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Chapter Text

Paper Cuts

It was the fourth hour of night, and the Promenade was drowsing. Truly, as was known up and down the Sword Coast, it never slept; the avatar of the commercial Amnish soul always had to keep at least one eye open for a bargain. But now, with the lamps going out under the eaves of the last tardy shops, and blinds covering all save two of the market stands, little remained to keep feet moving along the terraces and coin changing hands. The regular guard patrols discouraged lower class loitering, and the upper classes had warmer locations at their disposal than the darkened pavements of Waukeen's Promenade. Another hour or two, and the carts would begin to roll through the east gate, then the barrel-men and fish-wives, with a rearguard of street-sweepers following them, brushes carried like pikes on thin shoulders. But now – now he could enjoy the deep quiet, the pause between the breaths of a dozing giant.

Sand closed his eyes and inhaled. Spices and the fresh airs of night and fumes from the incense burners. To his right, honeysuckle. To his left, garlic frying in olive oil: one of his neighbours dining late, no doubt.

It had taken him a hundred and fifty years to find a city that by-and-large worked. There was no imminent invasion, no mysterious sickness; there were no recruiting drums beating up and down these streets. Many times, he had thought that everything was up for him, that one of the nastier deities had decided to stretch out a fat index finger and wipe him from the board. And yet he was alive. And well. Thriving, almost. So now he resolved to appreciate the unlikely fact of his survival. To forget the past, the future, the challenges of finding a reliable cheap supply of wolfsroot when the trade routes to the mountains were always closing.

He poured himself a shot of anisette from the decanter on his balcony table. “A hundred years, Sand,” he murmured, adding to the deserted market stalls below him, “and a hundred years to you too.”

He put a hand on the railing, not yet drinking, not wanting to return to his usual preoccupations.

Although it was night, and barely spring, having wrapped himself in a fur mantle and with a brazier radiating the balcony with warmth, he felt as comfortable as he might have on a midsummer's morning in Neverwinter, and a great deal safer.

On the opposite side of the market, he saw fabrics shake. Heard the rustling of a dress. Above them, a glimmer of red hair. He narrowed his eyes, but the person had gone – disappeared into one of the many hidden courtyards that lay behind the row of merchant's houses

The moment was broken. He was disquieted. He drained the anisette, poured a second glass, and sat down at his desk to catch up on his correspondence. The ink-well was dry. Not feeling like fetching water from the pool in the atrium, he tipped a few drops of the spirit into the ink to liquefy it. Well, it seemed to work. He hoped that Harcourt wouldn't sniff the paper and decide that he was in danger of addiction. But in that case, his friend might rush southwards to his aid, so perhaps the aromatic ink wasn't such a terrible idea. Especially if he could persuade Harcourt to visit the thermal baths with him.

Ches, 14.

My very dear Harcourt,

I cannot express with what delight I received your last letter. Enough for you to know that I had been awaiting the arrival of my annual summons to be cross-examined and potentially cross-sectioned by the Athkatlan bureaucracy concerning my licence to practise magic. The heavy knock at my door made me fear that the interview had been cancelled in favour of immediate deportation to somewhere unutterably horrible and vulgar: the Underdark, perhaps, or any halfling village you care to name, full of gluttons and clog-dancing, where even you would hesitate to look for me.

Imagine my delight upon finding instead a messenger from Candlekeep on my doorstep, delight only a little marred when he demanded a huge amount of money as a tip for his 'good service' (!) before he would consent to hand over your parcel. Next time please send me someone less financially astute. I suggest casting your net among the idealistic throng of baby adventurers, and sending your haul on a quest to save the universe (Address: The Glass Retort, Second Tier, Waukeen's Promenade.) They will do it for free. Faerun needs cures for fungal infections more than it needs fabulous magic swords, which it has already in sickening abundance; but no ballad has yet been written about the hero who found a remedy for mushrooms growing in the wrong place.

Anyway, the manuscripts are here, on my desk, and immaculate. A thousand thanks. One from me, and the rest from all of the well-paying customers whom my work will one day relieve considerably (just what of I leave to you to decide.)

That you have been promoted – again - is hardly a surprise. Or if it is a surprise, it is so only because you are a capable and intelligent young human clearly deserving of your new rank. Yes, still young! In the normal order of things, I fear that those with a dragon-wrestling barbarian warlord for their great-great-great-grandfather are too often given preferment at the expense of those with talent and focus. But even when we first met in the atrium of your old master's house in the Blacklake district, your gifts were apparent to the discerning eye – and two were on you that day, at least. Since then, the War, your courage in the matter of the murderer of Blacklake, and your actions at the start of the Spellplague – these have all confirmed and more than confirmed your earlier promise.

I will leave discussion of the things that interest us both to our next meeting for the usual reasons.

Life in Athkatla continues well. Well, life continues. A little miracle in itself, and one that the few who remain in Neverwinter and Luskan cannot expect for themselves. I find the Amnish every bit as acquisitive, selfish and mercenary as I was warned, and I rejoice in it. Rejoicingly. Your friend is a happy Sand when he counts his takings in the warm southern evenings. And don't pull that face! You know I have some purer concerns than the purity of the gold coins in my bank vault. But no one here suggests I should risk my life for the good of the state. No one uses blackmail and holy fervour to force me to do what I would have done voluntarily, Tyr rest milord Nasher's soul.

I miss much about my former home, and not only the regular sight of you and – you know the rest, my dear. Still, there are plenty of distractions from the pains of nostalgia in Athkatla available to the man of means, or to the mean elf with a knowledge of disintegration spells, for that matter. Plays, lectures, feasts, gardens, a circus – not the amateur kind that we were once involved in at Crossroad Keep, but a real professional circus with a real professional elephant. And lately there has been a curious addition to the old – now rather expensive and genteel – slum district.

A Festhall. Do you know what that is? Nothing like The Moonstone Mask, I assure you. The attendants are all literate and numerate, and remarkably few appear to have the pox. Festhalls are branches of the Society of Sensation, an organisation rooted in Sigil and, it seems, currently occupied in seeding itself wherever a door is opened between it and the Prime. These Sensates believe that to be truly alive, one must endeavour to feel, to experience, as much as possible. And to help their acolytes, disciples and bored members of the public to follow the path to enlightenment, they provide 'sensory stones', a kind of glass bauble which captures and preserves the memories of a donor and offers them up to whoever wishes in exchange for a small fee or a memory of their own. I gave them my memory of alphabetizing my file of invoices for potion ingredients on a gloomy winter's day when I had a cold. Let the voyeurs sensate themselves with that. The worthwhile memories are just for the two of us.

In the sensory chamber, some wag had switched all the labels on the stones. This led to some unpleasant surprises. A picnic in the meadows of Rashemen involved no meadows, no Rashemen and the picnic was a victim who was devoured by, judging from the tentacles, a polymorphed illithid. I could see, and hear, and smell, and taste everything. I could feel the shapeshifter's thoughts. I think I could even taste the thoughts of its victim.

The next stone promised an in depth tour of a yuan ti bordello – you would have chosen the same, so stop smirking. What I got was thirty minutes in the life of a prisoner at Zhentil Keep. I fear very much that their life did not extend for another thirty minutes. After that I saw a great many things I would rather not have seen – a man burning but not consumed by the flames that sprang from his body, an astral deva held crucified against a wall of bodies by a thousand silver splinters, a vampire on the prowl in Athkatla's own metropolis of the dead. Someone will certainly be renewing his stocks of holy water in the near future.

Within the final stone I visited, I saw something more unpleasant than in all of the previous memories put together. Surely a just punishment for engaging in such a crass past-time! The one comfort is that the experience becomes somehow distant, difficult to hold in the mind, as soon as the stone's spell is broken. I was not greatly traumatised, but nor did I learn anything of use. Who knows what innovations we may see imported from Sigil in the future? But as long as its lawyers and alchemists stay away, I will not complain – much.

Your faithful

Sand

p.s. Do you want to know what I saw in the final stone? Then wait till you see me a ten-day from now, and I'll tell you about it in as much detail as I can recall and you wish to hear. 

Chapter Text

Seen In Agate

S.St. 441, Athk. Fae. Contents: Lecture on the Properties of Liquorice Root by the hon. Prof. Avicenna Status: Active in public service.

The world melted. There was a violent jolt in my stomach like the process of metamorphosis, when the innards always insist on changing a half-second before the rest of the body follows.

And then I was standing in a dimly lit bar-room, and a burly half-elf was scowling at me. “Where has that smug snake got to now?”

I opened my mouth to say, “Duncan, the smug snake is standing two foot away from you counting your nose-hairs. Are you planning on going into horticulture?”

Instead, I heard the unmistakably gravelly tones of a dwarf come from somewhere much further down my throat than normal. “A tankard of the local. There aren't any cloves in it, are there? I can't abide all that fancy slime with cloves and fruit in it.”

A voice came from behind me. From slightly too close for comfort behind me, though two feet higher. “I saw him slip off to his little rat-trap over the way.”

Duncan briefly pulled his scowl into a over-friendly smile. “One moment, good sir.” The smile vanished. “Curse him. He's almost as shifty as you, Bishop.”

“Took you long enough to notice. You did know he's from Luskan, right? Keep your eye on him, if you can.”

“And another on you. Sure.”

“No eyes in the back of your head, my friend. But for now, I'd just worry about the elf. He'll be selling pessaries to the mademoiselles for the rest of the evening. Good to know he takes your niece's case seriously, isn't it?”

I felt annoyed. I wanted a tankard of strong beer, and a comely young lass with just a dusting of blonde hair on her upper lip. I also – the real me – wanted to vomit slightly at the very idea. But the real me was the shadow of a dream within a dream.

The idea of kicking up a fuss occurred to me. I had spikes on the toes of my tough leather boots, which usually made kicking up anything an efficient and entertaining policy. This barman, however, and the voice from above – I realized it could go badly. So I calmed myself by jangling the coins in my purse in as meaningful a way as I could manage. It worked, more or less.

“Get out of here, Bishop,” the barman growled through the side of his mouth, before glancing back to me. “A keg of beer coming right up, no cloves, no olives, no little lace parasols. You sit yourself down and the house's very own apprentice barmaid in training will bring you your order.” He turned to bawl down the corridor to my left. “Qara! Where in all the hells are you? Qara! Out or I triple your rent, starting now.”

“She's as thick as dead kobold,”said Bishop, still unseen, and, for my lucky host, ever to remain so.“But even she knows that three times nothing is still nothing.” Something heavy patted my shoulder. I bristled. “Your good health, dwarf. Enjoy the last of it.”

My fist swung the rest of me round in a powerful semi-circle. I was expecting to make contact with the bastard's gut. What I hit was thin air, pure thin air, and as I staggered and grasped the bar to regain my balance, the tavern door slammed shut. My face flushed. I was happy that none of my mates from the wharves were there to see me. It had been hard enough to live down the duck trafficking incident.

The thick-necked barkeep had noticed nothing. “Qara!” he yelled again. I held my shoulders straight, and walked in the direction of the darkest corner of the tavern.

“Nice try, little one,” a big brute chortled to me as he passed by with a cold meat platter for his friends, a gang of half-orcs and other scum. “That one ain't for you nor no one alive. Mask's own sweet son is Bishop.”

I thought hard about the daggers strapped to my left thigh, and stumped onward to the gloomy corner table. I hoped that its legs wouldn't be wonky.

They were. I couldn't even rest my elbows on the damn table without getting seasick. It was that kind of day. Shit morning, shit afternoon, and now a shit evening in a docks shithole with asymmetrical shitting furniture.

I really wanted my beer. Not that there was any sign of it coming any time soon. The barman left the tavern hurriedly, and his place at the tap was taken by a human female with a lot of red fuzz on top of her head. She was probably young. It's not easy to tell with humans. They all look like massive skinny bairnies with hair like feather-down and noses like squashed gooseberries.

At least she was drawing ale from the barrels. She took a deep sniff at one of the tankards and screwed up her gooseberry nose. Then she had a swig of the contents, and screwed up her plump bairnie face. Didn't seem to like the taste one bit, bless her.

I started to carve a geometric representation of a Kara-Turan Spotted Duck into the gnarled surface of the table. Difficult, since it kept rattling up and down and shaking my hand as I worked on the patterns on the wings and crest. Prettiest waterfowl in all the planes.

Clank.

“Come and have a suck on my beer tap, luv.”

Clank.

“Give us a smile, darling.”

Clank.

“Just bend over again. Not too flat are you?”

Clank.

A tankard had landed in front of me. Most of the beer was still inside. “Thank you, lass.”

This girl – Qara? - really was young. Like all red heads, she had pale skin; the furious blush on her cheeks was glowing like blood on fresh snow. If I had a daughter her age, she wouldn't be allowed into a tavern on her own. She wouldn't be allowed out on her own until at least thirty. Humans don't know how to look after their children in these sprawling cities.

Qara blinked. “Er – you're welcome.” She stalked away.

Clank.

“You'd look better if you smiled, honey.”

Clank.

I noticed that the group of orcish louts, still waiting to be served, were mumbling charms to themselves. After a few seconds, the skin of each was illuminated with some kind of protection spell. One of them was wrapping an enchanted cloak around his shoulders. Another had his hands clasped, his eyes closed in apparent prayer. I tugged at my beard plaits, and looked back at the barmaid. In her little white paw of a hand, the metal casing of a tankard had turned white. The beer inside was steaming.

Oh.

I put away my pocket knife, and laid my two daggers out on the table. Just in case.

Clank.

“This beer is too hot.” Cut-glass consonants. Loud, carrying voice. Stupid clothes. Pea brain. It could only be some nobleman's son out for a bit of rough. “Take it away. I ordered a tankard of cold ale.”

“Get it yourself.”

“I am paying your wages, girl.”

“You think I care? Do you know who I am? Do you know what I can do?” Qara laughed brashly, recklessly. A big laugh for a human female. The whole tavern had stopped its business to listen to her. She seemed to enjoy it, shooting glances around the room to make sure she had everyone's full attention.

“You're a silly little hussy, is what you are, with confoundedly ill manners.”

She tossed her head. “And you're about to be the barbecue du jour. You chose the wrong one to pick on. I'm not just some useless dockside trollop.”

“We'll see about -”

And she tipped two pints of boiling hot ale mixed with melted pewter over his unprotected head. He screamed. Then he sobbed. Then he screamed again. The girl watched him all the while with large eyes, fascinated. Bubbles rose and popped in the droplets of beer that fell to the floor from his foaming hair.

“Get her, imbeciles,” he said, waving to the three big fellows at the table nearest him. They rose up, hands on the sword-hilts. I went for my daggers automatically. All over the tavern, ready for trouble, the clientele were producing clubs, knives, spikes and knuckle-dusters.

Qara spread her arms out wide, palms upward, like a priest of Moradin. Blue and green flames wound round her wrists, and on and up towards the rafters. “Try anything, and I'll bring the ceiling down on your heads.”

The flames burnt more strongly. Shitting holy mercy, she meant every word.

I held my breath. Ten, nine, eight – I counted. If I got as far as one, I reckoned the men would back down. Seven – six – five – four – three – two -

They drew their swords.

“Qara, what by every devil in the nine hells do you think you are doing?” The barkeep was standing in the door. He had an elf mage with him, and a couple of humans in armour. A vein in his neck pulsed as he spoke. I was envious. I've been trying to get my neck to do that for years.

She dropped her hands and shifted uneasily. “I was just -”

“You haven't finished working off what you owe me for the last load of criminal damage,” he growled. “Just sit down, will you?” he said to the bodyguards. They sat down.

It was as if the tension had been pricked with a pin. The customers looked at their weapons with expressions ranging from mild surprise to regret. Most stowed them away, while a few were already laughing amongst themselves, and smiling at the raw and trembling member of the nobility.

“What did this unfortunate do, Qara?” said the elf mage, crossing to room to stand by the broiled, sobbing aristocrat. “Refuse to do your homework for you? Try to teach you to read?”

“These cretins had to learn who they were dealing with. They treated me as if I was - .”

“ - a barmaid? How dreadful.” His voice dripped in fake sympathy. I hate that breed of elf. Smarmy buggers. Think they know it all, and they haven't got a clue. “Oh, but wait. You live in a tavern, have resisted all attempts to educate you into someone socially useful, and can't count well enough to know when your clientele are cheating you. You are a barmaid!”

“What is it you do that's so marvellous, then? Make creams for the local tramps. Do they let you rub it in yourself if you give them a discount?”

The elf laughed. “If that's the worst you can imagine about me, Qara, you should thank your stars. Reality will hurt when it arrives at the gate of your little mental play-pen.”

“I could -”

“Not now, Sand,” snapped the barkeep, as the girl-witch began to swell again with anger. “Qara, get to your room. Before you burn down the whole damn city.” She went. With bad grace, and much stomping, but she went. Unbelievable. Strange people, sorcerers.

I re-sheathed my daggers, shrugged. But my yen for a quiet few hours with a lass on my knee and a drink in my hand had vanished. My blood was up. All that fuss had made me feel alive. I jumped onto my chair. “You!” I roared as loud as I could, willing my neck to do its duty. “Half-orc son of a dog prostitute prick-licker. What are you looking at, coward?”

The big brute in the cloak of protection stood up. He had tusks. When he saw me, he lowered them. He actually seemed to be scraping the floor with his right boot. I beckoned him over with my finger. His friends stood up. In the corner of my eye, I could see the barkeep put his head in his hands.

I was beginning to like this tavern. It was going to be a memorable night...

Chapter Text

Tarsakh, 3

To the honourable Sand of Neverwinter,

Your note arrived last week. I have decided that you may call on me tomorrow at any time after noon.

With the best compliments,

Lucia Veres

Tarsakh, 3

Dearest Harcourt,

She's agreed to a meeting. There are many ways in which this could end horribly. I have considered each one carefully. As long as she doesn't cry, I believe I will be able to forgive you for bringing up the ridiculous notion in the first place. I've told you many times that the best place for the past is in the past. I fear I can no longer complain when my advice is ignored, since I myself am setting this awful precedent.

Your faithful

Sand

Seen In Amethyst

S.St. 856 , Athk. Fae. Contents: Blank. Status: Sold Buyer: Sand of Neverwinter

I stared at the door. It was wedged shut with the lid of a sarcophagus. Something – some things – were there on the other side. Scratching. Whispering. Embrace. Smother. Kiss. Sleep. Die. Die. Die. The three humans couldn't make out the litany. Elvish hearing could be more of a curse than a blessing sometimes. I wrapped my robe more tightly around me.

“We went the wrong way,” said Qara. With all colours turned into grey and black by the ball of mage-light, the wound on the side of her face seemed to be oozing ink. Considering the beating she'd taken from that maniac Arval, she was quite chirpy by her sullen standards. Not that this meant much. “We should have gone in completely the other direction,” she said, speaking with difficulty through her swollen jaw.

“We'd have been running a gauntlet of shadows with a great mass of them waiting for us in the vestibule,” I pointed out to the girl that must be a contender for the title of Faerun's most blockheadedest. If that was a word. “Here we have a chance.”

“This is the worst rescue ever,” said the increasingly annoying Lisbet Bryce. “Next time, I'll cross my fingers and hope a trained band of sentient pistachios arrives to save me.”

“We wouldn't be sitting here waiting to die and be turned into horrible bloodthirsty echoes of ourselves if you hadn't insisted on completing the ritual, Miss Bryce,” I reminded her. She shrugged.

I looked at the fourth member of the group. “What now, glorious leader?”

Shandra winced. “Don't call me that.”

“You were the one who said we should go and explore the immense dark crypt full of aspiring necromancers without reinforcements, dear girl.”

“Well, Lisbet would be dead if we had waited for help.”

“Whereas now -”

She gave me a sidelong look. “We'll all be fine. We'll get out of this.” I felt my eyebrow raising itself of its own accord. Seeing it, she breathed out heavily, and her shoulders slumped. “That didn't sound totally convincing, did it?”

“Not bad. I confess I felt a flicker of hope. The way you squared your jaw was quite reminiscent of Casavir.”

“Gods. I like Casavir, but he owns an encyclopedia of sacred tombs and mausoleums. He'd be enjoying himself here a bit too much.”

I wanted to laugh. The shadows, the creeping dampness of the air and, above all, the whispering coming from the other side of the door conspired together to choke the laugh before it could ascend my trachea. What came out was a gurgle. “Still, if you want to become a paladin, the best time is about – oh – now. Pray very hard to your god -

“ - Chauntea -” said Shandra, as she leaned her head against a stone pillar, closing her eyes, perhaps trying to imagine herself back on her beloved farm.

“- yes, to her – renounce all worldly interests, flagellate yourself once or twice. A holy symbol with the power to repel the undead could be really unbelievably useful in the near future.”

“You think?” she muttered in response. A silence fell. I was trying to plan our escape. I supposed the others were too.

“I'm sorry about Qara,” said Shandra. She spoke so softly that I didn't know if I was meant to hear her or not. I could, of course. “She's sixteen years old.”

“And you're an old lady of what – twenty?”

“Twenty-four.”

“And I'm – well – never mind. But you're not her mother. She chose to be here.”

“Yes, but -”

“- I know you're talking about me. I'm not stupid,” said Qara in an ever so slightly plaintive voice. “Shandra – you watch my back. Bryce can open the door. Sand should just keep out of my way. I'll blast every shred of shadow I see back to – to -”

“ -to the Plane of Shadow, maybe?” I asked. “It's a place described in an famous essay called 'Cities of the Mind' by an anonymous writer working in Tethyr in the eleven nineties. Oh, but silly me. You've never heard of any of them because you are only interested in yourself, like all infants.”

“So does that mean you are volunteering to fight the shadows? Why don't you read aloud to them from your precious books, since you have so much faith in them. You can send them to sleep, while we sneak out to get the others. But I wouldn't count on them coming back for you afterwards because the only things you're good for are making spiteful comments and running away from danger with your tail between your legs!”

Die.  Drown.  Surrender.  Yield.   Love.   Kill.

Shadow voices. So distinct that it seemed impossible the others couldn't understand them.

The door rattled. A few beats later, and it rattled again. And again. The room was becoming hot and cold at the same time. Goosebumps ran up my back like the pricks of a pin.

“Quiet, both of you!” said Shandra, though I had lost the will to argue at the instant the door shook. By the bloodless look on Qara's face, so had she. I didn't think she could have enough power left to destroy even the dozen or so creatures waiting for us in the dark a few feet away. She'd turned Arval into charcoal. I certainly didn't have enough spells memorized. “What would Lila Farlong do in this situation?”

“Play dead and wait for her enemies to get bored and wander off,” I suggested, and, “Pull a shadow-eating rabbit from out of a hat.”

“Drink too much,” said Qara. “Try and sell them life insurance.”

“Not be here?” said Bryce. “I mean, I don't know who this Lila is, but clearly she's not – you know – around.”

Shandra looked so guilty and miserable that I wouldn't have been surprised if she'd turned into a paladin on the spot. The more so when she stood up, careful of her injured leg, and took out her weapon of choice – a sickle. As we sow, so do we reap. The enchanted words glowed faintly on the crescent blade. “The way I see it, we have three options,” she said, twitching rather self-consciously. “We can stay here and hope for help to arrive. Kyli knows we're here. She'll tell the others when they wonder where we are.”

Qara laughed derisively.

“Second option: we open the door and make a break for it. We can't fight all the way out, but if we refuse combat and -”

“ - run like a buttered pussy-cat in a gnome's kitchen -” supplied Bryce.

“What?” I saw Qara mouthing at the ceiling. If I hadn't felt such a perfectly reasonable antipathy for the sorceress, I might have smiled.

“ - and evade the enemy, I think our chances of getting out of this alive are quite high.” The idea did indeed sound promising. I had only one potion left, having failed to pack my usual battle kit that morning on account of not expecting any battles. Such innocence! But with the last potion being my emergency extra-strong invisibility serum, a break for it would suit me extremely well.

Albeit not Shandra. I doubted that she would be able to hop fast enough.

“And the last option?” I asked.

“We open the door and fight the shadows in here. That way, we can keep them from surrounding us, cut them down a few at a time. Once we've cleared the next room, we can catch our breath, then do the same with the ones in the outer passages.”

I was inclined to favour the invisibility serum.

“All of those choices sound terrible,” said Young Necromancer of the Year Lisbet Bryce. She might actually be worse than Qara. The latter had yet to set fire elementals on herself and then whine when she got burnt.

“And do you have a better idea, Miss Bryce?”

“Of course I do,” she answered coolly.

The sarcophagus lid crashed to the floor, as the door slowly, so slowly, began to open. Shandra flung herself against it. “Then get on with it!” she shouted at Bryce as she pressed with all her weight on the thick wooden panels.

A long dark tendril wrapped itself around Shandra's wrist. Her hand was turning white. “Sand!”

I didn't know what to do. None of my spells would break its hold without first damaging the flesh in its grip. My mind went blank. The only thought I could get hold of was: she should really have been wearing her gauntlets.

“Sand!” said Shandra again. “Knife!”

My mind cleared. I rushed forward and slashed at the shadow, missing several times and hitting the stonework, the door-frame and Shandra's mail shirt in my excitement. But it withdrew. The door shut, and with both of us leaning against it, stayed shut.

On the other side of the chamber, Bryce and Qara were removing the lid from the second sarcophagus. They inclined it carefully against the wall, as I noticed with a large degree of trepidation that the decorations appeared to date from a much more recent period than most of what I'd seen in the crypt. The enamel on the face of a beautiful long-locked woman gleamed as richly as if it had been set there the day before.

And before I could beg her not to, the infant necromancer reached down and knocked on something. I suspected, upon the lid of a coffin.

“Sorry to wake you up.” The girl's voice sounded an octave higher than before, and made her seem like a child in the nursery. “I know you were hoping for a long sleep, this time. But I'm in a bit of bother. It really can't be helped.”

First, a kind of grey mist exploded into the air between Bryce and Qara. Immediately after that came the sound of hinges squeaking in protest.

“Amazing!” was Qara's only response to whatever had been revealed. Then a long arm wrapped tightly in linen snaked out of the sarcophagus, and took Qara by the throat. The rest of the body followed. Eyes shining with a pale green luminescence were all that could be seen of the creature's true face, for everything else was hidden beneath an elaborate mask that seemed to have been moulded from the dead face of its wearer. Dusty blonde locks tumbled from the back of the head down to the middle of a jewel-coloured kirtle.

A dry hiss came from behind the mask, and, drawing itself up to its full height, the undead creature shook Qara by the throat. How I recognised that urge.

“No, no, mummy,” Bryce said. “She's not the problem. These people came here to help me. Unfortunately, they're about as competent as a bag of dead herring, and so I had to ask you.”

The – mummy? or was it a lich?- dropped Qara at once, and the girl landed choking in a heap on the floor. I tried to memorize her expression, which seemed to vacillate between horror and wonderment.

“There are shadows outside that want to kill me. They killed my friend Savanna. You remember Savanna, mummy? We used to have dolls' tea parties together by the lake.”

The mortal remains of Lady Bryce reached out a bandaged hand towards its offspring. The nails were visible, and quite black. They brushed against the cheek of Lisbet, who smiled tearfully. Then it shuffled back to its not very final resting place, and proceeded to rummage through whatever was left inside.

“They're normally under the cushions at the bottom end,” said Bryce.

A few silken cushions were thrown onto the tiled floor, and a fur-lined blanket landed on Shandra's head, while a heavy leather-bound tome bounced off the vaulted ceiling near my right ear. At length, the creature discovered what it had been looking for: a slender flail and a wand of fireballs. It clasped the flail in its right hand, and the wand in its left, and moved slowly and unstoppably towards the only door in the room.

I jumped out of its way, and pulled Shandra after me, still with the blanket on her head.

The hissing sound came again from behind the pale mask, and the late Lady Bryce shambled through the door as if it wasn't there. She hadn't knocked it down. She had simply...rearranged the physics to suit her.

Through the keyhole, I saw the adjoining room turn red. The oak panels felt distinctly warm under my touch.

Shandra pulled the blanket off her head. “What's happening?”

“Option Four.” I replied, against the sound of metal snapping on limestone. I was curious to learn to what species of undead the thing we had just seen belonged. It did not resemble anything that I had ever encountered, and in Luskan I had had the dubious pleasure of meeting a great number of beings who viewed death much as others view a few days in bed with a chill.

“She's amazing!” I heard Qara tell Bryce, looking hugely impressed. “I wish my mother could do that.” So the little sorceress had a mother. I'd thought Qara might have burned her to death in child-birth.

“She was dying,” said Bryce. “When my father knew he couldn't heal her, he got her to agree to - to that.” She paused, and looked away. “Now he protects our family house, and she protects the house of the dead. He got the idea from a history he was reading about the old empire.”

“That's – uh – very - ” Shandra was struggling. I could think of a great number of possible adjectives that could start her off. Disturbed, was one. Cruel and demented, they would do as well. However, since the undead monstrosity was busy saving our lives, I decided that it was not the time for an ethical discussion of the issues surrounding maternal necromancy.

“Don't tell Kyli. She's not supposed to know about it until she's older. Mummy made Dad and I promise before – the change.”

“We promise not to mention anything about – her - to Kyli. Don't we?”

“Oh yes,” I agreed. I wasn't going to cross the girl who had a powerful immortal undead mother on call.

“What?” said Qara, pausing in her nosing through the creature's burial goods. 

“She promises too. And now- I think we should go. Before our friends wonder where we are.” Shandra pulled herself up. “Qara, could you lend me your shoulder? I can't walk very well.”

“Don't you want to stay?” said Bryce, seemingly bewildered that her new friends wanted to flee the haunted crypt full of the bodies of dead shadow cultists. “I'm sure mummy would love to meet you properly. She can't speak, but she's a very good listener. She always loves to hear about what's happening in Neverwinter.”

“We'd like to, but we have an appointment at Castle Never this evening, and we need time to prepare,” I hastily interjected, before Qara could get any ideas. As Bryce began to pick up the cushions that had been thrown from the sarcophagus, I noticed the fur-lined blanket lying at my feet. Folding it into a neat equilateral triangle, I handed it to her.

“You should come and visit us at The Sunken Flagon sometime,” offered Shandra, no doubt motivated by the same feeling that had prodded me to fold up the blanket. “A friend of ours runs it and gives us good prices.”

“Daddy wouldn't like that at all. He's very against alcohol. He says it's immoral. He would be furious if he found out I was hanging round taverns. But thanks for trying to save me, anyway. You did pretty well, really, until I insisted on casting that stupid spell.”

As I walked back through the silent passages, trying not to step on any bodies or in the puddles of ash left by the destroyed shadows, I watched Qara and Shandra limping ahead of me. The farmer was a nice enough young woman; the sorceress, on the other hand …

I nodded politely to the late Lady Bryce when I saw her stooping by Arvel's corpse. It paid us no heed, being too preoccupied in trying on a silver bracelet and hissing in apparent pleasure as the metal glinted in the green light of its eyes.

“I could have burnt them all without her help...” Qara muttered. The most frightening thing was, she was quite possibly right.

Tarsakh, 4

My dear Harcourt,

In the matter of your hierarchical discomfort, I hesitate to offer you advice without meeting the particular discomfort concerned. They can take so many forms: there is the thorn requiring immediate extraction with forceps; the blister, whom one should cushion with an even larger sack of air to prevent it doing worse harm; the leech – left alone it will sate itself and fall off of its own accord; and of course, the bad tooth, whom one can remove only with the help of an experienced practitioner of such surgeries. You have surely already acquainted yourself with the benefits of applying a poultice of lard batter to the place under stress?

Were you expecting a letter about something else? You must wait till tomorrow!

Your faithful

Sand

Chapter Text

Tarsakh, 5

My very dear Harcourt,

The meeting went ahead as agreed. An unassuming brown-clothed servant brought me to her in her conservatory perched like a plump grey wren in a wickerwork chair, a miniature shrine to Tyr facing her, and an embroidery hoop in her lap. In her dimensions, she resembles her daughter – diminutive, for a human, with paw-like hands and fingers like fat little sausages. But her colouring and bone structure is totally dissimilar, to say nothing of her expression. As I recall, her late husband boasted a thick red mane, and his skin was wont to turn the colour of a plum when he was angry, much as Qara's so often did.

I began by offering up a few topics of small talk, which she accepted with cool grace but at the same time negligently, idly, like someone too tired even to feign interest. Yes, Waterdeep was a marvellous city. The conservatory had been expensive to create, but had been worth it because it reminded her of the sunlight of her native Sembia. She missed Neverwinter, and regretted its current state.

Then there were a few moments simply of quietness. I looked at her, and she scrutinised me. Again, without pretense or pretensions.

“Tell me about my daughter, Master Sand.” I was somewhat taken aback. No – the feeling was stronger than that. I believe I was in fact astounded. I had come there as the inquisitor-in-chief, and she was turning the tables on me before I could even begin my work.

“I was about to ask you the same thing, Madam.”

“How she died – I want to know how she died.” The voice betrayed no grief, no passion, no rage. The words came out in flat and uninflected succession. But my life hitherto instructed me to proceed with caution. The lady no doubt had connections across a large swathe of Faerun. People with large mansions in one of the most expensive districts of Waterdeep generally do. And I think that I can admit to you that some gentler instincts than I'm known for made me desirous to put a bridle on my tongue.

“I was not there - when she fell -” (when a massive rock fell on her, as I had heard from Neeshka.) “I was badly injured -” (by her daughter) “- at an early stage of the battle. As soon as the King of Shadows was destroyed, I teleported away. Not very heroic, I fear.” Though I didn't vanish as quickly as Zhjaeve. The gith had jumped to the Astral Plane before Neeshka could even finish swearing at her. “She was unconscious when I last saw her.” (Khelgar knocked her out to stop her from burning me alive. If he had not, I would be resting in pieces in the Merdelain.)

Madam Veres turned her head to look at the spring garden beyond the glass panes of her new conservatory. “That book - ” she gestured to her desk where a copy of A Short Account of the Second Shadow War lay open on the title page “- it said that Qara fought for the King of Shadows at the end.”

“Yes.”

“But before that, she fought for Lord Nasher and Neverwinter?”

“Yes. Occasionally. We – I mean, myself and Captain Farlong – tried to keep her away from the front lines as much as possible.” She had no self-control, and I was often more afraid of her than I was of our real enemies. “But she wanted to fight. She seemed to want it more than anything else.” I braced myself for recriminations, or suspicion, or questions about my motives. It seemed that I had walked into the conversation about her daughter that she should have had ten years ago.

But Veres merely nodded thoughtfully. Her mouth curled up a little. “Her father was the same. It is why he left me. And why she did too, I think. Though when she was a little girl, she loved me so much; she was so affectionate – she would trot up to me every morning and hug me as if I had been gone for a month-” She paused. “Tell me, Master Sand – why did she change sides? I could believe much of Qara, more perhaps than you would credit: but I cannot believe that she was a traitor or coward. She was too much my daughter for that. Why did she turn to the shadows?”

The great question. You see, my dear Harcourt, I do not know why she let Garius entice her to him at that last moment after so long spent trailing after Lila Farlong's collection of misfits. I do not think her betrayal was forced on her by any hostile enchantment, for I perceived nothing, and can recognise domination spells better than most. Qara's actual words I wrote down shortly after my escape, and I was able to repeat them to her mother:

“Even if Sand wasn't against you, I'd stand with you...I'm tired of him and all the rest telling me what to do and how, when I'm the one with the power, not them.”

Albeit I may have slightly distorted the phrasing, omitting minor details such as the entire first sentence. I did not want her to think that I had killed her daughter. That would give an entirely false impression of the status quo. So I believe.

Why would Qara be tempted by Garius's promises of power? She had the power already, and she knew it. Disgruntlement then? An objection to following orders? But as I recall, she invited herself to Crossroad Keep, and ignored orders when it pleased her to. She could have left whenever she wanted to. Belief in the King of Shadows? Unlikely. She wanted to survive as much or more than anyone in that chamber, and had seen what happened to the King's servants.

“Did she have any friends?” Her tone hinted that she had little hope of a reply in the affirmative.

“One.” It was a stretch to define Shandra Jerro as Qara's friend; still, Shandra sometimes spoke to Qara voluntarily, so I suppose she might be counted as such without offending the gods of pedantry. “But she died some time before we reached the Vale of Merdelain.”

“When did Qara's particular gift manifest itself?” I asked, trying to regain my forensic poise.

“Late – unusually late. She was thirteen, and we were staying in a cabin in the Neverwinter Woods to escape the plague. It was terribly cold at night. I was – unused to such a life. We had no store of fuel. And one evening she was sitting, staring at the empty hearth. And all of a sudden, it wasn't empty.”

Veres smiled. As she smiled, the muscles on the left side of her jaw flexed unevenly. While trying not to show that I'd noticed anything, I looked more closely, and saw a line of faintly mottled skin half-concealed by her (no doubt expensive) cosmetics. The husband or the daughter? That was my immediate thought.

“It was a good time for both of us,” Veres continued. “She was relieved to be away from the Academy, and felt special – felt blessed. She had her new talent, and even her father couldn't take it away from her. I was so glad to be with my darling girl, to see her happy. Put alongside that, what did the dangers and troubles of the war against Luskan matter?”

I was lost for words. I do not think that has ever happened before, nor is it likely to again.

“Here – Master Sand. Take this,” she said, leaning forwards to hand me a small velvet pouch. “I have very little left of my daughter. The convoy that was supposed to carry my possessions to Waterdeep was attacked by bandits, and they stole almost everything. Please send it back to me when you can. And if you find out more about her -” she hesitated “- if you find out anything else about why she died or how, don't tell me. I would rather remember her as she was when she was still my little girl.”

I assented, and forced one last question out. “Madam Veres – before I go, I must ask: why did you allow Qara to go and live with – people like us? Ex-farmers, rogues and Luskan deserters?”

Unconsciously, she put a hand up to her cheek. Then she smiled again. “Why did you let her stay?”

And that, give or take a few stories about the infant Qara's bouts of chickenpox, colic and Turmish Burping Sickness, concluded my interview. The pouch, by the way, contained an old jotter that my erstwhile teenage arch-nemesis had once used for handwriting practice, long before she discovered that combustion was more to her liking than calligraphy.

Before the visit, I had prepared a long list of questions designed to give me a picture of the girl's mental “totems”, from which I could infer the motives of her later actions. Whether she preferred elf-made, dwarf-made or human-made toys; if she had experienced a religious crisis; whether she was afraid of crossing bridges; what her favourite colour was, and other nonsense. Another of the superficial fads contracted from what passes for the intellectual set in Athkatla. Of course, I asked none of it. Nor do I suppose it matters that I failed to do so, for I feel sure that the answers I seek are to be found elsewhere, if at all.

The same discreet brown servant showed me to the door, and I departed for my lodgings, which are in a much less financially injurious area of the city. (The Lost Lion near the south gate, if you are following my itinerary.)

It took me the whole of last night to write this account up from memory. I hope your patience is not yet at an end with my little project. Have you followed the advice in my last letter? How are your affairs? I will be travelling north again in a few days, as far as the Mere of Dead Men that was. The return journey could certainly encompass a visit to Candlekeep. Even if you weren't there, I could hardly resist the lure of its labyrinth of books.

Your faithful

Sand

Chapter Text

Qara's Jotter

My name is Qara and I am seven years old and I can spel my name. I can count to 100000. This mornig I jumped out of bed. I said hello to my mummy. I said hello to the servants. We have five servants. That is more than my frend Itya but less than my father. My father has 9 servants and he is in charge of a lot of people. He is importunt.

This afternoon I learned about numbers and mummy told me a story about a land with out magic. It was very sad I dont want to live there. I did not like the story. Tomorow she says she will tell me a new story about Saverok the son of a god He is from Sembia and mummy is from Sembia. My father is not a god but mummy says he hasnt' noticed yet. Then I built a big casle bigger than casle Never. Itya built a casle too but it was smaller than mine and boring. My casle had trebuchets and a moat and four towers and two walls and a big gate with gards. I like my casle.

When I am grown up I will be in charge of the Academy and Itya will come and see me and mummy will come and see me and we will be hapy. I will eat peanut rice balls evrey day for brekfast and I will kill all the people in Luskan because they are bad and I will meet Drizt but I will not marry him. He will give me Gwenher Guenhivar Guenhuivere Gw He will give me his panther.

Summertide

Today is a holiday and it is good. I hate school. Its horrible. Its like Luskan. Today I will eat a lot and swim in the lake. Mummy says I can swim well like an otter. I want a pet otter they are funny and clever. I can swim and I can write well. But I hate elvish and I hate numbers. The teachers are stupid and I am very bord. The children dont' like me. I want to go to a school by a big lake and I will go swimming all day by myself and then I will make a camp-fire and the servants will cook nice food on it. I can cook but my father says that cooking is for stupid people who cant' do better. He says if I am bad at school I have to be an orc cook and make frog kebabs for stupid ugly orcs.

I like frogs. A big frog lives in the lake he is nice. His name is Nasher. Ketty the maid says it is because he makes a lot of noise but doesnt' do anything. I like frogs but I am scared of spiders snakes and mind-flayers. Father says they do not like ingorant children and I have nothing to worry about.

I saw an orc outside today. Ketty chaste it away with a broom. It was bigger than her but she was not afriad. She says think you are big and they will think so to. I am small but I am brave and I think big.

Now I am bord of writting and I will stop. 

 Here is a picture of me and Drizts' panther

/>

Chapter Text

Seen in Black Glass

S.St. 857 , Athk. Fae. Contents: Blank. Status: Sold Buyer: Sand of Neverwinter

“Drink to me only with thine eyes

And I will pledge with mine...”

A party has been going on too long when one of the guests begins reciting poetry. I was still on my first beaker of wine, but by the look of Veedle our master builder, he was on his second barrel already. He was on his feet and swaying gently like a poplar with its roots in sandy soil, clutching the back of his chair as he recited sentimental verse after sentimental verse to no one in particular. I hoped that it was not his customary state; if it was, the walls of the keep would collapse should a shadow priest happen to sneeze on them.

I did not feel at all festive. I looked at the green boughs decorating the courtyard and the braziers between each table with as much concentrated malice as I could summon, and willed them to burst into fire. Nothing happened, of course. I'm not the type of person to go about causing spontaneous combustions.

Not for the first time, I wondered at the care that had been taken in the seating arrangements. Kana had excelled herself. Neeshka and Khelgar placed next to each other, close to the nearest bench of soldiers, so that their good spirits would be clearly visible and audible to the troops, but not so close to the Captain that they could encourage her into uncaptainly behaviour. Not that she had ever needed much encouragement. Casavir as far away from Bishop as was possible, of course and Qara far away from me, squeezed between the twin pillars of calm – of slumber, even – Elanee and Zhjaeve.

Jerro's chair was still empty. Kana had taken a risk by setting his place near the head of the table, opposite the gith. Perhaps she had been gambling on a sense of public decorum prevailing between our self-appointed strategists-in-chief. Given that the entire show had been put on to help soften the effect of certain rumours concerning him she would be disappointed. Her competence in her role, coolly dealing with all manner of problems, even including the Gnome Question – it being that there was one and why wouldn't he go away? – assured me that she'd find the means to revenge herself on the warlock.

I took a larger swig of the wine, and sat back in my chair, feeling suddenly much better. I had a chair here, which I felt to be a positive development. At the Host Tower and in Neverwinter, I had always been a bench dweller. They even gave me a bench in the court case, and in that instance the reputation of a whole city, not to mention a life, hung upon the outcome. And now here I was with my own chair. I was needed. I was appreciated, and by people who didn't make a living by selling smoked rat on a stick to superannuated sailors and good time girls . For sure, I was disposable. The years of my Luskan sojourn had taught me that everyone was, when the last reckoning came in, however gifted and special they believed themselves to be. So I drank my wine, and listening to the conversations bubbling around me.

Listening is an underrated skill.

“...ten or twelve at a time without needing to rest; you just need to find the right alchemist...”

“...and what will that mean for my land?...”

“...he may still be sulking because I threw a vase at his head...”

“...mind your own damn business...”

“...I'm not listening to you any more, I'm going to need a sleeping draught as it is...”

“...the world is but a thoroughfare of woe...”

“...I would like to see it one day – with you, if I may say that...”

“...we are pilgrims passing to and fro...”

“...if he doesn't show up soon, I will go and find him...”

“...and he had the most tremendous – well – you know...”

“...this entertainment is pleasant, but I fear such things are not a wise use of our time...”

Amongst the throng of voices, it was one absence that stood out to me. I peered down the table, and located Qara, slumped and prodding at her food. She stopped long enough to shoot a dour look at Khelgar, who was starting on one of his yarns of indefinite length.

“Then these three came up to me by the wharves near the Flagon. 'We've heard you're working with the Watch now' they said. 'You heard wrong' I said, 'Me and my friends, we're doing the job of the Watch for them' and they said 'Well, we were going to take down some Watch hounds, but since you're doing their job, do you mind if we kill you instead?' 'My pleasure, lads,' I said, 'Let's just see you try' and they ran at me – all three of them, they just ran straight at me – but they were too slow, so I ducked under the spear of the first one and picked him up by the ankles and swung him round – and he hit both the others, knocked one clean over, the other realised he wasn't up to it, and when he saw me raise the gauntlets of Ironfist at him he shrieked like a young lass and jumped right off the nearest pier. Saw him swimming in the direction of the Moonshae Isles. Then one of them I threw in the drink myself, and as for the last one, I told him, 'Go and tell that she-wolf Moire to put on her best gown for swimming in, because she's next' and I tied his legs together and let him go hopping away...”

The dwarf sighed in satisfaction, and, three feet further along, Qara began to tug at her hair, and stab her roasted quail with a toasting fork. On her other side, Zhjaeve ate and drank nothing, and had not even removed her veil. I made a mental note to research githzerai culture when I was next in the Keep's library. Were her peculiarities not peculiar at all on the astral plane, or had her people decided to get rid of their version of Grobnar?

“Mask! but you talk rubbish,” Neeshka was objecting. “It wasn't like that at all, and I was there so I know. What happened was – eh – look who's arrived! Did he get lost in the basement or what?”

“I was crossing my fingers the spider'd eaten him,” Khelgar grunted.

There was a perceptible drop in the volume, as the latest and last to join our merry band walked down the path to the high table. And the Knight Captain, carrying a tray on which one full wine goblet remained, approached him from amongst the benches full of her cheerfully drunk soldiers. Some watched her pass curiously.

She seemed to be contemplating throwing the contents in his face. From the intakes of breath around me, I guessed that the others had hold of the same notion.

The two met at the head of the table.

Farlong clasped the goblet by its fluted stem, and raised it, very slightly, in a phantom toast, then tilted back the rim, and took a rather miserly sip.

Jerro's expression changed in some way, though I could not recognise what the change signified. But he played along. Impatiently, he took up the goblet himself, said, “Your health, Captain,” in a voice that must have carried to the furthest reaches of the bailey, and drank a less parsimonious measure than his new best friend for the night.

She smiled wryly, and put a hand on his arm to show him to his place.

The tension broke. The rank-and-file returned to their food and drinking contests, while we returned to our gossip, and to the solitary drinking contest that Bishop was set on conducting with himself.

Well, that had ticked Kana's boxes. Harmony. Check. Trust. Check. Empty symbolism. Check. And possibly started another entirely different rumour into the bargain. But the high table had set an inspiring example to the low, and our happy company was finally complete.

Or not quite complete. I spotted Qara as she moved off towards the Builders' Plaza. She was striding along with her head held high. No one tried to call her back. I looked up and down the table at the talking, chatting, arguing, laughing faces. Apart from me, no one had noticed her untimely departure. Not even Bishop, who noticed everything.

What was the mad girl up to? Abruptly, I made my decision.

“Leaving already, Sand?” Katriona, another of our glum souvenirs from Old Owl Well, had torn her eyes away from Casavir for a whole five heartbeats.

“Fresh air, sergeant, fresh air.”

“But we're outsi-”

As I hurried after Qara, I considered some still more fabulous excuses. 'I've just realised that my cactus needs watering as a matter of some urgency' – 'I thought I heard the King of Shadows knocking at the postern gate' – or best off all: 'I saw an attractive teenager heading towards an isolated spot out of sight of her companions, and instantly resolved to sneak off after her.'

I stopped at the mouth of the ally into which Qara had disappeared. It lay squeezed between the back wall of the architect's cottage and the southern curtain wall. At the far end was the so-called plaza; in reality an enclosed space that had been accidentally created as a result of the absent planning regulation in the early days of the Keep. These days it served as a storage yard, full of hoists, pulleys, shovels, and ropes.

A marauding tribe of pigeons had discovered the alley and recognised in it the perfect latrine. For the sake of my best shoes, I was obliged to hop on tip toe to arrive safely on the little patches of unguano'd ground. Mystra, it stank. Ahead of me, I could hear heavy human foot-steps. A few more careful hops, and I could see her.

She was in the plaza, pacing furiously up and down the trapezium of pressed black earth. I watched her from the gloom of the stinking alley. Coming upon a barrel, she aimed a kick at it. Not being the most well-coordinated of young humans, she missed.

I thought about retreating.

After several more laps of the square, she checked herself. Her breath was coming in rapid, shallow gasps, asthmatically. She put an arm again the curtain wall, and head down, let her hair fall forwards over her face. She took a large, slow breath.

I thought again about retreating. But here was a chance not to be wasted. She seemed more vulnerable than I'd ever seen her. It was an opening.

“They'll be missing you at the feast,” I said.

Her head snapped up. Between the locks of red hair, I could see her eyes gleaming like black glass.

“Their favourite pyromaniac not there. The roast goose just won't be the same without that taste of pulverised charcoal...” I continued.

She drew herself up. “Like they're missing you and your stupid bitter comments. They don't like you, Sand. They just use you to hunt through dusty old books that they're too busy to bother with themselves.”

“And it's better to be used as the resident fire-lighter? Come now.”

“Perhaps the resident fire-lighter could torch those precious parchments of yours then...or your spell-book.” She took a step towards me. I willed myself not to move, not to twitch a muscle.

“Is that how you display your distaste for learning? By destroying it?”

“I don't need to destroy it. Why would I? I understand more about power than you ever will, sad little elf. I live it. I breathe it. It's in me. And one day, you'll admit that to me. I'll force you to admit it. You all will.”

A crackling light was dancing on the bare skin of her face, running along her pudgy little hands, hissing on her lips. It jumped from her skin to the ropes on the earthen floor, and raced along them like maritime fire. Soon every pail, barrel and and basket in the plaza was glowing with energy. Opposite me, the giant windlass began to turn in an invisible wind, black flames lighting its spokes.

“Your power is limited by your ignorance. By your total ignorance.”

“I have no limits.” She was shaking with anger. Throughout the plaza, the air thickened, transforming itself into an orange haze lit with black sparks. Soon I could only see her silhouette. Heat pricked my face. All I could smell was the astringent odour of struck flint. “I'll prove it. Now.”

The barrel next to me burst into flames. Within three heartbeats, nothing remained. Not even ashes.

I turned and fled.

“Go on, Sand. Run! Get back to your hole, viper!”

Her laughter followed me down the alley.

Chapter Text

Tarsakh, 10

Honoured Sand of Neverwinter,

Your letter came as a surprise, for I never thought to hear about my poor girl again. I'm sorry this reply has taken its time in reaching you. I meant to answer write away, but between one thing and another (my sons and the housework and the troubles in Neverwinter Wood) I've only just managed to have a sit down in a few quiet moments with a pen and paper.

I spent over ten years working for Qara's family. I went into service when I was fifteen, starting out just as Qaron Bovardi was starting up his own household him being just back from Sembia with his foreign bride and being set on making a fine impression among the Neverwinter top brass.

I was there, tidying and serving and cleaning up after my master's friends. I saw the balls, and the grand dinners, saw Lord Nasher arrive on horseback to pay a visit, quite alone without his guards, which was a great source of pride to the Lady Lucia, for she said that in her country it was a great mark of favour and trust if a lord came without his retinue. Madam taught me and all the servants to read and write nicely, in the proper manner, after my master said he couldn't bear being surrounded by ignorant people. She was (or is for they say she's alive) a good lady and a kind mistress.

I was there for the birth of their daughter, and was the first person after the midwife to hold her in their arms. With her mother often falling ill during that time, I took on the job of nursemaid and looked after her, minded her first tears and sat up with her at night, when she was fretting. Not for any pay rise, of course, and on top of my usual work. I was a young thing myself then, and never had the brass nerve to ask Master Qaron for pay to match my new duties.

I was there when the master left the house for the last time, though I didn't know it when I saw him wrap his cloak around his shoulders and close the door. We didn't any of us know until his serving man arrived a week later with his master's instructions concerning the furniture. He'd left to live with his new woman, you see, as men do, saving your grace. Though I hear that in these matters elven men are better creatures than their human brothers.

My mistress cried for days, and my Qara cried too when she saw her mother so upset and felt the despondency our whole household was fallen into. But she soon revived, for she was a brave little mite, full of energy and tricks. When she was still learning to walk, she would clamber out of her cot like a tiny adventurer and crawl along the corridors, looking for her friends. She once even found me in the kitchens. I can still clearly see her, sitting on the stone floor, reaching her little arms up to me with a big smile full of gums and gaps.

Her father was still around in those days. He used to say he'd cast a caging spell on the cot if she went on any more night-time rambles. He never did though. I think he was as glad to see her as the rest of us were, even if he never admitted it.

It feels strange to write of these matters after so long. Because of Qara and what happened to her father and half-brothers, people call the family cursed. For the sake of my own family's reputation, I've thought it wise to say nothing of my history with the Bovardis of Neverwinter. That is simply how it's had to be.

I left my mistress when I married my husband a few years before the plague, and we moved to Conyberry, though Qara threw a fit when she found out, screaming and punching and trying to hold me back by my sleeves. After we left, I didn't see her again for a long time, and then just the once.

I was helping my husband load our possessions onto a cart. The evacuation order had gone out, reaching even us in our little village, and we knew we had to travel north in case the battles left the swamps. We weren't happy to leave, but “better safe than sorry” we said to ourselves, and got on with it.

A young woman with very red hair and very white skin appeared at the edge of the garden, and watched me quite silently. It was only when I was struggling with a case of pots and pans, and I saw white hands take hold of the other side of the box, and felt the burden lightened, that I looked up and recognised my old nursling, quite grown up and beautiful.

“I can't stay, Ketty,” she said, after I'd called her name, “I live at Crossroad Keep now, and it's on the front line. It's good for me there. I get stronger every day, and they need me, you know.”

Then she embraced me, in the big, bearish way she'd always had when she came to see me in the mornings, and she told me to stop being a silly fool and stop crying. (I'm ashamed to say I was crying, Master Sand. It was a difficult time, and everything seemed to be going wrong.) She pressed a gift into my hand. It was the crystal bust of a snarling dragon.

“I made it for you. If you meet trouble on the road, tell them your friend is a powerful sorcerer. And tell them she'll turn them into dust if they hurt you. But if they don't believe you, use this. Just touch it once, and say 'reckoning' – that's the command word – and they won't have any room left for doubt. Goodbye, Ketty,” she said, and hugged me again, and left, turning invisible as she closed the garden gate.

If not for the dragon, I would have thought it all a dream, or a premonition of evil. My husband and sons were in the house and saw nothing.

After the war, I kept the dragon for many years on the mantelpiece, till news of the Spellplague spread, and my husband didn't want anything magical in the house. It's at the bottom of the old village well now, where I hope it will do no harm to anyone.

When I knew her best, my Qara never hurt anyone or anything. She loved painting, animals, swimming and paddling around the Black Lake with her pet ferret on her shoulder and a string of imaginary friends tagging along with her. I don't believe the horrid stories people tell about the things she's supposed to have done, and I don't wish to try. She was, and will always be, my darling first child and only daughter.

Thank you for writing to me. I don't know if this letter helped you, or if it's what you had in mind when you asked what I could tell you about my time in service, but it has helped me in reckoning up the past. Although my situation in life is so different from what it was then, a a penniless orphan labouring for a fistful of nothing in one of the great houses of Neverwinter,and now the mother of three fine sons, and proprietor of the village store, still I think the chance to remember what I lost on the road to get here is rare and valuable. I hope you understand my meaning, even if I'm not the best at writing letters.

With compliments,

Rhian Kettering

“Ketty”

Chapter Text

Seen in Carnelian

S.St. 858 , Athk. Fae. Contents: Blank. Status: Sold Buyer: Sand of Neverwinter

Twenty mages. Blue robes. Academy students. Aged from young to very young to embryonic. They had set expressions. Dangerous. Not here to talk.

I threw myself behind Casavir. The paladin raised his shield, which suddenly seemed ridiculously small. Already I could hear a sequence of pops like the sound of minnows mouthing at the surface of a pool. Their defences were going up.

I started on my own enchantment. Stoneskin. No point in thinking strategy. Just survival. I hadn't survived the Host Tower to be annihilated by a gang of underachieving spoiled brats.

“You're dead, Qara!” one of the brats shouted. I enjoyed a surge of hope, as grey scales climbed up my skin from the tips of my fingers to my torso and head. So they were here for the girl. Good. Let them have her.

Then the first fireball struck. It broke harmlessly against me. The glare receded, turned grey, rose up again in an orange and black flare. And again. In front of me, Casavir stumbled.

How far was I from the door to the Sunken Flagon? Ten paces? Too far. Too far for now. I needed more protection. Settled on a defence against fire spell. These children would be predictable. They all would think the same way. Go for the magic that's big and dramatic and makes a terrifying whooshing noise. There are more subtle, more effective ways to win a mage fight, but they wouldn't be able to wrap their aristocratic little brains around that idea.

One defence completed, then the next. No time to think about turning the tables.

Casavir was charging, curse him. Hammer readied to swing, shoulders set. He was supposed to stand still and catch the fireballs meant for me.

I delved into a pocket – upper right hand, force open the mouth of the leather purse within, then quickly out again – and threw a sprinkling of ground feverfew on the ground. Blue light gathered round me. One spell closer to life.

I shot a look to my left. Qara wasn't dead yet, to my surprise. Smouldering somewhat, but on her feet, casting. Luckily for her she had Shandra in her bright new chain mail hauberk to take the brunt of the attack. The thing must have been created more from enchantment than metal, since its wearer was unharmed, already rushing upon the daughter of Johcris, Glina.

A fire arrow bounced off my shields. I longed to dash back to the Sunken Flagon. It would be easy to explain it to them later – not as cowardice, as strategy. Thick walls. Reinforcements. Defensible position. That kind of line. But I couldn't risk turning my back on the enemy.

I ducked as a green cloud of something flew over my head. Three beats later, and I heard it impact against the wall of the Flagon. No, it was too far away for shelter.

Another fireball broke near me. This time, I felt the heat.

I had two wands on me. The first was strapped to my side. In the horror and the heat – the terrible heat – I couldn't recall its effect. I simply pointed it at the tallest of the students, and hoped that I'd somehow picked up a device that would cause instant death or dismemberment or both. I was disappointed, but not badly. An enormous bear from the white peaks of the Spine of the World sprang into existence in the centre of the cobbled old street, between the site of the twice-monthly fruit market and my own establishment. It looked puzzled. Then angry. Then it lunged at the tall young man, surely one of the ring-leaders, its jaws wide and dripping saliva.

No time to savour the look of panic on his face. I went straight for the next baton. Domination. I had been saving this for a special occasion, and this one would do perfectly. No use targeting a leader again. Their wards and training would be too likely to shrug off an attempt to magically influence them.

I spotted an outlier, a fat little student of indeterminate race and sex. Seeing it already wavering, I aimed the wand and cast. From the instant change in the student's posture, I could appreciate my success. The back straightened, the head snapped in my direction.

“Frawardijaną,” I commanded, and pointed at Glina. My new pawn drew a dagger from its belt, and threw itself with a violent single-minded energy onto the girl's back, bringing its arm around to strike. So the compulsory physical education classes insisted on by the principal were useful after all, I thought, remembering my brief sojourn at the Academy, shaping the next generation of Neverwinter's youth. There was an almost epicurean pleasure to be got now from watching it tear itself apart. Ah, the humble joys of former teachers.

For the first time since the long semi-circle of mages had stepped out of the docks' half-light, I thought I might live to see another morning.

A cold drop landed on my nose. I started. Began to cycle through all the offensive spells I knew based on the force of cold. Ice storm? No. Freezing grip? No. Sleet storm? No.

I looked up, saw the pregnant clouds stretched overhead, lying low over the roofs of the town in mild grey billows. A snowflake landed on my forehead. So. It was snowing in Neverwinter.

Another flake landed on my wrist. On my flesh-pink wrist. Curse it. Curse it. Curse it.

Too close for comfort, a fork of summoned lightning cracked the surface of the street. Cobbles and pieces of cobble went flying, too fast to dodge. One chip ripped through my sleeve. Another scraped the side of my jaw. I raised my fingers to the affected spot, and brought them down wet. Whether with snow or blood, I didn't look to discover the cause.

Casavir fell to his knees. His helmet was dented, his shield brown and smoking. The smell of smoke was everywhere. Shandra was still fighting, taking on four mages at once, swinging her sickle in long arcs. Without support from Casavir, she wouldn't last long. There were just too many enemies. Easily quashed individually, as a pack they were nigh on undefeatable as long as their morale held.

I needed another protection spell. Or just protection. Shelter. I turned to look back at the Sunken Flagon. Saw the door opening, and allies stream out. Khelgar. Both Farlongs. Bishop. Neeshka. Elanee.

“Stay back!” Qara had seen them too. “I'll finish this. Shandra, get the paladin and get out of my way.”

Shandra drew Casavir's arm around her shoulder, and together they staggered as far as the eaves of the Flagon. I looked at Qara, assessed my position, and took several steps back.

“Qara, don't -” I heard the beginning of a command from the younger Farlong. The end was lost in the roar of fire. It was as if every stone in the road was a piece of coal. The street was bleeding flames.

I jumped even further back. Hoped my fire defences were sufficient. Hoped my shop's defences were sufficient.

The blaze covered the whole junction, from my tavern, to my shop, to the edge of the wharves, to the old marble bases of Nasher's plaster statues, made on the cheap to replace the old bronzes lost in the war with Luskan. In the middle of the flames, I could see figures leaping and dancing.

An blast of air smelling of salt-peter – sharp, metallic, astringent – swept in from the estuary. No chance to resist, to grab hold of anything. There was no anything to be grabbed. The wind knocked me to the floor as lightly as I I had been woven from spider's silk. Lying on my back, stunned, I felt only relief that the spell had absolved me from the responsibility of taking further part in the battle.

Or massacre.

When I craned my head up to see what was happening, there were no more dancing figures in the flames, now blown to a still greater ferocity and power by the arcane winds. They crackled higher than the tallest chimneys, and spat indifferently as the snowflakes landed on them in soft white sparks.

Thunder rolled once overhead. Twice. Three times. I muttered my last protection spell.

And then it was all over. The wind ceased to blow, the fires vanished, and in front of me there was only a mess of broken cobble stones, smoking earth, and bits and pieces of blackness sizzling under the ever thicker shower of flakes, coming down in flickering waves, like the rain of ash in the morning before a volcano ruptures its vents and breaks through the mountainside.

I stood up cautiously. Scanned the area.

Four from the score of students we had faced managed to scramble to their feet. Three ran away immediately, fleeing towards the Black Lake District when they realized what had become of their friends. But the last one actually rolled back his sleeves and began to weave a spell. The idiocy was unbelievable. The boy was surely an adventurer in the making.

Lila Farlong picked up what looked to be a large smouldering rock and lobbed it at him. It missed, landing near his boots with a bony crack, and smashing into dozens of charred fragments. That was enough; either his courage deserted him, or sanity returned, or he discovered an urgent need to find a latrine. Whatever the motive, he cried out once in horror and followed his colleagues' example of rapid retreat.

Farlong dropped to her knees and retched. I could understand the impulse. The smell was appalling. I undid my scarf, put a few heads of dried lavender in it, flicking away the snowflakes that had adhered to the blue felt, and tied it over my mouth and nose. A definite improvement. The aftermath of a magical battle is usually a discomforting experience for the senses.

Casavir and Elanee started walking together through the wreckage, perhaps looking for injured. They would be out of luck. Most of their intended patients were being trodden into the ground under their feet.

I had nothing more to do there, and made my way to my shop to check for damage. My jaw was stinging now. I wanted to get to a mirror and ascertain that my face was more or less intact.

“Please – please don't kill me.” I followed the voice downwards. It was the tall young man whom I'd set my summoned bear on. Not so tall now. His legs stuck out from his body at a strange angle, black and useless. He was supporting himself against the west wall of my shop with his hands. His face was white and twisted.

“Dear boy,” I said through the scarf, counting on my excellent diction to be understood, “I never attacked you.”

“M-master Sand?”

I looked more closely at him. Yes, now I saw it. A boy with a squeaky voice that had seemed to spend half the lesson running his fingers through his long hair. “Praven, isn't it?”

“Help – h-h-help.” One of my last students at the Academy. Reasonably bright. Pity. Still, perhaps in his legless future he might learn to apply himself. He wouldn't be running after any girls. By the look of him, he would be highly fortunate if he managed to beget heirs in the time-honoured fashion.

I pulled down my mask a little, and regretted it. It is a terrible thing to consider what an ex-pupil might taste like with béchamel sauce on a bed of watercress and spring onion.

He whimpered.

“I'll see if I can find you a healing potion, and an anaesthetic. Wait here.” As if the foolish boy could go skipping away on his burnt matchstick shanks.

I hurried to the shop door, and let myself in. Everything was in its usual order, thankfully. No fires, no jars shattered on the floor. Good. I fished my medical case out from beneath the counter, ran back to the door, remembered that I had a new delivery of gauze bandages, ran to the cupboard for uncatalogued stock, snatched the bandages and, on second thought, added a large jar of myrtle salve, and trotted back to the door, careful not to drop any of my load.

As I locked the door behind me, a patrol of watchmen jogged past, Cormick in the lead. I ignored them. The Farlongs or Casavir would talk them round to their perspective, and the evidence supported them. Gangs of apprentice mages didn't go ambling through the docks district to take advantage of the fresh air. No doubt some of them already had records.

Returning to the young man's side, I found him slumped in the same position I'd left him in. He was very still. Probably fainted from the pain and shock.

“Praven?” I bent down and brushed a few strands of hair from his brow. “Praven?”

I put my fingers on his carotid artery. No pulse. There was blood on his robe in the area of the stomach that I hadn't noticed before.

The medical case was heavy. My arms suddenly twinged painfully. Leaving it on the ground, I straightened, rubbed a muscle that was twitching near my collar bone. “Well, that's that, then,” I murmured to myself.

I wandered back to the group of my current associates: Farlong junior, as expected, talking rapidly with much excited gesticulation to Cormick; her friends behind her, supporting her testimony with their own.

Qara was standing apart. She didn't seem to care that she might be in danger of being carried off to prison for mass murder. As I came closer, I saw that she was talking to the corpse of a student, which was badly burned all along the side that had been closest to the fire.

“You shouldn't have attacked me, Glina. Why did you make me do it?” The sorceress's head was down. There was more softness in her voice than I had thought it capable of. She sounded almost sad. “You know now,” she continued. “You can't beat me. I'm better than you.”

The corpse shuddered. The mouth opened and closed without any noise escaping from the burnt lips. Glina was clinging on to life, more resolutely than Praven had done. Qara disregarded the movement. Instead she turned and stared at me dreamily.

“You needed to hear that too,” she said. “Look. Here's your Academy. Here's your book learning.” And the daughter of the Academy's principal gestured at the bleeding body of the daughter of the Academy's head of discipline. The next weekly staff meeting was going to be interesting. What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall in that particular chamber.

I was about to point out that her symbolism was flawed, since Glina, like Qara, had been expelled some time ago, and was hardly a paragon of scholarly diligence, when Master Johcris himself appeared on the scene. A teleportation spell. I would never have thought he had it in him. He was an unremarkable mage and an indifferent teacher.

His flat face for once shifted out of the doughy neutral registers in which it was accustomed to dwell. “Glina? Oh gods. Glina!”

However numerous his faults as a magic user, he hadn't deserved this. Or he probably hadn't. It never surprised me to find out that a pillar of society had a past less resistant to scrutiny than their worthy and respectable present.

His daughter raised her undamaged hand to him in mute appeal.

“She was asking for it,” said Qara, traces of the old heat returning to her voice.

“Get away from her,” snapped Johcris. “Get away from her now. You will pay for what you've done to her.”

“Oh yes?” Qara laughed. She bared her palm in preparation for her next spell. Then she swayed, staggered, fell backwards.

In the short period of her descent, I considered trying to catch her. But for all that she lacked in height, she was a solidly built young human. Her weight could squash me. Besides, I might need my arms free to stop Johcris from following through on his threat. If I wanted to stop him.

She landed on her side, not moving. Apparently she had discovered her limits, and dreadful ones they were.

Johcris's fingers whitened around the mage staff he habitually carried.

“She'll pay,” he said, addressing himself to the falling snow.

“Yes, she will. Not today, however.” Mentioning that the destruction would not have happened if his daughter had more than the smallest pinch of common sense didn't feel like the most tactful thing to say at that moment. And could well have resulted in fried moon-elf giblets being the hors d’oeuvre at the Academy's dinner table that night. “Now is not the appropriate time.”

Jocris made no reply. His mind seemed to have shut down. He looked first at his daughter, then at Qara.

“The priests from the Temple of Tyr are here at last!” I waved them over, thankful that the tête-à-tête with the dead-eyed Jocris could end. The three armoured disciples shook their heads over Glina, and set about their work.

Already, the snow was sticking to the rubble, and to the blackened shapes spread-eagled in the midst of the rubble. I left Qara lying where she'd fallen as snow-flakes collected on her robes and hair. They didn't stay on her face. Even unconscious, they seemed to sense a force antithetical to their own nature reposing there.

Beyond the zone of conflict, the snow had formed a thick blanket. Typical. You move to a city called Neverwinter in the hope of a decent climate, and within the first quarter century there's a blizzard. My feet were creating imprints nearly two inches deep. Wild elves were said to be able to run across the surface of a snow drift, and leave no trace of their passing. That must be because they were illiterate simpletons who had never read about gravity.

Icy water trickled over the rim of my boots, getting as far as the soles. Ugh.

I took care not to look at the corpse of Praven as I walked to my shop door. The priests would arrange everything. Once inside, I shut the door firmly, locked it, and drew the bolts home.

Chapter Text

Tarsakh, 11

Dearest Harcourt,

I write as one of the least martial alchemists on the surface of Faerun, however, let me assure you: do not fear skeletons. The common-or-garden variety are hardly more dangerous than a swarm of rats, and are easier to outrun. If your skeletons were ten foot tall, scythe wielding, fully sentient examples of the species, I would be hastening to your side now instead of writing you a long letter; but I assume you would not have neglected to mention it were this the case. Skeletons favour projectile weapons, since in close combat they fall apart very easily, and occasionally really do hoist themselves on their own petard - a sight to be seen. If you find yourself in an area with a skeletal infestation, use a magical or physical shield. The arrow heads they typically use are rusted, and rarely kill on impact, but have frequently resulted in seriously unpleasant cases of lockjaw.

Despite all that, please don't get any ideas about going down into the tunnels beneath Candlekeep to clean out the skeletons yourself. Although a minor threat in isolation, skeletons almost always prove to be the symptom of a larger problem. No doubt a necromancer, or a lich, or a shadow priest or some other tedious parasite has set up shop in your cellars. You have at least one archmage on a permanent contract at the library. If she starts talking about 'letting the young people have a go' or 'passing on the reins to the next generation' with that benign air of total ineffectuality that many successful adventurers cultivate in their retirement, take matters into your own hands by posting a notice outside the walls advertising a small monetary reward for the first mercenary group to successfully eliminate the threat. Don't trouble the guards with the matter. They'd be useless. They always are. And remember to put in the word 'successfully', otherwise you may have urchins turning up at your door claiming the gold owed to their deceased alleged 'father'.

I feel that I am coming to the end of my investigation. In truth, it was never a real investigation. There was no crime; no law courts; no due procedure or loop-holes to exploit. The head prosecutor has been dead for ten years, and her soul must have been consumed by the fires of Kossuth long ago.

Your full description of Candlekeep and the surrounding meadow-lands and coast in your last letter pleased me immensely. I look forward to seeing them all for myself in a few days' time with you as my guide. I have always been a city elf; nothing could have been more tiresome to me than a six hundred line elegy on the marvellous qualities of the bellis perennis when viewed through a spyglass in the light of the setting sun; I have never desired to ride into battle on the back of a white stag; nights forcibly spent star-gazing have served chiefly to make me sick and bad-tempered in the morning. Now, I fear the long-scorned rustic instincts of my race are beginning to surface. My experiences of yesterday only confirmed that.

The landscape of the Merdelain was not what I expected. Did you ever go there before the defeat of the King of Shadows? If you did, you would recall it as an uninviting place. Warm, fetid air that barely disturbed the tendrils of sick willow trees with sudden gusts of cold wind that chilled the condensation on your skin. No bird song. No firm ground, even on the paths. No clear day or night – merely a yellow-brown mist. Strange lights like lanterns that shook and swung across the most treacherous stretches of black mud. And, when I was there, a large quantity of unburied corpses, as well as shadows and other things that wanted to kill me. All this is to say nothing of the mentality of the people mad enough to live there. Or die there, as they mostly did.

As I rode up to the gates – the very new, very solid gates – of West Harbour yesterday morning, about me I saw rushes, blue skies and even a wind-pump draining a patch of marsh to make more land available to farmers. I did not have to stop and dig my horse out of a muddy pit. I was not attacked by lizard-men with spears and nets. It felt as if civilization was finally coming to the Mere of Dead Men.

The Past met me at the gates, as much like a scarecrow with an unusually lavish taste in clothes as ever. She did not seem diminished by the absence of the shard in her chest. That surprises me whenever I see her – I anticipate some kind of physical manifestation of the loss, and yet there's nothing.

“Well met, Glorious Leader,” I said.

“And you too, Swamp Elf,” she said, in reference to an abominable story told at my expense by the last headman of the village. He died in the war.

She began chatting at once as she led my horse to the stables, barely stopping for breath, and managed to remember a multitude of details about my life that I could scarcely recall telling her. She asked after you, and said that Aldanon was lost without you. I mean to cast no aspersions on your secretarial abilities, my dear Harcourt, but I think he was often lost with you. Lost is simply what he is. She asked about Athkatla, about the journey, about my views of the political situation in Neverwinter, about the Council of Six, about the new shop, and took me on a speedy tour of the rebuilt, extended town.

After a while, I began to wonder if she'd ever let me ask about Qara. She seemed so single-mindedly interested in the present and future. We walked around the town walls and along the steep banks of the Lost River – since the collapse of the last Illefarn palace, no longer lost and flowing in a broad deep welt along the channel of the old brook. The village – or town rather – was a bustling place, though I recognised none of the faces I saw there. The only things unchanged from before were the scar in the grass where the silver sword was broken, and a splintered birch tree, which lost all its leaves and half its branches ten years ago, when I summoned lightning down upon a shadow reaver.

At length, probably noticing that I was struggling to keep up and could not possibly listen to any more about town planning and the challenges of swamp architecture (the challenge is that the architecture sinks), she invited me to her home. As I crossed the threshold, my skin tingled. I held my nose and repressed a sneeze. The house was warded to the point that it would separate itself from the Prime if any more magical protection were added to it. One can only hope that no poor neighbour should ever nip in to borrow some milk and sugar. They would be scraping fat from the ceiling for days.

“This belonged to the Starling family. Bevil – Sergeant Bevil, you know? - lent it to me until we manage to get a house built that isn't immediately taken over by refugees. He doesn't want to come back. Understandably.”

She led me to an arm-chair near a pile of books, and vanished into the next room. I sat down, felt something rather hard and angular move under me, and found that I'd rested my posterior on a toy wooden bear painted in iridescent rainbow colours. I put it on top of the books.

When she returned with a bottle of wine and two glasses, her mood had visibly and audibly softened. I recognised that she would be more open now to the kind of conversation I wanted to have. “It's difficult to be in this house. But there are other priorities. I would have taken you to see the school, but West Harbour doesn't have one yet. You see what I mean? There are over fifty children living here already, and they have their lessons out of doors.”

I sniffed the wine. It smelled of grapes and alcohol. For the sake of my reputation as an alchemist, I try to give the impression that I can tell the difference between vintages. In fact, I could drink red vinegar and be none the wiser.“Dear girl, you spoil me. What is it? Not a Tethyr 80?”

“Not far off. It's a Cormyr 50.” She knew as much about time and geography as I did about wine. “I never thought I'd see you in West Harbour. It's been how long since we last saw each other? Three years?”

“Longer.”

“Ah, unbelievable.”

“I confess myself surprised that you settled here. You were always very vocal about hating the mere – and the people - if I recall correctly.”

“You do recall correctly. I hated them But I loved them too. Even if I realized it rather too late.” She sat herself cross-legged on a bench by the wall. We drank our wine in silence for a few moments. Gradually, her shoulders relaxed, until, with her glass half empty, she exhaled, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were clear, and focussed intently on me.

“Well, Sand, I'm very happy to see you. But I think you wouldn't come up here after declining my invitations for three years if there wasn't a particular reason. Nevalle hasn't got a task for me, has he? Planning his political comeback?”

“Nevalle's a tavern mercenary in the Dales, or he was when I last heard of him.”

She whistled in surprise. “I almost feel sorry for him. But it's hard to feel sorry for Nevalle, isn't it? I've met warmer lizard-men.” It was just such off-hand yet, in the opinion of a humble freelance alchemist, entirely just and accurate comments that made me like her when we first met.

“It's Qara that I came to ask about.”

“Qara? Really?” I should have considered in advance how best to frame the topic. “I thought you loathed her.”

“I did. But -”

And so I gave her the short version of my inquiries so far. She held her peace and listened as I spoke, not saying a word until I'd finished.

“I'm glad you went to see Qara's mother. I meant to do it myself when I got back from Mulsantir, and then kept on finding reasons not to go. Visiting Casavir's sister was awful enough, but at least I could tell her that he'd won the war for us at the cost of his life. What did you make of her?”

“Harmless. Well-intentioned. Probably a beauty in her youth, albeit one with the characteristics of a doormat.”

“Would you say she loved her daughter?”

“Yes. Unconditionally.” I answered at once. “Perhaps the only person that did. She can't have been an easy person to love.”

“I hardly knew her.” Lila laughed at my incredulity, and clarified with less respect for the dead and more honesty, “I couldn't stand her, and never had the patience to really talk to her. And I talked to everyone. Whether they wanted to talk or not. So yes, she wasn't very loveable. But she was eighteen. She might have improved.”

“Do you know why she stayed with you – with us?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

I waited. And waited some more.

“I think she was a very lonely young girl when we met her. And she liked being part of something. Shandra looked after her for a while, took her out on missions that let her fireball everything that moved and get praise and rewards for it.” She took another sip of wine, and uncrossed and recrossed her legs. I thought she had finished, but as I was opening my mouth, she continued. “But she never seemed to know how to make friends – she thought if she was the most aggressive, the most powerful, the most victorious, then we would love her. And the more she did that, the more we – I pulled away. And the more she pushed. Does that sound right to you?”

“It sounds plausible.”

“Plausible meaning plausibly true or is it plausible deniability you're thinking of?” she asked, smiling.

“My impressions were,” I said, choosing my words carefully so as not to alienate the old friend who was busy refilling my glass with a very expensive wine that no one at the Neverwinter Court or the Host Tower would ever have allowed within a mile of me, “that she mostly slipped out of view. You were fighting a war. We were all preoccupied with our own affairs. Grobnar obsessing over the blade golem, Neeshka and Khelgar putting the finishing touches on their circus act, Bishop -” planning how to betray us “-brooding about fictional slights.”

Lila had also invested much time in her own ill-tempered, murderous, human project during the final year of the war. That had paid off for them both in the end, though I wondered if it was at Qara's expense. I didn't say that aloud, of course.

“Is that your way of saying that I should have taken more care of her?” Lila asked without heat.

“We, dear girl.”

“But she chose to be there. And for a long time, she did good work when I let her. How could I know she would switch sides at a big evil skeleton's say-so? She would have lived if she'd fought for us.”

I tilted my head, and raised an eyebrow, with my face, I hoped, radiating angelic scepticism.

“Oy! Stop it. I invented that look to use on Ammon during our arguments at the Keep. It never worked on him then, and it won't work on me now.”

“I'm not trying to pressure you into admitting responsibility for someone else's actions, Lila.” Isn't it? I thought. Isn't that just what I'm doing?

“I do admit responsibility. I always have. For so many things. And I need something to eat,” she said abruptly, and left. She game back with a bowl of poppy seed rice balls, and offered them to me with exaggerated politeness.

“I only like the bergamot ones.”

“You can't get them now. They're too tied up with the Shadow Enclave. There've been boycotts up and down the Sword Coast.”

“Bergamot is a tool of Netherese oppression?”

“Apparently.” Farlong laid the bowl aside without touching the contents “My son likes the poppy ones more anyway.” It was quite uncomfortable to envision her as a mother, when I'd seen her doing a drunken hornpipe on a table in her uncle's tavern. You humans move through the stages of life so quickly.

“How old is he now?”

“Three. And a quarter.” She shifted uneasily. I watched her, curious to see what was brewing. Then the words burst out: “I think she saved my life.”

This was new. “You only think? Wouldn't you know?”

“I'm not the right person to ask.” Once again, I had to struggle to keep up. This time, not with her pace, or her age, but with the path her thoughts were taking.

“Who then, if not you? Elminster perhaps? The Seven Singing Goblins of Calimport?”

“Ammon.” Not my favourite person. Nor yours, Harcourt, and for good reason. “I was barely conscious by the end of the fight – the fight with the King of Shadows. And half-blind. But I can remember something happening as we tried to escape, and Ammon was there and saw it all.”

“Do you think he'd tell me?”

“Why don't you ask him? He's downriver supervising the work at the harbour – it's being dredged so that we can accommodate vessels larger than a gnomish coracle and once it's finished we can -” She must have seen my eyes glazing over. “Anyway, he'll be back this evening. Or we could walk there to meet him. I was going to go anyway.” I winced. “Or I could ask him on your behalf,” she concluded.

I realized that I really was fond of the girl. My reluctance to see him wasn't because I was afraid of Jerro or because I disliked him, though both were true; it was rather that standing in his vicinity, one always feels oneself to be the prey of a multitude of unseen, unblinking eyes.

“Thank you, Knight Captain,” I said, with total sincerity.

“None of that!” she muttered, blinking in embarrassment, and I suspect, some pleasure.

We spent the next few hours talking about less sombre matters. I declined her offer of a room for the night, using you as my excuse. Before bidding me farewell, she said: “She was too young, you know. Too young to die. But to me, she was just one among many. And there are others that I miss more – every day.”

The guards at the gate saluted me, and one asked for my autograph. They may have mistaken me for my third cousin twice removed, the infamous Elaith of Waterdeep. We're said to have the same ears. The likeness is reportedly quite remarkable.

And then I rode away from West Harbour on the newly paved road; banks of rushes swayed in the breeze, and some kind of fenland bird chirped at me as it fluttered through a pale blue sky. I may have briefly conceded to myself that it would not be such a humiliating fate, to be a swamp elf, though if you remind me of this when I next see you, I will deny it utterly.

Your faithful

Sand

Chapter Text

Seen in Heliodor

S.St. 858, Athk. Fae. Contents: Blank. Status: Sold Buyer: Sand of Neverwinter

The path was not there.

I stood as near to the end of its stump as I dared, and looked down. A slick of mud and loose stones had spread itself across the less vertiginous reaches of the upper slopes. A wind-blown rook perched on a crag to our left, and cawed at us with a clownish relish. Bishop took a swing at it. He missed, and the rook flew cackling away. Three hundred feet below me, jutting out from the side of the cliff, was some kind of shrub. Leafless, gnarled and bent, but it was the first one I'd seen for some time.

“I don't fucking believe it,” said Lila, the model of stoicism. Our predicament was making itself felt.

“Perhaps we should turn back?” Shandra murmured behind me. She sounded intensely hopeful. I took her question to mean, 'We should go back to the Keep at once and never return to this appalling, lifeless place.' Clever girl.

“We're almost there already,” replied Lila. Already? We had ridden for days through the foothills of the Crags. When the track had turned into a path, we had been obliged to leave the horses and most of our supplies behind with Casavir to guard them. We had been attacked by wolves, bugbears and midges. “We can't give up now.”

A snowflake landed on the end of my nose. The clouds above us were of that light grey variety that most often precede blizzards.

“Then what do you propose we do?” I snapped. “Have you added walking on thin air to your many talents, Captain? Perhaps you know a spell which allows us to sprout wings and fly across?” I waved my long sleeves in illustration.

I heard a snort of contempt from where Qara was huddled in a rocky nook beside the path. The arm movements might have been a misjudgement. The little jump at the end certainly had been.

But a ten yard expanse of nothing could not be traversed by the power of Harbourman pigheadedness alone. I was particularly annoyed with myself for my failure to bring a copy of Mezentine's Ethereal Bridge with me. There was a scroll tucked away in the warm, plushly furnished library at home – rather, at Crossroad Keep, which I should be careful not to regard as my home – however, lacking powers of supernatural foresight, I had not brought it with me on our trot through one of the Sword Coast's most inhospitable regions. I had packed some woolen mittens instead.

“Are you coming?” Bishop was standing on the path. On the path that began again beyond the gulf left by the landslide. His easy life at the Keep had slowed him down, added the beginning of jowls to his fox-like face. But clearly, he hadn't yet given himself over to total drunken decline, as many human rangers do.

“How did you manage that?” Shandra asked.

“You're in the wilds now. This is my territory, farmer.” He folded his arms, and stood firmly on the brink, his nose sniffing the air. One of his favourite postures.

“He walked along the ledge,” said Lila, puncturing his moment of rugged individualism triumphant before I was able to. “He used his extra special ranger vision to see that not all of the path has been washed away, and his fierce natural feet to walk over to the other side.”

Bishop bared his teeth.

But there was indeed a small amount of the path left. At its best points, it was less than a foot wide. At its worst, it ceased to exist, and it was only possible to cross if one said a prayer and stepped across to the next dubious remainder.

“You must be totally insane!” said Qara, when she left her hole to come and assess the situation. “I'm not crossing that!” It was not informative to say that she looked pale, since she always did. And yet there was something new in the set of her lips that I had never seen before. She peeped over the edge of the path, and jumped back, reaching unsteadily for the wall.

“It's perfectly feasible,” I said. It was not that I wanted to compete with the girl, or humiliate her, or grind her spirits down into the dust, I told myself – it was simply that one had to be rational about these things. The sooner we were across, the sooner we could find shelter from the snow. Besides, I had a good sense of balance.

“Watch.” And I walked out along the ledge. As long as I didn't think of the drop, the fear was bearable. I tried listing potion ingredients in my head. Willow bark. Cormyrian Rue. Red clover. Hawthorn petals. Black rue. Herb-of-grace. I reached the gap. Breathed in, breathed out. Gripped the cliff to my left with one hand. Moonwort. Peganium. Firethorn. Rue. Rue. Rue. I closed my eyes, thrust out my right hand for balance, stepped.

My foot felt nothing underneath it. Then, a second later, there it was. Oak leaves. Shredded palm fronds. Dandelion tufts. The rest of the way was easy.

When I arrived safely on the other side, and Bishop smirked at me, I couldn't entirely believe what I'd done. The exhilaration of having survived competed with horror that I'd been so reckless. I had volunteered to be the first to do something foolish and dangerous, and I had done so in style without a single scream.

“You see,” I called back to the others, “Quite simple.” They looked as dumbfounded as I felt.

Shandra crossed next. She moved slowly, cautiously, like an ancient mole feeling its way through a winding tunnel, but arrived safely with no mishaps. Then Lila. She bounced onto the ledge, and walked across with a half-swagger for the first section. Even before our captain stumbled, as I knew she would for persisting in that particular vanity, Ms Jerro had put her hands over her eyes.

She didn't fall. But she did drop to one knee. I could see her whole body quiver with the shock of her failure.

“I'm not wasting a haversack on you,” Bishop shouted to her. “If you fall, someone else is scraping up what's left of you.”

“Shut up!” she yelled back, and stood up, still quivering. Seeing that she was proceeding in a more sensible manner, I turned my attention to Qara.

The girl was standing stock still. She didn't seem to be looking at anything in particular, though the distance and the now thickly falling snow prevented me from discerning much in her expression. But I could see enough to recognise the unvarying language of terror. The deer at bay. Bishop knew it too.

“Cast 'Fire Shield'!” Bishop said

“What?” said Qara, not hearing him.

“Cast 'Fire Shield!'”

“How will that help?”

“It'll mean the rest of us have a good hot dinner waiting for us on the return trip!” She said nothing. Not the tiniest hint of rage. She looked very small and alone.

I enjoyed the moment.

“If you don't want to cross, you can go back and find Casavir,” said Lila. I wondered if she was totally oblivious to Qara's nature, or if this was a simple piece of manipulation. “The four of us will be enough.”

“Will we?” Shandra hissed. I saw Lila raise an eyebrow at her.

“We have Sand with us,” she continued. “He can handle any heavy duty arcane business we have to deal with. Don't worry about us.”

Qara hesitated. She looked over her shoulder, and seemed ready to sprint back to the camp-site. She turned back and stared at the snow-flakes falling down and down into the swelling great mist that was rolling along the base of the mountain. Her right hand clenched and unclenched.

She moved forward. Stepped onto the ledge. Took three large steps that carried her well past the broken end of the track. The first mistake she made was to look at the drop, and that set her swaying. The second was to put both hands on the cliff face to steady herself. After that, she couldn't move. A primal instinct from the deep well underneath the conscious mind had taken over, and it was telling her to freeze where she was. I was intensely glad that it wasn't me trapped out there. It occurred to me that I had one scroll of Ethereal Jaunt in my pack. Still, I wouldn't want to waste a useful resource that might be needed later.

“Get a move on,” said Bishop.

She didn't appear to hear him. Her shoulders were shaking.

“If you're going to fall, then let go now,” he said. “Just stop wasting my -”

And Shandra hit him. She had donned one of her heavy gauntlets while the rest of our eyes were on Qara; the sound of steel and chain mail colliding with Bishop's jaw seemed to resound through the mountain valley. I stored the memory up for later: I would derive immense pleasure from reminding Bishop of this incident, should he ever go snooping into the more private archives of my past. Or for any other reason, for that matter.

Before he could respond in kind, Shandra had returned to the ledge, and was hobbling along it, bent almost double, with no grace but much attention to her own safety.

She reached Qara, and began to talk to her in a low voice that the wind carried away into the mist. But I saw her rub the girl's shoulder, and take her hand. Their speed was slow, agonizingly slow. At the gap in the ledge, they came to a total halt. I could see their faces now, and Shandra looked almost as petrified as Qara.

“Going to scout the land ahead,” Bishop muttered, and departed, rubbing his jaw and shooting dark looks over his shoulder at us, his associates.

“Good,” said Lila, without looking away from the two young women struggling along the cliff face.

I went to join her, though was careful not to stand in any of the places where the path had begun to crack and crumble. “This has been an entertaining day,” I said, unable to conceal my high spirits.

“Sand, will you promise me something?” she said. Her voice sounded light enough, but there was an undercurrent of something more serious there too.

“Anything for you, Glorious Leader.”

“If you do ever feel impelled to build a secret haven where you can get up to arcane things without being bothered by in-laws or the tax inspector, would you put it somewhere pleasant, with a decent climate and good roads – Waukeen's Promenade, maybe, or the castle-town in Waterdeep.”

“I guarantee it.”

“You have taken a weight off my mind,” she said, and held out her hands to help Shandra through the last few feet. After Shandra was back on the path, they both helped Qara down, and led her to a less precarious position under the overhanging cliff face.

The sorceress looked like the ghost of herself. A tremor was running through her left arm, and her face shone with sweat. When Shandra tried to offer her a drink, she brushed her off with a glare.

“Thanks for your help, mage,” she spat at me. I wondered if she could possibly know about the scroll nestling reassuringly in my pack. But – surely not.

“Ah, so you've discovered irony. At last! The little sorceress is growing up!”

She pulled her hood up, and stalked away.

“Well - that was -” said Shandra, still leaning against the cliff, exhausted, with the look of someone trying not to vomit.

“She'll thank you one day,” I said, mentally putting coins in the Temple of Mystra's donation basket.

“It's a sin to lie, Sand,” said Lila, suddenly sharing in my good mood. “I'm surprised at you! You spent too long in my uncle's tavern.”

“If the mad girl lives to adulthood, she'll thank you,” I replied, still not at all convinced of my own sincerity. “At least, she should.”

Chapter Text

Tarsakh, 13

Dearest Harcourt,

An attractive morning in Waterdeep. Do you know this city well? Seen in the morning sunlight, it promises to be one of the most pleasant cities between Evermeet and Var the Golden. Orderly. Refined. Inclined to follow the law instead of inventing it every day anew to suit the whims of family and other allies. But the towns and cities in this part of the Sword Coast are often so on the surface. It is only if you should linger a while longer to better acquaint yourself with such a miracle of civilization that you understand the urbane hoardings are held up by an assortment of less appealing props. Chauvinism, blind piety, fear of the present, the future, the past. That those last anxieties have been well-justified in recent years, I allow.

I remember the impression Neverwinter made on me when I first walked through her gates. How beautiful and prosperous she was in comparison to Luskan. Nasher was about as old as you are now; he and his Greycloaks had gained more ground from the orc tribes in a few short months than the old Council of Merchants had managed in centuries. The slums of the city appeared wealthier than the baronial quarter of Yartar. In her clean and calm streets was more than a hint of the grace of an elven city without the tedium of the inescapable harp recitals or the impossibility of finding useful employment before the age of four hundred. Hunting, carousing and bonding with nature do not count.

You perhaps recall some of the splendour of the old city yourself, from growing up in the household of Lord Hawkes. For you, however, the shining face of Neverwinter would have been quite comme d'habitude . For me, coming from the dark core of Luskan, it was as if I had been the beneficiary of a powerful restoration spell cast by a priest for no monetary or evangelistic incentive – so, one might say I had arrived in utopia.

Of course, this feel never lasts. As you yourself must have recently discovered when you strolled through the well-tended rose gardens of Candlekeep, up the legendary marble stairs, and into the hallowed passages, where you were met by – well - shall we say a true disciple of the Lady of Pain? Such people are everywhere. An encounter with one of them was critical in solidifying my relationship with Neverwinter, afterwards acknowledging the city only as a kind of large inn, full of ragamuffins, pilgrims and traders - a halt in the midst of a long journey to a brighter elsewhere.

Several years after my arrival from Luskan, the Academy discovered that among all its teaching, all its alumni, all its fellows and associates, not a single one was capable of brewing the most simple of healing potions without first causing major structural damage to the school buildings, and to expensive pieces of equipment, such as the students. Alchemy was not considered a subject worthy of attention among the blue-blooded infants that for the most part ruled and attended Neverwinter's premier and, indeed, only college of the occult sciences. Learning how to prepare a potion to cure dysentery was far too practical for their tastes, whereas a spell to turn sentient flesh into dead granite they treated with more veneration than the Weave itself.

Regardless, Principal Qaron one day found himself without a competent alchemist, the previous human potions lecturer's eyesight having decayed so much with the years that he could no longer differentiate aconite from acorns. A client of his knew an illusionist who knew a conjurer who frequented a dubious tavern in a still more dubious part of the town, where his friend the barman – barmen are always your friend, while you're paying – sold extremely effective hangover remedies, which he bought from a newly opened shop that always seemed to be doing a brisk trade. (The remedies, permit me to add, were sold by the tavern at hugely inflated prices. But for the owner of a real cat-yowler of a migraine, supply chain economics are a notion as unreal as the legend of the dream-world condition of existence.)

Suffice to say that contact was made a contract signed, and Sand joined the faculty. I was working in a freelance capacity, which meant that I could be paid much less for taking twice as many classes as the permanent teachers. Nevertheless, I was advancing. My skills were needed; I could come and go in the wealthiest district of Neverwinter without being harassed by the city guard, or asked to give a harp recital by the loitering human matriarchs. It felt as if all the early promise I saw in the city was becoming real.

Initially, all was well. My students progressed. By progress, I am referring chiefly to their progress from the door of the classroom to their seats. But I found with time that it was possible to win them a little to my subject by describing what a potion could achieve in the right hands – or the wrong ones. I told them about Dram Kallen and his victory over the lycanthropes, Tanath and her potion of death-in-life, of Jacoy the Rose and the garden of poisoned blossom. If I had known of the future, I might have told them of the afternoon before the battle of Crossroad Keep, when you and I and Grobnar and anyone who could be trusted near explosives squatted in the cellars and stuffed glass baubles full of pine resin, naphtha and quicklime until our eyes stung and our hands trembled.

Do you remember that as well as I do? I can remember watching the lifetime of a bead of sweat, as it formed on your brow and trickled ever so slowly down to rest in the hollow of your throat just about the clavicle bone.

More crucial to my position than bribing the students with stories and parlour tricks was the Principal's approval. And indeed he gave every appearance of approving of me. He was friendly, jovial, prone to flattering remarks whenever we met: how much it was said the students were enjoying my lessons, how he hoped that I would stay in the city for a long time to come, how the school was planning to hire more permanent staff in the following year. I never mentioned my own history. He never asked.

He once brought his daughter with him to observe one of my classes. Two feet tall, and still the apple of her father's eye. He sat her on his knee, and encouraged the more motherly of the females to coo over her and feed her their squashed lunchtime sweetmeats. After the honey reached her bloodstream, she leapt from her father to the floor and made duck-footed laps of the room, screaming merrily, arms akimbo.

I don't think she remembered meeting me, but I recognised her as soon as I saw her again at the Sunken Flagon twelve years later.

Nine months into my respectable new employment, and Master Johcris arrived at my classroom door in the middle of a class with the senior year. “You're required in the meeting room,” he said. His expression was as blank as it always was, and for all I know, still is. “This class is over,” he told my pupils. “Get your things, and go.”

Have you ever been summoned from your work unexpectedly? It's never a pleasant sensation. Thoughts about what might necessitate your presence rush through your mind. A relative or friend has sickened suddenly. A false accusation has been made against you. A true accusation has been made against you. At the Host Tower, it might have been because your line manager has decided to feed your eyeballs to a demon lord from the Lower Planes.

The meeting room was in the oldest part of the building. Crests of the old merchant dynasties, which no one had yet bothered to remove, still sat plastered on the ceiling and carved into the panelled walls, although a portrait of our young Lord Nasher had been hung behind the Principal's chair, while a shrine to Tyr at the opposite end of the chamber smelt of fresh paint, and a icon of the Lady Aribeth decorated the base. The air was hot with the bodies and breath of more than thirty people.

Everyone was there. The Principal, his deputy, the Head Porter, the senior and junior teachers, the clerks. Lord Dalren and Lady Tamberlis were there, in their role as patron governors. It was only a wonder that Aribeth and the supreme ruler of Neverwinter himself were not present in flesh and blood themselves. When I entered the room and saw the unprecedented crowd, I rashly believed I might be about to join the glorious ranks of the tenured staff. I may even have begun to plan the elements of a speech of gratified acceptance.

Of course, the looks on their faces soon disabused me of my hopes. Qaron pointed to a stool at the far end of the table from himself. “Sit!” he said. His shoulders were hunched. His lips, or what I could see of them in the narrow slit between his red beard and moustache, were fixed downward. Watching him in the yard some weeks before this incident, I'd observed the same set of behaviours. Blood coming and going in his temples, eyes unblinking, breaths drawn slowly and deliberately. Then, it was a student who was to fall victim to the explosion of rage.

I heard Johcris close the door behind me.

Some people become ridiculous when they lose their tempers. Others become frightening. I have never been able to create a satisfactory theory to explain the difference. Take power out of the variables, for sufficient power in the paws of a tame squirrel would be frightening – and what I believe is left is the instrumentality of the anger. Qara's rages were like the unselfconscious tears of an infant. There might be a clear stimulus, or there might not. They served no deeper purpose than to rid herself immediately of what was wearisome to her. Qaron Bovardi, however genuine his feelings, however real the blood in his cheeks, knew that his anger was an uncatalogued spell, one that could be held in reserve for the right occasion. He was a man who rarely needed to raise his voice. The fear that he might was enough to quell thoughts of opposition.

I looked at the stool, and looked at Qaron. “No thank you, Principal. I can stand very well.” My refusal felt like the most daring speech I had ever made. But I wasn't going to let him loom over me. As it was, with him sitting and me standing, we were practically at eye-level. He made a dismissive gesture from which I inferred that I was to suit myself. “May I ask wh - ?”

“We are here today,” he began, in priestly tones, his voice drowning mine, “because a very serious allegation has been made against one of the Academy's teaching staff.” The flock of hens at the meeting table ducked their heads in a show of solemnity, while the ones left standing and squashed into the corners clucked amongst themselves.

“Nine months ago, we accepted into our academic family a promising young alchemist” (he really did say “promising young alchemist”, dear boy, it is not my invention) “to take the classes that were left suddenly vacant by the retirement of Master Brensnaw and the tragic death of our friend and colleague Master Dancre in the Luskan occupation of Port Llast. We welcomed this stranger – this Sand of - where? - of nowhere, it seemed. He was not a son of Neverwinter. He came from nothing. And we welcomed this stranger into the fold. But now it seems we have been deceived. This morning I learnt from a reliable source that our potions expert should rightly be called 'Sand of Luskan' or indeed 'Sand of the Host Tower'”

The professors emeriti with drooping eyes and hair sprouting from their nostrils jerked upright in their heavy oaken chairs. Coming from the whole flock of them on collective instinct came a guttural, rumbling growl. The unmummified staff members from the younger generation confined themselves to shaking their heads and with pursed lips imitating the Principal's own unconscious pastiche of the famous elven statue  Diweirdeb ddig yn dod yn goeden lelog trwy drugaredd y duw trugarog , which I shall translate into Common as Chastity Outraged Awaits Treeification .

A few of the teachers whom I found tolerably competent and respected looked at the floor, at the backs of their hands, out of the windows. They seemed desperate to avoid making eye contact with me.

“It's a very unfortunate business,” her Ladyship remarked, in the carrying, seigneurial fashion of someone whose grandfather and uncle were the same person. “I do hope this will cast no lasting cloud over our school's reputation.”

“You are quite right, my Lady,” Qaron returned. “And that is precisely the reason that I requested this presence of yourself, and his Lordship. The mistake I was inveigled into making must be confessed, corrected and atoned for, in the best Tyrran manner.”

“Here, here,” said Lord Dalren. The senior fossils sitting enthroned on Qaron's right and left burbled their approval.

“I therefore put forward the following plan of action.” Qaron glanced down at a paper that lay on the table in front of him, but only for a few moments. He had the ability, when he spoke, to appear to be looking at each person in the room individually. “The Luskan agent will be immediately removed from all his duties, and banned from the premises. We will expand the teaching hours devoted to Neverwinter history and Neverwinter values. At the same time, our Head of Discipline will lead an investigation that will search for traces of the Host Tower's corrupting influence - as much as in the students' minds and hearts as in their magical practices.”

Johcris lowered his eyes, mutely obedient to his younger superior. He may have had connections to the Host Tower even then. Half the people in the room that day probably did.

I had foolishly been waiting the the moment when Qaron would offer me to opportunity to defend myself. This was, after all, Neverwinter and not Netheril.

“I must protest that I -”

“Quiet, viper.” It was Lord Dalren who cut me off. When the news of his traitorous dealings during the siege reached my delighted ears, and of his subsequent murder, my lofty principals may have trembled somewhat on their high capitals. A little less understanding and a little more violent retribution briefly appeared to me to constitute a desirable part of civil mores.

Very briefly. It would be an immeasurable tedium if I took it upon myself to dispatch anyone whom I'd ever suspected of patriotic hypocrisy, and my letters would no doubt become unbearably repetitive. 'Dearest Harcourt; Yesterday I made the rivers of Tethyr run red with blood. (Again). Today I have put the half of the army officers to fire and the sword. Tomorrow I shall make many widows among the women of Amn. Otherwise I am well, but have a mild back ache caused by sleeping on a mountain of skulls. Your friend, Sand.'

Sadly, in the meeting chamber, I knew nothing of the friends in northern places possessed by both Dalren and Johcris. And even if I had, evidence gained by time travel spells is not valid legal tender in Neverwinter jurisprudence. Of course, although they would have balked at judging a man on his known future, that fine company was all too ready to condemn me for a past that they knew nothing about.

“I have the right -” I tried again.

“You have the right to leave unmolested,” said Qaron. “Go. Before you wear out our tolerance.”

I looked around the line that opposed me, three ranks deep, watching me with folded arms and frowns. Not a single expression gave me any hope of support.

The innermost ring, which contained the most important personages, each of whom was invited to draw an unconditional stipend from the Academy's sizeable treasury, stared back at me with the smug complacency of a pavilion of pure-bred cats.

I realised then that my dreams of success in that place were over. The Host Tower taught me to pick my battles very carefully. I owe it that much recognition, at least. And so after leaving, I returned to my neglected shop in the docks, swearing with every step that I would never let myself become involved in Neverwinter high society again. For ten years, give or take a few Nevalle-shaped lapses, I kept my promise.

Everything we do is ordered by what we did in the past, and by what was done to us. I do not know why Qaron acted as he did. I don't even know how he learnt of my lamentable Host Tower connections. But I am sure that when he dismissed me, and did so in such a way, such a cruel and unnecessary way, that he dropped a dangerous reagent into his future – and his daughter's – and his sons'. Small cuts are more powerful than fireballs, when they're made carefully, consistently, slowly, with a cold eye and a steady hand.

I'm sending another transcript with this letter. It shows a side of me that I have preferred to keep hidden from you. But I think you know me well enough by now to have divined its existence.

I am going to stay in Waterdeep for the next few days at the same inn as before. But you should look for me at Candlekeep before the end of Tarsakh, if you still wish to see me after reading through my depositions.

Your true friend,

Sand

Chapter Text

Seen in Jet

SSt. 859 , Athk. Fae. Contents: Blank. Status: Sold Buyer: Sand of Neverwinter

The new gate loomed up before me. Fluted columns supporting a massive architrave. Some kind of frieze resting above it, no doubt showing highly opaque allegorical scene that would provide fodder for the tortuous assemblies that I'd heard were being held with ever more frequency.

I squinted up at it, but the snow was falling thickly, and most of the sculptural detail was obscured. But really, the huge structure was more of a victory arch than a gate. 'Victory over what?' I wondered. No students in the courtyard. It was late morning, and they would be in class. One of my teaching slots used to fall at this time.

At the door to the main building, I knocked and waited, considering what I'd do if no one answered. Shove a note under the door? Break and enter? Stand raving in the snow, shouting dire warnings of approaching calamity up to the Principal's window?

The door opened. I felt relieved. No need to add another humiliation to the one I'd already suffered on the premises.

“Ah, Master Sand. How pleasant to see you again,” the doddering Head Porter quavered. “You are expected. Please follow me.”

Nothing in the interior had changed. I followed the porter through the reception hall to the foot of the grand staircase, where we were intercepted.

“Sand. Good to see you here.”

“Master Johcris. A pleasure, as always.” I thought of Sydney Natale and her golem of refracted light and magic. The Luskan witch had tried to assassinate Qara, and not on her own initiative. Nothing had ever been linked to Johcris – that could mean he was more competent than I had ever realized when he was my colleague.

He smiled at me. A ghostly smile, but not ghastly. It was an improvement on his usual expression of dead-eyed implacability.

“We can manage from here,” he told the porter, who readily accepted the reprieve from climbing the twisting flight of seventy-seven stairs. I was glad too; I had been expecting to be obliged to perform cardiac stimulation on him before we reached the second landing. That would have been a fine start to my embassy.

“Many thanks, Master Johcris,” said the old man. “This snow has been doing for my legs like the fucking knackers, saving your presence. Such snow in Neverwinter. Have you ever seen the like?”

“Yes,” said Johcris, his smile vanishing. “But only once.”

The old porter didn't appear to notice the change. He shook his head. “They'll have to change the name of the city at this rate,” he muttered, before stumping away.

I turned to Johcris. “How is your daughter?” I was careful to moderate my tone. People are always so ready to believe that my conversational essays conceal a sharper point than I intend . I can't imagine why.

“Glina is as well as might be expected – and yet not as well as might once have been expected.” While I unpicked the sentence, I watched his pale eyelashes flutter in agitation. “The burns on her face will never totally fade. She still has nightmares.”

“It must be difficult,” I said, casting my line for snippets of information, while quite sure that Johcris knew what I was doing, “to work for the father of the girl who did this to your daughter.”

“Qaron is not what he was.”

“Ah. So he has apologized?”

Johcris snorted. “No.” His eyes swept the hall. Empty, save for us. He took the bait. “You know, for two years every night I prayed to the gods that I would be allowed to avenge my daughter's suffering. When I first heard that Qara was dead in the Merdelain, I cursed, because it put her out of my reach. But now – now I think I'm glad of it. She died in disgrace. Your Knight Captain forced to recognize the nature of the demon she was harboring. And the more loudly Qaron cursed her memory, and disowned all kinship to her, the more he was tainted by association.” The man's eyes flickered. Footsteps became audible in a passage adjoining the entrance hall. He raised his voice. “Of course, Qaron has been my dear friend for many years. We are all very concerned for him.” He indicated the stairs. “After you, Master Sand. I believe you know the way.”

As I trotted up the seventy-seven stairs, and walked along the aged oaken floorboards that marked out the administrative sections of the building on the top floor, I considered what I had learnt. So Qaron's continued leadership of the Academy was in question if one believed Johcris, which I did. The Academy had been losing pupils to the new trade schools set up by the cartels. On top of that, the showing of the Academy had been less than impressive in the wars with Luskan and the Illefarn Guardian. Qara and Jerro apart, I couldn't name a single alumnus who had fought with any distinction. And Qara was a traitor, while Jerro had murdered half the governing body.

Qaron would be volatile then. Insecure, suspicious, afraid. Easily led. It would be just like old times in Luskan: no one there had possessed much job security either.

As I approached the meeting room, the door slammed open, from which a figure sped on light feet – Qara.

I stopped, stared. No, I realized, not Qara. A boy. About twelve years old. Stocky, pale skinned and with a mop of frazzled red hair. Another boy identical to the first appeared in the doorway, holding a ball of glowing, shifting lights.

Johcris touched my shoulder with the tips of his fingers before moving past me.

“Boys. Is your father inside?” They nodded. The ball fragmented into glowing dust and from dust into air. “Why aren't you in class?”

They looked at each other. “It's a free period today, sir,” said the one whom I'd mistaken for his half-sister. “Master Nernett is snowed in.”

“Well then – go and play.” They dashed off, no doubt relieved to get away from Johcris

Inside the meeting room, little had changed. The plaster crests of the old families had been removed. So had the statue of Aribeth. Remaining was the shrine to Tyr and the portrait of the young Lord Nasher, blonde curls faded from twenty years of direct sunlight. No one had dusted the frame for some months. A grey, paunchy old man sat slumped in the chair at the head of the table. Qaron. He was looking older than Johcris these days.

My companion took the seat at his superior's right hand. I contented myself with a chair some feet further down the table. I didn't want my ears hurt if he started declaiming again.

But Qaron didn't look up. He was concentrating on fiddling with a pile of scrolls and papers in front of him. First he took one from the bottom, and put it on the top. The he took one from the middle, and put it on the bottom, making no effort to read what was written on any of the documents.

“Johcris? Time for the staff convention again?”

“That's next on the schedule, Principal. As you may recall, the alchemist Sand wishes to speak to you on behalf of Captain Farlong.”

Qaron yawned. After squinting at me through smudged eyes, he suddenly gave a throaty chuckle. “You. I remember you. Can't say I'm happy to see you again. Well, why isn't the great Knight Captain here to address herself to me in person?”

Because I volunteered for this task, you superannuated, unfeeling, hypocritical conglomeration of ignominies.

“Lila has many demands upon her time,” I replied. First name. Remind him who has influential connections this time around. “She and Khelgar of the Nine felt that I should make this visit – since I already have some knowledge of this fine old institution.”

As I spoke, a handful of the senior faculty arrived. More would drift in presently, I was sure. Coming early to their meeting, by predetermined accident. That was only typical.

“You're wasting your time. You should be in the north, laying low Port Llast with your Luskan cronies.” So he had chosen to harp on that same old battered string.

“Neverwinter has lost control of it again?” I asked, not faking my surprise. I would never understand why the dirty, slimy trail of huts and graveyards was so coveted. It was sinking into the mud flats as it was. “How careless.” Qaron's deputy, who had just entered the room, guffawed, then turned rather pink. No, this would not be a replay of what had once happened. “Really, there should be some kind of rota set up to cycle ownership between the cities. It would be so much more economically sensible – and less messy, of course. I abhor mess.”

“Jokes and fooleries. What else would one expect of a Luskan? Blind to morality, deaf to the cry of the innocents of Port Llast, condemned to thralldom, to tyranny. No concept of citizenship, but merely -”

“- yes, yes, marvellous!” I had to shout to stop him; otherwise his sonorous voice would simply have rolled on and on from one lofty banality to the next. “However, it's not Port Llast that we need to worry about.” I forced myself to speak slowly, clearly, as if I were standing in court again opposite Torio Claven. It wasn't only Qaron I needed to convince; it was Johcris and the Deputy, and the other teachers watching the quarrel in amusement. I launched into my prepared speech.

“Neverwinter has not been short of troubles in the last decade. The plague, the war with Luskan and the revival of the Illefarn Guardian are merely some of the problems this city has had to withstand. Recently, we have had reason to hope that we are on the verge of a new age of peace and prosperity. A return to the Founding Age, when Lord Halueth ruled, and the great crafting guilds first gained their reputation for the creation of marvels of beauty and skill.” Breath. Look around. Make eye contact. Resume.

“I hope that such a renaissance is still possible. But at the end of last year, some disturbing rumours began to spread up and down the Sword Coast. You may have heard them yourself.”

“The talk about a disease that destroys magic?” the Deputy asked. A easy-going man, I remembered. Not stained with Qaron's vanity or Johcris's bitterness. “That story's been keeping the first year boarders awake at night. You're not going to tell us it's true, are you?” His question didn't quite manage to sound as jocular as he wanted it to. I noticed him shooting glances at his associates to judge their reactions.

Empathise. Win him over. “When I first heard of it, I thought it was pure nonsense. A gnomish fantasy.” Mystra be praised there weren't any gnomes among those gathered at the table. “A tale nurses tell their charges to make them behave. A nightmare born from the minds of people bludgeoned into terror by war and suffering. But then I travelled to Sigil, the world where past and future meet. Where everything is seen and known.” Well, some things. If you pay the right person the right obscene amount of gold. “The city where there are doors to every part of the multiverse. And there the Spellplague isn't a story. It's a fact. A disturbance in the planes is coming – indeed, has already started. And for as long as it lasts, no mage in Faerun will be completely safe. The plague doesn't simply destroy magic – it also breaks the minds of those who habitually use it. At its best, it puts them into such a state of fury and distrust that they are no longer able to recognise their own family.”

“You seriously expect us to believe this?” Qaron scoffed. His colleagues, however, looking serious, stayed quiet. My role in the Shadow War had bought me some amount of credibility, at least.

“It isn't just me who is ready to tell you that another disaster is imminent. Go to Sigil yourself. Send for the news from Calimshan, where the Djinn are already breaking the ties that bind them. Contact the Zulkir of Thay, or try to. Ask Vale and Sevann of the Many-Starred Cloaks, or Lila Farlong, or Ammon Jerro, or Xanos Messarmos, or Sharwyn Wanderer. Summon up the spirits of dead heroes and ask what they see in their dreams of the living. And keep watch on the eastern skies.”

“A Luskan trick,” Qaron growled. “A feint to make us drop our guard.” His fingers drummed on the table. He began fiddling with the pile of parchment again, his face down. “Is that all you have to say?”

The Deputy leaned forward, not without an uneasy flicker of the eyes in the direction of his chief. “Master Sand, if all this is true – then what do you propose we do?”

Qaron sneered at his papers. There was rebellion in the ranks. I folded my hands in front of me.

“Evacuate. As soon as possible. Some areas of Toril will be less affected than others. Sigil too is safe.” Full of demons, angels and everything in between, but offered them a better chance than staying put. “Captain Brelaina of the Watch already has the details. She would be willing to put some of her men at your disposal to help with the logistics. Alternatively, there is the possibility of using wards to defend against the full effect. But these are untested. Evacuation is therefore the surer option.”

The Deputy was nodding. “Has Lord Nasher been briefed?”

“Not yet, but in one hour from now, Captain Khelgar and Lady Ophala are leading a delegation that will address Sir Nevalle on the subject."

“Nasher's too sick to see them then?” one of the new faces asked. An illusionist, to judge by the cloud grey colour of his robe.

“As you say.” I bit back the remark about trusting ourselves to Nevalle's gallant and decisive leadership in crises that I so longed to make. They might not have known about the Cloakroom Incident. It would have been a case of throwing pearls before swine, as it so often is with me.

Johcris wrapped an arm around the back of his chair. When I met his eyes, he gave me one of his ghostly smiles. He'd be dancing the Lantan Goose Foot Foursome soon, if his manner grew any warmer. This could prove interesting. “Are you suggesting,” he said, “that the Principal should run away? Should abandon the Academy and its centuries of history? Leave its doors open to the wolves and winter winds, and simply flee?”

What a lovely gift the man had just handed me. It could hardly have been more obvious if he'd wrapped a ribbon around it, and donned a paper crown. It was a gift to be savoured. The first answer, the one I'd rehearsed alone and together with Lila Farlong, was almost at my lips. The answer that spoke about protecting the lives of the students, of making a temporary retreat in order to return in greater force and power later. That slipped away.

And then there was the other answer, wherein I would speak to Qaron for once as a fellow creature, not as a political agent. “I do not know what I did to earn your hatred, but, for my part, I always wanted to respect you. And if you stay in Neverwinter, then you and your sons and your students will most likely perish. If you cannot bring yourself to believe me, then make enquiries among the many wise men and women whom you do trust, and heed their advice well.” I let that go too. So much sincerity all at once might damage my reputation beyond amendment.

I looked at Qaron, the tin-pot ruler of a kingdom of teenagers, the ambitious, the self-serving patriot of many years' complacent power. I thought of Qara burning a barrel to cinders as she shook with hate. I found the words I wanted.

“Why not? Why not 'beat a tactical retreat'? It's not as if such a thing would be foreign to the Principal's instincts.” Qaron opened his mouth to interrupt, but I wouldn't let him say a word until I was quite finished. “Running from danger? Well, do you remember how he came to Crossroad Keep to offer his services to the defence of the land at its time of most desperate need – when we couldn't afford to turn away a poor farmer armed with a rake? I don't. Rather, I recall how well he sat on his roan mare as it took him away from the front lines. Leaving his daughter behind, of course. The archmage was too important to fight, but he was willing to let his daughter take his place. His eighteen year old daughter. And as for betrayal – this place was run on Luskan money for years. Where do you think Lord Dalren acquired the wealth he shared so generously with the Academy? No, dear sirs, I fail to see why a hasty retreat should pose difficulties for the honourable Principal. For the last ten years he's done nothing but practice!”

“That is unjust, Master Sand,” the Deputy rebuked me, his mildness taking any sting from the criticism. In any case, his opinion didn't interest me. His presence was useful, but only in as much as with it, my words could prick more deeply into Qaron's pride.

“Ignorance,” the Principal hissed. He was sitting upright in his chair; for the first time, his mind seemed to be fully engaged in the present. “No. I will not defend myself to you. You were Luskan's tool, and that corruption will never vanish. I am not a coward, and all the people in this room know as much. As for Qara, the only thing I regret is that I didn't kill her myself at birth.” The Deputy looked shocked. I inwardly exulted; the more vehement Qaron became, the more he was horrifying his remaining supporters. “And I will not leave Neverwinter. Come what may. Even if there's the smallest quantity of truth in the bad news you've delighted in bringing – my boys and myself will stay here, our home, where we belong, and which I'd die for. I swear it.”

He stared defiantly round the table. His hands were balled into fists. Most of the staff members present seemed embarrassed, especially the younger ones, who'd only known their superior as a prematurely aged, grandfatherly man.

“And what about your sons, Qaron?” the Deputy asked, breaking the uneasy hush that had fallen after Qaron made his declaration. “Will they die too?”

“If I had a thousand sons and daughters, I'd give them up to preserve the city.” He meant what he said, I realized, as I watched his maddened eyes. It wasn't merely a badly-judged rhetorical stunt. No need to wait for Spellplague. Qaron had auto-de-hinged some time ago.

“Well, you don't.” I said. I almost felt sorry for him, but the temptation to push him a little further was irresistible. “You've always had a way with words, Qaron. A pity you so rarely live up to them.”

“You've heard the Principal. He's not afraid of a little gossip from the east, Sand.” Johcris kept his voice level, but I could feel his elation. It was mine too.

“The interview is over.” Qaron stood up, and reached for the lion-headed cane that was resting against the wall. Before he grasped it, he stumbled. Johcris jumped up to support him.

“Qaron, there were some issues I wanted to discuss-” the Deputy began.

“Later. I can't stand the air in this room. Or discuss the issues with Sand, since I can see you believe him.”

Qaron left the meeting chamber, leaning on Johcris's arm.

The Deputy rubbed his temples. His colleagues exchanged sardonic looks, though some of them did so with anxious lines in their foreheads that belied their smirks. Once Qaron was out of earshot, the Deputy moved to stand by the window. I followed him.

“I do believe you,” he said.

“Good. You may yet have a long and fulfilled life.”

He leant his cheek against the window pane. Far below us, a couple of boys were playing in the snow. They might have had red hair. It was impossible to tell for sure through the smoky glass.

“We respect you here for the role you played in the war,” said the Deputy, watching one of the boys miss a pass.

“I did what I could,” I said, gratified.

The lunchtime bell sounded. Soon the quad would be full of students on their way to the refectory. It was time to go.

“One more thing – Qaron believes that it was you who killed his daughter. Is he right?” The Deputy turned from the window to raise his eyebrows at me. The glass had left a white mark on his skin.

“Qara died through chance. I never harmed her.” I couldn't have if I'd wanted to.

“Ah.” The Deputy bowed his head. “But I think you may have killed her father. Shall I show you the way out?”

“I know the way. I know the way very well.”

“I'm sure you'll hear from us shortly.”

“I'm sure I will.” I left the room. I didn't look back.

Chapter Text

Sand,

Your sudden fit of curiosity is as baffling as it is unwelcome. Had you not vanished at the end of the battle, taking with you the remainder of the group's healing potions, you might have no need to trouble me with profitless inquiries about the past. Let me further remind you that your career as a legal advocate for hire ended some time ago.

Despite that, your former captain has asked me to humour you. I hope that the following description will put an end to what you apparently call your 'project'. If you choose to, you can show this letter to the girl's mother, on the condition that she burn it in your presence as soon as she has read it: if something originating from me should fall into the wrong hands, be warned that I will know exactly whom I should hold responsible.

When the King of Shadows fell, and the palace began collapsing around us, we were left to make our way out as best we could. As we now understand, but did not know at the time, the palace had been built over a marvellous feat of Illefarn engineering that channelled the waters of two rivers into caverns deep underground; as the walls and vaults were crumbling around us, so too were the long-hidden waters rising back to the surface.

You, the druid and the gith, of course, had made yourselves scarce before this occurred. The gnome and the blade golem were crushed beneath the collapsing pillars, as was the young sorceress, though in her case not fatally; a misfortune for her, I fear. The dwarf and the tiefling fled together, and I began to follow them with your captain. We were prevented from doing so by Bishop. He had re-entered the chamber while my attention was elsewhere, and, training his bow on us, stated his intention to kill her, then me, then anyone else he came across. I kept him talking, which was not difficult to do.

At some point, Qara must have noticed what was happening. She had enough power left to bring the rest of the ceiling down on Bishop's head, and upon her own. The spell she used was nothing that I recognised; it must have been one of extreme potency, for it shattered every stone in the granite chamber. That I survived and your captain too is owed rather to chance than to the whim of the sorceress. The last I saw of the chamber was that it no longer existed: it had collapsed into the hill from whose stones the great palace was first erected.

In normal circumstances, a creature such as Bishop would pose no challenge to me. However, my powers had been greatly drained in the course of the battle, and as I faced him, with your captain injured and half-blind at my side, I felt I had few useful options open to me. In consequence, I would agree with Lila's assessment that Qara saved her life. The girl also saved mine, for what it is worth.

I do not know why the sorceress acted as she did, nor do I care to inquire into it. But I have some understanding of the nature of sorcerers, and suspect that the desire to utilise her gifts in one last act of destructive 'glory' was more important to Qara than a sudden wish to atone for her treachery. If I could undo her death, I would; she was too young to fight in such a conflict and should have been at home with her mother until - or if- age and maturity taught her self-restraint.

Next time you feel obliged to dig up old graves, I advise you to cultivate self-restraint yourself, or at least have the nerve to ask your questions in person.

A. J.

Chapter Text

Living in Bloodstone

SSt. 1067 , Wtdp. Fae. Contents: Blank. Status: Sold Buyer: Tarmas of West Harbour

There's a rushing in my ears. Like in a conch shell, they say you can hear the waves. I can hear the waves. They're in my head. I can hear pebbles rattling on a beach.

"Come on, lard-guts! Work with me here, we've gotta get you out." Neeshka? I open my eyes, and remember why I closed them. Coloured lights splinter through my retina. A rainbow that hates me. It's no good. I put my arm over my face to block the glare. My arm works, I realize. Good. That's something.

"Doing my best, fiendling. Where's the Captain?" Khelgar.

"Here," I try to shout. My voice is drowned by the crashing of boulders in the deep. Sand drifts over my face. Sand. What happened to Sand? To Casavir?

"She's here." Who's here? Zhjaeve? Elanee? Oh. He means me. I'm the casualty.

"Ammon?" Doesn't answer me. Fucking typical warlock. At least he's alive.

"Go. Take the dwarf. I'll get this one out if I can."

"But-"

"No arguments. Go!"

Somewhere not far away, I hear a keening. A sea gull.

"What – what's that?"

"Never mind.

I think I can here a word through the noise. Mother, it says. Mother. Please.

"Who's...?"

The same word again, howled. Mother. Mother. Then: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And then only sobbing.

"Qara?"

"Yes. Don't look. She's done for."

I almost laugh. Don't look. Well, I can't look. "What's happening?"

"Everything is falling apart. Collapsing. We have to go. Can you move?" He doesn't wait for an answer, and pulls me up. Something's not right. Something's broken. Gods. Stop. The lights turn red, and flash, and then nothing.

When the light comes back on, I can see a little. I see a shadow standing at the far end of a long chamber. My feet are cold. There's an tight pressure round my stomach. I tilt my head to the side. It aches, but not that badly. I see Ammon – barely. He's holding me up by the belt. And the shadow far away is...

"...you've got a lot to look forward too, Jerro. No, no, don't try and cast anything. You know what I'm like with this bow. You don't need to hurry the end. You know it's coming, anyway." Bishop.

"Why didn't you leave when you had the chance, fool?"

"For what? To what?"

Ammon Jerro put in charge of enumerating the reasons for living. It's just too funny.

My feet aren't cold. They're wet. There's water flowing past them. I'm not imagining it. Drowning and crushing at the same time - that isn't fair. And the pain is getting worse too. I could almost hope for a swift end now. But it's still not fair. It's fucking annoying. And I don't want Ammon to die because he tried to save me. That would be even more fucking annoying.

"You don't know, do you? Guess I don't either." What he could do is to use me as a shield. Without him, I would die anyway, but with me to catch the arrows, at least he might escape. That's not a very comforting thought.

"You're still young. There are mercenary companies that would fight over you. There are lords in the Abyss who would give you whatever your heart desires in exchange for your particular range of talents."

Laughter. "But, you know, I think this is what I want. My heart's desire. To end, here. To end everything. And I didn't even have to sell my soul to get it. I'm not weak. This is my choice, here and now." I can feel myself slipping back into unconsciousness. I hope Ammon has a plan.

"Then do it," he snaps. Some plan. I rest my hand on his shoulder. Ready.

"I don't have to – but I -"

"Bishop..." A different voice. Quiet. So quiet as to be almost not there. "Bishop...look here..." And a sound like thunder rolling over the battlements of Crossroad Keep during the late summer's season of storms.

I'm forced backwards. First, I think I'm hit. Bishop actually loosed an arrow at me. My old mate, Bishop. Wasn't he still drinking at his table in The Sunken Flagon? So funny. Fucking hilarious. Then I realize it's Ammon, dragging me backwards as the thunder continues. I wish he would drag me a little less brusquely. As it recedes, growing weaker but never inaudible, he slows. Eventually, he stops. I can hear him breathing hard.

"So we're alive?" I manage to whisper.

"It seems so," he says. "For now."

"And we won then?"

"Yes," he says. He puts a hand on my shoulder. "We won. Are you ready?"

Chapter Text

Seen in Rock Crystal

SSt. 859, Athk. Fae. Contents: Blank. Status: Sold Buyer: Sand of Neverwinter

I went to the war room as soon as the bell rang. I knew what it was about already, having heard Lila speaking to Aldanon in the library. After that it was only a matter of time until the summons came.

Despite my haste, Jerro was there before me. Lila too. The rest would no doubt not be long in coming.

I took my seat at the table and tried surreptitiously to feel my pulse. It was definitely too fast. Jumping around like a gnome on sprung stilts. Breath, I told myself - take a deep breath – hold – count – then exhale. I wondered if there would be time to drink some chamomile tea before we left. Being a young elf still, I had a much greater potential lifespan than the majority of those who had a place in the war room. Therefore, I had much more to lose.

I hoped the meeting wouldn't go on for too long, and I hoped the meeting would go on forever. Better to get the worst over with quickly, and yet – if only I could stay in one of the warm guest chambers of the castle, barricade the door, and never leave.

Elanee arrived and crossed straight to the oriel window, where she stood silently, not looking at us.

Lila and Jerro were debating something. I forced myself to pay attention, in case it would affect me.

"...so Grobnar is coming. He's the only one that understands the Construct anyway. Zhjaeve, yes. Casavir, yes. What about Qara?"

"Too undisciplined," said Jerro. "And too immature. Leave her here. Kana may find a use for her."

Lila gave a dry chuckle. "Not quite what I was expecting from you. Are you feeling alright Ammon?" He glowered. "Well, then, let me put the other view – she's powerful. You saw what she was like on the walls last night. She did more damage to the shadow host than me and all the Greycloaks put together. Besides, if we fail, what use is Qara here?"

Casavir entered, and went to join Elanee at the window. They stood close together, silently, bathed in the gemstone colours of the stain-glass. He was normally one of the most vocal planners and organisers, and, in truth, one of the most competent; but for several days, he had barely said a word. I would never understand paladins.

"The situation in the Merdelain will be different," Jerro was arguing. "Here, we lie on the most violent edge of the storm. There, we will be in its eye. I do not know what awaits us, but what we cannot expect is a simple battle with a three foot wall between us and the forces of the enemy. The sorceress is too liable to get in the way and endanger us all – and endanger our cause." The words 'much more importantly' didn't need to be added. We had all learned to apply them automatically to whatever he said.

"Points duly noted. Thanks, Ammon. What about you, Sand? You seem to know Qara a bit better than most of us. Can I assume you're coming, by the way?"

Jerro folded his arms and stared at me. Generations of Neverwinter aristocrats lived again in the glare of one scrawny human with the temper of a hippopotamus. It was worse than an audience with Nasher. He didn't even know what I would say yet.

"Of course I'll come with you. For a start, I want to make sure that Garius doesn't come back from his next death. And Ammon Jerro is quite right," I said; he frowned at once, probably because he correctly anticipated the qualification that was at once forthcoming. "Qara is undisciplined. And reckless. But we've always known that. She also has red hair. It's simply one of those things about her that is immediately obvious. So what's changed? You've put her in life-threatening situations before, Lila"

I met her eyes, and then turned my gaze meaningfully to her warlock associate. By the flicker of her lashes, I knew she had understood. Lila had taken Qara through Jerro's demented labyrinth, where she nearly died. As did I.

"The level of danger is likely to be higher this time. It won't be a brawl against a few companies of skeletons. Retreat won't be an option," said Jerro, to all appearances oblivious to the silent exchange.

"Running away is never an option for Qara, anyway. And since when were you worried about putting young wo – putting people in danger?" I corrected myself. No need to make this spat more drawn out than necessary. Though at least it was serving to distract me from my intense terror of approaching death. "We're all in danger. And as you have repeatedly reminded us, if we fail, safety is a word that can be struck from dictionaries all over the continent."

"She's very young," said Lila, who didn't seem much older than Qara to me.

"And capable of carbonizing a vampire before it can even flash its fangs. Listen, dear girl. If we put Qara in the vanguard, we can use her as a scourge to vanquish our enemies. I don't like the girl, and don't trust her – but she's indispensable. And I fear that if we leave her here, we are merely lowering to nothing our own chances of ever returning from the Mere."

"Thank you, Sand," Lila replied, and smiled brightly – too brightly - at someone behind me. "Qara. We were just talking about you."

"I know." Qara stalked past me. Her face was still covered in smoke from the battle, and her robes were singed and torn at the sleeves. "I'm not deaf. So you want me to torch some more shadows for you? Why not." She shrugged, and tucked herself into her chair with her feet drawn up under her.

"You could stay here. Help Kana defend the Keep. The attackers won't be gone for long."

"Neither will we," Qara replied, her lip curling. "I'll burn everything in the swamp to ashes, then come back and finish off whatever's left over here."

"Are you sure you want to come?" Lila asked. I couldn't tell what answer she was hoping for.

Qara wiped her nose with a trailing sleeve. It left more soot on her face rather than less. "Yes," she said "You can't take someone like Sand with you and leave me behind. And stop pretending you care about me, Farlong. You don't. I know how you think." She wrapped an arm around the back of her chair. Gently, dreamily, she reached out her free hand, palm upwards, and conjured a ball of light, as many-coloured as the stain-glass diamonds that were shadowed on Casavir's breastplate. "I want to come."

Jerro looked up from a map he was scrutinizing for long enough to shake his head in disapproval. I couldn't share his misgivings, and was surprised he had any. The man was obsessed with averting one impending disaster. And here was another for, judging by her abilities and her egotism, it was clear to me that if Qara lived to attain her full powers, it would be so much the worse for everyone else. I thought of the barrel. The smouldering bodies. The rash, beautiful boy dying under my own awnings while the snow fell.

"If you're certain," said Lila.

"Oh yes," Qara breathed, not looking away from her enchantment. "Certain."

Chapter Text

Shadow Shrivings

Tarsakh, 15

My dearest Harcourt,

This letter and the attached package should reach you two days before I do. This is the last of my – what shall we call them? - affidavits? depositions? - indeed, it is the very last of my documents in the case. Thank you for you patience and forgiveness of my neglect of your interests; the mania, I feel, is at last passing. With the letter is a sensory stone. I have not transcribed the content – I leave you to discover it for yourself. Though I do warn you that what you see, or rather, hear in it is not easy to forget. I needed several glasses of the local fire-water afterwards to recover my equanimity. There is also a note from a mild-mannered scholar of our shared acquaintance to go with it. The man's humility truly shines from the parchment.

His hypothesis is wrong, by the way. Qara's last act was not simply derived from the wish to end in her own flames. Nor, as Lila Farlong thought with a certain level of egoism, was it an attempt to save her. I believe that Qara saw the twin chance to revenge herself on Bishop for his frequent unkindnesses, while also paying off her debt to Shandra by saving her only surviving kin, whom she had overheard trying to protect her a few hours before at the final council. Of course, I can't prove it, and will never know for sure. Qara is still in the valley of the Merdelain, lying under a hill of rubble next to Bishop, and she isn't telling.

In your last letter, you asked me whether I would feel differently about what happened if she had been older. It was an intelligent question, and a perceptive question, and one that I feel confident answering in the negative. To me, an elf, though one (let me hasten to add) still in the bloom of youth and vigour, the strong beliefs that humans hold regarding the traits and social role of particular age groups lack substance. To me, you are all young. I judged Qara to be immature and wild not because of her age, but because of her behaviour. After all, present in Crossroad Keep for much of the war were a tribe of pre-pubertal street urchins, whose wizened eyes might have been old when they watched the beginning of the universe. Qara, being compounded from rage and passion, could have lived to a hundred, and still been a child to me.

So milord, ladies, gentleman, I am present in the court, and ready to face trial in the case of Sand versus Sand. The first allegation laid against me is that I wilfully engineered the death of a young woman of good family and noble lineage. This I deny, most strongly. I never harmed her, never ordered her into danger, and frequently advised her to moderate her rash impulses. The second allegation is one unacceptable in any court-of-law worth two coppers, yet it is one that needs to be answered. It is that I contributed to her death through persisting in behaviour that I knew would drive her further into hostility and anger; through letting my jealously and my dislike of her father dictate my treatment of her; through enjoying her humiliations, instead of helping her to overcome them.

It was easy in a time of real conflict, when life and death were constantly at stake, to dismiss jibes and taunts as forgivable lapses, as 'honesty', as a release of fear and stress. When there is a battle tomorrow, what does a little verbal baiting matter today? But we are not demons or blade golems. We are social beings, and need more than cruelty and self-interest to be able to thrive. Shandra had the maturity to see that; I did as well, to do myself justice. But also to do myself justice, I failed in the case of Qara. And there is no punishment for such a crime in the books, except to live with the knowledge that I failed.

As a – moderately – daring young elf, newly arrived in the Sword Coast, I recall priding myself on my worldly superiority to my sheltered kindred still living in secluded valleys or tree-top villages; how stifling the hierarchies were, how tedious the endless parade of festivals and holy days! Every other day being expected to leave work and engage in an obscure rite whose potency was as questionable as its folkloric origins. High Gelthin's Day. The Long Watch of the Blessed Riadweth. The Celebration of the Watercress. The Morning of Rejected Lovers. The Afternoon of Smashed Pineapples. (Would that the latter were my invention.) Yet now, now I fear I begin to see the purpose in a ritual calendar that runs in a twelve-yearly cycle with no day or night left unconsecrated to something. It both gives space, and set limits to the voices of the past. Enough room for catharsis, but not for fruitless obsession. Ritualized memory, followed by ritualized exhalation. Tarsakh, 15 is called Lost Chances in this, the sixth year of the cycle. Tomorrow is called The Shadow Shrivings.

Your faithful,

Sand

p.s. Don't worry about me. I'll be back to my usual self by the time we meet, and then you can tell me all about the skeletons in the crypts and the idiots in the attics of the blessed library.

Sand put down his pen. He realized he had misled Harcourt in his letter. The pale sheen in the dark sky, and the fresh smell seeping into angular turret bedroom from a gap in the window informed him that the fifteenth day of the month had been over for several hours. Wafting in with the sharp breezes of the early morning came the cries of the gulls; a briny, wailing dawn chorus.

He stretched in his chair. The muscles in his shoulders and back protested, twinged, and relaxed. He couldn't write any more. Instead, he flicked the edge of the latest missive to Harcourt with the tips of his index fingers, permitting himself to take in the lines and lines of elegantly dancing characters as a single object, and not as mutiny, the past ranged in illogical, inconsistent ranks against him. What a beautiful thing it was he had made. He tapped the letter again, before tossing it lightly to the side of the desk, to rest by the sensate stone that was banded with red and dark green. Bloodstone.

Better not think about that. Better to reach for the decanter and pour a second – or was it third? Or fourth? - glass of jenever. It was now too early to go to bed, and too late to put his mind to any productive task. Out of habit, he opened the journal of the Alchemical Society which he always took with him on his travels, and glanced lackadaisically at a page carrying an illustration of a copper-smith's workshop. The lines hung on the page in unmeaning tangles. Every time he tried to focus on them, they seemed to fade and shift. A waste of time. He snapped the book shut.

There were letters to write to Sorcerous Sundries and to Thunderstone. He took out a fresh sheet of paper, wrote the date and paused. He wrote “Honoured -” He paused again. The pause turned into a hiatus, and the hiatus into a longueur. His shoulders hunched, he continued to sit at the rented, worn old desk, tracing knots in the oak. Outside, he could see grey angles and depths clarify into dwelling hours. A few beams of sunlight began to glow in the east. He moved to the window. Below, the light was advancing up the street.

Placing his hands underneath the central bar of the sash window, he pushed upwards. It didn't budge. There appeared to be nothing wrong with the mechanisms, old as they were. No dimwitted kitchen boy had been permitted to paint over the rails and lining, as sometimes happened at the old hostelries on the trading routes round Neverwinter. He pushed harder, putting all of his not very ample strength into it. The sash window shot up to the top of the frame. He held it up with one trembling arm,while with his free hand he snapped the catch closed before his shoulder muscles could seize the opportunity to hand in their resignation.

“I once killed a dragon,” he told the window, before ducking his head under its sliding panel.

East directly behind the high street were the city walls, and beyond them the first ragged outliers of the High Forest. It had been creeping westwards. In places, the upper branches of beech and pine were spreading their twigs and silvan detritus over the turrets and battlements of the city defences.

By sitting on the window sill and leaning outwards, he could see the sheer eastern cadet of Mount Waterdeep, jutting through the centre of the oldest, wealthiest districts. And north-east – rooftops, chimneys, the patchwork brick and timber frame of an old water tower. He strained his eyes after the black undulations that sat in a haze at the point where earth and sky separated. Among them was one with the outline of a bent trident. Trigoron. The three-headed king of the mountain range.

And somewhere in the miles and miles of unseen ground that lay between Waterdeep and the roots of Mount Trigoron were the low fens, the willow forests and salt marshes of the Merdelain, the slow-marching court. He waited. The sun rose higher, and the blushing pink clouds in the east turned grey, then white, then dissolved into field of cornflower blue. Sand continued his vigil, his eyes fixed to the left of the morning sun. When he focussed, concentrating all his will-power on the search, he thought for an instant that he could see edge of a ragged hill that squatted at the foot of the mountains.

He lost sight of it. Shook his head. Refocused. There it was again. He held onto the distant outline, and slowly, slowly, felt it pull him in. Images flooded his mind. Dappled light. Grass and trees growing in the still peace of centuries at the base. Higher up, slides of rock breaking up the gentle undulations of the slopes. Closer, closer to the largest fragments, and here are straight edges, smooth sides. Near the hill's summit lie two pieces of one great flat stone. Measuring them, imagining them whole, this summons the memory of the vast door that they once capped.

The whinnying of a horse on the street brought him back to himself. He blinked. Rubbed his temples. How foolish this was, he thought, to sit up for hours and hours, waiting for – nothing. It was demented, irrational – and worse, it was melodramatic. It was the kind of thing done by people who weren't Sand. Infants sit up into the early hours waiting for Red Soul to bring them treats after the Harvest Festival. He, however, had always prided himself on his well-reasoned routine, and would never eat anything given him by a stranger, which could expose him to the twin dangers of poisoning and unhygienic cooking practices.

Irritated, he stood up, walked to the table and poured himself more jenever, drank it in one go, and - suddenly conscious of the sluggishness, the imprecision of his movements – placed the glass back and shuffled carefully back to his perch at the window. Nothing stopped him from going to bed, he told himself. But he had no desire to. He leant back, resting his shoulders and head against the window frame. Eyes open, mind awake, he dreamed.

He was standing again at the broken door lintel. Behind the flat rocks was a rubble of masonry, blocking the entrance passage, moss already sprouting in the sheltered cracks and crevices. He leant his cheek against the innermost of the stones. Cold. Above him the sky shone bright blue. He lowered his gaze. Tried to take one further step in his imagination that would let him inside the palace. Tried to imagine the stones melting past him, leaving him standing within the barrow in a corridor patterned with intricate vaulting like a spider's web. It was not possible. Something in him forbade those last few steps, and left him standing at the side of a crumbling old hill surrounded by spring foliage.

Nor, for all that he held his breath and listened, could he hear anything excepting the whistle-calls of blackbirds.

Heavy knocking.

He started, and clutched the sides of the window sill for support. His heart raced. The adrenaline was managing to pierce even his pickled blood cells. He had been so deep in his dream that for one moment, a moment of sickening excitement, he had believed the knocking to have come from within the destroyed Illefarn palace. He trembled, willing away the sudden feeling of nausea.

But he was in his warm room in The Lost Lion, the sun warm, and even the ear that he had pressed against the granite was warm. He checked his pulse, just to be on the safe side. It was stabilising. Good.

The knocking came again.

“Sand!” a male voice called.

He recognised it. He hopped down, and went over to the door. The floorboards squeaked under his feet in a reassuringly humdrum manner. Before lifting the latch, he glanced in the mirror. A little tired, a little ruffled, yet on balance acceptable. Not bad, considering that he'd been expecting to see a wild-eyed, spirit-sodden mess. He drew back the bolt, lifted the latch and let the door swing open.

And in the corridor: a tall human in dusty riding gear. Mud spattered all along his boots up as far as his hips. A beard perhaps a ten-day old or more.

“Dear boy, what have you done to yourself? Go and shave immediately .”

Harcourt fluttered his lashes in an elaborate simulation of surprise. “You don't like it?” he asked. Not waiting for an answer, he bent down to kiss him, rubbing his bristles firmly against Sand's jaw as he did so. Then, pushing past him, he clattered into the room still wearing his heavy boots, and stood at the desk, prodding at every object he found. He glanced at the barely initiated letter to Sorcerous Sundries, took off a glove to brush his bare palm over the sensate stone – he shivered as the red and green shadows danced under his skin – and finally examined the level of liquid in the decanter.

“Have you never heard of the notion that the integrity and privacy – privacy, take note – of people's possessions should be respected?” Sand asked.

“Heard of it. Stopped believing when I met a group of adventurers with a stolen silver sword, stolen dragon loot and a stolen castle who wanted to save the world.” Harcourt held the decanter up to the light and gave it a shake. He tutted.

“Entirely legally acquired castle,” said Sand. “And we had neither sword nor dragon loot nor castle when we first met. That was when we came to Aldanon's house. You opened the door.” Sentimentality threatened to engulf him; he drew back from it. “You're sacrificing accuracy for the sake of style. A clever remark isn't worth distorting chronology for.”

“Now where could I have picked up the idea that it was?” smiled Harcourt. That beard really was most distracting. He remembered how in his childhood a playmate glued moss on her cheeks and pretended to be a human. Dumbo Dragonfood the Barbarian Chief, he believed they had called the character. “But I don't have your memory, Sand.”

“Then thank your stars for it. It's not always a gift to have an excellent memory. One can forgive, perhaps, but never forget.” He paused, again feeling that he had grown too serious. “Of course, normally it's wonderfully useful. You never know when you may need to name the thirty-seven principal species of mountain salmon.”

“Mountain salmon? I swear you're making that up. Are there also cuddly gnolls and fire-breathing chinchillas in your mental compendium of beasts?”

“On the contrary. They are as real as you and I. In fact, the Waterdeep Zoological Gardensis said to have some very fine examples of the family.”

Sand glanced out of the window, at the sun shining cheerfully over the roofs, the spires, the battlements of the great city. He turned back. His eyes met Harcourt's. The young man seemed to have had the same idea.

“Do you know Waterdeep well?” Harcourt asked.

“Hardly at all.”

“Well then – today could be as good a time as any for exploring the city.” With a disapproving glance at the unslept in bed, he added, “Unless you need to rest. Candlekeep has given me two weeks' leave. We don't lack for time.”

“I am an elf, my dear young man. I can make do without sleep much better than you.” Despite the beard, Harcourt seemed especially young at that instant, pale and tired from the journey as he was. “Very well. Today we will explore the city. And this evening I will shave that dreadful growth off you. You simply don't look like yourself with it. I fear the disreputable influence of your employers. If you decide to shave your head and wear a habit, I assure you I will expect at least a month's notice in writing before seeing you, so I can steel myself.”

Harcourt laughed. “And so you're not glad I'm here?”

Sand reached up and brushed his fingers through his boy's dark curls. Just a few grey strands here and there. “Well now,” he said. “What do you think?”

Leaving arm in arm with his friend, he threw a last look back to the window. The sun was high in the sky; white gulls swooped low over the high street. He could hear the wheels of carts crunching along the gravelly surface of the road. But far away, far past the toing and froing, the day-time life of the city, he could see the Sword Mountains sitting in pools of silence, the night still shading their distant slopes.