The River Takes Them

Opening

The fight was already lost — for the men in the warehouse, not for the party. The guards in red dropped their will the moment their masters turned to run; the ones in black held for a single round more, until the damage came down on them and taught them what the red ones had already understood. Nobody in that warehouse had ever imagined this happening. They had been hired to stop a theft, not to die for one.

And their masters were leaving. Meridian had said something to Vorath — three words, four, whatever it took to tell him the documents were gone, out of the building, in the party's hands. Whatever it was, it turned him. He gathered her up against the ruin of the fight, spread his wings off the catwalk, and took to the air over the black water of the harbor.

Cloud of Daggers

Yeltsu was already outside, at the very edge of the land, moving twice as fast as the world around him under the haste Zuktind had laid on him. He watched the two of them climb into the night — Vorath carrying Meridian in the same square, the same body of air — and he reached for the spell he had come to love.

Not the low version. He conjured the daggers at fourth level, a churning cube of them born in the air around both figures at once, and the blades did what blades do. Nineteen points to each of them. Meridian screamed as the edges opened her skin. Vorath tried to keep his posture — tried, out of pride, to fly through it — and the constitution that had carried him this far failed him all at once. He rolled, and rolled badly, and the daggers took his wings apart in shreds.

The flight simply stopped. It was night; there was nothing to see. There was only the sound — a splash, and then the dark closing over the place where two dragonkin had gone into the river together.

Turning Point — The Kill

The current had them. It surfaced them once, briefly, and began to drag them toward the edge of the map, and Zuktind was already moving. Nine turns deep into his own haste, he flew out low over the water and lowered himself toward the thing that had been an enemy a moment ago and was now only a body being pulled under.

"I will save you from drowning on one condition," he called down. "Tell me what I want to know."

Vorath did not answer. Vorath could not answer — a man taken by a river does not stop to negotiate, and he was barely conscious of the water, let alone the offer. The words fell on nothing. Zuktind pulled back to think.

Telno had crossed the ground toward the harbor's edge without fully seeing what was happening. Lissandra had seen all of it. She came to the water's lip where the two struggling shapes were still visible, and she raised her hands.

Hold Person. On both of them. Both failed their saving throws. Both went rigid as struck statues.

Zuktind understood the arithmetic before anyone said it aloud. "When you're paralyzed in the water," he said, "you can't move your arms and legs to swim. They will sink like rocks." He heard his own voice change. "She's going for the kill."

She did not flinch and she did not hurry. She said the words, held her hands out over the river, and stared down into the water as Meridian and Vorath — locked, rigid, unable to lift a finger against the current — slid back under and were gone. She had known exactly what she was doing. She had always known what she was. Telno stood too far off to reach any of it, and something cold opened behind her eyes that would not close again that night.

The River Will Not Give Him Back

Zuktind refused it. He would not let the interrogation drown with them.

He landed on a moored boat and watched the black water, waiting for a head to break the surface. Vorath threw off the paralysis on a later breath — his constitution was the strongest thing about him — but breaking the spell was not the same as reaching air, and he sank again without finding it. Meridian never came up at all.

Then, for one moment, at the very last instant it could have mattered, Zuktind saw him: Vorath surfacing, hurt, spitting river, barely afloat. Zuktind spent his last spell to bring the haste back, flew out ahead of the drift, and reached down to seize an arm.

"Listen carefully. If you want to live, you will tell me what I want to know."

But there is no bargaining with a drowning man, and there is a reason that those who swim out to save the drowning so often drown themselves. Vorath's flailing was not surrender; it read as resistance, dead weight and thrashing panic, and Zuktind's grip failed. The current pulled, Vorath pulled, and Zuktind was dragged off his flight and down into the river with him. He kept his head above the surface by will and a good roll — and then by the only spell he had left, walking his own weight back up onto the top of the water as though it were a floor. He knelt on the river's skin and reached in one last time toward the place he had seen Vorath go under.

There was nothing there. The current had already carried Vorath toward the map's edge and out of sight. Meridian was somewhere below, and would not be coming up.

Telno was a hundred and twenty feet away, and when the splash took Zuktind she had shouted his name into the dark, helpless, with nothing in her hands that could reach him. Now she came and helped him up out of the water, and looked out at the river with anger and hard resolve.

"I couldn't save him," Zuktind said. And then, because it needed saying: "Feral he may be, but he's still a brother in the end."

She said nothing at all.

The Warehouse

There had been a second alarm somewhere in the building, and Zuktind could not let it go. While the others gathered themselves at the water, he and Yeltsu went back inside to find the source.

The lower rooms gave them nothing worth the trouble. A kitchen with a table you could have vaulted if you tried. A privy behind one door. A pantry behind another — the DM reaching for the word and losing it and finding it again. A sink stacked with dirty dishes behind a third. Whatever had rung the alarm, it had not rung down here.

Upstairs was different. The room proved to be Vorath and Meridian's own — a bed that looked like a heap of junk, a window, a desk with a bell hidden beneath it — and in the wreckage of it the real prize surfaced piece by piece. A second cash box. A folded paper that Zuktind recognized on sight as a letter of credit. A cloak whose weave carried a shimmer he had seen before, on Lissandra's shoulders. A beautiful longsword on the wall that rang magical under his hand even if he could not name what it was. And, tucked away on the way out, a package of a very particular make — a bag worked with intricate decoration Zuktind knew intimately, because he had once studied how to duplicate the one he carried.

A second bag of holding. He handed it to Yeltsu the instant he understood what it was, keeping it as far from his own as the room allowed — no accidents, no rifts torn in the fabric of the world tonight. The bulky warehouse cargo, spices and cloth and metalwork, they left where it lay. It was near one in the morning. Waterlogged and spent, they went back to the inn, meaning to sleep, wake early, and carry their report to Glasstaff.

The Morning After

They read nothing that night. Morning came first, and with it the thing they had all been carrying to bed.

Over breakfast — the murmur of the street coming in through the wall, the party folded into their own private corner — Zuktind tried to stand between his sister and Lissandra. He did not have the charisma for a mediator's work, and he tried anyway. Telno had wanted an interrogation. Lissandra had taken a kill.

Lissandra gave no ground. "I saw an opportunity and I took it," she said. "That's what I do. That's what we have done for a long time." Now that Zuktind's elder sister had arrived with all the clergy's teaching of Bahamut behind her, Lissandra allowed, their methods might be questioned — but she had done nothing she had not always done.

Telno was infuriated. "Now you are blinded, brother," she said to Zuktind. "There was no justice in what happened yesterday. There was no mercy." She turned on the paladin. Did his god not concern himself with justice? Did he think it fair?

Rathenfall did not soften it. "Yes," he said. "We should have been able to interrogate them." And then, plainly: "I was nowhere near when it happened. If I could have stopped it, I would have."

Zuktind reached for a middle path and it slipped through his fingers. He floated docking Lissandra to two-thirds of a share for something so reckless; she refused it flat. "I'll have my full part of the treasure," she said, "and do not call me reckless when I wasn't." So he folded — she would have her full portion, and a warning that would do nothing at all for now. "But consider yourself warned."

Telno's verdict on the whole of it was quieter and colder than the argument that earned it. "Feel free to handle things as you want, brother. But be warned — this one cares not for justice. She cares only for herself."

There was one more thread that morning, half-remembered from Zuktind's own paper notes: a line he was sure Bahamut had spoken, that Insa was with the cult, but not where the cult wanted them to think she was. Neither the god's words as Lissandra recalled them nor the DM's memory matched his. They set it aside — a thing to check against the recording later, rather than settle at the table.

Dividing the Spoils

Then the ordinary work of a party that has survived a bad night. Yeltsu filed at the cash-box locks with his thief's patience — the first opening quicker than the second — while the rest of them sat in an uncomfortable silence broken only by the rasp of steel on the lock. The first box held gold, platinum, and gems. The second held gold, electrum, and a single diamond worth three hundred pieces.

That diamond did not go into anyone's share. It was set aside whole, exactly the size a spell needs to call a soul back across the veil, and pressed into Rathenfall's keeping against the day someone at this table would need it. The coin split five ways. The loose gems went into the bag of holding Zuktind had made.

Lissandra glanced at the cloak Zuktind had carried up from the warehouse. "It's a cloak of displacement," she said, unbothered, as though the morning's argument had never happened. "It's very useful." Zuktind attuned it and put it on.

The wall-sword took longer — an hour Lissandra spent in ritual before her arcane sense could name it. A flame tongue: a blade that could wake into fire at a word. They meant it for Yeltsu, the only one of the main party still without a magic weapon at twelfth level, and when the greatsword's shape did not fit his hands they reworked it into a finesse rapier that did. Zuktind kept the Mace of Disruption at his hip and his infused musket at his shoulder, and the morning's bookkeeping was done.

The Ledger

Paper rasped against paper as Zuktind spread the documents across his knees, Rusty leaning in at his side. The murmur of the street went on beyond their corner. The ledger columns were neat, legitimate, boring even — dock fees, freight, brokerage, custom stamps — until the right-hand column began repeating something that was not a name. Just initials. KJ. And again, TA. Eighteen percent of every coin Vorath and Meridian moved was bleeding steadily out to those two, and neither bled like an honest debt.

Then a name he did know, written plainly in the record: Mira Ashveil. The company had done business with her.

He read deeper, and the paper gave up more than ink. On a blank page the pressure of a pen had left the ghost of a letter written above it, and reading the impression he recovered the words: Complications. Mira Ashveil has gone to ground. The workroom was cleared, but the index material was not recovered. If she surfaces and talks, the corridor situation becomes untenable. Recommend the Talon receive updated authorization to address her. Something called the Northern Transit ran beneath it all.

He read it aloud, quiet enough to keep it in the party's corner, loud enough for all of them to hear — who is the Talon? — and pushed further into the page. What he found was stranger and colder than a single letter: two messages on the same sheet, a request and its reply, both in the same methodical hand. Meridian's hand. She had written her messages out before she spoke them, and copied down the answers she was given, so that she would forget nothing. She had been talking to the Talon — and the ledger's TA line was the Talon's money, drawn steadily out of the business like a wound that would not close.

He worked at what the Talon was until the shape of it came clear. Not a council. Some arm of the Cult of the Dragon with a specific mission of its own — a body that carried out special work and, more than that, one that could grant and withhold authorization to other cultists. Enforcers. And the whole of Vorath and Meridian's honest-looking trade was a front for that cult, bribery and contraband beneath the freight, which was precisely why the pair had bolted the instant they learned the documents were taken. Neverwinter has no love for the Cult of the Dragon; exposure meant chains. Whatever else was true, Vorath was not coming back to that warehouse.

And the last piece landed like a gift. The order to kill Mira had come directly to Vorath and Meridian — the two of them now drowned or fled. The hunters were gone. It might, at last, be safe for the cartographer to surface.

Closing

If the party could only find her.

Not even her assistant knew where Mira had gone to ground — but the assistant, at least, might have a guess, a thread pulled loose the night someone broke into the workshop. That was the next lead, and the party laid it aside for the morning ahead: seek out Mira Ashveil's assistant, get word to her that the men hunting her were dead or gone, and through her find the road to Tamarand, King of Justice, the Ancient Gold Dragon — the whole reason they had bled for a warehouse full of ledgers on a black river in the middle of the night.

Somewhere out past the harbor, the river ran on toward the edge of the map, and did not give back what it had taken.