Ed Greenwood: The Herald

The nights are growing longer, and betimes the earth shakes!” young Lady Wyrmwood hissed, leaning forward in her excitement and granting the table a splendid view of the six linked silver dragons arrayed on fine chains across her décolletage. “What does it mean ? Are we all doomed ?”

The younger nobles around the table leaned forward in shared excitement, but several older ones rolled their eyes or muttered disparagements.

“Doomed, doomed-always doomed!” gray-haired Lord Garonder Illance remarked. “We’ve been ‘doomed’ since before I was born. Thankfully, the gods work slowly. Even more slowly than unsupervised servants.”

Lady Wyrmwood regarded him with finely honed scorn. “Dismiss my views at your peril, Lord Jaded Seen-All! Things are happening beyond these walls, outside our fair city-things that could well shake every last high castle in all the world! The nights are growing longer, believe you me!”

An elder lord at another table turned in his high-backed chair with a sigh of exasperation. He harrumphed to indicate his minor embarrassment at knowingly breaching etiquette-even in a club like this one, open to all with coin enough to pay ruinous prices for platter and goblet-it was customary amongst well-bred highborn to give no sign of having overheard something not addressed to them. And then he growled, “Of course things are happening beyond these walls; we’re at war again! I’d have thought you might have noticed! Aye, it’s Sembia, and it’s always Sembia, but the battles do affect the prices of everything, which is to say the fortunes of us all.

“And, aye, the nights are indeed getting longer. Yet strange things happen in the world every day; the lengthening nights may have nothing at all to do with the wild news that’s been reaching us-or even the real troubles. Still less do longer nights mean any sort of inevitable ‘doom.’ The ground-shakings have all but stopped, and they mean volcanoes erupting, not gods walking!

“All of this gloom-talk reminds me of the fights in my youth among the high priests of this city, over what certain movements of the stars meant. Each one seemed convinced the stars ‘proved’ that their deity was going to triumph over the others. And yet, where are we now? No god has triumphed over all others, and the stars still move. So please, let us hear less of inevitable doom!”

“What? Stars move ?” A young lordling frowned in disbelief from a table at the back of the room. His father shot him a look of contempt.

In the darkest corner of this exclusive upper room in the Memories of Queen Fee, the most fashionable and expensive club of all the clubs that overlooked the great Promenade in Suzail, the battered mountain of a man known as Mirt hid his rising interest behind a large and nigh empty goblet. If there was one thing apt to make nobles of Cormyr fall abruptly silent, it was being reminded that commoners-or worse, outlanders-were present and listening to them.

And if there was one good reason why a man who should have been dead a century ago, who’d been a lord himself in a different time and place, would spend far too much coin to drink with this lot of bores and snide highnoses, it was to overhear interesting things. Things that could be turned to his advantage.

Things that made Mirt feel as if there was any sort of reason to go on living at all, in this unfamiliar and darkening world.

Literally darkening. The night seemed on the verge of engulfing all, war erupted across the lands, and each day brought news of new strangeness. Stars fell from the sky; folks proclaimed themselves Chosen of this god and that, and gathered armed hosts to battle other self-proclaimed Chosen; and monsters boldly stalked farm fields and high streets night and day- pah .

’Twas like a bad dream.

But enough, the nobles were still gabbling. Of course.

“Lord Haelrood,” young Lady Wyrmwood was loudly telling the room, “I gladly accept your correction, for does not your care for this matter-your noticing the lengthening nights, and thinking on what it might mean-ride muster to my point ? Grim portents are everywhere, the world around us darkens, and some great reckoning is at hand!”

“Great reckoning? I had no idea the Wyrmwoods had been dodging the royal tax takers,” Lord Harflame commented mockingly, from behind the decanters of fine Tethyrian rubyfire he’d been steadily emptying all evening. Club rules forbade doxies from entering the upper rooms, so rather than cradling a playpretty in either arm, he’d brought a perfumed glove from each of the two waiting for him, and perched them atop the decanters as boastful trophies for all to see. “A great reckoning coming, indeed!”

“Display not your ill breeding further, sirrah!” Lady Wyrmwood spat. “I speak in all solemnity, caring for fair Cormyr above all-and we are at war, are we not? Or did you hide off in the countryside and do nothing to defend Suzail? — but beyond our borders, mindful of the fate of the vast world that cradles us all! Mock me not!”

“Ah, but you offer such a splendid-dare I say ‘juicy’?-target, my good lady-”

“Harflame, enough ,” old Lady Rowanmantle snapped, secure in the weight of her years and the formidable reputation she’d built over those many seasons. “What you dare or do not dare, and whether Lady Wyrmwood is correct or not, are alike neither here nor there. Your dares are your own amusements and follies entirely, but she fears for the future of our realm-and with good reason.

“War ravages our land once more, and I hear Cormyrean fights Cormyrean-something that even a child -if not a noble lord-must see can have no good ending for Cormyr. Moreover, since you seem for some inexplicable reason to need the reminder, ’tis the duty of nobility to ponder and fear for the future of their land, for that is their responsibility and their daily business. Or should be. As true nobles well know.”