|
Quick Bits: Yes, most people don't write in first person, but when I thought of this character, I couldn't imagine telling it in the third person.. it allows me to be a little more, well.. free-form in thoughts and expansions and little bon mots. This first chapter is about 3K words, I have outlines, and bits and pieces written for further chapters (and will post another chapter after I format this one and post the thread) Rule #8: Excitement should come from the spending of coin… not the acquiring of said coin. I’m reliably told the best way to tell a story is to start about the beginning and then tell the tale, all the way to the ending. The problem with that is sometimes the beginning of a story is in the middle of another story… which is definitely true in my case. You see, at the time I was working a set of lockpicks in the “business office” of House Garrowell. They called it the “business office”, I called it “the place I visited to steal House Garrowell’s money’. Yes, if you parse that statement out, you can reasonably infer from that statement I had been there before. This was my third visit, in fact, once a month for the past couple of months I had dropped in and helped myself to a bit of the Garrowell’s not-so-ill-gotten games. Each time I used the same method to get over the wall, get into the House offices, and get into the room before leaving, pockets stuffed with filthy lucre. You may ask why they hadn’t upgraded their security allowing me to fleece them over and over again? Well, first of all, I didn’t take a ton of money each time. This was for a couple reasons. One, the bards love to sing about charming rogues like me, who manage to sneak into some treasure vault, and clean out the place of thousands of pieces of coinage of the realm, leaving nothing but their calling card.. all in the space of a few minutes. It doesn’t quite work that way. You see, one of the bad things about coins is... that they’re made of precious metals. The operative word there is metal. You know how a coin will jingle and clang when they hit the ground? Now imagine hundreds of them in a bag. Every time you move, the coins jungle and clang together. It’s hard to be stealthy when every step you take is the vocal equivalent of a band of musicians tuning their instruments…. badly at that. Now, there’s solutions for that. I had a intellectually-inclined colleague of mine create what I’d call the “scoundrel’s coin purse”. This happened to be a series of draw-stringed bags inside a leather satchel. I’d pack the coins in tight, leaving little space in-between them, and finished it off by pulling the string to pack them together. They were so tightly packed together that it was more like one giant stack of metal. This minimized the sound it made, especially when the thick leather cover was sealed over it. The downside of this piece of roguish ingenuity is that you’re limited to the amount you can carry. The bag doesn’t have the carrying space of your average burlap sack. But that was only half the problem I had made for myself. The other part was rule #52 of my rules of being a successful rogue. That is “It is safer to steal 100 soldans five times rather than 500 at once.” Since I kept my thieving attempts low and without notice from the guards, the targets wouldn’t automatically blame thieves for the robbery. Instead, they would look for internal reasons first. They would accuse each other of stealing from the vault, or misreporting the amount of money turned in, etcetera. I once robbed a certain gang’s hideout so many times that the gang eventually went to war with itself, utterly convinced that someone in the gang was stealing from them, and of course, they all turned on each other trying to figure out who had been dipping their hands in the gang's stash. I made sure to stay well away from the gang at that time. What’s that, you say... I have 52 rules on how to be a successful thief? First of all, it’s rules on being a successful ROGUE, thank you very much. A rogue acquires his ill-gotten gains in a variety of methods, from schemes to con games…. to yes… robbery like I was committing this night. A thief, however is limited to breaking and entering or in isolated cases, cutting purses in a crowded area and hoping the proposed victim doesn’t recognize his belt is much lighter until too late. Besides, that's a kid's game these days. Secondly, there’s not 52 rules. There’s 137 of them… at least so far. Each of them, was a bit of acquired wisdom earned through my years of consorting with the underclass of the Eight Kingdoms. Not all of them had actually happened to me, but I had resolved, in one way or another to keep them in mind. Some of them were business related... for example #19 was “A good fence is worth his weight in gold… and will likely charge just as much”. Some of them were life lesson related… “Rule #45: Never steal from a Temple unless you have to. The priests may eventually forgive you… but their Patrons are a lot less likely to forgive, and worse, never forget."... and some of them had to do with my personal life. "Rule #2: Beware the woman who wants to make you her one and only. That’s because she in turn will expect you to do the same for her.” Yeah, I learned that last one very early. Well… more like I codified that rule very early. There was a few times after that I forgot the rule, and yeah… I paid the price each time. Anyway, enough lollygagging about. It sounds like you’re wondering why I’m risking my freedom and quite possibly my life for stealing a small fortune? It’s because the only way to steal a large fortune involves being a King’s Tax Collector. Or a King, now that I think about it. If you're not either of those, you have to make your fortune the old fashioned way.. by taking it from others. The only difference between me and the Noble Merchants is that I lie a lot less while I take it from you. Finally, my fingers managed to find the required angles for the lock picks to trip the tumblers and the satisfying *click* of the lock told me I had gotten the access I desired. Of course, during this time of the night, there was no light in the room, so I only opened the door enough so I could slide in be able to shut the door behind me. Then I pulled out a lightstone (one of the many good things about being a sticky-fingered rogue is that when one comes across interesting and useful items like the lightstones used by city watchmen to patrol the streets of the Eight Kingdoms after dark, they somehow end up in my bags and being used in so many interesting ways. I let the soft glowing light play off the walls of the business office. Well, they certainly were a bit more on alert after the previous month’s theft... there was no loose coinage and no business records being left around unlike the previous times.. as I worked my way through the room and examined everything, looking for hidden alarm wires or anything inconvenient like that, the counting boxes were closed and sealed with wax, but not locked down. That meant, unlike previous visits, my evening’s activities would be obvious, and as such, this would be my last visit to the House’s business office for the foreseeable future. That was kind of disappointing, but not completely unexpected. Businesses do not like “unexpected revenue deficits”, and the noble houses like Garrowell liked them even less. Sure it was a drop in the bucket of their total revenue, but still, there was a couple of reasons why they took such things personally. One of course, was the fact that they liked to consider themselves the Master Puppeteers of the Eight Kingdoms… that they actually controlled the serfs, freedmen and other such riff raff by being the economic engine that constituted the lifeblood of the men and women who toiled for their daily silver. The other was that since the Noble Houses generally used the size of their treasury as their measuring point in what was euphemistically called the “spear measuring contest” between the Noble Houses. Any loss was like their “spears” drooping… or worse yet, if another Noble House was gaining from the theft, they could see the other house’s “spear” rising. And that just couldn’t do. If you think it’s gauche or uncouth to refer to comparing the Noble Houses competing to make the most money to a bunch of teenaged boys in a brothel trying to figure out who has the biggest “spear”… keep in mind that the euphemism was not mine, at least to start with. It was that of a former colleague of mine, a disowned scalawag scion of House Merryweather, one of the great confidence men I had ever worked with and he was half in his cups at the time. But, if you ask me, it still fits. But I decided that was enough wallowing in the disappointment that this sheep would not be available for shearing in the future, and instead started on today’s shearing, that is, to wit, getting as many soldans as I could in the time that I had before the patrolling guards were able to detect my nefarious nocturnal activities. I reached under my shirt and untied the strings that held the two leather scoundrel’s bags I carried and after opening them and unfolding them, I started breaking the seals on the counting boxes, and started transferring the neatly stacked coins into the draw-stringed satchels. I had practiced this for endless hours in the various rooms, flophouses, slums and basically, anywhere I laid my head down for more than an hour, and it paid off as I quickly transferred a stack of coins into the satchel rolls. I had gotten good enough at this that I could open a roll, fill with 20 or so coins, and close it within approximately five or six normal breaths, without making a noise more than a muted *clack* as the coins were stacked up against each other. Soon enough, the bags were filled, and I grinned as I retied the much thicker leather satchels around my chest. It looked like I would be making approximately 400 soldans from tonight’s activities, which would be enough for a man like me to live the high life for months on end. Or, usually, as it turned out, spend it all in weeks of living the “low” life, in a manner that even a jaded Noble like the ones I was liberating said coin from would find excessive. That is one of my… well I don’t want to say character flaws, but it’s definitely not a positive thing. The way I reasoned it was summed up in Rule #54: “The second you have coin in your pocket, you yourself become a target for every gold-grasping con man, rogue, assassin and even the local tavern-wenches. They seek to separate you from your money, and the best you can hope for is to be separated from your coin in a manner that you will look back fondly on during lean times.” That’s when I let said nature get me into trouble. I still had a couple loose burlap sacks, and I started casing the room for anything valuable and portable that I could get out back over the wall without too much hassle. I let the lightstone play over the various walls and desks, while my mind tried to catalogue the items, their worth, and conversely, how much I could get for them from a local buyer of “distressed goods” to be resold in other parts of the Eight Kingdoms. Finally, a gleam from the corner caught my eye, and I felt an avarice filled grin flit over my face as I examined it. It was a golden-hued statue of the Patron God of Merchants, Mallian. It was about 18 inches tall, and if I didn’t miss my guess, it was solid gold, not just gold plated. My fingers practically itched with the desire to lift and find out if it was truly made of solid gold. If it was, even considering the loss I would take in selling it under the table to be resold someplace very, very far away, it would bring me a thousand soldans. My roguish nature very nearly overwhelmed my caution at this point, and I felt myself reaching for it, before a thought ran through my head, and abruptly caused every nerve ending to freeze as if being exposed in the harshest Icefish Bay winter. Like a message from the Gods above, it was easy to read what the ice-cold nerves were trying to tell me. This. Is. A. Trap. I stopped and took a step back, and did a more thorough search of the area, and found that I had nearly fallen for House Garrowell’s thief-trapping tactic. The floor that held the pedestal that the statue rested on was slightly recessed. When I removed the weight of the statue, the lifting of the weight would cause the floor to rise, and trigger some kind of mechanism that would have… undesirable consequences, let’s say, for whomever triggered said mechanism. Said person being your truly, I had to take a couple deep breaths to remind myself that I HAD found it, that I WASN'T trapped in here, that I was still on course to be over the wall shortly with time and money to spare. I chuckled to myself. “Almost… almost”, I whispered under my breath. Most thieves, not being as clever as I, and thus blinded by greed and avarice would have lifted the statue, and fallen prey to the trap. I let the lightstone shine on the area around the floor, and found that a series of tiles had recently been replaced, leading all the way back to the door I entered by. Holding the softly glowing stone close to the door frame, and smiled to myself as an answering faint glow was seen at several points on both sides of the door. A wizard I once bilked out of a few hundred silver Garats over several months for “top of the line spell materials direct from the Lastrian Jungle” had given me a lesson on how Magic truly worked. Well, I’m sure he dumbed it down for me, as he had a way of talking down to anyone he worked with, but he explained the rule of Sympathetic Magic. In short, and I’m going to use his words here… you’ll have to mentally add the sneer and lecturing manner yourself. “When two bits of diverse magic are brought in close proximity to one another, their magical fields blend together, and each will temporarily pick up a bit of the nature of the other, until the two items are no longer in close proximity, and they return to the magical nature by and for which they were created.” He went on for several minutes in this vein, but the salient point was, that bringing one magical field (the lightstone) close to the points on the door that were also magically charged caused the points, whatever they were, to pick up a bit of the Lightstone’s nature, and glow slightly as a result. If I had to hazard a guess, the way that it became a little harder to grasp the Lightstone firmly when it was near the points of magic, meant that the door had a ward on it of some type. That fit the whole setup.Thief comes in, steals money, steals statue, triggers mechanism, triggers ward on the door… equals one thief, caught in the act, and trapped well enough that when the ward was dispelled that the thief could instantly be taken into custody red-handed so to speak. I tipped a mental hat to whomever had created this setup. It played to the key nature of a thief clever enough to have had somehow made their way over the wall, past the guards, and all the way to the Noble House’s sanctum sanctorum twice before, and then coming to the conclusion that the House was onto them, meaning that they had to make this their big score, as they certainly would not find a welcoming reception on their next visit. They would then see the statue, and figuring that this was their last visit, seek to add the statue to their haul, and then be caught red-handed. They had thought of everything. Except a rogue who was clever enough to do all that, AND THEN clever enough to figure out what a clever person would do in response. “Well played…. But not well enough!” I thought, as I slid back out the door where I came, and turned to close the door behind me, whistling the mental equivalent of a merry tune as I already started planning on how I would spend tonight’s haul. “That’ll be quite enough there, thief.” The calm voice spoke quietly and my blood turned to ice as I slowly turned to face a man in House Garrowell’s colors. One could tell quite easily from the cut of his clothes and the tailored fit that this was no ordinary guard that had caught me but instead one of the members of House Garrowell in the flesh. But that’s not what got my attention, not really. That was only the peripheral details picked up while I focused on a much more immediate and pressing matter… That being the loaded and primed crossbow with its quarrel pointed unerringly at my heart. Which I might add, felt like it might not start beating again any time soon. Seems like I hadn’t been quite as clever as I thought. Oops. SirFozzie fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Aug 21, 2017 |
#
?
Aug 21, 2017 04:46
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 13:32 |
|
|
This next bit is from a bit later in the book, after our Rogue has gotten himself in various scrapes, both personal and professional.. for example "new rule: Never string along two wenches from the same tavern. Eventually, they'll talk, and you can block one angry woman from hitting you with thrown glasses, but not two.") Rule #45 “Those who can… do. Those who can’t... teach. Those who can do neither.... are usually related to the Guildmaster” First of all, I want to remark that there’s nothing but irony in calling your association of rogues, ne’er do wells and thugs the Independent’s Guild. That’s... two words that never really are comfortable together. But the Old Man made it work. He had formed the Independent’s Guild many years before I was born after a gang war that left all sides bleeding and raw. I never asked him, and he’d never had told me, but I somehow got the feeling that he engineered the whole thing so he could take over. He thought long term, while everyone else scrapped for short term benefits. He was scrupulous with his agreements. If he double-crossed anyone, they never lived to tell anyone about it. He was a bastion of neutrality in the various disagreements between the various criminal factions. He kept his people safe and an ocean of stability amongst an ocean of bloodshed. So, when he proposed his plan to stop the gang war, the various gangs not only agreed to giving up their autonomy, they begged him to run it. That's on the scale of convincing a starving Hajka dog to share its dinner with you. He managed to apply a minimum of order and rank on everything, so everyone stopped trying to screw each other over, and could turn their full attention to screwing everyone else over. So, if you needed less-than-legal material shipped across the city, to anywhere in the Eight Kingdoms, he knew someone. If someone was encroaching on your turf, and you needed to send a message to them that involved some kind of threat of physical violence (or Gods forbid, actual violence), you went to the Old Man. It's said he had a finger in half of the businesses of the city, both legal and otherwise. He was the city’s unknown leader. He could make or break people with a subtle action. And I mean he could make or break their lives, or he could make or break them personally. He actually rose up through the ranks himself, so he never asked anyone to do something he hadn't done before. I guess you can tell I kinda admired the Old Man, he took care of his folks. It might be said that the Old Man’s son, Harian had taken lessons in being ruthless. In fact, I could probably guess that he was not only ruth-LESS, he was ruth-NONE. he had completely no ruth at all. Apparently working with him was like dancing on the edge of a rooftop during a rainstorm. One false move, and you fell off. Knowing that he was the Old Man’s chosen successor was one of the reasons why I had made the deal with the Old Man, despite the fact that I gave up a lot in the deal to remain independent. I managed to stay independent by guaranteeing that certain targets would not be touched unless I was told otherwise, and I kicked in a share of my gains to the “City Guard Widows and Orphans fund” (yes, they actually had the shining brass bajaks to call it that). Even then, I don’t know why he let me do my thing. He must have liked me, despite being one of the most ruthless figures in the city when the situation called for it. His son had been specifically forbidden to recruit me (or more likely threaten me with joining the Independents Guild or a horrible death) because of the deal I made with the Old Man. His son had all of the viciousness but none of his father's virtues. I didn't want to be a cog in his son's machine. I don't think my soul could have taken it. If you were caught on one of the Old Man's tasks, you weren’t completely cut off. As long as you didn’t talk about the Independents Guild, your family was taken care of, and I knew a couple folks who had been quietly released from a sentence in the mines after a short amount of time thanks to the Old Man’s influence. But that wasn’t Harian’s style. If you were caught, he took it as a personal affront and instead of taking care of your family, he TOOK CARE OF YOUR FAMILY. Same words, but VERY different meaning. You had failed his glorious leadership, and therefore you must pay, and if he couldn’t reach you, he’d take it out on those you cared about. Meant people were a lot more willing to die trying to complete a task rather than be caught, but then again, dead people can’t be further use to anyone. He was liberal with his gold, and just as liberal in the use of his henchmen to kill and torture anyone who got in his way.. Now, I’m making it seem like he’s this mythical boogeyman, that is the very feature of the devils of legend and all the Holy books I’ve perused (hey, Don’t knock it. If you’re hiding out as a Temple Novitiate, it’s either read the source material so you have SOMETHING to talk about, or go nuts.). He was nothing of the sort. He was tall like the Old Man was, but where the Old Man was whipcord lean, and neatly dressed.. he was just plain large and heavy. Where the Old Man dressed neatly in somber colors, like your favorite uncle, he dressed in ridiculously colorful frippery that nauseated my fashion sense. Since he never had to make a dishonest living on the streets, he had spent his time feasting on the finest foods that the city’s cooks had to offer, and taking part in debauchery that I will not spend time describing... let’s just say he preferred his victims young and helpless. So maybe I guess he was a devil, but the type that got everyone else to do his dirty work for him. I guess I thought the Old Man would live forever. Or at least that at some point, he would put the ties of blood aside and realize that his son would quickly destroy what he had built. That didn't happen. And now, with the Old Man dead, and Harian in charge, the agreement was worth about as much as the paper it wasn't written on. Some days it doesn't pay to be a Rogue.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2017 04:49
|
|
|
Basically, I'm looking for Critique, and how you view the character, etcetera. Not just the wording, but if I've explained things enough to give you a mental picture.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2017 06:26
|
|
|
The POV character? He's clever, and has clever friends. He has a personal code, but I'm not sure if that extends to a personal moral code or is more a list of survival rules. I feel like I have a better idea of what Harian's character is like - how he interacts with others, what he likes/dislikes. The POV character notes those things but seems kinda detached from them. I do like how the magical sympathy bit played out. Makes me wonder how prevalent magic is in this society - different magics rubbing off on each other could have very strange consequences if magic is common.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2017 02:34
|
|
