The Nether Scroll

A mounted patrol caught up with him before the palisade was gone from sight. As they passed, they warned him to beware of goblins whose hunger, after three days of eating dust, might be stronger than their cowardice. Most of the riders were Zhentarim in black leather, chain, and carrying crossbows, but a few were Parnasters carrying scythes and pitchforks.

The truth was, Lord Amarandaris had himself a serious goblin problem. Displaced from their homes by some upheaval in the Greypeak Mountains, they were starving, desperate, and just civilized enough to recognize that a village meant food. The native Parnasters were a charitable folk, which had only made things worse. They'd fed and sheltered the first arrivals. Then a second wave arrived, and a third—all expecting the same good treatment and turning surly when the villagers hesitated. Or so said Tiep's friend Manya, who'd visited their room twice during the storm and whose fears were fast becoming hatreds. She worried what would happen after the Leafall when the weather got wintery and Lord Amarandaris hied himself down to distant Darkhold.

If he were smart, Amarandaris was worried, too.

Druhallen wasn't worried about goblins. He'd pulled a serviceable staff from the firewood pile on his way through the palisade. Goblins, even a pack of them, weren't likely to attack a grown man carrying any sort of weapon, not with bowmen riding the fields. And if the scrawny beggars were so foolish, Dru had the pinch of ash wedged beneath his thumbnail. A few breaths of a gloomy enchantment would quench their fury.

He was well beyond the village but not yet in sight of the Wood when he met a Parnaster coming toward him. The man was bent with age and leading a donkey that all but disappeared beneath a load of kindling.

"Be you bound for the Wood?" the codger asked.

"For the brook."

"Good for the brook! But I'd not be crossing the bridge today, not being a wizard and not seeing a path on t'other side. Maybe not then, neither, depending on the light. Being a wizard, maybe I would, no matter the light. But not without a path. Being a wizard, the Wood's not safe without a path."

Dru understood the words but not their meaning. "I'll mind the path and the light," he assured the codger and kept going.

Beyond the fields the path became a track through wild-flower meadows. Dru thought about the wood-gatherer. If the codger's words had any meaning, then men who weren't wizards shouldn't enter the Wood and those who were should stick to the path. But the codger hadn't gathered his kindling on the meadow side of the brook, which left Dru wondering about the Parnasters themselves.

As far as he knew, the Dawn Pass Trail was as old as men and had always skirted the Greypeaks. It had connected the ancient Netheril Empire, now lost beneath the Anauroch sands, with the Sea of Swords to the west and the Moonsea to the south. Whenever Parnast had been founded, it would have seemed reasonable for the village to have grown up where the trail divided rather than a half-day's journey to the west. It would have been typical of the Zhentarim to re-found the village at that more useful place once they'd come to dominate the area. Gods knew, the Zhentarim weren't averse to uprooting villages for their own convenience.

Sememmon might possess the least brutal reputation among the Zhentarim princes, but that was damning the master of Darkhold with faint praise. Amarandaris would burn the village and march the survivors to oblivion, if Sememmon twitched in that direction. It was that threat of annihilation that gave most Zhentarim villages their bitter, weary atmosphere— an atmosphere notably absent in Parnast. It was as if the Parnasters tolerated the Zhentarim, rather than the other way around.

What would have enabled a few farmers to bind the Black Network to good behavior?

The path cleared a hilltop. Weathercote Wood burst into sight, a lush wall of greenery on the far side of a brook which this late in summer scarcely needed a bridge. On the Parnast side the bridge came down in a gravel-filled ditch. On the Weathercote side, there was untrampled grass and nary a hint of a path.

The light, apparently, was wrong.

Bathing was impossible in the shrunken brook, but Druhallen could, and did, kneel in the delightfully frigid water. With no one watching, he splashed himself until he was soaked to the skin. During the past three days he'd sworn that he'd never complain about cold again, but it wasn't long—not more than a quarter-hour—before he was shivering and headed back to the patch of sunlight where he'd left his boots, belt, and folding box.