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“Surely you don’t intend to place me with these,” Cael said. “They are children.”

“No, I have a regimen of very special training prepared for you,” she said with a laugh over her shoulder. “I am sure you have heard of the tests given to apprentice wizards at the Towers of High Sorcery.”

Indeed he had. Once, when the moons of magic still coursed nightly across the sky and the Towers of High Sorcery were centers of magical learning, those apprentice mages deemed worthy enough were accorded a test to see if they were prepared to assume the responsibilities that came with learning spells of power. The tests were voluntary, because failure invariably meant death.

“So I am to be tested, like some apprentice mage?” Cael asked incredulously. “I should think my besting you in the house of Gaeord is sufficient proof of my abilities.”

“It is not your abilities that are to be tested,” she snapped back, a little overloud. She lowered her voice, continuing, “You are still an apprentice in the ways of the Guild. You must watch how we operate, so that you may learn to anticipate the actions of your colleagues in the Inner Circle. You must learn to depend upon them for your very life, and they must be able to depend on you for the same. When you are truly a team, you will be able to act together without speaking, and live and breathe as one.

“In the days of the old Guild, few thieves trusted each other, few would work together toward a common goal. This distrust, this selfishness led to the Guild’s downfall, by black betrayal. When Mulciber reformed the Guild, she used the example of the Knights of Takhisis to teach her captains how to organize and lead people who do not naturally work together. This is what you must learn. This is what you will begin to learn, tonight.”

“Me, a Knight of Takhisis!” Cael laughed.

“Be quiet, you foo1!” Alynthia barked.

They had reached the end of the hall, where a low, iron door stood, set deeply into the ancient stone. Few thieves were about in this area, and no one guarded this door, though it looked stout enough to be the entrance to a treasure chamber. Alynthia stopped before it and motioned for Cael to move in front of her. He stepped forward and ran an appraising eye over the door and its massive lock.

“My test is to pick this lock?” he asked.

“Of course not, you idiot!” she cried. “Haven’t you been listening to me? This is not a test of your individual ability. It is a test of your integrity.”

“Then I will fail, for I have none,” the elf responded with a smirk.

“Then you, or one of your companions, will die,” she answered coldly. “If you survive and one of your Circle dies because of your failure, rest assured, the others will gut you like a herring. And I won’t stop them.”

Chapter Thirteen

Cael pushed against the door. It swung open with an iron groan, revealing a stairway carved through solid rock. No torches lit the way. It descended into inky darkness. The stone walls were wet and dank and crusted with gray mold.

He turned back to Alynthia. “What’s down there?” he asked.

“Yours is not to question. I am ordering you to go there, so there you must go.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then I will kill you here and now. You wouldn’t be the first to die at this door,” she added, as her hand strayed to the dagger strapped to her thigh. Glancing down, he noticed a number of large, brownish spots staining the stone floor.

“I’ll go,” he said.

“I thought so,” she answered with a smile.

Cael crossed the threshold onto the first step. Immediately, his feet flew out from beneath him, and he found himself sliding down a long dark slope. Alynthia’s voice seemed to follow after him, mockingly pleasant in its tones. “First lesson,” she called. “Never trust only what you see with your eyes. Go ahead-I’ll be watching you.”

The journey down was a swift one. Someone had gone to great care to prepare this passage so that the sliding was almost fun, despite the vile odor of the substance coating the stone. But it was really too brief a journey to be able to relax and enjoy the trip. Besides, Cael worried about what he might meet at the bottom.

His eyes didn’t have time to adjust to the darkness, or he might have been prepared for what awaited him. Suddenly, the slope was no longer there. His heart hammered in his throat. He was flying though empty space and total darkness. A rank stench rose up and slapped him in the face just before he landed hip deep in garbage. Luckily, the stuff broke his fall. He swore several of the more descriptive dwarven curses taught to him by Kharzog Hammerfell and struggled to climb atop the garbage heap before he sank any deeper.

A torch flared into life above him, and scornful laughter echoed around the chamber. He found himself at the bottom of a garbage pit. Twenty feet above him, a walk led along the edge of the pit. Ranged along this walk, six people stared down at him, some laughing, others working to uncoil a rope. These were people Cael knew-"all members of his supposed Inner Circle. Each wore an identical uniform of loose-fitting dark gray material, with tight hoods pulled snugly around the face.

“The smell kind of reminds you of home, don’t it, elf?” Hoag said with a laugh.

“Very funny,” Cael returned, while biting back the gorge rising in his throat. He began to struggle across the pit, where a series of iron rings set into the stone wall served as a ladder up to the walkway.

“Cael, no!” Pitch shouted. “Don’t move.”

“Why in the name of the Abyss not?” he asked angrily.

“Gulguthra,” she answered cryptically.

“What?”

“Gulguthra!” Ijus cackled gleefully.

“What the hell is a gulguthra?” Cael asked.

“It means ‘dung eater’ and you’re standing on it!” the little thief answered, then clapped his hand over his mouth to stifle his laughter.

Cael looked around but saw nothing unusual beyond an assortment of rotting vegetables, well-gnawed bones, shivering masses of congealed fat, discarded bits and tatters of clothing, the odd dead rat or two, and a thing that looked like a length of pig intestine still attached to a rotting, leprous stomach. Then the thing moved, and he nearly leaped out of his shirt. A dwarven oath escaped his lips.

The thing was a tentacle of some sort, ending in a muscular, flat leaf-shaped appendage. As it inched closer to his leg, hook-shaped spines lifted along the length of the tentacle arm.

“Hurry up!” he shouted.

“I thought you were freelance,” Hoag said mockingly, echoing the very words Cael had spoken to Oros earlier that evening. “You don’t work well with others, remember? You prefer your own company. Mayhap you’d like to share it with the gulguthra?”

Ignoring the taunts, Cael shouted, “I’m going for the ladder!”

“You’ll never make it,” Pitch answered, as she and Rull continued to struggle with the rope. Varia watched their progress with a pained expression, her fingers twitching as though she wished to help but didn’t want to get in the way. Mancred stood beside her, his arms folded, his face inscrutable, watching the elf as though he were watching a dog cross the street.

The tentacle inched nearer Cael’s leg. It seemed to be searching him out, slowly, tauntingly.

“I’ll get there quicker than you’ll untangle that rope!” he answered.

“You don’t know how big the monster is. It has more than one tentacle,” Ijus said with a laugh.

“What is this thing?” Cael screeched. “Throw me a sword or something so I can at least fight it.”

Hoag laughed and kicked a dead rat onto the garbage heap. The tentacle paused and seemed almost ready to turn towards the rat before continuing its torturous advance toward Cael’s thigh.

“To hell with you!” he shouted. “I’m not going to just stand here and let this thing get me.”

“Catch!”

A loop of rope unwound as it descended towards his head. He caught it, his heart in his throat lest he miss. Rull wrapped the other end around his waist and braced his massive legs. Cael clutched the rope as high as he could reach and lunged up out of the garbage. He lifted his legs and swung to the near wall, slamming into it sideways and driving the air from his lungs. Behind him, the garbage pile rose up leviathanlike, refuse and offal cascading off the huge monster like water off a breaching whale. Massive, toothy jaws snapped blindly at the place he had just been, while two tentacles whipped out, trying to encircle him.