Frasalu stared uneasily into Shirrin’s silvered mirror, and a stranger’s face stared back. It was an oddly tanned face, rounded from a long life of plentiful food that had never actually taken pce, with hair long enough to fall past her shoulders if she hadn’t pinned it up at the first avaible opportunity. The whole of her body was like that now, eerily plush, with wide hips and fat breasts that suggested easy handwork and plentiful food rather than a long life spent fighting for survival on the streets of Chrysopolis. With a frown, Frasalu leaned even closer to the silver pne, searching for any simirity with her old self that she could find.

  Some of it was under the surface: despite appearances, Shirrin’s spell had preserved her muscle. The witch had expined that she might still need acuity on the part of her staff, after all. Frasalu had the good luck of getting to keep her eyes: Sothvam hadn’t. But then, Sothvam had been turned into a total pretty-boy, so that was the least of his problems.

  “Frasalu, Sothvam.” said Shirrin. “I’ll be going out soon. We need to discuss the pn.”

  Frasalu turned around at once, cursing her distractedness. “Of course, mistress,” she said. Sothvam moved to attention as well, sticking morosely to her side.

  There was a moment of shock as she saw Shirrin, a spindly figure in tight clothing, bancing a sword vertically on her palm. Frasalu reminded herself once again that this was a job, same as any other, the fact that she had taken the job while being rescued from a terrible fate at the hand of the city guard besides. The transformation wasn’t that much worse than any of the other unusual requirements that her eccentric hirers of the past had foisted upon her.

  “You’ll need to keep a watch on the Emperor’s chamber, understand? But make sure you are not seen.”

  Frasalu remembered back to a couple of years earlier, when some senator had hired the gang to keep watch on his rival’s vil, reporting the comings and goings to him every evening. It had been the most boring job she’d ever taken.

  “Just keeping watch?” Sothvam asked. “Nothing else?”

  “No,” said Shirrin. “But if you are seen, then the next step will be an impossible one to take.”

  “We can do that,” Frasalu said, giving Sothvam a brief look of annoyance. “Just tell us what we have to do next.”

  Shirrin flipped the bde over, catching its point on the back of her hand and setting it spinning along its axis. Frasalu might have called that magic if she hadn’t seen the sorts of tricks that a street busker would perform for coppers; as it was, she was left uncertain. The witch paused a moment, seemingly entranced by the strange afterimages left as the bde spun and spun.

  “This bde is one of Lord Ethirus’s cws. Do you still respect Lord Ethirus?”

  “The same way one respects a hurricane or a pgue. You grant offerings in the hopes that he will stay far, far away from you. I never exactly thought that the old god of justice and vengeance would be on the side of a thief and a bandit.”

  Shirrin grunted softly, as though this were some deep point of philosophy being put forward. “This evening, I will show the power of Lord Ethirus’s Cws to our gracious Emperor, and convince him that the only way to maintain the strength of his kingdom is to work from dusk to dawn on the ritual creation of as many of these weapons as possible. He will bleed himself dry, and think that he is doing it for the strength of the Empire.”

  “An excellent pn, my mistress, but what does this require of us? I know nothing of magic.”

  “Late this evening, you will see me enter Peleus’s chamber. If I am successful, he will leave with me, and the room will be left empty. That is when you make your move. Sneak within, and once you are inside, look for…”

  …

  That had been half a day earlier. Frasalu and Sothvam had found an area where the pace hallway dead-ended on a small door leading to an all-but-forgotten nursery; in other words, a pce where almost nobody would cross their path. Then the long wait. They traded off on watch, sitting around the corner and listening intensely for the sound of doors opening or sandals spping against stone. Then, while neither of them was looking, Shirrin had appeared. In almost no time at all, they were moving.

  The sheer opulence of the chamber that y beyond the door stunned Frasalu as surely as a blow to the head. There was not a single surface, it seemed, that was not decorated with piles of fine silk, with gold and silver leaf, with precious stones inid into the walls. One man owned all this; he lived amongst it every night, woke to it every morning while the people lived in hunger and filth in his city’s streets. No wonder Shirrin hated him.

  The next thought was whether they could get away with stealing anything. If Peleus was half as paranoid as Shirrin liked to say he was, then they did not dare steal anything rge, a jewel or a bit of silk, lest it be noticed, and Peleus be made certain that his chamber had been infiltrated. But perhaps…

  “Start searching his personals,” said Frasalu. “I’m going to make a profit.”

  A gilded chest y atop a cabinet of some imported ironwood, and Frasalu’s thief’s instincts guided her that way. She opened it: it was full of bottles, inks and oils and other such things. Nothing that she could feel certain Peleus would not notice. But the wood of the chest itself was covered in gold leaf, except around the joints and edges, where it had been scraped free. With a nail, Frasalu scraped away at the gold, expanding the bare patches as much as she thought she could. In the end, she had a handful of gold fkes; not much, but worth a handful of coppers at least.

  “We have one thing we were sent to steal, Frasalu,” Sothvam said. “One thing. Do not allow yourself to be distracted.”

  Frasalu quickly secreted the gold fkes away in a small locket, then followed Sothvam into the Emperor’s personal chamber. It was strange, that the man in charge of half a continent should own something as banal as a writing desk; but then, what else would he use to write all of his edicts and missives?

  The real prize y against the wall, where in a row upon row of nooks the Emperor kept years of correspondence. Letters from nearly every important dignitary one could name sat in ordered rows, month by month. The chronological nature of it all was the only reason that this heist was even vaguely viable: Shirrin had made her agents memorize a few key moments in history when she suspected Peleus of some wrongdoing, and ordered them to search there for something that would be damaging.

  Sothvam, being still the taller of the two in spite of his new, willowy figure, had started in the upper right, searching for any evidence that Peleus had mismanaged the war against the Trabakondai for his own purposes. Frasalu, on a whim, went nearly to the center, reading letters from early in Peleus’s reign as Emperor.

  It soon became clear why the narrowing of scope had been necessary. Peleus was a busy man indeed, and it seemed as though he received at least one letter a day, often quite lengthy. Reading letter after letter in search of some evidence of wrongdoing would have been a lengthy task at the best of times, but this was far from it. Neither Frasalu nor Sothvam were all too acute in their skill at reading the Macarian script, rendering even a page of text the work of a few minutes. More difficult still was the task of parsing political contexts and the arcane nguage of politics in order to discern what was an incriminating sin and what was merely the everyday trading away of lives that was the domain of the powerful.

  But Shirrin had made sure to impress upon the two of them how essential it was that they complete their task, and so they set to it. It was not long at all before the sun fell below the horizon and the two thieves were forced to rely upon another of Shirrin’s gifts, a pair of candles made of a bck matter which burned thrice as brightly and for thrice as long as any ordinary beeswax. It quickly became clear why Shirrin’s distraction had been necessary.

  Hour upon hour they searched and searched for any word or glyph that might implicate the Emperor. The night grew deeper and darker, until Frasalu was afraid that she might accidentally burn one of the letters, so closely was she forced to huddle around the enchanted candle. Her eyes grew tired, the words blurring together under the weight of exhaustion and ck of focus. The creeping doubt began to grow in the back of Frasalu’s mind: what if the Emperor truly was all he cimed? What if he was beyond reproach, every life he took or condemned to suffering entirely banced within the twisted ledgers by which the ws of the Macarians judged themselves.

  They ended up taking shifts, one resting while the other worked on, waking the other up when they were too exhausted to continue. Time was forgotten. And then Frasalu was awakened to an even worse omen: the very edge of the sky was beginning to turn red; the sun had not yet arrived, but it would soon.

  “We finish searching this month,” Frasalu said, gesturing to a pile of letters written nine years earlier, before Peleus’s ascension to the throne. “Then we leave.”

  They both read together, scanning each letter as carefully as they could, though the terror of the brightening sky needled at their ability to focus. Frasalu found herself wondering how well Shirrin would treat a subordinate who had failed. There were horror stories about some potential employers in the city narrows, who would fly into a rage if their slightest desire was not met. She wanted to believe that, as a fellow Trabakondai, Shirrin would be kinder than that, but she knew well enough that that was no assurance at all.

  While Frasalu was concocting her pns for escape, sacrificing herself to take on her employer’s rage and so on and so forth, her eyes trailed across an unremarkable sheet of papyrus, hardly comprehending the script written thereupon. Her mind had gone elsewhere. And yet, by some miracle, the eye noticed what the mind did not; a few words pced in just such an order that, midway through the stream of her thought, Frasalu was suddenly drawn down onto the page.

  She took the page from the top once again; it was a brief letter, barely more than a couple of paragraphs, and so when she reached the bottom it was a small difficulty to go back to the top and read it again. Her mind reeled in disbelief at what she was reading. If she was right, this letter revealed so simple and so terrible a betrayal on the part of the Emperor that it could not be countenanced. She had to be wrong.

  “Sothvam, I think I’ve found it. Do you remember what our Mistress said about the Temple Revolt, in Philgeonia?”

  “More or less,” Shothvam said. “Why?”

  Frasalu quickly passed him the letter, and he read it at least three times himself. By the look on his face Frasalu could tell that he was having to hold himself back from whooping aloud with joy. All at once, all exhaustion was banished from the both of them, and it was with renewed energy that they rushed to put away all of the letters exactly where they found them. As the sun rose properly over Chrysopolis, the pair of thieves slipped away back to their own quarters in the pace. And hidden under Frasalu’s robes, the incriminating letter.

  …

  Frasalu had expected to hand the letter off to her Mistress and be done with it, Shirrin using the note to bckmail her own Master or to shame his name by surreptitiously revealing it to the public. But she, apparently, had her own pns. She expined the next stage, and although Frasalu did not fully understand, she wasn’t going to argue. The next stage of the pn involved a game of dress-up.

  She, along with Sothvam and several other members of their gang, had switched their guises entirely from those of servants to that of men and women of wealth. She wore a dress of fine silk that clung to her form, and cnked and jangled with gold and jewels at wrist, ankle, and throat, and over her face she bore an actor’s mask made of ivory and nacre. The others were cd in simir garishness, the gold and jewels demonstrating wealth so extreme as to become a parody of itself. They all sat in a three-quarter circle formation, on vishly decorated chairs, in a dark and shadowy room near Chrysopolis’s port. It was a royal court recreated in shadow and secrecy.

  Sothvam and Frasalu discussed their pn, and there was a general hubbub of anticipation, much the same as the fisher who knows that a massive catch is soon to arrive on his hook. Then, there came from the street outside the sound of three pairs of sandals spping away at the cobbles. Silence fell, and although none dared turn to look, every ear in the chamber was on the doorway. When the door opened and the owners of the three pairs of sandals stepped through, that quiet anticipation produced a deeply eerie effect.

  Two of them were mere bodyguards, silent and purposefully unobtrusive, two pairs of hands bearing swords in defense of their master. The master was a young man, barely thirty, square-jawed and athletic and inimitably handsome, as though modeled off of a statue of a mythic warrior. His name was Bellerophon and he was no warrior, having instead nded himself in the Senate by virtue of the death of his father at a young age. His youthful ambition had given him a great deal of influence in politics, as had his connections; but that ambition was exactly what Frasalu needed to bring him down.

  Bellerophon stopped in his tracks as soon as he saw the gathering before him. His eyes dited, the dark of his pupils reflecting both the glittering of Frasalu’s golden decorations and the curve of her breasts. She winced, thankful for the mask hiding her expression.

  “Welcome, Bellerophon, son of Apollonius. Please, come in.”

  One member of the gang had drawn the short straw, and was in the guise of a bedraggled sve. He took Bellerophon firmly by the arm and had to all but yank him in order to get him to go to the center of the room, still fnked by bodyguards.

  “I thank you for your graciousness, though I wish that our meeting did not have to come in such dismal surroundings,” Bellerophon said with a bow. He paused a moment, his gaze slowly circling the room. His brow furrowed in thought. “Who are you, though?”

  Frasalu chuckled. “Truly, your curiosity knows no bounds. But some secrets must be kept. Our numbers are many and our members universally of great wealth and influence, and we have been keeping our eyes upon you since the very moment you first set foot upon the Senate floor.”

  Bellerophon frowned. “But if you are all of great wealth and influence, then how is it that I am not already a member?”

  Again the chamber fell silent, as the members of Shirrin’s staff looked at each other in confusion. Bellerophon, by accident, had stumbled upon a trick of philosophy: by saying something absurd, he had accidentally rendered his conversational opponent speechless, and so won. Unfortunately, he was not engaged in a philosophical debate.

  Elderly Diorda was the first to seize control. “Do not be so sharp with your betters, child. We have ruled Chrysopolis from the shadows for centuries. It is an honor that one so young has received any attention from us whatsoever.”

  “Don’t condescend to me, old hag! Do you know who it is that I am? I am—”

  “Silence, please,” said Frasalu, raising a hand. She was going to have to seize control of the situation herself; so she rose, and began to close the distance with Bellerophon. “We have watched your career with great interest, and have decided that at st it is time to py our hand. We have something that will be of great value to you, if you will merely agree to cooperate with us.”

  “Yes, of course,” Bellerophon said, his eyes aimed not quite at Frasalu’s face.

  “I have for you here a letter which will prove quite incriminating to Emperor Peleus,” Frasalu said, producing the letter in question from beneath her dress. “It is yours, if only you perform a simple task. In the harbor, there is docked a ship named Storm. It is beneficial to us that that ship be destroyed, burned down to the sea-line and left to ruin; do this for us, and the letter will be yours.”

  “Might I read the letter?” Bellerophon requested. With a nod, Frasalu acquiesced, and he read it swiftly. As he did, his eyes grew progressively wider, a grin forming on his lips.

  Bellerophon began to ugh, the sort of cackle that only a man who sees an opportunity to attack another for his own betterment can produce. “Oh, of course. How long has Peleus peacocked about the siege of Eunon as his greatest accomplishment? The bastard won’t be resting on his urels when the world finds out about this!”

  Bellerophon’s excitement grew until it fully escaped from his body, sending him hopping around the room like a flea, the letter fpping away as he did. Frasalu felt faintly embarrassed. And more to the point, there was something Bellerophon had forgotten. She took a step forward and with a single swift gesture, snatched the letter out of Bellerophon’s hand.

  “Now you know what is at stake. Destroy Storm and you will have the letter. Do we have a deal?”

  Bellerophon gave Frasalu a pathetic look, like a child whose toy had been stolen, before a moment ter remembering who he was. “Of course you have a deal, of course. Storm will be burned this very night. I’ll just have to… well, I suppose I can’t do it myself. I’ll have to find some rough sorts to do it, make sure they can be trusted… Storm will be destroyed before too long at all!”

  “And when it has been, the letter will be yours,” said Frasalu.

  “I’ll be off, then. I have to sleep, and… well, not until after much business has been taken care of, of course. Golden Lord’s grace with you.”

  “Golden Lord’s grace with you.”

  Even after Bellerophon and his two guards had left, the disguised servants remained utterly still. Any noise could, if heard from down the street, utterly destroy the illusion. After some time, the sounds of Bellerophon’s sandals faded away into silence. Even then, it was not until Sothvam leaned his head sheepishly through the doorway that they could be absolutely certain.

  “I feel almost bad for him,” said Frasalu. “For someone with such influence, you would think he would be more… subtle?”

  A half a dozen chuckles radiated out across the room.

  “Well I don’t. He’s a Senator, they’re all bastards. And willing to commit arson for the sake of basic bckmail? Disgusting.”

  Sothvam rolled his eyes at Diorda. “Given our benefactor’s pns, I doubt he’ll be escaping intact when all is said and done. A bit like putting down a puppy, if I’m being honest.”

  There was more ughter, and several more jokes at the expense of their pnned victim. Eventually, they ran out, and another question presented itself.

  “What do we do now?” Sothvam said. “Shirrin said she won’t be avaible, and I doubt we can cross the city in these masks.”

  Frasalu shrugged. “Sell as much of the jewelry as we can and hope nobody asks any questions?”

  All at once, the others changed their tone, the nguid boredom banished and repced by great excitement. A haul of this scale would have been the theft of a lifetime, and for as strange as the circumstances were, they all knew how to fence gold and jewels. One by one they leapt off of their couches and started stripping down, throwing the gilded masks and silver bangles onto the floor in piles.

  Frasalu couldn’t help but grin as she did the same. All of this, the transformation of the body, working under orders, the strange cloak-and-dagger misinformation to no obvious end, it had felt as though she were a new person, as though everything that had happened before was just a distant dream. But this? Sorting through piles of illicit loot, figuring out what could be sold where? This was familiar. This was something that made her feel like herself again. And if Shirrin’s pn did indeed take down all of the city’s rich bastards in one blow, all the better.

  SaffronDragon