โ Scribed by McClung, Michael
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Don't get noticed.
That's the first thing the world taught me about survival. When I was very young, and my father was very drunk, I'd hide, silent and still, in the muck under the shack we inhabited. There I listened to his stone fists pummel my mother. He would not have pulled his punches for me; he barely did when he was sober. I wouldn't have survived him in a drunken rage.
My mother didn't either, in the end.
He didn't notice me that last night, until I slammed the scaling knife into his back, once Iโd decided to be silent, but no longer still.
When I was a little less young, stealing on the streets of Bellarius, I learned how to slip through crowds unnoticed, dipping pockets and pilfering stalls and shops. Getting caught meant a beating at the very least, and being beaten to death by an angry mob if my luck was completely out. I learned to be a shadow and a whisper.
And then the Purge began.
They hunted us gutter children down, death squads backed by an archmage. All my hard-won expertise at skulking stealth, at passing unnoticed was a shabby joke in the face of that. One night, chased by Blacksleeves through the alleys and across the rooftops of the Girdle, my luck finally ran out.
The big scar, the one that nearly took my left eye, was from a wild swing of the Blackseeve's dirk that I just wasn't quick enough to dodge. The others that he put on my face as he sat on my chest were according to some pattern only he understood.
He didn't notice me get an arm free. He didn't notice me get my hand on the little stiletto I kept strapped to my thigh. He was too engrossed in what he was doing to my face.
He noticed when I opened up his neck, though.
That's when the world taught me the second thing: Sometimes you can't hide. Eventually you get noticed. Then you have to run. So I stowed away on a ship bound for, I found out when we reached it, Lucernis.
Now, a half-dozen splinters of a mad goddess are after me. I can't hide from them, and they'll catch up to me, sooner or later, wherever I run.
But I know what to do when you can't run, and you can't hide. The world didn't teach it to me. I discovered it inside me a long, long time ago.
When you can't run and you can't hide, when something relentless and unstoppable is hunting you, when something is destroying the people and the things you care about, you stick a blade in it.
And then you watch it bleed out, to make sure it's well and truly dead.
I never wanted a war. Maybe I have no chance. But I've always been outnumbered and overpowered, and if the Eightfold Bitch's Blades think they'll have me, then by all the dead gods, I have only one thing to say to them:
Not if I get you first.
Thieves -- Fiction
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