Abu Adon was a loyal courtier and able administrator to the King of Rath who was eventually named a madman. He had served the Satraps of the Southrun for many years before coming to Westrun (some say he was just one step ahead of his last lord's assassins). Known for his towering intellect and skill at administration, Abu Adon managed to work himself into a minor position in the king's court. From there he rose to become the chief advisor of the crown.
Abu Adon proved to be an excellent advisor, but his lasting legacy to the Kingdom and City of the same name, was the so-called Labyrinth of the Madman. Abu Adon commissioned a team of miners and craftsmen to dig a dungeon that was worthy of his lord's refinement and mercy. An alternative to the gibbet, it was intended to be a place of imprisonment for life. It was to have neither doors nor bars, but be connected to the surface by a simple shaft down which lifelong prisoners would be dropped and food lowered.
The project was indeed curious and the work was never deemed finished. The scope of the project was so long that even the lowliest beggar and simplest laborer could find some work to support it. Some records indicate that there were no poor in Rath for two centuries on account of it. While this is surely an exaggeration, it is not hard to see the truth behind it.
Abu Adon served three kings of Rath and died after 72 years in continuous service. His labyrinth ought to ceased construction, but a simple bureaucratic oversight meant that the contract continued to be paid long after anyone remembered what that line in the royal budget meant.
An entire guild (Royal Delvers and Dungeoneers Guild) was formed and dedicated to this project. They saw that small teams of men continued their labors for nearly 200 years after Abu Adon's death. When a long famine caused an examination of expenses the work was finally ceased. By then the complex had extended well outside of the walls of the keep, and some say outside of the walls of the city itself. Until that time, the workmen simply continued to labor, sinking additional shafts as necessary and quietly taking their pay in service of a contract which was faithfully executed. The craftsmen followed neither blueprints nor plans, but tunneled and excavated wherever their whims drove them.
From time to time, the Delvers and Dungeoneers Guild intruded on even more ancient structures from civilizations long forgotten. When they did, the laborers walled up those passages and continued on. It is said that some of those walls did not hold, though. Rumors abound that things which ought to have been forgotten, were able to break out and allowed to roam unchecked.
When the project was finally canceled, the resulting Labyrinth of the Madman began to be used as it was first intended. Unmapped and unknown, "The Pit" as it came to be known, was stocked with convicts. It is still in use today and the gibbet remains unknown for most criminal offenses.
Even now missing children are presumed to have fallen into the Pit, unsolved murders are often attributed to some allegedly escaped denizen of it. The people of the city have an uneasy regard for the structure, but it is still used. The shafts which lead to its darkened corridors have been fitted with stout iron bars as a hedge against accidental entry or exit. There have been no verified cases of any of them being broached.
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