very place he had intended to dispose of Gord and San, the hundred-foot-deep well hidden beneath the secret subcellar of the beggars’ headquarters.
The scene floated before his eyes, the memory clear enough even now. “Give me that box!” Theobald roared. He had been poised, waiting, just a little below the rim of the cistern’s mouth, expecting Gord and San to ease the heavy coffer down to his waiting hands. Instead, Gord had hefted the great metal box all by himself. It took all of his strength for him to raise it all the way up to his scrawny chest-not the muscular torso he now had; in that respect, as in most others, the change in him had been great. The uncomplicated but difficult act of lifting the chest, Gord thought later, had been part of a catharsis for him, part of the purging of boyishness to make way for the man to develop.
Why did he do what he did? A flurry of thoughts had raced through his mind as he staggered with the chest over to the rim of the cistern. Gord had despised Theobald. But beyond that, he feared the man, as one would fear some ravening demon-only more so, for this monster was there to threaten the boy day and night. The beatings and torture of his early days as a beggar-boy had not been repeated after Gord’s skills had become noticed and appreciated, but Gord always knew that the gross beggarmaster could resume such punishment at will, and the likelihood was strong that he would do so one day when the mood was upon him.
As his way of proving this assumption to himself, Gord recalled the day that Theobald had killed Violet. Like himself, she was a young member of the union with much promise. But she had incurred the wrath of her master and had paid the ultimate price-not that anger had been the man’s only emotion at the time of her murder. Gord was sure that Theobald had actually enjoyed the act.
In retrospect, Gord found consolation by telling himself that the girl had been unworthy of his admiration, which may actually have been love. That assessment was not meant to fault her; “unworthy” was a poor choice of word. It was simply that her mindset, her ethos, everything about Violet was very different from what he had become. At the time when they worked together, though, the difference had been less sharp. She had erred in greed, possibly helped to undo one of Theobald’s schemes-unwittingly, Gord was sure-and the beggarmaster had killed her for it, strangling, beating, and assaulting her slowly, methodically, with relish. Oh, yes, he remembered that all now… and then. It was for himself, for San, and for Violet too that he did what came next.
As Theobald demanded his cache of money, Gord had hurled the heavy chest down with all the force his puny arms could muster-quite enough to do the job. The fat man’s outstretched hands could not absorb the force of the downrushing iron box. The metal struck his bald head, hitting it sufficiently hard to cause the beggarmaster to topple off his precarious perch and plunge to his death in the depths below.
Only Gord and San knew of Theobald’s fate, and that fact they kept strictly to themselves. To speak of it would be to implicate themselves as part of the organization that had been expunged from Greyhawk. Even this much time thereafter, it was likely to mean a death warrant if the thieves or city officials should learn of it. So afterward they almost never discussed the execution even between themselves. Perhaps San still thought about it, but Gord knew his former companion was not the sort to take unnecessary chances. To San, he suspected, a chest full of coins was not sufficient reason to risk one’s life when plenty of less perilous ways existed to make an income. Gord had other thoughts, however.
Since becoming a trained thief, Gord had utilized his skills to make his livelihood. In fact, he and San had managed both by exercising and by putting their talents into play, as it were, not to just retain their skills but improve upon them too. Now his former comrade had gone off to become a member of the Thieves’ Guild, and Gord recently had worked strictly alone. He rationalized that he had to be an independent thief, a rogue, since he had no other means of supporting himself as a student.
“Don’t kid yourself,” Gord said aloud, startling himself out of his reverie temporarily by the sound of his own voice. Fortunately he was alone in the little storage chamber that housed the plans he was memorizing. He didn’t dare try to copy them here, but at his own place he drew from memory each night, carefully duplicating the information gained that day.
He tried to refocus his concentration on what was before him, but his mind wandered once more… Gord knew he had become a thief by force of circumstances, and he also realized that he remained one by choice. Other avenues, such as that Tapper had offered, were open to him. Gord wasn’t interested in such opportunities, though, partly because he liked the thrill of illicit thievery, the excitement of planning and executing a theft. He felt that the city owed him much while he owed it, and particularly its Thieves’ Guild, nothing but his revenge. Perhaps this was rationalization, but he thought not.
Once, shortly after the incident, San had wondered out loud why Gord had wasted the treasure in the strongbox. Gord explained that it had been his only weapon under the circumstances. He had simply utilized the best tool at hand to accomplish a much-desired result-and that was that. The ledger wasn’t closed yet, though. To be fully even with the ghost of Theobald, Gord needed to do one more thing. He intended to recover the chest of coins from Theobald’s wet grave and have the treasure for himself.
It was a challenge in many ways, and the gathering of the information was by no means the greatest. Finding where the cistern was required a lot of research, but Gord was steeling himself for a far more exacting demand than that. He had to face the dangers of the subterranean maze under Greyhawk by himself. He had to go where the bones of the beggar-master lay and take from them their treasure. The very thought of what he would have to do made the boy shudder, but the man in him was determined to see it through in order to prove that there was no longer a weak and frightened child in his body, no more gutless coward. Alone he would prove that once and for all time, and in the proving he would gain much more than monetary reward.
With that, Gord finally forced his mind clear of such thoughts and returned to his study of the ancient drawings. A vast complex of tunnels and drains was shown on the maps, but repeated exposure to the information had made Gord a virtual expert in deciphering the different features. Sewers were singled out easily now, and drainage tunnels too. The cisterns and aqueducts stood out clearly in his mind as he scanned the map. Tonight his own map would be complete, and his adventure ready to begin.
Chapter 12
The hand-drawn re-creation spread out before Gord showed the deepest layer of tunnels beneath Old City. A network radiated from a place under the old citadel, with ducts running to it from the far reaches of what then had been the whole of Greyhawk. From the notes he had managed to decipher, Gord knew that the whole system had been carved out of the solid rock that lay under the place. Beneath the upper layers of the limestone, the stuff that the higher tunnels ran through, there was harder rock. Into this the original builders had cut shafts and passages for water. But most of the old collection points had long ago been filled and cemented over for other buildings to stand atop.
The reason for this was that times, and needs, had changed. The sprawl of the city now was so great that getting water during time of siege was of no concern. When Greyhawk had stood far from the Selintan, and the damming of the Grey Run by enemies was a possibility, then the need had been a real one. Far beneath the surface was a huge cavern intended to hold a reserve of water against an. eventuality that would never occur now. The ducts that once had brought rivers of rain from above down into the deep pool two hundred feet below the surface sent only a trickle of liquid that way now. The rock was not permeable, yet the reservoir was not dry-of that Gord was certain. The splash that Theobald and the chest had made when they fell had told Gord that.
He studied his carefully made map again. Four main channels sloped gently down to the place where the big cavern was. A dozen smaller ducts fed into each of the underground canals. Each of those ducts, in turn, was fed by a half-dozen conduits from collection points. The place where the strongbox lay was in the western canal. All Gord had to do was to find one of those old openings that wasn’t fully closed up. He couldn’t use the secret subcellar of the Beggars’ Guild to gain access to the canal, but one of the conduits would do as well.
What seemed an easy matter proved to be quite the opposite in practice. Gord spent most of his free time during the following three weeks searching the streets of Old City for one of the places where the drains had been. Changes made over the centuries were difficult enough to determine, so that locating the correct areas in itself proved most trying. The task was complicated by new layers of cobbles, plazas, dwellings, and all forms of other things that had been built upon what had been there before. Perhaps a collection conduit still remained somewhere, but Gord couldn’t find it. He was only temporarily stymied, however. Giving up was not in his nature.
