26Alturiak, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
Marek watched the dancers for a few heartbeats, then watched one of the partygoers watching the dancers, then the dancers again, then another guest, on and on. He hadn’t come to Meykhati’s ridiculous affair for the pleasure of it, after all, but to do what he always did.
The dancers had been brought by the exotic merchant Lau Cheung Fen, and the guests were dazzled by their otherworldly beauty and alien gestures. Seven women dressed in silk gowns eovered in tiny brass bells and what appeared to be miniature cymbals, twitched and jerked to the strains of a Shou “musician” who made the most horrendous, atonal bleats on some kind of unwieldy string instrument. Marek’s head began to pound, and he found he had to use a spell to make the “music” fade from his hearing, to be replaced by the private, often whispered conversations of Meykhati’s other guests.
“Miss Phyrea,” the Shou woman Ran Ai Yu, who Marek found almost as fascinating as he did frustrating said with a shallow bow. “I have not had the pleasure to see your father this evening.”
“He’s not here,” Phyrea choked out.
The beautiful, haunted daughter of the inept master builder couldn’t even look at the Shou woman. Her eyes had fastened themselves to the red-headed man who stood at Ran Ai Yu’s side. Marek had never been formally introduced to the man, but he knew who Ivar Devorast was. So too, it would seem, did Phyrea. Devorast, if he recognized the master builder’s daughter at all, gave no outward sign of it. For all that, the man gave no outward sign of anything. Phyrea squirmed under his ambivalent glances.
Yes, Marek Rymiit thought, much more interesting than dancing girls.
“May I introduce you to Ivar Devorast of Cormyr,” Ran Ai Yu said.
Marek found the look on Phyrea’s face so priceless he just had to smile and clap his hands. The other guests around him clapped as well, apparently thinking he was applauding the performance.
“Aren’t they just?” a shrill voice invaded from his side. The effect of the spell made it painfully loud, and Marek couldn’t stifle a grunt and body-racking twitch. “Goodness, Master Rymiit. Are you well?”
Meykhati’s awful wife.
He forced a smile and nodded. “Yes, quite,” he whispered, his own voice rattling his ears. “I would hate to further interrupt the music.”
The woman smiled and made a childlike motion as though she were locking her lips closed. A spell that would actually do that came to Marek’s mind, but he suppressed the nearly overwhelming urge to cast it, and a second incantation that would make the lock permanent. Instead, he kept his ears on the Shou merchant and her odd little couple, while his eyes made a great show of adoring the dancers from beyond the Utter East.
“No,” Phyrea said, her voice so thick with the lie that Marek wished he could at least glance at Ran Ai Yu’s face to be sure she detected it as well, but alas Meykhati’s hideous wife still stood at his elbow, believing him to be every inch the dilettante her husband was. “No, we haven’t met.”
“I would have remembered, I’m sure.” Devorast must have lied too, but there was no hint of that in his steady, uninterested voice.
“Of course, though,” Phyrea said, “I have heard of your great… your great undertaking.”
Two of the dancers swayed their hips to the jarring rhythm while the other five stood as still as statues. Marek found their utter lack of motion interesting, but only passingly so. The two lead dancers jangled their bells and otherwise made rhythmic hissing and pinging noises. They waved their hands in a way that Marek thought looked a bit like they might be casting spells, but he detected no fluctuation in the Weave.
“It keeps me occupied,” Devorast replied. “I am away from the city for prolonged periods.”
“Are you?” Phyrea accused. Marek raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps that explains why our paths have never even once crossed, though we seem to know many of the same people.”
“Not too many,” Devorast assured her. “Meykhati, at least,” she said.
Devorast shook his head, but it was Ran Ai Yu who said, “I asked Master Devorast to come with me tonight so that he might make the acquaintance of the senator.”
“And have you?” Phyrea asked Devorast.
“We have been introduced,” he replied.
The two lead dancers wiggled back to the line behind them, and looking for all the world like water foul plucking food from a still pond, pecked one each of their companions and froze. Those so pecked began to sway and slipped out of line to take over the incomprehensible series of motions. The music changed too, going from one set of atonal pings to a series of bursts of grinding metal. Marek resisted the urge to flee.
“It can be a burden, can’t it?” asked Phyrea.
“Ma’am?” Devorast prompted.
“Having too many friends.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Wouldn’t you?” she asked, and Marek got the feeling she thought she might be toying with Devorast. Silly girl. “You seem like a man who would have unusual friends. Like Miss Yu, here.”
“Miss Ran,” Devorast corrected, and Marek so wanted to see Phyrea squirm. But instead, he watched the dancers sway around each other like two snakes reluctant to mate. “I have friends, yes. I don’t feel burdened by them.”
“Sometimes I feel so burdened I can hardly stand,” Phyrea said, and again Marek lifted an eyebrow.
“Perhaps you don’t have enough to occupy your mind,” Devorast said.
“Should I build a canal then?”
“No,” he told her, still without a trace of emotion. “But you can do anything else.” “I wish that were so.”
“It is,” he assured her, and Marek felt bile rise in his throat.
“Oh, yes, my darling,” Meykhati’s pinch-faced wife whispered at Marek’s elbow. Her hissing voice was so loud to him that Marek had to close his eyes. “Straight away.”
With that, at least she was gone.
As the new lead pair of dancers worked their way back to the line behind them, Marek turned to glance at Phyrea and Devorast. Ran Ai Yu had wandered off to be replaced by Lau Cheung Fen, who took Devorast by the arm.
The Shou gentleman had no trouble pulling Devorast away from Phyrea, who all but ran to the farthest corner of the large room, disappearing into a crowd of her father’s friends and political associates. Devorast didn’t watch her go, but a twitch of his eye betrayed him to one as observant as Marek Rymiit.
This, the Red Wizard thought, is a relationship I will need to follow as closely as possible.
Two new dancers began to quiver so quickly they appeared in the throws of some sort of catalepsy. The jangle of their various bells and cymbals began to intrude on Marek’s spell, and he noted a few in the crowded room place hands to their ears to fend off the foreign cacophony.
“I will leave it to you to determine the advantages to you and your trade,” Devorast told Lau Cheung Fen.
“And there is nothing you wish to add?” the Shou asked. “I should think that to have the endorsement of the merchant fleets of Shou Lung would be for you a very… ah, but help with the word…?”
“Advantageous?” Devorast provided.
Sharp, Marek thought. Very sharp of mind indeed, this shipwright turned canal builder.
Lau sketched a shallow bow and said, “To have this advantageous support from afar would give you greater support at home, is that not true?”
“I have all the support I need,” Devorast replied, and Marek cringed at the supreme self-confidence of that, the bold naivete. “I will build the canal, who uses it and why makes no difference to me.”
“Ivar,” Willem Korvan said, appearing from the crowd holding a half-full tallglass of Inthelph’s upstart local vintage. He took Devorast by the arm and bowed to the Shou. “If I may.”
Lau Cheung Fen appeared reluctant to release him, but apparently felt he had no choice and returned Willem’s bow.
All seven of the dancers began to move in a slow, fluid motion that Marek assumed most men would find alluring. For him, though, there was Willem Korvan. The young senator’s immaculate dress complimented his perfect features. Next to the disheveled, weather-beaten, ill-dressed Devorast, Willem appeared soft, still in the full
