Xigbar left Emerald and Soris twitching and writhing in an alleyway, crippled snake bites courtesy of his armband. The relic was the one thing he'd been able to get back from his old gear, by virtue of it always turning into a snake and coming to find him whenever he was away from it for too long.

Contrary to threats he'd given previously, one bite from the armband wasn't usually lethal, just excruciatingly painful. Emerald and Soris would probably be able to crawl out of that alleyway sometime tomorrow morning, angry, in pain, but very much alive.

"You know, you've got pretty good instincts," Xigbar told Emerald as she spasmed on the alley floor. "You should probably listen to them more often."

"Xig. . . bar," Emerald choked out his name amidst her pain and rage.

"Oh, you have heard of me," Xigbar said, running his hands through his now free hair. "I was worried you were gonna be confused about this, but I guess my reputation precedes me these days. Well, tell Arty I said hi."

Emerald glared up at him, a strangled noise coming from her throat, where Soris gave a growl so deep Xigbar felt it in his chest. He gave them an apologetic smile, and left them to their recovery. He had a job to do.

Gehrang's was an out of the way curio shop in Lochmire Keep, tucked onto a side street and surrounded by old houses. There were a lot of odd little details to it—the round windows, the wide, squat frame—but the thing that stuck out the most was the absolutely giant roof. The thing looked like it was made for a building twice, and it had an oversized chimney to match.

Quaint little place.

This was going to be too easy.

Emerald and Soris said the owner was out for the holiday, and with no smoke in the chimney or lights on inside or out, it looked like they were right. Xigbar gave a quick sweep of the streets to make sure no one was around. Two twirls of a sling later, the closest street lanterns were out, and Xigbar was scaling the side of the shop.

He paused at the precipice of the chimney, peering down to make sure he could make the trip down without getting stuck or landing on a pile of hot charcoal. It was clear, and he slipped all the way down without even having to turn into a snake to make the trip.

The interior was a lot more cramped than he expected. The fireplace was in the shop's front end, where a sales counter separated a small foyer from shelves on shelves of the weirdest, most tightly packed junk Xigbar had ever seen.

There were glass jars filled pieces of monsters suspended in clear liquid, dozens of empty wire cages containing shredded paper and woodshavings, stoppered bottles contain a dozen different colored liquids, the husks of insects held to cork boards with needles, musical instruments in various states of disrepair, an elaborate set of smoking pipes—and that was without turning his head.

Xigbar was reminded of the last mage's house he'd broken into, and he instinctively froze. His face burned as his inner street rat imagined the potential score, but the inner professional kept his fingers still. The last time he'd broken into a mage's home, he wound up sent to another continent.

Some of the stuff on these shelves could be worth a fortune, and some of it would be nothing but junk. He had no way of knowing which was which without taking it to someone else, and everything he touched risked setting off some magical mishap.

But maybe just a few extra odds and ends wouldn't hurt.

Cautiously, Xigbar reached for something that looked valuable as best he could gauge it. It was an ivory statuette, carved into the shape of a large eye with four tiny crab legs jutting out the base of it. Worst case scenario, it was a mundane art piece a fence would take for a few scales. Best case scenario—

As his finger came within a few inches of the eye, its legs flexed, and the whole thing leapt onto Xigbar's wrist. He jerked his hand back, but the crab legs bit through his sleeve and into his flesh, holding fast. Before he could even scream, the eye shone a brilliant white, and Xigbar found himself unwillingly transformed into a snake.

The transformation at least got the thing off of him, and the eye statue immediately scurried off deeper into the shop as Xigbar transformed back into himself—and his head on the base of another shelf. The shelf's contents tinkled as it rattled, and Xigbar stared in horror was he watched several pieces near the edge teeter precariously.

He caught the first mason jar that fell with ease, as well as the sand timer that followed. Then a small, buzzing glass orb rolled over, and he was out of hands. He tried to set the timer down as quickly as he could to catch the orb, but he was too slow.

The tips of his fingers bumped the orb instead of wrapping around it, and it careened off before shattering against a wall and erupting in a swarm of glowing bees. They scattered around the room, passing through shelves and walls as if they weren't even there. More than a few flew straight through Xigbar, and he felt stabs of pain wherever they did.

It was like someone had pricked with a dozen spikes of acid that were now all spreading out into his veins. His insides burned, and his body quickly fell into writhing fits.

Now he screamed.

Every unlit lantern flared to life as a thick, drawling voice sputtered out. "Wuzzat? Who's there?"

Xigbar writhed in pain for a few more seconds on the floor as he could hear footsteps coming from somewhere else in the shop. He was wrong. The owner was home.

He had to move, had to do something, or he was finished, but whatever the bees had done—if they were even bees in the first place—they'd left him too paralyzed with pain to do more than roll onto his stomach and start to crawl.

"Whatever you think you came here for, you're not gonna like what you get!" the voice warned, drawing closer now.

Just as Xigbar could hear the owner entering, he saw the sand timer he'd caught earlier, just in time to watch its last grains drop down into its lower half.

The shop lights and pain vanished all at once. His own screams halted. He was lying on his back again, in the dark, staring up at an unstable shelf as buzzing glass orb rolled off it. Xigbar lunged for it as it fell with both hands, and this time, he caught it tight against his chest.

The shop was still. No voice. No footsteps. Just a dull, droning buzz from the glass orb he now cradled against his chest.

Xigbar looked around, confused for a few seconds, until his eyes found the sand timer again, sitting on the floor. There was no sand inside it anymore, and its glass had cracked.

After taking a few moments to catch his breath, Xigbar returned everything that had fallen, and resolved not to touch anything else on the shelves.

It took a bit of exploring, but eventually, he found what he was looking for in a back room behind a door with six locks and an alarm ward. Those weren't a concern for him, but he did notice that the handle of the door—and all the handles in the house, now that he thought about it—was significantly lower to the ground than normal, and Xigbar had to stoop to grab it.

The safe was exactly as Emerald and Soris had described it—small, made of a milky white material with golden filigree carved into its face and golden bracing along its edges. There was no conventional lock or tumbler, only a simple handle.

He took a pinch of dust from a new pouch on his belt—he really should send Emerald and Soris a thank you card at this point—and tossed it at the handle. Sure enough, the dust shimmered as it settled onto the safe's handle.

It was sealed at the very least. And unless Xigbar missed his guess, it wasn't one of the mor common ones, that just needed a physical key or a spoke password. This one would only open to those exempted from it during its creation. Afterall, keys could be stolen, passwords learned, but no one could steal you.

At least, that was the idea. But there was always a workaround. And thanks to his earlier mishap, he knew one was close at hand.

Trying to remember where he'd first heard the voice of the owner come from before, Xigbar crept through the house until he found what he was looking for: a bedroom. A four post bed fit for a king dominated the room, with a child sized lump beneath its sheets.

Suddenly, the height of all the door handles made more sense.

Xigbar tugged a leather glove onto his left hand, and drew a dagger in his right. Quiet as a whisper, he drifted to the head of the bed, and carefully pulled back the covers.

The owner was unnaturally small if it wasn't a gnome, it was someone whose grandparents had slept with one, as they couldn't have been more than two and a half feet tall. They had a short, grey, bushy beard, and thick, round features that were scrunched tight, as if they were annoyed to be asleep.

Xigbar moved his dagger light and quick, cutting a small nick on sleeping gnomeling, and waiting. The gnome's pointed ears twitched, and he swatted at his forehead once in his sleep, but he didn't wake. Xigbar let out the breath he'd been holding. That was the riskiest part of the plan.

With the care of a surgeon, Xigbar used his blade to collect the rapidly pooling blood from the minor headwound, and smeared it across the palm of his glove. Once done, he returned to the sealed safe, and used the bloodied glove to grip the handle.

For a tense half second, he waited for the seal to recognize the life force of the shop's owner. Then, with a rush, he felt a click in the handle, and it gave. He pulled the safe door open with some difficulty, but it did open, and inside, Xigbar found what Emerald and Soris had been hired to steal.

For the first time that night, he wondered if maybe he was making a mistake.

Xigbar arrived at the client's location as the last streams of lanterns began to rise up over the city, in a slaughterhouse at the far end of town. The streets were empty here, and quiet and still in a way that went beyond evening inactivity. The misty air took on a stale, stagnant quality.

He wondered how much of that was this part of town, and how much was the thing he was now carrying. He'd tucked the prize from the shop in a bag, after coaxing it in with the tip of his dagger, and hadn't looked at it since. He didn't know for sure what it was, just that it wasn't something he wanted to make physical contact with or look directly at, and that was enough to give him a laundry list of horrible guesses. He didn't like any of them, but money was money, and he'd come this far.

Before he could decide whether or not to knock on the slaughterhouse doors, they opened, and a pencil thin man in faded, dark finery stood waiting for him, a black hood obscuring his face.

"You are late," the man said in a faintly displeased monotone. "Do you have it?"

"Wouldn't be here if I didn't," Xigbar said. "You have the money?"

Through the eye holes in the hood, Xigbar saw the man eye the bag hanging at Xigbar's hip. Xigbar made sure to rest one hand on it, and the other on his dagger, just to get the message across. The man nodded.

"Follow me."