Chapter 154: Chapter 88

Another fight against Gnolls. This one along a narrow passage that made it hard to keep out of each other’s ways. Some of the injuries Tibs healed were caused by his teammates.

This cache’s entrance was hidden behind a weave of Light, Earth, and Corruption. Tibs carefully drew light from around him and manipulated that into the weave, causing the weave to expand, and let them walk through the still visible wall as if it wasn’t there.

On the other side were more pedestals. One had an arrow, the next a knife, then a metal helmet, another book, and another amulet. Without knowing what the book contained, Carina couldn’t judge its value, and the amulet was much like every other one, which made the helmet the best value.

Then, they went through a handful of intersections and halls without incidents, then reach a door blocking their way.

It looked to be made of a dark wood, set in a golden frame, but the essence making it up was mostly Light, with Earth, Corruption, and other essences he couldn’t identify. The weave was tighter than that of the cache and when he added Light to it, nothing happened. He tried the same with Earth and Corruption, to the same lack of results. It had no handle or keyholes, and Tibs couldn’t find any hidden latch that might open it.

For decoration, it had three black shields, each with a different design. The one at the top was like a bird with its wings spread, but it had four legs with claws and it didn’t seem to have feathers.

“That’s a dragon,” Carina said. “I’ve seen paintings of them in books.”

“The way it’s posed within the shield makes me think this is a crest,” Mez added. “Which would make the one with the boar another crest. I don’t know what that one is.” He indicated the bottom one, with the face of a golden animal, its muzzle open in a scream, surrounded by brown mane.

“It’s a lion,” Jackal said. “The Arena in Mountain Sea had one while I visited with Kroseph. They’re deadly and it’ll take three or four of the better fighters to take one of them down.

“So, what do they mean?” Carina ran a hand over them. “They’re part of the door.” She looked at Tibs.

“They don’t move. The essence that makes them is woven into the door in a way that feels it’s all one thing. I’ve tried changing the weave and I can’t; it’s too tight. I don’t think that whatever we need to do is in the door.”

“Maybe this serves only to distract us?” Khumdar offered. “Keeping us from exploring more of the floor.”

“You sense any secrets?” Jackal asked.

“Many, but as with the others before, the sense of them is strange. There is an eagerness to the surrounding secrets that I do not understand.”

“They want us to discover them?” Mez asked.

“I do not know. The caches, which want to be found, have a different sense to them.”

“If we need to explore more of the floor,” Carina said, “we’re going to need to start mapping it; otherwise, we’re going to get lost.”

“No,” Jackal said, as Tibs said.

“I can get us back.”

They looked at each other, and Tibs motioned for the fighter to continue.

“I can sense the way we came to get here. It’s not the dungeon doing it, I just have a…. memory of the stone that’s around us.”

“That is interesting. Does it work in the town?” she asked.

“I just realized I can do this,” Jackal replied. “And it’s not like the town is filled with stone.” He looked at Tibs.

“I just remember the way we came.”

“Alright, then, if being lost isn’t a problem. How far do we go?” she asked.

“Until we’ve cleared the floor,” Jackal replied in a tone that asked why that was even a question.

“Do we have that kind of time?” Mez asked,

“We did not bring provisions,” Khumdar pointed out.

“And what happens if we’re here so long they send in another team and we run into them?” Carina asked. She looked up. “What happens if two teams are on the same floor?”

“No idea,” Sto replied. “I mean, there aren’t any rules Ganny knows of, keeping it from happening, but none of the floors are designed for more than one team at a time.” He was silent for a few seconds. “Although, the only actual cost to anyone would be that you’d have to share the loot on the floor, since I can’t control when teams enter and leave the floor.”

Tibs grinned at Jackal. “If you don’t mind sharing the loot, we can have another team here with us.”

“Nope,” Jackal said firmly. “There won’t be any sharing of our loot. Can you tell us when the next team enters?” he asked the dungeon.

“Not really, I don’t—”

“Actually,” Ganny interrupted Sto. “There might be something better, and it would make the floor more of a challenge. We set a countdown, at the end of which we lock all the closed doors so they can’t proceed forward. We can even make that countdown dependent on the delay between each team, since they’ve come in at the same rate.”

“They have?” Sto asked.

“Yes,” She replied, slightly exasperated. “Maybe this is a way you can start paying attention to how people count time. Tibs, you and your team have been in for about half the time it takes for the next team to enter.”

How much time was that? He hadn’t kept track. “We have as much time as we’ve already been in before the next time enters. I don’t know how long that it.”

“I didn’t keep track,” Jackal said.

“Me neither,” Mez added.

“Then, we have been here for two hours,” Khumdar said. “The spacing of the teams beyond Omega and Upsilon has been four hours.”

“That sounds about right,” Carina said. “I’ve been using my amulet’s recharge rate to keep track. It’s not a clock, but it’s steady enough.”

Jackal rubbed his hands together. “Then there’s time for more loot.” He headed back the way they came and took the other branch at the intersection.

* * * * *

Tibs ducked under the Gnoll’s swing, and Khumdar’s staff passed over him, hitting the creature and sending it flying against the wall, where it cracked, then crumbled, leaving a silver piece to drop to the floor.

“Anyone know how we’re doing for time?” Mez asked, looking around for more opponents.

“No,” Carina replied, then added. “I haven’t been able to let my amulet recharge with all these attacks.”

“We keep going,” Jackal said, picking up the coins. “If we encounter another team, we’ll deal with it. Considering how large the floor is, we might not even know they’re here.”

“Won’t they be able to follow our trail by the cache we’ve left open?” Mez asked. “Or the fact there won’t be any creatures along that way unless the dungeon puts them back. Can the dungeon reset a floor if we’re still on it?”

“That depends,” Sto answered, “on if Ganny is willing to break a rule or not. You only keep me from changing one room’s worth of a floor, so I could reset everything else, but I’m not supposed to. Not that there’s anyone here to keep us from doing it, right, Ganny?”

“There is a reason for the rules,” Ganny stated, but she didn’t sound happy about it.

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“They aren’t sure,” Tibs told Mez. “But something we need to keep in mind is that we’re getting tired. We’re going to have more and more problems in the fights,”

“But you can heal the tired away,” Jackal pointed out.

“I can do it in myself, but when I heal you, you just feel better, not like you slept.” He grinned. “But if you’re saying I should practice that on you, I can do it.”

“We’re heading out,” Jackal hurried to say.

“I didn’t think Jackal could be scared by Tibs offering to help,” Mez said.

Carina smiled. “You weren’t there when Kroseph volunteered him for Tibs to practice his healing on after a rough pit match. Jackal ended up healed, but by the look on his face during the long and imprecise process, it wasn’t pleasant.”

“Then maybe he’ll learn to stop fighting in the pit,” Mez said.

Tibs sighed. “That’s not the lesson he learned from that.”

* * * * *

“I thought you’d left with the caravan,” Tibs told Cross on seeing her at one of the merchant’s booths in the clearing.

“Just because you’re too busy looking at papers and counting numbers,” she replied with a grin, “doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t there. Don’t I remember a certain rogue telling me how horrible his friend was for forcing him to learn letters and numbers?”

“Just letters,” Tibs replied. “Dealing with the merchants forced me to learn numbers early so they wouldn’t swindle me.”

“I thought the merchants liked runners.”

Tibs grinned. “Merchants will swindle everyone, especially their friends. Darran taught me that.”

Learning number early, along with how the merchants loved including calculations with everything they sent him, to explain why they didn’t pay as much as they’d agreed to, had brought Tibs to the point where he could count to the hundreds and not need to heal the headache away afterward. He also had to make conversion of coins so often he could divide by fifteen mostly in his head.

“Well, I’m still around. If you’re looking to be rid of me, the next caravan will be here in a few days.”

In a few days, it would be nearly three months since the end of the Siege, and already, most of the reminders of it were in Tibs’s memory. The one noticeable change was in how sections of the town were becoming more different as a result. The grounds around the platform was already called the Market Place, on account of merchants setting up booths there for any travelers stepping off the platform. The only rule the guild had for them was that no one could build a permanent building on the open space.

That part of the town was Harry’s to protect. Tibs had approached the Attendants so the Runner could protect them, but in spite of how the guild left everyone in the town, including them, to fend for themselves, they refused.

The nobles wanted nothing to do with Runner security or the Guild. Tibs found out through Serba they had been firm, loud, and vulgar when the guard leader had gone to them to inform them of the rules they’d have to follow. Tibs hadn’t bothered approaching them.

Samuel had told him the nobles were buying houses just outside their neighborhood, paying more than they were worth, and not doing anything with them. Tibs had to ask Mez for the answer.

The Nobles were setting up for building a wall around their neighborhood.

Tibs didn’t know how he felt about it and left that to the guild to deal with.

And Kraggle Rock now had a Street.

Tibs did everything he could to keep it from happening, but the Siege had left too many people broken and unable to leave, work, or even look after themselves. He got into a fight with Harry over that. Over how the guild let it happen, and the guard leader didn’t seem too happy about it when he shoved in Tibs’s face that Tibs had demanded he be left to deal with the town.

Tibs almost handed the town over to him at that. Why he didn’t was that ultimately, no matter how much good Harry wanted to do, he’d do what the guild told him. And the guild didn’t care about the town or the people in it.

The merchant wouldn’t help.

“There’s no coin in it,” Darran told him sadly.

His friends wanted to help, but even Tibs had no idea how they could. He knew what he’d want to have happened to him when he lived on his Street, but how did he ensure everyone there was fed properly? Was healed when injured—a handful of clerics did the rounds, but after one died of over-exerting himself, they did so against their superior’s orders. Tibs had discreetly healed some of the worst off, but it hadn’t led to them picking up and leaving. They’d stayed there, not doing anything other than the bare minimum needed to subsist.

Tibs didn’t know how to heal whatever was broken in them, because as far as he sensed, they were okay. Only they clearly weren’t.

The one thing Tibs could do was ensure that no noble ever considered the Street their playground. Enough Runners had lived on a Street, or known of a Street, Tibs had no problem finding people to patrol it and kick any nobles out of it as hard as needed for them to get the message.

It took six beatings, and cost him three Runners. But the nobles stayed away from the Street.

His Street.

Then, there was the pool.

Darran had told him people had approached him regarding purchasing it away from him. How they’d found out the merchant was the one officially owning it now, Darran didn’t know, but suspected a great use of coins. The amounts was larger than Tibs could fathom, which he suspected made refusing to sell it to them, or anyone, easier.

Jackal had found out that officially, the guild owned the land where the pool of corruption was located since the destruction of the Garden Caravan had come with the death of the owner and any family he had. So no one to pay what was owed to the guild.

Tibs couldn’t approach the guild to buy it from them, no matter how few coins they’d want, as the corruption adventurer had claimed. So he’d asked Darran do to it. When the merchant asked him why, Tibs lied.

Tibs lied well.

Tibs loved lying, lying was such a simple way to weave and find secrets. And when he channeled Darkness, Tibs loves that secrets existed. He wanted there to be more. He wanted people to want to find out about them, search, and rejoice in the discovery. Discover that it led to yet more secrets to uncover.

So Darran had investigated, and Tibs had felt sick for lying to his friend.

He handed Cross the sphere. “It’s the same thing as the cube. It’s just memorizing how the pieces fit together.”

She took it, then made a show of patting her pouch. “Not every puzzle’s about patterns and locks.”

Tibs looked around and considered what had been running through his mind. “Sometimes, they’re about how people think.”

She nodded. “The greatest puzzle of them all; Society.”

Tibs rubbed his temple and grumbled. “That’s one puzzle I don’t want to work on.”

She patted his shoulder. “Then, you shouldn’t have started running this town.”

He glared at her. He wasn’t running it, he wanted to scream. The only thing he’d agreed to do was keep the people safe, but that was turning into so much more.

Like the coming bazaar.

It took place on Market Place, so it was Harry’s responsibility, and the guard leader was welcome to it, but Tibs was still going to have to make sure some of the rogue Runners kept an eye out for thieves and other kinds of troublemakers, because any trouble Harry’s guard missed, would have repercussions on the town even if it took place among the bazaar.

Tibs so couldn’t wait for his next run so he wouldn’t have to think about all this for a while.

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