Chapter 1: Plan The Crime, Do The Crime, Party Time?

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 visits I had made ... 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 minor percentage of their daily revenue, never mind yearly. However, 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 it was they who were truly in control of 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.