Chapter Seven: In which our hero recieves something that is absolutely, positively, not a bribe. Not really. Hardly at all. Anyway, it's not like there's any way to give it back.

Sand padded through the halls of the keep to his room.

No psychotic rangers had waylaid him enroute, no dragons had come crashing through the walls of the keep, no former diplomats had appeared to make sardonic comments. Sand had located a bottle of rather good brandy, and he and Serafin had made serious inroads on it.

That had been about all they did, in truth. Serafin had come back from killing bandits looking bleak and hollow-eyed, and Sand, who had seen that look often enough in the mirror, had come bearing alcohol. It didn't exactly kill the pain, but if you were drunk enough, you tended to forget just why you were miserable, and that was about the best you could hope for.

"Bloody hell, Sand," she said, for probably the twentieth time. "Bloody, bloody hell…" The firelight painted orange shadows across her face, and made her look closer to four hundred than he did.

She didn't particularly need a lover at that point, and she only barely needed a friend.

What she really needs…

"You need to go to sleep," he told her, taking the brandy glass away.

"Can't," she said, scrubbing at her face with her hands. "Had nightmares last night like…eh, you wouldn't believe. I'd just as soon not."

"Not sleeping is not going to help the matter."

"Mmmmph." She was getting that balked-mule set to her jaw again.

"As your personal physician…"

"I thought that was the gith."

"And who mixes all those healing potions, hmm? As your physician, I'm ordering you to sleep."

"I don't think so."

"I could order you as your lawyer…"

"You could try."

Well, reason has failed, so we will settle for duplicity…

He started rubbing her shoulders. He'd felt blocks of concrete with more give, but her head sagged a bit. Serafin chuckled tiredly.

"That's not going to put me to sleep, Sand, although I appreciate the thought."

"Perhaps not, but it can hardly hurt." He kissed the top of her head and murmured in Elvish—a nonsense rhyme used to keep track of the order of planets, but it sounded soothing, and furthermore, it allowed him to slip the words of a Sleep spell in without her noticing.

Either the alcohol or the exhaustion had lowered her defenses, because she passed out without even a token resistance. Her chin sank onto her chest and she went bonelessly limp under his hands.

Sand got an arm under her knees and another under her shoulders—the mass reduction cantrip was getting a lot of use lately—and dropped her into bed.

She was dead to the world. The back of her skull actually bounced off the headboard and she didn't so much as grunt. It would take a bit more than a kiss to wake her from this enchanted sleep. Sand was guessing it would require a hammer or amateur bagpipes.

Possibly I overdid it a bit.

The elf stood and looked down at her, his arms folded. People were always supposed to look younger when they slept. Serafin merely looked tired, and a bit annoyed.

Well, the spell ought to keep her from dreaming, and if she's angry at me in the morning, she can have me court-martialed.

He wrestled her boots off, pulled a blanket over her, and left her to whatever healing could be found in sleep.

Unfortunately, it was still fairly early in the evening, and he walked directly into Sergeant Kana, who had an armful of reports.

Oops.

She looked from the door to the captain's quarters to him and narrowed her eyes.

The one night I haven't done a damn thing to her, and I get caught. That's irony for you.

Don't panic. Let's start with the truth and go from there.

"She complained of trouble sleeping. I've spelled her down."

"Ah." Kana's face cleared. "I see."

"I've gotten her boots off, but you should probably send a servant in for...everything else." He made a vague gesture.

"I shall do so. Thank you, wizard." She made a small jerk of her head that had the feel of a salute.

Sand nodded, walked away, and got around the corner before he clutched his chest and exhaled in relief.

The rest of his walk back to his room was uneventful.

It's sad that that is starting to feel like a triumph.

Sand opened the door to his room and stepped inside.

He lit the candle with a word, closed the door behind him, and sank down onto the bed. He'd just lifted one foot and begun sliding off his boot when he saw it.

Sand froze.

There was a book on the table.

It was bound in tooled leather and embossed in silver that winked in the candlelight. The design on the cover was a stylized pitcher plant. He knew he hadn't left it there because he'd never seen it before in his life.

He recognized it, though.

Oh, yes.

His boot succumbed to gravity and fell off. He put his foot down. The flagstones were freezing, but that was entirely unimportant.

He reached out and picked the book up with shaking hands.

The cover creaked open, and, as he'd known there would be, a letter fell out into his lap.

Of course.

He didn't even have to look at the seal to know what would be on it.

The Hosttower moves quickly…

Sand turned it over in his fingers and felt his heart give a painful squeeze.

There was a name written across it, Sandaendaeran, an elven word that, depending on where you put the accents, was either a man's name or a description of the shadow cast by the bones of a rabbit's ribcage under the moon.

Sand knew that name. He'd been born with it.

It had been a very long time since he'd used it. He'd been Sand for nearly two hundred years, because it was the only bit humans could remember, let alone pronounce.

He swallowed hard, and put the letter down.

In a moment…in a moment…first, I have to know…

The front page of the book was blank. The second page began directly at the top without title or chapter. There were no page numbers, but there were meticulously detailed illustrations—of apparatus, of the anatomy of various creatures, of the flowers of plants.

It is. It is.

Oh, Mystra's blood…

He was holding in his hands a copy of the diary of Andraegen Vorn, possibly the greatest and certainly the most eccentric alchemist of the last thousand years.

His breath came a little faster.

The original was locked up somewhere in the Hosttower, and Sand had never risen high enough in the ranks to even be allowed to look at the catalog that listed it. There were less than a half-dozen copies known in the entire world. Due to Vorn's rather peculiar sense of humor, the diary could only be copied in a very particular ink, which required, among other things, dragon urine, raw silk, and molten silver, and even if you knew what you were doing, it didn't usually come out.

It could also only be copied if the scribe was wrapped naked in an uncured goathide during the dark of the moon, but the Hosttower had plenty of scribes for that sort of thing.

And now he had a copy in his hands.

He stroked the binding with a tenderness that Serafin would have recognized immediately, although she might have been a little disturbed to see it applied to a book.

Sand opened to a page at random, began to read, and within a paragraph had seen a usage for fire beetle bellies he'd never even dreamed of before. Two more pages revealed a whole new method of healing with potions under field conditions—my god, would that work? Perhaps if you had an immensely strong stomach—and a theory about using the law of contagion to generate large quantities of hard-to-get components, like the aforementioned dragon urine.

My god. My god. My god.

When the Hosttower set out to bribe someone, they did not think small.

He tore his eyes away from the book with difficulty and picked up the letter. His name seemed to glitter in the candlelight.

The hand that slit the seal was not steady.

Sandaendaeran—

The Arcane Brotherhood sends you this gift as a token of their regard, and a symbol of their hopes for a mutually beneficial arrangement.

We desire only information, something that we well know you are uniquely equipped to provide.

A mutual friend will contact you by name.

There was no signature, but then, it hardly needed one.

Sand set the letter down in the middle of the stone floor. It took him three tries to disintegrate it, because his mind was running in tight little gibbering circles.

Mygodmygodmygod…

There is a copy of the diary of Andraegen Vorn actually in my hands.

He stared at it, swallowing hard, feeling an intellectual avarice so pure it was practically holy.

If the book and Serafin had been dangling over a cliff, and he could only save one of them…well, surely he'd save Serafin, of course. But he would have had to stop and think about it first.

And all it's going to cost you is your loyalty and self-respect.

Sand was of the opinion that those were negotiable qualities.

Besides…it wasn't like he could give it back. What would he do, walk to Luskan and hurl it at the gates of the Hosttower? Hit Torio in the back of the head with it?

He hadn't agreed to do anything yet. It wasn't a bribe until he agreed to do something.

We desire only information…

He was already reporting on her to Nevalle. It wasn't as if Serafin didn't know he was a spy.

Oh, rationalize a little harder, Sand, you've nearly convinced yourself…whispered his sanity in an eerie echo.

With this book, he could do…well, some very impressive things, actually. To begin with, he could probably change the taste of the healing potions. Serafin was always complaining about the ripe olive taste. She'd appreciate that.

You ought to go tell her right now that Luskan is trying to buy you.

I can't. She's knocked out and even if I could wake her up, I wouldn't.

In the morning, then.

Sand licked his lips, opened it at random again. A spectacular diagram comparing the internal workings of horses and unicorns covered both pages. Unicorns have two more stomachs? Who knew?

Serafin had a lot on her mind.

Besides, the Hosttower obviously had a contact in the Keep, someone who could sneak in and drop the book in his room. He needed to ferret that out. He needed evidence. He needed proof.

He needed more candles to read by, and some parchment to take notes.

Sand fumbled around until he found another candle and lit it, without ever taking his eyes off the page.

Casavir, patrolling the hallways in the early morning, passed Sand's doorway and heard the sounds of a quill scribbling frantically over parchment, combined with a soft, feverish muttering in Elvish.

Probably still working. The mage hardly ever slept. Casavir considered his dedication to their cause to be admirable, even if the elf's sense of humor usually left him baffled.

Still, humor or not, he was the only one of the spellcasters that the captain had collected whose loyalty Casavir had never been inclined to question.

The paladin continued down the hall, with a measured tread, the scratch of quill on paper fading behind him.

Author's Note: Diehard geeks may note that most of Sand's name is actually derived from badly bastardized Sindarin. Which is crossing universes, I grant you, but A) Elves get around and B) the man invented two perfectly good elven languages, and bugger if I'm re-inventing the wheel. (Also, no bloody on-line dictionary I could find listed "rabbit." Sure, fifty million words for moonlight, but no rabbits. Elves, man. I tell ya.)