by David Cook
The beast stood and said nothing, its face puckered up in concentration. This finally gave Pinch a chance to study it clearly. It was bowlegged, broad, and reminded Pinch of Iron-Biter in that, except for the fact that where he could look down on the dwarf, this thing was a full head taller than him. He’d seen such beasts before, though during the brute’s battering that recognition was not uppermost in his mind. There was cold solace in knowing just what was killing you.
Now that it wasn’t trying to smash his skull against the wall, there was some chance and gain in that recognition. Naming the thing, though, added more to the mystery than solving the problem.
It was a quaggoth, an albino beast of the far underground realms. They were virtually unknown on the surface. The only reason Pinch knew of them was his youth here in Ankhapur. Manferic had raised a few, like slavish dogs, as his special lackeys. They were hunters and jailers, one of old Manferic’s “special” punishments.
“You not Janol. Janol boy.” Amazement that the thing knew him once was increased by urgency as the thing reached down to continue its beating.
“I’ve grown,” he blurted hastily.
He tried to duck beneath the sweeping arms, but the monster was quicker than its speech. With the thief in its grip, the quaggoth slowly and deliberately squeezed. The wind crushed out of him in a last series of choking words. “I … am … Janol,” he gasped in vain.
The beast snarled and crushed harder. Pinch heard a crack from within his chest and the sharp burn of a broken rib, but there was no air left in him to scream. The dim tunnel of light was quickly becoming even more dim.
“Ikrit—stop!”
The pressure ceased. The pain did not.
“Is he Janol?” It was a woman’s voice, quavering and weak but unmistakably female.
“He say, lady.”
“And you?”
“Me, lady, say he not Janol.”
“Put him down.”
Pinch tumbled to the floor. This time he made no move to get to his feet. He gasped for air like a landed fish, and each heave brought a new lance of pain that drove out all the wind he had regained.
“You want look, lady?” From his hands and knees, Pinch looked up to see the beast addressing something or someone in the darkness.
“… Yes.” There was a pained hesitancy in the framing of her simple answer.
The beast stooped to seize Pinch and present him like a prisoner before the dock. The rogue tried to crawl away, but all he did was trigger a paroxysm of choking that ended with a mouthful of coughed-up blood.
“No—wait.” Her words shook, as though they were a dam to her fears and uncertainties. “You say he’s not Janol?”
“No, lady. Not Janol.”
There was a drawing of breath from the darkness, a drawing of resolve. “Let me see him.”
The quaggoth bowed slightly to the darkness and stepped aside. Pinch, suspecting that his life might hang on this display, wiped the blood from his chin and lips and struggled to stand upright. He peered into the gloom of the tunnel, but even with his thief-trained eyes, he could not make out the slightest shadow of his examiner.
At last a sigh, pained and disappointed, floated from the darkness. “It’s too long. Who can tell?… Let him go, Ikrit. Take him out.”
“Who are—” Pinch’s question was forestalled by a spasm from his chest, the broken bone protesting even the rise and fall of words. There were so many questions inside him, all strangled by the lancing pain inside.
“Who am I?” The echo was a confused musing of his words. “I’m … one who loved unwisely.”
Riddles! Every answer led to more riddles. If he hadn’t felt so lousy, Pinch would have cursed the voice in the darkness. He forced himself to frame one last question.
“What am I—” he paused to force back the pain, “—Janol, to you?” The effort left him collapsed against the wall.
Footsteps crept closer from the darkness. The quaggoth took a protective step to intercede between Pinch and its charge. There was covert tenderness in its move, uncharacteristic for its race. “Janol is—” Suddenly the whispers halted in a gagging retch, like a drunken man. When it stopped, the woman tried again. “Janol is … hope,” she said weakly, although it was certain those were not the words she wished to use.
Pinch gave up. He hadn’t the strength to ask any more questions, and the lady, be she human, sprite, or spook, was not going to answer him straightly. The pain exhausted him so that all there was left was to let himself sink into aching stillness.
“Ikrit, take him out.”
“He attack lady,” the quaggoth argued as its duty.
The weakness faded from the woman’s voice as if filled with kind strength, the will of a mother imposed on her child. “Take him out—gently.”
“Yes, lady,” the big white creature rumbled obediently, even though it was clearly not happy with the command.
Pinch moaned as it picked him up. The lances were so constant now that their pain became almost bearable. The cracked bone had settled, not in the best place, but was at least no longer trying to reshape his muscle tissue. The quaggoth strode in great jolting strides, and with every lurch the rogue thought for sure he would pass out. They moved quickly through the total darkness, the quaggoth easily picking the way with eyes adapted to the dark. Even if he still had his full wits about him, the rogue could not have studied the way.
At last the beast stopped and lowered the rogue, weak and sweating, to the ground. “Go there,” it growled. In the pitch blackness, Pinch had no hint of where “there” was. Perhaps sensing this, a great clawed hand shoved him roughly forward, and he would have fallen if his body had not collided with a stone wall. “There—the bright world. Your world.” No more was said as the thump and clack of clawed feet signaled the beast’s departure.
Not ready to die in the darkness, Pinch forced himself to reason. The beast claimed this was the way out, therefore there had to be a door. With his trained touch, the rogue probed the stone searching for a knob, handle, crack, or catch. Patience rewarded him, and with only slight pressure, which was fortunate, he pushed a section of the wall aside.
It was the very last of twilight outside, the embered glow of the sun as it pulled the last of its arc below the horizon. The lamplighters were out, wizard-apprentices who practiced their cantrips activating the street lamps. Faint as it was, the wilting dusk blinded Pinch after his sojourn in darkness. Everything was orange-red and it hurt his eyes.
Blinking, he stumbled into the street, unable to clearly see where he’d emerged. It was good fortune that traffic was light at this hour and he was not trampled by some rag-picker’s nag that chafed to be home in its stable. As the glare finally faded, the buildings resolved themselves into shapes and places. Here was a tavern, there a gated wall, and farther along it a cramped tower.
It was from these clues that Pinch realized he was standing outside the necropolis. The necropolis meant priests and priests meant healing. A plan already forming in his mind, Pinch stumbled toward the barred gate.
When the priests saw a bloody and bruised wretch staggering toward them, they reacted just as Pinch expected. Most held back, but a few, guided by the decency of their faith, hurried forward to aid this miserable soul. As hoped, among them was Lissa, and toward her Pinch steered his faltering steps.
As she caught up to him, Pinch collapsed dramatically in her arms. It wasn’t that hard, considering his state. Real wounds added far more realism than what he could have done by pig’s liver, horse blood, and a few spells.
“Lissa, help me,” he murmured. “Take me to the temple of the Red Priests.”
“I will take you to the Morninglord,” she insisted, intent on repaying him with the works of her own faith.
“No,” he insisted, “only the Red Priests. It is their charge to minister to the royal clan. Take me to another and you insult their god.”
Lissa didn’t like it; it was against her inclinations, but she
could not argue against custom. She called for a cart and horse, and Pinch knew she would take him.
Soon, as he lay on the straw and watched the rooftops go by, Pinch smiled a soft smile to himself, one that showed the satisfaction that broke through his pain. He’d be healed in the halls of the Red Priests, and he’d case those same halls for the job he intended to pull. Sometimes his plans realized themselves in the oddest of ways.
Scouting
Healing hurt more than the whip that laid the wound, or so it seemed to Pinch as he lay on the cold marble platform that was the Red Temple’s “miracle seat.” The priests greeted his arrival with more duty than charity and proceeded to exact their fare from his body. There was no kindness as they reset his rib and pressed their spells into him to knit it together. Into his cuts they rubbed burning salves that boiled away any infection, then dried the ragged gashes and pulled the torn skin back together, all in a process designed to extract every fillip of pain they could from him.
As if the pain were not enough, the priests simply weren’t content to let him suffer in silence. They chanted, intoned, and sermonized as they went about their task. Each laying on of hands was accompanied by exhortations to surrender himself to the workings of their god, to acknowledge the majesty of their temple over all others, and to disavow his allegiances to other gods. The Red Priests were not of the belief that all gods had their place or that man was naturally polytheistic. For them, the Red Lord was supreme and there was no need to consider the balances of others. It was little wonder why the princes preferred self-reliance to the aid of the temple.
It was long hours and well into darkness before the priests were done. At last Pinch was allowed to rise, naked and shivering, off the icy stone. For all the pain, the priests had been thorough. Drawing his fingertips over his back, Pinch felt no scars—better handiwork than the priest who’d left his knee a web of whitish lines.
“When you are dressed, you may leave,” urged the senior brother, who stood at the head of a phalanx of brothers, though no sisters, Pinch noted with disappointment
The elder was a dark-skinned man whose triangular face was pinched by constant sadness. He nodded, a curt little tilt that could only be mastered by those who’d been in command too long. Another brother produced a rough-stitched robe of itchy red wool, normally allotted acolytes to teach them patience through poverty and discomfort. “Your own clothes were beyond repair, and suspect by their filth. They were burned. We give you these so that you do not go naked into the world.”
“Thanks, most beatific one,” Pinch drawled, though he hardly felt grateful for their mean furnishings. His doublet had cost three hundred golden lions and the hose had come all the way from Waterdeep. Itchy red wool was hardly providing him in the style he was due. “Fortunate for my soul, perhaps, but I don’t think I can depart so soon.”
The brother’s sad face grew even more dour. “Pray, why not?”
With a show of exhausted effort, Pinch struggled into the robe. “This day’s been an effort, patrico. Give me time to rest before sending me on my way.”
The elder yielded with sour grace. “Indeed, it is sometimes the case. Your strength should return to you within the hour. I will return to give blessings on your way then.” The elder priest bowed slightly and left, sweeping his entourage out with him.
There was a deadline inherent in that hour, but Pinch didn’t care. If he offended any of the Red Robes, it was only as they deserved. It was an old animosity carried over from his youth, when he sat in a palace chair at a palace desk and wrote the lessons of a droning temple tutor.
Although he was certain to be watched, Pinch made no effort to skulk about or slip away. Instead he ambled from the healing chapel and into a massive hall, the festival floor. The squat pillars of the temple fixed the high of the sky so large it almost took his breath away. The Red Priests clearly did not consider modesty a necessary virtue.
Sure as he’d sworn, Pinch had himself an escort, a lesser pater who lingered over the holy fonts with too little purpose and too much attention. The rogue noted the man with only the barest of glances. Years of spotting peelers and sheriff’s men made this shaved-head plebe painfully obvious. Pinch wandered out of the hall with seeming aimlessness, half-feigning the weakness he felt.
The thief strolled through the soaring nave fixed with a mask of contemplative awe, the face of the impressed sinner confronted by the majesty of greater power. Inside, though, his thief’s mind ran a cunning round of scheme and counter-scheme. How many windows were there? Where did the doors lead? What would be the round of the night guards? Here was a pillar to stand behind, there was a window whose casement was rotten. He made note of the shadows and what lamps and torches were likely to be lit in the long hours after the last benedictus was said.
All this was good, but the one thing it lacked was telling Pinch just where the Knife and Cup lay. The rogue tried strolling toward the main altar, keeping a veiled eye on his watchdog priest. There was no effort, no alarm to stop him, and from that Pinch guessed the regalia were not in the great nave. He was hardly surprised; stealing the Cup and Knife could hardly be that easy.
Pinch expanded his wanderings, passing through the nave’s antechambers and out to the cloistered walk that ringed a damp garden, verdant with spell-ripened growth. The trees leafed fuller than the winter should have allowed, the shrubs curled thicker, and flowers blossomed in brighter hues than true nature.
At the very center of the garden square was a tower of dark stone, a somber spire that thrust above the roofs and walls of the rest of the temple grounds till it rivaled even the great dome of the main hall. No doors marked its base, and at its very top was a single window, a tall, narrow slit that was clearly big enough for a robed priest. A faint glow shifted and weaved from inside the stone chamber.
There was no need to search any farther. This, the rogue knew, was his target. There could be no other.
It was with a sudden-found burst of fitness and strength that Pinch greeted the elder patrico when he returned. The man scowled even more than he had before, suspicious of his patient’s good cheer. Nonetheless, he was not going to interfere with Pinch’s leaving. He was more than content to cast one he saw as a viper out of his house.
So, the temple doors closed with a certain finality behind Pinch and he was standing at the end of the Avenue of Heroes, clad only in an itchy red robe and cheap sandals. With his hair and his bruises, he looked like a wretch given charity by the friars inside. Passing tradesmen made studious effort to avoid his gaze in hopes that they could forestall the inevitable harangue for coins that was sure to come. In this Pinch surprised them, keeping his needs and his counsel to himself.
The rogue was not forlorn and abandoned though. He’d barely taken three steps through the gelatinous mud that passed for a street when someone cried out his name. Old habit spun him around quick with a hand already on his dagger, which the Red Priests had at least not thrown away, by the time he recognized the speaker. It was Lissa, sitting at a tea vendor’s stall in the shade of a pale-branched willow.
“Master Janol, you are recovered?”
The rogue light-stepped through the muck and joined her.
“Well enough, for which I must thank you.” The answer was as sincere as Pinch understood the term. “Perhaps I may even owe you my life.”
The priestess dismissed the suggestion. “If not I, it would have been another there,” she demurred in reference to her part in getting him to the temple.
“My thanks, nonetheless.”
“What befell you?”
Pinch had already anticipated the need for a good story to explain the attack, and so answered without hesitation.
“Thieves. A cowardly lot waylaid me with clubs at an alley mouth. It was clear they planned to beat me to death and then rob me.”
“Did they?”
“Beat me to death?” Pinch asked in jovial amazement. “Clearly not.”
“No—rob you?”
Lissa nodded as if with great relief, but then she drew up hard as she pushed something across the table. “It is most fortunate they did not get this …”
On the table was the amulet of the Dawnbreaker, the same he’d stolen from the temple at Elturel.
If she could have opened his heart, the priestess would have seen a churning tide of panic and rage. The sudden fear of discovery, the self-rage to have clumsily forgotten such a detail in the first place, and the panicky rush to create a plausible reply all would have played open on the face of a normal man with a normal life. Pinch, though, was no common man who carried bricks here and there. He was a regulator, and regulators survived by their wits. Inwardly he boiled, but outwardly all Lissa saw was a flooding collapse of relief.
“Praise your god!” he extemporized. “It’s safe. I would have a bet a noble those Red Priests had stolen it. Where did you find it?”
“Where you were carrying it,” was her icy reply.
“Precisely. I was worried I’d dropped it in the mud,” the rogue continued, thinking fast. “Priestess Lissa, although it is not as I intended, let me present you with your temple’s treasure.” The only hope of coming out of this, Pinch figured, was to claim credit for what he never intended.
“You—what!”
“I was bringing it to you.”
“I surely cannot believe this.”
Now was the time for Pinch to assume the air of roguish effrontery. “I told you I had means.”
“How did you get it back?”
Pinch let knowing smile play across his lips. “I have had some experience with thieves and their like. I understand them. It just takes the right threats.”
“A few threats and they give it up?” It was clear the woman wanted to scoff.
Pinch pressed the amulet back into her hand. “Threats backed by sword and coin. There was a cost in getting it back—five thousand nobles. Will your temple honor my debt?” Pinch knew better than to look too pure and noble and so let his devious heart weave a profitable deceit.