Sitting up on my bed I groaned loudly, looking back I think about forty minutes had passed but it felt like less than five since my head hit the bed. I paused for a moment to listen to the eggs jaunty tune, determined that it was 11 o’clock, sighed and stood up. Pausing groggily next to my bed I shook my head violently to try to force my brain to wake up properly then bounced on the balls of my feet for a moment to stretch my legs out (accompanied by an internal cacophony of twanging ligaments and complaining muscles). Walking over to my armoire I slapped the door open with a tired gesture and quickly pulled off my cloak and boots, stowing them in the dirty section to be cleaned later. Then I stripped out of the rest of my grey and white thieves outfit, the soft suit with its half skirt was creased and sweat stained after the long night’s running so I dropped it into the dirty section as well. Then for the first time since entering our hideout I looked down. I had been doing all this with only one hand as the other was still clutching my grapple mace so tightly that my white leather gloves were deforming around the knuckles. I flexed my fingers open with a cartilaginous creak and then winced at the harsh thud of the weapon hitting into the floor. Shaking my head I found my hand instinctively reaching up to remove my mask like I might have done at home but I stopped the motion just in time.
Rolling my tense shoulders I grabbed my favourite simple dress from the cupboard, a light sky blue number decorated with Jute lacework and some small silver flowers on the hem. Flattening it as best I could I quickly slid it on over my laced up underclothes, smock, corset and frock.
What? Look, I may spend my nights running around the city stealing from nobles but I was still a lady and a lady must maintain proper standards of dress at all times and that means seven layers minimum, five when in bed... maybe four if it’s a very hot summer. No less!
Now you might have expected us to wander around maskless when it was only the two of us but we had an agreement, no knowledge of one another’s identities, no faces, no names. Even our skin colour might give us away so no visible skin. We had however both drawn the line at hair. Mine got tangled into painful knots under any sort of cap or hood and I assumed Bloods was the same since she always let her black waterfall of perfect curls lie down the back of her cloak and across her shoulders, seriously I was so jealous of that mane of hair, so thick and smooth. You know she never even has to brush it? NEVER! It’s so unfair... but I am really getting sidetracked now.
Anyway once I finished redressing into my casual outfit I left my room. I didn't bother shutting the door; there were only two of us in this house after all and I was going to check on the other one.
It was easy to recognise Blood's room. It was down one of the small corridors on the second level, just off the balcony around the communal area. The corridor didn't have any wallpaper anymore (or carpet... or ceiling beams) and had been burned so badly and so often that it looked like it had been painted black (when I had asked her about this, Blood's only reply was “Practice”).
I knocked on the partially charcoal-ified[24] door and heard a faint metallic noise stop. “Come in Bright.”
I opened the door and nodded at the girl on the bed. “How did you know it was me?” I joked.
Blood laughed quietly at that same adorable silken chuckle I’ve always loved. “Your perfume.”
She was sharpening her blades which she did nearly obsessively after every battle. Even as we spoke her hands never stopped moving, running a slice of sharpening stone up and down on the very edge of her sword, causing a faint and somehow silvery scraping sound like the ticking of some strange clock. I had offered to buy her a steel bar for sharpening soon after I moved into the base but she said she preferred the edge that stone left.
“That was... really well done.” I started looking around for somewhere to sit down. Unlike my sparse room Bloods was packed with stolen furniture every single bit of which was red. A huge double bed with crimson silk sheets, a copper chandelier (hanging slightly too low in the tiny room), a life sized mannequin for her outfit and a whole rack of swords, blades, knives and daggers none of which I had ever seen her use. “Stopping the knights like that I mean... I just want to say thank you again. I wouldn't have stood a chance alone.”
Blood tilted her head at me; a piece of body language we had wordlessly invented to project a smile through a mask. “It's never a problem to help you Bright. Besides I couldn't have memorised the manors blueprints in a single sitting, it's a pity that the old harpy found you out but sometimes luck isn’t on our side.”
“How did that happen anyway?” I asked, giving up and slumping onto the bed next to Blood, the younger girl (I am pretty certain) looked around at me sighed indulgently and dropped her sword and stone onto the floor.
“The old hag said how, didn't she? They saw you busted into that stuffy architect's office and nicked her house's blueprints. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where you’re going to rob.”
“But how did she know the night?” I asked distractedly. I was going to have to work on my burglary skills apparently.
“Probably didn’t,” said Blood leaning back against the wall and waving a hand. “She was probably waiting there every night for the last two cycles just in case you turned up, nobles have a lot of spare time.”
I found myself giggling at the image of a haughty noble woman and her hulking guardsmen standing in a shadowed cold corridor for hours just staring at a locked door.
“Any idea how they snuck up on me?”
“Not a clue!” replies Blood cheerfully. “I guess you’re just an idiot.”
“But I mean their armour is so loud they had steam-generators on their backs and everything...”
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“Ah in that case I can think of only one thing...,” started Blood with theatrical pomposity and gravitas. “...You’re a deaf idiot.”
I giggled again and threw a pillow at her which Blood caught out of the air and hurled back even as I grabbed another. We then proceeded to dance around her room hurling items of clothing and bed linen at one another for a good five minutes before I got tired and surrendered.
“I'm starving Blood,” I said, stifling a yawn. “Let’s get something to eat.”
“Good idea.” She replied and we walked towards the kitchen which turned into a run which turned into a race I won (Blood has short legs)[25]. The building whatever it was supposed to be hadn't been equipped with a kitchen as standard which was quite strange. In response we had simply smashed the door off one of the rooms on the lower level and fitted a rather crude, stuck an ice box in one corner and an oven onto the tile floor. We’d even set up a rainwater syphon from the roof down to a tap. These devices are relatively common around the slum districts (it was that or drink sea water, an unappealing prospect for anyone not of Ladorian blood although this advantage tended to pale in comparison to all of the other problems they faced in Prasus) and mechanical engineering skills was necessity for the young upwardly mobile noble women at least since the Arch-Doge took over[26], how else do you think I made my grapple-mace?
We spilled into our kitchen giggling like a couple of children. I dashed over to the cold box, lifted the lid and then squeaked in disapproval as the much shorter (and I insist younger) Blood lifted me bodily without apparent effort, spun me around and placed me back on the floor away from the box.
“Stay.” She said condescendingly as she grabbed a cold cut herself, I snorted and reached over her much lower shoulder to grab one myself, then we sat down at the table and simply... were. It's hard to explain to a non-noble (and any noble reading this knows exactly what I mean) but when you’re a noble you’re just a function of a bigger system you know? When people look at you they don't see you they see your alliances, policies, parents and bloodline. They may see the heir or the pretender but they never see you.
When I’m with Blood I am who I am and nothing else. Forgive me if that’s overly verbose and not particularly amusing but it’s important that you understand why this time means so much to me and why she means so much to me.
It’s not like we did anything important though I will admit, we just sat and chatted eating our terribly unhealthy meal of late night bread and meat. Talking about anything and everything that crosses our minds... but no names, that was the rule and we never broke it.
“You know I told you about our new tutor?” I asked her more as a framing device than a question. “He's got me doing hundreds of repetitions of our pointless motto and when I complained he set me a hundred more can you believe that? And of course my sister just sat there smirking and my brother was too busy staring out the window to even notice. It was infuriating!”
I sighed then raised my sandwich to my mouth. We had both perfected a sort of flick using our fingertips to lift the chin of our masks up as we leant forwards so we could stick food and drink in our mouths whilst keeping our masks on, not very comfortable and quite embarrassing but you get used to it after a while. “It's exhausting being the one everyone else relies on! My father sets me more lessons every day and my stupid sister just gets to go to balls and parties instead. I mean sure they’d be even more boring to me but at least I’d be outside!”
“Parents are always a problem.” Said Blood with forced joviality, I bit my lip and blushed invisibly under my mask, how could I ever have forgotten? Blood had a terrible relationship with her parents (she hardly ever mentioned them but that in itself was enough to tip me off. The few times she had... well it wasn't nice) and here I was complaining about nothing.
“Sorry Blood I shouldn't be moaning at you...”
Blood reached across the table and took my hand, “I'm your friend Bright, being moaned at is one of my jobs, the other is to be brutally critical of your dress sense,” she paused dramatically for a second and over exaggeratedly looked me up and down. “...Which is pretty awful if I'm being honest.”
I laughed loudly at that as the melancholy in the air vanished instantly. Blood always knows how to lighten the mood, she sees the whole world as one big wonderful joke and when you’re with her you can't stop yourself from enjoying the punch line.
We talked for hours and hours in our warm little kitchen about anything that crossed our minds. The problems with our families, the best parts of our previous heists, anywhere new we planned to explore or rob, our fighting styles, gadgets and devices. Hours we sat there just chatting and revelling in the comfortable feeling of being truly at home.
And then reality kicked us in the ribs.
Out past the empty door frame, in our trophy room, the egg began to ring at 1 o’clock. It did this rather more elaborate than a normal clock so rather than chime it played a brief piece of music ending in chimes worked artfully into the song (it was meant to impress the Arch-Doge after all), supposedly it would never repeat a song[27]. I flinched and slammed my hands into the table as I heard the machines muffled strains of Once a fine morning in Wilt I espied a burning heretic begin to float into the room.
“Damn!”
“Damn!” Echoed Blood and we both leapt to our feet; me dropping my second and Blood dropping her fifth portion of cold meat onto the table. We shot out of the door (well door frame) and raced around the house in panting silence, grabbing books, cloaks and other tokens of our maskless lives from their various resting places (I don't know where Blood kept all her stuff just that it seemed to require an inordinate amount of cursing to get it back).
Assembling my bundle I walked back into the trophy room and stood next to an incongruous wardrobe which was leaning against the back wall. This was my exit from the house, since obviously we didn't leave the same way we entered, or even the same way the other did.
I mean I trusted Blood with my life. By the Abyss I loved her like a sister already (in point of fact I loved her quite a bit more than my real blood sister who I rarely found I had time for thanks to her vapid focus on popularity). But we were fighting a group of notoriously unmerciful people literally called Inquisitors. We never spelled it out but the less each of us knew about the other the better.
With that gloomy thought in mind I turned to Blood who stood on the second floor gallery. She bowed with a florid wave and turning on her heel vanished into one of the empty rooms. I pried open the cupboard and slipped down the ladder within landing in a different yet equally dirty tunnel below our base. A minutes running and a minutes climbing and nother minutes fumbling later left me standing on the night time streets of Prasus again whilst behind me a pavement slab sunk slowly back into its socket again.
Dashing away into the night; rushing to beat the sun I nevertheless stopped and turned back one last time to gaze at our hideout. To this day I still say I saw a flash of red amidst the chimneys. Then I sighed and turned away from my best friend and began to trudge back towards my gloomy manor with its scurrying servants and snide sycophants.
Now dear reader my account temporarily ends and I hand you over to Blood for a comprehensive look at her journey home. I can only apologise in advance for the number of exclamation marks she uses.