Downshadow Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 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.”

THREE
    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