Chapter One: Child of Darkness
The glowing orbs lining the streets created small circles of light on the uneven stone road. The moon was barely visible through the thick night air and darkness embraced the sleeping city. The hour was late and all the citizens had long since returned to the safety of their homes, afraid of what might lurk just outside the lamplight in the tight alleyways and back streets of the city and in this particular alley Carrine remained crouched, nothing more than a small distortion in the black night air she had long embraced. She had quickly gained the art of blending into her surroundings and not attracting any unnatural attention to herself. During the day she was just another face walking through the city, a ghost with neither face nor memory. It was for the night hours she lived, for the times when the streets emptied and darkness seemed to cling to the cold stone walls of the buildings. At this hour the city was a different place, full of shadows and untold stories.
Carrine remained poised in the darkness, concentrating her eyes on the circle of light only a few yards away. The orbs, unlike candles or lamps light did not flicker or distort like common lamps; but remained a constant white glow, the last bastions of light in a city swallowed by darkness. They were lit every evening by the ordained mages of the city and would shine until the mages made their rounds were made the following morning. They crept along unnoticed, much as Carrine, and slowly lit the streets every evening. The robed creatures would neither respond nor give response, but floated along slowly like wraiths. Most people knew better than to try to confront or even speak to the robed figures and so they continued their nightly ritual; unchallenged and unnoticed, except by those with trained eyes.
The wind picked up just enough to make the long strands of hair on the side of Carrine’s head dance with excitement. She leaned her back against a nearby building and continued her observation. Her client was late and Carrine by nature was not a patient person, not that she didn’t mind waiting; it was more of a matter of principle than of personal preference. When you were in her kind of work, a certain degree of professionalism was necessary just to stay alive. The entirety of her business relied upon the concept of trust, but trust among thieves took on a whole different nature. In a city this large, containing many people crammed into a central location, there were certain jobs which required a specialist’s touch. Carrine was that specialist, and had become rather versatile at carrying out her… business.
Tonight’s business was rather important, her client was a foreigner; from a land she had never heard of before. It didn’t matter much where he was from, a foreign job usually meant there was a great deal more money involved. The man had been very discrete when he inquired about her assistance, and was very secretive about the specifics of the job.
All the better, Carrine thought. Having something to hide was part of what kept people alive. Everybody had there secrets, that part of themselves they chose not to share with the rest of the world. In Carrine’s eyes, this is what made people interesting; not knowing who somebody is, rather thinking of whom they could be. One of the tricks Carrine was forced to learn fast was how to judge character. Reading a person could keep a smooth job from turning sour, and had already saved her more times than she could count. As she traveled the city streets during dusk, she would observe. Just sit back on not say a word, always reading people’s motions and sizing them up. Letting down her guard was out of the question, as there was more than the simple minded peace force looking for her. Every time she completed a job, she made another enemy. They may not know who she is yet, but many of them would leap at the chance for retribution. This was the price she paid for her work, for every client, there was a victim. If she did her job right, she would remain anonymous; but it was not always the case. Some of her more… temperamental victims had taken it upon themselves to attempt to track her down. Some even required some “special” attention, which is where Briggs and Deshyr came in. They were experts at tying up loose ends, through the use of “persuasion”. They handled the business end of the job, and Carrine was the specialist. She liked it this way, in contradiction to the beliefs of many; she didn’t care about the money. It was the extraction, the “job”, which made her feel alive.
On most occasions Carrine would never even meet her clients, leaving Briggs and Deshyr to deal with them. But tonight was a rather special case…
* * *
“The man is after something.” Deshyr had told Carrine a few hours early.
“Of course he’s after something! He came to us didn’t he numskull!” Briggs hollered from the back of the office, throwing darts at some crudely drawn circles on a stack of empty wooden crates. Their “office” was a rundown storage building in the southern part of town. The floor was littered with partially open crates, barrels and equipment. It was a real dump, and none of them would have it any other way.
“Well, yes…” Deshyr replied sulkingly. “But I mean he was really after something. Something big.”
“Probably another collector after some ancient relic; nothing but a useless bag of bones.” Briggs retorted, picking up another dart; this time the throw missed the crates entirely and landed in a puddle of water.
Since the office was the basement of storage building, and the floor was constantly wet from the daily cleansing of the city. All the equipment lay across empty crates and barrels and the damp smell of wood hung stagnant in the air.
Carrine worked at tying up a length of nymph hair rope, listening through one ear. Briggs and Deshyr were always arguing about something, it was how they passed the time. As for Carrine she was quite satisfied with keeping her distant from their fruitless arguments.
“I’ve got a feeling…” Deshyr began again.
“Oh shove your feelings!” Briggs cut in, leaning forward menacingly. “You always have inklings or feelings and what have they ever done for us?”
“It’s just that…” Deshyr tried once more.
“There you go again!” Briggs continued to prod. “How many times to I have to tell you that feelings have no place in this business. You’ve got to run off instinct and cold sweat.”
“But…” Deshyr insisted stubbornly.
“No butts!”
“Come on help me out here, he’s rather petulant today.” Deshyr begged Carrine
She merely took her gaze off the rope long enough to smile at Deshyr and then went back to her preoccupation.
Meanwhile, Briggs grumbled something inaudible and threw a sloppy dart so that it shot off the stone wall. Deshyr liked to use complicated words which Briggs didn’t understand as a sly way of getting even. It had that very effect, as Briggs would become torn between his curiousity over the meaning and his embarrassment in letting on that he didn’t know the meaning. The effect played out well as he would suffer in silence and the argument would come to an uneasy pause.
“I just think that something big is happening, that’s all.” Deshyr spoke in a hushed manner. “Don’t you guys feel it? It’s on the faces of all the people, something is going to happen soon.”
“Well think whatever ya want, I’m gonna stick to my instincts.” Briggs muttered. He threw another dart, this time nailing the center ring perfectly.
“And that goes for you too.” He said turning to Carrine. “Keep it sharp out there; we can’t afford to have you go off into another one of those…. Trances.”
“Visions” Carrine replied, upset at the fact that Briggs would bring up such a sensitive subject. She regretted telling him about it; she should have never opened herself up in that way. The truth of the matter was that these “visions” as she had started calling them, were on the forefront of her mind. As of late they had been getting successively worse, to the point where they were interfering with her job.
At first she thought they were intense dreams, as at they originally only occurred in her sleep. However she would wake up feeling completely drained of energy and without any benefits of night’s rest at all. None of them were the same. In her visions she would assume many different people in lands she had never seen before. They were always fighting it seemed, or running; and most of them ended in tragedy. If there was some connection between the visions, she failed to see it, and thus dismissed them at first as an annoyance. That was… until two weeks ago.
She had been on a job, a simple grab job in a more wealthy section of town. The client was some sort of relative to the target, and wanted their assistance in recovering something he claimed was rightly his. It didn’t matter what his excuse was, all that mattered was he wanted something and he hired them to get it.
Getting inside the house was easy enough, scaling the wall to a balcony on the upper level. The door on the balcony was open, after all who expects someone to enter through their balcony. The information she was given was correct, she found the sculpture in a library on the upper floor, but just as she was about to grab the piece a banging noise came to her attention. Like a wisp of air she disappeared silently into a corner and listened for the noise. She waited for quite some time, scouring the air with her ears for the slightest sound.
Nothing to worry about, Carrine thought. She loved this feeling, the pumping adrenaline, the increased heart rate; it was what she lived for. When she tried to make her way back to the sculpture, her head reeled and she tumbled to the ground. She managed to catch herself, but not without a lot of noise and once again she retreated into hiding. As she waited the dizziness got worse, until the visions took over.
When she came to, it was pre-dawn and she could hear sounds all through the house of the occupants’ morning routine. Cursing her plight she snatched the vase and ran cat-like back to the balcony. She caught herself just in time to notice the master of the house having breakfast on the balcony. Lucky for her he failed to notice the rope still dangling from the balcony railing: her planned escape route.
Carrine always made a point of studying the layout of the entire building, in case just such an emergency arose. She made her way down the stairs, after ducking out of sight as a servant passed by, and out the front door. It was a sloppy job, and she had to tell Deshyr and Briggs something, so she told the truth. A mistake she had regretted ever since.
“Just remember who does all the work around here eh?” Carrine replied, throwing the tied rope into a pile of others. “and just make sure the info you give me is accurate, no more Weston incidents.”
A museum job several months early, the plans Briggs had obtained were outdated and nearly cost them the job. Most of the museum was the same as the plans, but the museum had just installed a sentry box several months earlier; a sentry box in which a single guard could overlook a good majority of the museum floor. When Carrine went for the grab she was spotted and in an instant half a dozen guards were on her tail. Grabbing the piece she flew up a flight of stairs, to the history section of the building. The guard from the tower headed her off at the end of a hallway, and the other guards were only a few yards behind her. In a desperate attempt she crashed through the second story window and fell to the garden below. To this day Briggs wouldn’t buy her story, saying that there is no way she could have broken through a window like that and come out unscathed. Whether he believed it or not didn’t matter, the price they paid was dear; as they were forced to move underground until the ordeal blew over.
“A mistake like that won’t happen again, I took care of the problem.” Briggs said, cracking his knuckles. “Besides I’ve changed sources since then.”
“What I’m trying to say is that we all have to be on our feet here. There is little room for mistakes, on all our parts.” Carrine lectured.
“Alright, I guess you’re right. Now don’t you have an appointment to get to?” Briggs replied, with a crooked smile.
