Ah, the joys of body snatching! Nature, fresh air (at least for a while), exercise under the stars, and meeting new people. I had fallen low, that's true, but the potential rewards were titillating. Not only had Baledar promised a considerable sum for the head and a bonus if I got the whole body, but he had also promised me he would pay for any possible troubles I could have with the law. As long as I kept my mouth shut, of course.

I was more worried about my reputation than for anything else. Grave robbery wasn't, from a legalistic point of view, the worse crime I had committed. Unless I did something else, like unlawful necromancy (and I wasn't the one who was going to do that), my crime was a minor offense. Still, it is not the kind of thing for which you want to be known. It also gave me quite a bad conscience, which was probably the worse part of the whole thing.

I shook my head, trying to dispel all those doubts, and then I kept digging. After a while, regular as a clockwork, I saw the same moving light going in my direction. It was the lamp from the night guard patrolling the cemetery. I had already digged a hole, so I only needed to crawl there and wait around two minutes; then I would keep digging. As many times before, I did that routine and, after the guard could not see me anymore, I continued my tomb desecration. I still had four more meters to go and even though it was one of the most exhausting jobs I had ever done, my method had the benefit of being almost undetectable.

I had gotten the idea from a history my grandad, a soldier in his youth, had told me about a siege in which he had fought. From the security of their camp, the soldiers dug tunnels towards the city to weaken its foundations. Part of the wall collapsed and then they charged through the hole.

The grave I wanted was on top of a little elevation, a detail that made my job easier. I had digged a little hole at one side of the promontory, big enough for me to crawl in and work inside it towards Sidon's casket. Then I would open it from below. And if I heard someone approaching, I just covered the hole with a few shrubs and waited.

I don't know how much time I spent in that narrow and barely illuminated tunnel (I only had a lonely candle). My mouth, nose and eyes were full of dirt, my arms felt numb, and my back ached from being in that uncomfortable position for so long. I was also disgustingly dirty, and I feared I was beginning to lose my sanity after I don't know how many hours digging and hearing the same repetitive thumping sound. In fact, I kept hearing it even when for some reason I had to stop digging.

At last I arrived at my destination. I began to hit and scrap with my wooden shovel at the tunnel ceiling, and after a few minutes I hit the wooden coffin. I had actually brought a complex wooden contraption to use it as a support for that next stage, but I was so tired and angry I just began to hit to the coffin with my shovel. It broke surprisingly quickly, but whereas I had hoped to see Sidon's stinking head, something dark and heavy (but odorless) feel on top of my head.

After madly screaming for a while, I wearily picked up the fallen thing and saw it was just a brick. I made the coffin crack a little bigger and groped its interior, trying to touch the corpse, but there was none, only more bricks. I don't know if it was my roar of frustration or my shoddy mining abilities -probably both- but without a warning the coffin suddenly collapsed and the wood, soil, and bricks almost crushed me. Although gasping for air and blinded by all the dust, I was able to crawl out of the tunnel alive.

Exhausted and coughing, I lay there on the ground, looking at the stars for a very long time. It was a beautiful sight and not even the smiling face of the patrolling guard grinning at me from above made it worse.

He arrested me or, more precisely, poked me with his spear and screamed me to get up. I answered him with a long string of curses about his mother and all his ancestors, but in the end I did what he ordered me. I was barely sentient by then, and I just walked in a not very straight line, changing direction every time he pricked me with the spear

"Did you find anything valuable, graverobber?" He asked, his cheerful voice muffled by the eternal thumping inside my head.

"Bodysnatcher," I said. "I didn't come here to plunder riches."

Well, not directly.

"Really? What corpse were you trying to steal, then?" He asked.

In hindsight, I know I should have realized there had been a change in his voice, a hint of alarm. I actually felt a bit bad about the whole issue and wanted to come forward as a relatively honest person. What a grave mistake that was. I should have lied to him.

"Sidon of Darromar. But why I wanted him is none of your damn business. Now, my ears hurt, so would you be so kind to shut up and just get me to the nearest jail so I can sleep comfortably and then pay my fine by tomorrow morning? And about your spear, stop..."

Then I heard it; or rather, I felt it. It was a silence when there should have been none: a discordance, a sudden stop in his footstep, the silence that his sudden breath-holding left behind. I glanced back and saw him thrusting his spear towards me. Terrified, I bounced sideways just in time to not get totally impaled, although he was able to wound me. The pain numbed me momentarily, but my warrior reflexes kicked in quickly and fear mutated into anger and desperation.

I hurled myself at him, and we both fell to the ground. I jumped on top of his torso and we wrestled for a while. He was a vicious warrior, but he wasn't a professional fighter. After a brutal struggle in which I had to beat him severely and break his nose (and a few more things), I was able to reduce him and choke him using my arm and his own shoulder. He resisted for a while but, at last, he stopped struggling and fainted.

I tried to stand up and calm myself dow, only to realize how much my side hurt. I was going to kick him as a revenge when I saw all the blood on his body, but it was not his own, it was mine. For the first time, I realized how much I was bleeding from my left side.

I didn't remember to pick up my tools or equipment; I just fled in the only direction I could think of, running as fast as I could for what seemed a whole life. It may have been for all I know, it felt like it and it certainly decided a whole life. I don't know for how long I ran, truth be told, minutes or hours, perhaps. But with every passing moment I felt weaker until I collapsed on the ground, in the middle of nowhere.

To this day, I still have many difficulties thinking about that moment. What I remember most, what even today it still haunts me, was not the physical pain -which was great-, but my dark resignation, like a surrender. I had accepted it and I stopped resisting. I had yielded, I had desisted and accepted that that was going to be my end and that I had failed... about many things. And that was how I was going to be remembered, as a fallen soldier turned grave robber, dying in some gutter. I even resigned myself to that.

No, I don't like to think about that moment. It hurt much more than the stabbing.