Sticks

Sticks is a thief in the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World"), a nimble, cat-like figure with black fur, neat black clothes, a dagger and a short sword. He says that his movements and instincts are a cat's, but that he is not one of the wild cats of the mine.^{1 2}

Background

When he was asked whether he understood Lingua Emperium, it was recalled that his father had sold him as a panther cub to a noble family, among whom he grew up.³

He is thirteen years old, which among his kind counts as grown. Asked later why he had come so far, he said that he set out for money; once his trade gave him easy access to people he could not otherwise have reached, it turned into a search for power, and after he had been carried off against his will and put in danger more than once, a wish for revenge joined the rest.^{4 5}

The ring and the mine

The day before the band came to the Alaztaşı mine, Sticks had crept into it and taken a noble house's ring, leaving by an air shaft narrow enough to crawl through. When the search of the mine was offered as a job, he hid the ring elsewhere before joining in, and kept both the theft and the shaft to himself.^{6 7 8}

For three bottles of acid, two in advance and one afterwards, he agreed to carry the living darkness panther cubs out by the hidden shaft. He left them in the brush and came back without showing the others the way. The foreman then asked him to have a copy of the lost ring made; Sticks asked whether the original bore any inner engraving, agreed to cut initials inside the copy, and settled a new price with the foreman that also bought his silence.^{9 10 11 12 13}

Finli later handed over the three bottles of acid owed under the bargain and gave him a fourth as a gift of friendship.¹⁴

Contacts in Aquila

In Aquila, the port city of Canarque, Sticks paid in advance for five nights at an inn on the merchants' road, built over a natural hot spring, with baths at the back and a small common room where traders did business. He later said that he lodged at an inn called the Buhurdan.^{15 16 17}

He called on an old acquaintance with a gold tooth, who ran hidden storehouses for smuggled goods in bulk and was reached by a special knock. From him Sticks heard that a native had given the governor a substance as medicine, that the priests could not draw out the poison, and that the Witnesses of Victory were spreading the story with their own reading of it.^{18 19}

He entered the walled city at night by paying guards he knew. Over drinks, Alex, a woman who robbed churches' donation boxes, told him that two knights might have died, since two riderless horses had come back, and that no inquiry had come from the church; there had in fact been three.^{20 21 22}

The church knights and the mages

On the road, in a chained column of prisoners, Sticks recognised a woman named Paul whom he knew for her skill at picking pockets and locks; one of her eyes was bandaged shut, and she saw him too.²³

Returning with the chest from Fauna's tribe, the band found itself between the claims of mages and of church knights. After the fight Sticks searched the mages' clothes and found in a hidden pocket a small pouch of petrol-green herbs, carefully kept, along with other written spells; he set aside a ring and some gold as his own share.^{24 25 26 27}

Spoiler: The cover-upRevealSpoils: Yeni Dünya #4 · Say what you have read

The band then tried to hide what had happened. Tracks were confused, acid marks were left on the knights' clothes to make it look like mages' work, three heads and the two mages' bodies were carried off, and what remained was set on fire.^{28 29 30}

Albus Rodarius Willow

The mage Albus Rodarius Willow sought Sticks out in a tavern and summoned him, his companions and the doctor who sheltered them to dinner the next evening, making clear that coming was not optional. Sticks meanwhile sent two of the captured scrolls to be sold quietly and kept one.^{31 32 33}

He paid an Archon mage for information about Albus and arranged go-betweens and meeting places for later dealings, using an inn behind an embassy for the meeting. Passing what he had learned to Bruno, he kept back what the informant had said of Albus's quarrel with the Archon's local representative.^{34 35 36 37}

At Albus's demand the band staged an attack that never happened: they scratched themselves, opened wounds on bodies already dead, and told the professor they had been set upon.^{38 39}

Two days later Albus proposed poisoning the professor. Sticks objected, not wishing to lose his link to the man, and Albus accepted instead that the professor be kept away from his work for a day. Sticks passed that task to the band but kept part of the offer made to him to himself.^{40 41 42}

Trade and side work

Sticks turned down an offer to move stolen goods within the city. For a woman who wanted back her late father's old knife, he stole it from her brother and was paid for the job.^{43 44}

He agreed with Finli to handle the bargaining and sale of his goods for a fifth of the income and reasonable free use of what Finli made; the share also made him responsible for sorting out any trouble the trade ran into. After a handshake with the merchant Otto over a supply of honey, he received his part of the first week's takings.^{45 46 47}

Bruno handed him a sum to finish the remaining business of the shop, openly content that he keep what was left over as his fee. Sticks made a yearly agreement for the use of Otto's papers; rent and stock were separate.^{48 49 50}

The vault of the Willow house

In an underground tavern, while the others were at the shop, Sticks met alone with Travis, known as Atmaca ("Hawk"), who offered the band a share of the plunder rather than a wage. Sticks carried the offer back to the others, and at a later meeting the band heard Travis's account of the house and agreed on equal shares among the survivors.^{51 52 53 54}

He and Travis agreed to watch each other for anything slipped into a pocket. Inside the house a stair kept turning back on itself; when Sticks's helper spirit, which had earlier taken the form of a cat and now flew as a black owl, watched both stair corridors at once, the two doors became one and the way on opened. Later, when Finli had worked out the vault, Sticks turned a star-shaped piece, and with the door held still the whole house turned to reveal the treasury behind it.^{55 56 57 58 59}

Sticks fetched porters of the Unchained, a thieves' brotherhood of Aquila to which he and Travis were tied, and watched as they took the silver and left bars of gold in exchange. The brotherhood is said to have arisen from criminals sent to an island out at sea, who in time took over its running. In the final division Sticks received a small luck stone shaped like a cat's head and an armour of leather set with fish-like scales and seashells, which replaced his own.^{60 61 62 63 64}

Among the Geroni

When a wind drew the band into a magic painting, Sticks was the first to be swept in; he struck his head on the frame and fell senseless, and Bruno carried him, so that he saw nothing of the fight that followed. He came round enough at the end to ask whether he had missed anything, and told of a nightmare in which his only loot was the cat-headed stone. Bruno passed him a pair of boots of speed.^{65 66 67 68}

In the Geroni city on the far side, when the band debated whether to stay, he spoke for leaving, for the sake of his ties outside and his short span of life. With his owl watching the gaps between patrols he climbed the wall, and the band made its way out by rope; that they met no one on the road he put down to the help of Malakar.^{69 70 71 72}

When a house where they sheltered was attacked, he and Bruno struck back at the man at the door, and he then kept watch from the roof. Later, riding with the others on a great forest automaton, he slipped away unseen; the head consul did not know where he had gone. He rejoined them at the forest's edge, unhurt, and warned of an ambush by a mage and about six men. Staying behind while the others hid, he watched a tracker, four helmeted men with maces, the mage and a warrior in what looked like imperial dress; he could not understand their speech, but saw them leave the trail at the mage's order and head for a set goal.^{73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80}

Back in Aquila

He came back into the city by another way, put aboard a barge loaded with fish from the Tail Quarter. Looking among the crop-eared for a woman bard linked to Galevan, Sera, he found that the first word of her leaving the city was false: she had stayed on an errand for an embassy. She was in the Square Quarter; a witness had seen her at a business dinner with an imperial judge some three months before, and for about four months she had been a guest in the high judge's house, seen less since Galevan left.^{81 82 83 84 85 86}

To reach Travis he bought a bottle of whisky and left a message in it, the usual way of sending word in that underworld; Travis, who had neither hidden nor fled, met him near the shop at about four in the night with two of his men. Sticks cut a sign on Bruno's clinic meaning "this place is ours". Carrying a painting back, he noticed four or five people placed where they could see the band, but found no sign that they were following; the next day he slipped the clinic's new lock unseen.^{87 88 89 90 91}

In a fight with a mimicking creature he wrapped his weapon in a green glow, crossed through a window to a middle floor and joined a family hiding below; when the trail was lost in the city he returned with the wounded to the clinic.^{92 93 94}

The witness and the following woman

After a long absence he rejoined the band from the direction of a mansion's well, bringing a forest elf who, he said, had once been on the other side but now helped with what he knew. In the fight that followed Sticks struck with a magic sword, drew back into the dark and climbed a wall, and was hurt by a touch.^{95 96 97 98}

He renewed his familiar in the form of a raven to watch the surroundings, and followed the departing elf until he lost him in the crowd. He asked Travis to carry word to the woman who had been following the band that they wished to talk without drawn weapons, on the word of the Unchained, and to look for a priest to be trusted with the touch and into a mage's seafaring kinsman.^{99 100 101 102}

He entered the building across the way that Omara had described through a window. Behind a stone of the hearth he found a report in cipher, three poisoned bolts for a hand crossbow and a plain dagger, and he brought back a bag of everyday things and mixed coins; there was no trap.^{103 104 105}

When church officers called at the clinic, he gathered the waiting crowd at the door, crying that the doctor was being hindered, and then listened in secret. Meeting a helmsman inside a priest's circle where no one could lie, he did not hide their earlier quarrel, and said that he meant his kinsman no harm as long as the man helped them and they went the same way.^{106 107 108 109}

The northern road

At a settlement he talked with the people who ran it while Fauna kept watch, and since the gates of Aquila would not open at night he proposed entering by way of a raftsman he knew on the river.^{110 111}

Against one of the armed automatons called collectors, his first blow glanced off the metal and the machine's upper body turned to strike back, wounding him; later he drove his sword into a gap between its cables and twisted it home. After the fight he felt a light pain in his back at the same moment as three of those who had fought beside him.^{112 113 114 115}

He gave Kuraks his old, ordinary cloak, and paid a bribe to bring his companions into the city. To fetch a wounded man he went to Korak, a human sailor at a mercenaries' tavern, and behind the tavern saw a body wrapped in cloth and tied with rope, its boots showing. He offered the band a safe place to wait: the attic of a bakery in an outer quarter, whose watchers he had paid to look away.^{116 117 118 119 120 121}

Spoiler: Later eventsRevealSpoils: Yeni Dünya #27 · Say what you have read

Sticks was next found with Finli, Fauna and Bruno in a shared vision of a quiet village, dressed in bright clothes and jewels and living in a four-storey wooden mansion, whose strongboxes held gold and shares, a belt with missing stones, a hidden dagger and a ring of the Mansfeld family. As the vision turned to nightmare after Finli woke, Sticks tried leaping from a battlement and awoke by himself in the laboratory where the four had lain.^{122 123 124 125}

Climbing a hill alone, he saw caravan lights towards the city and a small campfire; in a tent he found a water skin, a bedroll and a few apples, but no note.^{126 127 128}

When a stranger at the hilltop offered fig tea, Sticks at first refused it; after the stranger had said what he was, Sticks accepted a cup and drank.^{129 130}