Shadowdance 01 - A Dance of Cloaks

sword into his belly and twisted. As the thief bled out, Haern looked to the Serpent atop the wall.
    “Care to join the fun?” he asked, yanking out his blade and letting the blood drip to the street. “I’m out of players.”
    Two daggers whirled down at him. He sidestepped one and smacked away the other. Hoping to provoke the man further, Haern kicked the crate. With no other option, the thief turned and fled back down the wall on the other side. Disappointed, Haern sheathed a sword and used the other to pry open the crate. With a loud creak the top came off, revealing three burlap sacks within. He dipped a hand in one, and it came out dripping with gold coins, each one clearly marked with the sigil of the Gemcroft family.
    Interesting.
    “Please,” he heard the young thief beg. He bled from cuts on his arms and legs, most certainly painful, but nothing life-threatening. The worst Haern had done was hamstring him to prevent him from fleeing. “Please, don’t kill me. I can’t, I can’t…”
    Haern slung all three bags over his shoulder. With his free hand he pressed the tip of his sword against the young man’s throat.
    “They’ll want to know why you lived,” he said.
    The man had no response to that, only a pathetic sniffle. Haern shook his head. How far the Serpent Guild had fallen … but all the guilds had fallen since that bloody night five years ago. Thren Felhorn, the legend, had failed in his coup, bringing doom upon the underworld. Thren … his father…
    “Tell them you have a message,” Haern said. “Tell them I’m watching.”
    “Who?”
    In response Haern took his sword and dipped it in the man’s blood.
    “They’ll know who,” he said before vanishing, leaving only a single eye drawn in the dirt as his message, blood for its ink, a sword its quill.
    He didn’t go far. He had to lug the bags to the rooftops one at a time, but once he was up high his urgency dwindled. The rooftops were his home, had been for years. Following the main road west, he reached the inner markets, still silent and empty. Plunking down the bags, he lay with his eyes closed and waited.
    He woke to the sounds of trade. Hunger stirred in his belly, but he ignored it. Hunger, like loneliness and pain, had become a constant companion. He wouldn’t call it friend, though.
    “May you go to better hands,” Haern said to the first sack of gold before stabbing its side. Coins spilled, and he hurled them like rain to the packed streets. Without pause he cut the second and third, flinging them to the suddenly ravenous crowd. They dove and fought as the gold rolled along, bouncing off bodies and plinking into various wooden stalls. Only a few bothered to look up, those who were lame or old and dared not fight the crowd.
    “The Watcher!” someone cried. “The Watcher is here!”
    The cry put a smile on his lips as Haern fled south, having not kept a single coin.
    It had taken five years, but at last Alyssa Gemcroft understood her late father’s paranoia. The meal placed before her smelled delicious, spiced pork intermixed with baked apples, but her appetite remained dormant.
    “I can have one of the servants taste it, if you’d like,” said her closest family advisor, a man named Bertram who had loyally served her father. “I’ll even do so myself.”
    “No,” she said, brushing errant strands of her red hair back and tucking them behind her left ear. “That’s not necessary. I can afford to skip a meal.”
    Bertram frowned, and she hated the way he looked at her—like a doting grandfather, or a worried teacher. Just the night before, two servants had died eating their daily rations. Though she’d replaced much of the mansion’s food, as well as executed those she thought responsible, the memory lingered in Alyssa’s mind. The way the two had retched, their faces turning a horrific shade of purple…
    She snapped her fingers, and the many waiting servants rushed to clear the trays away. Despite the rumble in her belly, she felt better with the food gone. At least now she could think without fear of convulsing to death because of some strange toxin. Bertram motioned to a chair beside her, and she gave him permission to sit.
    “I know these are not peaceful times,” he said, “but we cannot allow fear to control our lives. That is a victory you know the thief guilds have longed for.”
    “We’re approaching the fifth anniversary of the Bloody Kensgold,” Alyssa said, referring to a gathering