Downshadow Read Online Free PDF

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