The Hand and the Knife

While in the City of Bolden, Snow’s incessant snooping revealed that The Bakers were no ordinary street gang, but the name given to a particular branch of the so-called Thieves Guild, an entity which he was not aware existed.



Given his successful work for a guild, he was then courted and recruited by highly placed members of that group. The promise to Snow was a steady supply of work, a sense of commonality with other like-minded individuals and help should legal problems develop in the course of his thieving profession. For all of this the guild, would demand 10% of his take each month and the right to vet any jobs that Snow wanted to perform to make sure none of them were “protected” by the guild. He also learned that the Bolden guild was but one chapter of a worldwide organization of groups which existed in every walled city in every Land, across all of Erenth. All of the so-called Princes of the Guild worked together to guarantee the quality of their membership and to police their own.

Snow then partook in a candlelight ceremony during which he promised to subject himself to certain horrors including amputation, evisceration and even death, should he betray the guild, or its Prince… the so-called Chugar. He the passed in front of “The Horns” a totem he was told could magically seal his fate to the guild and to telling the truth. After the ceremony was over, a party was held in his honor and Snow quickly determined that not all was as it seemed.

The guild of Bolden was an emaciated organization. Its long struggle against the wererats beneath the city had led to street wars and viscious in-fighting. Increasingly, certain businesses in the guild would not submit to the protection offered by the guild and had begun to hire certain Fighting Halls to see an end of the extortion. For its part, the guild also hired out some of its work to Halls like the Villains, because they were so badly weakened.

Snow also learned from the hired thief, “Uncle Cris” that the guild in general was a bad deal and he was looking to get out. The whole organization, Uncle Cris warned, only existed to put its membership in continual debt to their betters – a kind of pyramid scheme that benefited only the uppermost men called Arches. Uncle Cris had been a member since he was eight years old and now as a man forty years older had only just emerged from the debt placed on him. He intended to make his way in the world without the guild, and having bought his right to retire, wanted out.

Snow’s membership in the guild came to a bad result when his snooping after the whereabouts of Thalwyn ran him afoul of Prince Chugar and bought for him a visit to the so-called Kill House of the guild. There he was set upon by the shadowy figures known as the Hand and his Fingers. He narrowly escaped with his life and found himself pursued through the streets of Bolden with Slayers and Assassins in hot pursuit.

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