2

Now the thing about my thievery jobs is that me and the client need to set up some very specific timetables. Once the matter of payment is settled, the most important detail left to discuss is hashing out when and where our next meeting will take place. This meeting is typically the one in which I hand over my ill-gotten gains and receive my proper reward.

In the case of the Lugh Manor job, myself and the client met the following night after I filched the mask, and believe me when I say that I could not wait to be rid of the thing. All day long I was eager and looking forward to our rendezvous, and I kept checking on the mask in my bag to make sure it hadn’t summoned any dark and foul sorceries to bear down upon me while I wasn’t looking. Luckily it didn’t seem to have done anything of the sort, and when night finally fell I grabbed the awful thing and headed out across the city.

The big clock tower rising up out of the Temple had ticked its way to twenty minutes til midnight by the time I crossed the canal from the Muck Quarter into the White. I took that bridge down by the steamworks, which even at that time of night was still chugging away to bring power to the city. I’d heard tell that the owner of the place wasn’t too pleased with the Cerenites adding more and more buildings to their fancy new viarc grid, but what can one man do against the Church?

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous, at least a little bit. Not only was I carrying the kind of contraband that earns a man a lifetime in some Cerenite prison, but I was also strolling through the White Quarter. Usually when I went to the White Quarter it was the steal something expensive from a rich fella. Dressing up in what passed as my finest coat and going to a business meeting at the Temperance wasn’t exactly my style.

The hotel loomed over me as I approached. I’d always thought the Temperace’s facade looked kind of like a face, what with the way the windows were arranged and how the big double doors always seemed to be open no matter what time you happened to pass by. It looked like a big guy with a gaping mouth, and he also looked kind of like he was waiting for all his wealthy visitors to waltz on it and get gobbled up. ’Course I ain’t ever been gobbled up myself before that night. A Muck Quarter thief like me doesn’t get to dine in the finest establishments in New Alms, just as a general rule.

If my Granny could’ve seen me strolling into that swanky place, she’d’ve had conniptions. My outfit was really more of a costume than proper dress. Look too closely and it would become obvious my seemingly silk shirt was actually just cotton with a shiny dye, for example. My boots were polished enough that they could pass for high class so long as nobody was staring at my feet, and my trousers was just clean and whole and relying on the rest of my getup to make up for them. Only thing real in the whole ensemble was my coat, which had been gifted to me two years before by Eric, someone with actual wealth and taste, but even that was on the lower end of what would be expected of the Temperance’s clientele.

Wealthy folks love to judge people. They love to turn up their noses at anyone who’s not as fancy as them. Thing is though, once they’ve decided you’re their lesser, they tend to stop paying too much attention to you. They’re judgy, yeah, but they ain’t observant. They love their social protocols more than anything—except maybe for money—and it’s considered impolite to stare too hard at a fella or closely examine his clothes. So my disguise actually worked quite well. Soon as rich folk realized I wasn’t as wealthy as I seemed, they stopped looking too closely at me, cuz if they didn’t, that meant they’d be stooping to my level.

You can really get a rich fella to do anything if he thinks it’ll prove he’s better than you, is all I’m saying.

I made my way cross the lobby to the hotel lounge, where I perched myself at the darkest corner table I could find. A girl came by to take my order, but I waved her away and told her I was waiting for someone. I sure weren’t looking to spend any money at that place, not when I knew damn well I could get basically the same booze elsewhere for a fifth of the price. Not that I couldn’t afford it, mind.

My client’s initial offer, I remind y’all, was three-thousand Crowns with half up front. When I haggled my way up to four, that’d put him in a bit of an awkward situation, as he’d only brought a pouch of fifteen-hundred, divided into thirty fifty-Crown coins. I’d told him that was fine—only a fool would complain about merely getting fifteen-hundred Crowns before the job was even done. So I was already a little wealthy myself that night in the Temperance, and I was about to be twenty-five-hundred Crowns wealthier. But I weren’t looking to spend much of anything before the deal was done.

It was about ten minutes of waiting before I saw my fella saunter through the entryway. I didn’t even realize it was him until he started making his way over to me. This time he wasn’t wearing no disguise to try to blend in with the poor folk. Instead he was wearing a fine white shirt, and nice white pants, and he had black chains round his neck and wrists and black gloves and slippers on his hands and feet.

My eyes widened. I’d known my man was more than he’d portrayed himself to be, but I certainly didn’t imagine that he’d be a Cerenite. As he approached my table, my mind was awash in all sorts of questions, not least of which was why in the world a Cerenite priest would want a pagan mask of the Wild God, and why he’d hire a thief to retrieve it instead of simply ordering a raid on the heretics.

And with those questions came a strong sense of alarm, which I think y’all should find more understandable. The knowledge that the Church of the Civilized God both knew who I was and what I did for a living was far from comforting.

He smiled as he sat down across from me, and my worry must’ve shown on my face, because the first thing he did was to hold up his hands like he was trying to calm a moody horse, and he said: “Let me assure you, Mr. Balor, that you have nothing to worry about.”

“Well, that’s mighty kind of you to say,” I told him, “but considering the things I’ve seen over the past day or so, it’ll take more than a few kind words to assure me of anything.”

“How about some Crowns?” He set a pouch on the table. The metal coins inside clinked and jingled, which I will admit was a reassuring sound indeed. “You’ll find the agreed-upon sum within, plus a bonus to help you, aha, forget anything you happened to have seen.”

I looked at him, and he looked back at me with this placid sort of smile. I wanted to ask him what the Cerenites knew about the Wild cult that was apparently in the city, and more importantly why they hadn’t done anything about it, but I’d been in this game long enough to know that you don’t ask those sorts of questions to a client.

The Cerenite cleared his throat. “The mask?”

“Right here.” Now it was my turn to place something on the table, but in my case it was a bundle of cloth concealing a blasphemous artifact.

My client reached across the table and pulled the bundle toward himself. He unwrapped it just enough to confirm the mask was within, then folded the cloth back over it. “I can’t begin to tell you what good you have done, Mr. Balor. Thank you. And remember: whatever you happened to see in that woman’s manor, forget about it. None of it will matter soon enough.”

Well that invited a whole host of even more questions, but I bit my tongue like a good boy and nodded. “Pleasure doing business with you, Reverend.”

“Naturally,” said the priest. Then he stood up and left.

I opened up the pouch and counted the coins. Sixty fifty-Crowns, which meant he’d given me an extra five-hundred Crowns to put Lady Lugh’s garden out of my mind. With that confirmed, I closed the pouch, stood up, and headed out of the Temperance, now wealthier than I’d ever before been in my life.

So, what does a thief with four-thousand-five-hundred Crowns in his pocket do with himself? Well the first thing he does is go home and get some shut-eye. Y’all might think I’d have difficulty falling asleep, what with everything that I’d seen and the fact that I was suddenly rich, but it turns out that getting to sleep was, in fact, the easy part. Exhaustion is a more powerful force than stress, it would seem.

No, my issues began with the dreams.

I’d had them the night before too, but I couldn’t recall much of anything about them. These new dreams, though? The ones I got after receiving my payment? They was something else.

Y’all know how dreams are. They follow their own rules and their own reason, and they make perfect sense while you’re experiencing them, but the instant a fella wakes up he realizes that what he was experiencing just weren’t logical at all. Then they fade, and all you’re left with are images and sensations and a couple strange ideas.

These dreams? They was full of trees. Everywhere I looked, there was green foliage, so thick I couldn’t even tell if it was night or day. Dead leaves lay on the ground, and a three-eyed cat walked past and looked up at me. “I know what you did,” the cat told me. “I know what you are.”

Then there was water. It started as just a trickle, some thin little streams burbling through the dead leaves. Mushrooms sprouted up from the forest floor, growing bigger and bigger, and the cat disappeared somewhere and the water started getting heavier. Those little trickles had grown into a roaring flood, and just as the mushrooms got so big I couldn’t see their tops without looking up, I was hit by a wave of water and swept away.

I was drowning, but somehow I could still breathe. I looked down and saw there was a red light below me. The ocean floor was down there, and I watched as it split open and lava came bursting forth into the sea. It cooled into black stone, perfectly shaped to look like a whole crowd of people all looking up at me, sightless statues that covered the whole sea bottom. Blue lights started spinning around them, in a way that reminded me of snakes slithering their way between those statues, casting everything under the water in an eerie but strangely comforting azure glow.

And even though what was below me was just statues, even though they was rock and not even alive, I was suddenly certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were alert and focused on something. They were looking up, but not at me. No, they was looking past me, above me, at something far greater.

So I turned my head. I looked up to see what so commanded their attention. And I saw two big reptilian eyes looking back down at me. There was a shadow behind them, and in that shadow I could see horns and fur and... and eternity. I know that don’t make any sense—seeing eternity—but that’s the way of dreams, ain’t it?

The eyes were boring into me. I was on a rocky plain, staring up at the darkness, and these yellow lizard-eyes were examining every part of me, from my skin to my clothes to my blood and my soul. And then that dark shape behind those eyes spoke:

“Hello, little vessel.”

That’s when I woke up, a cold sweat all over my body. My heart was racing, and when I sat up I realized that my hands were shaking too. I took deep breaths and tried to calm myself down, tried to push through the memories of the dream, but then I saw something that filled me with a whole new terror.

There, in the corner of my little bedroom, in the shadowy space where the grains of wood on the wall disappear into darkness, was a shape. Someone was standing there—someone with horns and a tail and fur coming down to his feet. Two yellow eyes glowed in the darkness, and he raised a clawed hand out toward me, and I heard a buzz like some bug was flying past my ear.

Well, I ain’t ashamed to say that I screamed. I screamed right loud, and if I lived in a nicer part of town someone might’ve come running to see what all the screaming was all about. But no one did—and to be honest I’m not sure if my screams ever really left my room—and by the time the screaming died in my throat, the shape was gone and I was all alone again.

I looked out my window, to out above and across the rooftops of New Alms, past the plumes of smoke and steam, toward that big lit-up clock tower that rose up from the Cerenite Temple. It was just past five, and dawn would be here in about an hour or so. I lay back down in my bed, told myself it was all just a bad dream, and tried to go back to sleep.

I couldn’t. But I tried anyway.