Downshadow

THIRTEEN

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, ore 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-"

"Wirh 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, birch," 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.