Chapter 20: Chapter nineteen

 Everyone has likely heard stories of forceshapers flying through the air, fighting squadrons of armed men alone, and generally carrying on as though they were all-powerful. Let me assure you, these are nothing more than children’s tales. Forceshaping is useful certainly, and it has several military applications, from defending against arrows to simply knocking enemy troops to the ground, but many of the feats associated with forceshapers are exaggerations at best and complete fabrications at worst. The level of precision it would take accomplish such feats simply does not exist.

• The Fundamentals of Shaping.

 

Sal liked having a plan. He liked being prepared. He liked to know exactly what he was stealing, where it was located, and how he was going to get it. But as his father used to say, the pig loves to eat truffles, but slop will do in a pinch.

Standing on the outer wall of Bracken’s compound, the cold Salitian wind whipping his cloak behind him, Sal felt like the proverbial pig.

He had had a good plan. He was going to use the Dagger to find the lumographs. That was sensible, well thought-out and had a high chance of succeeding. Unfortunately, some Yarrls had soured that apple and then some girl from Inveritus had blackmailed his bodyguard away. So now he was stuck breaking in by himself and searching for the pictures without anything to go on.

He had prepared as best he could. He had spent half the day topping up on force by Siphoning it from a pendulum device he owned for just such a purpose, and he’d brought his best burglary tools. He also knew the schedule for guards on the outside entrances to Bracken’s home.

And that was it. That was the extent of his prepared knowledge and resources. It did not feel like enough. Not by a long way.

But then, I am Saladeen Hadon, greatest thief in all the world. If anyone can pull off this asinine plan, it’s me.

Well, that was true, and the thought made him feel a little better. Not much, but a little.

Sal stalked towards the compound. The main building was large and made of stone, probably three storeys tall, but something about its few windows and boxy shape made it look squat and ugly. Like a massive stone waiting to be overturned to reveal the world’s largest centipede. Bracken could be accused of a lot of things, but having good taste wasn’t one of them.

There were three entrances and two guards posted at each. Besides that, there were two more pairs of guards that patrolled the grounds. There was an eighteen second blind spot in the patrols, so Sal waited until one group of guards went behind a copse of decorative trees and dashed from a patch of shadows near the outer walls to an outhouse and waited. No cries of alarm. He was safe, for now.

The next dash was theoretically safer, as the next set of guards would be behind him and the outhouse would hide him from view for most of it, but it also obscured his view of where the guards were. If they altered their pace or stopped for any reason, he would be seen. If someone came out of the servant’s quarters off to his left, he would be seen. If anything went wrong at all, he would be seen.

Sal really didn’t like this plan.

He waited, watching the guards pass behind him through a hole in the outhouse wall. He took a deep breath, and ran for it.

Nothing again. He made it to a large bush and dove into it. It was a lot pricklier than he had thought, but he was safe. This next bit was going to be tricky. He was on the south side of the house, where there wasn’t an entrance. He had to get from the bush he was in onto the roof without the east or west entrance guards seeing him, and in the eighteen second window the patrol guards left him. For most people, this would be an impossible task.

But Sal wasn’t most people.

He waited for the patrolling guards to pass by, then burst from the bush as quietly as he could and sprinted at Bracken’s home. The building loomed before him, not looking nearly so squat now that he had to get to the roof. He judged his timing as best he could, pointed his right hand at the ground in front of him, and opened his Channel.

He pushed force out in front of him, bounced it off the ground while still in vis-state, and then flung himself into the air. He shot up and forward, bringing his Channel around to point in front of him.

This is the tricky part.

Force, like anything a shaper can use, doesn’t play by the same rules as physical objects while it was in vis-state. This meant that, at the speed Sal was going, he could push force out in front of him slowly and then, so long as he kept the force in vis-state for a couple of feet, he’d pass it by and could use it to throw himself the rest of the way onto the roof. The hard part was getting the angle right.

Sal aimed as best he could and then released another wave of force. It caught up with him a moment later and tossed him towards the roof. It also flipped him upside-down so he was plunging towards the stone building headfirst.

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That definitely wasn’t what Sal had meant to do.

If Sal was telling this story to a friend, he would tell them he kept his calm, quickly bounced a small wave of force off the roof to right himself, and then bounced another off it in time to cushion his fall. This would almost be true, except he didn’t so much keep his calm as scream profanities throughout.

Sal landed on the roof and checked that he hadn’t broken anything. He hadn’t, so he scurried over to the side to make sure none of the guards had heard his invective. It looked like he was in the clear. The closest guards, the ones on the west entrance, were sharing a drink on the job and seemed to be thoroughly engrossed in it. That was a lucky break, it would be terrible for Sal’s criminal career to come to an end because he swore too loudly and got shot by some idiot with a crossbow. If Sal had been a heathen, he would’ve been thanking some god or other. As it was, he was just pleased he got to continue this life for another day and got on with phase two of his plan.

The problem with breaking into this compound, other than all the guards and their big, angry dogs, is that the doors were thick and guarded at both sides and the windows were too small to slip through. Again, for any other thief this might be the point to pack up and go home. But again, Sal wasn’t just any thief.

Sal unpacked some basic climbing gear and pounded a metal stake into the roof. He had to be careful with this, timing the strikes of his small mallet for when the guards weren’t on the south side of the building and then using force to create a strong wind pushing the sound off that way, but eventually he got the stake in and secured his rope to it. From there, he just had to drop down the side of the building to a third-storey window, not much of a drop but a nerve-wracking one as he would be visible if the guards were paying attention to the house. In situations like this, Sal had found it was best to just get on with what you’re doing and hope nobody notices you. You’d be surprised how rarely people look up at the third floor of a building and, even when they do, how often people don’t notice things they don’t expect to be there.

So, Sal climbed down the wall a short distance to the nearest south-side window and started making himself an entrance. This part was another tricky bit of forceshaping, and not one a lot of people could pull off. Obviously, a big enough blast of force would just knock the stones surrounding the window in and Sal could get in that way, but that wasn’t a practical solution. For one thing, it would be pretty loud and would probably alert all of the guards. For another, the amount of force that kind of thing would require would be massive. Putting a moderately-sized hole in a thick stone wall is doable, but it would take almost all of the force Sal could comfortably hold just to do it.

So, no, blasting the window open was out. But Sal had never been much of one for blasting things anyway. It was brutish and about as subtle as a great big axe. And, as he was a thief and not a logger, subtlety was very much the name of the game.

In that vein, Sal took out his chisel and set it against one of the stones making up the window frame. He used force to push the chisel into the mortar holding the stones together, and then pried it out and dropped it inside. It was a difficult piece of forceshaping, but focussing the force to a single point was a much more efficient, not to mention less obvious, method to remove stones than trying to just blast them all away. Theoretically, he didn’t need the chisel, he could do it with just forceshaping. But doing so would be incredibly difficult, even for him, and Sal had never found chisels hard to come by. It took longer than he would have liked, but soon Sal had widened the window enough to accommodate him.

Sal slipped through the hole he had made and he was in. Sal found himself in a bedroom that wasn’t currently in use, which was also lucky as he wasn’t sure how he would explain his presence to the occupant if it was. He detached himself from the ropes, which were black so they hopefully wouldn’t be noticeable in the night outside, and had a look around. The room appeared to be for guests and hadn’t been slept in for a while. Definitely not the kind of place to keep blackmail material. Sal moved on.

Outside the bedroom was a hallway filled with thick rugs and fine tapestries. They looked expensive but didn’t really go together. At one end of the hallway was a staircase leading down. Sal could hear men talking from down below, but no one seemed to be up there with him. Sal had guessed that the third floor would be Bracken’s living quarters and it looked like he was right. Since Sal had seen Bracken leave with a group of thugs earlier that day and Bracken didn’t have a family, this area should be relatively safe. Of course, there was no guarantee that Bracken stored the lumographs in his own rooms. But with a paranoid man like that, he was likely to want to keep that sort of thing close.

Sal started checking rooms, moving as quietly as he could. There was a sitting room where a gentleman, or in this case Philious Bracken, might take tea, a small library, a dining room, and a bathroom with a bath large enough to fit five or six people. None had any good places for storing blackmail material. That is, until Sal got to the door at the end of the hall and entered Bracken’s master bedroom. Bracken’s lack of taste was on full display, with olive-green and rose-coloured bedding on the four-poster bed, a full-length mirror taking up most of one wall, and the chamber pot, still full, left in the middle of the floor rather than tucked away in a corner. There was also a set of chains on one wall which were rather small and low to the ground.

Sal didn’t even want to think what they were used for.

What there wasn’t was any kind of vault. But, if Bracken was going to hide his lumographs near him, this was about as good a place as Sal was likely to find, so he started searching. He started with the places a clever and paranoid man like Bracken might keep his blackmail material. He checked the dresser for secret panels, looked for loose floorboards he could pry up, and pulled apart cushions that could have been hiding lumographs within. With all the clever hiding places he could see exhausted, he decided to try the stupid ones, just in case.

He found the lumographs. They were under the bed.

With the lumographs safely tucked into his robes, Sal opened the bedroom door to leave.

And came face to face with a slave girl on her way in.

Sal blinked.

The girl screamed.

And guards all over the building heard it.

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