Most of the long, high hall lay in chill darkness. Here and there, lamps shed eerie, feeble glows into the cold vastness. Menacing shadows swirled where this lamplight was blocked by a long stone table, the many highbacked seats drawn up around it, and the robed men who sat in them.

"So you have all come," came a calm, purring voice from one end of the table. "Good. The Lord Manshoon will be pleased at your loyalty and eager ambition. We are looking for those who in days to come will lead this fellowship in our places. It is our hope that some among you will show themselves suited to do so. Others here, I fear, will reveal just as surely that they are not"

Sarhthor fell silent The men around the table knew his slim, graceful form would remain as still and as patient as stone until he wished to move a finger or change his expression. Right now, as the silence stretched, his calm, keen-eyed face was-as usual-expressionless. It might have been carved from the same gray stone as the pillar behind his seat. Sarhthor's dark eyes, however, glittered with cruel amusement, a look familiar to many seated there. They were the most ambitious and daring of the apprentice magelings of the Zhentarim, and had all been trained or inspected by this man. Many long, tense breaths were drawn as quietly as possible in the dimly lit cold as the wizards sat and waited, trying not to show their fear, their personal hatreds of each other-and their mounting impatience.