Trapmaster Alaric
Trapmaster Alaric
By Geoff Bottone
The Red Dragon Inn 10 launches goes live on Kickstarter October 10th!
Most people know there are two types of thieves in Greyport: the public-facing ones known for their charitable works in the Undercity and the much sneakier ones that collect involuntary donations from Guild-approved targets.
Alaric was what the Thieves’ Guild called a floater. He was a card-carrying member that specialized in traps and trap removal. Most of the time, he was employed to clear ancient and dangerous traps out of tucked-away corners of the Undercity. More rarely, he was sent in with a team of other specialists and troubleshooters to create a safe path for the loot and burgle boys.
Because he was a floater, Alaric sometimes did contract work, hired by an unnamed third party outside of the Guild’s usual channels to help with “special jobs.”
This was one of those jobs.
The initial meet was typical for its type, at an Undercity dive called the Swollen Goiter, a place so foul that even the patrons of the Black Dragon Depths steered well clear of it. A goblin with a nasty facial scar and a hook hand not only tended bar, but looked like she hated doing it. She seemed insulted when Alaric strode in.
Feeling the bartender’s one good eye on his back, Alaric sauntered to the back corner of the bar. He passed solitary customers trying to drown themselves in what passed for rotgut, over to a corner table lit by a sagging and despondent candle.
Alaric grabbed a chair, reversed it, and sat down, resting his elbows on the back. The table’s other three occupants gave him the once over. In the light of the candle, their eyes gleamed like black pearls.
“You’re early,” said the tall, blonde man with the chipped tooth and the crumpled nose.
“Means I’ll be early to leave, too,” said Alaric, indicating the rest of the bar with a nod of his head. “Sooner I can get out of here, the better.”
The woman with the matted, curly hair pursed her thin lips, while the scrawny guy in the knit cap sitting on her other side scratched at the side of his head.
He leaned back in his chair and met Blondie’s shark-eye stare. “You have my retainer?”
Blondie grunted, laid a small, clinking bag on the rough and reeking tabletop, slid it over. Alaric watched the rest of the room out of the corner of one eye as he loosened the bag’s opening and reached inside. No one seemed to notice him or his fee. He counted the coins quietly, by feel, before closing the bag and stowing it inside his shirt.
“You’d better be worth it,” said Curly, as she picked at her teeth with a ragged fingernail.
“Fully vetted and accredited. I’ve got the paperwork if you need to see it.” Alaric paused as Blondie waved the suggestion away. “But yeah, I’m worth it. Tell me about this job.”
Knit Cap pulled a tattered sheet of parchment out of his vest and smoothed it out on the table. The diagrams drawn on it were crude, and seemed to have been done in black crayon. The penmanship of the notations was also awful. A backward “R” here, an “of” spelled like “OVE” there.
Shalni help him, he was the only professional at this table.
“We’ve tried to get into this place before,” said Blondie, tapping the diagram. “But no luck. Place is sealed tight like a drum. Trapped to high heaven. Well guarded.”
“I don’t do guards,” said Alaric.
Curly hissed at him in irritation.
“We’ll deal with the guards,” said Blondie. “We need you to deal with the traps. Last time, they were concentrated in this tunnel here. There were also a few in the inner room. Here and…here. Should be easy for a man of your skill.”
Alaric shook his head. “Can’t assume that. You breached the area and failed. People will come back to check. They’ll replace the traps that didn’t work and move the ones that did. The intel you have now is less than useless. It’s a liability.”
Curly looked like she had bitten into a lemon thinking it was an apple. “So you’re saying you can’t do it?”
“No. I’m saying that you shouldn’t assume it’ll be easy.”
Blondie smirked and nodded, as if he liked what he was hearing. “Ease off, Mads, this guy is all right. We’re getting what we’ve paid for.”
“Yes,” said Alaric, still glaring at Mads. “When is this happening?”
“Two nights from now. We’ll meet over on Penance Street.” Blondie gestured at Knit Cap, who pushed the parchment over to Alaric. “That’ll give you time to get ready and memorize the layout. You deal with the traps and the vault. We’ll handle the rest.”
Their meet was the carriage stop on Penance. A good enough spot for it. No one would notice four extra people waiting around at a place where people were supposed to wait around.
Alaric got there half an hour before he was supposed to, both to case the location and to see if he could get a better idea of his employers.. He hadn’t liked the smell of this job from the first, and he wanted to take every precaution. No one followed him. No one seemed to take any interest in him. No one was watching the carriage stop. Just another evening in Greyport.
Even knowing that everything looked all right, he stayed where he was, in an alley across the street. The back of his hands itched. Something about this was off. He just couldn’t sense it yet.
He saw lights flickering in the windows up and down Penance Street, and wondered who had kindled them. Was it one of the regular folks of Greyport, sitting down to a quiet dinner before going off to bed? Or was it one of the unusual folks, who were only now rolling out of bed to make the most of the night? Alaric mused that he felt much more kinship with the second group than the first. He had been nocturnal since before he had worked for the Guild, rubbing elbows with obsessive scholars, questionable potion makers, necromancers, second-story boys, fences, nights’ watch, and even a few insomniac priests.
He still sometimes wished he could have fit in with the first group, though. Their lives seemed to be a lot simpler, and they often appeared to be much more well rested.
Alaric also knew that, beyond all reason, some of the people in the first group were jealous of him. They seemed to think that it was terribly exciting and exotic to be in a profession with no set hours, where you faced danger and detention at every corner, where you weren’t guaranteed to return home with all the fingers you left with, even if you were very, very careful.
He shrugged at this absurdity. Gold’s always shinier on the other side of the dragon hoard. Or so he heard.
Something in the scene ahead of him had changed. Alaric came back to full alertness and peered.
A trio of people approached the carriage stop, amateurish and obvious. Alaric suppressed a sigh at their ineptitude. He knew better than to make any kind of unnecessary noise when he was on a job. Slipping out of the alley way, he took a circuitous route across the street to join his temporary companions.
Blondie, Curly, and Knit Cap continued to walk too close together, clanking with every bowlegged step. They all wore identical brown cloaks that bulged in odd places, with the occasional crowbar gooseneck or sword pommel peeking through into the open air. They could only have more emphatically declared that they were up to something by carrying signs and drawing attention to themselves with bagpipes.
“Can we stop?” asked Knit Cap, for the third time.
“We’re almost there,” groused Blondie.
“But my back is killing me.”
“Maybe if you didn’t take all of those swords with you,” snarled Curly.
“But I need ‘em,” said Knit Cap. “‘Cause we’re going to have to take care of the prie…the guards…ourselves.”
“I’d have thought one sword would be enough,” said Blondie, above the noise of his own heavy load.
“Well, I’ve got two hands, don’t I?!”
“Then why,” ventured Curly, “did you bring three swords?”
“In case I dropped one.”
“In here,” said Blondie, waving them into a stinking alley, backed on three sides by crumbling buildings.
Alaric followed the trio in as they disappeared into the shadows and divested themselves of their heavy burdens. He was frankly shocked that the crashing, banging, swearing, and groaning did not attract the attention of any of the city guard. He made a mental note to have a word with Master Petra about that if he made it back to the Guild.
“All right,” whispered a sweating Blondie. “This next part is all on you. You’re going to have to go through here.”
He gestured to a rusted iron grating sunken into the lowest part of the alley.
Alaric nodded and got to work. He filled and lit his small covered, thieves’ lantern, arranging its hood so that a focused beam shone directly on the grate. Then he took out some medium weight oil and squirted it liberally over the pitted metal.
“Or you could just use this!” snapped Knit Cap impatiently, proffering him one of their many pry bars.
“Keep your voice down,” said Alaric, as he laid a thick fabric pad on the ground next to the grate.
Mercifully, the trio remained silent as Alaric gently tugged the grate from its housing and transferred it soundlessly to the pad. He picked up the lantern and shined its beam down into the hole. Vertical stone shaft, a good twenty feet down. Attached metal ladder. Badly rusted. Two rungs missing. Another half dozen all but eaten through. Everything covered by condensation.
Alaric hung the thieves’ lantern from a button on his tunic, slipped on a pair of deerskin gloves, and descended. The trio huddled around the hole as he made his painstaking way down the ladder, testing each rung before daring to set his full weight on it. At least they weren’t talking now.
He reached the bottom of the ladder soon enough and played the thin beam from his lantern around the area. It was a natural cavern that had been shaped and reinforced into a storm drain by some long forgotten effort of civic planning. Alaric was grateful it hadn’t rained in over six days, because this meant that the mud that made up the storm drain floor was merely treacherous and not impassable.
He pulled several magically-hardened rods from a long bag on his hip and screwed them together, until he had a pole that was about ten feet long. He laid one end on the bottommost rung and the other on the stone lip at the edge of the storm drain to create a makeshift bridge. Then with deft and careful movements, he walked down the pole until he had reached more solid ground. The enchanted metal flexed under his weight, leaving a damp groove in the mud. Other than that, there was no trace of his passing.
After unscrewing, wiping down, and storing the rods, Alaric stalked forward, lamp held high. The beam revealed an obstruction in the storm drain a short distance ahead. At first, it looked like a tangle of roots that had infiltrated the tunnel from above. As he drew closer, Alaric saw that it was actually a crude net made out of rotting rope that had been stretched across the storm drain. It had been liberally decorated with rusted scraps of iron, some of which had pulled away from their moorings and littered the floor.
A crude noisemaker, but if it alerted any nearby guards to an intruder’s presence, crude was all you needed. Alaric knelt down in the mud and spent a painstaking couple of minutes snipping off iron scraps and opening a large enough hole in the rope web for him to crawl through. The knots gave him more trouble than he was expecting. They were huge, clumsy things, as if they had been tied by a little kid. What they lacked in elegance, they more than made up for in durability.
He was soon on the other side and continuing down the storm drain. Or, more accurately, up the storm drain, because shortly after he had gotten past the net, the tunnel began a gentle slope up toward street level, lifting Alaric out of the mud and the damp. He eventually reached a point where the culvert diverged at a Y-intersection. To the right, just as the crude map had indicated, a crumbling set of steps led upward.
Alaric played the lantern beam around and was not surprised when something sparkled in the air ahead of him.
Reaching into one of his belt pouches, he extracted a handful of compound that was half finely-ground flour and half pixie dust. As he scattered it in the air in front of him, the particles adhered themselves to the nearly invisible tripwires and started to glow.
He took out his shears and was about to cut the tripwires when he noticed the carefully disguised counterweights hanging against the walls. A quick inspection confirmed what he had suspected–yes, putting pressure on the tripwires would trigger several traps, but cutting the tripwires would drop the weights and trigger other traps.
This discovery led to several minutes of Alaric carefully inspecting the immediate area, probing gently into cracks and crevices, and digging through the dirt on the floor a spoonful at a time. He did not stop until he had revealed at least one trap per wire. After that, it was a matter of inserting small pins and metal wedges into the traps’ workings to keep them from triggering.
Alaric realized, as he peered through a loupe and put the last pin in place with the help of a pair of extra long tweezers, that he was having fun. The cans on the ropes had been amateur work, but these were the work of a very skilled, very nasty trap maker. This one here would send a crossbow bolt into the back of the ankle, causing the intruder to fall heavily forward, into the path of this other trap that swung a spring-loaded mace at roughly head height. If that wasn’t enough to dissuade intruders with particularly hard heads, the actuator for the mace trap also triggered a nearby nozzle that would douse the offending party in stunning jelly.
The trap maker seemed to know that they were good, too, for they had signed every one of their creations. Even now, Alaric could see the Old Halfling letter G etched into one of the trap’s retaining bars.
He shot the pin home and slowly drew back, realizing he was sweating a little bit. Then he smiled, put his loupe and tweezers away, and took out his spoon.
With great care, he dug a shallow trench underneath the still dusty and faintly glowing tripwires. When it was deep enough, he removed his hood, his belt, and his pouches and thrust them through the gap to the other side. Then, with careful, wriggling motions, he shimmied on after them.
The stairs, Alaric was a little shocked to discover, were not trapped. He wondered if G the trap maker hadn’t gotten around to it, or if they thought that heavily trapping the approach to the stairs would be enough. If anything, the distinct lack of traps on the stairs served to make him more cautious instead of less.
Tightening his belt and straightening his hood, Alaric crept up the steps and into the mouth of a brick-lined tunnel. It sloped downward as it traveled, to an opening that seemed to be blocked by a heavy slab of wood.
Alaric placed his lantern on the ground before getting down on his hands and knees. He pushed the lantern in front of him as he slowly traversed the hallway.
No traps here, either. Unless he was missing something.
He blinked his eyes several times, as if doing so would sharpen his vision. He looked again.
Nothing.
With his blood pounding in his ears, Alaric traversed the rest of the hallway and at last reached the wooden slab on the far end. Peering around the edge, he saw hinges up at the top. Obviously the back of a concealed door, designed to sit flush with the wall on the other side. He sprinkled his pixie flour compound around, squirted some oil into the hinges, steeled himself, and pushed.
The door swung upward silently, opening onto a large, yet somehow cozy…
Kitchen?
He lowered the door, rubbed his eyes, raised the door.
The room beyond was still a kitchen. Moonlight filtered in through several high windows, picking out the tins and crates and sacks of foodstuffs piled high on shelves. Directly opposite Alaric stood a long wooden worktop, flanked on either side by two cast iron stoves that still radiated considerable heat.
He slipped out into the room and eased the panel shut behind him. True to his assumption, it fitted perfectly into the wall, looking like just another section of well-worn panelling.
As he stood up to take in his surroundings, Alaric quietly wondered what the hell his employers were playing at. He expected some kind of vault. With guards. And patrols. There should have been a strongbox with a lock he needed to pick, or a safe with a combination he needed to crack. Not a…month’s supply of potatoes and a…glass jar filled with licorice?
What, he thought to himself, the hell?
“‘Scuse me?”
He swung around, horrified at being so easily surprised.
Standing in the kitchen doorway was a little girl dressed in a white shift, tangled mop of hair sticking out in all directions. She cradled a stuffed Gog in one arm and held a too-large, slightly chipped tumbler in her other hand.
“Yes?” replied Alaric, wondering if he had stumbled into an insanely elaborate trap.
The little girl held up the tumbler and said, very politely, “I wanna drink of water.”
“Oh,” said Alaric after a moment. “Of course.”
He took the tumbler and placed it under the small spout installed on one side of the worktop. He gave the attached handle a few pumps and, when the mechanism squeaked irritably, paused to oil up the workings simply out of habit. When the tumbler was about half full, he crouched down and presented it to the girl, who tucked it against her body.
“Thank you!”
“You’re welcome.”
As the little girl nodded sleepily and turned to go, Alaric had a brief flash of inspiration.
“Young lady?”
“Mmh?”
“Is there…by any chance…do you happen to know if there is a big metal box anywhere nearby.”
“Mmh,” she replied, a touch more alertly, and toddled off through the kitchen door.
Alaric followed her through a substantial cafeteria decorated with pictures of the gods of Greyport and charming aphorisms penned with bright paints.
“Always wash your hands. Say please and thank you. Please ask before you borrow someone else’s things.”
The girl continued on a mostly straight path across the cafeteria through another door, which led out into an atrium. The walls were covered with framed portraits of smiling children, all of whom presented with varying levels of scruffiness. On the other side of the atrium, next to a polished staircase leading up to the second floor, was something that looked for all the world like a shrine.
And on that shrine was a large, metal box banded with reinforcing straps.
“There it is. G’night.”
He watched in silence as the little girl painstakingly climbed the steps one at a time, careful not to spill her water or lose her grip on Gog. When she was safely upstairs and thumping down a hall, Alaric devoted his attention to the shrine.
The box was quite large and secured to a stone platform by large rivets. A large lock hung on each of its sides. There was a narrow slot, labeled “Donations” on the top. The stone platform had an engraved plaque which read, “Please give generously to the Great Temple Orphanage, and help us give these wayward children a future.”
Alaric read the words and started to get angry.
There were three portraits on the wall behind the box, along with another engraved plaque. Two of the portraits were small and square, virtually identical to the portraits of kids decorating the rest of the atrium. The one on the left was of a human girl with fiery, and very messy, pigtails. The one on the right was a halfling boy with a rumple of brown hair, whose two front adult teeth had unfortunately grown in before his mouth had a chance to grow out.
Between them was another, much larger painting depicting two of the city’s most famous adventurers. It was clear that the red-headed woman in all the armor had been the pigtailed girl, and that the halfling with the mischievous grin and all the knives had been the little boy.
The plaque underneath this painting read, “Fiona and Gerki, alumni of the Great Temple Orphanage and School. We are so proud of how far they have come. We want to thank them for their generous donations of time and money that allow us to continue our important work.”
As he finished reading the inscription on the plaque, Alaric felt his anger curdling into fear.
Because now he knew who G the trap maker was.
It took Alaric about as long to get back to the ladder and the open grating as it had for him to reach the orphanage. He tapped a nearby rung with the hilt of his extra-long tweezers, and waited for three heads to pop into view.
“Thought they had gotten you,” said Blondie.
“No.”
“Did you get it?” asked Knit Cap, his voice betraying his excitement.
“No.”
“Why the hell not?” hissed Curly.
“I don’t do guards. There’s a couple of guards on the box.”
“Can’t you just get around them?” asked Blondie.
“No. They’re right on top of it.”
Blondie let out a frustrated sigh. “What about the traps?”
“I took care of all the traps,” said Alaric. “Nasty pieces of work. You were right to hire a professional.”
“So it’s just the guards left then, yeah?” said Blondie.
“Yeah. And the locks on the box, of course.”
“All right. Mads, Snitch, we knew it might come to this, and we came prepared. We’ll go down there, take care of the guards, have our freelancer open the locks, and leave with the loot.”
The three heads disappeared from the opening. Alaric could hear clanking and banging as the trio started gathering up their equipment.
Alaric drummed his fingers on one of the rungs and then called up, “you’re going to need to travel light. There’s some places where you’ll have to squeeze by some traps. Also, you don’t want the guards to hear you.”
He heard distant consenting replies and then a cacophony of clattering as the trio hastily divested themselves various crowbars, weapons, and similar.
The trio descended and, after a harrowing moment where one of the rungs gave way beneath Blondie’s feet and nearly sent him plummeting, joined Alaric on the bottom.
“Lead the way,” said Blondie.
Alaric held up his lamp, accidentally shining the focused beam in Blondie’s face.
“Better if I lead from behind,” he said, as Blondie squinted and tried to wave the light beam away. “I’ll have the light, so you can see, and I’ll also be able to tell you where to step and, more importantly, where not to.”
“Fine,” said Blondie. “Snitch, take point.”
The trio tromped through the thick mud on the bottom of the culvert, cursing and swearing as it sucked their feet under and refused to let go. Alaric padded across his segmented pole to more solid ground, watching and waiting as the trio blundered to the other side. It looked like Snitch had lost a shoe in the process.
“You could’ve mentioned the mud!” growled Curly.
“Sorry,” said Alaric. “It was right there. Thought it was obvious.”
The trio continued onward, grousing a little bit as Alaric brought up the rear. With his careful instructions, they managed to pass through the gap in the rope and metal net without making too much noise. Then they followed the culvert as it sloped gently upward to the Y intersection and the steps.
Alaric slowed to a halt and shone his lantern down at his feet.
“What’re you doing?” growled Snitch. “We can’t see!”
“Sorry,” said Alaric. “I think my bootlaces have come untied…”
“Well tie them up and–”
Alaric heard a sproinging noise, followed by a whistle and a thud. Someone–he thought it might have been Blondie–screamed and fell to the ground. There was a second, significantly louder, thud.
“AAH! MY HEAD!”
“What happened?!” screamed Curly. “Deetch! Are you–”
There was a loud, ominous swishing noise, followed by the clank of a pair of heavy metal jaws clamping shut on an unprotected shin. There was another scream.
“Mads!”
“AAAH! MY LEG!”
“I’m trying! Stop thrashing around! I didn’t bring my crowbar because the ‘pro’ here told us to travel light! Hang on, I think I got it!”
There was a squeak and then a click. He heard the sounds of a viscous liquid being liberally sprayed at high velocity!
“AAAAH! MY EYES!”
“AAAAAAH! WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?”
There was a flopping sound.
“Feeling…dizzy…”
“Me…me…too…How’s…whatshisname?”
“I un…”
The sedative gel had rendered both Flat Cap and Curly unconscious by the time the net trap sprang, gathering both them and Blondie up into a nice tidy ball.
“Oh,” said Alaric, to an audience of no one. “Turns out these boots don’t even have laces.”
Most people know there are two types of thieves in Greyport: the public-facing ones known for their charitable works in the Undercity and the much sneakier ones that collect involuntary donations from Guild-approved targets.
But there is another type of thief in the city–the type who think they can just steal from whoever they like.
Like most members of the Thieves’ Guild, Alaric derived a great amount of pleasure and personal pride from ruining the days of that type of thief.
Especially the ones that try to steal from orphans.