The King's Thief

Ok, this one gets a mature warning again; no harsh language, no in-depth discussions of exactly how it happens, no gratuitous language of any kind; but it does deal with rape, frankly. I've done it as gently as I can, however. You'll see.



This one took a couple of hours to write, during some time when I should have been working for my job, but this is more fun, and I'd spent six hours the previous day planning. And this is supposed to be my holiday.

I'm sitting down to write the next chapter as I write this, with my favourite muse in my hand; I'm currently favouring Sainsburys Dark Rum, not the absolute cheapest, the next one up (I'm cheap, but not THAT cheap) then filled to the brim with Lime Diet Coke. Currently playing on iTunes: Jim Noir. This is usually how I write. Someone asked me, so that's it.

Chapter 14


Beck moved quietly around the workshop. He had rented this scummy, dimly-lit room from a surly slumsdweller by the name of Ricken. The man’s stench was overpowering, but Beck had put his personal feelings aside to accept the tenancy agreement; he needed a place that he would never normally be associated with, and this certainly fitted the bill. A completely empty room had originally greeted him, and he had quickly furnished this with a trio of trestle tables, a fourth, smaller, desk and a chair for him. Moving the remaining Banshees had been a simple affair; he had sewn two rough hessian bags together, the kind that potatoes normally came in, and covered each woman. Then he had given a coin to one of the servants at the Barracks, telling him that the bags contained food for the Barracks which needed to be stored long-term in the Slums. Within a day, the bags had turned up. The three altered women now lay, a finger occasionally twitching slightly, on the bare trestle tables. They remained naked; the first signs of emaciation were starting to touch Sayela, as she had been nearly a week without food.

Chapter 2

Kaliss sat in silence, looking around the bar with hooded eyes. Around him the rowdy patrons of the bar carried on their evening’s entertainment, banging wooden beer pots against the tiny tables and calling for the busty serving maids to attend to them. The malty taste of the beer lay sour in his mouth as he thought about the events of the past hour. How had things gone so badly, so fast? Inevitably his wandering mind alighted on the face of his lover, Sayela. He tried his best to remember her as she had been in life, pure, full of laughter, her ginger hair bouncing around her fair cheeks as she playfully dodged the city guard, rather than the incandescent corpse he had left behind. Although he knew in his heart that she was just the latest in the list of his conquests since he arrived in the city, his feelings for her were raw, like an uncovered wound. Almost immediately as he distanced himself from the scene – he did not want to say corpse, even in the privacy of his own head – his emotions had begun to come back under his control, his heartrate had slowed and his breathing had become less ragged.

Chapter 1

Kaliss knelt in the mud. In the meagre light from the sickle moon he could see the target ahead of him; the merchant Dangha’s warehouse. As a cloud covered the moon, the area was once again shrouded in darkness, but Kaliss’s brown eyes retained much of his night vision; looking to his right, he could see Irban similarly crouched at the corner of an adjoining warehouse. Kaliss’s brow knit in frustration; even from twenty feet away he could see Irban clearly. The moon faintly lit the man’s clothing, almost identical to Kaliss’s own, a black cotton shirt, hardy leather trousers, boots and a leather jacket, for the night was cool. Irban’s angle was wrong, the entire left side of his body in view from the target.