Cassi always makes a point of sitting at the front of the train carriage, against the wall, feet up on the seats, facing the doors. Today, she has a book in her lap, fingers pressed down on the outer edge of the pages, ensuring her place isn’t lost as the train rumbles over the Low Market far below. 

The Thistlebrock line winds precariously between the high rises of the central city before jutting out over the lower rooftops of Key Town, the halfling ghetto, a clearing of stout brick and woodwork among the towering districts encircling it. There, an explosion of canvas awnings stretch between the tenements, dyed in once-brilliant colors now faded from decades of sunlight and acid rain. In their lee, sheltered from sky, a pockmarked woman hawks tepache at disinterested human passersby nearly twice her height; a street away, a pair of grim-faced dwarven ax sisters accompany a silk merchant from Belamma and her retinue. An urchin crowd surrounds them, greedy hands reaching for a touch of the bolts of silk piled in her cart, but a displeased cluck from her draft-pheasant mount keeps them from coming too close. 

Ahead, Barrowside Station looms, the last station stop before the rails careen into the Eastern reach of the Jhilandi Ring Wall, a bright streak of scientific marvel piercing the ancient battlements—outdated now in the age of airship warfare, a fact constantly evidenced by the colossal ironclad warships drifting sentinel in the clouds above—as it makes its way to the Ditch Ports below the Elfgate, a kilometer outside of Jhilandi proper. 

The arching entrance of the station consumes the Thistlebrock with the ceaseless hunger of an abyssal maw, the track its leering tongue, forever extended in mockery or malice as each successive wave of passengers is devoured or vomited up, empty and exhausted. This is the economy of Jhilandi: meals of flesh delivered with ruthless efficiency to the perpetual hunger of industry, raised cheap in tight-packed houses in the low city and churned into a constant circuit of production and distribution and consumption, then spit back out like empty husks when their shifts end. The Passage System, famed across the worlds as a monument to the modernity and civility of an empire equipped with science, committed to progress. 

She sits up as the train pulls in, covers her ears as the station klaxons sound the arrival. A conductor bellows the station stop—incomprehensible over the broken intercom, a static jumble of gibberish in Jhilish and halfling pidgin and then “Doors on the left. Watch your step when exiting the train.” The red brick arch of the station conquers the cityscape before being engulfed by darkness, as the train passes from the weak sunlight outside and emerges into the flickering gaslights of the platform. 

The doors hiss open onto the platform with a gout of steam as the condensation on the windows and collected pools of rainwater spill down onto the superheated tracks below. Her trip has taken her opposite the typical Thistlebrock traffic, so only a handful of passengers shared the car with her until this point: two Jhilish bank clerks, elf-ears protruding through slicked back hair falling on matching, stylish suits, six-fingered hands stuffed in too-small pockets, a human family whose travel bags suggested they were heading towards Elfgate, a priestess to some snake cult or another, and an off-duty beat cop from the Hand, black padded coat bundled on his lap, flintlock menacingly resting among the folds. He’d tried making eye contact with her as they left the Passage Spire, scanning her up and down like market meat, but she’d assertively ignored him and sat down with her book. Barrowspire was clearly his stop—he’d gotten up to disembark a few minutes before they hit the station, donning his coat with the idiot flair of someone who’d seen too many penny-shows in Low Market theatres—he calls out to her as he makes his way to the door. 

– “Hey genie-bitch: wanna come rub my la- ”

The catcall is cut-off as he stumbles face-first into a chitin breastplate. He starts to shout a challenge as his eyes travel upwards from the breastplate, intricately carved with whorling organic patterns so complex that Cassi cannot tell if they were the natural result of whatever alien insect was harvested for the chitin or the work of a master artisan in some distant workshop, but stops short when he realizes he’ll need to crane his neck to even meet the eyes of the towering oread woman before him. She has a falchion wider than his torso strapped to her back. 

– “I–I’m…I’m sorry, m…miss? I’ll be–”

His voice catches and he runs off.  

The oread, nearly crouching just to enter the traincar, turns and looks at him quizzically as he goes. Her skin—brown like Cassi’s, but more alike to the color of soil than her suli-jann olive-tones—is crossed with scars that mottle her… impressive muscles. Her white shoulder-length hair is partially tied back, cascading down around a messy ponytail and revealing a spiral of emeralds embedded on her back, swirling outwards to end at her exposed shoulderblade. 

She shouts after him in accented Jhilish, but her words are caught in the closing doors, the effect lost. A few meters away, a human and a flathead goblin have also boarded through the car’s other set of doors, and they call out to her: 

– “Oi, Ghati – y’want us to jump out ‘n toss ‘im then?”

– “Too late, boys. Places t’go, people t’see. Anyhow, he’s job, so it’s not worth the trouble. Hand jackets would be buzzing about like so many bees.” 

The man, pale and bald and glum, flicks a look around the train car, gives a polite nod to the human family and a scowl to the bankers, before reaching up to scratch the top of his head, ringed with concentric circles of blue-black tattooed script. His other hand rests on the stock of a brass-plated blunderbus slung on a strap over his shoulder, thumb caressing the embossments. Two handaxes hang at his belt, and clatter against a metal handpole in the center of the car as he goes to sit. His name is Muln and his tattoos mark him as a gun-priest of the Aether Mysteries, a lower city cult precious about their secret gods, but rather prodigious at killing, which is why Cassi’s employer shelled out the cash to bring him along. 

The flathead, Skitter, totters forwards past Muln, looks disappointedly through the window as the train lurches back into motion, and then loses his balance and stumbles over to Ghatiyara’s knee, which his head only barely reaches. His motley robes mark him as a street arcanist, as does his stoat familiar, who peaks out of his sleeve and blinks at Cassi as Skitter hops up onto the bench across from her. The stoat, Maurice, spills out and curls into a ball on the rotting seat-cushion at his side. 

– “Ey, Cass. Ready t’go make some coin?”

---

She unspools coiled black rope out over the lip of the roof and it tumbles into the black. A few feet away, Muln dutifully winds the other end around one of the stylized crenelations that line the roof of the Garrison Street Library, a dated relic of a brief trend a decade or so after the dispossession of the aristocracy, when everyone thought it fashionable and vintage to imitate feudal architecture. Skitter fiddles with his hands, casts a minor guiding cantrip over Muln as he goes to tie off the end. 

– “Can’t’ve it breaking, nah? Won’t be tumblin’ thataways, or the splat’d leave’d be biggern me!”

– “Shut up and let me work, y’fucking bitey flathead cunt.”

– “the fuck you call me?”

– “Little fuckin’ rat teeth y’got.”

Cassi tunes their bickering out as she checks her equipment, starting with her boots and making her way up from there, a method she’d picked up from her brief stint in a guild school in her misspent youth. She was proud of her boots, maybe the most expensive thing on her, certainly the most expensive that she’d paid for. Soft, flexible leather with a lampblack coating, ensorceled against wet and weather, with an enchantment for tumbling that she’d not yet had to use. Tough to exude an air of mystery when you’re out there muttering magic words.  

Her black trousers are tucked into the boots, buckled tight against her legs so as to avoid catching on anything while she burgles; mundane, but helpful in a pinch. She has a stiletto strapped to one thigh and a folding hand crossbow holstered at her belt, along with a dozen vials of this or that, and a satchel of tools hung from her hip and secured to her leg with a second strap. Her hands float across each buckle and belt in practiced turn, ensuring everything is locked in its place. 

Her shortsword—itself a burgling tool, serrated on one edge and flat at the tip—hangs in the small of her back horizontally, too unwieldy to keep at her waist; hard to access, but she’s not running around aiming to get in fights, anyways, and if she were, well, that’s what she has the muscle for. 

More out of hubris than utility, she refuses to wear armor, and so only wears a loose black tank-top over her chest-wraps; that is, in turn, strapped in place by the crossbody bandolier which holds her sword in place, and from which hangs a small, lidded quiver of bolts. Her hair, a mop of black curls, hangs loose over bare shoulders.  

She turns behind her as she goes to pull it back, and sees Ghati dismantling the collapsible ladder they’d used to reach this roof from the neighboring tenement; they’d reached that roof by paying off a pesh dealer that owed money to Skitters’ former crew, who’d let them use his window to reach a fire escape.

Ghatiyari ‘Ghati’ Loeliana has been called many things—-a mercenary bitch, a swaggering bravo, a gem-backed bastard with more cunt than brains, a drunk, a big-fuckin’-broad-aren’t-you-but-why-don’t-you-stay-over-there-with-that-giant-goddamn-sword?—but no-one would call her dextrous. Cassi stifles a laugh, watching her oldest friend struggle with a locking mechanism on the ladder, and considers helping before thinking better of it. She turns to Muln, who has finished tying off their fast-rope.

– “What’s the word, priest?”

He checks his watches, holds up five fingers.

– “Almost time. You need a last minute top-off?”

– “Got any orisons for being piss-anxious before jumping off a building? Otherwise I’m all set.”

The gig was simple: some crew had picked up a Ssharrvhe singing disc while delving in one of the border-planes and sold it to a historian at Elham College. The dumb things are priceless, and there’s thousands of royals in grant-money for gate researchers tossing around now after all the broadsheets went crazy with the Yueryn excavation, which is how Elham could afford to acquire the disc in the first place, snagging it before it even hit the market, even throwing serious dosh on a geas to get the same the crew go back for more. From all appearances, they wanted to keep the acquisition secret, do their research, get everything ready to publish on whatever the fuck wizard-y shit the disc has on it before they went public. But someone had loose lips, friends told friends, and then Cassi got a job. 

The Garrison Street Library—nominally a branch of the larger Jhilandi Library System, but in reality an effectively independent property of the Elham College thaumaturgical faculty and their ontotheologico-practical research division—is tall. Not high city tall, but technically a tower, and certainly tall enough to be above the smogline. The tasteless crenellations on the roof bely a seriously well-constructed building (she’d countenanced trying to get them in through the roof, first), with a fanciful nouveau clock, itself maybe eight-stories top-to-bottom, adorning the streetside facade of the upper floors. 

The pedestrian entrance straddles Brick Cross, which is crowded even this late at night. The only real ways to get past the wards at the main doors are to pass through one of the upper concourses linking the library to the neighboring Elham College buildings—not a reliable option, since students are always coming and going at odd hours—or, as Cassi had discovered, to dangle some cash in front of a starving student in exchange for leaving an upstairs window open, and then to scale the tower from the outside.  

There’d been some discussion of trying to get through the clock mechanism, but the risk just didn’t seem worth it, hence the bribery. Their employer—some upper city suit, according to her broker—threw enough money at the job that Cassi had no qualms greasing the wheels a little bit, so here she found herself, straddling a crenellation, rope wound thrice widdershins around her waist, an old guild superstition she never quite bucked, and ready to descend. 

Skitters mutters an incantation in his scratchy little voice—she’ll never quite be used to it, the way his voice wobbles and pitches like a child blowing false notes through a recorder—and feels herself go weightless, testing the cantrip by hopping from the lip back onto the roof, falls slow, like a sycamore seed, the air all strange around her, like it’s straining against the spell. The others gather at the ledge as she climbs back onto the crenellation. They’re silent, now, eminently professional, despite themselves. 

Cassi turns to face them, back to the open air, and silently offers a prayer to Olidammara: “O Laughing Thief, patron of idiots who jump off of buildings, catch me if I fall!” 

Her eyes meet Ghati’s and the oread winks, which sends an endearing little wave through her; she nods, in return, and then silently pushes off, diving into the night sky. 

Her stomach drops out, as it always does, and for a split second she’s convinced the spell has worn off early, that she’ll fall like a stone, crash face-first into the smog-blackened tower brick, another dead thief in a city built on dead thieves, but Skitter’s ensorcelling holds true. She sinks rather than plummets, the floors of the library drifting by with the slow inevitability of a dream, one after the next. Around her, the night air is electric with promise, and her fear is replaced immediately by thrill. 

When she reaches the end of her rope—carefully parceled out, exactly enough to reach the 60th floor window, fourteenth from the left, open, just as promised—she kicks off from the wall, swings herself through the open window, and then drops to the floor, unraveling the rope from her waist as she does. Again, as promised, she finds an empty study room, door locked from the inside, gaslamp turned low. She ties off the rope to a leg of the room’s colossal leather chair and gives it three tugs in quick succession, a signal to her comrades that it’s safe to descend. 

Unclasping her satchel, she reaches inside and grabs a coin-sized paper packet filled with green-gray dust, closed with a wax seal. She moves to the door, silently unlocks it, opens it a crack. Rows on rows of bookshelves reach toward a cavernous ceiling. A stacks-floor. She squints into the gloom. No gaslight in the stacks, for risk of fire, leaves the space nearly pitch black, with only magicked flameless lamps marking the entrance to the stairwell and lift, maybe 300 meters away. Students and staff browse the stacks by faerie fire, which marks them out conveniently for burglars or couples looking for a private place to fuck. Cassi, being among the former, slips out onto the soft carpet, enchanted to muffle sound (again a kindness for the humble footpad! Olidammara looks fondly on librarians for their shared love of silence, the blanket of thieves) and slinks towards the lift shaft, her suli eyes well-equipped to navigate the dark without a light; Skitters has prepared seeing spells for the others, who she already hears clambering through the window behind her. 

According to their employers, the disc is two stories down. Fifty-eighth floor. That means making it across this level to the stairwell or the lift and then descending. That means a dozen more chances to run into a hapless student, or, if luck holds, a mousy librarian. A smirk at the thought, and then Cassi flicks the seal off of the pouch, holds it to her lips, and exhales, quiet, but with enough force to puff a cloud of the dust into the air outside the study room. 

It congeals into the shape of a featureless green-gray man, six-hand high and vague, like a half-remembered shadow, perfectly still.

Carefully, she pads through the doorway and unfurls the paper that held the dust homunculus, revealing a phonetic incantation scrawled in fine, sharp letters. Command words. She whispers them in what she imagines must be the creature—thing’s?— ear, her slow, accented speech husky and languid in the quiet of the library. The packet loses shape and falls away, leaving only flameless cinders in the dark. As she finishes the spell, the homunculus ambles forward, cutting a straight path through the stacks in the direction of the lift doors.