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In front of shelves of leather-bound books, a severe, dark-haired woman with an eye-patch gazes directly at the viewer.

The Eye of the Storm

- prologue

The Eye of the Storm is a novel in progress and my first attempt at writing over an extended length. This extract is the prologue to the novel, introducing the main protagonist. The story is set in a vast city, in an indeterminate age on the cusp of the change from magic to science. Teela is an orphan thief, brought up in a great library. I tried to develop a very particular 'voice' for her, arrogant and self-deprecating both at once and always informed by her childhood buried among the histories and writings of ages past (excerpts from which appear as quotes at the beginning of every chapter)...

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"Once in every thief's lifetime there will come the one job that he was born to. If refused and left undone, that job will make a nonsense of all your aspirations. If you are a good thief you will recognise it; if you are the best of thieves you will carry it through, and your name will live in history." b[Vol. 2 of the Thieves' Handbook]

This is how it happened. So the storytellers always begin, and so do I. Death stalks us all, yet never in a guise so strangely terrible as that which the grim jester wore when first he came for me - and all of us in Draffe, and in the world - during the year of Storms. If he had won then there would be no tale, no teller, nor a single soul still able to peruse these words of mine. Well, things went the other way, and so it is that I, Teela Darkstalk, sometimes called One-eye or Steeltooth's bitch, take up my pen and wrack my brains for means to tell this tale, in the hope that it may amuse, if not instruct, its readers.

How to begin? Perhaps a description of myself will serve, some knowledge of the narrator informing the narration, especially since this tale must in good part come dredged from my own memories and what I saw and did - strange, to be both playwright and actor all at once. How easy it is to see oneself as central to the game of life, as if all things came into being with your birth and at your death the world ends; how easy and how arrogant.

But to my tale. (One cavil, here; some may not credit that such things should be. Well, thus for them! I have no need for approbation, and their unbelief reveals only the limit of their own experience, in no wise constraining or disproving mine!)

My early childhood is obscure and I have never known who my parents were, although it seems likely that my father was a minor thief executed by the authorities of Draffe - of whom I shall have more to speak later - and my mother one of the anonymous women who beckon with painted grins and disease-rotted fingers from the tavern doorways of Rogues' Hole, that waterfront labyrinth of alleys and lanes in Draffe, once described as the only place on Earth where the wine is cheaper than water, and the whores cheaper than both.

At least one of my parents must have been from the south, Sagathia probably, or so it would seem from my colouration - light-eyed and tallow-skinned, the pallor of my face made the more striking by the mop of coarse, black hair that frames it. Not a pretty face, if truth were known, gaunt, strong-featured, almost androgynous, with a wide mouth and a nose that could have been described as aquiline had not a sharp blow somewhat bent it several years ago. Anyhow, whoever my parents were and whatever their reasons for abandoning me, I was taken in by the Confederacy of Thieves at the age of two, joining the other young apprentices - or 'skippers' - in learning the tricks of the honourable and ancient trade of Thief. I was a solitary child, teased for my silence and my seriousness, but I was tall for my age and, despite a lean and bony scantiness of build that has stayed with me until this day, well able to look after myself. My scarred face and missing left eye are legacies of that time; I have forgot the reason for that particular fight but I still have the slicer I used to kill my antagonist, a beautifully balanced stiletto whose blade - worn paper-thin now by sharpening - still gleams as brightly as the day I stole it. I cannot remember the name of the deader even, as if it mattered. His only importance is that he was the first; I took his life and he took my eye - I've always thought that a fair accounting. I was nine.

In this and other ways I soon earned the respect of the other skippers, if not their liking, and so avoided the unpleasantness that came to others of the female apprentices with the onset of puberty. My defences were twofold; those who were not dissuaded by my plain face and skinny body were discouraged in any amorous intent by the prospect of a rather more violent encounter than they were prepared for. In fact I did not join in many of the crude recreations of my peers, preferring to browse among the books, maps and scrolls of the Safe-House's extensive library, and I developed a talent for taking isolated facts, hints and cryptic allusions from disparate sources and weaving them into a coherent whole. In these endeavours I was encouraged by Steeltooth, the old librarian and historian of the House, a wise and kindly man who was to me the father I never had, and who was eventually to die in a strange and horrible way at my hand, as I shall tell. Under his tutelage I became both literate and numerate (where most of my contemporaries to this day sign themselves with a scrawled 'X' and can barely count to ten using their fingers!) and developed a working knowledge of several languages, including some of the more arcane and ancient scripts that grimoires and books of lore are written in. Thus it was that I was able to unravel the circumstances surrounding the Eye of the Storm - but that was later.

With Steeltooth's help and my own natural skills I graduated from apprenticeship aged nineteen and three months (remarkably early for a 'federated Thief) and found myself a free agent, bound to the Confederacy only by loyalty and the yearly tithe. Like some few other of the younger thieves I kept my room at the Safe-House, to be near Steeltooth - who by now was aging and in failing health - and to have access to the library and the House's other benefits. Some teaching paid my rent and still allowed me time to ply my trade with little difficulty and some success.

My story proper starts a sevenyear beyond that time, one dark and rainsome night in Hallowsmonth - a time, so say, of witchery and ghosts, of hauntings from the past. And so indeed it proved to be.

So, Hallowsmonth, the tenth month of the year of Rains, a year before the world was all but ended...

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