The Nightingales

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

The letter

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

Their eyes must be sharp.

Gootcha,

Merrivet will have reached you before this did. I had meant to send her with the letter in hand and instead she left Berdusk three days early without telling anybody, which will give you a fair idea of her and saves me writing a paragraph on the subject.

You are in one place for a fortnight. That is the first fixed address you have had since the winter of '86 and I intend to use it, so please read the whole of this and not the first half.

Four matters, in the order they are likely to cause you trouble.

One, the notebook. Write your question in it. Merrivet reads it and answers in it, and how long that takes is not up to either of you. It depends entirely on whether anybody we have ever employed happened to learn the thing you are asking about. Ten minutes if it is already in a drawer somewhere. Ten days if a person has to go and stand in a place and find out. Most fall between the two and I cannot tell you in advance which yours will be.

Questions about creatures follow the same rule, and you will feel it more sharply there. Ordinary things come back quickly and come back accurate, because we have fought them and buried people over them and written it down afterward. The old and the singular come back slowly, and what arrives is half story. Nobody writes a reliable account of a thing that killed everyone who got close enough to see it properly, so weigh what we send you about a great wyrm against that. I would rather you doubted us than trusted us into a cave.

Two, one question at a time. This is tradecraft, not manners. A clerk chasing four answers at once produces four poor ones. Worse than that, four sets of people asking after four subjects in the same season is how a cell gets noticed, and we have lost cells exactly that way — twice in Amn, in my lifetime, and I knew most of them. If you have a question open and you want a different one answered more, drop the first and say so plainly. You will not get it back part-finished. Whatever was underway simply stops, and if you come back to it later it starts from nothing.

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

Three, the four of them. Four now. A fifth when your name carries further than it does at present, and a sixth after that, though I have known only two Ciphermasters reach a sixth.

Where they are standing is most of what determines what you can learn. An agent on the ground in the place you are asking about will find you the thing that nobody ever wrote down, and I would trade the whole 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 deliberately. Hours to cross a city, three to five days to cross a region, ten days and usually more to cross the coast, and that is with good weather and no reason for anybody to stop them.

Leave one somewhere long enough and they will begin sending you things you never asked for. Read those carefully. In my experience they are worth more than the answers.

Four, send us what you find. A dispatch taken 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 from then on, and the Harpers reckon intelligence delivered above intelligence requested, which I mention because your standing will climb quicker by sending than by asking. Most agents work that out too late to benefit from it.

Now the parts that are not instructions.

We are not diviners. I write that sentence to somebody every year, always to somebody who has begun to believe otherwise, and it has not once been unnecessary. We do not scry and we cannot see forward. What we have is what a Harper learned, and past the Sword Coast we have very little of that, and I would not act on the little we do.

What we send you is what we believe rather than what is so. It can be years old. It can be a lie that somebody fed one of ours in the summer of '85 and that has sat in a drawer since, waiting for a Ciphermaster to act on it. Where our word and your own eyes disagree, believe your eyes, and then write and tell me we were wrong so I can have it struck.

Last. They are people. They can be followed and they can be taken, and they can be bought, and a bought agent looks exactly like a working one for a considerable 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 expect you have already worked out who I mean.

So think before you move them. I am aware you will do as you judge best regardless, because you always have, but I have set it down now and that is my part of it done.

— Leosin

P.S. Merrivet will tell you inside the hour how quickly she works. 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, meaning 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 how fast she is.

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 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