The Marcher's Way

There was only one track, and his borrowed steed followed it. He let himself be borne onward at a steady canter, keeping a tight grip on the reins in obedience to Flemeth's warning, yet feeling no more in control than a piece of driftwood caught in a torrent.

Sometimes he stared over the ears of the bone-skinned horse, looking for turns or junctions or any change in the straight white track, and saw nothing but it receding, mile upon mile of it, into the deep starless night. Sometimes he looked to his left or right, squinting at the copses of trees in case they suddenly resolved into a familiar landmark. Once he saw a few tall pines that reminded him of the Morar Estate near his home, but then he remembered that all its lofty pines had been felled for timber after the Luskan War.

And then there came more rolling, shadowy country that he did not recognise. He could only hope that the bone-skinned horse knew what it was about, for he had no idea.

Drowsiness crept through his mind, winding through the map of his hopes and fears. In full armour, forcing himself to ride in sympathy with the motion of the horse, any sleep should have been shaken out of him, but, again and again, he had to straighten his slumped shoulders, and blink to clear his eyes.

Perhaps he should obey the insistent command, lie forward over his steed's neck, and give way to the pressing exhaustion. He might wake in his family's house or the Korcari temple, or in the belly of the Illefarn Palace, or somewhere else altogether. But it was pleasant to think of lying in his childhood bed, a boy again, nothing troubling his mind except the thought that his sister might steal his toy soldiers and use them in the make-believe balls she staged with her friends…well, he would be revenged. Her dolls would be indispensable in his campaign against the drow army of occupation that made camp between the onion bed and the stables most afternoons after lunch and before arithmetic…

Then the bone-skinned horse threw itself forward over a rut in the track, and he was jolted into a semblance of wakefulness.

There were pools now. Tens or even hundreds of shallow pools lying on both sides of the raised track, scattered amongst a wood of trees with huge spreading branches. The canopy met and meshed over his head, so it was as if he were riding through an underground cavern.

The steady trickling of water was the only noise save for the horse's hooves, though the surface of every pool that he passed was completely still, unruffled by the wind, undisturbed by springs or streams. Despite the abundant foliage above and around them, none of the pools had as much as a solitary leaf floating on them.

The tiredness descended again, and he found it easier not to wonder why that was. There would be an explanation somewhere…Aldanon would know…and, in any case, the pools were pretty. The woodland was pretty. He smiled and patted the horse's neck with one hand; the other retained a loose grip on the reins.

Just as he was thinking that it would be nice to dismount and wander through the pleasant forest, they were through. Once more the rolling grassland was about them, and a cool breeze blew from his left, wafting the cobwebs away.

Neverwinter. He was going to Neverwinter, where he would find Elanee, and ask her forgiveness for not protecting her from Qara. And then – well, that would depend on her response. He would have been missing for days, and what was he to say about that? She would believe his explanation, he knew she would. But Sir Nevalle might have him despatched to the prison fortress of Castle Irlingstar for his own protection. The leader of the Nine would probably like that idea as a solution to a vexing loose end.

The breeze returned, rushing over the track from the same direction as before, but warm, and smelling of the sea in summer.

He turned his head, and could only stare. Below the track, where a meadow had been, blue-green waves were lapping at the edge of the bank. To his right, the sky was still a dark indigo, a canvas for moving clouds of charcoal and – a change – for fixed stars, which were not the stars of Ferelden, nor of Faerun. To his left, the night had been chased back by a bright blue sky.

Stranger than that was the sight that awaited him a furlong beyond the sea: he was looking down on the harbourfront of a city, not so different to the docks at Neverwinter, though smaller in scale, built with fishing skiffs in mind rather than galleons. A cheerful procession like nothing he had seen on the functional, half-empty quays near the Sunken Flagon was ambling down the open-sided street and along the largest of the jetties. Women in wide skirts thumbed metal ladles on the bases of cooking pots; children ran around squealing and yelling; men grinned over steins of drink.

At the head of the procession, two straw figures danced around on the ends of long poles. The extra padding round the middle of one suggested that it was meant to be female. The poles were lowered; the straw figures bowed to each other like partners at the end of a dance, and at that they were thrown into the green-blue sea as the crowd cheered, roared, and stamped their approval.

That was all Casavir saw. The bone-skinned horse was already bearing him on. The smell of salt disappeared; the sea darkened, and night reclaimed the sky.

"Oy!" Now the sound came from the right. He looked round in time to see two little boys, not long out of the cradle, hurrying away from the red-brick door of a watermill, as a big man with flour dust on his clothes and sandy hair shouted after them. He could not discern the words, which were blurred with anger, but the tone was unmistakeable. Arleg the gamekeeper had used the same tone with him when he strayed aged seven into an enclosed part of the Morar lands.

Then the mill was past, and the millpond with a pair of swans gliding around the furthest edge. The shouts and laughter of the boys, the threats of the miller, dropped out of his hearing all at once, as if a door had been closed on them. The quiet rustling in the grasses, the stirring of the wind in the trees reasserted themselves, but not for long.

Another rift in the landscape opened. This one showed him a grey river streaming through a grey city of tall, oblong buildings. Equally oblong black wagons, each under an enchantment that disposed of the need for horses, rolled over a bridge that was twice as wide as the Dolphin Bridge in Neverwinter.

The only beautiful thing in the colourless scene was the dark-skinned young woman, dressed in a dress of unnaturally brilliant white, who was standing outside the bridge's parapet, arms bent back to grasp the railing. He knew what would happen before she did it; had she hesitated a second longer, he would have pulled on the horse's reins, and spurred it down the bank and onto the road amongst the ugly, rumbling wagons.

But she did not hesitate; she let go of the railings, opened her arms and fell towards the grey river, her swan-white dress fluttering and spreading out in the air, though not enough to slow her plunge. There was no splash. He did not even see the grimy water close over her body. But before the Marcher's Way reasserted itself, a woman's voice sighed, and parallel waves ran up and down the river from the place of her vanishing. The foam of the waves was the same colour as her dress; their crests were as clear as mountain pools.

A succession of unknown lands opened themselves to him afterwards. Workers in rough kirtles laboured in dead silence on a hundred-foot-high rig of scaffolding surrounding a pillar of rock that glowed a brilliant blue. Next, tattooed warriors brandished their spears, sang and danced around a torchlit form hanging from the branch of a tree. A golden eagle, its hooked beak half-open, its wings broken off near the torso leaving only shameful maimed stubs.

That too vanished, and then the rough metal roof of a hut caught the sunlight on a down grazed by short, sturdy sheep. Dogs barked from somewhere behind the hut. A smell he recognised, pipe smoke, made his nostrils twitch. The peaceful sight reminded him of the dales west of the Sword Mountains before they had been stripped of their population. But this hut, this shepherd's hut, had iron wheels unlike the stone outposts he knew, and where the shallow grass had been worn away, the rock underneath matched the chalk of the Marcher's Way. Not the dales, then.

The bone-skinned horse had slowed to an easy stroll as he viewed the sheep-mown downland. The smell of pipe smoke grew stronger. He looked around, but saw no one, not even a grey plume drifting through the fresh air. His mount whinnied like a friendly children's pony, and ducked its head, the first time it had done something so normal.

"Not your fold, my lad," said an old woman's voice, much older than Flemeth's, that conjured thoughts of aged leather, the stink of oil, and summer lightning storms.

A hand clapped the flank of the horse, and instead of sounding with the muffled resonance of polished bone, it made the warm thunk of flesh against flesh. The horse sprang forward. After ten yards, it was galloping, and the hut, the down and the smell of pipe-smoke had disappeared under the fields and trees of Marcher country.

His head was spinning at all the wonders…at so much that was new, so much that was strange. These were all worlds, entire and complete with their own systems, their own gods; they were like Flemeth's land, not planes whose existence was intimately tied to the Prime. That was what his instincts told him, and the scholars and mages whom he knew were not present to disagree, or put his opinion to the test. The Marcher's way is. The worlds are. That sufficed for him.

More troubling was the thought that, if he did find Abeir-Toril at last, it would be a version of his own land far removed from the one he knew that he returned to. To ride into Neverwinter of the oligarchy, or Neverwinter of the kings, or find no city there at all, but only Illefarn scouts from Arvahn: that would scarcely be an improvement on Flemeth's gameboard of templars, maleficars and darkspawn.

"Neverwinter," he whispered into the horse's ear. "Elanee. Take me to my friends."

He did not detect any change in the creature's behaviour. It continued unmoved, maintaining its easy canter. The flanks of his black destrier would have been heaving, sleek with sweat; this strange beast was as fresh as if it had just been led out from a stable.

But not long after begging it to take him home, he noticed a gradual change in the Marcher's Way itself: the track narrowed; dark grey pebbles cluttered the low ridges on either side of it; sedge and wild barley nodded their heads over the chalk, where before there had only been plain grass.

A wide, shallow brook appeared ahead of them, glittering and sparkling under the indigo sky. It resembled the Selverwater, the river that rose in the Sword Mountains, before running under Great East Road on its long journey to irrigate the fens of the Mere.

Once more, the horse slowed and stopped. It flicked its ears, stamped, and swished its tail. If the create had the ability to be uneasy, and not only to cause unease in others with its lizard tongue and serpent's neck, then he believed it was surpassingly ill-at-ease.

He rested a hand on the head of his warhammer and assessed his surroundings. Woodland. Meadows. An earth bridge over a brook that resembled one he knew, but which was not it. This was not Neverwinter; at the same time, he was not certain whether he was still on the Marcher's Way. Not completely.

As before, he sensed that someone was nearby. Not through the smell of pipe smoke; rather, his skin prickled on the back of his neck. He might be a deer grazing in a glade with the eyes of a wolf-pack watching him from the eaves of the forest.

"Is anyone there?" he called, bringing to bear the training he had received in his rhetoric classes to cover his discomfort. He thought he saw shadows moving ahead of him on the further side of the bridge. "I mean you no harm. Let us talk."

The shadows moved closer, revealing their human shapes. Then they were not just human-shaped, but human, a score of them, each dressed in a random array of chain hauberks, helms, and unmatched pieces of armour that might be a century old or more, pulled from a dusty trunk in the cellar, or discovered in an abandoned hayloft. Most were armed with pikes; depending on the skill of the blacksmith, the weapons' origins as hoes, rakes and apple pickers could still be discerned.

Casavir gripped the reins hard. The prickling on the back of his neck spread, and strengthened, until it felt as if all his muscles were trembling, on the verge of a spasm. He knew every one of the men and women in front of him, recognising them despite the darkness. Hollis, who went missing near the caves of the Bonegnasher clan. Jena and Jethil, cut down together on Needlepoint, Garant, who was caught in an ambush as he returned from checking his rabbit traps, only a mile out from Old Owl Well.

When he saw a woman climbing the bank on his right, he knew who it would be, even if the white-blonde hair had not announced her identity. As she turned to face him, standing at the head of the ragged band, the horse snorted and shied back.

His former sergeant was as pale as the moon; but then, she had always been pale. Her features were set, hard and unyielding; that was the same too. She wore only a light leather jerkin and breeches; her sword was sheathed at her hip.

"Casavir. We came when you called." Her voice was low and cool, exactly as he remembered it. "We're ready."

For an immeasurable amount of time, he could not reply. He felt stupefied. His palms sweated and slipped on the reins. When he realised at last that he should say something to the sergeant, to the waiting crowd, the words stuck in his throat.

"I am sorry," he whispered. "Katriona, you deserved more. You all did."

With the Eye of Tyr regarding him, with the attention of the kindred gods of vigilance and loyalty on him, he might have managed to tell them that their sacrifice would matter, would always be remembered. They would be recorded in history as martyrs who bought peace for their land with their blood. But on the stony track under the deep sky, after riding the way between worlds and seeing visions of so many elsewheres, big words seemed very small, and insufficient.

"That doesn't matter now," said Katriona. Her wintry eyes stared up at him. Was she real, or was she a trap like the ones set for Captain Farlong in West Harbour? At that moment, he did not care very much. The voice was hers; the hardness was hers, and the cold devotion. "The road to the mountains is open."

As she spoke, the militia began to step to the sides of the track, leaving the bridge open. They watched him as keenly as their sergeant, holding their pikes over their shoulders, rusty helmets pushed high up their foreheads to give them a clear view. But they were all silent; none save Katriona spoke to him. They just waited expectantly.

Beyond the bridge, the track divided, one branch curving off to the right, and another to the left. A few moments ago, no such junction had existed. He had little capacity for surprise left, and, as it was, it seemed easiest to accept the new state of things.

Katriona walked to the place where the track divided, and turned round to him again like the needle moving round the face of a compass. They will not hurt you, he told himself as he nudged the horse forward through the parallel lines of pikemen. They are your friends still.

He was not naïve enough to think that all the souls of his volunteer army would be resting in the Court of Tyr, but that so many should be phantoms here…

"Garant?"

The grey-beared farmer looked at him. His expression was not blank in the way that a revenant would look. Rather, it seemed calm, as if its owner had resolved to wait patiently for some important event, however faraway that might be in time or place.

"What are you doing here, Garant?"

The farmer paused, considering. Then — "Going to the mountains, I reckon."

"And what mountains are those? Garant?" He added the man's name again; it seemed to draw his attention in a way that the question alone could not.

Katriona raised her arm and pointed down the track that led away to the right. It was more a road than a track, in fact; the surface was broad and paved like the highway to Triboar. But the mountains that he saw in the distance were not the bleak Sword Mountains. These rose abrupt and sheer from the plain, their blade-shaped peaks thick with snow that shone rose-pink in the glow of a highland dawn. They were the kind of mountains where the spirits of silver dragons might choose to dream away eternity. As he followed Katriona's index finger, his mind's eye showed him visions of pine forests, of narrow paths through clefts in the rock, of secret meadows full of spring flowers that never faded, and day-long hunts that ended in the revival of the slain.

It was beautiful. It was the realisation of the lost purity he had longed for in Neverwinter. And he knew that it was not for him.

"We need our katalmach," said Katriona, using the title the orcs had given him: berserker, death-seeker.

"I am not the katalmach anymore," he said. "The campaign is over. I have changed."

Katriona shook her head. "You could never change so much, Casavir. New wars are starting, new camps are being built, swords are being sharpened. Come with us. Lead us. If you hadn't called us, we wouldn't be here in the lowlands."

He took a long look at her. In life, what she wanted from him was something he could never offer her. To see her once more, not blaming him for her death, not hating him for his lack of feeling, was like being released from a heavy chain. Even though he had to refuse her again, as he had refused her everything else, he still felt lighter, free of a load he had forgotten he was carrying.

"I cannot," he said. "I am not ready. I do not know if I will ever be ready. I am not what I was. Not really."

Katriona paused, then nodded. That was all. His refusal had been heard and accepted. She did not suddenly become a shadow-creature and lunge for him, or twist into a night walker.

"Fall in!" she called to the militia. Without waiting to see if they would follow, she began walking down the road to the mountains. As if emerging from a torpor, the militia volunteers stretched, some shifting their pikes to the other shoulder, some yawning like recruits on a long training march. Then, walking two abreast in a rough column, they trod in their sergeant's wake at a brisk pace, eager that now they could see their destination before them.

Casavir watched them go, torn between sorrow and happiness. How much of what he had seen was real, he could not tell, but he hoped that at least some of it was. When the rosy light over the mountains dimmed, and the night had swallowed the road and the little band of comrades, he looked away, and tugged the horse's reins to the left.

This track was much less appealing than the one at his back. A few paving-stones sticking out of the ground in odd places suggested that it had once had a proper surface, instead of the grit, dead tree-roots and mud that it consisted of now. Even Flemeth's resilient horse refused to move at more than a trot. Puddles spread across the path as the bank on which the Marcher's Way had once travelled grew lower, eventually disappearing altogether. Brambles and thorns pressed close on both sides, leafless, fruitless, flowerless.

But above him he could see the stars. Correlian, the trailing constellation that marked the end of the harvest. The Sleepless Knights, five well-known points in a sky of sable. As a boy, he had promised himself that if ever he was permitted a crest, he would choose them. Then there was A Citara Las, the curving harp that Elanee had taught him to find.

Casavir patted the horse's long neck. Stooping in the saddle, he whispered in its ear, "It is time to go home. Take me to Neverwinter. Please."

1388 — Uktar

It was only on the last morning of their journey, after they left the Frith Inn and the clean, mild-mannered tributary of the Never alongside it, that the legacy of the Spellplague became visible. For most of the last few days, the highway had been busy by the sparse standards of the lands north of the Dessarin, full of caravans, convoys, farmers holding up the traffic as they drove their herds to market, the odd carriage, and even a number of solitary pedestrians who would have been considered unhinged to travel alone in the area a score of years ago.

If the road from Waterdeep to Baldur's Gate was twice as full, the route to the north could at least claim it had a better surface; still, Elanee had noted that spidermoss and soreleaf were sprouting in the cracks between the paving stones that Shandra and labourers from Crossroad Keep had once laid as part of Master Veedle's programme of urgent repairs.

"What a strange thing to do!" their bodyguard from Silverymoon, Valein, had exclaimed as the wagon rumbled past the wide mouth of a lane leading off towards the Harbour villages. She pointed at the fences on either side of it, their railings painted scarlet, fresh evidence that time had not stood still since the Year of the Bent Blade in this part of the world. Elanee left the explaining to Rosalenita: the Mere of Dead Men, fogs, lantern bearers, outlaws and ghosts…

The Frith Inn lay a few miles south-west of Thundertree, very near the point where a new gravel road grew out of the highway, carrying traders, journeymen and other traffic east to the bridge at Barge End. Someone responsible, perhaps a patrol sent for the purpose from Helm's Hold, had nailed half a dozen signs around the old highway to Neverwinter with warnings in Common, Elvish, and Dwarvish. The messages were clear:

Danger: wild magic

Danger: monsters

Danger: undead

Danger: things unknown

Semmy made her read the signs aloud to him, asked her to check for any other warnings that might have been brazed onto the iron boards in smaller script, then writhed on his seat in barely-contained excitement. Their minder from Silverymoon gripped her staff in anxious determination to do her duty; she was a young elf, even younger than Elanee. Rosalenita continued combing her best hat, a hollowed and lined seedpod from a giant kapok tree. It was two feet high, covered in pale gold fluff, and when paired as it currently was with a gown and overcoat of white goat's wool, it made the botanist look as if a holy icon had escaped from its gilt frame and gone exploring.

"No need to worry," said Ross their Waterdhavian driver over his shoulder as the wagon rolled past the first row of warnings. "People have been coming and going this way all month to get everything ready. There was some trouble at the start, but since then it's been no worse than the Trade Way to Daggerford. We'll have a nice smooth run to Neverwinter."

"Best not say that too loudly," said Rosalenita as she packed away the comb. "There's some creatures would hear that and think they were being challenged. Put in a word for us all with Silvanus, won't you, Elanee?"

"Already done," she replied. Last night she had watched the sun down from the eaves of the Neverwinter Wood, and prayed to Silvanus then, wishing for nothing but the safety of her friends and a quick return home.

The optimism of their driver proved correct. Although nettles were growing through cracks at the edges of the highway, and here and there sections had been washed loose by winter storms, the last miles of their journey were easy ones, free of monsters, free of undead, free of all the hazards the signs had described.

Nor was it a ghost road: faster travellers on horseback overtook them ever more frequently as they neared their destination. A human in a patched, faded tunic went past on a dapple-grey pony, and Elanee thought she recognised Nimas, once of the Neverwinter Nine. The Eye of Tur was barely visible on his back, its stained outline merging into the tired blue fabric.

A human mage reined in her soft-lipped, curious skewbald to exchange news with Rosalenita; from the chat, Elanee gathered that the mage was Eltoora Sarptyl, a former leader of the Many-Starred Cloak, and that though she had indeed fallen into a volcano, it had been an extinct one.

"Who'd be in charge if you had the say?" Rosalenita asked.

"Well, not that Bann," said Eltoora, her expression reminding Elanee of the time Neeshka spiked Khelgar's beer with raw lemon juice and horseradish powder. "There've been some bloodcurdling stories from Highcliff about bodies washed up…ask one of the southern party for details. I did some things in the Luskan War that I'll never forget, but nothing like that."

Elanee leaned round the pillar of shining wool that was Rosalenita. "The southern party?"

Eltoora peered at her; with her heap of ash-blonde hair pinned into place by a cross between knitting needles and stiletto blades, and her dramatic cheekbones, she seemed formidable. "Not a partisan, is she?" the mage asked.

"Not at all," said Rosalenita. "She's here like us to pour the balm of our scholarly presence into stormy waters."

Eltoora snorted. "Good luck with that. Anyway," she addressed Elanee, "you're better going to anyone but me for politics. I'm here out of respect for my brothers and sisters in the Cloak who fell against Luskan. I'm staying away from today's battle lines, and that's exactly what the southerners have been doing, or so I hear."

She rapped the side of the wagon with her knuckles in farewell, and pulled her skewbald away from where it was mouthing the doorlatch. "Talk more at the party!" floated back to them, as horse picked up its speed, and bore its rider away down the road to Neverwinter.

A mile further, on the summit of a low hill to the east, the walls of pavilions rattled in the chill breeze, while the standards of the Lords' Alliance snapped to and fro amongst trees still clinging to the last of their gold-brown leaves.

"Are we nearly there?" Semmy rasped. He had drawn an extra cloak around himself. All she could see of him were his silvered eyes staring out from between the brim of his hat, and the top of his scarf. This part of the old highway lay wide open to the wind from the Sea of Swords. Unpleasant for the metamorphized halfling, but delightful for her. She closed her eyes, and relished the big sky, and the calls of the gulls as the birds swooped and spied and yelled strife at their neighbours along the cliffs.

Even her fear of what was to come could not spoil the sensation of wellbeing that came over her at that moment, the conviction that all was well on this storm-battered strip of rough ground, while the salt winds blew into her face, and the wagon shook and rocked across the unmaintained paving.

"Yes," she said, opening her eyes once more. "Not far now."

Valein of Silverymoon looked up from her corner of the wagon. "Less than a mile to go, although there will be a delay at the gates. The Flaming Fist have a checkpoint there. I'm afraid that from the gates you'll have to walk to the meeting point." She looked doubtfully at Semmy. "There's a marked route."

"I will walk," came the harsh whisper from the three-foot ball of fabric.

Elanee leant back, taking in the scenery that she had once known as well as her own face. Better, really, since she'd never bought a mirror, but had travelled up and down the highway more times than she could count.

The ancient ribcage of a vast creature, a dragon of the ocean, loomed up on their left. It too was a familiar sight. Neverwinter folk from the docks had called it Mother Keelbreaker, and deposited offerings of food and wine on top of the grassy mound that was thought to lie over the skull.

In the early days of her time in Neverwinter, Lila had insisted on climbing the spine to see what was at the top. As it turned out, a nest of angry salt mephits was there, and they'd proceeded to chase Lila, Elanee, Neeshka and Khelgar back to the walls. That was before Casavir, before Crossroad Keep, the Jerros and Zhjaeve, while there was still a Circle of druids keeping watch over the Mere of Dead Men.

A bend in the road, then another, then it was before them: Neverwinter, the Jewel of the North. At first she thought it looked no different, that like Mother Keelbreaker it had endured the Spellplague unscathed; the rumours and warnings must have been exaggerated by the power of gossip. There were the squat walls, surfaced with marble, packed within with brick. There was the Aganazzar Gate, wide enough to allow three carts to pass through at the same time, and it was as busy as it had ever been.

Tall guardsmen from the Flaming Fist had set up a line of hurdles across the road; carts and horses were secured in an area of wasteland where the Greycloaks had once mustered. Three lines of people, delegates and guests, waited to be questioned, searched, then ushered through into the winds of Thorn Street.

"I was expecting a pile of rubble," said Rosalenita.

Elanee nodded absently, still focused on the city. Neverwinter's walls had been built thick rather than high, designed to support catapults and companies of archers, as well as to offer some convenient niches for street traders shelter from the rain. Above them, the steep angles of the many rooftops jostled on the skyline, black slate to the west on the houses of the Merchant Quarter, and fired clay covering the tenements of the Alagondar District to the east, a cleared slum that had been built over by Lord Nasher in a work of charity intended to benefit the poor.

Now everywhere she looked, she read the signs of disaster: shattered dormer windows, exposed roof beams, great black brands like exploding stars marking brickwork and stonework. There were no plants though. Not even brambles had gained a hold in the damp, abandoned attics.

A hundred yards from the Flaming Fist, the wagon drew to a halt. Rosalenita climbed down first, jamming her golden kapok tree hat firmly onto her head, and bidding a cheerful farewell to their escort. The driver promised to be waiting for them with the wagon, ready to take them back to the Frith Inn or wherever they wanted to go; Valein gave them a curt nod before departing to join a crowd of her compatriots beside the western tower.

The queues were short. Elanee gazed round at the waiting people, mainly tired-looking humans in travelling clothes with a few dwarves in the mix. She was relieved to discover that she knew none of them. A few seemed passingly familiar, perhaps once seen at a festival, or glimpsed strolling through the Royal Gardens, but there was no one she could put a name to.

A heavy-browed sergeant from the Flaming Fist asked them for their details; a female officer briskly patted her down to check her for hidden weapons, then did the same to Rosalenita. Confronted by the stocky form of Semmy in his multitude of wrappings, she gave up and waved them past the barriers, and into the shadows under the gate.

"I don't feel anything wrong. Do you?" Rosalenita asked as they stepped back into the light of Thorn Street.

"No – the air is clear. Pure." In truth, the air here was much improved on what it had been: removing twenty-five thousand inhabitants as well as their cooking fires had banished the constant smog that had lurked in the streets of the low-lying inland districts. "I expected to feel a taint, such as once poisoned the Mere, and there's nothing like that, but -"

"-it is empty." Semmy stamped his feet. "Life has fled from the rock and the soil."

"I'd never have thought the mages could make such an alteration in the nature of the city," said Elanee. She slid her fingers between a crack in the cobbles, and felt the same emptiness as Semmy. "The broadsides said that the mages came with fire and grave-frost, and wept as they destroyed, until they were overwhelmed by their own powers, and burnt…but they said nothing about this."

"Maybe it's not the mages," said Rosalenita. "Maybe Neverwinter misses its people. What you call emptiness is really just sulking, like the bloodthorn when Semmy puts it on a reduced bonemeal ration. Neverwinter isn't like Waterdeep. I've always thought the old place wouldn't care a bit if everyone in it dropped dead one day. It would just say to itself: 'Excellent. More bodies to add to the strata!' and forget about us.

"Waterdeep's a cat, nature's arch-pragmatist. But Neverwinter – the people have this odd autochthonous connection thing going on, or they think they do, and that's what's important, even if their daddy was a githyanki and their mammy was a Thayvian flesh golem. Sensible folk move to Neverwinter, and the romance snares 'em. And within the turning of the tide, they're painting the Owl and Eye on their shutters, writing songs of praise, and swearing eternal loyalty or hatred in the blood of their veins on Halueth's Stone. No wonder the city misses 'em. So much passion, all gone. This is a temple without its priests and congregation."

Stopping, she waved the end of her cane around, encompassing the straight-lined tenements to the east, and the vacant windows, and broken-down doors of the older houses to the west. A few of the Flaming Fist stationed along the route raised their swords as if they thought the botanist might be casting a spell. A Waterdhavian sergeant, close enough to have heard all of Rosalenita's speech, took her pipe from her mouth and gave a wry grin.

Rosalenita waved at the Flaming Fist guards, and returned to leaning on her cane. She chuckled, and shook her head in amusement. "Listen to me going on about the underlife of cities. I'm just an old plant hunter with a weakness for tree ferns. Still, that's my theory, and I'm sticking to it until someone proves otherwise."

Elanee smiled to herself, and they moved on.

The long walk along Thorn Street from the Aganazzar Gate to the Wyvern Bridge would have been unbearable alone, trapped between the front lines of phantom districts, moving from one memory of before-times to another; the presence of her friends drove back the wandering ghosts, and formed a bulwark against regret.

In its current state, Neverwinter appeared to be exactly what the Circle of the Mere had always claimed it was: a barren circle of rock, its only purpose being to limit and pollute the flow of a great river. Rosalenita's notion of the city as a hidden personality exerting an influence over the people within its walls felt kindly in comparison.

But then, what if she was right? What if the trail of chosen pilgrims trickling back into the unmapped streets was the secret work of Neverwinter, resummoning its servants? Then anything might happen beside the Blacklake. Sacrifice was at the heart of worship. For Silvanus and the gentler gods, the soul was the foremost offering, one that was given and received. Other faiths wrote their teachings in flesh.

Thorn Street was interrupted at intervals by circular avenues which had served much the same purpose as the numerous plazas of Waterdeep: they were used for trade and public announcements, as well as for private chats under shop awnings. At the centre of the final crescent before the road crossed the River Never, the main watchhouse stood, as squat and strong as ever, built to house a much larger force than Lord Nasher had ever been able to pay for.

To reach the bridge, it was quicker to turn left and follow the road as it looped around the northern flank of the watchhouse, but the City Guard of Waterdeep had blocked that route. A silver-haired half-elf was being redirected by the chief of the guards while Elanee looked on. As he span on his heel and stalked past her little group, she recognised Fihelis, an informant deployed by the Watch against the Shadow Thieves whom she had once helped rescue.

It was good to see that he was still alive, albeit as pale as winter and much aged. He marched off along the southern arm of the crescent, not glancing to the right or left, shoulders hunched, appearing oblivious to her presence. That was what she preferred. At the same time, Fihelis's behaviour matched what she had seen from the delegates that they had encountered in roadside inns on the journey from Waterdeep: withdrawn, and wound up to a point of tension that could not be sustainable, like beaten dogs torn between fight and flight.

"If he was one of mine," Rosalenita remarked without troubling to lower her voice, "I'd prescribe him full sunlight, rich loam, and a pint of comfrey water twice a ten-day."

They walked along the crescent, slowing their pace further by silent agreement to avoid exhausting Semmy. He had become more quiet than usual, a sign that he was struggling.

The windows on the southern side of the watchhouse had all been shattered. Chunks of masonry were missing from the corbels, and the wooden planks of the higher storeys had been charred and warped through some terrible heat.

It was a sad sight, though not as pitiful as the remains of the Moonstone Mask on their right. The most luxurious of Neverwinter's taverns was a wreck: its roof was completely missing, exposing the mouldy ruin of the beds in the attic rooms. She stood in the spot where she had once found Lila Farlong, unconscious and stuck through with shards of glass, and took in the holes in the walls and the smell of rot and mildew emanating from the remains of the doorway. Both door and frame lay shattered on the ground.

On the stone walls of the ground floor, someone had painted the crest of Neverwinter, the Eye of Tyr on a blue background. The artist had devoted a level of attention-to-detail, a painstakingness, that most graffiti didn't even try to attain. Written neatly in Common above the Eye was a single word: remember.

"What should we remember?" whispered Semmy. He stared at the white paint as if it offended him in some way.

"Where we left the wagon, maybe," said Rosalenita. "Or not to order chicken at the Frith Inn again. I don't reckon what they served me was actually chicken. For a start, it had pincers."

Elanee refrained from making her own suggestion; she could think of more than one possibility and didn't want to recite them. There was enough darkness here already without waking more. Rosalenita might already know, in any case. "I don't understand why the Mask is in such a terrible condition," she said as they continued walking. "The other buildings look much less decayed."

"Ophala Cheldarstorm died a few years before the Spellplague," said Rosalenita, pausing to inspect the desiccated contents of a window box. "According to the stories I heard, she crossed the line peacefully in her bed after a night spent in company with three much younger humans. Heroic way to go." She poked at a rope of yellow vine, nibbled on one of its leaves, and made a face. "Not good. Onward!"

They passed the paths that wound uphill to the Tomb of the Betrayer, and one of the city's graveyards, the Temple of Tyr, and the elegant, carbonised skeletons of a few merchant villas. Several more delegates overtook them, outpacing them with their heads down, hoods up, and heavy cloaks fastened against the cold. If any of them recognised her, they did not so much as pause.

The Wyvern Bridge was soon upon them. Its famous wings were covered in scaffolding, and wooden boards had been placed over sections of its floor. She imagined the gaps in the old stone roadway, and the deep waters of the Never running fifty feet beneath, fast for a lowland river, and resolved that she would be the first to cross.

Before she could set her foot on the first step, she noticed the man leaning on the railing that divided street from gorge. He was a tall, broad-shouldered human, his auburn hair speckled with grey. As Rosalenita's cane sent a rock flying down into the river, he tensed, turned, and looked at them. The fine sable tunic he wore was decorated only by the outline of a silver gauntlet over the heart.

It was Cormick, previously Marshall Cormick of the Watch, and previous to that the winner of a fight which had brought him years of renown in his home village, and which she had described in minute detail to Kaleil, who'd completed failed to understand her excitement. Neither of the opponents had morphed into a bear, or pulled down a tree: Kaleil had sometimes been very single-minded in his interests.

Cormick shaded his eyes in a gesture that had to spring from habit rather than need: only a drow or duergar would struggle to see in the glare of the washed-out sunshine. "Is that Elanee?"

She froze in surprise. "Yes?"

He moved closer, nodding amiably to her companions, before giving her a short bow. "I thought it was."

"You have a good memory."

"Watchmen have to." He gave a bashful, boyish smile that left his eyes untouched. "Though if I'm honest, I think most people would remember you. I know Commander Tann kept pestering me for news about you. Only gave up when I reminded him he was a married man. Been keeping alright?"

"Yes," she answered, deciding on the basis of his hollow smile that wasn't interested in a fuller answer. There was a small and enthusiastic audience eager to hear stories about hunting rare mushrooms in the Amnish uplands: Cormick was unlikely to be among them. "And you?"

"Could be better, could be worse. Since Helm's Hold decided to keep me, the time fills itself. Someone always needs something fixing, and it keeps me busy. I like it that way." Carelessly, as if hardly realising he was doing it, he let his left hand bounce off the crossbar of the railing a few times. His gaze pulled to the left in the direction of Castle Never and the Blacklake District.

Elanee was glad that his attention had fallen elsewhere: there was something impossibly bleak in his manner that made her more agitated even than her walk through the abandoned city. About to make a swift farewell and pull Rosalenita and Semmy away, her plan was thwarted as he refocused on her.

"What do you think of all this then?" He waved a dismissive hand at the bridge; another group of delegates were half-way across.

"I…don't know. I'm just here with Doctora Rosalenita really. Sand brought her an invitation last month, and I invited myself along." It might be cowardly to hope her friend would shield her from some of Cormick's intensity, but Rosalenita could disarm people just through being herself. Cormick glanced at the botanist, then back to the bridge. He tapped the railing again.

"Guests of the Council then. Good. You don't want anything to do with Bann's child-killers, and as for the south—" He broke off, frowning and shaking his head. Elanee noticed that there were dark rings under his eyes, and the whites were webbed with red.

"We should be going," she said. "I don't want us to be late."

He nodded, and neither attempted to follow them, nor returned to watching the river church below. She thought that the conversation was over, but before she could mount the bridge he called after her.

"I often think about Sir Casavir, you know. Melia told me what he did; she thought he was as daft as an eel in Anauroch…still, she understood why he left his post and went to the mountains. Sometimes there is no other way." His frown deepened. "Sometimes I think it would have been better if the mages had burnt every inch of Neverwinter to ash and sown the ground with salt." His lips pulled back into a sickly grin. "But I'm not meant to say that. Not diplomatic of me. Though I don't know why anyone expects a thick-skulled Harbourman to act the politician."

Elanee struggled to find a reply. Cormick had always been just another face in the confusion of new faces she'd had to learn when she left the Mere: a likeable one, but not close, not near to her in a meaningful sense. The raw pain behind his unconvincing mask, and his mention of Casavir, made her feel as if her legs had been kicked out from under her.

"But you don't want to hear this." He was right. She didn't. It wasn't that she didn't feel for him; she felt too much. She couldn't let him push her into the mire of her past again.

"It'll be over soon," she told him. "Then we can go."

"It'll be over when we all make up and pretend to be friends with the people we hate most, and when we discover that what we thought was treason, rebellion and murder was really a grand misunderstanding. Compromise!" Bitterness weighed down each syllable of the word. He looked ready to spit with anger.

"I've kept away from Neverwinter for years," she offered, not sure how he'd react, "so I don't know what's gone on here. But it seems to me that compromise has got to be better than civil war."

Cormick looked at her with flat eyes. "You're of Brelaina's party then, are you? I thought you druids were supposed to be the stubborn ones, the kind that fight to the death before ceding a yard to the plough."

"My druids were," said Elanee. "They died. Take care, Cormick. It was good to see you again." She paused, and added, "Casavir always liked you."

Rosalenita and Semmy had gone ahead to wait for her on the bridge. As they trudged across, she hazarded a brief glance behind her, and saw that Cormick was slumped against the railing again, watching the river as it hurried to join the sea.

"I'm happy to know we're not the strangest friends you have," said Rosalenita as a plank shook under her feet.

Elanee rubbed her forehead. "I only met Cormick a few times when Lila Farlong was working for the Watch. He was confident, brave, and completely incorruptible."

"A rare species."

"Nearly unique at the time."

Relieved that Cormick was behind them, she changed the subject as they stepped back onto the solid ground of the northern bank. "Almost there now."

"Good," Semmy huffed.

"Ahead of them, there was another roadblock cutting off the gate to the Blacklake District. Beyond the gate, the road used to pass across an open plaza overlooked by Castle Never to the west, and the Academy to the north. Between the gates, warding spells distorted the shape of the air; a silver line had been drawn across the mouth of the plaza, and even from a distance of twenty yards, she could feel the powerful enchantments radiating off it.

"The vortex was there," said Semmy, his eyes glowing with dark excitement. "That is where the Spellplague entered the city."

"That's right," said a Waterdhavian guardswoman, breaking off a flirtatious conversation with a mage of Silverymoon to speak to them. "And it's still not safe in there. People go in and don't come out. Maybe once these mad Neverwinter folks have stopped shaking their antlers at each other, they can clean it up." She paused as she realised that she might be speaking to mad Neverwinter folks. "You're not from here, are you?"

All three of them shook their heads. Elanee wasn't sure if she was being untruthful or not. How long did you have to live somewhere to be from there?

"Well, good. Like the hat, by the way," she told Rosalenita. "Is it hyena fur?"

The resulting discussion was stopped several minutes later by the arrival of three more humans, Uthgardt delegates, their arms tattooed with the symbols of the Elk Tribe.

"Turn left and follow the wall," said the chatty guard. "We've made some improvements to the fortifications." The Uthgardt strode off impatiently without saying a word. The guard rolled her eyes, and turned back to Rosalenita. "If things get nasty, run back up here as quick as you can. We'll get you out."

She winked at Elanee, then strolled down to the bridge, where the Silverymoon mage was waiting for her. After they had walked a few hundred yards down the narrow strip of land on the northern bank of the river gorge, while Elanee monitored Rosalenita as they went in case the botanist suffered another fit of dizziness, they discovered that the main improvement the Lords' Alliance troop had made to the district wall was to knock a big hole in it.

Elanee stepped into the narrow area of ground that had been cleared of rubble, and looked down across the Blacklake District. She tried to take it in, then wrapped her arms around herself and dropped to her knees. It wasn't her friend who was having the fit of dizziness. She swallowed, blinked, forced herself to examine the scene properly.

The lanterns were all gone; absurd as it was, that was what she noticed first. Although the pleasure boats were still there, they had been piled up in a marshy corner of the lake, where they rotted, paint flaking, hulls full of stagnant water. She could still read the name on one, The Vhaemas.

The library lay opposite, and was as much of a ruin as the Moonstone Mask, or worse. She shuddered at the thought of all those books returning to pulp, the ink running, the pages melting together in the autumn rains.

A low mist clung to the surface of the lake. The grasses around it were dead, and so were the trees. There was life in the district, but it took the form of crows cawing over the ruins, and a crowd of people – no, three separate crowds of people – assembled round Blacklake's northern and western shores. At firsts, she recognised no one. Three masses of undifferentiated strangers shot suspicious glances at each other, or leant together in whispering, uneasy huddles.

But then she brought the full strength of her gaze to bear, and it was as if she suddenly knew everyone. Brelaina without a sword though still in chainmail. Veedle was looking in the direction of the sealed palace, gnawing his lower lip. There were Fihelis and Nimas, standing a yard away from Sand and Harcourt. Sir Grayson – Sir Edmund – Sevann, Vale and Eltoori of the Many-Starred Cloak – Kana. Aldanon was ignoring the divisions to chat with a grey-haired human, who had to be Tarmas, the glum West Harbour mage. Jalboun and, gods preserve them, Torio Claven.

Elder Naevan. Among so many humans, her former mentor, her not-quite-father, stood out by reason of his height and skeletal build, but also for the absence of any change in his appearance: he alone amongst the familiar faces looked exactly as he had when she last saw him.

And there were more, many more. There had to be hundreds of people at the gathering already. It took her longer to find them, the ones she was looking for, the ones she had fought alongside during the most important years of her life so far. In the end, it was Neeshka's high laugh that gave their location away. They were partially screened from her line of sight by a couple of lizardmen, by Keros of Clan Ironfist, and by an orc whom she guessed was Uthanck, though his back was to her.

In the gaps between the figures, she could see the much-reduced remnant of Crossroad Keep's war council. Neeshka. Khelgar. Lila Farlong. Ammon Jerro. They looked well: the intervening years had been allies, not enemies. Jerro in particular seemed to have sidestepped the demands of time; apart from the space where his left hand should have been, he looked as he always had: cold, hostile, and arrogant.

Khelgar was wearing a tunic of the Neverwinter Nine, one that was in better condition than Nimas's – so Sand had been telling the truth. He was chatting good-humouredly to his mixed orc and lizardmen audience, safe in the knowledge that he needed no weapon save his fists to defend himself if the violence ruptured the strained accord. Neeshka was observing the movement of the crowds, her tail lashing, her back straight. There was a change in her, but Elanee wasn't sure how to define it. And Lila…

The orphan of West Harbour, whom the Circle had instructed her to spy on so long ago, was observing the easternmost group with amused alertness, tilting her head towards Jerro as he muttered something meant for her ears only. She wore no sabre, of course, nor even armour, just a simple dress under a patterned cloak. Her black hair had regrown and was braided once more, now with a few lengths of gold thread added to the weave.

All told, they were one of the most relaxed groups amongst the three armies of delegates and guests. But all told honestly, they had little competition: fear and distrust were the most powerful, uninvited delegates, and they were traversing the shores of the Blacklake with total freedom.

"We should get going," said Rosalenita. She was stooping low behind Elanee with the aid of her cane. "There's a queue behind us."

That was an understatement. The path through the rubble left enough room for one person to pass, and she was blocking it. More cloaked, frowning humans were waiting for her to get out of the way. If anything went wrong during the service, it would take a long time for the assembly to exit the district: they would be bottled in, unless the Lords' Alliance forces opened the gates to the forecourt of Castle Never, and let the delegates flee past the ruins of the Academy.

She looked at the Blacklake, at the remains of Neverwinter's most beautiful and wealthy quarter, and at the three coalitions stewing in anxiety at its centre. "I can't," she told Rosalenita. Her legs felt as weak as twigs. "I can't go down there."

She didn't know where the paralysis came from, only that it was there. If Qara had been advancing on her at that moment, fire wreathing her hands and haloing her empty face, she could not have been more terrified.

Rosalenita said nothing; she only extended her arm like a falconer summoning a hawk to her gauntlet. She raised an eyebrow.

Taking a deep breath, Elanee accepted the invitation. She spread her arms, and threw herself into the change. It was the first time in years that she had chosen to hide in her thrush form; she needed it today. At once, the colours of the world looked as if they were being filtered through a wire mesh; the people grew more distant, less bound in nets of meaning and emotion. The paralysis faded, and a burst of energy sent her sailing up from the ground to perch on Rosalenita's wrist.

After waiting for Semmy to shuffle between the piles of broken masonry, her friend began walking slowly down to the lake, and together they drew nearer the twitching, whispering mass of factions. Spider-eyes watched the newcomers. Blurry faces rose and sank back into the grey pack of bodies like corpse-candles in the Merdelain.