“Who is this thief, and why has he not been arrested?” Sir Kinsaid demanded. “Don’t you think I have enough to do without having to coddle irate sorcerers and whining merchants?”
“His name is Caelthalas Elbernarian, but he goes by the alias Cael Ironstaff. He professes to be the son of Tanis Half-Elven, a Hero of the Lance, but his claim seems to have little merit,” Sir Arach spouted officiously. “Probably the name is a fabrication. This Ironstaff is a notorious rogue, a liar, and braggart, by all accounts.”
“You seem to know so much about him,” Sir Kinsaid said, somewhat mollified. “Why haven’t you captured him yet?”
“We think he has left the city,” Sir Arach answered.
“How do you know that for sure?”
“We don’t, but he has not been seen in three weeks, not since the day of the Spring Dawning festival, when one of your Knights let him slip through his fingers at the Horizon Road gate-he has been executed for his dereliction of duty, of course. Ironstaffs dwelling and the places he frequents-the Dwarven Spring, the alchemists’ shops, the University and the Great Library-have been watched most closely. He has vanished. He has either left the city willingly, or he has been slain by another thief and his body dumped in the sewers. So, as you can see, we are working on the case but there is little I can do right now, no matter how loudly Mistress Jenna protests.”
“She says in her letter that the thief is being hidden by the Thieves’ Guild,” Sir Kinsaid said.
“There is no Thieves’ Guild in Palanthas,” Sir Arach assured him.
The Thorn Knight jumped as Sir Kinsaid’s fist struck the desk. An avalanche of papers and reports cascaded to the floor. “If there is one person in this city who truly believes that lie,” Sir Kinsaid said in a voice tight with barely suppressed emotion, “he is a fool. I don’t care where this thief is or who is hiding him. If this supposed son of Half-Elven is in Palanthas, whether he be a living thief or a bunch of bones in the belly of a sewer monster, I want him found and his theft restored. I want Mistress Jenna satisfied. Do you understand me, Sir Knight?”
“Yes m’lord,” Sir Arach responded with feigned humility, bowing his way to the door. Almost as an afterthought, he added, “If it comes to searching the sewers, it might prove expensive.”
“Get out of my sight!”
Sir Arach ducked though the door as a glass paperweight shattered against the wall by his head.
Chapter Eleven
It was the first time he had seen anyone other than his bunkmates and trainers in three weeks. His escort, a wavy-haired young thief from the Fifth Circle, knocked on a small, nondescript door, then stepped back to wait. The hall they stood in was low and narrow, lit at regular intervals by candles in silver sconces. Cael had never been here before. He wasn’t even sure where he was. He’d not seen the light of day since that morning in the sewer, with the dawn light filtering through the grate above.
The door opened, and with a wave of his hand, Captain Oros motioned for Cael to enter and sit. The captain ordered wine, bread, and cold meats to be brought to his chamber. An apprentice thief, his eyes as wide as platters, hurried from the room, quietly closing the door behind him. Alone with the elf, Oros unbuttoned his coat with a sigh.
Cael closely watched the Guild captain. It seemed to him that the man acted a little too friendly a little too soon. Not three weeks had passed since Mulciber had sentenced the elf to death for his freelance activities, then granted his provisional pardon, and today the leader of the Eighth Circle of the Guild had summoned him and was now treating him like an honored guest, or even an old friend.
He realized of course that under the guise of casual friendliness the Guild captain was studying him. Every so often, as the man moved about the room, lighting a candle here, adjusting a chair there, pouring wine or carving the bread, he’d look up to see the elf’s reactions. Though hungry and thirsty, Cael toyed with the food and drink set before him until he saw the Guild captain set to his own meal with unabashed gusto. Finally, he eased his aching throat with a cup of chilled pale wine, then devoured the meats and hearty bread brought by the servant.
Three more cups of wine carried him through the meal. Another servant arrived to remove the plates, but Cael kept a tight hold on his cup. He felt the wine, the sweet oil of conversation, loosening his tongue. He was dying to have a word with the Guild captain, but as yet the man had hardly spoken three words to him.
The chamber in which they dined was small but comfortably furnished. In one corner stood the table at which they ate their meal. Opposite the table, a pair of deep chairs huddled near a glowing brazier. A few books and curious oddments littered the shelves, but none of them attracted his curiosity. In fact, the only thing more interesting than the Guild captain himself was a sea cabinet shoved into the third corner of the room. The cabinet was banded with scrollwork iron and fastened by a silver lock. It looked large enough to hold a store of treasure.
When all the servants had gone, Captain Oros invited Cael to join him by the brazier. Cael settled into his chair, but the Guild captain remained standing, sipping thoughtfully at his wine while he eyed the elf.
Finally, the Guild captain asked, “So how have you enjoyed your little stay with us? Bogul tells me you’ve been coming along nicely.”
“Is that so?” Cael asked, surprised. So far, he had not been able to detect much of anything in the way of training. He had been living in Thieves’ House for about three weeks now, and during that time he’d done little besides rooming with a group of six other thieves, “brothers” and “sisters” of his Inner Circle (to use the Guild’s terminology). Their immediate commander was old Hook-nose, whose real name was Bogul. They lived together in a small dormitory of seven beds, isolated from other thieves, playing dice and telling stories of previous thefts and jobs, eating, and drinking wine. Three hours per day they spent in a large empty room that they called the gymnasium, performing a regimen of callisthenic exercises surely meant to kill them, under the critical tutelage of a severe, ice-eyed female half-elf of the Kagonesti persuasion. If this were not enough, they spent another hour every day wrestling with a pair of dwarves, twin brothers named Gunder and Gawain, who did their very best to break every bone in the thieves’ bodies. The first week of Cael’s captivity and ‘training’ was a haze of pain broken only by bouts of extreme fatigue and excessive drinking, gambling, and telling of enormously stretched tales. By the second week, Cael could hold his own with his fellow thieves, at least in the drinking part (he’d always bested them in the telling of tales), but he still lost hugely to their dice. By the third week, they’d stopped calling him “elf” and started using his name, he’d figured out how they were cheating him at dice and had won back a good portion of his losses, and the previous day he had actually stood Gawain on his head, for which he received a hearty breath-stealing congratulatory thwack on the back from Gunder.
The brothers and sisters of his Inner Circle were not apprentice thieves, not by any measure. They were all experienced pickpockets, safecrackers, and cat burglars. The oldest of the group was Brother Mancred, an old cutpurse with some skill in magic, they said. He rarely bragged, not like the others, and spent most of his time sitting, his gaze far away. Next eldest in the group was Hoag, a dark-eyed native Palanthian who tried to assume the role of second in command to Bogul. He was the most hostile towards Cael, and never stopped calling him “elf.” His particular expertise was lockpicking. He liked to tell a story of stealing the whiskers of a leopard, a story that always began the same-“I once took a bet from a gnome in Tarsis…”-and was always received with groans and threats.