clawing away at it, and her hand finally wrapped around something solid.
She heard a sound like a sack of grain dropped from a great height and sobbed. She couldn’t see. It was too dark and there were piles of rubble everywhere.
“Ivar!” she screamed into the storm, and pulled back with all her might.
The sword came loose from its scabbard and the undulating blade shone in a flash of lightning.
The ghosts whirled through the air, spinning wildly, drawing her attention up. It was as though they churned in agony. Their screams rattled in Phyrea’s head. She staggered back and fell, sitting in a puddle of water. She shivered, still looking up, blinking against the rain and another form was flung through the whirling ghosts, passing through two of them.
It was Devorast. Phyrea opened her mouth to scream at the sight of him hurtling through the air. She imagined he’d been thrown by the undead creature, but when he hit the ground, Devorast landed on his feet.
Of course, she remembered. The banelar’s ring.
He spun. While Phyrea stood, Devorast took three long strides to stand beside her.
And Willem was there, his ghastly visage lit by a blue-white blast of lightning. The hate and fury she’d seen in his face was gone, though. She couldn’t read his expression, his face was too disfigured for that, but something about the way he stood there, the way he looked at them, made her profoundly sad.
The flamberge slipped from her fingers and splashed into the mud. Willem looked down at it, then back up to her. Though it was dark, she could see his eyesblack, desperate pits in his horror of a face.
“I won’t,” Willem said, his voice grinding and harsh.
He was a good man, Inthelph said, and his voice in her head made Phyrea start to cry. Don’t let this go on. Whatever he’s done, or whatever he’s failed to do, this he doesn’t deserve.
Phyrea bent and picked up the sword. Willem’s head tilted up with it then turned to Devorast. Phyrea looked at him too and shook her head.
Devorast took the sword from her hand and Willem lurched forward.
“Willem,” Devorast said. “I’m sorry.”
Willem stepped forward again and Devorast thrust the flamberge into his withered chest, into the space where his heart once beat.
“No,” Willem grunted as Marek Rymut’s necromancy unwound inside him. “Don’t be sorry. It was my fault. It always was.”
Phyrea sobbed and fell to her knees. Willem slid off the blade and crumpled to the rain-soaked mud.
74
13 Flamerule, the Year ofLightning Storms (1374 DR) Third Quarter, Innarlith
Pristoleph stood under a dying tree on a street in the Third Quarter, baking under a deep woolen cowl in the late summer heat. The genasi didn’t mind it. He was comfortable, in fact, but what he saw across the street bothered him greatly.
A cooper, a man he knew by reputation as one of the city’s finest craftsmen, stood with downcast eyes. His chestonce as big around and as sturdy as the barrels he fashioned appeared sunken and slack. He watched with dull, beaten eyes as a gang of animated corpses pounded away at tasks that had once been performed by young apprentices, boys in their teens who would one day open workshops of their own, either in Innarlith or in neighboring cities from the Vilhon Reach to the Border Kingdoms. But those apprentices were gone, replaced by Marek Rymut’s zombies.
The undead barrel-makers poured water into a barrel they’d finished. It was bad enough that the thing sprung leaks in a dozen places or more, but as they poured the water in, strips of their own rotting flesh fell into the barrel, fouling it. The cooper looked away in disgust, and so did Pristoleph.
He brushed past a man who sat on the street, his hand out, his eyes pleading. Children scurried after a rat, laughing only because they hadn’t yet had to come to grips with the fact that they had no future. They would not apprentice to the cooper, nor the baker, nor the chandler, but would likely grow up as Pristoleph had, struggling for scraps left from the tables of the Second Quarter, fighting every day for any meager existence, fighting just to survive. Stealing. Killing.
He put a hand against the wall of a boarded-up shop, what once was a baker of fine pastries had been forced to close when the undead work gangs brought disease and took the wages of the neighbors so that his steady business trickled to a few silvers here and there. Pristoleph had heard the baker moved his family to Arrabar.
Having gathered himself, his anger suppressed enough so that at least the heat that poured from him didn’t set his clothes on fire, Pristoleph continued on his way past another beggar and another, past another vacant shop and another. At least the tavern was still open. One thing anyone could count on was that when times were hard, men drank. When they had nowhere to go, and nothing to occupy them, they drank a lot.
Though it was still long before highsun, the tavern was crowdedpacked to the walls. Pristoleph entered and all conversation came to a sudden halt. More than two hundred sets of eyes turned to him, and he paused in the door to study their faces. Perhaps only one in ten held a flagon of ale, and more than half wore hooded cloaks despite the Summertide heat.
Pristoleph drew the cowl from his head and smiled, his strange hair waving on his head like a roaring campfire. The people gathered in the tavern and the barkeep himself stood a little straighter. Wemics stepped out of the crowd, their snarling smiles giving a few of the assembled pause. Second Chief Gahrzig tipped his maned head and touched the haft of a pole arm to his temple and the other wemics followed suit.
The men who’d come from the ranks of the city watch, and from Firesteap Citadel and the Nagaflow Keep, saluted him as well, smiles splitting their faces, perhaps for the first time in a month.
A woman stepped out of the crowd, her fine features and olive skin marking her as Shou. Her face, as beautiful as it was exotic, was one Pristoleph instantly recognized.
“Greetings, noble Ransar,” Ran Ai Yu said and bent at the waist in a deep bow.
Beside her another Shou, a man Pristoleph knew as Lau Cheung Fen, bowed alongside her, his unnaturally long neck swaying with the motion.
“Greetings, Miss Ran,” Pristoleph said, “and greetings to you all.”
The place remained as silent as a tomb, all eyes on Pristoleph.
“On the eighth day of Eleasias,” Pristoleph said, his voice carrying strong and stern to every ear in the room, “Innarlith will live again.”
75
8 Eleasias, the Year ofLightning Storms (1374 BR) The Chamber of Law and Civility, Innarlith
Marek Rymiit stood on the dais of the senate chamber, in the place normally reserved for the ransar. The significance of that was lost on no one, especially Marek himself.
“My dear friends, one and all,” Marek shouted over the din of the assembled senators, who quickly began to shush each other and turn their attention to the dais. “Please rise for three of your number, any one of whom would make a fine, steady, and resolute ransar.”
Marek then introduced Aikiko, Asheru, and Meykhati to thunderous applause. All three of them held up their hands in conciliatory gestures, calling for quiet even as their gloating smiles and limpid eyes soaked up the admiration of their peers like a spider draws the essential fluids from a doomed fly.
“Thank you, Khazark,” Meykhati said, and Marek grinned and bowed, charmed by the senator’s use of the Thayan honorific he’d only recently revealed to the Innarlans. He’d revealed it to Meykhati first, in fact, at the same time he’d cast a spell over the senator that suppressed his willfulness and ambition. “We three stand before you, humbled by the grand traditions of the city-state we love so dearly, our hearts swelled with pride over having
