Jeff Crook - The Thieves’ Guild

“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, creating, 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?”