Adahni slept a thankfully dreamless sleep for the first time in what seemed like ages. If she had not been exhausted, she supposed she probably would have kept herself awake, racking her brains to figure out how on earth she had made it from the mouth of the Lapendrar River in Thay to the shores of Lake Mulsantir in Rashemen. She had absolutely no sense of how much time had passed since she had passed out on the river bank and when she had woken up in the barrow. She acknowledged that it was possible that she had been out long enough for a journey by foot, though that would have taken a month or more… then again there were powerful sedatives out there in the world, and if whoever brought her there were truly invested, she could have easily been kept asleep that long. Bishop must be worried out of his mind, she thought, He'd better be worried out of this mind… with this thought on the brain, she drifted off.

She woke up, feeling rested but groggy. She numbly went about the tasks of getting herself some acceptable clothing and armor. She traded a few trinkets she had found in the tomb for gold, which bought her a passable set of leathers. They were tighter and softer than what she was used to, and she realized that this was because they were intended to be worn under clothes rather than over them. Over the leathers she put on a blouse and long skirt like the rest of the Rashemi women, not wanting to draw attention to her, any more than Safiya did. Safiya stayed hidden in their room at the inn until Adahni had returned with a set of clothes like her own, a kerchief to cover her baldness, and a pot of paints.

"What are those for?"Safiya asked, looking suspiciously at the wooden box as Adahni opened it, added water from the basin, and began to blend.

"To cover your tattoos," Adahni replied, "I couldn't find a wigmaker on our budget, so it's going to be pretty clear pretty quickly that you're bald. If I can cover these tattoos we might be able to pass you off as ill, or perhaps as a nun of some order."

"How do you know this will work?" Safiya asked, skeptically, as Adahni began to paint over the runic tattoos in a color that was close enough to the wizard's natural skin tone. The paints were surprisingly effective, much better than the ones she had used in Luskan."

"I've done it before," Adahni said, "I am actually quite an expert at painting women's faces to disguise… imperfections."

"Where did you learn that? As a warrior? A Knight Captain of Neverwinter?"

Adahni was silent a moment, and then realized that her past before her time as the Shardbearer was no longer the most dangerous secret from her past, "Actually," she said, "For about five years, I was a whore on the Luskan docks. Johns would rough us up, we'd have to work the next night, and so we all learned the best way to cover the bruises and scars." She smoothed the paint job she'd done. She was clever enough to add a few darker patches – under the cheekbones, beside the nose, to mimic the natural variations in skin color. If you didn't do it properly, a girl would look like she was wearing a mask. "There, you look almost passable, just sort of like someone might have punched you in the face yesterday."

"Where is Luskan?" Safiya asked, peering at herself in a handmirror. With the kerchief covering her scalp and the paint covering her tattoos she looked like any average woman walking the streets of Mulsantir.

"Several days north of Neverwinter," Adahni replied, surprised that of all the questions her story must have begged, that was the one that she asked.

"Is that why you learned how to fight?" she asked then, "Because you were sick of men beating you up?"

"You could say that," Adahni sighed, remembering all the times she had mixed paints and covered a black eye on one of her sisters. And then remembered how she had two of the bolder ones would go 'take care' of the man who'd done it. Provided, of course, he was not anybody important. Nobles did pretty much whatever they wanted with the pretty young women who plied their trade on the docks.

"I had a man try to force himself on me once," Safiya said.

"How did that work out for him?" Adahni asked.

"I lit him on fire," she replied.

"Good woman," Adahni said, "Now, you said we had to go to… the Veil? That's the name of it right?"

Safiya nodded. As they left the inn, the troupe of actors were rehearsing again. This time, the actress playing Adahni was wearing a flowing blue gown instead of costume armor and was in the midst of being seduced by a man she could only imagine was supposed to be Bishop. The actor, she had to admit, look quite a bit like him, only more handsome, with a chiseled jaw that was not entirely covered up by the five o'clock shadow. He was burying his head in her collarbone, and she was leaning back, about to swoon, with the back of her hand to her forehead.

"And who was that?" Safiya asked as they left.

Adahni laughed, "That was… that was the man who rescued me eventually. I imagine they're probably casting him as the villain."

"He's not the villain? He looked like a villain. A handsome villain, but a villain," Safiya said. They strolled leisurely up the steps the cut into the cliffs separating the town from the water.

"He is a handsome villain," she chuckled ruefully, "But he came around at the end. And now…"

"He was with you on your ship," Safiya said, "Does it grieve you greatly to be away from him?"

"You ask too many questions," Adahni said.

"I'm sorry for that, I just… you are so very different than I am. I only seek to understand the woman I travel with," she said.

"Yes," she said, "It does grieve me."

"So you must love him very much."

"You could call it that," Adahni said, and quickly changed the subject. She was not introspective about her feelings, not any longer. She was happy with Bishop, he treated her well, and the two of them had been thrown together by fate so many times she knew it would be absolutely useless to try and get away with him. Not that she would want to. She could not imagine another human being that, if they lived and worked and slept together, she would not want to murder half the time. If that wasn't love, then she didn't know what was, "There, I see the Veil, let's go."

They pushed open the double doors that lead to a circular building. The sign on the outside announced it as the Veil Theatre, and the finest troupe of actors in the land. The inside was very dark, but as Adahni's eyes adjusted to it, she saw that they were not alone. She was very grateful for the leathers under her blouse as a creature, as tall as a man and a half, bore down on her with a long and nasty looking halberd. Safiya pushed him back with spell, and Adahni ran him through with her blade. She examined the corpse, and quickly identified it.

"That's a gnoll," she said, "I've never seen one of those in person before."

"I hate to be a downer," Safiya said, "But you're about to see a lot more of them."

Adahni rolled to her feet in a fluid motion and put her blade through the kneecap of another creature. It howled with pain and fell to the ground. She cut its throat rather than hear it scream any longer, and moved to the next. Safiya had the lot of them pinned to the ground with some kind of sinister magic, making Adahni's job quite easy indeed.

When the gnolls were dispatched, Adahni felt the familiar burn of magic missiles hitting her. She looked up to see a small host of red wizards, standing on the rounded lip of the stage, using their superior position to their full advantage. The trick with spellcasters, Adahni had learned, was to hit them. Hard. Once you got actually skin to skin contact, they were sunk. The trick was getting past whatever shields they put up. But, if their concentration was elsewhere – on weaving very complicated offensive spells, for example, one could slip through. If red wizards were somehow hardier than normal ones, Adahni would have to find out.

She barreled into the first one, using her small stature and solid build to her advantage. The willowy man was knocked clean off his feet and cracked his head on the stage with a crack. Like most spellcasters, he didn't bother to put on a damn helmet which might have rendered to blow less than fatal.

Safiya dispatched the rest of them, evidently having had more training or talent in whatever school of magic the both of them were using.

As the smoke rose off the freshly slain bodies, a tentative motion came from beneath the stage. A dwarven woman with her dark hair piled high on top of her head stepped gingerly up from what must have been the orchestra pit. She looked around the room, taking in the overturned seats, the smoke crackling off of the dead red wizards, gnoll blood staining the hardwood floors. At first, she seemed to take it all in stride, but in a second, she gasped, and fell into a swoon. As though from nowhere, two men – one human and one dwarf – appeared to catch her. She recovered herself after a moment or two.

"Do you know where Lienna is?" Safiya asked, "We were told to look for her here…"

The dwarf woman opened one eye, clearly seeing if her dramatic fainting had impressed the newcomers, and then the other. She stood up, brushed herself off, and examined her guests with critical black eyes. "And you arrived not a moment too soon!" the dwarf woman intoned. Her voice was powerful, clearly developed from years of dramatic training, "My name's Magda, by the way, director of this troupe. Lienna took off into the back. Here!" She fished in her voluminous skirts for a moment and took out a smooth, flat, black stone. She handed it to Adahni, who would have thought it was glass for its glossy surface, but its weight told her otherwise, "She keeps a shadow room in the back of the theater, sort of a safe place, if you know what I mean…"

"A shadow room?" Adahni asked, cocking her head to the side, trying to remember the things she'd read about Rashemen.

"Yes," Magda said, "As you may know, stranger, the veil between the worlds is very thin in this part of the world. There is a Mulsantir-below-Mulsantir, a shadow of the city that you can travel to it sometimes, if you have the right equipment. That stone you're holding is the right equipment." She paused, mused for a moment, "Lienna and that red lady with the shaved head and all the tattoos… they used to go back there sometimes. If you take this stone to Lienna's room in the back behind the costume master's racks, you'll see a portal. Step through it in to Shadow Mulsantir, and I do so hope you will find Lienna."

They took off through the dusty back of the theater, leaping over crates and boxes, until they found Lienna's room. Bed, bookshelves, nothing out of the ordinary… except for the black and pulsating portal in the corner of the room. It was blacker than black, as though it were a hole from which no light escaped.

"Do you see it, Addie?" Safiya asked. Adahni nodded.

"Take my arm," she said. Safiya did, and her eyes widened as she, too, saw what Addie had seen. Arm in arm, the two women ventured forth, stepping into the portal.

It was as though she had stepped through a mirror. Everything in the room where they found themselves was the precise opposite of the room in which they had been. And, to make matters worse, the world had suddenly been leached of all its color. Adahni felt as though she were suddenly in a pencil drawing of the world, and found it hard to make out the outlines of things. She ran her hands along several of the items of furniture, trying to forge some sort of connection between the images she was seeing at the reality of what it was.

"The shadow realm is shadowy indeed," Safiya observed, "I prefer things in colors. Though, I suppose, it would be easy to hide in the place like this."

"Let's hope Lienna is having some luck with that," Adahni sighed, "And that our friends out in the theatre haven't followed her in here as well."

"Look, there's another door," Safiya said, finding one that was the opposite end of the room. She seized the handle and thrusting it open.

The room beyond was very much unlike the room that lay beyond the bedroom in real Mulsantir. The next room was covered in streaks of black. Adahni realized only after several minutes that if they had been in their own plane, the streaks would have been dark red, for their smell and consistency indicated blood. In the center of the room stood a table, a rickety thing, not much different than the one that Adahni and her father Daeghun had eaten off of when she was growing up. But this table had irons affixed to its four corners, and bloodstains deep into the wood. She touched it gingerly.

You've been here before, Addie, she thought. Conscious or barely conscious, but certainly she had. She fingered the wounds between her breasts, in the place left empty by her own self mutilation years before. Someone had been digging in her chest, looking for the shard. They had found nothing. Is that why they had discarded her in the barrow? She closed her eyes, trying to reach back into her memory, a trick she'd learned from being blackout drunk nightly for several years.

Where is it? Is she not the shardbearer?

She is indeed, but look, it seems she has divested herself of her burden before we had a chance to do it for her.

So we just opened up her chest for nothing.

Well sew it back up then, we should still be able to complete the rest of it.

I'm sorry, so sorry, but we have to do this. The voice was now addressing her. For love…

"I've been here before," she announced, not taking her eyes off the table. She tried to recall faces. She could see only demonic contortions of human faces in her mind's eye, but she knew not whether that was actually what her erstwhile captors had looked like, or if her mind, remembering the pain they had inflicted upon her, had assigned them those features.

Safiya looked at her uneasily, "We should move on. We can figure out this mystery when we've located Lienna and made sure she was safe. Red wizards do have a knack for walking among the planes, and if it were red wizards that were after her, we might have reason to worry."

"Very well," Adahni agreed reluctantly, and the two of them moved forward, deeper into the shadow plane. She picked up a few odds and ends as they moved through. Someone had left a rather nice set of throwing knifes, which she confiscated, and clipped to her belt with the ring the pouch came on. Such careless people to leave things lying around where anyone might just happen by!

They emerged onstage in the shadow theater. Adahni chuckled involuntarily, thinking how any bard would be proud to perform in front of such an audience that would fill a theatre of that size, but the smile dropped from her face when she realized that yes, their foes had also chased Lienna through the portal and into shadow.

There was but one red wizard this time, but he had managed to summon a few infernal companions. Erinyes, two of them, flanked him. Adahni thought something vaguely sexist about men and their penchant for summoning buxom female demons to fight their battles for them.

"Tsk tsk," the red wizard clucked. Adahni strained her eyes to adjust to the dim light and lack of color, but could only observe that he was male, tall, and as bald as Safiya, and with the similar runic tattooes covering his forehead and shiny pate, "Safiya, my dear, we are such a long way from home aren't we! I nearly didn't recognize you in that ridiculous getup. And where did your tattoos go?"

"Hmmm, I thought I smelled incompetence," Safiya snarled, ignoring his question, "Now that, Adahni, is Khai Khmun. If you have ever felt unimpressed by the Red Wizards of Thay, it's probably because this worthless blast from a mouse's ass was allowed into our order."

"Old lover, eh?" Adahni commented, observing the wizard's vitriol towards this Khai Khmun.

"Not in his wildest dreams," Safiya said through gritted teeth.

"Oh, you wound me, oh Daughter of Nefris!" Khai said, putting his hands to his heart in mock offense, "Do you not remember the sweet love we shared under your mother's desk?"

Safiya called him a very rude word indeed, one that even Adahni , who had always been crude, and now swore like a sailor quite literally, for she was one, flinched at hearing.

"You always were jealous of my relationships with professors. Araman rewards his allies… and I've done his bidding well. Her death means my promotion," Khai said, smugly.

Adahni looked for the first time at his feet. There lay a skeleton, almost entirely eaten by flame. No wonder it smelled like roast pork in here, she thought.

"Is that…"

"Didn't even have the nerve to fight us," Khai said, "Enveloped herself in flame as soon as we reached her. So ironic that I would find Nefris's daughter here, I'm sure she will put up much less of a fight than Nefris herself!"

"You stay away from my mother!" Safiya roared. The magic crackled off of her fingertips and soared through the air, striking one of the Erinyes dead where she stood.

"And stop misusing the word 'ironic'!" Addie added, "It doesn't mean what you think it means!" In her fury over his butchery of the Common language, she took a knife from her pouch and winged it at the other Erinyes. It struck her through one eye, and apparently when far enough back into brain matter that the demon convulsed and collapsed, if not dead, very close.

Undeterred, Khai just laughed, "I doubt you'll have the old hag's good sense and surrender. This is going to be fun! And you, bitch with the yellow eyes, I was going to leave you out of this. But I see that once Safiya is dead in a pile of ashes, I will have to turn my considerable talents to you."

"Oh good Gods," Adahni scowled as the two wizards put their hands up and began weaving spells. She let them go for a couple of rounds, walloping each other with acid, ice, and some arcane essence or another, before she lost patience, charged up to Khai, and took her blade to the back of his neck, exposing his spine, and sending him to the floor, dead, "You people try my patience!" she shouted, kicking his body. Safiya's spell fizzled at her fingertips, and she brushed its remnants off her hands.

"Interrupting a wizard's duel is the height of bad manners," she said.

She had kept her temper around the red wizard for most of their time together, as much out of fear of their legendary powers as out of respect for the help the girl had given her. Now that they were back in civilization, however, Safiya was beginning to grate on her. She let it loose, managing to keep her language clean, but raising her voice ever so slightly. "Any bad manners I have displayed are utterly dwarfed by you dragging me along on this ridiculous quest when I should be getting back to my ship!" Adahni retorted, "And did you miss something? Would you rather I had sat idly by while he had reduced you to ash and you were still busy fiddling with your spells? I don't question your power in battle, Safiya, but please, think of strategy! This isn't a wizard's duel, this is life and death, and there are no arcane healers to bring you back from the brink of it!"

Both women were silent a long moment. Safiya's dark eyes shooting imaginary daggers at Adahni's topaz ones.

"Point taken, Adahni," Safiya said finally, though she sighed huffily, "Let's go on about our business, no sense in criticizing each others battle skills while we both stand here in one piece. Khai mentioned the name Araman. He is a professor at the academy, like my mother… I do hope that he was bluffing about that."

"Whether he is or not we'll have to find out in due time," Adahni sighed.

"What troubles me," Safiya said, putting her head in her hand pensively, "Is that Lienna is not connected with the Academy. There must be some other association with her that they were interested in… and it was important enough for her to protect that she killed herself in a way that destroyed her body."

"Indeed," Adahni said, "I hear burning alive is not a pleasant way to go. Whatever her secret was, she must have been extremely devoted to keeping it." The two women sat there, each lost in her own thoughts, for a long moment.

"We should get back," Safiya finally said, "The smell is getting to me."

"Agreed," Adahni said. Safiya walked back across the stage, and Adahni followed her, "I am getting too old for this."

"Please, not that excuse," Safiya said, "You can't be much more than thirty, thirty-two."

"I'm twenty-seven!" Adahni protested.

Safiya laughed, "That's what happens to women who fish for compliments!"

They passed again through the horrid room with the bloodied table on it, and Adahni tried to avert her eyes.

"I wasn't fishing for compliments," she muttered, "I just feel tired. More tired than I used to after a whole day of fighting, not just a couple of hours. It's like all I want to do is nap right now."

"Really," Safiya said, "Because it sure seemed back at the barrow that all you wanted to do was devour spirits."

"Whatever that is, we can't figure it out while we're here in a land without color. Let's get out of here," Adahni said, pausing before the shadow portal, "We can't possibly get into any more trouble today."