She felt her cheek begin to twitch and so she turned away from the Shou merchant.
“To begin, and not to end… ” Lau Cheung Fen said, trailing off with a shake of his head.
“It might still be finished,” Phyrea offered, “but not by Devorast.”
WAy? the woman asked again.
But it was the old man, his voice a hoarse croak, who answered, Because she can.
Phyrea smiled and Lau asked, “By someone else then?”
“The master builder of Innarlith,” she said, “has an apprentice who by all accounts has surpassed him in skill if not position. This man is a senator in Innarlith, well liked and with all the right friends. He will be master builder himself soon, and this canal, should the ransar decide it’s indeed something that should be finished, will beshould becompleted by him.”
Phyrea swallowed. Her mouth and throat had gone entirely dry. Her chest felt tight, and she drew in a breath only with some difficulty.
“For me,” said Lau Cheung Fen, “it matters only that there is a canal. If Ivar Devorast or…?”
“Willem Korvan,” she said.
“Or Willem Korvan builds it, it will mean nothing to my ships. If there is water between here and there, they will float.”
Phyrea bobbed down in a small bow and grinned. Her upper lip stuck for half a heartbeat on her sand-dry teeth.
“Then I won’t belabor the point,” she said.
“I did expect to see him here,” said Lau, “but I’m told he is away.”
“He’s gone to beg peace from the nagas,” Phyrea replied. She had been at the canal site for less than a day, but had heard things. “They agreed to let him build the canal at firstor so he told the ransarbut came recently and killed some of the workers. I fear that if the canal is completed it might succeed only in spilling ships out into hostile waters, controlled by those monstrous snake things.”
She saw the very real concern that prospect elicited on the Shou’s face, and turned away.
12
7 Ches, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) The Nagaflow
'We feel anger,” Svayyah said for all the assembled naja’ssara to hear. “We feel great, grave, crippling anger, and that anger is directed not toward this dista’ssara before you, but for one of our own.”
The source of her frustration glowered back at her from where he hung suspended, almost motionless in the cool, murky water. Six more of their kind swirled around them, their attentions struggling between the accused Shingrayuand the human, Ivar Devorast. Their tension began to heat the water, and Svayyah’s red-orange spines grew redder still.
“Anger?” Shingrayu replied, literally dripping venom from his fangs into the water with each sneered syllable. “What does Svayyah know of anger? Let us tell our tribe-mates of anger.”
Svayyah brought to mind a spell that would heat the water around Shingrayu to so scalding a temperature that his scales would slough from his body. But rather than cast it, she said to the other water nagas, “This dista’ssara, this human, is known to us. We have given it our word. We have made an agreement with it.”
She looked at Devorast, who floated in. the bubble of air she’d made for him with his arms folded across his chest. She could read nothing in his face, but his irritation came off him in waves that nettled at her sea-green scales.
“We care nothing for an agreement with this low monkey of the dry cities,” Shingrayu spat. His serpentine body twitched, and he moved forwardonly a foot or twobut Svayyah reacted to the threat by enveloping herself in a protective shield of magic. It lit around her with a pearles-cent glow, reflecting off the particles of dirt that floated in the water. “You made this agreement, Svayyah.”
The other half dozen water nagas writhed at the sound of that word: you.
“We close upon the place where words fail,” Svayyah warned him.
“Discussions were had,” Zaeliira cut in. Her blue-green scales looked dull and old in the meager light from the surface and the glow of Svayyah’s shield.
“Zaeliira has been swimming the Nagaflow for eight centuries,” said Shuryall, “and however weakened by age, Zaeliira may be, all naja’ssara heed the counsel of Zaeliira.”
“We make our own way,” Shingrayu hissed. “We are Ssa’Naja.”
“Shingrayu went above the waves and brought violent magic to the naja’ssara in the employ of Ivar Devorast,” Svayyah accused. “Does Shingrayu deny this?”
“Is there denial?” asked Zaeliira, who appeared to smart from Shingrayu’s comment.
Shingrayu pulled himself out to his full length, an impressive eighteen feet, and drew his scales in tight so that he seemed to blaze green in the murk. “We see prey and we eat. We see invaders and we defend. We see insult and we take offense. We see Svayyah’s ambition and we protect ourselves and our ways. There will be no serpent queen here.”
The other nagas raced through the water at the sound of those words, whirling faster and faster around the bubble Devorast floated in until it began to turn in the water. He held out his handsthose freakish appendages of the dista’ssaraand steadied himself. Svayyah waited for him to speak, but he said nothing. He met her eyes finally, and she fell into his gaze in a way she couldn’t understandin a way that almost made her believe that Shingrayu had been right all along.
“What this dista’ssara works will be of great benefit to all the naja’ssara of the Nagaflow and the Nagawater,” she said, shouting into the tempestuous waters.
The other nagas began to calm, but Shingrayu remained just as rigid.
“Ivar Devorast comes here of his own will,” Svayyah went on, “and entirely at our mercy. Should we but wish it, the water would rush in to fill his human lungs and take him to whatever afterlife awaits him. He braves this, for a work.”
“A work?” Shuryall asked.
“We have heard of this thing the dista’ssara seeks to build,” said the young and impetuous Flayanna. “It will bring human after human, ship after ship to our waters.
Human filth. Shingrayu speaks and acts true. We should also like to go to these dista’ssara and kill.”
“If Flayanna wishes to kill Svayyah first to do so, then we stand at the ready,” Svayyah challenged, knowing the younger naga would back down.
Flayanna wouldn’t look at her, and only swam more slowly in a circle around Devorast.
“If this human wishes it,” Shingrayu said, “let it ask us all, not only Svayyah, who is no queen here.”
“Again, that word,” Svayyah growled. She twitched her tail to bring herself closer to Shingrayu. “Speak it once more, and it will be the last word to pass Shingrayu’s poison tongue.”
The other nagas swam then, not too fast, but with a purpose. They gave the two combatants room. They knew what was going to happen. And Svayyah knew that the future of the canal would rest with her. If Shingrayu killed her, Devorast would never live to see the surface again. He likely wouldn’t outlive the last dying spasm of Svayyah’s own heart.
“There will be no canal to bring human excrement into our home waters, Svayyah,” Shingrayu said, his voice heavy with challenge. “There will be no Queen of the Nagaflow.”
Svayyah opened her mouth wide, showed her fangs, let her forked tongue taste the familiar waters, and shrieked her challenge at the damnable Shingrayu. The sound, amplified by magic, sent visible ripples through the water. The other nagas pulled even farther back. When the wave front hit Shingrayu, he closed his eyes and withstood the battering force. The side of his face he’d turned into the Shockwave burned red, and a welt rose fast to mar his smooth skin. Though his eyes were closed tightly, his tongue slipped through a fast incantation.
Shingrayu opened his eyes to watch three jagged bolts of lime green light slice through the water, leaving not a bubble in their wakes. They crashed into Svayyah’s spell shield with force enough only to sting her, but the shield unraveled fast, drifting away into the water like a cloud of luminescent sediment.
