Elfsong - Elaine Cunningham [64]
Before highsun the bard saw below her the stout gray walls that surrounded Sundabar. The city had been built long ago by dwarves and was still a heavily armed fortress. Once the site of the barding college known as Anstruth, it was still renowned for the fine wooden instruments crafted there. The city sat at the crossroad of the River Rauvin and the trade road, and beyond it were the thick forests that yielded lumber for the city's craftspeople. More exotic woods were carried on the barges that traveled the busy river. From Garnet's height, the cargo boats looked to be about the size of water bugs.
Another command from the bard sent the asperii into a spiraling descent. Garnet landed openly on the trade road and entered the city without challenge, for bards were welcomed almost anywhere for their music and the news they carried.
As she traveled down the narrow cobblestone roads past the homes and shops of busy tradespeople, she found that Sundabar was greatly changed since she had last walked its streets, almost three hundred years before. As a very young noblewoman she had studied at Anstruth on her path toward the degree of Magnum Alumnus, the highest honor afforded a bard. Her years of study did not bring her to that goal, however, for a charismatic young bard had persuaded her to join the Harpers. While she ran about the Northlands doing the bidding of politicians such as Khelben, the barding colleges began their final slide into decline.
That Garnet could never forgive. The Harpers had originally been created, at least in part, to sustain tradition and preserve history, yet their efforts were ever directed to this or that political end. She would repay the lords and rulers in their own coin. Let Khelben and his ilk see what happened when music and history no longer served them and furthered their political games!
Finding her way through Sundabar was more difficult than Garnet had anticipated. The city through which she rode was now more concerned with commerce than art, and to her dismay she found that only one of Anstruth's original buildings still stood: a concert hall whose stone walls had survived the passage of time. Rage coursed through the bard when she realized that the once-beautiful building had been gutted and turned into a common warehouse.
Nevertheless, she tied her horse outside and made her way to a door at the back of the building. Within she found stacks of lumber, and at one end of the vast room was a workshop equipped with lathes and bores that transformed wood into the fine musical instruments for which Sundabar was famed. A number of unfinished recorders, shawms, and wooden flutes lay on various work tables, but she was alone in the vast room.
The workers had just left, probably to take a highsun meal. Garnet's sharp eyes-part of her inheritance from her elven mother-perceived the blurred and quickly fading shadows of warmth they had left behind. She had little time to complete her task. Garnet pulled up a low stool and seated herself in the midst of the workshop. Once again, she began to play the melody that bound magic and music together, singing the interwoven riddles that formed the words of the spell.
When the spell was complete, Garnet picked up her harp and hurried into the back alley. Impatient to test her new power, she set down the harp on the cobblestones and with her right hand plucked a single string. Her left hand sheflung upward. Lightning sizzled upward,disappearing intoa low-hanging bank of clouds. The rain began immediately. Garnet closed her eyes and raised her face to the soft shower, smiling as she imagined the reaction another such storm would cause in Waterdeep. Rain on Midsummer's Day was such a rare event that it was considered a dire omen. She would use this superstition to fuel the growing discontent in Water-deep, and