and the rate of accidents fell sharply off, they’d stopped coming, but while you sat in the dungeon, the bloodshed returned, and so did they.”
Devorast, who’d removed the nails from the board he was working on, placed it on the stack and went to work on another step with his crowbar. Only he and the ransar worked on disassembling the viewing stand. The rest of the workers were busy on the canal itself, and Devorast refused to allow them to waste their time taking apart something that shouldn’t have been built in the first place.
“Perhaps I should have left you in there,” Pristoleph said, intentionally baiting Devorast. “I could have sold tickets. As long as things blew up in people’s faces and men were buried alive in mud, I would have made a fortune.”
“You already have a fortune,” Devorast said.
Pristoleph laughed, but studied the man at the same time. There was no anger apparent on his face, but he did seem annoyed, if only just a bit.
“I suppose you’re right,” the ransar said. “I have several fortunes. Perhaps you can go home, abduct your realm’s infant king, and come to me for the ransom. I can pay it.”
“But would you?”
Pristoleph stopped, making a show of the surprise he felt hearing Devorast actually ask a question. He didn’t pretend to know the man, but he could feel it was unusual for him. Pristoleph thought he might have been getting somewhere.
“No,” Pristoleph said, “I wouldn’t. Would you? If you had the means, of course.”
“The king of Cormyr is not my responsibility,” Devorast said, “and besides, he has the royal family to pay his ransom.”
“Someone else, then,” the ransar prodded. “Someone closer to you?”
“It’s a meaningless question, Ransar.”
“I wasn’t always the man I am today, you know,” Pristoleph said.
Devorast stacked more weathered lumber then started prying apart another step.
“I grew up in the Fourth Quarter,” Pristoleph said. “I grew up in the streets, but never in the gutter. I made myself what I am today by the force of my own will.”
Devorast glanced at him, but Pristoleph couldn’t quite decipher the expression.
“It was a long and difficult road from the Fourth Quarter,” Pristoleph said, “to here, where I am now: the highest-paid garbage man in Faerun.”
“I’m not paying you,” Devorast said.
“Nor are you understanding any of my jokes,” the ransar said. “Still, I get the feeling you have a sense of humor. After all, here you are working peacefully side by side with the man who held you in a stinking hole in the ground for more than a year. I would have killed me.”
“I’m not stopping you,” Devorast said.
Pristoleph laughed loud and hard, and for a while they went to work taking the viewing stand apart in silence.
“I also had to rely on myself as a child,” Devorast said, and Pristoleph was startled as much by the sudden sound of his voice as by the admission itself.
“Then you know what it’s like,” Pristoleph said, “to struggle for everything, to fight for every hint of power and influence, and every copper.”
“No, I don’t.”
Pristoleph stopped what he was doing and stared at Devorast, waiting for him to go on.
He had to wait a long time before Devorast said, “I’ve never been interested in power and influence. I don’t want to control people, and coins are tools to be used when you have them, and replaced by other tools when you don’t.”
“So what do you want?” Pristoleph asked. “I want to take apart this viewing stand, then use the lumber to build two ladders and a pair of trench braces.”
29
21 Hammer, the Year of Rogue Dragons (1373 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
My Dearest Mother,
Where have I been? What has happened to me?
I know it has been so very long since you’ve heard from your dutiful son. Perhaps you, like some here in Innarlith, assumed that I had met my end. I pray to all the gods ever evoked by a desperate man that this was not the case, and that you held me in your heart, always with the fires of hope burning in your bosom, that I was indeed well but in some way occupied.
And such has been the case, these many monthsand can it really have been so long? It seems as though I fell asleep one night and woke up three years later.
Truly, can it have been that long?
Three years?
Three years with no news from mefor that I will spend the entirety of my life apologizing to my steadfast and loving mother, the only woman who would have held out hope for my return, the only woman who had not abandoned me, even when you left Innarlith to return to Marsember.
And what a disgrace that wasmy disgrace, my dear mother, and certainly not yoursthat I allowed you to be driven from my own home by a woman in whom I placed trust, only to have my heart rent from my chest and held, still beating, before my face that she might sink her harpy’s fangs into its meat and draw from it the last drop of the blood you yourself bore into me.
For that, I am sorry, too.
But where have I been? How have three years passed without a word from me? Those are questions to which you deserve a long and detailed answer. Though I have thought of little else in the past tendays, I have no answer to any of my own questions that satisfy me, much less that I believe would satisfy you.
When I was thrown to the side by that cruel woman, that alu-fiend in a girl’s guise, when you were proven right yet again and my own lack of faith in the wisdom of my dear protective mother was held up close to my eyes, when I was shown lacking, when I died, I
When I died?
Thatis what it felt like. It felt as though I died, but that word has not come to my mind or my lips since I entered my own house to find it closed and musty, with three years’ dust coating every surfacethat word hasn’t come to my mind or my lips, strange that it should be summoned by my pen.
In some ways perhaps I was dead. Dead in the heart. I had opened myself to the love of a woman who was not worthy of me. I put my trust in men who guided me wrong. I let my dear mother return alone to Marsember, there to live without word or support from a son who must have seemed so ungrateful, so disrespectful, as to simply ignore her for so long.
But that was not my intention, and if you ever believe anything I tell you again, if you have left in you a spark of the fire of the love for your poor son that I once felt burn from within you, please believe that what happened to me must have been beyond my control.
Of those three years I recall only dreams, Nightmares, in fact. I remember foul odors and wicked deeds. I recall the feeling of my body rotting away, while my soul was imprisoned within to feel every stinging bite of ten thousand flies nibbling away at my flesh.
But that couldn’t be. None of that could be.
Here I am now, three years on, hale and hearty, though you would find me thin. Here I am alive and awake and aware.
Here I am having changed two things about me.
First, no longer will I hold an image of Phyrea in my mind. Beautiful as she is, she is a being of frozen evil, a mad woman who has now put her spell upon another, and so be it. The man she has ensorcelled will have to care
