The cave was a long, narrow hovel of damp dirt, stones, and sagging old rough-tree furniture, more a hermit’s cellar than a druid den. Two small, flickering lamps hung from a crossbranch over a rude table, and somewhere behind their glows sat a stout, broad-shouldered old man, blinking at them past a fearsome beak of a nose. He had a long, shaggy white beard.

The floor was an uneven, greasy, hard-trodden litter of old bones and empty nutshells, and around the dirt walls roots thrust out here, there, and everywhere; on many of them had been hung a pathetic collection of rotting old scraps of tapestry and paintings.

“So ye’ve found Elminster, ye adventurers, and to earn thy hire would speak with me? Well, speak, then; I’ve naught to share, I fear, and if ye were expecting great magics or heaped gems, I’m afraid ye’ve come a century or so too late.”

“Huh,” Gaerond replied. “That’s a shame. We quite like great magics and heaps of gems, we do. Can you still manage little magics?”

The old man snorted sourly and fumbled for a clay pipe with age-gnarled, shaking fingers. “If I could, d’ye think I’d be sitting here in this mud-hole, slowly starving? That’ll be my price for answers, mind ye: a finger of cheese or a bite of meat, if thy pouches run to such luxuries!”

Gaerond smiled, not kindly, and shook his head. “Our shame steadily deepens, doesn’t it, lads?”

The Bloodshields chuckled unpleasantly by way of reply. They had already spread themselves out and had drawn various favorite weapons-that they waved menacingly.

“You may have noticed,” Gaerond told the burly old man, “that Lylar here has brought a spear. We think it’d look better adorned with your head, as a sort of wave-about trophy, when we return to Sembia. Sembians pay well for their bodyguards-and it’s not every band of blades that can claim to have bested the legendary archwizard Elminster in battle!”

The burly oldbeard seemed to shrink a little in his seat. “Ye … ye’re joking, surely …,” he quavered.