Chapter 10 – The Difference between Crows and Ravens
Garrett didn't know how many days passed in which he did nothing but a routine of repairs, training, exercises, stealing and looting. He felt distracted and his thoughts were elsewhere. The book about birds had been lying on his nightstand, but he found that he couldn't bear the sight and had hidden it in a shelf. Erin's broken necklace lay on his workbench, since he had not dared to stash it away as well, but he didn't know what to do with it either, so he left it there.
He slept so badly that he barely needed the kohl to darken his eyelids, often jumping awake in the middle of his sleep. The nightmares were back, terrible flashbacks of Erin's fall, her wounded, stricken form, his failure to save her, the asylum and the General's ambush that added physical to the emotional strain. The nightmares had stopped when Erin had returned to him, and he had almost thought that their reunion, his chance to make up for his mistakes, had helped to chase them away forever and clean his conscience, but now the events of the last year haunted him in his sleep once more. Garrett felt overtired and drained, and not even his thievery seemed to comfort him.
What was wrong with him? Erin surely was better off without him, so why could he not just let her go and continue like he always had? Knitting his brow whenever he thought about this, he found that should be glad about his newly restored solitude. But he wasn't.
It can't go on like this, Garrett thought after he woke up one evening after far too little sleep full of bad dreams, covered in sweat. If there is somebody that has an answer for me, it's the Queen of Beggars.
He dressed, equipped his claw and bow and went on his way to the Old Chapel.
As Garrett crossed the graveyard that surrounded the old building, he noticed that the number of tombstones, having grown largely in the last year due to the Gloom, had not increased as far as he could tell, at least not so much. Leafless trees surrounded the yard, their black branches reaching for the sky like bony fingers. Swarms of crows were sitting in the trees, cawing and croaking hoarsely, the only sound besides his own soft footsteps on the gravel that covered the ground. The ruin of the Old Chapel loomed above the graveyard, an ancient monument probably as old as the bedrock of the City itself, still imposing and archaic with the stern statues of men in robes, holding keys, despite the broken roof and weather-beaten walls. The inside of the Chapel was faintly glowing orange with the light of candles.
Garrett found the Queen of Beggars holding court at her place at the back of the Chapel, sitting in a worn chaise longue, surrounded by a flock of her ragged but loyal subjects. Even though every single item around her, from the small table in front of her to the teacups placed on it, looked like it had seen better days ages ago, she radiated an aura of majesty. When the beggars saw Garrett enter, they quietly merged into the shadows, leaving their Queen alone with the Thief. He appreciated their discretion, but still he checked with his Primal vision whether they were actually gone, just to make sure. Somehow he had the feeling this would not be very comfortable and the last thing he needed now were eavesdroppers.
"My beggars will not bother us, child of the shadows", the blind crone commented with her slightly quavering, old voice, always a hint of mischief in her tone. "There is much begging to be done, secrets to be heard and to be brought to me, but they would never spy on their own Queen."
She extended a long, slender hand that looked like twigs covered in parchment and signaled Garrett to take a seat. He obediently sat down in a dusty armchair across from her. A small table with a halfway finished game of chess was standing between them, the Queen playing the white side. She was winning, Garrett noticed after a quick glance on the board.
The Queen of Beggars had grabbed a battered teapot and poured him a cup of tea. He carefully took it from her hands, plucked a stray hair from the surface and hesitantly tried a sip. Relieved that it actually seemed to be tea, Garrett leaned back and looked into the blind eyes of the old woman in front of him, unsure of what to expect.
"Garrett, my child… So you come to me again, to find answers", she stated gently.
Garrett nodded slowly. A second later he realized that she could not see him nod and wanted to say something, but somehow, in her own unexplainable way, she registered it and continued.
"You think about Erin again, the one thing in your life you never really were able to control… You want to know why she left, and why it hurts you so much."
"I want to forget her. I want my life to be normal again", Garrett came back. He already knew why Erin had left. Or, at least, he thought so.
The Queen of Beggars shook her head, a sad look on her face. "Tsk, tsk, tsk. You think she left you because you did not return her feelings. Oh, how mistaken you are, my child!"
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Your tea, child."
Garrett took another sip, not taking his eyes away from the old woman. She spoke again. "Erin was trying to help you in return for the help you offered her, but you didn't notice. She thought she had managed to melt the ice around your heart, but you disappointed her by refusing to see the cracks she made in the cold mantle you wrapped your feelings in."
"I wanted to help her, not the other way around", Garrett corrected, but then he broke off.
He suddenly remembered something Erin had told him in a vision before he visited the asylum, her ghostly image shrouded in poppy dust.
I tried to help, but you wouldn't listen, Garrett had said.
She had replied: You know, I was just thinking the same thing about you.
Garrett fell silent. The Queen seemed to read his thoughts, for there was a knowing glitter in her milky, wrinkled eyes.
"I don't need anyone's help", Garrett insisted, noticing annoyed how stubborn he sounded.
"Of course not, my child. That is what you made yourself believe since you were thrown into this cruel world, that you and yourself alone were the only thing you needed to survive. And that might be true, since your are artful and cunning, Master Thief, but you need to realize that the tighter one wraps a barrier around one's heart, the more numb it becomes, until it turns into an empty hull, functioning perfectly but dead inside, and all that's left is a ghost."
"I've been a ghost all my life", Garrett whispered, desperately trying to keep calm.
The Queen shook her head. "You were, Garrett. But then Erin came into your withdrawn little world, and breathed some life into the ghost you turned yourself into, and you refuse to feel the cracks in that shield you hide your feelings behind, pushing her away over and over again. That is why she left, seeing that you don't allow yourself to feel even after all this time. And that is what is causing your pain."
Garrett didn't know what to reply. While the Queen had spoken, a mixture of panic, denial and, to his great confusion, realization was swirling inside his mind. His hands trembled slightly, he noticed. He grabbed the teacup tighter.
The Queen of Beggars sighed and turned her gaze to the broken roof through which the stars could be seen on the late evening firmament, small silvery dots on a blanket the color of ink and copper. Garrett blinked. She couldn't see the stars, so why bother?
"Do you know the difference between crows and ravens?", she asked him suddenly.
Baffled by the sudden change of topic, Garrett shook his head. They both were just black birds to him, and he had never really bothered about the difference between them.
"Look at the crows, my child. They live in big swarms, hundreds of them, a noisy, messy flock, but that is what they need. Crows love company, they cannot live alone. They need other crows around them, to share food with each other and to fight about it at the same time, to defend themselves against the evils of the world with their sheer masses." The Queen indicated the swarm of crows Garrett had already seen in the trees around the graveyard.
"Now, my child, look at this raven up there. I'm sure you can see it with your sharp eyes." Garrett focused and actually saw the bird she was referring to, circling high above the City. She went on.
"Ravens live alone. They do not like swarms, masses, noise and confinement, but they do not need other ravens either. They are stronger and more cunning than the common crows and very well able to defend themselves against any foe."
I think I prefer ravens, Garrett thought.
"But ravens eventually grow tired of the endless lonely circles, and find themselves a partner. That is the only exception, the only other being they tolerate as their companion. Ravens don't always fly together and are still often seen alone, but they know their partner is always there, waiting faithfully for them to return to their nest."
The Queen of Beggars turned her gaze away from the sky and back to Garrett, who sat across from her with his cold tea in his hands. He knew exactly what she was going to say.
"You think that I'm a raven."
"You both are. Erin already knows, but you… You haven't accepted it yet, Garrett."
"I prefer to remain a lonely raven", he said, but the words tumbled automatically out of his mouth. He was deeply lost in thought.
"You can either remain lonely, and grow even colder inside, or part with your old habit and be lonely together with Erin. Your choice, Garrett", the Queen said quietly, turning to her chessboard and carefully moving a piece.
"Well, it doesn't really matter, since she's left the City", Garrett heard himself say.
"Of course she has, the poor child…"
Garrett noticed that her attention was fully focused on the chessboard, and he felt that the audience was over. The placed the cup on the table, took a little bow and left the cathedral, not sure if he was feeling better or worse. He certainly felt different.
Outside on the graveyard, his gaze wandered over the cawing flock of crows again, one noisy mass of black feathers, a large swarm, huddling between the branches of the trees. Then he searched the sky for the lonely raven. He soon found it again and followed the large, black bird with his gaze.
Apparently this fellow here has made the decision to stay alone, he mused.
As if the raven had been waiting for him to think this, Garrett witnessed how the bird circled closer to the ground and approached the battered spire of the Old Chapel. A second raven flew up to the first one as if welcoming it, and they circled around each other for a while before they landed both on the top, sitting together in a nest.
Oh, really?
Garrett breathed in deeply and then sprinted back to his clocktower as fast as he could, feeling his lungs burn and his heart racing in his chest, drowning out his thoughts.
When he arrived at the top of the clocktower, he spent some time just standing under the clockwork for a long moment, trying to collect himself. The talk with the Queen of Beggars had the effect of being tossed into icy water on his wounded mind, hurting and biting and at the same time leaving him unpleasantly clear-headed. Slowly, realization dawned on him.
The realization brought profound sorrow.
Garrett desperately needed something to distract himself from thinking.
Feeling as if he was in a fever dream, he slowly trotted over to his loot collection and absentmindedly let his gaze wander over the paintings of Montonessi, carefully avoiding the one of the City at night with him sitting on a roof that Erin had given him. When his gaze fell on the painting he had stolen on the heist in the General's mansion, he knitted his brow. Garrett went over to his bookshelf and produced the book about birds, taking it back to his art collection, turning pages.
The painting from Harlan's mansion showed a ball society of colorful bird-people, the most prominent guest being a young lady with the head of a falcon standing slightly secluded from the other guests, dressed all in black lace, her look vigorous, proud and somewhat melancholic. It reminded him of something. After flipping through a few pages, Garrett found what he was looking for and he compared an illustration in the book with the painting.
The falcon-headed lady in black was a kestrel.
Garrett gently lifted the painting from its place and turned it around, studying the title written with the ominous yellow substance.
Beauty's Possibly Deadly Talons.
This is Erin, Garrett thought. As if Montonessi had intended to paint her. I should have given it to her, it fits her so well. She would have loved it.
Should, yes. Missed the chance.
Garrett slowly placed the painting back on the wall and closed the book. He took it back to the shelf, pushed it between the other tomes and continued to wander through his apartment, staring into the empty air, his mind feeling numb and sore at the same time.
This has happened before…
I lost Erin once and only when she almost died I realized how much I missed her, and now it happened again.
It really needs to come to the worst before I see that, doesn't it?
Garrett wandered along his workbench covered in tools, oily rags, screws and arrows. He noticed Erin's broken necklace he had placed there and gently picked it up, feeling the cool, smooth turquoises on his palms. He picked up a side cutter and carefully severed the necklace to remove the broken clasp and the damaged gemstone. Turning the bent silver clasp in his hands, he went over to his forge and lit a fire, picking up a small hammer.
I missed my chance, and now she's gone forever.
Garrett softened the silver in the forge's heat and formed the clasp into the shape of a ring, carefully evening out the surface with gentle strokes of his hammer. When he left the ring to cool for a while, he turned to the cracked turquoise and slowly removed a chunk, working the rough edges with a fine file until the fragment had the shape of a perfect oval cabochon. Heating the silver ring again, Garrett inlaid the turquoise into the ring, fastening it carefully. When he was almost done, he turned the ring and used a thin hallmark to carve two words into the inside.
Nobody ever cared about me, so I swore to never care about anyone. But Erin did care about me, and I cared about her…
He slowly turned the ring he had made from parts of Erin's broken necklace in his hands, a simple, matt silver ring with an oval turquoise and a fine engraving, but he didn't try it on. Garrett just placed it in a pocket in his shirt close to his heart.
Thievery has been all that had mattered to me, he thought as he wandered down the stairs to where his bed stood between supply crates and shelves.
Challenge is all that drives me forward, but still I can get hungry, and I need to eat, he thought as he took off his clothes.
Stealing is my freedom, and heists are my life, but still I can get tired, and I need to sleep, he thought as he stepped in front of a shelf. His hands found Erin's torn ceremonial dress he had placed there half an eternity ago.
I am a Thief with all my heart and soul, but still I can feel alone, and I need…
Garrett laid down on the bed, burying his face in Erin's dress, his hands trembling as they clenched the soft fabric, and he thought: … to love.
"Come on Robert, you can have my rations for three days in a row and my leftover opium, but just go in there for me!"
"Shit, no! I'd rather shoot myself in the knee, which is probably just what's going to happen to you if you make a wrong move", the other guard, whose name was Robert, replied to the first one. The first guard was all in a fluster, standing in front of the Thief Taker General's private office, and he was about to deliver a message. Bad news, it was, and given the mood the General had been in lately, he would not wave them aside with a smile.
"Please?", the first guard, who was named Trevor, tried again, but Robert just shook his head.
"Good luck, poor bastard", he said and shoved the unlucky messenger through the door with a gloating smirk.
Trevor heard the door slam shut behind him, and it sounded like his mourning bells.
The Thief Taker General stood in front of his desk brooding over countless documents, his broad back turned on the guard. The only lights in the room came from two fire baskets, casting a flickering, reddish light and painting quivering shadows across the walls.
Trevor was relatively new in the City Watch and therefore only rumors reached his ears about the latest events, but as far as he knew somebody had had the effrontery and arrogance to break into the General's mansion, stealing a small fortune worth of goods, and had destroyed a lot of seemingly very important documents. The Thief Taker General had been inflamed with rage, and his normal state of irascibleness, to put it mildly, had not been improved by that. One never really knew when exactly the General's seemingly jesting mood tilted, turning him into a keg of gunpowder, ready to explode at the tiniest of sparks. A lot of guards had already suffered from his fits of anger. Trevor had even seen how the General shot a rookie in the chest because he had dropped the Thief Taker's sword.
"What's the matter?", the General barked without looking up from his desk.
Trevor swallowed. The news he was about to bring would not sweeten his mood.
"S…Sir, Mr. Thief Taker General, Sir, I have news concerning the Watch inspection on the Western Trading Company."
Now, the General turned around. His greasy shoulder-length hair framed a face that radiated impatience and professional conceit, his mouth under the thick mustache smiling. It was not a pleasant smile.
"Ah, very well. And? Any traces of the Master Thief?"
"N… No, sir. Nothing. No traces of any kind of theft, in fact. A sailor claims to have heard that something heavy dropped into the harbor at one point. The Officer thinks it might have been some crate, but the chances that all the missing goods were lost in the sea at once is very unlikely. Still there was no proof for a thief to be found, and no clues or evidence", Trevor reported, trying to make his voice sound steady. He failed.
The General's eyes were daggers made of ice.
He turned around and wiped the papers from his table with an enraged roar. Trevor flinched and really wished he could turn invisible.
"Where are you hiding, you filthy little rat?", the General screamed at the open air. He stood for a while, breathing heavily, then he started wandering around the room.
"Why are you still here? Get out of here before I test my new bolts on your arse!"
Trevor left at the speed of sound, thanking all gods.
Thadeus Harlan was very proud of his unofficial title, the Thief Taker General. He had worked hard for this, gotten his fingers dirty very often. He had earned it, but not entirely. There was one certain thief he had never been able to lay his hands on: Garrett, the so-called Master Thief, always slipping out of his iron grip like a slimy eel, and he was sure that it had been him who destroyed all the evidence on his own crimes that the General had collected so meticulously over all those years. Ruined the Thief Taker's work.
What that damn arrogant rat had done had wounded Thadeus' pride deeply. Furthermore, it had undermined not only his authority, but also his reputation. His men were talking about the incident, at least the ones that had survived the severe punishment that followed their incompetence when it came to guarding their General's mansion. Talk was that he was getting sloppy. Talk was that the Master Thief was too smart for him.
He would not let this go unpunished.
Garrett needed to be taken care of, once and for all. There would be justice, and he would have his revenge. He wanted to see Garrett die, his hands around his throat, hear his last breath, look him in his dying eyes when his pathetic life was draining from him.
The General thoughtfully continued prowling around his office. As inconvenient as it was that all his notes and evidence on Garrett had been destroyed, the General still had most of it in his mind. He knew the Master Thief inside out, and damn him if he couldn't think of a way to lure that oversized rat in a trap.
The last time he almost had caught the Master Thief was when he accompanied Orion in his somewhat ridiculous ritual, this strange thing with the ominous force they called Primal. If Orion hadn't been the crux of the matter in the whole affair, concerning the Plague, the Baron's falling popularity and that damn Graven revolution, he would not have followed Orion down that ruined pile of debris he called the Hidden City. The General had had a hunch that Garrett was involved in the whole affair, as he always was when there was something pestering the City, and lo and behold, there the rat king came, right into the General's waiting arms.
Thadeus gritted his teeth at the memory of their duel. If Garrett hadn't been cheating in that perfidious and chickenhearted way instead of facing the General like a man, he was sure he would have crushed that little parasite like an ant under his boot.
But why had he come? Because of the girl? No, that was impossible. Erin might have been a wanted criminal in the City, but Garrett was known to always work alone and never really cared for his thieving colleagues, and he would never risk his life for one of them. Maybe he had had to settle a score between him and Orion, some kind of overdue payment or something of that nature… Yes, that must be it. Greed alone had always been what had driven Garrett forward. The General remembered how he almost had captured Garrett as he was trying to lift the Great Safe. Both the kidnapping of his fence Basso, who still refused to admit that he was working with Garrett, the fat liar, as well as the prospect of breaking the safe, had been enough to lure Garrett into the trap.
It wouldn't work a second time. The General needed better bait… Something so ridiculously precious and alluring that the Master Thief would be unable to resist.
Thadeus Harlan picked up a pen and wrote a note to the curator of the famous Wieldstrom Museum in Auldale, and asked him about a new exhibition addressing the City's aristocracy's history. Then, the Thief Taker General wrote a second note, this time to on the royal bursar, who was responsible for safekeeping the over 800 year-old crown jewels of Lord Laurence of House Black, the first Baron of the City. The General asked whether the crown of said Lord was still in the hands of the bursar, and how he would like it if this priceless artifact would be part of an upcoming exhibition.
Satisfied with his work, the Thief Taker General smiled, leaning back in his chair. Garrett would not be able to resist this allurement.
He went to bed shortly after, not looking forward to it. Ever since the cowardly attack on his manor, the General had had the feeling that something was lurking in his sleeping chamber, watching him from the shadows. When he got into his bed he could not get rid of the nightmarish sensation that the Master Thief was hidden under the bed, waiting for him to fall asleep, laughing at him in his dreams. Somehow, that sneaky rat managed to haunt him even in his sleep, prowling around his bed and filling the air with his nefarious stink while Thadeus tossed and turned, unable to find rest. He swore by his life that this would stop soon. The General would get rid of Garrett, no matter the cost.
A/N: You wanted a longer chapter, you get a longer chapter. It could be that chapter 11, which I'm currently working on, is going to be the finale, but I'll decide that later. :)
I don't know about you, but stories that just go on forever and slowly fade into nothingness because of lack of motivation from the author or something make me sad. I will never lose my love for Thief, Garrett or the pair I'm writing about, but I really, really love the two so much that I want this story to be self-contained and complete, with a proper finale. It derserves it.
Oh, and I promise the next chapter will be even longer!