A slow smile crept across Maspero’s brutal features. “Hells,” he said, “but you’re devious.”
“Prudent,” Mira corrected. “This is the best way to get what we all want.”
That, she thought, should keep him still. Harper, Zhentarim-Hells, even Shadovar-Mira didn’t care who she worked with if it meant she could be the one to unearth the ancient ruins. The history, the discovery-these were what mattered. If it took the promise of a powerful weapon to get that aid, then that was how things sat. They could fight over it once it was found.
She smiled at Maspero, but secretly, she hoped he prevailed and took the plans-it would mean every other Zhentarim leader on the Sword Coast would come down on him and wipe that sneer from his face. A hundred years ago, the Black Network had been something to fear indeed-across the continent, every Zhent answered to the same calculating, determined master, and the organization hid itself in every city, in every layer of power.
When Shade destroyed Zhentil Keep, the heart of the Zhentarim’s power, the cracks had already begun to form. Those who worshipped Cyric, the god of strife and madness, rose up and seized power from the more orderly Banites, leaving the widely scattered cells to their own devices. Every few years, it seemed, one of them-Cyricist or Banite-rose above the rest of the rabble and tried to seize power over his neighbor cells. And every few years there was another brutal internecine battle.
But as fractured and fractious as the Zhentarim were, Mira could not deny she was one of them.
What she’d told her father before had been the truth, only the details were lies-far more than guardwork, being employed by the Zhentarim meant she had the funds to do what she wished. If they wanted a particularly valuable artifact, well, at least they left the rest of the site to her. If they wanted to exploit her contacts among the Anauroch’s desert tribes, at least they never damaged their trust. If they wanted her to get them past zealous guards and into parts of the world that didn’t often see human eyes, well, at least they let her lead them to actual ruins when their business concluded.
Still, Mira had not gotten to where she was by being a fool. Maspero grew more dangerous by the day, his rivals more bold, and the certainty that one would decide Maspero needed to be stopped became surer. For all her bravado, she wasn’t certain he’d keep his temper steady. She wasn’t even certain he’d let her return to Everlund unscathed. He knew-all the Zhents knew, she was sure-that Mira didn’t care so much about their goals, about their machinations, about who had stood in whose way. She might be one of the Zhentarim in name, but patience for Mira’s lax loyalty was finite, and running out.
But without her ties to the Zhentarim, she was merely another copperless historian, pleading for coin from patrons who had to be convinced to care more about the ancient world than their new wardrobes, or-worse-patrons who only wanted her to look for and confirm what they wished to be true. That their race had been in that valley first, or that the Spellplague had spared their temple or touched their ancestral home.
She hoped her father wouldn’t press the issue. She’d rather not decide where she stood when the lost treasures of Tarchamus were here within her grasp.
As if her thoughts had called him, Tam appeared at the end of the aisle, smiling pleasantly. Maspero took a step backward.
“Well met, Mira,” Tam said. “How are your studies going?”
“Fine,” she said. “This section’s all natural studies it seems. We ought to-”
“You might find it better to do more searching,” Tam chided. “And less talking.” Mira pursed her lips in annoyance.
“I’ve been doing plenty,” she said. “Have you found anything?”
He gave her a small, tense smile, a vague expression that ignored her tone and her anger and the fact she had a very good point. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Have you considered discussing your search with the Book?”
She had-and had dismissed it. It was a fine artifact, to be certain; it’s quick denial of the existence of Tarchamus’s eruption spell meant it was also far cannier than it seemed. The arcanist’s most famous spell and the curator of his library had no knowledge of it? Unlikely. There was no being certain about the mind-set of a creature like that. Her father ought to know that-and hadn’t he been the one shouting at everyone to stay clear of the thing at the start?
“In due time,” she said. “Right now I think we’re better off narrowing our search area.”
Tam shrugged. “I think it’s worth looking into. Ask it where your city is. Or why not start with something simple? See what it knows?”
“You do that,” she said, turning back to her shelf.
“Why don’t you?” Maspero said with a significant look. “Nail down the necessities.” Prove you’re on my side, he did not have to say.
Piss and hrast. Mira gave them both a false and flimsy smile. “Why not?”
Her father brightened. “Wonderful. Come along.”
Following after Maspero, Mira took several deep breaths. She was not going to lose her temper. She was not going to let her anger show. And she was certainly not going to stoop to her father’s level and act like the child he was treating her as. At least, she thought, as they headed toward the center of the library and the Book’s alcove beyond it, it was warmer here, and brighter too.
She looked back the way she’d come. The lights had moved away from the shelves, casting them in dreary shadow. Unlike the sanctum at the center of the library, it seemed colder, more forbidding. Odd-she thought. She’d been standing there reading a moment ago, with no trouble. She looked up at the cavern ceiling-the magical lights were drifting back toward the center of the library in that section. As if the library were discouraging anyone from wandering into those shelves.
“Oh clever, Tarchamus,” Mira murmured, and she headed back the way she’d come.
“Mira!” her father called. “The Book is this way.”
The lights didn’t follow as she pressed farther into the darkness. She pulled a second sunrod from the kit at her belt as she passed the books she’d been examining.
“Stlarning Hells!” Maspero shouted after her. “I don’t shit those things!”
“Mira!” her father scolded. “Come back here!”
There was something here-there had to be. The darkness warred with the glow of the sunrod as she moved past the shelves to the face of the cave. More shelves lined the wall here, stretching up beyond the edges of the sunrod’s light. She pulled a scroll from the shelf-a copy of the Teachings of the Path of Enlightenment-and farther down, another-Earlanni myths. Not the spellbooks. Nothing to hide. The sunrod’s light moved along the shelves with her.
And then, abruptly, broke in a neat line. A corner.
Mira rounded it and thrust the sunrod into the darkened alcove. Where the rough and rippling cave wall should have been, the surface was smoothed stone, decorated with the figure of the same elderly man as the outer entrance. Mira felt the edges of the space-a seam in the rock all the way up both sides and across the top. Her grin spread so wide her cheeks ached.
A door.
“Maspero!” she shouted. “Da!”
Eyes locked with Tarchamus’s jade ones, she held the sunrod high, listening as the two men’s footsteps clattered ever nearer. Maspero reached her first and she beckoned him to come nearer, until he stood facing Tarchamus’s likeness too.
“There!” she said. “I will lay down coin that what we’re looking for is in there.” Maspero started toward it, but she put up a hand to stop him. “It’s sealed by some means. If you shove it open, you might well trigger one of those traps that blasted book mentioned.” She spun on her father. “Did you know about this?”
But she found she was demanding answers from the darkness. Tam Zawad was nowhere to be seen.