“Inquiries,” the clerk said with a perfunctory smile before he turned to hobble away.
“Should have known,” Gorm grumbled.
“I doubt they know more anyway, friend,” said Heraldin. “And I am eager to be out of here.”
Gaist nodded, still glancing around the room.
“Aye, can’t disagree there,” said the Dwarf, already making for the door. “And it seems a good lead. The trick is followin’ it.”
With the three customers gone, the Thieves’ Guild office returned to its quiet work. Clerks processed, indexed, cross-referenced, and filed tips from field observers. Managers assembled briefings from collected paperwork. Senior staff monitored these reports to see if adjustments were necessary in risk profiles or quarterly projections. Every guild member went about their duties wordlessly, completely focused on scrupulously following process. Few things survived from the pre-acquisition era of the guild, but creative and memorable punishments for breaking guild policy had endured.
And so the response clerk quickly went to the back office with Gorm’s payment and paperwork. A guild accountant counted out the payment, checked it against the total on the inquiry form, and returned the paperwork to the clerk with a receipt of payment. The clerk deposited the inquiry, the scripted reply, and the receipt into a new folder, signed a pre-printed attestation of veracity, stamped everything with his seal, and put the entire packet into the inbox of a desk marked “POST-OPERATIONAL OPERATIONS.”
The senior clerk of post-operational operations opened the file, reviewed its contents, and paused as she was placing it in an outbox marked “TO FILE.” Something echoed faintly at the back of her mind, like the call of a miner lost in a deep cave. She reviewed the description of the customers and nature of their request, then consulted a ledger of guild procedures. A few loose memorandums on process updates were in the back. One of them, dated from the prior Bloomtide, had a list of topics and the descriptions of a dozen people. She compared the memo to the inquiry form, made a note on the file, stamped it, and placed it in a different outbox labeled “ESCALATIONS.”
Thus Gorm’s paperwork was diverted from the river of paper flowing into the depths of the guild’s archives. Instead, it cascaded from desk to desk, collecting notes and stamps and additional papers, until it arrived at the Office of External Communications. A communications clerk bound the folio with a red ribbon, put it into a briefcase, and carried it to a courier waiting by a nondescript carriage.
The carriage took the clerk up to a beige, windowless building wedged between two law firms on the Seventh Tier. Suite forty-two of the building was empty aside from a single desk, and behind the lone desk sat the shadow of a figure reading from another set of documents. The courier placed the bound folio on the desk with trepidation before fleeing the room. Before the sound of the courier’s hurried, retreating footsteps had completely faded, the man behind the lone desk cut the red ribbon and opened the folder.
He picked up the inquiry form and read. Then he read it again.
He set the paper down. He took a deep, meditative breath, and trembled as though fighting to suppress a scream. The struggle contorted his fine features for a moment, and then he lost. An expletive forced itself from his lips in a spray of spittle.
“Spug!” swore Benny Hookhand.
Chapter 9
“Pardon my language. I am not used to this—bones!” Poldo swore again as his seat shifted and nearly dropped him. His stomach lurched as the cobblestones swayed below him.
“You all right?” Thane asked over his shoulder.
“Yes, fine, thank you.” Poldo righted himself. “I am not used to this height. Perhaps, though, a few adjustments to the straps? For stability.”
A Wood Gnome chittered an order, and the Domovoy on Thane’s shoulder sprang into action.
“And you’re sure you don’t mind? It’s just hard to move quickly on these, aha, relatively short legs.” Notes of apology rang in Poldo’s voice as he stared up at Thane. “And I never learned to ride, living in the city as I did…”
“I don’t mind,” said the Troll, though he was preoccupied with the leather harness around his arms. Wood Gnomes swarmed through his shaggy fur, making adjustments to the straps. Those strips of padded leather connected to Poldo’s seat, an apparatus halfway between a plush seat and a haversack on the Troll’s back.
“And, as you well know, coaches tend to attract unwanted attention,” Poldo continued.
“And I’m good at avoiding it, yes.” The Troll gave his limbs an appraising stretch. “It fits well.”
“I should hope so, given what that leatherworker charged,” said the Scribkin. “Are you ready to travel for Mistkeep then?”
Thane straightened and took a breath of the salty air. West of them, dark clouds rolled over darker waves that crashed against the rocky coast. North of them, the city of Chrate perched amid the rocks. Black smoke spewed from the maze of crooked chimneys that crowned the port city.
“Yes,” the Troll said. He took another breath, and his subsequent grin was equal parts pure joy and daggerlike teeth. “It will be good to be back in the deep forest.”
“Will it? Uh, excellent.” Poldo, for his part, had enjoyed his brief hours in a city, even one as dingy and soot-filled as Chrate. He’d found a teahouse that brewed a decent cup, and for a few blessed moments he’d been able to relax and pretend he was back on the Pinnacle of Andarun with a cup of Spelljammer’s green blend in hand and the jewel of the Freedlands spread out before him.
Yet Poldo knew they couldn’t linger too long. The fiasco with collateralized threat obligations had left a lot of people very angry at Poldo, many of whom had ample wealth and meager morals. At least a few had quietly placed bounties on his head. He wouldn’t be safe in Andarun without a king’s guard, and Chrate was far less safe than Andarun. The port city was a nest of skullduggery and grift, an orgy of thieves, spies, and assassins plying their trades against each other.
Whenever he walked into Chrate, the Gnome was like a plump chicken strolling into a den of wolves, albeit a chicken that walked around with a Dire Bear watching over it. Poldo preferred not to put his bodyguard out by provoking constant attempts on his life. They’d spent a night in the decaying port on their way to Adchul those many months ago, and poor Thane had barely slept for all of the would-be assassins creeping through the window and shimmying down the chimney. On this trip, they’d only been in town long enough to purchase Thane’s harness from a dusty antiques shop, drop it with the leatherworker, and have a cup of tea while waiting for the modifications to be complete.
The Troll gave the straps of the harness a couple more experimental tugs. Poldo’s seat didn’t shift. “Let’s be off,” he said.
Poldo sighed. “Yes, let’s. We’ve a long journey ahead. My luggage?”
A pack of Wood Gnomes carried his briefcase and bag up behind him and, through no small feat of acrobatics, climbed the Troll and hung the baggage on the saddle’s luggage hook. Once the tiny Gnomes had taken up positions in Thane’s fur, Poldo rapped on the small, wooden desk built into the front of the seat. “All secure!” he called.
“Hang on,” said the Troll. He stepped off the road and moved through the forest beside it. Leaves rushed by as the Troll reached his stride, but somehow the huge Shadowkin managed to not disturb them, and he moved through the forest with eerie silence.
They were only a few strides along when Red Squirrel hopped up onto Poldo’s desk and chittered a question.
Poldo shifted uneasily and thought for a moment about the tasks ahead of him, “Ah, yes. Let’s draft a reply to Mrs. Hrurk, shall we? I’m sure she’d appreciate an encouraging note before she starts her new job tomorrow.”
Red Squirrel squeaked and leapt back into the Troll’s fur. The hair by Thane’s left shoulder rustled, and Poldo heard the briefcase open and close behind him. A moment later, six Wood Gnomes were arrayed in front of a sheet of paper and a set of tiny stamps, each with one letter. One chirruped that they were at the ready.
“Thank you. Ahem. My dear Mrs. Hrurk… uh…” Poldo tried to find the right words, and found it unusually difficult. He cleared his throat again, but failed to dislodge a thought tugging at the back of his mind. Raising a finger to stay the eager transcribers, he leaned sideways and shouted up to the Troll, “You’re sure you don’t mind this?”
“Why would I mind?” Thane rumbled.
“Well, it’s just that I…” Poldo rapped his fingers on the wooden desk resting between the Troll’s massive shoulder blades. “I feel a touch guilty riding you in a saddle.”
“You’re not riding me,” Thane said. “I’ve put you into my backpack.”
Poldo leaned back. “What? No, this used to be an officer’s saddle in the Sky Knights. The Sun Gnomes used it to ride Great Eagles.”
“Well, it was a cow and a couple of trees before that, but I wouldn’t put it out in the pasture.” Poldo could hear the grin in Thane’s voice. “Whatever it used to be, it’s my backpack now. I hope you don’t mind riding in it.”
The Scribkin bristled a little. “Well, that doesn’t seem very dignified.”
Thane shrugged, shifting the desk and its occupants. “At least nobody is trying to saddle you,” Thane said.
Poldo barked a laugh at that despite himself. “Ha! Yes. Fair enough, I suppose.”
“Forget what is fair,” said Asherzu Guz’Varda. “The Wall is not fair. It is not even-handed or forgiving. It does not care about you at all, and if you throw yourself off its highest point tonight, the traders will still come back in the morning and buy and sell like you were never there.”
The Orcess smiled at the workers seated in the rows of chairs before her. From her place among their ranks, Feista Hrurk cleared her throat and glanced around the gathering hall at her fellow recruits, a motley collection of Shadowkin with fresh suits and nervous faces. All of them looked almost as terrified as she felt.
“And the best thing about the Wall is how unfair it is,” Asherzu continued. “The Royal Court is fair. The arbiters of the Heroes’ Guild are fair. They were not always so; years ago they came and slaughtered us at will, and that was unfair. They stole our wealth and left us destitute, and that was unfair. And then they set up a system of noncombatant papers to ‘allow’ us to live in their gutters, and that was unfair.”
The chieftain paced back and forth in front of them, raising her voice as if to call to those in the back even though there were no more than two dozen hires in the room. “And then a year ago, we worked with their king to make the NPC program apply to all, and the Lightlings discovered fairness again. Now they see that it would be unfair to punish the Humans for the evils of their parents. It would be unfair to take gold the Elves earned plundering us, unfair to penalize Dwarves for making investments in our suffering, unfair to take from the Gnomes just for doing the best they could while following the unjust laws of their time. And now, and only now, the kingdom and the Heroes’ Guild cannot do what is unfair.
