Shadowbane: Eye of Justice

by De Bie, Erik Scott

  Yes, he had ruined her latest and best chance to find something about her past, a path that had been hidden from her since she’d absorbed Umbra’s memories back in Luskan. Perhaps that was the source of her overwhelming rage. That, or the feeling that once again, he was treating her as an inferior—with poor judgment compared to his own.

  “Mother Mystra,” she said. “What’s it going to take, Kalen Dren?”

  Something felt strange, and she shifted her fingers along a hard edge under the silk of her crimson gown. Sure enough, there was something in the secret pocket of her bodice—what Ilira had called the “murder pocket.” Myrin drew out a twice folded scrap of parchment, marveling at it. When the elf had touched her, she must have placed this note. How deft her fingers were! Just the thought made Myrin start to blush again.

  “Oh, stop it,” she said to herself.

  The note contained six words, written in an elegant, feminine hand.

  Purple Lady. Tomorrow. Midnight. Come alone.

  She read it again, excitement rising. Kalen hadn’t chased off Lady Ilira at all. Cyric burn him, she could do this on her own. But she wouldn’t be foolish about it. Nay.

  She would go prepared.

  DUSK, 26 FLAMERULE

  AY,” A GRUFF VOICE SAID. “YOU.”

  Ignoring him, Kalen leaned against a rain-weathered stone wall and stared down at his hands. They seemed clean, and yet he couldn’t help feeling that he should be wearing Myrin’s blood on his knuckles. The things he had said to her … It had been as though every bit of frustration over the last tendays—all the words he’d bottled up about Rhett and about his own feelings—had boiled over and he’d lost control. He needed time to reason this out.

  “Push on, stranger,” said the voice. “Or we’ll do the pushing for you!”

  Time was what he needed—time, and this.

  Kalen turned toward the four Fire Knives gathered in the alley behind the Rosebud Tavern with the express purpose of burning it to the ground. It seemed the innkeeper Dolarune hadn’t paid her tribute for months and was taking a stand against First Lord Jaundamicar Bleth in the name of civic fairness. Apparently, disobedience to Bleth had grown increasingly common, as the Nine Golden Swords challenged his authority in Westgate. The Fire Knives had come to teach her a lesson—her, and anyone trapped inside her establishment or the tallhouse next door.

  Kalen didn’t bother with grandiose threats or ultimatums. He stepped away from the wall, revealing Sithe’s black axe leaning against the stone where he had stood. He was glad he’d left Vindicator behind in Myrin’s garden. The sword was too pure a weapon for this business, but the ugly axe would prove just the tool.

  The men hesitated, their eyes drawn to Kalen’s armament. “That’s not him, is it?” asked one man. “The one that did Yaeshl the Ripper two nights back? Shadowbane?”

  “Can’t be,” said another. “Shadowbane carries a sword, and—”

  Kalen heard these words, but in his growing rage, their significance flew past him. He focused on the first of the assassins, poured all of his rage into that one man, and knew his enemy. He swore a silent oath to the Threefold God, raised his axe, and lunged.

  The Fire Knife barely managed to raise his short sword in a vain attempt to block. The axe sheared clean through the steel and bit into the man’s shoulder, parting his leather armor like fresh bread. Blood bloomed in the fading daylight and the man staggered away.

  His attempt to flee only redoubled Kalen’s vehemence.

  The other men drew their blades, but Kalen slashed the axe in a circle, filling the alley with gray flames that warded them back. He lunged after his sworn foe and used the axe’s haft to sweep the man’s legs out from under him. The assassin went down with a cry, and his head struck the cobblestones with a satisfying, jarring thump.

  “Next,” Kalen said.

  One of the assassins risked a thrust at his back, but gray armor appeared and deflected it. That made his decision for him. He looked over his shoulder and fixed the man’s square face and terrified green eyes in his mind. That done, he swore a new oath to the Threefold God: this man would join his companion, then the others.

  He took down this second one and the third brutally and efficiently, and reveled in doing it. His gray armor of faith drove back their strikes, and flames swirled around him to keep them at bay as he beat them down one by one. He beat the second man senseless and cut off the third man’s breathing until he stopped squirming. He had no need to kill. Even in the depths of his anger, he wouldn’t murder unnecessarily. He’d seen enough bloodshed to last several lifetimes.

  Not that he minded inflicting pain, for which Sithe’s axe was marvelously efficient.

  “Shadowbane! Mercy, please!”

  The fourth Fire Knife stared as Kalen choked his last companion into unconsciousness with the haft of Sithe’s axe. As he held the man, Kalen looked up into the last assassin’s eyes, assuring him silently that he would not escape the Threefold God’s vengeance. Terror in his eyes, the man backed away, his hands shaking so badly his twin knives clattered to the cobblestones. He turned and fled.

  The battle done, Kalen could finally think clearly. They’d seemed to recognize him, but he’d not been in Westgate for three years. Had his legend persisted so strongly for so long?

  Kalen might have gone after the man, but a shadow moved behind him. Without thinking, he let Sithe’s axe fall, seized a throwing dagger from the belt of the man he’d just knocked out, and hurled it in the same motion. The blade plunged into rough stone of the Rosebud. His eyes shifted, and he caught sight of the shadow as it danced up the wall. It skipped over the crenellations, and Kalen saw a flicker of black fabric flow out of sight onto the roof.

  He leaped, his boots flaring with tiny blue-white flames as they carried him upward. He pushed off one wall, caught the escape ladder on the tallhouse, and swung up onto the tavern roof. He’d left Sithe’s axe in the alley, but he put out his hand and summoned Vindicator in a swirl of gray flame. He felt a slight pull in the other direction, but the sword materialized regardless. Its flames illumined the roof. “Show yourself,” he said.

  A figure clad in black leathers stepped out from behind a chimney—an elf woman with dark hair and familiar golden eyes. Ilira Nathalan.

  “You.” Gray flames surrounded him, and he beckoned her forward.

  Drawn by his unwavering faith, she staggered toward him, seemingly not in control of her own limbs. Kalen drew back Vindicator in anticipation.

  Ilira smiled at him, and her face dissolved as she approached. Her body contracted into a flat image, then expanded into a hulking brute of a giant, rather than an elf.

  Startled, Kalen faltered in his aim, and Vindicator passed harmlessly through the shadow without biting into it. In the split-second of silence that passed, the shadow man gave him a look that was nigh impossible to read, but looking at him, Kalen felt a swell of pity. For himself, for the shadow—for everyone.

  Then the shadow’s fingers wrapped around his throat and lifted him into the air. The darkness strangled him even as its chilling touch sucked the life from his body. Vindicator tumbled from nerveless fingers and slipped down the shallow incline of the roof. A black leather boot trod upon the blade, keeping it from falling. Its gray flames died slowly away.

  The wearer of that boot paused, then stepped over Vindicator toward them. Kalen noticed the elf cast no shadow over the sword, even though the moon was full. Her shadow was too busy strangling him. “I was hoping,” Ilira said, “that we could finish the conversation we began with those significant glances.”

  Kalen tried to choke out a reply, but the shadow’s hold wouldn’t permit him enough air.

  “Oh, no,” Ilira said. “I’ll talk. You just listen.”

  Although he recognized her easily, Ilira hardly looked like she had earlier today. Instead of an elegant gown, she wore black leathers buckled down the sides of her arms and up the sides of her legs with a score of straps each. Rather than
the noblewoman’s hair style, she wore her blue-black hair in a single long braid. She bore no weapon he could see, but if Kalen remembered anything about her from a year ago in Waterdeep, he knew she needed no other. Her touch alone could kill. Last but most significant, she wore a black silk mask over her eyes and brow: a mask of night.

  “I’m in the city looking for someone, and you’re obviously looking for someone yourself,” she said. “If we can find our respective quarries without finding one another, that would be well enough by me. If not …” She gestured.

  The shadow lifted Kalen in both hands and slammed him down onto the roof.

  “You should stay out of my way,” Ilira said. “It’d be best for both of us.”

  Kalen coughed. “Stay away from Myrin,” he managed, “and I will.”

  Ilira opened her mouth as though to reply, then paused. Ultimately, she shook her head. “I cannot,” she said. “She is … well, you’ve a spellscar as well. You must feel it.”

  Kalen knew with a start what she meant. The way he felt around Myrin—the way his spellscar sang in her presence—he had thought their connection unique. Did Ilira feel it, too?

  “I have no desire to hurt you,” Ilira said, “but if you force my hand, I’ll not hesitate.”

  “Then kill me now.” Kalen coughed, struggling to breathe. “Because we will fight again. On that, you’ve my word. I swear it by the Threefold God—by Helm, Tyr, and Torm.”

  From their first meeting a year ago, Kalen had found Ilira nearly impossible to read, but his use of those three names gave her pause, as though she’d heard them assembled that way before.

  “Very well,” she said, and she turned away. The shadow squeezed again, harder this time.

  The chilling touch only lingered a moment, before Ilira uttered a sharp hiss. She stared at something Kalen could not see. At her signal, the shadow ceased its assault and slinked away.

  Ilira gave him a last lingering look. “See you again, Saer Shadow.” Then she was gone.

  Kalen tried to rise, but he could not catch his breath. His spellscar raged in his body, making his chest feel like dead stone and his lungs burn. He lay struggling to breathe, expecting to fail. He might once have tried to heal himself with his divine power, but it didn’t work that way any longer. He was a destroyer, not a savior.

  As consciousness fled, he thought he saw a man in black standing over him, Vindicator in hand. A paladin without faith—an avenger without a cause. Shadowbane.

  “You,” he said. “You killed Rhett. And Vaelis. And Cellica. And all the rest—”

  He might as well have been talking to himself.

  The sword rose, catching the faint threads of moonlight. Then, before Shadowbane could bring it down, gray flames surrounded the blade and it vanished from his hands. His head rose, as though to acknowledge a challenge.

  The shadowed figure receded as Kalen’s vision failed, and darkness took him.

  Far away, another pair met under different but no less deadly circumstances.

  The tension in the chamber was not obvious to an onlooker. If anyone could see the gold-skinned elf with his feet perched gamely on the thick darkwood desk for what he was—and he’d ensured that no one could—that might have provided a hint as to the danger in the room. But the elf called Lilten wore illusions as comfortably and plentifully as other men wore layers of wool in cold weather, and so he seemed completely and totally at ease. Dressed in the eminently fashionable and colorful garb of a dandy, Lilten wore a bemused smile.

  From his mirth, one might imagine the next few moments did not threaten hundreds of people—perhaps the entire city of Westgate. What purpose had the game, if it lacked stakes?

  An exotic game board lay on the desk at his feet, fully arrayed with tiny carved figures that demonstrated astonishing attention to detail. He’d shaped them himself, over the years—both the figures themselves and the players they represented. The game was coroniir in Elvish, or—roughly, “crowns” for its resemblance to a Crown War battle between two coronals—and was the root of what humans called lanceboard or castles. Like all great things in Faerûn, the elves had invented it first, then humans had brutalized it. In his youth in old Siluvanede, his people had called it siadiir, and he remembered he had always defeated his older sister when they played. Ah, how he didn’t miss her after that business with Myth Drannor. Alas.

  On one side stood his pieces of ivory and on the other stood those of his opponent, carved in obsidian. No other substance could quite capture his would-be nemesis: obsidian was darker than midnight, and yet it cast its own distorted sort of reflection. Someone had to stand in front of that dark mirror, and he supposed it might as well be him.

  Ironic. Over his long life, he had worn many cloaks, but none of them white.

  He did not have to wait long, because his opponent appeared shortly, stepping out of the shadows near the wardrobe. Long accustomed to such a mode of travel, the elf merely smiled and extended the bottle of elverquisst he held in his left hand. “Drink?”

  The creature in the shadows—which may have been something like a man once—narrowed his black, gleaming eyes. “You called me here, Lilianviaten Changecloak, and I have come.” He drew a rapier of pure blackness and pointed it at the elf’s golden face. “Tell me why I should not kill you this very instant.”

  “Oh, come, Kirenkirsalai, I think we’re better friends than that, yes?” Lilten said. “I’m too clever for you to kill, and your blundering is too entertaining for me to do the reverse.”

  Kire lowered his blade. “Then why have you called me?”

  “I thought you might indulge me in one of my favorite games from my youth.” Lilten swept his hand across the lanceboard. “Apologies it’s not sava, as I daresay you would prefer.”

  Kire picked up one of the obsidian pieces and turned it over in his fingers. “You would play games with me, Changecloak?”

  “We are already playing, my old friend, and have been for some time,” Lilten said. “We have desires that contradict each other, and over the last century we have worked at cross-purposes to no good effect. You came close to your goal in Waterdeep, but the knight in shadow foiled you. Then your clumsy bounty in Luskan, and now the inept way you manipulate the Nine Golden Swords—tsk, tsk, dear boy.”

  “Not a boy.” Kire closed his fist around the carved piece and ground it to sand. “You know what I want. If you would only stand aside, I would have her, and all would be well.”

  “As you say,” Lilten replied. “But surely we can play this as men—”

  “Shar piss on you and your game.” Kire struck the table, knocking some of the pieces over, then swept half the army of white and black across to shatter against the far wall. “Step into my path, Changecloak, and however many centuries you have over me, I will end you. I will bathe in your soiled blood and leave your desiccated carcass at my feet.” And with that, he vanished, dancing back into the shadows as through an open door.

  “How rude.” Lilten wiped elverquisst off his handsome face. “It’s millennia I have over you, not centuries.”

  Lilten rose from the chair, ready to go, but his eye fell on the lanceboard. His lovingly crafted pieces lay scattered and mostly broken, but a few had survived the shadow man’s wrath. There was a white armathor—“knight,” in human parlance—and a white piece humans usually called “sorceress,” but he knew by its ancient Elvish name: Srinshee.

  His focus fell, however, on the black reaver: a female elf that rose in a leap, two blades drawn, her long tail of hair whirling out behind her. Many ages ago, when he’d been a boy in lands quite unlike those of Faerûn in the Year of Deep Water Drifting, this piece had been called the savalir, or “murderer,” and was the Coronal’s royal assassin. Lilten had always earned praise from his opponents for how well he used the murderer.

  “Aye, my love. You simply cannot help yourself.” He set the black reaver on the board. “You have already begun breaking them all apart.”

  PART THR
EE:

  SHIFTING ALLIANCES

  A dance of treachery and of taking sides, the waltz called Shifting Alliances pits first the lords against the ladies, then mixes all anew. Madness, naturally, ensues.

  Catalan the Mad

  Waterdhavian Etiquette: A Guide,

  Published in the Year of the Plotting Priests (1458 DR)

  MIDNIGHT, 27 FLAMERULE

  LONG BEFORE THEY CAME CLOSE, MYRIN HEARD THE music of the Purple Lady Tavern and Festhall filling the warm Westgate night. The dancing had spilled out into the street, and men and women pressed against one another and swayed in time. Braziers blazed to keep the porch and alley warm, coating the dancers with a thin sheen of sweat. The total effect was like something out of a temple of Liira, goddess of the dance, or perhaps Sharess, goddess of lust.

  “Er,” Brace said at her side. “Not a complaint, but are you sure about this?”

  “You’re not going to turn goblin on me and run?”

  “A gentleman walks, never runs, but I take your meaning, Lady Myrin,” he said. “And in point of fact, I would not be fleeing, but rather …”

  Myrin smiled slyly. “And pass up the chance to see Lady Nathalan again?”

  That got him. Brace bowed in silent acknowledgment of her superior rhetoric.

  In truth, Myrin wasn’t sure about any of this. She’d have felt better with a dose of Kalen’s chiding, but he hadn’t come back the previous night. She’d come to regret the harsh words she’d thrown at him—particularly blaming him for Rhett’s disappearance. Now she didn’t know how to feel. She both wanted him back and hoped he’d stay away.

  Either way, until he did reappear, she would just have to do things without him, and that meant confronting Lady Ilira on her own. She had to find out what she could.

  Shrouded in sheer purple curtains, the revelry inside the Purple Lady dwarfed the dancing and flirting outside. The festhall was packed to the rafters with dancers, jesters, and romancers. Stunning wait staff in diaphanous purple robes picked their way through the crowd of folk who kissed, caressed, fondled, and did all sorts of other exciting things to each other. Unmoving statues attired in daring gowns (or less) dotted the crowd, and Myrin took them to be fashion dummies similar to those she had seen a year ago in the Menagerie in Waterdeep. When one moved, however, she realized they were real people: servants of the festhall who shifted to show their gowns in all their glory. Surrounding all was an ear-splitting wall of sound fostered by a band of dark-skinned Chultans who pounded a series of tribal drums and blew resonant tones through long trumpets carved of horns.