Breaking the Sword

The Antique Job (V)

As it was, the three guards escorting the antique dealer's wares did not prove inclined to put up much fight in the face of thirty inches of bare, sharp steel. Tigraine corralled them and the wagon driver against the wall of the warehouse while Elyse rummaged through the crates and boxes on the wagon bed. Tigraine watched the wary looks of her captives and realized that it was the uncanny appearance of the robbers as much as the threat to life and limb that had caused them to surrender so easily. Trust Dane to quietly take control of a situation he had said he would let her handle. She and Elyse must look like spirits out of Adalian legend.

A frustrated hiss behind her distracted Tigraine from her thoughts.

"Problems?"

"I can't find it," Elyse returned, banging yet another crate shut.

Tigraine wished the thief would go about her business more quietly. The Imperial Guard would have little fear of supernatural retribution in dealing with them, particularly if they had some phoenix training of their own. Of the wagon driver, she demanded, "The bloodstone?"

Without daring to look at her, the man pointed a shaking arm toward some point behind her. Elyse clambered over boxes to the crate indicated, and soon had what she sought. Unseen by the redhead, whose back continued toward her, Elyse slipped a second small object from the crate into a concealed pocket on the inside of her blouse. The bloodstone she kept in her hand to wave at Tigraine as she jumped down from the wagon.

"Stay right there," Tigraine warned the four men, back-stepping toward the alley. She couldn't see the thief as she kept their victims in view, but she could hear her trotting ahead on the cobbles. How could someone who lived by her ability to sneak in and out of places make so much gods-curst noise?

Certain of her way, Tigraine backed straight into the alley, where Dane's waiting hand took hold of her shoulder. In a blinking, the three of them were standing, not between two buildings in the Warehouse District, but on top of the dining table in the same room of the Broken Sword Inn where the adventure had begun four days before.

"Damn," Dane said, sinking to his knees as Elyse hopped, a touch unsteadily, off the table.

Tigraine, more accustomed to the ill effects brought on by one of her partner's teleports, clambered gingerly down as Elyse folded onto the floor, looking green.

"You're getting better at that," the warrior said encouragingly as she stripped off her grimacing mask.

"I was aiming for that space in front of the door," her partner gasped weakly.

"The transmute could use some fine tuning, though. My sight lines dropped out as soon as I turned my head too quickly."

Dane nodded, too out of breath to continue the discussion.

Regardless of the vertigo it had caused them, Tigraine knew the teleport away from the scene of the crime would only add to the mystique around it, suggesting that it truly was marauding spirits who had robbed the wagon at swordpoint. He really had the outing engineered from the beginning, Tigraine thought with annoyance.

Still, she had to admit that it had worked quite neatly. What wasn't clear was why he couldn't have shared his plan with her beforehand. It was a question she would have to address later, however, for her stomach was rumbling quite audibly in the small room.

Dane, still sitting on top of the dining table as he recovered, waved her off toward food. And, after setting the mask and cloak on the seat of a chair, Tigraine departed quickly.

After a moment during which both the wizard and the thief waited to be certain she was not about to return, Dane unfolded himself back onto the ground and Elyse climbed into a chair on her side of the table.