them so quickly and radiating such anger that the dwarf, startled, stood and grabbed for his hammer.
Devorast stopped the dwarf with a hand on his forearm then whispered something into his ear.
“Devorast!” Inthelph shouted. “Devorast, you thrice-bedamned fool, what in the name of Toril and the crystal spheres do you think you’re doing here?”
The dwarf smiled at Inthelph, amused either by the master builder or what Devorast had saidor perhaps both. He walked away but kept glancing back at the master builder withnot quite menace but a subtle challenge in his eyes.
Inthelph, livid, ignored the dwarf and instead shouted at Devorast, “I told you to bring me plans, you drooling incompetent, not to begin work without the slightest word of approval from me. Who in the name of every god in the outer planes do you think you are?”
“There was no need to show you anything, Master Builder,” Devorast replied, and there was no mistaking the disdain he put into the words “Master Builder.” “I found the right location, quarried the stone, and now I’m building you and your ransar his keep.”
Inthelph was so taken aback by the brazen replya reply Willem fully expected to hearthat he almost fell over.
“On whose authority, boy?” the master builder shrieked. “I have not approved this site. I did not release the gold to pay this crew. I did not examine the design of your fortification. You’ve built one shipone too-big barge that sank its first day at seaand now you have the unmitigated audacity to begin a project of this nature, in the name of the ransar of Innarlith, entirely on your own authority?”
Devorast looked at the master builder with one eyebrow raised. Willem waited for the shrug, a gesture he knew would put the master builder completely over the edge, but it didn’t come.
“Do you have a better site in mind?” Devorast said. “Do you have a plan for a keep that will surpass my own?”
“No, you dolt!” Inthelph raged. “That’s precisely the point. What if I had? What if there is a flaw in your location? Sure, we’re up on top of a hill overlooking the river, but have you taken everything into account that the ransar and his generals would expect from a fortification that was meant to have been designed to suit their needs and not yours? Are we close enough to the Golden Road bridge or far enough away? Don’t you dare for one moment stand there and tell me that you know the answers to every question, have taken every last detail into account, drawing, I must point out, from the experience you gained building how many such structures?”
There was a silence and Willem knew that Devorast had no intention of filling it.
“None!” the master builder answered himself. “You’ve never done anything like this, even as a stonemason, even as a common laborer, yet here you are, building the damned thing already, and with the ransar’s coin!”
“The ransar will be satisfied,” Devorast said.
Willem took a deep breath and held it. Looking at Devorast’s face, seeing the look in his eyes and hearing the perfect control in his voice, Willem had no doubt that the ransar would be satisfied indeed, but he also knew that it would never get that far.
Inthelph took a deep breath too but didn’t hold it and didn’t look into Devorast’s eyes. Instead he turned away and walked in a circle, taking fast, short steps and shaking his head and shoulders in an effort to calm himself. Sweat soaked his silk tunic in the warm spring night.
“Because he has served me well for a long time now,” said the master builder, “your friend Willem will not suffer for your spectacular display of hubris, and if… if”he screamed”your plans have any merit at all you might just avoid a stay in the ransar’s dungeons. I want you gone. I want you away from here this very instant. If you ever set foot here again or ever so much as appear in my presence, no friend, no kind word of recommendation will save you from my wrath. You have ruined yourself with this insanity, Devorast, so I won’t trouble myself to take you the rest of the way down. This is no misstep, no blunder on the way that will educate you. This is incompetence, insolence of the highest order.”
Devorast did something then that Willem had so seldom seen. He smiled.
“If I’m incompetent,” Devorast said, “it’s only in my ability to suffer the opinions of lesser minds, and that, — Master Builder, is a fault I’m prepared to live with.”
Inthelph’s eyes bulged, and his mouth hung open.
“Ivar,” Willem said, doing his best to seem compassionate yet firm, “I think that’s quite enough.”
The look that Devorast gave him in return made Willem’s blood run cold.
“Go,” the master builder growled.
Then came that shrug, but Inthelph had already stomped away. When Willem watched Devorast walk off in the other direction and saw the looks on the faces of the crowd of workmen who had stopped to watch Inthelph’s display of righteous indignation, he realized just how wrong the master builder was.
25
9 Eleint, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
Before Marek cast the first spell he paused to consider what the neighbors would think. He let his attention drift to the window that looked out over the street, lined by fashionable townhouses, the finest addresses in the city. Close on all sides were the wealthiest people in Innarlith, and sure they all had their share of secrets, but Marek couldn’t imagine any of them were doing anything like what he was about to do. That made him smile.
On the polished wood floor all around him were the components and foci it had taken him tendays to collect. Two of his spellbooks lay open in front of him, and three scrolls were unfurled, held down with stones. The writing was in half a dozen languages, Draconic being the least exotic of them. He looked at the script, the drawings and diagrams, and he tried to sort out whether the shaking in his hands, the sweat on his palms, and his inability to take a deep breath were signs of fear or excitement.
The first series of spells would protect him from at least some of what he imagined he might encounter. He would be able to withstand extremes of heat and cold and be protected from things that might be able to drain his life-force or sap his will. He also knew there could be any of a million other things he hadn’t planned for.
The next spell, a complex one he’d cast only once before, made the very reality around him fade away. The walls melted into a gray nothing, the floor below him slipped into eternity, and he stood in the thin air of a separate reality.
A gray the color of an overcast sky surrounded him on all sides and quaint conceits like up, down, left, and right lost all meaning.
“Welcome to the Astral,” he whispered to himself.
Marek drew in a deep breath and took stock of the things floating in the air around him. The scrolls were there, but they no longer needed stones to hold them open. The foci he required were all there too. Thus far everything had happened the way he’d planned it, so he had no excuses for not continuing. Still, he hesitated, but only long enough to remind himself why he was doing what he was doing. The black firedrakes, those fierce beasts he was so proud of and so terrified by, were his greatest creation and his most valuable commodity. The correct application of their feral strength would cement his position in the city, would buy him a ransar, and would help complete his mission. The Red Wizards would have Innarlith, for whatever good it might do them.
The firedrakes needed space. He needed a refuge from the citynot just for breeding half-dragons but a place he could go where his work would be safe from prying eyes and escapes, and what better place than a little plane of existence he could call his own.
With a smile, Marek bent about the task of doing just that. Through a series of powerful spells, and the focused magic of the items that floated in the Astral aether around him, he sifted through the fabric of the multi- verse itself, thumbing through an array of environments until he found the right one.
“Fury’s Heart,” he said aloud, letting the words mix with the feeling of the plane that rolled in his head and burned in his veins.
He could see into the depths of that universe of chaos from the safety of the Astral, and what he saw frightened him but excited him too. There were things there, terrible things, things that were alive but hated life, things that lived on fear, panic, lust, and rage the way humans lived on food, water, and air. There were gods there
