Baxil
POV: baxil
Summary
In a great Selay palace at the heart of an unnamed city, Baxil the Emuli apprentice-burglar follows his older partner Av and the silent, hooded figure they only ever call the Mistress — tall and lean, dark-skinned, long-black-haired, with the sky-pale eyes of a Shin woman in a face that is not Shin — through corridors of gold-thread carpet and mirrored walls toward the room they have come for. They are, Baxil confides silently to the Prime Kadasix in the back of his head, very probably the only thieves working in the world tonight who have broken into the home of a rich man with the intention of taking nothing.
The Mistress's job is the same job, every job. She walks past the chests and the wall-safes and the open coffer of unguarded spheres without a glance. She finds a particular statue — a small one, this time, set into a wall-niche at the corridor's end — and breaks it apart with a padded mallet that makes almost no sound. The valuables go untouched. Neither apprentice nor partner has ever been told which statues, or why; she chooses them by some criterion neither of them can guess, and they have learned not to ask.
This palace's statue stands at the corridor's end above a small dish of votive lamps. The Mistress sets to her work. Av keeps the corridor mouth. Baxil leans against the cool mirrored wall and lets himself daydream the same daydream he has every job — that the Old Magic of the West, if he could only find it, might change him into the kind of man who matters. He knows his luck. He will probably never find it. The muffled thuds end. The Mistress drops the broken stone into her bag, gestures, and the three of them go out the way they came in.