happened. I know nothing of poisons. I know even less of poisons than I do of smokepowder. I would never… I would never…”
“Will you please calm yourself,” Pristoleph said. “And get up off the floor.”
Harkhuf did as he was told, hurrying to a small chair in the corner of the parlor, where he sat with his green hands at his sides. He was having a great deal of difficulty breathing.
“By the gods,” Marek said, “you’ll pass out.”
“No one here is accusing you of anything,” Pristoleph said.
That stopped Harkhuf breathing all together.
“Breathe,” the Red Wizard urged.
Harkhuf took a deep breath and nodded. He blinked and for a moment Pristoleph thought he was about to pass out, but finally he managed to gather himselfat least enough to remain conscious.
“It was the Zhentarim,” the alchemist said.
Pristoleph looked at the Thayan and met his eyes.
“The Black Network?” Marek asked.
“Yes,” the alchemist said, though he shook his head at the same time. “It was the merchant’s council of Turmish, then. Yes?”
“Do you?” Pristoleph started to ask.
“The caravanners!” the alchemist exclaimed. “Our own caravanners… they’ve opposed construction of the canal all along!”
“So, you’re guessing,” Marek said with a dark, perturbed look.
“I was hoping you could tell me more,” Pristoleph said with a sigh. “The two of you seemed close. And together you’ve made remarkable progress, or so I’ve been told.”
“Yes,” the alchemist said, looking down at the rug between his unshod feet. “I haven’t the slightest clue as to how or why, my lord, but we have made exceptional progress.”
“Whatever do you mean, you have no clue how or why?” asked Marek.
“I’m terrible, my lords,” the alchemist said to both the ransar and the Red Wizard. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m doing. By my own count I’ve killed two hundred men… more, maybe… and all that with smokepowder still left over from Surero. When I told the men to make some more they looked at me in a way that made it plain they had no idea where to begin, and yet within a tenday, the supplies were almost entirely restocked.”
Again Pristoleph traded a look with Marek.
“You mean you haven’t been?”
“Doing much at all, Ransar,” Harkhuf admitted. “Please, Master Rymiit… I should be discharged. I am incompetent and I have failed you over and over and over again.”
“And now,” Pristoleph grumbled, “the senator who’s been covering for you is dead, and you’re afraid whoever killed him will come after you next.”
“Master Rymiit,” Harkhuf said, a little drool beginning to drip from his quivering lower lip. “Something is happening to the zombies. Every so often some of them disappear. They just… aren’t there anymore. We… I have no idea what’s become of them.”
An angry scowl darkened the Red Wizard’s face even more, and Pristoleph found his pulse beginning to race. The other two men looked up at him and blinked, and he realized he’d inadvertently raised the temperature in the room enough for them to notice. He calmed himself, but it took a while for the room to cool.
Marek took the hint, though, and calmed himself as well. Harkhuf was one of Marek’s — men, at least after a fashion, and the Red Wizard was not someone a man like
Harkhuf should ever disappoint. Pristoleph hoped only for a little more information from the alchemist, then he’d do what ransars often did: turn a blind eye while Marek Rymiit did what he thought was best.
“I don’t want to go back up there,” Harkhuf said. “I beg you not to compel me to do so. I beg you both.”
“You will go where your ransar commands you to go,” Marek warned.
“It was not Horemkensi, then,” Pristoleph said, “who was responsible for the increase in productivity.”
Harkhuf shook his head and replied, “It could have been, but…”
“But?” the Thayan prompted.
“But only over the past couple months I began to notice that when he gave an order, it looked as though the men meant to carry it out, but often went off and did something else entirely. It was as though they knew he was wrong, and to a man knew what to do instead.”
“Or someone else was telling them what to do,” Pristoleph said.
Harkhuf replied, “All I know is it wasn’t me.”
23
4 Marpenoth, the Year of the Unstrung Harp (1371 DR) Third Quarter, Innarlith
Just enough of Willem Korvan’s mind was functioning for him to realize that the roar of the heavy, incessant rain would mask his shuffling footsteps as well as it masked his odor. That, and a cunning he didn’t remember from his days as a living man, kept him behind but in sight of his quarry.
Though he had followed people beforeIvar Devorast and othersit wasn’t too often that he was commanded to track someone but not kill him. But as he shadowed the shivering, stumbling alchemist through the dark streets of the Third Quarter, it was not for the purpose of ending the man’s life but of protecting it.
“He has use to me,” Marek Rymiit had told him as the sun set that evening. “Limited use, to be certain, but I would prefer him alive. Let him wander, though, to flush out the assassin. The assassin, I want dead.”
Willem set out to find the alchemist that night because he had no choice. Even if he tried to will it, he couldn’t resist the commands of his master. He existed only as a tool for the Red Wizard, and perhaps the same tiny fragment of what was left of the living man that made him thankful for the concealing rain, made him wish his death would finally be complete and he could be free of the Thayan, and free of the reality of what he had become.
The alchemist passed a tavern and seemed about to enter, but when two men, drunkenly propping each other up as they splashed into the street, burst out of the door, he turned in his tracks and scurried away. The drunkards paid him no heed, but as they passed the entrance to the alley in whose impenetrable shadows Willem lurked, their sodden, moaning song quieted, and their eyes twitched with instinctive nervousness.
Willem let them pass and soon their voices regained their ale-inspired confidence and were lost to the drumming rain.
After a few more twists and turns Willem lost his way. He still had the alchemist in front of him, but none of the buildings around him were familiar. The dark streets wound like a maze, or like a mass of writhing snakes, and like snakes seemed to constantly change their shape. But it didn’t matter where he was, only that the man he’d been told to watch was still in sight.
He smelled the pigs before he heard them, and even that was a long time before he rounded the corner of a low brick building and saw the animals. The pen sat next to a slaughterhouse, and the pigs were half-buried in mud, sleeping huddled together, painfully oblivious to the fate that would soon befall them. Willem didn’t have time to think about how lucky those pigs were that their masters granted them a quick death.
The alchemist stopped, his hand resting on the wooden fence that formed the pig pen. It wasn’t until Harkhuf took one slow, deliberate step backward that Willem knew for certain that the assassin had presented himself.
Harkhuf put his hands up and took another step backward, but stopped in the middle of a third step. He spoke to someone Willem couldn’t see, someone who stood around the corner of the slaughterhouse so that the three of them made the points of a triangle, and only Harkhuf could see both Willem and the assassin.
Willem moved closer, leaving any pretense of hiding behind him. He stepped out into the street.
The alchemist didn’t hear or sense his approach, but the pigs did. They smelled him, even in the rain. They stirred, and one by one began to stand, their flat noses wriggling in the air, expelling rain water with every other breath.
“Please,” the alchemist called to the darkness in front of him. “Just let me go home.”
