Prelude to a Heist: Chapter III - The Gambler

The Black Salamander is a high-class establishment, and Stefano fancies himself high-class.

He looks up from his book at where most of the noise is coming from. Amid the swathes of black gauze hung in lavish crescents from booth to booth, a group of young men are gathered around the dragoncard table, telling crude jokes and rolling with laughter. Every now and then mead sloshes across the table and the laughter raises an octave.

They're nobles, by the look of them. Stefano knows the difference. New money - land barons, merchant princes, crime lords - like to dip themselves in gold before they step outside; they flaunt what they have accrued. Those whose nobility comes from heritage rather than commerce bear their riches as a matter of fact. These men wear richly-made velvet and satin, but wear it modestly, hanging from their forms with a casual air that speaks to aristocracy. But that's good, Stefano thinks. Aristocrats are a less suspicious folk. Those who've lived their whole lives in wealth cannot comprehend losing it.

Stefano twists his eyepiece to a higher magnification. One of the gentlemen has his back to him, and Stefano can see his cards. He's not paying attention, Stefano thinks, as another peal of guffaws strikes up at the table. Should have folded. He thinks he's making up his losses, but there's no way he's winning with two greens and a black. Stefano ponders going up and offering some friendly advice, but the people of Gorgarten are a suspicious one, and their nobles stink of pride. These men wouldn't see the dashing gambler extraordinaire who'd piled gondolas high with gold - they'd see him as he is: a half-drunk half-man in a bar, hiding from his debts in the black armpit of the world.

But Stefano has an ace up his sleeve. Just like in dragoncards, there is always a dual play. Gorgarten is not just a hiding place - it's a well of opportunity. That is, if the rumours are true: rumours of an emerald worth a city, worn around the neck of a woman more beautiful than jewels. Yes, he thinks. That is the prize. One gem in exchange for freedom. A worthy challenge for Stefano Cartavani, the Casino Prince of Ferin.

The sound of the door opening is almost drowned out by the men at the cards table, but Stefano sees them enter. Four men: three humans, muscled and bearded, and one dwarf with a flat nose, sweating like a troglodyte. They fan out into the pipe-smoke, heads swaying like cobras to a charmer, eyes raking every inch of the curtained den. 

Stefano pales. The bouncers took his rapier at the entrance. He reaches down to his ankle - not far, luckily - and finds the hilt of a stiletto tucked into his sock. One knife against four men. Stefano likes a high-stakes game, but those odds are stacked against him. 

He slips from his chair, making his way on his little legs over to the door, keeping to the wall. He pulls his hat low over his face. The card-players shout jeers and curses as a round ends in loss.

"There!" shouts the sweaty dwarf in an unmistakeably Ferini accent, and Stefano runs.

He barrels out of the door, and as he sprints through the atrium he snatches his rapier out of the bouncer's furry grip. The narrow streets of Gorgarten, filthy with wheel-churned mud, fan out ahead of him. "Much obliged!" he calls over his shoulder, and vanishes into an alleyway. 

The thugs are right behind him. 

"Cartavani!" they shout. "Get back here!" 

"Sorry... gentlemen!" he replies between breaths. "You must... have... the wrong man!"

"Then why are you running?"

"Exercise?" 

Their legs are longer than his; they're gaining faster than he anticipated. Without thinking, he dives through an open window, landing like a stone on a pile of hot sheets. He flails as he slides onto the floor, tangled in linen. He jabs his rapier and cold air gushes through the tear in the fabric, and he scrambles out, hearing his pursuers cry, "In there! Block the door!"

Stefano looks around. It's a laundry: tiled floor, bleached walls, sheets hung up like cheap curtains. The lanternlight turns the white material yellow, making the whole place look like a jaundiced maze. 

A blow strikes the back of his head. He turns, swinging the rapier on instinct; it whaps against one of the muscled thugs and knocks him into the linen. Stefano chucks a bedsheet over him and sprints away, leaving him to struggle. 

He rushes through the aisles, ducking under breeches and tunics, hunting for an exit. There. A window. He runs to it, but there's only dark water on the other side, sludging downriver. He turns again.

The dwarf steps out in front, flanked by his cronies who stand at twice his height. Their dirks flash. To either side is only white-yellow bedclothes.

"We have you now," the dwarf says. "I'd advise against making any more gambles. It's what got you into this mess in the first place, ah?" 

"So who are you, then?" Stefano asks. He holds his rapier in the classic Ferini stance. "One of Niccolo's? Or Lucratia's? No, no, let me guess... Bruino?"

"If you wish to eliminate your enemies one by one, we will be here for some time, halfling. Now, you're coming with us. We have a long, long journey ahead of us."

They take a step forward, and Stefano backs away. His back touches the window ledge. 

"Why me, boys?" Stefano asks. "What have I really done? Just a few coins here and there, a few promises reneged..."

The dwarf spits. "Don't play the fool. You stole from Niccolo. You borrowed money from Lucratia and threw it away in the Gilded Tiger. You took Bruino's wife while he was downstairs cooking oysters."

Another step. The sill digs into Stefano's spine. He's close enough to see the beads of sweat on the dwarf's brow. 

"It could be any one of those reasons," the dwarf says. "But I'll give you another: it is because you are a slithering little rat, and every moneylender in Ferin wants your ballbag for a purse."

"Then you should tell them not to bother, because you wouldn't fit much coinage in there. Besides, you have me all wrong. You're working under faulty information."

"Is that right?" the dwarf says, toying with his blade.

"Absolutely. Bruino was cooking eels."

Stefano rolls backward out of the window.

When he drags himself out of the current, soaked to the bone and gasping, he squelches his way up the bank towards his accommodation and finds something waiting for him on his desk. He dries his hands on the bedsheet - feeling decidedly less fond of linen - pops open the seal and reads with a furrowed brow. Then his eyes widen to a breadth that only the promise of wealth could achieve. 

At last, he thinks. I played a dangerous game, and here are its fruits.

His reward is within reach. All he has to do is commit a touch of crime.

Prelude to a Heist: Chapter II - The Pale Baron

There is a castle in the Thornbound Alps, so dark and jagged that it resembles the mountain's peak itself. The natural rock flows up into the curtain wall in a seamless change: a current of midnight water meeting its twin. A traveller would be forgiven for thinking that it was all one formation, but for the crenelations that jut up from the snow like blackened teeth. 

The castle's name is Izolat, and it has visitors.

The Count leans back on his throne. The room is cold, always cold. Pallid sunlight bleeds through penny-thin arrowslits.

"Speak, then," he says. "You have not come all this way for nothing."

All three of the men bear the bands of the Crown: coiled witchmetal torques worn tight around the neck. Their eyes are hidden beneath hoods. The Count has no time for these men. They are ground-walkers, dragging their shrouded bodies into the mountains to act as living mouthpieces for the Witch-King. A pitiful existence. They know nothing of the mountains, to be so close to the sky as to fold it about their fingertips. They know nothing of the cold.

One of the three speaks.

"Count Richmar. I take it you are not unfamiliar with the rumours about the Pale Baron?"

Richmar flicks a speck of dust from the arm of his throne.

"What of him?"

"So you have heard. Sigmund the White is a wanted man across Kastalav. Three nobles in the last three years have been found dead. Same weapon, same method of execution, same circumstances: that being there was no possible way a killer could have entered unseen."

"Yes, yes. You want an explanation? He's a changeling. Or a doppelganger; it makes no difference. He clinks glasses with the elite by day and cuts our throats at night, that's what they're saying. D'you think I'm not safe up here? I can look after myself, thank you." Richmar surveys the King's men through squinted eyes. "Did you really haul your carcasses from Ostadt to the mountains just to deliver a warning?"

A second man speaks.

"Lannoc Veist, a Kapitan of the Ostadt guard, was slain two weeks ago at his table. Throat slashed: a clean cut."

"Good riddance," Richmar says with a shrug. "He was a lecherous old bastard, that one."

The King's man continues as if there was no interruption. "His servants say the only person who had access to him was his steward, but even under torture the man refused to admit a thing. The King wonders why."

"I'm sure the King wonders many things. I, for instance, am wondering what it's like to have quiet in this hall."

"Count Richmar," says the third man. "Did you hire Sigmund the White to assassinate Kapitan Veist?"

"Bleiße," Richmar swears. "You accuse me under my own roof?"

"Kapitan Veist led the raid on Polthagen, a town on your lands."

"True," Richmar admits. "But that doesn't mean -"

"There were a great many deaths. Buildings burned and men, women, children with them. Needless destruction."

"Yes, but -"

"One would be forgiven for assuming the ruler of these lands would want revenge. Especially if that ruler had a history of unscrupulous methods." 

Richmar stands. "I will not have my honour questioned in this manner. Not by the likes of you. Get out, all three of you, or I'll send your tongues back to Ostadt in jewellery boxes."

There is a moment - just a moment - where it seems they will not obey, but after an order like that, the King's men have no choice. They bow curtly and glide from the room. They accused me, Richmar thinks. The King sent them here for a reason. That was no warning - that was an interrogation. 

One man - the one who had questioned him so persistently - lingers. As his fellows reach the door, he draws from the folds of his robe a small scroll, sealed with wax that bears a Starazyk rune.

"If you meet the Baron," says the man, "give him this, and tell him the Konsortium says hello."

And he follows the others from the hall, leaving Richmar alone with the scroll. He pops open the seal and unravels the parchment. When he has finished reading, his anger has given way to glee.

Count Richmar marches down from the dais and through a side-door, down the coiling spiral staircase into the depths of the castle. He reaches a heavy stone door, locked by a key that only he possesses. The lock clunks and the door swings open, revealing a stark cell, rough-hewn on two sides: a dungeon in a mountain. Sat at the table within, hands placed palms-down on the surface, is Count Richmar. A second Richmar, identical in every way, save for the ghoulish pallor of his flesh, the bulge of the eyes, the loll of the head, and the deep red smile carved across his throat, spilling long-dried blood into his doublet.

"Good evening," says the living Richmar to the dead. "I'd really better move you before you start to rot."

And the face of the living Richmar changes. The nose melts away, the hair thins and retracts until only a shiny pate remains, the mouth becomes a slit in a face of smooth white nothing. He studies the dead Richmar, head cocked.

"I can't do this for much longer. They're growing suspicious. And when storms gather in the capital, all of Kastalav feels the rain." He looks down at the scroll in his hand. "Unless..."

A retainer, a young man in black, helps him carry the dead Richmar by the arms and legs up to the battlements. When they hurl the body over like a sack of grain, it falls so far that Sigmund doesn't even hear it land.

"Now," he says to the retainer, wiping his hands. "Tell the servants to prepare a horse. The Pale Baron rides for Gorgarten tonight. There's one hundred thousand kronen with my name on it."

Prelude to a Heist: Chapter I - The Hunted

 It is cold in the nightmare. 

Salumax is adrift in a river of ice, frozen to the spot. A blizzard howls around him with a thousand voices, peppering his indigo skin with razor flakes. Before him, he sees the tomb again - the sheer wall of crystalline blue, ice upon ice upon ice, and deep within it, the pinpricks of scarlet light that are the eyes of a devil.

The devil speaks to him in a voice like an iceberg cracking, whispers a hundred names that are not his own, until:

"Salumax. Your time is running out. I will find you, scion of my blood, and I will flay your secrets from your head."

---

Salumax jerks awake in his hammock, strung across the rafters in Bertolt's Brewery. He sits up, sees Erith watching him with anxious green eyes.

"Is something wrong?" she asks. She slept in her armour again: sheets of glittering green enamel layered over steel. "Another dream?"

Salumax rubs his forehead. "Another dream," he confirms. He crosses to the window, where the telescope stares out over the slate-grey walls and towering spires of Zeitrich Estate. Beyond it, Gorgarten ranges across the valley, framed against the mountains that loom like a row of shattered teeth. "The Entombed grows impatient. His agents are here, in the city. I'm sure of it."

"They can't have tracked you already."

"They can track me anywhere. They possess a power not of these realms." Salumax looks up at the Iasong, the perennial aurorae woven across the sky like curtains of stardust. Here in Kastalav, they called it 'the Gottlieder,' but it had the same story: the melody of creation, the source of life and magic in the Realms Within, the physical incarnation of the divine strokes that formed the shape of the world. Would that elder power be enough to protect him from the frigid hell in his nightmares?

"Just one more step," he says. "One more step, and we have it. The key to all our ambitions." 

"And what if you can't get it?" Erith asks, a note of uncertainty in her voice. "What could it cost?"

Salumax stares out at the city. He imagines it frozen, fractured, engulfed by a glacier, a baleful glare shining in the ice. 

"Anything."