The Nightingales

The Nightingales are a Harper cell placed under Gootcha on her elevation to Ciphermaster. They keep their clerk at Nuts Deep and their agents wherever she sends them.

The letter

Merrivet Ashcombe arrived at Nuts Deep in the first days of the fortnight's downtime, on a mule cart, with two crates of paper and no introduction. The letter came four days behind her, carried up from Elturel by a Harper courier who would not come inside the walls. Gootcha keeps it folded inside the front cover of her notebook.

Their eyes must be sharp.

Gootcha,

Merrivet will have got there before this did. I meant to send her with the letter and she left three days early without telling anyone, which tells you a good deal about her and saves me writing a paragraph on the subject.

You are at a fixed address for a fortnight. That is the first one you have had in three years and I am going to make use of it, so read all of this rather than the first half.

Four matters.

One. The notebook. Write your question in it. Merrivet reads it and Merrivet answers it, and how long that takes has nothing to do with either of you — it depends on whether anyone we have ever employed happened to learn the thing. Ten minutes, if it is already in a drawer at Berdusk. Ten days, if somebody has to go and stand in a place and find out. Most questions land somewhere between and I cannot tell you in advance which.

Creatures follow the same rule and you will notice it more. Ordinary things come back fast and come back accurate, because we have fought them and buried people over them and written it all down afterward. The old ones come back slowly and what arrives is half story. Nobody files a good account of a thing that killed everyone who got close enough to see it properly. Weigh what we send you about a great wyrm against that.

Two. One question at a time. I want to be clear that this is tradecraft and not manners. A clerk chasing four answers produces four poor ones. Worse, four sets of people asking after four subjects in the same season is how a cell gets noticed, and we have lost cells that way — Amn, twice, in my lifetime. If you have a question open and you want a different one more, drop the first and tell her so. You will not get it back half-finished. Whatever was underway simply stops.

Word your people send you unasked does not count against this. That is only an agent doing their job.

Three. The four. Four now. A fifth when your name carries further than it does, a sixth after that. I have known two Ciphermasters reach a sixth.

Where they stand is nearly the whole of it. An agent on the ground in the place you are asking about will find you the thing nobody wrote down, and I would trade the Berdusk archive for one of them on a good day. An agent walking between two postings is no use to you at all, so move them rarely and on purpose. Hours to cross a city. Three to five days to cross a region. Ten days and often more to cross the coast, and that is in summer.

Leave one somewhere long enough and they will start sending you things you never asked about. Read those.

Four. Send us what you find. A dispatch off a body, what a prisoner said before the end, a place properly mapped, a name finally attached to a face — give it to Merrivet and have it filed. Every subject you feed us comes back to you faster and fuller afterward, and the Harpers count intelligence delivered more highly than intelligence requested, which I mention because your standing will rise quicker by sending than by asking.

Now the parts that are not instructions.

We are not diviners. We do not scry, we do not see forward, we do not read minds, and every year I write that sentence to somebody who has begun to think otherwise. We know what a Harper learned. That is all. Past the Sword Coast we know almost nothing and I would not act on the little we do.

And what we send is what we believe rather than what is so. It can be old. It can be a lie somebody fed one of ours in the summer of '85 that has been sitting in a drawer since, waiting for a Ciphermaster to act on it. When our word and your own eyes disagree, believe your eyes and write and tell me we were wrong.

Last thing. They are people. They can be followed, and taken, and bought, and one of them being bought will look precisely like the network functioning normally for a very long time. Every question you ask moves somebody, and somebody moving can be watched moving. There are those who would find the four of them a great deal easier to reach than they would find you, and I think you have already worked out who.

Spend them as you would spend your own hours. You are not generous with those either.

— Leosin

P.S. — Merrivet will tell you within the hour how fast she is. Let her. She is not exaggerating and it is the only vanity she has.

The cell

They named themselves, as cells do. The Nightingales — for the bird that sings after dark, and for the older Harper sense of the word: the one who talks. Merrivet chose it, and maintains it was obvious.

Merrivet Ashcombe — gnome cipher clerk, resident at Nuts Deep. Does not leave and does not fight. Reads the notebook every waking hour and a fair number of the sleeping ones, answers in dry marginalia, and is openly smug about her turnaround time.

Will — Gootcha's squire, a Harper placement out of Baldur's Gate. Courier and liaison, and not counted among the four. Most deliveries arrive in his hands, which means most requests put him on a road.

Standing postings

Agent	Specialty	Currently posted
Tam Ossley	Watcher. Eleven years on the docks and noticed by no one. Reports in flat, unhelpful detail until something matters.	Waterdeep — on the Council
Hollis Renn	Fixer. Finds things, forges papers, and mentions what it cost. He is owed a great deal by a great many people and has never once forgotten by whom.	Baldur's Gate
Sera Dunwick	Face. Drinks with the right people and remembers all of it.	Luskan — working the Arcane Brotherhood connection
Corvin Ashe	Field scholar. Walks sites and reads what is left of them.	Travelling — The Grove Burnings

See also

• Harpers — the faction; standings are tracked on the Renown Tracker
• Nuts Deep — where the cell keeps its clerk
• The Anvil · Talonfall · The Broken Latch · The Hearthwardens — the other companies' cells
• Gootcha · Leosin Erlanthar