Even before Sharantyr could give him a disgustedly despairing look, he'd adopted graver tones, adding, "Which brings to mind why we've come. Do we attack everyone-everything-we meet? Do we avoid battle if we can, and try to scout about? Do we try to befriend someone, to learn all we can or to earn a place here?"
"Perhaps next time," Belkram added in a small voice, addressing the unseen ceiling, "we could answer a few of these good questions before we leap into the heart of danger."
Into the rueful little silence that followed, Itharr said, "I like that. 'Leap into the heart of danger.' Quite impressive. There's a ballad in that…"
"Don't" both of his companions advised, in chorus. He spread teasingly apologetic hands in silence and then gestured at Shar, wordlessly bidding her speak.
Sharantyr eyed both men, seeing several horns growing out of one side of Belkram's head, and small eyes that should not have been there blinking at her from a cavity in Itharr's shoulder. She closed her eyes on these sights for a moment and took a deep breath. Letting it out slowly, she looked at them both and said, "If we begin by fighting, we're sure to be slain as soon as we meet anyone too powerful, or a group. I don't even think we should be talking like this; they might be able to hear. Just act as arrogant as they did, back at the keep, but be casual… and mysterious."
"When you don't know what you're doing," Belkram agreed solemnly, hefting his saddlebag, "that's not too hard."
Sharantyr gave him a half-smile and a shrug in reply, and reached for the door. As her hand approached it, the door gave way silently, pivoting back into dim shadows beyond.
Shar gave her companions a raised-eyebrows look of wary, impressed-despite-myself surprise and peered into the chamber beyond.
It seemed empty of life, though it held shadows that flickered and clawed at each other in a fitful semblance of life. Blade first, Sharantyr advanced, looking this way and that, and saw that this smaller chamber had two doors to their right and one ahead. A massive metal fish bolted to the far wall spilled out light from its mouth, like a tap that flowed radiant air rather than water. They peered at it suspiciously and then advanced across the room. Something echoed in the mists, far ahead beyond the single door… a tapping sound. It came to their ears once but was not repeated.
"They're here, all right," Itharr murmured, trying to ignore the eel-like thing his left arm had just become. "I don't know just where, but they're here."
The other Harper looked at him and sighed. "Act like we belong here," Belkram suggested firmly, "not as if we're creeping around an enemy stronghold."
Itharr looked innocent. "But what if we are creeping around an enemy stronghold?"
Shar chuckled despite herself. The mist swallowed the sound as if it were hungry, and she stopped short and looked around once more. "I feel like I did in the Under-dark," she said softly, "creeping around, hoping I'd not be found…"
The two Harpers exchanged glances. Belkram laid a kindly flipper on her shoulder and said, "Shield high, Shar. We're-"
He broke off at the rather nauseated look she was giving her shoulder, or rather, at the part of him that was wiggling obscenely there, well on its way to changing into something else.
Her look was so comical that both men chuckled-long, deep chuckles that built into shaking mirth. Sharantyr gave them both a hurt look.
"Do you two giggling idiots mind?" she asked indignantly.
And the door in front of them swung open.
They hadn't even time to look apprehensive before an apelike, shambling thing with the head of a handsome young man and one hand that ended in a cluster of tentacles moved through the door and headed past them, over toward one of the doors on the right. He gave them a cold glance and then stiffened, turned, and looked Sharantyr up and down.
"Shapes of Faerunians? Are you practicing for a foray after this Elminster mortal, or just having"-his gaze traveled back and forth between them, and his grin acquired a few needlelike teeth-"a little fun?"
Sharantyr gave him an easy shrug. "A little fun," she drawled in soft, lazily menacing tones. The Malaugrym seemed to hesitate, and she added pointedly, brushing one arm along Itharr's now-pustuled flank, "Private fun."
The Malaugrym seemed about to say something more but merely nodded and went on. As the door opened, he looked back and was favored with a trio of faintly mocking, faintly challenging half-grins, just the look Belkram had seen on the lips of Elaith Craulnobur, the notorious elven adventurer, in a spell-scene shown to him by a Harper in Waterdeep. Itharr remembered that look from a lady brothel-keeper he'd arrested in Elturel, just before half her girls returned to their true doppleganger forms and she'd started to scream. And Sharantyr would always see the almost-smiles on the faces of drow bending over her, whips in their hands.
Seeming satisfied with what he saw, the Shadow-master vanished through the door.
"It almost seems as if we know what we're doing," Belkram commented, flexing his right arm, which was lengthening steadily into what looked like a gigantic crab claw.
Itharr nodded. "Just behave as if you know what you're about and have every right to be doing it, and most folk will accept you." He looked critically at his own arms, one of which was a deep red in hue. "A fairly simple deception at heart," he observed. "I suppose that's why so many kings have managed it down the years."
Elminster's Safehold, Kythorn 19
Elminster paced back and forth in the bookshelf-lined Safehold, frowning and stroking his beard. From time to time he lifted his head to stare at one of the room's four doors, noting absently that Ao had shuffled through the spell-stored animated scenes he displayed as hangings on those doors, and put on display the most alluring of each. He gave one of them-a lady who had been dust for almost eight hundred summers-a half-smile as he banished her, shaking his head. "Distracting," he muttered, and returned to his pacing, striding up and down the room, face dark with thought.
"This is ridiculous," he muttered after a time, coming to a halt by the table. "I must know."
He waved a hand. The chamber darkened obediently except for a small point of whirling light above the table, which grew and grew until it became as large as his face… whereupon it spun a book out of itself and vanished with a satisfied sound.
Elminster took the floating book and stepped on the floor tile that would whisk him at will onto the seat of his private privy. 'Twas time for some serious reading, before some bespectacled twit at Candlekeep noticed this tome was missing, and called on magic to trace it. Oh, he had his own copies of Alaundo's predictions, but the Commentaries of Iyrauthar, the book in his hands, was the only text to gather related records, rumors, legends, and testimonials about the Mad Sage's thunderings. Moreover, Candlekeep's copy had been annotated by First Reader Taltro some six hundred years ago, collecting even more useful lore on the Endless Chant and its various fulfillments-much of it errant nonsense, but one can't have everything.
"Oho," he said softly, after a while. "Oh ho ho, indeed." He summoned his pipe with a crook of one finger and sent the book back to its rightful home with a wave of his other hand, rising up through the floor from jakes to study in slow, stately majesty. Tablets of Fate, my wrinkled old behind, he thought sourly. Did even the divine lack taste and inspiration these days?
The Castle of Shadows, Kythorn 19
The door through which the Malaugrym had come proved to open into a long gallery, with pillars and a railing on their right. The view over the railing looked down into a shadow-shrouded hall where various robed folk- Malaugrym, presumably, in largely human form-strode back and forth from door to door. A smell wafted up that could only be described as something fishlike being fried. They did not tarry to watch, for fear of attracting attention. At the end of the gallery, a door opened into a room dominated by a deep, echoing well. They dared not confer in that room, in case the well took their voices to unseen ears far away. So they chose one of the other three doors leading out of the room and found themselves in a little closetlike space lined with benches. A hole in the floor made them suspect this was a Malaugrym garderobe, and useless to them for the same reason as the well room. Retracing their steps, they chose a different door and entered a room with a stair descending in front of them, curving off to the right as it did so.