Part 1: The Aftermath

The last time I couldn't remember where I had been, a whole year had passed by. This time it might not have been a day. I could only hear voices at first—it took me a moment to realize they were talking about other people around me. When the ceiling above me came into focus, I could only see it partway. Something covered the right side of my face and was squeezing my head so hard, the inside of my eye socket was aching.

A vague vision struck me when I thought about my eye. Or was a memory? Something about flames and people. A knife and... agony, from my right eye to my hands. There was a dull pain in both but when I tried to lift my hands, my wrists knocked against metal. My fingers wouldn't move—they felt as tightly wrapped as my head. What happened to me?

"The blackhand's awake."

"Black-and-Blue Hands' more like it."

A pair of guards pushed through a bland curtain and stood over me. I tried to sit up and one of them shoved me back down, but in that brief moment I could see doctors and nurses checking on people in cots. I couldn't have been in a hospital—they wouldn't have wasted a bed on a thief. I started to look around but one of the guards grabbed my chin and forced me to look up.

"Hey! Hey! Eyes up, lifter! Don't go getting ideas about leaving here."

His partner laughed so hard I felt his spittle in my face. "He's not goin' anywhere in that condition."

"Yeah, well he's faring better than the others behind the curtains, though he's a dead man all the same. You're lucky the Baron spared you this cot, taffer, or we'd be parading your head through what's left of the streets."

That explained it. The blacktops would have killed me by now if not for Baron Stonebridge's orders. It was the least he could do after I got rid of his Pagan problem.

The Pagans... My hands and head hurt even more when I remembered them. I tried to sit up again and that guard eagerly kicked me in the chest. My armor must have been taken because his boot hurt more than it should have.

"That's enough, Watchman. Nobody assigned you to carry out this man's punishment." Both guards snapped to attention fairly quickly and I was able to sit up and look at the man that made their boots shake. It wasn't the Baron but he wore the same armor as the rest of his hammer-wielding brigade with a few decorations to suggest a high rank. On face alone, I bet he could have stared a bull out of charging.

Now that I was free to sit up I could finally see the condition I was in. Most of my leather was stripped down to the cloth I wore underneath. My ankles and wrists were in irons that were shackled to the frame of the cot and my hands—

I remembered what happened to them. They were wrapped in gauze but the blood jogged my memory. The Pagans crippled my hands. They left me alive with broken hands because I got rid of the Trickster and Viktoria!

My hard look had to be faltering. The Baron's man pulled a stool close to the cot and waved off the guards. "Make the rounds, gentlemen; he's going nowhere." He sat and watched me while they wandered away. I stared right back and waited for him to talk.

"The Baron has heard a lot about your misdeeds, Master Thief, and he wishes he could set eyes on you himself." He paced his words so I knew what they really meant. "I'm here on his behalf to gather anything you wish to confess. Do you understand?"

I nodded a few times and kept quiet. He wasn't here to interrogate me but with only a thin curtain around us and several listening ears nearby, there was no better way to find out if the job was done.

"Was it you who disturbed our neighbor's garden?"

Another nod, though when I looked at my hands again I wondered why I was telling him anything. I put myself at risk for this damn city and now I was crippled for it. I was likely to be hanged as well.

"When you ruined what they worked so hard to build, did you take their most prized possession?"

I laid back down and stared up at the ceiling again. He wanted to know if I had The Eye but the right half of my face ached when I thought about it. The Eye got away from me. Someone took it before I could get to it, then the world went dark. That was all I remembered for now.

I groaned for lack of a better response. Pain blinked across my face and I couldn't reach up to touch it—not that it would have mattered with the way my hands were. I sighed away as much of the pain as I could.

The Baron's associate was quiet for a while. "It is unfortunate that a legend should be taken into custody in such condition." Meaning he felt sorry for me. I frowned at his pity. "In better circumstances, I'm sure these restraints would be nothing for you to undo and the belongings we confiscated would be easily found and retrieved from their locked cabinet."

His hand waved casually in a very specific direction. That might be where my gear was taken but he couldn't have expected me to break out and retrieve it.

"Baron Stonebridge is a very busy man, Master Thief, so you will be held here until he is available to witness your execution." He stood up to leave. "In the meantime, I will send a doctor to look you over. We wouldn't want you to die before the Baron has his chance to meet and speak with you to his satisfaction. Until then, thief."

I watched him leave but his words kept my mind occupied. Was the Baron giving me time and opportunity to escape? That would have explained why I was being left alone behind a curtain but after looking at me, his man had to know how impossible that was. I couldn't deal with any locks without my hands and even if they set me free, I couldn't climb or crawl my way around to avoid being seen. Whether they planned to hang me or help me, I was at their mercy.

Now that I was conscious I couldn't sleep in a place where I didn't feel secure. I kept my eyes closed and listened to what was going on beyond the curtains. People were shuffling, moaning and diagnosing. The guards were off harassing someone else who may have appeared on a few wanted posters. Then there was something beneath the noise that attracted my attention: Four light taps on stone accompanied by the muffled jingle of an overstuffed pocket. It paused for a few seconds in between but the sound was moving closer to my privacy curtain.

I may have had only one eye uncovered but it wasn't hard to recognize Six-Fingers when he pushed past the curtain. Even with the glasses and doctor's coat, he didn't look like he could have belonged to any credible physician's office. Of course, that didn't stop him from diagnosing me.

"Oi, mate, you look awful. Get caught up, did you?" He kept his voice low and I did the same when I answered him.

"Picking over the corpses before the carters haul them away?"

"You're fortunate that I am, eh? One of the Baron's hammerheads mistook me for a doctor and sent me over here to see about you."

The Baron's associate wasn't that stupid. He probably saw the leather boots and legs sticking out from the bottom of Six's coat and knew they weren't something a doctor would wear—at least not during his work hours. I guess he was trying to help me escape after all. Better not waste the opportunity.

I lifted my wrists as much as I could. "How are your lockpicking skills?"

Six shrugged and knelt down near the cot. "Not as good as yours—though maybe better now if those bloodied rags mean anything." He almost laughed but the look on my face helped him swallow it and focus on the task at hand.

Six-Fingers was nowhere near as skilled at locks as me. He spent too much time studying what the keyhole looked like on the outside and had too many lockpicks on his vest to choose from. I kept all that to myself since he was helping me escape but it was still a special brand of torture watching him try.

I swung my feet to the floor as soon as my ankles were free, then tried to rub my wrists out of habit. My fingers wouldn't even flex behind the bandages.

"We better get on if we're going to get you out of here." Six helped me to my feet and we slipped through a side curtain. The person laying in a cot on the other side was barely recognizable as a man. He must have been pulled from a pile of rubble and brought here to breathe his last breath.

"Poor bastard." Six shook his head in sympathy while he took the only valuable he could find on the dying man: A small, silver hammer on a string of wooden beads had been tucked under what was left of his hand. We passed through other privacy curtains with similar scenes and I realized I was put in this area on purpose. What better way to help a criminal escape from a hospital than to hide him where the patients were too far gone to be looked after.

The last thing I remembered was being in Auldale—Somehow I had ended up in South Quarter. The clinic we escaped was just a temporary setup in an old library. All of my gear was stored in the direction the Baron's associate covertly pointed out. It was painful to watch Six struggle with the locks but at least we made it out quickly after that. The huddled masses of injured and dying people were enough of a distraction for all the guards and medical staff that wandered in and around the building.

Six managed to stay quiet while we put distance between us and the commotion, but that wasn't going to last. "So the missus and I fled as soon as all the trouble began. She and Addi are holed up in a traveler's lodge waiting for word. You're lucky I came back to assess the damage instead of keeping on to Cyric. We can squat in the flat while things blow over."

I shook my head. "If I'm hiding anywhere, it's going to be the clock tower."

"We won't make it as you are." We stopped in an alley to avoid a group of guards. "The blacktops and hammerheads are everywhere, scrounging for marsh-dwellers and survivors."

"Then to Maurus." The pain in my head and hands was getting worse. "I need him to take a look at me."

"He's overworked like the other doctors. Went there for sundries and met with a line clear through Black Alley. Too many rogues didn't make it out in time." We moved deeper into the alley when a crowd wandered by with a horse-drawn cart. "Eel's End was barely scratched. You'll be safe there, and I'll have a look at you."

At this point I didn't have a choice in the matter. We stuck to the back alleys and made it to the abandoned bookstore below his hideout. Six used a hidden switch to activate a bookshelf on a track that hid the stairwell to their front door. It was the only way I could get in with my hands wrapped as they were. After I remembered what happened to them, I dreaded seeing how badly they were damaged. I still couldn't remember why my face ached so much but something told me I wasn't going to like what was hidden beneath those bandages.