“You are his secretary.”
“Only because someone has to be. I’m still—” He let the protest fall. It was arguable that he really counted as a Harper any longer, and that wasn’t an argument he felt like having. “Fine,” he said. “I’m his secretary.”
“I don’t know why that bothers you. It doesn’t mean you don’t count,” Khochen said, and not for the first time, Dahl wondered if the Westgate spymaster could pick through his thoughts. “You still have your itchy little tattoo to prove it. And while I’m sure it comes in terribly handy while you gather reports and make Tam’s schedule, it seems to mean you’re dedicated.”
Dahl scowled. “You’re going to have to have it done eventually.”
“And ruin this flawless skin?”
“You can’t see it once it’s done,” Dahl said, “unless you trigger it. And it only itches for a tenday.”
“I’ll hold out. I can hide a pin.” Khochen took his flagon from him and finished the ale.
“You owe me another ale for that.”
“For a sip? Hardly. Shall we go up?”
Dahl scowled at her again. “What do you mean ‘we’? You’re not due until this afternoon.”
She shrugged. “Vescaras and I tied our missions together. We’re to debrief as a team—didn’t you know that, Goodman Secretary? Come on.” Khochen stood, and though Dahl would much rather have stayed behind, he wasn’t about to make Lord Vescaras Ammakyl comment on the time.
“By the way,” Khochen said, as they slipped through the door that led to the more secretive areas of the Harper hall. “I found out why Vescaras dislikes you so.”
“I don’t care,” Dahl said. “What mission did you help him on? You’ve been in Westgate.”
“Shipping issues. And you care. Otherwise he wouldn’t bother you.”
“He bothers me because he’s a self-important prig who can’t see when he’s turned the wrong direction.” They headed up a flight of stairs, down a long hallway lined with rooms, and into an unassuming guest room that held another stairway. “His last reports were insisting that six earthmotes crashing on or in sight of the Trade Way means a conspiracy of wizards.”
“He’s cautious.”
“He’s idiotic,” Dahl said. “The rituals needed to take down one earthmote would have to mean that a cadre of archwizards the likes of which Vescaras of all people would have noticed is running around Faerûn wasting their powers on making caravans detour.”
“Did you tell him that?”
“No, and I wasn’t intending to. Tam will give him some other mission, and it won’t matter. Arguing will just set Vescaras against me more.”
“Maybe Tam thinks he could be right. There are worse uses of magic.”
“Yes, well, if you find Karsus, the Srinshee, and bloody Elminster gloating over a caravan they’ve just tipped, then I’ll concede. Until then . . .” He opened the door to Tam Zawad’s study and waved Khochen in. Vescaras was already there. Of course he was.
Vescaras hardly looked at Dahl, which was probably for the best. There was not another Harper in all of Faerûn who pushed Dahl so close to snapping. The black-skinned half-elf looked like nothing more than the wealthy, hardworking second son of a noble family—crisp linen and spotless silk, each row of his braided hair threaded decadently with gold. Posh and polished and like he’d never dirtied a finger in his life. If the mix of Turami ancestry and elven blood made him stand out among Waterdeep’s old blood, Vescaras’s impeccably cool manners reminded his peers of where they stood. Not even the Ammakyls suspected that their son’s interest in the family wine trade masked the fact that he ran a network of Harper spies working along the merchant caravan routes. He was very good at what he did.
And—for a time—Dahl had been very good at finding where he could do better.
“Let’s begin with your joint efforts,” Tam said settling behind his scarred desk. “Then Lord Ammakyl—I know you have family business to attend to. And Khochen, you can sew things up.” The older Calishite man still wore the plain gray garments of an itinerant priest of Selûne, despite having been made a High Harper five or six years prior. In any other setting, a person might have assumed he was petitioning Lord Ammakyl for tithes.
“Many thanks,” Vescaras said, inclining his head. “I had word, you’ll recall, from one of my agents of potential smuggling through Westgate. Additional smuggling,” he added, as Khochen started to speak. “We crossed networks and uncovered quite an operation.”
“Gems out of Vaasa,” Khochen said. “But also a great deal of weapons, some rarer ritual components. And people.”
“Headed toward Sembia,” Vescaras went on.
“Not all of it,” Khochen said. “I asked around. Some of it’s gone straight to Shade. Some of it—not the gems, obviously—were headed back north. Fortunately there are reputable shippers thereabouts as well. We found a serious mining operation in place. They’re fully routed and all but one of the mines are in working order.”
“There are four shafts in place,” Vescaras said. “All still finding gems. We pointed the prospectors from Thentia over to them.”
Which only made Dahl wonder. “And the fifth shaft?”
Khochen smiled, with a pause that lasted half-a-heartbeat. “Broke through to the Underdark,” she said. “We sealed it back up.”
“Shade did that?”
“No,” Khochen said. “We did. We took out the miners in one of the farther locations. Some well placed explosives and there were more drow than even the Shadovar can handle.” She smiled at Dahl. “Impressive?”
Impressive they’d pulled it off. “How did you keep the rest of the mining teams busy?” he asked.
Khochen’s smile flattened, and beside her Vescaras’s jaw tightened—ah gods, Dahl thought. His stomach dropped as Vescaras went on. “We had some help from the Dalelands Harpers. Slowed them down with stray sheep and other nonsense. Very minor.”
Tam’s eyes stayed on the scarred surface of his desk. “Were any killed?”
“Eight, by the drow,” Khochen admitted. “One of ours, seven of the Dales’.”
“Seven,” Tam repeated.
“Not ideal,” Vescaras agreed. “But they were willing and—”
“And that doesn’t matter,” Tam said sharply. He ran a hand through his silver hair. “They don’t know what they’re offering, shepherds and farmers and milkmaids.”
Dahl dropped his eyes to the parchment and finished scribbling notes on Vescaras’s reports. Even if the half-elf and he didn’t get along, even if Vescaras clearly thought Dahl should have been thrown out of the Harpers’ ranks, they agreed on this score: the Harpers not overseen by Tam were still a worthwhile resource, milkmaids, shepherds, and all.
Tam cursed under his breath for a moment. “What else?” he finally said. Khochen and Vescaras ran down the more mundane parts of the mission— coin spent, contacts made, resources lost. Dahl wrote every item down, all the while thinking it was not such a transgression to have let that question slip. Probably. He would have done the same thing in Vescaras and Khochen’s position . . . which might well mean it was the wrong thing to do altogether.
Gods, he thought. You’re a mess today.
Vescaras then gave a detailed accounting of more than a dozen missions the agents who reported to him were running along the caravan routes. He paused and gave Dahl a sidelong look. Perhaps Khochen was right. It might help to know why Vescaras disliked him so.
Because you say all the wrong things, a part of him seemed to say. Make all the wrong decisions.
Vescaras looked back to Tam and cleared his throat. “I’ve lost a village. A farmstead, really. Roarke’s Crossing, east of Berdusk.”
Tam cursed. “To the Shadovar? When did they capture it?”
“I’m not convinced they did. I received reports two tendays ago that it had been deserted. There are signs of struggle throughout, but not a single body, beyond a few animals. No goods taken—they weren’t fleeing a
nd they weren’t killed. But they’re gone.”
“It happens,” Tam said. “Maybe the raiders caught them at the right time.”
Dahl thought of the farmstead he’d grown up on, some miles outside New Velar in Harrowdale. Of what it would look like if everyone had just vanished—cow unmilked, butter half-churned, his mother’s bread burning in a dying fire. His brothers’ and their wives’ tools fallen. Only his father’s grave watching over the empty farm . . .
The image brought with it the sick shadow of grief, and he glanced out the window. Well after highsun. And Khochen had drank half his ale—Nera couldn’t fault him for one more.
“Did you check the state of their stores?” he asked. Vescaras and Tam both looked at him, as if surprised he was speaking. Khochen smiled between them.
“Low,” Vescaras said. “And tidy. Exactly what you’d expect to find this time of year.”
Dahl shook his head. “Right.” He cleared his throat. “Anyone raiding a farmstead would have ransacked the stores. And if they fled, they would have taken supplies.”
Tam frowned. “Did you have a wizard search it?”
“They didn’t find much,” Vescaras said. “The two I brought down there said it would be a feat to kill as many people who lived there with magic that destroyed the body so completely and left no trace. If there were portals involved, they sealed closed. If it was some other planar passage, it had been too long to find evidence of it.
“There’s more,” Vescaras said. “Possibly. A connection, perhaps. I’ve lost two agents as well. One scouting along the High Road, one working out of Athkatla. Again, out of the blue, no word, no sign.”
“Still, not as odd as we’d like,” Tam said sadly.
Vescaras shook his head again. “It doesn’t feel right. They were good agents, careful agents. They weren’t heading into anything difficult. Athkatla was recovering from fieldwork, watching donations to Waukeen’s temple. She missed a report, I went to see her. No one knew where she’d gone. The scout was in Daranna’s territory, reporting to her as well. Nothing. She’s covering a lot of empty wilderness,” he admitted, “but it’s Daranna.”
That made eight lost agents in the last tenday. And a farmstead, Dahl thought, wiping his quill on a rag. And much as he thought Vescaras was over-cautious, he agreed: something felt wrong.
“What else?” Tam asked.
“There are Shadovar picking through the ruins of Sakkors,” Lord Vescaras Ammakyl was saying. “I can’t say what they were doing, precisely. I didn’t want my people getting too near, but I would wager they’re looking for artifacts.”
Tam nodded at the dark-skinned half-elf over his steepled fingers, staring intently at the surface of his desk. Dahl kept writing and waited for the older Calishite man to say something—what else would the Shadovar be doing with the ruins of their floating city? Looking for survivors a year after the collapse?
“I still have no count of those who might have fled by arcane means,” Vescaras went on. “One assumes there were some, but we haven’t ascertained what exactly brought the city down yet. There mightn’t have been time.” Dahl dutifully added this to Vescaras’s report as well.
“Why are you still looking?” Khochen interjected. “It’s been ages.”
“Clues,” Vescaras said. “Sakkors falls, then the earthmotes start. It could be connected.”
“You mean the Trade Way crashes?” Khochen asked. “Dahl thinks that’s idiotic. I think he makes a convincing argument.”
Dahl froze, his mind a swirl of doubt. Vescaras glared at him.
“Oh?” Tam said, turning to face his scribe.
Dahl laid his quill down, swallowed to wet his mouth, and gave Khochen a glare of his own. “Most likely.”
“Then how do you explain it?” Vescaras asked.
“Bad luck? Odds? I’m not trying to be difficult, all right? It makes more sense.”
“Six within sight of the Trade Way and that’s the odds?” Vescaras demanded. “I’ll not be dicing with you throwing anytime soon.”
“If they were dice, you’d be right, but they’re great hulking mountains of earth.” Dahl shook his head, too far to stop now. “Moving an earthmote isn’t as easy as people seem to think. They float, but they’re enormously heavy and especially if they’re moving, it takes an absurd amount of power to turn them. They’re falling all across Faerûn, you know; it’s not that odd to have six fall near a road that runs the entire length of the continent. Otherwise you’d find signs of the rituals long before you’d get up to six earthmotes.
“And,” he added, “if you’re going to poke around Sakkors, a much better question to be asking is where are they taking those artifacts, because there is absolutely nothing else to be looking for in those ruins, and who is looking for them, because it’s almost certainly someone who expects to find something, and is possibly hoping that their fellows don’t notice, since you didn’t see a great bunch of Netherese soldiers. So yes: it’s idiotic, there are better uses of your time.”
Deliberately ignoring Khochen’s smirk, Vescaras’s glare, and Tam’s raised brow, Dahl picked up his quill again and set his eyes on the parchment.
“Lord Ammakyl,” Tam said, “Khochen. Would you give us a moment?” Dahl didn’t dare look up as the other Harpers left, his face burning, and for a long moment, the older man said nothing.
“My apologies,” Dahl said. “It just came out.”
“To be honest, I’m glad it did,” Tam said. “You almost sounded like your old self.”
“My old self is not exactly in high demand.”
“Oh for the gods’ sakes.” Tam stood and came around the desk to stand opposite Dahl. “What else haven’t you been saying?”
“It’s nothing important.”
“Dahl.”
Dahl blew out a breath. “Daranna’s agents could cover the ground Everlund’s leaving open, and instead, she shouldn’t worry about the possible slavers crossing into Anauroch. Our Zhentarim agent requested ‘reinforcements’ be sent to help the Bedine near there, and they’re going to walk straight into a moot of Bedine tribes, and you know exactly what they think of slavers. It will probably help Mira’s case, really—get them all banded together against the slavers as a mass for once. Brin’s reports are over-detailed—they boil down to two important facts: Crown Prince Irvel has the nobles in line for the moment and all our intelligence about the Dales and Sembia is correct. You could tell him to stop wasting parchment.” He paused. “That’s all I can recall. I expected to re-read reports tomorrow. No, wait—Vescaras’s agents and farmstead. That comes to eight agents—plus the farmstead—reported missing, although I haven’t gotten a report from Sembia or Many-Arrows, so it could be ten.”
“Were you planning to bring any of this up?”
“Of course,” Dahl said. Then added, “When I was sure.”
Tam sighed and covered his face with one hand. “How long is this going to go on?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Dahl you’re not the first person to have a mission go sour,” Tam said. “You aren’t the first Harper to let a target slip by. You aren’t the first one to find dead bodies that shouldn’t have been there.”
“Nor will I be the last,” Dahl finished.
Tam gave him a stern look. “If you believed me, I wouldn’t have to repeat myself. I pulled you off the field to give you time to collect yourself, to use your skills inside the house.”
“And I’ve done that,” Dahl protested.
“By deciding not to tell me things you don’t think I want to hear.”
“I just told you,” Dahl said. “Do you want more? I think you need to see a barber, you’re wrong about Storm Silverhand’s Harpers—in this case, anyway—and I’m pretty sure your daughter’s thinking about running off with that Bedine fellow or murdering him, maybe you should talk to her. Shall I keep going?”
Tam shook his head and chuckled softly. “You’re impossible.”
&nb
sp; Dahl studied Vescaras’s report, the blot of ink marring the runes that spelled farmstead. “You can always dismiss me.”
“That would be easier wouldn’t it? A pity, I dislike easy answers. Mira can take care of herself—which she’d be quick to remind me if I delved into her love life—so until she murders him or asks for my opinion I’ll stay mum. I’m right about putting untrained bystanders with their heads full of myths and stories into harm’s way, and you certainly don’t put other people’s safety in their hands—we have protocols for a reason.”
“It’s how they did it in the olden days,” Dahl said.
“Yes, well how did that suit them once Shade returned? Storm Silverhand can certainly let her networks run how she wants, only I don’t want my spies leaning on brethren who lack good sense and training. We ought to—”
“Forgive me, if you suggest you’re going to track Storm Silverhand down and explain what a terrible idea—”
“That was once,” Tam said, and he had the grace to look embarrassed. “I may be too old to blame wine as if I don’t know what it does to a man’s senses, but I’ll do it anyway.”
Dahl smiled. “I’ll not hold it against you.”
Tam regarded him. “Nera tells me that you’ve stacked up quite a lot of receipts in the taproom.”
Dahl made himself still. “It’s all paid for.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about. Anything troubling you?”
Dahl gave him an empty smile. “I’ve been a drunk, Tam. These days it’s just thirst.”
Tam nodded—as if he were waiting for Dahl to spill out everything he wasn’t saying. “War can make a man thirsty.”
Life can make a man thirsty, Dahl thought. “Yes,” he said. “Well.”
“How sure are you about the Dales?”
Not sure, he thought. Not sure enough. “Fairly,” Dahl said. “Brin seemed sure that Harrowdale was out of the worst of it at least. The elves won’t let Sembia break through, and Sembia seems to have better things to do. Their armies should keep well out of the northern countryside for awhile yet, and we should have fair warning before that changes.” He hoped. Gods above, he hoped.
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