Chapter 13

A Thief in the Moonlight

Femira crept along the shadowed hallway.

It felt good to be back in her discreet stealth gear. The trousers and shirt hugged tightly on her legs and shoulders, inhibiting even the barest whisper of swishing cloth as she moved. Using ecko’s moonlight from the windows as her only guide through the dim, she lightly sidestepped around furniture. When she had been new to creeping about in the dark in rich folks homes, she had been surprised at how much useless stuff they piled in their hallways. Suits of armour, randomly placed tables and plush chairs and the like. As if you’re just going to lounge around in your hallway all casual-like. Nothing highborn did with their money really surprised Femira these days. She’d once been paid for a job to break into a merchant's home and steal a flower of all things. It wasn’t even a pretty flower, just some blue flower that grows out in the desert in Keiran. And they paid her five silver marks for it, and that meant whoever had put out the job had paid Lichtin ten! For a single useless flower! Tonight though, she wasn’t here to steal flowers or chairs that nobody ever sits in. She was here for paper—specifically a set of pages from a book that Garld wanted.

Her thick socks brushed silently against the wooden floor, a much wiser choice than her clumsy bloodshedder boots. It was late, far past midnight but if she stopped and focused, she could faintly hear people moving about in other parts of the manse, servants about their nightly duties and—more worryingly—guards. Not to mention that highborn folk often have an annoying habit of staying up late to drink fancy wines. She’d staked out the manse for the past few nights so she was reasonably confident this would be the quietest time in the night. Her earthstone hung with a comfortable weight around her neck tucked into her shirt to not let off any light. It felt strange being comforted by that knowledge, while only a few months before she would have felt anxious if the earthstone had any substantial weight to it during a job. She had a pair of duelling dagger sheathed tightly on her belt. Garld had expressly told her to avoid any violence, but if a guard stumbled across her, she was glad to have them.

She approached the door. Fourth on the right, top floor. She checked the keyhole for any lamplight before taking out her picks and set to work on the lock. If the latch had been metal she felt bold enough in her new skills to dissolve the metal quickly and reform the latch when she was finished but this latching mechanism was made of wood. Lord Averstock was no fool it seemed. Regardless, any burglar worth their salt can pick a lock and Femira had been one of the best lockpicks in Lichtin’s crew. After just a few minutes, she was in, as slowly as she could to avoid any creaking hinges she pushed the door open and slipped into Averstock’s office. Rich folk often thought themselves very clever. They would hide important things in books or secret drawers but they were always painfully obvious places to Femira. Big fat hardback tomes were always the first checked. Then she ran her fingers along the seams of the brushed wood looking for secret compartments. She’d found two, and both had contained documents, but not the ones she was looking for, she’d pocketed them anyway in her satchel. The pages will be old, Garld had said, and handwritten, similar to these. And he’d shown her a tight scrawl of writing with diagrams she didn’t understand. She sat lightly in Averstock’s chair, trying to think where he would hide something important enough that a general in the Reldoni army would want to steal.

Ecko’s light flowed in through the windows casting the room in a blue tinge. In Altarea, she would often wait for storm clouds to give her cover from the moonslight, but Reldoni nights were almost always clear. So she’d chosen tonight when luna was the new moon, and she was left with only ecko’s dim blue to hide from. But that made it difficult for her now to get a good view of the room. Tentatively, she pulled out her earthstone and let the yellow-orange light give her some slight extra illumination, hoping it wouldn’t be noticeable through the windows to the guards in the courtyard below. She felt a thrill being back in this setting, trying to outsmart sneaky highborn folk who thought themselves crafty enough to hide their valuables from her.

She double checked the lacquered desk for any hidden compartments but felt out nothing even with the additional light of the earthstone. An idea struck her. She gripped her earthstone, and felt the thrum of it. Eager for her to pull out the light in it and give it shape again. She ignored the pulsations from the stone and reached out with her free hand, running it again over the desk. As it was wood, it didn’t pulse in response to her as stone or metal would. However as she glided her hands over the brushed brass hinges she felt it beat in response, like the metal was calling out to her. Smiling she ran her hands again over the desk and sure enough when she passed over the very top center of the desk she felt it. A light whisper of a hum. There was something hidden in the center of the desk. She pressed at it, expecting a pressure mechanism that pop up a secret latch but it held firm. Rude! She glided her hands along the desk looking for a release switch but came up with nothing. She felt back at the hidden metal humming to her, and just like the hinges, she felt as if it was calling to her. Beckoning her to pull the metal into her and the earthstone eager to drink it from her. Instead she pushed out, forming a thin thread of metal where she felt the hum. As with dissolving rock and metal, stoneshaping and metalshaping were the same. Forming metal simply took a lot longer than stone. At first, her attempts to form metal had taken her hours to even form a ring to fit around her finger. Now after weeks of practice it only took her a few minutes to form this needle. She formed it below her line of sight, where she felt the humming. As the needle formed and grew, she felt it resist against the weight of the desktop; she pushed against it, continuing to mold her needle. She strained against the weight of the table and found herself gripping at its edges, her muscles tightening as if she were using her own physical force to push the needle up.

It popped!

A small compartment smoothly glided up at the very center of the table, moving up as she continued to form her needle, easily now that the resistance was gone. Femira marvelled at how well the compartment fit in the desk, considering her fingers hadn’t been able to detect any seam. The compartment was no wider than her forearm, and inside she found scrolled pages. She pressed them flat and smirked when she found the matching scrawl to the pages that Garld had shown her. She scrolled them back up and tucked the pages safely into her pouch which she strapped snugly to her back. She drew the metal she’d used to form her needle back into her earthstone and the hidden compartment slid neatly back into the table. Awed, she ran her hand back over the desk to see if she could feel the boundary. Now that she knew exactly where to look, she could feel it almost imperceptibly beneath her fingertip. Idly, she wondered how many times highborn had cheated her out of finding the really valuable stuff using concealed compartments like these. Underhanded little crooks!

A part of her felt a little sad that the game was now over, but the more practical part of her brain was eager to get moving. Linger too long in one place and you might as well scream for a guard to find you. She peeked out into the hallway and after seeing no lights, she slipped out and reset the lock on the door. As she made her way back through the dark hallways of the manse, something felt off. She couldn’t pinpoint it, but it was the same feeling she got when she suspected a guard was just around the corner. Just a feeling that someone was nearby. She glanced over her shoulder and saw nothing. She padded noiselessly along, ears straining for other sounds. Nothing but her own heartbeat, not even servants moving around anymore. She continued on trying to pass it off as just jitters, this was afterall her first heist in a few months. She slipped out the window, and edged her way along an exterior beam to a steel drainpipe.

She shimmied carefully down the pipe, keeping her eyes fixed on the backs of the pair of guards in the courtyard. Guards were the utmost peak of misplaced security in Femira’s opinion—and the most costly. Invest in wooden walls and more complicated locks would be her advice if rich sods ever had the decency to ask. Don’t waste your money on hiring men to look off mindlessly into space for hours. At best, they were no better than scarecrows to deter any amatuer thieves. At worst, they were full on asleep. Get a scarecrow and put armour on him, it’ll be cheaper. That opinion didn’t make her reckless with guards however. All it took was for one of them to decide to have a little unlucky glance over the house and spot a shadow moving along the wall and the whole night would be a colossal bust. She didn’t doubt she’d get away, but the satisfaction of doing it completely undetected would be lost. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t look in her direction, or any direction other than whatever spot outside the manse gateway had taken their fancy.

The drainpipe ended onto the roof of the stables, leading into a gutter that led away from the courtyard which Femira followed down off the roof. She felt the feeling again of someone being close and looked back up the way she came and saw nothing. She disregarded the thought that maybe one of the guards had somehow bumbled across and she just hadn’t spotted them yet. She made her way through the garden, keeping to the shadowed hedges, brambles catching at her feet and stinging through her socks. She reached the palisade fence. The iron bars cool against her touch, her hands vibrating and ready to dissolve the metal. Sorry bars, not today. She reached down and felt the familiar thrum of the earth below her. In bug sweeping gestures with her hands she pulled chunks of earth and rock into her earthstone, carving out a small hole beneath the palisade for her wiggle through. Climbing out the other side and dusting herself off, she glanced up down the street to see if anyone had spotted her. The gaslamps were lit, at the far end of the street she could hear some drunks staggering along away in the opposite direction. She reformed the mound below the fence. It was messy and if anyone cared to look they would notice that the cobblestones of the pathway were missing next to the fence and had just been filled with dirt. She didn’t have time to focus on reconstructing the cobblestones as they had been so she hurried off down the opposite direction from where the drunks had gone.

It was a long walk back to the garrison and Femira kept to smaller streets and shadier alleyways. Epilas was primarily a military city, but every city has it’s crime regardless of how many soldiers were about. People often thought that they should keep to the main gaslamp lit streets at night, that they would be safer. But all that did was make the roughs spot you easier. She had learned very young, it was better to stay hidden for as long as you could. Not that she really had anything to fear from street thugs, not with her earthstone and her daggers, but old habits and all that. So Femira kept to the shadows, trying to shake the feeling she was being followed still.

She was two streets away from the manse when she heard a scraping of a tile above her. Her eyes shot up to the to where the ribbon of stars split the alleyway. She couldn’t see anything so she continued on, rounded a corner and broke into a full sprint down the gaslamp lit street and then took a sharp turn into another alleyway. A couple of rats scurried away along the walls of the alley but otherwise silence with no other indications of anyone following. She waited crouched in the shadows for any sounds. A few moments passed and she heard nothing. She waited for another few and stepped back into the main street. She cursed the gaslamps and the myriad of shadows they cast as she cautiously walked along the edges trying to remain unseen. She kept her gaze on the rooftops. A shadow moved and she froze, keeping her gaze where the shadow had been. There was no doubt now that she was being followed. Her heart quickened, and she resumed her cautious pace trying to devise a plan. Fear won over and she broke into a sprint, a part of her mind telling her it would be harder for her pursuer to keep on the rooftops. She sprinted down the street aiming for the main thoroughfare that cut through the city from the port to the garrison. It was a few streets over and if she could make it, the wide street would be reasonably populated even at this hour. There would be duty soldiers at the least patrolling. She cut through an alley and darted along onto a parallel street. She’d always been fast and the past months of endurance training with the braves meant that her lungs didn’t burn at the exertion. Adrenaline pumped through her as she ran, she looked over her shoulder and could see the shadow keeping pace along the rooftop. Shit.

“Eh love, where you running off to?” some drunk called as she ran past him. She ran into another alley closing the distance to the main street.

She heard footsteps behind her. Panic gripped her, and she reached for her daggers. She spun falling into a crouch and unsheathing them. The shaded figure pulled up a few meters away.

“Who are you?” she hissed.

“I could ask you the same thing,” the figure replied in an accent that Femira didn’t recognise.

“You’re the one following me,” she said.

“You have something, something that was not yours to take,”

“You were in Averstock’s manse,” she said, not exactly a question but wanting to validate her feelings of being watched.

“The journal pages,” Femira couldn’t tell with the accent whether the voice was even a man or a woman, “give them to me and I won’t hurt you.”

“What right do you have to them?”

“More right than you,” the person replied, “more than Averstock did.”

The person was wearing a cloak and Femira couldn’t tell if they had any weapons. She remained in her crouched fighting stance, waiting for the other person to make the first move.

“Well to me you’re just another thief. My right’s about the same as yours as I see it, so you’re going to have to do a whisp better than that.”

“Who are you working with?” the shadow asked.

“Working alone,” she said.

“Lying and thieving are often neighbours. If you’re going to lie to me, at least make it a convincing one.”

“I don’t owe you nothing,” she replied, running through the possibilities of what this person could be hiding in their cloak. Most likely daggers, similar to her own, or a shortsword, anything bigger would be showing. She slowly edged back closer to the street, hoping to lure the person into the light of the gaslamps.

“Just what you stole,” they replied and matched her steps slowly advancing.

Closer to the entrance of the alley, gaslamp light broke through from the street along with the ecko’s light. The person was hooded, but even shadowed beneath the hood, Femira was almost certain it was a boy. Not a man—a boy. You’ve made a big mistake kid. Femira jumped at him, slashing out with her dagger. He stepped quickly back surprised at her sudden attack and his hood flopped back showing a young pale face. Her intent had not been to hurt him but to scare him off, but he didn’t run.

“I’m giving you one more chance,” he said, a little shake in his voice now that Femira realised he was just a boy. Taller than her, to be sure, but still just a kid, “I’m giving you one more chance, kiddo. Back off before I cut you from neck to balls.” He didn’t draw any weapon, he’s got nothing, foolish boy. But he didn’t make any move to run from her. Fine! She took another swing at him, this one with a bit more intent behind it, not a fatal wound, just a little warning cut. The boy sidestepped around her, Femira felt the rush of wind as her blade brushed the space he had been, and she was falling. The ground beneath her collapsing, her feet kicking wildly against dust and her torso slammed hard against the cobblestone. Her daggers clattered ahead of her, echoing in the quiet alley. Outstretched arms she grasped at the stones before she fell further into the ground. There was a sudden tightening on her legs, cold solid arms grabbing at her legs and waist. Instinctively she tried to kick, but the grip was impossibly firm. Panic rising, she tried to twist to see where the cloaked boy had gone. But she was pinned in place at the waist. She realised with sharp clarity that she was held by the ground itself. But she didn’t grasp it quick enough as she felt her pouch containing the pages ripped from her back.

She reached for her earthstone, and felt the hum. She set to quickly dissolving the stone holding her, pushing her hand down with frenzied breaths. In a few moments, she’d carved out enough space to wriggle her legs free and crawl up out of the hole in the alley. Without even getting to her feet, she pushed herself forward reaching for her daggers, her hand clasped the hilt and she rolled on her back ready to stab the boy.

But he was gone?

Cautiously, she rose to standing. Her braid whacking as she whipped her head about the alley looking for the boy. “Shit”

“Fuck! Shit! Shit! Prick!!” she shouted furiously at the empty alleyway. She darted onto the main street but didn’t spot the boy anywhere. “Aaaaah!” she screamed bitterly, “get back here you little shit!” There were a few stragglers on the other side of the street and they hurriedly moved on.