A Piece of Parchment and Some Wax

Opening

The door of the Lords' Alliance building closed behind them, and the street on the other side of it was only a street.

A cart went by. A dog trotted after it with the air of someone who had business there. On the corner a woman was arguing with a man about the price of eggs, and neither of them looked up at the five filthy travellers and the cartographer coming down the steps — because in Neverwinter, in the morning, there was nothing in the least remarkable about any of it. Life was carrying on. It had not noticed they were gone.

Zuktind had already said what he meant to do with the day, and said it before they left the building: wash, eat, and only then go back to the hunt. They had come out of Barovia wearing it — the black dirt of its road, the grey of its fog worked into every seam — and he would not walk into anyone's house looking like that. The others had agreed. Nobody had wanted a rest; nobody had spent enough to need one. They wanted a basin of hot water and a bowl of something that had not been grown in a country of the dead.

Mira Ashveil had not said a word since the captain's office.

She walked half a step behind the rest, and she was counting on her fingers. Zuktind saw her do it twice before he asked.

"Is something wrong, Mira?"

"I ate for three days," she said. Her fingers were still moving. "We slept. We rested, more than once. And only one night passed."

The Arithmetic

Zuktind gave her the only answer he had. Barovia was on no map that any of them had ever read. Perhaps it was not on this world at all — another plane, with its own rules about how long a night was allowed to last. "Your maps didn't work there either," he reminded her gently. "As if the place didn't want to be mapped."

"Perhaps you're right." She opened her sketchbook as they walked and showed him the pages — the dates she had written at the head of each, the meals, the sleeps, all of it in her neat cartographer's hand. The pages were real. The arithmetic on them did not come out. She closed the book again and kept frowning at nothing.

Then they turned into Castwatch Lane, and there was the same crooked sign, and the same smell of lamb and pitch, and the Amber & Anchor exactly where they had left it.

Cobb looked up from behind the counter and saw five filthy people and a cartographer come through his door, and the cloth in his hand went slowly down onto the boards.

"Sorry for our state," Zuktind said. "You wouldn't believe what happened to us. But it was horrible."

"Your rooms are still yours," said Cobb.

Zuktind put a gold piece down on the counter — not a debt, there was no debt; only an apology, for the smell and the mud and whatever they were about to do to his washbasins. "This is for putting up with us." The boy's face brightened. "Now, if you'll excuse us. We have to clean ourselves up before we do anything else."

It took a long time. Six people and one inn's worth of hot water do not reconcile quickly. But eventually the last of Barovia went down the drains of Neverwinter, and they came down the stairs in clean clothes, and the common room was warm, and it was still early in the day.

What They Carried Out

The stew was the same stew. That was the comfort of it. The pot over the Anchor's fire was the kind that never fully emptied and never went cold — fed a little more each day, the lamb in it from a week ago and the bread beside it from yesterday — and every one of them ate as if they had not eaten since the fog took them, which by one reckoning was true and by another was not.

Telno ate with her left hand. Her right wrist lay on the table beside her bowl, and the little platinum mirror on its band caught the firelight and gave it back as plain metal. She turned it once, considering.

"It seems ordinary again," she said.

"Maybe it's not reacting because we're not in a place of darkness anymore," Zuktind said. He had been thinking about it too. "It may wake again the next time we face the cult. If it carries Bahamut's will, then it stands against Tiamat's — and against everything that serves her." He paused. "Though we carried it in front of the cult before, and it did nothing. So perhaps it is simpler than that. Perhaps it acts when He judges that we truly need Him."

"It was very powerful," Telno said quietly. "Whatever was pretending to be Him in that valley — it simply unmade it."

Zuktind put his spoon down.

It was not the first time he had gone back over it, and it would not be the last. Ravens. The thing on the throne had worn their god's shape and their god's voice, and around it had flown seven birds, and they had been ravens — not the canaries that sing around the Platinum Dragon in every story his people tell. Seven black birds where there should have been seven gold ones. He had looked straight at them. "I am still beating myself up," he said, "over how I could have been fooled by something so simple. So obvious."

He was glad, he told them, that they had never had to learn who S. was. He did not like to think about what might have happened at the end of that road.

"Who do you think it was?" Lissandra asked.

"Something stronger than the wolves," Zuktind said. "As long as we kept to the road toward S., they left us alone. As if they feared S.'s wrath." He followed the thought down. "And if S. was master of that whole realm, then S. could have been the one who dragged us there in the first place. It would explain why the letter already called us guests, before we had ever reached the door. To S., the whole valley was home."

"Maybe the lord of that realm," Lissandra said. "Maybe a friend. A would-be friend. We don't know."

"It still hurts," said Zuktind.

"Then thank the Lord Bahamut," said Lissandra, "for having other plans for us."

They went over the rest of it while the bowls emptied. The girl the Vistani had sent to fetch them. The fortune-teller and her cards. The wheel-ruts in the meadow when they came back out — deep where each wagon had stood, and nowhere else, as though the whole camp had not driven away at all but simply sunk into the ground. Had the wagon-folk been taken with them? Could they come and go as they pleased? Zuktind did not know. "But the girl came for us," he said slowly. "We were targeted. We were the ones they wanted. And why us — that is the question."

He asked whether the others had felt it too, on the platinum road at the end: the whole valley screaming as they walked out of it. Yeltsu admitted that he had — the trees, the wind, every creature in that country howling at once, and the wolves running at the edge of the light with their teeth bared and unable to set one foot on the road. Had they stepped off it for even a breath, the wolves would have been on them.

It was Lissandra who put the knife in, and she did it without raising her voice.

"Again," she said, "we are trusting unknown people blindly. And if not for Bahamut's little mirror out there, we would be in very big trouble this time."

Zuktind took it. He had no defence to offer, and he did not try to find one. "You're right. We can't simply trust anyone. I didn't expect we couldn't trust a child." He searched for the rest of it. "I thought at least the innocence of a child would carry through. But not every child is as innocent as you'd expect."

Lissandra looked at him for a long moment — a deep, level look that went on a little too long to be comfortable.

"Yeah," she said. "You really don't understand."

And then she was somewhere else. Her eyes went to the window and stayed there, distant and thoughtful, and she did not explain, and nobody at that table knew her well enough to ask. Zuktind went back to his stew and turned her words over while he ate, and took them to heart, because he did not know what else to do with them.

A lesson, then. Trust no one without good reason, or until they have earned it.

Outside the window, the ordinary city went past.

The Guide

They had spoken to every merchant and teamster in the city before the girl came, and gone down to the docks besides. That left the guides — the men and women who earned their bread walking travellers through the passes to the north.

The one who would talk to them was called Kase Torren, and he was a professional, and he made that clear before anything else. He listened to what they were looking for — an ancient gold dragon, wingtips drawn bronze — and considered it. "I am a guide, after all," he said. "I lead people to things they want to know. Two gold pieces seems a fair fee."

Zuktind put two gold pieces into his open palm, and the palm closed, satisfied.

"There are gold dragons on the Spine of the World," Kase said. "That much is true. But their lairs are hidden. They keep secret things — treasures they want kept. They do not fly about where anyone can see them." He shrugged. "Plenty of people say they've seen a great gold worm in the north. Most of the time it's some child who thinks he did."

Zuktind lowered his voice. "The one we seek is no ordinary dragon. We were told to seek one called the King of Justice."

"I didn't know dragons had kings."

"Apparently this one is. Or perhaps it is a figure of speech. We do not know him. We only know we were sent to find him, with a letter of introduction to put into his hands."

"If he's that important," Kase said reasonably, "maybe all the dragons know him. Maybe you could ask a lesser one."

"How would we even approach a lesser dragon?"

"I don't know. If you don't know how to approach the small ones, why are you looking for the big ones?" He studied them. "That must be a very important friend you have."

"Yes," said Zuktind. "You could say that."

The guide had nothing more to sell on dragons. But he had walked those passes a long time, and as the talk wound down he came round to the thing that was actually troubling him.

"The mountains are predictable," he said. "You see the same folk up there, season after season — the same folk who know the passages. But these last months I've seen groups I don't know. Organised. They move fast." He let that land. "Never saw them before this season. They're not bandits. They don't travel in caravans. They don't carry banners." His voice went flat. "I don't know them, and I don't wish to. If you're going into those parts — be aware."

"Thank you for the warning," Zuktind said. "We'll keep them in mind."

"You do well to. It's too harsh a country up there for honest work like that." Kase Torren looked north, through the walls of the city, as if he could see the passes from where he stood. "And they seem too much on purpose."

Losses, Claims, Bounties

Mira knew the city, so they let Mira take them to its memory.

The Neverwinter archive was not a place that had ever expected to be asked about dragons, and it took Mira and Lissandra the better part of the day to find that out properly. They read side by side while the others waited: the wizard fast and furious, pulling ledgers two and three at a time; the cartographer slower, more thorough, a lifetime of maps behind her. Lissandra was looking for two things at once — not only where Tamarand might be, but when. There was a ritual coming, somewhere, sometime, and the Circle of the Returned meant to work it under a third moon.

"We're asking the wrong records the wrong questions," Mira said at last, and pushed a sleeve of documents away. "This place doesn't keep anything about dragons. It keeps losses. Claims. Bounties. Dead livestock. Missing freight." No Tamarand. No King of Justice. Nothing.

Lissandra had done better. She had not found a date, but she had found its edges, and she had closed them in. The ritual was no longer some eight months off. It was four months away, or it was eight, or somewhere between. Still a great deal of road for her to research. But narrower than it had been that morning.

It was Mira who thought to ask the archivist herself. Her name was Spira, and she looked up from her desk at the question with the patience of someone who has been asked stranger things.

"Names? We don't keep names for whims. Nobody does." Then, almost as an afterthought: "You want a dragon named and ranked? Maybe the churches will do that."

Zuktind went very still.

"Isn't there a temple of Bahamut in this very city?"

There was.

The Warm Door

It was past noon when they crossed the city. The streets were full of people walking off their midday meal, and Neverwinter was loud and smelled like itself, and as they went down toward the harbour the river at their side began to take on the salt of the sea.

The temple of Bahamut sat back from its district behind a low iron fence. A tall, plain door with a platinum inlay. A small disc set into the stone above the threshold. And under the disc, on a stool, sat a man with a rag in his hand, glaring up at it the way a craftsman glares at a tool that has started doing something it was never supposed to do.

He did not look at them when they came to the gate.

"It's warm," he said.

Zuktind glanced at his sister. "My sister here is clergy too, at another temple of Bahamut. Perhaps she can tell you what it means."

The doorkeeper looked her over. "It's been warm since the midnight office. Eleven years I've sat under that thing, and in eleven years it's been metal." He wiped it again, as though he could wipe the warmth off. "If you know anything about it, be my guest."

Telno stepped beneath the disc and lifted her face to it, and Zuktind watched her search for an answer and come up short — and then, almost without thinking, he reached for the thing in him that makes connections, and pushed it toward her. A flash of insight passed between brother and sister like a spark between two wires.

She did not know what it meant. She did not know if the disc was waiting for them, or answering the Mirror's blaze the night before in a valley that was not on any map, or something else she had no words for. But she knew one thing with a sudden, settled confidence.

"It's about you," she said. "All of you." She lowered her eyes from the disc to the open door. "We're in the right place."

"May we enter?" Zuktind asked the doorkeeper. "We have business with the clergy."

"It's a temple, lad." The man went back to his polishing. "You're free to enter."

A Piece of Parchment and Some Wax

The hall was smaller than Zuktind had imagined a temple of Bahamut in Neverwinter would be — long and narrow, room enough for perhaps forty worshippers on a good day. There were six in it now. An old woman near the front. A man asleep sitting up. Two dockworkers who looked to have come in more from habit than from need. Platinum leaf had been laid along the ceiling beams, and on the pillars below, it had been worn thin in a long band at shoulder height, where generations of hands had touched it on their way past.

It was not a grand house. It was a well-kept one. Zuktind went still and reverent inside it, the way he had been taught.

A woman was crossing the far end of the hall with an armful of linen. She saw them, and stopped dead. Something like astonishment took her face — and then her eyes found Telno's wrist, and the linen slid out of her arms onto the floor and she did not seem to notice it go. She came toward them with her hands half-lifted, wanting to see, wanting very badly to touch, and caught herself just short of doing it.

"Forgive me." She drew her hands back. "I am Sister Kell. It is a pleasure to meet you. What a wonderful surprise."

At the far end of the hall an extremely old man shuffled across, complaining to no one that something was damp, and went out through a side door without a glance at any of them.

Zuktind drew out the letter. Sealed, unbroken, marked with the platinum dragon's head that mortals use as their god's sign, and he held it up so she could see it without putting it into her hands. "Greetings, sister. We seek information for a quest given to us by the Lord of the North Wind himself. We have been blessed to stand before Him, and He told us to seek out one Tamarand, the King of Justice — to show Tamarand this letter, and Tamarand would understand the rest."

Sister Kell's eyes went wide, and wider.

"Oh," she said. And then: "Perhaps it's better if you speak with Avara. Avara Mael. She's keeper of the house."

The woman who came down the hall a few minutes later was around forty, with grey and platinum sleeves pushed back to the elbow and ink on two of her fingers. She had the look of someone who had been deep in paperwork ninety seconds ago and intended to be back in it shortly. She looked them over once.

"You're not from this district."

It was not a challenge. It was a demonstration — of knowledge, and of whose house this was.

"You are correct," Zuktind said. "But we have business in this district. Business from the Lord Bahamut himself." And he held up the letter again, and told it all again: the god, the charge, the name, the dragon who would understand.

Avara Mael looked at the letter for a long moment. Then she looked at him.

"I see a piece of parchment," she said, "and some wax."

"We had hoped you might be able to tell us where to find—"

"I understood that, young lad. But as I said. I see a piece of parchment and some wax." Her voice did not harden; it did not need to. "How do I know you are not thieves, trying to plunder the treasure of a great golden dragon?"

Zuktind had no answer to that. So he did the thing he knew how to do, and turned to his sister.

"This is my sister, Telno. She is clergy of our faith, as you are — from our home village. Sister. Would you show her what Bahamut has blessed you with?"

Telno held out her wrist.

Avara bent to it with real interest. She knew platinum when she saw it, and she knew rare work when she saw it, and a little platinum mirror dangling from a band of the same metal was a pretty thing to find on a travelling cleric. Sister Kell drifted closer again to admire it. "That's a very nice piece of jewellery you have there," the keeper said. "It must have been very expensive."

"We don't know its value," Zuktind said. "It was a platinum mirror, and it turned itself into that bracelet when we were in a dire place. I know there is no way to prove that to you." He spread his hands. "I'm not as learned in our faith as you, or as my sister. Is there any way we can prove she is clergy — that we speak the truth?"

So Telno talked to her.

Not about the Mirror, or the god, or the letter. About the faith — two clerics of the same house, from opposite ends of the north, speaking the language of the people who keep the offices and sweep the rails and know which prayers are said at midnight. Zuktind could not follow half of it. He did not need to. He watched Avara Mael's shoulders change. He watched her look at Telno's face properly, for the first time, and something in her own face shift. She knew her. From where, or when, neither woman stopped to say.

When the keeper turned back to Zuktind, the wall had gone out of her voice. "This letter. Did Bahamut tell you to bring it to me?"

"He told us to bring it to Tamarand. But we don't know how to find him — only that he should be somewhere in this region."

"I notice it's sealed."

"Of course it is sealed. I would never dare open a letter from our Lord to someone who is not myself."

She almost smiled at that. "There's no designation on it I recognise. If King of Justice is a title and not a name, I couldn't tell you which. Does this King of Justice have a name?"

"Tamarand, Dragon King of Justice," Zuktind said. "An ancient gold dragon. That is all we were told."

And now she did smile, slightly.

"Well. King of Justice," Avara Mael said. "That's the Platinum Father you're describing. We use a dozen names for Him, and that's a good one." She tilted her head. "But if you mean Tamarand — the gold great wyrm called Tamarand is of the Father, certainly. But a king? And he does not live in Neverwinter, nor anywhere near it."

Zuktind's heart sank, and she saw it sink.

"But if the Platinum Lord — the King of Justice Himself — told you to seek this dragon," she said, "then perhaps our archives can tell you where the dragon actually lives." She was already turning toward the back of the house. "I suggest you get down to praying, then. So the Platinum Lord will help us find it."

The Rail

"Sister," Zuktind said, "will you lead us?"

"Not all of you are servants of Bahamut," Telno observed.

"No. But it can't hurt if all of us pray."

So they knelt at the rail of the narrow temple — all of them, alongside the old woman and the sleeping man and the two dockworkers — and Telno led them, not in words but in the way of her house: a little incense, a few herbs burned in a shallow dish, and then silence. It was not a prayer said aloud. It was a discipline. A patience. A practice of observing what was in front of you, and waiting.

The house went on around them as it had been going on before they came. Someone swept. Someone coughed. Somewhere a door opened and closed.

Rathenfall knelt among them with his heavy shield laid flat beside him, and was aware, in the way a man is aware of a draught, that he could pray to Tyr here if he chose. Nobody would stop him. Nobody would notice. That was all right. But he knew what he was — a paladin of the Even-Handed, kneeling at another god's rail — and he knew what had happened to him in the dark country, when a god who was not his had spoken his own oath back to him, word for word.

Beside him Yeltsu kept his eyes closed and his breathing even, and carried his own knot quietly. He had been born to a god who was imprisoned now, chained by a usurper wearing that god's own name. He had walked away from that worship and come to another god he had stood before in person. And now he knelt at the rail of a third, who had also spoken to him face to face — in a voice that filled his mind as the platinum road carried them out of Barovia.

Zuktind was lost somewhere in his own head. So much had happened. Here he was in another house of his god, in a strange city, praying with strangers, and he did not entirely know what he was asking for.

Telno did. Telno was centred and still. She trusted her order. They would bring answers. In her mind this was where they ought to have come first, before any guide or merchant or archive — and she did not need to say so.

And Lissandra was not praying at all. Her head was bowed and her eyes were open, and her mind was moving fast. The keeper had walked away into the back of this house and not come back. Who was she speaking to back there? Who might she have sent for? Was there a door in this temple that would close behind them? Would there be someone waiting in the street when they came out? The wizard counted exits, and waited, and did not close her eyes.

It took a long time.

Turning Point — The Top of the Map

Avara Mael came back with a map rolled under her arm and beckoned them to a table.

She spread it out, and it kept going. It ran off the edge of the Sword Coast that every one of them knew, east across the vast pale emptiness of the Anauroch, on toward the far side of the continent. She smoothed it flat with both hands, and leaned over it, and set one inked finger down — high up near the top of the sheet, nowhere near the coast at all.

"The dragon you seek," she said, "lives close to the desert of the Mara, under the great glacier, in the wilderness of Vaasa."

Nobody spoke.

Zuktind looked at the finger, and then at the distance between that finger and where they stood, and then at the distance between that finger and Claw Ridge — and it was more than twice as far. "But how," he said, "are we supposed to reach him?" He gestured at Mira. "He told us to come here. He said this woman would help us find him. And she has." He breathed out. "I still believe His words. But the how escapes me."

"If the Platinum Lord told you this," Avara said, "and you found the woman He sent you to find, then perhaps you are on the right track."

Zuktind asked her to say the name once more, so he could set it down properly. Vaasa. He wrote it in his notes, and spelled it twice to be sure. Seek the wilderness of Vaasa to find Tamarand.

Then they stood around the map and argued with it.

Claw Ridge lay north of the Nether Mountains — Zuktind put his own finger there, and showed them the valley at the mountain's foot where the three feral tribes lived. It was on the way. That was something. But Mira was already shaking her head. Walking was unreasonable. There was the river, but a boat would have to go all the way around the Anauroch. Better, perhaps, to go south from the start and cross by the Sea of Fallen Stars. Zuktind remembered his training in the Claw Ridge guard — he could drive nearly any land vehicle, if they could get one — and that might shorten the road. Lissandra wondered aloud whether magic might reach the dragon first, ask him whether he would come to them, given who had sent the summons. And Mira did the arithmetic again, as she had done on her fingers that morning, and it still would not come out. Even if the ritual were eight months off, the road to Vaasa was longer than eight months. It was half a continent.

It was Telno who said it.

"Or," she said, "we could use the same path I did. At least as far as Claw Ridge." She looked at her brother. "I have the disc for the temple at home. We could teleport there."

Zuktind turned to her as if she had lit a lamp in a dark room.

"You make a good point, sister." He looked round at the others. "If we go to Claw Ridge first, we can stock up on supplies there. My family may be able to help."

"It might be fun," Yeltsu said, "to visit your hometown."

"I have no objections," said Rathenfall.

Telno was certain, too, in a way the others were not — certain that Tamarand was truly there, and that Claw Ridge was the way to him. "We should consult the elders," she said. "Maybe they've even heard of Tamarand."

"Especially the High Elder," Zuktind said. "Maybe she would know what to do. One does not get to be High Elder of Claw Ridge without being both strong and wise."

Avara Mael had listened to all of it with her hands flat on the edge of the map. Now she looked up at the dragonkin and asked a question in the same even voice she had used for everything else.

"So. Are you looking to raise an army of dragons?"

Zuktind answered her honestly, because he did not know how to answer any other way. They were already fighting the Cult of the Dragon, who served Tiamat — and Tiamat's children were mobilising. The chromatic dragons had a side in this war. If it were only the party against the cult, they would lose. They hoped to bring at least some of the metallics to the field, to even it. And when they had asked Bahamut to give that order Himself, He had told them He does not command His children to fight on His behalf. But they would answer a council, if Tamarand called one.

Avara Mael watched him while he said it.

She went on watching him for a while after he had finished, and did not say what she thought.

"I've helped you with what I could," she said at last. "Whatever you decide is yours to decide."

They decided quickly. Even if they reached Claw Ridge and in the end turned back to stop the ritual themselves, without ever finding Tamarand, they would have lost nothing by going. Rathenfall said they were agreed. Yeltsu saw no reason not to.

"Well," said Lissandra, "I have what I need with me." And she touched the bag of holding at her hip, where everyone knew she carried her spellbooks now — three of them. Her own. Two others. And one of those two was a very dark book indeed.

The Keeper's Offer

"Remember, sister," Avara Mael said to Telno, before they could go, "you have the shelter of the faithful here, for you and your friends. There's no need to rush out of the city. You can rest safely here. If you need healing, we can provide it — and any supplies for your journey." She glanced at Zuktind. "Spell components. Anything you need. You don't have to go all the way to Claw Ridge to resupply."

That turned them to a question none of them had thought to ask in a long while: what would they do if one of them fell? A single diamond lay in the party's common stores. One life's worth.

So they pooled their purses. Zuktind bought one stone; Yeltsu bought another; Rathenfall bought two. Lissandra put five hundred gold of her own toward something heavier — a single larger diamond, so that if one of them were ever beyond the reach of a quick prayer, Yeltsu could still bring them back. In the buying they learned something that unsettled them more than it should have: a spell that calls for a stone of a certain worth must have one stone of that worth. Two lesser gems, together, will not do. "So we've been doing it wrong the whole time," Zuktind said, half to himself, and nobody had an answer for that.

They left the miners' exchange with five diamonds to call a soul back within the minute, and one to call it back within days.

And Zuktind bought one thing more. Gold and silver, platinum, raw ore — the makings of a hand. Lissandra's new hand would be iron at its core, but he meant it gilded and silvered over, made beautiful, and he meant to work something more into it than metal. He carried the stuff carefully, and did not say how much he had paid.

The Hollow

There was one debt of conversation still outstanding in Neverwinter, and they went down into the lower district to settle it.

Not to the tavern — that had only ever been the front of the place. They went to the warehouse they had been taken to the first time, and it was working. Half a dozen people moved between desks and crates. Someone at the back was knotting a net. It smelled of the river. And Caevar Moss saw them before they reached him, and came to meet them.

"Forgive us for not coming sooner," Zuktind said. "I trust your daughter made it home safely?"

"She did." Caevar's eyes went past them, to the door. "She didn't come back with you, though."

"We ran into some trouble."

But Della herself had heard their voices, and came out from somewhere among the crates, bright with surprise. "Oh — it's you again." She went to stand at her father's side, and he looked down at her for a moment before he spoke.

"She's here," Caevar said simply. "She wouldn't be, if not for you. I am very grateful."

"I'm grateful to you all too," Della said. "Thank you for coming for me. I know I was very nervous. I didn't want to stay there any longer."

"It was the right thing to do," Zuktind said. "They were holding you captive. It was wrong. Setting you free was the only right thing."

Della looked at him a moment longer than she needed to. "I don't think you'd understand," she said.

Glasstaff was there as well — and there was no telling, watching the two men together in that busy room, which of them answered to the other. Zuktind turned to the wizard carefully. He knew they had not done things the way Glasstaff had planned; the raid was meant to go undetected, and it had not. But the old mage did not seem troubled. He had his own house to run, and the collapse of the Vorath and Meridian operation had been no surprise to him. He had known it was coming before they did. He had made his preparations.

"I did hear Meridian's body surfaced on the river," Glasstaff said. "I haven't heard anything about Vorath."

"They both went into the river," Zuktind said. "As far as we can tell, they both drowned." He hesitated. "He was of my kind. We can hold our breath a long time. I don't know if it was long enough."

"The town guard are all over it," Glasstaff said. "They've worked out that both of them were tied to the cult, and important people are very unhappy about that." His mouth twisted. "The cult is not supposed to have its talons in Neverwinter."

"Then I'm glad our business is over," Zuktind said. "That we can leave on neutral terms. That matters to us. Very much."

"I'm glad you think so."

And then Caevar Moss surprised them. "To prove my gratitude," he said, "I have a boat ready. With a crew. To take you anywhere. I understand you're not from this city. Say the word, and it's yours."

Zuktind turned the offer over with real hope, and Mira's map came out again, and he traced the rivers on it one by one with his finger. The northern water ran east as far as the mountains and no farther. The southern rivers stopped at the Sunset Mountains, so close to another that would have carried them on — and no closer. Every route ran out of water short of the place they had to go. And time was pressing on them, and nothing on any river would ever beat a door that opened straight onto the floor of a temple half the world away.

"We thank you for your offer," Zuktind said finally. "But we'll have to take you up on it another time. Where we're going next is very far, and the rivers won't make the trip."

Caevar looked down at his daughter, and his eyes were bright.

"My debt with you," he said. "I will remember."

Zuktind wrote that down too.

Closing

They went back to the Amber & Anchor one last time, and told Cobb they were done with their rooms for now — free them up, let someone else have them, until the next time. Then they walked back through the ordinary city to the temple of Bahamut, under the warm disc and the doorkeeper's rag, and through the long narrow hall to the chapel behind the sanctuary.

It was barely a room. No windows. It smelled of cold stone and old incense, and in the middle of the floor was a ring of sigils, and the ring was very old.

Telno knelt and set her disc down inside it.

Lissandra began to cast, and it was not a quick spell. It took her a full minute, standing in that windowless room with her hands moving, and as she worked, the sigils began to rise up out of the floor one at a time — not all at once, but in a sequence, in an order that was plainly older than anyone standing in the chamber. One. Then another. Then another, the light climbing out of the stone in a pattern that someone had laid down long before the city above them had a name.

Avara Mael stood outside the door and watched it through the doorway. She did not come in.

Something caught the edge of their sight — a light, a flicker, a thing that pulled the eye away for half an instant — and when they looked back, the far wall of the chapel was not the far wall of the chapel anymore.

Cold air moved in a room that had no window and no wind. The smell of old incense and stone thinned, and gave way, and what came in to replace it was pine. And snow.

The floor under their feet was a floor Zuktind knew. Telno knew it too. They had both learned to walk on it.

Zuktind stood very still, and took a long breath of thin mountain air, and let it fill him all the way down.

"Feel that air," he said. "It's so good to be home."