It’s true that many of the wealthier folk I have known, lords of Waterdeep even, will open their purses wide for a journey to a far off place of respite. Even if a particular journey does not go as anticipated for them, with unpleasant weather or unpleasant company, or foul food or even minor illnesses, to a one, the lords would claim the trip worth the effort and the gold. What they valued most for their trouble and treasure was not the actual journey, but the memory of it that remained behind, the memory of it that they will carry to their graves. Life is in the experiencing, to be sure, but it’s just as much in the recollection and in the telling!
Contrastingly, I see in Mithral Hall many dwarves, particularly older folk, who revel in the routine, whose every step mirrors those of the day before. Every meal, every hour of work, every chop with the pick or bang with the hammer follows the pattern ingrained throughout the years. There is a game of delusion at work here, I know, though I wouldn’t say it aloud. It’s an unspoken and internal logic that drives them ever on in the same place. It’s even chanted in an old dwarven song:
For this I did on yesterday
And not to Moradin’s Hall did I fly
So’s to do it again’ll keep me well
And today I sha’not die.
The logic is simple and straightforward, and the trap is easily set, for if I did these things the day before and do these same things today, I can reasonably assume that the result will not change.
And the result is that I will be alive tomorrow to do these things yet again.
Thus do the mundane and the routine become the—false—assurance of continued life, but I have to wonder, even if the premise were true, even if doing the same thing daily would ensure immortality, would a year of such existence not already be the same as the most troubling possibility of death?
From my perspective, this ill-fated logic ensures the opposite of that delusional promise! To live a decade in such a state is to ensure the swiftest path to death, for it is to ensure the swiftest passage of the decade, an unremarkable recollection that will flitter by without a pause, the years of mere existence. For in those hours and heartbeats and passing days, there is no variance, no outstanding memory, no first kiss.
To seek the road and embrace change could well lead to a shorter life in these dangerous times in Faerûn. But in those hours, days, years, whatever the measure, I will have lived a longer life by far than the smith who ever taps the same hammer to the same familiar spot on the same familiar metal.
For life is experience, and longevity is, in the end, measured by memory, and those with a thousand tales to tell have indeed lived longer than any who embrace the mundane.
— Drizzt Do’Urden
CHAPTER 1
FAIR WINDS AND FOLLOWING SEAS
S ails billowing, timbers creaking, water spraying high from her prow, Thrice Lucky leaped across the swells with the grace of a dancer. All the multitude of sounds blended together in a musical chorus, both invigorating and inspiring, and it occurred to young Captain Maimun that if he had hired a band of musicians to rouse his crew, their work would add little to the natural music all around them.
The chase was on, and every man and woman aboard felt it, and heard it.
Maimun stood forward and starboard, holding fast to a guide rope, his brown hair waving in the wind, his black shirt half unbuttoned and flapping refreshingly and noisily, bouncing out enough to show a tar-black scar across the left side of his chest.
“They are close,” came a woman’s voice from behind him, and Maimun half-turned to regard Overwizard Arabeth Raurym, Mistress of the South Tower.
“Your magic tells you so?”
“Can’t you feel it?” the woman answered, and gave a coy toss of her head so that her waist-length red hair caught the wind and flipped back behind her. Her blouse was as open as Maimun’s shirt, and the young man couldn’t help but look admiringly at the alluring creature.
He thought of the previous night, and the night before that, and before that as well—of the whole enjoyable journey. Arabeth had promised him a wonderful and exciting sail in addition to the rather large sum she’d offered for her passage, and Maimun couldn’t honestly say that she’d disappointed him. She was around his age, just past thirty, intelligent, attractive, sometimes brazen, sometimes coy, and just enough of each to keep Maimun and every other man around her off-balance and keenly interested in pursuing her. Arabeth knew her power well, and Maimun knew that she knew it, but still, he couldn’t shake himself free of her.
Arabeth stepped up beside him and playfully brushed her fingers through his thick hair. He glanced around quickly, hoping none of the crew had seen, for the action only accentuated that he was quite young to be captaining a ship, and that he looked even younger. His build was slight, wiry yet strong, his features boyish and his eyes a delicate light blue. While his hands were calloused, like those of any honest seaman, his skin had not yet taken on the weathered, leathery look of a man too much under the sparkling sun.
Arabeth dared to run her hand under the open fold of his shirt, her fingers dancing across his smooth skin to the rougher place where skin and tar had melded together, and it occurred to Maimun that he typically kept his shirt open just a bit more for exactly the reason of revealing a hint of that scar, that badge of honor, that reminder to all around that he had spent most of his life with a blade in his hand.
“You are a paradox,” Arabeth remarked, and Maimun merely smiled. “Gentle and strong, soft and rough, kind and merciless, an artist and a warrior. With your lute in hand, you sing with the voice of the sirens, and with your sword in hand, you fight with the tenacity of a drow weapons master.”
“You find this off-putting?”
Arabeth laughed. “I would drag you to your cabin right now,” she replied, “but they are close.”
As if on cue—and Maimun was certain Arabeth had used some magic to confirm her prediction before she’d offered it—a crewman from the crow’s nest shouted down, “Sails! Sails on the horizon!”
“Two ships,” Arabeth said to Maimun.
“Two ships!” the man in the nest called down.
“Sea Sprite and Quelch’s Folly,” said Arabeth. “As I told you when we left Luskan.”
Maimun could only chuckle helplessly at the manipulative wizard. He reminded himself of the pleasures of the journey, and of the hefty bag of gold awaiting its completion.
He thought, too, in terms bitter and sweet, of Sea Sprite and Deudermont, his old ship, his old captain.
“Aye, Captain, that’s Argus Retch or I’m the son of a barbarian king and an orc queen,” Waillan Micanty said. He winced as he finished, reminding himself of the cultured man he served. He scanned Deudermont head to toe, from his neatly trimmed beard and hair to his tall and spotless black boots. The captain showed more gray in his hair, but still not much for a man of more than fifty years, and that only made him appear more regal and impressive.
“A bottle of the finest wine for Dhomas Sheeringvale, then,” Deudermont said in a light tone that put Micanty back at ease. “Against all of my doubts, the information you garnered from him was correct and we’ve finally got that filthy pirate before us.” He clapped Micanty on the back and glanced back over his shoulder and up to Sea Sprite’s wizard, who sat on the edge of the poop deck, his skinny legs dangling under his heavy robes. “And soon in range of our catapult,” Deudermont added loudly, catching the attention of the mage, Robillard, “if our resident wizard there can get the sails straining.”