Dear readers, tonight we have something different. We reprint an interrogation of a protagonist by a border guard. The guard is rightfully suspicious, as the protagonist is a master thief, a selfish drunkard, and as it happens, stone cold dead.

‘Name?’ asked the demanding crow behind the tower-like lectern. Her break of a nose was impressive enough without somebody playing the practical joke of dressing her in feathers.

‘What in the One-Eyed God’s arse-crack is this?’ I spluttered. ‘I’ve already given my name to the port-master—’

‘Name!’ she yelled. ‘No dawdling! By order of the Allmark, refuse to answer and it’ll be the cells for a rancorous ghost like you.’

‘My name is Caltro Basalt. And what a fine welcome home this is, I must say. I sail all this way from the city of Araxes only to be greeted like a leper? I am a free soul, I tell you.’

‘Home, you say?’ The crone sucked on the end of her quill. ‘Where did you grew up?’

‘Taymar, here in Krass, if you insist on knowing my history. Near the mountains of Kold Rift.’

‘Who’s your family?’

‘I have none.’

‘Your people, then! Or are you refusing to answer?’

In my peripheries, I saw stout Krass guards inching closer, looking eager to teach a ghost like me a lesson.  There were many in Krass who were not fond of my kind. Yet all kinds of locks and doors can be opened with a smile. I tried one on.

‘Not in the slightest, scribe. I have no people. I was born to a pair of healers who lived on the wild steppes. They had me late in life to cure their boredom and had the dream of me continuing the family trade. I preferred stealing things instead, you see. It started with my parents’ clothes and trinkets, then food from the village markets. Enjoyed the thrill of it so much I joined a few Taymar gangs to hone my skills and my nerve. Can’t tell you the number of times my father came to retrieve me from the local prisons, spending hard-earned coin on bribes or favours. I was too young to realise I was dragging my parents’ reputations through the mud and towards penury. When I turned twelve, I didn’t think twice about running away. I did it for me, but in a way, it was to give my parents the peace they deserved. My parents both died the winter after. Swelterflux, the letter said, but it was their time. Quick and painless, and their ghosts didn’t rise. They were buried by the Nyx under a lemon tree with a copper coin in each of their mouths, and through guilt I stayed in Taymar for almost a decade.” I was impressed I’d kept my smile. ‘Does that answer your question?’

The crow-shaped scribe scratched at her papyrus without taking the two onyx shards she called eyes off mine. ‘Current occupation, if you have one?’

‘Vaultsmith. And the finest one you’ll ever meet. None in the Reaches better. There isn’t a man alive that can pick the locks I build, except me. I learned from a master vaultsmith here in Saraka.’ It was an easy lie. I wasn’t so much about the construction as the breaking of locks. But few trusted a thief, and least of all a scribe itching for a reason to bar me from entering Saraka.

‘And where have you been… vault-mastering lately, if I am to believe that? What brings you here?’

‘Aside from dying a gruesome death and facing eternal enslavement, trying to topple the brutal regime that is the Arctian Empire one noble-born at a time, mastering death magic, and fighting for my well-deserved justice, you mean?

‘Guards—’ the scribe began.

I held up my glowing hands and let the vapour of my fingers waft back and forth. ‘I went to Araxes on the invite from a noble, to open a vault that had defeated every other smith in the Reaches. The visit did not go as planned, and I was unfortunately enslaved as a ghost, as so many hundreds of thousands are in that endless city. I won’t spoil my tale by rushing it for you, but all you need to know is I earned my freedom.’

A fierce slap of the lectern made the guards flinch. ’Highly suspicious, I say. You have the look of a trouble-maker to me! One that is fleeing the weight of his crimes. How can I trust you to behave yourself?’

I pondered my long and arduous time in the southern deserts and the City of Countless Souls. Of the hardship enduring the whims and games of the rich and powerful. They had received what they had wrought.  ‘All my trouble is left behind, you can trust in that. And although I may have lived a life of a scoundrel and criminal, sometimes a wastrel, most definitely a failure, often a drunk, I have paid my debts. You won’t have any trouble from me.’

‘No comrades or friends accompanying you?’

‘I am alone. All my friends are dead and well in Araxes. Or simply dead.’

‘No lover?’

‘Courting isn’t what it used to be since my murder,’ I said, pointing to the white scars across my neck that had killed me.

‘Quite true,’ snickered the crow. ‘Enemies?’

‘For now, only my own inability to make the right decision. And ale. It seeks to destroy me every time it passes my lips,’ I said, grinning again.

The scribe twiddled her quill, thinking long and hard with what to do with my answers, and which parts were truth and which were lie. ‘What are your intentions in Saraka, ghost?’

I angled my head. ’Honestly? Now I’m dead and free, I’ve got all the time in eternity to see the world as I’ve never seen it. I feel I will explore.’ That much was true. Not the whole truth, of course.

‘Another useless laggard to clog the streets,’ she muttered. With a humph, the scribe waved me through the wall of guards and towards the glimmering city beyond the ports. My interrogation was seemingly over. All her suspicion that I was some great evil had died.

I made sure to reach the doorway before I called back to her. ‘Then again… ’ I said with my infernal grin. ‘I’m sure there will always be somebody who has a need for the greatest thief in all the Reaches.’

Ben Galley is a British author of dark and epic fantasy books who currently hails from Vancouver, Canada. Since publishing his debut Emaneska Series, Ben has released the award-winning weird western Scarlet Star Trilogy and standalone The Heart of Stone, the critically-acclaimed Chasing Graves Trilogy, and the new Scalussen Chronicles. When he isn’t conjuring up strange new stories or arguing the finer points of magic systems and dragon anatomy, Ben explores the Canadian wilds, sips Scotch single malts, and snowboards very, very badly. One day he hopes to haunt an epic treehouse in the mountains.

You can find Caltro Basalt on the pages of the Chasing Graves Trilogy, starting with Chasing Graves.

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