Rising Tide

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3 °Ches, the Year of the Gauntlet

"… and salty diamonds stained the maiden's cheeks, as she laid the sod o'er her gallant knight.

Though the battle claimed her man,

Her heart stayed forever true."

His eyes closed, Pacys listened to his voice echo in the large room and knew that he'd fully claimed his audience. His fingers dwelled upon the strings of his yarting for a few beats more, mourning the loss of the lady for the man. Except for his song and the last fading chords of the yarting, silence filled the room.

Taking a deep breath, the old bard opened his eyes. Men wept openly, their voices hushed so they wouldn't reveal their pain and out of deference to his voice. The candles illuminating the room showed the emotions on the faces of the priests and the other faithful of Oghma. Shadows and candle smoke clung to the large beams showing through the ceiling.

Even large as it was, the room was near to overfilled. Fifty men and more sat around the plain pine board tables or stood along the unadorned walls of the meeting hall. Plates and cups scattered over the table were the only remnants of the fine meal they'd enjoyed before he'd started singing.

"I stand corrected, old man," a young priest said, rising to his feet. "Your voice has seasoned like fine whiskey." Tears mixed freely in with his beard. "Ill gladly stand the price of a tune such as that." He picked up an unused bowl and dropped a silver piece onto it. He passed it to the man on his left, who added more coins.

"There's no need for the bowl," Pacys said with a smile. "Tonight, in a much honored tradition for those in my trade, I sing for my supper," He hoisted a tankard of ale that had warmed during the ballad, "and for the drink afterward." He sipped the ale and found it warm, but he'd gotten used to drinking it just like that over the years of his long travels.

The bard was old, had seen seventy-six winters in his time, and showed his hard life in wrinkles and the stringy meat that clung stubbornly to his bones. He shaved his head these days, giving in to the baldness that had claimed him in his fifties. The sun had darkened his skin to the tone of old leather and turned his eyebrows silvery. He went clean-shaven and wore the newest breeches and doublet he'd had left in his kit. His clothing was serviceable, not gaudy as some in his calling preferred. His voice and his tales kept him employed, not a costume. He sat easily on one of the round dinner tables that filled the room, his legs crossed despite his years. Thick beeswax candles burned on either side of him, placed by him so that their light fell across his face.

"Another song," a man at one of the nearer tables pleaded.

Pacys smiled, loving the sound of the passion in the man's voice. His fingers carelessly caressed the yarting's strings, plucking melodious notes that haunted the large room. "Another song, gentle sir? And what would you have? A ballad of great daring in which fair Kettlerin reversed the schemes of Thauntcir Black-Eyed to gain back the heart of her lover? An epic poem of grand adventure of Derckin and Dodj and how they found the lost treasure of Gyschill, the Topaz Dragon of the Far North? Or a seafaring lyric of ghost ships that plunder the Sword Coast still?"

"Enough, good Pacys," Hroman said, standing at a table to the bard's left. He was a short man like his father, Pacys knew, but broad shouldered and good-natured. It was strange to see him as he was now, well into his forties when the bard wanted only to remember the boy as he recalled him. "You've entertained these layabout priests of Oghma well for the past three hours."

"And only whetted our appetites for more," another priest lamented. He was an older man among those around him, but Pacys felt he was still ten years his junior. Looking around the crowd, the bard knew he was probably the oldest man there.

Hroman laughed, and he sounded a great deal like his father, Pacys discovered. He was also full of the same fire of command. Sandrew the Wise, the high priest of the Font of Knowledge in Waterdeep, had proven his name by lifting Hroman to a place of command within the temple.

"Yes, and he'll be here tomorrow night as well," Hroman said, "unless you strip the voice from him tonight with your demands."

"Will you be here tomorrow, Pacys?" a priest roared.

The bard's fingers still moved across the yarting's strings, instinctively plucking out a soft tune that underscored Hroman's words and lent them even more weight. Part of his magic was in lending his music to words and making them more commanding. "Yes. I plan on being in Waterdeep for a tenday or more this trip."

"We want to hear all your songs and your tales," one of the younger priests said.

Pacys only grinned in appreciation, then reached down and snuffed the candlewicks between his fingertips. The hard calluses from playing the yarting for sixty years didn't let the heat through. "As many that we are able to share," he promised.

Hroman chased them out of the big room.

Pacys unfolded his legs, feeling the knee joints pop back into place and creak in protest. The legs were always the first to go, from too many miles spent walking, too many hours spent on a table or in a chair. He took a moment to place the yarting in its leather and brass case, then hooked his boots up by their tops in his free hand.

"Oghma has truly blessed you, old friend," Hroman said.

"I fear I played for a captive audience tonight," Pacys said. "With all the building that is still going on here, I suspect they've seldom seen much in the way of entertainment."

"More than you think," Hroman said. "Tallir, the lad who first started the singing tonight, had thought of becoming a bard before Oghma touched him and brought him into our fold."

"Pity," Pacys said, meaning it, "the boy has a rare and golden voice."

Hroman smiled. "I'll tell him you said so. It took a lot of nerve for him to get up in front of the group tonight, knowing you were going to perform."

"I hope I did not offend him."

Pacys took his travel kit from under the table where they'd eaten. It was tattered and scuffed, showing signs where he'd repaired it himself, serviceable but with no art about the stitching. Shouldering the kit and the yarting case, he gathered the iron-shod staff that lay under the bench.

"You didn't," Hroman said. "I saw young Tallir with a quill and parchment, writing furiously in that bastardized symbology he's developed for himself to take notes. He's skillful with it. I'd dare say he's written down every word you uttered tonight and will add it to his own repertoire."

"Those songs and tales aren't mine," Pacys said. "They've been given to me on the road, things that anyone can pick up. Though, in truth, I should give him the names of the bards who first arranged them." It was the only way a bard achieved fame and a certain kind of immortality, the old bard knew. It was something that had escaped Pacys for all his years.

"You'll have time to set him right tomorrow." Hroman grabbed their plates and headed for the kitchen. "Let me drop these off with the cook staff and I’ll show you to your room."

"I'd planned on supper," Pacys admitted, "but I hadn't intended to beg a room as well."

"Pacys," Hroman said, "it's by High Priest Sandrew's will that you will always be a guest within this temple."

"He's a generous man," Pacys said.

"I'll send word to him in the morning that you are here. I know he'll want to come, and it would do him good to be away from his projects for a time."

"You mean the building of the Great Library?" Pacys asked.

Hroman handed the stack of dishes to a priest in a stained white apron in the kitchen. Hroman took a candle from a box on one of the tables and lit it from the stove. He guided Pacys back to the large room and out into the hallway leading back to the personal quarters. The rumble of voices and bits of song, good-natured teasing and prayer filled the hallway as the bard walked by the doors.

"You know about the library?" Hroman asked.

"Of course," Pacys said. "Besides songs and tales and physical comedy a bard claims as his bag of tricks, there is always the news."

Hroman nodded and said, "Of course…"

He said something more, but Pacys couldn't hear him, lost in the aching melody of the music that had been drifting through his brain for the last few months. The strains and chords were clearer now than they had been in years. He paused, listening for more, but the music was taken from him, leaving only what he'd learned this time. He looked up at Hroman, who gazed at him with concern.

"… you all right?" the priest asked.

"I'm fine."

"Perhaps the wine," Hroman suggested, "or the lateness of the hour. I didn't even think to ask how many days you'd been traveling to reach Waterdeep."

"It's not that," Pacys replied. He hesitated, not wanting to say too much. Hroman was the son of one of his best and truest friends, though. "Come. Show me to my room and we'll talk."

Hroman looked indecisive for a moment, then walked further down the hallway. "We've not got an extra room at the moment. With the building of the new temple and the additional clergy Sandrew has put on, we're packed into these rooms like tuna in a fisherman's hold."

The current Font of Knowledge was located in a row house on Swords Street. They hoped to have the new temple finished this year. "I can take a room at an inn, or sleep outside."

"No," Hroman said with some force. "Even if I could be so cold-hearted, Sandrew would give me a tongue-lashing that would shame me for weeks. I'll give you my room."

He pushed open a door on the right. Weak candlelight flickered over the room, revealing the narrow bed under the only window, a small bookshelf against one wall next to a small fireplace, a wardrobe, and a compact desk.

"Where will you sleep?" Pacys asked.

"We've a common room."

"I could stay there," the bard protested.

"As could I," Hroman said. "Please take this room. As a priest, there's not much I have to offer in the way of tangible assets, but I can make a gift of this. I have earned it with my work, and it's mine to give."

Pacys saw the earnestness in the younger man's gaze and nodded. "As you say," he said humbly as he laid the yarting gently on the bed and sat. 'Take up a chair and well talk."

Hroman pulled the chair out from the desk, then took a wine bottle from the book shelves. He smiled as he sat. "I've been saving this for something special, if you've a stomach for it."

"For wine, I'll always have the stomach," Pacys said, smiling, "though not always the head."

"Isn't that the way of it?" Hroman said. "This is from our own press. One of our best vintages."

"Maybe we should save it for another time."

"When you're leaving?"

"That would seem a more appropriate time."

Hroman's face darkened. "I'd rather say hello over a bottle of wine than good-bye. I've said enough good-byes of late." He unstoppered the bottle and handed it to the bard.

Pacys took it. "I heard about your father," he said. "I'm sorry. If I'd known, I'd have been here."

"I know." Hroman took a deep breath and looked away for a moment. His eyes gleamed and he said, "He left a letter for you. It took him a long time to write it. Lucid moments were very few… very hard for him at the end."

A chill touched Pacys. Last year when he'd died, Hroman's father had been five years Pacys's junior. Death didn't scare the bard, but old age, infirmity, and mental loss did. It was hard not to grow more terrified with each passing year.

"Then I shall read it with pleasure," Pacys said.

"I've not read it," Hroman said, "so I don't know what he had to say, or if any of it makes sense."

"Your father was a good man," Pacys told him. "He'd not leave anything behind that didn't reflect that. I need only look at you to know that."

"Kind words," Hroman acknowledged.

"And truly meant." The bard held up the wine bottle. "To your father. One of the best men I ever knew. Fearless in heart and strong in his faith." He drank deeply from the bottle, then passed it back to the priest. The wine was sweet and dry.

Hroman drank deeply too. "What brings you to Waterdeep, old friend? A simple longing to see the Sword Coast again?"

"Compulsion," Pacys admitted. "My end time lies not too far before me now, and I'm not fool enough to believe any other way."

Hroman started to object and Pacys shushed him with a raised hand. "Kind words lie out of kindness, young Hroman, that's why numbers were invented."

Hroman passed the wine bottle back across.

"I come on a quest," Pacys said. "Of sorts."

"Of sorts?"

"I can't say that it's a true quest," the old bard admitted. "I can only hope for divine intervention." He drank again, passed the bottle back, then pulled the yarting from the bed and opened the case. He took it across his knee and strummed the strings. Even though it was in perfect pitch, he twisted the tuning pegs, gradually returning them to the positions they were in. "Listen." His hands glided across the strings, fingertips massaging the frets.

Music, beautiful and as true as rainwater, filled the room.

"Dear Oghma, but I've never heard the like," Hroman said when Pacys stopped playing.

"Neither have I," the old bard said. "Not outside of my head."

"What is it?"

"I don't know." Pacys's hands worked the yarting, underscoring their conversation with the lyrical sound. "Fourteen years ago, when last I saw you and your father here in Waterdeep, I was given that piece of a song. It came to me in a dream. That was the same night the mermen first came to live in Waterdeep Harbor."

"The ones who claimed that a great horror had risen in the seas to the south and destroyed their village," Hroman said. "I remember. Piergeiron kept the City Watch on double shifts for a time afterward."

Pacys nodded and asked, "Do you think I am a good bard?"

Hroman seemed surprised by the question. "Of course. Any time you showed up in Waterdeep, taverns requested you. Lords and ladies. You had a hearth and a home anywhere you wanted. Why you chose to spend so much time with a poor priest of Oghma used to astound my father."

"Your father and I were kindred spirits," Pacys said. "A slight tilting of the past of either one of us, and it might have been us filling the other's shoes. Your father had an excellent voice, but he chose to serve Oghma more directly than I, though I felt the pull of the priest's robes as well. Felt it most strongly."

"I didn't know."

"Now you do, and now you'll know why I see that I am not the bard everyone believes me to be." Pacys kept strumming the yarting, playing the melody over and over, wishing more might come to him. "Any bard might sing the songs of another, or tell the tales once he has heard them. It's a bard's gift to tell any tale, sing any song that he's heard. Most can even offer their own rendition of that tale or song, but none may approach the original singer's or teller's power for that song or story." He plucked the strings, gathering the crescendo that lurked in the back-beat of the tune he played. "To know true power as a bard, there must be a tale or a song that is always and forever acknowledged to belong to the composer."

Hroman nodded. "It's like that with treatises written by those inspired by Oghma."

"Yes." Pacys turned his melody to bittersweet memory. "I've covered the lands of Faerun, sang and orated in castles and palaces, relayed bawdy tales in the crassest of coast dives among the harshest of men, and given voice to some of the most spiritually uplifting music in temples scattered across those lands. I've traveled and seen things that most men only dream of, had adventures that fire a young boy's heart as he listens to the tales his fathers and kin tell around a campfire at night, or by the safety of the home hearth, but never-never-in that time have I crafted a song that will be remembered as mine."

Hroman remained silent.

"What about you?" Pacys asked. "Are there treatises in Sandrew's Great Library that you have authored? New ways of thinking about old things? Or old ways of thinking about new things?"

"Yes."

"Then you have been gifted," Pacys said in a dry voice, "and you should never forget to give thanks for that. In some distant time, a young priest will open a scroll you have written and know your thinking."

"That doesn't mean he'll agree with it."

In spite of the darkness that threatened to quench his spirit in the night of the city and after all the miles he'd walked that day, Pacys smiled. "Whether they lay accolades at your feet or descry everything you've put on paper, they'll remember and know you. That's immortality of a kind."

"You feel that's what you're missing?"

Pacys broke the bittersweet melody and went back to the haunting one again. They were part of the same thing, he knew that in his heart and in his talent, but how to bind them? What words went with the music, he had no clue.

"How much did your father write, Hroman," he asked, "that's going into Sandrew's Great Library?"

"Tomes."

"Exactly. Your father was a man of letters, a man who thought well and deep, a man I treasured as a friend. I could lay my soul bare on several levels and trust him to have a care with it." Pacys paused a moment, listening to the music he made. "I wanted to talk with him again and see if he could offer any direction for this melody that haunts me so."

Hroman waited in silence a moment before saying, "Would you mind talking of it with me?"

"Over a bottle of the temple's finest vintage?" Pacys asked. He shook his head. "I'd not mind at all. I couldn't imagine better company."

"When you played tonight, during a couple of the old songs I remembered from times past when you were here, I could almost see my father sitting in the shadows. Your music always soothed him."

"I worked very hard for it to."

"Then why isn't it enough that you brought so much happiness to people?"

"Because," Pacys said, his voice thickening in spite of his skill, "I want a part of me to live forever. I want bards years from now to say that they have this song, whatever it is, by way of Pacys the Bard. I want it to be a song of such magnitude that it brings tears to the strongest of men and brings strength to the weakest of men. I want a story of love so pure and unfulfilled that it will truly hurt all who hear it. I want to fill the listeners with fear when they hear of the villain."

"That's a difficult request."

Pacys smiled gently. "I could settle for no less."

"You've written songs before, written tunes."

"Nothing like that," the bard said wistfully.

"You said a quest drew you back to Waterdeep."

Pacys drank from the bottle again, wetting his throat with the wine. "Fourteen years ago, I felt the touch of Oghma on me. When I watched those mermen swim into the harbor, I knew. The first notes came to me then and wouldn't leave my thoughts. Your father was at a table with me down on Dock Street."

"And nothing has happened since?"

Shrugging, Pacys said, "A chord here, a note there. In the early years, I followed my heart, desperate to find out why I'd been given that much of the song but nothing else. I traveled more than ever, going into places I'd never thought I'd go, and into countries I'd never even heard of at all. I increased my repertoire considerably."

"Never finding the song?"

"No. A tenday ago, I was in Neverwinter as a guest of Lord Nasher. I was talking to him, strumming my yarting as I am doing with you now, and a large section of one of the bridging sequences was given to me." Pacys turned his attention back to his instrument and played it. He knew the power of the piece when he saw Hroman sit back in slack-jawed amazement.

"I have never," the priest whispered, "heard anything so beautiful."

"Nor have I." Stating the truth almost broke Pacys's heart because the music was unfinished.

"Can't you finish it?"

Pacys shook his head. "I've tried. Everything I've tried to graft onto it sounds false."

"Why come here if you were given that piece in Neverwinter?"

"Lord Nasher's interested in magic," Pacys said. "That's no secret. Of late, he's been counseling with a young woman who's caught his eye and claims some clairvoyance through a deck of cards she uses to tell fortunes. She laid out a pattern for me and told me I'd find the next piece of the secret of the song back where it first began for me."

"Waterdeep?"

Pacys nodded. "There can be no other place."

Hroman was silent for a time. "The music you played, it was beautiful, but it spoke of war to me. Of violence and anger, and men dying by the handfuls."

"Yes," Pacys agreed reluctantly.

"That can't happen here. This is the safest place along the Sword Coast."

"That's what I thought too, Hroman, but this music is like no other I've ever encountered. It's mine, crafted by the gods and given to me."

The priest hesitated. "Which gods, my friend? Have you stopped to ask yourself this?"

"I've prayed," Pacys said. "Since I first heard that music fourteen years ago, I've prayed every day to Oghma to reveal the secrets of it. The pattern the girl laid out for me in Neverwinter showed Oghma's hand in what was going on. There's no evil working here. Not in my part of things."

"Then I will pray for you as well, and for this city should such a thing ever touch her shores." Hroman drank from the wine bottle and passed it back.

A hurried knock sounded on the door as Pacys drank down the dregs of the bottle.

"What is it?" Hroman asked.

"The city's under attack," a young, bearded priest announced as he stuck his head around the door, "out in the harbor. Sahuagin and sea monsters have been called in from the deeps. A storm the like of which no one has ever seen before. They're saying… I'm told the guard are all but decimated out in the harbor. There's a fear that the sahuagin will push on into Waterdeep herself."

Pacys pushed himself from the bed. "Do you have horses?" he asked Hroman.

"Yes." Hroman gave orders at once, striding out into the hall. His voice crackled like thunder through the hallway, waking priests and clergy from their beds.

The old bard trailed after the priest, his heart beating with excitement. He took only his yarting at first, then reached back for the staff that had been his constant companion almost as long as the instrument had been. The fragments of the song filled his mind, pushing out the fear and wonderment of the attack. For the moment, nothing else mattered but the song.