Still wheezing from their trip up the dark stairs, Mirt said, 'Secrets. Yelver Toraunt told us to seek here.'
'What sort of secrets are you interested in leaving with me? Did Yelver say anything of my rates?'
'Nay, he did not-and being upstanding merchants of Waterdeep, lady, we have no secrets,' Mirt joked, assuming an air of exaggerated innocence.
Her answer was the snort he'd expected.
'Lady,' he added, 'we came here, at his bidding, to learn what secrets Yelver had left with you.'
'And where is Yelver, to give me his permission to reveal anything to you?'
'Dead,' Mirt replied. 'Eaten.'
'You can prove this, of course?'
Mirt looked at Durnan-who'd acquired a faint smile-and lifted his hand.
'Lady,' the innkeeper replied, 'I'm the keeper of the Yawning Portal, Durnan by name. Yelver was most definitely dead-murdered-when I put him down the shaft to where the beasts below lurk.'
'Interesting,' the voice observed.
Mirt waited, but the unseen woman said nothing more. He sighed, and waved at Durnan to unhood the lantern completely.
'Lady,' he said, 'Yelver was a business partner of mine-'
'So much I know, Mirt the Moneylender, and more- every detail of your dealings together, in fact. Know you something now: I keep secrets, not betray them. Even the secrets of the dead. Especially the secrets of the dead.'
The lamplight showed the two men a vertical row of identical small, round holes-one of which must have been the speaking-tube in use-in a stone block wall before them. Stout-and chained and locked-iron bar gates blocked the way to closed stone doors to their left and right. The landing they stood on led nowhere else except back down the steep stair they'd ascended, to the street door below.
'Keeper of Secrets,' Durnan asked, 'let us understand each other. Is there any way we can learn what Yelver told us to seek here? The payment of a fee, perhaps?'
'No, goodman Durnan. I have no need of bribes, and if, as you say, Yelver Toraunt is dead, I can henceforth never trust anyone claiming to be him, or with a letter purporting to be from him. Unless, of course, you two are lying to me now-which makes you both untrustworthy in my eyes, and so not to be given Yelver's secrets in any circumstances.'
'So there's no way we can ever learn Yelver's secret?' Mirt growled.
'None,' the voice from the wall said lightly. 'A good evening to you, good sirs.'
'It seems we've slipped from 'gentle' to merely 'good,'' Durnan observed aloud, waving Mirt toward the stairs.
'Evidently the price one pays for being made wiser,' Mirt agreed. 'Farewell, Keeper of Secrets.'
'Farewell,' the calm voice replied.
The two men traded glances, shrugs, and smiles.
Mirt set his boot onto the topmost step and asked suddenly, 'Why the darkness? And all these bars?'
'I like darkness,' was the reply, as calm as ever.
Durnan waved at Mirt to get moving, and rehooded the lantern. They went down the stairs quietly.
'Mayhap Yelver just wanted to have one last, lame laugh at me,' Mirt mused aloud, as they crossed a fish guts-littered alley where rats scurried fearlessly this way and that, and made for Adder Lane. 'Why'd ye bring us this far south, hey? The Portal's a good-'
'To see if all the men strolling along back there were following us, of course,' Durnan muttered.
Mirt stiffened, but managed to avoid turning around.
'And-?' he asked.
'They are.' Durnan replied. 'A dozen, and one may be a mage.'
'Watchful Order?'
'Far less official, I'd say. Let's duck into Roldro's cellar.'
The innkeeper strode ahead, rapped on a particular panel set into a crumbling wall, and sang a brief, wordless phrase of music. A much smaller panel nearby slid open, and someone uttered a non-committal grunt from beyond it.
'Flashscales,' Durnan murmured in reply-and the response was the click of a bolt being slid back.
The door, a few paces along the wall, looked more like a series of boards nailed over a disused hatch than a usable entryway. But the innkeeper snatched it open as he reached it, and was gone through it like a diving sea hawk. Mirt huffed and plunged after, banging the door closed not far ahead of a sudden shout and clatter of hobnailed boots on cobbles.
'Cellar to cellar, and so away,' Durnan told his friend several rooms and startled young Roldro children later, as they went down damp steps into a room that stank of rotting tide wrack and mildew. 'To rouse the Portal.'
Mirt nodded a little wearily and said, 'Aye, where they know where to find us.'
Something wriggled inside his head, and he stumbled up against the wall of Murktar Roldro's cellar with a groan.
'Magic?' Durnan snapped, putting a steadying hand on Mirt's shoulder.
The moneylender nodded and waved a vague hand struck dumb by a flood of memories-faces, places, names, and amounts owed and due dates and-and-
The invasion was gone, as swiftly as it had come.
'Someone … in my mind,' he wheezed, clutching at Durnan's stone-steady arm. 'That mage following us.'
The innkeeper nodded and asked, 'Seeking memories of Yelver?'
'Aye. Turned up everything-gods, my head's a-whirl still-but Yelver, yes, an' our talk with the Keeper. I wonder what Yelver was mixed up in?'
Durnan was already whirling past him.
'Stay here,' he said. 'Be right back.'
Mirt leaned against the wall, groggy, listening to his friend's boots racing up the stairs-and more slowly coming back down again. The keeper of the Yawning Portal wore another of his grim smiles.
'They're all racing away back nor'east, of course.'
'To the Keeper of Secrets,' Mirt grunted. 'Knowing she told us nothing, we're now nothing-but she remains a danger.' He slapped his hand to his sword hilt, drew in a deep breath, and started up the stairs himself. 'So, 'tis back to Sammarin's Street.'
'Way ahead of you,' Durnan replied cheerfully, bounding past.
'Aye,' Mirt agreed. 'Everyone always is.'
The flash and the trembling of cobblestones under their feet came when they were still a street away from the Keeper's shop.
Faint sounds of startled cries, curses, and the crashes of things falling and breaking arose in the tallhouses and shops all around. Durnan broke out of the trot that let Mirt keep pace with him, and raced ahead.
Almost immediately he returned with the terse explanation: 'Two Watch patrols.'
'Rooftops,' Mirt replied, waving at a distant tall-house with carved dolphin downspouts.
Durnan flashed him a smile and dropped it off his face as he looked back behind them.
'More Watch coming,' said the innkeeper.
Mirt shrugged and replied, 'So we're innocents, look ye. Deafinnocents.'
'No sort of innocent climbs downspouts in the middle of the night.'
'Innocent downspout inspectors do,' Mirt growled. When Durnan rolled his eyes, the moneylender protested, 'I've a palace badge, and know what names to invoke. I-'
The uppermost floor of the building they'd visited not long before burst apart with a roar, in an eruption of stones, roof slates, and the shattered bodies of men.
A head and what looked like a knee bounced and pattered wetly to the cobblestones nearby. Durnan abandoned any attempt to look innocent and clawed at Mirt.
'Down' he hissed, 'and look dazed.'
Blinking around at the tumult of running Watch officers and still-rolling shards of stone, Mirt complied.
They crouched together against the wall of what looked to be a toy shop as shouting uniformed men ran
