Rute

Rute

Rute meandered his way through the narrow streets of hell. Ok, it wasn't hell but it wasn't far off. This part of the Cogs was dark, smelly and foul and the same could be said for most of its inhabitants. It had been eight years since Rute had been in the Cogs and much had changed. New passageway and routes linked old structures which the ravages of time had made renovating necessary. Rute wondered how long it would take before the foundations of Sharn were so whittled away that the whole city collapsed under its own inadequacy.

Where were they...?

He remembered clearly the day that had changed his life forever. Most people would have thought that cliqued phrase would have applied to the event that caused the loss of his arm (and an eye, though most people hadn't realised the extent of the damage the accident had caused). It stood to reason it was only a matter of time before a small child working in a scrap metal yard and foundry made some small mistake that would end his young life. Rute was lucky in that his life hadn't ended that day. In fact, he didn't even consider he'd lost anything. His uncle who had some small skill in metal working had fashioned him a replacement arm and the rest of his small family, consisting of his parents, his grandparents and his uncle's wife had spend some of their hard-earned savings on a glass eye. The eye had been pure, whole and white. It wasn't any more. For Rute had a skill and this same skill that enabled him to animate a metal limb and change the basic properties of glass had drawn attention. That was the day his life had changed.

Rute had a vague idea of where he was now. The sign scrawled on the wall in charcoal had faded with time but still pointed the way to one of the poorest parts of the Cogs and the place where his family had lived. Not that there was much difference down here – how did you define between poorer and poorest? If anyone had any kind of money, they got the hell out altogether.

The dwarf had smelled like a brewery and had a face like a sackful of rocks. Not that Rute had had any idea what a brewery smelled like (nor what a dwarf was mean to look like come to that) but after eight years in the company of one of Mror Holds' most belligerent dwarves, Rute had come to learn that the smell (and the face) was the norm for this particular dwarf who on that fateful day had introduced himself as Kilbrek. Kilbrek had not been too impressed with his family's stock of scrap-metal but something had caught his eye.

“You boy!” a harsh and accented voice had rung out across the yard, “Let me see that arm.”

Rute stopped stoking the fires of the and wiped the sweat off his forehead with a rag which only served to move the dirt around his face. Wordlessly and without caution he rolled his sleeve up further and proffered it for inspection.

“Over here boy! I'm not of a mind to get scalded!”

Rute moved closer to the stranger and winced as he was treated to a face-full of breath that Rute could have sworn would have removed the shine off a mirror had he known what a mirror was. His arm was prodded and examined. He was told to lift his arm over his head, bend his elbow and drum his fingers. The last task he failed. He didn't have any.

“Who did this for you boy?”

“Sir?”

“Who made this arm?

“My uncle sir. Well, he made my first one but I couldn't move it. I had to make it move.”

A look of surprise flitted for an instant over the dwarf's craggy face. “You made your arm move?”

“Yes sir. And I changed my eye too. It's better now.”

“Let's see it then.”

Rute removed his goggles and met the hard gaze of the figure who was only a fraction taller than he was at an undernourished 15 years old. The dwarf stiffened. Finally he said, “I think that'll do boy. Cover it up now. And I'd leave those on as much as possible after you leave here if I were you.”

“Leave? Where would I be going sir?”

“Boy, would you like to learn how to drum your fingers?”

And that had been Rute's passport out of the Cogs. Saying goodbye to his family and all he had known (which wasn't a lot) Rute was taken under Kilbrek's rather ripe wing and relocated in the Mror Holds. There his skills in artificing were trained and honed. His masters realised he not only had a talent for artificing but also an innate skill for mental calculation. He could tell you the angle needed to approach the promising seam you'd found, he could calculate why your sword was off balance and tell you exactly how much leverage was needed to lift a boulder off a trapped miner. Rute took exceptional delight in coming up with new ways of doing things and improving whatever he could in his field of weapon making and the maintenance and repair of engineering equipment. “Improvement” became his watchword and as he grew and his arm needed replacing, he worked at it until now at the age of 23, wearing long sleeves and thick leather gloves, no-one could tell it wasn't his own flesh and blood. Despite his skills, Rute remained a simple lad, shut away from the wider world until he found a new itch. An itch to go home, an itch to improve himself, improve his skills, improve the world...

Rute stood at the gate of his family's scrap metal yard. Or rather, what had once been the gate. The big plates of welded metal were coming off their hinges and hung open like a dullard's mouth.

“Rute?”

Rute turned and regarded the man behind him. The man who stared back at him bore a vague resemblance to his uncle. If his uncle had looked like he'd been ravaged by wolves.

“Rute lad, you shouldn't be here. You shouldn't have come back.”