by Mel Odom
CHAPTER THREE
Are you awake?”
From half-closed lids, Shang-Li watched as his father reached for his nose. Shang-Li blocked the move and took a half-step back. He glanced at his father as they stood in the alley where the encounter had taken place only a handful of hours ago. “Don’t do that. I’m awake.”
“You shouldn’t have slept back in our room. You should have stayed awake and prepared. Now you’re all befuddled. You move like you’re older than I.”
Shang-Li gestured to the small bag and the katana over his shoulder. “I was already prepared. And I needed sleep. Not all of us got to wash vegetables at the Blinding Onion. Some of us had to lift heavy trays of food and wash dishes.”
His father waved the complaint away. “You complain far too much. Work is good for you. You could have studied. I brought books to read.”
“I’ve read the books you brought”
“They’re good books. I’ve read them before too. They’re worth re-reading.”
Before he could stop himself, Shang-Li sighed.
“Don’t be insolent.” His father slapped the back of Shang-Li’s head. Shang-Li moved farther away.
His father stared up at the wizard’s tower jutting up over the next building. The structure bent and twisted, and it gave the impression of a coiled snake. People in the city called it the Serpent’s Tower. If he hadn’t known, Shang-Li would have guessed that that the tower had been designed and built by dwarves deep into their cups.
Magic lurks in the mortar of Serpent’s Tower, Brianthom the Traveler had written in his history of the Pirate Isle—one of the books Kwan Yung had insisted Shang-Li read again. No one knows what secrets the edifice contains. If any thief has ever chosen to brave the tower’s magical defenses, none has ever escaped with the tale. The Wizard Kouldar entertains only a few guests, and those seldom. None of them have ever seen the entire interior of the Serpent’s Tower.
As he looked up at the tower corkscrewing toward the dark night sky, Shang-Li admitted to himself that he was more nervous than he’d expected. He’d broken into the lairs of wizards on other occasions. He’d gotten away with his life. Usually someone that crossed a wizard and got caught didn’t get the chance to learn from his mistakes.
“Stop fidgeting.” His father stood placidly, as if they were planning to go for a walk instead of invading a wizard’s stronghold.
Shang-Li adjusted the pack over his shoulder and didn’t look at his father. “Mentally preparing myself.”
“Do you think you will be finished sometime before the dawn?”
Shang-Li frowned at his father. He wished he knew what to say. Usually when he took risks like this, his father wasn’t around. He’d thought of leaving a letter telling his father his innermost thoughts, not to blame himself for whatever happened, and that he cared for him.
The thought of telling Kwan Yung that in person was just too awkward.
“I told the others that you could do this,” his father said.
For a moment, a flicker of pride sparked inside Shang-Li.
“So do not embarrass me.”
Shang-Li thought about telling his father that if anything went wrong he’d be too dead to worry about embarrassing anyone. But he didn’t. He nodded and smiled. “I won’t.”
Then he shot across the alley, caught the edge of the low roof, and flipped himself up onto it with a lithe move. On top of the building, he lay prone and reached for Moonwhisper’s senses.
The owl sat on the rooftop of a tall lighthouse that commanded a view of the town. Through the owl’s eyes, Shang-Li saw himself lying on the building’s rooftop, the river to the left of the Serpent’s Tower, and the crooked edifice that earned the building its name.
At Shang-Li’s urging, Moonwhisper fell forward and caught the wind from the sea with his wings. He glided toward the tower.
The tower’s exterior was rough, irregular stone mortared into place. Shang-Li felt confident he could climb it if he had to. But that was a long way to go without being discovered by someone. He planned to cut down on that distance by a considerable amount. Wicked-looking gargoyles manned the roof and a widow’s walk a third of the way down the tower.
From the widow’s walk, an observer could watch the sea in the distance. Someone with good eyes, Shang-Li felt certain, could identify a specific ship in the harbor.
Or a wizard could keep watch over his tower. The thought hung like sour grapes in Shang-Li’s mind.
Moonwhisper glided by the structure, then came back around it in a tight, gentle circle to see all sides of the tower.
Satisfied with the reconnoitering, Shang-Li drew his senses back from the owl and became aware of his own body again. The cool wind from the sea rushed over him and carried the almost lyrical noise of the lines banging against the masts. Here and there, occasional voices sounded, but most of them belonged to drunken sailors stumbling through the streets.
The quiet time, only a few hours before dawn, softened the city. If Shang-Li hadn’t known the place was a pirate stronghold, it would have looked like any other city.
Shang-Li glanced over the side of the building. His father was gone. Hopefully he would secure their escape vessel before it was needed. The dark ribbon of the river that cut through the heart of the city’s more prosperous side ran beside the Serpent’s Tower.
Only a few lanterns remained lit along the shores cluttered with small boats and transport barges. Most of those lights were stationary, the lights of guard ships sent out by pirates and, possibly, in the pay of the Nine Golden Swords.
He waited only a few moments more, until a black cloud scudded across the sky and masked the quarter-moon. A pall of darkness fell over the city.
Shang-Li stood, uncoiled a line and a padded grappling hook from his pack, and whirled the device beside him a few times. Then he cast, whipping his body with practiced ease.
The padded grappling hook sailed across forty feet and landed on the widow’s walk with a barely audible thunk. Shang-Li regretted that his father wasn’t there to witness his success. But then he would only have found something unsatisfactory about it.
The cloud continued across the quarter-moon and no one was around to notice the line that suddenly spanned the distance. Knowing time was short, Shang-Li tied the line to the rooftop. The rope was made of spidersilk, weightless as a feather and strong as dwarf-forged steel.
When he’d finished, the line was taut. Slipping off his soft-soled shoes, he ran barefoot across the thin spidersilk. The line twisted and swayed a little as he passed, but he had no problems making the adjustments to keep his balance. The alley floor was forty feet below. Rats and other things rooted through the garbage and never noticed him pass.
A grin touched his lips and dimmed some of the unease that filled him. If the wild things didn’t sense a predator among them, he was almost invisible.
But not against magic.
During his travels and adventures, that was one lesson he had learned the hard way. He paused at the other end of the line. The grappling hook hadn’t appeared to set anything off, but a protective spell might be laid to sense flesh and blood.
Moonlight slipped toward him and slid along the spidersilk line.
Once you’re focused on your goal, once you’re committed, inaction is your enemy. His father’s words came to mind. Shang-Li had drilled hard under the tutelage he’d received. He sipped a quick breath, then used the spidersilk’s slight elasticity to aid his leap toward the widow’s walk when it pulled back to its original length. He flipped forward, twisted, and landed almost silently on the jutting stone parapet.
For a moment he held still. His ears strained as he listened for sounds from within the tower. His body quivered like a tuning fork, waiting to feel any vibrations headed toward him. Nothing.
Then, an instant before the moonlight touched him, Shang-Li strode forward, shook his sleeves to free the sticks, and shoved one into the open window in front of him.
Sh
ang-Li slipped a necklace from beneath his shirt and held it out before him. A sliver of dark blue crystal hung at the end of the silver chain.
“Mielikki,” he whispered, “watch over me, because I’m going in dark places tonight.”
The crystal spun quickly. The faceted sides glimmered blue from an internal light, but didn’t flare up in warning. Some magical residue was to be expected given the surroundings.
Steeped in the shadows inside the room, Shang-Li breathed deeply and made himself remain calm. The scents of the room told him of the books, inks, parchments, wooden shelving, and furniture before his sensitive half-elf eyes adapted to the dimness.
A sweeping glance of the round room revealed the bookcases that reached at least fifteen feet from floor to ceiling. Books, all manner of books in many kinds of bindings, filled the shelves.
“Forest Mother,” Shang-Li whispered before he could stop himself as he surveyed the books. Then he waited to see if his inadvertent expression of surprise would set off a spell triggered by voice.
When nothing happened, he let out a pent-up breath and gave silent thanks to Mielikki. Once again, the Forest Mother was looking out for him.
Memory of his father’s voice jangled Shang-Li’s thoughts. She only looks out for those that look out for themselves. Have a care here, you great-footed oaf. Don’t get foolish.
Despite the fear that had tightened his belly, Shang-Li gave into the awe and curiosity that filled him. Outside of Candlekeep and the Standing Tree Monastery, the wizard’s collection of books was the largest he’d ever seen.
He took a deep breath and broke the fascination that had fallen over him. For a moment he worried that the effect was part of an enchantment that had been laid upon the books.
However, he quickly dismissed that idea. As his father had told him, Ravel Kouldar wouldn’t trifle with any magical spell that wouldn’t kill someone outright. The knowledge hadn’t been reassuring, but it hadn’t been meant that way either.
Across the room, a large mahogany desk gleamed from the outside incandescence. The top had been cut from a single piece of wood that showed the rings under a heavy varnish. An inkwell, a clutch of quills, and candelabra sat on the desk. An array of globes sat in front of the desk. Besides the doors to the balcony, another set of doors lay to his right. Those led to the stairwell and the lower floor.
Shang-Li knew better than to try the doors. Those would definitely be protected. Every door in the tower would be sealed. He’d been surprised the windows hadn’t been. His attention shifted to the three globes in front of the desk. Shang-Li focused. Don’t get distracted, he told himself. Your father is out there now counting down the time you’re inside.
But Shang-Li couldn’t forego his curiosity. It wasn’t every day that he invaded a wizard’s sanctum.
Carefully, Shang-Li stepped forward and examined the globes. He recognized the first one as the world of Toril as it had been before the Spellplague brought lost Abeir back from where the twin world had been hidden.
While growing up, Shang-Li had read many books concerning the twin worlds and the wars the gods had fought to control them. Mystra’s death a hundred years ago had broken the barrier between the worlds. A new continent had appeared in the Trackless Sea, and disasters had swept across Toril as the planet had become whole and less at the same time.
The second globe was of Toril as it was now. There were several unfinished areas he could have helped Ravel Kouldar fill in, but he doubted the wizard would be interested in his assistance.
Shang-Li longed to be out there exploring the newly arrived lands. As a historian for the monastery, he lived for the stories he found. And these days the stories were more like riddles, waiting to be solved.
The uncovered tales, pottery, weapons, and artifacts that belonged to cultures that hadn’t been part of Toril for thousands of years made writing history even more difficult. Historians, those like his father that served as librarians and keepers of knowledge, fought over how things were to be labeled. Explorers, like Shang-Li, reveled in a world that still held secrets.
The third globe was even less defined. It held only patches of lands that had once been part of Toril and were no longer on that plane. Ravel Kouldar was evidently attempting to fill in some of the spaces with educated guesses based on what parts of Toril had slipped back across the barrier weakened by the Spellplague.
Shang-Li thought seriously of shoving all three globes into the magical bag he’d brought with him. The bag was nearly bottomless, capable of holding a great many things without increasing in size or weight. His father had given it to him the first time he’d left the Standing Tree Monastery. He’d also told him to fill it with worthwhile things.
Things go wrong when you try to do too much. His father’s cautionary words curbed Shang-Li’s zeal. Stay with the plan.
Reluctantly, Shang-Li turned from the globes.
With the magical crystal still held before him, Shang-Li walked to the wall on his left. He sidestepped a hanging skeleton, making sure to stay out of reach just in case, and stopped in front of the bookshelves. A ladder built into the shelving was attached from the floor to the topmost shelf to his right.
The time had come to find out how good the information his father and the monastery had gotten was. He knelt and gazed at the shelves.
In the time of Shang-Li’s grandfather, a historian had happened on information that the Standing Tree Monastery had lost in a battle nearly three hundred years ago. An invading army under General Kirat Han had laid siege to the monastery and sought the riches they knew the monks had hidden within.
But he’d taken more than mere treasure.
The Shou kept journals written by monks that had served the monasteries. Wisdom and history resided in those pages, and all of it was irreplaceable. General Han had taken six of the books of Liou Chang, also known as Liou the Perceptive. The books had contained all of the monk’s family history of the five other monks that had preceded him.
Most important of all, though, Liou had written about spells, which General Han had used to open gates around the Inner Sea. With that power at his command, the warlord had been almost unstoppable. The knowledge of those spells remained a threat as long as the book containing the information was at large.
General Han had executed Liou the Perceptive, then ordered the monastery burned to the ground and salt poured into the gardens. Ultimately, the survivors had rebuilt the monastery and exacted vengeance on General Han. The warlord soon fathered a traitorous son that gave information to the Standing Tree monks that allowed them to kill him.
Unfortunately, Liou’s books had been hidden, scattered throughout General Han’s doomed empire. The search for Liou’s books had become legendary. Shang-Li had remained on the lookout for them for all his life. But he had never seen even one of those the monastery had recovered.
Four of Liou the Perceptive’s books had been found and returned over the years. General Han had traded them to sages and clerics that desired the herbal magics contained in the pages. Those had been relatively harmless, but the monks hadn’t known that until they’d gotten possession of them and deciphered them. Liou had always written his original manuscripts in code, and he’d created a new code for each manuscript. Liou had been laborious in his efforts, and each code had taken years to decipher.
Two of the books had at last been traced to an ill-fated historian, a man called Bayel Droust. Ravel Kouldar didn’t have either of the two missing books, but he did have a journal of a ship’s officer that had gone down on the Grayling. After hundreds of years of searching, the monks of Standing Tree Monastery finally had a clue as to where the ship had gone down, and what had happened to it.
Ravel Kouldar had recently hired a scribe to help him organize some of his books. Once the job was finished, Kouldar had planned to kill the scribe. The young man had kept his wits about him and barely made away with his life a step ahead of an assassin. In time, because he was one of those the Standing Tree
Monastery had taught and who had learned of Liou’s missing books, he’d reported his experience and the existence of the book mentioning Grayling to the monks only a short time ago. The monastery had worked quickly to take advantage of this bit of good fortune. Kwan Yung was given a ship and told to find Shang-Li, then travel to the Pirate Isles to verify the scribe’s report of the sailor’s journal.
Silently, Shang-Li stepped to the center of the room and faced the window squarely. He held up his right arm at his side, took note of where his shadow lay across the angle of the rectangle of moonlight streaming through the open window, and turned to face the bookshelves.
The tomes were expertly bound and expensive, and would have been worth quite a lot in certain circles, but none of them captured Shang-Li’s interest.
He reached under the shelf and felt along the back for the hidden trigger the scribe had told the monks of. At first Shang-Li thought the scribe had made a mistake. The man had been nervous, scared. Working for a wizard like Ravel Kouldar, he’d have been a fool not to be.
Even investigating carefully, Shang-Li found no hidden release as was promised. His anxiety mounted and he listened for noises within the tower but heard only the beating of his own heart.
Then, after a second search, then a third, Shang-Li’s callused fingertips discovered the barely discernable depression. It was there, only a small change in the wood.
He smiled and depressed the section of the shelving. The hidden door swung open and Shang-Li’s fighting sticks slid smoothly into his hands.
Shang-Li forced himself to breathe out. Forest Mother, he prayed, protect the fools that believe in you.
Tense, Shang-Li hunkered down and peered through the opening. It lay along the floor, barely large enough for him to slide through. He saw only the thick, impenetrable darkness on the other side.
With a fighting stick in his right hand, he propelled himself through the opening and gracefully rolled to his feet in the darkness on the other side. He bumped against something and flailed for it. Almost immediately, the sound of ceramic shattering filled the room and chunks of an object ricocheted from his feet and legs.
