The Thief Maker (ON HOLD)

The Eyrie

The Eyrie

Garen followed the man up the side of the Count’s Clock. The city lay fifty feet below them; and they weren’t more than half way up it.

         The winds screamed through the darkening night, the rain beginning to freeze and turn icy, stabbing at Garen’s face like needles. He clung to the side of the tower as it creaked and cracked, the cloaked man far ahead of him, scaling the face like he’d done it a thousand times before. In all honesty, Garen thought that much was possible.

         Through the sleet and hail, he tried to mirror the route the man took, finding there was a pattern in the façade. Windows and shudders were each separated by bare stone, cold and hard. Through the pattern, old, abandoned torch-mantles were bolstered to the stone, creating good handholds to grip and propel forward. While not always did the mantles appear, the irregular bricks stuck out in places like shelves, and Garen gripped onto them, pulling himself upward and supporting his legs by balancing on their precariously small footholds.

         Garen had climbed buildings and towers all his life, but this was something else. Amidst the rain, and sleet, and hail, and snow, he was lucky he managed to catch back up with the cloaked man nearly three quarters of the way up the clock tower. He was only able to see his dark figure because of the light of the clock, its silvery glow spilling down over the tower and onto the city far below, choked by the mists. A flash of red caught his eye as he gazed into the dark.

         “Rebels,” said the man from above him. “Most likely.”

         Screams carried up through the winds. “They’re being burned,” Garen said grimly.

         “They always are,” said the man. “As long as they continue to protest the Count’s rule, the Watch will burn them and therefore silence any future riot like the one today at the Reckoning.”

         The light roared down below through the shadows. “He’s going mad, isn’t he,” said Garen. “The Count.”

         The man laughed as he leapt across a patch of crumbled stone, held in place with a framework of wooden beams. “Going? Hell, he’s been mad every since he killed his damned wife and married his daughter. Likely call him insane now.”

         “Either way,” Garen replied. “It’ll get worse in the coming.”

         The man smirked. “Or better…”

         Garen didn’t have the time to respond, for the man had dashed away up the tower, robe flapping across his back like a flag. Instead, he simply climbed to an easy perch and looked out across the city. He had done something of the sort every night before he went out at the top of the Grey Bank, but that was some hundred feet below them now; and he thought that was a good view. Where he was now, he could see almost the entire city. He saw the Count’s Manor far below, the spires and torches visible through the night and he saw the lavish décor of the Count’s Court gathered about his manor. Farther out, he could see the Count’s Square, empty now, and farther see the bridge that arced over the river. His eyes followed the bend of the waterway as it flowed down through the slums and undergrounds, ending beneath the front gates as it flowed into the mouth of the lake. To either side, the sea of dark buildings and roads spread wide, the surrounding wall in the distance like a memory.

         What stopped his heart was the amount of guards. The city seemed to be patrolled so thickly that every street and alley held at the very least two guards. The Court contained almost and army and the square held twice the amount that had been there last night when Garen managed to slip past them. Then he heard the chink.