Dungeon Runner
The Tiger Writes
sciencefiction
sciencefiction
31K5
Tibs survived by picking pockets; until he's caught.
Instead of losing a hand, he's sent away and told he must now survive a dungeon.
How is a kid who knew nothing more than his ...Bottom Rung, Chapter 17
The meal, after a stop at each of their training tents for a healing potion, wasn't the jovial experience they'd hoped for. In dividing the coins, they'd forgotten about the ten percent the guild took, so it shorted the team of seventeen coppers. Because the guild didn't deal in broken coins, they'd needed to hand over a full one for the half Zarkane said they actually owed.
Tibs was the only one surprised by it. When he'd mentioned breaking a copper piece, he'd received odd looks, with another comment from Jackal about how street Tibs was. Walter had to hand over half his take, which brought the mood down further, but the thought he only had forty-three silvers until he was free of the guild did help.
While they ate, Tibs got Zarkane to help him work out how long it would take for Walter to pay off the amulet, and she figured that if no one helped him, and the number of coins was the same each time, he'd have to hand over one silver each run, so it would take him forty-three runs. The number was too large for Tibs to understand, so she explained it as close to a year and a half if he only had a run every two weeks. Would Walter outgrow its use in all that time? Could he outgrow it? Another question to ask Alistair.
There was so much he didn't understand.
"What should we do?" Walter asked as Tibs cleaned the bottom of his bowl with the last of the bread. Stew; Tibs hadn't known mixing vegetables and meats could create something so delicious. Now he regretted not having spent coins on a meal at the inn sooner. Going back to the slop of the mess hall would be difficult.
Jackal raised his tankard, noticed it was empty, and put it back on the table. "Now that we can make good coin from the dungeon, I think we need to assess what the merchants sell, and which ones we can trust to give us a good deal."
"How do we do that?" Claudia asked. "The trust part, I mean. I'm guessing assess means looking at what they sell."
"We ask about the prices, then we compare with another merchant who sells the same thing, or close enough. Right Tibs?"
"I never trust merchants, all they want to do is beat me."
Jackal chuckled. "This isn't the street, this place is too small to have a street. No merchant's going to beat you here. We're too important, without us, they can't make coins."
Tibs wasn't sure how confident he was in Jackal's explanation. The merchants he'd interacted with in his first days here had seemed plenty interested in beating him away, but the man had been right about a lot of other things up till now.
"How do we decide who sees which merchants?" Zarkane asked. "I mean, we probably want to pick one that's going to sell something we know, but in my case, unless the sign has a bow and an arrow on it, I'm not going to be able to tell if they sell something I know. I don't know my letters."
"Same here," Jackal said with something like pride, and Tibs felt better knowing he wasn't the only one, that even older people didn't always know their letters. "But what they sell doesn't matter at this point, because after we've compared what and how much, someone different will go there, with the accumulated information, and see if we can talk them down to something we can afford."
"I'm better at stealing than talking," Tibs said.
Jackal smiled. "Noted, but you can't steal here, we need you to keep both your hands. As for which merchant, we'll split up in different directions and just enter one of them. As I said, doesn't matter which one right now."
Which was how Tibs ended up standing by a door, looking up at the banner over it with a shield, knife, and rope depicted on it. Underneath were letters, but he didn't know them. The building was recent, one of those he hadn't had the chance to climb yet, fresh wood planks without marks on them not made by the tools to build it.