more substantial meal, he instructed the unseen servants to do the same. All around him handfuls of yolk sacs were offered up by invisible hands to eagerly snapping jaws.
The adult female drakes, their red scales shining with the vile-smelling moisture that filled the air, hissed and snapped from the periphery. The smell was starting to excite them and was having the same effect on their black offspring.
Marek finally found what he was looking for and quickly rattled off a simple spell that sent bolts of blue-violet energy ripping into the still-soft scales of a smallish newborn, one he thought looked weak enough to do without. The spell killed the black firedrake, and Marek dragged it to the creature he’d just delivered. Four others of the stronger newborns fell on their slain sister and fought over every last strip of bloody flesh.
The same began to happen all over the chamber and Marek, for the first time in a while, felt the icy tendrils of fear tickling at the edges of his consciousness. It wasn’t a feeling he relished.
“Insithryllax…” he said, looking up at the dragon and at the same time calling to mind a spell.
“Go,” the dragon said. “I will settle things, but you’ll lose more than I know you’re hoping to.”
Marek looked around at the hellish birthing chamber, the older black and adult red firedrakes were moving in slowly, but he could see in the corded muscles of their powerful legs the inevitability of dozens and dozens of feral pounces.
“This won’t do,” the Red Wizard said, frustration holding the fear at bay at least for the moment.
“It’s too crowded in here,” the great black rumbled.
Marek nodded, looked Insithryllax in the eye, and said, “I’ll send for you when I’ve found a bigger lair.”
The dragon nodded and Marek cast a spell that got him out of there half a heartbeat before all hell broke loose.
19
19 Alturiak, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR) First Quarter, Innarlith
In what was left of his pain-addled mind, Fharaud made a list of things he had lost:
Everwind.
The ship was utterly destroyed. Hardly any two planks were still nailed together when the Cormyrean ship that had been waiting for them in the Vilhon Reach dragged the few bodies, and even fewer survivors, from the unforgiving sea.
Fharaud, or so he was told tendays later when he first regained consciousness, had been “lucky”that’s how the priest of Waukeen in Arrabar had put it: luckyin that he had been wrapped in ropes that remained tied to a larger piece of wreckage and so had been dragged up and out of the water. They’d found him lashed to his makeshift raft and at first thought he was dead, so grievous were his wounds and so shallow his breathing.
The Cormyreans had dropped the survivors in Arrabar and buried the dead at sea. Ayesunder Truesilver, a Cormyrean naval officer of some note, had been aboard the ship that Everwind was supposed to have met. He’d written a short letter and tucked it into one of Fharaud’s pockets. When he regained some sense in the temple of the Merchant’s Friend one of the acolytes had read it aloud to him:
Master Fharaud,
Please accept the best wishes of the Kingdom of Cormyr and oursincerest hope for your speedy and complete recovery.
As the cog Everwind was still under your command and with a pilot from Innarlith at the helm, we must consider her to have been scuttled in your possession. In the interest of time and the proper maintenance of His Majesty’s Fleet, Cormyr shall look elsewhere for her ships and shall consider no balance owed to you.
Regrets,
Ayesunder Truesilver, Harbormaster And that brought him to:
His Family Fortune.
There was hardly a silver piece left.
Everwind had not been built from the pocket of King Azoun IV but from gold and collateral of Fharaud’s family fortune. His parents had left him with a sizeable trust, and with that he had built his business, all the while holding back enough to live on and to pay his modest staff.
He had gambled it all on Everwind.
Why shouldn’t he have? The ship was the finest afloat. He and Devorast had outdone the finest shipbuilders in Faerun, if not the whole of Toril. The purse and honor of King Azoun IV was without question. Fharaud had been mere hours from delivering the ship and coming into possession of chest after chest of Cormyrean gold. Instead, the gold had returned to Marsember with Ayesunder Truesilver, and it would not be coming back.
He had proven himself unworthy of it, after all, and so much for…
His Reputation.
From the moment word reached Innarlith that Everwind had been lost, everyone from whom he’d borrowed gold or goods, every enemy he’d ever made, every craftsman who thought he was owed a little extra for his effort, came to call on the business he’d left behind.
Though Devorast had done an admirable job of holding them at bay, by the time Fharaud returned to Innarlith, carried on a stretcher from the seemingly endless, agonizing carriage ride south from Arrabar, he had simply been picked clean, and people he thought were his friends seemed to have forgotten his name.
He was the man who lost the Cormyrean king’s gold, the fool who launched a ship and sank it the same day, who had built a ship too big for the portal, or so they said, because he wanted to impress a foreign king.
All he was left with was the little room that had been his office but into which Devorast had moved a bed and a scattering of his possessionsenough barely to live on. Alone and an invalid he had lost even…
The Following Parts of his Body:
His right leg, right arm, right eye, and right ear.
Fharaud felt like half a man, and in almost literal terms, he was. The priests in Arrabar had healed him enough to keep him alive, but to do more they wanted gold. Even that soon after the loss of Everwind, the priestsall savvy entrepreneurs in their own rightstarted to realize that Fharaud had no gold, certainly not enough for that sort of clerical attention.
They wrapped him up and put him on a carriage, and by the time he got back to Innarlith, there was nothing to pay for healing there either, and there he was left.
Every day was a long stretch of agonizing torment. The constant pain was so all-consuming there were times when he could feel his mind slipping away and would come back to his senses only hours, even days later, drooling, panting, screaming, tied to his bed and watched over by the one person who hadn’t abandoned him.
“I don’t deserve this,” he said to Ivar Devorast on the two hundred and fortieth day after the loss of Everwind.
Devorast looked him in the eye and shrugged.
Though it made his head virtually explode with agony to do so, Fharaud laughed. He didn’t understand what Devorast meant by that shrug any more than he understood his own words.
He didn’t deserve what?
To be ruined, to be maimed, or to be alive?
Maybe he didn’t deserve any of those things.
20
28 Alturiak, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
Willem could tell his mother didn’t like the house. Still, she knew enough not to embarrass him in front of the master builder. The look on her face when she first stepped into the confines of the dark, narrow townhouse on the
