The guard shone her lantern on Moher’s pale face and her eyes went wide in shock.
“Thief!”, she cried, and turned to run, presumably to alarm the rest of the patrolmen. Moher was faster, however. The pommel of his dagger connected with the back of her skull before she had managed to take three steps, putting her to sleep and cutting short any attempt to call for help.
For a moment, the two thieves stood absolutely still, their ears cocked for the sounds of more alarmed patrolmen. Then a door flew open somewhere at the far end of the warehouse, and they knew they had been found out.
“Well”, said Ceil as she stuffed some kind of intricate metal thing in her knapsack, “I guess this is goodbye. Give your boss my regards. Ta-ta.”
She pulled some kind of device from one of her many pouches and pockets, hurled it towards the general direction of the opened door, and turned to run.
Moher, having seen the trick once before, had a single second to shield his ears from the deafening blast that followed. With his bounty - a human skull covered in solid gold - safely tucked away in his own knapsack, he bolted for the other exit and disappeared into the night, unseen to the eyes of the building’s guards.
Or so he thought.
He heard the shrill cry of the bird only moments before it whooshed by his ear, tearing the side of his dark cowl to shreds with its wicked talons, missing him by less than an inch.
It was a strix, the large, owl-like familiar of some mage who was undoubtedly hot on Moher’s heels. The bird circled around him and got ready to swoop a second time, its eyes shining with baleful intent.
Unwilling to risk the strix’s talons a second time, Moher flung a throwing knife at it and ran. The blade caught the bird mid-flight, probably clipping its wing, injuring it just enough to keep it down. Not that he turned to check. There was a single priority on Moher’s mind, and that was fleeing to the city’s shady underbelly, where not even the constabulary would dare to follow him.
He was just about to cross the Girh, the river that divided Quortain in two, when the mage blindsided him from his left, blasting him off his feet with a bolt of pure force.
“Stop, you scum!” roared the man in a strange accent, his hands aglow with the aether from which he spun his spells. He was a tall and dark foreigner built like a brick wall, with his long hair braided in dreadlocks. A southerner, most likely.
The force of the magic bolt would probably have left any crook in Quortain lying on the cobblestones, gasping for air. Moher, however, was not any crook; he was Loricus’s right hand, the very best among the Guild’s ranks.
With a tumble and a roll, he flung himself into the dark waters of the Girh, letting the river take him under the bridge and away from the mage’s fearsome bolts.
Holding his breath for as long as his lungs allowed him, he dove near the river’s bottom, staying out of sight.
Not ten minutes later, Moher was pulling himself out of the river’s water and into the city’s intricate network of underground sewers - Loricus’s home turf.
The gilded skull was still in his knapsack, dripping river water but intact. The southerner mage was nowhere to be seen. There was no sound but the river crickets. Another night, another job well done.
Moher allowed himself a smile. Once more, he was uncaught.
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