The Shadow Shrivings
Tarsakh, 15
My dearest Harcourt,
This letter and the attached package should reach you two days before I do. This is the last of my – what shall we call them? - affidavits? depositions? - indeed, it is the very last of my documents in the case. Thank you for you patience and forgiveness of my neglect of your interests; the mania, I feel, is at last passing. With the letter is a sensory stone. I have not transcribed the content – I leave you to discover it for yourself. Though I do warn you that what you see, or rather, hear in it is not easy to forget. I needed several glasses of the local fire-water afterwards to recover my equanimity. There is also a note from a mild-mannered scholar of our shared acquaintance to go with it. The man's humility truly shines from the parchment.
His hypothesis is wrong, by the way. Qara's last act was not simply derived from the wish to end in her own flames. Nor, as Lila Farlong thought with a certain level of egoism, was it an attempt to save her. I believe that Qara saw the twin chance to revenge herself on Bishop for his frequent unkindnesses, while also paying off her debt to Shandra by saving her only surviving kin, whom she had overheard trying to protect her a few hours before at the final council. Of course, I can't prove it, and will never know for sure. Qara is still in the valley of the Merdelain, lying under a hill of rubble next to Bishop, and she isn't telling.
In your last letter, you asked me whether I would feel differently about what happened if she had been older. It was an intelligent question, and a perceptive question, and one that I feel confident answering in the negative. To me, an elf, though one (let me hasten to add) still in the bloom of youth and vigour, the strong beliefs that humans hold regarding the traits and social role of particular age groups lack substance. To me, you are all young. I judged Qara to be immature and wild not because of her age, but because of her behaviour. After all, present in Crossroad Keep for much of the war were a tribe of pre-pubertal street urchins, whose wizened eyes might have been old when they watched the beginning of the universe. Qara, being compounded from rage and passion, could have lived to a hundred, and still been a child to me.
So milord, ladies, gentleman, I am present in the court, and ready to face trial in the case of Sand versus Sand. The first allegation laid against me is that I wilfully engineered the death of a young woman of good family and noble lineage. This I deny, most strongly. I never harmed her, never ordered her into danger, and frequently advised her to moderate her rash impulses. The second allegation is one unacceptable in any court-of-law worth two coppers, yet it is one that needs to be answered. It is that I contributed to her death through persisting in behaviour that I knew would drive her further into hostility and anger; through letting my jealously and my dislike of her father dictate my treatment of her; through enjoying her humiliations, instead of helping her to overcome them.
It was easy in a time of real conflict, when life and death were constantly at stake, to dismiss jibes and taunts as forgiveable lapses, as 'honesty', as a release of fear and stress. When there is a battle tomorrow, what does a little verbal baiting matter today? But we are not demons or blade golems. We are social beings, and need more than cruelty and self-interest to be able to thrive. Shandra had the maturity to see that; I did as well, to do myself justice. But also to do myself justice, I failed in the case of Qara. And there is no punishment for such a crime in the books, except to live with the knowledge that I failed.
As a – moderately – daring young elf, newly arrived in the Sword Coast, I recall priding myself on my worldly superiority to my sheltered kindred still living in secluded valleys or tree-top villages; how stifling the hierarchies were, how tedious the endless parade of festivals and holy days! Every other day being expected to leave work and engage in an obscure rite whose potency was as questionable as its folkloric origins. High Gelthin's Day. The Long Watch of the Blessed Riadweth. The Celebration of the Watercress. The Morning of Rejected Lovers. The Afternoon of Smashed Pineapples. (Would that the latter were my invention.) Yet now, now I fear I begin to see the purpose in a ritual calendar that runs in a twelve-yearly cycle with no day or night left unconsecrated to something. It both gives space, and set limits to the voices of the past. Enough room for catharsis, but not for fruitless obsession. Ritualized memory, followed by ritualized exhalation. Tarsakh, 15 is called Lost Chances in this, the sixth year of the cycle. Tomorrow is called The Shadow Shrivings.
Your faithful,
Sand
p.s. Don't worry about me. I'll be back to my usual self by the time we meet, and then you can tell me all about the skeletons in the crypts and the idiots in the attics of the blessed library.
Sand put down his pen. He realized he had misled Harcourt in his letter. The pale sheen in the dark sky, and the fresh smell seeping into angular turret bedroom from a gap in the window informed him that the fifteenth day of the month had been over for several hours. Wafting in with the sharp breezes of the early morning came the cries of the gulls; a briny, wailing dawn chorus.
He stretched in his chair. The muscles in his shoulders and back protested, twinged, and relaxed. He couldn't write any more. Instead, he flicked the edge of the latest missive to Harcourt with the tips of his index fingers, permitting himself to take in the lines and lines of elegantly dancing characters as a single object, and not as mutiny, the past ranged in illogical, inconsistent ranks against him. What a beautiful thing it was he had made. He tapped the letter again, before tossing it lightly to the side of the desk, to rest by the sensate stone that was banded with red and dark green. Bloodstone.
Better not think about that. Better to reach for the decanter and pour a second – or was it third? Or fourth? - glass of jenever. It was now too early to go to bed, and too late to put his mind to any productive task. Out of habit, he opened the journal of the Alchemical Society which he always took with him on his travels, and glanced lackadaisically at a page carrying an illustration of a copper-smith's workshop. The lines hung on the page in unmeaning tangles. Every time he tried to focus on them, they seemed to fade and shift. A waste of time. He snapped the book shut.
There were letters to write to Sorcerous Sundries and to Thunderstone. He took out a fresh sheet of paper, wrote the date and paused. He wrote "Honoured -" He paused again. The pause turned into a hiatus, and the hiatus into a longueur. His shoulders hunched, he continued to sit at the rented, worn old desk, tracing knots in the oak. Outside, he could see grey angles and depths clarify into dwelling hours. A few beams of sunlight began to glow in the east. He moved to the window. Below, the light was advancing up the street.
Placing his hands underneath the central bar of the sash window, he pushed upwards. It didn't budge. There appeared to be nothing wrong with the mechanisms, old as they were. No dimwitted kitchen boy had been permitted to paint over the rails and lining, as sometimes happened at the old hostelries on the trading routes round Neverwinter. He pushed harder, putting all of his not very ample strength into it. The sash window shot up to the top of the frame. He held it up with one trembling arm,while with his free hand he snapped the catch closed before his shoulder muscles could seize the opportunity to hand in their resignation.
"I once killed a dragon," he told the window, before ducking his head under its sliding panel.
East directly behind the high street were the city walls, and beyond them the first ragged outliers of the High Forest. It had been creeping westwards. In places, the upper branches of beech and pine were spreading their twigs and silvan detritus over the turrets and battlements of the city defences.
By sitting on the window sill and leaning outwards, he could see the sheer eastern cadet of Mount Waterdeep, jutting through the centre of the oldest, wealthiest districts. And north-east – rooftops, chimneys, the patchwork brick and timber frame of an old water tower. He strained his eyes after the black undulations that sat in a haze at the point where earth and sky separated. Among them was one with the outline of a bent trident. Trigoron. The three-headed king of the mountain range.
And somewhere in the miles and miles of unseen ground that lay between Waterdeep and the roots of Mount Trigoron were the low fens, the willow forests and salt marshes of the Merdelain, the slow-marching court. He waited. The sun rose higher, and the blushing pink clouds in the east turned grey, then white, then dissolved into field of cornflower blue. Sand continued his vigil, his eyes fixed to the left of the morning sun. When he focussed, concentrating all his will-power on the search, he thought for an instant that he could see edge of a ragged hill that squatted at the foot of the mountains.
He lost sight of it. Shook his head. Refocused. There it was again. He held onto the distant outline, and slowly, slowly, felt it pull him in. Images flooded his mind. Dappled light. Grass and trees growing in the still peace of centuries at the base. Higher up, slides of rock breaking up the gentle undulations of the slopes. Closer, closer to the largest fragments, and here are straight edges, smooth sides. Near the hill's summit lie two pieces of one great flat stone. Measuring them, imagining them whole, this summons the memory of the vast door that they once capped.
The whinnying of a horse on the street brought him back to himself. He blinked. Rubbed his temples. How foolish this was, he thought, to sit up for hours and hours, waiting for – nothing. It was demented, irrational – and worse, it was melodramatic. It was the kind of thing done by people who weren't Sand. Infants sit up into the early hours waiting for Red Soul to bring them treats after the Harvest Festival. He, however, had always prided himself on his well-reasoned routine, and would never eat anything given him by a stranger, which could expose him to the twin dangers of poisoning and unhygienic cooking practices.
Irritated, he stood up, walked to the table and poured himself more jenever, drank it in one go, and - suddenly conscious of the sluggishness, the imprecision of his movements – placed the glass back and shuffled carefully back to his perch at the window. Nothing stopped him from going to bed, he told himself. But he had no desire to. He leant back, resting his shoulders and head against the window frame. Eyes open, mind awake, he dreamed.
He was standing again at the broken door lintel. Behind the flat rocks was a rubble of masonry, blocking the entrance passage, moss already sprouting in the sheltered cracks and crevices. He leant his cheek against the innermost of the stones. Cold. Above him the sky shone bright blue. He lowered his gaze. Tried to take one further step in his imagination that would let him inside the palace. Tried to imagine the stones melting past him, leaving him standing within the barrow in a corridor patterned with intricate vaulting like a spider's web. It was not possible. Something in him forbade those last few steps, and left him standing at the side of a crumbling old hill surrounded by spring foliage.
Nor, for all that he held his breath and listened, could he hear anything excepting the whistle-calls of blackbirds.
Heavy knocking.
He started, and clutched the sides of the window sill for support. His heart raced. The adrenaline was managing to pierce even his pickled blood cells. He had been so deep in his dream that for one moment, a moment of horror-full excitement, he had believed the knocking to have come from within the destroyed Illefarn palace. He trembled, willing away the sudden feeling of nausea.
But he was in his warm room in The Lost Lion, the sun warm, and even the ear that he had pressed against the granite was warm. He checked his pulse, just to be on the safe side. It was stabilising. Good.
The knocking came again.
"Sand!" a male voice called.
He recognised it. He hopped down, and went over to the door. The floorboards squeaked under his feet in a reassuringly humdrum manner. Before lifting the latch, he glanced in the mirror. A little tired, a little ruffled, yet on balance acceptable. Not bad, considering that he'd been expecting to see a wild-eyed, spirit-sodden mess. He drew back the bolt, lifted the latch and let the door swing open.
And in the corridor: a tall human in dusty riding gear. Mud spattered all along his boots up as far as his hips. A beard perhaps a ten-day old or more.
"Dear boy, what have you done to yourself? Go and shave immediately."
Harcourt fluttered his lashes in an elaborate simulation of surprise. "You don't like it?" he asked. Not waiting for an answer, he bent down to kiss him, rubbing his bristles firmly against Sand's jaw as he did so. Then, pushing past him, he clattered into the room still wearing his heavy boots, and stood at the desk, prodding at every object he found. He glanced at the barely initiated letter to Sorcerous Sundries, took off a glove to brush his bare palm over the sensate stone – he shivered as the red and green shadows danced under his skin – and finally examined the level of liquid in the decanter.
"Have you never heard of the notion that the integrity and privacy – privacy, take note – of people's possessions should be respected?" Sand asked.
"Heard of it. Stopped believing when I met a group of adventurers with a stolen silver sword, stolen dragon loot and a stolen castle who wanted to save the world." Harcourt held the decanter up to the light and gave it a shake. He tutted.
"Entirely legally acquired castle," said Sand. "And we had neither sword nor dragon loot nor castle when we first met. That was when we came to Aldanon's house. You opened the door." Sentimentality threatened to engulf him; he drew back from it. "You're sacrificing accuracy for the sake of style. A clever remark isn't worth distorting chronology for."
"Now where could I have picked up the idea that it was?" smiled Harcourt. That beard really was most distracting. He remembered how in his childhood a playmate glued moss on her cheeks and pretended to be a human. Dumbo Dragonfood the Barbarian Chief, he believed they had called the character. "But I don't have your memory, Sand."
"Then thank your stars for it. It's not always a gift to have an excellent memory. One can forgive, perhaps, but never forget." He paused, again feeling that he had grown too serious. "Of course, normally it's wonderfully useful. You never know when you may need to name the thirty-seven principal species of mountain salmon."
"Mountain salmon? I swear you're making that up. Are there also cuddly gnolls and fire-breathing chinchillas in your mental compendium of beasts?"
"On the contrary. They are as real as you and I. In fact, the Waterdeep Zoological Gardensis said to have some very fine examples of the family."
Sand glanced out of the window, at the sun shining cheerfully over the roofs, the spires, the battlements of the great city. He turned back. His eyes met Harcourt's. The young man seemed to have had the same idea.
"Do you know Waterdeep well?" Harcourt asked.
"Hardly at all."
"Well then – today could be as good a time as any for exploring the city." With a disapproving glance at the unslept in bed, he added, "Unless you need to rest. Candlekeep has given me two weeks' leave. We don't lack for time."
"I am an elf, my dear young man. I can make do without sleep much better than you." Despite the beard, Harcourt seemed especially young at that instant, pale and tired from the journey as he was. "Very well. Today we will explore the city. And this evening I will shave that dreadful growth off you. You simply don't look like yourself with it. I fear the disreputable influence of your employers. If you decide to shave your head and wear a habit, I assure you I will expect at least a month's notice in writing before seeing you, so I can steel myself."
Harcourt laughed. "And so you're not glad I'm here?"
Sand reached up and brushed his fingers through his boy's dark curls. Just a few grey strands here and there. "Well now," he said. "What do you think?"
Leaving arm in arm with his friend, he threw a last look back to the window. The sun was high in the sky; white gulls swooped low over the high street. He could hear the wheels of carts crunching along the gravelly surface of the road. But far away, far past the toing and froing, the day-time life of the city, he could see the Sword Mountains sitting in pools of silence, the night still shading their distant slopes.