The Heist of Sigallah (The Kingdom of Dragons Book 3)

III - The Master Plan

He'd expected the plan to be more complicated, but it was very straightforward. Well, mostly. The part about the underwater cave with an air bubble inside of it was a bit hard to believe at first. But Elaya hadn't seemed to be joking when she'd told him about it, and oddly, he believed her.

Otherwise, it seemed fairly simple. The night of the ship's arrival, a group of thieves would swim to the back of the ship and climb up onto the deck using a grappling hook with rope. The first one to climb up would use blow darts to knock out any guards and crew that might be awake. Then they would repeat this however many times they needed to get inside the hold of the ship, where the money was supposed to be stored. Then they would carry as much as they could outside in backpacks and dive to the underwater cave where they would hide the money until it was safe to transport it outside of the city.

The reason they needed more people for this was that not only it would make fighting the people protecting the money easier, but also because they couldn't go back to get more silver, so the more people there were, the more they could carry. The crew would most likely notice something was going on, and they would sound whatever alarms they had, alerting the guards who were always present in the harbor.

It didn't sound easy, but it sounded doable. As long as they were quick and quiet, they could take a relatively large number of coins back from the dragons. And frankly, Rhenor would rather throw it all in the ocean than for it to end in the dragons' pockets.

From the detailed plans of the ship, the various fail-safes in case something went wrong, and even just the fact that someone from this organization of thieves knew enough about alchemy to brew a potion strong enough to debilitate the guards and crew with blow darts, Rhenor could tell that this had been in the works many months ahead of time.

He would have loved to meet their leader since, according to Elaya, this woman was the one to put all of this together, and clearly much more than that. She had gone by Nova before her capture and most likely execution. Though surely the dragons would want to make that public, wouldn't they? And nothing like that had supposedly happened.

Nevertheless, something about this rubbed Rhenor the wrong way. Elaya had told him that the reason this hideout hadn't been discovered was that each member only knew about one or two of the hideouts, so even if they wanted to betray them, they wouldn't know about everything. Except for the leader, who had to know everything.

So with this logic, assuming it wasn't Nova who had betrayed them, which Rhenor doubted, it must have been more than one person. And with how thought through everything here seemed, and how long they had supposedly been able to keep everything secret, Rhenor had a hard time believing that the city guard would find and apprehend so many members. So how many traitors were there?

There had also been the concern that those traitors had also shared the plans to steal the silver, and that the whole mission would now be a trap, but Elaya had assured him that only Nova had known the full plan, with the rest only knowing bits and pieces, and that they only found all of the plans and documents by turning this place over, searching for anything related to the heist.

"How long can you hold your breath under water?" Elaya asked as she peered down at the map of the ship. It looked like any other ship, but it seemed to have metal plating to give the hull extra protection.

Rhenor shrugged. He wasn't sure since he hadn't exactly had much of a chance to test that ability and possibly train, living a lot of his adult life in the mountains with the only body of water near him a river that would most likely kill him if he tried swimming in it due to its temperature and speed.

But he was sure he could do this. Swimming to the cave to hide the coins would be the least of their worries, he was sure. The biggest problem, in his opinion, would be to sneak back on board to leave the way they had come after they were done collecting the money.