What Victory Would Mean

When Rishi and Maeril returned from Erik’s house, Elisa was lighting the lamps in the upstairs room Mereth had set aside for them. It had once been a reading room. A few hymnals and water-stained histories remained on the shelves; shutters covered the narrow windows.

Four mismatched chairs stood around a low table beside the hearth. Firemind brought a fifth to the end, then took the place with the wall behind him. Chime hovered beside his shoulder, their reliquary open on a cushion beneath the table.

Rishi eased himself into a chair next to Maeril. The walk had pulled at his side. Elisa set cups within reach and took the chair beside Firemind.

Footsteps stopped outside. Firemind rose, checked the door, and opened it.

Renaer Neverember stepped inside in dark blue, silver showing at his cuffs. Firemind closed the door behind him and turned back. Renaer stood within arm’s reach, looking at him.

“Checking whether I am real?” Firemind asked.

Renaer pulled off his gloves. “No. I know you are real. I paid enough to keep you that way.”

He held out his hand. Firemind took it, and Renaer gripped his shoulder with his free hand.

“It is good to see you on your feet,” Renaer said.

Firemind’s eyes dropped for a moment. “Thank you.”

Renaer gave his shoulder a brief squeeze before letting go. Elisa had risen beside the table. She came forward to embrace him, and he put his arms around her.

“It is good to see you too,” she said.

“I am glad you are both here.” Renaer drew back enough to look at her. “Are you well?”

“Better now.”

Chime drifted forward as they parted, a few soft notes rising in greeting. Renaer turned toward the sound.

“Renaer.”

His mouth softened. “Chime. I have missed that.”

“Chime has not forgotten what you did.”

Renaer’s shoulders lowered. “You are welcome.”

Chime sounded the quiet phrase again. Renaer listened until the last note faded, then followed Elisa to the table.

Firemind drew out the empty chair for him. “They brought us here. Rishi and Maeril.”

Rishi inclined his head. Maeril slid the unused cup toward Renaer. He laid his gloves beside it and sat while Firemind returned to his own chair.

Renaer looked at Firemind’s clothes. “The robe is awful.”

“It is legal. A monk with—”

“A reliquary,” Chime said.

Firemind tried again. “So long as—”

“The reliquary keeps its hymns to itself.” Chime’s last words rose through three clear notes.

“In the street,” Firemind said. “We are not in the street.”

Renaer looked from one to the other. “I had forgotten how disturbing it is when you two do that.”

“Long practice,” Firemind said.

“The robe got him through the gates,” Maeril said. “What has your coat accomplished?”

Renaer glanced at his cuff. “It persuades people to let me owe them money.”

From inside the coat, Renaer took a packet of papers bound in blue thread. His smile faded as he laid it beside the cup. “You were right to approach through intermediaries. We cannot assume a message with your name on it would reach only me.”

Firemind leaned forward. “What have you learned?”

“Xanathar has the Stone.”

“How certain?”

“People die for repeating it. The Guild has changed its search patterns, and the creature on the Trade Way gives us a reason why.”

“The creature may have been dreamed into flesh,” Maeril said. “I could not establish where it arrived.”

Renaer untied the packet. “Vajra has read your account. She says the residue you described is consistent with a beholder-born manifestation, though the creature appears larger and more stable than anything in her records.”

“Has she found a reason for that?”

“Her working theory is that the Stone is amplifying Xanathar.”

“The creature supports the dream theory. It cannot tell you who is holding the Stone.”

“The reports of the Stone are separate. Its effect on Xanathar is the part Vajra is trying to explain.”

Firemind rubbed the seam of his sleeve between his fingers. Chime settled nearer his hand. He rested it on the table.

“The Stone is not only a map,” Renaer continued. “It is aberrant memory: old, hungry, and skilled at making the world forget what it once knew. Put it beneath a paranoid beholder’s eye, and the distinction between memory and dream may stop holding.”

Firemind looked at the open packet. “Do any of those reports tell you where Xanathar is keeping it?”

Renaer separated one sheet from the others but kept it beneath his hand. “I do not know where it is. No one has come back with a location we can trust.”

Chime rose a little from the edge of the table. “What happened to them?”

“Anyone who learned more has vanished or returned wrong. One informant forgot his mother’s name but covered his walls with drawings of a fish. Another insisted the ceiling had teeth. A third tried to claw out his eyes when we mentioned the Stone.”

Rishi held his cup without drinking.

“But you think it is in the Guild’s lair?” Firemind asked.

“Probably. That word covers miles of bad possibilities beneath Waterdeep.”

Renaer pushed the report across the table.

Firemind left it untouched. He looked at the papers still in front of Renaer. “If Xanathar has the Stone, what is Manshoon doing?”

Renaer’s face closed. “Manshoon has the Key.”

“Object?”

“No.”

“A spell he can repeat?” Chime asked.

“A person. Lysaerra Harlowe.”

Rishi set down his cup. “Who is she?”

Renaer laid an older sheet beside the report, copied from a household ledger in a precise hand. “Lysaerra was a map-scribe for my father, Dagult Neverember. Not noble, famous, or powerful. She copied surveys, cellar lines, property boundaries, guild claims—the dull work that teaches a person where a city keeps its bones.”

Rishi leaned forward to read the notation.

Lysaerra Harlowe. Witness payment. Closed record.

No forwarding address.

Renaer said, “She saw enough of the Vault’s construction to know something essential. A passage, a false survey, perhaps the opening sequence. When my father used the Stone to remove that knowledge from the world, it took the memory from her.”

“He took the knowledge,” Firemind said. “But if she still carries something they can use—”

“The tune is gone,” Chime said. “The break remains.”

Firemind looked again at the name. “A scar.”

“A memory scar. That is Vajra’s term. The missing knowledge is the Key, and Lysaerra carries the shape of what was removed.”

“How does an absence open anything?”

“We do not know. Manshoon knows enough to believe it can.”

Firemind took the page. Chime lowered beside it. “Where is she?”

“His people removed her from a quiet house in Undercliff within the last tenday.”

“Does she have anyone waiting for her?” Elisa asked.

Renaer looked toward Elisa. “The neighbors were told she had gone to family. She has none.”

“Which cell?” Firemind asked.

“If I knew, we would not be talking in a borrowed temple while pretending your death remains administratively convenient. What matters is that they took her alive and understood her value before they moved.”

Firemind’s grip tightened on the paper. “Your father.”

Renaer met his gaze. “My father knew many things long enough to profit from them and forgot them morally afterward.”

“Did he understand what he made her?”

“Perhaps. I spent years saying I was not him, as if refusal were the same as virtue. Now I am trying to be more useful than innocent.”

Renaer arranged the papers into two columns. “Neither can reach the Vault alone, and each knows the other possesses what is missing. Xanathar’s people are abducting anyone connected to old Neverember surveys—scribes, clerks, cellar inspectors, one confused mason.”

“And Manshoon?”

“He is testing memory. People turn up alive with absences. A man remembers his own name but no longer recognizes his wife. A woman retains a spell but not the teacher who gave it to her. One victim can describe a street she never walked and not the room around her.”

“Experiments.”

“Yes.”

“Why bring this to us?” Firemind asked.

“Because you know what it is to be opened.”

Firemind went still.

Renaer kept his eyes on him. “And what it is to be helped without being owned. Lysaerra needs rescuers who will not call her a key after they find her.”

“Chime will remember her name,” Chime said.

Firemind smoothed the edge of the ledger sheet with his thumb. “Leave these with us.”

Renaer let go of the sheet beneath his hand. “There is something else. Not intelligence.”

“Those words rarely improve a meeting.”

“If you find the cache, what will you do with it?”

Rishi looked up from the ledger sheet. “You mean the gold in the Vault? How much is there?”

“Half a million gold coins. My father stole them from Waterdeep and hid them there.”

“Return it to the city,” Firemind said.

“Which Waterdeep?”

Firemind’s eyes narrowed.

Renaer asked, “The Palace? The Masked Lords? The magistrates who failed to notice forged transfers? The Watch officers selling routes? Noble houses arming private soldiers? Temples deciding which grief is politically safe? Give that gold back to the city and someone still decides what repair means.”

“I hate what happens in those clean rooms. That does not justify keeping the gold.”

“No.”

“Or giving it to criminals.”

“No. It should return.”

“There are many hands in a city,” Chime said. “Which ones get to hold it?”

“That is the difficulty. Once hands touch it, gold becomes power, and power chooses whose losses count.”

“Would your answer survive being questioned this closely?” Maeril asked.

“I have not found one that does.”

Firemind looked down at Lysaerra’s name. “You are trying to repair more than the theft.”

“Yes.”

“What do you want from us?”

“Think about the question before its answer becomes urgent. I also want Xanathar separated from the Stone, Manshoon separated from Lysaerra, the woman alive, Waterdeep unconquered, and my father’s crimes to stop collecting interest. The question is what I can give you tonight.”

Chime hovered over the two columns of papers. “Chime can remember the names. Not choose for them.”

Firemind nodded. He folded the ledger sheet with the reports. “Vajra?”

“She knows enough to be dangerous and not enough to be calm.” Renaer turned toward Rishi and Maeril. “Now that you two are Watchful Order adjuncts, you will meet the Blackstaff’s shadow before you meet her face.”

“Comforting,” Firemind said.

“It was not intended to be.”

Renaer stood and put on his gloves. Then he extended his hand.

Firemind rose with him and took it.

“I am glad you stopped being dead,” Renaer said.

“So am I.”

Firemind blinked, then held Renaer’s hand a moment longer.

Renaer released him and reached the door.

Chime gave him the same quiet phrase with which they had greeted him. Renaer paused with his hand on the latch and bowed his head to them before leaving.

Rishi watched the door for a moment after it closed. Then he looked back at the folded reports in Firemind’s hands.

What would they do if they won?