In a lord's fortress in northern Meridell, a rolicking party was underway. A few petpets had been slaughtered for the feast's most honored guests, and the lord of the fortress himself - an imposing Gnorbu with a thick, pleated beard - sat at the head of the table, laughing loudly and shouting his approval of the minstrels and dancers. However, he had no inkling of the intruder deep within his home's stone walls.
With footsteps silent, her cloth-wrapped paws making nary a sound, the Zafara Double Agent treaded the deep inner passages of the fortress. On a strap around her chest, she carried an archer's quiver; repurposed to store stolen documents. By the dim, flickering light of torches mounted in iron sconces, she navigated the fortress's deep recesses which no commoner had ever seen in their life. Passing by countless wooden doors, she ignored them for the most part. This was until she drew up to one particularly heavy door.
This door was thrice-locked, and supported by iron bars across its planks. It was plain to see that this room was exceptionally important, and this made it a prime target for the Double Agent. Thus, checking both directions of the hall twice, she reached up under her dress's sewn-in hood. From a pocket in the hood's lining, she removed a small set of lockpicking tools. This lord had been prudent in whomever he'd commissioned for the locks' design, but they were still years behind those developed in Darigan and Brightvale. As such, it took a rather short time for her to open the first lock.
Both of the other locks were picked in quick succession. Glancing about, the Double Agent backed up to the door to keep a watch. Easing the door open and snatching a torch from its sconce, like a ghost, she swiftly and silently darted into the room. With the door closed behind her, the Zafara of faded hair appraised the room. It was very dark, lit only by the torch that the Double Agent had thought to bring with her. Illuminating the sconce to the door's immediate left, she found it bearing an unlit torch.
A touch of her torch ignited the pitch-coated illuminator, while she placed the one she carried into an empty sconce. This lit the room well enough that the Blue Zafara could discern what exactly she was working with. Two long tables, a bookcase covering the height and breadth of the far wall, and innumerable documents, ledgers, and books scattered about. Up on the wall, the Double Agent could recognize maps detailing troop movements. The most complex of these, denoting some elevated importance, were promptly snatched. Rolling them up, the Double Agent tucked them into her quiver, and began to quickly scan the other documents for anything that her client would find desirable.
Then, came the voices chatting, and the sound of bootclad footsteps. Taking no pause, the Zafara made an agile dive beneath the table she stood at. Staying far from the door, she forced herself to make no loud noises. The voices stopped right outside of the door, she could see the ruddy, wavy shadows cast beneath it by the torches. One seemed to tell a fine joke, as the other burst into laughter. Not budging an inch, so as to not unnecessarily rustle the papers scattered about her, the Double Agent waited patiently for those outside to pass.
And indeed, they did. Their shadows went beyond the range of sight, their voices and footsteps faded to indstinct echoes far down the hall. Still, the Zafara Double Agent waited for a good two or three minutes after nothing could be heard of them. Cautiously slinking out of her hiding place, she began to look through the documents in no hurry. That is not to say that she tarried - in under ten minutes, she had extracted every piece of strategy relevant to her employer's demands. Lord Kass would be pleased. Well, he would for a time. That might come to an end sooner than anticipated.
As she left the door closed behind her, having had to pick the locks a second time - Re-locking design, she had mused to herself; that could get an upstart agent flustered into a panic. Kass will want to know to anticipate such a thing, for future spies. - the Double Agent made her way, slinking without a stray noise towards the exit. On the way, she slid an unremarkable scroll out of a pocket in her vest, and deposited it nonchalantly in with the rest of the documents. It was a perfectly-forged replica of a letter 'to be sent' to King Skrarl.
Kass would be wroth when he found that the lord's urgent distress was a figment of the scroll and nothing more, and that his troops were not struck by any such thing as a plague in the water supply. That little device had been of the Double Agent's design, and crafted to a nigh perfect similarity by a document forger that the Blue Zafara had known since youth.
Yes, Kass would be wroth, for certain. No betrayal went unpunished, once it was discovered, least of all those by the ones who had claimed to defect to his allegiance.
Now, whether or not he would survive the mistakes wrought by this and other fallacies...
...Yes, that was an entirely different matter, was it not?
