Life on the streets of Caliphas is hard. Finno’s father,a mate on a trading vessel that never returned from the lake, was gone before Finno was old enough to remember him, the pension was enough that Finno his twin sister Telra and their mother could survive in The Cairns. It was a pleasant if not perfect life, until mother started drinking and the the money from the pension could no longer support the three of them. The twins took to the streets and fell in with the local “beggars” guild, Telra pretended to be a boy and the two learned the craft the cutpurse.
Perhaps the fact they they worked as a team or perhaps due their natural aptitude the twins excelled at the trade. But even excellent cutpurse in the guild barely made a living, the twins drew the attention of Vismir a former burglar, with a mangled right hand, turned fence who taught them the trade of the burglar.
A burglar makes more money per job than a cutpurse makes in a month, but the most important part of any job was the prep work, and prep work takes time. But Vismir always said “It is it the prep that separates a skilled burglar from a soon to be prisoner.”
The night that changed everything
Finno and Telra knelt beside the wall of the compound and listened, they could hear the guard they had taken to call ‘the whistler’, they would have a hundred count to get over the wall any up to the roof once he passed. They looked to each other and shot odds/evens, Finno won and tossed his cushioned grapple to the top of the wall, the twins scrambled over and as Finno gathered his grapple Telra hossed hers to the roof. Brother and sister dropped prone to the roof as ‘the whistler’ made another pass.
There had been no lights on the second floor in the week they had been casing the place and the twins felt safe, Telra won the throw to open the shuttered window and they were inside.
By unspoken agreement Finno moved left and Telra right. He remembers that next minute with absolute clarity moving towards the moonlit bed right hand trailing along the wall, towards the bed. A silver candlestick holder, picked up and wrapped to prevent any noise as he steps forward to move the curtain aside. The smell hits him before he can see the body, the owner of the house dead for well over a week from the look and smell.
It starts as a scream, and he turns to his twin as the scream turns into a terrible laugh. Telra stands in the moonlight holding an ugly iron gobblet in her hand, but the way she stands and the look on the face are wrong. “You should have never come here.” Finno is frozen in place as his twin stretches obsceanly, “But thank you for this body, it is wonderful, ‘Taygetique canes infernum veniunt ad me’” A fiery portals begin to open besideTelra, the last words resonate in his skull to this day, as does the decision to run leaving his twin behind.
“Always plan an escape route and know it by heart” the twins always followed Vismir’s instructions and this time it was all that saved Finno’s life he was out the window off the roof and at the top of the outer wall when the black hound burst through onto the roof behind him, From his days has a cutpurse he could gut through the crowds like they weren't even there and that kept him ahead of the fell creature turning blindly into the alley he ran directly into Professor Petros Lorrimor. As clear as the rest of that day is Finno has no idea how the professor dispatched the Hell Hound but Finno would surely be dead without the intervention.
Since then Finno has acquired a few “hard to get” texts for the professor and the professor had promised to help find a way to free his twin it was a good relationship, so the news of the professor's death has hit the burglar hard. He heads to the funeral with a heavy heart, feeling as though his last hope of freeing his twin is gone.
