Chapter Twenty-One: The Heist

+++++Ezra+++++

They took the airship the next morning close to sunrise, with Rill in her new hat, floppy and lacy and burgundy, her hair dyed a less-conspicuous auburn, racing over to the ship's port lounge to watch the sun emerging fiery from the ocean. She jostled a man reading a newspaper out of the way to get to the observation window and, when the man objected, she shot him a look of such imperious disdain that he buried his nose in the paper and said not another word.

As they debarked from the airship, the first thing Ezra noticed was the smell. Granted, he was pretty good at picking up smells, but the sour river air of St. Arbalest was about as subtle as a punch to the nose. While he was dealing with the smell, Ezra felt Rill tense up next to him, felt her body heating up - and he soon spotted what had got her spooked. Right there, along the carriage queue, her mossy green eyes staring out from her too-large kao-alta eyes, was Berhu, Plenakton's lieutenant.

"I don't suppose that's a coincidence," Rill said.

"It seems unlikely."

Ezra looked around and didn't see anything of particular worry beyond Berhu, who wasn't making any effort to hide herself. In fact, she was gesturing them over. Still on guard, Ezra ambled up to her, Rill's hand squeezing his and searing little red marks into his skin the whole time… he was so used to first degree burns by now that he hardly noticed it. Berhu looked to their clasped hands and smiled. She pushed the carriage door open.

"Mister Plenakton says you're Teak's now," she said, as if that explained anything.

"We're working with him."

"What's the difference?"

Ezra suspected this was just to goad them, so he ignored the quip. He ran a finger along the engraved grip of his alchemical pistol, remembering its little ridges and grooves, the little loopy flower patterns cut into the metal. Then he hopped into the carriage. That was good enough for Rill - she hopped in, too, and then Berhu thumped on the roof to signal the driver to go. She lit an apuiha cigarillo with a snap of her fingers and eased back, her big eyes going squinty.

"Anything you find gets shared with us," she said.

"If that's the deal you have with Teak…"

"It is."

It struck Ezra as a bit ironic that the demon liberation movement was working with the city's biggest 'body work' organization… but the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Teak and Lusha took criminals - in excellent physical condition, if possible - and murdered them by destroying their higher brain functions with a neurotoxin. While being very illegal and very unethical, there was no reason for Plenakton to have a problem with that. The liberation leader's problem lay with those who insisted on trapping infernics in bodies and enthralling them. He didn't have any problem whatsoever with Teak - who could argue with a few fewer non-infernics in the world, and criminals no less? And Teak had every reason to support Plenakton… because the more thralls that were liberated, the more mages would have to go back to Teak for fresh bodies. He was giving bodies with one hand and taking them with the other. Ezra had to laugh, which Berhu misinterpreted:

"Teak is a criminal… wouldn't you rather secure the freedom of your people?"

"In case you hadn't forgot, you're a criminal, too," Ezra said.

"You know what I mean… he does business with slavers…"

"We were free the whole time we were at Teak's retreat," Rill said.

"We only did that because we knew you'd try to escape… which you did…"

"Which we wouldn't have done if you hadn't imprisoned us," Ezra added.

Berhu frowned in the little toothy way that kao-alta often did. Or maybe that was just her apuiha face. In any event, she stopped arguing. The carriage pulled to a stop in front of a dingy stretch of park between the East Shore and the Old City. A community band played in the park's little mossy amphitheater, finishing a piece to scattered applause. Berhu opened the door and hopped out, the autumn breeze whipping at her loose clothes.

"This carriage will be waiting here, should you require extraction… the driver will only take you if she does not observe that you're being followed. Do you understand?"

Ezra nodded. That was straightforward enough: escape was available, but not if they really, really needed it.

From there, he and Rill walked six blocks south to where they'd agreed to meet up with Anise. There she sat, among the little stretch of cafes and shops of East Central, on the upper balcony of a little bookstore café. She wore a broad-brimmed sun hat and dark sunglasses, which she peered over, squinting at passersby along the bustling street every fifteen seconds or so. Anise nearly jumped out of her seat when she spotted them, but instead waved them up.

"I've been here for two hours," Anise said.

"We're only ten minutes late…"

There was something… very fidgety… about Anise. If he didn't know any better, Ezra would have suspected her of trying to double-cross them. But Anise was about as guileless as they came and the coffee was quite strong on her breath. Anise noticed Ezra looking at her cup.

"It's my third cup," she explained. "I, uh… I like to be early… especially when I'm nervous. I've never trespassed somewhere before."

Ezra did not point out that what they were about to do was a lot worse than trespassing, nor that Anise had already committed several crimes far more serious than trespassing, including aiding and abetting his escape, stealing a carriage, and lying to the police. All for very good reasons but, assuming the criminal justice system here worked something like it did on Earth, the authorities wouldn't take kindly to any of it.

"We don't need you to trespass… we just need you to distract your uncle long enough for us to get inside and get his thrall-plug and crystal plans…"

Anise snorted. "I'm jittery, not insane. Who's to say he won't call the constables the second I show my face? He thinks I betrayed him…"

"Which you did," Rill observed.

"Exactly! Even worse! So I can't very well knock on the door and ask him out for a spot of lunch… but I do know when he'll be out?"

The temple belfry across the plaza bonged once for half-past eleven.

"Right about now," Anise said. With a slightly-shaky hand, she slid a paper across the table… a little clipping from the Events & Announcements section of the paper:

Magisters & Magistresses of St. Arbalest,

You are invited to attend the recognition ceremony for the acquisition of the 8th elevation by High Sorcerer Fenrik of Westval, as well as an award ceremony in recognition of his contributions to greater magic, as well as awards for the contributions of 3 Fellows from the college. 12:00 - 1:00 pm, the St. Arbalest Etudium Magika Enchanted Greens, 453 Magister Row. All invited to attend. Refreshments & cocktails to follow the ceremony - mages & special guests only.

-At the declaration of Sorcerer Ekra-tava,

St. Arbalest's Board of Sorcery

Anise nodded when Ezra rolled his eyes. "He'll be leaving now if he hasn't already, so we've got at least two hours, maybe three. And I've still got a key…"

Ezra held out his hand. "Thanks, Anise…"

She shook her head. "I'm coming with you. That bastard ruined my life almost as much as he ruined yours, and I'm going to destroy everything he has if it'll keep him from making another thrall…"

Rill nudged Ezra. "Her magic is strong… do you feel it?"

Ezra did, though he didn't have to feel anything special. The coffee cup, the saucer… the whole table was shaking with barely-constrained energy. He grasped Anise's hand, holding it gently until she calmed herself and their surroundings were no longer in danger of spontaneous detonation. "Fine, you're old enough to make your own decisions. If you're determined to make them as poorly as the two of us, I guess we should get going."

+++++Ezra+++++

Being back in Fenrik's house was a strange experience - virtually all of Ezra's early, bad experiences in Medias had been in that house. Back then, though, he hadn't had much of a frame of reference. He'd never taken Fenrik to be a wealthy man because, as sturdy as the house was and as nice as the neighborhood was, his home was sorely neglected and not all that large. However, this failed to account for the fact that there were two other city houses next to it that the sorcerer also owned, and which he used for virtually nothing but his magical research. Tinkering and dawdling he'd do at his little workbench in the house, but all of the big ticket magic was done in those huge, threadbare rooms of the emptied-out houses next door. And then there was the basement where he'd found Rill…

"Doesn't he have servants?" Rill asked.

"Not anymore," Anise said.

They strode into the entryway, books, papers, and discarded articles of clothing strewn everywhere. There were more books on the staircase to the upstairs than there were on the bookshelf, little piles with notes scribbled on top of them. Plates of half-eaten food with flies and roaches scurrying over them. The lighting crystals, even, somehow managed to have an unclean tinge to them.

At one point, Fenrick had employed a few servants, but he'd been such a poor employer to them, shouting at them, throwing things, occasionally beating them, that he'd been blacklisted and anybody who'd take a job under Fenrik demanded triple the going rate and, even then, invariably quit before too long. The only servants he'd allow any more were those he could utterly control - even kill if the whim struck him…

The very fact that there were no sigils inscribed anywhere nearby suggested to Ezra that anything the sorcerer truly valued must be further in the house. They passed through the downstairs hallway, passed by the stairwell. The door to Ezra's old room was slightly ajar. On impulse, he nudge the door open with his foot and peered inside. The little mouldering mat of a mattress on the floor, the damaged crate-table, the grimy square of mirror, the untouched chamber pot… all of it was the same.

He crouched down and cracked the corner of the crate open, reaching into the little hiding spot he'd once made. Twelve par and a handful of low-grade crystals. That's what he'd managed to save while dreaming of escape… was it really only six weeks ago? It felt like a lifetime. Without quite realizing it was going to happen, Ezra began to weep, just thinking about the pitiful state he'd been in, thinking about what he'd been through, thinking about how things would be much worse than even that if he or Rill were apprehended. It would make his little cell under the stairs seem like paradise.

"We should keep looking," Anise said.

Ezra nodded. He stood and shuffled over to Rill, who bore it stoically when he wrapped her in a great hug and sobbed into her auburn-dyed hair. Anise seemed a little put-off, like she'd been expecting that she'd be the one to get the hug. So he shuffled over and hugged her, too, before getting ahold of himself.

"Okay, let's check the back," he said.

It would have been more efficient if they'd split up, but Ezra wasn't about to leave Rill and he wasn't about to suggest that Anise should go off on her lonesome. Despite the eerie silence of the house, he also couldn't shake the feeling that they were being watched. But, whenever he turned to look, there was nothing.

Oddly enough, the 'back' - the two thirds of the triplex city house that Fenrik had cordoned off as his personal study area - was a lot tidier than the 'front' of the house. At least the old bastard kept things in neat piles with a discernible order to them. At least if you discounted the areas that appeared to have suffered explosions or avalanches of piled papers. Perhaps the ghost (which Anise insisted was real) didn't visit the back so much. Some of the doors were locked, but that wasn't much of an issue: when they came to an impassable doorknob, Rill would grab the handle, furrow her brow, and leave the doorknob and lock as a pile of smoking, vaguely-differentiated slag on the floor. More than once they had to put out flames. Ezra could feel the heat of molten metal on his face from two meters away.

As Rill flicked blobs of glowing metal off her hand, Anise asked: "Doesn't that hurt?"

"Why would it hurt?"

+++++Ezra+++++

There were papers, books, bits of shattered crystals, tools for metalworking. The pair of welding goggles dangling over the phlogiston-torch were similar to the ones Ezra had once had bolted to his face. They wandered the back of the house for what had to be thirty minutes, rummaging over three floors of cluttered space, through the room filled with ruined armillary spheres whose gears seemed to follow them, through the one where everything went squish, and down the hallway that was shorter going in one direction than the other. Fenrik was into some seriously weird, seriously high-level sorcery if Ezra was interpreting things correctly - he was mad, but he was undoubtedly a mad genius.

"I don't see his desk anywhere - it wasn't in the study, which is where he used to keep it, so he must've moved it somewhere in here. It's where he did all of his correspondence?"

"Fenrik does correspondence?" Ezra asked. Though he already knew the old man must've done quite a bit of it, given how many different people he had Ezra exchanging money, crystals, or magical knickknacks with during his stint as messenger boy.

"A lot," Anise said. "Nobody likes Uncle Fenrik very much, for obvious reasons, but they respect him a lot. He invented the crystalline converters almost everybody uses in their carriages - they go almost twice as far as the old ones…"

Ezra wasn't sure how patenting and inventions worked in St. Arbalest, but he suspected this meant that Fenrik could buy ten triple-sized city houses just like this one if he wanted to - but was just a cheap bastard. A cheap bastard who'd somehow hidden a sizable writing desk somewhere in his sizable house. He noted the recent scoring along the plaster of the nearby wall and the little tears in the old carpeting of the floor… it led right up to a pair of conveniently-placed bookshelves at the end of the hallway.

"I'll bet that's a hidden door…" he felt around the bookcase for a hidden latch or opening mechanism.

"Sorcerers don't use fake doors," Anise said. "Step away for a moment…"

As soon as he did, she creased her brow, raised her hands, and pushed them to the right. With a pulse of magic, the whole heavy bookshelf moved, creaking as its frame stressed and tearing up the fabric of the nearby carpet. It juddered to the side as if struck by a great, invisible hammer, cracked as one of its legs snagged against the bunched-up carpet, and collapsed to the floor, cracking down the middle atop a bed of fallen tomes. Anise had seriously upped her magic game in the past two months.

"It's a good thing we're not trying to be sneaky," Rill said.

But Anise had moved the bookshelf and, sure enough, there was a small, unfinished door right behind it.

"I think this is technically a hidden door," Ezra said.

Inside was a musty study littered with so many shattered crystals the floor crunched as they stepped across it. All of the letters upon the writing desk were prosaic communications, most of them from other sorcerers with snide notation from Fenrik in the margins:

I'll eat my hat if I give that dumb bastard another consultation!

Does he not remember he tried that exact same foolish nonsense twenty years ago?

This is why the dumb cow will never progress past magistress!

What a lovely man. But that lovely man hadn't left anything but unhelpful personal correspondences upon the desk. On the other hand, there was a large arcanite-reinforced safe with enough sigils inside to defend Fort Knox (if they'd had sigils on Earth) right below it. That was a pretty good bet. Anise crouched down to inspect the thing, waving her hands over the safe's surface without touching it.

"Damn… he somehow inscribed sigils inside the walls of the safe. Anything that unlocks the safe or crosses a sigil without first deactivating them will do… well… something. It'll unknot all of the pent-up arcane energy, and that's a lot… hmm… I could try carrying the whole safe out?"

It was worth a shot, but it didn't work. Anise's magical telekinesis had upgraded quite a bit since the time she and Ezra had bought extra bookshelves for the old bastard, but even she couldn't budge the metal behemoth on the floor. Ezra puzzled over what to do… even if they lit the whole house on fire and set off an explosion right below the safe, it probably wouldn't destroy the contents. And they wanted to get at the contents if at all possible.

"What happens if we, I don't know… just melt the metal. That wouldn't break the sigils, would it?"

Anise looked at him like he was crazy. "Theoretically, yes, that might work. But how would you propose we melt arcanite-plated steel? Do you happen to have access to a…"

"We happen to have access to a me," Rill said, and she nudged Anise out of the way.

Anise looked like she was about to object, but she stayed her tongue, clearly too fascinated about what was about to transpire to put up much fuss. Instead, she just watched as Rill's hands went from regular to dim red, and then up to a white-hot glow that hurt to look at. They pushed a front of heat against Ezra's face like he was standing two feet from a bonfire. It was so hot, the air around her hands became a luminous plasma that arced off in little streaks and left burn spots on the floor and furniture nearby. Within ten or fifteen seconds, the metal of the safe fizzled and crackled, bits of arcanite clacking to the floor and instantly hardening in little jagged droplets while the carbonized steel sloughed off in yellow sheets and sat, glowing like magma upon the foundation stone after it burned straight through the carpet and the wooden floor beneath.

"Sweet lord," Anise gasped… "that's… that's beautiful…"

Whether she was talking about Rill or her transcendental fire magic, Ezra had to agree. Rill wasn't the most powerful magical force on the planet - at least not yet - but nobody else did fire like his fire goddess. A circle of safe wall tilted out from the rest of the thing and clunked to the floor, the molten edges burning everything around them but Rill.

"Oh!" she gasped. For a moment, Ezra thought it was because she'd just realized her display of pyrotechnic might had just incinerated all of her clothes from the waist up (excluding, of course, her ceramic necklace)… but, of course, Rill didn't care one iota about nudity. No, she'd noticed that some of the things inside the safe had caught on fire and her hands were still far too hot to attempt to extract them or put the flames out.

Ezra did it instead, his skin hissing and searing, blobs of subcutaneous tissue rendered into liquid fat and plopping right off his arms. It would heal quickly enough and he was able to use his sensory-gating technique to block all but the slightest prickle of pain. He shoveled out dozens of papers and a safe box or two before everything was either outside of the safe or incinerated to a crisp.

"We should probably just burn it all, anyway…" Anise said.

"We told Teak we'd try to get the plans to him," Rill said. She wavered on her feet, suddenly looking very tired - she might be a goddess, but she was still a weak goddess and couldn't turn her hands into plasma torches for very long. But, like any good goddess, she took her promises very seriously.

"You can't be serious," Anise said.

"Rill takes her promises seriously," Ezra said. "And so do I…" Though, truth be told, he probably didn't take them quite as seriously as Rill. "You promised to help us…"

Anise glowered at him. "Fine. I… oh… wow. Oh. Oh, wow…" It sounded like something had broken Anise. She held that something, blue and papery and only slightly-singed, up for Ezra to see.

It was a 'blue-pal' note. A blue-pal note worth ten stacks… and there were dozens of them. And if a blue-pal that could buy half of Fenrik's house wasn't valuable enough to put in the safe boxes, then that was a pretty good bet where the old man kept his secret plans. They were rich and they had the plans…

"Ohhh… Oh no. Oh nonono," Anise said. She'd just spotted something outside the room.

Ezra looked up from the fortune. Ah. Of course. That's why it had felt like they were being watched this whole time. They had been. "That fucking bird," he said.

+++++Ezra+++++

"Kaaa… ka-kaaa!" Yacha cawed. "Ka-" he started again, but, in a flash of white flame, Rill burned the magpie familiar into a crisp.

There was tromping from elsewhere in the house… multiple sets of heavy footsteps. Ezra dashed out into the corridor to find an escape route - or, barring that, find out who was coming and from where. It seemed that the back two-thirds of the house didn't have anything in the way of emergency escapes, and the only unbarred, unsigiled windows they'd spotted were two floors up on the house's third floor. Though Rill could melt through bars, no problem, if she could burn a hole right through arcanite-reinforced steel.

"We can go out the front bay windows if you think you can melt the bars…"

"I can melt the bars," Rill said.

Anise clutched at the safe boxes, Ezra stuffed most of the blue-pal notes into his pockets, and they dashed toward the front, only to encounter a pair of burly, charging kao-etema rounding the corner. Another pair entered the far end at the other side of the hallway. And they had a hulking, snarling prymen lumbering after them. Wonderful.

"Believe me, you're not getting paid enough for this…" Ezra said. Of course, if any of those four men (and probably the prymen) knew he had north of a hundred stacks stuffed in his pockets, all three of them were probably dead.

"Mages ain't nothing but fops with potions," one of them said, squinting at Ezra past thick spectacles.

"Women can be mages, too," Anise stated. Though now was, perhaps, not the best time nor the best audience for discussing gender roles in magic.

The one who said that had a pistol… and, seeing that Anise had the safe boxes, he leveled it at her.

"No!" Ezra leapt in the way of the gun.

It cracked twice, and Ezra immediately felt blooming pain and the nauseating churn of his guts being shredded by metal balls the size of shooter marbles. Even so, his momentum had carried him into collision with the man and he took the tiny moment of confusion to brace himself and slam his forehead into the man's buck-toothed kao-etema mouth as hard as he could. There was more pain as his forehead gashed open, but he also felt the wet crack of buckling teeth. The man howled in pain and he and his fellow thug tossed Ezra to the ground, unloading another shot right into his chest.

Ezra felt the pain swirling, felt the blood filling his chest and his lungs. Already, his head was swimming and his ears were ringing - perhaps it would have been better if he'd just passed out from the shock right away. He heard another pair of gunshots… roaring… screaming… a man's screaming and a woman's… his whole body was numb… he was about to pass out… he was about to pass out… the pain came roaring back into him and it took everything he had to clamp it off. The whining in his ears subsided. A bullet popped out of his chest and clattered to the floor. Another was lodged somewhere between his back and the floor. He felt ravenous.

Ezra clambered back to his feet and took a few tenths of a second to take the scene in. The whole hallway was on fire, and Rill was completely nude, the rest of her clothes having burned away, completely covered in fire as the kao-etema tried to apprehend her. The prymen was going completely berserk - apparently, he didn't like painful, blistering burns across half his face. The gorilla-man grabbed at random books, pieces of furniture, and bits of semi-magical junk and hurtled them as hard as he could in random directions. And Anise was on the ground, badly-burned and writhing in agony. Shit. But the man Ezra had head-butted was still nearby and he was unstoppering a healing decoction, bloody-mouthed and trying to concentrate past the pain for long enough to invigorate the thing and heal his ruined mouth.

Ezra leapt to his feet, headbutted the man again, and caught the potion mid-air. He raced over to Anise… she was too out of it from the pain. When he put his fingers in her mouth to pry it open, she bit down hard, but his fingers made a pretty good bite-stopper. He invigorated the potion, poured it in, and waited for her to unclench her jaw, which only took a second or two.

"It's…" he was going to say 'it's okay', but it pretty clearly wasn't. "Just wait here," he said.

He raced down the hallway toward Rill. She struggled to maintain her fire, fending off the two remaining men with one white-hot fist slowly cooling to orange. And they finally realized that her well of deadly fire was finite and simply kept their distance, feinting in just enough that she had to keep her fist lit. She barely dodged a marble bust of St. Arquelus flung by the prymen. It hit the wall and burst into tiny St. Pebbles. As he raced past a weathered end table, Ezra spotted something…

"Rill!" He grabbed the handful of disorganized crystals just sitting there on the table, charged them all with one great pulse of energy, and tossed them in her direction.

They went clattering and scattering everywhere, a chaotic mass of caroming, glowing stones - but Rill's reflexes were almost as good as Ezra's. She caught three of them and, just like that, had enough energy at her disposal for three impressive feats of pyrotechnics, which she used to pulse walls of white-hot flame right out of her body and at the kao-etema thugs. The prymen collapsed, shocked or dead. It couldn't really be said that the kao-etema collapsed. There wasn't enough of them left to do much more than settle into smoking piles. Somewhere behind him, a mostly-recovered Anise ran up to the moaning, front-toothless thug and kicked him in the remaining teeth.

"Rill, can you still melt the bars?" she asked.

"I… I'm not sure," Rill said. Ezra had to catch his girlfriend to keep her from collapsing. She'd just expended far more energy than she ever had before and, while her feats of fire prowess were enough to make most mages jealous, asking her to do even more, even with a handful of charged crystals, was asking a lot. Ezra grabbed her hand and shook his head.

He nudged Anise. "If your uncle wasn't on his way, he is now… if we leap out the top floor, can you generate enough push to soften the landing?"

"I think so," she said. "Yes."

It wasn't the most reassuring response in the world, but Ezra had just survived three gunshot wounds, any of which ought to have been deadly. If he leapt out the window and broke both his legs, they'd just have to drag him along until he was healed enough to limp after them.

He practically carried Rill to the stairs and prepared to hoist her across his shoulders when the whole building shuddered, as if a great, meaty fist had thumped against the side. Ezra froze for an instant, wondering whether this meant he should ascend faster or hunker down with Rill. He decided for the former, and made it up exactly one quarter of a flight of winding staircase when the whole section of wall tore away from the house.

Fenrik of Westval floated in mid-air, his face twisted in fury, seething at the three intruders. An aura of crackling, swirling energy rushed around the sorcerer, sending little arcs of magenta and violet snapping against nearby objects. On the streets beyond him, Ezra could see people pointing. Even more had opted to flee in terror - that seemed like the appropriate response. For a nauseating instant, a crushing force gripped Ezra, but it weakened almost immediately.

"G… go!" Anise shouted. Somehow, she was holding her uncle back, but she couldn't last long against the power of an 8th elevation High Sorcerer.

Running up the stairs was next to pointless now, so Ezra held Rill tighter and prepared to leap through the cavernous opening in the wall, aiming to push himself right past Fenrik and his terrible magenta aura. He crouched and then pounced like a cat, whooshing through the air but suddenly finding himself suspended, once again smothered in a crushing grip like that of a great python. As Rill slipped from his grip, he could see her grimace and grit her teeth, preparing one last desperate salvo of flame. Suddenly there was fire everywhere. Fire and magenta energy, crackling everywhere and running right through him, every nerve in Ezra's body on fire with pain, his mental techniques utterly unable to block the maddening torrent.

The screaming was his own, but it seemed very far away. Blinding white fire surrounded him, crackling his skin, but far less badly than it ought to have. No, the pain was far too intense to be anything reel, burrowing right into his psyche like a mosquito probing for blood. The sorcerer's grip faltered and he felt himself falling, heard something crack, and the world went dark…