Bottom Rung, page 47
“You can have four for a copper,” someone said, and Tibs clamped down on the urge to jump. He was a rogue, he did the sneaking and surprising. He was always supposed to be aware of his surroundings. If Bardik found out a simple shopkeeper had him almost out of his skin, he’d rename Tibs “Jumps Easily”.
“Can I get five?” he asked, forcing his breathing to steady. “I’d like one for everyone on my team.”
The man was older, his gray beard well-trimmed. His eyes were a normal blue, and his suntanned skin wrinkled. “You’re a Runner? Are you with the nobles?”
“No,” Tibs replied. He was offended the man thought he was one of those. He might be in his leathers, but they looked nothing like what they wore. “I’ve been here since the dungeon opened.”
The man took a handful of the candy from the box. “I didn’t know there were any Omegas left from that group.”
Tibs almost explained about his eyes and his age, as he followed the man to the counter, the lie being so much a reflex by now. But the merchant hadn’t said it in a way that made a big deal of it, so would he care that Tibs was Upsilon?
“It’ll be a copper,” the merchant said, from the other side of the counter, and Tibs reached for his belt before remembering he no longer had his pouch. He smiled at the shopkeeper as he moved to one of the slits in his armor where he kept a few coins, but paused as he caught sight of what was on the shelf.
What was that doing there? He hadn’t expected to ever see it again after it disappeared from his table in the tavern.
“Quite the work, isn’t it?” the merchant said, chuckling. He was looking at it again. “I’m told it’s from a city far from here, MountainSea. That an artisan there makes them.” He took it off the shelf and placed it on the counter.
Tibs studied it, the grain of the wood, the burnish of the varnish. Maybe this wasn’t the same one he’d set down on the table of the Long in the Tooth tavern as Bardik had instructed him, but as far as he could tell, it was the same.
“Try to open it,” the man said.
The challenge was there, and there had been an emphasis on “try”.
He hadn’t considered opening it while carrying it for Bardik. You never looked at what you were hired to take or get. You did the work, and you forgot you’d done it. Anything else was asking for the kind of trouble coins might not get you out of, no matter how much you had, and Tibs had never had enough to consider it.
Because it was the obvious thing to do, Tibs tried to lift the lid. It didn’t move. He felt along the side, then the back and front for somewhere a key went it. None, no hidden latch. But he’d felt something.
“It’s a puzzle box,” the merchant said as Tibs turned it over. While it looked like a solid block of wood, faint grooves showed this was made of a series of small slates, each cut and put together to be nearly indistinguishable from one another. The merchant was wrong. This wasn’t a puzzle.
One of the slates slid past the edge and stopped.
This was a lock.
“Do you know what it is?” the man asked, surprised.
“I’m a rogue,” Tibs said, feeling for the next one. This didn’t only work by sliding the slates. Some needed to be pressed before they would move, and even then the give they had was minuscule. Another slid, more searching, and another. Searching again. He lost track of the number of moves as he noticed the pattern, then it changed when, instead of pulling the next slates, he needed to push one back into place. His fingers slid confidently over the distorted box and found a stubborn slate needed to move in a diagonal, then one had to go up, the next one down, then that one pushed there, this slid that way, and—
Click.
A collective gasp made Tibs lookup. A crowd was around him, everyone watching him. People peered over shoulders to get a view. Tibs blushed and placed the unrecognizable box on the counter. It listed toward a corner because of the slates pocking away from the edge in varying lengths.
“Sorry,” he whispered and reached for his belt.
“Open it,” the merchant said, awe in his voice. “You earned it.”
Tibs took the box and studied it again. With the poking slates, it couldn’t open up, and the entire process had only left one edge on one side clear. He slid the cover off that way.
There was nothing inside.
Of course there was nothing. Whatever it had contained had to have been taken before the box was put on display. The inside was painted black, and it was where the weave of essence was, the one that he couldn’t sense through from the outside. Or the inside. It was a wall blocking his sense.
“I’m kind of happy you were so fast to start,” the merchant said. “I was about to bet you the box that you couldn’t open it.”
Tibs slid the lid shut. “Don’t give something locked to a rogue.” He slid the first slate back into place, watching it slide. “The dungeon makes us very good with them.” It was all wood. The mechanism was all about how the slates were cut and interacted together. He marveled at how smoothly each slate slid as he moved them back into their original positions.
“Do you know who made it?” Tibs asked, wondering if the artist had an element. Wood, probably. How else could something this intricate be made?
“No, just that it’s from an artist in MountainSea. My daughter bought it from one of the other merchants. She hasn’t managed to open it, but I expect she’s not going to be happy you did it.”
“You shouldn’t tell her then.” Tibs took a copper coin and placed it on the counter.
The merchant looked at it, then seemed to notice the five candies on his side of the counter. He looked around at the people still watching the two of them. “I doubt I can keep them quiet about it.” He took the coin and the candies and placed them in Tibs’s hand. “Watching you unlock this, was worth the five candies.”
Tibs hesitated. He didn’t know this merchant. This could be a trap, with them claiming he’d stolen the candies. But with so many people watching them, Tibs would be able to convince the guards he’d given the coin back.
Tibs made his way through the crowd, which parted silently. He sped up, getting uncomfortable—crowds shouldn’t be quiet—and nearly collided with a woman entering. With a curse, she raised the leather tubes, causing the strap to slide from her shoulder to her elbow.
“Watch where you’re going, kid; some of us are holding fragile packages.”
He watched her as he stepped away, watched that tube. He’d seen those before. There had been one at the platform, when Alistair left. There had been a man with one at the inn, then at the Broken Tankard, speaking with—
He shook his head to clear it. She was a messenger. Plenty of people in the guild used tubes like that to move things. How else would the guild and nobles send things to other cities? Go there themselves?
Remembering the candies, he hurried to the room to share them with his team.
* * * * *
Tibs walked the roof carefully. The stiffness of the leather, even after three days of moving and training in it, made his footing unsure. Now that he had throwing knives, Tandy was teaching him how to throw them, when his and Pyan’s team weren’t taking each other on. He wasn’t good at it.
Tonight’s roof-walking wasn’t about getting into a house or looking into the distance. He’d finally found the right roof to test an idea he’d had during his last run. He’d seen the wagon deliver the bales of hay behind the tavern in the afternoon, and while he didn’t know why a tavern needed so much hay, the fact it was stacked three high and took almost half the alley made it perfect for this.
He stopped at the end of the roof and looked down. The hay was still there. The alley was larger than most, and he couldn’t reach the other roof by jumping. Another thing that made it perfect; he wouldn’t be tempted to make the full jump instead of doing his test. If he wanted to reach the roof, he had to do his test, and it had to work. If it didn’t… He looked down again. Hopefully bales of hay were soft enough.
He walked to the center of the roof for a running start and tried to relax. This was only three stories high. He’d fallen from higher without hay to cushion his fall…but Carina had been there to catch him. It had slowed his fall, if nothing else.
She so would not approve of this, he thought as a smile formed on his face.
He ran as fast as he could, his attention on the end of the roof and his essence. He’d have to time this right. He leaped, judged his arc, and as soon as he started down, he pushed air essence under his feet and willed it hard so he could leap off it.
He felt it under his foot, as it tried to provide him a solid surface, but as he pushed off, he kept falling. He rolled and landed in the hay on his back.
This needed more work.
* * * * *
Hay coated his armor, like it had more times now than he was willing to count. He brushed it off his armor and tried to get at the stalks that had somehow made it into it, causing him to itch, before climbing the wall yet again. This time he sat, letting his legs dangle over the edge, and studied the essence in each of his hands. In his right he had air, in his left, water. He shaped them into disks on his palm and they both changed. He stiffened the essence, and the water turned to ice, while the air remained the same, only no longer moving.
He realized there was something he was missing. Alistair had made a ball of water float in the air as part of a demonstration in his early days of essence training. If he didn’t have air, how had the water floated? Did it have something to do with etching with essence? That could hold between the other essences, somehow.
Could he use air and water to create his jumping surface?
He brought the two essences together and tried to have them behave as one. The best he accomplished was causing small shards of ice to dance in the wind the way Carina could pick up leaves with it.
He absorbed them.
He’d have to depend only on his will and air essence for this. He stood, took his running start, and jumped, believing this time was the right one. Until his foot went through the solidified air again.
He sighed and readied himself for the landing.
It was still early. He’d get this.
* * * * *
He looked up at the lightening sky from his bed of hay. The bales had gotten more comfortable the more he broke them with his landings.
Maybe this couldn’t be done. Maybe he didn’t have enough essence, or air just couldn’t become hard enough to take his weight. Was it worth another try? He had half an hour before there was too much light, that gave him time for—
A door opened and closed, and Tibs raised his head in time to see the tavern owner looking back at him, shock on his face.
“What?” the man asked as Tibs struggled to untangle himself. “What did you do to my bales?”
Tibs’s feet touched the ground, and he was off running, snickering as the man called for him to come back.
Had he broken any rules? He hadn’t heard any preventing him from jumping off a roof, or jumping into unguarded bales of hay. Would those be enough for Harry to come ask what Tibs was up to? And if he did, could he convince the guard leader that since no one had told him he couldn’t do that, he hadn’t broken any rules?
Maybe not. The rules were probably written somewhere, and Harry wouldn’t care that Tibs didn’t know his letters.
It was best if he stayed out of the guards’ way for a while.
* * * * *
“Do I want to know what you’ve been up to all night?” Kroseph asked, placing a plate of sausages, bread, and eggs before Tibs.
“Nothing.” He took in the aromas.
The server chuckled, picking hay out of Tibs’s hair. “You’re usually a better liar than that. I saw through that one easily.”
He grinned at Kroseph. “Just practicing rogue stuff.” He devoured the sausages; falling multiple times was a great way to work up an appetite.
“And would Jackal approve? No, never mind.” Kroseph chuckled and shook his head. “My man forgot how to say no to you a while back.”
“Is he up?” Tibs asked between yoke-covered bread chunks.
“He’s out, running. How do you guys do it? I’d think that with the dangers you face in the dungeon, all you’d want to do the rest of the time is take it easy. But if Jackal isn’t fighting, he’s training. If not that, he’s running. The only time he takes it easy is when he’s with me, and that isn’t exactly restful, if—”
“I’m eating,” Tibs protested, and Kroseph laughed. In the time it took for the server to quiet, Tibs tried to determine if Kroseph was making light of the situation, or if he was actually ignorant. “He does it for you,” he finally said.
Kroseph shook his head. “Tibs, that man knows I don’t care how he looks. He’d make me feel the way I do, even if there was fat over those muscles.”
Tibs looked at the man. “He does it because he doesn’t want you to lose him.”
“Come on,” the server said with a laugh, but Tibs remained serious, and the humor left Kroseph. “Oh.”
“I thought Jackal told you about what happens in the dungeon. How dangerous it is.”
“Tibs, it’s Jackal. He loves telling stories. He always exaggerates.”
“Not with that. You know how many people the dungeon ate. You saw how many of us were left when you arrived.”
Kroseph shrugged. “Not really. That was a busy time for us. We were among the first to offer food, drinks, and…” He grinned. “Other things.”
Why did Kroseph always imply those things as if Tibs should find them enticing? “We all train because we don’t want the dungeon to eat us, but he does it harder. He runs, and he fights, because it’s going to hurt you if it happens.”
“If what happens?” Jackal asked, stepping to the table. His shirt stuck to his chest from the sweat, and his hair dripped as if he’d been in the rain.
Kroseph kissed the fighter hard enough Tibs looked away, wiping his plate with some bread.
“You need a bath,” the server whispered in the tone Tibs expected someone to offer him the location of a treasure.
“Well, I have been running,” Jackal said, chuckling.
“Oh, that you have,” Kroseph said breathlessly.
“Kro, what’s going on?” Jackal asked, sounding slightly worried.
“I’m going to wash you.”
Jackal’s response was lost as the server pulled him away. Tibs looked up in time to see them vanish in a door he knew led to the bath rooms, Jackal with a confused expression on his face.
* * * * *
“That’s an ‘a’,” Carina said.
“That’s chalk on a board,” Tibs grumbled. All he’d wanted after his breakfast was to get out of his itchy armor and drop into bed, but Carina had been there, and as soon as he was out of it decided he was due for a lesson.
“You’re right,” she replied with pride. “It is chalk on a board, in the shape of an ‘a’. Come on, Tibs, you have to learn your letters.”
“No, I don’t,” he grumbled in reply. “I want to sleep. If I have to practice anything it’s how I’m supposed to sense and manipulate essence, not that.” He intended to tap the board, but knocked it off her lap. “Letters are for nobles. I’m a Runner. I’m Street,” he said proudly.
“The guild uses letters, Tibs,” she replied, picking up the clay-slate. “How can you be sure Darran isn’t going to cheat you the next time you buy a knife from him?”
Tibs grabbed the board and chalk as she sat back on his bed and drew the numbers. Numbers were easy. There were only ten of them, and how you repeated them was how you knew the whole number. Carina had already shown him twice that in letters, and it looked like they were just the start.
“Good, you know your numbers,” she replied, exasperation in her tone. She took the chalk from him. “Now, what are you going to do when he writes this next to the price?” she made scratches next to the numbers.
He recognized the “a” as she’d just shown it to him, and the “t”, which was the first letter of his name, and the “s”, which Jackal liked to call the snake. The rest? They might as well be meaningless.
“I’m going to ask you or Khumdar to tell me what it says,” he replied flatly. He thought it was a clever answer, but he was too tired to act on it.
“Damn it, Tibs.” She stood. “You can’t always depend on us.”
“You’re my team. Who else am I going to depend on?”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it!”
The door opened and Jackal stepped in, grinning.
“You deal with him,” she told the fighter, shoving him aside and leaving.
“What’s got her in a mood?” Jackal asked. Tibs showed him the slate with the markings on it, and the fighter winced. “She’s trying to help you,” he said in a soothing tone.
“I’m not seeing her sitting you down to learn the letters,” Tibs replied bitterly.
“That’s because she knows I’m a lost cause.”
“But it’s so hard,” he whined. “Why does there have to be so many letters?”
“Because people have a lot of stuff to say,” Jackal replied, dropping into his bed. “Hey Tibs, can I ask you something?”
Tibs shrugged, going to the table and putting the slate and chalk on it.
“What did you tell my man?” The fighter grinned. “And can you tell him that every morning?”
Tibs stared at him. Was he that dense, or purposely oblivious?
And suddenly, Tibs didn’t want to deal with the man. With how he took nothing seriously, not even the people his actions affected.
“Figure it out yourself,” he said, slamming the door shut behind him, and on Jackal’s question.
Chapter 48
Tibs woke to sounds of the town fully active, and the sun filling the room with light. Carina had suggested getting heavy fabrics to cover the windows so he could sleep better, but Tibs had stopped any talk of spending coins on his comfort. He’d learned to sleep under all sorts of conditions as he survived his street. These were no worse than them.
