by Nic Weissman
Erion should exercise extreme caution now. He glided with very small steps on the cable that he had tended from the guard tower to the roof of the Commander's mansion. As he walked, he concentrated on the next step, and tried not to look down at the void beneath him. He must be about fifteen or twenty steps above the street. A fall from there would probably be fatal, but Erion had a lot of experience and was not worried, nor particularly nervous.
At the moment, everything was going smoothly. The surveillance he had done in previous days had worked perfectly. He had been able to determine the schedules of the city guard and also of the Commander's house, which allowed him to plan the day and the right time to strike. On Wednesday at eleven, when it was pitch black, the guards changed shifts. He knew the right moment in which he could slide smoothly through the window of the first floor of the guard´s tower and climb quickly and quietly to the highest floor of it, while the soldiers were switching weapons on the ground floor.
From the roof of the tower, and with the help of his small hand crossbow and a harpoon, it was easy to lay the cable. But he had to move quickly and remove it before the new guards took their positions at all levels of the tower.
While walking along the cable, he could hear the noise of the soldiers leaving to go to their homes, or perhaps to an inn. Luckily they were already distracted and none of them happened to look up just then. In addition, his dark clothes were very well camouflaged against the colors of the stone with which most of the buildings from the area had been built. This, coupled with the fact that this was a night with a waning moon, made it a little more difficult to distinguish him.
Gradually, he came closer to the facade of the Commander's palace. He was about to get there. Maybe five steps more. Suddenly, a small gust of wind shook him slightly and he had to struggle not to lose balance. The cable had some slack and began to wobble on the sides. He waited, patient, while the movement ceased. He took a deep breath and continued. Two, three, four steps and hop, a little jump let him reach the roof of the mansion.
Without missing a beat, he dropped the harpoon from the place it was embedded in. He verified that there was no one on the street and then, with a deft flick of his wrist, released the cable from its handhold on the tower, and withdrew it quickly and without making any noise. He hid the material in a corner of the roof where it was hard to see. He was in.
One of the advantages of entering a home for the second time is that you know the layout of the building and you know where you can hide. The big disadvantage is that, because people do not like being robbed, you always find surprises or additional protection that was not present the first time. However, Erion was wise and insightful. He always waited for at least a year and a half before "visiting" a house for the second time. He had found that people used to relax again when it had been over a year since a robbery. However, they always added some extra precautions permanently. He wondered what surprises awaited him this time.
He walked stealthily to the door leading to the terrace. It was locked. And the lock was of good quality. If he remembered correctly, the time before that door couldn't be locked. Surely, the Commander had thought impossible for someone to come in from there with the guard tower right in front, but this time he had been careful by protecting all possible entries.
He put his hand in a pocket inside his jacket and pulled out a set of picks. Even good-quality locks weren't going to prove difficult in his capable hands. He slid the pick in the lock. A flick of the wrist. Clack! A second attempt and he heard the musical sound of the lock giving way and opening.
He hurried into the building. The booty would probably be found again in the Commander's office. Although, maybe this time, it was stored in a vault as Oris commands and not in the simple safe like the last time. After looking out and seeing that no sound was heard, he began to descend the stairs. Arriving downstairs, he went straight to the office. The door was open.
The office was as he remembered it, a lovely room with a balcony overlooking the main square of the city, walls covered with hardwood, premium Tylar furniture, and some family portraits and a few landscapes. There was also a small bookcase in the corner, next to the door. Between the center of the room and the balcony, there was a large desk with several drawers and some papers on the table.
The safe, which used to be in the corner under a small table, was gone. He began with the obvious, checking behind each painting without success. Then he began looking for hatches under the carpets, also without success. He approached the desk and began to check the drawers. One was locked.
At that moment he heard a noise somewhere in the house. The sound seemed to come from the lower floors. Rapid footsteps going up the stairs could be heard. Immediately he recognized the footprints of a dog or similar animal. For some reason, the dog had not barked. He had heard about guard dogs that were trained in Golsou to surprise their victims, and kill them with one bite in the jugular. The hardest training of these animals was, precisely, that they may learn to curb the instinct of barking and thus avoid alerting the victim.
Erion had to act quickly. He put his hand inside another pocket and pulled out a small package wrapped in a crumpled paper. He undid the wrapping and found a small piece of meat. He walked to the doorway and threw the piece of meat down the aisle, just as the animal was approaching that particular floor.
It was a large attack dog. Brutal, murderous teeth stuck out of its mouth, making it clear that it had detected him. Luckily, the piece of "prepared" meat was already placed before it, and the animal could not help but jump on the piece and devour it in two bites.
In a flash, Erion perched on a corner of the roof of the office. Now he just had to wait. The poison was quick, but he didn't want to give the dog an option to attack before it knocked it out. Less than a minute later he heard the animal collapse in the hallway. Erion came down and went to check the situation. The dog lay on the ground. He couldn't tell if it was dead or had lost consciousness but, considering the size of the animal, probably was just unconscious. In any case, it wouldn't bother anybody in several hours. He put it into a utility room facing the same corridor, closed the door and went back to the office.
Normally, he would have rather not gone into that house, with his relatively recent previous visit. The home of the Royal Commander of Andon wasn't the same as the home of any other wealthy person, especially if it was located opposite the tower of the town militia. But his biggest client had made a special request, and he couldn't say no. He must find a document that was allegedly kept in the house in a sealed envelope. His client, by a messenger, had shown him the way that the stamp would look: a griffin with outspread wings in the wind.
His client had offered an interesting sum for completing the work, delivering the document during the afternoon of the next day, at a meeting previously arranged in that city. But one of the conditions was that the envelope had to still be sealed. In other words, his client didn't want him to see the contents of the envelope. For him, this wasn't a problem. The payment that had been offered was fair for the difficulty and risk of the job. Another instruction was that the job had to look like an apparent common robbery. So he had to take all the valuables that he reasonably could get his hands on, and obviously he could keep them all. This was excellent. He could thus get a double reward for that job. And, as usual, he was going to try to get every last gold coin.
He approached the closed desk drawer and took out his set of picks. After a couple of scuffles, the drawer gave in and opened. There were several documents inside the drawer. He began to read: Irrigation Project of the Xelake Valley. That could be interesting, though, of course, it wasn't going to provide much gold. He had to find the safe.
Erion stood in the middle of the room and looked at it again carefully. He had observed the Commander in public. He had seen how he behaved in front of his wife. He seemed to be a man that didn't even trust his relatives. Money was probably one of those things that he didn't trust his relatives with. For some reason, he
was convinced that the safe would be back at the office, not in the bedroom or any other room in the house. Then he remembered ... the library. He was sure that it wasn't there the last time.
He approached the cabinet that stood in the corner of the room and began checking behind the books. He found nothing relevant. The bottom of the unit was apparently a hollow base that also served as an ornament. Then, for an instant, he saw something strange. He wouldn't know how to define it. Maybe a reflection? No, not that exactly. It was something very dim. Erion had a great visual acuity. The ability to quickly perceive and interpret small details was a useful skill in this occupation. Probably someone with a less trained eye wouldn't have seen it. But it was there, no doubt.
He began to feel the base of the bookcase with his hands. Then he was surprised. After touching the wall behind the bookcase, he perceived texture and a temperature that didn't correspond with what he expected. It was the unmistakable feeling of chromed metal that is often used to build the doors of safes.
They had set up the safe in plain sight, directly on the wall under the bookcase, and then had applied some kind of spell to hide it. It was possible that any other thief, who did not know that the bookcase was recently installed, would completely overlook it. Erion was glad of the insight of his eye, his visual memory and having been in this house a while ago.
His deft fingers slid through the door of the safe to reach the lock. It was a new safe and had a very modern double system of numerical combination and a lock. Erion had little experience with such safes. He decided to start with what he knew best. He pulled out his picks and began working on the lock. It was certainly of good quality. It took a couple of minutes to visualize the mechanism in his head and after some struggle, he saw the solution. He pushed with the pick in his left hand while making small circles with the pick in his right hand. Suddenly, he heard a clack. Then he took a different pick, more like a hook, and introduced it into the keyhole. After a couple of attempts he managed to hook it on the part of the appropriate gear and after another turn, he heard a new clack. This time it was slightly louder than the last. It was the unmistakable sound of celestial music, a lock opening.
Now he had to deal with the combination. He slipped under the furniture to support his ear to the door of the safe. Erion put his fingers on the combination wheel and began to spin the mechanism. A while later, after some effort and concentration, the last number of the combination triggered the mechanism, definitely opening the safe.
Inside he found a bag with coins (thirty-five platinum and fifty gold coins), love letters and a small locked chest. The coins amounted to a value of four hundred gold coins (which was the currency of reference in the kingdom of Bor and in most of the world of Oris). This amount could be considered a small fortune, something like the income of an average family in Bor for four years. But compared with the fortunes that the rich and noble accumulated, it was not a really large sum.
He put the box in his pocket, to examine it later, while he took a look at the letters. The Commander exchanged passionate letters with a woman named Jeifer Kibat, certainly his mistress of the moment. The origin of the name indicated she was from the Aurum Emirates, a very exotic choice for a lover. He thought about blackmailing the Commander with the disclosure of such information, although possibly his wife already knew. Even if he decided to do such a thing, he thought it best not to use the letters as evidence, as this would link him to the theft. In this job, the clients' interests were the priority.
When he was to continue reviewing the letters, he heard footsteps again; clearly, this time, they were human. He narrowed the door of the safe so it seemed closed, quickly hid behind the portiere next to the balcony and waited. His experience told him that in such situations, usually you could get away with it if you kept your cool. Being able to remain calm at all times or not was often what distinguished a good professional, versus the ones who ended up in jail or hanged. The cadence of the steps indicated an elderly person. Possibly it would be the housekeeper. Because of his vigilance, he knew the Commander and his wife would not be in the residence. However, with rich people like him, you could always count on one or more servants staying to guard the house. Discretion and secrecy were his greatest allies in this case.
The truth is that the dog being trained as an attack dog was actually a stroke of luck. This had allowed him to neutralize it without the housekeeper noticing his presence. If it had barked, the servant would have become a serious risk because it would have tried to set an alarm. This would have put Erion in a difficult juncture, between leaving or having to use more drastic methods, which was always a nuisance. He never wanted to hurt any servant. Even if their master was the most despicable person in the world, they were often innocent people.
After a while, a very long one, the steps began to sound more distant downstairs and then he heard a door shut. Probably the servant had gone to bed. Perhaps the servant had risen only to use the bathroom or perhaps suffered from insomnia. In any case, he had to have the utmost discretion, until he left the house.
He came out of hiding and continued looking through the letters. Among the letters of love, and some other minor letters, he finally found what he had come for. The seal of the griffin was unmistakable. He decided to take everything he had found in the safe and put it inside his jacket. The best thing was for them to think that they had emptied the safe without looking carefully at what it contained, so it would be more difficult for someone to understand that the intention of this theft was to take that letter. To give a more dramatic touch to the situation, he decided to leave the door of the safe wide open.
Then he turned back around to see what else he could take. Only one of the paintings seemed to have some value. He picked it up and, with a small knife, quickly removed the canvas from the frame. He rolled it and put it into his small backpack. On the desk he found an elaborate silver paperweight. It was a sculpture of a castle. The work had some merit for the level of detail that the artist had put into it. He took it, as well.
He glanced at the bookcase, but none of the books seemed particularly old or valuable. All were recent and indicated a dubious taste by its owner. He rechecked the desk drawers and found nothing valuable. Again he found the folder he had seen before and decided to check it out. The documentation described various details of an irrigation project in the valley near Xelake, north of the Mark. This project was not known by the public. From what he saw, the plans were highly developed and it was obvious that there was an intention to carry them out. The documents indicated dates that year and the following year. The maps indicated the areas that would be flooded to create a small dam and the pipelines that would be established and the lands that would be irrigated.
The information itself was quite valuable, especially if the Commander never perceived that the plans had been looked at. With this information, he could buy some of the land that would be later watered at a low price and then sell them after completion of the project for a much higher amount. He could sell the information to any of those affected by the flood in the area of the dam. They could get rid of the lands before they were to be devalued, or worse, expropriated by the Mark or the Kingdom. He could set a seed store in Xelake, with other agricultural products that allowed or would facilitate the growing of crops from the irrigation. This would make him an instant monopoly because at the time, that part of the Mark had some very arid lands for those crops and only wheat and other cereals were cultivated there. Surely there were other, more intelligent choices, if he thought a bit, but this is what he could quickly improvise.
He kept flipping through the sheets. They included a detailed accounting of the project. Mr. Balta'ryon would be in charge of the monopoly on water management, in a lifelong concession for and in which he was free to set any price for the water. Since then, they seemed to be extraordinary privileges. And everything despite that the Mark and the Kingdom equally funded seventy percent of the cost of the work, and the employer only
thirty percent. This was getting interesting at times. In the last of the documents he found a loose sheet in the middle of the papers. It seemed to be entries from a bank account. A number of important amounts had been deposited in the Calen bank, which was the only bank in the Mark and had just been established a few years earlier. All proceeds were in the Commander's name. In another document, the Commander appeared as head of the Commission of Water Development of the Mark.
That son of a bitch! How many people had suffered from shortage to pay the taxes that would finance that work? How many peasants would be abused in the future once the project was finished? He had to do something. He had to think of something.
He decided to act. He took the pen and inkwell that the Commander used to write regularly and opened the terms and conditions page of the concession to the employer. That document was final and was confirmed with the signing of the king of Bor. The idiot probably didn't even know what he had signed. The fact was that the document would be difficult to change. Moreover, as it was past all controls, it probably would remain intact until publication.
After reviewing the document for a while, with maximum concentration, he sought the table of terms and under the conditions for setting the price of water, added: With a maximum of the market price of water in the Deepcliff Central Square; the original text stated to be determined by the dealer. Deepcliff, capital of the Kingdom, had abundant water sources of high quality close to the city and was one of the cheapest places to buy it in the country. The change in practice nullified the privileges of the businessman and this would make him feel deceived and betrayed by the Commander. Erion had a knack for forging documents and knew that only the best expert could distinguish the handwriting that was added.
Then he took a sheet of paper from the table, the same kind that the Commander had used to write down the bank account entries, and began writing a letter saying:
Dear Principal Cashier of the Calen Bank
Hereby I beg you to undo the following entries in my bank account number 4392:
(The letter listed below all the entries of the fraudulent transfers contained in the sheet, with the amount, entry date, and volume, page and log sheet thereof.)
I also request that you issue a check for the value of such amounts on behalf of the social work of the Order of Light for use in their charity work and their soup kitchens, and remit it to its headquarters located in 4 Arrow Street, Roko, Norvik County.
Signed
Ahruman, Commander of Andon
Erion took an envelope from the desk. He folded and put the letter inside. He closed the envelope and applied the Commander's seal he found in the top drawer. He stamped the letter and put the letter in his pocket. Then he replaced all the documents as he had found them and placed them in the drawer.
Erion chuckled. Once the bank executed the order, the Commander would see how the money disappeared from his account. Although the bank would say it had been from his own order, the first suspicion of the Commander would certainly be that he had been a victim of foul play by the businessman. His reputation was not exactly that of a gentleman, and this favored Erion. This way, the farmers from Xelake would probably be greatly benefited, as well as the poor that the Order of Light attended throughout the Kingdom. The two brainiacs, the Commander and the businessman, would get nothing, and they would become enemies.
Well, maybe not everything would turn out so great, but he had to try. Luck is for the bold. In addition, he had nothing to lose because they could not track the mess back to him; obviously he was counting on getting away without being caught. The stakes had increased; if he was caught in that moment, he was to be surely hanged. A way as any to make life more interesting.
He shuffled the room a little more, knocking some books off the shelf, to reinforce the impression of a hasty and messy theft, but carefully as to not make noise. There was not much else to do in that office. He slipped into the hallway and then quickly checked the rooms in that floor: essentially two bedrooms. There was always a fine balance between how many goods you could get, and how much risk you wanted to take. He quickly decided he would not seek to steal anything in the other floors. With the presence of the housekeeper, it was too dangerous. He also decided to invest only five or ten minutes more checking the rooms in that floor, before leaving the house. He almost always managed to find valuables in the first minutes. He had a lot of practice.
He picked up a few more objects, including some jewelry, and put them in his backpack. Then he climbed to the roof and picked up his hook and cable. He had lost too much time. The tower guard had already taken their positions at every floor. He had to find a different way out.
He approached the south side of the roof, facing Elf Street. It was a busy street during the day, not the best way to enter or exit. However, at that hour of the night, with a little luck and if he was fast, he could escape without incident. He fixed his harpoon, and dropped the cable to the street. He carefully observed if the road was clear and then quickly slid down the facade. At the bottom, with a deft flick of the wrist, he picked up the harpoon and the cable and put them away.
He walked stealthily to the corner, looking at the junction with the next road. There was no one. He slipped back into the shadows until the next site. He would be well hidden there, as this street was narrow and dark. He took his hood off and changed his jacket into a more appropriate one he carried in his backpack. Then he went on his way like a normal passerby.
Erion walked through the empty streets without stopping for a moment. He passed very few people. A while later, he was back in The Flying Donkey where, even at that time, there was noise downstairs, where the tavern was located. But he didn't stop. He climbed to the second floor and went into his room and locked it.
Mithir was awake and was waiting impatiently. With a quick gesture Erion said that everything had gone well. Whispering, he explained in detail everything that happened. His friend's face lit up when he got to the part of the story about the fake letter. Mithir had to stifle a laugh. In the adjacent room, people were sleeping and they didn't want to wake them, especially this particular night.
Mithir was dumb. Maybe this was not entirely accurate. The boy did not seem to have any physical problem that prevented him to utter words, but for some reason, he didn't speak. Erion couldn't remember ever hearing him utter a word. However, he could issue grunts, groans, murmurs and laughter, for example. Mithir was also the closest thing to family he never had. He had met him as a child in the orphanage. His friend had entered the orphanage when he was very small: perhaps about two years old, when Erion was six. Immediately he decided to take account of protecting the smallest of the other older boys. As he had experienced, the orphanage was very hard with the weakest and youngest. The older boys immediately began to abuse you. Erion had promised to try and help him avoid the hardships that he had suffered. The child was relatively fragile and would not have lasted long in that place without his help.
Mithir was also other things. For example, he was the best magician he had ever met. Although he hadn't met many. But it was obvious he had a natural talent for magic.
They distributed the loot in their usual way. A quarter each. The rest would be dedicated to their investment project. Erion would make the payment in the next town they'd visit.
He then remembered the small box. He asked Mithir to revise it. The magician performed some quick hand movements, and then he stopped. He then performed another series of gestures and uttered a murmur that sounded like a growl. Mithir explained by signs that the box didn't seem to have traps or magical protections but that, however, the content itself seemed magical.
Mithir and Erion had learned sign language long ago and it was the fundamental mechanism they used to communicate. Very few people knew this language in the kingdom of Bor. They had had to pay a very large amount to a very important wise man that lived in Killian, Kiyats County south of the kingdom, for him to teach them and train them. But it had been wort
h it. Over time, he had gotten used to it and Erion felt that this communication was almost "normal"; in some aspects even better, since they could communicate in silence. And they could do it without anyone around them understanding. It was like speaking a foreign, eccentric language.
Erion took out his picks for the last time that day, and opened the small chest with more difficulty than he expected. Inside it was a charm enshrined in a pendant. The amulet was shaped like a dove. Mithir looked at him and smiled.
CHAPTER 2: THE ROYAL BOX
