The Nether Scroll Chapter 3: Storm Over Parnast
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey | Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
30 Eleasias, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR)
A dust storm blows in from the Anauroch desert that night. It lasts three days. Hot as a fire pit, sharp with grit. The locals wrap their faces like desert nomads and tell the visitors helpful things like “This is nothing” and “You should have been here last year, we didn’t see the sun for twenty days.”
Three days locked in a room with a sulky teenager and a married couple. Dru’s thoughts tilt toward murder. Lynn Abbey writes that sentence with zero drama, and it lands perfectly because anyone who’s been stuck in close quarters with family knows exactly what he means.
Weathercote Wood
When the storm breaks, Dru escapes at dawn. He follows a footpath toward Weathercote Wood, a forest that sits on better maps with the label “Herein lies magic.” The Wood’s greatest mystery is its lack of mystery. No dragons. No cursed castles. Just the quiet assertion that something magical lives there.
An old codger with a donkey gives Dru the strangest warning. Don’t cross the bridge if you’re not a wizard. Don’t go without a path. Being a wizard, maybe go, depending on the light.
Dru finds the brook and kneels in freezing water. On the far side of the bridge: untrampled grass and no hint of a path. The light, apparently, is wrong. He watches the Wood for hours. Crows burst from the canopy. A fox pokes its head through the thicket and vanishes. The Wood keeps its secrets. And Dru lets it. That patience and restraint are going to matter later.
The Caravan Arrives
Back at the village, chaos. A desert caravan has followed the storm in from the Anauroch. Forty-something camels, handlers, merchant retinues, all shouting. Zhentarim inspectors check every pack.
Then Amarandaris finds Dru.
The Meeting with Amarandaris
The Zhentarim lord of Parnast is utterly average looking. Forgettable face. Until you see his eyes, dark and predatory. During the handshake, Amarandaris hits Dru with a probe spell from one of his rings. Dru hits him back with his own. They’re both middling-skilled wizards and they both know it.
Amarandaris’s quarters are plush. Maps on every wall with details the Zhentarim never share. He offers wine in blown-glass goblets. And then the real conversation starts.
Amarandaris knows everything. The glass disk. Candlekeep. The scrying spell. He calls Galimer’s mother “Bitter Ansoain,” an epithet Dru has never heard but that fits perfectly. He has a letter from Sememmon, Lord of Darkhold, who takes a personal interest in Druhallen’s progress. The Zhentarim have been watching them for fifteen years.
They know the Red Wizards killed Ansoain and why: the bride’s Hlondeth suitor had “incurred debts of a most unpleasant kind” and sold out his own wedding caravan.
The Dekanter Problem
Amarandaris lays out his situation. Dekanter has become a nightmare. The Zhentarim had a profitable operation there for twenty years: artifacts, furs, and goblin slaves traded through a chief called Ghistpok. But seven years ago, things changed. New Beast Lord rituals. Raiding parties. War parties.
Amarandaris sent garrisons. They got slaughtered in their sleep. He went down personally with forty men. Ghistpok blamed demons coming out of the ground. Zombies and ghouls appearing in black fog. Sound familiar? That’s exactly what the Red Wizards used on the Vilhon Reach.
It gets worse. The Zhentarim caught Red Wizards at Dekanter once, but then Amarandaris’s own men turned on each other and killed everyone, Wizards included. Ghistpok said they “became demons.” After losing another garrison and two cart trains, Amarandaris gave up and moved the trail.
The Offer
Amarandaris wants Dru’s scrying spell results. He’ll escort Dru to Dekanter personally with all the men he can spare. Just share what you learn.
Dru refuses and walks out. But not because the offer is bad. He refuses because that’s what you do when the Zhentarim make their first offer. Amarandaris basically confirmed that they need Dru more than Dru needs them.
The Goblin
On his way home, rehearsing what he’ll say to his partners, Dru hears squealing from a chicken coop. Men are beating something inside. His first thought is Tiep. It’s not. It’s a half-grown goblin child, battered and bleeding, that breaks free and slams into his leg.
“Kick it back over here,” one of the men says.
Here’s the thing about Dru. He doesn’t like kids. Of any species. But children flock to him anyway. And every time, he resists the urge to toss them.
He resists again. He tells the men it’s over. When words don’t work, he crushes ash between his fingers and fills the alley with magical gloom. Sadness pours from the fog. One man runs away screaming. The rest are caught in melancholy that might not lift until sundown.
The goblin clings to him, hides its face in his arm, stinks of rotted food, tries to pick his pocket, gnaws on his knuckles. When Dru finally sets it down, it won’t let go. A goblin female shoots from the shadows, grabs the child, and both vanish.
This chapter establishes the political landscape, deepens the mystery of Dekanter, and ends with Dru rescuing a goblin kid for no strategic reason. He just couldn’t walk away from a child being beaten. That’s the kind of hero this book gives us. Not someone who fights evil because destiny demands it, but someone who steps in because he’s standing right there.