Willem walked as fast as his quivering knees would carry him, following the path he and the master builder had taken back into the Third Quarter. He felt like some kind of automaton, a golem of flesh commanded by his wizard master on an errand that would spell his demise even as it profited the wizard. A small part of his consciousness realized he was being more than a bit over dramatic, but fear can put the strangest thoughts into anyone’s head.
Once deep into the Third Quarter it was an easy thing to follow the crowds of tradesmen to the source of all the trouble. In a square surrounding an imposing public well, a crowd of thousands had gathered. Next to the well a crude wooden platform had been erected that Willem thought resembled a gallows.
The crowd reminded him of a demonstration he’d watched as a boy. Thousands had taken to the streets of Marsember in spontaneous support for King Azoun IV in his valiant struggle against Gondegal, the so-called “Lost King.” He’d seen nothing like it again in the intervening decade, and the gathering he found himself in the middle of in Innarlith was somewhat less cheerful, rather more tense.
A small group of men, all attired in what even from a distance Willem could tell were the least expensive drawn from an aristocrat’s extensive wardrobe, stood on the stage. Leading the wealthy men trying to look poor was a stout, slightly overweight man with a too-big hat of the sort commonly worn by carpenters and masons when they had to work in the rain. His ordinary demeanor was offset by his powerful voice, which boomed through the square so loudly and so clearly that Willem had no trouble making out every word he said, though he was some two dozen yards away.
“And in conclusion,” the man thundered, “all previous historical movements were movements of minorities or in the interest of minorities. The tradesman’s movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority. The tradesman, the lowest stratum in our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
“Though not in substance,” the orator went on, “yet in form, the struggle of the tradesman with the aristocrat is at first a local struggle. The tradesmen of each realm must, of course, first settle all matters with its own oppressors.”
Willem, having missed the majority of the man’s speech, had some difficulty understanding his point. From the looks on the faces of the commoners filling the square, though, the speech stirred their passions in a most unsettling way. While puzzling over how the speaker thought his audience of tradesmen and laborers might not struggle with words like “superincumbent,” the man’s parting words were lost on him. Only when the next of the men on the makeshift stage clapped the speaker on the back and said, “Thank you, Marek Rymut, friend of all common men, for your stirring words,” did Willem start to pay very, very close attention.
29
30 Nightal, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR)
A LITTLE UNIVERSE SOMEWHERE ON THE ASTRAL PLANE
Marek Rymut stood on an unnamed hill overlooking an unnamed lake in the center of an unnamed valley. The terrain was much like any of the subtropical climes of his native Toril, though in some ways it was a bit more angular. The hill on which he stood might have been called a plateau, so flat was its top, and in the distance rose red-brown rock formations that cut the thick air like serrated knives. The stream that fed the lake from a mountain spring at the very edge of the pocket dimension cut through the landscape in a series of straight lines punctuated by almost right angles.
The sky was a mass of high clouds that roiled like milk spilled in water, churned by winds Marek had still not even begun to sort out. Below the level of the clouds, the air was thick with the black firedrakes he’d finally been able to portal in from the stinking, overcrowded hatchery beneath the wary streets of Innarlith. The creatures reveled in the freedom and elbow room, and thanks as much to the abundance of native fauna, had largely stopped eating each other.
A particular favorite of the firedrakes were the fat, six-foot-long worms Marek had taken to calling Fury’s Grubs. They seemed harmless enough and at first failed even to take notice of Marek and even Insithryllax as they first explored, then with great violence of spell and acid, tamed the little nugget of Fury’s Heart.
Though Insithryllax was late, Marek hardly noticed, he was so caught up in the spectacle of the black firedrakes at play. When the great black wyrm finally emerged from a flash of brilliant red light a thousand feet in the air above his head, Marek didn’t bother to feign impatience.
“Apologies for my lateness,” the dragon said when he had settled with a ground-jarring boom on the hill beside Marek. “I know you have plans for the evening and peasant uprisings to run.”
“Bah,” Marek scoffed. “That strike? An amusing diversion is all. A chance to draw certain people out of the crowd of Innarlith’s poor excuse for an intelligentsia. It only lasted a day, and I think the poor, downtrodden commoner is even commoner for the experience.”
“So then just the odd society ball tonight?”
Marek shrugged and said, “Another year gone, eh, friend? And a busy one at that.”
“Indeed,” the dragon replied.
“So, then,” said Marek, “what is it you needed to show me?”
“It appears we were not as thorough in our cleansing of this place as we’d thought,” Insithryllax said.
“Do tell,” Marek prompted with a raised eyebrow.
“In the lake,” said the dragon.
Marek studied the calm, dark surface of the small body of water. They had given it only cursory attention, true, and Marek didn’t even know how deep it was.
“Surely it’s too small to contain anything of consequence,” he said, even then knowing he must be wrong.
“I’ve only caught a glimpse of them myself,” the dragon said. “The drakes are too like their mothers to go close to water. Still, one of them strayed too near, and not a trace of it has washed up.”
“Show me,” Marek said.
As the dragon took wing, Marek closed his eyes against the rush of wind-driven dust and considered the possibilities. If there was something living in the lake that was big enough and mean enough to kill one of the black firedrakes, it might be worth keeping-if it could be tamed, magically or otherwise.
Insithryllax swooped down into a copse of the native trees-spindly, skeletal things that bore a fruit Marek was currently harvesting for its potent poison-and came back up into the air with one of the fat, squirming grubs writhing in his talons.
A few of the firedrakes left off their aimless soaring and swooped down to follow their father, one of them even taking tentative snaps in the direction of the grub. When Insithryllax flew past the shore of the little lake, the firedrakes broke off and climbed, avoiding flying over the water.
Insithryllax dropped the giant worm over the lake and Marek half expected at least one firedrake to swoop in and try to grab it. The best any of them did was level a perturbed glance at their father for wasting so fine and fat a worm.
Having steeled himself to witness a great splash, Marek was startled when the splash came altogether too early. The disturbance in the water was not caused by the grub falling in, but by something else bursting out.
It was, for lack of a more educated perspective, a great fish, long like an eel. Fins flapped like sideways wings at the corners of its wide mouth, which opened so fully under the falling worm Marek thought he might be able to step into the thing’s gullet without tipping his head. A jagged row of swordlike teeth latched onto the worm and popped it like a sausage, sending the grub’s yellow-green blood pouring into its mouth.