Chapter Twenty-Five: Sneak Thieves

+++++Ezra+++++

When Ezra was ten, his mother had taken him to a card combat convention. He'd insisted on going because he was obsessed with MystikAnimals at the time, a card game that revolved round summoning and cultivating supernatural animals to do battle for you. He'd been astounded to find that nearly half of the attendees were adults, most of whom were grown men (and many had the beards to prove it). Even in the youth divisions, most of the competitors were years older than him. At that convention, Ezra perpetrated his first and only act of theft in his life on Earth.

He'd come across a vendor selling MystikAnimals 'championship packs' for $12 a pop - not a bad deal, considering that each pack was guaranteed to have a rare or special card. Still, it was well outside of young Ezra's price range. He salivated over the cards for about three minutes, imagining what he'd do with a fully-specced deck of cards, when the vendor wandered away from the table to conduct a transaction with a friend. In the minute he was turned away, Ezra swiped two packs of cards and shuffled off to find somewhere secluded to open his new decks.

The very first card in the very first pack was a Star Helicon, a card rare and powerful enough that he could have opened a hundred more championship packs and never found a card so elite. And something about that shamed him immensely - that he'd just acquired such a valuable thing through theft. Ezra did not add the card to his deck, and he didn't play another game of MystikAnimals after that convention… he wouldn't have been able to live with himself if he had. It was a bit odd, then, that the major turning points in his life in Medias had been defined by brazen acts of theft… and he didn't feel particularly bad about any of them.

"I used to be a good person," Ezra observed.

"You're still a good person," Anise insisted.

"I'm about to commit a major theft," he said. "That doesn't seem very good to me."

"I suppose… but look at it this way. Gladion owes you, doesn't he?"

"Of course," Ezra said.

"Right. Gladion owes you, but you've got no pathways toward recourse. If you were to ask Gladion nicely, he'd probably just drag you in for the bounty money. If you were to go to the constabulary, they'd throw you in jail or worse, and they wouldn't point a single accusatory finger toward Gladion. It seems to me that when we're given no reasonable recourse, we've got to take whatever other compensation we can get."

"I suppose," Ezra allowed. And he wondered: since when had Anise been like this? When he'd first met her, she'd been very nice - and she still was, he supposed - but she'd also been very meek and obedient. The way she'd said 'yes uncle' to Fenrik's often-unreasonable requests suggested that the sorcerer would have to suggest something audacious for her to offer pushback. Ezra wasn't sure which Anise he liked more, but this one was definitely the one whose good side you wanted to stay on, even before considering that she could toss a hundred and fifty kilograms of borrenkin over her head and repeatedly crack them into walls with her magic. "So you're going to help?"

Anise pondered that, a finger tapping against her expressive lips. "Yes… I can help with a distraction and act as your lookout. I'm not going inside, though - no more run-ins with the law for me, thanks."

That was fine - Ezra preferred not to drag anybody else into this, anyway. Berhu insisted on being involved more directly, though, and Ezra wasn't sure what he could do to dissuade her. The infernic kao-alta did not respond well to being told what to do, unless it was at Plenakton's behest (and, even then, the 3Z leader gave her a fair bit of leeway). Plus, if she was inside with Ezra, that increased his chances of escape if anything happened, since Berhu would be easier for a lumbering borrenkin to catch.

And the borrenkin would be lumbering. It was a little-known fact that the borrenkin didn't fare too well at night. They didn't become lethargic and cumbersome the instant the sun went down, but within about two hours of being out of daylight they grew sleepy and inattentive. Rich borrenkin could afford bright enough inside lighting that they could go into the wee hours of the morning if they liked, but the average criminal goon didn't have access to that. Therefore, Gladion had the few kao-etema in his consortium working as guards at night, the assumption being that their excellent hearing would make up for their poor vision if somebody broke in. Normally, that would be true, but not tonight.

+++++Ezra+++++

Gladion's crystal dealership was in one of the nicer neighborhoods of the Old City and, as such, it got regular service for things like trash and street cleaning, whereas the tenements tended to just let dirt and trash sit and accumulate into strata. Some of the back alleys in the poorer parts of town had midden piles that stretched practically to the rooftops. But Gladion's shop was along a well-tended street that got swept every Poyeday… and the street-sweeper was willing to do an extra-thorough job near the front of Gladion's establishment for a modest bribe.

"Ten minutes, no more," the dorthek said.

"Ten minutes is perfect - the street is really dirty," Anise said. Among the three of them, they'd decided that she came across as the least suspicious. Maybe she really did just want a clean street? Who could say?

When Ezra and Berhu cracked into the back of the shop, it was with a street-sweeping coach brushing away at the front of the street with the great static fuzz of rotating sweepers and vaguely-smelly dust kicking up into the night air. Even if the kao-etema guards could have heard them coming in, they wouldn't be able to hear it over that. Their ears were incredibly sensitive but their sound filtering was, if anything, even worse than that of a human.

"You have no clue what you're doing," Berhu said.

That was a fair observation. Ezra was busy trying to undo the lock with the picking set he'd picked up at the 3Z compound - you could find all sorts of useful stuff there. In theory, he knew how to pick a lock, but he wasn't any good at it, especially when the lock had a sigil on it that he also had to deal with. He handed the lockpick set to Berhu and concentrated on just keeping the sigil inactive. They made a pretty good team, too, getting the door open in a minute flat without alerting anybody.

Stolen story; please report.

Ezra had been inside the back of Gladion's place a handful of times before - it was one part legitimate crystal dealership and one point shady criminal front… but the criminal part was pretty easy to hide. Cooked books, unlabeled rooms, and boxes full of stuff that, while unrelated to crystallology, were not incriminating of anything in particular. The benches spoke of a man committed to the crystal trade, with a workshop for extracting the crystals from the raw arcanoids, purifying them to acceptable clarity, and cutting away the impure bits into shards of consistent crystal.

"Anybody out front?" Berhu whispered.

Ezra nodded. "A trio of guards complaining about the noise."

"A trio we can deal with. Do you know where Gladion's safe is?"

Ezra nodded - it was pretty clearly in the only room that was never open. He couldn't think of anywhere else it could be - and it was right across the hall from where the lesser crystals were stored. Knowing that Gladion was a bit lax when it came to security narrowed things down considerably.

If Stomen Blose wanted to, he could have just powered into the place at night with a half-dozen borrenkin who'd spent the evening under bright lights. With a plasma cutter, they could have burned right into the safe, brought in a shield to protect themselves from the draughtsman's eye, and then made off with whatever they could carry in their strong arms. But it would have been pretty obvious who was to blame, and Blose still had to act friendly with Gladion. Even if Ezra did get caught, it would be pretty easy to pin the blame on an infernic with a grudge.

They proceeded to the back - Berhu's footsteps hardly made a sound, and Ezra's might as well have been magically-silenced. He wasn't an inveterate sneak like Berhu, but his reactions were good enough to adjust his weight and balance the instant the floor started to creak, and he found himself unconsciously assuming an odd jaunt, such that any sound of a footfall was perfectly disguised in the natural creaks and groans of the old building. Berhu noticed and seemed to approve - apparently, you could impress her by doing something difficult without making a big deal of it.

"Shit… this is a pretty good safe…" she said.

Blose had insinuated that the safe was nothing to be too concerned about. And perhaps that was the case with an inveterate criminal safecracker on your crew. But neither Berhu nor Ezra was that, and they didn't have Rill's ability to melt through solid metal, not even if it was 'merely' comprised of carbon steel. The safe was a huge, wall-spanning thing that took up the whole back of the room, and its dial mechanism comprised six numbers ranging from zero to fifty… you'd win the lottery before you cracked that safe by brute force.

"How's your hearing?" Berhu asked.

"Good," Ezra said.

"How good?"

"Very, very good." Ezra still heard with his ears and saw with his eyes but, as far as he could tell, his senses relied upon the same metaphysical operation as his brain rather than being limited to what eyes and ears could normally do.

"Okay. Put your ear against the thing and I'm going to turn the dials. As soon as you hear something different… could be a click, a ping, or even a clunk… it depends on the mechanism. Just listen for something different and signal as soon as you do."

Ezra squatted and pressed his ear against the cool metal. In one ear, he could hear the ki-ki-ki-ki as Berhu slowly turned the dial. In the other ear, he could hear the kao-etema mumbling about how long the street cleaner was taking and sending one of their trio to get Gladion. And his eyes took in the dark - what should have been a grainy, almost pitch black darkness merely became shadowy and faded-out, the moonlight refracting in from some far-off window and providing plenty of light for him to see by. Apparently, Berhu's kao-alta eyes were also adequate to the task, though she had to squint to resolve the little tick-marks on the safe dials. Ki-plunk.

"There," Ezra whispered.

"Just signal," Berhu said, holding a finger to her lips. No talking - right.

Ki-plunk… ki-plunk… ki-plunk… ki-ki-plunk… crak. With the sixth number, something disengaged from deep inside the safe and Ezra felt the whole safe door vibrate. If this was one of Fenrik's safes, he'd have been worried about it being sigiled up to the gills but, apparently, Gladion thought his draughtsman's eye was better than any number of sigils. And maybe he was right.

"I'm going to open the door… are you ready?"

Ezra nodded and prepared himself to face the eye. Normally, the device would spot a person well before the person spotted it, and then it would spit out its nettle-stream of tiny offensive spells, punch a hole right through that person, and then they would be dead. Maybe that's what was going to happen to Ezra, too. He hoped he could absorb the spells of the device in the same way he could absorb a person's targeted energy. He thought he could, but there was no guarantee.

The door swung open. Ezra caught the glint of a lens swinging in his direction, and suddenly there was magic. He could see the crystals of the device pulsating with each tiny sip of power, flicking on and off at hundreds of times per second, and he could feel the spell forming by rote along the circuitry of the device, focused and thrown out by the blade. He absorbed the spells, or at least as many as he could. After maybe half a second - which was a long time when you're absorbing two hundred fifty tiny spells per second - he felt a pain in his chest, and another a second later. Each was like the jab of a needle. His attention faltered, and he caught more jabs. Tens per second, and then hundreds per second, and he felt his chest bloom open with pain, and he braced himself against the safe door before eventually collapsing. Just then, the draughtsman's eye flashed one last time as one of the crystals exhausted itself and the spell could no longer be produced.

"What the bloody fuck was that?" one of the guards said.

"Fuck…" Berhu grumbled. She waved her hand in front of the gap in the safe to assure herself that the device was powered down and dashed inside, rummaging through the boxes and cases as the guards, apparently more curious than alarmed, stalked toward the back.

Ezra struggled back to his feet, already healing from a thousand tiny wounds - even having absorbed most of the attack, it probably would have been enough to kill most people and he was still dribbling quite a lot of blood. But anything that didn't kill Ezra quickly wasn’t going to harm him at all - not for more than a few minutes. His shirt, though, was in tatters. In the street out front, Ezra could hear Anise speaking with the street-sweeper at a higher volume than strictly necessary.

"I'm sure when Mr. Gladion's people get here in about thirty seconds, since they're one block away, you can explain to him why you want him to have a dirty street!"

"Begging your pardon, miss, but eight minutes is enough…"

"Come on," Ezra said, nudging Berhu.

"Hey! Hey, there's somebody in the safe!" one of the guards shouted.

He rounded the corner and, before Ezra could really think about what he was doing, he'd pushed his hand out in front of him and repeated a magical pattern now intensely familiar to him, for he'd just absorbed it a thousand times. The man gasped as dozens of tiny wounds bloomed across his flesh, from the bald, leathery dome of his head right down his torso, shredding his shirt just like Ezra's had been torn. Clearly, Ezra's aim wasn't as good as the draughtsman's eye, but he'd done more than enough to dissuade the man from attacking. With a start, he realized that the corridor was very bright… that light was coming from his eyes.

"They're fucking infernics!" the man shouted, and he could hear the others backing away from the doorway. Meanwhile, though, heavy borrenkin footfalls tromped down the street and toward the front entrance.

"We'd better get scarce," Ezra said.

Berhu nodded, and she was out the door before him. He grabbed the draughtsman's eye and darted out into the hallway and out the back entryway just as Gladion's enforcers stormed through the front door to see what was amiss. They'd soon find out: quite a lot, for infernic thieves had just stolen most of their boss's soul crystals and made off with the most valuable artifact in his possession.