The Thieves’ Guild

by Jeff Crook

  “I see,” Gaeord sighed appreciatively. “But what does it mean?”

  “It means, dear Gaeord, that either your thief crossed the lawn by running backwards, or he wore his boots turned around backwards, or the boots themselves were magically altered to leave backwards impressions.”

  “Of course!” Mistress Jenna exclaimed from without.

  “So he jumped over my wall wearing backwards shoes,” Gaeord said, still confused.

  “No, he dropped from the wall into your garden wearing backwards shoes.” Taking the sweating merchant by the sleeve of his pajamas, Sir Arach led him back to the garden path.

  “Where has Mistress Jenna gone?” Gaeord asked as they emerged from the roses.

  Sir Arach looked around, equally puzzled, then shrugged and continued his explanation as he led Gaeord back to the house. The red-robed sorceress had vanished, as was her wont.

  “Having gained entrance to the estate, he then followed your daughter. from her assignation across the lawn and into the house, past the guards who probably thought it best to not see her entrance, in case they were questioned later. He then went up the stairs, hid for a moment in the niche, then continued down the passage after narrowly avoiding the attack of the magical bronze guardians.”

  “But you can’t get to that chamber from that hallway,” Gaeord argued.

  “Yes, I know,” Sir Arach said absently. He walked along, eyeing something he had drawn from a pocket of his gray robes. “Of course, I should have known at once that the boot prints were a ruse. The rose thorn stuck to the hem of his cloak proved that he had been in the garden before entering the house.”

  “What about the second thief?” Gaeord asked as they stopped at the front door. “This doesn’t account for the thief you say entered through the loft. I should think he is the more talented and dangerous of the two.”

  “My dear Gaeord, why worry yourself needlessly? Let a professional do the thinking, for it isn’t your strength. Now that I have a track to follow, I shall surely hunt down both thieves. Give me two turns of the glass on the grounds and about the house and I’ll give you your men.” With these words, Sir Arach turned and strode off in the direction of the reflecting pool.

  Gaeord was just finishing a breakfast of ham and fried potatoes, a servant standing at his elbow to retrieve the empty plates, when Sir Arach returned, red faced and excited by his efforts. He slid into a seat at the table quite uninvited, and said without being asked, “Yes, thank you, I am famished. But no potatoes. I prefer eggs, poached, lightly salted if you don’t mind. And do hurry, I am expected at the Spring Dawning ceremonies in little more than an hour.”

  The servant glanced at his master, and at Gaeord’s nod, hurried away to the kitchen.

  Gaeord set aside his knife and fork and dabbed at his lips with a linen napkin almost as large as a ship’s flag. “So you have solved it then,” he muttered through the napkin.

  “Most assuredly,” Sir Arach answered, as he examined the silverware. Gaeord had the uncomfortable feeling that his every possession had been carefully noted, categorized, and filed away in the enormous intellect of the Lord High Justice of Palanthas. “An interesting case, with several remarkable features. I thank you. I wouldn’t have missed it for all the jewels in Ansalon.”

  “So who is the thief?” Gaeord asked, as a servant entered and began to clear away the other dishes and glasses.

  “Thieves,” corrected Sir Arach. “No, perhaps you were right—thief. I’ll tell you who it is not. It is not the man who is currently at the bottom of your reflecting pool attracting sharks from the bay. Nor is it one of your household servants, nor one of your guests of the night before. They have all been accounted for. No one is missing.”

  So one of the thieves was dead! Gaeord let out a sigh of relief and wiped his brow with his napkin. Then a cold chill prickled the nape of his pomaded neck, for he realized that, during the course of an hour, Sir Arach had ascertained the current whereabouts of every guest who had visited his party, as well as all his servants. This hinted at an enormous network of informants and spies, a network more fantastic than even the most fantastic rumors circulating in Palanthas.

  “Who is at the bottom of the pool, then?” Gaeord asked timidly.

  “Most likely one of the servants hired for the evening—a steward, wine servant, or musician. He slipped away during a lull in the party. It is possible that he had assistance from someone else on the inside,” Sir Arach said.

  A servant entered with Sir Arach’s breakfast, and it was some time before Gaeord could get another word out of the man. For such a small, thin fellow, the Thorn Knight polished off copious amounts of fried ham and eggs, not to mention a full pot of tarbean tea. Finally, when nothing else remained, he settled back in his chair and dabbed his lips, sucked his teeth, and eyed the plates for any crumbs he might have missed.

  “Do you have any clues as to the other thief’s identity?” Gaeord finally asked. He had grown anxious and wished the Thorn Knight would leave. He could recover financially from the theft, but he feared he might never shake the feeling that Sir Arach Jannon knew everything there was to know about him, from how much sugar he took with his tarbean tea, to the number of bags of untaxed steel and gold coins that lay hidden under the floor beneath his bed. Besides, the morning was getting on, and as this day was the annual Spring Dawning festival, his schedule was quite filled. He was anxious to get the awful business of the burglary behind him.

  Sir Arach gazed at him for a while before answering his question, as though enjoying the tension that his continued silence created. Gaeord squirmed in his chair and toyed with his napkin, gazed out the huge windows of his breakfast room over the wide blue sweep of the Bay of Branchala—anything but look at his guest as he awaited the answer.

  Finally, with a small chuckle, Sir Arach began. “I’d say we’re looking for a youngish man, early twenties, with coppery hair, slim build, Walks with the aid of a staff,” he rattled off while he observed his host’s expression.

  “Really, Sir Arach. How could you—” Gaeord began, but the Knight cut him off.

  “I had a man watching the estate last night. He saw just such a character pass up the street toward the University but took him for one of its students. However, the time is approximately correct, as we learned from a more careful interrogation of your guards, which established the time when your daughter returned to the party. No one else was seen in the vicinity of your southern wall at that time, though my man failed to notice anyone climbing over it.”

  Gaeord rose from his chair, his face flushed, and threw his napkin on the table. “Really, I—”

  Sir Arach continued, “Having gained entrance to the house by following your daughter through the door while the guards looked the other way, he made his way upstairs, as I have already described. Now, you didn’t mention that three weeks ago you replaced the iron bars protecting the small fourth-floor window above the front door.”

  “Yes. How did you—”

  “The space between those bars is greater than at any other window, wide enough in fact to admit a grown man, if he is nimble enough,” Sir Arach said.

  “Yes, well, it would be impossible—”

  “Wide enough also to allow a man to escape. That itself is a clue, as the thief probably had knowledge of the replacement and its wider bars. Probably, we shall find him in the employ of the blacksmith who wrought them, or else a close friend of said blacksmith—a dwarf named Kharzog Hammerfell, I believe.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Gaeord croaked.

  Sir Arach continued, “The thief exited through the window, then used the ledge to make his way around the house until he could drop down onto the cage protecting the loft door.”

  “But the spikes.”

  “He avoided them somehow.”

  “Impossible!”

  “Master Gaeord, that word comes too often to your lips,” Sir Arach remonstrated. “Once all other possibilities are eliminated, what remai
ns must be true, no matter how remarkable it seems.”

  “I see,” Gaeord said, still unconvinced.

  “The rest you know. He entered and found the room already held by your inside-job thief. A scuffle ensued in which the inside thief was killed and the first made off with the loot. He then dived into the pool, swam through your water gate…”

  Gaeord opened his mouth to make some exclamation, then clamped his teeth shut before uttering a sound.

  Sir Arach continued, smiling, “… and made his way to shore less than a bowshot beyond the north wall. I found his boot prints in the sand, again backward as though he had entered the water there. Now it is simply a matter of following these clues to our man. The name of the thief, and his imminent capture, are only a matter of time.”

  Chapter Four

  An elf hobbled out of the alchemist’s shop at the corner of Trade and Truth Streets, pausing to watch as the owner, a small round man with a small round face baked brown and leathery from years of bending over his cauldrons, locked the door and propped a sign in the window that read, “Closed for the Spring Dawning Festival.” The elf turned, and, smiling, he patted the coin-fat purse dangling at his belt. Long strands of fine hair the color of burnished copper framed his narrow elven face and offset by the richness of their color the brilliance of his laughing, sea-green eyes. Narrow lips smiled slightly beneath a proud nose. His cheeks showed no hint of downy hair, for no elf upon Krynn could grow a beard. He wore a white tunic, somewhat blowsy at the sleeves and breast, and a pair of loose-fitting trousers of brown homespun. A pair of hard-worn, dull black boots completed his attire. He held a gnarled staff of polished black wood gripped firmly in his left hand.

  Across the street, a pair of drunken sailors stumbled from an alley and squinted in apparent surprise at the sun, already well up in the eastern sky. The elf turned right and slipped into Gravedigger Alley—a close, dusty lane lined along one side with stacks of empty caskets. Many of the city’s undertakers had their shops here. The noises of hammering and sawing resounded against the walls, drowning out all other sounds, even the click of his staff against the cobblestones. The work of this alley’s denizens never ceased, it seemed, not even on a day so full of hope and joy as the Spring Dawning Festival.

  The elf limped along, leaning heavily on his staff. Behind him, the two drunken sailors staggered into the alley. One bumped into a stack of coffins and sent the gruesome boxes crashing to the cobbles. A man appeared in the door of Mauris and Sons Caskets and began to curse at them loudly enough to be heard even over the constant hammering and sawing.

  While the elf watched them over his shoulder, someone bumped into him from in front. Instinctively, his hand grasped at the heavy coin "purse at his belt, while he spun, fist clenched. A young girl staggered back from him, her basket of laundry spilling onto the dusty cobbles at her feet.

  A string of shocking oaths escaped her lips as she angrily brushed a hand through her mop of long, dirty blonde hair.

  “Why didn’ya look where you’re going?” she swore. “Didn’t see you me stannnn…!” Her gray eyes grew wide as they met his. Her jaw dropped.

  The elf smiled, his green eyes sparkling. “What’s your name?” he asked the girl.

  “Claret,” she whispered, her eyes still round as saucers.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Sixteen,” she answered, then started as though stung. “Nineteen!” she corrected herself with a shout. “I am nineteen.”

  “Almost nineteen,” she amended in response to the elf’s skeptical glance.

  “Do you live in this place, Claret?” he asked.

  “Yes. My father—” she began.

  “I have lost my way. Can you tell me how to reach the Palanthas Trade Exchange?” he interrupted.

  “I’ll do better than that. I will show you,” she said suddenly, grasping his hand.

  “But your laundry,” the elf said.

  “It’s not mine. I was only doing it as a favor.” She hurriedly collected the spilled laundry and dumped it into the basket and before shoving the whole affair into an open doorway. “Come along, I’ll take you there,” she said. Clutching him by the hand again, she pulled him along, but he stumbled, unable to keep up.

  Seeing him hobbling madly to keep pace with her, a little cry escaped her lips. “I’m so sorry,” she whimpered. “Your foot.”

  “It’s nothing,” the elf consoled her. “Pay it no mind. But walk a little more slowly, if you would.”

  They continued on their way. She led him past more under- takers’ and cabinetmakers’ houses, a stonecutter’s shop with finished marble headstones crowding the doorway, and an inconspicuous door that proclaimed the occupant to be a dentist and surgeon. They reached the end of the alley and stepped into the sunlight, turning right onto Horizon Road just east of the gate. The elf looked back and spotted the two sailors, still staggering along behind him.

  “What’s your name?” Claret asked.

  “Caelthalas Elbernarian, son of Tanis Half-Elven,” he answered.

  “Son of who?” the girl asked over her shoulder.

  “Never mind,” he said with a smile. “You may call me Cael.”

  “I’ve never met an elf before, nor anyone so handsome. But handsome isn’t the right word, is it? Beautiful. Yes, that’s it. Beautiful. Are you married?” she asked in one long breathless string.

  “You seem to have got over your shyness,” Cael noted.

  “I’m not really shy, you know. You surprised me, that’s all. It isn’t every day that you meet someone like you in that alley. How did you hurt your foot?” she rambled. “My father is missing a hand. He used to be a fine carpenter, but he accidentally cut his hand off with an axe, and now all he does is sleep and drink wine and yell at my mother.”

  With Cael in tow, Claret led the way down Horizon Road toward the Great Plaza at the center of the city. Before they’d gone a stone’s throw, she turned left onto Palisade Lane, so named because of the balconies shading both sides of the street. Cafe waiters were already setting out tables and iron chairs beneath the balconies or hanging clean white tablecloths along the decorative rails above in preparation for the crowds that would soon be filling the city for the celebration of the festival.

  Two score paces down this lane, the girl pulled him beneath a pillared arcade and into a doorway where a flight of stairs led up into darkness. He twisted his hand free and stared at her in surprise, but found that she was looking past him. Turning, he saw the sailors stagger past, arm in arm. Neither looked his way. The girl breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Were those two men following you?” she asked.

  Cael paused and gazed admiringly at the girl before him. She returned his gaze unashamedly, blinking at him with her gray eyes. “No, I don’t think they were,” he said at last. “But I see I couldn’t elude you as easily as we eluded them.”

  “They were probably Guild thieves,” she answered proudly. “What did you do, steal something from them? Don’t worry, I shan’t tell. I can keep a secret better than anyone.”

  “I believe you,” Cael said. “But it is best you don’t know.”

  “I understand, but I’ll help you just the same. If anyone asks for you, I’ll tell them you’re everywhere that you’re not.”

  “Thank you for you help, Claret,” he said, as he took a coin from the fat purse at his belt and pressed it into her palm.

  She looked at it, then scowled at him. “I don’t want this,” she said, obviously hurt.

  “Very well then,” he countered while deftly snaking a hand around her slim waist. Her slippers scuffed across the dusty stairs as he pulled her close, her soft lips tightened in surprise as his met them, stealing a kiss, then releasing her before she had a chance to resist.

  She pulled away, blushing to her ears, almost ready to bolt, her brow knotted in confusion. Cael’s green eyes sparkled with mirth. “I hope that will suffice,” he said.

  For a moment longer, the
girl stood irresolute at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at the elf. Then her face split into a grin, her gray eyes dancing. “It does for now!” she laughed, then dashed away. Cael stepped out from the stairway to watch the coltish grace of her long-legged stride as she fled, giggling, back the way they had come.

  After he had seen her off, the elf strolled leisurely along Pallisade Lane until it brought him to the Palanthas Trade Exchange. He wandered for a while among the stalls, purchasing a small tome of elven poetry from a bookseller, then a jeweled pin from a man displaying his wares atop a woolen blanket draped over a crate of live cats. A woman tried to drag him into her stall to view an alabaster figure of the god Paladine, which she assured him had been carved by Reorx himself. He managed to gracefully extract himself from her greasy fingers, only to be captured by a young boy promising to show him a pair of candlesticks carved from the eyeteeth of a black dragon. Another woman rushed up and shook a live chicken in his face, pointing out in a shrieking voice the particularly fine qualities of the hysterical fowl. He ducked aside, finding himself within a warm dark tent sharp with the odor of vinegary wine. The woman with the chicken followed, only to be chased out again by the broom-wielding wine merchant. Cael breathed a sigh of relief and slipped out the back.

  This brought him into Jawbone Alley, which led away in the direction of the docks. After a few twists and turns, the alley opened onto a broad thoroughfare generally known as Bayside Road, though in truth there was little to identify it as road. Sometimes it was broad enough for three hay carts to pass side by side, sometimes two men walking in opposite directions would bump shoulders. More often than not, the widest stretches were filled with stacks of crates waiting to be loaded, making these areas as difficult to navigate as the most cunning maze. Bayside Road separated the city from the bay, running from Admiralty Street in the northwest corner of the city to Navy Point in the northeast.