Where Mercy Stands

Grim pushed his chair back from the table.

“I need a big pint of ale.”

Nobody attempted to improve the sentence. He took that for agreement and went downstairs.

Rishi waited until the footsteps had reached the turn of the stair. Then he looked at Maeril. She understood the question and nodded.

“Find out what he has been thinking so loudly.”

He followed Grim.

The room felt larger after their departure. Maeril loosened the strap of her pack, which had been pressing into her shoulder since the Ledger Rooms, and let it stand against the chair. Naeris still held her hand. When she noticed, she released it carefully, as though surrendering something she had not meant to borrow for so long.

Maeril left her hand where it was.

Elisa looked toward the door. “We cannot simply go home and begin again.”

“I have several excellent reasons to begin again,” Maeril said. “Most involve food, sleep, and people who need us.”

“I know.”

“Those needs have not become less real because we are frightened.”

“No. But if we return without understanding what follows us, we may bring the danger through the door with the help.”

Maeril looked at her white-stitched cuff. She had spent years making places people could enter without being harmed. The possibility that she could carry harm inside by doing exactly what she was best at made her want to check every ward she had ever laid.

“We cannot stop mending things.”

Elisa moved closer. “I am trying to learn what the mending must include.”

Chime hovered beside Naeris, quiet enough that Maeril could hear the thin sound of their magic beneath the noise from downstairs.

“I thought I knew what dawn asked of me,” Elisa said. “Get up. Feed someone. Heal what can be healed. Make the next morning possible.”

Maeril met her eyes. “That is still good work.”

“Yes.” Elisa held the answer firmly. “I need to know what it leaves untouched.”

At the bar below, Grim had found a place where nobody could stand behind him.

Rishi took the adjoining seat. The barkeeper set down a large mug, waited for payment, and departed without asking what had brought them there. Grim drank enough to lower the foam past the rim.

“If you say anything about an echo being alive, I will move.”

Rishi placed his staff where it would not trip the people passing. “Manshoon.”

Grim looked into his ale. “Worse.”

“You knew something upstairs.”

“I knew many things upstairs. Most of them involved leaving.”

Rishi waited.

Grim wiped foam from his upper lip with the back of his hand.

“The bastard planned for dying.”

The words made no attempt at mystery.

“You think he spent all his time expecting to win? He planned for betrayal. Fire. Doors failing. Servants stealing. His own body becoming unusable.”

Rishi remembered the rooms beneath Manshoon’s control, each one arranging danger for whoever entered without understanding its purpose.

“He left orders.”

“Orders. Stores. Things that happen if another thing stops happening. Men who have been frightened so long they keep obeying without anyone reminding them.” Grim turned the mug between his hands. “Then he dies, and half of them run while the other half starts grabbing what he left. Some apprentice thinks he has inherited a great secret. Some rival thinks he has found an unguarded door.”

“And they keep his work moving.”

“Often while congratulating themselves on being free of him.”

Rishi looked at Grim’s hand around the mug. The old scars on it tightened as he gripped the handle.

“You know where some of those doors are.”

“Some. Not the ones that matter most, probably. He did not explain his private contingencies to the man paid to stand outside.”

It was a limit Rishi could trust.

Across the room, someone laughed over a falling counter. Grim waited until the sound had passed.

“You people concern me more.”

Rishi turned back.

“Put a frightened person in a doorway. What do you do?”

“Find what frightens them.”

“And stand where it reaches you first.”

Rishi said nothing.

“Put a wounded child behind a locked door.”

His fingers moved against his knee.

Grim saw it. “There. I do not even have to finish the room.”

Upstairs, Elisa had drawn her cloak closer around her shoulders.

“I am already in the planes.”

Maeril looked at her with immediate suspicion. “That is rarely the beginning of a sensible thought.”

“I think I need to knock on Lathander’s door.”

Naeris lifted her head.

Maeril stared at Elisa. “You priests have a startling idea of a practical next step.”

“I cannot keep asking for renewal while refusing the knowledge that should guide it.”

“And you expect him to receive visitors?”

“I expect to begin walking toward him. As close as a mortal can go. I do not know what I will find.”

Maeril wanted to object to the road, its dangers, the enormous claim hidden inside the simple verb walking. Then she looked at the woman who had been forced through a broken portal and had still stopped to help a stranger.

Elisa was choosing a direction now. Fear remained plainly visible. It had ceased to be the only thing deciding where she went.

“You are coming back,” Maeril said.

“That is my intention.”

“Good. Keep it near the front of your theology.”

A tired smile reached Elisa’s mouth.

Naeris looked down at her staff. “I do not know what I am when I am not running.”

Maeril turned to her.

“Everything I have done here has been to stay ahead of this conversation. Or make you have it. Sometimes both.”

“You achieved the conversation.”

Naeris looked briefly at her, uncertain.

“Quite thoroughly,” Maeril added.

The younger woman’s shoulders loosened a little. “Then I need to learn what happens after it.”

Chime drifted to the other side of her chair. “Chime can assist with Naeris-not-running.”

Maeril felt the beginning of an objection and knew at once how unfair it would be. She had come to bring Chime home. Chime had acquired a life while she traveled, and there was a person in front of her who needed to be allowed the same thing.

“Learn stubbornly,” she told Naeris.

“I had instruction.”

“Yes. I am increasingly aware of the consequences.”

Naeris smiled. It lasted only a moment, but she had made it herself.

Grim had left a wet ring on the bar.

He placed his mug on the far side of it and tapped the empty circle.

“If he knows where you will stand, he does not have to defeat you in a fair fight. He builds that place to kill you.”

Rishi looked at the ring.

“And the person inside it.”

“Especially the person inside it. Otherwise you might not come.”

Rishi’s breath grew slower. Grim watched him with the irritation of a man who had supplied a clear warning and could already see it being turned into something difficult.

“Do not decide I am telling you to become cruel.”

“You are not.”

“I am telling you cruelty can read a signpost.”

Rishi placed one hand against the bar. His palm was broad with work, marked with old injuries and the fine changes of the training at Blackstaff Tower. More force now than before Waterdeep. More control over what could harm or heal beneath his skin.

If I can stay standing where he wants me, Rishi thought, the person behind me may still get out.

He did not yet see another answer his body could carry.

Grim drank again. “This city has people who study how things fall apart.”

Rishi looked up.

“The Doomguard. Your alarming little guidebook had a section. Rust, collapse, all the things respectable people pretend are exceptions.”

“You want to meet them.”

“I want to hear someone explain a broken system without insisting I rebuild it and thank the man who owned it.”

Rishi’s gaze rested on him a moment longer.

“Do not make that face,” Grim said. “I said meet them. I have not proposed marriage.”

He emptied the mug and stood.

When they returned upstairs, the conversation had already changed the arrangement of the room.

Elisa was standing with her cloak fastened. Naeris had gathered the food into a single bag. Chime remained beside her, turning toward each voice without drifting away.

Maeril told Rishi the direction Elisa intended to take. He listened, then looked at the priestess.

“What do you need before you go?”

The practical question steadied her. “A route. Advice from someone who has walked enough of it. Then courage I cannot buy.”

“Ask about the first two,” Grim said. “This city will sell you the third if you phrase it badly.”

Elisa accepted that with a small nod.

“I’m staying in Sigil,” Naeris said.

“And Chime is staying with Naeris,” the mimir added.

Rishi looked directly at the mimir.

“You choose that?”

“Yes. Naeris requires guidance, company, and someone willing to explain when she is pretending not to need either.”

“So do I,” Maeril said before she could stop herself.

Chime turned toward her. “Maeril has Rishi.”

For a moment she could not answer.

Then she reached out and touched one finger lightly beneath the skull’s jaw, where Chime permitted the contact.

“Be careful with each other.”

Grim began asking about the stairs and which exit would put him on the side of the building he wanted. Elisa moved to answer. Naeris adjusted the strap of the food bag. The group that had occupied one room with one impossible question was becoming several people with ordinary things to carry.

Rishi and Maeril found themselves beside the window.

“And us?” she asked quietly.

He looked at his hands.

“He can build a room around where I stand.”

She waited.

“I need to understand what I can hold.”

The answer came from the place in him she knew best: the body put to work before fear could turn into helplessness. She could hear its usefulness. She could also hear how much of it remained unfinished.

“About that, Rish. Didn’t you want a tattoo?”

He looked at her.

“You have been trying to keep light and darkness inside the same skin without letting either choose for you. I have some experience with boundaries.”

Rishi’s gaze moved to the white lines stitched along her sleeve.

“A ward,” he said. “Yes.”

She smiled a little. “A needle. Finally, a pilgrimage with an identifiable instrument.”

“But Vale first.”

Maeril’s smile changed. “Orentha Vale?”

“I can endure a great deal. That does not mean I will know when I have stopped observing what it does to me.”

She remembered the supervised readings at Candlekeep, Rishi returning with the silence of someone who had learned something too physical to explain over supper. She remembered the portable edition Selanka had given her, and how often it had survived a ruthless decision about what they could afford to carry.

Maeril opened her pack.

“Twenty-seven consultations,” she said. “Meeting the author once may be defensible.”

“I want her to watch what my body receives. While you work.”

Maeril drew out The Art of Being Struck and opened the foreword. Vale’s name had once seemed part of the book’s distant authority. Beneath it stood an address she could now walk toward.

“Civic Festhall,” she read. “Sigil.”

Rishi took his staff from beside the chair. Maeril marked the page with her thumb and went to ask which door led there.