The Nether Scroll

"Let's say he'd incurred debts of a most unpleasant kind, and that he kept his side of the bargain."

Air escaped Dru's lungs. So the Zhentarim named Galimer's mother Bitter Ansoain. So they knew more about her death than he'd been able to learn after all these years. So they'd kept track of him and Galimer and passed that knowledge along to a man like Amarandaris in a village like Parnast, where Dru had never been before. So what? Ansoain herself had said: Assume the Zhentarim know everything that happens and live your life accordingly.

"I pity the girl. May I assume there was a girl? We never saw her."

"A pity," Amarandaris agreed. "You're not looking for her, are you? Not thinking that you can rescue a fair, ill-fated maiden?"

Dru shook his head. "We weren't headed for Thay."

"But you're looking for Thay at Dekanter, yes?"

That was, of course, exactly what Druhallen hoped to find, though he'd scarcely admit it. "For treasure ... Netherese artifacts."

"A glass disk? A focusing lens? Something that might explain how the Thayans ambushed you or how they control their minions while they're casting spells?"

Their eyes met and locked. To be sure, Druhallen had talked about the disk since arriving in Parnast, but only in their room where he'd laid a ring of wards. He wasn't fool enough to think his wards were proof against Zhentarim spying, but Dru did believe that no one could have compromised his wards without his knowledge and he knew, even as he sat staring at his wine, that his spells were intact.

Of course, his intentions need not have been discovered by magic. Any one of his partners might have talked out of turn. Dru suspected only one of them. If he'd had the power to be in two places at once, the second place would have been in the corner of the courtyard where Tiep gambled, and he would have thrashed the boy without mercy. If Dru had had that power, which he didn't. He was rooted in one place, in Amarandaris's place, and the Zhentarim with the unmemorable face was asking close-to-the-bone questions.

"If you know to ask the question, you know the answer."

"I don't suppose you'd sell it to me?"

Dru set his goblet on the desk and shook his head.

"At least allow me a look at it. I know Dekanter, Druhallen. I know what's been found there in the last two decades ... and I know who's found it."

"If you knew everything that's been found and everyone who found it, there'd be no need to buy my disk."

Amarandaris refilled Dru's goblet. "I'm prepared to pay quite handsomely. We're prepared, that is. A year's profit, I'd say; a year for all three of you." He held the glass out.

"Then it must not be important. I've never heard of the Zhentarim paying handsomely or otherwise for anything you truly wanted."

"Stubborn," Amarandaris repeated and set the goblet down. "Very stubborn. Name your price, Druhallen. Walk out of here with something to show for your efforts."

"My life?" Dru stood up. "My friends' lives? If you know so much about me, Amarandaris, you know I'm not going to bite your bait. I walk out of here with what's mine, or I don't—and I'm not talking about an antique."

"Sit, Druhallen. Sit down. Nothing's going to happen to you or your partners."

Amarandaris's predatory eyes searched Dru's face. He held himself calm and the eyes blinked, the man sighed. "Stubborn?" Amarandaris mused, as if there were a third party in the room, which was always a possibility. "Stubborn or ignorant? Perhaps if you understood more about our situation—and it is our situation, Druhallen—you'd find it easier to cooperate. Let me start at the beginning; we're the newcomers in this corner of the world. The Netheril Empire was founded five thousand years ago out there in what's now the Anauroch desert. Four thousand years ago, a Netherese explorer by the name of Dekanter found the mines that bear his name. The Empire hired dwarves to extract gold, iron, silver, mercury, and platinum, not to mention the finest black granite in the Western Heartlands from the Dekanter Mines."

"I knew all that," Dru complained, "except for the mercury."

"Then I'll jump ahead a thousand years. The ore veins are empty and no one in the Empire wants or needs granite because they're all living in cities that float through the clouds. The dwarves have packed up their picks and the mines are gathering dust when a Netherese archmage reduces his floating city to falling pebbles."

"We'd call the city 'Sunrest'," Druhallen repeated the name he'd learned at Candlekeep. "The proper Netherese pronunciation eludes me, but I know the letters. I could write it down for you."