Downshadow

by Erik Scott De Bie

  Rath had never considered going to either of those cesspools, and he had no drive to dig or mine. These two did not look like builders or diggers—more like fighters. Foreigners, he decided—sellswords or adventurers, the kind who itched for trouble. He could see it in their bearing and in their confident glares. Besides, had they been Waterdhavian, they might have heard of the beardless, robed dwarf who stalked Downshadow and thus known better than to bother him.

  The beardless dwarf, for true, he mused. He hadn’t thought of himself as a dwarf in some time—not since he had shaved his beard on his twentieth winter solstice, forty years gone.

  “I don’t like being ignored,” Blackbeard said finally, unable to hold back his anger. “You get on your feet, or Moradin guide me, I’ll cut your throat where you sit.” He drew his knife.

  The red-bearded dwarf gave the same wheezing giggle and reached for his own steel.

  Rath opened his mouth to speak, but a murmured “sorry” stole the dwarves’ attention. The serving lass with her bright red hair and high skirt came and left his ale, sweeping up the coppers he’d set on the table. Rath thanked her without looking up—without paying her the slightest attention. The other dwarves ogled her, as sellswords are wont, and Rath felt queasy.

  “You going to say something?” asked Blackbeard. “Or am I going to say it for you?”

  At that, Rath had to accept that they weren’t going to go away. He took up his tankard and sipped. Nothing for it, he thought, but to deal with the situation.

  “Your Moradin,” he said softly over his tankard, “weeps for his people.”

  The dwarves looked surprised at the sound of his gentle voice. “Care to say that again, soft-chin?” said Blackbeard, his voice dangerous.

  Rath set his ale on the table and folded his hands. “Do you know why so many of your gods have faded and died since the world before?”

  The two dwarves stared. Redbeard uttered a nervous giggle that died halfway through.

  “It is because of faith like yours—that of weak, unquestioning dwarves,” said Rath. “The gods thrive upon courage, and when you fear the truth, the gods become weak.”

  “What?” The black-bearded dwarf was aghast, and the other’s face was turning red as his beard. “How dare you?”

  “You bluster and boast, but I see fear in your eyes—cowardice that would shame your fathers. You have never questioned your heritage, but accepted it without thought, and so you do not know what it is to be a dwarf. I know this, and I choose not to accept it. You …” Rath looked at them directly for the first time, “you do not deserve to be dwarves. You are nothing.”

  His speech had exactly the effect he had expected—expected, not merely hoped for. Rath was not a dwarf given to hope.

  The black-bearded dwarf drew his dagger and spat at Rath, hitting his tankard. “You beardless thin-blood,” he snarled. “You take that back, or you draw and fight me.”

  Redbeard giggled again—malevolently.

  Rath picked up his tainted tankard and looked at it distastefully. He made no move to draw his sword—sacred to his order—from the gold-leafed scabbard at his side.

  “It is simply the truth,” he replied.

  Blackbeard growled low like a murderous dog. “You insult your blood, smooth-face. Take it back!” He prodded at Rath with his blade. “Take it!”

  “As you wish,” he murmured.

  Rath flicked his half-filled tankard in the air to draw their eyes. They looked.

  In a blur of motion, Rath twisted the dagger out of the black-bearded dwarf’s hand and plunged it—to the hilt—into his companion’s right lung. Redbeard looked down at the hilt sticking out of his ribs and his giggle turned into a wet cough.

  Blackbeard just watched dumbly as the tankard fell and clattered to the floor, splitting open and sending ale over his boots.

  The dwarf looked mutely at his unexpectedly empty hand, then at Rath, then at his companion, who gaped down at his injury. As if on cue, the red-bearded dwarf’s eyes rolled up in their sockets, and he slumped in his chair.

  “Really,” Rath said. “Why would you stab your companion like that?”

  The dwarf looked at him again, eyes wide, and they went even wider when Rath smiled. It was not a pretty smile—handsome enough, but cold and sharp as drawn steel. The dwarf didn’t bother to catch his ally but turned and ran for the stairs.

  Trembling hands pawed at his side. Rath glanced down at the panting, wheezing dwarf and looked at him indifferently. The dwarf, mouthing pleas for help that went unanswered, fell to the floor with a wet burble that might have been a laugh.

  Rath waved for more ale.

  “Here’s for the tankard—and the blood,” he said, pressing silver into the terrified serving woman’s palm.

  In a secluded corner, behind the half-closed velvet curtain drawn for private dealings, a pair of gray eyes set in a feminine half-elf face sparkled as they watched, with some bemusement, the beardless dwarf defending himself against his assailants. A trifle unsubtle, that one, but some matters did not demand subtlety.

  “That,” said her patron, indicating her breast with one languid, silk-gloved finger, “is a passing fair brooch.”

  “It pleases?” Fayne ran her delicate fingers over the edges of the dragon-shaped brooch. “I just obtained it today. Had to elude the fastest red-haired chit of a guard, but I managed it.”

  She went back to watching the beardless dwarf, and she giggled when he drove one antagonist to the ground and scared the other away with a glance. Hesitant tavern-goers stepped forward to recover the bleeding dwarf—Rath did not so much as acknowledge their presence.

  That sort of man, Fayne thought, could be very helpful in certain situations. She would have to see about acquiring hold of his strings—coin-pouch or breeches. Either. Both.

  “Whence?” Her patron pointed at the brooch.

  Time for business, it seemed. Fayne turned to him. “A bumbling old fool of a merchant up on the Dragon,” she said. “I’ve been robbing him blind for two tendays now.”

  “Different faces?” Her patron’s tone was mild.

  “What am I, dull? Of course.” She rolled her eyes. “Art is pointless if you don’t use it.”

  “Quite right.”

  Her patron rubbed at his cheek, where she could see two small scratches that were the only flaw on his otherwise smooth, ever-bemused face. His elf cheekbones were thin and high, his nose sharp without being aquiline, and his eyes a rich gold that matched the soft hue of his skin and his deeper golden hair. He wore a fashionable doublet and coat, rich but not attention grasping, and several rings over his white silk gloves. Each high, pointed ear bore several jewels, and though a great flounce of lace hid it, she knew he wore a thin silver chain around his throat with a locket that she’d never seen him open.

  He bore no weapon, but Fayne knew he needed no such thing.

  “So to business,” Fayne said. “Who shall I ruin this time? Another lordling, perhaps? You’ll read about the Roaringhorn girl on the morrow.” She smiled at the memory.

  He nodded. “Someone more important.” Plucking a pink quill from nowhere—it might have come from his sleeve or from the air—he wrote three words, two short, one longer, on a scrap of parchment, without benefit of ink. This he pushed across the table to her.

  “Who—?” Fayne furrowed her brow in thought. Then her eyes widened. “You don’t mean it.” Her hands trembled in her excitement.

  He straightened his gloves. “You’ve prepared for this for some time, yes?”

  “Decades,” she said. “Suppose that doesn’t mean much to you. Just a wink of an eye.”

  He smiled and handed her a scroll bound with a burgundy leather thong and his seal, a silver shooting star surrounded by a ring of tiny flames.

  “I’ll do it.” She stuffed the instructions into her bodice. “Besha’s tits, I’d do it for free.”

  He put a hand up, and she froze as though he’d smitten her with a binding spell.
“Have a care upon which goddess’s bosom you swear, dear one,” he said. “And mind: as much as you’ve looked forward to this, take care.” He slid his fingers along her cheek. “Do not grow careless.”

  She smiled. “You know me—I am the picture of care.”

  He didn’t look convinced. “I am very familiar with hatred, my little witch,” he said. “And I know well the damage it can cause. Do not let it control you.”

  She closed her eyes and laughed. “I haven’t spent half a century sculpting myself to fail now. Don’t—” She looked up, but he was gone as though he had never been there.

  Fayne sniffed. His abrupt comings and leavetakings had startled her in her youth, but then she’d started to wonder how to do it herself. She hadn’t quite mastered that power—yet.

  She put her small belt satchel on the table and waved for ale. The serving woman nodded and held up three fingers. Fayne shrugged, took out a small mirror, a quill and ink, and a bit of parchment, and began writing.

  When next Fayne looked up, the woman was standing over her, hands folded in front of her apron. “Aye, lady?”

  She was a pretty thing, the serving lass, with hair that fell in ruby ringlets to her midback. Fayne liked her looks—had worn such herself, once upon a tenday.

  “Take this”—Fayne pressed the note into the girl’s fingers, along with a disk of polished platinum—“and a bottle of your best amber brandy to yon beardless gentle.”

  The young woman looked where Fayne pointed and blanched. “You don’t mean … Arrath Vir, aye? Oh, lady … unwise, methinks.”

  “What?” Fayne flicked blonde hair out of her eyes. “He’s not one for the ladies?”

  The serving lass shook her head, then slid into the booth opposite her. “’tis said he’s a mystic or some such, heartless and cruel. Hails from a temple of some sort of … emptiness? Void? Sommat the like. Only”—she leaned closer to speak softer—“only he tired of his brethren, killed ’em all, and now he sells his sword for coin. He’d slit your granddam’s throat for a copper nib. Him, or one of the Downshadow folk what worship the ground he treads.”

  “Mmm,” Fayne said. “Sounds perfect.” She could feel her heart in her throat and a heat in her belly. “I wonder at his skill with his blade—perhaps I’ll sample it myself.”

  The woman didn’t look convinced. “‘Ware, goodlady—his in’t the sort you ought toy with. And his taste—” She looked down at Fayne’s clothes and bit her lip.

  Fayne understood. Beneath her greatcoat, she wore the immodest working clothes—low-cut, high-slit—one might expect of a Dock Ward dancer. The shirt was frilly, the vest cheap, and the skirt revealed more than it hid: the wares of a lady of negotiable virtue at best. In truth, the crass garb did ride Fayne’s rather fine curves and lines very well—at least, in the body she’d made for herself with her flesh-shaping ritual.

  She’d just come from scandalizing one Sievers Stormont in a Dock tavern, luring him into just the sort of irresponsible play that would cast a pall on his upward-bound older brother, Larr Stormont. Not that she had any idea why—she trusted her patron to keep his own counsel regarding the cut-and-thrust of the nobility (and of those who yearned to join them, like Stormont). This, of course, hadn’t stopped her from spending a night in the elder Stormont’s bed and acquiring evidence that led her to believe he was a Masked Lord.

  Which, of course, only helped in writing her next tale for the Minstrel—one of Waterdeep’s most caustic, sarcastic, and thus widely read broadsheets. A lass has to earn a living, she thought, and if she did it by ruining the wealthy and self-important, then so be it!

  The serving woman was staring at her, Fayne realized. For a reply, and yet, something more …

  “I like your hair.” Fayne leaned across the table and fingered the lass’s red curls. Then, impulsively, she kissed the woman on the lips. Then: “Go to, go to! Enough eyes on my chest.”

  Blushing fiercely, stammering some kind of reply, the serving lass hurried off.

  Fayne put the quill and ink away and looked in the silver mirror. She pulled from her belt a thin wand of bone and waved it across her forehead. Her blonde hair shifted into a strawberry red, then a vivid scarlet.

  There. Just like the servant’s. Only—there. Fayne’s hair shortened until it just kissed the tips of her shoulders. Perfect.

  Still looking in the mirror, she pressed the wand to her cheek. A scar crept onto her face: not caused by the wand, but rather revealed by it. The wand peeled the magic back.

  She remembered that day. A thumb to the right, and she wouldn’t be sitting there at that moment.

  “Oh yes, bitch,” Fayne said. “I remember you—I remember you quite well.”

  THREE

  Shadowbane crept through a Downshadow passage, taking great care to attract no notice. He stole past natives as quietly as a ghost, leaving barely a footprint.

  Huts and lean-tos crowded Undermountain’s stale interior, packed into ancient chambers like the carcasses of freshly cleaned game in a butcher’s window. The structures were built mostly of bones, harvested cave mushrooms, and scraps scavenged from above. The folk rarely stayed in one place long, skulking from chamber to chamber to avoid the underworld’s inherent dangers. The knight in the gray cloak picked his way between the huts and barriers like a wraith.

  Cook fires released greasy smoke into the air and coalesced at the ceiling. There, it escaped through holes and cracks and dispersed into the night above. Visitors to Waterdeep often claimed that the streets smoked, but they did not know why.

  Long ago, in the old world, heroes and monsters had struggled in death-dances in these very halls. Now life filled the place: folk too scarred or poor to live in the light above. The last century had seen an influx of warriors, sellswords, treasure seekers, and what many might deprecatingly call adventurers, all of them with more prowess than coin. Waterdeep required coin, so they lived in Downshadow, where the only requirement was survival.

  Downshadow was far from healthy, and even farther from pleasant. As he slipped through a chamber the width of a dagger-toss, Shadowbane nudged against something wet and cold near the door, and he stepped quietly back. The corpse of a hobgoblin, its face and snout twisted in terror, sat at his feet, the marks of three dagger wounds livid in its naked chest. The knight stepped over the body and continued stalking through the tunnels, cowl pulled low.

  Downshadow was a complex, interwoven system of warrens in passageways and chambers, only one of which held any kind of permanent encampment. The southernmost cavern of the complex, it had once been a breeding and warring ground for monsters, but the adventurers who moved in had cleared most of them out. The newcomers built shacks and shanty huts that huddled against walls or stalagmites until the place resembled a clump of city. Perhaps a thousand souls lived there—the population ever shifting as would-be heroes braved the lower halls of Undermountain, which still held hungry creatures that skittered and stalked.

  Shadowbane paused to consider Downshadow “proper.” The shanty town was an unpleasant reflection of what Waterdeep could become, were it sacked and burned by a marauding army and rebuilt by bitter, impoverished survivors.

  Once he gained the smoky interior of the great cavern, Shadowbane shifted his travel to the walls, rather than the floor, swinging between familiar handholds and stalactites. Downshadow was quiet this night—many of its inhabitants gone to the world above for the hours they thought their due. Climbing allowed him to survey the most dangerous part of the underground world from above—safer and largely unnoticed as he looked for trouble.

  Trouble was why he had come—why he came every few nights.

  The great cavern was the first area settled in Undermountain, and Downshadow’s reach had expanded from there, gradually encroaching on the monsters year by year. Those who lived nearest the surface made some attempt at civilization, forming tribes built on mutual protection. Those who could make food from magic did so for the benefit of their tribes. Other f
ood came from harvested mushrooms, slain monsters, thieves working above, or from trade with the blackhearted merchants who visited below.

  The tents and lean-tos hosted exceptionally seedy taverns, dangerous food markets, and shops that traded equally in hand-crafted wares and stolen goods. These establishments sometimes disappeared at a heartbeat’s notice. Some of the folk had become sufficiently organized to establish a fire patrol of spellcasters, though residents had to bribe them for protection.

  As in Waterdeep above, trade ran the city, but barter in Downshadow took the form of illicit services and stolen goods, rather than hard coin.

  Most folk of Waterdeep had never seen Downshadow—they knew it mostly from hushed tales in taverns, and repeated those stories to frighten children into obedience. The Guard ventured down on occasion, but only at need and only in force. Guardsmen hated such assignments, preferring tasks like gate watch or midden duty. More than a few merchants made a killing in these halls—literally and figuratively. When surface folk spoke of “driving the thieves and swindlers underground,” they weren’t speaking metaphorically.

  One of those thieves, Shadowbane meant to visit that night. Ellis Kolatch was his name, and in Downshadow he brought back clothes and jewels he’d sold on the surface a tenday before, then had stolen cheaply. He met with his hired thugs in an alcove not far from the lower half of the Knight ’n Shadow tavern.

  “Threefold God,” Shadowbane murmured, running his fingers over the hilt of his bastard sword. It bore an inscribed eye in the palm of a raised gauntlet. “Your will be done.”

  As though in answer, Shadowbane felt that same ancient weakness inside him—the numbness in his flesh that gave him power and stole life from him little by little.

  He did not beg for strength, for he would not beg.

  Never again.