That boy had been Kalen Dren, the second Shadowbane. And his first vow had been never to beg for anything, ever again.

  And how sorely that vow had been tested, so many times.

  A cough formed in his chest, and he fought it down. His illness—though he pretended it was worse than it was, in truth—would always haunt him. He had the spellplague to thank for that. From birth, Kalen had borne the spellplague’s mark: a spellscar, the priests called it—a different blessing and curse for every poor soul who earned or inherited one. For Kalen, it was toughened flesh and resistance to pain. Any warrior would wish for such a thing but for its accompanying curse: a body increasingly losing feeling, one that would eventually perish.

  Justice for the sins of a poorly spent youth, he mused.

  He watched as the sea fog shifted, taking on color, radiance, and form. Like much of the spellplague’s legacy, this was a rare and unexplained occurrence. Soon, the glowing fog would take on shapes and tell a story, though none could say why.

  Kalen eased himself away from the banner pole atop Gilliam’s and half-ran, half-slid down the domed roof. Using his momentum, he bent low and sprang from the edge. The magic in his boots—one of the few items he’d managed to bring from Westgate—carried him across the alley and up to the roof of the next building, a tallhouse.

  He ran along the crenellated edge, leaping over potted plants and a few squatters who sheltered in the corners of the roofs. Running the rooftops was safer than the street. A seagull, borne on the lazy breezes, matched him, and he balanced on the ledge beside it.

  He remembered running the roofs of Westgate with his teacher in the church of the Eye: the half-elf Levia, old enough to have borne him, but who looked as young as he. Her skill was not martial in nature, but divine—priestly magic. Healing and the like.

  Kalen knew little of such magic. Aside from his healing touch and the protection given a paladin, he asked little of his threefold god—and begged for nothing. He’d once broken a man’s nose for calling Levia a spell-beggar, but he was not sure if he’d done it for her honor or his.

  He wished Levia had come to Waterdeep. She was family, Kalen thought. Levia, the only mother he’d ever known—and Cellica, his sister in spirit if not in blood.

  Not like the rest of their wayward faith. Kalen did not consider such fools to be his kin.

  Gedrin had created the Eye, bringing crusaders from the ranks of the Night Masks—a powerful thieves’ guild at the time, ruled by a vampire called the Night King. Gedrin had burst forth from the Masks like a hero digging out of the belly of a beast, and aided in ousting the dark masters of Westgate. Thereafter, they had set out to cleanse the world of evil in all its forms. Gedrin was a zealot, and his faith inspired hundreds to worship the threefold god.

  But in time, the purity of the Eye faded, its quest tainted by flawed men in the church—men who used their thiefly skills for personal gain, rather than justice. Gedrin left the Eye, after spending so much of his life in the doomed church, and Kalen, years later, had followed in his footsteps. Both had taken Vindicator, hoping to put its power to use elsewhere.

  Kalen felt lost without the sword. It had set him on Gedrin’s quest to redeem the world. And though a part of him needed it back, another large part of him approved of its loss. If he had not been worthy of it, was it not the threefold god’s will that it choose another wielder?

  A low sound perked up his ears. Kalen caught a spire, whirled, and pressed himself flat against the stone, closing his eyes. He heard it again: sobbing. A female voice—somewhere near.

  He looked and saw a cloud of mists that glowed blue. That was odd—he had seen colors and distortions in the sea fog before, but never blue. And he recognized the hue—a sickly yet powerful azure, like the inner shade of a flame just before it turned white hot. It was spellplague blue, he realized, just like the spellplague that had changed him.

  Unease crept into his fingers, but he heard the sob—more like a plea for aid—again and leaped from the roof. If the Eye would claim him this night, then so be it.

  The blue fog was close, only two rooftops away. The near building was a squat noble villa with an open-air garden in the center, and he ran along the wall to stay aloft. Blue fog swirled around him, threatening, and he felt a drive to step forward, to face an unknown peril that might be the end of him. Was it not better to fall now, if Vindicator had abandoned him?

  He sprang into the alley, rolling with the fall to come up on his feet, watchsword drawn. It occurred to him only then that carrying the blade would be damning if any Watchmen were to see him, but too late.

  The mists seemed empty, but he heard the sob again. The blue glow crackled, electric, deeper in the alley, and he stalked forward.

  The mist took on shapes, and Kalen fell into guard, both hands on his sword.

  Ghosts appeared out of the mist. He saw two figures—slim men who might have been elves—standing together in a room in some distant land. They were arguing—even fighting, waving misty limbs like blades. Then one vanished into the shadows near a leaning stack of crates. The remaining figure turned to Kalen, smiling.

  Another figure appeared out of the mist, this one a woman, her features blurred. The mist man turned to greet her. Without warning, he thrust his fist into her chest and she fell, hands clenched.

  Kalen felt a surge of anger, but these were just visions. They meant nothing.

  The mist man stared at him. “The sword,” the mist man said with a too-wide smile.

  Kalen had never heard that the visions of Waterdeep could speak. It chilled him.

  Lightning crackled again, blue and vivid, and Kalen turned to search for its source.

  When he looked back, both mist men were there, looking at him with hunger. They approached him, hands rising, and he realized they meant to attack. He retreated, but his back was against the wall of the alley.

  “Away.” As Levia had taught him, Kalen let the threefold god shine against them. He began to glow, warding off the walking dead. “Away!”

  But either his power was too weak or these were not undead, for they came forward. Kalen saw the woman climbing to her feet, a bleeding hole where her heart should be.

  “The sword,” the mist whispered. “The sword that was stolen—the crusader has come!”

  Kalen thought, for one horrible moment, that they were talking about him. But these were images of long ago, if not entirely random manifestations.

  He struck with his watchsword, but the mortal steel passed clean through them, disturbing the mist with its wind. Their hands passed through his guard and leathers as though they were not there. He felt ice inside his flesh.

  “Away,” he tried again, but his voice was hoarse.

  Weakness was taking him, and he could not even flee. The woman in the mist appeared over him, and he thought she was not beautiful but terrible—she was death embodied.

  Then the alley was bathed in blue light. Kalen felt the hairs on his neck and arms rise and he threw himself down just as lightning crackled through the air, scorching the stone buildings. A figure stood before him, surrounded in blue electricity and fire. It was the fiery woman he had seen in Downshadow only a few nights before—whose appearance had saved him from death at a half-orgre’s gnarled fingers.

  He averted his eyes to keep from being blinded, and the mist creatures fell back. He could see them, just vaguely, bowing and scraping like servants, almost … reverent.

  Then the light went out, and the woman—no longer flaming but still glowing—stood shakily in the center of the alley. Her dizzy eyes met his, and he saw they were startlingly blue.

  “Szasha,” she said in a tongue he did not know. “Araka azza grazz?” Then she sagged.

  Leaving his watchsword on the cobblestones in his lunge, Kalen caught her just before she hit the ground. She was so light, barely more than a girl, and little more than skin, bone, and … blood.

  His gauntlets came away sticky. The girl was naked but for a slimy coating of what looked like black and green blood. He searched for wounds but could find none. Her hair, plastered in the sickly gore, was blue. Everything about her was blue: hair, lips, even her skin.

  Then Kalen realized her skin was not blue, but rather covered in glowing tattoos. Runes, he thought, though he did not know them. Even as he noted them, the tattoos began to fade, shrinking into her deeply tanned flesh like ink on wet parchment. He blinked, watching as lattices of arcane symbols vanished, little by little.

  Kalen didn’t know what to do, but he couldn’t leave her.

  Her arms tightened around his neck and her face pressed into his chest. “Gisz vaz.”

  “Very well,” he replied, not having the faintest idea what she’d said.

  He took off his cloak and wrapped her in it. Then he held her tightly, looked around for mist figures—the fog had begun to disperse—and started off at a trot.

  Cellica’s stew—left to simmer until morningfeast—was bubbling when he returned to the tallhouse.

  “You’re back early,” the halfling said when he came through the open window. She had risen from her cot, a towel wrapped around her little body, but she didn’t look sleepy.

  “Did I wake you?” Kalen took care not to hit the strange woman’s head against the sill.

  “I never sleep when you’re—” Cellica’s eyes widened. “Who’s that?”

  “No idea.”

  Kalen strode into Cellica’s room and laid his burden on the halfling’s cot.

  “She’s …” The halfling trailed off, touching the sleeping woman’s cheek. “She’s bone cold! Out! Out! I’ll take care of this.”

  Kalen felt Cellica’s will take hold of him and wandered out while she laid blanket after blanket over the sleeping woman. The stranger’s uncertain frown became a blissful smile.

  Gods, Kalen felt tired. His limbs ached and his armor stank of sweat. The girl was light, but he’d carried her all the way across the city. In that time, her azure tattoos had all but disappeared. Her breathing seemed normal, and she slept peacefully.

  “Why lasses run around the night streets naked in this day and age, I’ll never understand,” Cellica said. “Younglings! Hmpf.”

  “Mmm,” Kalen returned. He was rubbing his eyes. Gods, he was tired.

  “Who is she?” the halfling asked. Rather than being upset, she was inspecting the woman critically, fascinated. “Your hunting extends to naked ladies in addition to villains and dastards?”

  Kalen murmured a reply that did not befit a paladin. He traipsed off to his cot, shedding his leathers as he went, and slumped into bed. He was asleep two breaths later.

  It only briefly occurred to him to wonder where he’d left his watchsword.

  CHAPTER 13

  Fayne slammed her fist on the table in the little chamber in Downshadow.

  “I should have known.” She spat in most unladylike fashion on the array of cards. “Useless. Utterly useless. I should have known you were a perverse little fraud, after you fed me all the drivel about the doppelganger conspiracy.”

  B’Zeer the Seer—the tiefling who ran this small, illicit “diviner’s council” in a hidden chamber in Downshadow, of which only those of questionable honor knew—spread his many-ringed hands. “Divination is an imprecise art, my sweet Satin, and requires much patience.”

  “Oh, orc shit,” Fayne said. “Divination hasn’t worked right in Waterdeep for a hundred years.” She shoved her scroll of notes in her scrip satchel. “I don’t know what I was thinking, coming to a pimply faced voyeur like you.”

  B’Zeer ran his fingers over the cards and furrowed his brow. His milky white eyes, devoid of pupils, scanned the tabletop, and he scratched at one of his horns. “Now wait, I think I see aught, now. Something to do with your father … your need to please him … perhaps in—”

  “I don’t need some peeping, pus-faced pervert to tell me about my father, thanks,” Fayne said. “I was asking about my dreams—you know, the girl in blue fire?”

  “Ah yes, B’Zeer sees and understands. I believe—”

  “With all due respect—and that’s none—piss off and die. I have business to attend to this night, and a tale for the Minstrel to deliver to print.”

  Fayne exploded from her chair, but a hand clamped around her wrist. She looked down, eyes narrow. “Let go of me, or I will end you.”

  “This may be a touch indelicate, what I ask now,” the seer said. “But what of my coin?”

  Fayne glared. “No hrasting service, no hrasting coin.”

  “Call it an entertainment fee,” he said. “We all have to eat.”

  “Piss,” Fayne said, “off.”

  He moved faster than a shriveled little devil man should be able to, darting forward and seizing her throat to thrust her against the chamber wall. She saw steel in his other hand.

  “You give me my coin,” he said, “or I’ll take it out of you elsewise.”

  She should have expected this. Most women in Downshadow were of negotiable virtue. It was simply part of living coin-shy. Particularly amusing were those monsters that took the form of women and revealed themselves only in a passionate embrace. Justice, Fayne thought.

  She smiled at B’Zeer dangerously.

  “Hark, Seer—it isn’t bound to happen,” she said. “I think, if you read your destiny, you’ll see only you … alone but for your hand.”

  “So you say, bitch,” the tiefling said. “But let us see what—uuk!”

  The seer choked and coughed, grasping at himself where she had driven a knife through his bowels. Blackness poured down his legs. He mumbled broken words in his fiendish language—harsh, guttural sounds—but he could summon no magic with his life spilling down his groin.

  “If it gives you any comfort,” she said as he sank to the floor, “I did warn you.”

  Then she left him in his small nook in Downshadow, which to him had become a shrinking, blurry world of heaving breaths, pain, and—quite later—wet darkness.

  CHAPTER 14

  As dawn rose, Araezra sat alone in her private room at the barracks. She slapped the broadsheet down on the table and leaned back in her chair, fuming.

  “Watch fails to apprehend vigilante in Castle Ward,” noted the Mocking Minstrel, this particular tale written by the bard Satin Rutshear. “Clumsy fool Talanna Taenfeather injured in pursuit while narcissistic superior, Araezra Hondyl, parades half-naked through streets.”

  Araezra groaned. The emphasized words were underlined in a girlish hand.

  “Open Lord Neverember calls Araezra’s actions ‘justified,’ saying ‘I’m sure she acted for the best’ … in protecting his bedmate interests in the Watch,” she read. “Neverember was later seen furtively arriving at Taenfeather’s bedside in the temple of Torm, protected by cloaked men.”

  Then: “For misuse of city taxes to support nonregulated religious bodies, see over!’

  Araezra rubbed her eyes. The quotations were accurate if slanted, and the additions infuriated her. Lord Neverember and Talanna’s energetic flirtations were well known, but had never been put quite this way. The casual cruelty left a foul taste in Araezra’s mouth. She stabbed her nails into her palms hard.

  And of course, Satin quoted Lord Bladderblat, the broadsheet’s ubiquitous parody noble.

  “On young Hondyl’s competency as a valabrar, Lord Bladderblat calls Hondyl ‘too pretty for a thinking woman, but she’s got assets; better she find a blade for ’twixt her thighs than one for her belt—though she can wear the belt to my bed, if she likes.’”

  That Araezra was presented as the bedmate of a fiction rankled. And being described as “young”—true, she was just over twenty, but her rank came from her success, not her beauty.

  This wasn’t new to her, this ridicule. She’d often tried to track down “Satin Rutshear,” but it was just a fancyname, of course. The Minstrel protected its own, and the Lords’ command against punishing broadsheet writers and printers stayed Araezra’s hand. Violating it would have led to her discharge—but it would have made her feel much better.

  “Watch keeps silent on continued threat,” Satin went on. “Hondyl has no comment.”

  In that private, unheard, and thus safe moment, Araezra finally let vent. “Mayhap you might ask, Lady Rutshear,” she cried. “I’d give you a comment, well and good—then twist your snobby head off your shoulders, you little whore!”

  She balled up the Minstrel and hurled it across the office into the spittoon.

  She felt better.

  Then she set to repressing her anger into a tight, simmering ball.

  Burn her eyes and her waggling tongue, but this “Satin” had the right of it—there was no place for screaming, hysterical lasses in the Guard, particularly not those ranked as highly as she.

  This story—and the whole situation it cat-raked with such fiendish glee—was bad enough. If she was going to be humiliated and reprimanded for abandoning her patrol, endangering her men, and landing her second in a bed at the temple of Torm, then at least she could do it with some dignity. The judgmental eyes of the rest of the Watch and Guard, the disapproving glare of Commander Jarthay—they were bad enough.

  And where in the Hells was Kalen? He hadn’t appeared for duty this morn, and she could really use his shoulder to—

  Araezra dropped her face into her hands. She wouldn’t cry—she couldn’t. Crying was for weak-willed women, and she must be strong—for Talanna, if for nothing else.

  Don’t think about Talanna, fading in and out of life under the hands of those priests.

  She looked instead at the sword on the table, and let its silvery masterwork distract her.

  It was a bastard sword, well and good, but deceptively light and sharp. Magical, she knew—it had glowed fiercely silver in Shadowbane’s hand, and retained this glow even after he’d left it. Now, sitting cool on her desk, it radiated power at a touch—but balanced power.