Jeff Crook: The Thieves’ Guild

“Magic user!” someone shouted. In response, Sir Arach whipped an obsidian-tipped wand from some hidden pocket in his robes. His lips moved, an arcane word crackled on the air, and a sheet of flame erupted from the wand, engulfing the thief trying to skewer him with a short sword. The man became a living pillar of fire. He staggered away, screaming among his fellows, disrupting their attacks, forcing them to dodge the flaming torches that were his flailing arms.

Meanwhile, the skill of the Dark Knight took its toll upon his attackers. His sword licked out, a man fell, his head cloven to his teeth. Another dropped, clutching the ropes of his intestines as they spilled out on the ground. A third lunged low, slashing with a dagger, and leaped back, holding the fountaining stump of his wrist.

With a crack of bone and a spray of blood and teeth, Captain Avaril sent one man sailing backwards, unconscious before he hit the cobbles. He lifted his fingers to his lips and blew a long, quavering call, like the cry of a curlew. A moment later, a deep bellowing roar some distance down the alley answered it.

At this noise, the Guildmaster urged his fellow thieves to redouble their efforts. A thunder of boots and clatter of hooves on the cobblestones echoed from both ends of the alleyway. Soldiers shouted that the Lord Knight was under attack. Officers blared orders. Sir Kinsaid staggered, clutching at a terrific gash in his mail, blood oozing between his fingers. Three thieves fell to the ground and began to snore loudly, victims of another of Sir Arach’s magic spells. The knot of fighting wavered, shifted, flowed here and there. One moment, the dwarf, forgotten in the fray, had to lift his head to see the progress of the battle, the next he was in the midst of it. Someone stumbled over him, cursing, only to have his words cut short by Sir Kinsaid’s sword. The dwarf tried to crawl away, only to be stomped on the fingers. Then, someone kicked him in the head. A dull pain thudded in his ears, bringing blackness and merciful oblivion.

When he awoke again, the battle had ended. Someone had rolled him over, and he lay now on his back, staring up into the sky. A steady, heavy downpour sent a plume of steam rising from the burning building. It was as though, with the work of the Knights of Takhisis completed, the rain had come to douse the fires lest they spread throughout the city. The fallen rain flowed red with blood into the gutters of Smith’s Alley.

The dwarf turned his head and met, face to face, the former master of the former Thieves’ Guild of Palanthas. Daavyd Nelgard’s head lay next to his, lusterless eyes, lids drooping, bruised lips in a death grimace revealing teeth clamped tightly on a bloated purple tongue. Already, a rat had been chewing on his nose. The dwarf recoiled in horror, only to bump into another body. He raised himself onto his elbows and found that he had been placed in a long row of corpses that stretched into the shadows in either direction. How many had died, he could not hope to count. Of those who lived, he recognized three.

Sir Kinsaid was being tended by a healer, having the wound in his side bound with strips of cloth while two Knights stretched a tarp overhead to shield him from the rain. Sir Arach Jannon was picking through the remaining pile of loot taken from the Guild house and directing the clerks and bearers where each item, crate, or box was to be taken. Meanwhile, Captain Avaril, his face once again hidden by the heavy cowl of his cloak, sat on a crate, his elbows resting on his knees, his head in his hands, exhausted. Rain spattered on his back and hood, but he paid it no mind. Knights and guards meandered about, searching the dead, cataloguing the booty, tending their own wounds or recounting their deeds of the night.

All over Palanthas, the same scene was being played out in a hundred other alleys. Towers of smoke and oily steam rose into the storm-wracked sky, while Knights of Takhisis, their officers and servants, sorted, recorded, and carted away the collected belongings of the Thieves’ Guild of Palanthas. They counted and identified the dead according to a large book that each senior officer carried under his or her arm. This book, which would in after days come to be called the Book of the Damned, bore the names and descriptions of every member of the Guild as of 27 Darkember, 34 SC. Those who had not been slain were being hounded, hunted, and smoked out of every Guild house, safe house, and sewer in the entire city. Not a single secret of the Guild, not a member, not a sympathizer, not a rat hole or bolthole, nor even the lowliest treasure hole, though it contained but a pair of thin coppers, was overlooked or missed. The jails had been emptied hours before of their least-dangerous criminals, just to make room for the sudden influx of Guild thieves this night would bring. Old dungeon cells, which had not been inspected for centuries, had their doors pried open, their hinges oiled, their locks repaired. For weeks afterward, there was a notable shortage in chain and rope throughout the city. The price went through the roof, and ropemakers and blacksmiths found themselves the unexpected benefactors. Fortunes were hurriedly invested in fresh supplies of these commodities, only to be lost when the mass executions began and all that surplus chain and rope was reintroduced into the Palanthian markets. Meanwhile, a huge mass grave, a death pit, was dug into a mountain valley five miles south of the city. Though at first the gravediggers complained of the depth of the mass grave ordered by the Dark Knights, in a few weeks it was feared that it might prove too small.

This night, as the rain sluiced Smith’s Alley of some of its refuse, the dwarf lay mere feet away from his most hated enemy in all of Krynn. A short sword, broken near the tip but otherwise serviceable, lay inches from bis grasp. The old doorwarden of the Guild edged closer to the weapon, careful that he make no noise.

Rain and blood had made the sword’s grip slick, and his hands were grown feeble, weak from pain and loss of blood. The sword slipped and scraped across the cobblestones as he lifted it. Captain Avaril glanced up but did not move. Lightning flashed, shadows leaped up, startled. One shadow in particular caught the dwarfs attention as he gripped the sword. It loomed over him like a tower. He looked up in time to see a boot lifted above his head. With a clap of thunder that shook the ground, he knew no more.

20th day of Brookgreen, 38 SC

A rustle in the rose bushes by the wall marked the spot where Petor and Marta had secreted themselves for the better part of an hour. A giggle and a hushed whisper preceded their stumbling appearance on the garden path just beside a white statue of a centaur aiming his marble bow at the moon. A great oak, growing in the midst of a spacious lawn, cast its moon shadow over the path, but torches set atop tall poles illuminated the garden path at regular intervals. Petor hurriedly buttoned his blue velvet coat and fluffed the white silk ascot at his neck, while Marta brushed bits of dirt and leaves from her gown. She giggled again and plucked a rose petal from Petor’s hair.

“Stop that!” he hissed. “We mustn’t be seen!”

“Oh, what do I care anymore?” she laughed.

“I do! Your father would kill me!” Petor cried. He was a young man of nineteen summers, his companion older than he by a mere month.

“Daddy? He’s harmless,” Marta said offhandedly.

“Ha! He’s the seventh richest man in all Palanthas!” Petor exclaimed under his breath.

“Riches and wealth. That’s all anybody ever thinks about,” she sighed.

“It took my father eighteen years to be invited to one of your father’s Spring Dawning parties. If I ruined it for him by being caught in the bushes with you…” His voice trailed off with a shudder.