I leapt backwards out of the way as a cloud of dark shapes billowed inwards through the falling glass. Like swooping living shadows they mobbed around the knights who began to stumble and swat at them with glacial slowness in their heavy armour. As they turned, their swords cutting huge useless lines through the air, a crimson lightning bolt hurtled out of the sky. It shot through the ragged hole in the roof and landed astride the wide pauldron of one staggering knight. Pausing for a moment the lightning bolt becomes a figure who lashes out with both the long blades it holds and spears the knights back mounted power cores with almost contemptuous ease.

These knights were good, they were the bodyguards of a house head after all, and as such their armour was the latest issue with the latest safety features but I doubt this comforted them. Their joints locked down with a scream of metal on metal as their steam and water tanks vented explosively spewing out of overflow pipes and spattering a nearby bookshelf which began to smoulder (seriously why do we put bookshelves everywhere?)

The knight’s both swayed, quivered and then stilled, muted thumping indicated that they were unhappy about this but I think they should just have been grateful that their powered mail had a heat proof internal layer. As I thought that, the figure that had been standing on the knight’s pauldrons jumped down with catlike grace and taped one of the figures gently on his breastplate.

“Be a good boy and stay there will you?” She said in a voice as sweet and sin and as soft as silk.

Blood Mask strolled around the immobilised knights and nodded companionably at me no doubt beaming beneath her mask. She did so love her grand entrances.

“Blood.” I greeted her fondly as the ravens that had been mobbing the knights came to a rest on their now immobile forms.

The little hellion turned a pirouette and bowed to me with a dramatic wave of her arm, “Bright.” She replied, causing me to reach up self consciously to touch my mask, my bright white quartz mask[19].

Then I remembered the rat faced harpy who had forced us to go loud. I spun around readying my mace but the ancient crone was already sprinting away at commendable speed for a little shrew wearing about ten thousand Lire of precious metal. Within a dozen heartbeats she was through the vault door[20] which slammed down again behind her, just before it closed I saw her slam a fist onto a large bass button on the opposite wall. All around us alarms suddenly screamed to life sounding like the cries of a herd of burning cows.

All around us the vault was locking down even as the deafening horns echoed throughout the manor. Huge steel grids slammed down across trophy cases in the gallery whilst thick bars slid across the ticksteel vault door. The (apparently) previously deactivated pressure floor reactivated and the knights tripped it instantly adding yet another alarm to the cacophony which was followed by a staggered slamming. Small previously invisible slots were opening in the walls, in the depths of which I could see something metallic... and sharp. Just barely over the blaring alarms I heard a distant ominous ticking start.

*Tick* *Tick* *Tick*

I spun around panicking blindly (as if you wouldn't under the circumstances!), “the walls have spikes!” I screamed. “The walls have spikes!”

Blood turned away from the vault door, apparently unconcerned by the spikes, and headed back towards the everglass display pyramid. With a single spin of her rapier she carved an elaborate figure of eight pattern in the hardened glass, she must have juiced the move with a little bit of magic because the edges left by her rapiers were glowing with heat, the ravens around the room cawed at this display of power with a sound very much like raucous applause.

I dashed over and reached in gingerly grasping the disruptor whilst being careful not to touch the white hot everglass as it dripped down onto the ground. Luckily (yes luckily) the angle I was forced to bend my arm at was an awkward one and as I grabbed and lifted it from the display cushion it slipped from my sweat slicked grip and began to plummet. My other hand shot out instinctively and grabbed it out of the air and as I did so my fingers closed heavily on a tiny lever.

*Click*

There was a second’s breathless anticipation then the end of the disruptor clacked open and a wash of blue light poured out and filled the room.

The alarms stopped instantly and so did the distant ominous ticking. I really should have felt relieved at that but instead I felt sick... really sick. My head was spinning, my heart was pounding in my ears and my stomach seemed to be filled with acid. At the time I just put it down to delayed shock.

“Ohhhhh so THAT'S what it does!” I murmured as I held the disruptor out in my suddenly weak hands, “now... let’s... just...” My numb and shaking fingers knocked the lever again and the light vanished as the bronze shutter slammed back down.

Instantly I felt much better, the acid in my throat stopped rising and my vision cleared as my heart resumed its normal restful beat. Again at the time I just thought it was because my precious hands weren’t ringed with razor sharp molten glass anymore.

Looking around and rubbing at my still slightly tingling fingers I saw we were still trapped, the door was still locked, steel grates still obscured the gallery and I was sure I could hear heavy booted feet stomping across fine marble tiles in the middle distance. But worst of all... the ticking had restarted again.

“How are we going to get out?” I squeaked, my voice nearly cracking with nerves. “...could we drag one of the bookcases and put it in front of the spikes? And then... Eppp!” My idea was interrupted (probably for the best) by Blood who grabbed me around the waist. I squeaked with a mixture of indignation and surprise as she lifted me off the floor, for someone so tiny she was incredibly strong.

Blood just chuckled at my shock of course. Then before I could muster any actual words of complaint she got a good grip on my corsets, looked at the ceiling speculatively and... leapt upwards. Any normal person is hard pressed to jump at all carrying another person let alone up a whole story, but Blood hurtled skywards like a bolt from a crossbow. She landed on the edge of the partially shattered glass roof nearly twenty metres above the vault floor trailed by a swirling mass of ravens like a long black cloak.

I fell out of Blood's arms (to another damnable chuckle) and desperately tried not to be sick, this was made significantly harder a few seconds later when a dozen metres below me the ticking stopped and... well there were a few less bookcases. Luckily for the knights they were in full body ticksteel powered mail or it would have been rather messy. As it was their immobilised suits were now even more immobilised by hundreds of long steel spikes that now filled nearly the entire room, it was going to take days to get them out.

I looked away from the sight, having to force my dinner down and turned back to Blood. “Thank you Blood... so much those knights were so big and you just... thank you.”

Blood laughed at my praise and waved magisterially. “I am perfect you know? It was nothing.”

I nodded absentmindedly trying to identify a strange nagging feeling in my brain then I stood bolt upright and gasped. “Slet[21], we need to get moving, the guards saw where we went, how long until...?”

“Until they get up here and stab us?” Interrupted Blood seemingly entirely unconcerned as she coos at a large albino raven now sitting on her shoulder.

Stolen story; please report.

I looked at her and then the raven which cawed loudly as my crimson companion began to laugh.

“Hermosa says about two minutes normally,” my stomach turned to ice. “But they’re going to be delayed a bit this time.”

“What? Why!” I snapped desperately looking around for an escape route. That was when I noticed that many of the ravens now settled happily on the rooftop were holding things in their beaks, small and shiny things.

“Well... became Hermosa and her flock stole all their keys.” Giggled Blood.

For a second I froze, then I laughed, I laughed and laughed and laughed as stress poured off me like steam off a boiling pot, soon the ravens began to chuckle as well and nothing chuckled like a raven.

After a few more moments of relieved laughter the hysterical hilarity subsided and I pulled myself together. Taking a few deep calming breaths and wishing I could wipe my eyes I turned to the ledge and nodded at the distant buildings.

“Ready?”

Blood nodded. “Always.” I could hear her smiling under her mask.

We leapt from the rooftop and there was a moment. A singular perfect moment as the world fell away beneath us and we flew out into the night where I wasn't the heir to a damn noble house, a scion of privilege, a relied upon elder sister. Just for a moment whilst dashing moon shadow to moon shadow alongside my best friend I finally felt like I was home.

It didn't take us long to make it back to our base but it did take us quite some considerable time to actually get inside it.

I suppose I should describe our little hideaway but from the outside there really isn’t a point. That is in fact the whole point, after all what good would an overt secret lair be?

Our hideout (we hadn't bothered coming up with a name) was in a slum district called “beggar’s row” owned by House Lyteth. Originally a bright and cheerful district catering to a nearby magical college (technically this was done via printers and paper binders but more often than not it was the taverns and houses of negotiable affection) after the purge destroyed the colleges (and more importantly the students) the workers moved away en masse, without skilled artisans the whole district gradually collapsed and died becoming yet another slum that the nobles only let exist because the poor had to go somewhere. And this was nearly a decade ago! By now it had decayed so badly that only the most desperate, degenerate and dangerous would dare live there.... and us, but hey two out of three ain’t bad.

It was Blood who had found our hideout itself and she had done so long before I had even thought about putting a mask on. It was nestled in a row of half collapsed houses and looked like any other house there apart from one thing it was, in fact, two houses.

Only Blood had spotted that and she’d laughed for a good fifteen minutes the first time she brought me here and watched me wander around the stinking ruin poking at walls and complaining about the smell.

The house had been commissioned either by some overly ambitious land Baron or upwardly mobile scribe back when the district was respectable and was designed to house two families in as small an amount of space as possible and how had they done that? By making one large house and cutting it in half with a thick stone wall. On one side was a dirt and filth encrusted wreck that had been colonised by rats for so long that its carpet now consisted wholly of droppings and on the other side of the wall was a dry, clean silent space without even windows or doors hiding behind the rotten mass of the first building.

I would never have spotted it but Blood had somehow (And even to this day I'm not sure exactly how) and she dug a tunnel into it from the nearby canal. The entrance was hidden just under the lip of the bank using a few fronds of Lorik weed[22]. You had to hang from the edge like a monkey and really swing your legs to get in and you had to know juuuust where to aim for but after a while it became second nature.

As for the tunnel... well what do you want me to describe? It was just a tunnel, long, dark and boring. It didn't go straight into our base of course, even though she acted like she never took anything seriously I found that Blood had a healthy paranoid streak (healthy for a thief at least). Our tunnel twisted and turned two dozen times before it reached our base and it was filled with traps, tricks, false passages, hidden doors and a whole host of other inconveniences to delay, discourage and basically ruin the day of anyone who tried to sneak in.

However whilst it is highly secure it’s also the reason why it took us nearly half an hour to actually get into our base every time we came home, the stylish life of crime eh?

Just before we had entered the warren of tunnels Blood had bid goodnight to Hermosa and her flock. They had cawed what I had been assured was a polite goodbye and compliment of my dress sense at me and vanished up towards the roof and their makeshift aerie that we had installed there. I wasn’t very pleased with it but Blood said they liked it a lot more than sleeping out in the open even if it suffered from mild subsidence and all’s well that ends well right?

But as it was they were probably all nice and warm and more than likely asleep by the time we even managed to drag our exhausted bodies out of the hole in our base's floor. Thanks to our many and lucrative thefts our hideout was far better decorated than the decoy house (with its stylish collection of rat droppings) but it was not improved by the arrival of two sweaty mages with muddy boots.

I crawled to my feet and half collapsed against a wall within seconds the white and gold striped wallpaper had blurred slightly as the damp from my cape seeped into it.

Blood of course didn't look like she’d even noticed the run or been perturbed by clambering through a trap filled sewer. She crawled out of the hole, did a reverse somersault onto her feet and strode away towards her room with every sign of enjoyment only stopping to pat me gently on the back.

“I’ll... fine... See... Later” I managed to gasp as a whole evening's worth of fighting, running and worrying finally caught up with me. The little hellion simply nodded with what I was sure was a smile on her invisible face and wandered off glancing at her cabinet as she went past.

Ah yes I should describe that. Give me a moment though will you? You need the full description of our little hidey-hole as it very soon became the centre of my world.

To start with our hideout was massive, consisting of twenty large rooms arrayed into two levels around a central space. We used two of the side rooms as bedrooms with a third being an armoury of sorts, a fourth a small kitchen and a fifth being “The strategic centre” as Blood called it (really it was entirely unnecessary since it was just a table with a few maps and plans in a box on it; all of which could have easily fit anywhere else in the house but oh well). To be honest we mostly lived in the central room (which I think used to be a landing) it had a large fireplace, a number of trophy cabinets where we kept our loot and an even larger number of overstuffed armchairs that were being sorely missed in noble smoking rooms all across the city.

The entire house smelled... odd. Not bad if that's what you’re thinking but it smelled like a sealed up room. Faint notes of lacquer and sawdust drifted through the air accompanied by a slight tang of mildew and the scent of stillness which you could taste on your tongue. The atmosphere of the place was always cold as we arrived, like old stone radiating chill into your bones, but it always seemed to warm nearly instantly as if the house enjoyed finally having inhabitants[23].

Now finally the most interesting bit, our trophy cases.

They sat in our large central living room, three along the left wall for me and six along the right for Blood, finally in-between them was a large pentagonal case where we put things that we had both stolen together. We took any money or jewels we found obviously (and tended to give some nearby peasants some very happy Kothmas days) but this was where we kept the things we couldn't bear to part with (generally either by chucking them in the sea or later when we gained a few new friends by selling them), some were just too useful to part with like the harmonic intercept box and after tonight the aether disruptor. Some because they were far too well known or were still being actively hunted for (the egg of Baron Fairbanks for instance) and the majority were there because we liked to show off to one another and needed evidence to back up our heist stories. Or as Blood had once put it “Loot or it didn't happen”.

As I walked through our trophy room I lifted the lid of our joint storage case and dropped the Disruptor in, looking around I smiled at the pleasant memories the room invoked. I saw the Fairbanks egg sat on a pedestal in my case and a Deroth pendant forged from moon silver next to it, I even had a trans-logical equation punch card made from solid gold and stolen from a sub-cloister of the Church of the Divine Mechanisms itself. All in all I was very happy with my various hauls but they paled in comparison to Bloods. She had actually been forced to leave the top off her trophy case just to fit them all in! But that is to be expected after all, she had been doing this for 4 eons and I for only 12 cycles but I think I had some pretty decent cabinets all the same.

After a moment more lost in pleasant recollection I gritted my teeth and pushed off from the cabinet, stumbled across the room and lurched up the stairs. With an effort of will I pushed all my remaining energy into my battered legs, crashed through my door and half fell into the room beyond landing heavily on my bed. Its fluffiness defeated any attempts at a struggle and I (lying sideways with my shins still on the floor I will point out) fell soundly asleep.

I didn't dream I don't tend to, I just closed my eyes peacefully... and then slammed them open growling under my breath as the Fairbanks egg chimed, trilled and sang the hour in.