Umber

In which another individual expresses interest in Castle Pescheour.

Several times during the day, Psydney felt a familiar probing at her mind. Each time she mentally snapped, ”If this isn’t life or death, I’m busy.” Each time the probing hastily withdrew. When the party finally paused for a few moments, she returned the contact. “Do you have any idea what we’re doing?” she demanded.

”No, in fact I don’t,” her sister replied irritably. “The Bard blazed through here, told me a lot of strange things about you personally, said what you and your friends were up to was definitely not for public consumption – not even mine – then left again. Said I had to ask you myself, that it wasn’t his place to tell. What in the Nine Hells is going -” T’lar broke off, and Psydney felt her take the mental equivalent of a deep breath, then an image began forming in the spaces between and around their minds’ eyes.

In a few moments, a small elven woman hovered before her, so pale of face and hair as to be almost spectral. She wore a long, white silk dress, and over it an almost blinding white satin coat whose spacious hood folded back along her shoulders. A scene began forming around her, a platform of rough-hewn planks balanced in the middle of an oak with a canopy spreading perhaps forty feet, its branches heavy with strands of golden pollen. Silver birds sang all around her, and snow-white squirrels scampered along the tree limbs. Although oak leaf shadows danced in a light breeze, she stood as if in full sunlight. “It was all too mysterious for me,” she said more calmly. ”And I had to see if what he said about you is true.” 

Concentrating, Psydney formed an image of herself and projected it into one of the darker corners of the treehouse. “We haven’t met here for years,” she said. 

“We haven’t talked much for years,”  T’lar replied. “And some of us have formed a very great attachment to the so-called real world.” She studied her warrior sibling carefully, her weapons and especially her physical appearance, then shook her head. ”I don’t suppose this is a joke you and The Bard cooked up between you, or you let him wheedle you into…?” When Psydney merely arched an eyebrow in reply, she murmured, “No, I didn’t think so. Who would have predicted it? All those years I teased you, and now you really do look like…Well, well. The Bard is quite amused by it, you know.”

”Why don’t you ever call Hanen by his name?” Psydney asked. “I never thought about it, until I saw how much not using it annoys Lia.”

”I don’t know. I like titles better than names. They’re more descriptive. Take how you turned out.” She grinned slyly. “Maybe I’m clairvoyant in addition to telepathic.”

“More descriptive, but less personal,” Psydney said. “I thought you were the champion of individuality.”

T’lar shrugged. “My own, at least.” She waved her projected hand, and a low, black lacquered table appeared between them. On it sat a white china pot, and two cups and saucers. Steam rose from the neck of the pot. ”I’d offer you tea,” she said, a hint of mockery in her voice, “but I suppose you’re a little too important these days for flights of fancy?”

Not in the mood for her sister’s sport, Psydney concentrated and dismantled the table, but the tea set remained hovering in mid-air. The images of the two elven women glared at one another. Finally T’lar looked away, and the crockery disappeared as well. ”I’m sorry,” she said. ”Why do we always end up fighting?”

“Forgive me if I don’t have time to revisit the issues of our childhood,” Psydney replied shortly. “What do you want?”

“I just want to know where you are.”

“Why?”

T’lar began pacing the platform. The shadows parted before her, leaving her always bathed in light. “Berrick and Haissha invited The Bard to Blasingdell for a party. In your little merry band’s honor, as usual.”

The psi warrior gathered her sister’s forsaken shadows around herself until her own image had faded to monochrome. ”I heard she invited you as well, but you declined.”

”You know I hate leaving the Enclave!” T’lar snapped. ”But I saw some notes he’d left behind for the performance he was planning. He sang of Castle Pescheour, didn’t he?” A strange, anguished look crossed her sunlit face. “He thinks you’ll find it. He thinks you’ll win your way through.” Bitterness smoldered in her eyes. ”He thinks so much of you all…”

Here’s the real reason for the urgency, Psydney thought. “Castle Pescheour?” she asked cautiously.       

T’lar appeared lost in reverie. ”Old Fireharp told him that story. We used to talk about looking for the castle. Dream about what we would name as our own rewards.” She reached overhead to pluck a strand of pollen from a branch and crushed it between her fingers, watching specks of gold drift down her cloak and fall at her feet. “But it never appeared to us,” she said softly. “Adventuring was never the same again for me. The Bard likes to travel, tell his stories, listen to others tell theirs. The castle was another pretty tale he could imagine himself into or out of with equal ease. Any other experience would do just as well. But for me, it was never enough anymore. What else could compare to that plum, forever hanging ripe on the tree but never within my grasp? So l came home, and assumed leadership of a place where leadership is not prized.” She watched Psydney carefully. Her dappled, black and white face was hard to read. They’d made a pact years ago for honesty in their projections here, but neither promised to be utterly transparent. “You’ve found it, haven’t you? And I’ll bet you don’t really care. And you’ve never given a thought to your reward.”

“I’ve thought about that a great deal,” she replied. “I think it’s dangerous. But for now I’m still thinking about why you contacted me.”

A look of dreamlike curiosity crossed her sister’s face. “Tell me about it,” she said. ”Tell me how you found it, what it looks like, what’s happening to you there.”

Psydney realized with a start that her sister truly wanted no more than this. Her obsession with the castle was plain to read on her face. And yet it was puzzling.”If it had such an impact on your life, why haven’t you mentioned this place before?”

She laughed. “And admit to you that I wasn’t worthy? Take the chance that you might find it in my place? Please. Besides, we were sworn to secrecy. I was sworn to secrecy,” she added bitterly, her shoulders slumping. ”It seems Fireharp gave The Bard other instructions.” She straightened up and faced her sister squarely. “Now it’s too late to hide the tale from you, but my ignorance need no longer consume me. So will you tell me, or will you force me to beg?”

Or steal, a tentative tendril of thought drifted through Psydney’s mind, to which the warrior replied in kind, even as she said, ”I’ll tell you,” with Don’t try it. T’lar acknowledged the warning with a slight nod, then fashioned herself an ebony chair with feet carved into panther claws and sat down in the center of the platform. Psydney remained standing in her dark corner, armor and the i glowing dimly.

”Hanen’s tale,” she began, “gave us little enough to go on. And at first our search was a bit of a lark, something to do between visits to bowyers and armorers.”

T’lar flushed crimson. ”A lark?” she sputtered.

“Frankly, yes,” her sister replied. “It feels as if there have been too many eyes on us of late. The idea of disappearing into an obscure castle scarcely anyone has heard of had a certain appeal. I didn’t think much beyond that. So we went looking for the bard who told Hanen the story of the castle in the first place.”

”Old Fireharp is still alive? He seemed ancient when I knew him.”

”No, not exactly.” Psydney fidgeted a little. “But Kuhlefaran has some skill at speaking with the dead.”

“How gruesome.” Tlar’s lips curled into a grimace. “I never considered being pulled from my eternal rest by every passing cleric with an idle curiosity. Remind me to hide my body from you and your friends when I die.”

“It’s not a summoning,” Psydney explained. “It’s more like listening to an unusually verbose echo. Verbose and very repetitive, in his case. We didn’t learn much. We had better luck speaking with the warden of the temple of Olidammara where he is buried, if only to find out that we weren’t the only people asking after the old bard. Some indigent scholar named Thrombose had been making inquiries as well. We tracked him down to a pretty seedy area of Greyhawk and discovered that he was a paid agent. And he didn’t seem to want whoever was paying him to see him with others, especially others like us. After Bane intercepted a scrying attempt from an unknown source while we were there, Serge, Sardis and I took up guard positions outside.”

“Sardis?” T’lar interrupted. “A new friend of yours? I don’t recall that name.”

“He – did some work for us a while ago,” Psydney hedged. “He took a liking to Magnus, and returned recently, offering to travel with us.”

Having known her sister since infancy, T’lar recognized a dodge when she saw one. “Such an unusual name. Is he elven?”

“No.” After a long silence, she said, “He’s a ghaele.”

“He’s a ghaele,” T’lar repeated. “A ghaele just happened to take a shine to your fighter, and offered him his services. A ghaele.” Then she shook her head and started laughing. “Next you’re going to tell me that you’re all on the road to demigodhood.” Forgetting that she was not physically present and that her sister would hear any casual thoughts as if they were spoken, Psydney muttered to herself I sincerely hope not; the telepath probed for more, but a mental wall slammed down before she could glean any more information. No wonder The Bard hadn’t been tarrying in the Enclave since he talked to her sister, she thought. His mind wasn’t nearly so well guarded. No point in pursuing an obvious dead end, though. “So if your scholar was already under an exclusive contract, which his anxiety would seem to indicate, how did you acquire your information?”

“Magnus dealt with it the old-fashioned way, by negotiating a better exclusive contract.”

“A better one?” T’lar asked skeptically.

“Believe me, I know the value of exclusivity among those who barter in information. Many more heads can wear knowledge than a helm, and a single expenditure of labor can yield profit across many buyers. Bane and I tried to impress upon him that we weren’t interested in killing him to enforce the terms of our contract, but he might not be so lucky with others.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re getting paranoid? You see evil everywhere.”

“Yes, I do,” Psydney sighed. And it’s not paranoia. “And my concern was justified. For while we were inside talking to Thrombose at The Golden Phoenix, someone was outside searching our saddlebags. Serge and I left to watch him, but he evaded our vigilance.”

“The Bard didn’t tell me much, but he mentioned those mounts of yours,” T’lar interjected. “Who on earth would go near them? For that matter, just how do you travel through Greyhawk without every merchant thinking the horsemen of the apocalypse are upon him and locking his doors before you’re within twenty yards?”

“We veil the Black, and ourselves as well, behind more mundane images, and that protects us from all but the nosiest mages,” she replied. “And we tend to deal with rather specialized merchants.” T’lar caught a flash of an unattended thought, a planetar standing before a forge, wielding a hammer and tongs.

“Maybe your thief was just some ragged street urchin, looking for food,” the telepath suggested.

“A street urchin that neither Serge nor I could keep track of? I find that difficult to believe. In any case, when we took the scholar home again, he discovered that someone had been rifling through his belongings there as well. That seemed too much of a coincidence, so after seeing him to safer quarters we accelerated our search for the castle.”

“Why?” T’lar asked.

Psydney looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Why was it suddenly vitally important to find the castle, when it wasn’t before? Oh, wait, to keep the bad guys from getting there first, right?”

“I don’t know if I’d put it in quite such simplistic – ”

“But it is that simple, isn’t it? If you found out that some paladin of Heironeous was attempting to reach the castle, you wouldn’t spirit away his sources of information, spy on his every move and obscure your tracks, would you?” After Psydney stared at her in stupefied silence for several moments, she continued, “Let me answer that for you, since you seem to be having trouble finding your voice: no, you wouldn’t. In fact, you’d probably offer to travel with him.”

“But we wouldn’t have to worry about the paladin of Heironeous stabbing us in our sleep, either,” Psydney retorted.

“If paladins always remained true to their principles, there would be no blackguards,” T’lar observed. “Anyone can fall from his lofty perch at any time. But I suppose if a companion of yours crossed some line you’ve defined you’d cheerfully strike him down regardless of your previous loyalties, wouldn’t you? And call it justice.”

“I wouldn’t call it justice,” Psydney corrected her sternly. “And I wouldn’t do it cheerfully.”

”But what does it matter if someone else reaches the castle?” T’lar demanded. “It isn’t here once and never again. Legend has it that more than one hero has entered, asking for more than one thing, and the multiverse has survived. Why should now be different? Why are you entitled to actively thwart other potentially worthy candidates in their quest, just because you don’t agree with their,” she sought a word that would convey her feelings for her sister’s so-called principles, “politics?”

Psydney recalled Ashardalon growing fat on the souls of the unborn, the storm of death swirling around Blasingdell, the unceasing torture of a solar on the Abyss, the six bloodied figures around the table on the Thanatos mountaintop. I’ve seen what they desire, she thought to herself.

Then why didn’t you and Serge just kill the little sneak? “Rid the world of one more evil,” the telepath’s projection added aloud.

“It isn’t that – ”

“Simple, yes, I know. But why not? You seem to delight in self-flagellation. Can’t kill them, can’t take them with you, can’t allow them to achieve their own ends, can’t prevent them from trying in a neatly final solution.”

Svengali slaughtered captive orcs in a barn. In the name of expediency, in the name of hatred. “Why is the Enclave hidden? Why do you post guards?”

And do you not hate evil? “To keep out unwanted intruders,” T’lar answered.

Achomed said to Blastir, I keep hoping you’ll learn the value of fair play. “Slaughtering all those who do not live among you would be a more certain means of keeping out unwanted intruders. Why do you not do that? Merely because it is impractical?”

Who? “Other people are entitled to carry on their lives however they like,” the telepath said irritably, feeling that she was being herded in a direction she didn’t want to go. “Just not among my people. But that’s different. You seem to have appointed yourselves guardians of practically all of Oerth, but now you’re squeamish about accepting the responsibility and the consequences.”

“Even if we accepted the title,” Psydney replied, “guardianship would be poorly served by engaging in raw exercises of power every time someone slips a hand into our saddlebags. We’ll keep a closer eye on them, though.” And allowing a blackened heart to achieve its most cherished desire? Yes, I will strive to prevent that; by strategy if possible, by violence if necessary.

Spare me your agonized moralizing. T’lar shrugged. “I’m sorry I brought it up. We could argue about this forever and never agree. I’d rather you continued your tale. Where did you go after seeing the scholar to safety?”

You started it. “Thrombose had suggested that the druids outside of Greyhawk might know more of the castle, so the Black took us there. They were startled and it seemed not entirely pleased to see us again, and swore they had no knowledge of what we sought.”

T’lar looked amused “So the old man sent you on a wild goose chase?”

“No. The grove appeared to know what the druids did not. As we approached, the plinths of the structure centered within the trees began to glow, more and more dazzling the closer we moved. A figure stepped from the center of the brightness, clad in golden armor. He said he was a representative of the family Pescheour, mortal guardians of the castle since its creation by the deities. He gave us a ring which would enable us to seek the castle.”

“Nothing more?”

Psydney laughed humorlessly. “The usual speeches about our worthiness, designed to lull one into a false sense of one’s own importance. We were to find the castle, enter it, give no quarter to the obstacles and champions we might meet along the way, obtain a specific token of our victory, then return to him for our justly earned rewards.”

The strength of your misgivings, little sister, is nearly enough to dislodge me from this platform. “A man clad in golden armor steps from a brilliant light that just appears in the middle of a druidic grove, offers you access to a castle of legend, and still you’re suspicious?” T’lar looked incredulous. “Your distrust really knows no bounds, does it?”

“It was no man that appeared to us,” her sister replied. “It was an image of a man, impossible to read. And pretty armor and pretty words mean nothing. I have no aversion to the trials of the gods, but something nags at me now.”

“Now?”

“Perhaps it is nothing. But I feel a certain – unease – since we’ve arrived. Using the ring and the unique ‘roads’ of the Black, we reached the site of the castle quickly. It was set in the middle of a swamp, and I wished Hadrack was with us to read the tangle of lives at its nexus. There were what appeared to be primitive natives, lying dead near handcarved canoes. Long swaths of unnatural scorched ground left us on the alert for a dragon’s presence. And not long after we arrived we saw several yuan ti being pursued by a pack of gorgons. The question is, who were the natives of Oerth and who the natives of the castle environs?”

“Does it matter?”

“Perhaps,” Psydney said. “Suppose those hapless natives were indigenous to Oerth, going about their normal lives when a large castle dropped down and let loose dangerous creatures against which they couldn’t possibly mount an adequate defense? If that’s the case, in my mind someone has a callous action to answer for.”

A few peasants are meaningless against the panaroma of heroes. “You’re the agent of Cuthbert,” T’lar said wryly. “At least you were on hand to take revenge by slaughtering the dragon and the gorgons and the yuan ti. Giving no quarter, as you were instructed.”

No one is meaningless. Even Hanen knows that. Psydney shook her head. “As far as we could tell, the gorgons were hunting. We aren’t going to involve ourselves in every carnivore’s efforts to feed itself. They finished off their prey, then returned to patrolling the swampy woods surrounding the castle. We didn’t disturb them.” Unless the gorgons are not native and we’ve let them run loose on Oerth, in which case they may need to be disposed of. But how do we tell?

So many consequences, so little certainty. I could almost feel sorry for you all. “Does that mean you patted the dragon on the head and sent it on its way?”

“Well, sent it on its way, at least,” Psydney replied. “It was a bit of a nuisance, but we dispatched it.”

“A bit of a nuisance? Was it no bigger than a wyrmling?”

“Bane thought from the look of it that it was probably fairly old.”

Impatient, T’lar plucked the dragon’s image from her sister’s mind; Psydney made no move to stop her. “That’s what you call ‘a bit of a nuisance?’”

“In the final analysis, what dragons mostly have in their favor are speed and distance. They cast spells, and run away, wearing a party down and then moving in for the kill. The Black, however, largely nullify those advantages. It would have been a much more challenging fight without them.”

“And the castle?” T’lar asked impatiently. “What is it like?”

“The castle,” Psydney replied slowly, “is a ruin. It is infested by harpies, spiders and trolls. Perhaps that is the way it is meant to appear; we don’t know.”

“I don’t understand. I expected –”

“Something grand? Impressive? Imposing? So did we, I suppose. Serge thinks that the splendor will be within, hidden beneath a shabby exterior. Perhaps he’s right. But some of the rest of us feel wary. Only time will tell.”

“But what have you found so far?” her sister persisted.

“We found harpies guarding the door. They offered to speak with us, then merely tried to weave an infernal spell of words around us, and died for their deception. Just inside the gates we found more natives, also dead. Perhaps they sought refuge from the dangers outside, only to perish at the hands of greater peril within. Without someone of Hadrack’s ability, it is difficult to say. Serge destroyed a roomful of trolls, Kuhlefaran banished a roomful of demonic spiders back to the Abyss. We left a stable of nightmares undisturbed, as they made no threatening overtures. Magnus moved to investigate a tower, and roused a trio of beholders. They gave us a few ugly moments, but we defeated them as well. We have met no champions, only servants of evil. But perhaps that is as it should be. There is no way to know. And there you have it,” she concluded abruptly. “As much as we’ve seen so far.”

She expected the contact to be broken, but T’lar remained seated in her chair, a certain wistfulness on her face. ”Will you send me news, when there is more to be had?”

”Yes, I will.” She began to dissolve her image, but T’lar stopped her. ”What will you take as your reward?” the telepath asked.

Psydney frowned. “We have not prevailed. We have perhaps scarcely begun the quest. And the gift I would seek depends greatly on the givers, whose faces I have yet to see. Perhaps they have nothing at all I would want.”

T’lar rose and dismissed every shadow, leaving both elves standing in brilliant sunlight. “If wisdom is always so grim,” she said, “I’m thankful I lack it.” Her outline softened and brightened to a sunbeam. Farewell, warrior archon. The column of light shot into the sky and vanished in a burst of silver and gold. Alone in the treehouse now, Psydney thought the shadows back into existence, deepened and darkened them to nightfall and starshine. Fare well, T’lar. She allowed the scene to collapse to a point in her mind and extinguish itself.