Seen in Heliodor
SSt. 858, Athk. Fae. Contents: Blank. Status: Sold Buyer: Sand of Neverwinter
The path was not there.
I stood as near to the end of its stump as I dared, and looked down. A slick of mud and loose stones had spread itself across the less vertiginous reaches of the upper slopes. A wind-blown rook perched on a crag to our left, and cawed at us with a clownish relish. Bishop took a swing at it. He missed, and the rook flew cackling away. Three hundred feet below me, jutting out from the side of the cliff, was some kind of shrub. Juniper, perhaps. Leafless, gnarled and bent, but it was the first one I'd seen for some time.
"I don't fucking believe it," said Lila, the model of stoicism. Our predicament was making itself felt.
"Perhaps we should turn back?" Shandra murmured behind me. She sounded intensely hopeful. I took her question to mean, 'We should go back to the Keep at once and never return to this appalling, lifeless place.' Clever girl.
"We're almost there already," replied Lila. Already? We had ridden for days through the foothills of the Crags. When the track had turned into a path, we had been obliged to leave the horses and most of our supplies behind with Casavir to guard them. We had been attacked by wolves, bugbears and midges. "We can't give up now."
A snowflake landed on the end of my nose. The clouds above us were of that light grey variety that most often precede blizzards.
"Then what do you propose we do?" I snapped. "Have you added walking on thin air to your many talents, Captain? Perhaps you know a spell which allows us to sprout wings and fly across?" I waved my long sleeves in illustration.
I heard a snort of contempt from where Qara was huddled in a rocky nook beside the path. The arm movements might have been a misjudgement. The little jump at the end certainly had been.
But a ten yard expanse of nothing could not be traversed by the power of Harbourman pigheadedness alone. I was particularly annoyed with myself for my failure to bring a copy of Mezentine's Ethereal Bridge with me. There was a scroll tucked away in the warm, plushly furnished library at home – rather, at Crossroad Keep, which I should be careful not to regard as my home – however, lacking powers of supernatural foresight, I had not brought it with me on our trot through one of the Sword Coast's most inhospitable regions. I had packed some woollen mittens instead.
"Are you coming?" Bishop was standing on the path. On the path that began again beyond the gulf left by the landslide. His easy life at the Keep had slowed him down, added the beginning of jowls to his fox-like face. But clearly, he hadn't yet given himself over to total drunken decline, as many human rangers do.
"How did you manage that?" Shandra asked.
"You're in the wilds now. This is my territory, farmer." He folded his arms, and stood firmly on the brink, his nose sniffing the air. One of his favourite postures.
"He walked along the ledge," said Lila, puncturing his moment of rugged individualism triumphant before I was able to. "He used his extra special ranger vision to see that not all of the path has been washed away, and his fierce natural feet to walk over to the other side."
Bishop bared his teeth.
But there was indeed a small amount of the path left. At its best points, it was less than a foot wide. At its worst, it ceased to exist, and it was only possible to cross if one said a prayer and stepped across to the next dubious remainder.
"You must be totally insane!" said Qara, when she left her hole to come and assess the situation. "I'm not crossing that!" It was not informative to say that she looked pale, since she always did. And yet there was something new in the set of her lips that I had never seen before. She peeped over the edge of the path, and jumped back, reaching unsteadily for the wall.
"It's perfectly feasible," I said. It was not that I wanted to compete with the girl, or humiliate her, or grind her spirits down into the dust, I told myself – it was simply that one had to be rational about these things. The sooner we were across, the sooner we could find shelter from the snow. Besides, I had a good sense of balance.
"Watch." And I walked out along the ledge. As long as I didn't think of the drop, the fear was bearable. I tried listing potion ingredients in my head. Willow bark. Cormyrian Rue. Red clover. Hawthorn petals. Black rue. Herb-of-grace. I reached the gap. Breathed in, breathed out. Gripped the cliff to my left with one hand. Moonwort. Peganium. Firethorn. Rue. Rue. Rue. I closed my eyes, thrust out my right hand for balance, stepped.
My foot felt nothing underneath it. Then, a second later, there it was. Oak leaves. Shredded palm fronds. Dandelion tufts. The rest of the way was easy.
When I arrived safely on the other side, and Bishop smirked at me, I couldn't entirely believe what I'd done. The exhilaration of having survived competed with horror that I'd been so reckless. I had volunteered to be the first to do something foolish and dangerous, and I had done so in style without a single scream.
"You see," I called back to the others, "Quite simple." They looked as dumbfounded as I felt.
Shandra crossed next. She moved slowly, cautiously, like an ancient mole feeling its way through a winding tunnel, but arrived safely with no mishaps. Then Lila. She bounced onto the ledge, and walked across with a half-swagger for the first section. Even before our captain stumbled, as I knew she would for persisting in that particular vanity, Ms Jerro had put her hands over her eyes.
She didn't fall. But she did drop to one knee. I could see her whole body quiver with the shock of her error.
"I'm not wasting a haversack on you," Bishop shouted to her. "If you fall, someone else is scraping up what's left of you."
"Shut up!" she yelled back, and stood up, still quivering. Seeing that she was proceeding in a more sensible manner, I turned my attention to Qara.
The girl was standing stock still. She didn't seem to be looking at anything in particular, though the distance and the now thickly falling snow prevented me from discerning much in her expression. But I could see enough to recognise the unvarying language of terror. The deer at bay. Bishop knew it too.
"Cast 'Fire Shield'!" Bishop said
"What?" said Qara, not hearing him.
"Cast 'Fire Shield!'"
"How will that help?"
"It'll mean the rest of us have a good hot dinner waiting for us on the return trip!" She said nothing. Not the tiniest hint of rage. She looked very small and alone.
I enjoyed the moment.
"If you don't want to cross, you can go back and find Casavir," said Lila. I wondered if she was totally oblivious to Qara's nature, or if this was a simple piece of manipulation. "The four of us will be enough."
"Will we?" Shandra hissed. I saw Lila raise an eyebrow at her.
"We have Sand with us," she continued. "He can handle any heavy duty arcane business we have to deal with. Don't worry about us."
Qara hesitated. She looked over her shoulder, and seemed ready to sprint back to the camp-site. She turned back at stared at the snow-flakes falling down and down into the swelling great mist that was rolling along the base of the mountain. Her right hand clenched and unclenched.
She moved forward. Stepped onto the ledge. Took three large steps that carried her well past the broken end of the track. The first mistake she made was to look at the drop, and that set her swaying. The second was to put both hands on the cliff face to steady herself. After that, she couldn't move. A primal instinct from the deep well underneath the conscious mind had taken over, and it was telling her to freeze where she was. I was intensely glad that it wasn't me trapped out there. It occurred to me that I had one scroll of Ethereal Jaunt in my pack. Under such an enchantment, you could walk across that freezing gulf and feel as if you were gliding through flowering meadow.
But I wouldn't want to waste a useful resource that might be needed later. Needed by me.
"Get a move on," said Bishop.
She didn't appear to hear him. Her shoulders were shaking.
"If you're going to fall, then let go now," he said. "Just stop wasting my -"
And Shandra hit him. She had donned one of her heavy gauntlets while the rest of our eyes were on Qara; the sound of steel and chain mail colliding with Bishop's jaw seemed to resound through the mountain valley. I stored the memory up for later: I would derive immense pleasure from reminding Bishop of this incident, should he ever go snooping into the less attractive areas of my past. Or for any other reason, for that matter.
Before he could respond in kind, Shandra had returned to the ledge, and was hobbling along it, bent almost double, with no grace but much attention to her own safety.
She reached Qara, and began to talk to her in a low voice that the wind carried away into the mist. But I saw her rub the girl's shoulder, and take her hand. Their speed was slow, agonizingly slow. At the gap in the ledge, they came to a total halt. I could see their faces now, and Shandra looked almost as petrified as Qara.
"Going to scout the land ahead," Bishop muttered, and departed, rubbing his jaw and shooting dark looks over his shoulder at us, his associates.
"Good," said Lila, without looking away from the two young women struggling along the cliff face.
I went to join her, though was careful not to stand in any of the places where the path had begun to crack and crumble. "This has been an entertaining day," I said, unable to conceal my high spirits.
"Sand, will you promise me something?" she said. Her voice sounded light enough, but there was an undercurrent of something more serious there too.
"Anything for you, Glorious Leader."
"If you do ever feel impelled to build a secret haven where you can get up to arcane things without being bothered by in-laws or the tax inspector, would you put it somewhere pleasant, with a decent climate and good roads – Waukeen's Promenade, maybe, or the castle-town in Waterdeep."
"I guarantee it."
"You have taken a weight off my mind," she said, and held out her hands to help Shandra through the last few feet. After Shandra was back on the path, they both helped Qara down, and led her to a less precarious position under the overhanging cliff face.
The sorceress looked like the ghost of herself. A tremor was running through her left arm, and her face shone with sweat. When Shandra tried to offer her a drink, she brushed her off with a glare.
"Thanks for your help, mage," she spat at me. I wondered if she could possibly know about the scroll nestling reassuringly in my pack. But – surely not.
"Ah, so you've discovered irony. At last! The little sorceress is growing up!"
She pulled her hood up, and stalked away.
"Well - that was -" said Shandra, still leaning against the cliff, exhausted, with the look of someone trying not to vomit.
"She'll thank you one day," I said, mentally putting coins in the Temple of Mystra's donation basket.
"It's a sin to lie, Sand," said Lila, suddenly sharing in my good mood. "I'm surprised at you! You spent too long in my uncle's tavern."
"If the mad girl lives to adulthood, she'll thank you," I replied, still not at all convinced of my own sincerity. "At least, she should."