Whisper of Waves

16

9 Mirtul, the Year of the Serpent (1359 DR)

SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

Willem Korvan had a very busy year.

In that time he continued to rise in the ranks of the office of the master builder. He hadn’t quite become Inthelph’s “right hand” as Halina had predicted, but he had managed to make himself indispensable.

Most of the time he succeeded by being close at hand. There was not a single day that went by, even those days Halina hoped he would set aside entirely for her, that he wasn’t at the wall or at the home or offices of the master builder. When an assignment came up he always volunteered, until it became something of a joke among the master builder’s staff. Finally Inthelph stopped asking for volunteers and rewarded Willem ahead of time with the plum assignments.

Few in the master builder’s staff complained. The few who were not quite friends of Willem’s knew that Willem had too many friends. No one got in his way by choice, though Willem never detected a sense of fear or intimidation in anyone around him. He hadn’t set out to make anyone afraid of him, after all. He just wanted to be indispensable, and he was. He wanted to be liked, and he was. His casual manner and disarming good looks carried him far in the social circles of Innarlith, and he found himself attending an increasing number of posh gatherings and official functions, sometimes with Halina on his arm and sometimes not.

For her part, Halina continued to be a grateful and attentive lover, and over the months they saw a great deal of each other, though still he had not met her important uncle. She tried time and again to introduce them to each other, and Willem had developed quite a bag of tricks to help him dodge the meeting over and over again. He was delighted, but also a bit disappointed, that Halina never seemed to notice the intent behind his sudden need for a fresh drink, a breath of air, or the uncontrollable urge to whisk her off to a quiet bedchamber away from the guests and the looming specter of her uncle.

There were two reasons that Willem didn’t want to meet Marek Rymut. The first was the least of the two, but one he still couldn’t deny, at least to himself. The promise implicit in their meeting, the promise he’d made to Halina, would turn an hourglass. When that sand ran out, the whole of Innarlith would expect there to be a wedding, and though the feel of her skin still thrilled him, and he time and again found himself telling her things he’d promised himself he’d tell no one, he couldn’t bring himself to marry the girl.

She was the bright spot of true happiness in an otherwise difficult and nervous existence. All the time Willem’s mind spun with plots and schemes and the constant push and pull of social climbing. The wall reconstruction went slowly, ran frighteningly over budget, and one senator after another stepped forward to oppose it, to oppose even the retention of Inthelph as the city’s master builder.

How could he marry Halina Rymut-Sverdej, much less meet her uncle, while things were still so uncertain?

Marek Rymut had become one of those sunlike men, those bright centers around which others rotate in fixed orbits of favors and secrets. With any hint that the project he’d become so integral a part of was proceeding under any but the most ideal circumstances would put Willem in too precarious a position. Would someone like Rymut support a young man who some senators were already saying was helping to bankrupt the city? Certainly not.

The wall would have to be finished before he could meet Halina’s uncle. She would just have to wait. They both would.

Willem was torn between wanting the project to continue forever that it might never be that last passed hurdle before he’d have to marry Halina and wanting it to be done and done well so that his position in the city would finally be fixed and strong. Though Marek Rymut was an important man, he was Thayan. He was a foreigner, and so was his niece. Could Willem attain the position he wanted in Innnarlith if he was a foreigner married to a foreigner? There was a better girl out there, wasn’t there? Was there?

All thoughts of returning to Cormyr, where he would never be anything but a boarding house owner’s son, had long since fled him. He meant to stay in Innarlith. He meant to buy himself a seat on the senate. He meant to keep going, all the way to the ransar’s Palace of Many Spires.

He was still young, and there was time. Still, he could afford few if any mistakes.

Not only Halina, but Thenmun had begun to show himself as a possible mistake.

Willem had put his trust in the young lieutenant, and for a few months it seemed as though that trust was well placed, but then the senators started to whisper, and those holes in the master builder’s social armor-tiny as they were-were revealed. Thenmun had started to get ideas, and like Ptolnec before him, he started to identify mistakes.

Many sleepless nights of hand wringing and sweating gave Willem a final answer for his problem with Thenmun-or more appropriately, his two problems with Thenmun. The first was Thenmun himself. The lieutenant was too smart, too well-liked, and had scented the master builder’s blood in the water. Even if Willem stopped making the mathematical errors that plagued him and the project itself, the lieutenant wouldn’t stop until he had built a career on the ruins of both Willem’s and Inthelph’s.

He couldn’t remember actually making the decision to kill Thenmun, but one day he found himself researching poisons.

The second problem was the fact that Willem was indeed making one critical miscalculation after another in regards to the renovation of the walls. Confused, over his head with the mathematics required, Inthelph was no help at all. Willem’s greatest fear had been that his mentor would prove incompetent and a bad teacher, and both had proven true, though the master builder was still Willem’s strongest link to the city-state’s elite. Willem would need to complete the wall, and that wall would have to stand.

Willem went to see Ivar Devorast for the first time since they’d parted ways in Cormyr a tenday after Thenmun first fell ill from the poison. Willem kept the visit brief and friendly-and they were friends after all, to the extent that anyone could be friends with Ivar Devorast.

The second visit came the morning after Thenmun was found running naked through the streets, foaming at the mouth for all the world like a rabid dog. The lieutenant was stripped of his rank and confined to a sanitarium on the edge of the Fourth Quarter that very day. While Thenmun was being tied to a bed, Willem asked Devorast for his help.

Devorast didn’t resist or even ask for gold, though Willem could tell Devorast was in need of a coin or two by the way he lived. Having lived with the man and seen him in school, Willem knew how to appeal to Ivar Devorast. He presented Devorast with a problem. How to shore up the wall in such a way as to double its strength, to accommodate twice the number of men and twice the number of artillery pieces, while using as much of the existing structure as possible.

Devorast went to work quickly and though it took two months to copy his wild, almost indecipherable drawings with their conversely precise notations, Willem submitted the plans as his own and heard no complaint from Devorast.

The plans were extraordinary, with every condition not only met but exceeded to the degree that the master builder himself had to study the plans for a full month before he even understood the extent of their genius.

Thenmun was eventually released into the care of his mother, who cared for him in all the ways she had when he was a newborn infant, and no one ever suspected that it was poison that had ruined his mind, much less that that poison had been administered by Deputy Master Builder Willem Korvan.

Work began in earnest on the wall the first of Mirtul, using plans that no one but Willem and one other knew were devised in total by an unknown foreign shipwright by the name of Ivar Devorast.