The Thieves’ Guild

Chapter Seven

At the corner of Knight’s Candle Street and Horizon Road, Cael turned aside, ducking beneath a gleaming, hissing street lamp and entering a dark little alley called the Greenway. A slime-slick stream of water running down its center gave the alley its name. At the alley’s end, a rickety wooden stair clung to the side of an old building. Cael mounted it to a door and entered a low dark hall as rain sounded on the slate roof above.

An early spring rain would do nothing to dampen the night’s festivities. Indeed many in Palanthas welcomed the rain. Since the Dragon Purge, when the great blue dragon Khellendros seized the lands about Palanthas and began changing them to desert, the weather in the city had been turned on its head. In springtime little rain fell anymore, and the summers grew longer and hotter with each passing year. Yet autumn had grown unaccustomedly wet, with frequent violent storms, and winter brought the occasional dusting of snow, a thing unheard of in the past. Luckily, Palanthas had never relied on agriculture for its trade, but of late those families who did farm the surrounding valleys found it more and more difficult to reap the bounty of the soil.

So a good downpour on the night of Spring Dawning seemed a welcome reprise, even a sign of hope. The streets filled with drunken revelers, splashing in the puddles and singing like lunatics.

Cael entered a narrow, dark hallway, shutting the door behind him to keep the rain from washing in. Somewhere along the hall’s length, a baby wailed, while a man and a woman shouted obscenities at one another. A pair of children, naked and filthy, cowered outside an open door. Cael passed them without glancing into the room. He stopped a few doors down. As he tugged a key from his belt, a piece of crockery shattered behind him, sending fragments bounding down the hall. A woman screamed, and the children in the hall bleated as they bolted past him, their little feet slapping on the floor. Cael casually unlocked the door and entered his room.

The room was dim and small, with only a low bed beside the wall and a cheap wardrobe near the window, one door hanging crookedly ajar. Cael froze, immediately sensing that something was wrong. The wardrobe stood empty, his few possessions littering the floor before it. The thin mattress on the bed was overturned, the blankets stripped from it, and it was slashed in a dozen places. Quickly, he crossed to the window and threw open the shutters. No sign of anyone. His room had been ransacked. He swore softly to himself, but at the same time thanked his stars that he hadn’t been here. That thought drove another into his head, and he stepped quickly to the door to lock it.

Too late. The knob turned, the door banged open. A man huge as an ogre shouldered into the room, followed by what was surely his twin, in size and ugliness if not in blood. They grinned broadly with their yellow teeth. Behind them strode on lithe legs a woman closely dressed in velvet green, with velvet hood and cloak. A lavender veil obscured the lower half of her face, but it did not hide her dark, angry eyes.

Cael dove for the window.

“I wouldn’t do that!” the woman shouted. The note in her voice brought him up short, and he glared over his shoulder at her. “…if I were you,” she finished. “There is a crossbowman on yonder roof who can pierce the eye of a sparrow in the dark.”

“Mistress Alynthia,” Cael said with a grim smile. “Quite a coincidence, running into you so often.”

“Captain Alynthia, elf!” the uglier (if that were possible) of the two thugs growled.

“The same,” the woman answered as she removed her veil. The second hulk closed the door behind her and put his back against it. She pushed back her cowl, freeing a mass of dark curls, which spilled onto her slim shoulders. She returned his smile, but there was no friendliness in it. Her eyes spoke daggers.

“We’ll take it now,” she said.

“Tea? Surely. Just let me set a kettle to boil,” Cael said.

“No, you fool,” Alynthia snapped. “Stop trying to delay. You’ve cost us enough. We want it now.”

“Mistress, all I have is yours for the asking,” Cael said. “Only tell me what it is, and it shall be delivered.”

“You know very well, Cael Ironstaff, for you lifted it from my person last night,” she spat.

“How well my unworthy hands remember the occasion,” Cael answered.

Both bodyguards growled dangerously. “Let me break his head, Captain,” one said as he cracked his knuckles.

Alynthia’s dark eyes narrowed, her moist lips pursed. “The pollen of the dragonflower is the most valuable spice on Krynn,” she said. “It grows only in the Dragon Isles. Three days past, a shipment arrived aboard the Star of Ansalon, Gaeord uth Wotan’s flagship. I planned a daring theft and would have absconded with it from his private stores if you hadn’t interfered. Your vile fingers lifted it from my bodice, defiling my flesh in the process.”

“You speak like a novel,” Cael commented.

“You speak like a man about to die!” she snapped.

“Let me break his head,” the thug urged.

“My ankle pains me. May I sit?” Cael asked as he hobbled to the bed and eased himself onto it.

“Do what you like, only do not delay. I will not be trifled with.”

“Of course you won’t, Mistress Alynthia,” Cael smiled, his green eyes flashing merrily. While one hand clasped his black staff, he gripped the rail of the bed with the other. Moving faster than imaginable, he suddenly heaved the bed onto its side and dived behind it. A quarrel thick as a man’s finger thudded into the wall by his head.

With a roar of delight, the thugs rushed in. One snatched aside the bed as though it was a toy, the other sprang with clawing hands at the elf. But he was gone.