Chapter 3

Alanis awoke to the sound of something sizzling. She slid out of bed and yelped when her feet touched the cold stone floor. The lights had been restored. Looking around, Alanis could see the interior of this smaller room with much more detail than she did the night before. She saw stacks of books, some of which looked very old. A small desk sat across the room and as Alanis made her way toward it, she peered over to see a large journal. The writing was in a language she did not understand, but judging by the readiness of his feather quill pen, Lokhi obviously wrote in it very often.

Alanis made her way through the wide hall, noticing again the family portrait that hung on the wall. She leaned in close and was sure that Lokhi had green eyes in the painting, as well as in the painting of he and the elf maiden. But she could have sworn that his eyes were a haunting blue color…Something was definitely strange about this man, and she would have to satisfy her curiosity. Of course, she thought, curiosity can be more deadly than ignorance.

Lokhi stood in the large room, lit by the sun. Glancing up, he smiled as he looked through the roof of the cavern, magically made transparent to anyone looking up from below. Those on the surface wouldn't notice any difference at all. He often did this during the day to flood the room with sunlight, as well as to get a glimpse of the forest overhead. Lokhi closed his eyes for a moment and let the sun warm his face. How he had gone so long without it, he'd never know. Sunlight: one of life's simple pleasures that cannot be substituted.

He looked down to resume cooking breakfast: eggs, grilled on a large stone that Lokhi had heated by magic. Adding a handful of cheese he had been given from a few of the farmers nearby in exchange for using his healing arts on ailing livestock, Lokhi flipped the eggs to cook them evenly.

His keen hearing picked up on Alanis's footsteps before she had entered the room, and he noticed her pause when she saw the paintings. Lokhi knew that the questions would come eventually, and he was unsure of whether he wanted to answer them or not. The only man in the Realms that knew his secret was over a thousand miles away. Despite his knowledge of Lokhi's past, Lokhi looked forward to his appointment with the Sage of Shadowdale later on that day.

Scraping the eggs onto two plates, Lokhi turned and handed one of them to Alanis. She smiled and took it, her face showing signs of curiosity and confusion. Lokhi gestured for the two of them to take a seat at a small table he had conjured several feet away from the large stone, now cool to the touch.

"Enjoy, the eggs and cheese come from my friends east of here who run a small farm." Lokhi smiled, hoping that Alanis would wait before the questions began. He was disappointed, however, when they began nearly immediately.

Alanis took the fork that appeared on the plate and ate breakfast slowly, obviously dealing with several questions on her mind.

"In the paintings…your eyes are green. When I see you now, though, they are blue. Was it magic that caused this? And who are the people in the painting? Are they your family? And the blue-haired elf, who is she?"

Lokhi took a sip of his hot tea and rested against the back of his chair. His face showed that he was going to be very careful how he answered the questions, though he did not intend to lie to Alanis. Trust was something earned, he knew, and he had done his best to earn everyone's trust in the past three years.

"The questions you ask are difficult to answer, but I will do my best. My eyes were green and now they are blue. This was a change that Mystra made when she met me. Evidently blue eyes struck her fancy that day and she has not seen the need to change them back," Lokhi smiled. "And I like them the way they are now."

His expression took a more serious tone as he decided how to best approach her other questions.

"As for the other people in those paintings, the large group you see was my family for a time. Nearly eleven years, if I remember correctly. The woman in the other painting is an apprentice of mine, Sa'shalinae." Lokhi looked down at his eggs and pushed them around with his fork. "She commanded the Art naturally and was powerful on her own. I suggested that a careful study of magic could help her natural talents blossom to their full potential. In that, at least, I was correct. She married a man of questionable integrity and they journeyed far to the North; I never saw her again."

Alanis noticed the melancholy in his voice and considered putting a hand on his to comfort him, but thought against it.

"At any rate, I haven't taken many apprentices that have lived up to their potential. As far as the Art was concerned, Sa'sha was excellent. We made a good team…" Lokhi decided to change the subject before revealing too much about himself, things he would rather keep suppressed and buried under several feet of resentment and bitterness.

"As for this journey of yours to Amn, I am prepared to cast the teleport spell as soon as you are done with your breakfast. I have even taken the liberty of enchanting a ring that will allow you to teleport back to me in case you are in danger or are successful with your reconnaissance." Lokhi placed a silver ring on the table and slid it toward Alanis with one finger. "Simply turn it once to the left and it will teleport you to wherever I am at the time."

Alanis put the ring on the fourth finger on her right hand and held it out to look at it. Satisfied, she caught Lokhi's eye and smiled.

"Do you have anything else, or will you shower me with jewelry all morning?"

Lokhi ignored her efforts to fluster him, and pulled a few pieces of equipment from his jacket pocket. He placed a dark cowl, a curved knife, and a small wand on the table, and wasted no time in explaining their uses.

"Wear the cowl and you'll be invisible to nearly every sort of prying eyes. There's not much short of a god that can see through this invisibility spell. The knife will not rust and is blessed by clerics of Tyr, Ilmater, and Torm. The wand has a spell stored in it that will allow you to use a spellguise as often as you like, and it is much more convincing than those of a common hedge wizard. This includes a brief mind-reading spell if you attempt to disguise yourself as a sentient creature."

Lokhi stood and prepared to cast the spell.

"If that's all you'll be needing, I'd prefer if you got an early start on this, the sun has already been up for quite some time in Amn."

Alanis nodded slowly and rose to her feet, slipping the knife in her belt and the wand and cowl into her pouch. She barely had time to prepare herself before Lokhi began casting the spell to teleport her to Amn.

With a flourish of his fingers, the spell was nearing completion and Alanis felt herself pulled very quickly by gentle hands southward. Lokhi's cavern disappeared and she found herself in an ally with a view of a very busy marketplace. She walked out into the street and took in the scenery of Athkatla, the capital of the province of Amn.

She saw houses made of dried mud and booths of merchants peddling whatever wares the people would buy. Making her way along the unfamiliar streets, Alanis saw large crowds of traders selling medallions of Bane out in the open.

Weaving in and out of the crowd, Alanis was able to pickpocket a few of the more wealthy-looking customers. Slipping into a dark alley, she examined the coin purses she held and saw that the gold coins were very soft Maztican gold, the purest gold she knew of. Between the sight of the gold and the salty smell of the ocean nearby, Alanis realized that Athkatla's main value was as a port city.

Being the thief she was, she quickly counted the gold she had stolen, a nice sum of 53 gold pieces, and put the coins into her own coin purse. Walking back out into the street again, Alanis recalled her objective in Amn: to spy on the warlord, wherever he was. She smiled to herself and wondered how much gold she could steal in the mean time and just which direction the military buildings were in.

Just then, Alanis spied a squad of soldiers marching to the north along the street. The crowd was parting to make way for them, and Alanis decided to follow them. No doubt it was the guards coming off the nightshift, having just been relieved by fresh guards. Alanis decided to hold off on the use of magic just now and just casually followed the line of guards marching two abreast.

No one in the city paid any attention to the leather-clad fiery haired woman that walked after the soldiers. Apparently that had become a common sight in this time of political instability, not to mention in a town in which the motive behind even the smallest action is money.

Alanis continued following the guards, hoping that eventually they'd lead her to the military headquarters where she could find what was behind all this danger Lokhi had told her about.