”
She smiled and shrugged again.
Willem returned her smile, and his hands went to her body again. They kissed and for a moment, perhaps, Willem felt guilty for what he was about to do, but then the moment passed.
He drew away from her gently and said, “Perhaps we shouldn’t meet like this again…”
Her face became a mask of hurt and confusion, changing in a way only a woman’s could.
“Until I meet your uncle, I mean,” he said, holding her gently by the back of the neck and drawing her in for another kiss. “I should meet him. We should be introduced to him as… as a couple. To him, at least, if not all of Innarlith.”
Her face changed again, just as fast and just as completely. She thought he had said what he wanted her to think he’d said, and the look on her face made his skin crawl.
“Oh, Willem,” she said, a tear appearing at the corner of her eye, “my love.”
Then they kissed and touched each other just long enough for him to think of a reasonable excuse to ask her to leave.
5 Uktar, the Year of Shadows (1358 DR) First Quarter, Innarlith
Fharaud let the brandy sit on his tongue for as long as he could take it, then he swallowed loudly and smiled. He looked over at Devorast, hunched over a drawing table, his own snifter of brandy sitting untouched on the table next to him.
“Really, Ivar, you should try it,” Fharaud said, pausing to take another sip of the potent liquid. “It’s really among man’s most extraordinary creations.”
Devorast made a notation on the drawing in front of him. His handwriting was so small Fharaud shouldn’t have been able to read it from where he sat, but it was so precise he found he could make out the words: “Adjust beam angle up one eighth of one degree.”
One eighth of one degree, Fharaud thought, then said, “I doubt the boatwrights’ tools will allow for so fine a measurement.”
Devorast looked up at him with an expression Fharaud had come to know too well. It was one of fulfilled expectations at having been confronted with some inadequacy in the world, irritation at having once again to suffer at such a deficiency’s hands, and a determination to set the problem right.
The next note read: “Refine toolsagainto achieve proper angle.”
“You know,” Fharaud said, “you could make a fortune on the tools you’ve invented alone.”
“I’m not interested in tools,” Devorast replied, “only what I can build with them.”
“A contradiction?” Fharaud asked, just to make conversation. “It takes tools to make tools after all, and isn’t a ship but a tool men use to ply the seas and not an end to itself?”
Devorast didn’t take the bait, but then why would he?
“People don’t like you, Ivar,” Fharaud said, the brandy his second glassloosening his tongue. “They think you’re arrogant and closed-minded.”
“A mind isn’t something to be left open,” the younger man said, “so that just anything might crawl in and take up residence there.”
Fharaud laughed. He had come to treasure those rare bursts of sincere humor and simple, if unsociable, wisdom from Ivar Devorast.
“Ah, Ivar,” said Fharaud, “I’d take you under my wing if I thought I had a wing big enough.”
“You have taught me much,” Devorast admitted.
That made Fharaud sit up straighter in his chair. The air was cold in the little room he called his office, the breeze coming from the north unusually cool but characteristically damp. Neither of them had bothered to get up and tend the little wood stove, and the fire had gone to slowly blackening orange coals.
“By all the gods above us, Ivar,” Fharaud said, “I do believe you just paid me a compliment.”
Devorast, try as Fharaud was sure he was trying to hide it, smiled at that, then glanced at the brandy.
“Go ahead, my boy,” Fharaud urged. “Drink up. It might loosen the reigns you keep on yourself.”
Devorast shook his head, the smile fading.
“We’re ready to build it, aren’t we?” Fharaud asked with a nod at the stack of drawings in front of Devorast.
“You should name it,” Devorast said, thumbing through the drawings. “It’s good.”
“High praise indeed, my boy. High praise indeed,” Fharaud replied. “Not yet, though. I prefer to see her in the flesh before I name her. She’s like a baby, you know.”
He paused to see some reaction from Devorast, but there was none.
“You know when you conceive a child,” Fharaud pressed on, “or at least you know when you might have.” He winked
at Devorast, who didn’t look up to see it. “Anyway, you can see it growing in the womb, see it being built in whatever way it is that a baby is built by a woman.”
“But you don’t name it,” Devorast cut in; “until it’s born.”
“You don’t name it until it’s born,” Fharaud concurred.
Devorast sighed, and leaned back from the drawing table, regarding the plans down the length of his nose.
“Yes, I know,” Fharaud said, having seen the look too many times already.
“It’s too big,” Devorast said. “It’s too big and it’s too far away.”
“The client wanted it big, and the client asked that it be built here,” Fharaud said. Devorast shook his head. “It will be fine, Ivar.”
“It makes no sense,” Devorast said. “Why would Cormyr have us build a ship for them, here, on the shore of the Lake of Steam?”
“I wasn’t always a used-up, bitter old boatwright, my boy,” Fharaud joked. “I was a fine salesman in my day.”
Devorast ignored the remark and said, “There’s no way to get this ship from here to Cormyr. There is no navigable waterway to connect us, or the Sword Coast and beyond for that matter, to the Sea of Fallen Stars. This ship is too big to be taken overland. The hull wouldn’t stand it. It would get to the Vilhon Reach in tatters.”
“She would get to the Vilhon Reach in tatters,” Fharaud corrected.
Devorast ignored that too and said, “It’s folly.”
“There are ways to move a ship besides through water, Ivar. We’ve discussed this.”
Devorast sighed again and said, “I know, I know. These magical portals. You know I don’t trust them.”
“I don’t know why,” Fharaud said. He took another sip of brandy then stood, stretching limbs that were stiff in the cold air. “We have a long road ahead of us before we have to worry about that anyway. The ship still has to be
built, and that will take a year and a half or more. Perhaps two years.”
Devorast said, “Of course, but not to plan ahead for its delivery is irresponsible.” He shook his head, then glanced again at the brandy.
Fharaud drained his own glass, coughed when the brandy burned the back of his throat, then set his glass on the table next to Devorast.
“Build me a grand ship, Ivar,” Fharaud said, reaching out to take the younger man’s untouched snifter, “and I’ll see it delivered to Azoun’s navy.”
Fharaud downed the brandy in one searing gulp, ignoring the look of doubt from Ivar Devorast, though the look was no less searing.
9Mirtul, the Year of the Serpent (1359 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
Willem Korvan had a very busy year.
In that time he continued to rise in the ranks of the office of the master builder. He hadn’t quite become Inthelph’s “right hand” as Halina had predicted, but he had managed to make himself indispensable.
Most of the time he succeeded by being close at hand. There was not a single day that went by, even those days Halina hoped he would set aside entirely for her, that he wasn’t at the wall or at the home or offices of the master builder. When an assignment came up he always volunteered, until it became something of a joke among the master builder’s staff. Finally Inthelph stopped asking for volunteers and rewarded Willem ahead of time with the plum assignments.
Few in the master builder’s staff complained. The few who were not quite friends of Willem’s knew that Willem I had too many friends. No one got in his way by choice,
though Willem never detected a sense of fear or intimidation in anyone around him. He hadn’t set out to make anyone afraid of him, after all. He just wanted to be indispensable, and he was. He wanted to be liked, and he was. His casual manner and disarming good looks carried him far in the social circles of Innarlith, and he found himself attending an increasing number of posh gatherings and official functions, sometimes with Halina on his arm and sometimes not.
For her part, Halina continued to be a grateful and attentive lover, and over the months they saw a great deal of each other, though still he had not met her important uncle. She tried time and again to introduce them to each other, and Willem had developed quite a bag of tricks to help him dodge the meeting over and over again. He was delighted, but also a bit disappointed, that Halina never seemed to notice the intent behind his sudden need for a fresh drink, a breath of air, or the uncontrollable urge to whisk her off to a quiet bedchamber away from the guests and the looming specter of her uncle.
There were two reasons that Willem didn’t want to meet Marek Rymiit. The first was the least of the two, but one he still couldn’t deny, at least to himself. The promise implicit in their meeting, the promise he’d made to Halina, would turn an hourglass. When that sand ran out, the whole of Innarlith would expect there to be a wedding, and though the feel of her skin still thrilled him, and he time and again found himself telling her things he’d promised himself he’d tell no one, he couldn’t bring himself to marry the girl.
She was the bright spot of true happiness in an otherwise difficult and nervous existence. All the time Willem’s mind spun with plots and schemes and the constant push and pull of social climbing. The wall reconstruction went slowly, ran frighteningly over budget, and one senator after another stepped forward to oppose it, to oppose even the retention of Inthelph as the city’s master builder.
How could he marry Halina Rymiit-Sverdej, much less meet her uncle, while things were still so uncertain?
Marek Rymiit had become one of those sunlike men, those bright centers around which others rotate in fixed orbits of favors and secrets. With any hint that the project he’d become so integral a part of was proceeding under any but the most ideal circumstances would put Willem in too precarious a position. Would someone like Rymiit support a young man who some senators were already saying was helping to bankrupt the city? Certainly not.