Good Faith

Opening

The glass staff was already on the table when the meeting resumed — both his hands visible on either side of it, a man laying down his tools to prove he had none hidden. Glasstaff had not been invited to sit at The Hollow's warehouse on Wharfmasters Row, and he sat anyway, the way a man does when he has decided his own terms of entry. Along the walls, Caevar Moss's people watched from where they leaned, saying nothing, tracking the winged shapes of the party the way careful men track weather.

Three times the party had fought this man. Three times he had slipped away. Now he was across a table, offering to trade.

Zuktind reminded him where they had left it — the cartographer, Ashveil, and the promise of information if the party helped him first. There had been no bargaining yet. Only the shape of one, waiting to be made.

The Broker's Table

Zuktind opened with his own price. He remembered, he said, what they had found in the ruins of Tresendar Manor after their first bloody encounter — letters that named the one he had crossed half a continent to find. If Glasstaff could deliver word of a certain Insa, the party would do far more than the bare minimum he asked.

Glasstaff had nothing on the woman. He barely remembered her name. But the cult she served — that he could sell. He knew where the cell operated in Neverwinter and how it moved. His price was patience: twenty-four hours' warning before the party struck, so his own people, planted inside, could be pulled clear before the fighting started. He had lost men to this party before. He did not intend to lose more.

Zuktind, ever the one to think a thought all the way out in the open, went further than the deal required. Best, he reasoned aloud, that Glasstaff withhold even the location until his people were clear — so that no one at the table could be tempted to charge in early. He knew the party's habit of doing exactly that. He was guarding them against themselves.

Then the negotiation turned on him. Pressed on what the party had learned in their days about the city, Zuktind volunteered too much — that they had recovered a spare map, one the cult had torn a workshop apart searching for and never found, and that it was now in their hands to be used against the cult if it came to that. He caught himself a beat too late, seizing his own snout shut as though he could pull the words back through it. Glasstaff only smiled. That kind of candor had a cost. Three hundred gold, he said — for talking too much. Zuktind growled, and threw the coins onto the table.

What the money bought was a confession, offered flat and without apology. "I gave the information about this cartographer of yours to two individuals called Vorath and Meridian," Glasstaff said. "They needed her address, her schedule, her routines, and we gave it to them. That's what we do. I didn't ask what they were going to do with it. And I'm telling you now because I'd rather you hear it from me." He read Mira Ashveil as alive — competent enough to have run when they came for her, gone to ground somewhere in the lower districts. Whatever they had commissioned from her, he added, unaware he was handing them the most important sentence of the night, involved high mountains and country a person could only chart from the air.

He gave them the address on the upper river docks, and Cassin Meridian's name, and his read on the two men who ran it. When Rathenfall pressed for a way through the door, the paladin's cold persuasion pulled loose the rest — a gap in the guard rotation between midnight and the second hour, alarms wired to the building, a private dock and crane on a canal that flanked the place on two sides. Meridian was methodical, Glasstaff said, and methodical men are predictable; he documented everything, and a man who keeps every record keeps a means to burn them. Take the building before he can, and he would not need to say a word. Vorath was another matter — he would not break on pain, and here Glasstaff gave Zuktind a smirk and allowed that Vorath resembled him in certain ways, though he had made different choices in life.

There was one more name. A young woman of Caevar's network, barely into her twenties, sent ten days ago to carry a package to a private address for Vorath and Meridian. She had not been heard from since. Della, her name was. Find out what became of her, and the cartographer's whereabouts were theirs. Caevar had not asked after the girl himself — but when the deal was struck Yeltsu watched the man's face and understood the shape of what was held there, contained rather than composed. Not an employer worried about an asset. A father who could not act on the answer.

What Does Your God Make of This

Before the party left, Caevar spoke to the one who had said the least.

He had watched them clear a building once — watched what came out of that wreckage, and rebuilt something smaller from what was left. Now he sat across from the paladin who had done it, and asked, not as a challenge but as a man who genuinely wanted to know: "Paladin of Tyr, God of Justice — tell me something. What does your god make of all of it? What does he tell you that justice is?"

Rathenfall did not answer.

"I don't know," he said at last. "I'll figure it out later."

It was the truth, and it was no answer, and Caevar received the silence the way a verdict is received — as a thing that had settled whether or not anyone spoke it aloud. The paladin's stoic face did not crack. But the question did not leave with him. It rode the party out the door and down the street and sat with them long after.

The Inn, After

Back at the inn that night, over a meal, the animosity of years had somehow thinned to something almost ordinary. An outsider watching them talk would never have guessed that these people and Glasstaff had, three separate times, tried in earnest to kill one another. Lissandra put words to it plainly — perhaps the man had simply grown tired of being beaten. Three times they had nearly finished him. There was a number of times a person could take a thrashing before deciding it was wiser not to cross you again, and Glasstaff seemed to have reached it.

Morning brought a smaller revelation, and it was Zuktind's own. Turning over his spellcraft the way an artificer must at the start of a day, he discovered a thing he had apparently been able to do all along and never had — swap the spells he kept ready. He set about it at once, trading away what a quiet infiltration would never need for the tools it might: a face that was not his own, and the means to make his companions vanish. The rest of his list he left as it stood.

Tesswyn, at First Light

When they came down into the common room of the Amber and Anchor, the halfling was already there.

Tesswyn had been waiting since dawn, small and frail-looking in the wide chair, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea Pell the innkeeper had set before her and which had long since gone cold. She looked up at the party with wet, waiting eyes, as though their arrival were the thing she had been holding out for. Yeltsu, gentlest of them, went to her.

"I went to open this morning," she said. "The door was forced. The whole back room — upstairs too. I don't know what they took. I didn't want to be there alone."

They went with her to the ransacked shop. Where the intruders had worked quietly before, careful to leave no trace, now the place had simply been torn open — the door cracked, the rooms overturned. Zuktind went over it with a jeweler's care, Telno murmuring a steady prayer at his shoulder to keep his eye sharp, and what he found told a clear story. The compartment beneath the worktable had been discovered and pried up — but it was empty, the map long since in the party's own keeping. Whoever had come knew, now, that someone else had gotten there first. And the ledger's last page had been torn away. Reaching back through a flash of hard, sudden clarity, Zuktind remembered what that page had held: Vorath and Meridian's commission, the order set down and its fulfillment recorded beside it. They had ripped out the one leaf that named them.

It was Tesswyn, in the middle of all that wreckage, who arrived at the thing that mattered most — not handed it, but worked to it, one careful step after another. Mira was not on any survey. She had told Tesswyn to say so, which meant she had known people would come asking, which meant she had known she was hunted — and a hunted woman does not go north to chart mountains. She goes to ground. There was a place, Tesswyn said, somewhere in the River District near the canal, in the low-rent quarter; Mira had never named the address, and Tesswyn knew of it only from paying close attention to a woman who guarded her privacy. But if Mira was hiding anywhere, she was hiding there.

The shop was no longer safe, and neither was Tesswyn in it. Yeltsu drew her, gently and with a patience she plainly trusted, to agree to wait out the danger at the inn. She went.

Other Faces

That left the matter of who would walk up to the cult's front door, and wearing what.

Zuktind wanted Rusty with them, and Lissandra pressed him on it until he heard the weakness in his own reasoning — that a construct who could not speak or think for itself was worth less on a delicate survey than one more able mind. He looked down at the steel companion, pointed at Telno, and gave the one order that would make him useful where he stood. "Obey Telno." Telno would remain behind with Tesswyn.

The disguises took longer, and Zuktind worried at them aloud through every option. His own frame was the problem — eight feet of dragonkin, wings folded at his back, nothing a stolen human face could hide. He circled toward a chromatic dragonkin, which Lissandra and his own better judgment flagged as far too dangerous to walk through a city; toward an aarakocra, too short; and at last, working through the lore of it, to an aasimar born of human parents — a shape that could stand seven feet and carry wings and demand no explanation for either. Lissandra took the form of a tiefling. Over Yeltsu and Rathenfall, they laid invisibility, some three hours of it to cover the hour the false faces would hold.

Four of them, then, went down to the water.

Closing

The north end of Wharfmasters Row was a quiet stretch of riverfront — fewer storefronts, fewer people, more private wharves with their gates turned to face the water. At the end of the lane stood a building of working stock: weathered timber above, stone at the base, a private dock reaching out over the canal with a small crane arm bolted to its edge. Above the dockside entrance, a painted wooden sign read Vorath and Meridian — River Trade and Acquisitions.

They stood before it in borrowed faces, two of them unseen, and looked at the place where Della was held and the cult did its business, and there was nothing wrong with it at all. Nothing suspicious in the timber or the stone or the quiet. Nothing at the door that whispered Cult of the Dragon. Only a river-trade house at the end of a lane, ordinary as anything — and the certain knowledge, carried in from a broker's table, that ordinary was the whole of the disguise.

They had found the door. Everything past it was still ahead of them.