Shadrak was in the shadow of New Londdyr’s Cyclopean Walls even a half mile out from the city. No matter how many times he’d seen them, he’d never grown used to the scale, the size of each individual block, the seamless masonry. The walls were Maldark the Fallen’s last gift to the human settlers from Urddynoor, his way of making up for the devastation he’d almost brought upon them and his own people, the dwarves.
Shadrak’s goggles whirred and clicked as he brought them into focus on the gatehouse. What if he was too late? What if the thief was already inside? How could he find someone he’d never even clapped eyes on?
The gates were closed. It was an odd thing about New Londdyr: the Senate were so paranoid, they only allowed people in and out of the city at set times throughout the day. Arrive in between those times, and you were in for a long wait. Then, of course, was the even longer wait inside as they herded you through checkpoints and administration. But the thief would be fast-tracked, so long as he belonged to one of the guilds. It was a longstanding arrangement with the Senate, unless they’d revoked it following the death of Mal Vatès.
Sunlight glinted from atop the barbican. Shadrak trained his goggles on the spot, adjusted the lenses till it seemed he was mere feet from the battlements. A galea—the plumed helm worn by the city’s legionaries, an affectation of the Senate’s that harked back to a pre-Ancient culture on Urddynoor.
A soldier scanned the grassland skirting the walls, looked out over the fields being plowed by teams of oxen, and those lying fallow. Same routine, day in, day out. The sort of thing that bred carelessness. They needed to change things up from time to time, keep the men on their feet. That’s what Shadrak would have done, if he was in charge. Little details like that were what won him the guild war and made him top dog in New Londdyr’s underworld. Back in the day.
As the soldier ducked out of sight, Shadrak reset the goggles to pick out heat, but before he turned his attention back to the gatehouse he saw a blur of red high above the curtain walls. It just hung there, a shimmering oval. It must have been burning up inside to give off such radiance. He adjusted the goggles again, reset them to normal vision, but the oval winked out of existence. Back to heat mode, and it was there once more, suspended from nothing, invisible to the naked eye.
Magic.
He’d seen this sort of thing before, made use of it himself from time to time. A wizard eye.
Question was, why was there a wizard eye in the sky above the walls? Added security? The Senate were wary, but a permanent spell was a bit extravagant, even for them. And it seemed redundant, given the impregnable walls and the vetting of everyone who entered the gates.
So why, then? Or rather, who? Who had set the eye to keep watch over the entrance? Did someone know the thief was returning with a priceless artifact? You had to think so. Unless the eye was a fixed feature, it was too much of a coincidence, and Shadrak believed in coincidence as much as he did the Wayist god of peace and mercy.
The eye would see him approaching the walls when the time came. A dimwit might assume he was a child, but after Mal Vatès the Senate knew just what he looked like, how small he was. They might even have worked out that he wasn’t human at all, that he was a homunculus.
With practiced discipline Shadrak severed the train of thought. Knowledge of what he was hadn’t grown easier with the passage of time. It was a bad dream he wished he could wake up from. How could he go from being the foster son of a Barraiya Dreamer to a creature formed from the very stuff of deception? How could he reconcile himself with being the spawn of the Demiurgos, Lord of the Abyss?
He let his eyes return to the gatehouse, scouring the area for any sign the thief was about to show himself; because judging by the height of the suns, the gates were due to open any minute—if, and only if, there was someone outside requesting permission to enter.
Shadrak’s mind was still preoccupied with what he was going to do, how he was going to apprehend the thief, or enter the city without the wizard eye seeing him, but before he could fret any longer the air in front of the gates shimmered, and a cloaked figure appeared.
He knew it. Knew the shogger was a one-trick pony. A wizard worth his salt would have flown here, or used some other means to enter the city unseen. But this one, this scrawny-looking pickpocket, had played his hand with the invisibility, and now he’d had to drop it in order to persuade the guards to let him in. If he was a mage, he was a piss poor one. No, he was likely just a thief who’d been loaned a spell, or a trinket more likely, to give him the power. Which meant he’d either stolen it, or he was in the employ of a wizard.
Shadrak focused the goggles on the thief: threadbare cloak fluttering in the breeze, crimson rather than the black or brown you’d have expected from a guildsman. The sort of thing you’d expect to see on one of those egg-head sorcerers at the Academy. There was something about the awkward gait, the stooped shoulders… If he could only get a look at the face… But even without it, he was getting the feeling he knew this man from somewhere.
Before the name reached his brain, a bird swooped down from the barbican, straight at the shogger’s back. Big bird, too. A hawk, maybe.
The thief started to turn at the flutter of wings, but the bird was already on him. Only, it wasn’t a bird any longer. It was a woman in black leather, legs wrapped around his waist, one arm around his throat, the other applying pressure to the back of his head. The thief flailed weakly with both arms, stumbled in a tight circle, then toppled to the ground.
The woman rolled lithely aside, got down on one knee, and rifled through his pockets.
And Shadrak was running then. Running like the clappers toward the gate. No shapeshifting bitch was taking his ring, and especially not an ex-Dybbuk.
Because he knew her, even more certainly than he knew the man. He’d only seen her the once, as he gunned down her guild boss, Master Plaguewind. But once was enough with a memory like his.
He’d crossed barely half the distance between them, when Ilesa Fana glanced up at the eye in the sky she shouldn’t have been able to see. She nodded once, and then her black hair turned to feathers, along with the rest of her. A raven now, she soared into the air and disappeared over the top of the curtain wall.