The Thieves’ Guild Page 6

  This day, the docks were alive with activity. Those ships that had wintered in Palanthas were loading and preparing to disembark. Sailors and seamen representing nearly every race on Krynn crowded the quays seeking employment aboard any ship that might take them. Other ships arrived hourly, returning from winter-long voyages that had visited nearly every port and harbor of Ansalon, bringing home to Palanthas their profits and curiosities. As far as the eye could see, masts rose high above the docks, creating the impression of a forest of tall ships. And above them all, floating and hovering and crying longingly, were the gulls of Palanthas, famous in song and tale.

  Cael made his way along the cobbled waterfront, weaving among the boxes and crates and squads of city guards, customs officers, and Knights of Takhisis. Though the Dark Knights allowed the city a loose rein when it came to harbor traffic, they had very strict rules about what could and could not be imported into the city. These rules were posted at strategic points all along the docks so that no visiting ship’s captain could claim ignorance as a defense. One of their most rigid laws forbade the possession or sale of any weapon. More than once, Cael was stopped and questioned, his papers checked, and his staff examined.

  All the while, he felt eyes watching him, but whenever he looked around, he noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Once, he spotted a woman mending a sail who looked suspiciously like the chicken vendor who had pursued him into the wine-merchant’s tent. Another time he was accosted by a beggar whom he thought resembled one of the drunken sailors.

  He walked slowly, leaning heavily on his staff and stepping carefully along the slippery cobblestones. His long straight auburn hair, though not so uncommon in Palanthas as it might have been in some other cities, singled him out as did the fact that he was an elf. He received many a stare. Even in a city as metropolitan as Palanthas, it wasn’t every day that a crippled elf strolled along the rough and tumble waterfront.

  His cool green eyes alert and inquisitive, he seemed aware of everything that passed around him, and though obviously crippled, he had no trouble dodging the occasional netload of freight that swung too near. He handled his staff as though born with it in his hand, and once, when a loose net hook careened at his face, he struck it aside without pausing in his hobbling stride.

  He continued along the waterfront until he reached Fleece Street and its beggars. He passed them without a glance, ignoring their plaintive cries and miserable wails, turning at last back onto Horizon Road, having taken the circuitous route around the city wall to bypass its heavily guarded gate. At the corner of Fleece and Horizon, he passed a noblewoman dressed in a green gown, with silver bangles on her wrists. Behind her, two men struggled beneath a massive rug, bearing its rolled weight on bowed shoulders. His suspicions alerted, Cael glanced back, but they turned quickly into Washwell Alley and vanished from sight. The woman looked like the seller of alabaster figurines, while one of the male servants, though his face was hidden by the rug, was certainly the second of the drunken sailors.

  As he stood staring after them, a sound behind him brought him spinning around. “Pardon me sir, could you spare—” the old man began. Cael had seen a glint of metal in the old man’s hand and instinctively cracked the fellow over the head with his staff. The old man slumped to the ground at his feet, his tin cup spilling its meager bounty of thin copper coins at the elf’s feet.

  Quickly, Cael propped the old man up against the wall, pausing for a moment to check for the lifebeat at his throat, and sighed in relief. “Sorry, old one,” he apologized. “You ought not to sneak up on me like that.” He gathered up the coins, dumped them in the cup, and placed it in the beggar’s limp grasp. Then, on second thought, he emptied the beggar’s cup back into his palm, returned the cup, and hurried away.

  After turning onto Horizon Road, the elf resumed his normal pace. The ancient cobbled way was sunk beneath the level of its curbs. Its iron sewer grates rose up to trip the unwary traveler and jolt the careless wagon driver from his seat. Where a tavern or shop stood, its doors thrown wide or darkly closed and guarded, the curbs were worn away by the passing of countless feet. Here stood a fountain spilling cool water into an ancient well, there a gate of new-Wrought iron guarded a small comfortable garden where a speckled terrier yapped wildly.

  As the cool morning breeze lifted, Cael felt a great longing enter his heart. All around him this great and ancient city thronged. He wondered at its multitudes, its thousands and tens of thousands of lives and loves and hates, its joys and grief. He looked at the well-ordered buildings and streets, some ancient and beautiful, some new and shabby, and a feeling for this place blossomed within him, unfolding and spilling with a thrill through all his limbs. He’d been in Palanthas, City of Seven Circles, for nearly a year, though to his elven senses it seemed but the passing of a day. After all he was an elf, and to the elves the passing of time means little. It seemed all the more strange to him that he should suddenly feel such affection for a city of humans, for nothing in the elven heart is sudden. He shook his head in wonder, his long auburn hair tousling in the freshening breeze, as he continued on his way. The breeze brought a scent of rain, and thunder rumbled in the hills to the west.

  Chapter Five

  Twenty-five. generations of Hammerfells have passed since the Founderstone was stolen from Balgard and Brimbar Hammerfell,” the dwarf growled as he tugged angrily at his snowy beard. Cael smiled wearily across the table. He’d heard this tale many times before. “We were never paid for it,” the dwarf finished.

  “Not that they would have sold it,” the elf said in his gentlest voice.

  “Not that we would have sold it!” the dwarf shouted, his fist striking the table so hard that their two mugs jumped into the air. Foam leaped on high and washed across the dinted wooden surface of the table. “Never! Not for any price!”

  “So tell me, Grandfather, why does the world not know this remarkable tale? Why do the minstrels not sing it at every festival?” the elf asked as he sat back in his chair and gestured at the players singing in the corner of the tavern Outside the streets were alive with the noise of festivities, but inside the small common room of the Dwarven Spring, a group of minstrels played and sang a lively air to a nearly empty room. Other than the elf and the dwarf, the tavern’s only occupants were a pair of off-duty Knights of Takhisis, a young man wearing the red robes of a mage, and an Ergothian silk merchant who snored with his head on the bar. Behind the bar, the barkeep carefully stacked a pyramid of crockery mugs. Windows set high in the walls provided the room’s only illumination. These looked out at street level, presenting a fascinating view of the latest fashions in Palanthian footwear.

  “Because, young Cael,” the dwarf explained, “it was forgotten. Yes, forgotten! Having stolen from Balgard and Brimbar Hammerfell their only treasure, the citizens of Palanthas promptly forgot how they came by the stone or what it meant or why it was taken from the dwarves in the first place. You see, thieves stole it from the city treasury not long afterwards, and it was never recovered. The city forgot about it, because to remember it was to remember their failure. History was rewritten and the stone forgotten.”

  “Until now,” Cael commented.

  “We never forgot it!” the dwarf roared. “We knew where it was all along. We tried to get it back, but we failed. Meanwhile, the city gave us a pittance in return for our ‘gift.’ To this day, we pay no taxes, though I am sure not half the fools in the Senate know why. Nor would they question it. No, the Hammerfells have always been exempt from taxation, and so it shall remain.”

  “Surely, Grandfather, over the centuries your family has saved in taxes many times the value of the stone,” Cael remarked.

  “That is not the point, as you well know!” the dwarf growled. “You young rapscallion, you always seem to steer me to the subject of the Founderstone. Why is that? You know how it makes my blood boil.”

  “I enjoy the telling of the tale,” Cael answered. “I am an elf, after all. I never weary of remembranc
es.”

  “Aye, that you are, my boy,” the dwarf smiled. “You and I, we are as unlike as wood and stone, yet we understand one another better than we do these humans, wouldn’t you say?” The elf nodded in agreement as he sipped from his mug.

  The minstrels finished their song and set aside their instruments. One wandered over to the bar and eased himself atop a stool, while the rest stepped outside, rapidly ascending the stairs to the street and vanishing into the crowd. Meanwhile, the two Knights of Takhisis paid their bill and staggered to the door. Turning, they waved to the dwarf. “Good morrow to you, Mashter Hammerfell!” they shouted drunkenly.

  “So long, boys. See you tomorrow.” The dwarf waved and turned back to his elf companion. “They keep the rings on my fingers,” he said, shrugging.

  The barkeep approached the table, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. He was a slovenly man, with heavy unshaved jowls and a nap of hair clinging to his sweaty forehead. He stopped at their table and slid two coins before the dwarf. “They paid their tab in steel coin, marster,” he said.

  “If nothing else, the Dark Knights can be counted on for steel coin,” the dwarf commented as he swept the coins from the table and into the pouch at his belt. “You can go now, if you like. The ceremonies will begin soon, I imagine.”

  “My boy is right keen to see them,” the barkeep said, smiling with his brown teeth.

  “Go on, then. I’ll close up here. Just make sure you are back by dark. There’ll be a crowd in here tonight, once the official festivities are over.”

  “Thank you, sire,” the barkeep said. He left them, tossing his apron on the bar as he hurried out the door. The last minstrel finished his drink and followed him up the stairs.

  “Now where was I?” the dwarf asked when they had gone.

  “The Founderstone,” Cael offered.

  The old dwarf stroked his long white beard while he eyed the elf with some curiosity. He seemed a mere youth, a lad of no more than twenty summers but reckoned handsome as far as elves go.

  “The Founderstone,” the dwarf continued after a pause. “Your talk always seems to come round to that, young Cael. You’ve ideas better forgotten.”

  “I only wanted to hear the story again, since we are about to go and see the precious thing,” Cael protested innocently.

  “Well, you know the rest as well as I. It was stolen by the Thieves’ Guild not long after Bright Horizon was renamed Palanthas, a long time ago even for dwarves. The city thought it better to forget that the stone had ever existed than admit its greatest treasure had passed beyond its grasp. The Guild, damn their greedy fingers, were untouchable. No one knew where to find them, no one knew how to stop them. Every attempt to recover the stone failed, and offers to purchase it back were ignored. So the city pretended it didn’t exist, and in time it was forgotten by everyone… except the Hammerfells.”

  “And now it has reappeared,” Cael said, finishing the story. “Found amongst the ruins of a Guild House when it was destroyed by the Knights of Takhisis four years ago. And the city has suddenly remembered the heritage of its greatest treasure, thanks to the researches of Bertrem, head of the Aesthetics of the Great Library. And today…”

  “Today it sees the light of day once more, after over two thousand years of darkness,” the dwarf said. “The Founderstone of Palanthas shall flower again. Though it grieves me to see it in the hands of another, I shouldn’t miss this for the world. Shall we go?”

  As the two rose from their chairs, the young mage in the corner dropped a couple of coins on his table. Nodding to dwarf and elf, he strolled out the door and up the stairs to the street. The old dwarf locked the door behind him, while outside, a fanfare of trumpets resounded above the city. “There’s the signal,” the dwarf said excitedly. “We’d better hurry.”

  “What about him?” Cael asked of the Ergothian silk merchant still snoring with his head on the bar.

  “Let him sleep it off,” the dwarf said, dismissing the fellow with a wave of his hand. “Come along. We’ll go out through the smithy.”

  They passed through a low door behind the bar, the elderly dwarf waddling ahead, the young elf limping behind, leaning heavily on his black staff with each step. They entered a storeroom filled with barrels and burgeoning sacks. A few candles in sconces near the door provided a dim light. In the center of the room there stood a wide pool, like the walls of a well, but it was filled to the brim with crystalline water that rolled and bubbled. Set into the water was a pair of tall wooden kegs, with their taps dangling over the pool’s lip. This was the Dwarven Spring, which gave the tavern its name. The water was not boiling but icy cold and rolling with a current that brought it up through one crack in the floor and out through another. The carefully joined stone walls of the pool captured the water for a brief moment on its subterranean journey and cooled the keg of beer and tun of wine set in it.

  The dwarf took a bucket from a stack of others and held it under one of the taps. He filled it until suds slopped over the side and spilled on the floor. “Grab yourself a bucket,” he said to the elf.

  “A skin of wine would suit me better,” Cael said.

  “Fill her up then. Hurry. I have a place on the stage for the unveiling of the stone. You shall stand with me, my old friend.”

  Cael filled a large goatskin with wine and slung it over his shoulder. Then together, they ascended a stair of rough wooden planks to a door that opened into a low roofed smithy. The dwarf locked the door behind them and, taking the elf by the elbow, led him quickly through the close, hot darkness, winding amongst a wilderness of anvils and bellows, piles of scrap iron, and stacks of finished products ranging from horseshoes to delicately wrought railings destined to grace the balcony of some noblewoman’s sitting room. A fire roared somewhere deep within the smithy, visible only as a wan red glow reflecting off the gently sloping ceiling. An intermittent hammer clanged out an awkward rhythm.

  “Who is that?” the elf asked. “You’ve someone working today?”

  “That’s just Gimzig,” the dwarf answered with annoyed scowl. “Gimzig!” he shouted. The hammer continued its weird cadence.

  “Gimzig!” the dwarf roared.

  The hammer ceased, and a few moments later a squat figure shuffled out of the shadows. Cael staggered back, covering his nose with his sleeve and coughing.

  The figure was shorter even than the dwarf, lighter boned, his movements quick and deerlike. The lower half of his face was covered with a thick mat of beard that was once white, as evidenced by the snowy fringe around the lips, but was now black with soot and the gods only knew what else. The upper half of his face was nearly hidden by a pair of billowing eyebrows, colored much like his beard, but tending towards gray rather than black, which hung sheepdog-like over his face. His eyes, twinkling with merriment, appeared and disappeared behind them with each movement of his head. The top of his head was quite bald, with only a thin halo of hair standing straight up from his scalp, as though he had been frightened as a baby and never recovered.

  As he appeared from the shadows, he wiped his grimy hands across the breast of the filthy apron dangling around from his neck. His beard split into a wide toothy grin at the sight of the dwarf and his companion.

  “Reorx’s bones, Gimzig!” the dwarf exclaimed as he covered his nose with a handkerchief. “You smell like a hive of gully dwarves. Don’t you ever bathe?”

  “OfcourseldowhentheneedarisesalthoughlatelythethoughthasescapedmeIadmit,” the gnome answered in one breath.

  Hammerfell rolled his eyes and gestured for the gnome to slow down.

  “Oh. I have been working,” the gnome enunciated as carefully as he could, “on some improvements to various time-saving devices. Would you like to see them?”

  As a race, the gnomes of Krynn were a curious lot. First and foremost, they were inventors—of machines, devices, appliances, and bureaucracies, none of which ever worked as originally designed. They lived furiously busy lives, always planning, devising, creati
ng, inventing, repairing, and reinventing their (more often than not) faulty first, second, third, ad infinitum, designs. Even their speech was rapid. To the unfamiliar, it sounded like a different language, but they simply spoke the common tongue at eight or nine times the rate of human speech. What was more, two or more gnomes could talk at once and understand each other perfectly. Gimzig had been a resident of Palanthas for approximately eighty-five years (like dwarves and elves, the gnomes were a long-lived race), and because of his more frequent dealings with humans, he had learned to slow his speech to a more intelligible rate. Because of this, whenever he met gnomes from his homeland of Mount Nevermind, they thought him slow and dull-witted.

  The gnome continued, “Of course you are one to talk, being a dwarf after all. Dwarves are notorious for their bathing habits or lack thereof. I have often considered conducting a study to determine exactly how often… oh! say, Cael tell me how did the self-extending portable pocket curtain rod work?”

  “Perfectly,” the elf answered through his sleeve. “I am so glad. I had some concerns about it, because the last three versions displayed some rather remarkable projectile tendencies.”

  “What’s this?” the dwarf asked, looking from one to the other. “You’ve been using his gnomish contraptions? For what? Certainly not to hang your clothes.”

  “My inventions have multiple uses that—” the gnome began to protest.

  Kharzog cut him off. “Enough! I don’t want to hear it. Are you or are you not coming to the Spring Dawning festival? I have a place on the stage. I don’t want to be late.”

  “Yesofcoursejustamomentletmegetmythings,” Gimzig said as he hurried away.

  “You aren’t coming with me smelling like that!” the dwarf shouted after him.

  The gnome’s voice floated back to them from the darkness. “Of course not. Just let me step into my newest invention, a speed-washing bathtub. The water is superheated and pushed through nozzles at a high velocity in order to yeeeeoooowwwwwwwww!”