Finally Varden and Gratus stopped behind the skeleton of a burned-out butcher shop. The blackened beams stood like dead trees, and a jumble of rubble cluttered the area that the shop had once occupied. Gratus carefully crept to the center of the heap of charred wood, where a slightly singed door lay on the pile, and rapped quietly five times.
After a moment, Midnight heard a voice softly ask for a password. Gratus bent over, and when his face was almost low enough to touch the door, he whispered, "Friends of Sembia."
The door creaked open slightly, and a guard peered out at the heroes. "Well, well," he whispered, "if it isn't Gratus! And, Varden, you're alive!" The door flew open now. "Come in quickly!"
The heroes rushed through the open door and found a set of blackened, burned stairs leading to a musty cellar. Once the heroes were down the stairs, the guard reset several traps on the door and rejoined them. Then he moved toward a small crawlspace in one of the walls. "Don't worry," he said, turning to Midnight and Adon. "This leads to our hiding place."
After crawling down a short passage, Midnight and Adon found themselves in a stone tunnel, much like the one they had used to escape from Durrock and the Zhentilar earlier. Torches lined the walls, lighting the gray-bricked passage, and Midnight saw a handful of soldiers dressed in the uniforms of various nations. Some rested against the walls, others sat on crates of food, sharpening weapons or rolling dice.
"Wait here," Varden told Midnight and Adon. "I'll go talk to Barth, the leader of our little troop." The thief smiled warmly and walked toward a large curtain that was hung in the tunnel a few yards away.
It was over two hours before Midnight and Adon were given an audience with Barth. Since none of the soldiers made any attempt to talk to the mage or the cleric, they spent the time exploring possibilities for Kelemvor's rescue and discussing all that had happened to them since they'd met in Cormyr.
At one point, the conversation lagged, and Adon spent a few moments looking around the tunnel at the tired, dirty soldiers. For the first time, he noticed that they were huddled in groups — the Cormyrians with other Cormyrians, the men from Hillsfar only with their own, and so on.
The Zhentish invasion changes Scardale little, the cleric thought with a sigh. This was once a thriving, happy place… before Lashan's reign, anyway.
In fact, it hadn't been so long ago that Scardale was on the verge of forging its own empire. Under the leadership of Lashan Aumersair, an aggressive young lord, Scardale had gathered an army and even managed to conquer a few of its neighbors. But the invasion of Harrowdale, Featherdale, and Battledale drew the attention of the rest of Scardale's rivals for power in the area — Hillsfar, the Dales, Sembia, even Cormyr and Zhentil Keep.
Lashan was eventually turned back from Mistledale and Deepingdale by the combined forces of Scardale's powerful neighbors, and the young nobleman's empire collapsed as quickly as it had risen. The troops from the conquering armies soon occupied the town of Scardale itself, though Lashan escaped and was presumably still in hiding somewhere. Then each of the major powers placed a small garrison in the town, to prevent any one power from rising unchecked in the dale.
The various garrisons had fought among themselves for years over petty insults, making the town little more than an open invitation to lawlessness. Now that the balance had been tipped in Zhentil Keep's favor, Adon thought bitterly, the soldiers were treating it like another taproom brawl, another momentary inconvenience. They weren't banding together as allies to save their city; instead, they were huddled together like groups of thieves in a darkened alley. At any moment, they might suddenly turn on one another. To Adon, it was all very sad.
When the heroes finally got to meet Barth, Adon's musings about the soldiers' pettiness were proven correct.
"You expect us to what?" Barth exclaimed, his normally well-tanned face turning bright red. The soldier was strongly built, with curly black hair and a thick mustache.
"I don't expect you to do anything," Midnight growled, balling her hands into fists. "I'm offering you a chance to strike back at Bane's forces. You might be safe while you're inside these tunnels, but the Zhentilar have made you prisoners here just as surely as if they had thrown you in their dungeons!"
Barth leaned back in his chair, the only one Midnight had seen in the tunnels, and looked at the mage and her friends. Contempt showed in the soldier's eyes as he mulled over Midnight's plan to rescue Kelemvor.
Gratus smiled fatuously and addressed the leader of the resistance. "The mage has a point." Raising his hand, the old merchant placed his index finger and thumb together, then allowed a small space to open between them. "Why, we can't even go outside the tunnels this far, even to look for food, without worrying about a Zhentish patrol picking us up. I can't even — "
"Stop thinking of only yourself, you old con man," Varden snapped. "There's a very real chance that Midnight's companion may be enduring torture even as we speak. He might even be dead, for all we know. Bane is going to crush Scardale beneath his black boots. The least we can do is try to strike a blow against the tyrant."
"Enough!" Barth barked, waving Varden away with a meaty, unwashed hand. "Your passion and your beliefs are not the issues. We've already sent messengers to alert Sembia of the takeover. If we wait it out, reinforcements will arrive. Then we'll attack the Zhentilar. Not before." The Sembian paused for a moment and picked a bit of his lunch from his teeth with a dagger. "Right now, any attack would be a waste of effort and men."
"There's another reason you need us," Midnight said. She hated to lie, but she was beginning to realize that Barth was going to give her no other choice. "Bane is in possession of a mystical object that we were carrying to Tantras for Elminster the Sage." The Sembian looked up quickly, nearly poking himself in the cheek with his dagger. Midnight smiled and continued. "The object is an amber sphere of great power. If Bane learns what it is and how to control it, he will have the power in his hands to find you whenever he wants to."
Panic flared in the eyes of the Sembian leader. "Perhaps I could spare a few men," Barth said slowly, his mind racing. "Tell me, with this sphere, would you be able to destroy the Zhentil Keep garrison?"
He won't help me for altruistic reasons, Midnight thought to herself, but fear certainly convinced him to assist me soon enough. "No," Midnight said with mock sadness. "Only a god, or a being with a god's power, could accomplish such a task with this object."
Barth paled slightly. "If it's a danger to my, uh, soldiers, I'll assign two men to your party. They'll assist you in your efforts to retrieve this magical sphere… and your friend." The Sembian cleared his throat and wiped a thin film of sweat from his brow.
"You have our thanks," Midnight said.
Barth made a futile attempt at a smile. "Yes, well, perhaps you should get going right away. We wouldn't want… your friend to suffer any undue danger, would we?" Midnight nodded and silently cursed the Sembian, then led her friends out through the curtain and into the section of the tunnel where the soldiers were gathered.
Almost an hour passed before the soldiers who had been assigned to assist Midnight arrived. The heroes had pulled together a few crates to serve as a table, and the section of the tunnel they occupied had started to look like a military planning room. Maps of Scardale and the outlying areas lay all over the floor. Trade routes and various notations concerning the business districts of the town marked the surfaces of the maps, which had come from a local merchant's looted store, making it impossible to make out some of the map's details.