Erik de Bie: Downshadow

"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 Stormonr 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 causedhy 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."

Shadowbane ciept 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 rhrough 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 food 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.