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Caladaster pushed back his chair and got up. "I'm ready," he said simply. There was something like a smile deep in the Harper's eyes as he rose, set a stack of coins as tall as a tankard on the table...many eyes in the room bulged...and said, "Tavern master! Our horses... here's stabling for a tenday and for the feast. If we come not back to claim them by then, consider them yours. We'll walk from here. You set a good table."
Baerdagh was staring up at his old friend, his face pale. "C-Caladaster?" he asked. "Are you going yon, in truth...into the Dead Place?"
The old wizard looked at him. "Aye, but we can't take along an old warrior, so don't fear. Stay...we need you to eat all the rest of this for us!"
"I...I..." Baerdagh said, and his eyes fell to his tankard. "I wish I wasn't so old," he growled.
The Harper laid a hand on his shoulder. "It's never easy, but you've earned a rest. You were the Lion of Elversult, were you not?"
Baerdagh gaped up at the Harper as if he'd just grown three heads, and a crown on each one. "How did you know about that? Caladaster doesn't know about that!"
The Harper clapped his shoulder gently. "It's our business to remember heroes...forever. We're minstrels, remember?"
He strode to the door and said, "There's a very good ballad about you...."
And then he was gone. Baerdagh half rose to follow, but Caladaster pushed him firmly back down. "You sit, and eat. If we don't come back, ask the next Harper through to sing it to you." He went to the door, then turned with a frown. "All those years," he said, scowling, "and you never told me you were the Lion! Just such a little thing it slipped your mind, huh?"
He went out the door. Tabarast and Beldrune followed. They just gave him shrugs and grins at the door, but Tabarast turned with his fingers on the handle and growled, "If it makes you feel better, you're not the only one who doesn't know what's going on!"
The door scraped shut, and Baerdagh stared at it blankly for a long while...long enough that everyone else had come back from the windows and watching the four men walk out of town, and sat down again. Alnyskawer lowered himself into the seat beside Baerdagh and asked hesitantly, "You were the Lion of Elversult?"
"A long time ago," Baerdagh said bitterly. "A long time ago."
"If you could go back to some moment, then," the tavern master asked a tankard in front of him softly, "what moment would it be?"
Baerdagh said slowly, "Well, there was a night in Suzail … We'd spent the early evening ru
Turning to Alnyskawer to properly tell him the tale, Baerdagh suddenly realized how silent the room was. He lifted his eyes, and turned his head. All the folk of Ripplestones old enough to stand were crowded silently around him in a ring, waiting to hear.
Baerdagh turned very red and muttered, "Well, 'twas a long time ago...."
"Is that when you got that medal?" Alnyskawer asked slyly, pointing at the chain that disappeared down Baerdagh's none-too-clean shirtfront.
"Well, no," the old warrior answered with a frown, "that was..."
He sat back, and blushed an even darker shade. "Oh, gods," he said.
The tavern master gri
"Hah!" Baerdagh barked. "They were indeed...have you ever seen a man in full plate armor fall down a circular stair? Sounded like two blacksmiths, fighting in a forge! Why, we ..."
One of the villagers clapped Alnyskawer's shoulder in silent thanks. The tavern master winked back as the old warrior's tale gathered speed.
"Not all that much more sun today," Caladaster grunted, "once we're in under the trees."
"Umm," Beldrune agreed. "Deep forest. Lots of rustlings, and weird hootings and such?"
Caladaster shook his head. "Not since the Slayer," he said. "Breezes through the leaves, is all...oh, and sometimes dead branches falling. Otherwise, 'tis silent as a tomb."
"Then we'll hear it coming all the easier," the Harper said calmly. "Lead on, Caladaster."
The old wizard nodded proudly as they strode on down the road together. They'd gone some miles and were almost at the place where the overgrown way to the ruins turned off the coast road, when a sudden thought struck him...as cold and as sudden as a bucket of lake water in the face.
He was very careful not to turn around, so that the Harper could see his face...this Harper who'd never given his own name. But from that moment on, he could feel the man's gaze on him...a cold lance tip touching the top of his spine, where his neck started.
The Harper had called him by his full name. Caladaster Daermree.
Caladaster never used his last name … and he hadn't told the Harper his last name, he never told anyone his last name. Baerdagh didn't know it...in fact, there was probably no one still alive who'd heard it.
So how was it that this Harper knew it?
Eighteen: No Shortage Of Victims
The one certainty in a coup, orc raid, or well-side gossip session is that there'll be no shortage of victims.
Ralderick Hallowshaw, Jester
from To Rule A Realm, From Turret To Midden
published circa The Year of the Bloodbird
It was dark and silent, once the scrape of his boots had stilled. He was alone in the midst of cold, damp stone, the dust of ages sharp in his nostrils...and a feeling of tension as something watched him from the darkness, and waiting.
Elminster let himself grow as still as the stone handholds he still clung to, faced the aware and lurking darkness, and called up one of the powers Mystra had granted him. It was one he'd used far too little, because it required quiet concentration, and time ... far more time than most of the beings he shared Faerun with were ever willing to give him. Too often, these days, life seemed a headlong hurry.
His awareness ranged out through the waiting, listening darkness. Things both living and unliving he could not see, but magic, when El concentrated just... so, he could feel so keenly that he could make out surfaces on which dweomer clung, the tendrils of spell-bindings, and even the faint, fading traces of preservative magics that had failed.
All of those things lay before him. Faint magics swirled everywhere, none of them strong or precisely located, but outlining a large cavern or open space. A good way off, on the floor of this chamber or cavern... or down in a pit, he could not tell which...several closely clustered nodes of great, not-so-slumberous magical might throbbed and murmured ceaselessly. El blinked.
Trap or no trap, he had to see what waited here that could hold such magical might. He'd been led here, the swirling sentience that had done it was watching him or at least knew of his coming...so what was the point of stealth? El cast a stone-probing spell, seeking pits or seams ahead of him. Shrouded in its eerily faint blue glow, he stepped warily forward.
Great expanses of the floor were the natural rock of the cavern, as El proceeded, this gave way smoothly to a floor of huge stone slabs, smooth-polished and level, no mosses had stained them, but here and there, the fine white fur of salts leaching out of age-old rock trailed finger-like across the stone.
A throne or seat of the same stone faced Elminster... empty of magic, surprisingly, though it was almost hidden from view behind the dazzle thrown off by the seven nodes of magic when he viewed it with his mage-sight. Thankfully, the seat was empty.