Sythemis worked hard to control her breathing and still the swell of her chest. Many times she had stood before the serpents of great Set, whose bit was death and who feasted upon fear. Many times she had delved into ancient tombs for hidden relics or fragments of arcane lore from creatures whose form and memory were lost to the minds of men. All these things she had done but never had she felt herself so surely on the edge of death. The glittering knife and hard eyes of the thief were a hot death, not the cold of a serpent’s fang or antediluvian spell. It thrilled her to consider.

 

“For three hundred and thirty three years a precious jewel has lingered in Xareme,” she began, her voice was melodic but lacked any suggestion of hypnosis of coercion sure to bring a swift hot stroke of the blade.

“It is no earthly gem, but a piece of the Moon itself, fetched back in the times before men rose from the mud of the southern jungles, from before great Atlantis was sunk beneath the waves. Strange beasts brought it in their black galleys which rode the stars on their thousand oars and silver sails,” she explained, gesturing up to the waning gibbous moon that hung above the spires of the city. It seemed to peer down at them like the lidded eye of a waking lover, warm and expectant.

“Once there were many such gems, prized by the Elder race above gold and silver, above even the glittering anthrax for which they traded armies of slaves and mountains of riches. They are gone now, taken up to the stars or lost in the abyssal depths to the hunger of things that lay below the ocean which men fear to even think of save in the dim recesses of dreams,” the stygian continued, her words redolent with forgotten lore and the blasphemous secrets of past ages which had been dredged from the ancient crypts, or drawn from the lips of things long dead but undying.

 

“Only one such gem now remains upon the earth, locked in a chamber within the Emir’s palace,” Sythemis continued, nothing the glimpse of hungry avarice on the thief’s hard face with pleasure.

“It is written that during the dark of the moon, in this auspicious year, a great thief will come to Xareme and take the jewel. The Emir’s astrologers have seen this written in the stars, as others have seen it in augury and dream. I have come to Xareme to make this prophecy come true so that I may lay my hand upon the Moon Stone. One who has touched it may ask a boon of the moon, and I have such a boon to ask.”

 

The air shivered as warm wind blew in of the desert, the smell of hot sand and the cedar of the distant hillsides that made Xareme famous throughout the cradle of the world.

“I asked Ishtar to reveal to me the thief that would take the stone, and you stood before me in a chamber where you ought not stand, in a temple which you ought not enter.”