Scream of Stone

45

21 Uktar, the Yearof Rogue Dragons (1373 DR) Fourth Quarter, Innarlith

It’s the smell that hits you first, isn’t it?” Pristoleph asked.

He looked over at Devorast, who walked alongside him down the narrow, filthy street at the city’s easternmost edge. Devorast didn’t respond. His eyes darted from the overflowing midden to the walls of the ramshackle houses, but he never met the eyes of the people that stopped to watch them pass.

“For me,” Pristoleph went on, “the smell was the easiest thing to forget. Faces, little things like a pile of rotting lumber abandoned for years, or a child’s doll floating in raw sewagethose sights have been burned into my memory. I’ll never forget that doll.”

Pristoleph closed his eyes, but opened them after only a couple stepson that street, it was a risky proposition to not look where you were going for more than that.

“Someone’s mother had stitched it together from rags. It was supposed to be a little girla little girl for a little girl, I’d guess. I can see its blue eyes, its red lips, its nose that was actually a button. There was a stain on the doll’s face that made it look like it had some sort of disease of the skin, but all it was was blood, mud, or wine. I suppose that either of the three of those things would constitute a disease for a child’s plaything.”

Devorast glanced at him, as though he were affected in some way by that image, but what little trace of emotion Pristoleph thought he saw in the Cormyrean’s face was gone as quickly as it appeared.

“It’s been yearsdecades, reallyand I still wonder about that doll. What happened to the little girl who must have loved it? Did she drop it and not notice? Did she try to retrieve it from the midden before her mother pulled her away? Anything that goes in there doesn’t come out in any condition to be hugged ever again.”

Devorast smirked, and Pristoleph laughed a little.

“See this building here,” the ransar said, pointing to a brick building whose walls had been repaired so many times it looked like the patchwork rag doll of Pristoleph’s childhood memory. “This used to be an inn. My mother worked here.”

Devorast stopped and looked at the building, and Pristoleph stood behind him. He waited for Devorast to ask for more information or to show any interest in anything he was saying, but he got nothing in response but a mute examination of the falling-down old inn.

“She would take men there,” Pristoleph said.

An old man dressed in rags that had to be tied onto him staggered toward Pristoleph. His clothes looked and smelled no different than the midden ditch that ran like a stripe of feces, urine, garbage, and dead rats down the middle of the street. Pristoleph locked his eyes on the beggar’s and the man wilted under the ransar’s steady, firm gaze. The old man turned on his heel and scurried off into a garbage-strewn alley.

“It was the first building I ever bought,” Pristoleph said to Devorast’s back. “I’ve been collecting a pittance in rent on it for years. I’d almost forgotten about it, actually. It’s been used for meat packing, a blacksmith that made nailsnails, only, one after another after another all dayand Denier only knows what else, but it’s never been an inn. I never let it be that again, and I never will. I’ll burn it down myself before another woman sells her body in that building.”

“It wasn’t the inn,” Devorast said, not looking over his shoulder.

Pristoleph found himself nodding but angry at the same time.

“I bought the building next door, too,” Pristoleph went on, and started to walk again. “I bought a lot of buildings, and most of the time I didn’t ask what was going on inside them. I didn’t care. If the rent was paid, they could have been…”

He didn’t know what they could have been doing that would have come close to offending him, but that he would have allowed just the same.

“You haven’t asked me why I brought you down here,” he said to Devorast. Then he turned on a woman who had inched closer to them, and said, “Easy, there.”

The old woman took just a little more convincing than the male beggar before she moved away from the two men.

“You want me to know that you came from nothing,” Devorast said. “You thought I should see how far you’ve come, all the gold you’ve”

“No,” Pristoleph said, loudly enough so that a couple of the grimy passersby turned and ran from him. “Or yes, I suppose,” he went on more quietly, directing the words to Devorast, and Devorast alone. “We’ve always agreed that coin for coin’s sake is hardly worth pursuing.”

Devorast nodded.

“I wanted you to know that I have dreams for Innarlith,” Pristoleph said. “I really don’t come here to remind myself of what it was like growing up on the streets, ‘raised,’ if you can call it that, by a whore. I didn’t ask for your pity, and I never will.”

The two men turned to look at each other and stood there longer than either had intended. A little boy tugged on Devorast’s sleeve and mumbled something about silver coins. Devorast shook his head but didn’t push the boy away.

The little beggar looked up at him, and Pristoleph watched a tear collect in the boy’s big eyes. He held out two silver coins. The boy smiled, grabbed the coins from the ransar’s hand, and disappeared back into the dark alley.

“That could have been me,” Pristoleph said, gesturing after the boy.

Devorast looked him in the eye and said, “Save for?”

Pristoleph raised an eyebrow and said, “Luck?”

“There is no such thing.”

“Ambition?”

“And what’s wrong with ambition?” Devorast replied.