Scream of Stone

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.”