Rogue's Rules: A Certain Roguish Charm
Copyright© 2018 by FozzieBare
Chapter 6: The Illusion of Freedom
There is a specific kind of claustrophobia that doesn’t come from small spaces, but from small options.
I spent the entirety of the next day pacing the floor of my safest safehouse a cramped, dust-caked attic above a cooperage in the Tanners’ Quarter trying to math my way out of a corner. Normally, when the heat gets turned up in Totar City, a Rogue’s default setting is to pack light and hit the open road. Head for the border, slip across to Karkona or one of the coastal free-towns, and set up shop under a new name until the dust settles.
Except Harian had casually slammed that door shut over squab and Menruvian trout.
If his grand plan was to spread the Independent’s Guild across the Eight Kingdoms, running wouldn’t make me free; it would just make me a fugitive in a slightly different dot on the map. Eventually, some regional branch manager with something to prove would spot Arin Wolf eating lunch in a foreign tavern, and I’d end up floating down a river with a Taval Special, missing a finger or three.
So, running was off the table.
What about saying no? Denying him outright to his face? That was just suicide with extra steps. Harian wasn’t the Old Man. The Old Man appreciated a principled stance, even if it annoyed him. Harian regarded principles as a personal insult. A refusal in front of the rest of the Guild would be a public challenge to his authority, and his response would be fast, brutal, and thoroughly fatal.
Which left Option Three: Join up. Bow the knee. Put on the colors and become a lieutenant in Harian’s shiny new criminal empire.
Just thinking about it made my stomach churn. Joining Harian meant enforcing his brand of tyranny. It meant looking the other way or worse, participating when Taval went around collecting “debts” from desperate families. It meant trading away every shred of the Code Thalid had pounded into my head in that damp morgue years ago. It might keep my body alive, but it would sicken my soul, if not damn it eternally.
“When you take away their choices, Arin...” Thalid’s voice echoed in the back of my mind, competing with the rhythmic clack-clack of the cooper’s hammers three floors below.
By the time the sun dipped below the horizon, painting the sky in bruised shades of purple and orange, I realized I didn’t have a plan. I had a prayer, a pair of hidden Tang’fa sticks, and the vague, desperate hope that I could fast-talk my way through the night without signing my own death warrant or selling what was left of my conscience.
The Catacombs beneath Totar City were ancient. They were built long before the Empire fell, before the Nineteen Kingdoms became the Eight, back when people buried their dead with whole treasure hoards to pay for their passage to the underworld. Naturally, the living scoundrels had dug up the dead scoundrels centuries ago, leaving a massive, labyrinthine network of stone vaults, abandoned ossuaries, and forgotten tunnels.
It was the ultimate neutral ground for the underworld. Cold, damp, and smelling faintly of turned earth and ancient dust.
As I descended the winding stone stairs beneath the ruined Church of Saint Jude, the sound of the party reached me before the light did. Music a loud, raucous sea shanty played on a squeaky fiddle and a battered accordion—reverberated off the low stone ceilings, accompanied by the clash of pewter mugs, loud laughter, and the unmistakable roar of an underworld playing at being high society.
When I stepped into the Grand Crypt, the sight made me pause.
Harian had spared no expense. Torchlight flickered against the damp limestone, reflecting off silver platters of roasted meats, barrels of imported Karkonian ale, and red velvet drapes slapped hastily over ancient burial niches. Hundreds of thieves, smugglers, cutpurses, and enforcers were packed shoulder-to-shoulder, drinking the Old Man’s legacy away while pretending to mourn him.