Lies of Light Read Free Page B

but the man wouldn’t be able to see him. He stood and waited, and it seemed as though an awfully long time had passed. The door didn’t open.
    “Rymiit?” he whispered.
    Then his throat closed again, and his knees were going to collapse under him, so he sat. He ended up leaning half against the rough stone, his cheek pressed against the wall, his nose filled with the spice of mold.
    He’s taunting me, Surero thought. They aren’t going to let me go. It’s Rymiit. He’s playing a trick on me.
    “He’s playing a trick on me,” Surero whispered.
    Then his teeth closed as tightly as his throat, and his wasted, filthy, clammy body trembled with impotent rage. He boiled inside his six by six cell, and tried to close his ears to the sound of men moving on the other side of the door.
    They aren’t there, he told himself. Give up. Give up hope.
    Surero hadn’t had a word of news from the outside world for a hundred and twenty-five days. For all he knew, the hated Marek Rymiit was dead. But he doubted that. Surely the Thayan scum had only further ingratiated himself into the petty aristocracy of Innarlith. Surero had no doubt that Rymiit had taken from more and more people like him. The Thayan had taken his customers, had stolen his formulae, had robbed him of his reputation. Surero, who had lived every moment of his miserable existence in the pursuit of excellence in the alchemical arts, had been reduced to a ragged, homeless, desperate husk of a man, no more substantial a creature than the wretch four months in the ransar’s dungeon had made him. When he’d done the only thing fitting, the only thing a man in his position could do, he had failed. Something had gone wrong. The mixture itself had worked and the explosion was powerful, but Marek Rymiit had lived.
    And Surero had gone to the dungeon to rot. Forever.
    A key turned in the lock. The sound was unmistakable.
    Surero looked up at the door, his eyes locked on the very edge so he could perceive any minute crack that might actually open.
    Fear washed away his hatred, but the source was the same. Was it Marek Rymiit behind that door? Was it the Thayan robber come to kill him once and for all?
    “Rymiit?’ he asked, his voice squeaking past his constricted vocal chords.
    The door swung open to a flash of blinding light and a deafening squeak of hinges that hadn’t been used, much less oiled, in four months. Surero’s eyes locked shut against the brilliant illumination of the single torch, and he could only listen as the man stepped into the room, his steps heavy and confident, shaking the stained flagstones beneath them.
    “Stand up,” the voice commanded, closer and clearer with no door between it and Surero.
    “Kill me,” Surero croaked, his hands pressed hard against his burning eyes. “Go ahead and kill me, Thayan bastard.”
    A hand that seemed the size of a god’s grabbed a fistful of the soiled linen gown that had been his only clothing since the previous Marpenoth, and took a few dozen chest hairs along with it. Surero winced and shook as he was pulled to his feet.
    Hot breath that smelled almost as bad as his cell washed over his face, and the man said, “Who in the Nine perspi-rin’ Hells are you calling a Thayan?”
    Surero chanced it. He opened one eye.
    “You…” he mumbled. “You’re not… Rymiit.”
    “I’m the jailer, wretch,” the man said. “I’m the bloke what’s been feeding you these months. How’s about a little gratitude here, eh?”
    Surero swallowed, forgetting how much his throat hurt, and replied, “Yes. Sorry. Thanks.”
    That made the jailer laugh, and Surero was just relived
    enough that it wasn’t Rymiit who’d come to claim him that he laughed a little too.
    “Are you really…?” the prisoner stuttered. “A-are … are y-you going to… ?”
    “You’re all done, mate,” the jailer said, setting Surero down and letting go his clothes. “The ‘Thayan bastard’ said you’d had enough so the