Thereafter Chapter 22: The Heist Part II (A Word in Darkness)
Michael searches Nih-Ka's home in the dark. The plan goes awry in the exact way one would predict.
Michael had not been breaking and entering long when he realized that he hated it. The second he tested the front door and found, much to his surprise, that it was unlocked, he realized this sort of work was never going to be for him. Slipping inside was easy enough. He had prepared for locked doors. The lockpicking set he had picked up had the tools needed for all but the most exotic of locks, and while he was not so confident in his abilities as to say he had the skills to match, he would be able to outsmart at least a basic lock. It was, however, not necessary to even retrieve the tools to gain access to the house. This realization of sour relief fused together with the knowledge that he hated this.
It wasn’t breaking in he hated, Michael realized, as much as it was the sheer violation of it. He was trespassing. Going somewhere he was not wanted. Intruding. For as good of a cause this heist was championing, he felt like he was crossing some personal Rubicon by going through with it. Not that it mattered, Michael found himself thinking as he slipped inside the entryway of the mansion. He was on the other side of the Barrier now, which meant that his only way out was through. Either he found the artifact, thus opening the way for his fellow Exalted Ones’ ingress and his own getaway, or Nih-Ka found him first and, most likely, killed him on the spot.
The house was, as Bartholomew had assumed, in the dark. The hallway door and windows let in pale moonlight, but not nearly as well as Michael would have preferred. There was a hunger to the darkness of the house, like it slurped up any light that came in, devoured every errant photon. It wouldn’t, Michael figured, take a large leap of logic to ensoul the darkness with malignant purpose and ability, and that simply would not help him at all. As such, he decided to ignore this fresh new way in which this mission gave him the willies, and proceeded carefully into the darkness.
While it was tempting to use his tremorsense to get a better look at the house, Michael hesitated to do so. Yes, he could get a decent overview of the layout by creating some vibrations and charting how they reverberated. Unfortunately, so could Nih-Kah, and while any molekin worth their salt could make do with the echoes of their own soft footsteps, Michael would need stronger vibrations. It wasn’t his fault, of course, there were special nerves in the feet of molekin that he, human as he was, lacked. The point remained that he would be lighting floodlights for his potential enemy while receiving only the illumination of a cheap flashlight for his efforts. Instead, Michael found himself wandering as blind, carefully taking steps, sweeping with his cane ahead of him.
Finding the stairs would be a good start to this infiltration, Michael figured. If the theorized study existed, and held the key to the mansion’s security, it would make sense to keep it on the top floor. That was, of course, assuming the house was laid out human style and not molekin style. Seeing as ingress from any direction is similarly likely under ground, the safest room in a molekin burrow would be the center one. In burrows with children, that’s where one would dig the padded soft cave that held the vulnerable molekin pups. If Nih-Ka was old school about things, the center of the house was the place to go, but while Michael did sense a certain nostalgia about the man, he was also intelligent and adaptive. Given how getting into the second floor without crossing the first was notoriously difficult, it would, Michael reasoned, be the most easily defensible location of the house.
This meant stairs, and as Michael felt the cold electric feeling in his knee, he did cherish the thought of climbing them. It could, however, not be helped.
Michael’s cane tip struck something made out of wood. A few taps confirmed that whatever it was resembled a stair step, and above it another. Michael wanted to quip something about stairs being his nemesis, but thought better about it. The jokes could wait until the only person who might hear them wasn’t the incredibly dangerous molekin crime boss.
Michael took the stairs one step at a time. Part of him wanted to keep his cane out of it to produce the least amount of noise. Fortunately, the part of his brain that took practical concerns of having a human body into consideration, decided that distracting amounts of pain was not something he needed at this juncture. As such, he supported himself on his cane and the banister. It was a touch noisier, but Michael figured it was worth it.
Michael stepped off the stairs. The air felt different on the second floor. Stuffier. Nih-Ka didn’t air the place out much, which made a certain kind of sense to Michael. Burrows had no windows after all, although he had heard that some barrows would insert something much like windows to large geodes or other subterranean wonders if any were present.
It was on his second step that Michael realized the downside of his plan of checking the top floor first. If this house indeed employed human logic to its room placement, the single most likely room to contain Nih-Ka, the bedroom, was likely up on the second floor as well, and dark as it was, he’d have little, if any, way of telling which door led to which. Again Michael wanted to quip how terrible of an idea this whole expedition had been, and again he restrained himself. First off, he’d get nowhere by complaining, and secondly, even the off chance that Nih-Ka could hear him was entirely too risky for Michael’s taste.
Michael, then, extended his tremorsense. With only the reverberations of his soft foot steps, he couldn’t see very far, nor in much detail, but he’d take every bit he could.
The stairs terminated in an L-shaped corridor. Michael reasoned that the bedroom would not be in the end with the bend, seeing as the room directly opposite of the stairs had at least two doors from what Michael could sense. In fact, the only rooms with only one entrance and exit was the small room next to the stairs as well as the room at the Ls tip. It wasn’t conclusive, but Michael felt certain enough he had narrowed the bedroom down to two possibilities, and went about exploring with this in mind.
The door directly opposite the stairs was a bust as Michaeal opened it as silently as he could, only to be faced with some sort of dining room dominated by a large wooden table that looked like it didn’t get an outrageous amount of use. Pale not-moonlight shone through the room’s lone window, casting stark impressionistic shadows over the little scene. Michael closed the door, although there was a door at the left hand wall, he doubted it lead to the study.
Michael moved as quietly as he could past the first of the suspected bedrooms, aiming for the room at the bottom of the L corridor. As Michael tried the door, he found it locked. While this was discouraging, certainly enough so to wake the first nascent spark of terror in his chest, Michael figured it was also a good sign. After all, why not lock the door if there was not some secret worth keeping in there.
Picking the lock, however, was easier said than done. Michael had practiced with the tools a time or two to make sure he knew what to do, but that had been sitting at a well-lit desk, not crouching in the dark with a throbbing knee and danger lurking potentially only a few meters away. Even these considerable barriers, though, were surmountable. Hell, when he got into it, it wasn’t even that hard, and Michael managed to catch the tumblers one after the other. The door opened with a dry creak, and Michael cursed himself for being too distracted by the lockpicking to open the door quietly.
Michael felt his pulse rise in his ears as he entered the locked room. The room was dark, replete with the musty smell of old books. This could be a study, there certainly was some kind of furniture with a chair next to it that could be a writing desk. Michael approached it, hesitant yet in a marked rush. If the room had possessed a singular window, the pale fake moonlight would be plenty to search the place visually and, if it was present, grab the prism or whatever it was. It’d be an “in and out in five minutes” type of job, but seeing as the room had no windows, he’d have to do it the slow and risky way instead.
The furniture was a writing desk, Michael confirmed with a touch, or something very much like a writing desk. The rough-grained wood surface was intermittently covered by books and papers, Michael shuffled through them, trying his best to find any object that stood out. A fountain pen, some kind of small knife. Michael found his search become frantic. So frantic that he didn’t quite hear the soft creak of the floorboards.
Two things happened at once. First, Michael’s fingers closed around a cold object, possibly made out of glass, second, a creaky baritone voice spoke out, shattering the prickly silence into a million pieces.
“Assassin!”
Michael froze. Nih-Ka was awake, and he was here. In the same room if his voice volume was any indication. He wanted to explain, he wanted to clarify that he was here for the Sword of Lakes, to appeal to Nih-Kas better nature. Hell, who knew, maybe this didn’t have to end in bloodshed after all.
There was no denying the facts, though. He had come to this house alone, in the dead of night, carrying lockpicking tools and a sword. Even if he had nothing but good intentions, which Michael would fervently argue was the case, the circumstantial evidence for ill will was very strong. Were the roles reverse, it’d take some serious doing from Nih-Ka’s end to convince Michael that he wasn’t up to something unwholesome. Then there was the question of the sword. Nih-Ka was a creature with morals and sense, but if he had stolen the sword, or had it stolen, it was for a reason, and Michael could not imagine the moleboar would give it up without a fight, even if he actually believed Michael wasn’t there to kill him.
Every once in a while, Michael would see himself from the outside. He wasn’t sure if it was some sort of delusion born from his eyes receiving no light, but whether it was that or some advanced anxiety, he felt like he wasn’t inhabiting his body as he gripped the glass object and chucked it to the ground, where it shattered with the customary sound of breaking glass, albeit distorted somewhat, as if an effect pedal had been applied to real life however briefly.
Apart from being keenly aware there was now broken glass on the floor, Michael didn’t feel anything change, which was ironic. The magic barrier allegedly being destroyed by this act was one thing, but the fact that he had in practice declared war on Nih-Ka was another. Granted, the shattered glass on the floor was every bit as much of a problem for him as it was for the moleboar, but Nih-Ka had no idea that was the case. As far as Nih-Ka knew, or so Michael assumed, the armed, booted intruder had just made a hostile move.
Michael drew his sword. If there was a point where he could have stopped all of this, it was long past, and now he had to fight if he wanted to live.
“Assassin!” The creaky voice called out behind him as something small but deadly lunged at his exposed back.
Author’s Note: The cliffhangers come close and heavy now that we’re approaching the climax! I think I thought more about the interior geography of the Nih-Ka house than I have of any other location of this book. Turns out when my protagonist knows less about what’s going on, the author has to know more. One of life’s little self-contradictions, there.
Catch you next chapter, when this heist concludes, one way or another.
V.S.D