Downshadow (11 page)

“You’re so stubborn,” Cellica said. “Haven’t you atoned enough?”

Kalen started to reply, but his words became a coughing fit. He spat blood into his hand.

“You shouldn’t worry.” He coughed more blood. “Not much longer, I think.” He took a mashed scroll from his pocker and handed it over. “Throw this out, aye?”

Cellica took the scroll—which smelled of both perfume and sweat—and frowned. “You shouldn’t push yourself like this,” she said. “Your body will only fade faster, you know.”

“I know.” He coughed. “I felt it hard tonight.” He winced, but not from the needle.

“What if Rayse calls today?” Cellica asked. She snipped off the thread with her teeth.

He stared at the table a long breath. Such pain marked his face—so many shadows that the halfling knew were only his own.

His eyes closed and he sighed. “She won’t,” he said finally.

Cellica thought she glimpsed another shadow near the window that couldn’t have been his, but it vanished when she looked more closely.

Trick of the dawn light, she thought.

Bath’s eyes narrowed. That was the only sign of unease he allowed himself—a slight squint—at her appearance. Orherwise, sirring back in his booth at the Knight ‘n Shadow after a night of drinking, an open bottle of brandy before him, rhe dwarf might have seemed perfectly at ease. No one could see the conflict inside him, which he drank to pacify. “You,” Rath said. “Me,” she replied.

The red-haired half-elf slid casually onto the bench across from him. She was quite fetchingly attired in flattering black breeches and a green doublet trimmed in gold, puffed at the throat and wrists. The lady threw her legs—long, sinuous, smooth legs—across the edge of the table and leaned back on her right hand. Her left hand, still in view, danced along her knee. Her deep gray eyes appraised him wryly.

Rath couldn’t deny a stir in his loins. Strange that she would affect him so. The curve of her hips, the lines of her face—perhaps that was simply her way. Mayhap it was the drink.

The dwarf silently inclined the bottle of brandy toward her.

“No, my thanks,” she said with a sweet smile.

He poured himself another. “You’re taking an awful risk coming to me.”

“What can I say? I’m brave.” Fayne waved to the serving lass for wine. “All passes “well in Downshadow, I trust?” Rath only stared at her silently.

When the wine came in a chipped bowl, Fayne raised it to her lips and drank it down greedily, more like a beast than a woman. Rath liked that, too.

“Aye?” Fayne blushed and adjusted her seat. “You’re wondering about me?”

“Weighing you.” Rath ran his hand across his grizzled chin. He hadn’t shaved, he realized, and took his hand away. To look anything but impeccable filled him with self-loathing. “Judging, specifically, whether you purposely arranged matters for me to meet Shadowbane. It seems very much in character.”

Fayne put a hand to her throat. “My dear” she said. “Certainly not. Why, I would never so much as go near that foul creature, even for a thousand dragons. The very idea!” She gasped in mock offense, then went back to smiling. “And have no fear of any tension between us, either: Ours was a legitimate disagreement regarding coin. We are both professionals—I bear no grudges, and I trust you do not either.”

Though she smiled broadly, her eyes betrayed nothing.

Rath shrugged. He drained the last of the brandy from the bottle and waved for another.

“You ought take care with such strong drink,” Fayne said. “Or does your dwarf stomach ward you from its ill effects?”

Ill effects, Rath mused. It would be worse if he did not drink.

The second bortle came, and he snatched it from the tavern wench with a scowl.

He hated this—hated his occasional and inconsolable desire for drink. It reminded him of his dwarf blood, and that heritage was one of the things he most hated about himself. Also failure and his urges. He hated that he could not master himself.

The need for drink had first come before he had shaved his beard and fled his homeland for the monastery hidden deep in the mountain. Training among the monks had suppressed this desire to connect with his hated blood—for a time, at least. He had drunk himself to a stupor just before he killed the masters of the monastery, took their most sacred of swords, and fled to Waterdeep. And for a while, with the blood he spilled almost as easily as brearhing, he had not felt the urges.

Until this night—until that thrice-cursed Shadowbane.

Was this the third time he would drink to excess?

“Rough eve?” Fayne asked, pointing to the empty bottles—three of them.

Hard as it was—and it was hard, indeed—Rath set the bottle back on the table and pulled his gaze away from it. He still thought about

it—craved the sweet fire on his tongue and in his belly, dulling his base impulses—but she could not see his mind.

“What do you know of it, girl?” Rath asked. “I am a master at my art—I have never been defeated, or I would be dead.” He was saying too much. It was the liquor in his stomach, saturating his blood and making him weak. Making him into a dwarf, when he should be free.

“And yet,” Fayne said, “you look like a man who bears a vendetta. Against a foe who left you alive, perhaps?”

Rath would dance to her steps no more. “What do you want?”

“The question,” Fayne said, “is more correctly, do I know what you want?”

The dwarf waved. “I want nothing.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure.” Fayne took a slip of parchment from the scrip satchel she had set on the table and showed it to him. It had a single long word on it. A name.

He read the parchment and his eyes narrowed. “You know this man?” he asked. “Not just know of him, but you know him?”

“Indeed!” She nodded. “It’s only a matter of time before I have his face, too—and I’m sure that would be worth something to you.” She reached across rhe table and laid her fingers across his wrist. “And perhaps I can think of a few other things, aye?”

Rath looked at her hand on his arm. His face remained expressionless.

“I had thought,” he said, “that your inclinations did not match mine.” He nodded to the serving lass, who was delivering a heavy tray of tankards to a group of half-ores. “From your kiss with yon wench of yesterday.”

“You noticed,” Fayne said. “Would you like to see it again— perhaps in a more intimate setting? Waterdeep is the city of coin, after all.”

“You mean—” Rath grimaced. “How disgusting.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said. “Call me… free of mind. I can do many things—even dwarves.” She winked. “Especially dwarves.”

Rath curled his lip. “Offer me coin, or begone—I’ll have nothing else of you.”

Fayne pouted. “What a pity.”

Rath drank his brandy down and poured another. Fayne took out a second parchment, this with two words written on it, and passed it across the table. He looked at the name.

“Interesting,” he said. “The first shall be my reward for this? Why?”

“This is personal,” she said. “Someone I’ve hated for a long, long time.” Her face and voice were deadly serious. “You are a professional—I do not think you could understand that.”

It was Rath’s turn to smile—yet it might have been the brandy. “You’d be surprised at what I would understand.” He chuckled. “I am very familiar with hatred.”

Fayne paused at that. “Mmm,” she said. “Well. I shall deliver your payment—as noted on that parchment—upon completion. Aught else?”

As quickly as a snake might lunge, Rath reached across the table and seized the lace at her collar, wrenching her face close to his own. Fayne went pale.

“You are afraid,” he whispered. “Why?”

Fayne blinked. Her face was calm, but her eyes were fearful. “Release me,” she said. “Release me, or—”

“Or you will strike me?” Rath smiled. “I could kill you in a heartbeat.”

To demonstrate, Rath gave her face a flick with his fingers, splitting open her upper lip. She didn’r wince, and he almost respected her for that. Almost.

He laid his other hand around her neck. “Answer my question.”

The woman licked where he had broken her lip. “Dreams,” she said.

Rath relaxed his grip. “Dreams?”

“A girl—a girl in blue fire.” Her eyes narrowed and her lip curled. “Know one?”

The dwarf sighed and released her to flop back to the bench. He leaned back, drained.

Fayne sucked her broken lip. “So you’ve caught me,” she said. “I suppose I dream of wenches after all—but that isn’t a fault, aye?” Discomfited as she was, she winked.

Rath understood something about her then: how she used allurement to fight anxiety. He smiled wryly. So he wasn’t the only one who demeaned himself in moments of weakness.

He pulled his hand away. “Within three nights,” he said, and gestured for her to depart.

If Fayne had gone then, it would have been well, but instead her eyes held him fast. She reached casually across and plucked up his hand. She rubbed it against her cheek, teasing her lips along his thumb. His arm tingled, and his hand looked blasphemously dark against her skin.

Long after she left the table, her touch lingered.

Rath folded the parchment upon which she’d named his mark and slid it into his black robe. He raised the brandy to his trembling lips, but the cool liquid tasted like ash on his tongue. He threw rhe bottle aside with a hiss.

Even drink did him no good now. She had ruined it for him.

He needed a woman, he knew, but not her. Not that faceless creature.

His sharp eyes fell on the serving lass. She had smallish breasts— well enough—and a strong, rounded backside. He wouldn’t enjoy it, he knew, but he had no choice. He wouldn’t go so far as ro say he wanred her, but he knew that he needed her.

Needed to drive his demons away—to forget.

“Girl,” he said across the tavern, and she stiffened. He raised the mostly empty bottle of brandy. “Come. Drink with me.”

He laid gold on the table.

Shadovar assassin hides among corrupt merchants!” cried a boy for the Daily Luck, hawking his broadsheet on the Street of Silks as evening fell. “Watch denies all rumors!”

“Shadovar spy rumors srupid!” called a rival broadcrier, a bob-haired girl crying the Merchant’s Friend. She stuck out her tongue at the Luck boy. “Daily Luck prints idiocy!” “Does not!” cried the boy. “Does so!”

A disgruntled Watchman came upon the two and hissed them onto the next street. They ran from him, laughing, hand in hand, and—Kalen thought—likely fell to kissing as soon as they were out of sight. Younglings. He shook his head and smiled ruefully.

“I swear to the gods, Kalen,” said Bors. “If you keep on delaying us for words with which to woo yon strumper—when hard coin will damn well do—I shall declare her the Lady Dren.”

Kalen surveyed the chapbooks just inside the shop. “Leleera likes to read.”

“I suppose we all have our bedchamber pleasures,” Bors said. “Kindly don’t share.” Bors grinned.

Kalen coughed into his hand, though it was mostly feigned. The weakness had subsided since yestereve, but he could still feel numbness throughout his body. As on any other day.

They had stopped on the way up the Street of Silks at a shop called the Curious Past, at which Kalen was a frequent customer. The business—which after more than a century was growing to be an ancient treasure in its own right—sold oddities, antiques, and chapbooks about the old world. Kalen scanned the titles of the books stacked on the table as the anxious vendor looked on.

Both were off duty that day, and as he often did on such days, Bors had invited Kalen to his favorite festhall—the Smiling Siren. Mostly, Kalen knew, Bors did so to interrogate Kalen for intimate information about Araezra. Kalen had not seen his superior that day—she had not reported for duty—but he wasn’t about to let his worry show more than was seemly.

Kalen tried to put her out of his mind. He srudied the wares laid out before him.

Though all the thirty-or-so-page books were romantic in nature, they ranged from rhe speculative (The Chained Man ofErlkazar, The Blood Queen ofQurth) to the historical (Return of the Shades, the First and Second of Shadows series), and from the salacious (Untold Privy Tales of Cormyr: The Laughing Sisters, The Wayward Witch Queen) to the outright naughty (Adulteries ofLadyAlustra:A Confessional, Seven Sisters for Seven Nights, Tortn’s Conquests; this last not a reference ro the god of justice, but a lecherous adventurer of the last century).

He also found most of Arita’s Silver Fox series, up to the eighty-page eighth volume, Fox in the Anauroch. Rumors of the upcoming ninth, Fox and the Blue Fire, had been the talk of literary circles for some months.

Kalen selected one of the books and handed the vendor five silvers. He slid the book into his satchel and adjusted the thong over his shoulder. The two wore no armor while off duty, but their black greatcoats—hallmark of the Waterdeep Guard—kept vendors from cheating them.

“Well? Which is it?” Bors winked at the vendor’s giggly daughrer.

“Aye?”

“Which masterpiece shall Leleera be enjoying this night, man?” asked Bors. “Aught with pirates, nay? I’ve heard the lasses swoon over pirates these days.”

“All due respect, sir,” Kalen said. “Can you even read?”

“Ha!” Bors clapped him on the back. “Well enough, then.”

As they walked to the Siren, a light rain began to fall on what had been a warm day, sending up dust from rhe cobblestones. It was that time of winter-turning-to-spring when the weather could not choose

how to behave. Dust swirled in a breeze that came from the west. “Sea fog tonight,” predicted Kalen.

“Ridiculous!” said Bors. He spread his hands. “You hear this, Waterdeep? Ridiculous!”

Kalen just smiled—and coughed lightly.

With the rain and the approaching eve, business slowed. The street lighters—retired Watchmen, mostly—were about their work, lifting long hooks to hang fish-oil lamps. The streets would grow crowded near the gates, which closed at dusk.

“I don’t see,” Bors said, munching an apple, “why you bother with lasses of the night, when by all accounts you could tumble a nymph like Rayse for free.”