Thaland of the Walk, Part Two

When the guilds moved, they did not act with subtly. Twice, small squad of thugs ambushed him. Once between the Watch Station and his home, the second on the route between the Station and the docks. He’d survived each attack, killing or wounding each of the thugs. When the surviving attackers talked, Thaland acted. Those who’d commanded the thugs were pursued, captured, questioned and dealt with.
Thinking that he was winning, Thaland stepped up his attacks. Though prostitution was not against any laws, the whore (male or female) had to be fifteen (both physically and mentally mature to conduct business) and be UnBonded (able to leave the establishment at will). Despite the ‘UnBonded’ law, some establishments attempted to both dodge the age regulation and effectively enslave their ‘product’ by buying the debts or fines of children who were orphans, beggars or just from penniless families. By adding wildly inflated ‘costs of housing and feeding’ those bonded by debt to the legal obligation, the debtors found themselves effectively enslaved by their ‘benefactors’. Because the debt-bond laws had no controls for age beyond suckling infants, it effectively allowed the purchase and enslavement of anyone from toddlers to the extremely aged.
The Powdered Palace, a pleasure house with ties to both guilds was widely known for ‘fresh’ and ‘exceptionally compliant’ whores. The establishment’s manager was known to frequent debt sales and purchase far more pantry maids and stable boys than the establishment could ever use. In addition, those who patronized The Powdered Palace spoke of both the compliant ‘young stuff’ there bearing curious scars on their wrists and ankles and the new ‘Privileged Area’ that commanded an exclusive, and expensive membership.
Thaland acted one he believed the bonded children, the exclusive members-only area and the scarred ‘young stuff’ amounted to evidence of child sex-enslavement. He and his twenty-man squad attacked in the pre-dawn twilight a mere Turn of the (Time) Glass after the place closed. The establishment doors bore powerful Sealing runes, preventing them from breaking or opening. However the wood and stone outside the doorframes easily shattered under the Rending spells cast by the squad wizards.
The unorthodox raid, done without approval from or notice to, the watch commanders or any legal authorities, caught the entire house by surprise. The few house guards were either half-drunk or asleep and easily dealt with. House servants and staff (many with elegant locked metal bands around their wrists, ankles and necks were rounded up and quickly ‘persuaded’ to cooperate and guide half the squad into the ‘Privileged Area’. Thaland led the rest of squad into the upper floors of the house where the legal whores and the establishment manager lived. The delays caused by rending the walls around several sealed doors allowed the woman to escape by climbing down a concealed ladder in a false chimney.
Thaland recklessly pursued her for several blocks through tenement blocks, merchant houses and into the warehouse blocks at the waterfront. He caught sight of her descending into the crate and barrel-cluttered basement of a small warehouse. Just as he began to reach out to seize the woman, an arm suddenly shot out from a stack of crates and lifted her up from the floor by her neck before jerking her out of view.
Stunned into immobility, Thaland listened to the woman’s strangled scream, cut short by the sounds of tearing fabric mixed with a gurgling, meaty, tearing sound and a spray of blood on the far wall. He swallowed heavily drawing his plain, un-adorned standard-issue sword as the woman’s headless body, her silk nightdress and fur-trimmed robe alike darkly spattered with her life’s blood, was tossed from behind the crates. The meaty splat of the decapitated corpse landing (three yards from the crates) mingled with the clanging of trapdoor behind him slamming shut. The heavy, dragging sounds and metal-on wood thuds announced that that exit was now closed to him.
“Enjoy your time with Grandfather Bones!” a mocking voice shouted down through the floorboards. “Aye, Thaland,” another voice added raucously. “Clap yer bracelets on him, if ya can!” Several other voices shouted encouragement to Grandfather Bones, urging him to make a messy, lingering end to ‘The Walk-Warden’, as Thaland had come to be known.
“You forget, gutter-spawn,” a disembodied, sepulchral voice pronounced from everywhere and nowhere. “Floorboards and grates hold the living prisoner, not one such as I. I feed and kill as I will. Your commands try my patience.”
Thaland’s heart sank to his knees and the sword nearly slipped from his fingers. This wasn’t something mortal he’d been trapped with. Grandfather Bones was legend. The vampire was reputed to have an ‘arrangement’ with the Thief’s Guild. In exchange for not meddling in the affairs of the living, Grandfather Bones was supplied with a steady stream of food in the form of people troublesome to the Guild’s leaders was said to be a minor detail, if it mattered at all, to the undead executioner. Bloody items of clothing and minor personal possessions were the only remnants ever found.
The raucous yells from above increased, but Thaland’s mind had no room for them. His thoughts focused only upon how to survive this encounter with the legendary vampire. Failing that, he hoped to retain some vestige of himself in whatever awaited him on the far side of death’s door. His thoughts ran in panicked circles, sifting through his mind for any fragment of folklore or legend related to vampires, or how to kill them.
A sudden, blood-chilling howl shattered Thaland’s thoughts. A stream of dark vapor shot up from behind the crates and through the gaps between the floorboards above. The mocking shouts from above suddenly became panic-stricken cries of terror which, one by one, were cut off in mid-scream.
Thaland forgot his immediate concerns in the horrible fascination of watching what appeared to be a mild-mannered man in the robes of an ancient Imperial Academic, devastating a gang of street toughs that would have given a squad of his best patrolmen a hard time. The toughs that could still move soon fled. As their footsteps faded, a harsh, Power-Laced syllable sounded from the main doors and crackled through the gaps in the floorboards above. A flash of other-worldly energy blasted through the warehouse and was gone.
Thaland felt himself falling, falling into a great darkness punctuated at irregular intervals by colored points of light. He approached a warm, brown light that eventually resolved itself into a door-shaped portal through which he could hear sounds of singing and the raucous clash of swords in mock combat. He yearned to pass through the portal to the revelry beyond, despite the knowledge that to do so would mean that the Thieves’ Guild had beaten him. His hands reached for the rim of the portal, then stopped. His regret at losing his low-level war with The Guild hardened into an ardent desire to take any avenue to extract justice, or at least vengeance from his enemies.
Suddenly, an ornately engraved ring of silvery-gray metal appeared on in the air before him. “Do you thirst for justice to be done more than you thirst for the drink of the righteous dead?” asked a powerful voice in the back of Thaland’s mind. “Would you make yourself a tool in the hand of He Who Bears the Scales?”
Thaland’s mind staggered. The Aspect of White devoted to Justice was commonly thought to not bother with the living. Few outside the legal professions gave him any consideration other than the abstract knowledge that the Scale-Bearer weighed the souls of the deceased and sent them to their eternal reward according to their life’s deeds. Yet, story-tellers and bards knew of ancient legends that said otherwise. The legends told of Justicars, ordinary persons devoted to true justice, plucked from the midst of the peoples and given vast powers to bring villains (protected by power and influence from mortal justice) to account using their own methods and time-table. Some said the Justicars were living immortals, immune to all manners of death. Others said they were undead, filled with the dark powers of the night-dwellers.
Thaland’s sense of duty and purpose made his decision in an instant. Here was his chance! He would no longer need to rely on weak, corruptible people in the constabulary or on the court bench to carry out justice! He was being offered license to become an instrument in the hand of Justice itself! As he grasped the ring with his left hand, Thaland sensed the overwhelming Power in the overlapping runes concealed in the ring’s engravings. His hands trembled slightly as he slid the band onto the middle finger of his right hand.
The instant the ring settled into place, Thaland felt it surge with released Divine Power, pushing the portal away from his grasp. The portal shrank rapidly into the distance as Thaland’s mind ‘flew’ backward at an ever-increasing pace. The ring was indeed transporting his spirit back to the realm of the living!