A Direction, Not a Door

Opening

They woke late, because they had come in late, and by the time they left the Amber and Anchor the morning had already spent itself. The streets of Neverwinter were past their first rush — the people who worked had gone to work, and the ones left in the road were buying, or looking, or going to see someone. The party moved through them the way they always did: too big to be ignored, a dragonkin with wings and a leonine head and shoulders above the crowd, and the crowd folding open ahead of them without being asked.

Behind them the night before still hung in the air, unfinished. Two figures had gone into the river out of the V&M warehouse fight — held fast by Lissandra's magic, unable to swim. What Lissandra had done, and whether it was any different from the killing they had already done, was a thing Telno had raised and Lissandra had answered with a flat nothing different from what we've done so far, and it had not been settled between them. No one settled it this morning either. They carried the documents they had pried out of that warehouse, and a plan: the cartographer first, to find Mira Ashveil's apprentice; the Hollow and its business could wait for the dark, when the people they needed to see kept their hours.

Somewhere in that busy street, Zuktind's eye caught on a man who did not belong to the errand of the morning.

The Man Behind Them

He was thin, and old, and dressed in nothing that meant anything — peasant's clothes, dirty, the clothes of a man who slept where he could. He kept his distance and he kept behind them, and he had done so since the inn. Zuktind marked him without turning his head, and passed the doubt down the line: this was a tail, but a poor one, nothing with muscle behind it. Not the cult, then. The cult would have hired a body, not a beggar.

Yeltsu read the man the rest of the way clear. There was no professional in him, no loyalty, no stake — only a few coins pressed into a palm and a name to watch. A street person, doing the one bit of paying work that had ever come looking for him.

So Zuktind did not confront him in the road. He walked as though he had no interest in the man at all, drifted wide down the middle of the street until the corner came even with them — and then cut through the crowd faster than the old man could react and put him against the wall before he thought to run.

"We mean you no harm," Zuktind told him. "All we want to know is who paid you to watch us."

The man tried the honest lie first — who told you I was, I'm not watching anybody, I'm just asking for some change — and it fell apart in his mouth the moment it met Zuktind's patience. He was too poor to hold a secret against an offer. The truth came out of him like water. A fine woman had done it. Black hair, and green eyes — proper green, like glass, he said — dressed the way only real money dressed, nothing like the market folk with their loose coins. And she had not handed him the coins. She had dropped them into his palm, two coppers, and not touched him doing it. "I don't think she wanted to touch me," he said.

Zuktind knew her then — not by sight, but by the shape of her: the woman they had taken prisoner once before, the one with friends in the Lord's Alliance who had reached in and gotten the captured Phandalin raiders set loose again. He paid the old man far better than she had — an electrum for the truth, then more, pressed into his hand, to buy his silence and his cooperation. Tell her nothing worth hearing. Tell her the strangers walked around town and went back to the inn. It was not even a lie, Zuktind pointed out; that was the whole of what they meant to do.

The man left rich, by his measure — two years of proper meals in a fist — and delighted with his new trade. "I hope more people tell me to follow people like you again," he said, going. "I should tell people when they are being followed next time."

The Cartographer's Door

Chart Street was short, and Ashveil Cartographic Services still hung its sign, but the shopfront behind it stood dark and the door was locked. Someone had set the window display to rights since the ransacking — the wreckage tidied, the glass ordered, a small proof that the place had not been altogether abandoned. Zuktind knocked.

The latch worked before the door opened, and Tesswyn came out to meet them all at once, too fast to be careful. "I was waiting for you," she said. "I went to the tavern last night, but you weren't there. Where have you been?"

Inside, with the door shut behind them, Zuktind gave her the night: they had gone for the cult's leaders and the information they held, tried to take it quietly, and been forced to fight their way clear. The two who ran V&M had gone into the river. One woman drowned and did not come up; the man was pulled under and might have lived or might not. Either way, he would not trouble Neverwinter again for a long while — and the woman they had come to help, whoever the cult had marked for death, was safer for it.

Her face moved through all of it as he spoke — the rhetorical question forgotten, the worry rising, the reflexive are you all right she never quite said, and finally a conflicted quiet at a doom she could not decide how to feel about. But she had a lead, and she had been turning it over since they left. She had no address for Mira. What she had was a place: the lower harbor, near the canal, somewhere Mira had once named the way you name a place you never expect to have to explain. Weeks of waiting in a locked shop had made her ready to go the moment they were.

The Body in the Canal

They went through the streets again, later now, the crowds thicker, and as they came toward the lower harbor they walked into a commotion before they could see the cause of it. People pressing in, more arriving, and fragments carrying over the heads of them — pulled her out this morning, the harbor man said; the Watch has stood there an hour and done nothing; nobody's seen her face before. The party was big enough that the crowd opened for them, and it opened all the way to the water's edge, and there on the bank lay a drowned woman, face-up, an hour out of the river.

It was Cassine Meridian. The operations mind of Vorath & Meridian, the woman from the warehouse — smaller now, outside of it. She had made it to the water and no further.

The crowd did not know her the way the party did, but it knew enough. Word of a drowned body travels a city faster than the body travels the river, and by the time they arrived the whispers had already found their shape: that she was no honest trader, that the Watch was turning her warehouse over and finding ugly things in it. "I heard she was with the cult," a man said, "the cult of the dragon." Another scoffed at him, and the argument rippled outward — and somewhere in it the eyes began to turn, from the body to the dragonkin standing over it, and the whispers changed direction.

Zuktind felt it land on him and did not like the weight of it. He had stood in a crowd like this before, in a town that had nearly hanged them for the shape of their kind. To Telno he said, low, that it would be best if they moved on — the people here were turning unfriendly toward their sort — and he turned away from the scene and started walking and trusted the rest to follow. That Meridian had surfaced alone told them one thing worth carrying away: Vorath, maybe, was still somewhere the river had not given back.

They had barely cleared the crowd when a woman fell into step beside them. Slight, middle-aged, dressed like some chandler's assistant, unremarkable in every way except that she had been watching the party and not the body.

"You're not from the district," she said. Not a question. She kept walking. Did they work, or were they only looking around? They had come from the upper docks, she said — where a woman might have drowned yesterday.

Zuktind gave her the careful answer, that the dead woman had by all accounts been an unsavory sort, and that death was a tragedy even so.

"I guess it's not that easy to speak about this," the woman said, "when you help her drown."

"How would you claim such a thing?"

"How would I know, right?" She let it go. "Doesn't matter." And she turned, and looked at them, and waited — and when Zuktind said very well, I follow, she led.

Finding Mira

She took them deeper, down into the lower districts where the streets pinched narrow and the trades grew small and specific — rope repair, sail-menders, the fitting of brass. Tesswyn came quiet at their backs, wide-eyed at a thing she did not understand but recognizing the ground under her feet: this was the district she had guessed. Above a rope workshop stood a row of storage units, and at one door with no marking on it the woman stopped. She knocked — twice, a pause, once — and stepped back, and told them to go ahead.

A voice came through the wall before the door would open. Wait. I need to ask you something. What had they found in the workroom? The hidden compartment, Zuktind answered. Where? In the floor. It was enough. The latch gave.

The woman inside was shorter than any of them had braced for — shorter than Tesswyn, shorter than most things in a room that was nothing but flat surfaces and paper. She looked at Tesswyn first, then at each of them, the way a person checks a picture built from description against the thing itself. She did not look relieved. She looked like someone whose problem had merely entered a new phase. Tesswyn broke and ran to her, and the two of them held each other and talked over each other, and Mira Ashveil let it run its course and then turned her assertive attention on the strangers filling her hiding place.

"You follow the research," she said. "Come in. Don't touch the maps."

Zuktind told her the good of it first: the two the cult had set to kill her, one dead in the river, the other swept away and unlikely to return. Mira's read on it was dry and unsurprised — it's not right to hire a professional to do a work and then try to get rid of them. He showed her the letter, and then the rest of the documents he had saved from Meridian's acid, and she went through the ledger without a word, hunting specific dates, and found what she wanted in them — good, at least this — and handed it back. Then she named her price.

"I need to leave the city. That's my price." She would not be argued out of it. "You have a dragonkin on the loose that has orders to kill me. You say it will take him a while to come back. But somebody gave that order." She held the letter up. "Two people were sent for me. What keeps them from giving the same order to somebody else?" When Zuktind offered to smuggle her out after their night's meeting, she waved it off. "I don't need to be smuggled out. I just need to leave. And I'm going with you."

Then came the harder sell — his, not hers. He told her why they had come: that a great worm of Bahamut, taken into a woman's shape, had sent them to seek her, because she could lead them to Tamarand, the King of Justice, whose council of metallic dragons was the only counterweight to Tiamat's mustering children. Mira looked at him the way a shopkeeper looks at a tall tale. Are you sure you're not just talking to some old man who tricked you? We are talking about the same Bahamut — the platinum dragon? It was not the god's name that turned her. It was the road to him. Zuktind spoke of the ordeal on Mount Celestia — of climbing the mountain of the Seven Heavens and proving themselves before they were ever allowed to speak — and no charlatan hosts an audience behind an ascent like that. Tesswyn talked her the rest of the way, reminding her of what she had prayed for while she hid, and of how rarely the God of Justice answers by sending help to the door.

Turning Point — The King of Justice

Mira let a silence sit, and then gave them the thing they had crossed a city and a warehouse fight to reach — and it was not what they had come for.

"As surprising as it might be," she said, "me, Mira Ashveil — I never met Tamarand."

But a title like King of Justice, she said, does not come from nowhere. Someone gave it to him, and enough others agreed, and a great dragon with a name and a reputation is seen, and where he is seen he is spoken of, and the speaking leaves witnesses, and witnesses leave records, and records can be found. She stopped being a woman in hiding and became, in front of them, a professional at her craft — reaching for parchments, thinking aloud. He would have claimed high ground, a fixed lair, permanent and ancient. The Sword Mountains? No — too close; they would have known of that. The Northern Great Peaks, more likely — the mountains to the northeast — which sat well with the V&M commissions she had built. Not a mark on a map. A direction, and a way to close on it: the harbor master's flight and freight records, the northern freight houses, the guides who worked the northern passes, the Temple of Bahamut here in the city, and the Andavar Archive. Leads, gathered along a road, until the road ended at a lair.

They had wanted an X on a map. What they had was a heading and a method — and a partner who knew how to follow both.

Closing

Mira was already packing before the conversation had fully closed, talking to herself as she went — we'll need this, we'll need that, I can't forget the paper and the ink — gathering compasses and the tools of her trade into a backpack, alive with the prospect of the thing. Whether Tesswyn would come or hold the shop was left unsettled, a question for another day.

There was time before the dark and the meeting at the Hollow. The harbor master's, then — first stop on a road that had no clear end, only a direction: northeast, into the mountains, after a great golden dragon none of them had ever seen. The race that had begun as a search for information had become a race for position, and the party left the little paper-filled room with a cartographer at their side and a whole quarter of the world to cross.