A Wealthy, Stealthy Thing

Opening

The face Zuktind wore was not his own, and it fit badly.

He had reached, in the moment of choosing, for the nearest thing to a man he could make of himself — and settled on a tall human-born Aasimar, because his shapes were bound by his own bones and he could only wear what walked on two legs with arms and wings. A dragonkin in any guise, even another dragon's, would draw the eye. An Aasimar drew less. Not none. "Aasimar are still rare," he'd allowed. "People would still wonder." But less. Beside him Lissandra had taken a tiefling's horns and skin, and somewhere behind them both, unseen and unheard, Yeltsu and Rathenfall moved as smears of nothing at all — invisible, and therefore the only two who could get close.

Rusty stayed behind at the inn, told to obey Telno. This was work for quiet feet, and a steel defender had none.

Ahead of them, past the road, stood the warehouse: dark stone, a loading dock, a sign that could be read even from a distance. Vorath and Meridian — River Trade and Acquisitions. And in front of it, a knot of dockhands were arguing with men who did not want to hear it.

The Warehouse by Daylight

It was not a usual day at the warehouse. Four bodies short. Nobody had sent word — the crew that should have come simply had not, and half the cargo still sat on the boats while the third bell came and went. The party knew why. It had been arranged: Glasstaff's men kept clear so that no honest worker would be hurt when the blow finally fell.

Zuktind and Lissandra drifted up the road and played at having a reason to be there, and neither the foremen nor the guards spared them a second look. The guards had no interest in the workers' complaints — they were there to secure cargo, not to shift it. One of them said as much, then added the thing that ended the argument: if Vorath comes back and this isn't unloaded, you'll be in for trouble. The dockhands traded a look, swallowed the rest of it, and went back through the open gate to the crane and the boats.

The men found it funny once the workers had gone. "Whenever they give us trouble," one said, "we just mention Vorath's name and they shiver like chickens." The other laughed. "I wouldn't want to be on his bad side either."

Zuktind marked the ways in — the main door, the closed trap door, the open gate to the working dock where the crane swung its slow load off the water. Vorath himself was nowhere at midday. There was nothing more the disguised pair could do from the road. Whatever came next belonged to the ones no one could see.

Yeltsu Goes In

Before he touched the dock door, Yeltsu breathed a dome of silence into being around himself — his harmonica's oldest trick — so that no hinge would betray him. Then he opened the door onto no sound at all and slipped inside.

Piles of goods, a warehouse's clutter, a staircase down and a staircase up. He climbed. From a catwalk that ringed the open floor he looked down on the whole operation, then found a door and cracked it — and found a woman at a desk who lifted her head at the movement, went very still, and said, into an empty corridor, "Hello."

He did not close the door behind him. A door left ajar could have swung on a draft. A door pulled shut told her someone's hand had done it. He left it as it was and withdrew — but the woman, Meridian, was not fooled for long. She rose, and began to move through the building.

He went down instead, into the basement, past two men deep in the idle cruelty of the bored. One floated the idea of skimming a little product — so much of it, who would notice? The other shut him down flat. "You want Vorath to eat your liver? He would take it out and eat it as you watch." Yeltsu let their talk cover him, worked a locked door with his thieves' tools, then a second, and stepped into the smell of ten days' confinement — a water jug, a bucket in the corner, and a young woman already on her feet, braced for whatever came through.

"If you came to move me," she warned the empty doorway, "I'll give you trouble." Then she looked, and saw no one, and did not understand.

He kept his voice low and told her the truth of it. "My name is Yeltsu of the Stones. I am part of a group that is fighting against this cult. We were tasked by your father to come rescue you." Relief broke over her like water. "When are you coming?" she asked the air where his voice was. "When do you think you will come for me?" He gave her sundown, and asked her to wait, and to keep the secret in her face — to look as though no one had ever come. She promised. She kept looking a little to one side of him, hunting for where he stood.

But time was against him. The relock of the outer door came slow — his hands fumbled it once before they caught — and the delay was enough. When he turned from the lock, Meridian was standing in the corridor, looking at the door. Looking, from where he stood, straight at him.

That was where the first night ended, with a stolen glance he could not answer and an invisibility spell running down toward nothing.

The Amber and Anchor

He got out. A single roll of the dice, high enough to matter — and Meridian arrived at the sealed door a heartbeat after he cleared it, suspicious of a thing she could not name. Yeltsu bolted up and out and did not stop until he was back among his own.

They pulled into a back alley to let the disguises fall where no guard would see the change, and then to the Amber and Anchor, where Telno and Tesswyn waited. Tesswyn was still shaken from the shop, but steady, and full of questions. Yeltsu laid it out: the office upstairs, where whatever they needed was likely kept; the daughter below, behind a hidden and locked door; his own narrow escape. He had left her there, and Tesswyn did not love that — and you left her? — but he had gone in alone and been cornered, and two prisoners would have helped no one.

Over honest fish stew and day-old bread, a bad hand drum somewhere in the corner and a table of off-duty city watch across the room, they built the plan. Six of them, counting Rusty. They would split. Yeltsu, best at locks, would take the basement and Della; Lissandra would go with him. Zuktind and Rathenfall would climb for the office — Yeltsu walked them through the way, across the catwalk and toward the street, then right, and right again, to the door. Glasstaff had told them of a guard change at midnight; that was the seam they would slip through. They ate, because none of them knew when they would eat again, and Zuktind allowed that a man too hungry to fight was a liability. Then they went out into the busy Neverwinter evening, the workers spilling toward the inns, and took up a watch a careful distance from the warehouse.

The Long Watch

They waited in the dark under a chandler's shuttered eaves. The dogs thinned out of the streets. A cargo barge slid down the canal, lanterns burning at bow and stern. The daytime dockhands were long gone. The two guards on the exterior loosened by degrees — one produced a short pipe and drew on it — and for a while nothing at all happened, and the light in the upper window burned steady over a building where they knew Meridian and the guards and Della all waited behind their several doors.

Then a skiff came poling up the canal, flat-bottomed, one man working the pole. It touched the private dock and a passenger stepped off without a word, and the poler pushed away and was gone. The guards straightened. A door opened before the man reached it — someone had been expecting him. And in the moment before he passed inside, they saw him clearly: abnormally tall for a human, too much shape beneath the cape. A dragonkin. The same height as Zuktind, the same line of body, broader across. He moved like a man bored of owning the thing he owned. Upstairs, a light came on and stayed.

It landed hard in Zuktind. "I was not expecting one of my own kind," he said. Not quite one of his own — if the creature ran with the cult it was a feral thing. "Though apparently this one has also learned to blend into civilized society, unlike the tribes in the valley."

Every plan he'd been turning over — a lure, a false noise, a trick borrowed from a job already done — he turned over once more and set aside. With Vorath in the building, any clever thing was a variable, and the guards who had watched that pipe vanish before it was asked to would never raise an alarm they weren't sure of, would sooner smother a problem quietly than carry it to the man who ate livers. A noise in an alley at midnight was a risk that bought nothing. So they waited, and watched, and did not gamble.

Into the Dark

When the change finally came — four men down the street, the old guards hushed with a reminder that Vorath is in the building — the seam they'd hoped for became a crowd on the pavement, every eye somewhere it shouldn't have to be, and no clean way through the front. It was Yeltsu who found the other road: a search of the shadows south, down the alley, turned up a door none of them had marked. A door in the dark, away from the light and the talk.

Zuktind flew up first to try the high windows and saw only black inside, no movement his eyes could catch. The door was locked; Yeltsu's tools opened it. And before they crossed, a colder instinct held them — a trigger wired to the threshold, caught by his passive care, filed loose with a steady hand. Lissandra took ten minutes and a ritual to be sure nothing magical lay against the door, and while she worked Zuktind spent the same ten minutes wringing a short rest out of a Catnap so the harmonica would sing again. When the ritual came back clean, they went in, one by one, into a dark deep enough that Zuktind cast himself darkvision to see at all. Telno, honest about her own clumsiness, stayed at the door to hold it. Rusty was set at the top of the stairs, fast enough to cover them and quiet enough, tonight, to keep still.

They split.

The Basement

Group B went down. The two basement guards were where the dice had put them — one slumped against the wall with his head tipped back, not asleep and not quite present; the other more awake. Yeltsu went invisible on Lissandra's spell and threaded past them, his sound folded down to five feet by the harmonica, working the same two locks he had worked the day before.

Della was waiting. "Thank the gods," she breathed. "I was waiting for you." He pressed the flask into her hand so she could see it appear from nowhere. "This is a potion of invisibility. This will allow me to help you get out of here unseen." She drank, and vanished, and followed the pull of his hand — and made a little noise on the way, not enough to reach the guards, and then they were clear, threading back up through the dark toward Telno and the door with the girl safe between them.

Lissandra came behind. And somewhere in the black of the warehouse floor her foot found something it shouldn't have, and a heavy box went down, and the whole room rang with it.

Vorath's Face

Upstairs, in the same breath, Zuktind wore a second stolen face — Vorath's own this time, dragonkin to dragonkin, cast not from Alter Self but from a Disguise Self that asked no concentration of him. Rathenfall went invisible at his shoulder. Rusty held the stairs.

He had never heard Vorath speak, so he resolved to be a silent Vorath, and simply opened the office door and walked in as a man walks into a room he owns. It was empty. "Perfect," he told the invisible space beside him. "Let's search everything. Split up."

The desk was his; Rathenfall took the shelves and found nothing worth the finding. But the cabinet by the archive had a wire run to its door, and Zuktind read it for what it was — turned his tools to thieves' tools and worked it free rather than let it trip. Inside: a draft report tucked into a small ledger, a note sealed with red wax. He did not read them. "I will be reading them later," he said — reading here would only waste time, and time was the one thing the room could take from him. He bagged them both. And the wire's other end told its own story: an acid vial, rigged to drown the documents the instant a thief pulled at them. That's how they were going to destroy the documents, he realized aloud. That was why the cult had felt no need to burn anything in a hurry — the archive was built to burn itself. He pocketed the vial too.

Near it sat a locked box, heavy, the shift of many coins inside. He took it, and tried to file it open on the spot, and the lock held against him — a bad roll, and no genius left to fix it. Time was of the essence. He would let Yeltsu crack it later.

Then, from below and outside, a sequence of loud bangs — as if a stack of crates had all come down at once.

Closing

The noise rolled up through the building and hung there.

Zuktind turned toward where he thought Rathenfall stood, the bag of holding heavy with a ledger, a sealed note, a stolen vial, and a box of coins he could not open. "Rathenfall — we've got to get out of here now." He would use the face he wore, he decided, to try and calm whatever was breaking loose downstairs.

Below him, Della was already clear of the building with Group B, safe and unseen. Behind an ajar door on his own floor, the real Vorath waited, sleeping, unaware. And out on the warehouse floor the guards were beginning to move toward the sound Lissandra had made.

The session ends there — in the ring of fallen crates, with a false Vorath at the top of the stairs, the documents in the bag, and every quiet advantage they had spent the night buying about to be tested all at once.