You long for it, came a shrieking wail. We know you crave the cold bite of steel. That thin chill of the blade passing through your own flesh, and the delicious quiver of your hand as you force it to draw your own blood.
The sword.
That blade bites the best.
Use the flamberge, they screamed at her in a chorus of disembodied howls. Let it drink you in. Let it bring you to us.
One of them said, Take me home. I don’t like it here. Take me back to Berrywilde. Berrywilde…'
It sounded like a little girl, but Phyrea could feel its soul sometimes, and it was the cold, bitter, mean spirit of a devil.
“No,” she whimpered into the deathly quiet of the merchant quarter at night. “Get out of me.”
A man screamed into her ear in inarticulate rage, but no real sound disturbed the silence. The voices didn’t speak into her ear, but rather from it.
“Tell me what you want,” she asked, though they’d told her before. She wanted a different answer.
Cut yourself.
Use the swordthe sword I gave you.
Don’t give it to him. Don’t give it to the Thayan.
Go home.
Take us back to our pretty home and stay with us there forever.
Kill forme. Give us your life. Spill your blood. Phyrea shook her head.
She’d gone thererented the flat, broken from her life in whatever ways she couldin the hope of gaining some clearer understanding. Perhaps, she’d thought, in the silence of a strange place, away from the people and the places that kept the ghosts rooted in her, she might find some answers.
Did you hope to catch us off guard? one of thema little boy by the sound of his voice, but a monster by the cold dread that followed his wordsasked. What did you hope? That we would just rot in the ground, or that we would be frightened by the stench of rotten cheese? Have you ever smelted the inside of your own moldering casket?
Phyrea shook her head.
Of course you haven’t, a woman whispered at the edge of a sob. But you will.
Phyrea opened her eyes, wondering how long she’d had them closed, and saw them gathered all around her. They loomed over her, each one drawn in the air from violet light. They existed as a glow, as a sourceless luminescence, and as voices.
Free us, a little boy with one arm demanded through stern, gritted teeth.
Free yourself, the man with the scar on his cheek said.
Phyrea shook her head, pressed her hands to her temples.
Cut yourself, a woman whispered in her ear so close it made her jump. The desperation plain in the woman’s voice made tears well up in Phyrea’s eyes. Maybe it will make it go away.
Phyrea began to sob so hard she feared her ribs would crack, and that fear only made her cry some more.
Feel that little pain, the womanthe ghostwent on. Just a little pain of the body makes all the pain of the mind go away. At least for a little while, yes? Just a little? Isn’t that good? Doesn’t that make it go away? Can’t you just make it go away?
Still crying, Phyrea nodded.
Trust us, said the man with the z-shaped scarsome long-dead relative she’d never known. We love you. Will you listen while we tell you some things you need to do?
Phyrea wiped the tears from her eyes only to feel her cheeks soaked with tears again a scant heartbeat later.
Trust us, the old woman insisted.
Phyrea started to nod, and the ghosts started to laugh.
11
7 Ches, the Yearofthe Sword (1365 DR) The Canal Site
'This is disgraceful,” Phyrea said.
She glanced to her left to make sure the strange man was looking at herhe was.
She folded her arms in front of her and let a breath hiss out through her nose. The man didn’t speak, but Phyrea knew he’d heard and understood her.
A very short manno taller than a halfling, but he looked humanrushed up to the stranger and spoke to him in a language Phyrea didn’t recognize, though she assumed it was the language of Shou Lung, from whence they’d come.
Lau Cheung Fen answered the little man in clipped tones that sent the servant scurrying away as fast as he’d approached.
“You object, Miss, to the viewing station or to the endeavor itself?” the Shou merchant asked.
Phyrea paused to consider her response carefully. She’d learned from Meykhati’s dreary wife that Shou would only respect slow speech and careful responses.
“Please accept my assurance, Master Lau,” she said, “that this is a subject that I have given considerable study. I object to both.”
The merchant nodded.
“This canal is a fool’s errand,” she added.
“I have heard quite differently of this Ivar Devorast,” Lau replied.
“There are some who mistake madness…” she began, but stopped to think. Then she continued, “Thank you, Master Lau, for letting me reconsider what I was… for letting me think.”
“One should do precisely that,” he said, “before one speaks. But in fact there is more of interest to me in what your first response might have been than in what you might believe I wish to have you say.”
Phyrea let one side of her mouth turn up in a smile. Though he was alien to her in so many ways, she could feel him respond to her beauty the same as any Innarlan.
“I hope,” she said, “that those who have given you reason to believe that this canal will be of; use to your trade will think again. This Devorast has ideas and passions, but he has no true skill.”
“He will not be able to finish this?” the Shou asked.
Phyrea looked down at the toes of her boots and sighed. She scraped a line of dried mud from her boot across the wood planks.
“I think this… station, as you called it,” Phyrea said, “is all one needs to see to understand the nature of this canal.” She put as much sarcasm as she could into that last wordand feared it might have been a bit too much. “This is for show. It’s a performance. A master manipulator is at work here, not a master builder.”
Lau Cheung Fen nodded, and looked out over the men scurrying this way and that, going about the complicated business of digging a miles-long trench from the Lake of Steam to the Nagaf low.
“Soon,” Phyrea went on, “this will all stop. This will all be closed down, and all these men will go back to Innarlith.”
“I was to understand that he had the support of your ransar,” Lau said.
“And he does, for the time being. That will surely change once the gold has run out.”
“The ransar’s gold?” Lau asked.
“The gold he’s already given Devorast,” Phyrea told him. “It’s all the gold he’s going to getall the gold the ransar will give him. And from what I have been told, there might be enough coin left for a tenday’s work. No more.”
Lau Cheung Fen nodded again, and she thought it appeared as though he was considering her words. At least she hoped he was.
You’re hurting him, the sad woman’s voice asked her. Why?
