The Guild of Thieves

''“Everything you’ve stolen in your life, kid, you stole using your five fingers and your palm. One finger can’t do much on its own: tickle under a chin; hook a keyring. Two fingers can do more: you can whistle through them, nock an arrow between them, poke someone in both eyes. You can talk with three fingers, from secret hand-signs from your days back in the alley to the Cant itself. Now add in the thumb, and you can draw a bow, grab a ledge, squeeze a throat. You can exert power. And your fifth finger, the last, smallest one, you don’t strictly need -- four’s enough. But ask anyone who’s lost it how much they miss it.''

''“Five fingers and a palm -- that’s what you need to hold onto something in the world. We don’t just steal; we hold on to what we’ve stolen. And when we do that, we’re not five fingers and a palm. We’re a hand. We’re a fist.''

''“Kid, you’re that fifth finger right now. No shame in it. Might even be cause for pride, if you don’t let it go to your head. But keep your eyes watchful, your mouth careful, your ears open for where to put your feet, and when the time’s right, you’ll find yourself ringer or middleman. Or hey, you might even make pointer, like me. And if that happens, maybe you’ll meet the Thumb.”''

Theft is older than the words all the races use to describe it; the stepson of injustice and envy, living well in the households of men but scarcely acknowledged by them. Some traditions hold that the first theft was the sun from the sky by the sea, birthing night and defining day. Many others don’t even bother acknowledging when it was that man first began to steal from man, far more interested in the first marriage, the first love, or the first murder.

Thieving is the oldest profession, though it lets whoring claim so in public; it doesn’t want the attention, after all. And when so many people do something for so many years across so many stations of their lives, some of them turn out to get quite good at it, indeed.

But while the concept of theft is eternal, thieves themselves do have a history, and they know exactly when that history began. The Guild of Thieves (occasionally self-styled the Imperial Guild of Thieves, stealing the Queen’s imprimatur even while the top sheriffs and praetorians serving her and her court struggle to hunt them down) was formed one snowy night in the burnt-out ruins of the Cathedral Cathodoesca, the seat of the High Church in the Imperial west and the pride of its city, Ex Cathos, until it burned to the ground during the War of with all its nuns and monks barred inside it. The first of the House Ottarim dynasts was not seven days on his new throne when the five founders met in that charred basement, agreeing that it was time for them to impose some sanity of their own on the thieves who worked for, against, and beneath them.

[Invent four NPCs from suitably diverse parts of the Imperium], and finally, the leader of the new Guild and the first to hold the rank of “Thumb,” a man called Friend Lastly. Little is known about Lastly’s youth or early career besides that he was a cutpurse of some minor skill in the capital for a few years before war broke out; even less is known of what he did during the war, and how it came to be that he approached the table beneath Cathedral Cathodoesca that night with the markers of the forty-four most influential confidence gangs, robbers’ communes and criminal houses from across the new king’s great cities. He was of average height, dark hair and eyes, human, at least to look at him; not particularly handsome nor particularly odd-looking, and he dressed like a tavernkeep. But Lastly was an enthralling speaker, a devious negotiator, a hopelessly charming liar and, when he needed to be, the scariest men the other four had ever met. The talks took until sunrise, and from the cellar down into which five individual contractors had descended the night before emerged four fingers and a thumb -- the Guild’s first leadership committee, the Friendly Hand.

Lastly was not just personally persuasive; he was a capable administrator, and he understood that it would be a delicate thing, this new guild of his; no one had ever tried this before on this scale, not without violence and direct coercion, and thieves would be skittish of it by nature. The first thing he made clear was that the Guild of Thieves would not be collecting dues in gold or plunder from its new tributaries; instead, the thieves would pay a due of service: four of their number in each city would be selected, each from a different gang, to leave their criminal families and join a new one. The Thumb knew exactly who he wanted: his recruits were young, impressionable, ambitious and talented, and they were chosen, not asked. Some came willingly, others didn’t; most, however, found their capos unwilling to part with one of the family’s best talents. Often there was blood, but rarely any killing -- every crime boss who went up against Friend Lastly found himself wanting by the end of the exchange, but missing little more than his arrogance.

City by city Lastly and his band went, setting down roots and a permanent presence -- here, an inn with a secret bar down the stairs through the kitchen; there, a merchant who had more early-morning delivery wagons going out than coming in -- and then finding the four recruits they wanted to run that presence. As the front business flourished, acting as fence, illicit wholesaler, and occasionally legitimate employer for the local thieves, the Friendly Hand would sequester themselves away with the recruits, vanishing so completely that their former compatriots would swear they’d left the city. They had not, of course. They were right there, if you knew where to look for them, and they were learning what it really meant to steal things for a living.

Months later, the four recruits would emerge, immediately recognizable to those they’d left behind but still different; older-seeming, more mature, more confident, and all newly-minted masters of their trade. It was not uncommon for two thieves who went into seclusion as rivals to emerge the best of friends or even lovers; it was downright common for recruits plucked from gangs feuding with each other to make their first work as guildsmen dragging their former leaders to the negotiating table for a truce. Above all, the four emerged deeply committed to each other and the formidable team they made when they worked together. These young people would form the first Hand of their city’s Guild of Thieves, loyal to their Thumb, each other, and above all, the ridiculous amount of money they were going to make together.

The Hand in Their City’s Pocket
As noted, the Guild of Thieves does not collect dues, and it certainly doesn’t track general membership -- from pickpocket to brigand, no self-respecting thief would want their name written down in a book somewhere that named them a criminal. Instead, the Guild’s presence in a city is organized in a four-thief cell called a “Hand.” There is never more than one Hand in a city, and there are never more or less than four guildsmen in a Hand.

Each one of the four plays a different, specific role. The pointer is the highest-ranking guildsman in the city, responsible for both leading the Guild’s local muscle and deciding when to use it -- when a city’s Hand splits evenly on a vote, the pointer’s vote always acts as the tiebreaker. The middleman (or middlewoman; the very first one of them was, after all) is their Hand’s appointed concierge, diplomat, go-between, social butterfly...and spymaster. Most middlemen lead double lives: a respectable face for polite society often hides a larger-than-life criminal persona played like a stage role for the underworld. The thieves of a city will see their Hand’s middleman more often than the other three put together, since it’s the middleman’s job to keep the peace between the rowdy, conniving, constantly-quarrelling factions that make up the local thieving scenes so everyone can keep making money -- and many a thief has foolishly mistaken that accessibility and preference to talk for weakness, and learned that a middle finger is always comfortable standing alone. The ringer is the Hand’s accountant, banker, and quartermaster, responsible for the thankless day-to-day merchant-work that goes into a successful criminal empire, but compensated for it appropriately. These are the most “legitimate” members of a city’s Hand by necessity; if the merchants that ringers meet with a daily basis knew who they really worked for, their conversations would be short and bloody. That isn’t to say they’re actually on the straight-and-narrow, however; a good ringer prefers honest work to thieving, but a great one learns how to make his thieving look like honest work.

The final member of the Hand doesn’t have a defined role as such, and is almost always the youngest of the four guildsmen -- sometimes significantly so. They spend much of their time delivering messages, doing odd jobs, or fighting fires their three seniors are too busy to personally put out. It quickly became tradition that while this “little finger” had the right to their say in Hand business same as the other three, they would defer to the more experienced fingers until after serving some period of apprenticeship. When one of the other three members of the Hand retired, was arrested, or passed on, this youngest member was expected to step up and fill the empty shoes -- and then help select the next promising young talent to take their former place. On rare occasions, in certain Hands struck by very special or dire circumstances (such as an entire Hand somehow being arrested or slain), this fourth member is actually the group’s elder statesman, functioning more as a wiseman and trusted advisor and training the other three younger fingers into their roles. Originally, these fourth members were called littles, but over time, as the legend of the Guild’s founder spread, they began to be known as lastlies in his honor. After all, the greatest thieves all started as nobodies, holding nothing. That’s why they became thieves in the first place.

The Rule of Thumb
Only four fingers per Hand -- the Guild never has more than one Thumb at a time, and as Friend Lastly did in those first nights, the Thumb always chooses their own four trusted companions to complete their own personal hand, still called the “Friendly Hand” in the founder’s honor. Very rarely do any of these personal subordinates come from the Hands that oversee the various Imperial cities; the potency of a city’s Hand comes from the relationships it develops locally with thieves, merchants, guards, landed nobles, clergy and others. Not only are ringers and middlemen not trained to be the wandering courtiers-cum-bodyguards that those in the Friendly Hand find themselves working as, but all of them have deep roots in their cities and public lives -- many with spouses and children -- that can’t just be moved about. Occasionally a pointer who is restless and has already trained his successor will join the Friendly Hand, but more often than not, a pointer training his successor has his eye on either retirement or becoming Thumb, and losing a bid to become the latter often quietly leads to the former.

Instead, a new Thumb will often offer places on his Friendly Hand to powerful, skilled bandits or infamous, renowned independent operators. A city’s ringer serves the Guild best right where he is, but that same city’s beautiful, legendary cat burglar who marks all her crimes with a single purple rose -- that sounds like someone the Guild’s leader should form a personal relationship with, and someone who might want a personal relationship with the Guild’s leader in return. Similarly, the roguish but steadfast head of a brigade of former knights-errant who, following betrayal by their liege lord, turned their soldiering to robbing his noble house blind, might find himself intrigued by the head of an Imperium-wide organization that can help his crusade...and nothing says he has to leave that brigade of knights at home while traveling with the Thumb.

As he put the Guild together, Friend Lastly spoke often to his four now-closest friends about the importance of making symbols into substance. He was keenly aware how easy it would be for his new Guild to turn into nothing more than a roaming group of scalawags playing at bandit princedom while their underlings in the cities amounted to little more than administrators. They need to see a stealer when they look at you, he would often say, unless you want them to see someone to steal from. While almost all of the Guild’s modest overhead is covered by fencing stolen goods, merchant scams, and the occasional bit of honest trade, one crucial bit of the budget is handled the same way in each Hand across the empire: big crimes done boldly, with the sort of character and style that leads to a fortnight-long crackdown of the merchant quarter by a city watch beside itself with rage. Each member of the Guild, from the rawest of lastlies all the way up to Lastly himself, was obligated to pull and claim credit for at least one heist of “unusual size and irresistable intent,” as he liked to put it. And should a guildsman ever bite off a bit more than they could chew in planning their yearly crime, it was their right to ask the head of the Guild directly for his personal assistance in pulling it out of the fire -- all they had to do was write to him for help in the secret, approved ways, and a few nights later Lastly and his four companions would appear at the guildsman’s backdoor, inviting themselves in and sharing some suggestions they’d come up with during their travel. Lastly dubbed this “the rule of Thumb,” and he thought it the most important weight in the delicate balancing act that was the Guild of Thieves, where everyone was obligated to everyone, everyone returned their favors, everyone grew their legend, and everyone got paid.

The local nobility are always favored targets of a finger’s yearly heist, but any particularly worldly High Church clergy, too-gauche new-money merchant prince, or uncommonly skilled and irksomely honest guard captain might find themselves on the wrong end of a Guild caper. Even thieves themselves aren’t necessarily safe -- when an upstart crimelord challenges the Guild’s right to operate in “his” territory, or some of the local smash-and-grab boys “forget” they’re not supposed to mess up the ringer’s front businesses three times in one month, the Guild doesn’t start by looking for a fight. First, they take back what was taken, plus interest. Then, they make sure everyone knows it was them who did it. Usually that’s enough of a message -- because the tales of what happens to the guys who then show up on a Guild Hand’s doorstep looking for blood are the stuff of local folklore, and they get grimmer with every new telling. Eventually they get so embellished someone decides they can’t possibly be true...and then they become the next very real story with a very short middle and a very bad end.

The Last Night for a Friend
It has been a long, long time since the nights of Lastly and his Friendly Hand. The stories of the other four founding members end well, with their happy retirements into occasional petty larceny, parenthood, grandparenthood, and telling tall tales while tending bar. But Lastly’s story, as befits the greatest thief in the history of the Empire, ends in a mystery. Some versions have it happening in a roadside inn down the Monthagen High Way during rainy season, when business was dead; others, in a desecrated chapel out in the western forests inside which Lastly personally oversaw the installation of a massive barrel of the finest ale atop where the altar used to be. Some stories claim his lover, the famous former nun and fallen paladin Sister l’Aveline, waited for him just past the rise of the hill down the road; most others agree he said farewell to her as well, hours or days earlier. Whatever the circumstances, there is a party to end all parties, culminating in Lastly naming Bartoc Bander, the gentleman thief from Musphul who went from Lastly’s greatest rival to closest friend, and who held the honor of being the only person asked to join Lastly’s Friendly Hand following the retirement of one of its original members, the second Thumb of the Guild of Thieves -- and telling the raucous partygoers that if anyone thought themselves more qualified, they had until midnight to prove it by stealing the thumb off his hand. This would become the succession rite for the Guild: the outgoing Thumb would name their replacement, along with an outlandish, dangerous, and personal act of thievery that a spurned candidate could perform on a strict time limit to force a membership vote. Only twice has someone taken the outgoing Thumb up on their dare. Both times ended with a powerful, beloved member of the Guild dead, killed by a friend.

No one challenged Bander, of course, who thanked his old enemy-turned-brother with a witty, rambling toast that eventually built to a question everyone in Lastly’s life had asked him at least once over those last ten years, without ever getting a straight answer. This time, Bander declared, this fraternity of old men and women demanded satisfaction for their curiosity before they all went their separate ways one last time: “How is it, my old Thumb,” the new one asked, “that we’ve known you some thirty years, and you haven’t aged a day?”

For he hadn’t: as all the other thieves’ hair went white and skin sagged, as their muscles began aching and minds became just the slightest bit less sharp, just enough for it to be noticable, just enough for it to make them afraid of losing anymore keenness, Friend Lastly stayed that same, unassuming youngish man with nondescript dark hair and eyes. Even the elf in their number had shown some slight sign of age, but not him.

Lastly looked around the room, at his closest friends and their families, smiled and shook his head. “I’m guessing you don’t want to hear me say something about how I owe it all to you for being so good to me and how its kept the gray from my hair,” he replied. “Since that’s more or less what I said the last hundred times you all asked. But it’s truer said that way then if I explained it out.”

All versions of the story agree that Bander harrumphed and ordered every mug in the room refilled, then continued, “Fine then. Being as we’re not fools, we’re not rubes, and we’re not here to steal your blasted potion of youth, we’ll just go in a circle with our best theories, because if we had to hear each other spout this nonsense at each other while you were out, the least we can do is make sure you have to hear it once, too.”

So they went about the room, and everyone laid out their best guess as to how Friend Lastly remained eternally frozen in time. Some favored wizardly magic, others some divine blessing or strange nature spell from an ancient druidic order; there was talk of potions and magic rings, and Friend Lastly gamely obliged a request to remove the simple woven necklace he always wore to see if losing its blessing would disintegrate him down to dust (it didn’t). There was the delicate mention and then hasty retreat from the possibility of demonic or devilish bargains, which Lastly didn’t seem insulted by in the least, and everyone agreed the best theory was delivered when [finger NPC]’s six-year-old daughter looked up from her dolls and said with the annoyance of someone explaining something incredibly obvious to people who should know better that “clearly Uncle Friendly is the god of thiefs.”

It was late by the time they had finished, and at some point the attempts to get Friend Lastly to reveal his secret had turned to reminiscing. One by one, all the old people he’d lived so long with gathered up their families, said farewell to their friends, and took Lastly aside for one more moment together before the road. Soon, only Bander remained.

“You’re really not going to tell me,” the new Thumb said as the two sat together. He wore a frown, but there wasn’t any disappointment in his voice. He’d known Lastly long enough to assume that if there was an answer coming, it would have come long before tonight. “One last great, unsolved mystery.”

But then Friend Lastly sighed, and Bander straightened on his barstool at how old and tired the sound was. “Even to me,” he said. When the gentleman thief looked at him, Lastly was still smiling, and everytime he later told the story Bander would swear that for the briefest moment he saw a field of stars in the depths of the master’s eyes. “That’s how it has to work.

“I’m a story, my friend. If you want to know what I am, there you have it: I am a story. And a story is nothing without someone to read it.” Lastly finished his drink and stood. “Everytime you asked, I told you the truth: I look like this because of all of you. You loved each other, you loved me, and together we did great things. And knowing that is going to make this harder for you, but I’m glad you know, because eventually you’ll realize it couldn’t have gone any other way.”

Bander said nothing, mouth open and frowning; he would regret that later, the moment of confusion at Lastly’s confession, because it was the last thing his friend would ever see on his face. “People find their peace in this world,” Friend Lastly said. “Stories just end.”

He stepped out into the night, and history has nothing more to say about Friend Lastly. That hasn’t stopped the legends of a laid-back black-haired traveller who happens upon the victims of highwaymen on the farthest outlying Imperial roads, telling them to rest a spell while he moseys off into the scrubland and moseys on back minutes later with whatever sentimental objects were stolen from them -- but never their money. More cynically, it hasn’t slowed a constant parade of grifters and con men claiming to be the Guild’s first Thumb, either reincarnated or simply back from vacation; the first of these began after Bander’s retirement and passing and hundreds of years later there will still be one good impersonator every decade or so who builds enough of a following that the Guild can no longer ignore him, which it prefers to whenever possible.

But while guildsmen shake their heads at the stories of good deeds on the high road and laugh or throttle obvious pretenders, there is one tale that causes them to fall silent. Sometimes, it’s said, when a particularly talented young thief sends a particularly desperate invocation of the rule of Thumb describing a particularly impossible heist, she’ll get a knock on her backdoor a few nights later just like she’s expecting, but when she opens it she doesn’t find her Thumb and his crew waiting for her. She finds a nondescript man with dark hair and an easy smile, and when she asks who he is, he says, “Firstly I’m a thief, and lastly, I’m a friend.”

Some stories are so good it’s not worth asking if they’re true.