Jeff Crook - The Thieves’ Guild

When the staff was placed in his hands and he felt the cool dark wood against his palms, he sensed what his master had told him he would feel, that the staff would serve him. He felt an instant bond to the weapon, and as he slid his hand down its length, the blade appeared effortlessly. In the year since that morning by the sea, the bond between himself and the weapon had only grown. At times he felt it was alive and if he had ears to hear, it might even speak to him. When he was away from the staff, he felt as if he were torn in two, as if he had left a part of himself. When the staff was in his hands, he felt whole, complete, and with that came a sense of peace as well as power.

He had already vowed that he would never reveal its secrets to Arach Jannon, no matter how much he was tortured. As the torture continued, he came to realize that the longer he kept such knowledge secret, the longer he would live. His elven blood would not allow him to surrender to despair. It offended his sensibilities to even consider relinquishing his staff to buy a swift end to the pain.

With these thoughts, Cael let himself slip back into the haze from which he’d been so rudely awakened only moments before. The Screamer now snored soundly, having exhausted himself. He’d wake again, no doubt, in a couple of hours, and once again give voice to the madness and horror of this place. Cael couldn’t sleep, couldn’t rest Every breath he took was full of pain, as if the air itself was poison. Every breath was to gag, every sniffle of dungeon air sent his stomach heaving as surely as though he were leaning over the rail of a wave-tossed ship. He was tempted to shout for the guard, but he knew that would do no good. No, what he was really tempted to do was weep.

In the darkness of his cell he noticed a light beginning to well from the tiny sewer grate near the floor. Never had he beheld such a beautiful glow, even as he wondered at its source. The golden light danced through the sewer grate, growing in brightness until he thought he’d go blind. Even as the light grew, the malodorous air neared an extreme beyond human or even elven endurance. Cael at last identified its source, the putrid scent fielding the memory directly from his reeling brain.

“Gully dwarf!” he retched.

“For that I ought to leave you here,” a shrill voice barked in reply. The silhouette of a head appeared behind the sewer grate. The head was bearded, but Cael could distinguish little else without leaning closer, something he was reluctant to do.

“Gimzig?” he inquired.

“At your service, sir,” answered the figure. The gnome continued to spout a rapidfire stream of words, while fumbling with some large cumbersome object that looked like a giant spider trying to attack his bearded face. “Have you out of there in a jiffy, got a spider here in my pack that will do just the trick on these deep set bars, good thing they aren’t steel. Passage is so small I didn’t think I would get it in here, but where there’s a will there’s a thousand ways, as my grandfather Gornamop used to say. Say you look a little thin and worse for wear, haven’t they been feeding you now and then? Well, we’ll set that straight, just let me put this thing in place here with the legs against the stone and grasp the bars like so, did you notice the modifications? No? Well, that should do justthetricknowpresshereandlockthisintoplaceand… whoa! Look out!”

With an explosion of dust and splintered ‘stone the small but stout iron grate vanished, leaving behind a ragged gaping hole slightly larger than the grate that once filled it. Fearing that the noise had been heard by his guards, Cael didn’t hesitate, and despite his many injuries, immediately squeezed through the opening, nearly shredding his threadbare prison clothes in the process. When he wriggled into the tiny passage on the other side, he looked as if he had passed through a gnomish cheese grater.

The tunnel in which he found himself was barely large enough to accommodate his slender elven form. Even so, the figure that confronted him seemed little discomfited by the narrow surroundings. Only his pack, half as large again as himself, caused him any inconvenience. His grizzled white beard was now matted with dried sewage. A pair of long white eyebrows drooped over his eyes, and around Gimzig’s head was a strapped a leather belt that held the two halves of an open scallop shell in which a stubby yellow candle burned and dripped with yellow wax.

Like most gnomes, Gimzig wore an odd conglomeration of clothing replete with multiple vests of differing material, pouches, pockets, pencil bandoleers, as well as plenty of hooks and loops from which depended numerous useful tools and a good many for which the uses had been forgotten. Various scraps of paper, some covered with scrawls of ideas and design outlines and drawings, poked out from pockets all over his body (even from the cuff of one boot), giving him the appearance of a poorly stuffed toy bear. Even his grizzled beard served as a tool repository. Entangled among the matted hairs, bits of straw and metal filings, remnants of meals, and caked sludge of the gnome’s sewer home was a pair of pliers hopelessly tangled beyond retrieval.

“Very good very good!” Gimzig nodded excitedly, nearly extinguishing his candle flame and flinging hot wax like a wet dog shakes off water. “The spider worked perfectly, or I should say it would have worked perfectly had I not accidentally pressed the release, but otherwise it worked very nearly just about perfectly. Of course, it almost took my head off.” He took a breath, pondering for a moment. “I think I know how to fix that, in any case you are free now. My, but it’s a good thing the Knights starved you or else you would never make it through this tunnel, you’d been shading a bit toward the heavy side lately and eating too much anyway, I should say it all comes of eating dwarven cooking.”

All the while the gnome had been carefully folding in the legs of a large mechanical spider that he had used to rip the sewer grate from the wall. Seeing Cael’s alarmed glance, he continued in an unbroken stream, “Remarkable the things you can do with springs and levers. You know my work, well, this is one of my latest creations. I call it a spider, and it was originally designed to open salt-crusted portholes on ships but it displayed an unfortunate tendency to rip great gaping holes in the hull, which of course induced advanced tendencies to sink especially in heavy seas, are you ready?”

Cael held his nose and nodded. In the meanwhile, the gnome had finished folding the spider’s legs into its body, creating a remarkably compact and nondescript metal box. He dropped this over his shoulder into the pack strapped to his bent back, producing a metallic clunk, which was rapidly followed by an alarming series of sproings, poings, and pings. Gimzig paused, his mouth open to say something and waited warily, peering over his shoulder, until the noises subsided.

“Crikey! I hate it when that happens,” the gnome sighed when all was quiet behind him. “There’s enough in there to turn us into cabbage salad faster than you can say rotoslicerdicer. Of course everything in there is absolutely essential for the rescue of certain elves from the dungeons of Palanthas, well, come along then, follow me, are you sure you are able to, I could probably arrange for you to be pulled by a crankrope.”

“I’ll crawl,” Cael coughed. Blood flecked his parched lips. Meanwhile, Gimzig somehow turned himself and his pack around in the narrow tunnel without setting off any of his devices. Dragging himself with his elbows, Cael struggled after his rescuer.

“The tunnel just goes a little farther before it dumps into a proper sewer,” Gimzig said. “Watch that stone there, it looks ordinary enough but it’s a trap.”