To Stefan von Horkheimer, First Lieutenant of Lukas of Dar Und, from Emissary and Justicar Jan Kormick
My Dear Bloody Ear,
Old friend, I write to introduce you to the bearer of this letter, one Vatik Rockminder, a.k.a. Fungusfinder, a dwarven huckster. I expect magnificent things of him in Dar Und.
My comrades and I have encountered Vatik more than once in the Sovereign marketplaces of
Lord's Edge and
Cauldron. Each time, he has been unfailingly incomprehensible, vulgar, and (when we could understand him) dishonest. He has driven our poor murder slave—the one I told you about—to the point of distraction, which means Vatik is lucky not to have a dagger in each orifice. (The murder slave is so very endearing when something's driving her crazy. She quivers with suppressed murderous rage.)
Vatik recently got himself on the wrong side of Cauldron's alternative government, the Eighths, who consequently wanted him run out of town or stabbed repeatedly. They asked me to take care of him, so, along with the murder slave, the esteemed Alirrian priestess Savina, and Dame Mena the Beautiful and Terrifying, I sought him out in the market. He was a sad sight:
droopier than we'd seen him before, with his stall now nothing more than a turned-over box and a single torn burlap bag of trinkets. His illiterate patter showed minor improvement, in that he'd learned to say "bargains" rather than "bagels," but when he started to holler about "good fornication" to potential customers… well, let's just say that the Sovereignty, with its excessive fixation on politeness and decorum, had not been kind to him.
After he evaded our questions as usual, I explained to him that, as an Inquisitor carrying a couple of large and lethal hammers, I really,
really wanted to know what he was doing there. (I didn't mention the Eighths yet. As Brother Scribe insists, it's always sensible to
try the most legal solution first.)
"My buttocks are free for all to see," he responded proudly.
Signora Savina and Dame Mena tried addressing him in Dwarven, but he refused to answer, claiming he only wanted to speak Common. I advised him that he could speak Dwarven now or he could scream it later, his choice.
He didn't answer directly—he just shoved a smelly pile of matted fur into my hands while declaring that it was a gift to make yours truly, his new best friend, "moan with pleasure." It turned out to be a functional, if ugly, magically protective cloak. The attempted bribery was the first competent move he'd made. Sure enough, it wasn't long before he started muttering in Dwarven. Dame Mena informs me that his accent was crisp and upper-class as he asked himself, "Why in the name of the seven hells do I end up in these human towns?"
Now that we were finally having a conversation, I offered—with Mena translating—to help him out with his little Eighths problem.
"Ah, I see," he responded. "This is a shakedown."
"No," I clarified, through patiently gritted teeth, "this is the friendly warning
before the shakedown. We are here to chat with you, not kill you."
"'Chat' … is the good one?" he asked Mena. (Be advised: his language skills still need work. He told us that some generous Sovereign traders had taught him the basic merchant's lexicon of "fornicate," "buttocks," deals that make one "moan with pleasure," etc. Yes. Very generous of them.)
We explained that he had best go home immediately to his fellow Rockminders (though I wondered how those honor-obsessed folk would receive him). He got squirmy and squirreled around for a minute before admitting that he was less of a "Rockminder" and more of a "Fungusfinder"…apparently a less prestigious family line in the dwarven world. He'd gotten good at conning people into believing that he was higher class than he really was.
Signora Savina suggested, adorably, that he might go to her home city of Pol Henna and set up a legitimate business. It was a generous offer, but I wasn't surprised when he squirreled around some more before admitting that he might… just maybe… have some legal problems that might follow him into certain human cities on the Peninsula.
Savina, determined to persuade him to take up honest living, invited him to join us for a light lunch while we continued to chat. Yes, yes, I can imagine you groaning, old friend, and no, I am never taking Savina with me on a shakedown again.
At any rate, Vatik eventually clarified that, like all dwarves, he has a finely honed and painstakingly practiced craft, but unlike most dwarves his craft is the art of the con. Among his own people, he'd done a general trade in the procurement of desired items, and he'd specialized in something he called "The Deep Shaft"—selling tapped-out mines to unsuspecting buyers for huge sums, then arranging an accident for said buyers, then repeating the procedure. At some point, his reputation began to precede him, and eventually he found himself driven into the Sovereignty.
Savina tried one final time to inspire him to commit to an honest life, at which point the murder slave lost her self-control, begged us to turn him over to the authorities, realized her mistress was too nice for that, rolled her eyes, and quietly chortled to indicate either her cynical resignation to the vagaries of life or her impending mental breakdown. And
I stepped in to offer to write this very letter. This was, clearly, one of those rare and precious times when a letter of recommendation from me would be far more useful than a letter of recommendation from Signora Savina di Infusino.
With that, we bought a few of his trinkets in order to give him gold to pay for teleportation to Dar Und. The murder slave has announced that she will refuse to let him out of her sight until she sees him safely magicked away into your welcoming arms.
And thus I write to introduce you to Mr. Vatik Fungusfinder, a clever and honorably dishonest dwarf whose calling and high craft may be of great service to Dar Und. Please give him a chance. If he works out, wonderful. If not, or if his idiotic malapropisms become tiresome rather than hilarious, kill him. I've warned him that the cost of errors in judgment is higher in my homeland than just about anywhere else.
Your pal,
Two Knocks
P.S.: This is surely the kindest way I've ever run anybody out of town. You and I were almost as kind to Red Friedrich, but I bet he still whines about missing his thumb.