The Thief Maker (ON HOLD)

The Thief of the Streets

The Thief of the Streets

Garen had been running all his life. It had gotten old.

His brown boots had served him well through all those years, and like everything else, they had grown old. The leather was worn and beaten while the stitching was frayed and ripping, holding the shoe together precariously. Such was common of Garen’s clothes; always ripping, always patched, and always black. They had to be black.

A puddle of icy water hissed behind him as he heard the guards turn the corner and sprint off after him. They were slow compared to Garen, they always had been. Sometimes, he found it quite comical. Although this night was different.

These weren’t the regular set of guards. These were the Count’s Watch, and everybody in Lamorr knows the Count’s Watch are none to be reckoned with. Most see them for the first time at the Reckoning, garbed in their customary red and black armor, watching the crowds as they paid their dues to the Count. This time, Garen was running for his life.

Like a shadow, he changed direction, spinning off a city street and down an alley. It was long and narrow, choked with rotten food and bile. At its end was an iron pipe. Garen climbed it.

The pipe was slick with ice from the falling snow, radiating with a dull chill that bit through his leather gloves. Garen’s tense fingers clung and gripped, hoisting him further and further up the pipe, until he leaped across the narrow alley onto a wider ledge and scampered away onto a steeply sloping roof. The black tiles were frosted in snow, cracking like shattering teeth as Garen’s worn leather boots ran across. He heard the guards curse below, and he smirked.

The smirk was gone quick. Ahead of him, the roof ended, dropping into a river, the water black as ink and cold as ice. Garen had fallen into those waters twice before. Once on his will, the other forced. It was not a good experience. Although the river was not what scared him, it was the guard next to him. He held a thin spear in his hands and his hand out. He didn’t ask with his mouth.

Instead, he lunged forward at Garen with his spear flashing. Garen ducked and slid along the tiles like a snake, ripping a crude steel dagger from his pocket. The guard struck again, and Garen countered, quick as lighting, interlocking his arm with the spear and forcing it from his grasp to plunge down into the river. He made short work of the guard afterward.

Behind him, a troop of guardsmen were in full pursuit, weapons glinting in the dark moonlight. Garen jumped backwards into the street, his back cradled by the soft arms of a hay barrel below. In little time he was back to running through the streets, darting this way and that, though never loosing his path. He had lived in the city all his life. Everybody had. They didn’t have a choice.

Garen’s footsteps echoed through the barren streets and as he turned, pressed his back against the cold stonewall of a smithy. There he stood, still as rock, his black clothes blending into the shadows. The guards rushed past without a second glance. They always did.

When he reached the Count’s Square, they were waiting for him. He approached slowly, feet hardly making a sound, hiding in the long shadows beneath the stone colonnade. In the darkness, the Count’s patrolmen gathered about his honorary statue, hewn of pale carven stone, standing in a fountain of dark grey water. It towered over the vast circular square, reaching higher than most of the commonwealth’s homes. The statue had been constructed more than ten years ago, with the tax money of the people, the Damned. They, including Garen were slaves to his will and rule. Whatever he ordered was done. No questions asked. At least not in public.

Garen eyed the guards as he rimmed the square, the light of the Count’s Clock, or the Count’s Tower as some called it, drifting over the city like a pale mist. His palace loomed directly below it, a monster of a manor with walls thick as mountain sides, turreted with tall spires all dressed in blood red cloth with the Count’s sigil emblazoned onto the fabric: a raven perched atop a sickle moon, shaped in the likeness of a ‘C’.