The Thieves’ Guild

Chapter Twenty-Six

In the next chamber a door opened, and a pair of Knights of Neraka dragged a man out into the dungeon passage. The man clawed at the doorposts, kicked, pleaded, begged, and screamed, but they lifted him bodily from the ground and carried him down the long arched shadowy hall to the iron door at the end. There they stopped, and a man wearing only a leather apron came out with a hammer and chains. While the prisoner wept, the jailer clapped irons around his legs, waist, and wrists and the Knights stripped his clothing. They dragged the man through the iron door. The jailer followed, slamming the door behind him with a resounding bang, cutting off a parting wail of despair.

Cael turned away, slumping to the floor of his tiny cell, his elbows resting on his knees, his forehead on his crossed arms. Heavy chains draped from the manacles around his wrists to the ones around his ankles, as well as to the iron collar around his neck. The collar had already begun to chafe the underside of his jaw, but that pain could not be compared to the dull pounding in his head. One sea-green eye was swollen shut, the skin around it the color of a plum. He breathed through bruised lips because the blood from his broken nose had dried, clogging both nostrils. Slowly, he worked his tongue forward, wetting his parched lips and gingerly feeling for loose teeth.

He suspected several ribs were broken, because whenever he coughed up blood, he nearly fainted from the pain. His back felt as though he’d had a family of dwarves dancing on it. His joints ached as if he’d been racked for several days, his neck throbbed as if he’d been hung for twice as long. He was swiftly growing sore in other places from sitting for a night and half the day in a stone chamber neither tall enough to stand up in nor large enough to lie down.

A voice at the iron door roused the elf from his musings. Looking up, Cael saw the round face of a city clerk peering through the three-inch-square hole in the door, but the man wasn’t looking at him. Instead, his eyes were lowered, as he read, “Cael Ironstaff, elf, homeland unknown, age unknown, parents unknown. You are accused of five counts of murder of her Dark Majesty’s soldiers, one count of burglary, one count of breaking and entering, one count of possession of an illegal weapon, seven counts of use of an illegal weapon, one count of possession of an illegal magic item, seven counts of use of an illegal magic item, one count of disguising your person for the purposes of subterfuge, one count of traveling without proper identification, and two counts of assault with the intent to commit bodily harm. You stand before his most dread lord, Sir Arach Jannon, Knight of the Thorn, judge of the city of Palanthas. Prepare to plead your innocence or declare your guilt.”

The clerk stepped aside. The tiny window remained empty for a moment, then the narrow, rat-eyed visage of Sir Arach appeared, glaring down at the thief. “Stand up before your judge,” he snapped.

Slowly, Cael struggled to his feet, his chains rattling. He had to stoop, the ceiling was so low.

“So, we meet again,” Sir Arach said. “This time, you do not have any friends around to help you.”

“No, but you do,” Cael said through his swollen lips.

“A pity we cannot meet, one to one, to see who is the better man,” the Thorn Knight bragged.

“Truly, a pity. Perhaps another day,” Cael said thickly.

“Alas, I fear your days are numbered.”

“Where there’s fear, there is also hope, as my shalifi used to say.”

“Not much hope, considering your life is soon to end.”

“Don’t count your draconians before they hatch,” Cael responded. “I could stand here and trade cliches with you all day, but these chains are heavy. Do what you will and be done with it.”

“Very well!” Sir Arach snapped. “You have heard the accusations. How do you plead?”

“Guilty on all counts,” Cael said, adding, “I’m proud to say.”

“Good! I like a man who owns up to his deeds. Shame is a foolish thing. Clerk, please note that the prisoner declared his guilt of his own free will and without coercion,” Sir Arach said, turning to the scribe. The pen scratched on the page.

“Of course, you realize the punishment your crimes warrant. An assault upon the Dark Queen’s agent is an assault upon the Dark Queen. The usual punishment for the murder of her Dark Majesty’s soldiers is death by slow torture,” he said as he returned his gaze to the interior of the tiny cell. Cael stared at him.

“The slowest torture possible, mind you. I have servants steeped in the arts of exquisite pain. They can draw out the torture of a man for months, even years. I imagine that a long-lived elf such as yourself could be made to endure for several decades.”

Still, Cael stared, saying nothing.

“Yes, it would be most horrible for you, rest assured. Yet, I could be persuaded to reduce the sentence to a quick, painless beheading…”

Cael blinked, his face as yet displaying no emotion. “I thought that might get your attention,” Arach Jannon chuckled. “All you have to do is reveal to me the secrets of your staff, and I’ll see that you do not suffer.”

Cael looked away.

“Think about it, my dear elf.” Sir Arach said. “Unless you have a will of iron, eventually you’ll tell me everything I want to know anyway. Why suffer days, nay, months of agony, when you can end your suffering in one swift moment?”

“One might think, your lordship, that the court is more concerned with my staff and the acquisition of power than with the administration of justice,” Cael said blandly, not looking at him.

Sir Arach spluttered a string of oaths and curses. “Strike the prisoner’s last remark from the record!” he shouted at the clerk, then turned one last time to the elf.

“I offered you mercy, elf! You will tell me every secret of the staff. Do not imagine for a moment that I cannot break your will, for I have done it many times and to stronger elves than you. Now you have made your own bed, and I have no more patience for your prattle. The sentence shall be carried out as ordered.”

Cael lowered his eyes, his head sank to his chest. He slumped to the floor, exhausted.

“Death by slow torture!” Sir Arach shouted, striking the door angrily with his fist.

A peel of mad laughter woke Cael from a dreamless reverie. He jerked awake, rattling the chains on his wrists and ankles. The Screamer, as Cael had named the poor demented soul locked in the next cell, loosed another cry of self-induced horror that ended in a series of hyenalike twitters, warbles, and whoops. A little farther down, from yet another cell, a voice harsh with thirst shouted, “Shut up, you giggling idiot!”

He was answered by yet another series of bloodcurdling shrieks.

“Shut up! Shut yer stinkin’ mouth!” the other inmate shouted. “Let me get my hands on… by the gods! Get me outta here! If I… I only… by the gods!”

“Rats! Rats! Oh, I ate one. There’s another! Rats!” the Screamer cried. “Oh… no! Not that. Not again. Not…” and so on, until the screams came again.

“Just shut up, will yer just shut up,” the other inmate wept. “Please, for Gilean’s sake, won’t somebody please kill me?”

Cael kicked at a rat nosing about his feet, then adjusted his position against the wall. A little rotten straw barely softened the wet stone floor beneath him, while a tiny grate next to the floor allowed his waste, as well as the water seeping from the stone walls, to slowly escape. Very slowly. Above him, a tiny window in the iron door was the portal through which light sometimes shone and his food, when he was lucky enough to get any food, was lowered.

He had no idea how long he’d been in this cell since his “trial.” The only way that he had to calculate time was by his feedings and by the regular torture sessions he endured. Tomorrow, or the next day, or perhaps the next, they would come for him again to question him with the rack or red-hot iron or something new. Again and again.

At each session Sir Arach reminded him how simple matters between them were. If Cael would only answer his questions, it would all end, quickly, painlessly. That was the one thought that kept the elf alive. The Thorn Knight couldn’t kill him until he discovered the secret of the staffs powers.

Ironically, it was only in the last few days before his capture that he’d begun to suspect and experience the full extent of its magical powers. The staff had been given him by his shalifi, Master Verrocchio, the greatest swordsman in all Krynn, a little less than a year before. With the staff came knowledge of some of its powers, including its ability to become a sword with a magically keen edge, to merge into a solid surface so that it might be hidden, and to lengthen or shorten at will. Because it was made by sea elves, it also gave its owner the ability to breath underwater. However, its seeming power against magic and undead were new to Cael’s experience. He wondered if these two new powers were somehow connected to his location, to Palanthas.

When the staff was placed in his hands and he felt the cool dark wood against his palms, he sensed what his master had told him he would feel, that the staff would serve him. He felt an instant bond to the weapon, and as he slid his hand down its length, the blade appeared effortlessly. In the year since that morning by the sea, the bond between himself and the weapon had only grown. At times he felt it was alive and if he had ears to hear, it might even speak to him. When he was away from the staff, he felt as if he were torn in two, as if he had left a part of himself. When the staff was in his hands, he felt whole, complete, and with that came a sense of peace as well as power.

He had already vowed that he would never reveal its secrets to Arach Jannon, no matter how much he was tortured. As the torture continued, he came to realize that the longer he kept such knowledge secret, the longer he would live. His elven blood would not allow him to surrender to despair. It offended his sensibilities to even consider relinquishing his staff to buy a swift end to the pain.

With these thoughts, Cael let himself slip back into the haze from which he’d been so rudely awakened only moments before. The Screamer now snored soundly, having exhausted himself. He’d wake again, no doubt, in a couple of hours, and once again give voice to the madness and horror of this place. Cael couldn’t sleep, couldn’t rest Every breath he took was full of pain, as if the air itself was poison. Every breath was to gag, every sniffle of dungeon air sent his stomach heaving as surely as though he were leaning over the rail of a wave-tossed ship. He was tempted to shout for the guard, but he knew that would do no good. No, what he was really tempted to do was weep.

In the darkness of his cell he noticed a light beginning to well from the tiny sewer grate near the floor. Never had he beheld such a beautiful glow, even as he wondered at its source. The golden light danced through the sewer grate, growing in brightness until he thought he’d go blind. Even as the light grew, the malodorous air neared an extreme beyond human or even elven endurance. Cael at last identified its source, the putrid scent fielding the memory directly from his reeling brain.

“Gully dwarf!” he retched.

“For that I ought to leave you here,” a shrill voice barked in reply. The silhouette of a head appeared behind the sewer grate. The head was bearded, but Cael could distinguish little else without leaning closer, something he was reluctant to do.

“Gimzig?” he inquired.

“At your service, sir,” answered the figure. The gnome continued to spout a rapidfire stream of words, while fumbling with some large cumbersome object that looked like a giant spider trying to attack his bearded face. “Have you out of there in a jiffy, got a spider here in my pack that will do just the trick on these deep set bars, good thing they aren’t steel. Passage is so small I didn’t think I would get it in here, but where there’s a will there’s a thousand ways, as my grandfather Gornamop used to say. Say you look a little thin and worse for wear, haven’t they been feeding you now and then? Well, we’ll set that straight, just let me put this thing in place here with the legs against the stone and grasp the bars like so, did you notice the modifications? No? Well, that should do justthetricknowpresshereandlockthisintoplaceand… whoa! Look out!”

With an explosion of dust and splintered ‘stone the small but stout iron grate vanished, leaving behind a ragged gaping hole slightly larger than the grate that once filled it. Fearing that the noise had been heard by his guards, Cael didn’t hesitate, and despite his many injuries, immediately squeezed through the opening, nearly shredding his threadbare prison clothes in the process. When he wriggled into the tiny passage on the other side, he looked as if he had passed through a gnomish cheese grater.

The tunnel in which he found himself was barely large enough to accommodate his slender elven form. Even so, the figure that confronted him seemed little discomfited by the narrow surroundings. Only his pack, half as large again as himself, caused him any inconvenience. His grizzled white beard was now matted with dried sewage. A pair of long white eyebrows drooped over his eyes, and around Gimzig’s head was a strapped a leather belt that held the two halves of an open scallop shell in which a stubby yellow candle burned and dripped with yellow wax.

Like most gnomes, Gimzig wore an odd conglomeration of clothing replete with multiple vests of differing material, pouches, pockets, pencil bandoleers, as well as plenty of hooks and loops from which depended numerous useful tools and a good many for which the uses had been forgotten. Various scraps of paper, some covered with scrawls of ideas and design outlines and drawings, poked out from pockets all over his body (even from the cuff of one boot), giving him the appearance of a poorly stuffed toy bear. Even his grizzled beard served as a tool repository. Entangled among the matted hairs, bits of straw and metal filings, remnants of meals, and caked sludge of the gnome’s sewer home was a pair of pliers hopelessly tangled beyond retrieval.

“Very good very good!” Gimzig nodded excitedly, nearly extinguishing his candle flame and flinging hot wax like a wet dog shakes off water. “The spider worked perfectly, or I should say it would have worked perfectly had I not accidentally pressed the release, but otherwise it worked very nearly just about perfectly. Of course, it almost took my head off.” He took a breath, pondering for a moment. “I think I know how to fix that, in any case you are free now. My, but it’s a good thing the Knights starved you or else you would never make it through this tunnel, you’d been shading a bit toward the heavy side lately and eating too much anyway, I should say it all comes of eating dwarven cooking.”

All the while the gnome had been carefully folding in the legs of a large mechanical spider that he had used to rip the sewer grate from the wall. Seeing Cael’s alarmed glance, he continued in an unbroken stream, “Remarkable the things you can do with springs and levers. You know my work, well, this is one of my latest creations. I call it a spider, and it was originally designed to open salt-crusted portholes on ships but it displayed an unfortunate tendency to rip great gaping holes in the hull, which of course induced advanced tendencies to sink especially in heavy seas, are you ready?”

Cael held his nose and nodded. In the meanwhile, the gnome had finished folding the spider’s legs into its body, creating a remarkably compact and nondescript metal box. He dropped this over his shoulder into the pack strapped to his bent back, producing a metallic clunk, which was rapidly followed by an alarming series of sproings, poings, and pings. Gimzig paused, his mouth open to say something and waited warily, peering over his shoulder, until the noises subsided.

“Crikey! I hate it when that happens,” the gnome sighed when all was quiet behind him. “There’s enough in there to turn us into cabbage salad faster than you can say rotoslicerdicer. Of course everything in there is absolutely essential for the rescue of certain elves from the dungeons of Palanthas, well, come along then, follow me, are you sure you are able to, I could probably arrange for you to be pulled by a crankrope.”

“I’ll crawl,” Cael coughed. Blood flecked his parched lips. Meanwhile, Gimzig somehow turned himself and his pack around in the narrow tunnel without setting off any of his devices. Dragging himself with his elbows, Cael struggled after his rescuer.

“The tunnel just goes a little farther before it dumps into a proper sewer,” Gimzig said. “Watch that stone there, it looks ordinary enough but it’s a trap.”

Cael twisted himself into cramped knots to avoid the stone slightly projecting down on him from overhead.

“Someone probably placed it there to prevent just this sort of escape, I could disarm it, but that would take time, and it’s just as well to leave it alone, mighty tricky those traps in the sewers and dungeons, you can always know exactly where anything important is by the number of traps you find beneath it, don’t know why it took the city so long to find the Thieves’ Guild in the first place, all they had to do was root around down here for a while and you get to know everything you ever wanted to know about this city, the sewers are a perfect reflection of the city above, clear as day if you know what to look for, I could have told them ages ago and I could tell you now where every Guild house lies.”

The gnome suddenly vanished from sight, but his voice echoed back up the tunnel, “Watch that step there, don’t fall on yore’ head.”

Cael wriggled head first down the narrow tunnel, emerging like a red-haired worm from the wall into a larger sewer passage. On the walkway below, Gimzig nervously eyed the black churning water flowing through the circle of his candle’s light. “Been raining dwarves and kender up above,” he commented, as Cael slid to the floor beside him.

“I am deeply in your debt, Gimzig,” Cael said, rising wobbily to his feet. “How you came to find me, I haven’t a clue.”

“Captain Alynthia sent me of course. It was a simple enough task to track you down, all I had to do was search most of the dungeon cells, you forget that I spent forty years mapping every passage, tunnel, hole, channel, pipe drain, grate, gate lock and quoin of the vast and magnificent Palanthian sewage system that has been perfectly operational for over two thousand years!” His voice had sunk to an awestruck whisper.

He continued, “Long ago, the Civil Engineering Guild of Mount Nevermind decided the sewers should be studied to see if the gnomes ought to make any improvements, and after they placed their request before the city senate-only to be turned down, for some unaccountable reason-they commissioned me a junior Guild member only just earning his first engineer’s stripe, with a worthy life quest-to make a detailed map of the sewers of Palanthas-but unfortunately it only took me forty-odd years to complete my report. Naturally by now I know these sewers like the hairs of my own beard: every nook, cranny, crevice, crack, and rat hole of it (the sewers not my beard) and so it was simplicity itself to find you and effect an escape. Say lad, are you sure you’re capable of mobility, you look like you’re about to faint.”

“I just feel a little light-headed,” Cael mumbled as he slumped to the ground.