The streets of King's Circle offered a broad and fascinating array of options to use in killing the unwary. In the filthy outer circles, it wasn't uncommon for a mundane knife to the throat to be the last sensation a man would feel, only for their bodies to be gathered up by desperate fishermen in the morning, noted in a log, and then chopped up as a morbid chum for use on the great river spearing boats. The things in the river loved the taste of human flesh.

Less dramatic but far more common was disease, infection, illness... anything that could spread from one person or object to another. Rat bites in the inner circles accounted for as many deaths as knife bites in the outer, and insects more then everything else in the city.

Eany knew them all, the common methods and the more exotic (strangling, eaten by a mad city dog pack, trampled to death) and she avoided anything that looked like it might lead to one of those outcomes. Stick close to the crowds, but not too close. Don't linger in animal alleys or hospital squares. Don't take jobs with a gang, or a mysterious stranger.

Loners survived, if they were smart. Even the smartest gangers could go brought down when their dumb companions made a mistake.

But then... there were some ways the City killed people that Eany didn't know how to handle, except to stay far far away from them. She never crossed canals. She stayed out of the sewers. The King's Thieves, the best of the best, had tried to recruit her once, but they worked out of the tunnels and sewers beneath the city, connected to the canals. Connected to the rivers.

So Eany worked alone.

Buildings were so close together in the King Rickard District; she could go window-to-window halfway across the district without ever touching the ground. She'd done this run before, too, which made it even simpler. She slipped from house to house, quiet as a woman of her stature could be, and picked a souvenir or two from each before moving on.

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A silver fork here, a shirt there, a necklace elsewhere. Little things, big things, but just a few from each place. Never take enough for them to realize they'd been burgled – that was Eany's rule. One necklace missing, and it's been misplaced. All necklaces missing, and a thief's been through.

Some thieves weren't happy until they'd cleaned a place of every last penny. Eany had even heard of one, a master from the rumors, who insisted on blowing out candles and eating anything his marks left outside their kitchen cupboards. No one could agree on whether it was meant as a calling card, or if the guy was just always hungry. To Eany, it just seemed excessive. Obsessive, even.

She saw a pair of fine crystal goblets – she left them. If one went missing, it would be as quickly noticed as if they both went missing. She spotted a drawer of silk napkins – she left them. Her buyer had stopped buying silk since the foreign-cloth plague scare. She saw candlesticks, a little tarnished, sitting in a cluster on a side table – she took one of the five.

None of the local sneaks wanted the district to realize how many thieves slipped past the guards' notice. Some thieves physically spread out their hits, taking from one district, then a different one, then a different one. Others went into hiding for a while after a big hit, waiting for things to cool down. Eany preferred to do her part by being very selective. She pocketed a fine gold chain on her way back to the upstairs window and left the rest untouched.

It was a careful climb up the side of the building to regain the relative safety of the roof. The locals of the district paid to have city guards patrol their streets all night, and the King's Circle Protectors were very keen to keep the additional funding. Fortunately, for people like Eany at least, the King Rickard District merchants and noblemen liked their complex buildings. The many-sided roofs gave skulkers a nice variety of shadows to hide in.

Eany perched in an angled corner where two parts of the roof met to consider her next move. The tidbits and trinkets of a dozen houses were wrapped and tucked into little cloth pouches at her belt, soon joined by the two new ones she had just scored.

That's probably enough for tonight...