The night sky was starless. That was never a good sign, even if it was easier to hide in the pitch black night.
Safiyyah waited patiently as a pair of rough looking men with swords on their belts stepped on past the braziers lighting the entrance to the dark tower. She dangled from the wall to their right, her gloved hands pressed against it like a spider's legs, not gripping but stuck to it.
Seconds passed. A minute. One of the men said some sort of joke in the Borean tongue, something she couldn't quite hear. His friend laughed, and their footsteps grew distant.
With a heave, the Iiramite burglar pulled herself back onto the ramparts, glancing left and right one last time. Nobody was coming. Nobody was looking, and the braziers gave out a light that was small and red, faint from a nightlong vigil over this place. And there, just before her, stood the door. Safiyyah pulled off her sticky gloves and stepped on over to it.
It was an impressive door, to be sure, stately and made of fine, ash-colored wood. Twisted shapes adorned its edges, and the knob was in the shape of a dragon's head. A quick glance revealed that it was locked, and most probably trapped as well. Dealing with both would take time. Time was not a luxury Safiyyah could afford.
So, she pulled a small metal box from the folds of her clothes, and she gingerly opened it. She removed from inside it a small metal strip, then spread the green paste on it around the hinges of the door. The wood hissed as the nasty stuff ate through it, and within seconds she was able to carefully grab the door where the hinges had been and step on in.
It was always better to evade danger rather than face it needlessly.
One word entered Safiyyah's mind as she stepped into the forbidden tower: gloom. The darkness was thick like soup. Even as she set the door back in place convincingly and lit a candle with which to see, she found that it offered little light and no comfort. It would suffice, though. Holding her candle high, she saw rows upon rows of books, stacked higher than she thought was fair for one man's collection, some of the tomes' covers etched in languages long forgotten by the world.
If only I had time to read them all, Safiyyah thought to herself, but she kept on moving. She scanned the covers of those books, noted the tables in the room. Upon one was an astrolabe and what looked to be a more modern map. Safiyyah snatched it. She'd need a good map later.
Her search seemed to take hours, though Safiyyah knew it did not. Fear and darkness had a way of playing tricks on the mind. At times she could swear there were eyes in the shadows, but such was mere imagination. She ventured through the labyrinth of tomes, ancient volumes, and mystic texts, taking two books which interested her most. At the end of the hall she came to another set of doors, this one made of thick brass, its entirety rounded with a strange, alien language. It seemed so familiar...
But time was precious, and the master thief was already at work. It took but a minute of poking about with her lockpick and probe. There was a pop; a click; and then the door was cast wide, a groan like rolling thunder echoing as it did. Safiyyah entered with her pack in hand.
It was a magnificent room, far better lit than the others, though what the source of that sickly white light was could not be discerned. It certainly did not come from any flame, nor were there crystals embedded in the walls. Deciding not to question the magical means of mountain-dwelling warlords, Safiyyah took stock of the rooms contents. Marble floors, more of that strange script along the walls, shapes like bodies seeming to pop out of the wall... It was a good illusion, playing mean tricks on the eyes. Safiyyah wondered if she could replicate such an effect.
But more important than any of this was a set of ornate, ritual daggers arrayed on a table at the back. Something in Safiyyah's mind clicked: those were ancient Atlantean daggers! And the script on the walls, the language she could have sworn she recognized - it was one of the languages of that era, perhaps a bastardized form of the old Iirami alphabet. Her heart pounded and she began copying as much of the script along the walls as she could as quickly as she could, grabbing what looked to be a journal of some kind and flipping to the back. She scrawled onto those pages the text on the walls, text which seemed to repeat itself, and filled three pages with the stuff. It was then, in that moment of elation, that she noticed something.
Some of the writing was gone.
Gone. It had been there but a moment ago. Words do not walk away, Safiyyah reminded herself, confused and rather upset with herself. Another optical illusion. She looked around, but sure enough, no words were hopping around the room. No matter.
The daggers remained, though. Safiyyah approached them cautiously, half-certain they would disappear as well. They did not. She eyed the strange implements, wondering what odd things might have been done with them. A chill ran through her body as she reached for them, but she was no superstitious girl. She snatched one, and then another, and the last one too, stowing them all into her sash. They would be better observed in a safer place.
And that was when she suddenly found herself lurching forward, her head slamming into the table with a terrible crack! Wood split beneath her skull; splinters dug into her face; and before she could gasp for breath, she was hurtling backward across the floor. She slammed into the marble on her back, the most painful of sensations coursing through her body. Blood was in her eyes. She wiped it away, coughing, head spinning, mind racing.
Nothing? There was no beast, no gargoyle, no angry guardsmen pointing a sword at her throat. Above her was only a ceiling upon which was painted a terrible battle. It showed people dying, a city ablaze, and a terrible, terrible scene of a woman having a nail driven through their head.
It was her.
Quickly, Safiyyah rolled to the side, just in time to see a large iron spike slam into the floor where she had been but a second earlier. She got up quick as lightning, stumbling away from the cracked floor, bleeding from her forehead and face. Her blood should have felt warm, but she was cold. She was cold as ice. And looking back at the shapes where the writing had been, she understood.
The words did come to life. They did walk. They were words of protection; words of warding; words binding spirits to this place to serve as its protectors.
One of the daggers yanked itself from her sash and came down toward her chest. Safiyyah batted the unseen arm away skillfully, then sped for the doorway. It slammed shut in front of her, and she looked about the room quickly. One, two - no, three sets of words had left the wall, all of them vaguely like a man's. Three shapes. Three opponents. Three invisible devils.
Safiyyah started running, shoving her her hands into a pouch on her belt. She didn't remember whether it was powdered silver or chalk or gold dust or just some kind of sand; it didn't matter and she didn't care. She listened carefully for a footstep, and there it was, to her left. She tossed a fistful of powdered chalk at the creature there, covering it wholly. Safiyyah grew a wry, triumphant smile. She spotted some of her blood picking up off the floor, and so tossed another bunch of the stuff at that creature as well, making its outline visible to her.
But where is the third? she asked herself. But she had no time to guess. The missing dagger was in a monster's hand. She'd find it, or it would find her.
The creatures - not humans, she reminded herself, perhaps not even once-living things - came at her, totally silent, not even making sound where their feet touched the floor. Safiyyah yanked free one of the remaining daggers from her sash, ducking under the swing of the first and slicing at its side as it ran past. It hissed like a cloud of gas as her blade went through it, and she could see black ink oozing up into the air from its invisible wound. Still, it wouldn't stop moving, and Safiyyah could barely bring the dagger up again as the second creature came rushing at her. They bleed, she thought to herself as it reached out with its arms. Do they think? Feel? Were they people?
It took all her will to hold her dagger out, certain these things were not people. They may have once been, but no longer. She put the weight of her body into the thrust, and even though the invisible monster grabbed hold of her, she stuck her blade into its stomach, feeling a spray of something like mud splat upon her clothes. She looked down, staring as the black ooze rose up from where she'd stuck the thing with her dagger.
The creature covered in chalk fell upon her, heavy and thick, but as the last of the inky stuff escaped its body, it fell through her. A strange, soft mist of letters rose into the air around her, fading into nothingness.
Thunk! Safiyyah wasn't sure exactly what had happened for a moment, save that her leg felt odd and stiff. When she looked down, she saw a dagger - the lost dagger - sticking out from her thigh. The burglar screamed, and her scream surrounded her, ringing throughout the huge, marble room. Then, the dagger twisted about, wrenching her flesh and shredding it with its serrated edge. Her vision became watery as tears jumped from her eyes.
But she knew where the third beast was. Desperately, she took her dagger in both hands and jammed it down where she knew the monster to be. Black ooze came out, and so she pulled it out again, and she stabbed again and again and again. The air seemed to shudder, and then the weight on the weapon in her leg gave way entirely. It was gone.
Across the room, the last creature, still covered in chalk, sat crouched against the far wall. It did not move. It simply stared at her - she could feel its stare - as Safiyyah stared right on back.
Safiyyah had never felt such intense hatred directed at her until that moment. Gasping for breath, the alchemist stood on up, took the third dagger out of her leg, and grabbed the journal off the table. She then left the tower as quick as she could, dread gripping her the whole way as she went.
The last monster had seen her. It would tell its master. What was more, that master commanded unholy magics, and he would know she had stolen his secrets and destroyed his puppets.
Yet she was too afraid to go back and dispatch that creature, and she wondered if, perhaps, it knew that.
The night sky was starless. It hid more than thieves, it seemed. Safiyyah made her escape.
