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 below arrived folded inside the front cover of her notebook, in a hand she recognised. She has kept it there.
The letter
Their eyes must be sharp.
Gootcha —
There is much to see, and you have seen enough of it that the rest of us have stopped pretending you are junior. Ciphermaster is not a reward for what you did at the fort, whatever the others tell you. It is a decision about where you are most useful. You have spent three years finding things out for us. It is a poor use of you to keep asking you to walk to them.
So we are giving you the network instead. Read this properly before you use it, because agents who use it badly get other people killed.
Merrivet, and the notebook
Merrivet Ashcombe is a cipher clerk, and as of this season she is yours. She is posted to Nuts Deep and she will not be leaving it. Do not ask her to. She reads your notebook, she answers in it, and she is faster than anyone I have ever put behind a desk, a fact she will tell you herself within the hour.
Write your question in the notebook and she will get you an answer. How long that takes is not up to her and not up to you — it depends entirely on whether anyone 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 someone has to go and find out. Most things fall between.
Ask about a creature and the same rule holds, but you will feel it more sharply. Common things come back fast and come back true — we have fought them, buried people because of them, and written all of it down. The old and the singular come back slowly, and what comes back is half story. Nobody writes an accurate account of a thing that killed everyone who saw it closely. Weigh what we send you about a great wyrm accordingly. I would rather you doubted us than trusted us into a cave.
Keep one question open at a time. This is not a rule of etiquette, it is a rule of tradecraft — a clerk chasing four answers at once produces four bad ones, and four sets of people asking after four subjects is how a cell is noticed. If you have an open question and you need a different one answered more, drop the first and say so. You will not get it back part-finished. Whatever was underway stops, and asking again later starts from nothing. Choose accordingly.
If one of yours sends you word unprompted, that costs you nothing and does not close your notebook. That is simply an agent doing their job.
The four, and where they stand
Four agents answer to you. A fifth when your name carries further than it does now, and a sixth after that — I have seen two Ciphermasters reach the sixth and neither expected to.
Where they stand is the whole of it. An agent on the ground where you are asking is worth more than the entire archive at Berdusk — they will find you the thing nobody wrote down. An agent on the road is worth nothing at all, so move them deliberately and not often. Hours to cross a city. Three to five days to cross a region. Ten days or more to cross the coast. While they walk, they are no use to you, and they are at their least safe.
Leave one somewhere long enough and they will start sending you things you never asked for. Read those. In my experience they are worth more than the answers.
What you put in
The network is not a well you draw from. It is a memory, and it remembers only what someone has put into it.
When your company turns something up — a seized dispatch, what a prisoner said before the end, a place mapped, a name finally confirmed — send it to Merrivet and have it filed. Every subject you feed comes back to you faster and fuller ever after. And the Harpers will count it, because delivering intelligence is precisely what we reward. You will find your standing rises faster by sending than by asking.
What we cannot do
I will be plain, because agents at your rank start to believe otherwise and it kills them.
We are not diviners. We do not scry, we do not see forward, we do not read minds. We know what a Harper learned — saw, overheard, filed, or was told — and nothing else. Beyond the Sword Coast we know almost nothing, and I would not act on what little we do.
And what we send you is what we believe, not what is true. It can be old. It can be half. It can be a lie someone fed one of ours two years ago that has been sitting in a drawer ever since, waiting for you to act on it. When our word and your eyes disagree, trust your eyes.
The last thing
They are people, Gootcha.
They can be followed. They can be taken. They can be bought, and one of them being bought will look exactly like the network working normally right up until it doesn't. Every question you ask moves someone, and a moved person can be seen moving. There are those who would find it far easier to reach the four of them than to reach you, and I think you already know who.
Spend them the way you would spend your own hours. Not freely.
— Leosin Erlanthar
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. Hers is the hand that does the actual deciphering; the rank is named for the work she does.
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 — Xanphina's lance of the Order of the Gauntlet
- Gootcha · Leosin Erlanthar