Tilda’s eyes were narrow. “Do you still mean to catch John Deskata and the others in Camp Town? Even though your money is not an issue?”
Instead of answering Dugan rolled back the right sleeve of his rough Orstavian tunic, where he still had a plain bit of cord looped around his wrist like a bracelet. He had now run the cord through an air hole of a short flute identical to the one Tilda had been given as a receipt for her passage with the Shugak. He shook it briskly, and from inside the hollow stick he produced a string of beads on a wire hook, multi-colored and of different substances, with tiny runes inscribed.
“This is what a license to enter Vod’Adia looks like, in case you were wondering,” Dugan said. “I could not go in alone with just this, but if I join with a party of adventurers it gets fastened to some other Shugak stick. That is what the man in the tree-tower says, anyway.”
“What did you pay for it?”
“Fifty-three. I know, you would have done better. This one is only valid starting eight days after Vod’Adia Opens, though I am told I can pay for an ‘upgrade’ in Camp Town to use it sooner. I reckon they tie an extra bead on to it if I join a party entering the city before that.”
Dugan looked at Tilda evenly in the eyes.
“What I am telling you, Tilda, is that I have other plans. I am going into Vod‘Adia. I don’t give a good damn about John and the others either way. Not anymore. They stole from me, but you have now made that good.” Dugan shrugged. “As it turns out, I’ve blown the whole stack already, so it really matters little at this point.”
“So you do not mean to even look for them?” Tilda pressed. Dugan sighed.
“Not for myself. But if you want support when you go looking…you can have it.”
Tilda’s eyes were down to slits.
“Why?”
“Because I feel like I owe you something. I feel like I owe Block something.”
Tilda studied Dugan’s face just as she did when she was haggling with someone, looking for any tic or tell to let her know if she was north or south of what would be the final price. She believed Dugan but she was self-aware enough to know that she wanted to believe him.
“We meet the others at first light,” she said. “On the Shugak dock.”
Dugan nodded. “And once we get to Camp Town?”
Tilda let out a breath through her nose. “What is the expression in Tull? We will burn that bridge when we come to it?”
Dugan smiled. “That, is not that expression.”
Tilda looked at the short flute still in Dugan’s hand, just like the one she had bought as proof of payment for passage on a Shugak raft.
“We should not need these now, should we?” she said.
“I don’t suppose we will.”
“May I?”
Tilda held out a hand, and with a shrug Dugan unthreaded the carved whistle and dropped it into her palm. She dug her own out of a cloak pocket, looked around at the inn patrons at tables and the bar, and held both aloft.
“Has anyone not yet purchased a raft pass from the Shugak?” Tilda called, trying the room first in the Trade Tongue. Several people looked over, and Dugan chuckled.
“You are a credit to the Islands.”
“Leave no coin behind,” said Tilda. She slapped a smile on her face and bounded into a smooth stride for the table of the Oswamban twins, who had looked up at the first sound of the Trade Tongue.
*
Pagette walked beneath the spreading arms of the Shugak-built tower well after midnight, sighing at its weird silhouette against the starry sky. He had watched the bullywugs and hobgoblins raising the place three months ago, an abysmal process during which the whole mess had fallen over at least twice and rolling brawls had frequently broken out among the construction crew.
Behind the tower a tall pier normally used for large river vessels extended empty out over the water. Pagette took a trail down the bank through clumps of reeds and slick rocks to the end of a floating dock bound to the bank with ropes twisted together from the vines of the Vod Wilds. When he put one foot on it the whole structure seemed to move, and Pagette took his bejeweled hands out of his pockets for balance. The boards were narrow for it made little difference to the amphibious bullywugs who operated the rafts that would moor here whether they fell into the water or not. Pagette was getting a belly in his middle years but the nimbleness of his misspent youth was not totally lost. He made it to the end of the dock still dry.
A single bullywug stood waiting on the end, a very small one hardly as high as the man’s waist. Its dark hide looked blue-black in the night, and Pagette mostly saw the creature by the faint phosphorescent glow of its yellow, cupola eyes. Size was not a reliable determinant of age among the frogmen, and this little one did not seem young.
“Greetings,” Pagette said in Daulic as he stopped and steadied himself on the bobbing boards. The wug chirped neutrally. So much for small talk.
From a jacket pocket Pagette produced a missive he had just written in Zantish in his shop, then sealed in a water-tight tube made of tin, the two ends of which screwed together in the middle. He held it out toward the wug.
“You know where to find him?” Pagette asked before handing it over. The wug made a rumble from low in its belly, then a flute-like whistle that billowed out fleshy pouches where its throat would be if it had a neck. Together the two sounds meant that the wug was not an idiot.
Pagette gave it the scroll tube and the wug deftly used its webbed hands and long fingers ending in round suction pads to place it into a small pouch bound across its torso. The wug wrapped a long trailing strap many times around the pouch, then cinched the harness tight.
“Swim swiftly,” Pagette said, and the wugs glowing eyes turned on him. It made a series of croaks, ribbits, and slaps of its hands that roughly translated as, What in the green hell would you know about fast swimming, pink thing? Mind your business.
With that, the wug slipped off the dock and into the dark water with hardly a ripple, leaving Pagette alone.
He made his way back to land, then up the path to street and pier level. Rather than returning immediately to his shop Pagette stepped out on the pier some little distance, went to the railing, and fished his pipe and a clever little steel-and-wheel lighter from his coat pockets. He smoked, looking up the river to the north, and his eyes eventually drifted to the right, up to the sharp shapes of the Ducal castle high on the hills.
“Apologies, your Graces,” Pagette said around the stem of his pipe. “The money was just too good. And I, less so.”
Chapter Twenty
After more than two weeks walking the long road from Souterm to Galdeez, Phin Phoarty felt better than he had in years.
The first week, admittedly, had been rough. Phin had awakened every morning with his feet, knees, and hips aching. It took until the noon stop for a quick meal before all the soreness worked through then in the afternoon his legs started to feel tremulous, like a new-born bird’s. The discomfort was exacerbated by sleeping on the ground out of doors, which was something Phin had never done in his life.
The Imperial Post Road crossed the whole of the Empire from Souterm north through Doon and over the Girding Mountains at the Rhuunish Gap, then through Tull, the western Beoshore, and across the ancient, defunct lands of Gyle and Telina to a port on the Cold Sea called, with typical Codian efficiency but a lack of originality, Norterm. The northern terminus of the Imperial Post Road. All along the Road’s great length tidy “King’s Inns” were erected a good day’s march apart, or half that by coach or horse. The five travelers stopped at one each night but only the woman with the lovely Zantish name of Nesha-tari took a room. Phin, Zebulon, Amatesu and Uriako Shikashe camped for a copper piece in fenced fields across from the inns, which at least all had wells and fire pits. The Far Westerners had two small pup tents but Phin shared a third with Zeb despite the fact that the Minauan man had a tendency to roll over in his sleep and elbow Phin in the throat, or even more alarmingly, to nuzzle the back of Phin’s neck with his nose.