Once, shortly after the incident, San had wondered out loud why Gord had wasted the treasure in the strongbox. Gord explained that it had been his only weapon under the circumstances. He had simply utilized the best tool at hand to accomplish a much-desired result-and that was that. The ledger wasn’t closed yet, though. To be fully even with the ghost of Theobald, Gord needed to do one more thing. He intended to recover the chest of coins from Theobald’s wet grave and have the treasure for himself.
It was a challenge in many ways, and the gathering of the information was by no means the greatest. Finding where the cistern was required a lot of research, but Gord was steeling himself for a far more exacting demand than that. He had to face the dangers of the subterranean maze under Greyhawk by himself. He had to go where the bones of the beggar-master lay and take from them their treasure. The very thought of what he would have to do made the boy shudder, but the man in him was determined to see it through in order to prove that there was no longer a weak and frightened child in his body, no more gutless coward. Alone he would prove that once and for all time, and in the proving he would gain much more than monetary reward.
With that, Gord finally forced his mind clear of such thoughts and returned to his study of the ancient drawings. A vast complex of tunnels and drains was shown on the maps, but repeated exposure to the information had made Gord a virtual expert in deciphering the different features. Sewers were singled out easily now, and drainage tunnels too. The cisterns and aqueducts stood out clearly in his mind as he scanned the map. Tonight his own map would be complete, and his adventure ready to begin.
Chapter 12
The hand-drawn re-creation spread out before Gord showed the deepest layer of tunnels beneath Old City. A network radiated from a place under the old citadel, with ducts running to it from the far reaches of what then had been the whole of Greyhawk. From the notes he had managed to decipher, Gord knew that the whole system had been carved out of the solid rock that lay under the place. Beneath the upper layers of the limestone, the stuff that the higher tunnels ran through, there was harder rock. Into this the original builders had cut shafts and passages for water. But most of the old collection points had long ago been filled and cemented over for other buildings to stand atop.
The reason for this was that times, and needs, had changed. The sprawl of the city now was so great that getting water during time of siege was of no concern. When Greyhawk had stood far from the Selintan, and the damming of the Grey Run by enemies was a possibility, then the need had been a real one. Far beneath the surface was a huge cavern intended to hold a reserve of water against an. eventuality that would never occur now. The ducts that once had brought rivers of rain from above down into the deep pool two hundred feet below the surface sent only a trickle of liquid that way now. The rock was not permeable, yet the reservoir was not dry-of that Gord was certain. The splash that Theobald and the chest had made when they fell had told Gord that.
He studied his carefully made map again. Four main channels sloped gently down to the place where the big cavern was. A dozen smaller ducts fed into each of the underground canals. Each of those ducts, in turn, was fed by a half-dozen conduits from collection points. The place where the strongbox lay was in the western canal. All Gord had to do was to find one of those old openings that wasn’t fully closed up. He couldn’t use the secret subcellar of the Beggars’ Guild to gain access to the canal, but one of the conduits would do as well.
What seemed an easy matter proved to be quite the opposite in practice. Gord spent most of his free time during the following three weeks searching the streets of Old City for one of the places where the drains had been. Changes made over the centuries were difficult enough to determine, so that locating the correct areas in itself proved most trying. The task was complicated by new layers of cobbles, plazas, dwellings, and all forms of other things that had been built upon what had been there before. Perhaps a collection conduit still remained somewhere, but Gord couldn’t find it. He was only temporarily stymied, however. Giving up was not in his nature.
Returning once again to Landgrave College’s hallowed repository of scribings, Gord managed to convince the doddering old custodian that he was still involved in the project for Doctor Prosper and that the good sage desired him to garner more from the dusty archives the librarian warded. Again with the great folio before him, Gord located and studied successively higher layers of the works beneath Old City. He had to go back several times to find what he was looking for, but it was eventually uncovered. Then Gord had to search through yet more of the old plans to get what he wanted. That was the military plan of the subterranean complex.
When he finally thought of the answer to his problem, he was astounded by his own stupidity. It was simply this: Well openings alone weren’t sufficient to manage the reservoir-there had to be passages leading to it for maintenance!
These ways would be regarded as secret, naturally. But somehow the college had gained copies of the military plans despite their secrecy. That probably had happened in that long-gone time when the masters of the complex that was spreading forth to become a major metropolis of the Flanaess, instead of the out-of-the-way trading center that the city had been, realized that the former concerns of the community were no longer applicable. Gord imagined the long-dead officials of the college receiving the gift of the plans from the equally long-deceased city officials with great ceremony; and sometime shortly thereafter, the lad mused, the whole batch had been quietly consigned to the oblivion of an ordinary storage room. Surely that was as good as, if not better than, locking them in a strongroom that every spy would seek to penetrate to discover what it held.
Once he knew what to look for, Gord quickly found what he needed. The plan wasn’t identified as a secret military one, but he recognized it as such immediately. Routes for movement of troops beneath the city were shown, and so were the means of getting to the reservoir. All he had to do now was to get to the passages that lay about midway between the sewers and the drains, and the rest would follow.
Because of his own experiences, especially his apprenticeship as a thigger-thief, Gord was familiar with the maze that existed just beneath the streets. From deep cellars, sub-basements, sewers, and the like, one could enter a network of hidden pathways that could be taken to bring the adventurous individual unseen from place to place within the entire city. Beggars used this lowway, as it were, and thieves and assassins also utilized it frequently and extensively. Wild cats, huge rats, all sorts of vermin, and who knew what else made the complex their home. Gord had heard stories of desperate and mad individuals who dwelled in the subterranean realm under the city. Recalling that thought made him shudder. Such an environment would make men into something different and more terrible in a short time, for to survive there would mean that an individual would have to become more ferocious, more vicious, than the other beasts that resided there.
What equipment would he require to get through the upper labyrinth, find a means of penetrating deeper to the ancient military complex of passageways, and eventually go all the way from there to the western canal wherein the coin-filled strongbox lay? The list was not difficult to make.
First, he needed dark-colored, old clothing that fit snugly so it wouldn’t get in his way when he had to climb or go through a tight place; solid boots, well-greased to keep out water; and, of course, his weapons-boot knife, long dagger, and short sword.