It was only after five full minutes of raucous laughter that anyone noticed the boy sitting in the mud. His head buried in his hands, Abril wept. And when every eye was on him, he looked up red eyed and said simply, “It’s true.”

The entire crowd took a single step backward, and Jag felt like his head would explode.

“It’s truet It happened just the way the gnome said. Everything, everyone in this town holds nothing for me other than painful memories. I’d gone up into the hills to run away when I came across the cyclops. He was my first true friend. But his friendship was nothing compared to my need to be revenged.”

Now the lad stood, radiating more menace than his slight frame should have been capable of holding.

“So I figured a plan to get my revenge, and make myself the hero of Minroe at the same time! It would have worked too, if not for that meddling gnome!”

The crowd, who had been standing stock still, suddenly came to angry life. They screamed for Abril’s head on a pike-none louder than his own father-and surged toward the lad, bent on getting it themselves.

“Riktus! Help me push these people back!” Jag yelled as he grabbed a fallen beam that used to support the roof of the Dancing Roc Inn. The young deputy was already at work, though, pulling Abril away from the clasping mob, then coming back to help Jag press them back. It was a fight they were destined to lose.

Luckily, the three other deputies chose that moment to come around the bend leading seven horses, twelve mules, four oxen, and a camel toward the fallen giant. The commotion of the crowd spooked the animals such that they all reared up, knocking the hapless deputies off their feet, then sprinting out of town.

“My plow horse! You stole my plow horse!” one member of the mob yelled.

“What are you doing with Sand Treader?” another one cried.

As quickly as it had begun, the riot ended as the citizens all ran off either to rein in their frightened mounts, or to get home as quickly as possible to ensure that they too had not been the victims of looters. Within minutes, the only people left on the streets were Jag Dubblspeir, his four deputies, Abril Fentloque, and Ekhar Lorrent.

“Take him to the stockade.” Jag said, grabbing Abril’s arm and handing it to Riktus. “Quickly… before they decide to come back.”

The young man hurried off with his prisoner.

“Well, Ekhar, I hope you’re satisfied. You took a town in the midst of a celebration and turned it in against itself. The hero of the day is now likely to spend the next year or more of his life in prison, if his friends and family don’t decide to hang him instead.”

“I know, I know. I’ve no need for thanks. Just knowing the boy and his deadly pranks will receive justice most swift is all that I need. Now my job here is done, I’ll go home with all speed. And tell often the story of what I’ve seen here today. The lessons I’ve learned will not soon fade away. ‘The Case of the Really Big Corpse’ is my true masterpiece. This pride that I feel may never surcease.

“So I bid you farewell, Jag, my one truest friend. The mystery is solved, this is finally the end.”

With that, Ekhar Lorrent dusted off his lapel and headed toward Home, never once looking back to see Jag Dubbispeir, sword in his hand and murder in his eye, barely being restrained by his three deputies. The only clue available to the gnome, had he cared to observe it, was a slight twitching in his left earlobe.

There’s a common saying that I have recently taken to heart. It’s normally the type of phrase you hear among adventurers, freebooters, tax collectors, and other individuals of low moral character. The phrase, if you pardon my language, is “a special place in the Hells.”

Normally such a comment would be heard in adventuring dives, usually uttered when a particularly large barbanan, laden heavily with scars, tattoos, and other body modifications, heads for the door. One of the other adventuring types would give a head-nod toward the barbarian’s slouched, fur-covered back and say something like, “There’s a special place in the Hells for that one.” Sometimes they might just say “hell,” or something more exact “the Nine Hells,” or “the Myriad Pits,” or, if they are among the intelligentsia, they would call it “Baator,” home of the baatezu. In any event, said adventurer-type would invoke that lower dimension of lava pits, imps, devils (another name for baatezu) and brimstone. His companion would probably grunt in agreement. Or start a tavern-clearing brawl. Such is the way things are done among professional adventurers, as I understand it.

Never would I imagine that my own name, Tertius Wands, would be connected with that dark domain, nor that I would potentially have my own named parcel of abyssal real estate. But such might have been the case, if not for my ever-present and ever-wise companion, the genie Ampratines.

Let me start at the beginning, which in this case is not in the However-Many Hells but in the city of Iriaebor, crown gem of the upper reaches of the River Chionthar. Iriaebor consists of two cities, an upper city built along a narrow ridge overlooking the river, and a lower city bunched up along the sides of that selfsame ridge. The upper city is a tight jumble of important buildings, all stacked next to each other like children’s blocks. Space is at a premium in the upper city, and none of the various merchant lords wants to move from their lofty (if crowded) perch into the Lower City.

And for good reason. While the Upper City basks in the relatively warm sun of those climes, the Lower City is usually draped in a miasma of morning fog, noonday drear, and afternoon industrial smoke. Down below are the tin foundries and the ironmongers, the steelworks and the lime bakers, the tanners, hide-men, hat-makers, coach-works, stables, and working offices of the various trading costers, with their attendant collection of stables, wagons, warehouses, hostels, festhalls, and all manner of entertainments for the laborers, teamsters, stevedores, and other haulers. The Lower City, in short, operates under a continual cloud, both figuratively and literally, as far as those of the Upper City are concerned.

At the time I was lodging at the Wandering Wyvern, highly-touted in the guide books for its view. Unfortunately the view is mostly of the aforementioned L.C., as it was situated directly above the tanneries. As a result, I kept to the Wyvern’s drawing room for the most part of my stay, and broadened my horizons primarily by reading.

At that time of my life, I was moving eastward, slowly but unyieldingly, seeking to put as much of Faerun as possible between myself and my home city of Waterdeep.

The wondrous City of Splendors has a special place in my heart, and I would choose to reside there, if not for the presence of my assorted relatives in the Wands family. The fact is that the vast bulk of said relatives are mages. Powerful mages. The most powerful of them is my great-uncle Maskar, who is cause enough to make any young man showing no more interest in spellcraft than he does in killing dragons for a living, head eastward. I had earlier thought that Scornubel was far enough, but recent encounters there convinced me that relocating further inland from the Sword Coast would be a wise decision. At the time when all hell (or hells) was about to break loose, I was comfortably ensconced in the drawing room of the Wandering Wyvern, with my nose in a book.

At this point, I can hear the reader saying to him- or herself, “Aha! some fell tome of magic, wrested from some elder crypt.” Actually the book I was reading had been penned the previous spring by an aspiring young author, Allison Rodigar-Glenn, published by Tyme-Waterdeep, and sold by the august offices of Aurora’s mail-order catalog. It was a historical mystery book, or “mysthricals” as they were called, and I must confess I could not get enough of them.