out and studied it for a moment. It had a sturdy handle, and the thinner end curved into a crescent moon shape.
For a moment, she just pondered that shape.
Then she realized what she was holding. Lockpicks.
Lockpicks were not a family heirloom, not so far as Tennora could see. Her heart was in her throat. Why had her mother owned lockpicks?
To pick locks, you fool, she thought. What else?
Her mother had been so proper, so boring in her easy adherence to the niceties of the North Ward.
And yet buried somewhere underneath her effortless manners and graceful charm, beneath the hostess and the wife and the mother, there might have been a creature who moved in the darkness with a well-kept weapon in her hand, finding her way through locked doors-How? How could mild-mannered, easily laughing Mesial Hedare have tamed that creature of the night into a house pet-her wings clipped, her teeth filed, her manner calm and subdued?
Tennora shook herself. Fanciful tendencies. There must be another answer.
She reached into the chest. Perhaps she'd missed something-a letter from a long-dead aunt requesting Liferna hold on to her things, maybe. Nothing. The chest was empty.
Or perhaps not. Tennora frowned. The hand that brushed the bottom of the trunk sat a solid three inches from the ground. A false bottom.
It would not pry up when scratched her fingernails at the edges. Tennora picked up the dagger, ready to slam the hilt into the thin wood She looked up at the loft, at Nestrix sleeping there. Even though she'd slept through the breaking of the lock, the woman was bound to wake if she heard Tennora smashing open the bottom of the trunk- Tennora felt certain. Much as she wanted to know what was in the box, she should wait. She would wait-she needed to think, to find her way out of the tangle of thoughts that would overwhelm her.
She stood, feeling oddly light-headed-unmoored and empty. As if she had nothing left to stand on. Her steps uneven, she crossed to the window and nudged the shutters open. Fresh air would help.
Below, the City of Splendors stretched out, lights shining like jewels scattered all the way up to the black silk of the Sea of Swords. Selune hung full and bright above her. The God Catcher gleamed in the moon's light. She sat on the ledge and leaned against the sill. A cool breeze ran over her skin. The remains of the clouds from earlier scattered.
One of the statue's eyes had been knocked out to form a window, and from the socket a flimsy drape hung, limp as torn flesh. The other eye, a great carved orb the size of the trunk sitting in Tennora's living room, stared up at her. The statue's other features wavered uncomfortably in the midst of masculine and feminine, youth and age- full lips, hard chin, round cheeks. She wondered who it had been meant to look like. A hero, or the sculptor's lover, or a god with a fickle form?
From where she sat, Tennora could just make out the shadows and lights of other Walking Statues, now fallen or frozen. Against Mount Waterdeep, the dark humps of the prone warrior who had become Downgiant Row. The tall and listing silhouette to the north of Sparaunt Tower, its hawklike beak illumined by a line of magical lights. The crown of a seated man, the suggestion of leather armor carved into his chest and limbs, peeking over the buildings of the Castle Ward, the edges of his stone hairline traced by the lights of the tavern built in his lap.
Time had not forgotten the fallen statues. The city had rebuilt the damage they had caused when the Spellplague had erupted, and then continued building, hollowing out the fallen statues and laying stonework over the tops of their feet.
Tennora looked down at the face of the God Catcher. It was easy to forget what those carved eyes had seen, what horrors and wonders they had witnessed. She thought back to what Nestrix had said about the way the world had or had not changed, and she wondered how wild a lie she had been told.
Then the eye below blinked.
Tennora startled, sliding back off the windowsill as she did.
The lips parted with a crack, and the God Catcher sighed, the dry and powdery breath gusting up at her. The moon brightened and turned faintly blue, and the stars burned through the blanket of the night.
'A tempest is coming,' the statue said, its voice clattering like a rockslide. It lowered the hand it normally held outstretched, and with it the sphere of Aundra Blacklock. The sphere settled into its palm and it turned its great head, shattering years of gull droppings. 'I feel it in the ground. The door is left wide and the path uncovers itself.'
Tennora froze, too startled to move.
In the distance the other statues cracked to life as they lifted their heads, the murmur of a half dozen other stone voices echoing the God Catcher. 'The door is left wide.'
The sphere in its hand shimmered, and there appeared atop it a woman of sorts wrapped in a cloak of feathered wings. Aundra Blacklock stood as still as a statue herself.
'What else do you see in your dreams?' she said.
The God Catcher gave a low, growling hum. 'A blue stone. A spiral of vultures. A gathering storm.'
'Spellplague?' Aundra whispered. 'Does the Blue Fire return?
'There is Blue Fire here, but it sleeps, as it sleeps in us. Beware that one-it will flush out the vultures. For good or ill.'
'What good do buzzards bring?' Aundra said. 'What else?' 'A child walks in the storm,' the statues chanted in a single voice. Tennora's ears rang with the sound. 'The vultures follow. A path reveals itself, old stones that have seen many feet and lain beneath the sand for many more years. The key is the singer's collar. The lodestone is the first lord's gift.'
'Is the child the plaguechanged one?'
'It is,' the statues said. 'And it is not.'
Aundra's wings twitched. 'You speak in riddles, Old Ones,' she said. 'This information does not aid me.'
'We speak truth. We always speak truth,' the God Catcher rumbled. 'The future unfolds itself in myriad ways. You will discern the proper path. Or the city will fall.'
'As always,' Aundra Blacklock said. She turned her yellow eyes skyward toward the low-hanging moon and stars. And caught sight of Tennora leaning over the windowsill. She frowned.
Tennora blinked and jerked awake as her elbow slid out from where it had propped her chin. The statue's face below lay quiet and unmoving, still staring up at the heavens and crusted in bird droppings. Clouds smeared over the sky, dulling the distant moonlight's silver fire. The moon hung much farther along its path than where Tennora had left it. Aundra's sphere floated once more twenty feet above the hand of the God Catcher, which was once more reaching up as if offering the sphere to the moon.
The carved eye stared up at it, rainwater pooling along its lower lid like a rim of tears.
Tennora rubbed her own eyes. What a strange dream. A dream of dreams, she thought, stretching her stiff back. Usually her dreams were all urgent and panicked and plotted like a handful of chapbooks shredded and pasted back together. She woke from them feeling harried and tired more often than not, shreds of the dream clinging to her thoughts like cobwebs. But the dream of Aundra and the God Catcher had left her feeling more… peculiar, and oddly calm.
She studied the God Catcher's face a moment, wondering if it had been a dream at all.
She sighed and tugged on the roots of her hair-of course it was a dream. The statues had not moved in a century. People would notice if they started talking. Especially if they started talking about lost paths, children, and vultures. 'Fanciful tendencies' was being kind.
'The key is the singer's collar,' she said. 'The lodestone is the first lord's gift.' Wasn't that the way of dreams? To sound portentous and riddling, but in the end mean nothing at all? She'd dreamed hardly a tenday before that her aunt and Master Halnian had been trying to convince her to marry some hideous spider creature, telling her that if she didn't a portal to a plane of mud would open and everyone's garden would be ruined. And that hadn't meant anything, of course, except that she was overworked.
She went back into the sitting room. Even though she'd managed to doze off, she didn't feel tired. Her thoughts kept returning to the cryptic notions of the dream-a puzzle she wanted to piece together, but could not. And then another puzzle-her mother's trunk. She glanced up at Nestrix, still sleeping in the loft.
'To the Hells with it,' she said. She stomped, heavy on her heel, into the false bottom. The wood cracked. Nestrix stirred and grumbled, but did not wake.
