by Edun, Terah
Then a grin came across his face. The fastest way to a scholar’s heart was through knowledge—she knew that firsthand.
“Not many know about the lost emperor,” Ezekiel admitted from the ground, “or the twin rulers, for that matter.”
“Not many care,” she said flatly. “I do.”
He rubbed his shins with a pained expression. She waited to see what he would do.
I might have been a little hasty, she thought. Maybe it’s up to me to extend the olive branch of peace.
“Perhaps we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” she admitted.
He swallowed. “Perhaps I should have introduced myself.”
There. We both apologized, Sara thought in relief.
He adjusted the spectacles on the bridge of his nose and tried to stand. He winced when he tried to put weight on his left leg and it failed. Grabbing his hand in her own, her dusky skin contrasted with his much paler flesh as she pulled him up until he could stand.
“Sorry if that hurt.”
“If?”
She glared.
“Apology accepted,” he hurriedly stated.
She nodded. “Now, where are we going?”
He sighed. “The warehouse for the artifacts is this way.”
“This way where?” Sara knew better than to follow anybody to an unknown location. The first rule of battle was to know your surroundings. The second rule was to be prepared for anything.
Ezekiel looked over at her, truly confused. As if he couldn’t fathom why she was being this difficult. He’d obviously never been cornered in an alley with only a rock to defend himself with. That had been in her younger days. Before she’d learned to always keep a blade on her. Now her opponents would be hard-pressed to get the drop on her at any time. But that didn’t mean she’d let her guard down.
“Well?” she demanded.
Ezekiel raised a finger to point at a gray building in the distance. It sat on a rocky outcropping and looked generally very dreary even in the early morning sun.
“There,” he said. “We’re going right there.”
She nodded and proceeded forward.
When she was about to pass him and he still hadn’t moved, she reached out, grabbed his shoulder, and pushed him along ahead of her. There was no way he was going to walk behind her.
“You know you’re very pushy, right?”
She glanced over to see if he was mocking her. He looked completely serious. And completely annoyed as he moved a few inches to the left to get out of her reach.
She snorted. Not answering his question and not pointing out the fact that he’d have to be at least five more feet away from her to keep her out of grabbing or stabbing distance.
“So,” she said, “what are these artifacts?”
He bit his lip and then mumbled something.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you,” she said. She wasn’t sorry, and her voice arced up in irritation to show it.
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye before he clearly stated, “Objects that Cormar has procured from mages across the realm. He keeps them in a magically-sealed warehouse. I’m their curator. You’re their guard. Okay?”
She gave him a glare that had him inching further to the left.
Softening the look, she said, “Look, if you drop the attitude I won’t hurt you.”
He stopped dead between the fisherman’s wharf and the warehouse.
“What you mean is as long as you’re not in a bad mood and I do exactly what you say you won’t hurt me.”
She turned to face him. “Did I say that?”
“No, but that’s what you meant.”
“No,” she contradicted. “I meant what I said. Drop the attitude, because I didn’t force you into this crappy job. In fact, I’m pretty sure Cormar back there forced us both into this crappy job.”
He muttered, “Not so crappy.”
“Watching artifacts all day isn’t crappy?”
“It’s better than cleaning fish guts, which is what you came for,” he shot back.
Her back relaxed and then she grinned. She liked that he stood up to her. Maybe he had a spine after all. Besides...he had a point.
“So, Ezekiel, what’s so important about these artifacts?” she said, turning back to the warehouse.
He started walking beside her again.
“Some have special powers. Others have yet to be studied. They’re all valuable. To all kinds of people, which is why Cormar needs a watcher skilled in fighting to stop anybody who tries to take them.”
She raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. They had reached the entrance to the warehouse. He slid a key into a normal-sized door and walked in first. She followed closely behind and looked around to see an open space filled with rows and rows of waist-high benches. As she walked forward she saw that each bench had multiple objects arrayed on it, each object was spaced a few even inches from the next. They ranged from beautiful opal necklaces to giant mechanical constructions whose purpose she couldn’t surmise. Looking around, Sara continued walking forward.
“Is this everything?” she said turning to see that Ezekiel had stayed standing near the front two rows.
“Yes,” he said back. “Everything we have is here on these benches.”
“How many artifacts do you have?” she asked.
He looked up and did a quick calculation out loud. “Two rows of ten benches that are full. With five artifacts a piece for those. Then there are also two partially full benches because of the danger the artifacts pose. That’s another seven. So one hundred and seven artifacts now.”
She nodded sharply while proceeding to walk to the end.
As she walked away, she heard him add, “But we get more and more each day, you know.”
Judging by the two minutes it took her to walk from front to back and then five minutes it took her to jog the perimeter, she thought it would be easy to keep an eye on the artifacts. Half of the warehouse, towards the back, wasn’t even full. The good thing about the warehouse was that it had an open layout—easy to see clearly in all directions at once and giving her the ability to spot intruders. The bad thing about the layout was that the benches would easily get in the way if she had to fight someone, and there was nowhere to get a tactical advantage.
She sighed and walked back to Ezekiel.
“Anything I should know about these artifacts?”
“Like what?” he said, holding up a magnifying glass to look at a bug made of solid gold with emerald eyes that sat in his hand.
“Like is there anything in here that will react if I touch it or breathe on it?” she said tersely. It was a valid question. Mage objects had the bad habit of killing their owners.
“Um, there’s a pygmy statue about four benches back that way,” he said as he motioned with the magnifying glass. “It’ll turn you to stone if you spit on it and rub it with your thumb, but that’s it, I think.”
She stared at him.
“All right, then. Security question time. Has a mage tried to break into the warehouse in the last week?” she said, spitting out rapid-fire questions. “In the last month? What would they want to acquire first?”
“No, no, and everything in here is priceless.”
“You’re not helping,” she pointed out.
“You’re not asking the right questions,” he retorted.
She clenched a fist and held back from wringing his neck.
“All right,” she said tersely as he continued to play with what she thought was a beetle. “Is the warehouse protected magically?”
He looked up at her with a smile. “Ding, ding, ding! Right question there. The answer is yes. This building has some of the strongest wards I’ve ever seen. No mage, no matter how powerful, could get through those doors.”
He is a very weird man, Sara decided privately.
Then Sara thought about what he had just said and what he had conspicuously left out.
“You said ‘mage,’” she said slowly.
>
He nodded patiently.
“What about common thugs?”
He said, “There’s no mage ward known to man that can bar a common human thief. Why? Because there’s no magic in them to detect.”
She cursed a blue streak.
He continued, “Which is why we need you.”
She changed her original question in light of this news. “Has anyone tried to break into the warehouse in the last month?”
“Three street thugs in the past week, two trained art collectors in the past two weeks, and one very determined thief three times over three weeks,” he said. “Cormar took care of that last one himself.”
Her stomach sank. That was a lot of break-ins.
“And what did Cormar do with the thieves who broke in before that?”
“The watcher before you took care of them.”
She was afraid to ask. “Where is that watcher?”
“In the city morgue. Died last night of multiple stab wounds,” he said, looking at her as if the question was dumb.
Sara groaned. She supposed it was. Why else would they need a new fighter unless the old one was dead?
The death bothered her, but she was practical. Fighters died. She could handle that and handle herself much better than whoever they had previously hired anyway. She was sure of it.
Then Ezekiel said, “There’s a cot over there, a supply closet with materials on the far wall, and a food allowance. You can move a few things in, but don’t bring your family.”
Sara froze. The position had come about so fast that it had never occurred to her that they would need her for more than the daylight hours.
She turned around, muttering, “I can’t do this.”
For the first time Ezekiel stopped fiddling with his golden beetle. As she walked toward the door he reached out a frantic hand to latch on to her upper arm.
“Wait,” he shouted.
She gave him a hardened glare and he let go of her hastily.
“Please,” he pleaded, giving her his full attention. “What do you mean you can’t do this? You promised Cormar!”
“I promised him nothing. I thought this job would be a few hours a day. Now you’re saying I have to live here,” she snapped. “I can’t do that.”
He looked at her and shook his head. “If you leave, he’ll blame me.”
“He won’t if you find a replacement,” she said.
“Where am I supposed to find that?”
“Oh, I don’t know, the mercenary’s guild?”
He grimaced. “They don’t like me there.”
“Why?”
“It’s confidential.”
“Confidential enough to get your ass kicked if you walked through that guild’s doors?”
“Yeah,” he admitted.
“What in the world could you have possibly done to piss off the entire mercenary’s guild?” she said.
He pushed his falling spectacles up the bridge of his nose and glared.
“Never mind, I can take a guess.”
He sniffed.
She said, “Look, I want to help you. I do. But I can’t be here all day and night. I can’t live here. I have a family of my own.”
My mother, she thought silently.
He started trembling. “What am I going to do?”
“Not my problem,” Sara said, walking toward the door.
She heard a clatter from behind her. She turned around to see that Ezekiel had knocked a small acorn off of a bench. It bounced and rolled until it stopped in front of her feet. She bent down to pick it up gingerly. In her hands it had a warm muted glow of amber. It was very pretty.
She looked up to see Ezekiel kneeling on the floor as he sat back with a look of pure resignation on his face. He looked like a man who knew he was going to die and had accepted his fate.
Sara let out a breath slowly and grimaced.
“Two days,” she said.
Ezekiel’s head snapped up. “Two days?”
“I’ll help you for two days. We’ll go to the mercenary’s guild tomorrow and get a replacement.”
Her voice was firm.
“Think Cormar will accept that?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, “but he won’t really have a choice. I only took this job for the money. But it’s not worth it to leave my mother alone. I’ll find something else.”
Ezekiel looked a tad doubtful but he didn’t question her. He was probably too grateful that his imminent death had a stay of execution to pester her.
“Now,” she said, “why don’t get back to do doing whatever it is you do here?”
He nodded and stood.
“What are you going to do?” he said.
“I’m going to check the exterior perimeter for weak spots in the mage field. Then I’m going over every inch of the walls to see how those thieves were sneaking in.”
“Sounds like a good plan.”
Sara smirked. She doubted he knew what she was looking for.
“Ezekiel?” Sara said.
“Yes?”
“Catch!”
She threw the amber acorn to him and watched as he caught it after a few fumbles. Just before he caught it, the priceless artifact almost hit the floor. Again.
Chapter 5
“Stay inside,” Sara told Ezekiel. She took a calm breath and strode out the door. Her back was stiff and her gait was sure, but inside she was quaking with doubt. This was the first time she had deliberately flouted the law and her mother’s rules at the same time. Come hell or high water, for the next two days she would defend this warehouse with her life. She would just have to send a messenger home to her mom saying that she had agreed to work the overnight shift. But she hoped to the gods’ own lives that her mother never found out what she was really doing. She wouldn’t survive that confrontation, she was sure of it.
Sara shook her head to clear her mind of the grim thoughts. With a wary hand on her knife, she paced the exterior of the building. Checking for obvious entrances, holes in the wall and damage put there by thieves. She saw none while she paced around all four sides. She noted however that the building was built of some kind of thin metal sheeting. Small, rectangular windows were interspersed regularly high up near the ceiling. Sara could tell in a glance that they were much too small for anyone to climb through, and besides, they were clearly sealed shut. The entire building had four walls, a peaked roof, and stood in a long, rectangular shape. The only entrance was the one she and Ezekiel had entered through. Even the magical protections surrounding it were impenetrable. Which left only two explanations. They had gotten in through the roof or through the front door.
She stepped back from the front entrance until she had a clear view of the sloping roof. She couldn’t see much from here but she had feeling that five sets of thieves had known something that she currently did not. Sara paced around the walls one more time. On this circuit she looked for a tear or irregularity in the roofing structure. Halfway down and on the ocean side of the building facing away from the fisherman’s wharf, she found it.
It wasn’t all that obvious, if you weren’t looking for it. But she was.
Sara grunted in satisfaction while she kept her eyes on the small metal pole protruding from the sloped roof. It was no bigger than her hand but she had the feeling it was strong enough to hold the weight of a person climbing up the walls. Excited, she trotted back to the front and into the warehouse. As she sprint between the benches to see if her theory of a hole in the roof was true, she stopped cold. She felt something weird. Like a presence that her instincts were telling her not to ignore. Not the mention the fact that her curator was gone. She knew Ezekiel would have never left the artifacts alone, not of his own volition. If he’d been forced to leave through the front door, the man should have at least known enough to scream and catch her attention. She would have come running.
So Sara carefully assessed the rows in front of her. Nerves alive, she looked for what her eyes couldn’t see. She opened her ears
and sharpened her hearing. She heard the pants of muffled breathing in front of her.
“Might as well come out,” she said. “I know you’re here.”
Then the cloak fell. A man stood in front of her. Ezekiel stood in front of him with a sharp knife held at his throat. The man was gripping him tightly. Sara quickly spotted one other man with his back turned to the three of them about six rows back.
“Nice trick,” she said. She carefully took in the situation. She wondered if she was dealing with a mage, but she didn’t think so. Her battle instincts told her she was dealing with a normal man. Those instincts were almost never wrong. However, there was something magical about him. Narrowing her eyes, she realized it was the pendant around his neck. It was giving off an aura of old magic. She was impressed.
Haven’t seen one of those before, she thought.
It was an object of residual magic and imbued with a specific gift. In this case, the ability to cloak the man and his compatriot in a mobile sight shield. The problem with objects like that is that they could only accomplish one thing. They could do it perfectly but nothing else. Which meant the man hadn’t been able to muffle the sound of his breathing like he would have if he had been a true mage with a sight and sound shield.
She took out her knife and wished she had a sword at the moment. Screw the wharf rules.
“Who are you?” she said tightly.
“Not important,” said the man in a relaxed voice with an inflection that indicated an educated background.
She said through gritted teeth, “It is to me.”
He stared at her with cold eyes. “Edgar, it’s time to go.”
He wasn’t talking to her that time. The man in the back startled and turned around. When his cape moved she saw a rotund belly, several chins, and thick, squinty eyes. Not a threat.
“Already?” said Edgar in a whine.
“Yes,” said the man tightly.
“But there’s so much here.” Edgar clearly didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.
“Get what you came for and let’s go,” said the man with his knife at Ezekiel’s throat as he stepped forward. He was watching Sara warily.
She mirrored his actions with a thin smile.
He raised an eyebrow and pressed the knife down on Ezekiel’s throat. A thin red line of blood appeared and dripped down. The curator of the artifacts whimpered. She halted.