Whisper of Waves

37

12 Hammer, the Year of the Wyvern (1363 DR)

SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

Phyrea liked the way the leather felt against her skin. It wrapped her in a second layer of flesh, a barrier against the very air of the world she had no use for.

“Pretty,” a voice said.

It was a man, his voice echoing in the high-ceilinged chamber. She didn’t turn around but heard him cock the crossbow. Her eyes settled on the egg. It sat on a piece of soft fur-probably mink-in a silver bowl. The bowl was in the little wall safe she’d found hidden behind the picture just where Wenefir told her it would be.

“So,” she said, still not turning around, “you can hear.”

She’d overstated her ability to open complex dwarven locks-if she hadn’t Wenefir wouldn’t have let her come-but when she grew bored with trying to pick it, there was always the magical oil that blew things up. It didn’t take much of the stuff to blow the door off the safe.

“Step back,” the man said. “Take one step back from the egg and turn around slowly. Do anything else and you get a quarrel in the arse, and it would be a shame to hurt that arse.”

The side of Phyrea’s mouth curved gently up into a half smile, and she didn’t step back or turn around. She looked at the egg.

It was a real egg-just a common chicken egg-but it had been pierced with a needle and the contents blown out. Then the delicate, intact shell had been decorated with gems and gold. The emeralds alone were worth a fortune, and still there were rubies, sapphires, and one diamond after another. The gems could buy a seat on the senate, but the egg-the craftsmanship, the delicate beauty, the rarity-was priceless. When she looked closely, she could see the man reflected in hundreds of little gemstones. He was a big man, and he had a big crossbow, but he was looking at the wrong part of her.

“You heard me, beautiful,” he said, taking a step closer to her, but still looking at her shapely behind. “Step back and-”

She tossed the vial over her shoulder. It tumbled through the air, reflected a thousandfold in the facets of the gems. He never looked up and never saw it. Phyrea closed her eyes just before it hit him on the forehead. The vial broke and the oil did what the oil was made to do. The sound was a dull thump that rebounded from wall to wall in the candlelit confines of the hall. It hurt her ears but not too badly.

She turned, and her smile became a grimace.

The headless man was still standing. His body quivered, blood rained around his feet, and his arm jerked.

And the crossbow fired.

Phyrea leaned back and watched the quarrel rip through the air an inch from the tip of her nose. Bent so far back that her shoulders nearly touched the floor, all she had to do was tip her head back to watch the crossbow bolt smash into the silver bowl.

She hissed a curse no girl her age should ever have heard, let alone said, and went into a fast, dizzying backward somersault, spinning and landing on her knees just in time to catch the delicate egg a handspan from hitting the floor.

Phyrea breathed a sigh of relief and stood, just as running footsteps began to echo from farther down the hall. More guards.

She took the swatch of fur and wrapped the egg in it then stuffed it into her little shoulder bag. The footsteps grew louder and louder. She drew the short sword from its scabbard at her belt and whirled it through her fingers. The magically enhanced balance of it always made her feel good-powerful, in control, safe.

The guards practically fell over each other coming around the corner, all trying to stop the second they saw her.

Her long, soft, black hair fell playfully over one side of her face in the way she knew men liked. She smiled at them in the way she knew they couldn’t resist. Then she bent one knee and extended her other leg straight out in front of her, lifting the short sword over her head with her right hand and motioning them to her with one finger of her left hand in a way she knew they would find mesmerizing.

To a man their jaws went slack, and their weapons hung limp at their sides.

“Good boys,” she said.

Before they could snap out of it-if they ever did snap out of it-she skipped into a run, one step then two, and she was out the window to her right, a window she’d only just noticed was there.

Phyrea fell through the cool night air, slipping the short sword back in its scabbard. She rolled when she hit the neatly trimmed hedges, and the leather protected her from the sharp branches.

In the darkness of the moonless night, the garden was devoid of color. The hedges and flowerbeds might have been rocks. The bare trees appeared black, skeletal, dead. Still, she was sure that in the spring, in the bright daylight, it would be the most beautiful garden she’d ever seen. It was a garden that no petty aristocrat, no insufferable dilettante, could possibly deserve. Kept away from the sight of everyone but one man and a half dozen of his servants, it was a waste. The whole gigantic house full of hidden wall safes, hidden gardens, hidden agendas, hidden everything, was a monument to the petty hubris, the paranoid lack of imagination of the better families of Innarlith. The better families, including her own.

Phyrea ran from the garden amid a shower of crossbow bolts that she knew she shouldn’t have been able to outrun. The guards, just boys really, surely didn’t give the north end of a southbound rat for their master’s precious egg, and though they hadn’t really met her, Phyrea knew they liked her a lot.

She passed through a wide archway at a dead run, her high, thick-soled black leather boots splashing on the rain-soaked flagstones. Phyrea didn’t bother being quiet. They knew she was there, after all, and knew where she was going. Being quiet would only slow her down.

On the other side of the archway was a wide belvedere that overlooked the city. Even running for her life, she was impressed by the view. Innarlith spread out below her. Light from the windows of hundreds of houses and shops sparkled like the gems in the damnable egg. The city looked like a pool of stars under the black sky. The real stars were obscured by clouds heavy with rain, as they always did in the winter.

She skipped to a stop and hopped up onto the low stone railing. Looking down made her head spin with a giddy, startled delight. The toes of her boots hung off the edge of the railing, and there was fully a hundred feet of air between them and the street below. The sight of the falling rain drops seen from above was particularly intriguing.

“Don’t!” a young man all but shrieked from behind her.

She looked at him down a crossbow quarrel that shook in his unsteady grip. The guard was no older than Phyrea, but she wondered at how much like a child he seemed.

“If you think I’m going to jump a hundred feet to a messy death,” she asked the young guard, “what do you suppose I have to fear from your crossbow?”

“I’ll shoot!” he warned her.

Phyrea didn’t laugh at him, much as she wanted to.

“I mean it,” he said, stepping closer to her, his voice betraying a growing confidence. “Step down.”

“I wonder what it is about crossbows that make young men think they can tell young women what to do,” she said.

He raised the crossbow to his cheek and sighted down the barrel. His comrades-in-arms scurried up behind him and more crossbow bolts were aimed in her direction.

“If you shoot me,” she warned them, “I’ll fall.”

The guards glanced at each other.

“If I fall,” Phyrea went on, “so much for your master’s egg.”

The guards had no idea what to do.

“or maybe not,” she said. “Let’s see.”

She stepped off the railing into the thin, unwelcoming air.

Phyrea chuckled in delight at the collective gasp from the young guards, and her stomach lurched-not an entirely unpleasant sensation-just before she slowed. Phyrea laughed with unabashed glee the whole way down, falling so slowly she felt as if the air had become as thick as water. She chanced a look up at the high belvedere and saw the tops of the guards’ heads watching her, the tall spires of the palace rising into the black sky above them. They didn’t bother shooting at her or even calling out.

Her boots settled onto the cobblestones so gently she had to stand still for a few heartbeats just to be sure any weight had returned to her body at all. Then she looked up, offered a friendly wave to the guards still watching her in mute fascination, then sped off into the darkest alley she could find.

Phyrea sank into the deep shadows and only made it a few steps before she almost ran into someone.

Not entirely surprised, she stopped quickly and back-stepped, careful not to leave the cloaking shadows of the alley.

“Good evening, Wenefir,” she said.

The man who’d hired her to steal the egg nodded a greeting.

He was an odd man about whom Phyrea had heard even odder rumors. His skin was soft, and his whole body had a feeling of rounded edges. He wore a heavy weathercloak pulled tight around his pudgy throat. When he spoke his voice was quiet and just a bit too high-pitched for a man’s but just a bit too low for a woman’s.

“Phyrea,” he said. “May I have it?”

“No,” Phyrea replied.

Wenefir raised an eyebrow in an attempt to appear curious, but she could read the growing impatience on his face.

“I didn’t get it,” she lied. “I got the safe open, but the guards … it broke.”

Wenefir drew in a deep breath that seemed to go on and on for hours. Phyrea wondered at how anyone could hold that much air.

“Sorry,” she said.

He let the breath out in an even longer sigh. Phyrea liked the sound of it. She wished she could sigh like that, so deliciously world-weary.

“You’ll never be able to sell it,” said Wenefir. “How many buyers for such a piece do you think there are in this city? In any city? Who has that much gold?”

“It’s-” Phyrea started. “It was worth that much?”

“Oh, Phyrea,” he said. “You have no idea.”

“Enough for your senate seat?” she asked.

The question caused him pain, and Phyrea thought she almost felt something that might be guilt.

“Alas,” Wenefir replied, “that ship has long since sailed, but be that as it may, I hope that if you have the item you will give it to me now so I can pay you your due and we can still be friends.”

“I hope,” Phyrea countered, “that you’ll believe that the egg was accidentally broken, that I did all I could, you’ll keep your coin, and we can still be friends.”

They stood in the rain in the dark alley and stared at each other for so long Phyrea almost cracked.

“Very well, then,” Wenefir said finally. “I’ll have my ring back at any rate.”

He glanced at the ring on her finger-the enchanted ring that had let her fall a hundred feet and live to tell of it-and there was no way she could deny she was wearing it.

“Of course,” she said, pulling the ring off her finger and reaching out. “Though I wish you’d let me keep it. Thadat, yes?”

She’d seen the mark that identified it as the work of a local Innarlan wizard who was making quite a name for himself selling magic rings. Wenefir held out his hand and she dropped the ring in his palm. He smiled at her, bowed, then turned and stalked off into the night.

Phyrea stood, watching him go. She waited for the sound of his footsteps to recede before she tried one of those long, heavy sighs. She was less than satisfied with the results.

On her way home through the alleys and side streets of the Second Quarter, she picked gemstones off the egg and littered them in her path. When she grew bored with that, she crushed the priceless artifact in her hand and tossed the pieces in the midden.

The egg was beautiful, priceless, and prized by some very powerful people in Innarlith, including the ransar, whom she’d stolen it from, and the mysterious and unsettling Wenefir.

The feeling Phyrea got from destroying it made her happier than she’d been in months.