Not Empty-Handed

Opening

The paladin had named the price, and the Elder had taken it, and now the long room waited for her to say what it bought.

Ziesge Jennu Trothar sat in her chair by the fire with the survey sheets still under her claw, where she had counted three walls on them an hour before. Hugto stood at the table's end. The party sat where they had been told to sit. Rathenfall, who had offered a copy of whatever sigils the valley gave up — the one offer in the afternoon that had landed — sat with his hands on his knees and the look of a man who had said his piece and did not intend to say another.

Outside, the innermost ring of Claw Ridge went about its business. Somewhere across the square a gem-covered temple stood open to the afternoon. Somewhere in the residential ring a recruit was telling her father about a gun. None of that had reached this room yet.

The Elder looked at them, one by one, the way a quartermaster looks at a requisition.

The High Elder

"Then here is what Claw Ridge gives you."

She did not count it on her claw. She counted it on them — on Rathenfall's plate, on the scales at Yeltsu's throat, on the bare arms of the cleric from the coast — and found every one of them wanting.

"And you will remember this when you go down into that valley. You are not dressed for it. You go down there like that and you will be dead in two or three days."

"Rathenfall wears fur," Zuktind said, which was true, and which she acknowledged with a glance that agreed it was fur and disagreed that it was enough.

So the Give was furs. Clothing, boots, whatever a body needed to climb the valley's walls around the fires rather than through them — and she would write them a note for the Woari houses, and the Woari would fit them. On my grant, she said. Not yours.

Zuktind asked, with the care of a soldier asking a general, whether he might take a little time before they left the ring to visit the militia headquarters. There was a patch he had not claimed. Some of the men had scoffed at the idea that he should have one.

"I am not pressing you for time, Zuktind."

She had let him go after Insa five years ago as a special mission. She did not seem to have stopped thinking of it as one. He bowed his head and thanked her, and she went on as if he had not interrupted, because in her house he had not.

"It is important, when you go into the valley, that you all remember: those are not people you talk to."

"We understand, Elder."

"They have not seen you yet." Her eyes went to Yeltsu, and past him, toward the door, toward the temple across the square where a wizard with a hand of gold and silver and a halfling with a sketchbook had spent two days among old books. "And those that walk with you — the soft-skins — they are only meat to them. Perhaps you should consider leaving them at the temple."

Zuktind had begun to answer before he understood which two she meant, and when he understood he answered anyway. One of them could not fight. The other was an accomplished wizard. And the one who could not fight was the one who wanted to go most — because no one had ever mapped that valley, and a map was what would let them, and everyone after them, walk around the camps instead of into them. He shared the Elder's concern. He said so. He did not think he could talk Mira out of it, and he did not say that he would try.

"You know them better than I do." She let it go. "But those two will die in the cold. You and your friends may handle it. They will not."

Zuktind looked at the snake beside him. Yuan-ti, he observed, were cold-blooded and not built for mountains; he was frankly amazed Yeltsu was not shivering already. Yeltsu said, with the mild patience of a man correcting a misunderstanding about his luggage, that when he had left his home he had packed his own people's clothing — light, made for his kind, made so a yuan-ti could go where he liked — and that the cold, at this altitude, was nothing to him.

It was not nothing in the valley, Zuktind said. That was the thing nobody from outside understood. It is warmer up here. Every house in Claw Ridge kept a fire nearly the whole year, and the heat of four hundred years of hearths leaked out into the streets. Down there there were three fires, in three camps, and between them nothing. Everyone should have a cloak at least. The humans should have more.

"Then you should send for your cartographer," the Elder said, and laid her claw flat on the table.

The sheets

"Survey sheets."

She did not lift them. She did not need to. "Somebody walked this mountain with a chain and a level when the wall was being laid, and they were good. The valley is on two of them. The old house is on one. Nobody has walked it since."

The house. The ruin. The place the sigils were carved in stone.

"The halfling at the temple is drawing it from stories, the priestess tells me. Stories are not the same as knowing. These are knowing." Her claw stayed where it was. "She may copy them. They do not leave this room. And I want a copy of whatever she makes from them — and of the sigils you recover."

"It sounds reasonable," said Rathenfall, and it was the first thing he had said, and the Elder nodded at him as if he had signed something.

The far wall

When she asked if there were any more questions, Zuktind looked to his friends before he spoke for them, and each of them said in his own register that it was straightforward, and he looked last to his sister, who said nothing, which meant yes.

Then the Elder looked at the paladin, and asked him where he was from.

It was a question with two answers, and Rathenfall had both. One was the story the party had pieced together since — that his kind came from another plane, and that some accident had set him down on Toril as an infant, which was why the Order had found him. He had been with the Order of Tyr since he was very young. That much was simple.

The other answer was older than that, and it was his own. Born on the Sharpclaw Plains. Raised a hunter among the plains folk. A normal life — until the feral tribes came down out of Charfield Valley. He had fought beside the plains warriors, young as he was. It had gone badly, and quickly. He had run to a church of Tyr for aid, and the church had saved a handful. He had stayed to serve the god who saved them.

He had never said it in Claw Ridge. He had not, perhaps, said it in a long time.

The plains lay below the mountain. Not far. The valley the party was about to walk down into opened, at its far end, onto grass.

Ziesge had never heard of the Sharpclaw Plains, and she did not pretend to. But she looked at the paladin when she said the next thing, and she did not look away.

"They go down as well as they go up, Paladin."

"Yes," said Rathenfall.

"The valley has a far wall, and a mouth in it. But what happens on the other side is not this wall's business."

It was the whole of what she gave him. It was more than the town had ever given anyone about the far side of the valley. It sat on the table between them with the survey sheets, and the paladin who received wisdom more than he gave it received this, and kept it.

How he and Zuktind had first met was simpler: a tavern in Neverwinter, a dwarf named Gundren looking for hands. Whether Rathenfall had been walking north toward these mountains in the same year a lieutenant walked out of them, no one could say, and no one in that room needed to.

The terms

So it was settled, and the Elder settled it aloud. They could go down. They could find the house and its stone and its sigils. They could not take what they found and vanish through the floor of a ruin — they would come back, up the mountain, and wait while the high priestess made her copy properly, and the Elder would have every map the halfling drew. All of it. Everything.

"Understood," Zuktind said. "I suppose we will take our leave, then. Thank you for your time, Elder. May your days be long still — may you live as long as any of us ever has. I swear, the day someone challenges you for this chair is the day I eat my boot."

She gave him a sharp eye. "You think I am going to be challenged forever?"

"I think you are strong enough, and wise enough, to do what few elders have done, and leave that chair on your own terms."

She only smiled, and gave him no answer at all.

Lieutenant

There was a man waiting outside the Elder's door.

He had been waiting a while; it was in how he stood. Bronze, going grey, with a jaw the party had seen across a sparring yard that morning on a girl of nineteen. He did not raise his voice. He did not come close.

"Lieutenant."

There was no warmth in it. There was not meant to be.

"Yes, sir." Zuktind walked to him.

"I am not here to fight you." Halgrin Vurr's eyes stayed on Zuktind's face. "She came home at midday and she could not stop talking. Her brother's gun. You put her brother's gun in her hands." A breath. "And I heard she beat you. And she beat your snake friend as well, and he bowed to her."

"She is as good a shot as her brother," Zuktind said. "And yes. She is impressive."

"I want to know one thing, and then I will go." The voice did not rise. It did something worse; it held. "You went to look for her. Five years ago. My son is in the Rows, and the lieutenant who was supposed to be hunting the thing that killed him went off to find it instead. So I would like to know. Did you find her?"

"I did."

"Then where is she? Why is she not here with you — to face justice?"

There was an answer that Zuktind carried, and had carried since a god told it to him: that she had not chosen it. That something had bound her. That the woman who had opened the gate was a woman with a hand on the back of her neck. It was the truest thing he knew about Insa, and it would have told this man, in his grief, that there was no one left to blame.

He did not say it.

He said that she had joined the ferals, and then joined a group the ferals worked for — the Cult of the Dragon — and that the cult had armed her better than the town could arm anyone. That it had taken him five years only to find her. That he and the friends he had made were gathering strength, so that the next time they met her she could neither overcome them nor escape.

"So you failed." Halgrin let it land. "Five years, and you still did not bring her here. What a shame, Lieutenant. What a failure." And then, quieter: "Are you going to stay now? Have you given up?"

"No. Coming back is another leg of the journey. Toward having enough strength to apprehend her at last."

"So you came to take more of our children."

"No." It came out of him fast and whole. "The only ones from this town who will go after her are myself and my sister. No one else." He stood straighter, in the coat with the black cloth tied over its insignia. "And I promise you — the next time I return, I will not return empty-handed."

Halgrin Vurr looked at him for a long moment.

"I wish I could believe you."

He turned and walked away down the street, and he did not look back, and he did not, at any point, call him Zuktind.

The Patch

Between the Elder's house and the way out of the ring stood the other temple.

It was small — a building the size of a barn — and it was covered in gems, inside and out: set into the lintel, into the walls, into the frame of the door, half of them gone dull with four centuries of mountain weather. Its door stood open. Through it, on a bare pedestal, sat a single ruby the size of a man's head, and beside it a man in the most ornate robes any of them had ever seen, tending it alone.

Zuktind saw it and meant to come back to it, and kept walking. He had told the Elder where he was going.

The militia's command centre was one room with a map on the wall that stopped at the treeline. Captain Ruskal sat in it alone, with a lamp, and did not stand when the door opened.

Zuktind saluted.

"Captain. I have come with a request. I wish to obtain a veteran's patch."

Ruskal reached into a drawer without looking into it — the way a man does when he has already taken a thing out once today and put it back — and set a square of dark cloth on the desk between them. A sewn badge. A claw over a wall.

"Here it is."

Zuktind stepped forward and took it as if it might be taken back. "Thank you, Captain."

"The sergeant said you would come for it. I said you would not." Ruskal looked at him over the lamp. "I am glad to be wrong."

"It is about time," Zuktind said, "that I stopped running from my history and embraced it."

He saluted again, and bowed, and went out with the patch in the pocket of the coat it belonged on — a soldier who knew perfectly well how to sew, and had no needle.

The Ruby

They went back for the gem temple together.

The man at the ruby saw them in the doorway, and saw the scales on two of them, and came down the steps far faster than his robes or his dignity would have recommended. Zuktind knew him — or knew what he was: Giuzzuph Darastrix Lexi, High Priest of Sardior, a cousin many branches removed, from the side of the family whose blood had turned toward the mind.

"High Priest Giuzzuph. I have come to ask for your help — the gifts Lord Sardior grants you and the few who still worship him."

"And how can they help?"

So Zuktind told a second person in one afternoon that he had found Insa. That she was with the Cult of the Dragon now, and the cult meant the world harm. That they had met her, more than once, and lost her each time, and no longer knew where to look. "I would ask you to divine, if you can, where she is — and what dangers wait for us in finding her there."

The High Priest considered it. He was not, he said, a clairvoyant wizard who could snap a spell off his fingers. It would want a ritual, and the ritual would want preparing. Come back tomorrow.

"And in the meantime," he said, "I have a request of you as well, Zuktind. I would like you to stand before the ruby of Sardior."

"High Priest — I am not psionic. I do not have his gifts."

"Do this for me. Please. Only stand before it."

Zuktind took a breath, and stood before the ruby.

It was cold under the lamp, a red stone on a bare pedestal in a room full of dull ones.

And then it was not.

Light moved inside it — the way light moves in water, slow — and settled on the side of the stone nearest to him. Every other gem in the walls stayed dull. Only the ruby. Behind him, Giuzzuph had stopped breathing. When he spoke, his voice was very small for a man in those robes.

"It has not done that in thirty years."

He went away into the back of the temple, and came back, and pressed something into Zuktind's hands: a chip of ruby set in silver, cut from the base of the pedestal itself. Take this with you. It was bound to the pillar, the priest said, and to the ruby, and through the ruby to Sardior himself.

Zuktind turned it over and knew it the way an artificer knows a tool — a focus, a thing to cast through; nothing more than that, today. A token of a god whose stone had just, after thirty years, looked at someone.

"I will return tomorrow," he said.

Giuzzuph was already turning back to his pedestal, plainly delighted, a man with a ritual to prepare. "Let us see what Lord Sardior has to reveal to us."

The Economic District

The afternoon had gone further than any of them had noticed. A father had said midday as though it were long past, and it was — three o'clock, perhaps four. The valley would not be tonight. Zuktind kept saying tonight, and then stopped, and could not remember why he had stopped, and reached for it the way a soldier reaches for a word in a briefing that he knows he was given.

There had been something else promised for tomorrow. First thing in the morning.

It came back to him: the hand. Telno had promised to try again — Regenerate, at the Temple of Bahamut, with the god's own house to give it strength — and see whether Lissandra could have back what she had lost. That was first. Then Giuzzuph's divination. Then the valley.

And tonight: the furs. The archive, where Yeltsu wanted to sit beside Lissandra among the temple's records and look for anything they held about a god whose worship had been stolen, and about the god who had stolen it. And Ghelka, for Zuktind — while the others were among the books. A sentence he owed a woman who had been right for five years.

They found Lissandra and Mira at the temple where they had left them, deep in books and old men's stories, narrowing a valley down from everything anyone had ever said about it. Zuktind interrupted them to say that the Elder had ordered everyone fitted for furs; Mira's face at the word shopping did most of the persuading. They closed the books and put each one back where it belonged, as properly educated people do, and came.

Through the Gate of Bahamut and down, the quartzite ring was where the town actually lived. Hunting parties sold out of the backs of carts. Something with too many legs hung in the open air, half jointed. Hammering came from three directions in three different rhythms. There was a long shopfront with firearms in its window, and a fletcher's where a red-scaled woman sat fitting a nock by eye, and a forge big enough to be three forges, and two general shops facing each other across the street, both run by people wearing more gemstones than the Neverwinter temple had ever put on its altar.

Nothing had changed. Everything was a little smaller than Zuktind remembered.

And this afternoon, for the first time, people stopped talking when they passed.

The furrier

Oshtu Woari wore robes crusted with gems and the air of a man who had seen everything that came down off the mountain and been impressed by none of it. He was pulling furs off a high shelf when they came in, and he read the Elder's note without slowing down.

"Into the valley, you say?" He looked at the two humans. "These two will die in a day out there. Dressed like that."

Zuktind took off his coat and held it up — the lieutenant's coat, with the black cloth still tied over the insignia — and showed him the place below the rank patch where a veteran's mark belonged, and produced the patch from his pocket. I finally decided to embrace being one of the ranks, he said. My brothers and sisters who defended this town for centuries. Oshtu said that if they were taking all this, he could sew that too.

He measured them with a tape he drew from his pocket like a man drawing a knife — everyone, briskly, without conversation.

Zuktind wanted nothing but a plain cloak of rough brown fur. That was all he needed.

Yeltsu wanted green.

There was not, Oshtu admitted, much call for green on a mountain. Yeltsu was prepared to settle — grey, with a greenish cast; yellow, if it came to that — and was gracious about it, and kept asking. And at the back of a shelf, Oshtu found the thing nobody had wanted: a single hide gone green the way fur only goes green on something cursed, or changed, or come over from the Feywild. He had bought it thinking it would be an investment. No one had agreed with him. Yeltsu took it with real pleasure, and thanked him twice.

It was not free, Oshtu reminded them — nothing was free. It was only that they were not the ones paying.

The furrier came at last to Rathenfall, tape in hand, and stopped, a little confused, at the enormous lion in the doorway.

"Will you need a fur coat as well, sir?"

"Probably not," said Rathenfall.

Zuktind, unwilling to let it go at that, pointed to the cloak already on the paladin's shoulders — the one they had taken off a dead feral, or out of a warehouse, the provenance had blurred — and asked the furrier whether it would do. Oshtu fingered the hem. Interesting material. No one could tell him what it was made of; only that something of a bat had gone into it. Old things, Oshtu said, were the best things. It would do.

Once a feral, always a feral, Zuktind said of the cloak's first owner — to anyone from Claw Ridge, that was simply true.

Lissandra and Mira were measured last. The coats on Oshtu's shelves had been cut for dragonkin, and would need their wing-slits sewn shut; Yeltsu's green would need taking in.

"Come back tomorrow," Oshtu said, "and everything will be ready."

Closing

So the evening found them in the middle ring with the light going, owed a coat each and a stitched patch, and carrying more promises than they had carried up the mountain.

They had promised the Elder a copy of every map and every sigil, and their own return before they left by any door but hers. Zuktind had promised a grieving father that he would not come back empty-handed. A god's stone had woken for him after thirty years, and a priest was preparing to look further — to find a woman who did not want to be found, and to say what waited beside her.

Tomorrow, before any of that, a cleric would put her hands on her friend's wrist in the house of the Platinum Lord and try again.

And tonight there was still a lamp in the temple archive, and a yuan-ti who had twice been promised a seat beside it. There was still a woman in the residential ring who had argued for five years that Insa was not to blame, and lost every time, and did not yet know that someone was coming to tell her she had been right.

Below the far wall, where the valley opened onto grass, the plains a paladin had been born on lay in the dark, and were not this wall's business.