Tarsakh, 13
Dearest Harcourt,
An attractive morning in Waterdeep. Do you know this city well? Seen in the morning sunlight, it promises to be one of the most pleasant cities between Evermeet and Var the Golden. Orderly. Refined. Inclined to follow the law instead of inventing it every day anew to suit the whims of family and other allies. But the towns and cities in this part of the Sword Coast are often so on the surface. It is only if you should linger a while longer to better acquaint yourself with such a miracle of civilization that you understand the urbane hoardings are held up by an assortment of less appealing props. Chauvinism, blind piety, fear of the present, the future, the past. That those last anxieties have been well-justified in recent years, I allow.
I remember the impression Neverwinter made on me when I first walked through her gates. How beautiful and prosperous she was in comparison to Luskan. Nasher was about as old as you are now; he and his Greycloaks had gained more ground from the orc tribes in a few short months than the old Council of Merchants had managed in centuries. The slums of the city appeared wealthier than the baronial quarter of Yartar. In her clean and calm streets was more than a hint of the grace of an elven city without the tedium of the inescapable harp recitals or the impossibility of finding useful employment before the age of four hundred. Hunting, carousing and bonding with nature do not count.
You perhaps recall some of the splendour of the old city yourself, from growing up in the household of Lord Hawkes. For you, however, the shining face of Neverwinter would have been quite comme d'habitude. For me, coming from the dark core of Luskan, it was as if I had been the beneficiary of a powerful restoration spell cast by a priest for no monetary or evangelistic incentive – so, one might say I had arrived in utopia.
Of course, this feel never lasts. As you yourself must have recently discovered when you strolled through the well-tended rose gardens of Candlekeep, up the legendary marble stairs, and into the hallowed passages, where you were met by – well - shall we say a true disciple of the Lady of Pain? Such people are everywhere. An encounter with one of them was critical in solidifying my relationship with Neverwinter, afterwards acknowledging the city only as a kind of large inn, full of ragamuffins, pilgrims and traders - a halt in the midst of a long journey to a brighter elsewhere.
Several years after my arrival from Luskan, the Academy discovered that among all its teaching, all its alumni, all its fellows and associates, not a single one was capable of brewing the most simple of healing potions without first causing major structural damage to the school buildings and to expensive pieces of equipment, such as their students. Alchemy was not considered a subject worthy of attention among the blue-blooded infants that for the most part ruled and attended Neverwinter's premier and, indeed, only college of the occult sciences. Learning how to prepare a potion to cure dysentery was far too practical for their tastes, whereas a spell to turn sentient flesh into dead granite they treated with more veneration than the Weave itself.
Regardless, Principal Qaron one day found himself without a competent alchemist, the previous human potions lecturer's eyesight having decayed so much with the years that he could no longer differentiate aconite from acorns. A client of his knew an illusionist who knew a conjurer who frequented a dubious tavern in a still more dubious part of the town, where his friend the barman – barmen are always your friend, while you're paying – sold extremely effective hangover remedies, which he bought from a newly opened shop that always seemed to be doing a brisk trade. (The remedies, permit me to add, were sold by the tavern at hugely inflated prices. But for the owner of a real cat-yowler of a migraine, supply chain economics are a notion as unreal as the legend of the dream-world condition of existence.)
Suffice to say that contact was made a contract signed, and Sand joined the faculty. I was working in a freelance capacity, which meant that I could be paid much less for taking twice as many classes as the permanent teachers. Nevertheless, I was advancing. My skills were needed; I could come and go in the wealthiest district of Neverwinter without being harassed by the city guard, or asked to give a harp recital by the loitering human matriarchs. It felt as if all the early promise I saw in the city was becoming real.
Initially, all was well. My students progressed. By progress, I am referring chiefly to their progress from the door of the classroom to their seats. But I found with time that it was possible to win them a little to my subject by describing what a potion could achieve in the right hands – or the wrong ones. I told them about Dram Kallen and his victory over the lycanthropes, Tanath and her potion of death-in-life, of Jacoy the Rose and the garden of poisoned blossom. If I had known of the future, I might have told them of the afternoon before the battle of Crossroad Keep, when you and I and Grobnar and anyone who could be trusted near explosives squatted in the cellars and stuffed glass baubles full of pine resin, naphtha and quicklime until our eyes stung and our hands trembled.
Do you remember that as well as I do? I can remember watching the lifetime of a bead of sweat, as it formed on your brow and trickled ever so slowly down to rest in the hollow of your throat just about the clavicle bone.
More crucial to my position than bribing the students with stories and parlour tricks was the Principal's approval. And indeed he gave every appearance of approving of me. He was friendly, jovial, prone to flattering remarks whenever we met: how much it was said the students were enjoying my lessons, how he hoped that I would stay in the city for a long time to come, how the school was planning to hire more permanent staff in the following year. I never mentioned my own history. He never asked.
He once brought his daughter with him to observe one of my classes. Two feet tall, and still the apple of her father's eye. He sat her on his knee, and encouraged the more motherly of the females to coo over her and feed her their squashed lunchtime sweetmeats. After the honey reached her bloodstream, she leapt from her father to the floor and made duck-footed laps of the room, screaming merrily, arms akimbo.
I don't think she remembered meeting me, but I recognised her as soon as I saw her again at the Sunken Flagon twelve years later.
Nine months into my respectable new employment, and Master Johcris arrived at my classroom door in the middle of a class with the senior year. "You're required in the meeting room," he said. His expression was as blank as it always was, and for all I know, still is. "This class is over," he told my pupils. "Get your things, and go."
Have you ever been summoned from your work unexpectedly? It's never a pleasant sensation. Thoughts about what might necessitate your presence rush through your mind. A relative or friend has sickened suddenly. A false accusation has been made against you. A true accusation has been made against you. At the Host Tower, it might have been because your line manager has decided to feed your eyeballs to a demon lord from the Lower Planes.
The meeting room was in the oldest part of the building. Crests of the old merchant dynasties, which no one had yet bothered to remove, still sat plastered on the ceiling and carved into the panelled walls, although a portrait of our young Lord Nasher had been hung behind the Principal's chair, while a shrine to Tyr at the opposite end of the chamber smelt of fresh paint, and a icon of the Lady Aribeth decorated the base. The air was hot with the bodies and breath of more than thirty people.
Everyone was there. The Principal, his deputy, the Head Porter, the senior and junior teachers, the clerks. Lord Dalren and Lady Tamberlis were there, in their role as patron governors. It was only a wonder that Aribeth and the supreme ruler of Neverwinter himself were not present in flesh and blood themselves. When I entered the room and saw the unprecedented crowd, I rashly believed I might be about to join the glorious ranks of the tenured staff. I may even have begun to plan the elements of a speech of gratified acceptance.
Of course, the looks on their faces soon disabused me of my hopes. Qaron pointed to a stool at the far end of the table from himself. "Sit!" he said. His shoulders were hunched. His lips, or what I could see of them in the narrow slit between his red beard and moustache, were fixed downward. Watching him in the yard some weeks before this incident, I'd observed the same set of behaviours. Blood coming and going in his temples, eyes unblinking, breaths drawn slowly and deliberately. Then, it was a student who was to fall victim to the explosion of rage.
I heard Johcris close the door behind me.
Some people become ridiculous when they lose their tempers. Others become frightening. I have never been able to create a satisfactory theory to explain the difference. Take power out of the variables, for sufficient power in the paws of a tame squirrel would be frightening – and what I believe is left is the instrumentality of the anger. Qara's rages were like the unselfconscious tears of an infant. There might be a clear stimulus, or there might not. They served no deeper purpose than to rid herself immediately of what was wearisome to her. Qaron Bovardi, however genuine his feelings, however real the blood in his cheeks, knew that his anger was an uncatalogued spell, one that could be held in reserve for the right occasion. He was a man who rarely needed to raise his voice. The fear that he might was enough to quell thoughts of opposition.
I looked at the stool, and looked at Qaron. "No thank you, Principal. I can stand very well." My refusal felt like the most daring speech I had ever made. But I wasn't going to let him loom over me. As it was, with him sitting and me standing, we were practically at eye-level. He made a dismissive gesture from which I inferred that I was to suit myself. "May I ask wh - ?"
"We are here today," he began, in priestly tones, his voice drowning mine, "because a very serious allegation has been made against one of the Academy's teaching staff." The flock of hens at the meeting table ducked their heads in a show of solemnity, while the ones left standing and squashed into the corners clucked amongst themselves.
"Nine months ago, we accepted into our academic family a promising young alchemist" (he really did say "promising young alchemist", dear boy, it is not my invention) "to take the classes that were left suddenly vacant by the retirement of Master Brensnaw and the tragic death of our friend and colleague Master Dancre in the Luskan occupation of Port Llast. We welcomed this stranger – this Sand of - where? - of nowhere, it seemed. He was not a son of Neverwinter. He came from nothing. And we welcomed this stranger into the fold. But now it seems we have been deceived. This morning I learnt from a reliable source that our potions expert should rightly be called 'Sand of Luskan' or indeed 'Sand of the Host Tower'"
The professors emeriti with drooping eyes and hair sprouting from their nostrils jerked upright in their heavy oaken chairs. Coming from the whole flock of them on collective instinct came a guttural, rumbling growl. The unmummified staff members from the younger generation confined themselves to shaking their heads and with pursed lips imitating the Principal's own unconscious pastiche of the famous elven statue Diweirdeb ddig yn dod yn goeden lelog trwy drugaredd y duw trugarog, which I shall translate into Common as Chastity Outraged Awaits Treeification.
A few of the teachers whom I found tolerably competent and respected looked at the floor, at the backs of their hands, out of the windows. They seemed desperate to avoid making eye contact with me.
"It's a very unfortunate business," her Ladyship remarked, in the carrying, seigneurial manner of someone whose grandfather and uncle were the same person. "I do hope this will cast no lasting cloud over our school's reputation."
"You are quite right, my Lady," Qaron returned. "And that is precisely the reason that I requested this presence of yourself, and his Lordship. The mistake I was inveigled into making must be confessed, corrected and atoned for, in the best Tyrran manner."
"Here, here," said Lord Dalren. The senior fossils sitting enthroned on Qaron's right and left burbled their approval.
"I therefore put forward the following plan of action." Qaron glanced down at a paper that lay on the table in front of him, but only for a few moments. He had the ability, when he spoke, to appear to be looking at each person in the room individually. "The Luskan agent will be immediately removed from all his duties, and banned from the premises. We will expand the teaching hours devoted to Neverwinter history and Neverwinter values. At the same time, our Head of Discipline will lead an investigation that will search for traces of the Host Tower's corrupting influence - as much as in the students' minds and hearts as in their magical practices."
Johcris lowered his eyes, mutely obedient to his younger superior. He may have had connections to the Host Tower even then. Half the people in the room that day probably did.
I had foolishly been waiting the the moment when Qaron would offer me to opportunity to defend myself. This was, after all, Neverwinter and not Netheril.
"I must protest that I -"
"Quiet, viper." It was Lord Dalren who cut me off. When the news of his traitorous dealings during the siege reached my delighted ears, and of his subsequent murder, my lofty principals may have trembled somewhat on their high capitals. A little less understanding and a little more violent retribution briefly appeared to me to constitute a desirable part of civil mores.
Very briefly. It would be an immeasurable tedium if I took it upon myself to dispatch anyone whom I'd ever suspected of patriotic hypocrisy, and my letters would no doubt become unbearably repetitive. 'Dearest Harcourt; Yesterday I made the rivers of Tethyr run red with blood. (Again). Today I have put the half of the army officers to fire and the sword. Tomorrow I shall make many widows among the women of Amn. Otherwise I am well, but have a mild back ache caused by sleeping on a mountain of skulls. Your friend, Sand.'
Sadly, in the meeting chamber, I knew nothing of the friends in northern places possessed by both Dalren and Johcris. And even if I had, evidence gained by time travel spells is not valid legal tender in Neverwinter jurisprudence. Of course, although they would have baulked at judging a man on his known future, that fine company was all too ready to condemn me for a past that they knew nothing about.
"I have the right -" I tried again.
"You have the right to leave unmolested," said Qaron. "Go. Before you wear out our tolerance."
I looked around the horseshoe that opposed me, three ranks deep, watching me with folded arms and frowns. Not a single expression gave me any hope of support.
The innermost ring, which contained the most important personages, each of whom was invited to draw an unconditional stipend from the Academy's sizeable treasury, stared back at me with the smug complacency of a pavilion of pure-bred cats.
I realised then that my dreams of success in that place were over. The Host Tower taught me to pick my battles very carefully. I owe it that much recognition, at least. And so after leaving, I returned to my neglected shop in the docks, swearing with every step that I would never let myself become involved in Neverwinter high society again. For ten years, give or take a few Nevalle-shaped lapses, I kept my promise.
Everything we do is ordered by what we did in the past, and by what was done to us. I do not know why Qaron acted as he did. I don't even know how he learnt of my lamentable Host Tower connections. But I am sure that when he dismissed me, and did so in such a way, such a cruel and unnecessary way, that he dropped a dangerous reagent into his future – and his daughter's – and his sons'. Small cuts are more powerful than fireballs, when they're made carefully, consistently, slowly, with a cold eye and a steady hand.
I'm sending another transcript with this letter. It shows a side of me that I have preferred to keep hidden from you. But I think you know me well enough by now to have divined its existence.
I am going to stay in Waterdeep for the next few days at the same inn as before. But you should look for me at Candlekeep before the end of Tarsakh, if you still wish to see me after reading through my depositions.
Your true friend,
Sand