"Are we done here? Can we leave now? With Galimer?"
"By all means. Or stay. You have questions; I see them in your eyes. Dine with me and I will answer them… some of them."
Dru shook his head. "We left our horses outside the forest. We can get back to them by dawn, if we hurry."
"Your horses are safe and you are tired. Eat. Rest. Ask your questions. There'll be no other opportunity. Once you leave, you will not return to Weathercote Wood."
He hadn't intended to come back, but the sound of prophecy sent a chill down Dru's back. Before he recovered, Rozt'a broke her self-imposed silence.
"I want answers, Dru. I want to know more about the mind flayers. And will you make Sheemzher whole again?"
She was talking to Wyndyfarh and Wyndyfarh answered her directly.
"It isn't Sheemzher's body that needs to be made whole. You have begun that well enough. All his body needs is time. He saw his people for what they were. That broke his heart."
"Will you heal his heart, then?" Rozt'a demanded.
Wyndyfarh shrugged. "I will speed his body's healing. His heart is his. Perhaps he will return to Dekanter, a glorious hero searching for his followers."
"There's nothing left at Dekanter," Dru announced. "Ghistpok led the tribe into the Beast Lord's lair and lost it there."
"Goblins will return to Dekanter." Wyndyfarh laughed privately. "It and the Greypeaks are well suited to their needs, their way of life. The Beast Lord will call them. It will begin again… without the scroll."
Druhallen shrugged and laughed. He knew something Lady Mantis didn't. "If the Beast Lord's still there. It was hard-pressed when we left. Of the living mind flayers I counted, four were dead, but there were more still hunting it."
Some part of what he'd said seized Wyndyfarh's attention. "I will prepare a table for you and places where you may rest. You will tell me about these living mind flayers." With the scroll and Sheemzher in her arms, she started for the waterfall.
Rozt'a moved to follow her, but Dru stayed where he was and worried that Lady Mantis was up to her old tricks of saying different things to different people. He'd been paying careful attention and hadn't caught her speaking directly into his mind, but that only meant he hadn't caught her, not that she hadn't done it.
"It's all right, Dru," Galimer tried to reassure him. "She's hard through and through, but fair, not evil. You heard her-she's oath-bound to Mystra. Keeping watch on Toril's mind flayers is her whole life. If there's a chance they've replaced the Beast Lord in Dekanter, she'll want to know everything you and Rozt'a and Tiep can tell her."
Keeping watch on Toril's mind flayers? That was as good as an admission that Wyndyfarh had come from somewhere else, and not the far side of an ocean. Curiosity, the wizard's curse, took command of Druhallen's interest. He picked up the sling in which he'd carried Sheemzher-it was too good a blanket to waste-and followed Galimer and Rozt'a toward the waterfall. Tiep hung back to walk beside him.
"Did you see her? Did you see her change?" the youth asked excitedly. "She's not human, not even close. You can't be serious about following her, Dru."
"She's oath-bound to Mystra; she has to keep her word to another wizard. You can stay here, if you want, but she's right about one thing: I've got questions."
Dru broke into a run and caught up with Galimer before his gold-haired friend walked beneath the waterfall. They shared a back-pounding embrace-and Druhallen took his friend's measure with his ring. Galimer felt the discharge and gave him a sour look.
"I haven't been through what you've been through, but it hasn't been exactly pleasant and I haven't changed. That's more than I can say about you."
Dru folded his arms. "If we hadn't made it back, what do you want to bet you'd have become her new Sheemzher, looking for good people to lead to Dekanter?"
"She'll keep her word, Dru," Galimer replied, which wasn't an answer. Then he sighed and returned Dru's embrace. "Gods-it's good to see you. You, Rozt'a, Tiep-?" He stopped and reached back for his foster son.
Left with a choice between staying alone on one side of the waterfall or being with the people he knew best on the other, Tiep chose to follow Dru and Galimer through the water. A simple supper was waiting for them. The food looked natural and smelled delicious after three days of frog soup and other delicacies. Druhallen needed a moment of watching Galimer and Rozt'a eat before he overcame his reservations about eating Lady Mantis's food. Tiep needed a moment more.
The lady herself did immediately join them but carried Sheemzher to a white marble building similar to the one in her Weathercote glade, but larger and divided into chambers. Galimer whispered that he'd dwelt in a different chamber than the one Wyndyfarh chose for Sheemzher. She remained out of sight for several moments then sat at the head of her table as if her plain wooden chair were a gilded throne. Wyndyfarh didn't eat the food she served, but did keep her word about answering questions.
She began with the questions Druhallen asked regarding Beast Lord's fascination with the Dekanter goblins.
"To an illithid-a mind flayer here in Faerun-anything that is sentient but is not illithid is thralclass="underline" a slave to be kept for work, breeding, amusement, and, of course, consumption. There is, however, an ideal thrall, a sentient race some call the gith. Gith were specifically bred to serve their masters. When the gith revolted successfully, the illithid race entered a decline from which they have never recovered and from which they will never recover, partly because they have forgotten what they were and partly because there are those, including the children of the gith, who will never forget."
"Are you a child of the gith?" Dru asked when she paused.
He thought it a serious question. Wyndyfarh found it droll. She laughed to herself before replying,
"Imagine a taller, cleverer goblin and you might imagine the gith. No living mind flayer of Faerun has seen one-"
Rozt'a interrupted with, "The Beast Lord is an alhoon."
Wyndyfarh indulged another private laugh. "Be assured, it has never seen a gith. It is guided only by memories stolen from the elder brain of the colony where it was spawned, wherever that was. That memory became an obsession that led it into a study of material magic, which is anathema among illithids. They have their own disciplines of will and thought which they refuse to call magic. An illithid practicing material magic is driven out of its colony and invariably pursues the spells that will transform it into a lich, an alhoon."
"Invariably?" Dru rejected invariably; invariably there were exceptions.
"Illithids do not believe in death," Wyndyfarh said with a stiff smile. "The only conceivable fate for an illithid is Commencement-becoming a part of its colony's elder brain. An exiled illithid invariably seeks to avoid death. They are a rational race, according to their understanding. I have no interest in illithid obsessions, but the Dekanter alhoon most likely believed that if it could recreate the gith, its elder brain would forgive it and it would receive Commencement. For a hundred years it had pursued its obsession, seeming to nurture the goblin tribes and littering the Greypeaks with the deformed, crippled fruits of its labors in the abandoned mines. Then it found a Nether scroll. Duke Windheir cannot guess how it could learn anything from a Nether scroll, but it did, and you have seen the results. My servants were lost, defiled. I claimed vengeance and was denied. I sent no more servants to Dekanter. My eyes were blind until Sheemzher came, and Sheemzher brought me you."
"And vengeance could be served, if it was not done in your name?" Tiep had found his voice and his courage.
Lady Mantis wore her most predatory expression when she saw who had spoken, but she answered the youth's question. "In a word, yes."