Mirt strode toward the origin of the sound. From a pile of rubble before him, a phantom lady slowly rose. She had long, swirling white hair and a beautiful face; her dark eyes stared into his with such sadness that Mirt found himself, as always, on the sudden edge of tears. Buried somewhere far beneath the debris, Mirt knew, lay the crypt where she had been entombed. Lady Duskreene of Tethgard, its door would say. Mirt silently added two words to the inscription he envisioned: Unquiet Spirit.
“Mirt,” she said, in that soft, sad voice. “It has been long since you called me.”
“Grandlady,” Mirt said huskily. “I have need of yer—powers.”
The translucent, dead-white watch-ghost frowned, emerging in a smooth, silent flight from the rubble, revealing her skeletal, legless torso. She floated in the air before him.
“Name your desire, son of my blood.”
“There are soldiers fleeing this place—Zhentilar. They must be destroyed.”
Duskreene smiled. “And your girth makes catching them all a doubtful prospect for you? Will you wait for me? I have been so lonely.”
Mirt went heavily to one knee and bowed. “I will,” he said formally.
She swirled over his head and arrowed off into the trees. After a moment, a terrified scream—suddenly cut off—came to Mirt’s ears. A few breaths later, there was another, fainter and farther away.
Mirt got to his feet, grunting at the effort, and went over to Shandril. Checking that she was still breathing, he cut the knots at her throat with his dagger, and set about unbinding her.
A few breaths later, as he was carrying the freed Narm over to the wall, he heard another scream.
Groggily, Shandril roused. “Whaa—”
“Peace, maid. Lie still while I free Delg, here. He’s got more nets on him than several boatloads o’ Moonsea fish.”
When the ghostly lady at last returned, Mirt and his companions were all awake and were nursing splitting headaches, rubbing at rope burns, and sipping cautiously at firewine from Mirt’s belt flask. Mirt had apologized to them for scouting in the wrong direction, and was telling Shandril what he guessed—not much—about magic that could swallow spellfire.
As the glowing apparition flew into view, Delg choked, grabbing Mirt’s arm and pointing. “Hast any spellfire left, lass? L—”
“Relax, Delg,” Mirt said, pushing him back against the wall with one large and firm hand. “This is a friend—an ancestor of mine—and a lady of high breeding, too. I’d like ye all to meet Duskreene, Lady of Tethgard.”
The three stared up at the translucent lady as she smiled and drifted slowly nearer. Long hair swirled about her bare shoulders and breast—and but for the white pallor and translucence of her form, she might have been still a living woman. Below her breasts, however, bare ribs curved from a spine that dwindled away into wisps of glowing radiance.
“Well met, friends of the son of my blood. Be welcome here, in what is left of my home.” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, and her eyes were kind. She looked around at the crumbling ruins and shook her head. “It was once so grand—and now, so little is left.”
Then she turned and smiled at Mirt. “For once, you’ve missed the best accommodation.” She pointed. “There’s a door, the other side of that pile of stone. Behind it, several rooms are still intact—and safe from falling in on you, I believe.”
Mirt bowed. “My thanks, Lady.” He turned to the others. “Lady Duskreene ruled in this castle before there was a realm of Cormyr, very long ago. She’s now a watch-ghost—one of the few ghosts who do not always mean swift death to the living.”
“Here,” Duskreene added, “you sleep under my protection. Relax, and feel safe.” She glanced at Mirt, and mischief danced in her eyes. “And please bear with my kin—when he gets no sleep he’s apt to be as grouchy as a bear.”
“ ‘Gets no sleep,’ Lady?” Narm’s eyes were wide with wonder as he looked at her. He’d never seen a ghost before—and this gentle, dignified, half-beautiful and half-skeletal woman was nothing like the spectral monsters whispered of in ghost stories.
The lady who had laughed and loved a thousand years before he was born looked into his eyes sadly. “I’m very lonely here—and on the too-rare occasions when Mirt comes to call, he tells me what has befallen in the lands around since last we talked. I take a morbid interest, I’m afraid, in what the remote descendants of those I knew as friends—and rivals, and foes—are doing, and what contemporaries of mine still walk the world today.”
“Such as … Elminster?” Shandril asked on a hunch, inclining her head to one side.
It was an interesting sight, seeing a watch-ghost blush. “Yes,” she said, eyes far away, seeing things long ago. “He was much younger then. Yes,” she said again, and laughed, “such as Elminster, indeed.”
“Tell me more,” Delg said eagerly. “I’ve got to hear this ….”
“How quaint,” murmured one who watched from the darkness of the trees, concealed by layer upon layer of cloaking magics. It listened and spied all through the watch-ghost’s long talk with Mirt, and through her silent vigil over the sleeping foursome, in the hours before dawn. All the while, it took care to keep out of her sight.
There was very little in Tethgard that night that Iliph Thraun did not see and hear.
“The trick to finding your way back out of deep woods, look ye,” said Mirt to Narm, “is to glance back behind yerself often on the way in. Then ye know what to look for.”
“What if you must be leaving by a different way?” Delg asked sourly, almost challengingly.
Mirt froze, and then turned and blinked at the dwarf. His face looked as if he had just been spoken to by a stone, or he’d just seen a bird smoking a pipe. He blinked again and said mildly, “Well, then ye ask the elf who guided ye in to show ye the way out, of course.” And with a merry twinkle in his eye he strode on through the deepest stands of Hullack Forest in his relentless, rolling, brush-crashing way.
Delg snorted more than once as he followed. Mirt had urged them up in the chill dawn, bidding a hasty farewell to the wraithlike Duskreene. Without ceremony, he’d led them in a steady tramp through the trees. The going proved agonizing to Narm and Delg; limbs that had stiffened overnight cramped and groaned at the joints.
Mirt kept them moving along with a steady stream of jests and barbed digs directed at lazy dwarves and effete young mages. Shandril shook her head at some of his words, but she wisely kept silent and followed the bobbing axe the stout old merchant adventurer wore at the back of his belt.
Something about Mirt’s name was niggling away in her memories, something fleeting that the ranger Florin Falconhand had said, and a reply that Elminster had given, in Shadowdale, at some point in the whirlwind activities of her brief stay there. She looked back at Narm, as if meeting his eyes would bring the memory to her—and it did. She smiled at Narm and turned back to stare at the broad back in front of her. Mirt was one of the Lords of Waterdeep, the not-so-secret band of powerful folk who ruled that great and splendid city.
Striding along at Delg’s side, Narm returned Shandril’s brief and knowing smile. Her expression had been as bright and beautiful as the rising sun, which had just announced morning through the branches above them. Rosy lances of light struck amid the trees here and there. The sudden, broad dawn reminded Narm that the Realms were beautiful and vast, but of course safer when one walked them with friends. He chuckled his joy aloud and thus earned a sour look from Delg.
“When a lad chuckles like that,” the dwarf said gloomily, “it’s usually the sound of his wits escaping out his mouth. He’s sure to do something wildly stupid, all too soon.”
Ahead, Shandril turned, eyes flashing as she laughed. “Why, Delg! And what does a lass’s chuckle warn you of?”